Posts by Mark Dempsey
The state of sensors
“Sensors” and “internet of things” are buzzwords that repeatedly come up during the National Convergence Technology Center’s (CTC) quarterly meetings with the Business and Industry Leadership Team (BILT) that helps shape program curriculum. Christopher Mims at Quartz, a digital news outlet, offers a thorough overview of the state of sensors today. On one hand, to…
Read MoreTop Ten IT Skills for 2014
Global Knowledge’s Paul Simoneau projects a list of major IT skills he suspects will be in demand in 2014, taking into account a number of different surveys and reports. Below is the skills list, along with a few words of explanation from Paul. 1. Programming and Application Development – “Major organizations are planning to transition…
Read MoreBaseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and malware
Network security remains an important element of IT/convergence training, as this article from Infosecurity magazine’s website proves. The United States is now the world leader (a whopping 44%) in hosting malware, according to a report by Solutionary. Part of the reason seems to be the boom of domestic cloud providers like Google and Amazon which…
Read MoreIt’s the cloud closer to the ground
A lengthy discussion of IT/convergence trends is always a staple of the National Convergence Technology Center’s (CTC) quarterly meetings with the Business and Industry Leadership Team (BILT) that helps shape program curriculum. One recent meeting mentioned something called “the fog” that Cisco is developing. PC World provides an overview. As we’re surrounded by more and…
Read MoreBunches of bits and bytes
Everyone knows megabytes and gigabytes. Most know terabytes. (Old 1980s owners of Commodore 64s also know kilobytes.) But the digital world is expanding rapidly, creating massive amounts of data that need to be stored somewhere. How do we talk about that kind of volume? Consider these data measurements: Brontobyte Exabyte Geopbyte Petabyte Yottabyte Zettabyte Can you…
Read More802.11ac is finally here
If you don’t already know about 802.11ac, InformationWeek provides an overview of this new wireless standard. According to the article, which of these statements are myth and which are fact? 802.11ac performance advantages are minimal 802.11ac requires ripping and replacing my wired infrastructure Not many 802.11ac clients are available 802.11ac is 5 GHz only and leaves 2.4…
Read MoreMPICT 2014 Winter ICT Educators Conference recap
The National Convergence Technology Center (CTC) kicked off 2014 by attending the Winter ICT Educator Conference in San Francisco. The conference is hosted each January by MPICT, the Mid-Pacific Information and Communication Technologies Center. Like the National CTC, MPICT is an ATE Center funded by the National Science Foundation. The event was held at City…
Read MoreWinter Working Connections 2013 Recap
The “Winter Working Connections” professional training event wrapped just before the holidays and by all accounts, it was a huge success. This is fourth time the National Convergence Technology Center (CTC) offered a three-day December counterpart to its long-running Summer Working Connections. The 2013 edition of Winter Working Connections welcomed over 40 IT/convergence faculty members…
Read More2013 Highlights
2013 was the first full calendar year for the Convergence Technology Center acting as a National ATE Center. It was a busy twelve months of conferences, professional development, special projects, and meetings. Lots of meetings. We decided to take a moment to reflect on last year and asked some of our grant partners to…
Read MoreNorth Pole IT spec sheet
Rumors have long swirled regarding a possible massive upgrade of the IT infrastructure at Kris Kringle’s sprawling North Pole plant. The stories appear to be true. Kringle’s spec sheet was recently obtained by an underground group of yuletide hackers. Multinational companies have reportedly begun assembling proposals and budgets. Servers and routers to maintain the proprietary…
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