Here is my collection of trends and predictions for year 2014:
It seems that PC market is not recovering in 2014. IDC is forecasting that the technology channel will buy in around 34 million fewer PCs this year than last. It seem that things aren’t going to improve any time soon (down, down, down until 2017?). There will be no let-up on any front, with desktops and portables predicted to decline in both the mature and emerging markets. Perhaps the chief concern for future PC demand is a lack of reasons to replace an older system: PC usage has not moved significantly beyond consumption and productivity tasks to differentiate PCs from other devices. As a result, PC lifespan continue to increase. Death of the Desktop article says that sadly for the traditional desktop, this is only a matter of time before its purpose expires and that it would be inevitable it will happen within this decade. (I expect that it will not completely disappear).
When the PC business is slowly decreasing, smartphone and table business will increase quickly. Some time in the next six months, the number of smartphones on earth will pass the number of PCs. This shouldn’t really surprise anyone: the mobile business is much bigger than the computer industry. There are now perhaps 3.5-4 billion mobile phones, replaced every two years, versus 1.7-1.8 billion PCs replaced every 5 years. Smartphones broke down that wall between those industries few years ago – suddenly tech companies could sell to an industry with $1.2 trillion annual revenue. Now you can sell more phones in a quarter than the PC industry sells in a year.
After some years we will end up with somewhere over 3bn smartphones in use on earth, almost double the number of PCs. There are perhaps 900m consumer PCs on earth, and maybe 800m corporate PCs. The consumer PCs are mostly shared and the corporate PCs locked down, and neither are really mobile. Those 3 billion smartphones will all be personal, and all mobile. Mobile browsing is set to overtake traditional desktop browsing in 2015. The smartphone revolution is changing how consumers use the Internet. This will influence web design.
The only PC sector that seems to have some growth is server side. Microservers & Cloud Computing to Drive Server Growth article says that increased demand for cloud computing and high-density microserver systems has brought the server market back from a state of decline. We’re seeing fairly significant change in the server market. According to the 2014 IC Market Drivers report, server unit shipment growth will increase in the next several years, thanks to purchases of new, cheaper microservers. The total server IC market is projected to rise by 3% in 2014 to $14.4 billion: multicore MPU segment for microservers and NAND flash memories for solid state drives are expected to see better numbers.
Spinning rust and tape are DEAD. The future’s flash, cache and cloud article tells that the flash is the tier for primary data; the stuff christened tier 0. Data that needs to be written out to a slower response store goes across a local network link to a cloud storage gateway and that holds the tier 1 nearline data in its cache. Never mind software-defined HYPE, 2014 will be the year of storage FRANKENPLIANCES article tells that more hype around Software-Defined-Everything will keep the marketeers and the marchitecture specialists well employed for the next twelve months but don’t expect anything radical. The only innovation is going to be around pricing and consumption models as vendors try to maintain margins. FCoE will continue to be a side-show and FC, like tape, will soldier on happily. NAS will continue to eat away at the block storage market and perhaps 2014 will be the year that object storage finally takes off.
IT managers are increasingly replacing servers with SaaS article says that cloud providers take on a bigger share of the servers as overall market starts declining. An in-house system is no longer the default for many companies. IT managers want to cut the number of servers they manage, or at least slow the growth, and they may be succeeding. IDC expects that anywhere from 25% to 30% of all the servers shipped next year will be delivered to cloud services providers. In three years, 2017, nearly 45% of all the servers leaving manufacturers will be bought by cloud providers. The shift will slow the purchase of server sales to enterprise IT. Big cloud providers are more and more using their own designs instead of servers from big manufacturers. Data center consolidations are eliminating servers as well. For sure, IT managers are going to be managing physical servers for years to come. But, the number will be declining.
I hope that the IT business will start to grow this year as predicted. Information technology spends to increase next financial year according to N Chandrasekaran, chief executive and managing director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest information technology (IT) services company. IDC predicts that IT consumption will increase next year to 5 per cent worldwide to $ 2.14 trillion. It is expected that the biggest opportunity will lie in the digital space: social, mobility, cloud and analytics. The gradual recovery of the economy in Europe will restore faith in business. Companies are re-imaging their business, keeping in mind changing digital trends.
The death of Windows XP will be on the new many times on the spring. There will be companies try to cash in with death of Windows XP: Microsoft’s plan for Windows XP support to end next spring, has received IT services providers as well as competitors to invest in their own services marketing. HP is peddling their customers Connected Backup 8.8 service to prevent data loss during migration. VMware is selling cloud desktop service. Google is wooing users to switch to ChromeOS system by making Chrome’s user interface familiar to wider audiences. The most effective way XP exploiting is the European defense giant EADS subsidiary of Arkoon, which promises support for XP users who do not want to or can not upgrade their systems.
There will be talk on what will be coming from Microsoft next year. Microsoft is reportedly planning to launch a series of updates in 2015 that could see major revisions for the Windows, Xbox, and Windows RT platforms. Microsoft’s wave of spring 2015 updates to its various Windows-based platforms has a codename: Threshold. If all goes according to early plans, Threshold will include updates to all three OS platforms (Xbox One, Windows and Windows Phone).
