Every child who's ever played a board game understands that the act of rolling dice yields an unpredictable result. In fact, that's why children's board games use dice in the first place: to ensure a random outcome that is -- from a macro point of view, at least -- about the same likelihood each time the die is thrown. Consider for a moment what would happen if someone replaced the dice used in one of those board games with weighted dice -- say dice that were 10 percent more likely to come up "6" than any other number. Would you notice?
Smart speakers are becoming a more common platform for controlling connected entertainment due to a rapid increase in popularity and ease of use. Household penetration of smart speakers is expected to reach 47 percent among U.S. broadband households by 2022, based on Parks Associates estimates. New entrants in the connected consumer electronics market, including Samsung, Roku and Facebook, are likely to make announcements about new voice-controlled speakers at CES 2019 in order to claim a share of this new voice-first CE market.
Supermicro CEO Charles Liang has informed the company's customers that a leading third-party investigations company found "absolutely no evidence of malicious hardware" on its motherboards. The investigation was undertaken in response to a recent claim that bad actors had inserted spy chips in the firm's motherboards on behalf of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, China's armed forces. The findings "were no surprise to us," Liang noted, because "our process is designed to protect the integrity and reliability of our products."
DNA printing has given rise to the world's first "DNA printer" on the market, a claim advanced by the product's creators. The BioXp 3200 System is available from SGI-DNA, a division of Synthetic Genomics, a San Diego biotechnology company. The BioXp 3200 System is a DNA/RNA assembler and synthesizer made out of steel, glass, plastic, insulated wire, laboratory instruments and microprocessors. The system is about the size of a business office network laser printer, but instead of outputting printed hard copy, this device copies genes and outputs proteins.
Picking a product of the year is anything but trivial because the products I cover every week range from headphones to laptops to books, cars and more. So, I thought I'd try something different this year and pick six products that each deserve the title and then name a winner that stands out from the rest. This allows me to simplify the task and get around a bit of a writer's block I've been having on this subject. The six products will be a book, a car, a laptop, a smart speaker, Security, and a component. Let's get to it.
December has become consistent with the Chinese curse, "May You Be Born In Interesting Times." We are up to our armpits in wars, and each is very different. Qualcomm and Intel are fighting for 5G control, and Intel is tearing itself apart. Microsoft passed Apple in valuation, largely because it has not been focusing on Apple. Canadian authorities just arrested the daughter of the Huawei founder, at the request of the United States, cratering the stock market again, and setting up a potentially costly chain of events.
The healthcare cloud has been growing incredibly, becoming an ever-more-important element of health information technology, or HIT. There are many reasons why the HIT cloud has been becoming more prominent, such as research and development and collaboration. Since the cloud has been expanding so rapidly, this may be a good time to reconsider security -- and that means understanding the threat, reviewing best practices, and heightening awareness of emergent approaches. First, realize the cloud is only getting bigger.
In DNA printing, genetic code becomes computer code. This transformation occurs when the chemical bases adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine present in a chemical mix or gene sequence are translated by computer through gel electrophoresis technology into their representative letters: A/T, T/A, C/G, G/C. This alphabet code was formalized in 1970 by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry for integration into a text-based bioinformatics format, called "FASTA," in which nucleotides are represented symbolically using single letters.
When I think of corporate responsibility, one company tends to float to the top, and that is Cisco. With massive efforts to train people all over the world in the critical networking skills needed to secure and expand global communications, Cisco has been taking a major chunk out of joblessness. It has invested millions to reduce homelessness near its headquarters -- something most of the tech firms seem to ignore -- and it has been aggressive in deploying crisis teams during disasters to ensure timely communications to first responders.
Generation Z is getting a lot of attention these days, as the cohort is expected to outpace millennials, and comprise 32 percent of the world's 7.7 billion population. This powerful group of consumers was born into a digital world. A much-reported claim is that Generation Z has an attention span of 8 seconds. It may seem that to reach younger consumers, your website should mirror this lightning-quick attention span, but in reality, the reverse is true. Members of Gen Z constantly get slammed with every conceivable stimulus.