Here are comes my long list of computer technology trends for 2015:
Digitalisation is coming to change all business sectors and through our daily work even more than before. Digitalisation also changes the IT sector: Traditional software package are moving rapidly into the cloud. Need to own or rent own IT infrastructure is dramatically reduced. Automation application for configuration and monitoring will be truly possible. Workloads software implementation projects will be reduced significantly as software is a need to adjust less. Traditional IT outsourcing is definitely threatened. The security management is one of the key factors to change as security threats are increasingly digital world. IT sector digitalisation simply means: “more cheaper and better.”
The phrase “Communications Transforming Business” is becoming the new normal. The pace of change in enterprise communications and collaboration is very fast. A new set of capabilities, empowered by the combination of Mobility, the Cloud, Video, software architectures and Unified Communications, is changing expectations for what IT can deliver.
Global Citizenship: Technology Is Rapidly Dissolving National Borders. Besides your passport, what really defines your nationality these days? Is it where you were live? Where you work? The language you speak? The currency you use? If it is, then we may see the idea of “nationality” quickly dissolve in the decades ahead. Language, currency and residency are rapidly being disrupted and dematerialized by technology. Increasingly, technological developments will allow us to live and work almost anywhere on the planet… (and even beyond). In my mind, a borderless world will be a more creative, lucrative, healthy, and frankly, exciting one. Especially for entrepreneurs.
The traditional enterprise workflow is ripe for huge change as the focus moves away from working in a single context on a single device to the workflow being portable and contextual. InfoWorld’s executive editor, Galen Gruman, has coined a phrase for this: “liquid computing.” The increase in productivity is promised be stunning, but the loss of control over data will cross an alarming threshold for many IT professionals.
Mobile will be used more and more. Currently, 49 percent of businesses across North America adopt between one and ten mobile applications, indicating a significant acceptance of these solutions. Embracing mobility promises to increase visibility and responsiveness in the supply chain when properly leveraged. Increased employee productivity and business process efficiencies are seen as key business impacts.
The Internet of things is a big, confusing field waiting to explode. Answer a call or go to a conference these days, and someone is likely trying to sell you on the concept of the Internet of things. However, the Internet of things doesn’t necessarily involve the Internet, and sometimes things aren’t actually on it, either.
The next IT revolution will come from an emerging confluence of Liquid computing plus the Internet of things. Those the two trends are connected — or should connect, at least. If we are to trust on consultants, are in sweet spot for significant change in computing that all companies and users should look forward to.
Cloud will be talked a lot and taken more into use. Cloud is the next-generation of supply chain for IT. A global survey of executives predicted a growing shift towards third party providers to supplement internal capabilities with external resources. CIOs are expected to adopt a more service-centric enterprise IT model. Global business spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will reach an estimated $174.2 billion in 2014 (up a 20% from $145.2 billion in 2013), and growth will continue to be fast (“By 2017, enterprise spending on the cloud will amount to a projected $235.1 billion, triple the $78.2 billion in 2011“).
The rapid growth in mobile, big data, and cloud technologies has profoundly changed market dynamics in every industry, driving the convergence of the digital and physical worlds, and changing customer behavior. It’s an evolution that IT organizations struggle to keep up with.To success in this situation there is need to combine traditional IT with agile and web-scale innovation. There is value in both the back-end operational systems and the fast-changing world of user engagement. You are now effectively operating two-speed IT (bimodal IT, two-speed IT, or traditional IT/agile IT). You need a new API-centric layer in the enterprise stack, one that enables two-speed IT.
As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up. Although fears that technology will displace jobs are at least as old as the Luddites, there are signs that this time may really be different. The technological breakthroughs of recent years — allowing machines to mimic the human mind — are enabling machines to do knowledge jobs and service jobs, in addition to factory and clerical work. Automation is not only replacing manufacturing jobs, it is displacing knowledge and service workers too.
In many countries IT recruitment market is flying, having picked up to a post-recession high. Employers beware – after years of relative inactivity, job seekers are gearing up for change. Economic improvements and an increase in business confidence have led to a burgeoning jobs market and an epidemic of itchy feet.
Hopefully the IT department is increasingly being seen as a profit rather than a cost centre with IT budgets commonly split between keeping the lights on and spend on innovation and revenue-generating projects. Historically IT was about keeping the infrastructure running and there was no real understanding outside of that, but the days of IT being locked in a basement are gradually changing.CIOs and CMOs must work more closely to increase focus on customers next year or risk losing market share, Forrester Research has warned.
Good questions to ask: Where do you see the corporate IT department in five years’ time? With the consumerization of IT continuing to drive employee expectations of corporate IT, how will this potentially disrupt the way companies deliver IT? What IT process or activity is the most important in creating superior user experiences to boost user/customer satisfaction?
Windows Server 2003 goes end of life in summer 2015 (July 14 2015). There are millions of servers globally still running the 13 year-old OS with one in five customers forecast to miss the 14 July deadline when Microsoft turns off extended support. There were estimated to be 2.7 million WS2003 servers in operation in Europe some months back. This will keep the system administrators busy, because there is just around half year time and update for Windows Server 2008 or Windows 2012 to may be have difficulties. Microsoft and support companies do not seem to be interested in continuing Windows Server 2003 support, so those who need that the custom pricing can be ” incredibly expensive”. At this point is seems that many organizations have the desire for new architecture and consider one option to to move the servers to cloud.
Windows 10 is coming to PCs and Mobile devices. Just few months back Microsoft unveiled a new operating system Windows 10. The new Windows 10 OS is designed to run across a wide range of machines, including everything from tiny “internet of things” devices in business offices to phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops to computer servers. Windows 10 will have exactly the same requirements as Windows 8.1 (same minimum PC requirements that have existed since 2006: 1GHz, 32-bit chip with just 1GB of RAM). There is technical review available. Microsoft says to expect AWESOME things of Windows 10 in January. Microsoft will share more about the Windows 10 ‘consumer experience’ at an event on January 21 in Redmond and is expected to show Windows 10 mobile SKU at the event.
Microsoft is going to monetize Windows differently than earlier.Microsoft Windows has made headway in the market for low-end laptops and tablets this year by reducing the price it charges device manufacturers, charging no royalty on devices with screens of 9 inches or less. That has resulted in a new wave of Windows notebooks in the $200 price range and tablets in the $99 price range. The long-term success of the strategy against Android tablets and Chromebooks remains to be seen.
Microsoft is pushing Universal Apps concept. Microsoft has announced Universal Windows Apps, allowing a single app to run across Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 for the first time, with additional support for Xbox coming. Microsoft promotes a unified Windows Store for all Windows devices. Windows Phone Store and Windows Store would be unified with the release of Windows 10.
Under new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft realizes that, in the modern world, its software must run on more than just Windows. Microsoft has already revealed Microsoft office programs for Apple iPad and iPhone. It also has email client compatible on both iOS and Android mobile operating systems.
With Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome grabbing so much of the desktop market—and Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Google’s Android browser dominating the mobile market—Internet Explorer is no longer the force it once was. Microsoft May Soon Replace Internet Explorer With a New Web Browser article says that Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system will debut with an entirely new web browser code-named Spartan. This new browser is a departure from Internet Explorer, the Microsoft browser whose relevance has waned in recent years.
SSD capacity has always lag well behind hard disk drives (hard disks are in 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB). Intel and Micron will try to kill the hard drives with new flash technologies. Intel announced it will begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year as part of its joint flash venture with Micron. Later (next two years) Intel promises 10TB+ SSDs thanks to 3D Vertical NAND flash memory. Also interfaces to SSD are evolving from traditional hard disk interfaces. PCIe flash and NVDIMMs will make their way into shared storage devices more in 2015. The ULLtraDIMM™ SSD connects flash storage to the memory channel via standard DIMM slots, in order to close the gap between storage devices and system memory (less than five microseconds write latency at the DIMM level).
Hard disks will be still made in large amounts in 2015. It seems that NAND is not taking over the data centre immediately. The huge great problem is $/GB. Estimates of shipped disk and SSD capacity out to 2018 shows disk growing faster than flash. The world’s ability to make and ship SSDs is falling behind its ability to make and ship disk drives – for SSD capacity to match disk by 2018 we would need roughly eight times more flash foundry capacity than we have. New disk technologies such as shingling, TDMR and HAMR are upping areal density per platter and bringing down cost/GB faster than NAND technology can. At present solid-state drives with extreme capacities are very expensive. I expect that with 2015, the prices for SSD will will still be so much higher than hard disks, that everybody who needs to store large amounts of data wants to consider SSD + hard disk hybrid storage systems.
