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Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Miami ranked Top 10 in connectivity...
Monday, December 8, 2014
Friday, December 5, 2014
The 85 Most Disruptive Ideas in Our History (BusinessWeek)
1937 Simon Kuznets presents to Congress a research report called National Income and Capital Formation, 1919–35.
The biggest thing in the world is the gross domestic product of the U.S. To equal it would take the combined earning power of a dance line of Taylor Swifts 100 miles long. It’s so big that writing out the number rounded-off to the next trillion puts you deep into a forest of zeroes: $18,000,000,000,000.
As big as it is, it doesn’t actually exist. At least not in the physical realm. GDP is an organizing concept, akin to taxonomy or the periodic table.
GDP compartmentalizes a chaotic world, imposing order on the vast flow of daily transactions we call “the economy.” It can be regarded as the sum of all output, or the sum of all expenditure, or the sum of all income. Conceptually, these three ways of attacking the problem should arrive at exactly the same number. That’s elegant.
By the most familiar of the three definitions, the expenditure one, GDP equals C + I + G + (X - M): consumption plus investment plus government spending plus exports minus imports. If you buy a laptop computer for personal use, it goes into C, consumption. If you buy it for work, it goes into I, investment. Thus accountants shape our perception of reality.
Getting a grip on GDP, including its thousands of components, empowers the planners in both Big Government and Big Business. It was conceived mainly in Great Britain and the U.S., first to understand and combat the Great Depression, then to organize war production to defeat the Axis powers. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: Today countries as different as China and Nigeria regularly report their GDP using a United Nations-developed standard called the System of National Accounts. In 1999, the U.S. Department of Commerce declared GDP “our greatest achievement” of the 20th century.
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Sony Pictures Computer Network Hacked (PCMagazine)
- BY STEPHANIE MLOT
- NOVEMBER 25, 2014
A hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment has left many employees without access to the network.
Workers on Monday were met with an ominous skeleton image on their PCs, from a group called #GOP (Guardians of Peace), alongside a message threatening to release "top secret" data if undisclosed demands were not met.
According to PCMag sister site Geek.com, #GOP leaked a large ZIP file with two lists detailing the extent of the doxxing. "Most of what's inside appears to be from the Sony Pictures finance department, including the stuff of IT guy nightmares: Excel sheets and ZIP files that appear to be full of passwords," Geek said. "There's even a text file that helpfully lists the last 10 recently used passwords for something at Sony."
A number of Sony-related Twitter accounts also appear to have been breached.
Sony Pictures did not immediately respond to PCMag's request for comment, buttold Deadline that the company is "investigating an IT matter."
The image appeared publicly first on Reddit, posted by an anonymous user claiming to be an ex-Sony employee, whose friend shared a screenshot of the threat.
"Warning: We've already warned you, and this is just a beginning," the message said. "We continue till our request be met. We've obtained all your internal data including your secrets and top [secrets]."
Citing an unnamed source at Sony Pictures, Variety said the situation may take up to three weeks to resolve. In the meantime, employees have been instructed to turn off their computers and disable Wi-Fi on mobile devices.
Sony is no stranger to attacks, though. In August, the company's PlayStation Network was taken offline thanks to the efforts of hackers known as Lizard Squad. The same group targeted Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley via Twitter.
Earlier this week, meanwhile, a hacker group claimed to have infiltrated Sony's PlayStation Network and published gamers' email addresses and passwords of gamers, but Sony denied any hack, The Hollywood Reporter said.
In 2011, Sony's network was hit with a massive outage that included the loss of personal information. It lasted almost a month, and attracted the attention of Congress.
Stephanie began as a PCMag reporter in May 2012. She moved to New York City from Frederick, Md., where she worked for four years as a multimedia reporter at the second-largest daily newspaper in Maryland.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
DIY Smart Home: LittleBits' New Kit Connects Old Appliances to the Internet (BusinessWeek)
The promise of future technology is that all your dumb household stuff will become smart. The lock on your front door, your smoke alarm, your thermostat will all “speak” to you through your phone, and vice versa. The problem with this domestic Internet of Things (IoT)—apart from the annoyance of receiving messages from your coffeemaker—is that it requires swapping perfectly serviceable gadgets in favor of ones that can connect to the cloud.
Now there’s another option. LittleBits, which makes brightly colored modules that snap together to create electronic circuits, is now selling a $249 DIY kit for those who want to turn their analog abodes into WiFi-enabled smart homes. The set extends the use of the recently launched cloudBit, giving users a menu of projects that include a remote pet feeder, a smart air-conditioner, and a garage door monitor. It essentially allows people to build their own IoT hardware without having to wait for companies like Nest, GE, or Apple to roll out another product.
“The electronics industry pretty much remains a very top-down industry that is very much controlled by large companies, by experts, by engineers,” says LittleBits CEO Ayah Bdeir. “Very few people are able to gain access and innovate in it.” Her three-year-old startup makes it as easy to customize hardware as it is to assemble Ikea furniture.
