I did not have time to post my computer technologies predictions t the ends of 2016. Because I missed the year end deadline, I though that there is no point on posting anything before the news from CES 2017 have been published. Here are some of myck picks on the current computer technologies trends:
CES 2017 had 3 significant technology trends: deep learning goes deep, Alexa everywhere and Wi-Fi gets meshy. The PC sector seemed to be pretty boring.
Gartner expects that IT sales will growth (2.7%) but hardware sales will not have any growth – can drop this year. TEKsystems 2017 IT forecast shows IT budgets rebounding from a slump in 2016, and IT leaders’ confidence high going into the new year. But challenges around talent acquisition and organizational alignment will persist. Programming and software development continue to be among the most crucial and hard-to-find IT skill sets.
Smart phones sales (expected to be 1.89 billion) and PC sales (expected to be 432 million) do not grow in 2017. According to IDC PC shipments declined for a fifth consecutive year in 2016 as the industry continued to suffer from stagnation and lack of compelling drivers for upgrades. Both Gartner and IDC estimated that PC shipments declined about 6% in 2016.Revenue in the traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure segment decreased 10.8 per cent year over year in the third quarter of 2016. Only PC category that has potential for growth is ultramobile (includes Microsoft Surface ja Apple MacBook Air). Need for memory chips is increasing.
Browser suffers from JavaScript-creep disease: This causes that the browing experience seems to be become slower even though computer and broadband connections are getting faster all the time. Bloat on web pages has been going on for ages, and this trend seems to continue.
Microsoft tries all it can to make people to switch from older Windows versions to Windows 10. Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses as malware attacks that could have been avoided by upgrading to Windows 10. Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses. Microsoft: Windows 7 Does Not Meet the Demands of Modern Technology; Recommends Windows 10. On February 2017 Microsoft stops the 20 year long tradition of monthly security updates. Windows 10 “Creators Update” coming early 2017 for free, featuring 3D and mixed reality, 4K gaming, more.
Microsoft plans to emulate x86 instructions on ARM chips, throwing a compatibility lifeline to future Windows tablets and phones. Microsoft’s x86 on ARM64 Emulation is coming in 2017. This capability is coming to Windows 10, though not until “Redstone 3″ in the Fall of 2017.
Parents should worry less about the amount of time their children spend using smartphones, computers and playing video games because screen time is actually beneficial, the University of Oxford has concluded. 257 minutes is the time teens can spend on computers each day before harming wellbeing.
Outsourcing IT operations to foreign countries is not trendy anymore and companied live at uncertain times. India’s $150 billion outsourcing industry stares at an uncertain future. In the past five years, revenue and profit growth for the top five companies listed on the BSE have halved. Industry leader TCS too felt the impact as it made a shift in business model towards software platforms and chased digital contacts.
Containers will become hot this year and cloud will stay hot. Research firm 451 Research predicts this year containerization will be US $ 762 million business and that Containers will become 2.6 billion worth of software business in 2020. (40 per cent a year growth rate).
Cloud services are expected to have 22 percent annual growth rate. By 2020, the sector would grow from the current 22.2 billion to $ 46 billion. In Finland 30% of companies now prefer to buy cloud services when buying IT (20 per cent of IT budget goes to cloud).Cloud spend to make up over a third of IT budgets by 2017. Cloud and hosting services will be responsible for 34% of IT budgets by 2017, up from 28% by the end of 2016, according to 451 Research. Cloud services have many advantages, but cloud services have also disadvantages. In five years, SaaS will be the cloud that matters.
When cloud is growing, so is the spending on cloud hardware by the cloud companies. Cloud hardware spend hits US$8.4bn/quarter, as traditional kit sinks – 2017 forecast to see cloud kit clock $11bn every 90 days. In 2016′s third quarter vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 8.1 per cent year over year to $8.4 billion. Private cloud accounted for $3.3 billion with the rest going to public clouds. Data centers need lower latency components so Google Searches for Better Silicon.
The first signs of the decline and fall of the 20+ year x86 hegemony will appear in 2017. The availability of industry leading fab processes will allow other processor architectures (including AMD x86, ARM, Open Power and even the new RISC-V architecture) to compete with Intel on a level playing field.
USB-C will now come to screens – C-type USB connector promises to really become the only all equipment for the physical interface.The HDMI connection will be lost from laptops in the future. Thunderbolt 3 is arranged to work with USB Type-C, but it’s not the same thing (Thunderbolt is four times faster than USB 3.1).
World’s first ‘exascale’ supercomputer prototype will be ready by the end of 2017, says China
It seems that Oracle Begins Aggressively Pursuing Java Licensing Fees in 2017. Java SE is free, but Java SE Suite and various flavors of Java SE Advanced are not. Oracle is massively ramping up audits of Java customers it claims are in breach of its licences – six years after it bought Sun Microsystems. Huge sums of money are at stake. The version of Java in contention is Java SE, with three paid flavours that range from $40 to $300 per named user and from $5,000 to $15,000 for a processor licence. If you download Java, you get everything – and you need to make sure you are installing only the components you are entitled to and you need to remove the bits you aren’t using.
Your Year in Review, Unsung Hero article sees the following trends in 2017:
- A battle between ASICs, GPUs, and FPGAs to run emerging workloads in artificial intelligence
- A race to create the first generation of 5G silicon
- Continued efforts to define new memories that have meaningful impact
- New players trying to take share in the huge market for smartphones
- An emerging market for VR gaining critical mass
Virtual Reality Will Stay Hot on both PC and mobile.“VR is the heaviest heterogeneous workload we encounter in mobile—there’s a lot going on, much more than in a standard app,” said Tim Leland, a vice president for graphics and imaging at Qualcomm. The challenges are in the needs to calculate data from multiple sensors and respond to it with updated visuals in less than 18 ms to keep up with the viewer’s head motions so the CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, sensor fusion core, display engine, and video-decoding block are all running at close to full tilt.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Ubuntu maintains a familiar application bar
Since version 17.10, Ubuntu no longer uses the Unity desktop, which switches to GNOME. However, Canonical is importing GNOME extension that adds a “unified” application bar to the desktop. In a way this is a handshake for Unity fans.
No application bar does not have any radical additions. According to Canonical’s own surveys, users want “Dock” on their desktop. And in Macs, the same works very well.
Ubuntu developer Didier Roche presents a new application bar on his blog, and at the same time justifies its use by default.
Source:
http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6712-ubuntu-sailyttaa-unitysta-tutun-sovelluspalkin
More:
Ubuntu GNOME Shell in Artful: Day 5
pu · ubuntu
https://didrocks.fr/2017/08/18/ubuntu-gnome-shell-in-artful-day-5/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Fellow: Neural Nets Need Optimized Hardware
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332185
If you aren’t currently considering how to use deep neural networks to solve your problems, you almost certainly should be, according to Jeff Dean, a Google senior fellow and leader of the deep learning artificial intelligence research project known as Google Brain.
