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:
Data centers seen scrambling to fill IT skills gaps
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/pt/2017/02/data-centers-seen-scrambling-to-fill-it-skills-gaps.html?cmpid=enl_cim_cimdatacenternewsletter_2017-02-14
“The evolving digital world and the cloud require a change in data center strategy with different skill sets coming to prominence,” says Karsten Scherer, global analyst relations lead for TEKsystems. He sees a growing tension between traditional data centers and the mega data centers operated by service providers such as Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The latter group is either increasing facility size or adding new data center facilities.
It’s a tough world when it comes to recruiting and retaining staff. According to a study by TEKsystems, 81 percent of IT leaders say it’s difficult to find quality candidates, and almost half don’t expect to fill an IT position within the anticipated time frame. Meanwhile, only about one-third of data center managers and CIOs believe their organization have the skills in-house to address their needs. This is being made all the more acute by the changes taking place within IT. The cloud, convergence, the Internet of Things (IoT), virtualization and mobility have shifted the demands being placed upon the data center. Modern technology configurations and a reliance on external services are shifting staffing and training priorities.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Data centers without borders: What the hybrid cloud will do for the modern enterprise
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/pt/2017/02/data-centers-without-borders-what-the-hybrid-cloud-will-do-for-the-modern-enterprise.html?cmpid=enl_cim_cimdatacenternewsletter_2017-02-14
From the latest issue of FORBES magazine: A hybrid cloud strategy is the rule, not the exception. There are currently two main types of organizations making investments in the public cloud. The first is predominantly interested in public cloud because its internal IT infrastructure is not agile enough to meet its needs. More interesting though is the second type of organization, which considers the public cloud as part of its IT strategy, using it as an extension of its own data center.
These organizations understand and leverage strengths of both public and private cloud – a hybrid cloud strategy – to best benefit their business and customers. For example, the use of public cloud services allows them to spin up a project in a very short amount of time with limited complexity.
However, as those new applications mature, there comes a tipping point when running them in a public cloud will be more costly than moving them on-premise.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2017/02/13/data-centers-without-borders-hybrid-cloud-and-new-intelligence-transform-the-modern-enterprise/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Multi-Cloud Convergence Tipping Point
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/02/07/multi-cloud-convergence-tipping-point/?utm_source=internal-link&utm_medium=foot-link&utm_campaign=previous
Cloud adoption has matured to an advanced stage where enterprises are increasingly relying more on cloud infrastructures, and the industry at large is extremely bullish when it comes to cloud futures. Cisco predicts that global cloud IP traffic will almost quadruple between 2015 – 2020, reaching 14.1 zettabytes. By then, global cloud IP traffic will account for more than 92 percent of total data center traffic. This surge in cloud adoption also represents a huge shift in cloud spending by IT organizations, directly or indirectly affecting more than $1 trillion dollars in IT purchases dedicated to the cloud by 2020, according to Gartner.
Forrester predicts 2017 will be the tipping point for cloud adoption and sees a convergence of multiple clouds across the enterprise as “CIOs step up to orchestrate cloud ecosystems that connect employees, customers, partners, vendors and devices to serve rising customer expectations.”
In 2017, more than 85 percent of enterprises will commit to multi-cloud architectures that IDC describes as “encompassing a mix of public cloud services, private clouds, community clouds and hosted clouds.”
Some of its greatest benefits to organizations are:
Faster access to infrastructure and IT resources and services
Greater speed-to-market and global expansion
Business continuity and disaster recovery
Higher performance and scalability
The economies of scale of pay-per-use cloud business models are also enticing enterprises to move to the cloud, however, they have also been a major source of confusion and frustration for companies. Today, there are multiple ways to buy cloud services ̶ on-demand, pre-paid, reserved capacity, monthly enterprise agreements ̶ and this trend will accelerate in 2017.
Also, migration of those applications that are not “cloud-ready” is not a slam-dunk. This has brought about the rise of cloud migration and orchestration tools, such as open source containers (Docker, Mesosphere) and container-based migration services from leading cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
The Next Steps
Ultimately, a well-planned hybrid and multi-cloud cloud migration strategy is necessary to facilitate comprehensive assessment, migration and optimization plans to reduce cloud migration risks and costs. Your strategy should also include cloud exchanges for fast, cost-effective, direct and secure provisioning of virtualized connections to multiple cloud vendors and services to best leverage the flexibility and agility converged cloud infrastructures contribute to becoming a competitive digital business.
Tomi Engdahl says:
MariaDB Fixes Business Source License, Releases MaxScale 2.1
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/02/15/2214237/mariadb-fixes-business-source-license-releases-maxscale-21
MariaDB is releasing MaxScale 2.1, a new version of their database routing proxy, and has modified its timed-transition-to-Open-Source “Business Source License” to make it more acceptable to the Open Source community and more easily usable by other companies.
http://monty-says.blogspot.fi/2016/08/applying-business-source-licensing-bsl.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Talk of tech innovation is bullsh*t. Shut up and get the work done – says Linus Torvalds
A top life tip, there, from the Linux kernel chieftain
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/15/think_different_shut_up_and_work_harder_says_linus_torvalds/
Linus Torvalds believes the technology industry’s celebration of innovation is smug, self-congratulatory, and self-serving.
The term of art he used was more blunt: “The innovation the industry talks about so much is bullshit,” he said. “Anybody can innovate. Don’t do this big ‘think different’… screw that. It’s meaningless. Ninety-nine per cent of it is get the work done.”
“All that hype is not where the real work is,” said Torvalds. “The real work is in the details.”
Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation.
The Linux kernel is perhaps the most successful collaborative technology project of the PC era.
The project is structured so people can work independently, Torvalds explained. “We’ve been able to really modularize the code and development model so we can do a lot in parallel,” he said.
Technology plays an obvious role but process is at least as important, according to Torvalds.
“It’s a social project,” said Torvalds. “It’s about technology and the technology is what makes people able to agree on issues, because … there’s usually a fairly clear right and wrong.”
But now that Torvalds isn’t personally reviewing every change as he did 20 years ago, he relies on a social network of contributors. “It’s the social network and the trust,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 things marketers need to know about AI
AI-enabled marketing isn’t just about cute chatbots. Here’s what CMOs, CIOs and others need to know to make the most of AI in their marketing initiatives in 2017 and beyond.
http://www.cio.com/article/3168727/artificial-intelligence/10-things-marketers-need-to-know-about-ai.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kids technology overload. I blame the parents
http://www.electropages.com/2017/02/kids-technology-overload/?utm_campaign=&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=article&utm_content=Kids+technology+overload.+I+blame+the+parents
Walk round any shopping mall and you’ll see parents pushing their beloved offspring in buggies with the child totally absorbed in the computer tablet or mobile phone they are playing with.
