MSA

You might've heard of MSA (Master of Science in Analytics) by now.
It’s an intensive 10-month professional graduate degree program designed by Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University that focuses exclusively on the tools, methods, and applications of analytics and is designed to educate professionals with sophisticated technical skills necessary to navigate and analyze the masses of data that organizations are collecting.
The objectives of the program are:

• provide students wit an understanding of basic concept and methodologies in the analysis of massive data sets
• Show how these methods are applied to a variety of complex problems facing organizations, using real-world problems
• Give students a sense of the broader context, such as security, privacy and ethical issues in the use of personal and confidential data

What makes this program unique is its emphasis on real-world, business-focused analytics. Comparing this program with other business related programs you'll realize that its aim is to provide the talent capable of leveraging world-class business intelligence systems. For example typical MBA degrees include limited instruction in statistics or advanced degrees in Data Mining don’t address critical and contextual issues such as data quality and integration, privacy, security and enterprise-wide decision making.
This endorses what the course designers believed that “Competing on analytics in corporations, government agencies and educational institutions is becoming a must”.

What has mostly caught my attention (and the reason I made this post) was that this program is about how to apply mathematic to get what you are looking for. Those who, like me, have studied applied mathematics and liked it and dealt with pure-math professors know what I mean.

If you like to participate and be one of the first graduates of this program, you better hurry. For more information you can take a look at the program’s website at NCSU.

Microsoft and Linux

If you are an Oracle expert or follower, you’ve probably been following Oracle’s Open World and its news. One of the biggest one was Oracle’s announcement of distribution and support of Red Hat Linux on October 26. This made the Linux Magazine to say “Oracle was predicted to make a big Linux announcement this week and you would be hard pressed to make a bigger one than this”.But I believe the second announcement from Microsoft and Novell that they would be working together on Linux wasn’t something less important than that.Yes, you red it right. Microsoft made a deal to be a distributor of Suse Linux, Novell's version of the operating system.Beyond the patent covenant and financial arrangements between them, it was revealed that, the two companies will work together on at least three projects.The companies will jointly develop a compelling virtualization offering for Linux and Windows. The result of which would enable Windows to run under Linux and Linux to run under Windows.
The two companies will be working together on Web Services. And finally there will be an effort to create interoperability between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org file formats.Well, things are changing in the world of software development. I think we have to get ready for the time that .NET applications are fully portable to Linux.

Update (2013):

Mono has simply kept its promise of delivering a cross platform .NET development framework to this day. For example, we ported and recompiled an ASP.NET web application which was built with .NET framework 3.5 (utilizing many of its new features) and deployed onto a server running a CentOS linux.