Tech that’s tops on a Mother’s Day gift list
Technology can make a perfect Mother's Day gift, whether it's filling a need or pampering mom. Here are some great ways to show how much you care:
Belkin Chef Stand + Stylus
If mom likes to spend time cooking, she'll love the Belkin Chef Stand + Stylus. It will let her consult recipes and operate her tablet without getting it dirty. The stand and stylus will work with any tablet and can be washed with mild soap and water.
Price: $29.23 on Amazon.com Read more...
Tracking your kids for safety — and for health
Technology makes it possible to keep tabs on our kids in a way our parents couldn’t. We can put GPS trackers on them and in the vehicles they drive, get text messages automatically when they return home from school, get an audible alert when a toddler strays, and soon, even updates on whether or not they’ve brushed their teeth.
Each act of tracking has its health and/or safety benefits and it’s easy to see why parents would want to use these helpful products. Their use, though, raises questions. Are we using technology in instances when we should be parenting? And, are we raising a generation whose expectation of privacy that’s very different from ours? Read more...
Carrier Ethernet 2.0 soups up service delivery for the cloud
Ethernet creator and former InfoWorld columnist Bob Metcalfe this week announced Carrier Ethernet (CE) 2.0, representing an array of advances to the networking technology that will be a boon for both service providers and customers in an increasingly cloud-based, service-oriented world.
The idea behind CE 2.0 is to make the delivery of Internet-based services faster, more reliable, more predictable, and less expensive, thanks to support for multiple classes of services, increased interconnectivity, and superior management capabilities. In a nutshell, whereas CE 1.0 was geared toward delivering standardized Ethernet services over a single provider network, CE 2.0 aims to deliver multiple classes of service and manageability over interconnected networks. Read more...
CIOs: Your next hire might not be an IT pro
In 2012 a preferred IT candidate might be someone whose background is in business rather than technology and who has sought supplementary tech certifications. How can this be? As Forrester analyst Stephanie Moore recently stated: "To build technology solutions that drive the business, as opposed to just enable the business, technologists need to have more contextual understanding -- so they understand, intuitively in some cases, what the business wants without the business having to specify it." It's tough to tailor a solution to your sales department's needs, for example, if you don't understand pipeline management. Read more...
CIOs: Your next hire might not be an IT pro
In 2012 a preferred IT candidate might be someone with a background in business rather than technology, who has sought supplementary tech certifications. How can this be? As Forrester analyst Stephanie Moore recently stated: "To build technology solutions that drive the business, as opposed to just enable the business, technologists need to have more contextual understanding -- so they understand, intuitively in some cases, what the business wants without the business having to specify it." It's tough to tailor a solution to your sales department's needs, for example, if you don't understand pipeline management. Read more...
Apple’s new OS X tightens screws on some malware
Apple will introduce a new Mac security model with OS X Mountain Lion this summer that by default lets users install only programs downloaded from the Mac App Store or those digitally signed by a registered developer.
Some experts called Gatekeeper -- Apple's name for the model and technology -- a game-changer while others criticized it as less than watertight.
Gatekeeper will block the installation of the most common kind of Mac malware yet: Trojan horses unwittingly executed by users who have been duped into downloading and installing fake software.
Last year, several campaigns of "scareware," programs that posed as antivirus software but actually infected systems with attack code, made headlines. Apple responded to the scareware threat by repeatedly updating a rudimentary blocking list that debuted two years earlier.
Apple even took the trouble during the skirmishing to issue a tool that scrubbed infected machines of the "Mac Defender" malware.
Mountain Lion, which Apple said Thursday will ship late this summer, uses a new mechanism to bar malicious applications from most Macs. Read more...
Red-hot valentines for the guys, gals, and geeks we love
Chocolates that you picked up from the grocery store on the way home from work a few minutes before the big V-Day date are not sexy. In the world of fine taste, they rate somewhere around squirt cheese, Spam, and tuna casserole — which is to say they're great for kids who don't really care what candy tastes like just as long as it's candy or for people you don't like that much. But for loved ones? Your best bet this year is to go cute, kitschy, connected, or totally cutting edge.
Here are several ideas that say "I love you" in their own own special way.
ASUS Zenbook UX21 UltrabookCutting-Edge Splurge: The sexiest new gadget around
ASUS Zenbook UX21 Ultrabook
Price: Starts at $999
Nothing says "I love you" like a gadget that "turns on instantly, is incredibly responsive and stays charged for up to eight hours." Now that's just plain PC porn. Ultrabooks are the hottest new tech gadget on the block, and this sleek little Asus Zenbook with Intel Core i7 processing technology simply oozes 007-style sex appeal. It comes in rose gold for her, polished metallic for him. Read more...
