First Super Scalable LDAP Directory Driven by Big Data
August 9, 2013
We read a rather lengthy summary of a new solution that is classified as a “world’s first.” Yahoo Finance published the press release from Radiant Logic about their commercial solution for distributed storage and processing for enterprise identity management. “Radiant Logic Introduces HDAP: The World’s First Super Scalable LDAP Directory Driven by Big Data and Search Technology” shares the information on it.
It was at the Cloud Identity Summit in Napa that Radiant Logic announced their solution. Based on Hadoop, this new version allows enterprises to channel the power of large cluster and “elastic” computing in their identity infrastructure.
The article tells us:
“With HDAP as part of the upcoming RadiantOne 7.0 virtualization release, companies can radically scale their access and throughput, using the first highly scalable and secure directory that’s based on big data and search technology. A diverse array of forces, from federation and the cloud to an increasingly mobile workforce, is putting escalating pressure on the enterprise identity system. To keep up with authentication and authorization demands, while tapping into greater use of personalization and recommendation engines, companies need a richer view of their identity, along with better performance and greater flexibility.”
We may not typically share articles that use such terminology as LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), however we do understand those magical words ‘business value’ that appear so close on the page.
Megan Feil, August 09, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Imagining a World Without Open Source
August 9, 2013
Open source technology has made substantial changes to the culture of technology in a remarkably short period of time. Open source software started the movement and now open source is even moving into hardware. Wired covers the impact that open source had made in their article, “In a World Without Open Source.”
The article muses on what would happen if the world lacked open source:
“It’s thought-provoking when you consider software in this way, and a breathtaking demonstration of the power and influence of open source software (OSS) in our lives. If you’re a techie or a software developer, you know this and live it every day. But stop a moment to consider this: for the rest of the world, how deeply OSS has become a part of daily life, both in the enterprise and for consumers, is news.”
From mobile to financial services to automotive, open source impacts every area of our lives, and the article covers it all. And while open source touches consumers in ways they often don’t realize, enterprises know how dependent they are on open source technology each and every day. More and more enterprises of all shapes and sizes realize the need for open source, but turn to value-added solutions to save the hassle of having to build their infrastructure from scratch. LucidWorks for instance, offers LucidWorks Search and award-winning LucidWorks Big Data. These packages allow for multiple modes of deployment with full support and training offered by LucidWorks. It is the best of open source with the support and hassle-free implementation of a customized solution.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 9, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
HP Autonomy: Lawyering Antics
August 8, 2013
I read “HP Changes Autonomy Lawyers Faster Than CEOs.” I don’t know if the write up is spot on, but I found it amusing. As you may know, Hewlett Packard bought Autonomy and paid $11 billion or so. Then about eight or nine months later, HP wanted its money back. Various actions took place between the parties, but as far as I know, the money has been a “horse out of the barn.”
Here’s the passage from the write up which tickled my funny bone:
HP is now on its third set of attorneys as the company attempts to defend itself against Autonomy-related shareholder lawsuits. The lawsuits surfaced after HP acquired Autonomy in 2011 and later claimed former Autonomy executives had made misleading financial statements.
I find lawyers somewhat similar to the MBAs cranked out by Stanford- and Harvard-like MBA programs. What I mean is that these folks are interchangeable, think in a similar manner, and often belong to the same country clubs/health clubs/bridge clubs/golf clubs. What one thinks, others may think too.
Why shift attorneys?
Maybe change is good or the shifts signal some contention with regard to the notion that a seller sold something the buyer wanted?
I learned from my high school Latin teacher, Ken Bushman, the phrase caveat emptor. My memory is not as it was when I was 13 years old, but I think it means, “Buyer beware.”
How about this Latin phrase?
Non pote non sapere qui se stultum intellegit.
I would translate this as, “A person must have some brains to know he is a fool.”
Granted Rome declined prior to its fall, but common sense can persist for centuries.
Stephen E Arnold, August 8, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
Natural Language Interface Transforms Search
August 8, 2013
Projections and opportunities are often forecasted for emerging technologies and natural language processing is no exception. We took a look back at an article from earlier in the year posted on Semantic Web: “Looking Ahead to a User Experience Transformed by Conversational Interfaces and NLP.” According to this article, software that is able to understand human intention will play a vital role in transforming business processes and search technology.
