Tuesday, December 09, 2014

When Did This Lack Of Respect For Police Start?



When you blame others, you give up your power to change...Robert Anthony



As I read the stories about deaths because of a confrontation with a police officer, I am astonished at how the media and masses fail to see the "cause and effect" relationship here. Who REALLY should be held accountable for these events?

So when did society lose respect for the police?

Shooting at, or assaulting a cop or trying to steal his gun seem foreign to me but it happens every day now. Everyone is fixated on the "effect" but not the "cause" in EVERY one of these situations. What triggered (cause) the incident (effect)? When you look at the cause, the effect makes more sense.

As as child I grew up respecting ANY police officer. They were always intimidating to me. As a cop walked by, or entered a room, I would always be aware of my actions.

This talk about police officers needing to be trained how to deal with people is nonsense. Try walking in his shoes for a day. He is approaching you not knowing if you're on drugs, just committed a crime, if you have a weapon..and when you don't do as you're told, this only raises his anxiety.

When you reach into your pocket, or act in a threatening manner, YOU are escalating the situation. YOU are creating the "cause".

When a police officer flashes his lights, pull over. When he tells you to spread your legs while he frisks you, do it.

Accountability...EVERYONE should be held accountable for their actions.

The irony here is that perhaps if more "victims" really did put their hands up, we wouldn't be having these issues.






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Saturday, April 26, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

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Saturday, April 19, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

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Saturday, April 12, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

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Saturday, April 05, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

    • Microsoft is believed to be working on a desktop-as-a-service product, titled Mohoro, that could be released around the middle of 2014. It isn't clear how this will influence Microsoft and Citrix's traditionally close working relationship
    • strengthened by research from Endeavour Partners in the US, which found that one-third of American consumers who have owned a wearable product stopped using it within six months. What's more, while one in 10 American adults own some form of activity tracker, half of them no longer use it.
    • What does that presage for wearables? It may be that they are presently so primitive that it's no surprise that people give them up: they're too big, haven't discovered the killer app that we want out of them, and have battery life that is too limited.
    • The era of the on-premise server is clearly behind us, with the cusp of change literally on our calendars.

       

      In just the past week, we’ve seen significant server-shedding events and announcements from GoogleBox and Amazon Web Services. Even Microsoft finally seems to get it: enabling people to work from anywhere is more important than keeping them leashed to a platform going nowhere.

    • This shift will ultimately steady itself, but in the meantime – you better start out-human-ing the machines. You need to create a platform. You need to serve others in the way computers can’t. You need to use the leverage being created by these computers.
    • “A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.” —Max Lucado
    • Thanks to the high hopes and deep pockets of tech investors, a host of high-profile tech firms are now offering incredible business and consumer services at impossibly low prices. The trend is playing out across a range of industries, including business I.T. services, communications, media, payments, local delivery and e-commerce. And because these start-ups are exerting pricing pressure on established market players, even customers who don’t use their services might benefit from their rise.
    • So as long as you don’t make the mistake of investing in dubious tech dreams, you may be able to ride out the bubble to some pretty great swag
    • the IRS Bitcoin ruling is that for a currency--or any payment system--to work, its units must be completely fungible.  One reason dollars work really well as a currency is that one $20 bill is entirely fungible with another $20 bill.  This means that when I pay, I don't have to make a decision about which $20 bill to use
    • The IRS ruled that Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are property, not currency.  This means that they are subject to capital gains taxation.  And that means that Bitcoins are not fungible.  The price at which a particular Bitcoin was acquired (and this is traceable) determines the capital gains on that particular Bitcoin when spent.
    • If I spend Bitcoin A, which I bought at $10, but is now worth $400, I’ve got a very different tax treatment than if I spend Bitcoin B, which I bought at $390.

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Saturday, March 29, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

    • Russian government officials have swapped their iPads for Samsung tablets to ensure tighter security, the telecoms minister told news agencies on Wednesday.
    • American special services... will significantly increase the volume of information they intercept (which) of course causes serious concern to many governmental clients."
    • While 82 percent of respondents disapprove of Congress — with both parties "universally despised," according to Democratic pollster Celinda Lake — 73 percent support medical marijuana in their states, 53 percent back decriminalizing pot, and most importantly, 68 percent said they are more likely to go to the polls if marijuana is on the ballot.
    • For the first time in American history, non-whites will make up half or more of the next generation, likely pushing Washington toward a bigger government
    • Their tendency is more liberal, their tendency is bigger government,” he said of so-called “millennials” born between 1979 and 1995. They will likely set the trend for the still-unnamed next generation.

