Here we go again, offshoring is not a problem

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080208/162149213.shtml 

Comment #19 seems best of them to me. Seems right.

Can Facebook ever make money?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/31/myspace_fb_comscore_drop/

Before you bite into that chicken wing

I grew up in Eastern North Carolina, so I know something about the poultry industry. Conditions were said to be this way 20 years ago, some things never change. 

http://www.charlotte.com/716/story/487187.html

Series: http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/

Past disasters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_chicken_processing_plant_fire

Neighborhood boundaries the next frontier in geodata

Political boundaries of course are hard and fixed. Mental maps that we carry around with us (’safe’ vs ‘unsafe’ areas, neighborhoods) are not so fixed. Marketers and researchers have used zip codes to delimit neighborhoods for their purposes, but using zip codes are too coarsely grained or provide incomplete boundaries.

http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=2686&trv=1

Neighborhood mapping requires some combination of the hard and fixed, and mostly mental mapping:

At Maponics, there are two parts to data creation. The first focuses on finding resources. What public and private data exist about neighborhoods? Maponics staffers seek and gather information that’s available. What if such data do not exist for a city? Then the company creates the boundaries with input from its many customers, especially those in real estate, who, like the direct mailers, know their geographies. Clement chooses the term “expert sourcing” to describe a process that includes only those with knowledge of the topic, to contrast it with “crowd sourcing,” where just about anyone can have input.

A real issue with neighborhood mapping is the fuzzy boundaries. Perceptions of what makes up a neighborhood varies within and without the area. For the data to be useful for some purposes, enough of the fuzziness has to be removed so you can have clearly enough defined boundaries.

Consumers don’t care about their credit card numbers being stolen

http://www.cio.com/article/179603?source=nlt_cioinsider

If customers don’t care, the Street doesn’t care

Good SOA people hard to find

http://weblog.infoworld.com/realworldsoa/archives/2008/02/ibm_agrees_with.html

Lack of people could be a chicken and egg thing, there aren’t many good people out there because there haven’t been many people with experience from very many successful implementations, because of the lack of good people…

So the answer is to get the “right” people to do it. The author mentions the problems with that, namely politics, unqualified vendors and lack of understanding of SOA.

Well, politics isn’t going away. Unqualified vendors, what’s new about that? As far as the lack of understanding, does that simply mean that it is just too difficult for many shops to pull off?

Best comment on the page:

“… need to have a holistic understanding of all enterprise systems”

Holistic? Dear god please, not this word!

Most shops - big or small - are clueless about how things actually work. If that sort of comprehensive knowledge is required for SOA, its dead now. Only things that work despite “holistic” ignorance can survive.