Technically Speaking

Hurricane season is far from over, but with four major hurricanes – Category 3 or greater – already causing untold damage in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico, 2017 has already proved to be a brutal one.

Digital transformation, application modernization, faster service delivery – these terms are being thrown around so much that they’ve become so ubiquitous as to be meaningless. What is digital transformation after all? For me, the best analogy is Blockbuster versus Netflix. Failing to anticipate the shift to on-demand and streaming entertainment, Blockbuster failed to futureproof its business model. It resisted digital transformation, and paid the price.

Your database is truly critical to the successful operation of your data center, yet databases pose extraordinarily complex management challenges. Try as you might to resolve issues as they arise, you may find yourself coming up short. Part of the problem is that many people consider database health and performance to be one and the same, but that’s not necessarily the case. These concepts aren’t strictly interchangeable, and if you treat them as such, you may be impeding your own ability to troubleshoot.

Building an engaging workplace is a key mission of any government agency. Engagement matters. Not only are engaged employees more innovative, productive, committed, and satisfied, they are also less likely to leave. And we all know that the cost of employee turnover is high in terms of monetary and knowledge loss. But what building blocks do you need to nurture an employee’s sense of purpose and committed role to the mission?

The U.S has trailed much of the world when it comes to roundabouts, aka traffic circles or rotaries. In fact, Americans must pass through 1,118 intersections before they are likely to encounter a roundabout. In France, you’ll encounter one every 45 intersections and the UK every 127 intersections (source).

The 2017 DefCon conference featured former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, who spoke about artificial intelligence, computers, and of course, chess.  After losing a match to a purpose-built computer in 1997, Kasparov realized that the machine, although it had beaten him, was not truly intelligent:  it had simply out-calculated him, by examining over 200 million chess positions per second.  Kasparov soon devised “advanced chess”, in which a strong human player teams up with a computer.   Advanced chess combines the best human qualities of imagination, judgment,