Discover how mastering email communication can boost business efficiency, avoid common pitfalls, and ensure secure, respectful online interactions.
Turkey Revenge
The turkeys are pissed this Thanksgiving they are seeking revenge.
Germs Infest 60% of Americas Phones
60% of Americans sleep with their phones, harboring germs. Cleaning regularly with UV sanitizer or alcohol wipes can help keep your phone and bed germ-free.
Smartphone Sanitizing: A Practical Guide
Securely erase personal data from your old smartphone before recycling. Protect your identity from hackers—easy steps to follow.
Why Soft Skills Matter in Today’s Job Market
Boost your career with essential soft skills like communication, teamwork, and emotional intelligence. Learn why they’re crucial for workplace success.
Printer Ink Costs More Than Gasoline
Anyone who has ever shopped for a replacement ink cartridge knows they’re not cheap. In fact, printer ink is more expensive per gallon than gasoline or the blood running through your veins. This infographic from InkJet Willy examines the truth about the high cost of ink cartridges, and reveals their unfortunate impact on the environment.
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I always try to get my customers to drop Inkjet printers from their fleet. Many times it seems like a hopeless battle. Consumers Reports says that InkJet ink can cost up to $75.00 a gallon. They recommend Brother printers as the most efficient inkjet printers. Sorry HP.
Do your customers understand that printer ink costs 25x more than a gallon of gas?
Related articles
- Guzzling printers can waste $100 of ink a year (today.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Data Growth Tests Storage Capabilities
Data Center Knowledge had an article by Steven Rodin, CEO of Storagepipe Solutions, that lays out the challenges that those of us charged with managing backups face every day. Storagepipe Solutions, which has been a provider of online backup services for business since 2001, has identified several emerging storage trends that organizations will need to overcome in the future.
In the early days, the author says, organizations were primarily concerned with data protection, encryption and automation. The era of “Big Data” has changed those demands. The new demands are overwhelming most backup and storage systems. The article cites data from IBM (IBM), which claims that worldwide annual data production has actually exceeded worldwide storage capacity. Big Blue believes that demand for storage capacity is growing nearly 60 percent a year. The gap between the data that organizations produce and their ability to store it will continue to grow for years.
The Storagepipe Solutions CEO identified a number of important storage trends which are accelerating the growth rate of corporate data. He provided a few of the most important factors.
Cheaper Storage Hardware
Hard drive capacity has fallen exponentially in price ever since Moore’s Law was introduced. This has changed attitudes to backups. The article says that today, hardware is so cheap and abundant that attitudes have shifted to a “Better keep this. We may need it someday” mentality.
New technologies, such as advancements in compression, deduplication and hardware virtualization, have improved overall storage utilization and further accelerated the rate at which the cost-per-gigabyte of storing data is falling.
Cheap and Abundant Bandwidth
Internet bandwidth is no longer a bottleneck. Bandwidth availability has accelerated the growth of file sharing and online storage. Now large files are copied and distributed at an exponential rate which has caused duplicate data to become a major source of storage waste and data growth. The CEO of the firm based out of Toronto, calculates that if one person shares a 1GB file with 500 people, that’s half a terabyte of storage consumption.
Business is Going Paperless – Email has replaced letters, eBooks and tablets have nearly replaced paper books, and digital imaging has replaced photographs and x-rays. Not only are paperless offices better for the environment, but Mr. Rodin writes, they are also more productive, flexible and better able to extract value from their business data. Many industries are using more and more video (which is highly storage intensive) for marketing online, security and communication.
Enhanced Automated Data Collection Capabilities
Automated data collection is one of the fastest-growing areas in the “big data” space. With every move we make, the article says we’re generating GPS data, web traffic statistics, power usage data, surveillance video, and a broad range of data which companies and governments are collecting.
The author calls automated data collection the “Pandora’s Box” of the big data revolution. The information being collected about us through the electronic devices we use every day could present a threat to our privacy, but they also have the potential to offer tremendous value to society.
Advances in Data Analysis Technology
The blog says that until recently, data analysis was almost exclusively performed on structured relational databases, maintained and organized by humans. But now, a new approach to data storage which focuses on rapid analysis and processing of vast data volumes. Technologies like Hadoop, Cassandra, MapReduce and NoSQL have given birth to a whole new class of services, and have revolutionized the way organizations think about the data they collect. Organizations can now get more insight into their internally generated business data by integrating external feeds and databases into their reporting and analysis.
The Growing Strategic Importance of Data
In the past, data was simply a tool which assisted in decision-making and helped companies execute on their strategic objectives. But recently Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB), Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes and other brands have built their entire corporate strategy around the data they own. The DCK article states, information is power, and it’s now more powerful than ever.
Regulatory Compliance
Even if companies wanted to cut the amount of data they store, they wouldn’t always be able to. Laws like PIPEDA, HIPAA, Sox404 and many others are forcing companies to keep historical archives of their exponentially growing business data going back several years.
