Why the White House Office of American Innovation can’t replace the U.S. Digital Service

Last week, the White House announced the Office of American Innovation, intended to disrupt and fix ossified government agencies and procedures using ideas taken from the business world—primarily the high-tech industry. Led by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the Office of American Innovation is Trump’s spiritual, if not actual, successor to President Obama’s United States Digital Service.Both agencies were created to cut through government red tape to get things done faster and more efficiently. And that’s a noble goal, no matter which president tries to make it happen. But the two approaches are significantly different, and I believe their widely varying approaches will lead to very different results.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Star pitcher willing to join IT team

It’s a standard line of inquiry by sportswriters that until now has always generated answers straight out of the Crash Davis school of interview banalities.Question: “How do you feel about the way you’re being used?”Answer: “I’ll do anything to help the team; anything the (manager/coach) wants.”For emphasis you may hear the athlete express a willingness to carry equipment or staff a concession stand or the like.Then we have Sports Illustrated asking Cleveland Indians All-Star relief pitcher Andrew Miller about last year’s postseason, which saw manager Terry Francona not only calling upon Miller in virtually every game but often for multiple innings, a workload considered barbaric by today’s standards. Miller doesn’t see himself being used quite so often during this just-begun 162-game regular season, but adds:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Star pitcher willing to join IT team

It’s a standard line of inquiry by sportswriters that until now has always generated answers straight out of the Crash Davis school of interview banalities.Question: “How do you feel about the way you’re being used?”Answer: “I’ll do anything to help the team; anything the (manager/coach) wants.”For emphasis you may hear the athlete express a willingness to carry equipment or staff a concession stand or the like.Then we have Sports Illustrated asking Cleveland Indians All-Star relief pitcher Andrew Miller about last year’s postseason, which saw manager Terry Francona not only calling upon Miller in virtually every game but often for multiple innings, a workload considered barbaric by today’s standards. Miller doesn’t see himself being used quite so often during this just-begun 162-game regular season, but adds:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Android now the world’s most popular operating system

Move over, Microsoft Windows. Thanks to mobile, Google’s Android is now king, as it has become the world’s most popular operating system for getting online.Web analytics firm StatCounter reported that, for the first time ever, Android topped the worldwide OS internet usage market share. In March, looking at combined usage across desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile, Android usage hit 37.93 percent. That was enough to narrowly overtake Windows’ 37.91 percent. StatCounter “This is a milestone in technology history and the end of an era,” said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen. “It marks the end of Microsoft’s leadership worldwide of the OS market, which it has held since the 1980s. It also represents a major breakthrough for Android, which held just 2.4 percent of global internet usage share only five years ago.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Android now the world’s most popular operating system

Move over, Microsoft Windows. Thanks to mobile, Google’s Android is now king, as it has become the world’s most popular operating system for getting online.Web analytics firm StatCounter reported that, for the first time ever, Android topped the worldwide OS internet usage market share. In March, looking at combined usage across desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile, Android usage hit 37.93 percent. That was enough to narrowly overtake Windows’ 37.91 percent. StatCounter “This is a milestone in technology history and the end of an era,” said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen. “It marks the end of Microsoft’s leadership worldwide of the OS market, which it has held since the 1980s. It also represents a major breakthrough for Android, which held just 2.4 percent of global internet usage share only five years ago.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Opinion: Why You Will Never Be Better Than Automation

Michelin starred restaurants are serving Nespresso coffee . Why ? Because automation produces a consistent coffee. With sufficient quality inputs (coffee, machine etc), you will achieve a better overall outcome:

… in most cases mechanisation is competing not against the artisanal best but against the human mean. So, even if the very best coffee is still made the traditional way by a skilled, human barista, all Nespresso need do is produce better coffee than the majority of baristas, whom most coffee fanatics describe as incompetent anyway.

Its not just about automating coffee, leading restaurants are focussing on the quality of the inputs, system design and the outcome.