       

      “This is a generation that is 41 percent non-white; the generation behind it is likely to be close to 50 if not more than 50 percent non-white, and the anti-government kind of tone is one that really doesn’t resonate with that non-white sector in particular,

    • At this point, our economy has stabilized at a much lower level than it was at before.  For example, 32 million Americans were on food stamps when Barack Obama took office, and subsequently that number shot up to about 47 million.  Fortunately, that number has been relatively stable for the last couple of years, but there has been no recovery.

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Saturday, March 15, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

    • The link is graphite, a vital component in batteries used in Tesla’s Model S, Toyota’s plug-in Prius and other electric cars, as well as in electronic gadgets including iPhones. It’s mostly mined and processed in China where graphite pollution has fouled air and water, damaged crops and raised health concerns. Now, in response, Chinese authorities are closing dozens of graphite mines and processors in a bid for cleaner air even as global demand for the commodity is surging.

              

      “There’s little question that the Chinese are between a rock and a hard place environmentally,” said Josh Landess, an advanced transportation analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “There’s an obvious irony that the disruption it’s causing is within the clean vehicle and transportation industry.”

            

      The graphite outcry is the latest among environmental flashpoints in China that have ranged from lead poisoning to acid spills and “unbearable smog” in big cities. And while the clampdown may help improve the quality of China’s environment, it could also affect as much as a third of worldwide production

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Saturday, March 01, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

    • I think America’s more fucked up now than it’s ever been. People are angry that in the game of musical chairs that is the U.S. economy, there are less seats at the table when the music stops. And at every recession, the music is stopping.
    • what has happened in the arena of patent policy since then and announced new initiatives going forward—including one to "crowdsource" the review of patents
    • The Innovation Act, which includes fee-shifting and customer protection measures for patent lawsuits, has passed the House and is being debated in the Senate.
    • by valuing the number of users above revenue, Facebook is inflating another dot-com bubble.
    • In WhatsApp, Facebook sees not a trove of patents or a lucrative advertising model but the future of communications — mobile, cross-platform, cheap and international. I

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Saturday, February 22, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

    • It is a fool's errand to try to raise the living standards of the bottom 60% through higher income taxes on the top 1% or 0.1%.
    • The shift in incomes in favor of the wealthy has been due to several large forces, including a world-wide boom in asset prices, the rise of global markets, and technological innovation that has increased the earning power of the well educated.
    • At a time of slow economic growth, mounting government debt, a stalemated politics and the impending retirement of the "baby boomers," the attacks on the "one percent" look more and more like a diversion from the nation's real problems.
    • Using an array of sensors and eight video cameras around the terminal, the light fixtures are part of a new wireless network that collects and feeds data into software that can spot long lines, recognize license plates and even identify suspicious activity, sending alerts to the appropriate staff.
    • The light fixtures are outfitted with special chips and connect to sensors, cameras and one another over a wireless network. Data that is collected — say, a particular car pulling up to the terminal — can then be mined and analyzed for a broad range of applications
    • The newspaper has also learned that Apple is heavily exploring medical devices, specifically sensor technology that can help predict heart attacks. Led by Tomlinson Holman, a renowned audio engineer who invented THX and 10.2 surround sound, Apple is exploring ways to predict heart attacks by studying the sound blood makes at it flows through arteries.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Saturday, February 08, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

    • every time AAII bullish sentiment has dipped below 25% during this bull market, the S&P 500 Index went on to rally over the next six months
    • February is the second-worst month for the Dow
    • However, it's essentially a flat month, which is followed by two of the most consistently profitable months of the year.
    • Bitcoin is an excellent technology, with many very good use cases. But for the average end user—be it an individual wanting to pay for goods or a merchant wanting to accept payments—the new reality of those risks will be more than they can swallow
    • Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.

       

        What kinds of digital property might be transferred in this way? Think about digital signatures, digital contracts, digital keys (to physical locks, or to online lockers), digital ownership of physical assets such as cars and houses, digital stocks and bonds … and digital money.