IBM distinguished engineer Currie Boyle is quoted as stating the following:
This ecosystem change is happening in the industry…discussing the desire for business dialogue management systems to try to determine the intent of a user seeking information and the intent of the author who wrote it, and matching the two by that intent, even if they don’t share the same words in common to express it. The applications range from consumer conversational and context-aware systems to business professionals finding answers in structured or unstructured data through via natural language interfaces to boosting call contact center performance with dialogue management.
Expert System solutions offer precise analytics using their core semantic search technologies. Their linguistic analysis capabilities enhance the extraction and application of data in the natural language interface.
Megan Feil, August 8, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Google Plays Defense
August 8, 2013
Google App Engine’s engineering director Peter Magnusson went straight to (you guessed it) Google+ to argue against the pervasive perception amongst developers that Google is trying to lock them in with their PaaS offering. GigaOM reported on this topic in “Google Defends, Quantifies App Engine Lock-in Concerns.”
Additionally, Magnusson discusses the idea that portability is possible with the right practices. He cites examples such as the Google Cloud Datastore that, as NoSQL solution, can be replaced by stacks such as MongoDB.
The focal point of the article tells us that Magnusson explains away lock-in as a case of necessary trade-offs:
“Essentially, he argues, you can either have access to the guts of the infrastructure and the flexibility — and operational effort — that comes along with that, or you can free yourself of those headaches by using someone else’s abstractions. If you’re using App Engine, that means you also get to use rad features such as Datastore and take advantage of Google’s know-how around things such as load balancing and fending off DDoS attacks.”
Google continues to play offense in the many markets they have dipped their toes in. However, even with their unmatched ability to achieve ubiquitous reach and depth across most all business and technology areas, they too must play defense sometimes.
Megan Feil, August 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Data Mining is Part of Online Experience
August 8, 2013
How much are we revealing of ourselves online? Every day we are hearing new information about how even the safest internet users are most likely wide open to spying. It’s hard to say what NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden thought would happen, but the world’s reaction is probably pretty close. The NSA isn’t the only one peeking, as we learned in a recent TIME article, “This MIT Website Tracks Your Digital Footprint.”
According to the article about a program called Immersion:
Much like the government phone-surveillance programs, Immersion doesn’t need to access the content of communications. Instead, by gathering information about the senders and recipients of all the e-mails in an inbox, it can create a detailed portrait of the user’s social connections. Each person’s picture on Immersion is as unique as a fingerprint, but much more informative.
While, sure, we treasure our privacy as much as anyone, this news and the NSA fiasco isn’t really much of a bubble on our radar. Much like the President said it’s not really a huge deal. If anyone who spends a lot of time online thinks they have anything resembling privacy, we have a bridge we’d love to sell them.
Patrick Roland, August 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Bing Now Offers Search By Creative Commons License
August 8, 2013
Here is a useful tidbit brought to us by Search Engine Land. Amy Gesenhues clues us in to a time-saving search feature in, “New Bing Search-by-License Feature Filters Images Based on Usage Rights.” She reports:
“Bing announced a new ‘Search by License’ feature today that filters images based on usage rights. The new feature filters images with a Creative Commons license, helping users avoid the hassle of digging through image licensing details to find available photos. . . .
“Bing also notes clicking on an image from the Bing image search results page will provide the image’s source to help determine licensing details. According to the announcement, the latest version of Microsoft Office 2013 uses the same ‘Search by License’ technology released today, so that when an image search is performed within any Office application, only licensed images are pulled by default.”
A curiously kid-themed screenshot accompanies the write-up, showing the six Creative Commons options under the handy License drop-down menu. Another image illustrates the source listing that accompanies an image from the results page. With this feature, Bing has just added a welcome shortcut to the arsenal of many who work with graphics for a living.
Cynthia Murrell, August 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Red Hat Partners with MongoDB
August 8, 2013
Red Hat is a major leader in the world of open source. Founded in 1993, they are considered one of the major forerunners to the present day open source boom. So the latest Red Hat news is usually a harbinger, and is worth following. Read the latest news from Red Hat in the PC World article, “Red Hat Enterprise Linux Gets Cozy with MongoDB.”
