That was Then... This is Now

Didn’t get everything you wanted on Black Friday or Cyber Monday? Do you still need to find a last minute tech gift for a friend or family member? Check out this list from PCMag.com –each of these items costs under $100. Shopping on a budget doesn't mean boring or useless. Their selection includes media streamers, smart speakers, and many other options. A few are PCMag Editors' Choice products that anyone on your list will enjoy, while others you might just want to keep for yourself. Some of these I already own. Others, like the Sega Genesis Mini gaming console, bring back childhood memories. Maybe I’ll find one underneath my tree? Happy Holidays!

A couple of weeks ago at the Mobile World Congress event in Los Angeles, NVIDIA unveiled its EGX Edge Supercomputing platform. The product is designed for all edge applications including, but not limited to, artificial intelligence and internet of things. This was the first time NVIDIA has been part of a Mobile World Congress. EGX is a reference design that other server manufacturers can use to roll out a validated design for edge computing solutions using NVIDIA GPUs. Cisco, Fujitsu, Lenovo, HPE and others have been confirmed as partners. Powered by NVIDIA’s CUDA Tensor Core GPU, it offers cryptographic acceleration, networking for Mellanox, NVMe over TCP and RDMA for storage, an industrial-strength cloud native stack, and hardened AI software. Computing is moving to where the data resides, and this will take power. 5G is one of the key enablers of edge computing. 5G brings multi-gigabit speeds to wireless and enables more data to be processed in more places. One view is that a...

Writing in the October 4 issue of PCMag.com, Nathan Hurst discusses many of the issues involved in the future of space for both private companies and governments. Getting to space has become easier and more cost-effective. That's great for private startups that want to explore business models based on satellites, but the competition they bring reduces the control governments have traditionally leveraged over space and introduces new safety concerns. What's rarely mentioned however, is what both governments and startups are doing, or will have to do, to ensure the security and safety of the tech they're putting up there. As well as our data. "Air travel became routine in a matter of a handful of years, and I think we are at that point. This next generation that is coming online, this year and next, it's capitalized on 50 or 60 years of investment," says Chuck Beames, a retired Air Force colonel who chairs both the York Space Systems startup and the SmallSa...

Stephanie Mlot, reports on Geek.com that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is leading 50 states in a bipartisan investigation of Google’s business practices. They intend to investigate Google’s overarching control of online advertising markets and search traffic, which may have led to anticompetitive behavior. “Now, more than ever, information is power, and the most important source of information in Americans’ day-to-day lives is the Internet,” Paxton said. “When most Americans think of the Internet, they no doubt think of Google.” For most of us, myself included, Google is my primary web browser and search engine. Every one of us at times has “Googled” something. It’s so common that the term has entered our language as a verb. But as Mlot has pointed out, there are also potential dangers from monopolistic domination. According to eMarketer, Google is expected to collect more than $48 billion in U.S. digital ad revenue this year, capturing 75 percent of all spending ...

According to Michael Kan writing in PCMag, Microsoft's most recent goal is to build an AI that will be capable of running society and solving our most pressing problems. Last Monday, the company said it wants to lay the foundation for its creation by investing $1 billion into OpenAI, a San Francisco-based company co-founded by Elon Musk. The idea is to create an artificial general intelligence (AGI). Currently, the most cutting-edge AI programs have been designed to focus only on a single task. AGI is far more ambitious: Imagine a computer smart enough to master one field, and then another, and another, and then using that knowledge for the betterment of society. "The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in today's announcement. "Our mission is to ensure that AGI technology benefits all of humanity." Whether or not cre...