In a keynote address at the Hot Chips conference here Tuesday (Aug. 22), Dean outlined how deep neural nets are dramatically reshaping computational devices and making significant strides in speech, vision, search, robotics and healthcare, among other areas. He said hardware systems optimized for performing a small handful of specific operations that make up the vast majority of machine learning models would create more powerful neural networks.
“Building specialized computers for the properties that neural nets have makes a lot of sense,” Dean said. “If you can produce a system that is really good at doing very specific [accelerated low-precision linear algebra] operations, that’s what we want.”
Google recently began giving to customers and researchers access to the second-generation of its TensorFlow processing unit (TPU) machine-learning ASIC through a cloud service. A custom accelerator board featuring four of the second-generation devices boasts 180 teraflops of computation and 64 GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Describes Next Xbox SoC
Scorpio picks 12GB GDDR5 over HBM memory
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332180
Microsoft described Scorpio, the SoC inside its Xbox X One. The device, detailed at Hot Chips, aims to balance cost and performance for 4K gaming in a console shipping in November.
Scorpio packs 7 billion transistors with 6 TFlops graphics performance in a 359 mm2 chip made in a 16FF+ TSMC process. The chip, designed in partnership with AMD, also packs eight x86 cores running at 2.3 GHz and sharing 4 Mbytes L2 cache.
Scorpio uses 12 GBytes of GDDR5 memory rather than 32 MBytes embedded SRAM used in a prior generation or a high-bandwidth memory (HBM) module which engineers considered. “We were a little nervous making a consumer product with data moving around at 6.8 GHz,” said John Sell, a Microsoft distinguished engineer, referring to the GDDR5 data rate.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Startup Unveils Graph Processor at Hot Chips
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332176
ThinCI, a five-year-old startup in California, presented Monday at the Hot Chips symposium the company’s “Graph Streaming Processor (GSP).” ThinCI (pronounced “Think-Eye”), a chip developer for machine learning and computer vision, is poised to roll out its GSP and Graph Computing compiler.
The company, which says that it’s in the midst of taping out with its first silicon, plans to ship PCIe-based development boards in the fourth quarter this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Aiming to Divorce Cloud, Qualcomm Buys Machine Learning Start-Up
http://www.electronicdesign.com/industrial-automation/aiming-divorce-cloud-qualcomm-buys-machine-learning-start
Last year, Qualcomm stopped short of including an accelerator core called the neural processing unit its Snapdragon silicon. Instead, it announced that it would publish software to bend its existing smartphone chips to the whims of machine learning.
The strategy shift shows Qualcomm’s sense of urgency around machine learning, which has typically required powerful servers to understand speech and sensor readings. It also reflects the chipmaker’s plans, which it elaborated on Thursday when acquired Dutch machine learning start-up Scyfer.
To bring intelligence to everyday gadgets, other companies are gunning for custom silicon. Last year, Intel bought vision chipmaker Movidius to enable intelligent security cameras and drones, while start-ups like ThinCI are cobbling together silicon engines for self-driving cars. Microsoft is customizing chips so that its HoloLens goggles can analyze what users have in their field of vision.
For years, Qualcomm teased plans of releasing silicon that resemble in a limited way how the human brain processes information. But last year, it appeared to shelve its neuromorphic chips in a pivot to software tools that make the most of conventional computing cores.
The software it released last year, called the Neural Processing Engine, carefully curates machine learning code that understands speech and translates text. It finds the right CPU, GPU, and DSP cores inside Qualcomm’s chips to execute tasks as fast and efficiently as possible.
“Qualcomm’s solutions already have the power, thermal, and processing efficiency to run powerful AI algorithms on the actual device,” Grob said in the Thursday blog post. “The diversity in architecture is essential and you can’t rely on just one type of engine for all workloads.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joon Ian Wong / Quartz:
Profile of China’s Bitmain, which is a major player in bitcoin mining rig market, controls 29% of Bitcoin hash rate, and is entering deep learning ASIC market
China’s Bitmain dominates bitcoin mining. Now it wants to cash in on artificial intelligence
https://qz.com/1053799/chinas-bitmain-dominates-bitcoin-mining-now-it-wants-to-cash-in-on-artificial-intelligence/
Two years ago, a Chinese chip-design expert named Micree Zhan was reading China’s seminal science-fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, while wrestling with how to create a new processor. He had already designed custom chips for the company he co-founded, Bitmain, that had made it into the world’s leading bitcoin miner, allowing it to dominate the new, hyper-competitive industry of unearthing bitcoins. Now he needed a chip that could launch Bitmain onto a new trajectory, one that would help it master a world-altering technology called deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence.
Bitmain’s newest product, the Sophon, may or may not take over deep learning.
he Sophon unit will include Bitmain’s first piece of bespoke silicon for a revolutionary AI technology
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft shares more details about Project Brainwave, a real-time AI platform running on FPGAs — Microsoft is sharing more details about its plans for bringing its deep-learning platform to customizable chips — a step toward making Azure an ‘AI cloud.’ — On August 22, Microsoft unveiled …
Microsoft shows off Brainwave ‘real-time AI’ platform on FPGAs
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-shows-off-brainwave-real-time-ai-platform-on-fpgas/
Microsoft is sharing more details about its plans for bringing its deep-learning platform to customizable chips — a step toward making Azure an ‘AI cloud.’
Brainwave consists of a high-performance distristributed system architecture; a hardware deep-neural network engine running on customizable chips known as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs); and a compiler and runtime for deployment of trained models, according to today’s Microsoft Research blog post.
Brainwave is a deep-learning platform running on FPGA-based Hardware Microservices, according to a Microsoft presentation on its configurable-cloud plans from 2016. That presentation mentions “Hardware Acceleration as a Service” across datacenters or the Internet. Brainwave distributes neural-network models across as many FPGAs as needed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Salvador Rodriguez / Reuters:
Google says it will announce specs for Titan, a security chip that scans cloud hardware for evidence of tampering, on Thursday
Google touts Titan security chip to market cloud services
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-titan-idUSKCN1B22D6
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Does Your Machine Actually Learn?
http://www.securityweek.com/what-does-your-machine-actually-learn
Machine Learning, or Artificial Intelligence as it is sadly erroneously being marketed as, is all the rage right now. We are being promised a brand new emerging world where digital minions jump at our every whim to fulfil our dreams and wishes. It even promises to do away with pesky employees and their meat body demands and expectations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
El Reg gets schooled on why SSDs will NOT kill off the trusty hard drive
Shirts will be lost!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/24/ssds_will_not_kill_off_hdds/
Interview Some commentators think saying SSDs will kill off disk drives is wrong. Here is an exchange El Reg had with a storage media industry insider who wished to remain anonymous
Commentator: I read your article about SSD replacing HDD and I think you completely underestimate the challenges of increasing NAND capacity to meet the world’s storage needs.
