IT News and Views – the Friday Collection

IT recruiters upbeat about 2012 jobs outlook, says REC
I’m not sure how rooted this is in reality but apparently IT recruiters are looking forward to next year with their only concern being the lack of suitable candidates. It seems that, while the rest of the economy has caught pneumonia, there’s never been a better time for candidates to acquire skills that the market wants. Read the story, here.

A few things I am looking forward to in 2012
An interesting end-of-year prediction Gartner blog for the direction of IT in the year to come. I must confess that I can’t disagree with any of it in terms of where IT should be headed rather than where it will necessarily end up. See if you agree, here.

Microsoft releases emergency critical security patch
The software giant releases an interim patch to clear up recently discovered vulnerabilities. It just goes to show that the battle against the hackers is ongoing. Read the specifics, here.

Odd technology job interview questions revealed
A list of some fairly terrifying interview questions asked by techie recruiters. I’m willing to wager money on the fact that the candidate who rolled up for an interview with Amazon hadn’t prepared an answer to world hunger. Read the rest, here.

And finally…
Gaming gecko
A heartwarming story of man and his companion working together for a shared aim. The fact that the aim is to complete a game on a telephone shouldn’t detract from this seminal moment in inter-species cooperation. See the story, here.

IT News and Views – the Friday Collection

IBM 5in5: IBM Reveals Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives within Five Years
IBM cast a techie glance into the future to predict the sort of changes that will happen in the short term future. It seems as though the headline story is that analytics might make unsolicited mail more relevant to you but at the cost of seeming more intrusive. That’s my take, judge for yourself, here..

UK’s top 10 2011 YouTube videos put dog above royals
Doom and gloom pervade the world of business but, as it’s Christmas, here’s something a little different. The BBC list the top 10 youtube videos of the year headed by a talking dog; yes, ladies and gentlemen, that’s right: a talking dog. Magnificent. Read the rest, here..

Yuletide Backbytes
A little bit of lightweight Christmas cobblers from Computing magazine. They gather together 5 frivolous stories to lighten everyone’s mood: from nerd dating to super-strength finger nails. Enjoy a couple of minutes respite, here..

Government lacks skills to deliver ICT strategy, says NAO
In the latest salvo, the NAO admit that the Government have an IT strategy but they just don’t have the skills to deliver it. Computer Weekly’s solution?: keep talking internally and externally to identify gaps and to plug them. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Judge for yourself, here..

And finally…
The Nativity like you’ve never seen before
Not being a young person, I should frown upon such attempts to tell the old story in an updated way. However, I am reliably informed that you can’t wack a bit of beatboxing Nativity so I will maintain a slightly baffled silence. Er, happy Christmas, here..

IT News and Views – the Friday Collection

CIOs reveal technologies making the most impact in 2011
Study finds that virtualisation and cloud technologies are most significant in CIOs driving down the cost of IT. The study gives a bit of a V-sign to mobile devices which are perceived to make much less of a contribution. Read the report, here.

Silent updating for Internet Explorer
Microsoft announce that updates for IE will happen ‘while you sleep’. This is important as it should keep users more secure as they clearly can’t be trusted to apply updates themselves. Read it, here.

Social Media Doesn’t Change Business Basics. But.
At the risk of sounding like a Gartner-groupie, here is another excellent Gartner blog about the use of ‘the social’ in business. It makes the valid point that adopting social methods is not going into the scary unknown, but using new technology to aid business. Sage advice and analysis, here.

FBI says hackers hit key services in three US cities
Worrying news story that hackers have turned some of their attention to breaking into utility facilities. The 2 revolutionary main conclusions of the story are: 1. have passwords of more than 3 characters; 2. if it’s not too much trouble, go wild and change your password once in a while. Duh! Be concerned while reading the blindingly obvious, here.

And finally…
Back in my day……..we didn’t have apps
We are never more divided by a common language than between age groups. This application is the boom-ting (I think) and will help those who speak English as a first language understand our younger brethren. Probably. Er…innit. Read more, here.

IT News and Views – the Friday Collection

Atos boss Thierry Breton defends his internal email ban
Company boss has the courage of his convictions in allowing staff to rely on social media techniques rather than internal email. This is a major challenge to a mentality that you copy the world and his labrador on every email to prove you are doing your job. Read the interview, here.

