Project management lessons from the chicken and the pig

You may already know this story, but for those who don't I hope this will provide an interesting distraction. Mr Pig and Mr Chicken were taking a stroll through the farmyard one day and thinking about a life outside of the ranch. Mr Chicken says, "Hey Mr Pig, we should bust this coop and pig pen...
Martha Lane Fox backs Coding for Kids programming tuition

Remember Computer Club at school? If you are a 40-something like me, you may remember the Commodore Pet, the BBC Micro and daddy of them all, the Research Machines 380-z with its whopping 56K of RAM costing over £3000 as it did back at the end of the 1970s. Bringing us (thankfully) bang up to new...
Supercomputer software, wind power turbines & big data analytics

With the creation and deployment of environmental "renewable energy" technologies now growing at a faster rate than ever, the 'touchpoints' for IT-driven infrastructural support for the eco-energy sector are also growing at a commensurate rate. While IT firms selling to this space are having to be...
Programming possibilities: recognising facial recognition technology

As seemingly impossible as we might have thought it 50 or 60-years ago that a journalist would be using an electronic slab to write this story 33,000 feet in the air, there was also a time when the notion of facial recognition technology was thought beyond the realms of scientific research. Well...
How loosely coupled applications beat middleware

This is a guest piece written for the Computer Weekly Developer Network blog by Phil Lewis, business consulting director for UKIMEA at enterprise software vendor Infor. A lot of people in business hate the software that runs their company. Executives grudgingly accept the painful shortcomings...
¡Ole! Spain drives legality into mobile services with Sybase 365

Mobile-focused software application developers might want to take more than a passing glance at what's going on in Spain just now. Arguably not always known as the technology epicenter of Europe, the northeast region of Catalonia is Spain's high-tech hub, apparently? OK so there's Mobile World...
Why is it called cloud computing?

Why did we settle on the name cloud computing for the delivery of hosted and managed service-based computing? All we needed was a term to describe a cavernous domain with (potentially) limitless expanses of space. Surely "dungeon computing" would have sufficed -- or would that have sounded too...
Compuware’s dynaTrace does APM, UEM and BTM with great TCO, but so what?

Compuware's dynaTrace division is taking its application performance management (APM) wares to market this month with an ebullient skip in its step. Using warm and fuzzy vendor-marketing terms like "unparalleled business value", "shortened time-to-value" and, wait for it... "lower total cost of...
VMware and the 40-foot ISO shipping container

VMware, Trend Micro and F5 Networks all gathered around one oblong-shaped roundtable late last week to discuss the state of the cloud, the future for the virtualised corporate network and the importance of 40-foot ISO shipping containers. VMware's chief cloud strategist Joe Baguley escorted the...