El Reg: Why?
Commentator: In 2015, the NAND industry produced ~60EB of NAND. 75 per cent of that wasn’t used for computing; it was instead targeted towards phones, tablets, thumbdrives/SD cards, etc. Only about 15EB was used for compute.
In the same year, the HDD industry produced 550+EB.
El Reg: OK but more flash is being made.
Commentator: Every estimate I’ve seen suggests that the total amount of data produced and the total amount necessary to be stored are increasing exponentially. Intel keeps quoting 44ZB of data produced annually by 2020, although obviously not all of that will need to be stored. The numbers I’ve seen suggest total market storage demand of about 3ZB by 2020.
El Reg: 3D NAND is increasing NAND’s capacity growth rate.
Commentator: The NAND industry is going to use 3D to try to get closer and closer to that 40 per cent density CAGR that they had before they started hitting limits on planar. But 40 per cent CAGR on 60EB in 2015 is ~320EB by 2020 – not even half what HDD vendors were putting on the market in 2015. They’d need 10X that level of output to reach 3ZB.
El Reg: But they could build more fabs.
Commentator: And what happens if they [do] spend a few hundred billion dollars to build out all the fabs they need to produce 3ZB of NAND annually? Prices crater and they lose their shirts.
El Reg: So what do you think will happen?
Commentator: [I'm] bullish on SSDs, as SSDs can do things with performance and latency that HDDs cannot. But I’m also bullish on HDD, because HDD can do things that SSD cannot – store large amounts of colder data cheaply.
This is an error I see frequently. Yes, SSDs can actually achieve higher storage density than HDD. But they have fundamental economic problems trying to scale production to the level needed to satisfy the demand for storage, and as a result they will be primarily used in the applications that require performance, leaving the bulk data storage, coldish storage, and archival to HDD, which HDD still does better than tape.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows Cloud Microsoft Network Linux
Microsoft .NET Core 2.0 For Linux Released; Redhat Will Bundle Microsoft’s .NET
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/08/23/2046234/microsoft-net-core-20-for-linux-released-redhat-will-bundle-microsofts-net
Microsoft recently released Visual Studio 15.3 for Windows and Visual Studio 7.1 for Mac with .NET core 2.0. In addition to porting Microsoft Code and SQL Server to Linux, they have ported .NET. Redhat will bundle .NET in their software offerings instead of relying on Mono.
Red Hat adds Microsoft’s .NET Core 2.0 to its Linux and cloud offerings
http://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-adds-microsofts-net-core-2-0-to-its-linux-and-cloud-offerings/
The latest version of Microsoft’s open-source .NET Core platform will be available soon across Red Hat’s Linux and open hybrid cloud offerings.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open source professionals are more in demand than ever
http://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-professionals-are-more-in-demand-than-ever/
Dice and The Linux Foundation’s 2017 Open Source Jobs Report reveals Linux and open-source jobs are hotter than ever.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Github now10 years old
GitHub is known as a service where many source software is stored and distributed. At the beginning of next year, GitHub is already 10 years old.
According to statistics, GitHub open code projects have been encoded in over 300 different languages. Last year, the exact figure was 316. Clearly, the highest number is encoded with Javascript, their number is already over 1.6 million.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6723&via=n&datum=2017-08-24_14:38:34&mottagare=31202
Tomi Engdahl says:
World’s biggest external hard disk
WD has 20 terabytes hard disk.
16 terabyte version costs 640 Euros.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6721&via=n&datum=2017-08-24_14:38:34&mottagare=31202
Tomi Engdahl says:
SUSE pledges endless love for btrfs, says Red Hat’s dumping irrelevant
Also hints at crypto and update tech to make it handy for updating Linux on IoT devices
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/25/suse_btrfs_defence/
SUSE has decided to let the world it has no plans to step away from the btrfs filesystem and plans to make it even better.
The company’s public display of affection comes after Red Hat decided not to fully support the filesystem in its own Linux.
Losing a place in one of the big three Linux distros isn’t a good look for any package even if, as was the case with this decision, Red Hat was never a big contributor or fan of btrfs.
SUSE is a big contributor and in its post argues that Red Hat’s tepid interest in the filesystem means its decision makes little or no difference to btrfs’ future.
Hence the statement that “SUSE is committed to btrfs as the default filesystem for SUSE Linux Enterprise, and beyond.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Node.js Forked Again Over Complaints of Unresponsive Leadership
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/08/24/1811217/nodejs-forked-again-over-complaints-of-unresponsive-leadership?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
The codebase for popular Node.js JavaScript runtime has been forked again — the second time in less than three years — with a growing number of contributors charging that the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) leadership is ignoring repeated violations of the project’s code of conduct. The new project, called Ayo will be managed under an open governance model. The complaints centered around ongoing behavior of NodeSource Director of Engineering, and Node.js TSC member Rod Vagg.
Node.js Forked Again Over Complaints of Unresponsive Leadership
https://thenewstack.io/node-js-forked-complaints-repeated-harassment/
Tomi Engdahl says:
What is an SLA? Definition, best practices and FAQs
https://www.cio.com/article/2438284/outsourcing/outsourcing-sla-definitions-and-solutions.html
A service-level agreement (SLA) is a document describing the level of service expected by a customer from a supplier, laying out the metrics by which that service is measured and the remedies or penalties, if any, should the agreed-upon levels not be achieved. It is a critical component of any technology vendor contract.
SLAs are a critical component of any technology vendor contract. Beyond listing expectations of service type and quality, an SLA provides remedies when requirements aren’t met.
Following are answers to common questions about SLAs and tips on how your organzation can craft effective SLAs with your vendors and partners.
A service-level agreement (SLA) is simply a document describing the level of service expected by a customer from a supplier, laying out the metrics by which that service is measured, and the remedies or penalties, if any, should the agreed-upon levels not be achieved. Usually, SLAs are between companies and external suppliers, but they may also be between two departments within a company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC sales to fall and fall and fall and fall and fall for the next five years
Surfaces, iPad Pro and their ilk will do okay, bad news for all other form factors
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/25/idc_pc_sales_forecast_2016_2021/
Analyst firm IDC has issued a forecast for PC sales from 2016 to 2021, and the news is bad: shipments slipping from 2016′s 435.1 million units to 398.3 million in 2021, for five-year compound annual growth rate of -1.7 per cent.
“Shipments could pick up if accelerators like economic conditions, adoption of gaming, VR, and Windows 10 speed up,” says the veep for IDC’s Worldwide Personal Computing Device Tracker Loren Loverde,” but he adds “even in the best case, overall growth would likely remain limited.”
