May 212013
 

To help out I’ve been asked to teach a COBOL programming class in the fall.  I have not committed to teaching the class yet but here is an interesting post by Scot Nielsen at MicroFocus.com…

What is the first thing which springs to mind when you think of COBOL? Did you know that 200 times more transactions are processed daily by COBOL business applications than there are Google and You Tube searches made? COBOL is not about to drop dead – it still dominates the business language world. Here are our top ten reasons for learning COBOL.

via Top 10 Reasons to Learn COBOL | Micro Focus Blog.

 Posted by at 11:34 am
May 202013
 

By Minda Zetlin at ComputerWorld.com…

Not long ago, IT consultant Mark A. Gilmore was called in to help an IT department that was struggling with project overload. “They’d gotten this kind of attitude — the executive vice president calls it ‘Burger King Syndrome,'” he recalls. “Their approach was, ‘You can have it your way.'”

The business executives believed IT could supply whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it. Salespeople had gotten into the habit of asking the development team to create applications within a week to fulfill promises they’d made to customers. As a result, IT employees were spending about 80% of their time reacting to crises or struggling to meet impossible deadlines rather than calmly planning their workloads, says Gilmore, president of Wired Integrations in San Jose.

via How to prevent IT department overload – IT transformation, management, Burger King, Gartner, applications, Networking, software, project management – Computerworld.

 Posted by at 5:02 pm
May 042013
 

Trying to build a Linux desktop that replaced Windows is something I tried 4 years ago with Ubuntu 9.04.  For me it was the first time I ever became truly excited about Linux.  The experience accelerated my adoption of the Mac.  I enjoy articles such as this one.

By Falko Timme and Christian Schmalfeld at HowToForge.com…

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 13.04 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

via The Perfect Desktop – Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) | HowtoForge – Linux Howtos and Tutorials.

 Posted by at 10:37 am
May 032013
 

By David F. Carr at InformationWeek.com…

The job of a higher-education CIO is changing, partly because of disruptive technologies for online learning, but that doesn’t mean the basic challenges go away. Perhaps now more than ever, a CIO’s job hinges as much on surviving a brutal schedule of meetings and the academic politics of the institution as it does on mastering bleeding-edge technologies.

via Higher Ed CIOs Can’t Ignore MOOCs Or Politics – Education –.

 Posted by at 10:28 am