PC sales, and even laptops, are down, and manufacturers are pulling out of the market. The future is all about the device. We have entered the post-PC era so deeply, that even tablet market seem to be saturating as most people who want one have already one. The crazy years of huge tables sales growth are over. The tablet shipment in 2014 was already quite low (7.2% In 2014 To 235.7M units). There is no great reasons or growth or decline to be seen in tablet market in 2015, so I expect it to be stable. IDC expects that iPad Sees First-Ever Decline, and I expect that also because the market seems to be more and more taken by Android tablets that have turned to be “good enough”. Wearables, Bitcoin or messaging may underpin the next consumer computing epoch, after the PC, internet, and mobile.
There will be new tiny PC form factors coming. Intel is shrinking PCs to thumb-sized “compute sticks” that will be out next year. The stick will plug into the back of a smart TV or monitor “and bring intelligence to that”. It is likened the compute stick to similar thumb PCs that plug to HDMI port and are offered by PC makers with the Android OS and ARM processor (for example Wyse Cloud Connect and many cheap Android sticks). Such devices typically don’t have internal storage, but can be used to access files and services in the cloud. Intel expects that sticks size PC market will grow to tens of millions of devices.
We have entered the Post-Microsoft, post-PC programming: The portable REVOLUTION era. Tablets and smart phones are fine for consuming information: a great way to browse the web, check email, stay in touch with friends, and so on. But what does a post-PC world mean for creating things? If you’re writing platform-specific mobile apps in Objective C or Java then no, the iPad alone is not going to cut it. You’ll need some kind of iPad-to-server setup in which your iPad becomes a mythical thin client for the development environment running on your PC or in cloud. If, however, you’re working with scripting languages (such as Python and Ruby) or building web-based applications, the iPad or other tablet could be an useable development environment. At least worth to test.
You need prepare to learn new languages that are good for specific tasks. Attack of the one-letter programming languages: From D to R, these lesser-known languages tackle specific problems in ways worthy of a cult following. Watch out! The coder in the next cubicle might have been bitten and infected with a crazy-eyed obsession with a programming language that is not Java and goes by the mysterious one letter name. Each offers compelling ideas that could do the trick in solving a particular problem you need fixed.
HTML5′s “Dirty Little Secret”: It’s Already Everywhere, Even In Mobile. Just look under the hood. “The dirty little secret of native [app] development is that huge swaths of the UIs we interact with every day are powered by Web technologies under the hood.” When people say Web technology lags behind native development, what they’re really talking about is the distribution model. It’s not that the pace of innovation on the Web is slower, it’s just solving a problem that is an order of magnitude more challenging than how to build and distribute trusted apps for a single platform. Efforts like the Extensible Web Manifesto have been largely successful at overhauling the historically glacial pace of standardization. Vine is a great example of a modern JavaScript app. It’s lightning fast on desktop and on mobile, and shares the same codebase for ease of maintenance.
Docker, meet hype. Hype, meet Docker. Docker: Sorry, you’re just going to have to learn about it. Containers aren’t a new idea, and Docker isn’t remotely the only company working on productising containers. It is, however, the one that has captured hearts and minds. Docker containers are supported by very many Linux systems. And it is not just only Linux anymore as Docker’s app containers are coming to Windows Server, says Microsoft. Containerization lets you do is launch multiple applications that share the same OS kernel and other system resources but otherwise act as though they’re running on separate machines. Each is sandboxed off from the others so that they can’t interfere with each other. What Docker brings to the table is an easy way to package, distribute, deploy, and manage containerized applications.
Domestic Software is on rise in China. China is Planning to Purge Foreign Technology and Replace With Homegrown Suppliers. China is aiming to purge most foreign technology from banks, the military, state-owned enterprises and key government agencies by 2020, stepping up efforts to shift to Chinese suppliers, according to people familiar with the effort. In tests workers have replaced Microsoft Corp.’s Windows with a homegrown operating system called NeoKylin (FreeBSD based desktop O/S). Dell Commercial PCs to Preinstall NeoKylin in China. The plan for changes is driven by national security concerns and marks an increasingly determined move away from foreign suppliers. There are cases of replacing foreign products at all layers from application, middleware down to the infrastructure software and hardware. Foreign suppliers may be able to avoid replacement if they share their core technology or give China’s security inspectors access to their products. The campaign could have lasting consequences for U.S. companies including Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Intel Corp. (INTC) and Hewlett-Packard Co. A key government motivation is to bring China up from low-end manufacturing to the high end.
Data center markets will grow. MarketsandMarkets forecasts the data center rack server market to grow from $22.01 billion in 2014 to $40.25 billion by 2019, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.17%. North America (NA) is expected to be the largest region for the market’s growth in terms of revenues generated, but Asia-Pacific (APAC) is also expected to emerge as a high-growth market.
The rising need for virtualized data centers and incessantly increasing data traffic is considered as a strong driver for the global data center automation market. The SDDC comprises software defined storage (SDS), software defined networking (SDN) and software defined server/compute, wherein all the three components of networking are empowered by specialized controllers, which abstract the controlling plane from the underlying physical equipment. This controller virtualizes the network, server and storage capabilities of a data center, thereby giving a better visibility into data traffic routing and server utilization.
Large data center operators will be using more and more of their own custom hardware instead of standard PC from traditional computer manufacturers. Intel Betting on (Customized) Commodity Chips for Cloud Computing and it expects that Over half the chips Intel will sell to public clouds in 2015 will have custom designs. The biggest public clouds (Amazon Web Services, Google Compute, Microsoft Azure),other big players (like Facebook or China’s Baidu) and other public clouds (like Twitter and eBay) all have huge data centers that they want to run optimally. Companies like A.W.S. “are running a million servers, so floor space, power, cooling, people — you want to optimize everything”. That is why they want specialized chips. Customers are willing to pay a little more for the special run of chips. While most of Intel’s chips still go into PCs, about one-quarter of Intel’s revenue, and a much bigger share of its profits, come from semiconductors for data centers. In the first nine months of 2014, the average selling price of PC chips fell 4 percent, but the average price on data center chips was up 10 percent.
We have seen GPU acceleration taken in to wider use. Special servers and supercomputer systems have long been accelerated by moving the calculation of the graphics processors. The next step in acceleration will be adding FPGA to accelerate x86 servers. FPGAs provide a unique combination of highly parallel custom computation, relatively low manufacturing/engineering costs, and low power requirements. FPGA circuits may provide a lot more power out of a much lower power consumption, but traditionally programming then has been time consuming. But this can change with the introduction of new tools (just next step from technologies learned from GPU accelerations). Xilinx has developed a SDAccel-tools to to develop algorithms in C, C ++ – and OpenCL languages and translated it to FPGA easily. IBM and Xilinx have already demoed FPGA accelerated systems. Microsoft is also doing research on Accelerating Applications with FPGAs.
Universal Memory for Instant-On Computing will be talked about. New memory technologies promise to be strong contenders for replacing the entire memory hierarchy for instant-on operation in computers. HP is working with memristor memories that are promised to be akin to RAM but can hold data without power. The memristor is also denser than DRAM, the current RAM technology used for main memory. According to HP, it is 64 and 128 times denser, in fact. You could very well have a 512 GB memristor RAM in the near future. HP has what it calls “The Machine”, practically a researcher’s plaything for experimenting on emerging computer technologies. Hewlett-Packard’s ambitious plan to reinvent computing will begin with the release of a prototype operating system in 2015 (Linux++, in June 2015). HP must still make significant progress in both software and hardware to make its new computer a reality. A working prototype of The Machine should be ready by 2016.
Chip designs that enable everything from a 6 Gbit/s smartphone interface to the world’s smallest SRAM cell will be described at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in February 2015. Intel will describe a Xeon processor packing 5.56 billion transistors, and AMD will disclose an integrated processor sporting a new x86 core, according to a just-released preview of the event. The annual ISSCC covers the waterfront of chip designs that enable faster speeds, longer battery life, more performance, more memory, and interesting new capabilities. There will be many presentations on first designs made in 16 and 14 nm FinFET processes at IBM, Samsung, and TSMC.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
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By | Paul Kunert 21st May 2015 10:26
Post-PC era? Surely you’re joking, says Lenovo as computers fly out of door
Profits down following acquisitions, though
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/05/21/lenovo_q4/
Computers are still flying out of the door for Lenovo but Q4 profits crashed by more than a third due to a hike in operating expenses that followed several acquisitions.
Net income fell 36.7 per cent to $100m as the buys of Motorola and IBM’s x86 server business took a toll on costs.
More Reading
Tech disties: What the HELL happened to our sales growth in Q1?