The only real ray of sunshine for vendors and channel is what IDC calls a “detachable tablet”, devices like the iPad Pro or Surface Pro that can be bought as a standalone tablet but also come with a first-party keyboard. Such devices are the only type of PC that will grow more than one per cent in the next five years
even in a good quarter the world’s most populous nation only buys about 2.1 million machines. So much for the developing world riding to the rescue.
Other bright spots IDC thinks will emerge include ultraslim laptops, while the firm expects that commercial PC sales will start to grow again in 2019.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Zack Whittaker / ZDNet:
Node.js forks again after a third of technical steering committee members quit over failure to remove a committee member for allegedly violating code of conduct
After governance breakdown, Node.js leaders fight for its survival
http://www.zdnet.com/article/after-governance-breakdown-node-js-leaders-fight-for-its-survival/
The tumultuous events this week in the Node.js community were a long time coming. Insiders tell ZDNet how the community is trying to repair — and prepare for what’s to come.
After years of battling a string of systematic failures of governance and leadership, the Node.js community, one of the largest collectives of software developers on the internet, reached a breaking point.
Node.js steers the ship for the powerful open-source web technology. It’s relied on by dozens of Fortune 500 companies, like Microsoft, Netflix, and PayPal, for their critical infrastructure and core operations.
Its stable governance isn’t just necessary for the businesses that rely on it, but also the core community that develops and advanced the widely-used technology.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Darkwood Creators Share Game on The Pirate Bay, For Those Who Can’t Pay
By Ernesto on August 26, 2017
https://torrentfreak.com/darkwood-creators-share-game-on-the-pirate-bay-for-those-who-cant-pay-170826/
Acid Wizard Studio, the creators of the popular Darkwood game, have shared a copy on The Pirate Bay. The developers want to help out people who don’t have the financial means to buy a legal copy of the game and also prevent them from going to unauthorized key sharing sites.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elon Musk’s Neuralink Gets $27 Million to Build Brain Computers
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-25/elon-musk-s-neuralink-gets-27-million-to-build-brain-computers
San Francisco-based company hiring engineers and scientists
Brain-machine interface hopes to connect humans with computers
Neuralink Corp., the startup co-founded by billionaire Elon Musk, has taken steps to sell as much as $100 million in stock to fund the development of technology that connects human brains with computers.
The San Francisco-based company has already gotten $27 million in funding, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk said via Twitter on Friday that Neuralink isn’t seeking outside investors. A spokesman didn’t respond to questions about the source of the funds.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Asus unveils cryptocurrency mining motherboard that supports 19 GPUs
A motherboard for serious cryptocurrency miners.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/asus-unveils-cryptocurrency-mining-motherboard-that-supports-19-gpus/
Want more PCIe slots on your motherboard so you can put more GPUs to work mining Bitcoins for you? Asus has unveiled just the board for you — the B250 Mining Expert.
There are quite a few cryptocurrency mining motherboards already out there — such as the ASRock H110 Pro BTC+ which is equipped with 13 PCIe slots — but Asus has raised the bar substantially with a motherboard that has 18 PCIe 3.0 x1 slots along with a physical 3.0 x16 slot.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Game You Control With Your Mind
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/08/27/2015242/a-game-you-control-with-your-mind?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
A startup recently demoed their prototype for a VR headset using sensors that read brain waves. An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times:
There is no joystick or game pad. You must use your thoughts. You turn toward a ball on the floor, and your brain sends a command to pick it up. With another thought, you send the ball crashing into a mirror, breaking the glass and revealing a few numbers scribbled on a wall. You mentally type those numbers into a large keypad by the door. And you are out. Designed by Neurable, a small start-up founded by Ramses Alcaide, an electrical engineer and neuroscientist, the game offers what you might call a computer mouse for the mind, a way of selecting items in a virtual world with your thoughts…
The New York Times
A Game You Can Control With Your Mind
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/27/technology/thought-control-virtual-reality.html
A number of companies are working on ways to control machines simply with a thought. But they are likely to be met with skepticism.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Open Invitation To Valve, Nintendo and Others To Join Xbox One and PC Crossplay
https://games.slashdot.org/story/17/08/29/1255226/microsofts-open-invitation-to-valve-nintendo-and-others-to-join-xbox-one-and-pc-crossplay
Mike Ybarra, vice president of Xbox, told VG247 that it’s happy to talk to the likes of Valve and Nintendo when it comes to getting multiplayer games working across multiple platforms, not just between Xbox One and Windows. “It’s more about gamer choice, more about making an IP on our platform last longer. I don’t care about where they play, I just want people to have fun playing games because that’s just better for the industry,” said Ybarra.
Microsoft’s open invitation to Valve, Nintendo and others to join Xbox One and PC crossplay
https://www.vg247.com/2017/08/29/microsofts-open-invitation-to-valve-nintendo-and-others-to-join-xbox-one-and-pc-crossplay/
Microsoft has said it’s ready to have a “conversation” with any development team that wants to feature crossplay support on consoles and PC.
“The demands of consumers and developers have changed,” he continued. “People are like, ‘we want all of our gamers in one multiplayer pool together, playing’.
“We totally agree with that. If any developer wants to have that conversation… Valve is right down the street from us, Nintendo is too – they’re like a block from us. We’re having these discussions as developers come up, and we’re completely open to that.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jeremy C. Owens / MarketWatch:
Western Digital buys assets of cloud storage firm Upthere after leading a $77M round in the company last year
Western Digital acquires startup UpThere for cloud storage
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/western-digital-acquires-startup-upthere-for-cloud-storage-2017-08-28
Western Digital Corp. WDC, -0.54% announced Monday afternoon that it has acquired the assets of startup Upthere, an app-based cloud-storage offering meant to challenge services like Dropbox. Terms of the deal were not announced. Western Digital, known for storage hardware, will incorporate the Upthere services into its consumer offerings
Natalie Gagliordi / ZDNet:
Western Digital plans to buy hybrid flash storage firm Tegile Systems, which has raised $178M with last round led by Western Digital, adding 1,700+ customers
Western Digital buys flash storage company Tegile Systems
Financial terms were not disclosed.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/western-digital-buys-flash-storage-company-tegile-systems/
Western Digital just announced that it plans to buy flash storage vendor Tegile Systems. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2012, Tegile makes hybrid flash storage arrays for virtualized server and virtual desktop environments, and these days is known for its IntelliFlash product series.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Daniel Rubino / Windows Central:
Microsoft says Steam VR, Minecraft, and Halo are coming to Windows Mixed Reality, provides more details about upcoming hardware for the holiday season
Microsoft Mixed Reality to get support for SteamVR, Minecraft and Halo starting this holiday season
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-mixed-reality-steamvr-minecraft-halo
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ian Cutress / AnandTech:
Intel unveils Xeon-W CPUs for workstations, with up to 18 cores and peak turbo clock speed of 4.5GHz coming in Q4
Intel Launches Xeon-W CPUs for Workstations: Skylake-SP & ECC for LGA2066
by Ian Cutress on August 29, 2017 11:00 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11775/intel-launches-xeon-w-cpus-for-workstations
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Memory Prices Are Heating Up
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1332200&
The issue of increasing memory prices is more complicated than many people think.
