TABULA ROSA SYSTEMS

Monday, February 8, 2016

Tabula Rosa Systems - Happy Chinese New Year!

Sharon Schweitzer, JD

15 Taboos to Avoid For a Prosperous Chinese New Year

Feb 5, 2016

If you’re planning to do business in China this February, it is important to be aware of the customs of Chinese Lunar New Year, also known as the Spring Festival. Those unfamiliar with the customs might find they have a difficult time scheduling meetings, finalizing deals or getting much work done.

In 2016, the festival starts the day before the New Year on February 7th and spreads across 15 days, peaking on February 8th, as China welcomes The Year of the Monkey. The festival begins with Chunyun, which is the biggest annual human migration. Over 1 billion Chinese leave densely populated metropolitan areas to return home to their villages. The festivities conclude with Lantern Festival, the 15th day of the new year.

These traditions will be celebrated across the entire country of China by approximately 1/6 of the world’s population, making it the largest event on the globe. The holiday originated in China and is celebrated in Asian countries and economies with significant Chinese populations such as Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. The largest Chinese New Year celebration outside China occurs in London, and begins on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2016.

Traditionally, many taboos are associated with the Chinese New Year Festival, but in recent years some of them have been ignored to a certain extent, especially among the modern urban populations in larger cities, and the younger generation. However, many people still take these superstitions seriously. Unless you know your audience well, it is best to be aware of these top 15 taboos as you work and negotiate in Asia in February 2016.

Don’t Say Anyone’s Name to Wake Them

On New Year’s Day morning, don’t use a person’s name to wake them or encourage them to get up—otherwise you will have to urge them to do tasks and projects all year.
Don’t Awaken A Sleeping Person with “Happy New Year!”
On New Year’s Day, don’t awaken sleeping individuals with New Year greetings. Wait until they rise or they will be sick in bed for 2016.
Avoid Washing Hair
In Mandarin (Chinese language) hair (发) has the same pronunciation and is the same character, as fain facai (发财), which means ‘to become wealthy’. So it is best to wait until after New Year’s to avoid ‘washing one’s fortune away.’
Avoid Congee, Meat, or Fish for Breakfast
You don't want to start the year “poor,” by eating Chinese porridge, as this is a bad omen. So eat cooked rice for the first meal of the year to invite prosperity. Meat should not be eaten at this breakfast out of respect for the Buddhist gods, who are believed to be against the killing of animals.
Don’t Wear Damaged Clothing
Buy new clothing and avoid clothes with tears, rips, and damage. Children are especially susceptible to this bad luck in the first lunar month.
Avoid Doing Laundry on 1st and 2nd Day
Water should be conserved on these special days, which are celebrated as the birthday of Shuishen (水神, the Water God).
Avoid Using a Knife, Scissors, or Sharp Blade
It is said that if you use a knife or scissors on the first day of the New Year, quarrels or disputes are inevitable all year long.
Avoid Moving the Financial Needle
Avoid financial and budgetary discussions on New Year’s Day. The saying goes, “If you move the needle on New Year’s Day, watch out, you may prick the dragon which will make you grow a stye.” This is a play on words, because the character for stye and needle sound the same. “Moving the needle” refers to changing or making progress.
Avoid Chopping Wood
The word for firewood in Chinese is “chai,” which sounds a lot like the word for wealth, “cai.” Thus, on New Year’s Day, one should avoid using an axe to split firewood, because you might be chopping your wealth.
Avoid Borrowing Cash
Avoid starting the New Year with someone else’s money, or legend says you’ll need loans all year. If you start the year lending money, you will suffer loss all year. According to tradition, one should pay all debts by New Year’s Eve.
Don’t Nap During New Year Celebrations
Lore says one should avoid napping on New Year’s Day or you will be lazy all year; it is rude because you should be receiving many guests.
Do Not Sweep or Take Out Garbage
You shouldn’t sweep or take out the garbage on New Year’s Day because you will sweep or remove prosperity, wealth, and good fortune for 2016.
Theft & Pick Pockets
Avoid pickpockets and people taking objects, including money, from your pocket during the Spring Festival, or all of your wealth will be stolen in the coming year.
Avoid Debt Collection
During the Chinese New Year, it is considered bad luck to be involved in collecting debts.
A Married Woman May Not Leave Her Home or Visit Family
On New Year’s Day, a woman should not leave her home or she will risk bad fortune for the coming year. Instead, as a wife, she should entertain visitors in her home. She must avoid visits on New Year’s Day, as this brings bad luck to the parents, causing economic hardship, and poverty.

