Steve Jones

Coming back from the EMC World conference in Las Vegas I was looking at the people playing on the slots and making ridiculous bets at Craps and wondering 'don't these people know anything about statistics?'.  Lets be clear I get the idea of it being fun, but when you sit next to someone on a blackjack table who twists when the dealer is showing a six and they've got 15 is just depressing. There

There is something that is beginning to irritate me, ok something else.  Its mobile applications that don't cache.  I'm fed up of travelling on a train or being on a plane and the end result being that my iPad or iPhone app doesn't work because I'm in an area that doesn't have reasonable network coverage.  I was using the App earlier when it had WiFi and it was all fine but the app requires me

In all of my career to date in IT there really has been three clear worlds in IT, the software development guys who are the bespoke tailors, the package guys who deliver off the shelf and the BI guys. I'm going to admit a prejudice here.  Until a couple of years ago my impression of BI guys was folks who were one step up from Excel guys.  It was dead-data and done in batches, sure it had to be

You know when people laugh at the fashion industry for saying that 'blue is the new black' and because of its ridiculous amount of fawning over models, designers and the like?  Is that really different to IT?  We've got our fashion houses - Google, Facebook, Apple.  We've got the big bulk conglomerates IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and oh hell the fawning that goes around... I'd say the

At the recent Hadoop Summit in Amsterdam I noticed something that has been bothering me for a while.  Lots of companies have done some great Proof of Concepts with Hadoop but they are rarely turning those into fully blown operational solutions.  Being clear I'm not talking about the shiny, shiny web companies where the business is technology and the people who develop are the people who support,

Oh the chanting is out, Big Data, Fast Data, the three 'V's and of course the ubiquitous elephant are roaming across the IT landscape as the next great hype monster.  Its going the same way as pretty much every IT hype exercise.  Yes this links to the hype cycle but the way it happens is sadly predictable in IT. Company has a business problem they think about it in an innovative way Company

There is a famous phrase In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king IT has always had a problem communicating with the business, and the business communicating with IT.  To fix this IT created something called Enterprise Architecture which aimed to provide a framework around the internal IT estate in a manner that helped that conversation. We can argue how successful that was but

A few years ago I wrote an article about "When Big Data is a Big Con" which talked about some of the hype issues around Big Data.  One of the key points I raised was about how many folks were just slapping on Big Data badges to the same old same old, another was that Map Reduce really doesn't work they way traditional IT estates behave which was a significant barrier to entry for Hadoop as a new

I've had an experience in the last few months with the folks from BT that really brought home how bad support can be when they have a real issue and how they look to trot out excuses to fob you off when they dont actually have a fix. So in January iPlayer stopped working at my mother's house.  She isn't a techy so I took over support.  The first call went fine, and a secondary follow up call

Back in 2006 I wrote a post on why JavaSE 6 wasn't for the Enterprise with all of the cruft that had been added and one comment I made around the inclusion of a Web Server was its potential impact on security.  Well it appears that thanks to this bloatware approach and lack of focus on core stability Java is now one of the number 1 security threats out there.  Apple have been hacked thanks to

One of the things that annoys me sometimes, and its quite a long list, is when people proclaim something as 'new' when in fact its just a case that its gone mainstream.  The problem I have with this is that it normally means that they've forgotten all of the learnings of previous generations of implementation and are starting from scratch and making the same old mistakes.  We saw this with the

Right now in the UK there are hundreds if not thousands of trains around the UK, all moving at different speeds and going on various routes across millions of rails, switches, points and other things.  This gives billions of pieces of information. But right here, right now I just want to know why my train is stuck and when I'll get home. The key to remember in Big Data is that its not the

There are lots of stats out there about CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers), CFOs and COOs now spending more on IT than the IT department.  Lots of this spend is on SaaS solutions and information centric solutions.  The previously powerful IT department has dropped out of contention in many cases because its not seen as adding any value. And what is the main reason for that? Well the IT department

A friend of mine the other day said an amazing thing I like coding in C++ I mean, seriously?  The land of friends, of people writing C code and debugging nightmares, had things got that much better, I mean I know there are some good threading libraries now but seriously, C++ is nice? All of the idiots code in Java, they don't know C++ And there we have the point.  Its not about what technology