Amateur programmers are becoming increasingly more prevalent in the IT landscape. A new IDC study has found that of the 18.5 million software developers in the world, about 7.5 million (roughly 40 percent) are “hobbyist developers,” which is what IDC calls people who write code even though it is not their primary occupation. The boom in hobbyist programmers should cheer computer literacy advocates.IDC estimates there are almost 29 million ICT-skilled workers in the world as we enter 2014, including 11 million professional developers.
The Challenge of Cross-language Interoperability will be more and more talked. Interfacing between languages will be increasingly important. You can no longer expect a nontrivial application to be written in a single language. With software becoming ever more complex and hardware less homogeneous, the likelihood of a single language being the correct tool for an entire program is lower than ever. The trend toward increased complexity in software shows no sign of abating, and modern hardware creates new challenges. Now, mobile phones are starting to appear with eight cores with the same ISA (instruction set architecture) but different speeds, some other streaming processors optimized for different workloads (DSPs, GPUs), and other specialized cores.
Just another new USB connector type will be pushed to market. Lightning strikes USB bosses: Next-gen ‘type C’ jacks will be reversible article tells that USB is to get a new, smaller connector that, like Apple’s proprietary Lightning jack, will be reversible. Designed to support both USB 3.1 and USB 2.0, the new connector, dubbed “Type C”, will be the same size as an existing micro USB 2.0 plug.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel and Asus put the dual boot in, offer 2-in-1 lapslab WinDroid
See that Windows laptop? Now it’s an Android tablet…
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/01/10/intel_asus_present_dual_boot_windows_and_android_device/
CES 2014 Intel is attempting to knock rivals’ SoCs off with a dual-boot platform that lets you flip between Windows 8.1 and Google’s mobile operating system on the same device.
The chip giant announced delivery of dual-OS at CES 2014 with PC partner Asus, with the PC maker delivering the laptop/tablet hybrid to run it on: the 2-in-1 Transformer Book Duet TD300.
Krzanich called the platform a response to customer and OEM demand, with both wanting the option to run Windows 8.1 and Android at different times on one device.
Intel isn’t the only chipmaker straddling Windows and Android.
AMD used CES to announce what it called its latest milestone: putting Android and Windows on the same tablet, working with Android vendor BlueStacks.
BlueStacks creates a virtualised Android device that runs on the Windows desktop. You download, install, and run apps inside a BlueStacks window.
Devices capable of running Windows and Android are unlikely to prove anything more than a niche concern, but anything will help the chip makers in the today’s tab-tastic environment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft shops ditch XP for New Year as Windows market share expands
But what’s this… they’re all moving to Windows 8.1?
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/01/03/windows_december_market_share/
Less than one-third of PCs are now running Windows XP, with many a Microsoft shop giving up on the popular 12-year-old operating system in time for New Year.
Microsoft will no longer make security patches for Windows XP after 8 April this year.
With PC sales falling and consumers sucking up tablets, the biggest driver for Windows 7 is businesses moving off Windows XP to beat the April deadline.
The question is, where are those other PC users going?
The answer would seem to be a small number are going to Windows 8/8.1.
Canalys analyst Rachel Lashford told The Reg the expectation is that for this year Microsoft will manage to carve out a total five per cent of the tablet market.
Android and Apple will continue to lead, with 65 and 31 per cent respectively
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM’s Watson-as-a-cloud: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s another mainframe
Forget point’n’click computing, think long-term data crunching and training
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/10/ibm_watson_analysis/
IBM’s attempt to spin its supercomputer-cum-TV star Watson into a $1bn business unit may eventually boost Big Blue’s bottom line – but going from beating Jeopardy! to defeating cancer is going to be harder than expected.
Watson gets its magic from a DeepQA analysis engine, which blends together Hadoop, Apache UIMA, and other tools to achieve machine learning: this allows the machine to ingest a large amount of structured and unstructured information, analyse links between facts, come up with likely answers in response to questions, and ultimately rank them in terms of confidence.
“The overarching principles in DeepQA are massive parallelism, many experts, pervasive confidence estimation, and integration of shallow and deep knowledge,” IBM wrote in an AI Paper discussing the tech in 2010.
DeepQA required IBM to do fundamental research into diverse areas, such as question processing, relation extraction, linguistic frame extraction, passage matching ensembles, and refining knowledge out of extracted data. All extremely tricky problems, and areas where Big Blue made great strides.
Rather, for IBM’s cloud-based service to generate insights greater than the sum of an individual developer’s contributed data, it seems Big Blue will have to add in a hierarchical system that can select which information repositories are relevant for solving a particular problem. Hardware-wise, this is all doable (it needed 2,880 Power7 cores, plus Wikipedia and other texts held in 15TB of RAM, to win Jeopardy! in 2011), but it’s unclear whether the software is there.
Tomi Engdahl says:
4K Is For Programmers
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/01/10/1441210/4k-is-for-programmers
“The 4K television revolution is upon us, and nobody is impressed. Most users seem content to wait until there’s actually something to watch on these ultra-high-res displays, and also for the price to come down. However, Brian Hauer has written an article promoting a non-standard use for these displays. His office just got a 39″, 3840×2160 display for each of their programmers’ workstations”
‘Four editors side-by-side each with over a hundred lines of code, and enough room to spare for a project navigator, console, and debugger.’