U.S. losing high-tech jobs, R&D dominance to Asia
U.S. companies are locating more of their research and development operations overseas, and Asian countries are rapidly increasing investments in their own science and technology economies, the National Science Board (NSB) reported this week.
While the U.S. remains the global leader in science and technology R&D, that lead is narrowing, asserts NSB, the policymaking body for the National Science Foundation. In particular, 10 countries in Asia -- China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand -- are closing ranks on U.S. leadership in science and technology.
The U.S. share of global R&D expenditures dropped from 38% to 31% between 1999 and 2009, according to NSB's new report, Science and Engineering Indicators 2012. Meanwhile, global R&D share in the Asia region grew from 24% to 35% during the same time frame. Asia's rapid ascent has been driven largely by China, where R&D growth spiked 28% in 2008-2009, landing it in second place behind the U.S. Read more...
Google’s Marissa Mayer says more women needed in tech
Women may have come a long way in the high-tech field in the last 10 years, but there's still a lot of room for growth, according to a group of female tech executives.
And Marissa Mayer, a vice president at Google, said we're just not doing enough to get more women into the high-tech field.
"I think what we're really playing is a numbers game, " said Mayer, speaking as part of a panel at CNet's Women in Technology panel at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. "Right now, it's a really great time to be a woman in technology -- but there aren't enough women in technology. I worry that a lot of times the conversation gets focused on what percentage of the pie is women. And the truth is the pie isn't big enough."
Part of the larger problem, she noted, is that the United States is not producing enough computer scientists.
"We're not producing enough product designers. We need more people to keep up with all these gadgets, all this tech and these possibilities and the jobs of the future," said Mayer. "We need a lot more people and if we grow that number, then the number of women, by nature, goes up." Read more...
Google’s Schmidt says devices, apps need to be friends
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt told an audience at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that the future of technology will be getting all the electronics in our lives to friend each other.
Schmidt, speaking before a standing-room-only crowd at the show in Las Vegas Tuesday afternoon, said devices aren't living up to their full potential unless they're connected. That ecosystem includes devices, operating systems, applications and content.
"Computing devices without a network are lonely," he said. "You really want to be able to walk into your house and, through your Android device, have all the devices in your house adjust because you've walked in. The TV should know that you've come in and turn on to your favorite show."
And the growth of that digital ecosystem is the future that Schmidt envisions.
"Think of these as peer-to-peer devices that talk to each other," he added. "It should become seamless." Read more...
How to launch your career 2.0
Comedian Louis CK recently produced an "HBO special"-style show, but with a difference: HBO wasn't involved -- and neither was any other network.
CK did all the work and took all the risks. But he also kept all the money.
The project was made possible by technology unavailable 10 years ago. The cost of the cameras, website, editing equipment and other necessary elements would have been far too high in the past.
The special, called "Live at the Beacon Theater," cost CK $170,000 to make. It was edited by CK himself on a regular MacBook Pro. Distribution, which happened entirely on the Internet with a digital rights management-free download costing $5 for each user via PayPal, took place on a site built for $32,000.
That's a lot of money. But the whole project paid for itself in a few hours after the special went on sale. Within four days, CK had made $500,000. And the money is still rolling in. Read more...
Weak IT teaching fuels tech skills crisis
Lacklustre teaching of IT in English schools is resulting in thousands of students leaving secondary education without the skills to pursue a career in technology, according to a report by Osted.
In more than one-third of the 74 secondary schools surveyed by the national education inspectorate nearly half of the students left without "a sound foundation for further study or training in ICT", the report found. Students at these schools were either not offered the chance to study the IT National Curriculum, the report said, or could only take a single vocational examination course that failed to challenge more able students.
The teaching of IT at more than half of secondary schools was judged to be no better than satisfactory, with the report finding that a limited number of teachers had the ability to teach key topics such as programming. Overall ICT teaching skills within secondary schools have failed to improve since Ofsted last surveyed them between 2005 and 2008. Read more...
Why there’s real hope for webOS – if HP is committed
It's too soon to declare that Hewlett-Packard has "dump[ed] webOS in the open source trash can", as my friend and mobile open source expert Fabrizio Capobianco insists. But it's also way too soon for HP to speculate on its action being any sort of victory, given the immense difficulties inherent in successfully open sourcing technology.
Open sourcing webOS is not an end, but a means to an end, and one that depends heavily on HP's ability to get out of the way and cooperatively construct a community around the mobile platform.
It's not for the faint of heart.
Just ask Nokia, which sought to sustain Symbian as a mobile powerhouse by turning Symbian into an open-source project. Except that it didn't. Not immediately, anyway. From the outset, the Symbian Foundation promised a long wait for the Symbian code, but it took years, and was eventually pulled back into proprietary software land.
In open-source land, the lack of shipping code is a deal killer. It is impossible to sustain interest in chimerical code. Read more...