Is this a good thing? Not according to some recent research where 2000 parents were questioned by OnePoll in a study commissioned by Discover Ferries. The overwhelming conclusion was technology is ruining family time together.
As a journalist I get scores of surveys and polls ping into my desktop. Most are about electronic industry trends but this unusual one caught my eye. Apparently 90% of those parents surveyed reckon electronic gadgets get in the way of the family spending time together.
So let me ask one question. Going back to that youngster in the buggy totally fascinated with the electronic gadget locked in their grasp, how did it get there? Did they pop into the Apple Store and lash out £500 for a phone or tablet. Of course they didn’t. It got there because the parents find it an easy way of keeping the little darling quiet while inflicting the mind-numbing tedium of shopping mall trips on them. No wonder so many youngsters get hooked on the technology habit. And it’s a life style habit started by the parents.
So back to those 90% of them whingeing about how technology spoils family time together, I blame them for starting it.
In my view what parents should be doing is first of all taking responsibility for just how much technology time their sprogs are allowed and secondly considering just how many wonderful advantages the microchip has provided younger generations during the past twenty years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kevin J. Delaney / Quartz:
Bill Gates supports taxing the use of robots to slow the spread of automation and to finance other employment
The robot that takes your job should pay taxes, says Bill Gates
https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-job-should-pay-taxes/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Breaking Away From the Vicious Vendor Audit Cycle
http://www.itmanagement.com/research/breaking-away-from-the-vicious-vendor-audit-cycle-44945?mid=6158450&lgid=3441165&mailing_id=2710927&list=it-reg&mailing=manualoffers&tfso=147487&engine_id=1&success=true&templateid=10
Vendor software and hardware audits have become so common in the enterprise IT landscape that they are beginning to be accepted as “business as usual.” In fact, almost two-thirds – 61 percent – of enterprises received a vendor audit request in the last 18 months, and 17 percent of those companies were audited three or more times in that period, according to a 2016 survey conducted by BDNA®
break away from the vicious vendor audit cycle and put an end to the madness!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Home> Community > Blogs > Brian’s Brain
Open source is still an unpredictable option
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/brians-brain/4457836/Open-source-is-still-an-unpredictable-option
Don’t misunderstand; I’m not an open source detractor. Quite the contrary; in general, I’m not only an open source user and beneficiary but also a longstanding advocate. But a pragmatic one. I don’t assume that any project whose output I leverage will be around (to any reasonable degree of robustness, far from at all) in the long term. And I certainly wouldn’t tie my ongoing business success to fickle open source projects’ fortunes. Nor, I’d strongly suggest, should you.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Embedded computing market projected to grow, but challenges remain
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/embedded-computing-market-projected-to-grow-but-challenges-remain/79ebec0fed13b1607a8a07c2549b4ba5.html
IHS Markit’s projects that the embedded computing market, currently valued at an estimated $2.54 billion in 2015, will grow for the next 5 years at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.7%, but ATCA revenues have declined.
Sales in 2017 typically depend on design wins made in 2014 and 2015 and grow at different rates for different form-factors because of varying sector exposure. Commercial communication projects, for example, have typically become “run rate” business faster than defense, civil aerospace or railway projects. System-level technologies typically reach run rate business faster than board-level business.
For system-level ATCA, for example, 2014 was a reasonable year for design wins. However, vendors report that the outcome of these wins has not materialized into the production runs originally forecast. In some cases, system vendors would offer both ATCA-based and software-based products simultaneously and the latter outsold ATCA systems by far. As a result, ATCA vendors may have to transition away from a focus on hardware and telecom platforms to a more software-centric one, for example, by investing in new product lines to enable the transition to SDN/NFV environments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 10 Option to Block Installation of Win32 Apps
http://www.securityweek.com/windows-10-option-block-installation-win32-apps
Windows 10 could soon allow users to block the installation of applications coming from other sources than the Microsoft Store, a feature that would likely help prevent the installation of malware.
The feature, which would essentially prevent users from installing Win32 applications, is said to be currently tested as part of the latest build to have been pushed to users in the Insider Preview program (which is Windows 10 build 15042).
Win32 is the core set of application programming interfaces (APIs) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems and is often referred to as the Windows API. In addition to Win32 apps, however, Windows 10 users can also install software built using Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform, or UWP.
With millions of Win32 applications available out there, it might take a while before all developers switch to the new framework, especially if users aren’t in a hurry to embrace UWP applications.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mehedi Hassan / MSPoweruser:
Windows 10 Creators Update will include a feature, disabled by default, that prevents apps that are not from the Windows Store from installing
Microsoft just added the best way of preventing installation of bloatware in Windows 10
https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-just-added-the-best-way-of-preventing-installation-of-bloatware-in-windows-10/
With the upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft is adding a brand new feature to Windows that will help prevent installation of bloatware in Windows 10. Microsoft is currently testing a new feature which will allow Windows 10 users to only install apps from the Windows Store — preventing them from installing the classic Win32 apps. Once enabled, users will see a warning whenever they try to install a Win32 app — they will get a dialog saying apps from the Windows Store helps to keep their PC “safe and reliable.”
This feature is obviously disabled by default, but users can enable it really easily if they want. I will repeat in case you didn’t understand it the first time: this feature is completely disabled by default in Windows 10.
Microsoft offers two different options for the feature: you can completely prevent installation of Win32 apps, or you can allow users to install them anyway from the dialog
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brad Linder / Liliputing:
Sony debuts Xperia Touch projector, an Android-powered computer that turns any surface into a touchscreen, coming to select countries in spring for €1499
Sony Xperia Touch projector makes any surface a multitouch computer (nifty, expensive niche product)
https://liliputing.com/2017/02/sony-xperia-touch-projector-makes-surface-multitouch-computer-nifty-expensive-niche-product.html
I can’t decide if the Sony Xperia Touch represents an exciting new product category in the personal computing space, of if it’s just an overpriced novelty. It could be both.
The Xperia Touch is basically an ultrashort throw laser projector that beams content onto a flat surface… and then uses cameras to watch you interact with that surface, turning any tabletop, desk, or wall into a sort of toucshcreen computer.
The only catch? The Sony Xperia Touch will sell for €1499 ($1591) when it launches in select countries this spring.
Sony’s crazy new projector measures about 5.6″ x 5.3″ x 2.7″ and weighs about 2.1 pounds, making it relatively easy to carry around. But the internal battery is only good for about an hour of run time
The Xperia Touch runs Google Android Nougat software
So far, those sound like the specs for a mid-range smartphone. What makes the Xperia Touch tick though, is the 100 lumen laser diode projector with a 4000:1 contrast ratio, 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, and automatic focus. It can project images between 23 and 80 inches in size.