Sharon Schweitzer, JD is cross-cultural consultant, international etiquette expert, and founder of Protocol & Etiquette Worldwide. She is accredited in intercultural management, her work and travels have taken her to over 60 countries on seven continents. Sharon speaks French and some Czech. She is a popular radio and TV guest on NPR, and CBS; as well as a sought-after conference speaker, columnist and blogger appearing regularly in Investor’s Business Daily, Fortune, Inc., the New York Times, Bangkok Post and numerous others. Connect with her at www.austinprotocol.com

============================================== For a great satire on email, please see the following:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zwscoop_post=bcaa0440-2548-11e5-c1bd-90b11c3d2b20&__scoop_topic=2455618
===============================================
Good Netiquette And A Green Internet To All!

Special Bulletin - My just released book,

"You're Hired. Super Charge our Email Skills in 60 Minutes! (And Get That Job...)

is now on sales at Amazon.com

Great Reasons for Purchasing Netiquette IQ

· Get more email opens. Improve 100% or more.

· Receive more responses, interviews, appointments, prospects and sales.

· Be better understood.

· Eliminate indecision.

· Avoid being spammed 100% or more.

· Have recipient finish reading your email content.

· Save time by reducing questions.

· Increase your level of clarity.

· Improve you time management with your email.

· Have quick access to a wealth of relevant email information.

Enjoy most of what you need for email in a single book.

=================================

**Important note** - contact our company for very powerful solutions for IP
management (IPv4 and IPv6, security, firewall and APT solutions:
www.tabularosa.net
==================================================

Another Special Announcement - Tune in to my radio interview, on Rider University's station, www.1077thebronc.com I discuss my recent book, above on "Your Career Is Calling", hosted by Wanda Ellett.

In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” has just been published and will be followed by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

In addition to this blog, I maintain a radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ and PSG of Mercer County, NJ.

I am the president of Tabula Rosa Systems, a “best of breed” reseller of products for communications, email, network management software, security products and professional services. Also, I am the president of Netiquette IQ. We are currently developing an email IQ rating system, Netiquette IQ, which promotes the fundamentals outlined in my book.

Over the past twenty-five years, I have enjoyed a dynamic and successful career and have attained an extensive background in IT and electronic communications by selling and marketing within the information technology marketplace.Anyone who would like to review the book and have it posted on my blog or website, please contact me paul@netiquetteiq.com.
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Tabula Rosa Systems Security Information Blog - Passwords, Email Addresses, Were Most Stolen Data In 2015

Passwords, Email Addresses, Were Most Stolen Data In 2015

Analysis of public data breaches finds US and UK represented more than 45% of all reported breaches last year, and major energy firms make the list of most multiple breaches.

A tally of reported data breach incidents worldwide in 2015 shows that user credentials are one of the hottest commodities bad hackers crave: some 50% of all incidents exposed passwords and email addresses.

Risk Based Security in new report also found that of the nearly 4,000 reported incidents, which exposed some 736 million data records, 40.5% occurred in US organizations, accounting for nearly 65% of the breached data for the year.

Most of the stolen data records -- some 238 million -- came from just four data breaches. Some 55% of the attacks victimized between 1 and 1,000 data records, according to Risk Based Security, which tracks reported data breaches via its proprietary application that crawls breach reports and also manually gathers information via the Open Security Foundation.

Oil companies as well as convenience stores landed in the Top 12 of companies suffering multiple incidents last year, including Shell Oil, 7-Eleven, Exxon Mobil, Circle K Convenience Stores, and Sunoco. Some of that trend had to do with a resurgence in skimming attacks on gas pumps.

Government agencies reported some 37 multiple incidents; retail, 32; and education, 27. “A staggering 142 organizations reported multiple data breaches in 2015 alone, setting another dubious record,” says Barry Kouns, CEO of Risk Based Security.

