Wednesday, March 30, 2011

In Praise of Resource Constraints

The article "In Praise of Resource Constraints" by By Michael Gibbert, Martin Hoegl and Liisa Välikangas in MIT Sloan Management Review raises an important question how to allocate resources effectively. At first site a sound idea will be to allocate resouces according to the needs. But the authors have a different insight at the problem:
It may pay to remember the old Finnish army adage (derived from Finland’s battles against much bigger adversaries throughout the course of its history): “If the heavy armor does not move with four people pushing it, take one man away and let us see if three can do it!”

I would agree, there should be a reason to innovate. But still a sound balance should be kept. This is where an art begins...

Friday, March 25, 2011

Do You Write Right Stuff

Today I have read an article "They write the right stuff" . It is completely not new. Still I enjoyed some chritisism of existing and widely used approaches to software engineering.
And probably they have the right to do so, look:
According to statistics the last three versions of the product contained only 1 issue per 420,000 lines of code (no code generators, this is shutle onboard computer!)
Jone Manson, software engineer and professor of informatics, says that compute science is not a science at all. "It is a cave art!"
According to the studies made 70% (by GDP I believe) of the companies stucked in chaos or something that is a little better than chaos.
It is a pitty but I would agree ...

Friday, March 18, 2011

It's Been a Hard Day's Night

I know, it has been a difficult week for the planet. But believe, everything will be fine ;)

Data Stream Management Systems

Recently I have read an article in IEEE Computer Society, Dec 2010 about Data Stream Management Systems and their application to finance sector. Later I found a full article that is available here .
In the article Microsoft StreamInsite engine is used as an example. It is a part of MS SQL Server Platform 2008R2.
I was also curious whether there are any other commercial products that implement such an approach and can be used for an enterprise. Unfortunately I couldn't find any. And Wikipedia gives references on academic investigation projects only like STREAM or Aurora. Strange...