DRAM and NAND prices are going up and projected to rise further, according to market analysts. Many people perceive the current memory market situation as a temporary imbalance between supply and demand. Or, they expect the market to settle when the manufacturing of 3D NAND flash reaches maturity. However, In case of DRAM market, no one knows when DRAM supplies will improve.
Observing the demand, although some market segments are growing, there are no killer applications or booming market segments. Therefore, the problem originates from the supply side.
According to Micron, DRAM bit growth is expected to be 15 to 20 percent in 2017 (noted below), the lowest bit growth in the last 20 years. Such small bit growth comes from DRAM scaling limitations. There has not been any news regarding DRAM scaling for a while.
When bit growth is below 45 percent, it is a seller market. Thus, the DRAM oligopoly, slow bit growth, and sluggish fab expansion results in a long-term, tight supply. Ultimately, DRAM prices could increase without any improvements in supply.
There is extreme competition in the NAND market. Based on expectations that 3D NAND will significantly improve productivity, all NAND vendors invested billions of dollars in 3D NAND manufacturing. Therefore, oversupply was expected a while ago. However, this expectation proved false. 3D NAND had been more difficult to fabricate than previously thought. Currently, a few NAND vendors are struggling to ship 3D NAND.
As discussed, high memory prices are not simply due to the imbalance of supply and demand anymore. It will be very difficult to see a cool down of memory prices from now on, because such high memory prices come from scaling limitations of memory devices. Ironically, memory vendors are making big money based on these memory scaling limitations. From the top five semiconductor ranking, three of them are memory vendors in the first half of 2017. SK Hynix and Micro, for example, heavily depend on DRAM because 75 percent and 65 percent of their revenue comes from the DRAM market, respectively.
For the time being, buyers could control the memory price and memory products have been disregarded as commodity. Now, it is a golden age for memory vendors and high memory prices will become a burden for buyers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Neurable Wants to Let You Control Any Device With Your Mind
https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/neurable-wants-let-you-control-any-device-your-mind/46156199157357?ADTRK=UBM&elq_mid=788&elq_cid=876648
Brain-controlled VR games are just a start. If startup Neurable has its way, controlling devices with your mind will be the next frontier in everything from home computers to medical devices, robots, and automobiles.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Old display connectors disappear
At one time, monitors had more connections at the back or bottom. There was often an old VGA connection, a DVI connection, a DisplayPort connection, and several HDMI connections. Samsung now shows the model with its new professional display. They have only one type of connectivity, type C USB.
Specifically, the USBC is not the only interface of Samsung’s newmonitor monitors. They also feature a DP linking interface that allows multiple display DisplayPort signals to be chained to different screens.
However, physically different connectors will disappear because the USB-C can support different protocols.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6744&via=n&datum=2017-08-29_15:18:07&mottagare=31202
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel ME controller chip has secret kill switch
Researchers find undocumented accommodation for government customers
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/29/intel_management_engine_can_be_disabled/
Security researchers at Moscow-based Positive Technologies have identified an undocumented configuration setting that disables Intel Management Engine 11, a CPU control mechanism that has been described as a security risk.
Intel’s ME consists of a microcontroller that works with the Platform Controller Hub chip, in conjunction with integrated peripherals. It handles much of the data travelling between the processor and external devices, and thus has access to most of the data on the host computer.
If compromised, it becomes a backdoor, giving an attacker control over the affected device.
That possibility set off alarms in May, with the disclosure of a vulnerability in Intel’s Active Management Technology, a firmware application that runs on the Intel ME.
The revelation prompted calls for a way to disable the poorly understood hardware. At the time, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a security hazard. The tech advocacy group demanded a way to disable “the undocumented master controller inside our Intel chips” and details about how the technology works.
An unofficial workaround called ME Cleaner can partially hobble the technology, but cannot fully eliminate it.
On Monday, Positive Technologies researchers Dmitry Sklyarov, Mark Ermolov, and Maxim Goryachy said they had found a way to turn off the Intel ME by setting the undocumented HAP bit to 1 in a configuration file.
HAP stands for high assurance platform. It’s an IT security framework developed by the US National Security Agency
Disabling Intel ME 11 via undocumented mode
http://blog.ptsecurity.com/2017/08/disabling-intel-me.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
16 Views of Hot Chips ‘17
Mainframes live, and they still run Cobol
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332192&page_number=14
Hot Chips ended with a traditional session on big iron server processors. It included the usual x86 rivalry where Intel described the Skylake chips it announced in July and AMD discussed its Epyc detailed in June.
The new entrant was Qualcomm, which gave first details of the custom ARM core in its Centriq. But details of its L3 cache size, frequency, die size and performance will not come until a launch later this year.
IBM gave what was undoubtedly the most retro talk of the event, describing the chips inside its z14 mainframe (below) announced in July.
It packs six 14nm, 696mm2 CP chips in a drawer, each with ten cores and 128 MBytes of shared L3 cache. They link to a similar size and process system controller with 672 MBytes L4 cache.
And the systems remain relevant. “When you run a credit card to pay for dinner tonight or when you bought airline tickets to get here, the transactions likely ran on a mainframe,” said Christian Jacobi, chief architect of the z14’s processors and caches.
The transactions were likely programmed in Cobol, too, he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How I replicated an $86 million project in 57 lines of code
When an experiment with existing open source technology does a “good enough” job
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-i-replicated-an-86-million-project-in-57-lines-of-code-277031330ee9
Victoria Police is the primary law enforcement agency of Victoria, Australia. With over 16,000 vehicles stolen in Victoria this past year — at a cost of about $170 million — the police department is experimenting with a variety of technology-driven solutions to crackdown on car theft.
To help prevent fraudulent sales of stolen vehicles, there is already a VicRoads web-based service for checking the status of vehicle registrations. The department has also invested in a stationary license plate scanner — a fixed tripod camera which scans passing traffic to automatically identify stolen vehicles.
Don’t ask me why, but one afternoon I had the desire to prototype a vehicle-mounted license plate scanner that would automatically notify you if a vehicle had been stolen or was unregistered. Understanding that these individual components existed, I wondered how difficult it would be to wire them together.
But it was after a bit of googling that I discovered Victoria Police had recently undergone a trial of a similar device, and the estimated cost of roll out was somewhere in the vicinity of $86,000,000. One astute commenter pointed out that the $86M cost to fit out 220 vehicles comes in at a rather thirsty $390,909 per vehicle.
Surely we can do a bit better than that.