Tomi Engdahl says:
4K is for programmers
http://tiamat.tsotech.com/4k-is-for-programmers
At our office, we just equipped all of the programmers’ workstations with Seiki 39″ 4K televisions as monitors. At $500 a piece, you should be doing the same. For the time being, there is no single higher-productivity display for a programmer.
Heralded by some as a “breakthrough,” the Seiki monitor—ahem, television—does have its limitations. Most notably, the HDMI 1.4 ports can only support 30Hz at the signature 3840×2160 resolution. Lower-end GPUs are also similarly limited to 30Hz at that resolution. The GPU in a truly old desktop PC will not support 3840×2160 at all, but if you are programming on something so old, you should first contend with that.
The fact that Seiki markets their 4K display as a television only betrays a bit of marketing ignorance. Seiki is missing a golden opportunity to dominate the desktop display market by removing the television tuner, speakers, and remote, and then reallocating that budget to a 60Hz or better input (HDMI 2 and/or DisplayPort), a matte screen surface, and instant-on DPMS support, all the while retaining the market-wrecking price.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Forget selfies. ‘Server SAN’ is storage world’s 2014 TWERKNADO
Converged SANs and servers the next big thing
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/10/server_san/
The Wikibon consultancy says a developing Server SAN form of storage needs to be tracked by IT people.
The authors bring together the concepts of virtual SANs and converged server/storage hardware and software systems with a server SAN being a collection of servers whose direct-attached storage (DAS) is virtualised by software into a single storage resource pool available to all the servers.
This is positioned against and contrasted with single server’s DAS, networked storage (SAN and NAS), cloud storage and hyperscale (distributed DAS) storage.
Wikibon adds an Action Item to its Server SAN report:
The investments that companies have made in people, processes and technology of traditional storage infrastructure is slowly going to die. Customers do not need to rip and replace what they have, but they do need to learn about these new architectures and consider how new applications and new infrastructure models like Server SAN can fit into future deployments. Wikibon believes that a large percentage of applications will leverage Server SAN architectures by the end of the decade.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is your IT department too tough on users?
Speak your brains now
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/10/it_dept_user_study/
Tech Panel “It’s too old, crippled by overbearing control, and generally not nice to use.”
In today’s world of highly capable and highly desirable consumer tech, these are complaints we are hearing more and more from end users about company-issued kit.
So should IT lighten up and allow users more freedom when it comes to the technology they use to get their jobs done?
Tomi Engdahl says:
SteamOS beta picks up built-in AMD, Intel GPU support
Update follows announcement of 13 Steam Machines at CES.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/steamos-beta-picks-up-built-in-amd-intel-gpu-support/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lifelogging: Digital locker looks after your stuff
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129514.400-lifelogging-digital-locker-looks-after-your-stuff.html#.UtDvwPuAq9J
An online inventory of your belongings could help reduce insurance premiums – and let you sell things on eBay with one click
Most lifeloggers gather information about themselves every day, whether by keeping a photographic record, or just measuring how far they run during a workout. But the field has spent too long focusing on gathering information, says Steve Whittaker of the University of California in Santa Cruz, a psychologist who has been studying lifelogging technologies for the last eight years. “I’m fed up with the idea that it’s enough to just record stuff,” he says. “It’s log first, applications after. We should be moving into a new phase where you try and see what the point of having all that data would be.”
Several firms and research projects are answering Whittaker’s call. Trov, a start-up based in San Ramon, California, is building a digital locker for people to record their possessions – allowing them to manage their belongings just as our emails, music, photos, documents and so on are managed online.
Jim Gemmell, Trov’s chief technology officer, envisions logging every detail of our interactions with our possessions, whether house, car or collectables. This will give us more flexibility over how we use them, he says. Haven’t ridden your bike in a year? Think you should sell it and upgrade the running shoes you use all the time? Trov will know.
The firm is starting small, providing customers with a means of logging their possessions to receive discounted insurance premiums. But Gemmell’s plan is to turn it into an intelligent hub for your belongings. “Imagine posting to eBay in one click,” he says. “If I have all my stuff in cyberspace, it’s ready for me to manipulate it.” Trov has already partnered with eBay to speed up the digitisation of assets by importing receipts for items bought on the site.
Tomi Engdahl says:
China’s Lenovo last year was the world’s largest PC manufacturer. The market research company Gartner statistics show that the number one surpassing the previous year’s HP .
PC sales fell According to Gartner, 10 percent, and the equipment was sold 315 million copies. The figure does not include tablets.
Lenovo and HP market share is over 16 percent.
The next biggest manufacturers are Dell , Acer and Asus.
Source: Tietoviikko
http://www.tietoviikko.fi/uutisia/lenovo+nousi+pcykkoseksi/a958833
Tomi Engdahl says:
I Stop Breathing When I Type and You Probably Do, Too
http://gizmodo.com/very-interesting-observation-i-suspect-we-stop-breath-1460853027/@Fulgurites
While working on an especially stressful post and a particularly challenging paragraph, I started getting lightheaded. I’d stopped breathing.
