The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
Issue No. 90 - 15 February 2013
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In This Issue
Fastest Inter-City Link in the World
LinkedIn Reaches 200M members
Splunk: Exploiting Machine Data
Business Capability Taxonomy
Traveling Salesman
WiGig (802.11ad)
Seen Recently
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The Fastest Inter-City Link in the World
The French have a thing for speed. In 1981, the French railways opened the first "TGV" high-speed train line between Paris and Lyon, a distance of 450 km (275 miles), at 270 kph (170 mph). Two weeks ago, Orange and Alcatel inaugurated the fastest long-distance Internet connection in the world between those same two cities, with a fiber optic line carrying 44 channels of 400 gigabit/sec. traffic, for a total of 17.6 terabits/sec. More information here. While such speeds have been employed between tightly connected servers inside a data center, this is a new record for inter-city traffic.
A Milestone for LinkedIn
LinkedIn, sometimes called "Facebook for grown-ups," reached 200 million accounts. This infographic shows basic statistics about the distribution of that population. The role of the English language in LinkedIn is interesting and is consistent with the professional focus of the network. About half of the members are from countries where English is the first language. India (where English is the language of higher education) also figures prominently. Brazil is the top country where English is, strictly speaking, a foreign language.
Exploiting Machine Data
"Big Data analytics" is quickly becoming the most overused phrase of 2013. So it is refreshing to see a company address the issue of massive data collection and interpretation without using the BDA phrase, but instead talking in concrete, understandable terms about what you can do with the information gathered from the computers you operate. Splunk, based in San Francisco, has made this their business strategy, talking about "machine data generated by all your IT systems and technology infrastructure."
Business Capability Taxonomy
The International Foundation for Information Technology (IF4IT) has released an Enterprise Capability Modeling Framework, which is basically a taxonomy of capabilities, which are themselves key concepts in an Enterprise Architecture (EA). According to Frank Guerino, chairman of IF4IT, the framework "is a precursor for the released of an Enterprise Capability Model (ECM), which will be published shortly."
Theoretical Computer Science Corner
Readers who went through formal education in computer science should be familiar with the "traveling salesman" problem, which is NP-complete (i.e., there is no polynomial-time algorithm to find the shortest route to travel through N points and return to the starting place). This being established, research shifted to heuristics to find paths that are "close enough" to the optimal path length. Thus the computer science world was abuzz when researchers from Stanford and McGill universities found a way to improve on a 35-year-old method.
802.11 Alphabet Soup
In January, the IEEE Standards Association approved the "WiGig" 802.11ad specification, which allows wireless data transfers at 7 Gbps over distances of up to 40 feet (12 meters).
Seen Recently...

"I think much of the value of cloud computing is lost when companies choose private clouds over public clouds. What you give up is true elasticity. In private clouds you still have to procure hardware and have excess capacity on hand to scale to handle extremely large peaks. Another part of the value proposition that is lost is you still have to do all the datacenter work including renting or buying floor space, powering, cooling, maintaining redundancy across physical data centers, and employing all the human resources required to do all of that."

-- Mike Kavis. of Kavis Technology, in his blog