An update to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is coming. Did I lose you already? If you’re not familiar with WCAG, it’s a collection of guidelines that developers, designers and accessibility experts use to help ensure the apps and websites they create are accessible to people with disabilities. The W3C has the latest guidelines published here.
Privacy and Security on Blockchains | @CloudExpo #Cloud #FinTech #Blockchain
Decentralization of everything, the great new idea of which the web can’t stop babbling, might still seem a bit utopian if you inspect it closely.
Yes, blockchains are likely to reshape our economy, or a huge part of it, and benefit considerably those who are currently unbanked.
They might also facilitate the creation of rating/reputation systems that are not controlled by any single entity and thus allow people (say Uber drivers who’d like to work for Lyft) to switch employers without having to establish their credibility anew.
They might give users complete control over their assets; protect them, to a degree, from being robbed and provide tools to sustain privacy even when a state-level actor – a bank or a government – is after their identity.
[video] Digital Innovation with @GrapeUpInc | @CloudExpo #Agile #DevOps #CloudNative
«Grape Up leverages Cloud Native technologies and helps companies build software using microservices, and work the DevOps agile way. We’ve been doing digital innovation for the last 12 years,» explained Daniel Heckman, of Grape Up in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Thoughts on the Post-Quantum Computing Era | @CloudExpo #AI #ML #DX #Cloud
With IBM, Google, and Microsoft pouring funding into the research of quantum computing, it’s really starting to look like we are going to see the benefits in the next 5 – 10 years. Google may be just weeks from announcing they reached the quantum supremacy milestone and IBM may not be far behind either. Today, I wanted to share my thoughts on how quantum computing may affect cryptography as we know it.
When we talk about the basic cryptography used for things like TLS when you access your bank’s website, the premise behind securing your data is surprisingly simple. The certificate uses a public key which is really just a large number that’s the result of multiplying two prime numbers together. This key has a size typically between 256 bits and 2048 bits. It’s quite a large number. To find the two factors via brute force, in today’s classical computers, it would take a billion years to solve (give or take a year or two). In computational complexity theory, they refer to these problems as intractable. They just can’t be solved with the computers we have today.
Why Every Entrepreneur Must Know a Bit of Digital Marketing | @CloudExpo #DX #API #Cloud
Hiring a digital marketer starts as soon as you plan to launch a prototype of your innovative idea. But, without knowing anything about digital marketing, you may not be able to reach out to investors and target audiences. You can follow the following basic points to know the significance of digital marketing even if you are not doing it on your own.
A 2018 cloud trend – the return of the on-premises solution?
Research published earlier this year by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) revealed that the rate of cloud adoption by UK-based businesses has reached 88%. The top three reasons respondents gave for cloud take-up were delivery flexibility, operational cost savings and scalability.
For many businesses, public cloud has been an attractive, effective way to build out their existing models and experiment with new ones, but it has often been oversold and under-performed. In my view, we’ll see a retreat from the public cloud in 2018, especially for storage of highly critical applications, and a return to on-site solutions for various reasons.
First, public cloud still requires an army of people to manage it. While many public cloud companies provide the cloud platform, they don’t provide the manpower or resources to manage it. This means the company utilising the platform has to provide the resources and time required to maintain it, both of which cost money. For anything other than short-term storage, these costs eventually add up. In particular, management costs for the public cloud are more expensive than organisations first expected.
Second, the availability of the public cloud was well-publicised in 2017, but so were the failure issues that came with it. For example, Amazon’s S3 service experienced an outage in February after an employee accidentally typed an incorrect command in the system, resulting in platforms such as Slack and Quora being down for four hours. Other public cloud giants that experienced significant outages in 2017 include IBM and Microsoft Azure. This highlights the risks associated with companies using public cloud to store critical or sensitive data, and has emphasised the importance of companies keeping greater control over that data. We predict this will lead companies to reconsider their storage strategies moving forward, particularly from a data protection, storage and management point of view.
Finally, as alluded to above, many organisations are realising that – at least for long-term storage – public cloud can more often than not turn out to be more expensive than similar on-premises solutions. To start, the advertised price of the public cloud often demonstrates the initial cost of use, but, as organisations become tied into paying recurring monthly fees, and gather larger amounts of data and deploy more extensions, the cost continually increases. Some public cloud platforms also charge per user, so although public cloud promotes unlimited scalability, it can come with a heavy price tag.
