Cluttered by E-Mails – The Problem

Believe it or not, I often hear people complaining that they are cluttered by E-Mail or falling behind their emails.  When ever I come across such conversation, I immediately think of ‘Poor Management’.  E-Mail is by far a poor communication tool and when used for critical business process, it should always backed by some rigid communication.  It is like tossing the coin in the fountain, you have no idea whether it reached your recipient and does not guarantee any facial expression.  If the message is critical, normally people always backup with a phone call or an instant messenger.

Why so many E-Mails?
One of the prime suspect is the ‘CC’ traditionally translated to ‘carbon copy’.  People became acquainted to using CC and using it liberally became the problem.  You are tagged between a conversation between two recipients (From & To) which may sometimes get over 10 E-Mail thus overloading your Inbox.  By the end of the day, all you need is a single E-Mail with the outcome of the conversation between ‘From’ and ‘To’.

The next suspect is automated systems.  Today, any system (from hardware to software) can send an E-Mail.  If one system/software send you one E-Mail every 4 hours, then by the end of the day you have 6 E-Mail to ignore.  Most of the new system tools today are using ‘Dashboard’ mechanism to keep you informed and eliminate E-Mail clutter.

‘Poor Management’
This one is vital as it serves and supports the strategy of any business.  Trust me, cluttered E-Mail shakes the business.  If you are unable to keep up your E-Mail, it means either your business does not have a clear regulations on E-Mail communication or you are over loaded with responsibilities.  Either way, the work is not get done on time.

This applies mainly to business leaders, for others it is a different story.

HTML 5

Ian Hickson said he is reluctantly dropping the codecs subsections in the HTML5.  By doing so, we are not building a standards, instead we are trying to play nice.  This is totally wrong.  The specification should look a head and provide a open implementation.  Since, the majority of the player agreeing upon Ogg Theora and since Ogg is a open standard container, it should be adopted in the specification.  By doing so, there are couple of benefits in the long run.
- Apple can adapt its hardware for Ogg support.
- Ogg Theora can improve.
As Ian Hickson pointed out the options and possibility of including ogg/H.264 in the future.
But the codec should be included in the final specification, otherwise, we will end up with the same situation we have for <img> with no specifics.

Devices are for future

As we go through generations of innovation in technology, it is clear that while today is the day of computers, the future is for devices.  As the devices are evolving, it is pertinent that these are capable of doing more yet weighing less and fits in your palm.  From music player to game machine, they are the loaded beast, enough to replace the traditional computer today.

A gentle introduction to Cloud Computing …

I would like to take few minutes of your time explaining today’s industry buzzword – Cloud Computing. I will briefly narrate the definition of cloud computing.

History

The term cloud was coined in the IT industry by Ramnath Chellappa during his Dallas Speech in 1997. In a very concise measure, a cloud is the infrastructure behind the ‘service’ offering. It is also loosely termed for internet.

Service Definition

According to ITIL V3, a Service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.

One of the key points of Cloud Computing is the ownership of the costs and risk associated with the process is poised on to the service offering organization relieving you as a customer from those hurtles.

Understanding Cloud Computing

In order to understand the cloud computing, let us take a very simple example of web hosting. The hardware and software to run the web server is not owned by you, instead a web hosting company will take the burden from you and you simply use the service. However, a web hosting is not a typical cloud computing.

Cloud Computing is also closely related to the electricity grid and hence also termed as ‘utility computing’. Today, we take it for granted when we plug our ‘appliances’ to an electrical socket, we get the electricity. Back back in 1930, when the national grid was not available,

Cloud is Green!!!

The fundamental way a web hosting differs from cloud computing is the effective use of resource. In a web hosting, you are allocated a fixed amount of processing power and storage, while from the cloud computing prospective, the processing power and the storage is either shared among others or fixed and volatile or both. For this main reason, Amazon’s cloud platform is named as ‘Elastic’ In case of cloud computing, you pay for what you use. In most cases, you have the complete control of your ‘instance’, so you can increase or decrease the capacity.

Terminology

Cloud is the umbrella term for

• SaaS – Software as a Service
• PaaS – Platform as a Service
• HaaS – Hardware as a Service

Since, cloud computing is often deal with the internet or web, the service offering is done through ‘web services’.

In the future post, I will cover the benefits, drawbacks and industry players in this field. So Long…