Even at El Bulli in Spain, voted the world’s best restaurant for a record five years before it closed in July 2011, this basic principle was evident. Head chef Ferran Adrià and his core team were not actually the ones preparing the food on the night. Their main role was to develop dishes, in a form of gastronomic R&D, during the six months of each year that El Bulli was closed. The restaurant kitchen itself was really just a very fancy production line. ‘You have to function like perfect machines,’ Adrià was shown telling the Continue reading

These desks are made for walking

A 2015 research study concluded that walking at a treadmill desk for two hours a day can improve blood pressure and sleep, among other health benefits. Treadmill desks are particularly attractive to busy office workers who are primarily sedentary and have little time for working out. Instead of devoting, say, an hour to a walk, you can walk all day and still get your work done — at least in theory.A treadmill desk may also be compelling to a company’s employee fitness challenge competitors. But some wristband activity trackers won’t log all treadmill steps while your hands rest on the desktop. (Check out these Fitbit community threads, for example.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to succeed despite these terrible tech managers

No amount of free sodas and beer Fridays are going to wash away the taste of bad leadership. If your dream development gig is turning into a nightmare and your projects are suffering, it might be time to manage up your boss—before your career takes a turn in the ditch.Management guru and author Peter Drucker said that “only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.”[ Find out how to get ahead with our career development guide for developers. | Give in to the dark side: 10 steps to becoming a horrible IT boss. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld’s App Dev Report newsletter. ] While there are truly great leaders in IT, not all inspire confidence. Worse, you can’t always choose who will lead your team. But you can always map out new paths in your career. With that in mind, here is a look at some prototypically bad managers you may have already encountered in your engineering departments, with tips on how to deal with each of them. In the meantime, keep your head on a swivel and read on.To read this article in Continue reading

Google Researchers Measure the Future in Microseconds

The IT industry has gotten good at developing computer systems that can easily work at the nanosecond and millisecond scales.

Chip makers have developed multiple techniques that have helped drive the creation of nanosecond-scale devices, while primarily software-based solutions have been rolled out for slower millisecond-scale devices. For a long time, that has been enough to address the various needs of high-performance computing environments, where performance is a key metric and issues such as the simplicity of the code and the level of programmer productivity are not as great of concerns. Given that, programming at the microsecond level as not …

Google Researchers Measure the Future in Microseconds was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Expert tips for managing your cloud data

When oncologists at Carolinas HealthCare System go before a tumor board review to discuss patient cases, they are looking for feedback on treatment plans and clinical trials. During their presentations, the doctors show their peers genetic data, pathology reports, lab results and physicians' notes -- all of which is at their fingertips because it is stored in a Hadoop cloud on Microsoft Azure.Cloud security governance processes must also be considered, as well as aligning corporate security requirements with compliance and privacy laws, especially when it comes to personal information, says Forrester's Shey.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

How to install Windows on an external drive

Thanks to the speed of USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3 connections, it’s now possible for an external hard drive to match the read and write speeds of an internal drive. Combine that with a proliferation of external SSDs, and for the first time, running Windows off an external drive is viable.There are a few reasons you might want to do that: You have a work laptop that you’re not allowed to make many changes to, but you want to take games or other non-work sanctioned software with you when you travel. You want to run multiple operating system installations on the same machine, but don’t have enough space to split your internal drive into multiple partitions. You’re running an enterprise version of Windows that comes with the Windows To Go feature, and have a certified installation drive, so you can create a portable installation that will work on any computer. Before we start, let’s get the bad news out of the way: Windows will refuse to install on an external drive if it knows that’s what you’re doing. But there are a few ways around this, including emulation via tools like VMWare. The easiest workaround is an application Continue reading