    • In addition, merchants are highly attracted to Bitcoin because it eliminates the risk of credit card fraud. This is the form of fraud that motivates so many criminals to put so much work into stealing personal customer information and credit card numbers
    • Bitcoin is a monumental technical achievement in its simplicity and effectiveness. But just as the dot-com era overestimated the impact of the Web in the short term by several orders of magnitude (a hype-filled time during which Mr. Andreessen made his initial fortune selling a piece of free software to AOL, only to see it fall from grace and never monetize) so too do investors risk once again pouring billions into the currency equivalents of Web Van and Pets.com, failing to analyze all the dynamics of the market in which it competes
    • And dealing in currency requires protection of government and consumer interests—neither of which Bitcoin is well suited to
    • The co-evolution of hardware and software is going to define a lot of what’s going to happen..Everything is going to be connected to cloud and data…All of this will be mediated by software.”
    • Obamacare will push the equivalent of about 2 million workers out of the labor market by 2017 as employees decide either to work fewer hours or drop out altogether, according to the latest estimates Tuesday from the Congressional Budget Office.
    • the health care law’s incentives are driving businesses and people to choose government-sponsored benefits rather than work
    • the current recovery has been driven almost entirely by the upper crust,
    • the head of Microsoft’s cloud division, Satya Nadella, looks set to be its next CEO
    • Microsoft has struggled with a good response to the dual iOS/Android device and marketplace strength
    • The telecom gear business has not been touched by the crushing economics of software delivered via cloud computing, the kind of low-price, high-versatility product that has caused so many problems for companies making business software, and for many traditional high-cost computer hardware makers.
    • The report found that the most vulnerable workers were those that followed well-defined procedures that were executed on a repeated basis. Jobs such as factory and warehouse workers, paralegals, payroll administrators, office assistants, and retail salespeople are but a few of the repetitive jobs that developers can write code for.
    • While eliminating repetitive middle-class jobs through software automation seems to be inevitable, a dire future also lies in wait for many upper middle-class jobs requiring higher cognitive skills. An increasing commoditization of their skillset will occur through cloud-based technologies.
    • Right now there is approximately a billion square feet of vacant retail space in the United States.
    • While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the average duration of unemployment in the United States has risen from 19.8 weeks to 37.1 weeks.
    • According to the most recent numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, an all-time record 49.2 percent of all Americans are receiving benefits from at least one government program each month.

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Saturday, February 01, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

    • leading companies are changing silo unified communications and collaboration, mobile device management and desktop computing to more efficiently deliver and foster employee engagement and innovation
    • the desktop category — now under fire as more users make their tablets or smart phones their primary device — isn’t going away any time soon. “They are the devices of yesterday and today, phones are the devices of today and tomorrow and machines and sensors are the devices of tomorrow,
    • “It’s a good time to be in enterprise mobility,”
    • MDM gives companies a way to set protocols and secure their employees’ smartphones.  The space has undergone consolidation for several years.
    • VMWare’s purchase will put pressure on remaining independent competitors to sell within the next 12 months.
    • Buyers, like IBM, are placing the “economy” of the Bring Your Own Device(BYOD)  to work phenomenon through M&A, said Christopher Clark, president of Fiberlink. “They’re building a mobile IT stack” through serial acquisition-making that allows for “collaboration, sequencing, securing and implementing apps” on employees’ mobile devices.

       

      The AirWatch-VMWare deal “validates how big and strategic” MDM is

    • Gartner, the analyst firm created by and for technology professionals, has been predicting that IT departments will be dissolved and dispersed into the business units they serve
    • Love others. Drop the greed because it will blind you to opportunities for more ice cream around you. When you harness this mindset for a long enough amount of time, you will see the abundance of possibilities and
    • "The moment you stop caring about money is the moment you start making money
    • Guests at these properties will receive a message on a Starwood app containing a virtual key, which will unlock the door with a tap or twist of their phone through the use of Bluetooth technology. The company says the iPhone 4s or newer models and the Android phones running 4.3 or newer will be compatible
    • Unable to claim credit for creating actual products, union apologists will fall back on the assertion they “built the middle class.” The UAW example shows this too is a dubiously sourced accomplishment
    • From here forward, middle class jobs will come from smart decisions made by the leaders of American free enterprise - entrepreneurs and executives at companies large and small. Exploitation of workers is most likely to happen when Big Labor bosses cash in the dues money and go to Disney World

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Saturday, January 25, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

    • Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city
    • The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. That allows them to create portraits of roughly 2 million people's habits as they have gone about their daily lives, traveling from yoga studios to restaurants, to coffee shops, sports stadiums, hotels, and nightclubs.
    • The company's dense network of sensors can track any phone that has Wi-Fi turned on, enabling the company to build profiles of consumers lifestyles.
    • The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers.
    • From driverless cars to clever household gadgets (see article), innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched. The public sector is one obvious target: it has proved singularly resistant to tech-driven reinvention. But the step change in what computers can do will have a powerful effect on middle-class jobs in the private sector too.
    • Until now the jobs most vulnerable to machines were those that involved routine, repetitive tasks. But thanks to the exponential rise in processing power and the ubiquity of digitised information (“big data”), computers are increasingly able to perform complicated tasks more cheaply and effectively than people.
    • People would learn soon enough why nongovernment money works badly.

       

      Deflation is an obvious issue. Price declines are inevitable when a finite supply of Bitcoin money, a feature of the software, meets an expanding supply of purchased goods and services. That would be uncomfortable. Consumers might delay purchases as they wait for prices to fall, workers might chafe at regular annual wage cuts, and creditors would be even worse off

    • the popular interest in Bitcoin can be interpreted as a sign of ignorance of economic history. More realistically, it is a sad statement of a loss of faith in a monetary system that has not worked as well as promised. Unfortunately, Bitcoin is no more than a high-tech version of an even worse system
    • A huge 70% of occupations could become automated over next 30 years
    • I believe we are the inflection point where robotics are going to change everything you know and do,
    • What technology am I talking about? Personal computers in 1975, the Internet in 1993, and – I believe – Bitcoin in 2014.
    • Bitcoin is the first practical solution to a longstanding problem in computer science called the Byzantine Generals Problem
    • Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.
    • What kinds of digital property might be transferred in this way? Think about digital signatures, digital contracts, digital keys (to physical locks, or to online lockers), digital ownership of physical assets such as cars and houses, digital stocks and bonds … and digital money
    • All these are exchanged through a distributed network of trust that does not require or rely upon a central intermediary like a bank or broker. And all in a way where only the owner of an asset can send it, only the intended recipient can receive it, the asset can only exist in one place at a time, and everyone can validate transactions and ownership of all assets anytime they want.
    • (including converting dollars from your account into Bitcoin, if you did not own any Bitcoin
    • of The Wireless Registry, a company trying to build the equivalent of a domain name server for the itnernet of things
    • The world of smart devices is dazzling, the potential is there but what’s holding us back isn’t technology but our ability to know what to do with it.
    • The “Internet of Things” and open source hardware and software is surely going to turn up some ingenius uses of smart devices – and these are going to arise from the next crop of entrepreneurs and niche start-ups.
    • the demand for apps to control the plethora of sensors increases.
    • there are three cloud layers. At the base there is infrastructure — provided by the aforementioned AWS, VCHS, Microsoft Windows Azure clouds. Then there’s a middle layer, like the one described above, that lets the customer aggregate base services needed from the infrastructure providers. Then atop that there’s a business application layer that will likewise aggregate Software-as-a-Service applications from many providers — say Salesforce.com for CRM;
    • Kay believes porn.com’s increase in sales thanks to Bitcoin is the result of more than just hype. Sure, Bitcoin fans are rushing out to support a site that takes their preferred form of payment, but he also argues privacy and confidentiality are “paramount” for the majority of users joining an adult service.
    • Most porn is available for free, but premium services require forking over some dough, almost always accompanied by personal information like your full name and address. Bitcoin circumvents all that, although it doesn’t support recurring payments, which makes it impractical for renewable subscriptions.