IBM feathers pillow with System z cash – but still losing sleep after 12 quarters of decline
PC sales dip below 2009 levels, with Japanese sales off 44 per cent
Ex-HP PC and print gros fromage Cador rocks up at Lenovo
HP warns channel types ahead of split: Hold on, it’s gonna get bumpy
The Chinese tech maker reported quarterly sales of $11.3bn, up 21 per cent year-on-year for the period ended 31 March, helped by continued market share gains in the global PC arena.
PC sales, which accounted for 63 per cent of revenues (Lenovo remains world No. 1 PC maker) jumped eleven per cent to $7.2bn – 13.3 million units were shipped, up 2.7 per cent and global market share was 19.7 per cent.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Webmaster Tools Rebrands To Google Search Console
Google aims to get more users on Google Webmaster Tools by renaming it to Google Search Console.
http://searchengineland.com/google-webmaster-tools-rebrands-to-google-search-console-221282
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The Reason For Java’s Staying Power: It’s Easy To Read
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/05/21/0056251/the-reason-for-javas-staying-power-its-easy-to-read
Java made its public debut twenty years ago today, and despite a sometimes bumpy history that features its parent company being absorbed by Oracle, it’s still widely used. Mark Reinhold, chief architect for the Oracle’s Java platform group, offers one explanation for its continuing popularity: it’s easy for humans to understand it at a glance.
Java’s key to success is simplicity
http://www.itworld.com/article/2925134/development/javas-key-to-success-is-simplicity.html
As Java turns 20, Oracle looks to what keeps the programming language so vital
Java’s success in remaining relevant on the ever-changing landscape of software development has been its relative simplicity.
“The core values of the language, and the platform, are readability and simplicity,” said Mark Reinhold, Oracle’s chief architect for the company’s Java platform group.
Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find programming languages in as many corners of the computer industry as Java. It routinely tops, or is near the top of, surveys of the most widely used programming languages. Oracle estimates that the language is used by over 9 million developers and powers more than 7 billion devices.
Readability is a particularly valuable trait for a programming language, especially one used for writing enterprise software, Reinhold explained. With complex software, programmers must be able to understand code that may have been written months, or even years earlier.
“Most of the cost of maintaining any body of code over time is in maintenance, not in initial creation,” Reinhold said.
Oracle, and Sun before it, were also mindful about long-term compatibility, which helps keep perfectly serviceable software running for as long as possible.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP Strikes China Deal, Sales Slump
Whitman says PC market slower than expected
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326668&
Hewlett-Packard reported declining revenues and profits amid a slumping PC market in which it is gaining some share. The news came the same day it announced a deal to roll its server and networking business in China into a joint venture aiming to take on China’s Lenovo.
Servers were one of the few bright spots in HP’s dismal second fiscal quarter. Overall revenues were down seven percent from the same quarter last year to $25.45 billion, and profits slid to $1.01 billion from $1.27 billion a year ago.
“The PC market is weaker than I expected at the beginning of the year,” said Meg Whitman, HP’s chief executive in a call with analysts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
DevOps Isn’t a Job. But It’s Still Important
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/devops-isnt-job-still-important/
Traditionally, companies have at least two main technical teams. There are the programmers, who code the software that the company sells, or that its employees use internally. And then there are the information technology operations staff, who handle everything from installing network gear to maintaining the servers that run those programmers’ code. The two teams only communicate when it’s time for the operations team to install a new version of the programmers’ software, or when things go wrong.
Instead of speaking only occasionally, both the development and operations team would collaborate on the entire process of conceiving, building and maintaining software. The idea of creating such unified teams is called “DevOps.”
The important thing was, he says, getting away from the mindset of software projects as ever being complete. Instead, they should be thought of as ongoing processes that continue long after an application has been delivered to the user. That means thinking about updates, security fixes, and maintenance in a more holistic way.
“It’s as fundamental a shift in the way build technology as it was when we went from a hunter-gathering society to a farmer society,” he says. “We stop viewing as a one-and-done and think of it as a series of cycles over the entire lifecycle.”
The DevOps movement grew out of a related idea called agile software development. In 2001, a group of programmers published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development,
Since the term was first coined for an event in 2009, DevOps has become a trendy buzzword. The term has always been fraught with controversy
“The problem with ‘learning DevOps’ or ‘doing DevOps’ is that the word means different things to different people,” he tells WIRED in an email. “Even the guy who came up with the term chooses to leave it without a solid definition, so the legion of ‘thought leaders’ surrounding it have twisted it every which way—usually to promote a product or e-book or certification program.”
How To Prepare for a Career in DevOps
DeGrandis says DevOps isn’t really a job, it’s an organizational strategy. Goerlich agrees.
That said, there are skills that tech professionals can learn that will help them adapt to a DevOps way of thinking. Goerlich suggests IT operations staff get started by learning about automation tools like Puppet, Chef, and Microsoft’s PowerShell language. “Then use the time that frees up to spend more time with developers and end-users to understand what they’re doing and why,” he says.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Last year sold 5.7 million Chromebook laptop based on Google’s operating system. This year the number will grow to 7.3 million, and next year to almost 8 million.
Despite the growth, the Chromebook does not seem to strike through consumer shopping list.
According to Gartner, colleges bought 72 percent of all Chrome notebooks. Companies are not enthusiastic, which is why Google is trying to speed up the company to sell the Chromebook for Work Application Package.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2859:chromebook-ei-vain-lyo-lapi&catid=13&Itemid=101
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EXT4 filesystem can EAT ALL YOUR DATA
RAID bug can corrupt the filesystem, patches incoming, caution advised
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/22/ext4_filesystem_can_eat_all_your_data/
Flaws have been found in the EXT4 filesystem that can cause data loss when running Linux 4.0 and higher.
Reports such as this Debian bug report suggest “massive filesystem corruption” is the result of the flaw.
The problem appears to strike RAID0 users, on Arch Linux and Debian.
Fixes are available
All of which sounds just terrifying and means that this patch for version 4.x and the patched Linux kernel 3.12.43 LTS both seem like sensible code to contemplate.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jonathan Vanian / Fortune:
Cost of splitting HP into HP Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise to be $400-$450M, will be divided equally between them
Hewlett-Packard shares more detail on its plans to split the company
http://fortune.com/2015/05/21/hewlett-packard-separation-earnings/
On an earnings call, CEO Meg Whitman gave analysts an update on HP’s efforts to split its business into two separate companies.
Breaking up may be hard to do, but for Hewlett-Packard it’s apparently a necessity for the company to streamline its business.
One company, to be named Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, will focus on selling technology like servers and data center gear to businesses.
The other, to be called HP Inc., will sell printers and personal computers.
“Today I’m more convinced than ever that this is the right thing to do,” Whitman said as she proceeded to explain that the total dis-synergies—a fancy word for costs—for the separation will equate to $400 million to $450 million “divided equally between the two companies.”
“As separate companies, we will have a sharper focus on the markets we serve,” Whitman said.
As a whole, HP HPQ 3.42% took in $25.5 billion in revenue during the second quarter of 2015 compared to the $27.3 billion it raked in the previous year during the same time period.
Breaking it down by segment, however, it’s clear to see that HP’s enterprise business has a lot more momentum going for it rather than its PC and printer business.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chrome for Android is now ‘almost entirely open-source,’ letting anyone build a Chromium-based mobile browser
http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/21/chrome-for-android-is-now-almost-entirely-open-source-letting-anyone-build-a-chromium-based-mobile-browser/
Google has uploaded the majority of the remaining Chrome for Android code into the open-source Chromium repository. In other words, Chrome for Android now matches Chrome for desktop in terms of available open source code, letting anyone examine, modify, and compile the project.
Chromium is the open source Web browser project that shares much of the same code as Google Chrome, and new features are often added there first. Google intended for Chromium to be the name of the open-source project, while the final product name would be Chrome, but developers have taken the code and released versions under the Chromium name. Eventually, browser makers used it as a starting point; Opera, for example, switched its browser base to Chromium in 2013.
Until now, however, Chromium was largely a desktop-only affair
A Chrome for Android software engineer posted on Reddit to say that “Chrome for Android is now almost entirely open-source.” The “almost” refers to licensing restrictions: media codecs and some of proprietary Google features can’t be included in Chromium.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Celebrating 20 years of juicy Java. Just don’t mention Android
A remarkable past, and a clouded future
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/22/celebrating_20_years_of_java_but_dont_mention_android/
Oracle is celebrating 20 years of Java, which was officially announced at the SunWorld conference in San Francisco on May 23 1995. Java 1.0a2 was made available to download. In addition, Netscape’s Marc Andreessen came on stage to announce that Java would be integrated into the Navigator web browser.
The origins of Java go back earlier, of course, to Sun’s secret “Green Project”, led by Patrick Naughton, Mike Sheridan and James Gosling. Gosling created a language called Oak, a processor-independent language for controlling entertainment devices.
