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Submission + - What If You Could Fire Your CEO? (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Three years ago, talent management and human resources company Haufe U.S. created a workplace democracy, in which C-level leadership is elected by the employees for a one-year term. In an interview with CIO.com's Sharon Florentine, Kelly Max, who is currently serving as CEO, explains how the company got to this point and what they've learned from the experience. 'If you're going to talk about how your employees 'own' the company, if you're going to tout how they all have a voice, why not go all the way and see what happens? Because why not? You already have people working for and with you who elect you every day, who either agree or disagree with you and follow you, so we wanted to make it very transparent,' says Max. Could your organization work as a democracy? Would your CEO still have a job?

Submission + - Older Workers Adapt To New Technology Just Fine, Survey Finds (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Those older workers in your office, you know, the one ones you think can't handle dealing with new technology? Turns out, they struggle less with technology than their millennial colleagues. A survey by London-based market research firm Ipsos Mori, sponsored by Dropbox, found that older workers are less likely to find using technology in the workplace stressful and experience less trouble working with multiple devices than the younger cohort. The reason for this might lie in all the clunky old technologies older workers have had to master over the decades. Digital Natives don't know how good they've got it.

Submission + - Landlords, ISPs Team Up To Rip Off Tenants On Broadband (backchannel.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Eight years ago, the FCC issued an order banning exclusive agreements between landlords and ISPs, but a loophole is being exploited, leaving many tenants in apartment buildings with only one choice of broadband service provider. The loophole works like this: Instead of having an exclusive agreement with one provider, the landlords refuse to let any other companies than their chosen providers access their properties, according to Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford, who wrote an article about the issue.

Submission + - Playing politics with agile projects (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Politicians would be utter failures as agile project managers, writes David Taber, and for all the reasons you might imagine, but mainly because they wantonly make promises they have no hope or thought of keeping. But then he gets into the political attributes successful project managers need. And that's where things get interesting because, while he points out that agile was 'conceived of as a way of bypassing bureaucracy and internal politics,' the attributes he says are required for success are pretty much the worst of the political behavior we've all witnessed in our organizations. For example:

A key success factor for agile projects is the ability for every team member to talk expectations down at every possible juncture. Agile should inherently involve frequent 1:1 contact with users: use that time to lower expectations! Without this habit, the inevitable scope creep and the impulse to believe “of course the system will do X for me” will get you.

Is it any wonder why users hate agile.

Submission + - Samsung, Nvidia End Their Patent Lawsuits (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: In September 2014, Nvidia sued both Samsung and Qualcomm, asking for shipments of Galaxy phones and tablets with graphics processors from Qualcomm, ARM and Imagination Technologies to be blocked. Samsung fired back, suing Nvidia for patent infringement, and for supposedly false claims by Nvidia that its Tegra K1 was the world's fastest mobile processor. Now, in an agreement announced today, Nvidia and Samsung have agreed to 'settle all outstanding IP litigation.' Under the agreement, the companies will license 'a small number' of patents to each other, though they said there's no broad cross-license agreement. There's also no financial payment. And no mention was made of Qualcomm.

Submission + - India Makes It Compulsory for Phones To Have 'Panic Buttons' (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Starting in January 2017, all feature phones sold in India will need to have a panic button that will alert 'police & designated friends/relatives, for immediate response in case of distress or security related issues,' said Minister of Communications, Ravi Shankar Prasad, on Twitter late Tuesday. The measure is one of several responses by the Indian government to the growing problem of rape attacks on women in the country. In addition, starting in January 2018, mobile phones will also be required to have GPS systems to help pinpoint the location of the affected person in the event of harassment or distress, said Prasad.

Submission + - Torvalds Hasn't Given Up On Linux Desktop Domination, Will 'Wear Them Down' (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Linus Torvalds told attendees at the Embedded Linux Conference on Monday that although Linux hasn't dominated the desktop like it 'has in many other areas,' he isn't particularly disappointed but also hasn't given up on that goal. 'I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled,' Torvalds said. 'That's why, to me, it's not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it's a really hard area to enter. I'm still working on it. It's been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I'll wear them down.'

Submission + - Study: Drones Present Minimal Threat To Aircraft (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: A study from George Mason University, which estimates danger from consumer drones suggests that rules around private drone use could be relaxed without endangering general aviation. Research fellow Eli Dourado married data on bird strikes with aircraft with an estimate of the number of birds in airspace and the average weight per species of bird and concluded that 'a two-kilogram drone would cause an injury once every 187 million years of continuous operation.'

