That was Then... This is Now

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 ...

While 5G will reach critical mass in developed countries by mid-to-late 2019, it will not be until 2020 or beyond when it is so common you can depend on it being everyplace you need it to be. This last step is a critical one: we will have to reconsider where apps run and begin to rethink what apps do. 5G will change what we consider a mobile platform to be because the OS will move as well. It is interesting to note that when Steve Jobs first conceived of the iPhone, he thought all the apps would exist in the Cloud and not run locally. With 5G we get to see a moment where it looks like Apple was first with the concept, but others will get it right first. This is because Apple is expected to be a year late with 5G and the Cloud currently is dominated by Amazon, Google and Microsoft. As Jobs envisioned, if you can push everything into the Cloud, you get a number of potential advantages: such as nearly unlimited processing power, offline upgrades and patches that are completely man...

Data analytics remain a work in progress. While the majority of organizations recognize the benefits of analytics initiatives, most have yet to maximize these advantages, according to a recent survey from Snowflake Computing, MicroStrategy, Wipro, and Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. Relatively few companies are effectively embedding data/analytics into all business decision making. What’s more, organizations are still struggling to deliver actionable intelligence to their employees. Over 700 business leaders took part in the research. The following slide show  from eWeek, presents highlights, with charts provided courtesy of Harvard Business Review Analytic Services and the three sponsoring IT companies. A "must read" for everyone involved with analytics in their organization.

According to digital security company Gemalto's 2018 Breach Level Index Report, more than 4.5 billion data records were compromised in the first half of this year, a 133 percent increase over last year. That equals more than 25 million data records lost or stolen per day, one-million every hour, over 17,000 every minute, and 291 every second. Not surprising is that the number one source of data breaches was "malicious outside actors," meaning external attackers. Those attacks encompassed more than 3.6 billion data records, or 80 percent of the total from the first half of 2018. The second most frequent cause of compromised data was accidental, which dropped by 47 percent from over 1.6 billion records in the 2017 report to 879 million in 2018. Human mistakes still accounted for 318 out of the 945 total incidents reported this year. Next, 7 percent of data breaches were the result of malicious insiders stealing information from a company, and 2 percent of breaches w...

If you are planning to buy a new TV in 2018, 4K has replaced 1080p as the industry standard. 4K content is being streamed and readily available on disc. Prices of 4K TVs continue to fall. Last week however, Samsung introduced a new 8K TV line at the IFA trade show in Berlin. The Q900R QLED 8K will be offered in 65-inch, 75-inch, 82-inch, and 85-inch sizes complete with "Real 8K Resolution." What this means is you are getting a TV with four-times more pixels than 4K or 16-times more than HD. Samsung is using artificial intelligence and a dedicated chip to offer 8K-quality upscaling. Each Q900R TV includes a dedicated chip to handle content upscaling coupled with proprietary AI. Samsung claims that this combination allows it to enhance lower resolution content up to the point where it is 8K quality. Even though you may be watching a 4K Blu-Ray disc, it will appear as 8K on the screen. The Q900R offers a brightness of 4,000 nits and supports the HDR10+ standard for enhanced hi...