You can use the system to run Android apps, play games, make video calls over Skype or other video services, watch videos, or even use PlayStation 4 Remote Play to stream games from a PS4 to the Xperia Touch.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD Ryzen – the Zen architecture release date, specs, price and rumours
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/amd-zen-release-date-specs-prices-rumours
Update Febraury 22, 2017: The launch of AMD’s Ryzen chips are only a little way away now – March 2, with pre-orders starting today – and so we’re starting to see more performance benchmarks leak out. The most recent has come from the Ryzen Tech Day going down in San Francisco this week.
The new Zen architecture could change the CPU landscape when it launches this year, but right now these are the best CPUs for gaming.
By offering single-thread parity with Intel’s $1,000 octa-core chip that puts the $500 Ryzen a little behind the Skylake’s i7 6700K.
AMD Ryzen release date, specifications and features: Three CPUs from the Ryzen 7 range now available to pre-order
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/new-product/pc-components/amd-zen-processor-release-date-price-specs-features-3643552/
In recent years Intel has been pulling away from AMD’s processors, with most people – including gamers – choosing the Intel-based CPUs for their machines. AMD is looking to change that in 2017, with its new Ryzen processors. Here’s everything you need to know about the new Ryzen CPUs, including specifications and prices.
AMD’s new Ryzen processors are coming in a matter of days now. Ryzen s is the official brand name for the chips which are based on the ‘Zen’ core architecture. They’re aimed at gamers and PC enthusiasts who want a high-performance CPU, and AMD reckons it’s better than Intel’s Skylake. Ryzen processors will be available for desktop PCs, laptop and servers.
What is AMD Ryzen?
AMD has been making processors for a long time and Zen is the name of the new ‘core architecture’ around which a whole family of products will be based. One of these is the newly announced Ryzen processor. This is not a single CPU, but rather a range (just like Athlon back in the day). Ryzen CPUs will be available for desktop PCs, laptops and even servers.
The x86 Zen architecture is built on a 14nm FinFET manufacturing process.
With Ryzen, AMD is claiming that an 8-core, 16-thread chip is 10 percent faster than an Intel Core i7-6900K in various benchmarks, such as Blender and Handbrake. Importantly, these tests were run with the Intel chip using its Turbo Boost speeds, while the Ryzen chip had its boost disabled.
Intel is about to launch the next-generation chip, the seventh-generation Core processors (codenamed Kaby Lake). This shouldn’t worry AMD, though, since early indications are that the Core i7-7700K is no more efficient than the 6900K in terms of performance per clock cycle: it is simply more power efficient.
Ryzen, meanwhile, is 40 percent more efficient than the Excavator chips it replaces. To be specific, it is able to process 40 percent more instructions per clock cycle – this is the ’40% More IPC’ in the slide below.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The “Zen” Core Architecture
http://www.amd.com/en-gb/innovations/software-technologies/zen-cpu
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kingston introduced at the beginning of january Las Vegas CES the world’s largest-capacity USB flash drive. The stick is suitable for two terabytes of data. Its price is also shockingly high.
Data Traveler Ultimate GT
One terabyte sticks sold in special introductory 942.50 dollars.
Two-terabyte drive normal price reported in 2273 dollars. The promotional price of $ 1625
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5926&via=n&datum=2017-02-28_15:11:50&mottagare=30929
Tomi Engdahl says:
Popularity of Sony’s PlayStation VR Surprises Even the Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/business/sony-playstation-vr-sales.html?_r=0
There are plenty of people who are skeptical about virtual reality, a technology some have heralded as the biggest thing to come along in years in games and entertainment.
Even Andrew House, global chief executive of Sony Interactive Entertainment, the video game division of the Japanese electronics giant, had doubts about how quickly virtual reality would be embraced by the mass market. So when Sony needed to decide how many of its virtual reality headsets to manufacture, Mr. House was among those inside the company advising that Sony make fewer of them.
“It’s the classic case in any organization — the guys who are on the front end in sales are getting very excited, very hyped up,” Mr. House said. “You have to temper that with other voices inside the company, myself among them, saying let’s just be a little bit careful.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Programmers are confessing their coding sins to protest a broken job interview process
https://theoutline.com/post/1166/programmers-are-confessing-their-coding-sins-to-protest-a-broken-job-interview-process
“Whiteboard” interviews are widely hated. They also discriminate against people who are already underrepresented in the field.
“After drawing on data from thousands of technical interviews, it’s become clear to us that technical interviewing is a process whose results are nondeterministic and often arbitrary,” she wrote. “We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest.”
Some companies, including Foursquare, have already dropped the whiteboard interview. Perhaps DHH’s meme will inspire more.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why is hiring broken? It starts at the whiteboard.
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/why-is-hiring-broken-it-starts-at-the-whiteboard-34b088e5a5db#.wxrdduwpz
Open source extraordinaire Sahat Yalkabov has given up his search for a front end developer job after a series of technical interviews that he described to me as a “humiliating and dehumanizing process.”
Various recruiters lined up interviews for him at six different companies over the past few months. Each of his interviews revolved around scrawling algorithms on a whiteboard, in front of other developers, who stood by to render judgement on his fitness for the job.
And after each interview, he received a brisk email informing him of the company’s decision not to proceed with his candidacy, without any further explanation.
At a time when big tech companies are scrambling to find capable developers, why is he having so much trouble getting job offers?
The answer lies in part in with how big tech companies interview developers.
You might assume that in this high tech industry, interviewers use fancy tools to analyze the quality of code samples, or look at how widely a candidate’s code was included as a dependency in a package ecosystem like npm. That’s how an academic researcher’s work would be judged — by how many other academics cite them.
Unfortunately, interviewing practices at big tech companies aren’t that scientific. The decision of whether to hire a developer usually comes down to the candidate walking up to a whiteboard and regurgitating algorithms that haven’t changed since the 1970s, like a (classically) trained monkey.
How whiteboard interviews work
The most common tasks meted out at the whiteboard are recalling algorithms and writing them bug-free on the whiteboard.
There’s usually an element of time pressure. If you don’t remember the algorithm or never learned it (i.e. never had a use for it), your interviewer may push you to guess your way into a working implementation.
Your interviewer will probably ask about time complexity
And remember that this is a whiteboard — not a code editor. You can’t actually run the code to see if it works, let alone benchmark it.
The good news is you can prepare for whiteboard interviews
Whiteboard interview questions generally come from a predictable pool of around 200 questions, the solutions of which are all available in Cracking the Code Interview. This book is the closest thing to a whiteboard interview playbook.
Of course, your interviewer is under no obligation to ask you one of those questions you so diligently prepared for.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is that writing algorithms on a whiteboard has almost nothing to do with modern software development.
In real life, you would rarely just whip up an off-the-cuff algorithm from memory in the middle of a coding session. You are almost always going to use an existing library, which has its own test suite, and has survived the scrutiny of other developers.
Whiteboard interviewing is a discrete skill, much like being able to remember Pi to a thousand decimal places. And students of programming are spending a disproportionate amount of their time mastering this skill instead of practicing real software development by building projects, maintaining legacy code, or contributing to open source.
