Doug Cutting talks about Hadoop, and open source | ITworld: "Doug Cutting has changed the way that IT does Big Data. Hadoop, the Open Source project he started, has made it so that any company with access to a rack of commodity PCs and a reasonable amount of programming skill can do the type of large scale data analysis work that was previously done only on supercomputers. Enterprises such as Amazon, eBay, Facebook and IBM, all the way to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are taking advantage of tremendous value offered by this Open Source hit. Hadoop is a game changer."
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Why Harry Potter's Latest Trick Is to Speak a Syrian Dialect - WSJ.com
Why Harry Potter's Latest Trick Is to Speak a Syrian Dialect - WSJ.com: "DUBAI, United Arab Emirates—When Khulud Abu-Homos, a television producer at OSN network here, decided to dub the Harry Potter movies into Arabic for distribution in the Middle East, she faced a quandary: which Arabic?
The Arab world, it turns out, isn't one world at all. It's a collection of overlapping worlds that harbor a dizzying array of diverse people, cultures and language. The rest of the world noticed this recently in the varied ways the Arab Spring democracy movements have played out."
The Arab world, it turns out, isn't one world at all. It's a collection of overlapping worlds that harbor a dizzying array of diverse people, cultures and language. The rest of the world noticed this recently in the varied ways the Arab Spring democracy movements have played out."
Monday, July 18, 2011
From Technologist to Philosopher - Manage Your Career - The Chronicle of Higher Education
From Technologist to Philosopher - Manage Your Career - The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Getting a humanities Ph.D. is the most deterministic path you can find to becoming exceptional in the industry. It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industrywide shift toward more 'product thinking' in leadership—leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed.
Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status—Steve Jobs—recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets.
It is a convenient truth: You go into the humanities to pursue your intellectual passion; and it just so happens, as a by-product, that you emerge as a desired commodity for industry. Such is the halo of human flourishing."
Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status—Steve Jobs—recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets.
It is a convenient truth: You go into the humanities to pursue your intellectual passion; and it just so happens, as a by-product, that you emerge as a desired commodity for industry. Such is the halo of human flourishing."