Machine learning is a method of teaching computers how to use data to make predictive models and perform important tasks accurately without manually programming them to do so. In other words, machine learning allows a system to learn from data and experiences so that it can improve its performance in future tasks. For example, have you ever seen on Amazon the “Frequently Bought Together” section? This is where Amazon recommends add-ons or complementary goods based on the product you are looking at. If Amazon had to manually program recommendations for each of its 200 million products, it would take a … Read More
Upgrading a PC SATA drive to SSD
In my journey to upgrade my new Windows 10 laptop from its SATA mechanical hard drive to a much snappier SSD, I came across several stumbling blocks that were not all addressed within a single blog post or YouTube instructional. Here is my attempt to remedy that. *NOTE* Before you purchase an SSD and undertake this mission, we urge you to please research that your particular laptop model can indeed be upgraded to SSD. Background: If you’re buying a laptop today (early 2016) and looking to upgrade its hard drive (HD) to SSD, you can probably accomplish this upgrade for … Read More
Industrial Internet of Things Platform Comparison
Last updated June 12, 2017. Published on February 8, 2016. The market for Internet of Things (IoT) platforms is rapidly evolving. With an ever increasing number of available platforms to choose from, we decided it would be helpful to lay out their features and capabilities for easy comparison. To complete our matrix, we used the following criteria: a major IoT player with a platform that has real-world success implementing industrial use cases. The first section gives general information about the various platforms, including the platform name, the Platform as a Service (PaaS) used, and the date the platform became available. Most were … Read More
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday Word Clouds
There are some fun holidays coming up so we decided to see what people were saying about them on Twitter. Similar to the Valentine’s Day Word Cloud we created, we used R to pull tweets from Twitter, clean them up and display the most frequently used words in a word cloud. See them below! Black Friday: Cyber Monday: Giving Tuesday:
What’s New for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c
With the new release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.0.5, Oracle has added even more functionality to their Management Server (OMS). This latest version expands on plugin integration with the Oracle public cloud services, and adds Oracle virtualization plugin (12.1.0.7) which provides complete control of your private cloud. Additionally, OMS also comes with the ability to deploy agents so that you can monitor and control your existing hardware and virtual machines. By implementing these agents within your virtualized environment, you can automate the patching process for all your VMs. By implementing a couple instances of the new Oracle Enterprise Manager, you can have … Read More
IDaaS – Vendor + Product + Feature Matrix – November 2016
As the world of IDaaS continues to evolve at a rapid pace, we’ve put together the latest IDaaS vendor – product – feature matrix for the largest active vendors in the IDaaS space. This information is current as of November 2016 and is put together by a combination of real world industry experiences, documentation reviews and other available information… IBM and Oracle are of note this year for every different reasons. IBM has recently consolidated it’s platform and added many of the emerging technologies into their platforms to offer what appears on paper as the strongest offering, while Oracle has … Read More
On-Premises Identity & Access Management – Vendor + Product + Feature Matrix
As with any packaged, on-premises suite, finding the best Identity Management products for your enterprise is a not a trivial task. This is especially true when different products from different vendors, that accomplish different objectives or services, have remarkably similar (and therefore confusing) naming conventions. To make matters worse, not unlike other COTS enterprise suites, the ‘cloudification’ of these products has begun and many vendors have started to offer a version of these products as a PaaS or SaaS offering. Additionally, many of these vendors also offer an IaaS type deployment of these packaged products in their on-prem form. M&S has … Read More
Leveraging the Power of Salesforce External Objects
Here at M&S we are working on a ground-breaking new project containing multiple data sources being brought into one Salesforce org and displayed using Visualforce with Bootstrap CSS. A crucial and challenging area of our client request involved not replicating data from external enterprise systems by storing it in a Salesforce Object (neither Standard nor Custom). This led us to the use of Salesforce External Objects. External objects are similar to custom objects, except that they map to data that’s stored outside your Salesforce organization. Each external object relies on an external data source definition to connect with the external … Read More