This ultimately reduces the quality of entry-level hires, as it becomes difficult for the average interviewer to figure out who’s good at developing software, and who’s merely good at whiteboard interviewing.
Whiteboard interviews also punish more experienced developers who are too busy doing real software development to drop everything and cram for a month. They also punish people who don’t have a computer science degree, or who finished theirs so long ago that they’ve forgotten most of these (rarely needed) algorithms.
Whiteboard interviews favor fresh graduates from theory-heavy computer science programs. But it’s hard to believe that those are the people who will perform best in the highly collaborative, practical 21st century developer workplace.
Whiteboard interviews are akin to a hazing ritual — a rite of passage that one must endure before joining an organization — because everyone else there did.
Supporters of the whiteboard interview will argue that it tests one’s ability to solve problems under pressure, or that it tests fundamental competence.
Whiteboard interviews provide an interviewer a defensible reason for passing on a candidate that their gut tells them they don’t like. Instead of attributing a no-hire decision to a poor “culture fit”, the interviewer can tell themselves and their superiors that “she just didn’t know how to invert a binary tree.”
Because of these forces, whiteboard interviews may stick around for a long time
There are only two good options here (other than to give up and go farm goats).
Option 1: Accept it and cram.
Option 2: Avoid companies that do whiteboard interviewing
In doing so, Four Square has gotten rid of the random false negatives that can result from the “algorithm question lottery.”
Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0984782850/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0984782850&linkCode=as2&tag=out0b4b-20&linkId=CPE5JO5PB2MAJLZA
Tomi Engdahl says:
Business information management is a lot of room for improvement – “the Functioning of the missing customer orientation”
The amount of digital information in the world will grow to an estimated 23 per cent per year. The growth poses challenges for companies and organizations to information management.
“Core Knowledge is vital for the organization’s activities, such as customers or products for information. The problems of core known to give rise to costs, and are displayed to the customer, for example, deterioration of the quality of services.”
According to the survey data dispersed among different departments and information systems pose the greatest challenges -> information silos.
“Organizations can have several different functions and even hundreds of different information systems. Information is often managed by each system without dialogue between them.”
However, customers, products and services are common in the organization. Customer problem is reflected in the separation of services.
“In practice, the activities often lack a customer-oriented”,
“The key is a shared vision of the organization as to what is the core of information and who is responsible.”
“Traditionally, data management is perceived as it’s the task of the core data into the greatest responsibility is, however, a person responsible for business, because the core data forms the basis for the organization’s operations..”
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/yritysten-tiedonhallinnassa-on-paljon-kehitettavaa-toiminnasta-puuttuu-asiakaslahtoisyys-6628795
Tomi Engdahl says:
shrinking the role of the computer to browse the web
Adobe Digital Insights report, the smart phone is the device most used by European Internet traffic. Europe, the number of website visits in smartphones increased by 156 percent since 2014. In the same period, visits to your website tablets grew by 6 per cent, while the number of visits to the website on a desktop computer decreased by 25 per cent.
Although the number of application downloads will rise in January, the general trend of decline in app downloads. From 2014 to 2016 the number of app downloads in the United States fell by 38 per cent and 5 per cent in Europe.
Adobe’s analysis shows that in 2014-2016 the share of smartphones digital devices has only grown. At the same time the proportion of tablets has fallen. The trend is strongest in emerging countries, where the tablets share has dropped to 27 per cent.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/5923-tietokoneen-rooli-kutistuu-verkkoselailussa
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Walton / Ars Technica:
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X review: excellent eight-core workstation performance at half the price of Intel, but weak gaming performance especially in modern titles — Review: an excellent workstation CPU, but it doesn’t game as hard as we hoped. — It’s finally happened.
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X still behind Intel, but it’s great for the price
Review: an excellent workstation CPU, but it doesn’t game as hard as we hoped.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amd-ryzen-review/
It’s finally happened. Over a decade after Intel’s Core architecture launched and began a period of market domination that few would have predicted, competition at the high end of the desktop market is back.
AMD Ryzen—a line of desktop CPUs that will soon range from four-core lightweights to eight-core monsters like the Ryzen 7 1800X—aren’t the fastest processors in terms of pure instructions per clock (IPC). Nor does every application take full advantage of their multicore prowess. And if you’re a gamer that demands that absolute highest frame rates, Ryzen in its current state is not the CPU to buy.
But the differences in certain tasks are thin enough, and the value proposition strong enough, that for anyone thinking of building or buying a high-performance workstation or home server that doubles up as a competent gaming PC, Intel is no longer the only option.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Servers, the price becomes cheaper slowly
The servers were sold in October-joulukuuussa 14.8 billion dollars. The sum is 1.9 per cent lower than a year earlier. At the same time, the actual equipment delivered to 0.6 per cent less.
Of the total number of machines delivered last year, decreased by only 0.1 per cent. Alan turnover shrank by 2.7 per cent. Data centers drive x86-based machines continued to be strengthened, says Gartner.
In monetary terms the HP continues to number one suppliers of the nearly $ 3.4 billion in net sales.
Dell sold the highest number of individual machines, a total of 562 thousand servers.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/5942-palvelimien-hinta-halpenee-hitaasti
Tomi Engdahl says:
The popularity of the hard disk drops
The traditional mechanical, based on the magnetic recording hard drive sales are steadily decreasing. Last year, the HDD discs were sold 425.8 million units.
According to the statistics IDEMA organization (International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association) hard drives in the peak year was 2010, when the discs were sold 651.4 million units. At present, consumption is shrinking steadily and last year’s drop came just over nine per cent.
This year, the sale is estimated 407.7 million hard drives. The number will shrink as more and more computers includes a flash memory-based solid-state disk.
HDD manufacturers still in business are Seagate, Western Digital and HGST
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5950&via=n&datum=2017-03-03_15:16:36&mottagare=30929
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kyle Orland / Ars Technica:
Microsoft sheds more light on how “Game Mode” in the upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update will improve gaming performance
How “Game Mode” will make games run better on Windows
Plus details on strict limitations for UWP apps running on the Xbox One.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/how-game-mode-will-make-games-run-better-on-windows/
A few months ago, Microsoft announced that its upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update (currently in testing) would include a new “Game Mode” that improves the performance of interactive titles running under Windows by at least a few percentage points.
Currently, on the Windows OS level, a game is just another process among many running simultaneously. With Game Mode, though, Windows will isolate CPU resources to be devoted exclusively to that game process and optimize the GPU to give the game as much attention as possible as well.
On the CPU side, Game Mode allocates a majority of the CPU’s cores to be devoted exclusively to the target game, so an eight-core system might get six gaming-dedicated cores when running in Game Mode (depending on what other processes are running). The system then moves threads devoted to other processes off of those gaming-focused cores, reducing thread contention among the various gaming process threads and improving performance.