As this data grows, storage increasingly becomes a major business problem. Also, companies must plan for cost-efficient search and retrieval of these large historical data volumes to stay ready for an unexpected electronic discovery request.
As the scale and complexity of big data storage grows, it’ll quickly reach a point where manual handling is no longer practical, desirable, economical, or even possible. Automation will become absolutely essential when it comes to backing up big data.
Many big data applications have serious privacy implications for the customers that benefit from their use. So security will become a top priority for backup administrators. Gone are the days of unencrypted backup tapes.
The big data applications has created a whole new class of applications built on real-time data. These applications require much more frequent backups to optimize Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). Strategic big data apps will need minimized downtime. This means smaller backup windows, built-in redundancy, and server fail-over to disaster recovery sites.
That’s why many organizations are opting to outsource their data backups by partnering with experts who run ahead of the trends and who can help with the complexity of some situations.
Related articles
- Infographic: The Physical Size of Big Data (domo.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Is Your iPhone Turning You Into a Wimp?
New research from Harvard implies that consumerization and BYOD can have an impact on how staff behaves. Carmen Nobel at HBS Working Knowledge wrote about research from post-doctoral research fellow Maarten Bos and Associate Professor Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School. They claim Your iPhone is Turning You Into a Wimp.
The research says that in an experiment, people who had been using smartphone-sized iPod Touch devices were 47% less likely than desktop users to get up to try to find out why a researcher hadn’t come back after leaving the room to fetch paperwork so that participants could be paid. And of those who did take action, the iPod Touch users took 44% longer than desktop users to get up and look for the researcher. The research suggests that your hunched posture as you use a smartphone-sized device for just a few minutes makes you less likely to engage in power-related behaviors than people who have been using desktop computers.
The researchers claim that body posture inherent in operating everyday gadgets affects not only your back but your demeanor. A new study entitled iPosture: The Size of Electronic Consumer Devices Affects Our Behavior. It turns out that working on a larger machine causes users to act more assertively than working on a small one (like an iPad).
The study proves the positive effects of adopting expansive body postures – hands on hips, feet on the desk, and the like. According to the article, deliberately positioning the body in a “power pose” for just a few minutes actually affects body chemistry. They increase testosterone levels and decrease cortisol levels. This leads to higher confidence, and more willingness to take risks. According to a 2010 report by Andy Yap, Cuddy, and Dana Carney good posture leads to a greater sense of well-being,
Contractive body postures like folded arms have the opposite effect. Contractive body postures decrease testosterone and increasing cortisol. Bos and Cuddy wondered whether there might be behavioral ramifications from using electronic devices. The author says that many of us constrict our necks and hunch our shoulders when we use our phones. And statistics show that we use our phones a lot.
Americans spend an average of 58 minutes per day on their smartphones, according to a recent report from Experian Marketing Services. Talking accounts for only 26 percent of that time. The other 73% is devoted to texting, e-mail, social networking, and web-surfing – in other words, activities spent hunched over a little screen.
Bos and Cuddy hypothesized that interacting with larger devices would lead to more expansive body postures. That in turn would lead to behaviors associated with power—including assertiveness and risk-taking behavior.
To test their hypothesis, Bos and Cuddy paid 75 participants $10 each and randomly assigned them to perform a series of tasks on one of four devices, each successively larger than the next: an iPod Touch, an iPad, a MacBook Pro laptop, or an iMac desktop computer. Each participant sat alone in a room during the experiment, monitored by a research assistant.
When the participants were done with the tasks, the researcher pointed to a clock in the room and said, “I will get some forms ready for you to sign so I can pay you and you can leave. If I am not here in five minutes, please come get me at the front desk.” Rather than returning in five minutes, though, the researcher waited a maximum of ten minutes, recording whether and/or when the participant had come out to the front desk.
The article reports that device size substantially affected whether the participant left the room after waiting the requisite five minutes. Of the participants using a desktop computer, 94 percent took the initiative to fetch the experimenter. For those using the iPod Touch, only 50 percent left the room.
And among those who did leave the room, the device size seemed to affect the amount of time they waited to do so. The bigger the device was, the shorter the wait time. On average, desktop users waited 341 seconds before fetching the experimenter, for instance, while iPod Touch users waited an average of 493 seconds.
“The steady increase of waiting time is locked in step with the size of the device,” Harvard’s Bos says. “I have never before in my life seen such a beautiful effect.” The results indicate that expansive body postures lead to power-related behaviors. This happens even in cases where the posture is incidentally induced by the size of the gadget or computer. Mr. Bos concludes that a break from your mobile phone is needed to be powerful, “... you need at least a few minutes of interacting with a device, or, more importantly, of being in a specific posture related to that device, before you find effects.”
In the meantime, the article suggests it may be a good idea to avoid the smartphone immediately before your next big meeting. Texting up until the boss starts speaking may make you look busy, but it may make you act meek. “We won’t tell anyone not to interact with those devices just before doing something that requires any kind of assertiveness,” Bos says. “Mostly because people won’t listen: They will do it anyway...”