This was no medical emergency. I pulled my fingers off the keys, kicked back from my desk and took a gulp air. What was that about? I must’ve slipped a little too deeply into the zone.
A head shake and a couple breaths later, and I was back at it. Within minutes, the same light-headed feeling was back. I’d stopped breathing, again!
It turns out this is a thing. It’s called “email apnea.” According to one (very unscientific) estimate, about 80 percent of us do it. That includes you.
The term “email apnea” was coined in 2008 on the Huffington Post by Linda Stone, a former Apple executive who’s done extensive work on the physiology of our relationship with technology.
Hypothesis number one: it’s physical.
Hypothesis number two: it’s emotional. Email and computer activities are stressful—as is texting—and we don’t breathe right when we’re stressed out.
All that said, email apnea is not a medical condition. While it has medical effects, it actually falls into the broader category of ergonomics. The solution is simple: sit up straight and pay attention to your breathing. If you go to yoga, you’ll be great at this.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Obama administration to end contract with CGI Federal, company behind HealthCare.gov
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-administration-to-end-contract-with-cgi-federal-company-behind-healthcaregov/2014/01/10/001eb05a-719e-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html
The Obama administration has decided to jettison from HealthCare.gov the IT contractor, CGI Federal, that has been mainly responsible for building the defect-ridden online health insurance marketplace and has been immersed in the work of repairing it.
Federal health officials are preparing to sign early next week a 12-month contract worth roughly $90 million with a different company, Accenture, after concluding that CGI has not been effective enough in fixing the intricate computer system underpinning the federal Web site, according to a person familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private negotiations.
According to officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the decision is not yet public, leaders of CMS became frustrated with the pace and quality of CGI’s work on the repairs.
CGI Federal was hired Sept. 30, 2011, as the main contractor to build one of the most complex computer systems the federal government has ever attempted to create. The company’s failure to deliver on key aspects of the project was a main reason behind the site’s botched Oct. 1 launch, when error messages were generated when many consumers tried to shop for and select health plans online.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Threshold” to be Called Windows 9, Ship in April 2015
Microsoft tries to put Windows 8 in the rear-view mirror
http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/threshold-be-called-windows-9-ship-april-2015
At the BUILD developer conference in April 2014, Microsoft will discuss its vision for the future of Windows, including a year-off release codenamed “Threshold” that will most likely be called Windows 9. Here’s what I know about the next major release of Windows.
As a kind of recap, we know that Microsoft will update Windows 8.1 in 2014, first with a service pack/feature pack-type update called Update 1 (or GDR1 internally)
But Threshold is more important than any specific updates. Windows 8 is tanking harder than Microsoft is comfortable discussing in public, and the latest release, Windows 8.1, which is a substantial and free upgrade with major improvements over the original release, is in use on less than 25 million PCs at the moment. That’s a disaster, and Threshold needs to strike a better balance between meeting the needs of over a billion traditional PC users while enticing users to adopt this new Windows on new types of personal computing devices. In short, it needs to be everything that Windows 8 is not.
Windows 9. To distance itself from the Windows 8 debacle, Microsoft is currently planning to drop the Windows 8 name and brand this next release as Windows 9. That could change, but that’s the current thinking.
Metro 2.0. Maturing and fixing the “Metro” design language used by Windows will be a major focus area of Threshold. It’s not clear what changes are coming, but it’s safe to assume that a windowed mode that works on the desktop is part of that.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How and when the iMac and Mac Pro can go Retina
http://www.marco.org/2014/01/08/retina-imac-mac-pro-prediction
Three major factors have probably prevented a proper 2×-in-each-dimension “Retina” version of today’s 27″ iMac and standalone Thunderbolt Display, which would need to be 5120×2880 pixels:
Nobody makes general-purpose LCD panels with that resolution today. “4K” panels are 3840×2160,
Almost twice as many pixels require almost twice the bandwidth to drive over a cable. Thunderbolt at 10 Gbit/s wasn’t fast enough to drive 4K, which needs about 16 Gbit/s. Thunderbolt 2 at 20 Gbit/s can drive 4K, but not 5120×2880, which needs 28 Gbit/s.1 The only promising standard on the horizon is DisplayPort 1.3 at 32 Gbit/s, but that spec is being finalized later in 2014, which means we’re probably still years away from anything supporting it
Many GPUs haven’t been powerful enough to drive much at 4K resolution even if they could output it somehow,
I suspect that 5120×2880 on the desktop is still 2–3 years away.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Valve’s Steam Machines Are More About Safeguarding PCs Than Killing Consoles
http://games.slashdot.org/story/14/01/11/2144226/valves-steam-machines-are-more-about-safeguarding-pcs-than-killing-consoles
“CES has come and gone, and we’ve gotten a chance to see many different models of Valve’s Steam Machines. They’re being marketed as a device for a living room, and people are wondering if they’ll be able to compete with the Big-3 console manufacturers”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel launches 22nm Xeon E5-2400 v2 chips for servers
10 core prcoessor is aimed at server, storage and communication systems
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2322307/intel-launches-22nm-xeon-e5-2400-v2-chips-for-servers
CHIPMAKER Intel has launched its 22nm Xeon E5-2400 v2 family of processors for servers and workstations, a lower specification version of the Xeon E5-2600 the firm launched at its Intel Developer Forum (IDF) last September.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OpenStack’s Contributions to the NSA’s IT Operations: Agility, Flexibility and Scalability – See more at: http://www.buildyourbestcloud.com/72/openstack%E2%80%99s-contributions-nsa%E2%80%99s-it-operations-agility-flexibility-and-scalability#sthash.hhUI3SGK.dpuf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kids Can’t Compute — And That’s A Problem
http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2013/11/14/kids-cant-compute-problem/
Kids are “digital natives.” They grew up using computers, and therefore are more “tech savvy” than older people. Right? No!