==============================================
For a great satire on email, please see the following:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zwscoop_post=bcaa0440-2548-11e5-c1bd-90b11c3d2b20&__scoop_topic=2455618
===============================================
Good Netiquette And A Green Internet To All!

Special Bulletin - My just released book,

"You're Hired. Super Charge our Email Skills in 60 Minutes! (And Get That Job...)

is now on sales at Amazon.com

Great Reasons for Purchasing Netiquette IQ

· Get more email opens. Improve 100% or more.

· Receive more responses, interviews, appointments, prospects and sales.

· Be better understood.

· Eliminate indecision.

· Avoid being spammed 100% or more.

· Have recipient finish reading your email content.

· Save time by reducing questions.

· Increase your level of clarity.

· Improve you time management with your email.

· Have quick access to a wealth of relevant email information.

Enjoy most of what you need for email in a single book.

=================================

Another Special Announcement - Tune in to my radio interview, on Rider University's station, www.1077thebronc.com I discuss my recent book, above on "Your Career Is Calling", hosted by Wanda Ellett.

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Tabula Rosa Systems Blog Of 2/7/2016 - AI IS TRANSFORMING GOOGLE SEARCH. THE REST OF THE WEB IS NEXT

AUTHOR: CADE METZ.CADE METZ BUSINESS

DATE OF PUBLICATION: 02.04.16.02.04.16

TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM.7:00 AM

AI IS TRANSFORMING GOOGLE SEARCH. THE REST OF THE WEB IS NEXT

Yesterday, THE 46-YEAR-OLD Google veteran who oversees its search engine, Amit Singhal, announced his retirement. And in short order, Google revealed that Singhal’s rather enormous shoes would be filled by a man named John Giannandrea. On one level, these are just two guys doing something new with their lives. But you can also view the pair as the ideal metaphor for a momentous shift in the way things work inside Google—and across the tech world as a whole.

Giannandrea, you see, oversees Google’s work in artificial intelligence. This includes deep neural networks, networks of hardware and software that approximate the web of neurons in the human brain. By analyzing vast amounts of digital data, these neural nets can learn all sorts of useful tasks, like identifying photos, recognizing commands spoken into a smartphone, and, as it turns out, responding to Internet search queries. In some cases, they can learn a task so well that they outperform humans. They can do it better. They can do it faster. And they can do it at a much larger scale.

This approach, called deep learning, is rapidly reinventing so many of the Internet’s most popular services, from Facebook to Twitter to Skype. Over the past year, it has also reinvented Google Search, where the company generates most of its revenue. Early in 2015, asBloomberg recently reported, Google began rolling out a deep learning system called RankBrain that helps generate responses to search queries. As of October, RankBrain played a role in “a very large fraction” of the millions of queries that go through the search engine with each passing second.

As Bloomberg says, it was Singhal who approved the roll-out of RankBrain. And before that, he and his team may have explored other, simpler forms of machine learning. But for a time, some say, he represented a steadfast resistance to the use of machine learning inside Google Search. In the past, Google relied mostly on algorithms that followed a strict set of rules set by humans. The concern—as described by some former Google employees—was that it was more difficult to understand why neural nets behaved the way it did, and more difficult to tweak their behavior.

These concerns still hover over the world of machine learning. The truth is that even the experts don’t completely understand how neural nets work. But they do work. If you feed enough photos of a platypus into a neural net, it can learn to identify a platypus. If you show it enough computer malware code, it can learn to recognize a virus. If you give it enough raw language—words or phrases that people might type into a search engine—it can learn to understand search queries and help respond to them. In some cases, it can handle queries better than algorithmic rules hand-coded by human engineers. Artificial intelligence is the future of Google Search, and if it’s the future of Google Search, it’s the future of so much more.

This past fall, I sat down with a former Googler who asked that I withhold his name because he wasn’t authorized to talk about the company’s inner workings, and we discussed the role of neural networks inside the company’s search engine. At one point, he said, the Google ads team had adopted neural nets to help target ads, but the “organic search” team was reluctant to use this technology. Indeed, over the years, discussions of this dynamic have popped up every now and again on Quora, the popular question-and-answer site.

