Link Collection – July 31, 2011

• The Enterprise Family

  “Enterprise architects need to work with the enterprise as if it were a family. If you look at a family, especially one with kids, they have their moments, but over time, they all start to embody a set of shared values.”

  tags: entarch toddbiske

• Couchbase Goes 2.0, Pushes SQL for NoSQL – NYTimes.com

  “The bigger news for the industry most likely is UnQL, which Couchbase Co-Founder and SVP of Products James Phillips hopes will become the equivalent of SQL for unstructured databases. A standard query language could be very beneficial to the NoSQL space, which is characterized by many different products with different functions and different syntaxes.

  Created by CouchDB creator Damien Katz and SQLite creator Richard Hipp, UnQL extends aspects of SQL to NoSQL databases. According to Phillips, it’s an expressive language that, like SQL, lets the database do “heavy lifting” instead of putting the burden on application developers to write certain functionalities into the application.”

  tags: nosql SQL UnQL couchbase

• MoMA’s ‘Talk to Me’ Focuses on Interface – Review – NYTimes.com

  “The Museum of Modern Art’s “Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects” is one of the smartest design shows in years — by which I mean that it’s intelligent but also that it’s made for the texting, tweeting, social-networking, app-downloading, smartphone-wielding museumgoer.”

  tags: moma interface

• The Fertile Unknown: 77 Awesome Creativity Books

  “The following are some of the books (both the classics and some newer ones) that have informed, inspired and/or resonated with me along my journey over the years. I’ve chosen each based on philosophy, context, concepts, principles, practices, or applicability. Some are more reflective and other more active. Since most would fit into more than one catagory it felt too reductive to break them down that way. I’m just listing them in no particular order for you to explore whichever calls to you.”

  tags: creativity books

• Jeff Bezos on innovation: Amazon ‘willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time’ – GeekWire

  “If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company. AWS also started about six or seven years ago. We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them, but we are going to continue to plant seeds. And I can guarantee you that everything we do will not work. And, I am never concerned about that…. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.

  But. if you get to a point where you look at it and you say look, we are continuing invest a lot of money in this, and it’s not working and we have a bunch of other good businesses, and this is a hypothetical scenario, and we are going to give up on this. On the day you decide to give up on it, what happens? Your operating margins go up because you stopped investing in something that wasn’t working. Is that really such a bad day?

  So, my mind never lets me get in a place where I think we can’t afford to take these bets, because the bad case never seems that bad to me.”

  tags: amazon innovation

• Why the shortage of cloud architects will lead to bad clouds | Cloud Computing – InfoWorld

  “I’ve worked on cloud-based systems for years now, and the common thread to cloud architecture is that there are no common threads to cloud architecture. Although you would think that common architectural patterns would emerge, the fact is clouds do different things and must use very different architectural approaches and technologies. In the world of cloud computing, that means those who are smart, creative, and resourceful seem to win out over those who are just smart.”

  tags: architects cloudcomputing

• Behind the Youthful Sales Surge for IBM Mainframes – Digits – WSJ

  I’ll always have COBOL… “Just how hot is IBM’s most venerable computer line? Well, revenue from the high-end machines known as mainframes surged 61% in the second quarter, capping the best four quarters of growth for the segment in five years.”

  tags: ibm

• Gartner Releases Their Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2011 | A Passion for Research

  “Bottom line: The greater the hype, the more the analyst inquiries, and the faster a given technology ascends to the Peak of Inflated Expectations. After reading this analysis it becomes clear that vendors who strive to be accurate, precise, real and relevant are winning deals right now and transcending the hype cycle to close sales. They may not being getting a lot of attention, but they are selling more because enterprises clearly understand their value.”

  tags: Gartner cloudcomputing

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.