Well, the first part’s right, but the second part is increasingly wrong. Ironically, with each passing year, young people entering the workforce know less and less about computers and the Internet.
What Kids Can’t Do — And Why
What’s changed is that we’ve entered the post-PC world. Yes, kids are using computers more. But today’s computers—even Windows PCs and Macs—don’t force users to confront what’s going on “under the hood.”
Using a computer no longer requires knowledge, awareness or skill. What’s worse: post-PC devices don’t even inspire curiosity about such things.
It’s not that young people are dumb. It’s just that their whole orientation and experience is detached from the nuts and bolts of computing.
Why This Is A Problem
Psychologist Abraham Maslow talked about the Law of the Instrument, most commonly expressed as: When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Likewise, when you grew up using Post-PC devices, every problem is solved with an app or Internet-based service.
The overwhelming quantity and user-friendliness of today’s apps and web-based services isn’t stretching users. It’s not confronting people with the need to understand computing, or to be creative in building solutions.
Hiring managers should watch out for knowledge, skill and perception gaps.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sinclair’s 1984 big shot at business: The QL is 30 years old
Quantum Leap micro leapt too early
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/12/archaeologic_sinclair_ql/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Top Microsoft bod: ARM servers right now smell like Intel’s (doomed) Itanic
‘A big challenge ARM has is what workloads are you going to run on it’
http://www.epanorama.net/blog/2013/12/22/computer-trends-for-2014/
Microsoft is unlikely to use ARM-compatible processors in a meaningful way in its data centers – unless there is a huge change in the software ecosystem around the non-x86 chips, a top Redmond bod told The Reg.
“It’s a new technology, but where is it going to be disruptive? A big challenge ARM has is what workloads are you going to run on it,” Neil told us.
This means that if Microsoft made a shift to ARM, it would have to make sense both from an infrastructure standpoint, and a product standpoint.
His comments follow news that Google and Facebook are investigating the chips for major production use, and the combustion of ARM server specialist Calxeda which bet too much too early on 32-bit ARM being ready for the data center.
Amazon Web Services faces a similar problem: why go to the trouble of buying ARM-powered servers, and port the AWS cloud orchestration software, if there isn’t a large base of applications for customers to run to take advantage of the fledgling hardware platform?
This is a problem that Google, Facebook and such web giants lack, as they are working just for themselves.
“It’s like any industry,” he added. “A million to do a compiler, $10m to do ports, $100m to do apps, probably $1bn to make an ecosystem that is self-sustaining. Industry has tried that a few times: we’ve had Itanium in the past, it’s expensive.”
“[ARM] will go through that maturation cycle,” Neil said. “It’ll be interesting to see if they make it all the way through.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Smallness über alles: Intel’s tiny, Haswell-based NUC desktop reviewed
Diminutive desktop is a workstation, game console, and HTPC all rolled into one.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/smallness-uber-alles-intels-tiny-haswell-based-nuc-desktop-reviewed/
The NUC is sort of a side-project for Intel. It’s a some-assembly-required desktop computer aimed at hobbyists who like playing with new tech and building their own PCs, but who also want something that’s as small as possible. It gives up much of the expandability that we’ve come to associate with desktops, but in exchange you get more processing power than anyone else is offering in a computer this size.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Video: Our first reaction to the Steam boxes, Steam OS controller
Gaming Editor Kyle Orland on Valve’s big reveal.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/video-our-first-reaction-to-the-steam-boxes-steam-os-controller/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Steam Machines are here: how Alienware is realizing Valve’s console dream
Alienware leads the charge for Linux-based gaming PCs
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/6/5281824/steam-machines-are-here-how-alienware-is-realizing-valve-console-dream
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tablets initiated the PC decline; the complexity of Windows 8 accelerated it:
Windows 8 and the Cost of Complexity
http://stratechery.com/2014/windows-8-cost-complexity/
PCs just suffered their worse quarter ever. From the WSJ:
World-wide PC shipments fell 10% last year, research firms Gartner Inc. and IDC said Thursday, the worst-ever sales slump for the industry.
The WSJ – and prevailing wisdom – blames two factors for the decline of PCs: PCs have become “good enough,” lengthening the replacement cycle, and more and more time is being spent on tablets and other appliance-like devices.
