(Photo Credit: Gizmodo)

You lose some. You win some: Of course as NBC’s online partner, Microsoft gets a least a cut of the $100 million dollars in online advertising spent around the Olympics. And the millions of downloads of Silverlight aren’t too shabby either.

The Internet is Falling! Arbor Networks, a security and network management company, partnered with ninety network services and content providers from around the world to publish an extensive study of IPv6 traffic on the Internet. Craig Labovitiz, Arbor Networks chief scientist, stated that only 900 days were left until the end of the Internet, or at least the exhaustion of IPv4 registry allocations. For the past year, the study shows very little IPv6 traffic – something like 1/100^th of 1% of Internet traffic. Craig credits this to money issues. “The department of commerce estimates it will cost $25 billion for ISPs to upgrade to native IPv6.”

Blogger James Urquhart created a bill of rights for cloud computing. The purpose of the bill is to “help guide would-be cloud customers to those clouds best able to guarantee their freedom.” The blogosphere is a great place to get some open debate going, and I applaud James for trying to make something yet so “cloudy” a bit more clear and concrete. But what’s up with the creating a PAC for this?? (Check out the comments.)

Trying to get by on limited resources? Need more money, staff and the freedom to focus on long-term projects? Sound familiar? Then you just might be in IT at a midsize company. (or in marketing at a young but rapidly growing IT company ) Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions conducted a survey of 200 tech leaders at midsize companies (500 to 3000 employees). The upside: 61% of those surveyed think they’ll be spending more on IT next year – is this bullish thinking about the economy or how much their own business (rev) will be growing?

Bill Snyder calls Dell “Bozo of the Month” for trying to trademark “cloud computing”. Yikes. Maybe not a “bozo” move but certainly inadvisable given how ubiquitous the term is. Here’s our take on it.

Photo Credit: www.heelys.com

Since the Ninja has such a hypnotizing voice, we decided to leave this one as a podcast: ScienceLogic Q&A with the Splunk Ninja

A good place to being to look for clues to an answer is Wikipedia, where the opinion of the author there is,

 ”A simple and practical definition, however, would be how an entity (i.e., business) arrives at an optimal or realistic decision based on existing data.”

Quoting the Wikipedia author(s) further,

“Common applications of Analytics include the study of business data using statistical analysis in order to discover and understand historical patterns with an eye to predicting and improving business performance in the future. Also, some people use the term to denote the use of mathematics in business. Others hold that field of analytics include the use of Operations Research, Statistics and Probability. However, it would be erroneous to limit the field of analytics to only statistics and mathematics.”

The Wikipedia author(s) continue their discussion of analytics, as follows;

“Analytics closely resembles statistical analysis and data mining, but tends to be based on modeling involving extensive computation. Some fields within the area of analytics are enterprise decision management, marketing analytics, predictive science, strategy science, credit risk analysis and fraud analytics.”

All of these topics above are CEP-related areas involving complex events and situations based on the need for optimal and reliable real-time capabilities to make meaningful (business) decisions. 

Simple pattern matching, event mediation and routing, and basic mathematical calculations do not really fall into the realm of complex event processing.  Instead, CEP is real-time decision support based on modeling and “extensive” computation.  In a nutshell, complex events and situations require analytical models that are non-trivial and that is why without analytics, there is no true “complex event processing.”

See also:

WIkipedia on Predictive Analytics

LAS VEGAS -- Last weekend, more than 9,000 hackers, freaks, feds and geeks gathered for the 16th annual DefCon, the world's largest computer security convention.

Wired.com brought you live coverage of the most newsworthy events at DefCon 16. Here are some photos from the lighter side of the conference.

Left: South Korean hackers compete in the Capture the Flag competition. The goal is to hack into and keep control of targeted servers.

Mr. Sinister and Dragon Cracker battle it out in a round of Guitar Hero -- one of DefCon's newest competitions.

Bringing-your-own-booze supply ensures optimal buzz at DefCon. Shortly after this picture was taken, hotel security escorted this backpack-hacker to his room.

Computer geeks from the National Institute of Standards and Technology set up a network secured with quantum encryption in a conference room at DefCon. The quantum-entangled photons are being used to encrypt a video stream across a line-of-site network.

A compact optical bench and an atomic clock (left) are used to secure a network with quantum encryption.

In the Lock Pick Pavilion, DefCon attendees Dustin, Jennalynn and Kunfoozball practice their lock-picking skills.

DefCon founder and organizer Jeff Moss, aka Dark Tangent, at the conference's closing ceremony Sunday.

A collection of black badges awaits the winners of the various competitions. These badges give their holders lifetime entry to DefCon.

One of DefCon's logos, the smiley-faced skull and crossbones, is welded inside a yellow sphere. The sphere is the primary stage of one of the most difficult competitions at DefCon: The Mystery Challenge.

Unbeknownst to attendees, this laptop is sniffing RFID tags and taking photos of their owners when they pass in front of the detectors. RFID tags are used in everything from building access to some credit cards.

At the closing ceremony, DefCon organizers turn off the lights while the attendees wave their high-tech badges back and forth.

The baaad folks who were listed up on this “Wall of Sheep” consisted largely of security professionals who should know better, though many of them were using iPhones or other types of mobile devices instead of traditional laptops. Apparently, users were warned ahead of time that this could happen, and this type of passive hacking was done good naturedly, as a lesson and a point of humor.

But the event turned a bit sour when some reporters set out to actively hack credentials and passwords from other well known press representatives (like eWeek and CNET), in order to post them on the Wall of Sheep, too. It’s a credit to the Black Hat organizers that they showed their commitment to security and confidentiality, and threw the reporter-hackers out of the conference for their “active” hack:

With thousands of hackers milling around the Black Hat convention here, and widespread snooping on the public WiFi network, one place was supposed to be off limits: the press room.

But in a case of reporters spying on other reporters, three journalists working for the French publication Global Security Magazine were booted Thursday from the hackers’ conference after they were allegedly caught hacking into the private computer network set up for the media.

Read the full article here.