Facebook tracking sites it’s users visit even after logging off

facebook

Facebook relies on tracking cookie technologies similar to the controversial systems used by Google, Adobe, Microsoft, Yahoo and others in the online advertising industry.

Facebook has admitted it is tracking which sites its users visit even after they log off, thanks to plug-ins and cookies.

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Why big companies die

life-expectancy-of-firms-r1

Peggy Noonan isn’t usually thought of as a mangement thinker.  But in her Wall Street Journal column last week she has an insightful paragraph on management:

There is an arresting moment in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs in which Jobs speaks at length about his philosophy of business. He’s at the end of his life and is summing things up. His mission, he says, was plain: to “build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products.” Then he turned to the rise and fall of various businesses. He has a theory about “why decline happens” at great companies: “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.” IBM [IBM] and Xerox [XRX], Jobs said, faltered in precisely this way. The salesmen who led the companies were smart and eloquent, but “they didn’t know anything about the product.” In the end this can doom a great company, because what consumers want is good products.

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Cotton Candy – USB stick-sized portable computer

cotton candy

Cotton Candy

FXI Technologies, a Norwegian company, showed off an amazing USB stick-sized portable computer prototype on Friday. It is code-named Cotton Candy because its 21 gram weight is the same as a bag of the confection, the tiny PC enables what its inventor calls “any-screen computing”: the ability to turn any TV, laptop, phone, tablet, or set-top box into a dumb terminal for its Android-powered operating system.

 

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Giant South Carolina tire dump visible from space

tire dump

South Carolina tire dump so large it is visible from space.

The giant pile of hundreds of thousands of tires isn’t easy to spot from the ground, sitting in a rural South Carolina clearing accessible by only a circuitous dirt path that winds through thick patches of trees. No one knows how all those tires got there, or when.  (Pics)

 

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DARPA developing sensors to track you by your heartbeat

heartbeat

The government wants to track you by your heartbeat.

You may be hiding on the other side of the wall but the U.S. military can see you breathing, they can even see your heartbeat racing.  But you may be surprised if you think you can run farther away or hide in a crowd.  The Defense Department’s sensors will find you.  The Pentagon is looking to tweak their life-form finder that can spot your heartbeat no matter where you are.

 

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