MOOCs: A Revolution … or Just Plain Hype?

Posted on April 25th, 2016 by Olena Ivanova

As of this writing, hundreds of MOOCs are being offered by US and foreign universities and millions of people have registered for them. But are they effective? They have been criticized for their lack of academic rigor. They also suffer from poor completion rates, with the bulk of participants dropping out in the first few days of the course. But they do offer the promise of making higher education and degrees accessible to a much larger chunk of the world’s population at a fraction of the cost, significantly reducing the cost of corporate training, and providing a convenient and cost-effective option for lifelong learning.

SDN/NFV: Enhancing Network Capacity and Functionality

Posted on November 10th, 2015 by Editor (Emma)

SDN and NFV have been developed to help meet the challenge of increasing demand for services and user expectation of rapid provisioning and universal availability. Both rely on virtualization, the ability to make a piece of equipment look like another via the magic of software. SDN was originally developed to address the problems of large data centers, where virtualization of hardware and operating system is important. It will likely spread to other areas, including the WAN, where virtualization and the ability to dial up bandwidth and related characteristics would be extremely valuable as well. NFV is an outgrowth of SDN in many respects, concentrating on backbone networks, where the need to rapidly reconfigure resources is key.

Computing in the Cloud: A Practical Review

Posted on November 26th, 2014 by New Admin

Cloud computing appears simple but is very complex. The apparent simplicity has caused many organizations to move to cloud computing somewhat blindly, driven largely by promises of simplification which will result in cost savings, or just sheer cost savings. Cost savings alone is often enough cause for celebration. And, interestingly, the results achieved by those organizations who “just go for it” are, unexpectedly, usually very positive.

Tutorial: Functional Requirements of Software Systems

Posted on November 26th, 2014 by New Admin

If functional requirements are not capabilities of the system, what are they? Formal definitions of requirements almost universally agree on this essential characteristic of a functional requirement: it defines a transformation of inputs into outputs.

Tutorial: Microsoft Exchange

Posted on November 26th, 2014 by New Admin

Exchange is Microsoft Corporation’s premier email server. In the world of Internet, there are email servers and email clients. Servers are responsible for sending, receiving, and storing email messages and attachments; clients are needed to read these messages and download the associated attachments.