In 2007, Apple released the first iPhone. This innovative and revolutionary product that would define what a “smartphone” was, made its debut six months earlier at MacWorld. Here’s what was said about it way back at its introduction: “The iphone—called the iphone, and not any derivative, as had been speculated—will serve both as an ipod as well as 3g phone, somehow cramming a "3g" radio, ipod functionality, and even a version of os x into the phone-size package. The phone itself is dominated by a giant touchscreen, the patent apple applied for in February.” And the rest is history. Over the years, the iPhone has slimmed down, bulked up, added new colors, another antenna, more carriers, a friendly yet somewhat sassy personal assistant named Siri, and, oh yeah, gained a few million customers along the way. It hasn't been a completely smooth ride however. Apple would like to forget the iPhone 4 “death grip,” Mapgate, and Bendgate, among other things. The iP...

According to Mike Vizard, writing in ITBusinessEdge , Salesforce announced plans to roll out a blockchain network that organizations will be able to invoke from within the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) application platform. Announced at the company’s TrailheadX 2019 conference, Salesforce says organizations will not only be able to create a blockchain network using Salesforce development tools, but also view all the nodes that make up that network as objects within Salesforce applications. Salesforce CTO Parker Harris told conference attendees that Salesforce is leveraging its software-as-a-service (SaaS) application to both launch blockchain networks and monitor events such as transactions as they occur across that network. “We’re bringing the ease of use of Salesforce to managing a blockchain network,” says Harris. If Salesforce is successfil, blockchain networks will simply be an extension of a suite of digital business applications that all share a common...

According to a recent study by Gartner, the container ecosystem is immature and lacks operational best practices. But adoption of containers and Kubernetes is increasing for legacy modernization and cloud-native applications. By 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% today. Key Challenges facing Business include: Container usage for production deployments in enterprises is still constrained by concerns regarding security, monitoring, data management and networking. Cloud-native applications require a high degree of infrastructure automation and specialized operations skills, which are not commonly found in enterprise IT organizations. Identifying, creating and empowering the right team is challenging, due to legacy mindsets and operational burdens on team members. There is a hodgepodge of competing vendor interests, uncertain monetization strategies and varie...

Airbus has released a video, filmed at the plane manufacturer’s plant in Toulouse, France, showing the assembly of an A330-900. From delivery of components, to the assembly line, and then takeoff. The video begins with the parts being unloaded from an Airbus Beluga 3, one of the company’s original fleet of five whale-shaped cargo planes which fly its aircraft components between European production sites and final assembly lines in Toulouse, Hamburg and Tianjin, according to CNN. Source: https://www.geek.com

Our winner this year is Matthew Stankovsky who made over $11 billion. Each semester students in BUS 350 Operations Management compete to see who can make the most in the simulation which uses Microsoft Excel's "Solver" add-in. Congratulations!

You just bought your first drone, and you're charging the battery getting ready for a test flight. But before you take it outside, you need to be aware of the rules and regulations that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has put in place for flying drones in the United States. Jim Fisher , writing in PCMag discusses what you should know before you take to the air for the first time. Mandatory drone registration for recreational pilots was once a requirement. There was a court challenge and then it wasn't. Now, after another round of legal proceedings, recreational pilots in the US are required to spend $5 to register with the FAA before flying outdoors. You'll be assigned an FAA identification number. After February 23rd 2019, this number will need to be placed on the exterior of the drone. But not every drone needs to be registered. If it's a tiny toy that weighs less than 8.8 ounces (250g), you won't have go through the registration process. Als...

Rob Marvin , writing in the current issue of PCMag, travels ahead 20 years to 2039 to imagine what technology—and our society—will be like then. For the article, he interviewed a select group of futurists, execs, academics, researchers, and writers who shared their predictions. They discuss the many ways that technology will affect our lives and change our culture. Each of the experts contributes a unique perspective on the most important factors that will influence our tech-driven future, including artificial intelligence, automation, biotechnology, nanotechnology, autonomous vehicles, the Internet of Things, smart cities, and more. They also speculate on how broader issues such as climate change and online privacy and security will affect us. It's an educated guess at predicting what our world and technology's role in it will look like—whether our lives will be dystopian, utopian, or somewhere in between. Awesome. I thought it was a great way to begin the New Year. You ...