eBook: Saas for Dummies: free download from oracle.com

If you visited oracle.com today you hit the following landing page:

And if you are interested in that book, just hit the "get saas for dummies" button and after a few clicks, you have downloaded this ebook:

68 pages is not so much - i will try to read it and give a review in a later posting.

Review at amazon: Software Product Lines in Action: The Best Industrial Practice in Product Line Engineering

This weekend i read the following book:

Software Product Lines in Action tries to explain, why a company should move from contract-based development to its own product strategy. But this change does not only involve software engineering -  you have to do organizational changes, business process changes, technology changes, ....
One nice excerpt is "Bringing comprehensive change to a software development organization isn't easy, and false starts are expensive."

The book has three divisions: "Aspects of Software product line engineering", "Experience Reports" and "Conclusions"
Part one covers the theoretical statements and is quite readable.
Part two presents 9 experience reports, which are not really helpful. Different companies are presented with their problems and their lessons learned. The best example is Nokia Mobile Phones - it is clear that their change to software product line has not worked very well. Nokias software for mobile phones was not a magic bullet...
Part three ("Conclusions") is much to short, to learn something.
Reading the 300 pages is at the beginning quite interesting, but after page 80 i did not get anything new or helpful...

If you are interested, take a look at my review at amazon.de. (like all my reviews: written in german ;-)

Journalismus, den die Welt braucht. Teil 3 | Pearls of journalism. Part 3

Yippie! I got a new release of IT-BUSINESS:

 And inside there was really nice article:

aha. I did not get this, but there is a magic weapon called chain management. Let's see what Google Translate does with this text:

Channel conflict threatens

The comparison of the "delivery price of Distribution" (blue line) with the average "sales price of Channels" (green line) makes it clear that price reductions on the part of distribution only be partially passed through the channel to the end customer. This focuses thus partially more on profit than on volume growth. A coordinated supply chain management is the solution to avoid such a channel conflict and specifically to develop benefits for participants

I think the english text is much more understandable than the german version...

Journalismus, den die Welt braucht. Teil 2 | Pearls of journalism. Part 2

Two weeks ago i started a first experiment with translating strange articles by Google (see here).
This was the next snippet (from IT-BUSINESS), which was a little bit weird:

Aha. Fog Computing...

Let's see, what Google Translate means to this:

Fog Compuing

The Fog is all symbolize the cloud around. It is all about the primary processing of data close to the data encoder, such as in the car or in the refrigerator before it is to be forwarded to cloud services. The more devices are connected to the cloud, the more data must be downloaded from and to the cloud. Fog Computing to store data that are needed for a specific device right there too and process.

"Downloaded from and to the cloud"...
For this snippet it wasn't really helpful to translate it into to english. But Fog Computing is a nice neologism ;-)

Journalismus, den die Welt braucht. Teil 1 | Pearls of journalism. Part 1

Today i browsed the magazine IT-BUSINESS  and read some really annoying articles. It was just words without building meaningful setences. It was so stunned, that i decided: I have to do something...

The  following idea came into my mind:
What about translating the part of the article, which i did not understand via Google Translate? Perhaps in english it sounds more meaningful (and more than 20% of the words are just technical terms in english...)

And after Google Translate:

Matching promotional concepts

In replacement markets optimization of promotional activities is one of the easiest ways to improve the profit. A price reduction associated with the direct delivery into the channel leading to a significant decline in sales in the distribution. A channel conflict could follow: The inventory turnover in the distribution decreases the Profitabliltät in the width of the channels decreases. It is a further price action required to stimulate demand again. It is more settled, for all concerned but worsens the profit situation.

Wow. It is really easier to understand this...