On the GPU side, Windows already gives the bulk of processing time to whichever window is in focus at any specific point. In Game Mode, though, the system gives an even greater majority of GPU cycles to the active game, reducing the time available for everything else.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Safari browser sheds users, mimicking IE
Chrome most likely beneficiary of 19% decline in share of Apple’s browser
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3176832/software/safari-browser-sheds-users-mimicking-ie.html
Apple’s Safari browser, like rival Internet Explorer (IE), has lost a significant number of users in the last two years, data published Wednesday showed.
The most likely destination of Safari defectors: Google’s Chrome.
According to California-based analytics vendor Net Applications, in March 2015, an estimated 69% of all Mac owners used Safari to go online. But by last month, that number had dropped to 56%
Safari’s share erosion was much less than that suffered by Microsoft’s browsers, particularly IE, during the same period. From March 2015 to February 2017, the use of Microsoft’s IE and Edge on Windows personal computers plummeted. Two years ago, the browsers were run by 62% of Windows PC owners; last month, the figure had fallen by more than half, to just 27%.
Simultaneous with the decline of IE has been the rise of Chrome.
It’s impossible to be certain, but Chrome was probably the beneficiary from Safari’s user share decline as well.
The downturn of both IE and Safari expose the fragility of what was once thought to be their biggest advantage: That they were bundled with their respective operating systems. B
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Slashdot: What Would Happen If All Software Ran On All Platforms?
https://games.slashdot.org/story/17/03/06/0623244/ask-slashdot-what-would-happen-if-all-software-ran-on-all-platforms
We live in a computing world where the OS you use — Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, others — often determines what software can and cannot be run on a given electronic device. (Let us pretend for a moment that emulators and other options don’t exist). What if — magically — such a thing as as Universally Compatible Software Application were possible. Software, in other words, that is magically capable of running on any electronic device equipped with enough CPU, GPU and memory capacity to run the software in a usable way.
Comments:
We’ve already got that. It’s called Java.
Some manufacturer makes an device that is incompatible to the universal software ecosystem, but cheaper/faster/better/better marketed.
And the situation is back to the current state.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. These four open-source components form the original lamp stack.
The basic idea does not change, even if one or more of the components of the stack would replace another. Linux can be changed, say, Windows, Apache, lighthttpd ratio, MySQL MariaDB, PHP, Python, and so on.
Recently, the biggest change associated with lamp-model has been a significant decline in the popularity of Apache servers. Replacement or rather complementary solutions has risen above all the lighter Nginx.
Nginx is already used in more than half of the sites visible to the Internet server, when you look at the hundred thousand most popular online service.
Introduced in 1995, Apache is still the world’s most popular web server software.
In this case, the WordPress platform lamp is a traditional and a clear alternative.
Apache’s biggest problem is perceived in many cases, its weak ability to handle massive amounts of simultaneous connections: when a critical number of simultaneous connections is exceeded, the performance collapse. Nginxin creator Igor Sysoev started to solve just this problem in 2002.
Distributing static files Nginx is simply faster compared to Apache.
It is able to provide static files with the same hardware resources with ease up to several tens of times larger number of users than Apache.
Nginx, however, does not take care of themselves dynamic content formation, but delegates it on to other server software. In many cases, Nginx handle connection management and serving static content and dynamic content for forming the back-end may continue to operate the Apache.
It is able to provide static files with the same hardware resources with ease up to several tens of times larger number of users than Apache.
Nginx, however, does not take care of themselves dynamic content formation, but delegates it on to other server software. In many cases, Nginx handle connection management and serving static content and dynamic content for forming the back-end may continue to operate the Apache.
Nginxiä can also be used as a proxy
The idea is that Nginxin user selects the best tools for your specific needs and our web site can add or change them as needed.
Viciously javascript
Lamp-stack parallel has recently become more common in whole javascript-based mean-stack, which are the typical components of MongoDB database, Express.js- and angularjs application frameworks, as well as Node.js Runtime Environment.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/nettipalvelun-peruspilarit-natisevat-hyvasti-lamp-6630084
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bradford Cross:
AI predictions: bots go bust, fewer machine learning acquihires, AI is cleantech 2.0 for VCs, MLaaS dies again, full stack vertical AI startups actually work
Five AI Startup Predictions for 2017
http://www.bradfordcross.com/blog/2017/3/3/five-ai-startup-predictions-for-2017
Bots go bust
Deep learning goes commodity
AI is cleantech 2.0 for VCs
MLaaS dies a second death
Full stack vertical AI startups actually work
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Right Way to Plan a Migration (Forget Cloud-Washing)
When you migrate without a plan, you risk cloud-washing.
https://arstechnica.com/sponsored/the-right-way-to-plan-a-migration-forget-cloud-washing/
Some companies just don’t know what they need. They move to the cloud because everyone else is doing it. They take physical infrastructure and dump it into a virtual environment without asking why. Getting on the cloud will solve all our problems, right? Well, not exactly. When you migrate without a plan, you risk cloud-washing. Yes, you’re in the cloud but, no, you’re not set up to take advantage of what the cloud offers.
What’s more, over half of cloud migrations go over budget and beyond the migration window, leading to unexpected problems for businesses, according to research from Gartner, Forrester, and others. The only way to avoid that fate is to decide which cloud benefits matter most, then plan a migration accordingly.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shopping for PCs? Ding, dong, the Dock is dead in 2017′s new models
The world’s big three PC vendors tell us what they expect you will buy this year
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/07/2017_business_pc_guide/
Yes, PC sales are now moribund. But someone’s going to buy about 280 million of them this year. Lenovo, HP Inc and Dell look like being the ones to sell them to businesses, because all have rosy outlooks for PC sales despite the long sales slide across the industry.
When you shop for PCs this year your theme tune may well be “Ding, dong, the dock is dead” because now that USB 3.1, USB-C connectors and Thunderbolt all play nicely together there’s much less need for dedicated hardware to connect a laptop to peripherals.
“With the type of bandwidth we have now, we can eliminate bottom docking and do a cable dock instead,”
Lindsay Tobin, Lenovo’s commercial product marketing manager, said the Chinese company will bring USB-C to all its business PCs this year and will therefore offer USB-C docks. Lenovo
HP Inc muddies the dock waters a bit with the HP Elite x3 Lap Dock, basically a brainless laptop that relies on an HP phone to push Windows 10 onto its screen.
All of the big three think that USB 2.0 and 3.1 will co-exist in 2017′s PCs, because nobody wants to lose touch with the enormous fleet of USB peripherals in which businesses have invested. HDMI won’t die, but the clear direction is for Thunderbolt to carry video before too many years have passed.
Everyone’s going thinner and lighter in laptops, helped by the cool runnings of Intel’s newest silicon.