The Smart Home Kit comes with 14 bits, including the cloudBit as well as five new ones: an MP3 player, a temperature sensor, a number counter (which, for instance, can be attached to the temperature sensor to display Fahrenheit or Celsius values), a threshold (which can turn a sensor into a trigger module), and an infrared transmitter (which can be paired with an AC switch to turn appliances on or off). The company includes an infographic poster cataloging a host of potential projects, from a device that adds toilet paper to your digital grocery list when someone takes the last roll to an alarm that sounds when your fridge is left open too long. Makers can control the devices through the LittleBits-hosted Web app; their own API, orIFTTT (If This Then That), a service that connects to a channel like Twitter or Facebook to trigger an action such as a tweet or Facebook status update.
Courtesy LittleBits
“The idea is that you are able to take control of your home, take control of your devices, and innovate in the middles where people haven’t created products for you,” Bdeir says. “We’re not out to replace Nest, but why shouldn’t you be able to make your own?”
The kit is available for preorder today, and beginning in December, will be sold in select RadioShack locations. In June, RadioShack announced that it would start carrying the LittleBits in a bid to remake itself as a Home Depot for tech geeks.
Monday, November 24, 2014
Hagel Said to Be Stepping Down as Defense Chief Under Pressure (NYT)
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| Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's resignation was expected to be announced by President Obama on Monday.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Defense SecretaryChuck Hagel is stepping down under pressure, the first cabinet-level casualty of the collapse of President Obama’s Democratic majority in the Senate and the struggles of his national security team amid an onslaught of global crises.
The president, who is expected to announce Mr. Hagel’s resignation in a Rose Garden appearance on Monday, made the decision to ask his defense secretary — the sole Republican on his national security team — to step down last Friday after a series of meetings over the past two weeks, senior administration officials said.
The officials described Mr. Obama’s decision to remove Mr. Hagel, 68, as a recognition that the threat from the Islamic State would require a different kind of skills than those that Mr. Hagel was brought on to employ. A Republican with military experience who was skeptical about the Iraq war, Mr. Hagel came in to manage the Afghanistan combat withdrawal and the shrinking Pentagon budget in the era of budget sequestration.
But now “the next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus,” one administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He insisted that Mr. Hagel was not fired, saying that he initiated discussions about his future two weeks ago with the president, and that the two men mutually agreed that it was time for him to leave.
But Mr. Hagel’s aides had maintained in recent weeks that he expected to serve the full four years as defense secretary. His removal appears to be an effort by the White House to show that it is sensitive to critics who have pointed to stumbles in the government’s early response to several national security issues, including the Ebola crisis and the threat posed by the Islamic State.
Even before the announcement of Mr. Hagel’s removal, Obama officials were speculating on his possible replacement. At the top of the list are Michèle Flournoy, the former under secretary of defense; Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and a former officer with the Army’s 82nd Airborne; and Ashton B. Carter, a former deputy secretary of defense.
A respected former senator who struck a friendship with Mr. Obama when they were both critics of the Iraq war from positions on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Hagel has nonetheless had trouble penetrating the tight team of former campaign aides and advisers who form Mr. Obama’s closely knit set of loyalists. Senior administration officials have characterized him as quiet during cabinet meetings; Mr. Hagel’s defenders said that he waited until he was alone with the president before sharing his views, the better to avoid leaks.
Whatever the case, Mr. Hagel struggled to fit in with Mr. Obama’s close circle and was viewed as never gaining traction in the administration after a bruising confirmation fight among his old Senate colleagues, during which he was criticized for seeming tentative in his responses to sharp questions.
He never really shed that pall after arriving at the Pentagon, and in the past months he has largely ceded the stage to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, who officials said initially won the confidence of Mr. Obama with his recommendation of military action against the Islamic State.
In Mr. Hagel’s less than two years on the job, his detractors said he struggled to inspire confidence at the Pentagon in the manner of his predecessors, especially Robert M. Gates. But several of Mr. Obama’s top advisers over the past few months have also acknowledged privately that the president did not want another high-profile defense secretary in the manner of Mr. Gates, who went on to write a memoir of his years with Mr. Obama in which he sharply criticized the president. Mr. Hagel, they said, in many ways was exactly the kind of defense secretary whom the president, after battling the military during his first term, wanted.
Mr. Hagel, for his part, spent his time on the job largely carrying out Mr. Obama’s stated wishes on matters like bringing back American troops from Afghanistan and trimming the Pentagon budget, with little pushback. He did manage to inspire loyalty among enlisted soldiers and often seemed at his most confident when talking to troops or sharing wartime experiences as a Vietnam veteran.
