Notes from the Consultant’s Jungle

Posted by Bob Landstrom: CISSP, CGEIT

This week I was in New York City attending a meeting with the Executive Communication Group.  One night I decided to go for a walk, and as I was walking I reflected upon the fact that right there, in the streets of Manhattan where I walked, there was once a [...]

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Early news wires this morning report the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle at a $9.50 USD/share price.  While many of us were watching the dance between IBM and Sun over the past few months, this deal with Oracle leaves me scratching my head.
Oracle’s Larry Ellison says, “The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, [...]

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Microsoft Windows running on a mainframe?  Could this be the greatest abomination since the Labradoodle (before you Labradoodle owners out there skewer me, I’m sorry but the Labrador Retriever is such a wonderful dog and to corrupt this fine breed with Poodle blood is a bane to me)?
Anyway, this week’s Network World magazine carries an [...]

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To many, the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and what-have-you as a Service (XaaS) is well understood.  The emergence of strong cloud based services facilitates a true paradigm shift in modern computing.  I’ve found though, that there remains a misunderstanding in some circles about exactly what this new [...]

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I’ve waited for the dust to settle to log a post about Google’s Chrome, and to do so now almost seems trite since there’s already been so much content in the dialogue about browser wars, IE killers and such.  I do feel compelled to make a few cursory points about Chrome, just for the [...]

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‘Tis true me hardies, the day o’ big data centers on the seven seas be upon us all. So cast off yer land lubberin’ server farms an’ hoist the main sail. We’re settin’ these servers afloat ‘fore ye feel the bite of me floggin’ whip. Arrr.
Well, we’ve talked about data centers in [...]

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In earlier posts and conversations, I’ve mentioned my interest in container data centers and the opportunities they bring for certain types of implementations and use cases.  As a big fan of agility in IT in order to meet the dynamic demands of the Business, containers can be a valuable weapon in the arsenal.
In my conversations [...]

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One of the contrarian voices in enterprise use of Web 2.0 technologies has often been doubt of the value of the “Wisdom of Crowds.”  That is, an apprehension that the input from widespread collaboration may have only marginal value toward the development of the product or initiative, or even worse- will be a waste of [...]

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I’ve written before about how the various aspects of our lives drive us to use multiple online personas, and that this is a shortcoming of social networking sites today. What I’m referring to here is that we all wear multiple “skins,” and to represent these personas online one needs separate profiles on separate social networking [...]

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An article appearing today on Reuters describes how researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University’s Machine Learning Department have been experimenting with brain activity related to thinking of words.  The process involves capturing MRI images of a person’s brain as they are shown and asked to think about specific words.  The image captured on the MRI of the [...]

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