Beware misleading marketing of “private clouds”
Interesting Gartner blog which, horrifyingly, implies that some of the marketing surrounding the Cloud might be a bit iffy. The author identifies 3 porkies told by those trying to get us to float into the Cloud. Read the entry, here.

Made in IBM Labs: Breakthrough Chip Technology Lights the Path to Exascale Computing
IBM unveil a new type of chip that should dramatically increase the speed of computing. In other news, this article has introduced the word ‘Nanophotonics’ which would go a long way to winning any game of Scrabble. Read the IBM article, here.

Martha Lane Fox launches Government Digital Service
Article about the change of mindset in government that will make services ‘digital by default’: or, I suspect, online unless it is simply impossible to achieve. This is broadly a good idea as it could represent huge efficiency savings but I can’t wait to see how they deliver meals on wheels over t’interweb. Read the story, here.

And finally…
Laptops may fry more than just thighs
Report that using your computer might affect you in the downstairs frontal-type trouser area. Is this a co-incidence or another form of Darwinian selection? I’ll let you decide by reading, here.

IT News and Views – the Friday Collection

Big business steps up IT spending despite downturn
Deloitte fire another salvo in the war to ascertain as to whether enterprises’ IT departments are skint or not. The budgets are obviously focussed on providing cost-saving, agile solutions; so IT need to step up to the plate. Read about it, here.

The Social Revolution: The first thing we do, let’s remove all the CIOs.
Interesting Gartner blog about the difficulties of driving Social innovation within an IT context. The author argues that this needs to be driven from the top as there are many opportunities waiting and plenty of available and keen labour to achieve this. Read it, here.

Java is hackers’ most common target
It seems as though hackers have focussed their nefarious attention on Java. The solution? Nothing definitive but do make sure that all versions are up to date with the latest protection. Read the news story, here.

Coding wizards offered X Factor-style competition
Companies are outsourcing the solution to some of their more sticky problems to competitions. Geeks can fight it out to provide the best solution to a defined problem in exchange for some fairly substantial cash prizes. Read more, here.

And finally…
What is worse than a game of charades? Lionel Blair hosting an online game of charades
Cannot compute; cannot compute; cannot compute… Lionel Blair is back and will be miming stuff on Twitter. And you can win stuff you didn’t know you wanted. Find out more, here.

IT News and Views – the Friday Collection

Government opens its procurement heart to IT suppliers
Government promises to do procurement better, more openly and collaboratively with suppliers. Words are cheap (especially when they are subjected to a competitive tendering process) so I wait with more hope than expectation for a positive result. Read the report, here.

Facebook users average 3.74 degrees of separation
Report finds that if you go through a ‘friend’ who goes through a ‘friend’ who goes through a ‘friend’ who goes through 0.74 of a ‘friend’ you will find anyone in the world. This grotesque simplification hides the fact that the world is getting smaller, driven by the interweb. Read the BBC report, here.

The top five spam subjects sullying inboxes
The Register report the 5 most common ways that spammers try to draw the attention of the great unwashed. Personally I am far too busy cultivating the Nigerian side of my business to worry about these. Find out what they are, here.

Companies are struggling to keep up with security management
Report finds that security updates/ upgrades etc coming through every five minutes makes it difficult for IT departments to keep up, potentially resulting in a dangerous hole in security. Call me an old cynic, but I am guessing that the company that commissioned the research probably have something to sell you that will stop this. Read the report, here.

And finally…
Best £5 you’ll ever spend? Not likely.
For a tenner an hour, online gamer promises to act as bodyguard for you in the virtual world. Should you feel that your online presence requires a backup you might conclude that seeking treatment for paranoia was a more appropriate action than hiring Geek-bo. Decide for yourself, here.

IT News and Views – the Friday Collection

Wild, wild data
Our partner, CommVault, provide an excellent graphical respresentation of the results of a survey of CIOs regarding data management. I think the response can be summarised by the phrase “not happy”. See the picture and download the associated white paper, here.

IBM’s 2011 Tech Trends report
Ed Brill blog about the release of a report by IBM about trends in technology. It’s an interesting insight into the thoughts of IT-ers across the globe. Click here and then click on the link, there.

I’ll Take ‘Curing Malaria’ for $1,000, Alex
Some of the cash won by Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, is being used to help combat malaria. The project is using volunteer computers to find compounds that might stymie the development of the disease once the victim is infected. Read it, here.

