“Merely Humanistic”

(Especially dedicated to Ishrat Ali Awan)

There is so much I would like to utter. There are so many feelings and emotions bottling up inside my heart. There are so many actions I want to realize. Whilst I think about them more and more, the more I get indulged in emotions and sentiments. Sentiments get the better out of humans sometimes. This helps me appreciate the recurring reality that humans, no matter how strong they may appear to the naked eye, deep inside they are extremely fragile and are affected by the slightest of features they are exposed and subjected to. Over the last two months or so, a facet as such has started to establish a tiny little home inside me as well. Having gone through several ups and downs during the last couple of years, I believed I had become a stronger person both mentally and physically. It allowed me to undertake some wise and bold decisions. There have been circumstances where I have defied time and have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. I realized the way to move forward with this was to think anything one wants can achieve can be achieved given the notion one goes after it with full heart. It seemed like things were poised to follow nature’s course. I am at entire harmony understanding this. However, now I understand it does not always have to pursue this particular path. When this instinct is translated to humans, thereby ruling out the nature aspect, there are certain secrecies that are unrevealed while multiple questions emerge that remain unanswered. Over the years, I achieved a thorough understanding of how humans behave, how a particular human should be handled, the type of profile that should be adopted with a person, so on and so forth. I thought I acquired significant knowledge about that already. Now I think to myself was I strayed? I have come to understand every human being is instilled with elements of fragility and feebleness, me included! This has compelled me to raise certain questions. What is it with humans? Are humans so hard to handle? What exactly do humans want and expect from one other? There are many questions I want to address. My sentiments get the better out of me and words start betraying me as I am subjected to this same syndrome that embraces fragility and feebleness as prominent symptoms. As I write this, I consider is it time to back off as I am incapable to translate this into words. I feel like it is a huge war I am participating in that lacks the grace to drive towards either victory or a letdown. The positive side is that it certainly helps to describe something rather than nothing.

Humans are a strange creation. They love to feel loved. It gives them an impression of feeling more important and more valued. As I understand, love creates a coalition between the entities in which love itself mediates. This should trigger a magnetizing behavior within the entities. It should, at least. But with humans, the generated effect seems to be working on the contrary side. The individual receiving love starts evading the individual giving it. Understanding human behavior is a complex task. Having said this, I speculate whether is it better to give love or to be loved. I presume a lot of resilience and candidness are required to understand these features. But the question is how exactly? Well, I think the ultimate answer to understanding this issue lies in clear communication, severe persistence and resolute determination among humans. It is the real deal and indeed is a very human attribute.

ORACLE – The Information Company

It has been nearly a month now that I attended the Oracle conference in Kista, Stockholm. Finally, I have defied time allowing myself to put into words the experience I underwent during my presence at Oracle. The conference was interesting and fruitful as it allowed me to gain knowledge about which line of action Oracle has adapted to promote their business and products in the future. Their philosophy is simple and revolves around three criteria to recruit new customers and maintaining existing customer relationships. Their approach is simplistic, yet profound and insightful. These criteria are competitiveness, efficiency and simplification with respect to other market actors. Elaborating a little more on each of these three attributes, I found out they are keen on laying the “Best” foundation in the form of competitiveness, "Minimization" of operating costs by providing efficient solutions and providing "Standardization" and consolidation via simplification. The company differentiates itself by using off-the-shelf functionality allowing custom development of differentiating functions, thereby allowing richer options to customers. Their product, the Application Server, focuses on achieving best practices using the existing Java framework. The Application Server was portrayed to be prone towards performance, reliability, scalability, flexibility and manageability. The promoters of the products referred to this as Clustering Integration Management. The product is invaluable for its acquirers as it supports uprising architectures such as cloud computing. People at Oracle think that it is critical to achieve compatibility of existing product with proposed future paradigms. Apparently, cloud computing is useful for a firm as it enables pooling of resources and their sharing as well. This enables more capabilities to its user-base which is complemented with automation. It is a fast deployment architecture that eventually leads to achieve Operational Efficiency and High Performance. This architecture does this by eliminating big programs like huge operating systems and bringing in smaller apps which is where the idea of Operational Efficiency belongs. I learned the mode the apps adopt to realize this. These apps are available in high quantity. Being relatively smaller in size, deployment becomes easier as application deployment time is zeroed down. Putting this altogether, cloud computing results even more beneficial as the cloud architecture can exist at different levels.

Coming back to the Oracle product, people at Oracle have developed the product in a way that complements existing capabilities that can be found in similar products. This feature is what they believe sets them apart as it allows leveraging and reusing existing tools. Not only this, it also exhibits an identical programming paradigm. The product has been tested for deployment at enterprise level for which a number of enterprise development strategies have been proposed. These strategies are fault tolerant and enable high speed data intensive computing, which, in turn, parallelizes tasks. This leads to both time-saving and cost-saving.

It seems Oracle has learned a lot more since they acquired Sun Microsystems. They have a clear vision as to how they will move forward with a clear strategy. Their post-Sun strategy is designated towards productivity with choice which allows its customer base to undertake more freedom. From a personal point of view, I believe companies that fall within the technological territory have started to envision futuristic methods and are keen on implementing them by closely interacting with their core customers. The technological territory is full of rivalry. With one eye placed into the future, it is likely firms are going to combine forces rather than going head-to-head to achieve excellence.