However, I don’t think these factors are independent; it’s not just that tablets occupy more of a user’s time, but that by doing so they make any performance issues on one’s PC less pressing simply because you use it less. To put it another way, users are likely to have a higher standard for their primary computing device than they are a secondary one; as PCs become secondary devices for more and more people the standard for “good enough” becomes lower and lower.
This was particularly worrisome for Microsoft; the only way that Microsoft makes money (in the consumer market) is through users buying new computers and the associated licenses
This means that people using Windows are in effect worthless to Microsoft; they need people to buy Windows, which usually means buying a new computer.
This was the context for Windows 8, which was meant to address both of the problems facing PCs:
By making touch a central part of the interface, customers would find that their current non-touch PCs were not good enough, and thus be motivated to buy new hardware (and new Windows licenses)
By having touch and an app store, customers would spend more time on their PCs, once again making them the primary device and raising the expectation for performance, reducing the upgrade cycle
However, the exact opposite happened.
In other words, instead of alleviating the problems facing PCs – no reason to buy – Windows 8′s increased complexity added a reason not to buy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How the ‘value trap’ squeezes Windows PC makers’ revenues and profits
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/09/pc-value-trap-windows-chrome-hp-dell-lenovo-asus-acer
Analysis of the revenues and profits for the ‘big five’ PC manufacturers – HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus and Acer – which make more than 60% of the Windows PC – shows a multi-year squeeze on prices and profits. What next?
The news that LG is considering quitting the traditional Windows PC business isn’t surprising.
t’s not just LG that’s hurting. The PC business is in a slump which has seen year-on-year shipments (and so sales) of Windows PCs fall for five (imminently, six) quarters in a row, after seven quarters where they barely grew by more than 2%.
And it’s not only growth that’s fallen. Analysis by the Guardian suggests that as well as falling sales, the biggest PC manufacturers now have to contend with falling prices and dwindling margins on the equipment they sell.
My research took published data from the quarterly financial figures for HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Asus, which together make more than 60% of the world’s Windows PC shipments.
The data shows that the weighted average selling price (ASP) of a PC has fallen from $614.60 in the first quarter of 2010 to just $544.30 in the third quarter of 2013, the most recent date for which data is available.
Even worse is the profitability. From the financial data and shipment data, it’s easy enough to calculate the per-PC profitability of each company, though it creates a confusing picture.
In the first quarter of 2010, the weighted average profit per PC was $15.71 – a 2.55% margin. (So the overall per-PC cost of manufacture, sales and marketing was just under $599.)
So much so that by the third quarter of 2013, the weighted average profit had fallen to $14.87.
That actually marks an improvement in margin, to 2.73% – but the absolute fall both in profits and numbers shipped means that companies are struggling.
“The trend for low-priced computers will last for the coming years,” said Shih confidently.
While HP and Dell (and to a lesser extent Lenovo) use PC sales to corporations as the Trojan horse for more profitable services contracts, any PC sale to a consumer is effectively the end of the financial relationship. The OEMs can’t extract any more value from them. That’s why many tried (and still try) to extract as much as possible at the point of sale.
When you think how thin that profit could be, you understand the purpose of “crapware” preinstalled on so many Windows PCs: to escape from the value trap.
For Asus and Acer, which don’t have substantial sales to business, the attempted solution has been to offer “cloud” services, though with little result. The idea is sound – retain consumers by tying them to the brand, and so to future sales – but set against the might of Google or Microsoft, it’s an uphill struggle.
That means there is always downward pressure on both prices and margins, while the only way to make useful profits is to be able to build at scale.
So who wins? The most obvious beneficiary of every Windows PC sale is Microsoft. It gets revenue from the sale of the Windows licence – but it then captures extra value through the high likelihood that even consumer buyers of PCs will buy its Office suite, and probably buy another version of Windows at some point in that computer’s life. It’s the reason why Microsoft is so fabulously profitable, while PC manufacturers are struggling.
Into this, the arrival of Chromebooks – running Google’s Chrome OS – could be the early signs of a disruption. Although sales are tiny compared to the overall PC market, at a few million in 2013, they have the potential to undermine many of Microsoft’s most lucrative markets
At the research group Gartner, where research director Annette Jump agrees that “the profit squeeze on PCs is very real”, the expectation is that Chromebooks will make slow – but real – inroads. For 2013, it reckons that Chromebooks would have been about 0.5% of total shipments – compared to 92% for Windows, 6% for Apple and 1% for Linux.
By 2017, the expectation is that the overall market will be about the same size, or slightly smaller. Windows will have fallen to just 83%; Apple will make up 11% (which, if even vaguely correct, would be its largest share in decades), while Chrome will be about 4.5%.
That might not be a lot of Chromebooks, though it’s likely they could be going to some key customers: the ones who used to reliably buy Windows and then subsequently Office.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Faster, more private, easier to read: My 2014 browser wishlist
Five features for developers users
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/13/my_browser_wishlist/
Improved privacy controls
Preferred caching
Need for speed
A responsive image solution
Reader view AKA: Saving developers from themselves
Universal sync tools
Conclusion
There are other things it would be nice to have – an easy and universal way to turn sites into “apps” for instance, something that can still be cumbersome on mobile platforms. Or perhaps some more fine-grained ways to control how much data is downloaded when you’re on constrained mobile connections.