But Mr. Hagel has often had problems articulating his thoughts — or administration policy — in an effective manner, and has sometimes left reporters struggling to describe what he has said in news conferences. In his side-by-side appearances with both General Dempsey and Secretary of State John Kerry, Mr. Hagel, a decorated Vietnam veteran and the first former enlisted combat soldier to be defense secretary, has often been upstaged.
He raised the ire of the White House in August as the administration was ramping up its strategy to fight the Islamic State, directly contradicting the president, who months before had likened the Sunni militant group to a junior varsity basketball squad. Mr. Hagel, facing reporters in his now-familiar role next to General Dempsey, called the Islamic State an “imminent threat to every interest we have,” adding, “This is beyond anything that we’ve seen.” White House officials later said they viewed those comments as unhelpful, although the administration still appears to be struggling to define just how large is the threat posed by the Islamic State.
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Friday, November 21, 2014
How to Move Files From One Cloud Storage Service to Another
You may want to switch to another cloud storage service — perhaps moving to Microsoft’s OneDrive to get that now-infinite cloud storage. Yes, you could just download and re-upload all your files, but you can also do this a faster way.
Your home Internet connection’s upload speed is usually the bottleneck here. Use a service that will move your files between services for you and you won’t have to worry about your upload speed or even leaving your computer on.
The Obvious, Slow Way
The cloud storage wars are heating up. Microsoft now offers 1 TB of cloud storage along with Office 365, and... [Read Article]
First of all, keep it simply. If you don’t have that many gigabytes of data stored in a cloud storage service, you don’t have to use any of the services below. All you have to do is download your files to your computer — if they’re all synced to your computer, that will work. If not, you’ll need to change your service’s sync settings to sync all files to your computer.
Note that, if you use Google Docs, you’ll need to export those Google Docs file to Office documents or another format before you can move them to another service.
Next, install the desktop client for the service you want to move your files to, and just move or copy the files from your current cloud storage folder to the new one. The new cloud storage service will upload all of them from your computer to its data center.
This is all well and good, but this process involves downloading everything over your home Internet connection and then re-uploading it. Your home Internet connection is probably the slowest part of the process, so this just isn’t efficient if you have a massive amount of data. The solution is a service that grabs the files for you and then pushes them to the new service.
Mover.io
We first became aware of Mover.io when they partnered with Canonical to help get people’s files out of Ubuntu One and onto other services before its shutdown. Mover.io supports more services than that, and it’s actually free for personal use. This means it’s a great way to get files out of any consumer cloud storage service and onto another without the hassle. Mover.io supports Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, Copy, Yandex, and PutIO for its free consumer service.
You’ve probably given a few applications or websites access to your Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, or Microsoft account. Every application... [Read Article]
Add your accounts and mover.io will gain access to them via OAuth. You can then run an immediate transfer of the files from one location to another, or set up a scheduled transfer to have this happen automatically on a schedule. This is faster than doing this yourself, because it uses mover.io’s Internet connection, which will likely have faster download and upload speeds than yours. You also don’t have to leave your computer for the duration of the process, as it all happens on their servers (or “in the cloud,” as we say nowadays).
After performing the file transfer, you can revoke the service’s access to your files if you don’t plan on continuing to use this service on a continual basis. You can and should revoke any service’s access when you’re done using it.
Otixo
Otixo isn’t designed only for moving files between different services. It’s a cloud storage aggregator that allows you to see all your cloud storage services and their files in a single interface. Otixo also lets you easily transfer files between these services with a quick drag-and-drop.
The nice thing about Otixo is that it supports a wider variety of cloud storage services, including SugarSync, Amazon S3 storage, FTP servers, and WebDAV sites. Otixo does have a limit in that it can only move a single file at a time between services if you have a free account. However, if you need such a service to move large files — for example, ISO files, large videos, or archive files — this may not be that much of a downside.
IFTTT
Cloud storage services such as Google Drive and Dropbox are endlessly useful. Not only can they be used to make...[Read Article]
There are other services like Mover.io, but we can’t resist doing this with IFTTT – short for “IF This, Then That.” We love IFTTT for its ability toput together “recipes” that operate on certain triggers. To do this, IFTTT has functions that can grab files from a cloud storage service and push them to another. Enterprising IFTTT users have already created recipes that use IFTTT to push files from one cloud storage service to another, and they can be found with a quick search on the IFTTT site. Indeed, there are recipes for syncing your Dropbox folder to OneDrive or adding files to Google Drive by moving them to a specific Dropbox folder.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to use OneDrive or Google Drive as a source in IFTTT. It’s not just that no one has created the recipes yet, but that a created recipe can’t start with OneDrive or Google Drive — they can only be a destination. This could be a good way to migrate files from Dropbox, though — especially if you already use and trust IFTTT, as many geeks do.
There are more services beyond these, of course. You can find them with a quick Google search. Be sure to look at the fine print — many services require a payment, even for personal use. You’re also granting such a service service access to both of your cloud storage accounts if you do this, so you should try to find a trustworthy service that won’t abuse that access.
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