You could say I was reading wide this morning, here an assortment of links that caught my attention:
Esther Schindler “Since every programming language is a tool suited to solve a particular problem, it behooves each IT shop to use the best tool for the job. So in this article, I share a few up-and-coming scripting languages that really ought to be on your company’s radar, with a few passionate arguments from developers who have adopted them.” The 6: Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Lua, F# and Boo.
It’s True: There’s Fraud in the H1-B Visa Program – BusinessWeek
Is this fraud good for US tech workers? “The program for what are known as H-1B visas is designed to help U.S. companies bring workers with rare or specialized skills into the country. A Microsoft (MSFT) or IBM (IBM) can use the visas to hire someone from abroad if they can’t find an American citizen with equivalent skills. But in a recent study, U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) found that 13% of the requests for H-1B visas were fraudulent and 7% contained technical violations. In one case, when a company requested a visa for a “business development analyst,” USCIS found the person would be working in a laundromat, doing laundry and maintaining washing machines.”
Stupid QA tricks: Colossal testing oversights | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-10-20 | By Andrew Brandt
J. Crew ‘upgrade’ “During the second quarter of fiscal 2008 we implemented certain direct channel systems upgrades which impacted our ability to capture, process, ship and service customer orders.”…Among the problems reported by customers was this whopper: A man who ordered some polo shirts received, instead, three child-size shirts and a bill for $44.97 for the shirts, plus $9,208.50 for shipping. And before you ask, no, they weren’t hand-delivered by a princess in an enchanted coach. As a result, the company temporarily shut down e-mail marketing campaigns designed to drive business to the Web site. It also had to offer discounts, refunds, and other concessions to customers who couldn’t correct orders conducted online or who received partial or wrong orders.. In a conference call with investors in August, CFO James Scully said, “The direct system upgrades did impact our second-quarter results more than we had anticipated and will also impact our third-quarter & fiscal-year results”
Service Oriented Enterprise: 16 Corrections on Cloud Computing
Jeff Schneider and his “crack team of cloud computing consultants” offer 16 corrections to James Governor’s “15 ways to Tell Its not Cloud Computing” post. James’ origninal post is focused (IMO) on the cloud computing providers (and pretenders). Jeff’s slideshow (IMO) is focused on enterprises/organizations who might purchase cloud computing services.
James offers some IT investment common sense in uncommon times: “Let’s start by acknowledging that an enterprise should only buy a product only when it decreases risk. If you don’t understand how the product works, or if you don’t believe claims about its capabilities, then don’t buy it until those issues are settled…Likewise, buy the simplest, cheapest product that meets your needs. Don’t buy expensive products with lots of features you don’t need, even if you think those features might be useful someday…More importantly, you need to remix your thinking and acknowledge that open source belongs in the buy side mentality. While you can avoid the arduous mind numbing negotiations around seat-based licensing, you can focus on getting something deployed in production that meets the business need a lot faster. Of course, you should consider buying support not just from the vendor itself but also in terms of contributing back to the community…”
Why I think Web Oriented Architecture is phony « Judith Hurwitz’s Weblog
SOA is about the business: “When we talk about SOA we really aren’t talking about protocols. Sure there are lots of protocols and interfaces that are an important part of service orientation. But the power of SOA is in the fact that it enables businesses to focus on two key enables: 1. creating business services that are key business functions 2. enabling these services to be used flexibly to create a variety of business processes that can be changed quickly to enable change and innovation. Companies are getting pretty creative with this approach. Not only are they creating business services involving software components, but they are tying those business services into business elements such as monitoring electric meters…25 case studies that are part of the forthcoming second edition of SOA for Dummies. What did we learn? Simply put, customers are implementing SOA from a business perspective. They are leveraging back end and web based capabilities and gaining huge business value.”