What’s perhaps most encouraging is some of the features I’d like to see are today via some third-party tool. Many features we take for granted today began life as third-party tools. Others, like privacy, meanwhile are a work in progress, it seems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple now shipping the Mac Pro to Europe once again, after EU ban of old model
http://9to5mac.com/2014/01/12/apple-now-shipping-the-mac-pro-to-europe-once-again-after-eu-ban-of-old-model/
Since March, the old Mac Pro has not been available to buy in Europe as changes in regulations meant that the old Mac Pro no longer complied with EU law. In particular, the large exposed fans of the Mac Pro were the main reason behind the ban — the amendment required fan guards and minor changes to electrical ports.
Tomi Engdahl says:
QNAP at CES: Fanless NAS, mSATA SSD Caching, Home Automation and More…
by Ganesh T S on January 12, 2014 5:00 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7683/qnap-at-ces-fanless-nas-msata-ssd-caching-home-automation-and-more
The HS-210 is a standard 2-bay Marvell SoC-based NAS marketed as being completely silent and fanless. This NAS is not going to win any performance records (only one GbE port, a 1.6 GHz ARM SoC etc.), but the market it is targeting doesn’t need high performance. Personally, I would never have a NAS in full view in my entertainment center for two reasons – they don’t blend well with the existing equipment and the noise from the installed hard drives would be a distraction in certain scenarios.
TVS-x70
The TVS-x70 class of products is the first that I have seen in this NAS market segment with an in-built hypervisor. This allows end-users to run virtual machines on their Turbo NAS units. QNAP had convincing demonstrations, running Windows 8, Ubuntu and other operating systems on top of their Turbo NAS unit.
This feature allows users to utilize their Turbo NAS unit as a server for storage as well as virtual machines.
QNAP also had a demonstration of their integration with the Control4 home automation system. A NAS is an essential aspect of the home automation scene, and QNAP claims that they are the only NAS vendor to be officially certified by / integrated with the Control4 system. The demonstration involved using the Control4 hub to access and navigate the NAS contents.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ Surges in E-Book Sales
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/hitlers-mein-kampf-surges-book-sales/story?id=21466401
Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic political testament “Mein Kampf” is surging up electronic book bestseller lists, even as sales of the printed version have been stagnant for years.
One explanation offered for the surge in electronic sales concerns the relative anonymity offered by e-books as compared to their printed counterparts.
“These are things that people would be embarrassed to read otherwise,” journalist Chris Faraone, who wrote about the trend for Vocativ.com told ABC News. “Books that people would probably be a bit more embarrassed to read or display or buy in public, they are more than willing to buy on their Kindle, or iPads.”
Faraone believes the phenomenon is similar to that surrounding erotic novel “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which in 2012, became the first to sell more than 1 million copies on Amazon’s Kindle e-reader.
“’50 Shades of Grey’ is something you would probably be embarrassed to read in public,
“With digital readers, no one faces the stigma of having a copy of Mein Kampf on their bookshelf or risks it being seen on a table and having visitors make false assumptions about their reasons for owning it. They can read it in the subway without fear of being mistaken for a racist just because they want to learn about history,” Ford said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft will fling open curtains and reveal ‘Windows 9′ in April
Report: Time to bury the Windows 8/8.1 past
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/13/windows_9_coming_april_say_microsoft/
Microsoft will map out its plans for the successor to Windows 8.1 – which might be named Windows 9 – at a company event in April, according to a recent report.
Microsoft will start a discussion around the next iteration of its client operating system at its Build Conference on 2 to 4 April in San Francisco, California.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Her Will Dominate UI Design Even More Than Minority Report
http://www.wired.com/design/2014/01/will-influential-ui-design-minority-report/
A few weeks into the making of Her, Spike Jonze’s new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence, the director had something of a breakthrough.
isn’t a movie about technology. It’s a movie about people.
Of course on another level Her is very much a movie about technology. One of the two main characters is, after all, a consciousness built entirely from code.
t there isn’t all that much technology at all.
still sits at a desktop computer when he’s at work, but otherwise he rarely has his face in a screen.
In this “slight future” world, things are low-tech everywhere you look.
Theo’s home gives us one concise example. You could call it a “smart house,” but there’s little outward evidence of it. What makes it intelligent isn’t the whizbang technology but rather simple, understated utility. Lights, for example, turn off and on as Theo moves from room to room. There’s no app for controlling them from the couch; no control panel on the wall. It’s all automatic. Why? “It’s just a smart and efficient way to live in a house,” says Barrett.
Today’s smartphones were another object of Barrett’s scrutiny. “They’re advanced, but in some ways they’re not advanced whatsoever,” he says. “They need too much attention.”
while he has a desktop display at home and at work, neither have a keyboard. Instead, he talks to it.
Indeed, if you’re trying to imagine a future where we’ve managed to liberate ourselves from screens, systems based around talking are hard to avoid.
