The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
Issue No. 17 - 1 February 2010
In This Issue
OMG's President on SOA, BPM, Cloud
Zevenseas Discussion Central
Siftables
35 Terabytes per Cartridge
Agile Adoption?
Petascale Computing in Asia
Bridging Grids Between Europe and China
Seen Recently...
CB photo
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OMG's President on SOA, BPM, Cloud
In a video interview by Rob Barry of SearchSOA.com, Richard Soley, President of the Object Management Group, talks about the state of BPM, SOA, and Cloud Computing, their maturing relationships, and what he expects to see in 2010.
Blogging Add-In to Sharepoint
Several small companies are striving to fill the usability and social networking gaps in Microsoft Sharepoint. One of them is zevenseas with Discussion Central, which "extends SharePoint Discussion Lists to the enterprise. It adds an aggregation of threads and replies from across the organization, and a number of small but important enhancements to the standard SP Discussion List."
Siftables
David Merrill, who was a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab under Prof. Pattie Maes, is now at Sifteo in San Francisco, making a commercial version of the siftables smart blocks - "the toys blocks that think." David gave a 7-minute TED talk that seems to barely scratch the surface of what novel user interface capabilities this invention promises.
35 Terabytes per Cartridge
IBM may have reinvented themselves, but one of their areas of research is still... magnetic tape. They have been able to pack 35 terabytes of data on a single cartridge, using barium ferrite in a different orientation that usual, and advanced signal processing. More details in this Technology Review article.
Adoption of Agile Development Methods
eWeek published key findings from Forrester Research about the adoption of agile development methods in companies. But when I read "45% of the nearly 1,300 surveyed developers and IT professionals say they use agile techniques," I wonder whether people really do what they say and say what they do, and whether the summary that these methods are "being rapidly embraced by enterprises" is warranted. Agility guru Jim Highsmith recently painted a more subtle picture when he wrote, in Cutter's predictions for 2010, " there may only be a small but significant number of organizations that will 'get it' when it comes to agility."
Petascale Computing in Asia
In a rare (so far) announcement of collaboration involving two Asian countries but not the U.S., Fujitsu and Singapore's Institute of High Performance Computing have launched a joint R&D project to create scalable algorithms for petascale computing in areas such as CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and materials science.
Bridging Grids Between Europe and China
The BRIDGE program pursues bilateral collaboration between the European Union and China through the linkage of heterogenous grid computing environments. According to an article in ICT Results, the program has already achieved concrete results in drug development, aircraft design, and weather prediction.
Seen Recently...
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable."
-- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower
quoted by Mitchell Ummel in the Nov. 2009
issue of the Cutter IT Journal on Enterprise Architecture