This Is How a Router Really Works The evolution of the Internet is one of the biggest game changers in the way we interact with technology today. As we’ve moved from the highly primitive ARPANet to America Online to browsing and streaming from a highly sophisticated wireless network, it’s hard to imagine life without going online. You can thank the router for that. Yes, that little box with all those ports that you plug into the wall is actually the magical gateway for all of your devices to connect simultaneously to the Internet. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to click through your beloved GIFs of cats, stream Netflix or even connect to Google. The Hardware Needless to say, the first system that functioned the same as a router — ARPANET’s "gateway" — was a massive machine that looked more like a refrigerator than an integral part to building and sustaining an internetwork of computers. What routers have an abundance of are reliable ports through which to feed the Internet connection. How It Runs How It Makes Internet
Will Software Eliminate Physical Retail? Not Quite. What Would You REALLY Ask a CEO? Many CIOs moving beyond IT: Survey Gartner recently conducted a survey of 2,053 CIOs, asking what's going to be important over the coming year. If you look at the lists below--for technology and business priorities--there probably aren't too many surprises. Analytics/BI tops the list, followed by mobile, then cloud, and so on. The piece of bad news is the economics. The three main anchors of service-oriented technologies--cloud, legacy modernization, and virtualization--make the list, at numbers 3, 5, and 8 respectively. What's really new and different is evidence that CIOs are increasingly evolving into "chief digital officers" (CDOs). Nevertheless, almost a fifth of CIOs now act as their enterprise's CDO, leading digital commerce and channels. Ultimately, a CDO posture may attract far more corporate budget dollars than the traditional IT-centric CIO role, Gartner suggested. Top 10 CIO technology priorities: Top CIO 10 business priorities:
7 Tips For Writing A Great LinkedIn Invitation Whether you’re new to LinkedIn or you’re a seasoned user, connecting with new people can be a challenge, especially when you’re not sure what to write in your LinkedIn invitation. You might be tempted to use the generic “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” template, but beware! By not personalizing your message, you could lose a precious opportunity to network. Here are seven great tips on writing LinkedIn invitations from our approved career experts: 1. Be Honest “Explain why you want to connect with the person,” says Amanda Haddaway, author of Destination Real World: Success After Graduation For New And Soon-To-Be College Graduates. Dorothy Tannahill-Moran of Next Chapter New Life says honesty is the best policy when trying to connect with someone, especially if you’re looking to do some serious networking. 2. “I get a lot of requests and I always appreciate a brief mention of why the person wants to connect,” says Jenny Yerrick Martin of Your Industry Insider. 3.
A Shape-Shifting Smartphone Touch Screen Tactus Technology, a startup in Fremont, California, is prototyping touch-screen hardware with buttons that emerge when you need the feel of a physical keyboard and disappear when you don’t. The approach, in which a fluid-filled plastic panel and cylindrical fluid reservoir replace the usual top layer of glass, is among a crop of emerging technologies aimed at adding tactile feedback to make screens feel like old-fashioned keyboards. Touch screens are ubiquitous: in 2012, 1.2 billion were made for smartphones and 130 million for tablets, and they’re showing up in everything from game consoles to car navigation interfaces. Tactus isn’t the only company recognizing a need for screens to offer tactile or so-called haptic feedback. Tactus’s approach, however, is the only one that allows users to orient their finger on the screen before actually depressing the key, or to rest their fingers on buttons without triggering them.
Managers are for Efficiency, Leaders are for Innovation Time was, back when the railroads were built, that the military was basically the only management structure that was large, distributed and relatively effective. So the railroads and other rapidly expanding businesses adopted the military’s top down, command and control management philosophies. This was actually a driver for industrial growth, since many corporations were forming and needed a structure to allow them to grow, to expand and to control operations. Fast forward to today, and the top down, command and control organization is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The Cross Roads Our businesses are at a cross-roads, in terms of existing structures and purpose, and future demands. Leaders, managers and visions, oh my! Back in the day when command and control was the accepted and the practical alternative, executives created strategies but didn’t bother to share them with their employees. But today, things should be different. The new paradigm Wait!
Digital Activist Aaron Swartz Dead At 26 Digital activist and early employee at Reddit, Aaron Swartz, committed suicide in New York on January 11. He was 26. Swartz was a fiery proponent of Internet freedom and the founder of DemandProgress.org. Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing wrote a beautiful eulogy to the young man who, at the age of 14, surprised his computing peers by organizing the RSS 1.0 working group. I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. Schwartz was in the news in 2011 for taking 4 million documents from JSTOR, an online aggregator of scientific journals. It is always tragic when one of our own dies and it is made even more tragic when they choose suicide rather than help. But rather than dwell on what went wrong, it is right to celebrate this young man’s accomplishments and mourn his passing.
Why aren’t more business leaders online? Tetradian Books » Blog Archive » Power and Response-ability Published: July 2008 Suggested price: £25.00 Preview: see: Buy print edition from: Buy e-book edition from IT Governance “Many of the common concepts of power in business are so close to perfectly wrong that it’s amazing any work happens at all…” The physics definition of power is ‘the ability to do work’; most social definitions are closer to the ability to avoid it. This enlightening and enlivening book explains the interplay of power, property and responsibility in the business context – how it works, why it doesn’t, and what to do about it. how to identify power in the workplace – both functional and dysfunctionalhow to enhance responsibility and ‘response-ability’ at workhow to resolve differences of scale, from ‘I’ to ‘We’ to ‘Us’ to ‘Them’how to avoid ‘power-traps’ that could put the enterprise at riskhow to design systems that improve purpose-fulfilment, relationship-management and knowledge-technology in the enterprise
Which Best Practice Is Ruining Your Business? - Freek Vermeulen by Freek Vermeulen | 11:00 AM December 3, 2012 For many decades, newspapers were big; printed on the so-called broadsheet format. However, it was not cheaper to print on such large sheets of paper — that was not the reason for their exorbitant size — in fact, it was more expensive, in comparison to the so-called tabloid size. So why did newspaper companies insist on printing the news on such impractical, large sheets of paper? Why not print it on smaller paper? When finally, in 2004, the United Kingdom’s Independent switched to the denounced tabloid size, it saw its circulation surge. When I looked into where the practice had come from — to print newspapers on impractically large sheets of paper — it appeared its roots lay in England. Everybody does it Most companies follow “best practices.” One reason why a practice’s inefficiency may be difficult to spot is because when it came into existence, it was beneficial — like broadsheet newspapers once made sense. The short-term trap