Hot June but IT news continue

Summer is coming and IT news are more and more interesting.

First thing we are going to speak about Facebook:

Why Facebool is worth a dollar year ...and falling

Another interesant investigation to know the current situation is the document written by Ashlee Vance last 16 May.

The Ellison Files: Oracle Strikes Back

Over the course of a few months in 2009, Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) top executives engaged in a furious debate. Intel (INTC) was considering halting production of its Itanium chip, a high-powered but expensive workhorse that had fallen out of favor with nearly every company except HP. If it went extinct, so too would HP’s Integrity line of servers, which still made a ton of money for the Silicon Valley hardware manufacturer. The executives decided to hide the outlook from their customers, business partners, and even employees. “The Itanium situation is one of our most closely guarded secrets,” wrote Martin Fink, the head of HP’s high-end server business, to another executive.

That e-mail is part of a stream of private communications between Fink, former HP Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd, Intel CEO Paul Otellini, and numerous others that have just been made public in connection with ongoing litigation. In March 2011, enterprise giant Oracle (ORCL), which makes database software that runs on about 80 percent of HP’s Integrity servers, announced it would no longer develop Itanium-based products, citing conversations with Intel higher-ups about the chip’s murky future. HP sued Oracle for reneging on an agreement. Oracle countersued.
Snippets of both parties’ arguments have trickled out as the cases wind through court. But more than a dozen previously redacted documents were obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek in their original form. The confidential communications make it vividly clear how badly HP wanted to prolong the life of Itanium—widely considered one of the tech industry’s most costly duds—even, possibly, at the expense of its customers and business partners. Regardless of the legal outcome, the documents show that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison retains a remarkable knack for dragging opponents through the muck.
It was not, of course, supposed to come to this. Itanium was conceived in the mid-1990s as a state-of-the-art chip that would correct decades of past design mistakes. Intel and HP spent billions developing and marketing it, expecting rivals like Sun Microsystems, IBM (IBM), Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), and Compaq Computer to recognize the technology’s supremacy and use it in their own servers.
In the years that followed, Itanium became an industry laughingstock, even as its backers poured more than $15 billion into the chip. New versions tended to arrive late and slower than expected, and software makers took their time updating applications for it. SGI, one of the Itanium converts, went bankrupt and abandoned the chip. Most others decided that Intel’s regular Xeon chips, which were advancing at a quicker clip, were the better long-term bet. Critics dubbed the chip “Itanic,” and HP ended up as the only major Itanium backer.
While HP did not sell huge volumes of Itanium-based servers, it did make a lot of money on them, with some configurations costing upwards of $1 million. The buyers tended to be large organizations like banks and government agencies, which also paid HP for multiyear service agreements to support the hardware. But by the late 2000s, the court documents show, Intel wanted a clean break. Due to Itanium’s high engineering costs, Intel barely made any money on the chips, and only then because HP helped pay the R&D bills and guaranteed a certain level of sales. “So what happens if we don’t pay?” one HP staffer asked Fink in a 2009 e-mail. Fink’s response: Intel would “exit Itanium and have a round of high-fives.”
 
Photograph by Gary S. Chapman/Getty Images
Even as Fink wrote that e-mail, HP continued telling its customers that Itanium had a bright future. In fact, the company was plotting ways to dump Itanium and stop paying Intel. One option: Acquire Sun Microsystems. Its server software would give HP flexibility in the event of the demise of its own product, which was “on a death march due to [the] inevitable Itanium trajectory,” argued one executive in 2009. (Oracle ended up purchasing Sun later that year.) In other documents, HP describes a number of secret projects to move its high-end server business over to the Xeon chips the rest of the industry had come to rely upon.
Time and again, Fink, in particular, talks about the imminent “end of life” of Itanium while trying to keep that knowledge from partners like Microsoft (MSFT), which, like Oracle, made software to run on Itanium. Fink urged HP executives to “avoid any (Itanium) conversations” about the chip’s future and instead “extract money from Microsoft” to accelerate engineering work related to the secret projects. 

Secondly, the security is important in our homes but we have to be awake with the e-security, the security in internet.

Security performance should be part of procurement

Data Art vs. Data Visualization: Why Does a Distinction Matter?

We can see an interesting and personal article about Data Art and Data Visualization

Two distinct approaches to presenting data graphically exist today—data visualization and data art—and rarely do the twain meet. They differ in purpose and in design. When we fail to distinguish them from one another, we not only create confusion, but do great harm as well.
There are as many definitions of data visualization as there are definers, but at the root of this term that has been around for many years is the goal that data be visualized in a way that leads to understanding. Whatever else it does, it must inform. If we accept this as fundamental to the definition of data visualization, we can judge the merits of any example above all else on how clearly, thoroughly, and accurately it enlightens.
By data art, I’m referring to visualizations of data that seek primarily to entertain or produce an aesthetic experience. It is art that is based on data. As such, we can judge its merits as we do art in general.
Either one, done well, is worthwhile, assuming that it fits the task at hand. If the task is to help a particular group of people understand something, then data art is not appropriate, no matter how well it is executed. If the task is to entertain or engage an audience in a particular emotional experience, then data visualization probably isn’t appropriate. If the situation requires that both objectives are achieved, then a deeply informing and aesthetically beautiful visualization would be in order. Although it is quite easy to make any data visualization aesthetically pleasing, it takes a great deal of skill as a visual designer and information communicator to make one beautiful.
People make better decisions when they’re based on understanding. For information to be understood, it must often be presented in visual form. This is because patterns, trends, outliers, and a sense of the whole as opposed to its parts require a picture for the human brain to see and comprehend. Data visualization is essential. Visualizing data effectively is vital. Anything less is frivolous, costly, and harmful.
How in particular is data art—visualizations that strive to entertain or to create aesthetic experiences with little concern for informing—harmful when it masquerades as data visualization?

1. It suggests that data cannot be visualized without training in the graphic arts. As such, it works against the democratization of data. In fact, anyone of reasonable intelligence and a little training can present data effectively. It’s vital that this ability spreads more broadly across the population, because it can play a role in making a better world.
2. It features ineffective practices as exemplars of data visualization. It encourages people to present data in ways that are difficult to perceive and understand simply because they are prettier or more entertaining, which is rarely relevant to the task.
3. It keeps the practice of data visualization spinning its wheels, never able to progress beyond the mistakes of the past. Best practices of data visualization have emerged through many years of research and experience. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (Santayana).

I am personally and painfully acquainted with each of these problems. For this reason, I try to differentiate data art from data visualization and encourage others to do so as well.