Link Collection — April 22, 2012

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  • Stealing Computer Code Isn’t Theft, Court Rules – Input Output

    “The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said the taking of source code by Sergey Aleynikov was not a crime under a 1996 law that makes it illegal to steal trade secrets because the code did not qualify as stolen goods under another federal law because it was not physical “goods” or “wares” or “merchandise.” He had taken high-frequency trading computer code from Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank where he worked, as he was about to start a new job at Teza Technologies, a startup in the same business, according to the Chicago Tribune.
    In particular, the code did not “become” stolen property even when Aleynikov saved it to a flash drive, a tangible device, noted Waters Technology.
    In addition, because the software was used internally rather than sold to other people, that meant it could not be subject to laws regarding interstate commerce, noted the New York Times.”

    tags: legal code goldmansachs

  • Why Netflix Never Implemented The Algorithm That Won The Netflix $1 Million Challenge | Techdirt

    “We evaluated some of the new methods offline but the additional accuracy gains that we measured did not seem to justify the engineering effort needed to bring them into a production environment.

    It wasn’t just that the improvement was marginal, but that Netflix’s business had shifted and the way customers used its product, and the kinds of recommendations the company had done, had shifted too. Suddenly, the prize winning solution just wasn’t that useful — in part because many people were streaming videos rather than renting DVDs — and it turns out that the recommendation for streaming videos is different than for rental viewing a few days later.”

    tags: bigdata kaggle contest

  • Amazon launches cloud app store (and eats ecosystem?) — Cloud Computing News

    “From Amazon’s perspective it’s easy to see why the marketplace idea was so appealing. Letting users launch fully configured versions of popular products in a single click is a compelling feature, especially for complex software that isn’t easily deployed in the cloud (or at all). For its software-vendor partners, AWS Marketplace represents an opportunity to do SaaS without having to build a SaaS business or infrastructure.”

    tags: cloud computing amazon

  • Ingineering.IT — DevOps, Technical Debt, and Adaptive Organizations

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

  1. Link Collection — April 15, 2012
  2. Link Collection — April 1, 2012
  3. Link Collection — February 5, 2012

The Technology Strategy

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Many organizations are to some extent dependent on using information technology to deliver products or services to its customers. This applies to organizations within the private as well within the public sector. There is some form of hierarchy among strategies that relates to the enterprise information technology strategy (IT strategy) and there might be some […]

What platforms has social media created for us, and how should we use them?

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Complexity of networks and the opportunities they bring
Photo Credit: GustavoG

There is no doubt that social media has made a significant impact on our lives. Consumers get their information socially via articles and videos recommended by their friends, they buy things based on their friends’ recommendations but also often based on “strangers’ recommendation” like on Yelp and Tripadvisor, and some even offer products and services on sites like getaround, airbnb and prosper, but here again more to strangers than to people in they know.

From the earlier description, we can see two types of social network. One that is made up of people we know (simplistically referred to here as friends), while the other is made up mostly of people we don’t know (referred here as strangers). The key values of friends networks are trust and relationship. These are people that we know, so we are more trusting of the truthfulness of their recommendations. Note though we might not believe in their suitability at making particular recommendations, for example we would not trust computer advice given by our technology-challenged friends. Friends networks also hold people we care about. We want to know how they have been recently; we are interested in their photos, etc. and we want to share highs and lows of our lives with them.

The key values of stranger networks are size and diversity. When we need advice on a niche topic, it might be hard to find someone in our friends network who can help us but because of comparably much large size of the stranger network, it is likely that we can find someone there who can help us. Moreover, if we need help from a lot of people, say to complete the one million pixel project, the stranger network is more right-sized for the job compared to our friends networks.

Are there other types of networks? There are professional networks, now championed by linked-in. There are also interest-based networks, like customer networks. What values do these networks offer? The article “Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media[1]” seems to offer a good framework for analyzing different types of social media. Hopefully I will get to reading it and then I can share my thoughts.

What are the implications of these networks and how should we make the best use of them? I think every individual and organisaton need to be more aware of these different types of networks, their functions and values, and then think about how best to use them. For example, recently I have grown to see more of the value of LinkedIn, as it is a better platform than Facebook for building a community of practice around my expertise. I can join in discussions related to my professional interest area and also build my reputation, something that is harder to do on Facebook as the content there is more informal and I might not be connected to colleagues that I am connected with on LinkedIn (and for many relationships I want to keep it that way). What are other networks I can tap into? What are the opportunities there?

[1]Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media  – Jan H. Kietzmann *, Kristopher Hermkens, Ian P. McCarthy, Bruno S. Silvestre 

What platforms has social media created for us, and how should we use them?

by

Complexity of networks and the opportunities they bring
Photo Credit: GustavoG

There is no doubt that social media has made a significant impact on our lives. Consumers get their information socially via articles and videos recommended by their friends, they buy things based on their friends’ recommendations but also often based on “strangers’ recommendation” like on Yelp and Tripadvisor, and some even offer products and services on sites like getaround, airbnb and prosper, but here again more to strangers than to people in they know.

From the earlier description, we can see two types of social network. One that is made up of people we know (simplistically referred to here as friends), while the other is made up mostly of people we don’t know (referred here as strangers). The key values of friends networks are trust and relationship. These are people that we know, so we are more trusting of the truthfulness of their recommendations. Note though we might not believe in their suitability at making particular recommendations, for example we would not trust computer advice given by our technology-challenged friends. Friends networks also hold people we care about. We want to know how they have been recently; we are interested in their photos, etc. and we want to share highs and lows of our lives with them.

The key values of stranger networks are size and diversity. When we need advice on a niche topic, it might be hard to find someone in our friends network who can help us but because of comparably much large size of the stranger network, it is likely that we can find someone there who can help us. Moreover, if we need help from a lot of people, say to complete the one million pixel project, the stranger network is more right-sized for the job compared to our friends networks.

Are there other types of networks? There are professional networks, now championed by linked-in. There are also interest-based networks, like customer networks. What values do these networks offer? The article “Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media[1]” seems to offer a good framework for analyzing different types of social media. Hopefully I will get to reading it and then I can share my thoughts.

What are the implications of these networks and how should we make the best use of them? I think every individual and organisaton need to be more aware of these different types of networks, their functions and values, and then think about how best to use them. For example, recently I have grown to see more of the value of LinkedIn, as it is a better platform than Facebook for building a community of practice around my expertise. I can join in discussions related to my professional interest area and also build my reputation, something that is harder to do on Facebook as the content there is more informal and I might not be connected to colleagues that I am connected with on LinkedIn (and for many relationships I want to keep it that way). What are other networks I can tap into? What are the opportunities there?

[1]Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media  – Jan H. Kietzmann *, Kristopher Hermkens, Ian P. McCarthy, Bruno S. Silvestre 

Humans Just Don't Do That Very Well

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Dateline: 1988, somewhere around the planet Mars.  Russian Mars probe, Phobos 1, was ordered to commit suicide by a ground-based human controller who sent it the wrong commands which were meant to slightly adjust its trajectory. Control of the spac…

Humans Just Don’t Do That Very Well

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Dateline: 1988, somewhere around the planet Mars.  Russian Mars probe, Phobos 1, was ordered to commit suicide by a ground-based human controller who sent it the wrong commands which were meant to slightly adjust its trajectory. Control of the spac…

OTTF – Providing a Level of “Surety”

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Joshua Brickman from CA Technologies gives context to a recent testimony by The Open Group’s Dave Lounsbury in front of the House of Representatives Sub-Committee on Energy and Commerce. With security concerns around the global supply chain on the rise…