Weekly Tech Roundup for December 14 2018

by Bincom Dev Center · December 14, 2018

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.” – Bill Gates

Today’s technology is a booming market full of exciting and innovative products and new learning opportunities. With technology as a major consumer of our time and also an exciting experience in our world today, are you motivated to generate something new?
How do you come up with a great new idea? Check out these inspiring technology trend that might just inspire you to further develop your love for technology.

We also included some snippets from our daily knowledge development sessions, just to give you a little extra knowledge. After all, knowledge is never enough. Take your time and digest every one of them. The world is fast evolving and so should your mind.

Facial recognition: It’s time for action – Microsoft on the Issues

While some are still grappling with the impact of Facial Recognition technology in our world, Microsoft is taking a bold and rare step of calling for regulation around the technology. Yes. This solution has helped a city find hundreds of missing children … but just imagine the more sinister things that a rogue operator (or government) can do with the same innovation.

Why Third-Party Browsers Will Always Be Inferior to Safari on iPhone and iPad

iOS supports third-party browsers, but not like you might expect. Third-party browsers will always be inferior to Apple’s own Safari on iPhone and iPad — at least until Apple relaxes their restrictions.

This is the reason why Mozilla no longer offers their Firefox Home app for iOS, and it’s the same reason why Google’s Chrome developers had an internal debate before releasing the current Chrome app in the App Store.

How Google Tracks Your Personal Information

When lazy journalists are pessimistic about Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home, they say stuff like: “Even Orwell couldn’t have predicted that we’d willingly bring Big Brother into our own homes.”

What they fail to mention is our willingness to exchange privacy for convenience didn’t start with the advent of virtual assistants. It started in the early 2000s, when people—in return for having access to Google products and seeing more relevant ads—allowed Google to have all their data.

Today, Google provides marketers like me with so much of your personal data that we can infer more about you from it than from any camera or microphone

NVIDIA GeForce RTX Laptop and Max-Q Graphics Cards Lineup Leaked

Starting with the latest entrant to the leaks, the GeForce RTX 2060 has shown up in the Futuremark 3DMark database. The GeForce RTX 2060 is mentioned to be a mobility part with a Turing GPU. It is presumed that the GeForce RTX 2060 desktop part will be using a cut-down TU106 GPU core so it is likely the mobility variant would be based on the same chip. The graphics card ships with a clock speed of 960 MHz which could be the base clock and the memory is 6 GB of GDDR6 VRAM that runs across a 192-bit bus interface and is clocked at the reference 1750 MHz which means even the mid-range mobility parts would be featuring 14 Gbps memory chips.

LinkedIn: ‘Blockchain developer’ is the No. 1 emerging job

LinkedIn today revealed its top five emerging careers and – in concert with other recent data – found that blockchain developer is at the top of the list.

Job listings for those who can create distributed ledgers using a peer-to-peer topology – blockchain’s construct – have grown 33-fold in the past year, according to LinkedIn’s 2018 U.S. Emerging Jobs Report. In distant second place are machine learning engineers, positions for which have grown 12-fold over the same period.

Rounding out the top five jobs in 2018: Application sales executive, machine learning specialist and professional medical representative.

Nvidia Shield TV update adds Amazon Music, discounted down to $150

The Nvidia Shield TV is our favorite media streamer. Even though the set-top box is well over three years old at this point, Nvidia continues to support it, bringing Android 8.0 Oreo to the device a few months ago.

Now, the Shield TV is getting some love from Amazon, in the form of both Amazon Music and a global rollout of the Nvidia Shield TV skill in the Amazon Alexa app.

Once you’ve updated your Shield TV to the Shield Experience Upgrade 7.2, you can fire up your Alexa app on your smartphone and add your Shield to the list of skills. Once done, you can say, “Hey Alexa” to either your smartphone or your Echo hardware and ask it to do things like turn on your Shield TV, alter the volume, open apps, etc.

The Golden Age of the iPhone Is Ending

Don’t bet against Apple.” That’s my go-to mantra when someone asks me about Apple’s future as a market leader, or the success of any new iPhone. If the company’s performance this quarter didn’t wow you, the next one probably will.

Yet the wind is clearly shifting for the iPhone, with intensifying worries about sales figures, diminishing global demand for smartphones overall, rumors that Apple won’t make the 5G leap for another year, and the company’s startling decision to stop disclosing unit sales for iOS devices and Macs in its financial reports. Though you’d be foolish to doubt Apple’s prospects, the status quo for its star product is, after many years, changing.

A Year After the Crypto Bubble Burst, Will Bitcoin Ever Recover?

Bitcoin was worth $3,300 on Dec. 11. That’s amazing, considering that cryptocurrency was created out of nothing 10 years ago. But it’s also depressing to many, because a year ago, Bitcoin’s value hit almost $20,000 in what could prove one of the most dramatic economic bubbles in world history.

The fallout has been stark. “Mr. Satoshi, the CEO, [is] not showing up to provide any kind of explanation … #Shame #Refund,” lamented one frustrated crypto enthusiast online, apparently misinformed about the role of Bitcoin’s unknown, pseudonymous inventor.

GitHub improves its status reporting

GitHub has updated the status page on its popular code-sharing site to help developers find out as much information as possible on potential outages or site issues.

The site now lists individual component statuses that comprise the wider GitHub product. Git operations, for example, are now split out from API requests. Also, page builds can be tracked independently of notifications. Users can subscribe to different status reports via mechanisms including email, SMS, and webhook delivery. Subscriptions can follow the entire life cycle of incident, from investigation to remediation.

About Weekly Tech Roundup by Bincom Dev Center

You probably already know that Bincom ICT‘s core is Best Use of Technology. This initiative is a compilation of some of the things the people at Bincom Dev Center found interesting during the week in review. Bincom Dev Center is the Training & Development Arm of Bincom ICT.

In this weekly publication, You will find various pieces ranging from ideas to trends, to random thoughts. They are here because we found them interesting. We also include some knowledge development pieces and where to get more information about the topic. We aim to publish an edition every Friday at 5:00pm (with exception of Holidays). We are working hard to keep ourselves updated and we think you should too!

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One more thing, Credits for this edition goes to :