Email security appears grounded as attacks continue to take flight

Recently inboxes have been hit by the so-called “airline phishing attack.” It is a new take on an old phishing email. It uses multiple techniques to capture sensitive data and deploy an advanced persistent threat (APT).Barracuda Networks has seen this attack with several of its customers, especially in industries that deal with frequent shipping of goods or employee travel, such as logistics, shipping, and manufacturing. The attacker will either impersonate a travel agency or even an employee in HR or finance who is sending an airline ticket or e-ticket. The email will be constructed to appear inconspicuous.The attacker will have researched his target, selecting the airline, destination and price so that these details look legitimate in the context of the company and the recipient, Barracuda reports. After getting the employee to open the email, an APT embedded in an email attachment goes into action. The attachment is typically formatted as a PDF or DOCX document. In this attack, the malware will be executed upon opening the document. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Email security appears grounded as attacks continue to take flight

Recently inboxes have been hit by the so-called “airline phishing attack.” It is a new take on an old phishing email. It uses multiple techniques to capture sensitive data and deploy an advanced persistent threat (APT).Barracuda Networks has seen this attack with several of its customers, especially in industries that deal with frequent shipping of goods or employee travel, such as logistics, shipping, and manufacturing. The attacker will either impersonate a travel agency or even an employee in HR or finance who is sending an airline ticket or e-ticket. The email will be constructed to appear inconspicuous.The attacker will have researched his target, selecting the airline, destination and price so that these details look legitimate in the context of the company and the recipient, Barracuda reports. After getting the employee to open the email, an APT embedded in an email attachment goes into action. The attachment is typically formatted as a PDF or DOCX document. In this attack, the malware will be executed upon opening the document. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top 5 email security best practices to prevent malware distribution

A trusted channelImage by ThinkstockEmail is a critical enterprise communication tool synonymous with sending important documents quickly and efficiently between employees, managers, HR, finance, sales, legal, customers, supply chain and more. That said, organizations often don’t understand that the file types used every day to share important information – standard files like Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and PDFs – are also the most common attack vectors widely used for the distribution of malware. For cybercriminals, it’s often too easy to target a user with a spoofed email or phishing attack, and trick them into opening an infected attachment that appears to be legitimate.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top 5 email security best practices to prevent malware distribution

A trusted channelImage by ThinkstockEmail is a critical enterprise communication tool synonymous with sending important documents quickly and efficiently between employees, managers, HR, finance, sales, legal, customers, supply chain and more. That said, organizations often don’t understand that the file types used every day to share important information – standard files like Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and PDFs – are also the most common attack vectors widely used for the distribution of malware. For cybercriminals, it’s often too easy to target a user with a spoofed email or phishing attack, and trick them into opening an infected attachment that appears to be legitimate.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How company culture can make or break your business

If there's one big lesson to be learned from the recent revelations about ridesharing startup and Silicon Valley darling Uber's culture, it's this: Culture can be a four-letter word if it is ignored. Culture can be a four-letter word if is toxic. And toxic cultures kill more businesses than recessions. And it is liable to kill Uber too, says Steven L. Blue, president and CEO of Miller Ingenuity and author of American Manufacturing 2.0: What Went Wrong and How to Make It Right.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can the IoT transform loading operations?

Transporting freight operates at a massive scale in the U.S., most of it hauled by trucks that are the lifeblood of the American economy. But the trailers those trucks are hauling typically have a load efficiency of 70 to 75 percent, says Tom Bianculli, CTO of Zebra Technologies. The remaining 25 to 30 percent is air.But smart environments powered by the internet of things (IoT) can change that, Bianculli says. Zebra's new SmartPack Trailer offering, announced at ProMat 2017 in Chicago today, uses sensors on the dock doors of distribution facilities, which peer into each trailer using a combination of 3D depth-sensing technology and a conventional megapixel camera.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT service providers get low marks on innovation

Nearly half (48 percent) of the customers of IT service providers aren't satisfied with the service they’re getting, according to Everest Group’s global survey of 132 enterprises. That figure includes 25 percent who are “highly unsatisfied.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

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