The Success Criteria
Before getting started, I outlined a few key requirements for product design.
The image processing must be performed locally
Streaming live video to a central processing warehouse seemed the least efficient approach to solving this problem. Besides the whopping bill for data traffic, you’re also introducing network latency into a process which may already be quite slow.
Although a centralized machine learning algorithm is only going to get more accurate over time, I wanted to learn if an local on-device implementation would be “good enough”.
It must work with low quality images
Since I don’t have a Raspberry Pi camera or USB webcam, so I’ll be using dashcam footage — it’s readily available and an ideal source of sample data.
It needs to be built using open source technology
Solution
At a high level, my solution takes an image from a dashcam video, pumps it through an open source license plate recognition system installed locally on the device, queries the registration check service, and then returns the results for display.
The data returned to the device installed in the law enforcement vehicle includes the vehicles make and model (to verify if only the plates have been stolen), the registration status, and notification if the vehicle is reported stolen.
If that sounds rather simple, it’s because it really is. For example, the image processing can all be handled by the openalpr library.
A Minor Caveat
Public access to the VicRoads APIs is not available, so license plate checks occur via web scraping for this prototype. While generally frowned upon — this is a proof of concept and I’m not slamming anyone’s servers.
Results
I must say I was pleasantly surprised.
I expected the open source license plate recognition to be pretty rubbish. Additionally, the image recognition algorithms are probably not optimised for Australian license plates.
The solution was able to recognise license plates in a wide field of view.
As you can see in the above two images, processing the image a couple of frames later jumped from a confidence rating of 87% to a hair over 91%.
The $86,000,000 Question
To be fair, I have absolutely no clue what the $86M figure includes — nor can I speak to the accuracy of an open source tool with no localized training vs. the pilot BlueNet system.
I would expect part of that budget includes the replacement of several legacy databases and software applications to support the high frequency, low latency querying of license plates several times per second, per vehicle.
On the other hand, the cost of ~$391k per vehicle seems pretty rich
Future Applications
While it’s easy to get caught up in the Orwellian nature of an “always on” network of license plate snitchers, there are many positive applications of this technology.
Using open source technology and existing components, it seems possible to offer a solution that provides a much higher rate of return — for an investment much less than $86M.
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/taitems/7c56e6e1b51906f9158281bda3839545/raw/e61cf55fdcc7443f34d198bc08be13dca33b1a70/plate-snitch.js
Tomi Engdahl says:
Coders In Wealthy and Developing Countries Lean on Different Programming Languages
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/08/30/194252/coders-in-wealthy-and-developing-countries-lean-on-different-programming-languages?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
To be sure, programmers everywhere tend to build things with the same tools, which makes sense because software is a global industry. The first is in data science, which tends to employ the programming languages Python and R. “Python is visited about twice as often in high-income countries as in the rest of the world, and R about three times as much,” Robinson writes. “We might also notice that among the smaller tags, many of the greatest shifts are in scientific Python and R packages such as pandas, numpy, matplotlib and ggplot2.
C and C++ use is similarly skewed toward wealthy countries. This is likely for a similar reason. These are languages that are pushed in American universities
Coders In Wealthy and Developing Countries Lean on Different Programming Languages
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/neekm8/coders-in-wealthy-and-developing-countries-lean-on-different-programming-languages
This week, Stack Overflow data scientist David Robinson published an interesting observation: There exists a small but meaningful divide between the programming technologies used in wealthy countries and those used in developing countries. To be sure, programmers everywhere tend to build things with the same tools, which makes sense because software is a global industry. In my own engineering side hustles I regularly work for and with people all over the world. But there are some curious exceptions.
The first is in data science, which tends to employ the programming languages Python and R.
“Python is visited about twice as often in high-income countries as in the rest of the world, and R about three times as much,” Robinson writes.
C and C++ use is similarly skewed toward wealthy countries.
And then there’s PHP.
It’s a PHP framework. PHP is itself skewed toward lower-income countries, but CodeIgniter is deep. “Further examination shows it is especially heavily visited in South/Southeast Asia (particularly India, Indonesia, Pakistan and the Philippines) while it has very little traffic from the US and Europe,” Robinson suggests. “It’s possible that CodeIgniter is a common choice for outsourcing firms building websites.”
I’m not sure there’s a profound explanation for these disparities.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Esb is dead – live a new esb!
Micro services are increasingly being seen as a substitute for monolithic service bus solutions, but rumors about the final death of esb may still be premature.
Enterprise service bus or more esb is the enterprise service bus. At its best, it can connect anything to anything.
The service bus is a loosely defined collection of products and technologies whereby enterprise information systems can be exchanged between each other. Through the service bus, different software and services that work on different ages and on different platforms can be communicated, worked together and produced communal information – at least in principle.
Many people see the benefits of the esb model especially in a large organization
Ville-Matti Toivonen, Futurice’s Technology Director, formulates this in a slightly different way:
“In an extremely controlled environment where the role and responsibility of esb is well-focused, it can be a centralized way of making selected integrations such as file transfers or mainframe invitations.”
Esb is not a single product or standard, so its definition is ambiguous. There are both commercial products such as IBM Integration Bus, Microsoft Biztalk and Oracle Service Bus. On the other hand, open source solutions such as Apache’s ServiceMix and WSO2 are also available. The characteristics of the products are different.
Instead of being aware of and relying on addictive services, service-oriented architecture like esb is based on Loose Coupling. Every service is independent and their development, decommissioning, or exchange does not affect the other services used.
Esb-products are, however, seen today as heavy and monolithic. Particularly the large number of configurations required and the vulnerability of a centralized solution are considered problematic: if the ESB crashes, the whole business will be paralyzed at one go.
In addition, the products are often based on decades of development work, so they have a lot of historic ballast on their shoulders.
“The introduction of Esb solutions did not really make IT systems architecture service-oriented. Architectural membranes esb appear as a beautiful simple box through which connections go. In reality, only a big bottleneck for integration is created, “Ville-Matti Toivonen says.
“In addition to everything else, the esbs are old-fashioned development techniques, do not support the development of advanced services on new platforms and are surprisingly often unstable and weak in performance.”
More and more, as an alternative to Esb, a popular microcomputer architecture is seen: simple, just one thing to do designed applications that communicate with well documented, open, and easy-to-use interfaces.
Particularly important are the representational state transfers, which are increasingly used by cloud applications to communicate with each other.
Karri Lehtinen , Senior Vice President, Cloud Computing and Integration Services, believes that Saas-based cloud-based software (as-a-service) will see more directly interconnected applications.
“The need for integration, on the other hand, is decreasing, but with the increasing use of cloud services, the number of applications in the cloud is increasing. Connecting cloud services to a functioning whole requires experience, understanding and the right tools. Managing and controlling the whole is becoming increasingly important, “says Lehtinen.