Lenovo’s Tobin says that enterprise buyers are now asking for 8GB of RAM more often than not. Dell’s Morris says the company used to offer 16GB of RAM only for machines running a Core i7 CPU, but now makes the offer for i5s too
Consensus is that business machines will offer a 7th-generation Intel Core CPU, solid state disk with an option to add conventional disk for users who require higher storage capacities and 4K graphics. 802.11 AC WiFi will be standard. Nobody’s rushing to 10GB Ethernet, but it’s an option on top-end machines.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sir Tim Berners-Lee refuses to be King Canute, approves DRM as Web standard
Will decision bring back need to use specific browsers?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/06/berners_lee_web_drm_w3c/
Sir Tim Berners-Lee has controversially decided to back the introduction of digital rights management – aka anti-piracy and anti-copying mechanisms – as a Web standard.
Writing in a blog post last week, the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) argued that to stand in the way of the new Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) standard was equivalent to being King Canute commanding the tide to halt.
“W3C does not have any power to forbid anything,” Berners-Lee argued. “W3C is not the US Congress, or WIPO, or a court… W3C is a place for people to talk, and forge consensus over great new technology for the web. Yes, there is an argument made that in any case, W3C should just stand up against DRM, but we, like Canute, understand our power is limited.”
Berners-Lee makes a series of arguments for why EME should be approved: including that having a standard allows for greater inoperability; and that it enables the data provided by content use to be limited, improving online privacy.
But the decision has caused uproar
On EME in HTML5
https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/02/on-eme-in-html5/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Natalie Gagliordi / ZDNet:
IBM, Salesforce announce strategic AI partnership where Salesforce customers will gain access to Watson services, and IBM will use Einstein internally — IBM’s Watson is about to get cozy with Salesforce’s Einstein. — IBM’s Watson is about to get cozy with Salesforce’s Einstein.
IBM, Salesforce announce AI partnership
IBM’s Watson is about to get cozy with Salesforce’s Einstein.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-salesforce-announce-ai-partnership/
IBM’s Watson is about to get cozy with Salesforce’s Einstein. The two tech giants announced a partnership Monday that will give Salesforce customers direct access to structured and unstructured data from Watson’s artificial intelligence platform. Additionally, IBM will begin using the Salesforce Service Cloud internally.
More specifically, APIs from IBM Watson will integrate into Salesforce and be used to combine data from the two AI platforms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM and Cisco have another crack at converged infrastructure
And this time VersaStack’s all about hybrid and/or cloud with software-defined storage
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/07/versastack_for_hybrid_and_automated_clouds/
IBM and Cisco are having another crack at converged infrastructure, by releasing a few new configurations for their joint VersaStack rigs.
VersaStack emerged in late 2014 and offers racks full of Cisco switching and UCS servers, plus IBM’s StorWize arrays. At launch, the concept was awfully similar to those used by the Cisco/NetApp FlexPods and Dell/EMC’s VCE unit.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rachael King / Wall Street Journal:
HP Enterprise to acquire flash storage vendor Nimble Storage for about $1B in cash, an amount about 41% above Nimble’s roughly $700M market value as of Monday — Hewlett Packard Enterprise hopes the acquisition of the flash-storage systems maker will boost sales
HP Enterprise to Acquire Nimble Storage for About $1 Billion
Hewlett Packard Enterprise hopes the acquisition of the flash-storage systems maker will boost sales
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hp-enterprise-to-acquire-nimble-storage-for-about-1-billion-1488890704
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. said Tuesday it agreed to acquire Nimble Storage Inc. for about $1 billion in cash, aiming to ignite sales in its declining storage business.
The deal also calls for HP Enterprise to assume or pay out Nimble’s unvested equity awards with a value of about $200 million at closing. The cash amount is about a 41% premium to Nimble’s roughly $700 million market value as of Monday’s close of trading.
Nimble Storage, based in San Jose, Calif., makes so-called flash-storage systems which use flash-memory chips that are much faster than disk-based storage.
The flash-storage business has been one of the bright spots in a competitive storage market. Revenue in the flash-storage industry is expected to rise to nearly $20 billion in 2020 from an estimated $15 billion in 2016, according to research firm International Data Corp.
Tomi Engdahl says:
TechCrunch:
Sources: Google is acquiring Kaggle, a platform with ~500K data scientists, which hosts data science and machine learning competitions and has raised $12.75M — Frederic Lardinois, John Mannes and Matthew Lynley — Sources tell us that Google is acquiring Kaggle, a platform that hosts data science and machine learning competitions.
Google is acquiring data science community Kaggle
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/07/google-is-acquiring-data-science-community-kaggle/
Sources tell us that Google is acquiring Kaggle, a platform that hosts data science and machine learning competitions. Details about the transaction remain somewhat vague, but given that Google is hosting its Cloud Next conference in San Francisco this week, the official announcement could come as early as tomorrow.
Reached by phone, Kaggle co-founder CEO Anthony Goldbloom declined to deny that the acquisition is happening. Google itself declined “to comment on rumors.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
NVIDIA Announces Jetson TX2: Parker Comes To NVIDIA’s Embedded System Kit
by Ryan Smith on March 7, 2017 9:00 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11185/nvidia-announces-jetson-tx2-parker
For a few years now, NVIDIA has been offering their line of Jetson embedded system kits. Originally launched using Tegra K1 in 2014, the first Jetson was designed to be a dev kit for groups looking to build their own Tegra-based devices from scratch. Instead, what NVIDIA surprisingly found, was that groups would use the Jetson board as-is instead and build their devices around that. This unexpected market led NVIDIA to pivot a bit on what Jetson would be, resulting in the second-generation Jetson TX1, a proper embedded system board that can be used for both development purposes and production devices.
This relaunched Jetson came at an interesting time for NVIDIA, which was right when their fortunes in neural networking/deep learning took off in earnest.
The big change here is the upgrade to NVIDIA’s newest-generation Parker SoC. While Parker never made it into third-party mobile designs, NVIDIA has been leveraging it internally for the Drive system and other projects, and now it will finally become the heart of the Jetson platform as well. Relative to the Tegra X1 in the previous Jetson, Parker is a bigger and better version of the SoC.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia Announces Jetson TX2 High Performance Embedded Module
http://hackaday.com/2017/03/07/nvidia-announces-jetson-tx2-high-performance-embedded-module/
The last year has been great for Nvidia hardware. Nvidia released a graphics card using the Pascal architecture, 1080s are heating up server rooms the world over, and now Nvidia is making yet another move at high-performance, low-power computing. Today, Nvidia announced the Jetson TX2, a credit-card sized module that brings deep learning to the embedded world.
Embedded Deep Learning
The marketing pitch for the Jetson TX2 is, “deep learning at the edge”. While this absolutely sounds like an alphabet soup of dorknobabble, it does parse rather well.