Report reveals drop between peak and off-peak surfing
Generally interesting article marred by the blindingly obvious: when more people are online, it slows down. It also shows that we are an extremely data-hungry populace and we should still be wary of some of the truth-averse claims made by advertisers. Read it, here.

And finally…
iPhone emergency get US man into hot water
Inebriated man calls the emergency services when his mobile, sorry cellphone, goes kaput. While (contrary to the popular maxim) you could make this up, there’s no point as there are always idiots like this to step up to the plate. Click whilst raising eyebrows, here.

IT News and Views – the Friday Collection

There’s no such thing as a “safe” public cloud IaaS
Thought-provoking Gartner blog about security issues in the cloud. This is further grist to the mill for people to consider whether, when and how they should migrate to the cloud. Read it, here.

London Underground software failure raises concerns about driverless trains
As a technology company based in the capital, we often have cause to use the tube. Despite assurances that the public were safe during this outage, I think a great deal more public expressions of the virtues of driver-less trains are necessary. Read the story, here.

Beating the stealth threat in IT security
The Beeb ask a Sophos big cheese three techie questions. There are no great revelations but an interesting read, nonetheless. Read it, here.

US dismantles ‘massive’ cyber crime syndicate
The FBI are instrumental in breaking up a computer fraud that had infected 4 million machines. The £9m they defrauded begs the question: what could they achieve if they focused on something constructive? Read about some extreme naughtiness, here.

And finally…
No half-baked solution to weak WiFi signal
They say that necessity is the mother of invention. This scenario doesn’t fit the bill of ‘necessary’; he could have done something else like, for example, turn off the infernal machine and look at the view. Read it, here.

IT News and Views – the Friday Collection

Computerworld: IBM opens up smartphone, tablet support for its workers
Ed Brill blog about IBM’s facilitation of their staff to use their mobile devices in anger at work. This is purely speculation but I would imagine that the security guys at IBM had kittens when such an innovative approach was first suggested. Read the blog and find the original article, here.

Massive PC shortages to hit this Xmas
When composing your begging letter to Santa, you might want to bear in mind that a PC might be beyond the bearded bringer of pressies. All this as a result of the devastation caused by the Thai floods. Read about it, here.

Would police use malware to catch cyber-criminals?
This is all we need: both sides in the cyber war launching strikes at each other. The official attitude seems to be ‘we might use it but we’re not going to tell you about it’. Read this interesting BBC account, here.

DWP awards another big IT contract to another big supplier
Francis Maude has been given a hard time after another corporation is awarded governmental business; he once opined: “We will end the oligopoly of big business supplying government IT by breaking down contracts into smaller, more flexible projects.” In fairness to Maude, we don’t know if the original scope was wider and there’s always a chance they might deliver. Roll your eyes, here.

And finally…
1980’s style tweeting looks cool but it’s time consuming
A baby step forward, a massive lurch back. This is Twitter for the generation that is still coming to terms with the compact disc (and possibly the discovery of fire…). Read it, here.

IT News and Views – the Friday Collection

Cloud computing will become the government’s ‘common infrastructure’, says Francis Maude
Beware of government ministers carrying promises of cost cutting, particularly in the IT sphere. Apparently the G-Cloud will deliver savings and efficiencies; in fairness, it can’t go any worse than recent governmental IT project debacles. Read some IT crystal ball gazing, here.

Facebook sets up data centre in Lapland, Sweden
Facebook opens a data centre in Lapland to use the natural brass monkeys to cool their overworked hardware. The local mayor, unsurprisingly, is keen for others to follow this example. Read it, here.

CNNMoney: IBM CEO Palmisano to step down
Ed Brill blog reporting the appointment of a new boss at IBM. It also dwells upon the successes of the previous CEO. Interesting read, here.

Internet publishers liable for privacy invasion in each country material is accessible, ECJ rules
If you are going to put something on t’interweb that might annoy someone else, you should probably start saving up. And don’t expect to see much of the world outside a courtroom anytime soon as you can be pursued across any EU state that the offending data has been accessed. Read a rather lengthy but interesting article, here.

And finally…
GPS-enabled shoes to hit US market soon
A practical application of technology to help track Alzheimer sufferers. The downside is that could also be used to piece together what you got up to ‘the night before’; some things are best not known. Read it, here.