Oak was demonstrated on a device called *7 (named for its ability to answer the phone) in summer 1992.
The entertainment device idea did not take off but the team adapted the language, whose name was changed to Java because Oak was already trademarked, to support animations and dynamic content delivered over the internet.
In 1994 they created a web browser based on Mosaic but using Java. The browser was initially called WebRunner and then HotJava.
Java took off rapidly.
As it turned out, Java did not flourish for long as a browser plug-in, but found huge take up elsewhere. Its cross-platform ability made it ideal for IT vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Sun itself.
It was an obvious choice for enterprise middleware and application servers. At the other end of the scale, Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) was widely used for apps on mobile phones. Java is part of the standard for Blu-Ray discs and runs on billions of devices. Sun released Java as open source in 2006.
Java is no longer much used for desktop apps, where its constant security updates, and Oracle’s habit of bundling unrelated software with the runtime download, have made it an annoyance.
On mobile phones, Java was pushed aside by Apple, which uses Objective C and Swift for iOS apps, and although Google chose Java as the primary app development language for Android, it developed its own runtime, called Dalvik, rather than implementing the official Java specification, resulting in a largely unsuccessful lawsuit from Oracle in 2010.
Android aside, can Java recover its mojo beyond enterprise server applications?
“There remains a substantial interest in doing rich Java clients,” said Saab. “I’m interested in the position that Java can enjoy in Internet of Things. There is a great deal of fragmentation and Java gives people a consistent model and uses the same technology from device to gateway and into the back end in the cloud.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Java Changed Programming Forever
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/05/21/2248245/how-java-changed-programming-forever
With Java hitting its 20th anniversary this week, Elliotte Rusty Harold discusses how the language changed the art and business of programming, turning on a generation of coders. Infoworld reports: “Java’s core strength was that it was built to be a practical tool for getting work done.”
Java at 20: How it changed programming forever
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2923773/java/java-at-20-how-java-changed-programming-forever.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel does not believe in the new Windows
According to Gartner, sales of PCs shrank 5.2 percent in the first quarter. Intel President and CEO Bruce Krzanich does not believe that the future after the summer distribution of the new Windows 10 would bring any big boost to unit sales.
- In the long term, PC sales will remain at the present level or drop slightly, Krzanich designers of Intel’s shareholders conference. In practice, this means that Intel’s sales of its most important part – PC processors – stopped growing.
Last year, 95 per cent of the company’s profit was made on desktops and laptops processors.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2867:intel-ei-usko-uuteen-windowsiin&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big Data, OpenStack and object storage: Size matters, people
Consider your needs before rushing out and investing in new storage tech
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/18/size_matters_storage_open_stack/
Do you have the problem?
These technologies are all designed to solve problems on a big scale:
Object storage = storing huge amounts of unstructured data
Big Data (analytics) = analysing huge amounts of data
OpenStack (and cloud management platforms in general) = managing huge pools of compute, networking and storage resources
The common word here is HUGE. Otherwise, it’s like shooting sparrows with bazookas.
But you’re probably already using them
Take object storage as an example. Somewhere in your organisation there is a sync & share solution, a cloud storage gateway of some sort, back-ups are being sent to the cloud or something else. In all these situations, even when the front-end is installed locally, you are already leveraging object storage at the back-end.
Closing the circle
On-prem Big Data, OpenStack (private clouds) and object storage are not for everyone. If you don’t have the problem, you don’t need them. It’s just common sense, isn’t it?
In fact, only surveyors and some analysts aren’t aware of it. In this case, leveraging external services is the best choice.
If you are experiencing an exponential growth of data and infrastructure then, sooner or later, you are going to need them. In that case, it’s time to start building the two-tier strategy
Consolidation of different storage/data islands will become an important part of this process, but at the same time, flexibility remains the pillar to maintaining simplicity and usability of data and resources.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud Security Temperature Check
What keeps Reg readers up at night?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/20/cloud_security_survey_results/
The democratising effect of cloud is a double-edged sword
Reports of the imminent demise of the corporate data centre might be somewhat exaggerated, but if you work in IT, the chances are that you are seeing more use of cloud services across your organisation. Software as a Service (SaaS) has lowered the barriers to adoption for many business applications. Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), meanwhile, are increasingly seen by developers and operations staff as important keys to streamlining application delivery.
Whether you are an advocate or sceptic, there is no denying that cloud services in their various forms have a strong democratising effect
But while this ease of adoption is highly convenient and great for flexibility and responsiveness, the benefits of rapid cloud adoption often come at a price. The danger is that the organisation ends up accumulating a sprawling mishmash of services that don’t work well together and collectively create a significant data and application management headache. Disjoints between ‘cloud silos’ can even undermine the very efficiency and flexibility gains that were sought in the first place.
Cloud computing is simply an alternative model for application deployment and storage of data.
Distributed and inconsistent landscapes create more problems
As a result of the cloud-related acquisition behaviour we have been discussing, both within the business and within IT, security challenges can arise around trying to coordinate security and identity across boundaries
Tools are available to help, but they aren’t always used
When it comes to security tooling, the survey suggests that most know what they should be using, but they are frequently not acting on this knowledge
Familiar people-related issues remain a problem for many
A frequent lack of understanding and appreciation of the cloud security imperative among senior managers is evident from the survey, and this obviously goes hand-in-hand with some of the previously mentioned funding and resourcing challenges. What also comes across is a clear need in many cases to both educate and motivate users, not just on cloud specific security risks, but also on the more fundamental matter of what constitutes sensitive data
It’s important to act sooner rather than later
Wherever you are in terms of cloud adoption, it’s important to develop a sustainable approach to managing security as soon as you can.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Office Blogs:
New OneNote plug-ins include WordPress for turning notes into blog posts, Equil for organizing digital-pen notes, and cloudHQ for syncing to 3rd party services
OneNote welcomes three new partners—cloudHQ, Equil and WordPress
http://blogs.office.com/2015/05/22/onenote-welcomes-three-new-partners-cloudhq-equil-and-wordpress/
WordPress
WordPress is the world’s largest blogging and publishing platform. How great would it be if you could connect OneNote to WordPress to transform ideas and information into meaningful blog posts? Thanks to a new OneNote plug-in for WordPress, you can!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Benjamin Wallace-Wells / New York Magazine:
Four years after ‘Jeopardy’ win, IBM’s Watson program has seen applications in 75 industries including finance, healthcare, molecular biology
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/jeopardy-robot-watson.html
Watson was just 4 years old when it beat the best human contestants on Jeopardy! As it grows up and goes out into the world, the question becomes: How afraid of it should we be?
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Indians will make an increasingly greater part of the code
The software work to countries with lower labor continues. Brazil and China attract companies, but the fastest encoding grows in India. There, Software Engineering has a size of over $ four billion business.
According to Gartner, the Indian software business grew by 8.3 per cent last year. Microsoft’s share of the Indian code is already one quarter, or just over a billion dollars. Oracle commissioned in India database code 516 million dollars, and IBM purchased the programming was already worth nearly half a billion dollars.
A tricky situation in Russia has dropped off the number of software job growth countries. Last year, the work of the software market in Russia shrank by 6.4 per cent. In the previous year the market still grew by nearly 10 per cent.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2873:intialaiset-tekevat-yha-suuremman-osan-koodista&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP: you know we said we were done with cost cutting…
Enterprise Services needs to find $2bn of savings, but s’ok, got 3 years to do it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/24/hp_es_cost_cutting/
Just when the folk at HP Enterprise Services thought the multi-year cost cutting timetable was almost at an end, along comes another plan to lop $2bn off the expenses bill.
The division reported a 16 per cent drop in turnover to $4.81bn in HP’s second quarter of fiscal ’15 ended 30 April, although profit before tax went up 31 per cent to $194m, eased by strict controls on overheads.
The specific problem area is infrastructure IT Outsourcing (ITO), where the impact of cloud services is being felt acutely and where revenues dropped by a fifth in the quarter.
HP is “making progress” to meet its long-term goal for ES of a seven to nine per cent operating margin but CEO Meg Whitman is worried about several factors that could pull the run from underneath it.
“ITO industry challenges have accelerated and are driving risk in the sustainability of this profit level if we don’t do further cost reductions,” she warned.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The innovative CIO
http://www.cio.com/article/2925992/innovation/the-innovative-cio.html
CIO’s sit at the intersection of the business and IT and there is no doubt that the CIO’s role is changing, but rather than simply “manning the engine room,” I argue that they should be on the bridge working in new ways to help their organizations identify and conquer new market opportunities.