The new hotness every new CS grad wants to get into is deep learning. It’s easy to see why — deep learning is found in everything from drones to self-driving cars. These ‘cool’ applications of deep learning have a problem: they all need a lot of processing power, but these are applications that are on a power budget. Building a selfie drone that follows you around wouldn’t be a problem if you could plug it into the wall, but that’s not what selfie drones are for.
Like the Nvidia TX1 before it, the Jetson TX2 is a credit card-sized module bolted onto a big heatsink. The specs are a significant upgrade from the TX1:
Graphics: Nvidia Pascal GPU, 256 CUDA cores
CPU: Dual-core Denver + quad-core ARM A57
RAM: 8GB 128-bit LPDDR4
Storage: 32GB EMMC, SDIO, SATA
Video: 4k x 2x 60Hz Encode and Decode
Display: HDMI 2.0, eDP 1.4, 2x DSI, 2x DP 1.2
Ports and IO: USB 3.0, USB 2.0 (host mode), HDMI, M.2 Key E, PCI-E x4, Gigabit Ethernet, SATA data and power, GPIOs, I2C, I2S, SPI, CAN
The Jetson development kit is the TX2 module and a breakout board that is effectively a MiniITX motherboard.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/embedded-systems.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg:
Microsoft partners with Qualcomm and Cavium to develop Windows for servers using ARM processors, has been testing it in Azure for search, storage, more — The software maker seeks to cut costs in its Azure cloud business by developing new hardware — Microsoft Corp. is committing …
Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel’s Dominance
The software maker seeks to cut costs in its Azure cloud business by developing new hardware
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-08/microsoft-pledges-to-use-arm-server-chips-threatening-intel-s-dominance
Microsoft Corp. is committing to use chips based on ARM Holdings Plc technology in the machines that run its cloud services, potentially imperiling Intel Corp.’s longtime dominance in the profitable market for data-center processors.
Microsoft has developed a version of its Windows operating system for servers using ARM processors, working with Qualcomm Inc. and Cavium Inc. The software maker is now testing these chips for tasks like search, storage, machine learning and big data, said Jason Zander, vice president of Microsoft’s Azure cloud division. The company isn’t yet running the processors — known for being more power-efficient and offering more choice in vendors — in any customer-facing networks, and wouldn’t specify how widespread they eventually will be.
“It’s not deployed into production yet, but that is the next logical step,”
Microsoft is planning to incorporate the ARM chips as it develops a new cloud server design, which it will discuss Wednesday at the Open Compute Project Summit in Santa Clara, California. The company is announcing new partners and components for the design, first unveiled last year, as it moves closer to putting the machines into its own data centers later this year. Because the design is open-source, meaning it’s freely available to be used and customized, other companies are also likely to use variations.
Both the server design, called Project Olympus, and Microsoft’s work with ARM-based processors reflect the software maker’s push to use hardware innovations to cut costs, boost flexibility and stay competitive with Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which also provide computing power, software and storage via the internet.
While Intel is among companies making components to work with the Project Olympus design, ARM-chip makers such as Qualcomm and Cavium are also in the running, increasing the chance that other server customers will begin to use these processors.
Any challenge to Intel’s dominance in server chips is a threat to its most profitable business and main revenue driver as demand for PC processors continues to shrink.
Microsoft’s server spending decisions have the potential to impact suppliers’ bottom lines — its Azure service is No. 2 in cloud infrastructure behind Amazon, and it’s one of the biggest server buyers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows Server on ARM Is Finally Happening, And It Should Worry Intel
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/03/08/1840221/windows-server-on-arm-is-finally-happening-and-it-should-worry-intel?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
There have been rumors for the past several years that Windows Server would be coming to ARM. Today, March 8, that rumor became an acknowledged reality. Microsoft officials said that the company is committed to use ARM chips in machines running its cloud services. Microsoft will use the ARM chips in a cloud server design that its officials will detail at the the US Open Compute Project Summit today, March 8. Microsoft has been working with both Qualcomm and Cavium on the version of Windows Server for ARM, according to company officials.
Windows Server on ARM: It’s happening
http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-server-on-arm-its-happening/
Microsoft has committed publicly to use ARM chips in machines that will be running cloud services in its own datacenters before year-end.
Microsoft officials said that the company is committed to use ARM chips in machines running its cloud services, as its officials told Bloomberg.
Microsoft will use the ARM chips in a cloud server design that its officials will detail at the the US Open Compute Project Summit today, March 8. Microsoft has been working with both Qualcomm and Cavium on the version of Windows Server for ARM, according to company officials.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Qualcomm, Microsoft team up on Windows Server on ARM servers, submit spec to Open Compute Project
http://www.zdnet.com/article/qualcomm-microsoft-team-up-on-windows-server-on-arm-servers-submit-spec-to-open-compute-project/
Qualcomm and Microsoft demonstrated Windows Server on Qualcomm’s 10nm ARM processors. The collaboration will cover future generations of hardware and software.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Arista courts container, white box infrastructure data centers
http://www.zdnet.com/article/arista-courts-container-white-box-infrastructure-data-centers/
Arista wasn’t shy about pitching white box hardware players that’ll be attending the Open Compute Project Summit in Santa Clara.
Arista Networks is aiming to woo the white box datacenter crowd with a container-friendly version of its networking operating system and support from the likes of Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Microsoft Azure Networking.
The networking company, which is competing with the likes of Cisco in enterprise accounts, launched its Containerized EOS (extensible operating system) in a move that aims to win over development and operations teams as well as fans of container technologies such as Docker.
In its statement on EOS and containers, Arista wasn’t shy about pitching white box hardware players that’ll be attending the Open Compute Project Summit in Santa Clara
Courting white box customers such as major cloud providers isn’t new. The fastest growing segment in the server industry are no-name systems. Even Hewlett Packard Enterprise has played along with the white box market. Arista is acknowledging that no-name networking gear is also having a big impact.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Details Project Olympus Open Compute Standard
by Brett Howse on March 8, 2017 10:15 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11187/microsoft-details-project-olympus-open-compute-standard
Today, at the 2017 Open Compute Project U.S. Summit, Microsoft unveiled some significant announcements around their hyperscale cloud hardware design, which they first announced in November as Project Olympus. With the explosion of growth in cloud computing, Microsoft is hoping to reduce the costs of their Azure expansion by creating universal platforms in collaboration with the Open Compute Project. Project Olympus is more than just a server standard though. It consists of a universal motherboard, power supplies, 1U and 2U server chassis, power distribution, and more. Microsoft isn’t the first company to want to go down this road, and it makes a lot of sense to cut costs by creating standards when you are buying equipment on the level of Azure.
Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Leendert van Doorn expanded on why the company is exploring this option in a blog post today. Clearly ARM has made some progress in the server world over the last few years, and Microsoft feels it’s the right time to bring some of that capability to their own datacenters. I think one of the key takeaways is that Microsoft wants to shape the hardware capabilities to the workload, and with an open platform like ARM, this can make a lot of sense for certain workloads.