Edmond Lau, who worked on Google’s search team and is the author of the bookThe Effective Engineer, wrote in a Quora post that Singhal carried a philosophical bias against machine learning. With machine learning, he wrote, the trouble was that “it’s hard to explain and ascertain why a particular search result ranks more highly than another result for a given query.” And, he added: “It’s difficult to directly tweak a machine learning-based system to boost the importance of certain signals over others.” Other ex-Googlers agreed with this characterization.

Yes, Google’s search engine was always driven by algorithms that automatically generate a response to each query. But these algorithms amounted to a set of definite rules. Google engineers could readily change and refine these rules. And unlike neural nets, these algorithms didn’t learn on their own. As Lau put it: “Rule-based scoring metrics, while still complex, provide a greater opportunity for engineers to directly tweak weights in specific situations.”

But now, Google has incorporated deep learning into its search engine. And with its head of AI taking over search, the company seems to believe this is the way forward.

Losing Control

It’s true that with neural nets, you lose some control. But you don’t lose all of it, says Chris Nicholson, the founder of the deep learning startup Skymind. Neural networks are really just math—linear algebra—and engineers can certainly trace how the numbers behave inside these multi-layered creations. The trouble is that it’s hard to understand why a neural net classifies a photo or spoken word or snippet of natural language in a certain way.

“People understand the linear algebra behind deep learning. But the models it produces are less human-readable. They’re machine-readable,” Nicholson says. “They can retrieve very accurate results, but we can’t always explain, on an individual basis, what led them to those accurate results.”

What this means is that, in order to tweak the behavior of these neural nets, you must adjust the math through intuition, trial, and error. You must retrain them on new data, with still more trial and error. That’s doable, but complicated. And as Google moves search to this AI model, it’s unclear how the move will affect its ability to defend its search results against claims of unfairness or change the results in the face of complaints.

These concerns aren’t trivial. Today, Google is facing an European anti-trust investigation into whether it unfairly demoted the pages of certain competitors. What happens when it’s really the machines making these decisions, and their rationale is indecipherable? Humans will still guide these machines, but not in the same way they were guided in the past.

In any event, deep learning has arrived on Google Search. And the company may have used other forms of machine learning in recent years, as well. Though these technologies sacrifice some control, Google believes, the benefits outweigh that sacrifice.

Deep Learnings

To be sure, deep learning is still just a part of how Google Search works. According to Bloomberg, RankBrain helps Google deal with about 15 percent of its daily queries—the queries the system hasn’t seen in the past. Basically, this machine learning engine is adept at analyzing the words and phrases that make up a search query and deciding what other words and phrases carry much the same meaning. As a result, it’s better than the old rules-based system when handling brand new queries—queries Google Search has never seen before.

But over time, systems like this will play an even greater role inside Internet services like Google Search. At one point, Google ran a test that pitted its search engineers against RankBrain. Both were asked to look at various web pages and predict which would rank highest on a Google search results page. RankBrain was right 80 percent of the time. The engineers were right 70 percent of the time.

This doesn’t detract from Singhal’s work. He joined Google in 2000, and a year later was named a Google Fellow, the highest honor Google bestows on its engineers. For most of Google’s history, he has ruled the company’s search engine, and that search engine pretty much ruled the Internet.

But machine learning is rapidly changing that landscape. “By building learning systems, we don’t have to write these rules anymore,” John Giannandrea told a room full of reporters inside Google headquarters this fall. “Increasingly, we’re discovering that if we can learn things rather than writing code, we can scale these things much better.”

Special Bulletin - My just released book,

"You're Hired. Super Charge our Email Skills in 60 Minutes! (And Get That Job...)

is now on sales at Amazon.com

Great Reasons for Purchasing Netiquette IQ

· Get more email opens. Improve 100% or more.

· Receive more responses, interviews, appointments, prospects and sales.

· Be better understood.

· Eliminate indecision.

· Avoid being spammed 100% or more.

· Have recipient finish reading your email content.

· Save time by reducing questions.

· Increase your level of clarity.