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Professor Cuddy’s power poses theory says that certain body stances, such as standing with your legs apart and your hands on your hips, or opening up your chest area, bathe your cortex in testosterone, a hormone associated with assertiveness and the willingness to take risks. Meanwhile, they also reduce cortisol, the stress hormone. On the other hand, low power poses—crossing your arms over your chest, say, or bunching your shoulders—increase neural levels of cortisol and reduce testosterone, resulting in more stress and less confidence.
Does this have implications for BYOD? The evidence seems to indicate that staff seeking advancement will gravitate toward tablets. Offering a larger device to a normally shy worker will make them more assertive.
Look around the office do your observations match the researcher’s implications?
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2013, AAPL, Apple, BYOD, Consumerization, Harvard Business School, iMac, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Mobile
Coffee in the Workplace
Some will say a good night’s sleep or a hot breakfast is essential to start your day. However, Most people start their workday with a cup of coffee in the morning. This infographic ‘The Bond Between Work and Coffee’ by Zoho takes a look at the bond between work and coffee. Did you know that workers who have consumed a cup of joe do better at work, especially when they take coffee breaks at the same time.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
ALU Gets 31 Tbps
David Meyer at GigaOM noted the latest tests by Alcatel-Lucent’s (ALU) venerable Bell Labs division. The lab has figured out how to increase the bandwidth of submarine cables by a factor of three. They were able to move traffic at 31 Terabits per second (Tbps).
Alcatel-Lucent says it has broken the record for the amount of data that can be pushed through submarine cables. They claim to have achieved 31 Terabits per second over a single fiber that’s 4,474 miles long. For comparison, the Register figured that the average 15 minute, low-res movie is about 100Mb in size. They calculate that the new cable could speed 40,632 flix across the Atlantic every second. That would be enough for 423 days and nights of non-stop video viewing – in just one second.
It is important to remember we’re talking about a lab test. The test took place at ALU’s Innovation City campus in Villarceaux near Paris. The GigaOm article notes that the researchers with Bell Labs squeezed almost 10 Tbps more out of the fiber than the 21.7Tbps that NEC (6701) and Verizon (VZ) managed last year. This is three times roomier than in today’s most advanced commercial undersea cables.
Transoceanic cable
The author points out that that’s just one fiber and a transoceanic cable may have eight pairs of fibers. Again, this is a lot of capacity. However, it’s also worth noting that Alcatel-Lucent’s tests required a signal amplifier every 100km along the line.
The article claims that ALU’s Bell Labs division has done this type of research since 1925 in New Jersey. This type of work is more critical to ALU than ever. In June 2013, Alcatel-Lucent announced its “Shift Plan”, which involves moving away from being a telecoms equipment generalist. They want to be a specialist in IP networking and mobile and fixed broadband access. Philippe Keryer, Alcatel-Lucent’s chief strategy, and innovation officer said in a statement:
Undersea fiber-optic transmission is integral to the digital economy, delivering vast amounts of video and data between countries, regions and continents. As our customers cope with increasing demand on their networks for data capacity and higher-speeds of transmission, our researchers are intensifying their application with tests like this to develop new technology solutions to transform global data networks.
Mr. Meyer explains the test used Bell Labs’s technique for squeezing 200Gbps through a single data channel. It used 155 lasers, each one carrying 200Gbps at a different frequency. This represents an enhancement to the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) techniques that run at up to 100Gbps in today’s commercially deployed cable.
Normally such signals suffer from distortions and noise, which limit performance. But GigaOM understands that Alcatel-Lucent was able to resolve this by using an enhanced version of WDM. The enhanced WDM works by splitting light up into different wavelengths so that it can carry more data.
Long-haul high-speed networking
The pace of development in the long-haul high-speed networking field is impressive. It’s easy to see just how far we’ve come. GigaOM provided a quick look at some of the other recent developments in long-haul high-speed networking.
- May 2011 a team of German, UK, and Swiss scientists successfully used Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) to send data at a rate of 26Tbps over a 50km long single-mode fiber optic cable.
- January 2012 a Japanese team working out of NEC successfully transmitted 4Tbps over a single “ultra-long haul” (10,000km) fiber optic cable without repeaters by making use of WDM just like Alcatel-Lucent.
- May 2013 a more exotic approach with the UK test of hollow fiber optic cable that delivered speeds of 73.7 Tbps.
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Remember that the NSA has a submarine, the USS Jimmy Carter designed to tap undersea telecom cables on the bottom of the sea. This new speed record could be used to spy on more people.
Related articles
- Alcatel-Lucent Cuts Go Deeper – 7,500 Jobs Gone and Counting (slashdot.org)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2013, Alcatel-Lucent, ALU, Bell Labs, NEC, Optical fiber, Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing, QAM, Security, Verizon, VZ, WDM