“The CIO’s role is changing driven by Cloud and an increasing number of ‘as-a-Service’ solutions that progressively reduce the organizations dependency on maintaining a high number of specially skilled ICT staff. Under these new conditions organizations have two options – they can make their technology managers, architects and administrators redundant and reap the short-term rewards in an uptick in profits and share price or they can retain these highly skilled staff who sit at the intersection of the business and technology and create an impressive innovation team that adds considerably more value to the business.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Death of a middleman: Cloud storage gateways – and their evolution
Fading glory for Google, Microsoft and Amazon go-betweens?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/25/cloud_storage_gateways/
For decades, we’ve survived quite nicely using on-premise storage. According to industry research, though, that may be changing as cloud-based storage emerges. A Tata Communications survey last year found that within ten years enterprises will store 58 per cent of their data in the cloud, compared with 28 per cent today.
Whether or not the shift ends up being that drastic in practice, it does seem clear that companies are getting more interested in cloud storage. Google launched a cloud storage alternative to Amazon’s Glacier and Microsoft’s Azure Backup in March, for example. Clearly, it sees an opportunity to substitute cloud storage for tape.
Whether you’re treating the cloud as an alternative to tape-based backup, or doing something more sophisticated with cloud storage, moving your data from an on-site array to the cloud isn’t always that simple.
“Cloud storage works differently than your average network-storage array, in that it is object-oriented,” points out John Sloan, research director for infrastructure at analyst firm Info-Tech Research Group.
Object-oriented storage is great for scaling out storage infrastructure, but it isn’t interoperable with the block storage typically seen on an on-site SAN. Another problem is that cloud-based storage is stateless, and typically accessed over web-friendly REST APIs. This is not the way that your legacy apps normally work.
“Also, sending and retrieving data from the cloud introduces performance hurdles (latency and bandwidth limits),” said Sloan.
Cloud storage gateways are designed to solve some of these issues. They’re typically devices, whether appliances or virtual machines, that sit on the local network and pretend to be a local storage array, while interfacing with cloud-based storage.
Case study
One CTERA customer, JWT, has a large presence in the Middle East, where in some regions the Internet can be slow and unreliable. During the Arab Spring uprisings, the firm had to move staff from several offices. It used a cloud storage gateway with a connection to Amazon Web Services, which enabled it to access data from the offices that were shut down.
In that way, the cloud storage gateway doubles as a backup solution, and allowed the company to save 63 per cent on its old backup system, which was tape-based. A conduit for backup and disaster recovery isn’t the only use case for a cloud storage gateway. Some vendors, like Nasuni, focus on scalability, offering what looks like a NAS but with infinite capacity thanks to cloud-based infrastructure.
“If you’re using a cloud gateway and you’re depending on particular performance, you have a lot of variables in there that you don’t have control over,” said Kern. “Latency is a factor of environment and the risk. If you’re saying ‘I need the data in a certain window’, then you have to architect the network connectivity based on that.”
Market evolution
Unless a company extends beyond simple format translation into other value-added services such as local data storage and centralised storage management, the cloud service market category may end up being temporary, say some. “My point of view is that the cloud gateway is going to evolve from a distinct network storage device to a feature of mainstream storage devices,” argued Sloan, explaining that this is a repeating cycle in the storage business. “A decade or so ago, we had these emerging features for storage like deduplication.”
“Today backup software has become smarter about targeting disk (and doing deduplication) and the leading VTL makers have been bought by mainstream storage vendors,” he said.
We’re already starting to see cloud gateway-style features making their way into higher-end boxes such as Hitachi’s HNAS. The question is: how long will it be before more large storage vendors ingest these functions into their kit, perhaps building out back-end cloud storage services specifically to support them?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Even Tiny Updates to Tech Can Be Obstacles for the Disabled
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/even-tiny-updates-tech-can-obstacles-disabled/
Make no mistake. Technology is playing an important role in fulfilling the equity promise that began with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act 25 years ago. But we also want to ensure these advances continue to open up access to the disability community and don’t create new barriers to our participation in society. By designing from a place of empathy, with an eye on accessibility and universal design, developers have the power to improve and enhance the lives of millions of people like me.
Tomi Engdahl says:
MariaDB teams up with IBM and Canonical to reinvent the LAMP
We love LAMP. We’re not just pointing at things and saying we love them
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2409757/mariadb-teams-up-with-ibm-and-canonical-to-reinvent-the-lamp
OPEN SOURCE software and hardware vendors have come together to create a highly optimised version of the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, or LAMP, stack.
LAMP is used primarily for building dynamic websites and web services. The new version, Turbo LAMP, has seen MariaDB and IBM team up with other key partners to fine tune the stack for IBM’s Power architecture, resulting in some impressive acceleration.
“IBM have traditionally had an ecosystem of key partners that they work with and they’ve brought together a group to really demonstrate and leverage the power of the Power systems,” he said.
“Together we’ve built the Turbo LAMP stack, with Canonical representing the Linux angle, Zen who is a PHD vendor, and MariaDB working together to really optimise the power of LAMP stack.”
With IBM now fully committed to the Power architecture after the completed sale of its x86 server division to Lenovo last year, it seems the perfect time to really show what she can do.
“We demonstrated this in a use case, which was e-commerce. Magenta is one of the most widely used e-commerce platforms, which has traditionally been built using the LAMP stack, and we were able to demonstrate some pretty amazing capabilities using Power architecture,” explained Sallner.
“Traditionally the LAMP stack has been composed by the Linux vendors. What we’ve done is not only work with a Linux vendor, but with other software components and a hardware vendor to optimise through and through the hardware architecture and software stack to give maximum performance through and through,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
No, Your SSD Won’t Quickly Lose Data While Powered Down
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/05/25/1428246/no-your-ssd-wont-quickly-lose-data-while-powered-down
A few weeks ago, we discussed reports that enterprise SSDs would lose data in a surprisingly short amount of time if left powered off. The reports were based on a presentation from Alvin Cox, a Seagate engineer, about enterprise storage practices. PCWorld spoke to him and another engineer for Seagate, and they say the whole thing was blown out of proportion. Alan Cox said, “I wouldn’t worry about (losing data).”
” The intent of the original presentation was to set expectations for a worst case scenario — a data center writing huge amounts of data to old SSDs and then storing them long-term at unusual temperatures”
Debunked: Your SSD won’t lose data if left unplugged after all
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2925173/debunked-your-ssd-wont-lose-data-if-left-unplugged-after-all.html
In a conversation with Kent Smith of Seagate and Alvin Cox, the Seagate engineer who wrote the presentation that set the Internet abuzz, PCWorld was told we’re all just reading it wrong.
“People have misunderstood the data that they’re looking at,” Smith said.
“I wouldn’t worry about (losing data),” Cox told PCWorld. “This all pertains to end of life. As a consumer, an SSD product or even a flash product is never going to get to the point where it’s temperature-dependent on retaining the data.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will YOU be living in a cardboard box under the motorway in five years?
One in four will be out of business, predicts ball-starer Huawei
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/05/26/channel_is_dead_says_huawei/
Chinese kit-maker Huawei reckons one in four resellers will be out of business inside the next half a decade, such is the dwindling shelf life for the classic man-in-the-middle model.
A report outlining the company’s strategy predicted: “Within next five years, one fourth of the channels will disappear, and the remaining channels will have to transform themselves from a distribution type into a more competent type [of business].”
A spokesman singled out IBM, Cisco and HP as relying too much on resellers and failing to customise services for their clients. Resellers account for 75 per cent of HP’s sales and 90 per cent of Cisco’s top line.
“If [vendors] rely on this model to do their business, in this competitive market, they may become extinct.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fibre Channel over Ethernet is dead. Woah, contain yourselves
No one (well, maybe just Cisco) wanted it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/26/fcoe_is_dead_for_real_bro/
How many times have you heard one of these statements: Tape is dead! Mainframe is dead! The laptop is dead … and so on. It then turns out not to be true.
Most of the time it was just a way to say that a newer technology was seeing a strong level of adoption, so strong as to eclipse the older one in the eyes of the masses. However, in the case of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), it’s slightly different.
No one wanted it!
Well, no one except Cisco.
FCoE is a standard way to encapsulate Fibre Channel (FC) frames into Ethernet networks. It is a lossless protocol encapsulated in a best-effort network. Why? Technically speaking it makes no sense.
But FCoE has nothing to do with technical reasons. At one time the FC market was in Brocade’s hands while iSCSI was not considered enterprise-grade. Cisco was not as good as Brocade on FC but it had a lot of expertise in Ethernet and IP. So it pushed very hard, at every level, and promoted FCoE.
It is a protocol that has a lot of implications but, above all, specialised adapters (CNAs) and specialised high-end Ethernet switches. Long story short; it could have meant a lot of revenues and control all over data centre networks. Alas, it didn’t work as expected.