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Saturday, January 18, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

    • NeulNET is based on the new Weightless standard, which takes unused fragments of radio spectrum and harnesses them to connect smart meters, structural-integrity sensors and other devices without needing dedicated spectrum. Low power is the name of the game – this is all about devices that can run for many years without needing new batteries or other maintenance. Think of this technology as the machine-to-machine connectivity glue for the “smart cities” concept
    • The new system is supposed to give operators everything they need to dive into this new world of connected lampposts and bridges. At the heart of it is the NeulNET Connected Device Platform (CDP), a cloud-based platform for device and service-level management, authentication and billing, for which operators will pay on a “per device, per month” basis.
    • Wi-Fi calling is a significant feature because it allows you to place and receive calls and text messages over Wi-Fi instead of your cellular network.
    • According to MoneyTree’s annual report, the software sector captured 37% of total venture capital for the year, which is the highest percentage recorded since MoneyTree’s inception in 1995.
    • America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency.
    • There is no cure for poverty, because there is no cause of poverty — poverty is the natural condition of the human animal.
    • The government gives people checks, but nobody teaches them how to live
    • Our vision is that the storage market is facing a transition from hardware-based primary storage coming from the big guys like NetApp, EMC and Dell to a much more flexible, elastic software-based primary storage,”
    • France’s Bouygues Telecom has effectively abandoned its program for using mobile phones as contactless payment devices
    • NFC is still not a sure thing when it comes to handsets – indeed, outside of a couple of countries it’s barely taken off for users of contactless payment cards. Part of this is down to manufacturer enthusiasm; Apple, for example, still doesn’t build NFC into its iOS device
    • We may be entering the era of sponsored data — the era of an internet that we don’t directly pay for, but that we also don’t control. It’s the old net neutrality nightmare, in other words, disguised as a gift.
    • an assurance that internet providers can’t favor one kind of traffic over another, or charge for access to certain parts of the internet. All traffic, according to the rules, was to be treated equally
    • This ruling means there is no one who can protect us from ISPs that block or discriminate against websites, applications or services,” says a statement from the organization. Tell the FCC to start treating broadband like a communications service, and to restore its Net Neutrality rules.”
    • n plain English, this means that they have had to behave in a similar way to phone companies and not give special preference to one type of call (or traffic) over another.
    • The upshot of Tuesday’s ruling is that it could open the door for internet giants like Verizon and Time Warner to cut deals with large content providers — say Disney or Netflix — to ensure that their web content was delivered faster and more reliably than other sites.
    • If the decision stands, it could mean that Internet providers could soon start charging websites like Google, Facebook and Netflix to reach users.
    • when a company like Google — which has had numerous run-ins over privacy in the U.S. and abroad — plans to buy a company that makes products equipped with motion detectors that track what’s happening inside the home, it’s time that conversation about privacy and the internet of things takes a step forward
    • The continued growth of the mobile ecosystem depends on unimpeded access to data. New radio technologies that enable spectrum sharing and better public policies will ensure that wireless innovation continues without disruption.
    • As growing numbers of devices consume more capacity, carriers are being compelled to make billions of dollars in capital investments for additional spectrum resources
    • Why is this spending spree even necessary? In large part, it is the result of ill-conceived government policies, such as auctions, that have created artificial spectrum scarcity. Much spectrum sits idle at any given time due to spectrum auctions, which give service providers control over large swaths of our wireless infrastructure. That encourages inefficiency and underuse of spectrum. It also costs carriers billions and keeps new competitors and technologies out of the market.
    • Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the Internet, recently said that radio spectrum isn’t being used effectively due to regulatory constraints that make sharing spectrum more difficult. Continuing the practice of doling out precious spectrum resources through auctions won’t help carriers to adequately meet consumer demand, but the government is still allocating significant spectrum resources to individual carriers.

       

      Think of it this way: The government is allowing private companies to build highways that only green cars can drive on — even when adjacent roads are backed up for miles with traffic jams. Apple or Google could provide additional capacity for their services if more spectrum was available for shared use. Even carriers could expand their device and service offerings. Instead, service providers need to recover their auction investments from the customer.

    • There is now a consensus among regulators that neither the spectrum availability nor inefficiency problems have been solvable with existing technical and regulatory approaches. FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn has responded by c
    • VMware leads the world in server virtualization but has struggled in its desktop virtualization efforts where it lags Citrix’ XenDesktop.
    • The year of desktop virtualization:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

