Weekend Reads 050820

Thanks to a unanimous Federal Communications Commission (FCC) vote today, your Wi-Fi network could become faster and more reliable. The FCC‘s vote opens up 1,200 MHz of the 6 GHz band for unlicensed use, which means that this spectrum will join the existing 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands found on most home Wi-Fi routers today. —Chuong Nguyen

What is remote-first? In normal times, it’s an organization that is built in such a way that anyone can work from outside the office if necessary. —Jennifer Riggins

Two Congressmen recently introduced a bill that would create a special type of patent called an “Inventor-Owned Patent.” Having classified a group of “inventors,” the Inventor Rights Act (H.R. 5478) goes on to give them a long list of special privileges that will help them sue other people for patent infringement. —Joe Mullin

There is currently a heated discussion going on in Europe, and particularly here in Germany, about the use of COVID-19 digital tracing apps, a discussion that shows us how much the Internet has become a matter of life and death. The uses for such apps are undeniable, but the idea of deployment still meets with popular resistance. —Klaus Stoll

Mental resilience is the quality of being able to snap back after a setback, catastrophe, or anything bad that life throws at you. We all need resilience right now. For some of us, it’s second nature, while others may be discovering or desiring to find that resilience because of the current COVID-19 crisis and the widespread stay-at-home orders. —Will Kelly

The 2020 State of the Data Center report found that the average rack density increased by nearly an entire kilowatt (kW) from the previous year, jumping to 8.2 kW per rack, up from 7.3 kW in the 2019 report and 7.2 kW in 2018. About 68 percent of respondents reported that rack density has increased over the past three years, with 26 percent saying the increase was “significant.” —Rich Miller

Monitoring is a crucial feature for any successful company in a disputed market. It allows companies to understand application and user behavior quickly, identify bugs, and scale an application due to usage as needed. Due to the increasing number of services running in a distributed manner, observability tools have become important for dev (and DevOps) teams as systems became too hard to be monitored manually. —Ran Ribenzaft

The COVID-19 pandemic circling the world transformed the gradual advance of remote work into a stampede, compelling millions of people to abandon the office and go home. From Google, Apple, and Microsoft to Chevron, AT&T, and Spotify, the list of companies embracing remote grew and grew. —Toptal

A number of experts have spent their quarantine thinking about how work life will change when we do finally go back. But here’s a selection from the management literature of stop-and-think-how-this-affects-your-business predictions. —Denise O’Leary

How do I cope with social distancing and staying at home? How do I manage to do anything work-related now that both my wife and I work from home? My answer is always the same: Our routine has changed little. —Jurica Dujmovic

In an attempt to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic, at least 30 governments around the world have instituted temporary or indefinite efforts to single out infected individuals or maintain quarantines. Many of these efforts, in turn, undermine personal privacy. —Dave Gershgorn

The coronavirus pandemic has, like its predecessors from the Black Plague to the Spanish Flu, once again demonstrated the great vulnerability of social and economic systems to microbes. Yet, it may be that there is an important difference this time around. —John Arquilla

Through the current global outbreak of the novel coronavirus, the hedgehog’s dilemma is suddenly and uncomfortably clear. Distance tends to be conceptualized as either a problem for living in modern societies and so something to overcome, or, conversely, as a solution to some of the problems in modern societies and so something to be cultivated. —