The article describes the recent Red Hat partnership with MongoDB:
“Easing the path for organizations to launch big data-styled services, Red Hat has coupled the 10gen MongoDB data store to its new identity management package for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution . . . Although it already has been fairly easy to set up a copy of MongoDB on RHEL — by using Red Hat’s package installation tools — the new integration minimizes a lot of work of initializing new user and administrator accounts in the data store software.”
The partnership between Red Hat and MongoDB can only mean good things for the open source community. In fact, we have been seeing more and more of these likeminded partnerships over the last several months. LucidWorks announced a partnership with MapR to strengthen their LucidWorks Big Data offering. LucidWorks is worth keeping an eye on, as they are constantly seeking innovation and advancement for the open source community.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 8, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
The Price of News: The Post Deal
August 7, 2013
I have been following the flood of information about Jeff Bezos’ apparent purchase of the The Washington Post. I use the word “apparent” because it is not clear if Mr. Bezos or Nash Holdings LLC bought the newspaper. For the purpose of this Beyond Search item, let’s assume that a Bezos-controlled entity has the keys to the Lego kit with millions of blocks that the Washington Post represents. Building a profitable newspapers may be like taking the brightly colored blocks and assembling them in just the right way to build a cash machine.
Can Jeff Bezos build a money machine from the many Lego blocks that make up the Washington Post? Image from Lego Corp. at http://goo.gl/QG0xU2.
The obvious point is that Mr. Bezos, an Internet business superstar, sees riches where others see union hassles, declining advertising revenues, and “real” journalism about the most exciting place in the swampy area bordering on the Potomac.
Reuters’ take on the deal was interesting. The story “Amazon’s Bezos Pays Hefty Price for Washington Post.” Thomson Reuters rarely overpays for its acquisitions, so I interpreted the headline as a suggestion that Mr. Bezos’ financial skills are not up to Thomson Reuters’ standards. Both Thomson Reuters and Amazon have cost control challenges, and it is not clear which organization is better positioned for the economic storms which are forming on the horizon.
The Reuters’ story states:
The multibillionaire founder of online retailer Amazon.com Inc may have paid more than four times the price that the financial results of the Washington Post suggests it is worth.
Before the Reuters’ era, Thomson Corp. sold most of its newspaper properties. I wonder if some of the Thomson Corp. era executives are asking, “Why didn’t we meet with this fellow?” Too late now I suppose.
The other interesting angle on the Washington Post deal appeared in “Bezos Brings Promise of Innovation to Washington Post.” (Note: this link may go dead due to the pay wall stuff at the venerable newspaper.) The headline uses an interesting word “promise”. There is no guarantee that Amazon’s WalMart approach will work with “real” journalism. The write up says:
UK Member of Parliament Calls for Murdoch to be Questioned
August 7, 2013
Britain’s The Guardian reports on outrage surrounding the emergence of a certain recording, one on which Rupert Murdoch can be heard lamenting his News Corp‘s cooperation with police in a recent investigation. The media emperor can also be heard excusing payments to police and public officials, the subject of said investigation, as simply the way things are done. “Question Rupert Murdoch Over Secret Tape, Urges MP [Member of Parliament]” has us asking, aren’t “real” journalists fascinating?
Writers Josh Halliday, Patrick Wintour, and Lisa O’Carroll report:
“Labour MP Tom Watson has called on Rupert Murdoch to be questioned by police after a covert recording emerged of him appearing to regret the level of help News Corporation gave to the investigation into alleged wrongdoing at its newspapers.
“News Corporation boss describes payments to police and public officials as ‘the culture of Fleet Street’ in a secret recording made during a meeting with staff from the Sun newspaper this March.
“In a transcript of the recording, which was obtained by the investigative website ExaroNews and aired by Channel 4 news on Wednesday evening, he appears to regret the extent of News Corporation’s internal management and standards committee’s (MSC) co-operation with the police.”
I wish I could say I’m surprised. Will Murdoch ever learn to play well with others, or will he sooner find himself toppled?
Cynthia Murrell, August 07, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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