Very few adopted it
In the meantime, iSCSI inherited most of the good stuff from FCoE (suh as DCB, or Data Centre Bridging, for example) and it has slowly become much more appreciated by end users and vendors.
Thanks to FCoE, Ethernet storage has grown tremendously. A few years back, it was considered only for secondary needs.
Now, it is considered as first citizen and some vendors (like SolidFire) leverage it to build huge infrastructures. Nonetheless, all VSAs and hyper-converged products are all based on Ethernet communication protocols, and not FCoE.
Would you buy FCoE today? Cisco partners don’t even use it: EMC maybe, but most NetApp FlexPod installations I’ve spotted in the field primarily use NFS, and other storage suppliers, such as Pure or Nimble, don’t support it at all.
FCoE failed miserably
Tomi Engdahl says:
Unisys weans itself off homebrew chippery, finally slurps Intel gear
New colosso-iron ClearPath Dorado 8300 is all Chipzilla, all the time
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/26/unisys_finally_weans_itself_off_cmos_chippery/
Unisys has unveiled a new range of all-Intel colosso-servers, effectively closing the chapter on Unisys’s own proprietary CMOS chips.
The new ClearPath Dorado 8380 and 8390 systems the company will put on sale this week pack high-end Xeons into a 42U chassis and run OS 2200, Unisys’ bundle of OS and apps. Unisys has been promising this move for a while and now says the new iron represents “the culmination of Unisys’ decade-long initiative to transition the entire ClearPath architecture from proprietary complementary metal oxide semiconductor processor technology to a software-based fabric architecture running on Intel processors.”
The machine’s internal arrangements are interesting, as there’s three bits doing the work.
The new beasts can run anything written for previous generations of ClearPath servers, be they Intel-or-Unisys-CMOS-powered. This year’s models can also be clustered alongside older all-Intel or mixed Intel-and-Unisys-CMOS kit from Unisys.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Private cloud has a serious image problem
‘AWS is to the era of cloud what Microsoft is to client/server’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/26/public_cloud_domination_game_aws_microsoft/
As domination goes, it’s hard to surpass Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to recent Gartner data, AWS now offers 10X the utilised cloud capacity of the next 14 IaaS and PaaS providers… combined.
For those paying attention, that’s double the dominance AWS established last year.
And while public cloud spending remains a rounding error in the broader scheme of total IT spending, it’s growing at a 29.1 per cent compound annual growth rate, threatening to up-end legacy IT vendors.
Which is just as it should be. Cloud spending is on a tear precisely because traditional vendors have failed to deliver the convenience that enterprise buyers increasingly demand.
This leaves us with AWS assuming the role that Microsoft played for years. In the words of Hewlett Packard’s cloud chief Marten Mickos : “AWS is to the era of cloud what Microsoft was (and is) to the era of client/server.”
According to Gartner, in 2014 the absolute growth of public cloud IaaS workloads exceeded the growth of on-premises workloads (of any type) for the first time. Including all forms of cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), IDC expects the cloud-computing market to more than double by 2018 to $127bn.
The primary driver of all that growth? Convenience.
As RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady posits: “Convenience trumps just about everything” when it comes to cloud adoption. With developers playing an increasingly important role in IT procurement decisions, appeasing them has become Job #1. Developer appeasement starts with open source and often ends with public cloud computing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SanDisk opens for business with point-of-sale terminal SSD
Dedicated retail POS storage will ensure no-sleep tills in Brooklyn
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/26/sandisk_has_pointofsale_terminal_ssd/
SanDisk has built an SSD for point-of-sale terminals, digital signage and surveillance gear, saying it’s better than disk drive use. Tablet, notebook and PC OEMs could use it too, so long as they don’t need more than 256GB.
The idea is to price the SSD “on a par” with disk drives, while pointing out that the Z400s outperforms HDDs by a factor of 20, provides five times the reliability and with five per cent of the average power consumption. The customers are OEMs and actual prices haven’t been provided.
It says the Z400s is useful in those embedded apps where storage requirements are relatively short-term, “thus these applications only require low capacities, but reliability and performance levels are paramount”.
We imagine there might be production or marketing limitations preventing higher capacities than the current 256GB maximum, hence this short-term data retention marketing tactic.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Novet / VentureBeat:
Microsoft partners with LG, Sony, other OEMs to sell Android tablets featuring Office, OneDrive, Skype
http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/26/microsoft-partners-with-lg-sony-other-oems-to-sell-android-tablets-featuring-office-onedrive-skype/
Microsoft announced today that it’s signed up 20 more hardware partners to sell Android tablets with its Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive, and Skype apps included out-of-the-box.
The news follows Microsoft’s announcement in March that it had gotten Samsung, Dell, and several regional hardware makers to sell Android devices packed with those same Microsoft apps.
The announcement shows how committed Microsoft is to getting its apps preinstalled on mobile devices that aren’t running Windows. That’s been a clear theme for the past several months — consider, for example, the company’s push to bring free Office apps to iPad, iPhone, and Android tablets and phones.
Tomi Engdahl says:
In the Forrester report “Hadoop Ecosystem Overview, Q4 2014,” it was forecasted that, “By the end of 2016, we think that two-thirds of all enterprises will have implemented Hadoop or a cloud-based analytics solution that uses Hadoop analytics for at least one use case.”
This means that 2015 is a critical year for Hadoop in the enterprise – are you going to be ahead of or behind the curve?
Source: https://webinar.informationweek.com/19855?keycode=IKWE01
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finally! It’s the year of Linux on the desktop TITSUP
Mandriva goes into liquidation
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/27/finally_its_the_year_of_linux_on_the_span_classstrikedesktopspan_titsup/
Mandriva, a French purveyor of desktop Linux, is being wound up, after becoming totally incapable of supporting usual performance (TITSUP), financially at least.
The liquidation notice suggests the company’s 2013 was around €600,000 and that the company has between 10 and 19 staff.
The company’s wobbled for years and has struggled to keep itself liquid. Now it appears the battle’s been lost: the outfit’s web site and blog aren’t responding at the time of writing.
Perhaps the most telling piece of data in the windup notice is the headcount, because it’s small. Canonical employs over 700.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel’s new chips are from ‘Purley’ – know what I mean? Know what I mean? Say no more
A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/27/intel_purley_xeon_chips/
A presentation given at a conference on high-performance computing (HPC) in Poland earlier this month appears to have yielded new insight into Intel’s Xeon server chip roadmap.
A set of slides spotted by our sister site The Platform indicates that Chipzilla is moving toward a new server platform called “Purley” that will debut in 2017 or later.
The slides, which were presented at the Konferencji Użytkowników KDM conference, describe Purley as the “biggest platform advancement since Nehalem,” a reference to the microarchitecture that Intel debuted in 2008 with the release of the original desktop Core i7.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 10 won’t help. The PC biz is doomed, DOOMED, I TELL YOU
Industry folk react calmly to Microsoft’s hopeful future sales targets
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/05/27/windows10_expectations/
What a difference a year makes. At this point in 2014, PC vendors were riding high on Windows XP support doom, but fast forward to the here-and-now and the pending launch of a certain OS isn’t causing the same waves.
Anyone mildly connected to the IT industry understands chip and operating system updates don’t have the same pull for consumers and businesses as they used to – these are no longer viewed as “big events”.
But with desktop demand returning to pre-XP support expiration levels, and notebooks – specifically low-cost machines – growing at low single digits, some may be praying for a Windows 10-led revival this summer.
“Don’t hold your breath” seems to be the message from analysts at both Gartner and FGR & Co, however.
Microsoft forecast that one billion devices would be running Windows 10 in two years – but it didn’t break down the numbers for each type of hardware, and could be accused of marketing bluster.
Gartner predicts more than 422m devices (desktops, notebooks, tabs and phones) running Windows will ship this year. At that rate, Microsoft would need to double sales between 2015 and 2016, and do it again in 2017 to give it a chance.
Clearly the size of the pie for iOS and Android developers may not be as big as Redmond wants them to believe.
“We believe many investors did not expect additional PC inventory drain into the Win10 release… “
Tomi Engdahl says:
On Control-S
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=182&doc_id=1326691&
That nervous twitch of the left hand to save files may be obsolete.
In the computer world there are a few subjects sure to provoke a flame war. What’s the best editor? Where should one put the braces in C code? How many spaces should we indent in C? Agile or plan-driven?
One that seems to have tamped down, at least somewhat, is Microsoft sneering. You know what I mean: Computer pros are expected to expect little of value from that company. Linux is the gold standard, Windows the vulture pickings. Office is junk, and any knowledgeable person uses an open-source alternative.
And yet.