“At present, solutions that support the whole lifecycle management of aids from design to implementation and publishing are of interest to customers, both in the private and public sectors,”
The practical implementation of interfaces is typically rest techniques. Lehtinen sees many benefits.
“Ease of use, simplicity, and low learning thresholds have made Rest Bonds popular. Developers can easily understand both interface usage and frequently used json format. ”
According to Lehtinen, compared to the soap interfaces used in many ESB integrations, rest techniques have risen to popularity because of their straightforwardness.
“Json format has direct support for example in javascript. It’s a simple format and therefore easy to adopt and use, “explains Lehtinen.
“Previous, soap-based services use the xml standard, which is for many developers a guest except for the very basics. The wsdl used as a description language for the soap services is also complicated, and its use requires familiarization. ”
Esb’s deployment projects are typically seen as overwhelming jobs, while in the micro service model, every service with interfaces is developed as a separate, precise set of entities. When one service comes into trouble, others may not be disturbed. Locating and solving the problem is easier.
This enhances the ability to tolerate defects and correctly implemented the service tolerance of external interference, such as denial of service attacks.
Micro services do not, however, automatically eliminate complexity: the more components and services that are in use and the more messages communicating with each other, the more complex the entity is still to perceive and manage. Although a single microcomputer is simple and clear, it resembles a large number of them as a graph, often very similar to a snake’s nest as a traditional integration model.
“Although old solutions are about to be discussed for a long time, monolithic products and platforms will disappear in the future. They are fragmented into distinctly well-defined services that will always gather the necessary business logic dynamically and gradually. These micro services can be implemented with any technology, apart from each other. Infrastructure is a massive cloud, “says
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/esb-on-kuollut-elakoon-uusi-esb-6671493
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finnish teachers do not like coding
Finnish teachers’ attitudes to teaching digital skills are worse than in China. In particular, attitudes towards the teaching of coding skills are significantly more negative than China, it is clear from a new comparative study.
The joint research project carried out by the University of Pori studied the differences between the attitudes of elementary school teachers to the teaching of future IT and working life skills between Finland and China, especially with regard to coding.
There were hardly any differences in the programming skills of Finnish and Chinese teachers – in both countries teachers’ programming skills were on average fairly low. In addition, some of the teachers expressed the coding as being a completely strange area.
“This is the challenge of the Finnish school system, which must be reacted quickly”, says Multisilta .
According to the study, Chinese teachers are more positive about technology turnout and experienced IT skills to benefit students both in teaching and later in working life. In addition, the attitudes of Chinese teachers to teaching prospective students as part of primary school education are more positive than Finnish teachers.
Source: https://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2017/08/31/suomalaisopettajat-eivat-tykkaa-koodaamisesta/
Tomi Engdahl says:
2017 Open Source Jobs Report Available For Downloa
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/open-source-jobs-report-2017/
Key Findings
89% of hiring managers find it difficult to find talent
47% of employers are willing to pay for professional certifications, up from 33% in 2016
Positions they are looking for:
73% – Developers
60% – DevOps
53% – SysAdmins
Employers are seeking expertise in:
70% – Cloud
67% – Web Technologies
65% – Linux
Tomi Engdahl says:
Peter Bright / Ars Technica:
Microsoft was an early player in AR, thanks to HoloLens, but is being superseded by Apple and Google, who focus on adding AR to software over expensive hardware
Microsoft was leading the world in AR; now it’s at risk of being left behind
HoloLens was inspirational, but it’s ARKit and ARCore that are going to win developers.
Peter Bright – Aug 29, 2017 7:19 pm UTC
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/microsoft-was-leading-the-world-in-ar-now-its-at-risk-of-being-left-behind/
Tomi Engdahl says:
You Can Store an Insane Amount on SanDisk’s 400GB MicroSD Card
https://www.wired.com/story/400gb-microsd-card-sandisk
The nice thing about being a digital hoarder is that all of your stuff doesn’t accumulate in scattered piles around your living room. The downside? There’s never enough space. And while SanDisk’s new 400GB microSD card may still not satiate the most extreme storage hounds, good lord is that a lot of room in a teeny tiny package.
It’s fast, too, with transfer speeds that Western Digital—which owns SanDisk—claims max out at 100MB/s.
That translates to about 1,200 photos per minute. And it’s rated for full 1080p video
And at $250, it’s actually not an unreasonable purchase.
What could you possibly fill it with?! Well, for starters:
40 hours of 1080p home video
105 copies of The Lion King in HD
62 copies of Sports Night: Season 1 in SD
6,825 copies of Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” (video)
54,794 copies of Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” (mp3)
250,000 GIFs of Minions laughing in the snow
4,683 episodes of the Comedy Bang Bang podcast (they’ve made 506 so far)
70,633 copies of the King James Bible
551,724 copies of The Bible for Dummies®, Mini Edition
67,796 photos taken with a Samsung Galaxy S7
80,000,000 New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles
Almost two-thirds of the entire GeoCities archive
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sysadmin 101: Ticketing
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/sysadmin-101-ticketing?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
Why Tickets Are Important
Like documentation, tickets are one of those important things in a mature organization that some administrators think are unnecessary or even a waste of time. A ticketing system is important no matter the size of your organization. In a large organization, you have a large volume of tasks you need to keep track of distributed among a group of people. In a small organization, you often have one person taking on many roles. This leads me to the first reason why tickets are important.
Tickets Ensure That Tasks Aren’t Forgotten
Tickets Make Sure the Task Is Done Right
Tickets Help You Prioritize Tasks
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ocado Technology’s Kubermesh
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/ocado-technologys-kubermesh?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
Instead of relying on servers concentrated in one large data center, the new Kubermesh is designed to simplify data-center architectures for smart factories by elegantly and cost effectively leveraging a distributed network of computing nodes spread across the enterprise. Developed by Ocado Technology, a division of Ocado (the world’s largest online-only supermarket), the Kubermesh package uses container-based technology and the Kubernetes system to implement an on-premises private cloud architecture in which desktop computers can be configured as nodes supporting the compute or storage functionality typically delivered by high-performance servers in a data center.
Ocado Technology observes that Kubermesh-based nodes are fault-tolerant, secure, flexible and designed to process the generous amounts of real-time data generated in smart factories.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SanDisk’s little microSD card sucks up 400GB
iPhone charging and backup base unit also on cards
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/31/sandisk_microcard/
WDC has the highest-capacity microSDXC card at 400GB – pumping up mobile device storage space – and has launched a natty little iPhone charger that backs up the phone’s data.
The SanDisk Ultra Plus microSDXC UHS-I card comes in a range of capacities, from 16GB through 32, 64, 128, 200, and 256 to 400GB. The read speed is up to 100MB/sec.
Tomi Engdahl says:
User thanked IT department for fast new server, but it had never left its box
Head of IT then used happy user’s praise to score a bigger budget
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/01/on_call/
Welcome again to On-Call, The Register’s Friday frolic through readers’ memories of jobs that turned into oddities.