New technology that is coming through the pipeline will make it easier for businesses to orchestrate servers and VMs, providing on-premises solutions at a lower cost, and making them as easy to manage and scale as if on a public cloud platform. That is why, in 2018, I predict that we will see a return to on-premises solutions as companies realise that adopting public cloud may not actually be cheaper or easier to use, particularly with the issue of data security coming to the fore. The adoption rate of public cloud will slow significantly next year as newer, better on-premises solutions come into play.
How artificial intelligence will drive digital transformation
Ignore the doom and gloom, artificial intelligence (AI) will become a positive job motivator. Moreover, 2020 will be a pivotal year in AI-related employment dynamics, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner.
The number of jobs affected by AI will vary by industry. Through 2019, healthcare, the public sector and education will see continuously growing job demand, while manufacturing will be negatively impacted. Starting in 2020, AI-related job creation will cross into positive territory, reaching two million net-new jobs in 2025.
Artificial intelligence market development
"Many significant innovations in the past have been associated with a transition period of temporary job loss, followed by recovery, then business transformation and AI will likely follow this route," said Svetlana Sicular, research vice president at Gartner.
AI will improve the productivity of many jobs, eliminating millions of middle- and low-level positions, but also creating millions more new positions of highly skilled, management and even the entry-level and low-skilled variety.
Unfortunately, most calamitous warnings of job losses confuse AI with automation, that overshadows the greatest benefit from the technology — AI augmentation — which is a combination of human and artificial intelligence, where both can complement each other.
IT leaders should not only focus on the projected net increase of jobs. With each investment in AI-enabled technologies, they must take into consideration what jobs will be lost, what jobs will be created, and how it will transform the way workers collaborate with others, and make decisions.
"Now is the time to really impact your long-term AI direction," said Ms. Sicular. "For the greatest value, focus on augmenting people with AI. Enrich people's jobs, re-imagine old tasks and create new industries. Transform your culture to make it rapidly adaptable to AI-related opportunities or threats."
Gartner identified additional predictions for AI:
- AI has already been applied to highly repeatable tasks where large quantities of observations and decisions can be analyzed for patterns.
- However, applying AI to less-routine work that is more varied due to lower repeatability will soon start yielding superior benefits.
- AI applied to non-routine work is more likely to assist humans than replace them as combinations of humans and machines will perform more effectively than either human experts or AI-driven machines working alone will.
- By 2022, one in five workers engaged in mostly non-routine tasks will rely on AI to do a job.
- Through 2022, multi-channel retailer efforts to replace sales associates through AI will prove unsuccessful, although cashier and operational jobs will be disrupted.
- In 2021, AI augmentation will generate $2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity.
"AI can take on repetitive and mundane tasks, freeing up humans for other activities, but the symbiosis of humans with AI will be more nuanced and will require reinvestment and reinvention instead of simply automating existing practices," said Mike Rollings, research vice president at Gartner.
Rather than have a machine replicating the steps that a human performs to reach a particular judgment, the entire decision process can be refactored to use the relative strengths and weaknesses of both machine and human to maximize value generation and redistribute decision making to increase agility.
Editor's note: Read more about artificial intelligence on our sister publication, AI News.
Here’s How to Fix “Windows is running out of free disk space”
There are lots of things you can do with a Parallels Desktop® for Mac virtual machine (VM) that you can’t do with a physical PC. For example: You can increase (or decrease) the amount of RAM or the number of processors by just moving a slider or using a menu. You can have lots of […]
The post Here’s How to Fix “Windows is running out of free disk space” appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Harnessing Your Continuous Future in 2018 | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #ContinuousDelivery
The Toyota Production System, a world-renowned production system is based on the «complete elimination of all waste». The «Toyota Way», grounded on continuous improvement dates to the 1860s. The methodology is widely proven to be successful yet there are still industries within and tangential to manufacturing struggling to adopt its core principles:
Jidoka: a process should stop when an issue is identified prevents releasing defective products
How to Start Learning About Quantum Computing | @CloudExpo #AI #ML #DX #Cloud
Quantum Computing is becoming quite the hot topic lately. With research being done by Google, IBM, Microsoft, universities, and a number of other players, it’s looking this is really going to happen. In fact, Google may just be weeks away from announcing the Quantum Supremacy milestone. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of Quantum Supremacy yet, it’s basically the point where a quantum computer can complete a computation in a short time where a classical computer can’t complete it at all. This is a big deal. While there are some simple quantum computers out there right now (you can try out IBM’s via the Q Experience), this will be a big deal.