I have been running Windows 8.1 on some of the machines here for quite a while. It is big. It is complex. It has annoying quirks.
It’s annoying to have to reboot to complete an installation. It seems silly to have to edit the registry to change program properties.
But it has never crashed. Not once. Nor have any of the Microsoft Office 15 or 365 programs.
Some of my Office documents are enormous and very complex with video and other demanding resources. It’s not unusual for me to create a 300 page Word file. And Word just works. It’s not quirky.
Today I use PowerDirector, which can consume every available CPU cycle on every core in the machine. But it plays nicely
Unexpected stuff just doesn’t happen.
It wasn’t always thus.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hybrid Memory is a standard fitting DRAM module position, which has been used in DRAMs, but also flash memory. Now DRAM technology manages the JEDEC has approved the preliminary standards for future DDR4 hybrid memories.
Under the auspices of JEDEC has been the JC-45 Committee, where the definitions of hybrid memory is turned. Memories referred to as NVDIMM ie it is non-volatile DIMM combs.
The first two versions of the hybrid memory NVDIMM-N and NVDIMM-F. The first flash section works DRAM back-up for example, during power failures. In another version of the flash memory can be established, just as bits of DRAM blocks.
According to the final JEDEC standards for hybrid memories are expected during this year.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2887:uusi-hybridimuisti-sai-hyvaksynnan&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Valve Changes the Tux Logo with the SteamOS One, Users Are Now Confused
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Valve-Changes-the-Tux-Logo-with-the-SteamOS-One-Users-are-Now-Confused-482545.shtml
So this just happened! It would appear that Valve just took the decision, without asking users first, to change the Tux logo with the SteamOS one on both the Steam website and the desktop client.
As a result, the entire Linux community is now on fire trying to understand why the sudden change. The fact of the matter is that it is not all of a sudden, as Valve added information about SteamOS + Linux a while back, instead of just Linux.
We understand that the change is part of Valve’s plans to expand further and to promote its SteamOS operating system, which is a GNU/Linux distribution derived from the well-known Debian project and built around the Steam for Linux client.
What we don’t understand, is why replace the Tux penguin logo, which is the official mascot of Linux, with the SteamOS logo?
Yes, the “Linux / SteamOS” option is still available when you try to filter games on Steam and see all the games that are supported on the Linux platform.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Much C++ Should You Know For an Entry-Level C++ Job?
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/05/27/1554254/how-much-c-should-you-know-for-an-entry-level-c-job
How much C++ do you need to know to land an entry-level job that’s heavy in C++? That’s a question Dice posed to several developers.
How Much C++ Do You Need to Know for a Job?
http://insights.dice.com/2015/05/27/how-much-c-do-you-need-to-know-for-a-job/
How much C++ do you need to know to land your first job?
Yes, there’s always more to learn, whether you’re a beginner or a professional with 20 years in the programming business. There’s no magical point at which you can stop studying and learning.
That being said, there are bare minimums when it comes to C++ knowledge; the further you proceed past those minimums, the more likely you’ll end up hired for your first job (and succeed in it).
Fundamental Skills
Regardless of what language you’re learning, every programmer needs to know some fundamental skills. Databases, for example: Learning some combination of SQL, MySQL and NoSQL can’t hurt, nor can knowing as much as possible about selects and joins. A solid programmer is familiar enough with Linux and Windows to display some command-line and administrative skills, when needed.
Let’s face it: C++ is not an easy language to learn. Mastering the basics of C++ means you’ve developed some strong skills.
First, learn the basics of object-oriented programming; also know data structures and algorithms inside and out. For example, know how to build a linked list, even though you’ll probably use one that’s part of an existing library.
Mastered those? Here are some more items
Tomi Engdahl says:
Creating an IT organization where people want to work
http://www.cio.com/article/2926560/staff-management/creating-an-it-organization-where-people-want-to-work.html
The very nature of information and technology is changing and oftentimes right under the nose of enterprise IT leaders. In the vast and complex landscape of corporate IT in both small and large businesses, the focus is on delivery, cost management and stakeholder engagement. However, amazing opportunities are left on the table because the talent dynamics of implementing the next level of IT required for the business to be successful are not fully considered. While new technologies and their impact on our industries are crucial to a strategic IT vision, the long-term success of IT is truly about how it can create organizations that people want to work for.
Technology groups are facing a vortex of challenges that create the perfect storm for creating the workforce capabilities that will drive the future of technology needed for business success. Certainly, the shortage of people with the necessary skills for both legacy and emerging technologies matters but the issues are broader. As I think about experiences across various industries, there are three major drivers that create barriers to truly successful human capital management.
Both within IT organizations and outside, there is often a perception that only business support or legacy technologies are within the realm of the CIO.
Leveraging the five concepts below, they have the chance to create organizations people desire to work for – attracting and retaining the best people that directly align to driving business success.
1. Branding: How many tech organizations are actively thinking about their brand to prospective and current employees?
2. Spirit of opportunity: It relatively easy to catch the spirit of a team after spending some time with them. IT teams are not different and perhaps one of the most critical aspects of creating a team people want to work on is that they have a spirit of opportunity.
3. Interlock people and capabilities: Businesses and IT often talk about what capabilities are needed to succeed in the future and how to build them. Technology leaders frequently discuss the latest platforms and trends in industry. People and teams may even be aligned a clear strategy that maps people and competencies to the current and future investment portfolio for IT.
4. Own the strategy: Too many leaders think that other groups like HR are solely responsible for the IT recruitment, staffing and people management.
5. Infuse relevance: Mapping tangible connections between people and teams in IT to business success is easily said and more difficult to do.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kurt Wagner / Re/code:
Oculus Rift headset and the computer needed to run it will cost around $1,500 in total
Oculus Rift Total Package Price: Around $1,500
http://recode.net/2015/05/27/oculus-rift-total-package-price-around-1500/
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said Wednesday that his soon-to-be-available virtual reality Oculus headset and the computer needed to run it will cost “in the $1,500 range.”
The company, owned by Facebook, announced in early May that it would start selling the Oculus Rift to consumers in early 2016, but the price for the headset itself has yet to be announced.
“We are looking at an all-in price, if you have to go out and actually need to buy a new computer and you’re going to buy the Rift … at most you should be in that $1,500 range,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
FPGAs Ride HP’s Moonshot
SRC goes to data centers with Altera
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326707&
Hewlett-Packard’s processor-agnostic Moonshot server officially adds today another board to its menu of options – the Saturn 1 from SRC Computers. The deal is the first big step into the commercial limelight for SRC that has been quietly selling its boards mainly to government users since 2002.
Moonshot is a chassis with a passive backplane that can host a variety of processor and networking cards. HP launched the system in October 2013 using Intel microserver processors and in late September 2014 added options for ARM-based cards using chips from Applied Micro and Texas Instruments.
HP would not disclose how many of the non-x86 versions of Moonshot it has sold so far. But it did say it has more than 20 reference customers and run more than 275 customer proof-of-concepts in its four Moonshot labs.
The company was co-founded in 1996 by supercomputer guru Seymour Cray. Its secret sauce is its Carte compiler that automatically turns users’ C-level code into FPGA-readable firmware, eliminating the need for often complex Verilog-level FPGA programming tools. The FPGA also lets users quickly change code as workloads shift.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The servers are sold at an accelerating pace
The data centers were sold in January-March of servers to 13.4 billion dollars. Almost 18 percent increase from one year ago is the fastest, the field was then assembled for autumn 2010.
According to Gartner, the acceleration of server sales shows that the recession and the slump in IT investments is over. At the same time the first quarter was the second best-selling history.
HP is still the clear market leader. Nearly a quarter of the server machine is made by HP, as its market share in the first quarter was 23.8 per cent. HP servers sold nearly 3.2 billion dollars.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2896:palvelimia-myydaan-kiihtyvalla-vauhdilla&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT service management as an enterprise-wide service
What’s good for the IT goose is good for the business gander
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/29/it_service_management_as_an_enterprise_wide_service/
When it comes to providing efficient services, can the IT department teach the rest of the business a thing or two?
IT has come a long way in the last few years. Traditionally, the IT department lived in an ivory tower, but commercial pressures forced it to change its stance. IT service management (ITSM) tools and techniques helped to reposition IT within the business, making it more accountable and more responsive to departmental needs.
For years, ITSM was something unique to the boys in the engine room. But now, companies are gradually rolling out service management software to other departments.
If ITSM helped IT to better serve the rest of the business, then perhaps it could offer the same benefits to departments including legal, finance, and HR. After all, these departments have to serve employees too.
