Mark Palmer on Regulation of information sources: “Here’s where regulators should step in: automated trading based on unregulated sources of information should be prohibited. It’s just not right, and the UAL debacle illustrates this perfectly. This “news” was 5 years old. Indeed, it was probably eliminated by most news processors as an outlier; but it only takes one to start a chain reaction. This “data” shouldn’t have entered any trading system in the first place. Dow Jones wouldn’t have put that story on the wire, nor would Reuters.” Good discussion in the comments.
Event Processing Thinking: On Occurrence time: a footnote to the UAL fiasco
Opher on Event Occurrence Time: “The works in the temporal area are talking about several time dimensions – the bi-temporal model talks about: transaction time — the time that a fact is recorded, and valid time — the time interval in which the fact is valid. In event processing we also look at a bi-temporal time similar to this: detection time — the time that the message that represents the event was detected by the processing system, and occurence time — the time which the event happened in reality (occurrence time can be considered as the starting point of a valid time that ends when the event becomes irrelevant, but let’s get it out of the scope and concentrate in occurrence time).”…”Thinking about standard structures for events — I would think that having “standard header” with some mandatory properties for each event…the occurrence time should be a mandatory. Occurrence time has some inherent issues associated with it – but I’ll discuss it another time.”
Microsoft joins OMG | InfoWorld | News | 2008-09-10 | By Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Microsoft joins OMG, (finally) supports UML, will bring BPMN to Visio: “As part of its strategy for model-driven software development, Microsoft on Wednesday announced it has joined the Object Management Group (OMG).”…”Microsoft views model-driven technologies as a main pillar of its “Dynamic IT” vision for aligning business and IT. Other pillars include service enablement, virtualization, and the user experience.”
The 10 Laws of Cloudonomics – GigaOM
Intro: “Public utility cloud services differ from traditional data center environments — and private enterprise clouds — in three fundamental ways. First, they provide true on-demand services, by multiplexing demand from numerous enterprises into a common pool of dynamically allocated resources. Second, large cloud providers operate at a scale much greater than even the largest private enterprises. Third, while enterprise data centers are naturally driven to reduce cost via consolidation and concentration, clouds — whether content, application or infrastructure — benefit from dispersion.” Followed by 10 laws of (groan) ‘Cloudonomics’ — bad name, good read.
Is the Cloud Right for You? Ask Yourself These 5 Questions – GigaOM
5 questions for enterprises on using the/a cloud: is demand constant? is growth predictable? can demand be shaped? where are the users? is the application interactive?
CFOs more optimistic about U.S. economy: survey: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance
“Chief financial officers are more optimistic about the direction of the U.S. economy, but remain concerned about consumer demand and weak credit markets, according to a quarterly survey.” ” Compared with the previous quarter, 28.5 percent said they were more optimistic about the U.S. economy, up more than 7 percentage points from June, according to the Duke University/CFO Magazine survey of about 1,300 CFOs, including 524 from the United States. Those saying they are less optimistic fell to 41.5 percent, from more than half in the previous survey and more than 72 percent in March. About half expect the U.S. economy to begin recovering by the middle of 2009.” “Still, many finance chiefs say they are cutting plans for capital spending and employment and 43 percent say the credit crunch is directly hurting their company. CFOs named weak consumer demand as their most pressing concern, followed by credit markets and the cost of fuel, the survey found.”
User Experience: Learning from the Pros – ReadWriteWeb
Compelling User Experience shouldn’t be limited to the web & consumer tech, enterprise users deserve good UX as well. ReadWriteWeb notes some UX resources to check out: “The initial User Experience has to be compelling or any new application is going to be passed up in favor of whatever shiny object is next in line. What’s a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. Below are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.”