Fixing the machine was easy – a malware scan found over a thousand pieces of nastyware. Colin deleted them, cleaned out temp files, defragged the drive, rebooted and then headed off to his own lunch with the satisfaction of a job well done.
Upon his return the marketing veep improved Colin’s mood further, as he’d sent an email proclaiming, “That new email server is wondrous. I just logged onto my laptop and my email client has never been faster. Will mention this at the next Ops meeting. Well done!”
CC’ed on that mail was Colin’s boss, the veep of finance, who “showed up, printed email in hand, glanced into the server room, saw the server still in the box and quizzically raised one eyebrow.”
Colin explained the laptop fix and said he’d have a chat with the marketing veep to let him know the fix was entirely on the client side.
But Colin’s boss was having none of that plan.
“Don’t send that mail,” he said. “I’m presenting for a bigger IT budget at that Ops meeting. Say nothing.”
Colin followed instructions and got to work configuring and installing the email server, which went online a weekend later when no-one was around to see it happen and generated no appreciative emails.
But the IT department appreciated Colin’s actions, because that Ops meeting signed off on a 15 per cent budget increase
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft’s Windows 10 Fall Creators Update will begin rollout to mainstream users worldwide starting October 17
Microsoft’s Windows 10 Fall Creators Update rollout to kick off October 17
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-windows-10-fall-creators-update-rollout-to-kick-off-october-17/
Microsoft will begin rolling out the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update on October 17. Here’s what to expect.
Microsoft officially confirmed on September 1 that its Windows 10 Fall Creators Update release will begin to roll out to mainstream users worldwide starting October 17.
Lenovo inadvertently revealed yesterday during a product launch at the IFA conference that the Fall Creators Update would arrive starting on October 17.
As has been the case for the past couple of Windows 10 releases, Microsoft doesn’t start delivering a new Windows 10 feature update the month that the build is marked as “done.” The Windows 10 Creators Update, which is also known as 1703 (for March 2017) did not start rolling out until mid-April. Its predecessor, Windows 10 Anniversary Update, a k a 1607 for July 2016, didn’t begin rolling out until August.
Tomi Engdahl says:
ReactOS is a free and open-source operating system for x86/x64 personal computers intended to be binary-compatible with computer programs and device drivers made for Windows Server 2003.
ReactOS has been noted as a potential open-source drop-in replacement for Windows and for its information on undocumented Windows APIs.
ReactOS 0.4.6 released
http://www.reactos.com/project-news/reactos-046-released
The ReactOS Project is pleased to release version 0.4.6 as a continuation of its three month cadence.
0.4.6 is a major step towards real hardware support. Several dual boot issues have been fixed and now partitions are managed in a safer way avoiding corruption of the partition list structures. ReactOS Loader can now load custom kernels and HALs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Oracle Should Cede Control of Java SE
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/09/02/0059201/why-oracle-should-cede-control-of-java-se
Now that Oracle wants to turn over leadership of enterprise Java’s (Java EE’s) development to a still-unnamed open source foundation, might the same thing happen with the standard edition of Java (Java SE) that Oracle also controls? Such a move could produce substantial benefits… Oracle said it has no plans to make such a move. But the potential fruits of a such a move are undeniable.
The case for Oracle to cede control of Java SE
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3220516/java/the-case-for-oracle-to-cede-control-of-java-se.html
Turning over the platform to an open source foundation could broaden the Java community, but don’t look for it to happen soon
Now that Oracle wants to turn over leadership of enterprise Java’s (Java EE’s) development to a still-unnamed open source foundation, might the same thing happen with the standard edition of Java (Java SE) that Oracle also controls? Such a move could produce substantial benefits. But it does not seem unlikely, at least at the moment.
Oracle said it has no plans to make such a move. But the potential fruits of a such a move are undeniable.
If Oracle steps aside, there’s more room for many others
Today, Oracle is in charge, despite involvement by others
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle finally decides to stop prolonging the inevitable, begins hardware layoffs
Pink slips are en route, say staff
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/31/oracle_stops_prolonging_inevitable_layoffs/
Oracle is laying off staff in its hardware division, The Register has learned.
Current and soon-to-be former staffers have whispered online and to El Reg that the database giant is shipping out packages of paperwork for ending their employment. The workers learned of this by receiving alerts from FedEx that the parcels, which need to be signed for, are en route for a September 1 delivery.
“One of my co-workers emailed that he received a notification from FedEx of a label created by Oracle America, Inc,” wrote one anonymous employee.
“I just checked and a label has been created for my home address. This is in the US. Looks like Friday is it for Sparc MicroElectronics.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mega VR roundup: Lots happening in the virtual and real worlds
New products, cheaper kit and company tie-ins
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/01/vr_roundup/
Every year for the past ten years has been the one when virtual reality will finally break out.
Based on the pace and number of recent announcements, it looks as though that time has finally come – well, will soon come. Probably in 2018, maybe.
Tomi Engdahl says:
That old ‘freezer trick’ to save a hard drive doesn’t work anymore
Properly backing up your data is still the first line of defense.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3035017/storage/that-old-freezer-trick-to-save-a-hard-drive-doesnt-work-anymore.html
In 2007, we listed the “freezer trick” as one of the solutions to revive a failed hard drive. Well, consider that solution as over as the last Ice Age.
Freezing a hard drive is one of those home remedies that date from the early days of computing, alongside such tried-and-true methods as blowing on a game cartridge to improve its chances of being read by a Nintendo 64. The thing is, it did work. But now, storage experts say, you stand a better chance of making the problem worse.
“No matter what that article might say, the freezer trick doesn’t work,” Scott Moyer, the president at DriveSavers Data Recovery, told PCWorld.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle staff report big layoffs across Solaris, SPARC teams
Storage products in peril, too, but Big Red declines to comment
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/04/oracle_layoffs_solaris_sparc_teams/
Soon-to-be-former Oracle staff report that the company made hundreds of layoffs last Friday, as predicted by El Reg, with workers on teams covering the Solaris operating system, SPARC silicon, tape libraries and storage products shown the door.
Oracle’s media relations agency told The Register: “We decline comment.”
Tech industry observer Simon Phipps claims “all” Solaris staff were laid off, but threads on anonymous The Layoff mention small numbers of staff being retained. Other comments mention hundreds of workers recently moved from dedicated Solaris teams to Oracle’s Linux development efforts.
Threads on The Layoff suggests that around 2,500 layoffs have been made, covering Solaris, SPARC silicon development and storage hardware, including tape libraries, with one result being that development work has ceased on the ZFS Storage Appliance. The fate of Solaris and SPARC silicon remains unclear.
Oracle’s silence on the matter is true to form, as the company seldom discusses layoffs.