Submission + - Facebook Is Shuttering the Parse Developer Platform (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: In a blog post yesterday, Facebook announced it is shutting down the Parse developer platform as of Jan. 28, 2017, giving developers a year to move off its hosted services. This comes as a bit of a surprise, considering that just last month, Parse launched a set of new tools to help developers work with Apple's watchOS and tvOS last, and at the time, Parse Product Manager Supratik Lahiri promised more updates in the future. Developers who don't want to rewrite their applications to work with a new back-end service provider can follow a migration guide from Parse to make their applications work with an independent MongoDB instance and a new open-source Parse Server that's running on Salesforce-owned developer platform provider Heroku.

Submission + - Why 6 Republican Senators Think You Don't Need Faster Broadband (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: 'Broadband in the United States still lags behind similar service in other industrialized countries, so Congress made broadband expansion a national priority, and it offers subsidies, mostly in rural areas, to help providers expand their offerings,' writes Bill Snyder. And that's where an effort by the big ISPs and a group of senators to change the definition of broadband comes in. Of course, the ISPs want the threshold to be as low as possible so it's easier for them to qualify for government subsidies. In a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, dated January 21, 2016, the senators called the current broadband benchmark of 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream 'arbitrary' and said that users don't need that kind of speed anyway. '[W]e are aware of few applications that require download speeds of 25 Mbps.' the senators wrote, missing the simple fact that many users have multiple connected devices.

Submission + - Google Says It Killed 780 Million 'Bad Ads' In 2015 (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: According to a new Google report, the search giant disabled more than 780 million "bad ads," including include ads for counterfeit products, misleading or unapproved pharmaceuticals, weight loss scams, phishing ploys, unwanted software and "trick-to-click" cons, globally last year. This marks a 49 percent increase over 2014. For perspective, it would take an individual nearly 25 years to look at the 780 million ads Google removed last year for just one second each, according to Google. If the trend continues, Google's team of more than 1,000 staffers dedicated to killing spam will be even busier in 2016, and they could disable more than a billion junky ads.

Submission + - EFF: Cisco Shouldn't Get Off the Hook For Torture In China (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: In a lawsuit in Northern California that was dismissed in 2014, Falun Gong practitioners alleged that Cisco Systems built a security system, dubbed 'Golden Shield,' for the Chinese government knowing it would be used to track and persecute members of the religious minority. That case is being appealed, and on Monday the EFF, Privacy International and free-speech group Article 19 filed a brief that supports the appeal. Many U.S. and European companies sell technology to regimes that violate human rights, and if this case goes to trial and Cisco loses, they may think twice, said EFF Staff Attorney Sophia Cope. 'In a lot of instances, these companies are selling directly to the government, and they know exactly what is going to be happening,' Cope said.

Submission + - Panasonic To Commercialize Facebook's Blu-ray Cold Storage Systems

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: A couple of years ago, Facebook revealed it was using Blu-ray disks as a cost-efficient way to archive the billions of images that users uploaded to its service. When Facebook users upload photos, they're often viewed frequently in the first week, so Facebook stores them on solid state drives or spinning hard disks. But as time goes on the images get viewed less and less. At a certain point, Facebook dumps them onto high-capacity Blu ray discs, where they might sit for years without being looked at. Now, Panasonic has said it plans to commercialize the technology for other businesses, and is working on new disks that will hold a terabyte of data.

Submission + - New WTO Trade Deal Will Exempt IT-Related Products From Import Tariffs (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Under an agreement finalized Wednesday that applies to all 192 member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO), tariffs on imports of consumer electronics will be phased out over 7 years starting in July 2016. The agreement affects around 10 percent of the world trade in information and communications technology products and will eliminate around $50 billion in tariffs annually, according to IT industry lobby group DigitalEurope. It expects a $190 billion boost to global GDP from the changes.

Submission + - Quantum Computer Security? NASA Doesn't Want To Talk About It (csoonline.com) 2

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: At a press event at NASA's Advanced Supercomputer Facility in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, the agency was keen to talk about the capabilities of its D-Wave 2X quantum computer. 'Engineers from NASA and Google are using it to research a whole new area of computing — one that's years from commercialization but could revolutionize the way computers solve complex problems,' writes Martyn Williams. But when questions turned to the system's security, a NASA moderator quickly shut things down [VIDEO], saying the topic was 'for later discussion at another time.'

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