    • Java’s popularity may indicate employers’ rising interest in mobile development. But due to the language’s wide number of development uses
    • employers listed Java as the number-one developer skill they’d be seeking out over the course of 2013. Likewise, ReadWrite also predicted that Java would be one of the seven most in-demand technology skills for the upcoming year
    • What should job seeking developers take from this? Trendy skills and languages may come and go, but employers are still boosting for the classics. 
    • Sony also (sort of) unveiled an upcoming cloud-based video service, through which customers will be able to watch TV and movies whenever they want and on whatever device they want, including, yes, game consoles, but also devices such as the  iPad and smartphones. No name or launch date were given.
    • Oracle and Verizon are teaming up so that Oracle shops can run their databases and Fusion middleware on the Verizon Enterprise Cloud and pay for all that by the hour
    • This is a pretty important enterprise software deal for Verizon which is billing its new cloud as a safe, secure, highly-available home for enterprise applications
    • What Verizon is doing is help those Oracle customers move some or all of their work off of physical CPUS and let them run Oracle across a spectrum from managed services to the existing Verizon Terremark enterprise cloud to the new super-duper Verizon cloud,
    • DVR manufacturer TiVo has spent most of the last 15 years building hardware that would allow consumers to record their favorite TV shows and watch them later. Now the company is working toward building products that would let consumers save their favorite shows not on a hard drive in a box, but up in the cloud.
    • With the network DVR, TiVo will be able to deliver the same consistent UI to users without having to have a hard drive in its set-top boxes. That will dramatically lower the cost of producing hardware, and it offers all sorts of new pricing and business models on top of its service.
    • Big Data as-a-Service (BDaaS) will emerge this year as cloud providers offer midsize and smaller organizations access to much larger streams of relevant data they could not tap into otherwise
    • this represents a major shift in how organizations obtain and maintain software, hardware, and computing capacity.
    • As individuals increasingly use personal mobile clouds, we will see a shift to services and less of a focus on the devices we use to access our services. This shift will also help us address the three limiting factors of mobility: battery life, memory, and processors.
    • Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) is increasingly joining Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), creating what some have called “IT as a service.” The rapid growth of Collaboration-as-a-Service (CaaS), Security-as-a-Service (SaaS), Networking as-a-Service (NaaS), and many more are all giving birth to Everything as-a-Service (XaaS).
    • These services will help companies cut costs as they provide access to powerful software programs and the latest technology without having the expense of a large IT staff and time-consuming, expensive upgrades.
    • continue to see the virtualization of processing power, allowing mobile devices to access supercomputer capabilities and apply it to processes such as purchasing and logistics
    • Intelligent Electronic Agents
    • This is the year we will see sales organizations using this to enhance communication and collaboration, gaining new competitive advantages.
    • Geo-Spatial Visualization combines geographic information systems (GIS) with location-aware data, RFID (radio frequency identification), and other location-aware sensors (including the current location of users from the use of their mobile devices) to create new insights and competitive advantage
    • By 2020, there will be well over a billion machines talking to each other,
    • Licenses for the spectrum were last purchased by Verizon for $2.4 billion, but the airwaves sat unused. Verizon CFO Frank Shammo indicated the carrier was willing to sell the license to the spectrum for a reasonable price, with both AT&T and T-Mobile reportedly looking into bids.
    • The company will use the new low-band airwaves to support its aggressive rollout of LTE services across the US. Although it's reportedly vulnerable to interference from TV operators, the spectrum offers better building penetration and rural coverage than many other bands
    • hey shift more production to robotics. Many are expanding their commercial footprint with a new addition or in some cases, excavating for a lower floor to accommodate the recent influx of extremely heavy live-in machines
    • As we peer into 2014, we will see the total number of cellular subscriptions eclipsing humans on the planet for the first time
    • The inefficiencies of a middlemen can be overcome by algorithms. The concept is not new but society expects more each year to narrow the gap between the thought and task execution.
    • There are two issues in the wireless industry today that need to be decisively and transparently addressed. Beyond aging infrastructure and a rising demand for spectrum, the issues of data security and data collection are critical to protecting the safety and peace of mind of consumers when using their mobile devices
    • The sustainability of the economic recovery, particularly as it relates to employment and the % of workforce participation.
    • should take the next step and mandate videoconferencing in lieu of travel for employees.
    • However, a bill introduced in the House of Representatives this summer, H.R. 2643 (also known as the "Cut the Waste, Stay in Place Act of 2013” bill) takes it a step further, by mandating the reduction of the federal government's travel expenditures by 50 percent in 2017. The U.S. federal government spends about $15 billion each year in travel expenses
    • While videoconferencing and telecommunications technologies save money on travel expenditures, there are other costs to consider. Security and bandwidth requirements are the top of the list, and government official will need to spend money to ensure their networks will meet the increased demand.

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Saturday, January 04, 2014

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.