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news

We need to talk about Steve Jobs

I’m angry about it, really. The treatment around Steve Jobs, in books, in movies and on TV seems to depict him as part-genius, part-ogre, and seldom looks at him as Steve Jobs: Human.
Who benefits from that? I can’t help but wonder who gains from such diluted biography. People can’t solve big problems if the culture they work in means they’ll be fried to a crisp for making a mistake.
That’s why people put money into Jobs or Musk.
Companies that work together well grow while those with inadequate management inevitably shrink.
I spoke at length with Apple VP education John Couch this week. We discussed many of the concepts in his highly recommended book Rewiring Education, which I’ll be returning to soon.
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Just think of 6 a.m. as Beta Time

This pilot fish is writing mainframe software for a large defense contractor, and he's discovered a way to become a lot more efficient: arrive at work at 6 a.m.
“The traffic is light at that hour, and I get a couple of hours of work in without much interruption,” says fish. “It also means I get to find what changes the computer center — which is at a different location — has made overnight.
“One morning I sat down, fired up the PC that's my terminal and started to work. But the editor was acting very strangely, so I called a system guy I know to find out what was going on.
Fish: Fred, what did you do the editor last night?
Fred: “We made some minor changes, but there were no changes visible to the user.”
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For cloud deployments, ‘it works’ is not good enough

“It works.” That’s a term used to go right along with “success,” but these days it means that you’ve gotten an instance of a cloud solution up and running. But it’s typically falling short in some way that those that use the term “it works” don’t yet understand.
Why? If you have an IT problem to solve using cloud computing technology, there are about 5! (five factorial) solutions, and they all “work.” However, only one solution pattern and corresponding technology solution are the most optimal.
[ InfoWorld explains: What is cloud-native? The modern way to develop software. | Get started: Azure cloud migration guide. • Tutorial: Get started with Google Cloud. | Keep up with the latest developments in cloud computing with InfoWorld’s Cloud Computing newsletter. ] So, you can have something working, but it’s costing you $1 million a month in lost efficiency. Yet those who crafted the solution are marveling at the fact that it’s functioning—and are typically unaware of the lost value that ..

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Machine learning: How to create a recommendation engine

What do Russian trolls, Facebook, and US elections have to do with machine learning? Recommendation engines are at the heart of the central feedback loop of social networks and the user-generated content (UGC) they create. Users join the network and are recommended users and content with which to engage. Recommendation engines can be gamed because they amplify the effects of thought bubbles. The 2016 US presidential election showed how important it is to understand how recommendation engines work and the limitations and strengths they offer.
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(Insider Story)

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Interview: Brendan Eich on JavaScript’s blessing and curse

Being the creator of JavaScript has been a blessing and a curse for Brendan Eich. On the one hand, JavaScript has the distinction of being the most popular programming language in the world. On the other, no language has been the target of more snark.
Eich is well aware of the language’s drawbacks—after all, in 1995, he worked around the clock to create JavaScript in a mere 10 days. In this lively interview with IDG’s Eric Knorr, Eich readily admits to JavaScript’s flaws and talks frankly about what he might have done better, while touching on JavaScript’s improvements over its 23-year lifespan. Warts and all, JavaScript has indeed become “the assembly language of the web.”
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What is Nmap? Why you need this network mapper

Network administrators, IT managers and security professionals face a never-ending battle, constantly checking on what exactly is running on their networks and the vulnerabilities that lurk within. While there is a wealth of monitoring utilities available for network mapping and security auditing, nothing beats Nmap's combination of versatility and usability, making it the widely acknowledged de facto standard.
What is Nmap? Nmap, short for Network Mapper, is a free, open-source tool for vulnerability scanning and network discovery. Network administrators use Nmap to identify what devices are running on their systems, discovering hosts that are available and the services they offer, finding open ports and detecting security risks.
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