Microsoft already has a version of Windows Server running on ARM, and they’ve announced that both of their partners will be demonstrating this internal use port of Windows Server, first with Qualcomm with their Centriq 2400 processor, with 48 cores on Samsung’s 10nm FinFET process. Cavium will be running on their second generation ThunderX2 platform.
The ARM platform, if properly executed, should be a good solution for some specific tasks, and if Microsoft can work with the platform makers to shape the hardware to fit specific tasks, but still be more general purpose than an ASIC, but at this time, it’s unlikely to be a serious threat to Intel’s monopoly on the datacenter at the moment. Intel has a pretty sizeable advantage in IPC, and especially on single-threaded workloads, so x86 isn’t going anywhere yet. What really matters is how Qualcomm and Cavium can execute on their platforms, and where they price them, since the end goal for Microsoft with this change is certainly, at least to some extent, to put pressure on Intel’s pricing for their datacenter equipment.
Back on the x86 side, Microsoft also had some announcements there as well. AMD will also be collaborating with Microsoft to include their Naples processor into Project Olympus, which is their new server processor based on the “Zen” architecture.
Microsoft already has FPGAs in Azure, so adding them to Project Olympus is a no-brainer.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Best SSDs: Q1 2017
by Billy Tallis on March 8, 2017 6:00 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9799/best-ssds
The industry-wide NAND flash shortage has not abated, so there’s little good news for consumers since the holiday edition of this guide. The best deals are a few cents per GB worse than they were during the holiday season. Older SSD models are being withdrawn from the market and current models are often out of stock. At CES we noticed a pattern of companies being ready to launch new models and capacities, but many of them are holding off until they can launch with sensible pricing and volume.
The situation should improve later this year when the next generation of 3D NAND hits the market. With 64 layers or more and up to 512Gb per die for TLC parts, we should finally see 3D NAND from all four major manufacturers making its way into retail SSDs. In the near term however, there’s not much hope for improvement in prices and available drive capacities.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Daring Fireball: Video Pros Moving From Mac to Windows for High-End GPUs
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/5vljzf/daring_fireball_video_pros_moving_from_mac_to/
It shouldn’t matter if Pros aren’t huge money makers anymore for Apple, Apple should be supporting them rather than screwing them and then losing them. You ignore pros and creatives and artists and high end users, aka, influential people, it’s gonna trickle down. When entire industries start shifting to PC, video, film, photography, that’s going to end up being tens of millions of people down the line, people in the industries and young people pursuing that path.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The impact GitHub is having on your software career
https://opensource.com/article/17/3/impact-github-software-career?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
Over the next 12 to 24 months (in other words, between 2018 and 2019), how people hire software developers will change radically.
, “All the work you do here will be in the open. In the future, you won’t have a CV—people will just Google you.”
Fast-forward to 2017, and here we are living in a world that is being eaten by open source software.
There are two factors that give you a real sense of the times:
Microsoft, long the poster child for closed-source proprietary software and a crusader against open source, has embraced open source software whole-heartedly.
GitHub has become a singular social network that ties together issue tracking and distributed source control.
Smart people will take advantage of this environment. They’ll contribute patches, issues, and comments upstream to the languages and frameworks that they use daily in their job, including TypeScript, .NET, and Redux. They’ll also advocate for and creatively arrange for as much of their work as possible to be done in the open, even if it is just their contribution graph to private repositories.
In a recent interview, Linus Torvalds (49K followers, following 0 on GitHub), the inventor of Linux and git, put it like this, “You shoot off a lot of small patches until the point where the maintainers trust you, and at that point you become more than just a guy who sends patches, you become part of the network of trust.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
DNA computer can be the future of supercomputing
Scientists say that it is possible to build a new type of self-replicating computer with piiprosessorit replaced by the DNA molecules made. It would be faster than any other form of computer such as the proposed quantum computers. Professor of the University of Manchester, led by Ross D. King has been demonstrated for the first time a universal non-deterministic Turing machine (NUTM) feasibility.
Silicon based computers are approaching their limit and quantum computers is very difficult to operate. But the third option would be DNA-based machine, which receives all the benefits of a quantum computer without quantum problems, because it is based on the DNA and it does what the DNA does best – doubles.
- Our computer has ability to grow in the calculation progresses, which makes it faster than any other computer and allows the solution of many computational problems that have been previously considered impossible, says King.
Although DNA computers have been proposed since the 1990s, King and his team can boast to be one of the first, which is a physically feasible DNA-based universal non-deterministic Turing machine (NUTM) plan.
DNA is the ideal storage media, because it is very compact and can last for hundreds of thousands of years, if stored in a cool, dry place.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/5981-dna-tietokone-voi-olla-tulevaisuuden-superkone
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Promise of Blockchain Is a World Without Middlemen
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/03/09/2139242/the-promise-of-blockchain-is-a-world-without-middlemen
The Harvard Business Review has an interesting article about how Blockchain technology may bring down the cost of business transactions and enable new ways of doing things: “Consider the problem that small manufacturers have dealing with giants like Wal-Mart. To keep transaction costs and the costs of carrying each product line down, large companies generally only buy from companies that can service a substantial percentage of their customers.
The Promise of Blockchain Is a World Without Middlemen
https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-promise-of-blockchain-is-a-world-without-middlemen
The blockchain is a revolution that builds on another technical revolution so old that only the more experienced among us remember it: the invention of the database. First created at IBM in 1970, the importance of these relational databases to our everyday lives today cannot be overstated. Literally every aspect of our civilization is now dependent on this abstraction for storing and retrieving data. And now the blockchain is about to revolutionize databases, which will in turn revolutionize literally every aspect of our civilization.
IBM’s database model stood unchanged until about 10 years ago, when the blockchain came into this conservative space with a radical new proposition: What if your database worked like a network — a network that’s shared with everybody in the world, where anyone and anything can connect to it?
Blockchain experts call this “decentralization.” Decentralization offers the promise of nearly friction-free cooperation between members of complex networks that can add value to each other by enabling collaboration without central authorities and middle men.
Tomi Engdahl says:
These technologies to use – two years in
Main business landscape change trends
Intelligent deep analytics. Computer vision and pattern recognition progresses, companies will be able to search for caches-ordered data, among other things, images, audio, video, and “deep web” on the information. These analytics provide companies with a strong strategic and operational insights on technology-driven enlightenment on the next level.
Cloud services. Service-based ecosystems are increasingly common in the business world, and they require an open and agile systems.
Machine intelligence. Artificial intelligence and machine learning Not only do views and recommendations, but also to complement and organizations automate increasingly complex core tasks.
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2017/03/10/nama-teknologiat-kayttoon-kahden-vuoden-sisaan/
More:
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/Technology/gx-tech-trends-the-kinetic-enterprise.pdf