The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
No. 155 - 2 November 2015
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In This Issue
ACM Webinar on Software Testing
Most Popular ACM Courses
Industrial Internet Security Forum
CSCC News
Ten Years of IT Failures
Seen Recently
Claude Baudoin

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An ACM Webinar on Software Testing
On November 18, at noon Eastern US time, ACM's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSoft) presents an hour-long webinar with Alessandro Orso and Gregg Rothermel, who will "provide an accounting of some of the most successful research performed in software testing in the last 15 years and present some of the most significant challenges and opportunities in this area." Details and registration here.
Ten Most Popular ACM Courses
ACM periodically refreshes its "hit parade" of specialized courses. The latest list is, as usual, an interesting blend that ranges from business disciplines to technology:
  • Introduction to Business Analysis and Essential Competencies
  • Agile project Management Essentials
  • Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures
  • Introduction to Java
  • Python Language Basics
  • Networking,. Communications and Local Area Networks
  • Linux System Architecture
  • ITIL and the Service Lifecycle
  • Changes in the CISSP 2015 Exam
  • Certified Ethical Hacker v8: Hacking and Penetration Testing
See the details and access the courses (if you are an ACM member) here. If you are not an ACM member, access to this content may well justify your annual $99 dues (there are reduced rates for students and retirees).
The Industrial Internet Goes to New York
IBM hosts a half-day Industrial Internet Security Forum at its Manhattan office tomorrow morning, November 3rd. The event is free but you need to register. The registration Web page is now closed, but you can e-mail [email protected] and blame Claude Baudoin for informing you too late (but seriously, do drop that name and you may get in). You may also call +1 781 444 0404.
Cloud Standards Customer Council News
The CSCC has released its Practical Guide to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Clicking on the link will download this free 30-page guide, which contains eight steps to ensure the success of your PaaS deployment. The new guide joins the growing suite of guides covering all aspects of cloud computing.

The CSCC is now starting to work on a guide to hybrid cloud computing, to be published early in 2016. Hybrid clouds were the topic of the CSCC's September 24 Summit in Cambridge, Mass. The presentations from that day are now available here (they are hyperlinked to the titles on the agenda).
Depressing Moment of the Decade
Lest you develop an exaggerated sense that IT people know what they're doing, the IEEE Spectrum magazine just published an interactive issue entitled Lessons from a Decade of IT Failures. By which they don't mean that IT systems have only failed for ten years, just that the study is about that period, refreshing previous and equally depressing retrospectives. With uplifting titles like "The cadavers of dead IT projects are buried under mounds of cash," the various sections of the Web site are not going to do much to help convince young people to join the profession.
Seen Recently...
"Hiding in the history of the [Requests for Comments] is the history of human institutions for achieving cooperative work."
-- Vint Cerf, reflecting on the creation of Internet standards through
a series of documents humbly called "Requests for Comments" (RFCs),
in RFC 2555, published on April 7, 1999, exactly 30 years after RFC 1.
Vint Cerf, one of the "fathers of the Internet," was then at MCI.
Among other things, he is now Google's "Chief Internet Evangelist."

"The computer will never be as important to society as the copier."
-- Remark made circa 1973 by a Xerox research facility manager to Bob Taylor,
inventor of the Xerox Alto, arguably the first real personal computer,
as related in Walter Isaacson's book The Innovators.