It’s high time that ITSM got rid of the ‘IT’ and looked at service management as something that can be used far outside the IT department. So, how do we take the best parts of ITSM and apply it elsewhere? Some of the answers lie in software, and some lie in technique.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Libre Office comes to Android
Read all you want, but editing’s a science project
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/29/libre_office_comes_to_android/
The Document Foundation has released a version of Libre Office for Android.
The new app allows users to read and edit documents. The Document Foundation bills the app as a “Viewer” with “experimental … basic editing capabilities, like modifying words in existing paragraphs and changing font styles such as bold and italic.”
Viewing documents will also feel like an experiment for many users: when Vulture South tried the app it dumped us into a listing of our Galaxy S5′s directories and offered no depiction of the phone’s internal storage or secondary SD card. Nor does the app integrate with the cloud storage services to which we subscribe.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The impact of open cloud technologies on IT
Column Open source developments are at the heart of new cloud technologies, says Jim Zemlin
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/opinion/2410317/the-impact-of-open-cloud-technologies-on-it
NOWHERE are we seeing more open source and collaborative development than in cloud computing.
From software-defined networking to application development, containers and more, hundreds of open cloud projects are emerging to accelerate the development of transformative technologies that deliver products and services on demand, at the click of a button.
Open source and collaborative development have been proven time and time again to increase the rate of development and to result in better software.
The impact on the IT industry of these development practices for the cloud is a much faster evolution of the enterprise in the cloud era than any other time in the technology industry’s history.
The industrial revolution took decades to mature with proprietary designs and pending patents for machinery, while the computer hardware era of the 1950s and 1960s didn’t materialise for the average business until the 1980s and 1990s.
We know that today computers and information technologies double their capabilities every 12-18 months. Open source software and collaborative development are driving this cycle.
The Linux kernel’s rate of development, for example, is unmatched. The latest data tells us that nearly eight changes are made to Linux every hour and that it’s being built faster than ever before.
Projects like OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, CloudStack, Docker and others are using the same practices to move increasingly fast.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google I/O: What’s in it for developers across Chrome, Android, iOS and C++
Old McGoogle had some tools, I/O, I/O, eek!
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2410640/google-i-o-whats-in-it-for-developers-across-chrome-android-ios-and-c
GOOGLE ANNOUNCED a series of new developer tools and initiatives during the Google I/O keynote last night.
Google I/O, at its heart, is a developer conference and, while there was surprisingly little to impress at a prosumer level, it was still Christmas for the developers.
Android Studio gets a 1.3 Preview edition and Polymer 1.0. The latter is Google’s web app toolkit designed to help devs create app-like experiences in modern browsers (cough) like Chrome OS (cough).
The relationship between iOS and Android was brought a step closer with CocoaPods, the SDK library for Google Products on iOS, which was declared as the official channel.
If iOS isn’t your language you’ll also be pleased to hear that Android Studio will now support C and C++, as well as an improved Gradle build speed and a new memory profiler. Or if you want to make it easy, there’s the newly acquired Firebase web app platform.
Universal ad campaigns are “on the way”, allowing you to set up a campaign with just a budget and a target and let Google take care of the rest.
Finally, the rather dazzling demonstration of group hallucinations that is the new updated ‘Unity’ Google Cardboard has an SDK for Android and iOS.
Unity means that a whole group can take a virtual trip to wherever Cardboard is equipped to let them go and view it together with the exact perspective based on their position in the room. We wish they’d had this option for gym class when we were at school.
Tomi Engdahl says:
DARPA wants you to verify software flaws by playing games
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2928001/software/darpa-wants-you-to-verify-software-flaws-by-playing-games.html
Can online gamers perform the sometimes tedious software verification work typically done by professional coding experts?
Researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) think so and were so impressed with their first crowdsourced flaw-detecting games, they announced an new round of five games this week designed for improved playability as well as increased software verification effectiveness.
DARPA began the program known as Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV) in December 2013 and opened the Verigames web portal (http://www.verigames.com/home), which offered five free online formal verification games.
“These games translated players’ actions into program annotations and assisted formal verification experts in generating mathematical proofs to verify the absence of important classes of flaws in software written in the “C” and “Java” programming languages. An initial analysis indicates that non-experts playing CSFV games generated hundreds of thousands of annotations,” DARPA stated.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s new goal: Make everything work together
http://www.cnet.com/news/google-io-2015-new-goal-make-everything-work-together/
The search giant has found a new purpose in all our lives: Bringing together the various products and services we use to work together as easily as possible.
Key to the Internet giant’s ambitions is Android, its software designed to power devices ranging from smartphones and tablets to smartwatches, home appliances, your car and more. For Google, tying these devices together will make it easier for us to use the various products, and hopefully live less digitally complicated lives as a result. The hope is that consumers will be more inclined to stick with the Google family of products and services.
“It’s about putting Google to work on important problems,”
Google’s efforts also mirror a larger trend in the technology industry. Gone are the days when successful companies released various products that hardly worked together. Nowadays, companies like Google are following the lead of those like Apple, which tightly stitches together all its various devices with the software and services that power them, offering an easy and consistent experience for customers. But instead of closing down its hardware and software, Google is trying to tie its software to everything.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Kahn / 9to5Mac:
New 15-inch MacBook Pro is first MacBook to support 5K and 4096×2160 4K displays
http://9to5mac.com/2015/05/28/15-inch-macbook-4k-5k-display-support/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Steven Max Patterson / CIO.com:
Google releases Polymer 1.0, a core library used to build and style Web components
Google’s Polymer 1.0 brings reuse and better branding to Web development
http://www.cio.com/article/2927587/web-development/google-polymer-brings-reuse-and-better-branding-to-web-development.html
Google’s Polymer 1.0 library promises to tame Web development awash in HTML soup, and make it easier for developers to create feature-laden apps and websites.
Signaling Polymer’s production readiness, Google announced release 1.0 at its annual I/O developer conference. A core library used to build and style Web components, Polymer transitioned rapidly from concept to production release in less than two years.
Web developers are attracted by its simplicity. Traditionally, developers create Web pages with a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which can be difficult to modify, debug, maintain and reuse. Polymer encapsulates these three languages into functional component elements from which Web pages can be constructed, reducing development complexity and boosting reuse. In essence, Polymer elements can be used to create “app-like,” immersive experiences on the Web.
The Web’s explosive growth and competition between browser makers drove Web standards bodies such as W3C to ignore a component-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) model. Polymer aims to reverse this trend by allowing Web developers to build functional and design elements that fit a familiar SOA-like architecture in which components called elements provide services to other components through clearly defined interfaces.
With components, Google agitates for a revolution in Web development
http://www.cio.com/article/2426801/with-components-google-agitates-for-a-revolution-in-web-development.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
The 6 Hottest IT Trends for 2015
http://www.csc.com/innovation/insights/117537-the_6_hottest_it_trends_for_2015?utm_campaign=0515-GDC-Outbrain4ThoughtLeadershipLegCampaign&utm_source=outbrain&utm_medium=ocpc
1. “Outside-In” Accelerates
In today’s highly interconnected markets, many of the most important new business forces are taking shape outside the walls of your enterprise. To respond effectively to these changes, you’ll need a shift in mind-set, from inside-out to outside-in: leveraging innovation and technology outside your enterprise, from cloud to bring your own technology (BYOT) to cocreation and more.
2. Industry Ecosystems Emerge
One manifestation of the outside-in trend is what we call cocreation. Partners, clients and vendors are creating ecosystems to provide deep analytics, market sensing, planning and co-creation of products and services to ensure that needs are rapidly sensed and met.
3. Big Data Analytics Enters the Boardroom
Last year, we spoke of big data’s need to get fast. That’s happening, with business analytics increasingly available in near-real time, thanks in large part to advances in nonrelational databases and other key technologies. Now big data is also moving into the boardroom. A new digital leadership, led by tech-savvy “double deep” executives who know technology and the business, is demanding quantitative insights into customers, products and partners.
4. “3rd Platform” Shift Deepens the Critical Skills Gap
The “3rd Platform,” driven by SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud), generates a wide skills gap versus traditional IT skills. On the one hand, organizations are facing competitive pressure to modernize their older back-office systems. These systems need to be run more economically, and they need to be more agile. On the other hand, today’s connected consumers are demanding innovative front-office applications that are both cloud-based and mobile.
5. Digital Leadership Becomes More Defined
Increasingly, business and IT executives need to be proficient in both technology and business, and not — as in the past — just one or the other.
6. SMAC Meets the Internet of Things
SMAC is moving the enterprise from the office out into the larger world. SMAC has a symbiotic relationship with Internet of Things, each supporting the growth of the other. IoT will act as an accelerator for SMAC as more devices come online, and it will add value to SMAC because of the increased context these devices bring us, empowering organizations to conduct new, different kinds of conversations with their customers.