· Improve you time management with your email.

· Have quick access to a wealth of relevant email information.

Enjoy most of what you need for email in a single book.

=================================

Another Special Announcement - Tune in to my radio interview, on Rider University's station, www.1077thebronc.com I discuss my recent book, above on "Your Career Is Calling", hosted by Wanda Ellett.

Tabula Rosa Systems Blog Of 2/7/2016 - Composable Infrastructure

Composable Infrastructure

Posted by: Margaret Rouse

WhatIs.com

A composable infrastructure is an infrastructure whose physical compute, storage and network fabric resources are treated as services. Infrastructure resources are logically pooled so that administrators don't have to physically configure hardware to support a specific software application. Instead, the software’s developer defines the application’s requirements for physical infrastructure using policies and service profiles and then the software calls those services it requires with application programming interfaces (APIs) and creates (composes) the infrastructure it needs to run on bare metal, as a virtual machine (VM) or as a container.

Download This Guide To Nailing Your 2016 IT Interview

A composable infrastructure negates the need for IT administrators to be concerned with the physical location of physical infrastructure components. Instead, a framework defines what the individual objects "of composure" are -- and each object exposes information about itself through a management API. Then, when a software application requests infrastructure to run, available services are located through an automated discovery process and resources are allocated on demand. When an infrastructure resource is no longer required, it is re-appropriated so it can be allocated to another application that needs it.

The goal of a composable infrastructure is to allow an enterprise data center to use its own physical infrastructure in a more cost-effective manner by reducing waste and the amount of time it takes to deploy a new application. Several vendors, including HP Enterprise and Cisco are promoting the concept as a way for internal IT departments to provision workloads just as quickly and efficiently as public cloud service providers can, while still maintaining control over the infrastructure that supports mission-critical applications in a private cloud setting. The concept of pooling physical infrastructure resources and building infrastructure logically is supported by the growing popularity of software-defined networking (SDN), object storage, converged infrastructure and DevOps.

As of this writing, there are no agreed-upon standards for deploying a composable infrastructure and different vendors and proponents are describing composable infrastructure by different names -- including programmable infrastructure, intelligent infrastructure, software-defined infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), decoupled infrastructure and hardware disaggregation.

Special Bulletin - My just released book,

"You're Hired. Super Charge our Email Skills in 60 Minutes! (And Get That Job...)

is now on sales at Amazon.com

Great Reasons for Purchasing Netiquette IQ

· Get more email opens. Improve 100% or more.

· Receive more responses, interviews, appointments, prospects and sales.

· Be better understood.

· Eliminate indecision.

· Avoid being spammed 100% or more.

· Have recipient finish reading your email content.

· Save time by reducing questions.

· Increase your level of clarity.

· Improve you time management with your email.

· Have quick access to a wealth of relevant email information.

Enjoy most of what you need for email in a single book.

=================================

Another Special Announcement - Tune in to my radio interview, on Rider University's station, www.1077thebronc.com I discuss my recent book, above on "Your Career Is Calling", hosted by Wanda Ellett.

Pages

Monday, February 8, 2016

Special Bulletin - My just released book,

is now on sales at Amazon.com

=================================

Another Special Announcement - Tune in to my radio interview, on Rider University's station, www.1077thebronc.com I discuss my recent book, above on "Your Career Is Calling", hosted by Wanda Ellett.

Special Bulletin - My just released book,

is now on sales at Amazon.com

=================================

Another Special Announcement - Tune in to my radio interview, on Rider University's station, www.1077thebronc.com I discuss my recent book, above on "Your Career Is Calling", hosted by Wanda Ellett.

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Special Bulletin - My just released book,

is now on sales at Amazon.com

=================================

Another Special Announcement - Tune in to my radio interview, on Rider University's station, www.1077thebronc.com I discuss my recent book, above on "Your Career Is Calling", hosted by Wanda Ellett.

Special Bulletin - My just released book,

is now on sales at Amazon.com

=================================

Another Special Announcement - Tune in to my radio interview, on Rider University's station, www.1077thebronc.com I discuss my recent book, above on "Your Career Is Calling", hosted by Wanda Ellett.