Think about what happens today when we’re bored at the dinner table. We check our phones. At the same time, we realize that’s a bit rude, and as Barrett sees it, that’s one of the great promises of the smartwatch: discretion
The central piece of invisible design in Her, however, is that of Sam, the artificially intelligent operating system and Theo’s eventual romantic partner. Their relationship is so natural that it’s easy to forget she’s a piece of software.
In essence, it means that AI has to be programmed to dumb itself down. “I think it’s very important for OSes in the future to have a good bedside manner.” Barrett says. “As politicians have learned, you can’t talk at someone all the time. You have to act like you’re listening.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD’s Kaveri APU Debuts With GCN-based Radeon Graphics
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/01/14/1954238/amds-kaveri-apu-debuts-with-gcn-based-radeon-graphics
“AMD’s next-generation Kaveri APU is now available, and the first reviews have hit the web. The chip combines updated Steamroller CPU cores with integrated graphics based on the latest Radeon graphics cards. It’s also infused with a dedicated TrueAudio DSP, a faster memory interface, and several features that fall under AMD’s Heterogeneous System Architecture for mixed-mode computing.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Chrome 32 Is Out: Noisy Tabs Indicators, Supervised Users
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/01/14/231226/google-chrome-32-is-out-noisy-tabs-indicators-supervised-users
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fedora 21 Linux Will Be Nameless
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/01/13/2114204/fedora-21-linux-will-be-nameless
http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/nameless-fedora-21-linux-is-an-opportunity-for-growth.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Acer CEO Apologizes for Failures
http://www.dailytech.com/New+Acer+CEO+Apologizes+for+Failures/article34123.htm
Former CEO Gianfranco Lanci has capitalized on vision at Lenovo, while Acer has fallen to record losses
Investors appeared to have little faith that chaos is not continuing to reign at Taiwan’s Acer, Inc. (TPE:2353), the world’s fourth largest computer maker.
Acer Rejects Visionary Path
Acer cashed in on the netbook craze and increasing sales of mass market notebook computers, but largely missed the trend toward handheld computers (smartphones, tablets) and faced declining profitibility. Acer made a bold move in 2007 buying Gateway in the U.S. and Packard Bell in Europe. The move greatly expanded Acer’s sales revenue, but shrunk its cash pile and failed to significantly improve profits.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tablets remain in second place – a hit product in trouser pockets to bottle early in the year
This year’s hit products are phablet of 5 to 6.9-inch devices that are a mix of smart phone and tablet PC.
At the same time, the traditional older tablet computers sales growth is waning, the consulting firm Deloitte predicts, published its report on Tuesday.
The compact tablet computers override the larger tablets in the first quarter of 165 million unit sales.
Some of the phablet success is due to the fact that people acquire different sized devices for different purposes. Among the major tablets will be a replacement for home computers, evaluates the CEO of Deloitte Finland Teppo Rantanen.
According to Rantanen, phablet wave does not, however, we go to Finland as great as, for example, in Asia.
Source: Tietoviikko
http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/tabletit+jaavat+kakkoseksi++hittituote+pullottaa+housuntaskuissa+alkuvuonna/a959445
Tomi Engdahl says:
How freeloaders build your community
http://www.outercurve.org/Blogs/EntryId/129/B-How-freeloaders-build-your-community
This post is the eighth in a series that will explore why businesses should become active participants in open source communities. We’ll explore what open source is, the economics of OSS (open source software), who uses it, how to make projects successful, and how to participate in external projects. It will also taken a deep dive into more complex topics such as the commercialization of FOSS, community vs customers, managing inbound IP, licenses, software hygiene, and when NOT to publish a project.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Latest Chrome adds Chrome OS flavor to Windows 8 mode
Noisy tab alerts, supervised users, and malware blocking, too
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/chrome_32_new_features/
Google on Tuesday delivered a new stable version of Chrome that offers a few features previously only available in beta versions, as well as giving a major overhaul to the UI of the browser’s Windows 8 mode.
The new version is the first mainstream release to include a feature that allows users to quickly locate tabs that are playing unwanted audio.
Another feature that has made it into mainstream Chrome after premiering in experimental builds is supervised users, which allows parents and other overseers to monitor the browsing habits of their charges.
The latest Chrome also comes with a new anti-malware feature that will automatically block downloads of files that it considers malicious and issue a warning message.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Computer programs should communicate better with each other. Software interfaces too strong protection to prevent the current technological advances, it turns out the University of Turku Ulla-Maija Mylly study.
Changes should be done to the patent and copyright law.
Purpose of the legislation is to create exclusive rights, which are believed to contribute to the technological and cultural development.
But the situation is more complicated in the software industry. Driving the development of that new programs and their components can be incorporated in existing. If the legislation prevents developing new software connection to the old, it slows down the development.
Mylly proposes a more appropriate level of interoperability information should be available to all developers.
In addition, she proposes to study patent law change. It would enable the interoperability of the element the use of other computer software without the patent holder’s consent. One option is that after the change of interoperability element user would pay compensation to the patent holder.
Source: Tietoviikko
http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/rajapintojen+pihtailusta+tuli+kehityksen+jarru/a959531
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why the World Needs OpenStreetMap
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/01/14/2335240/why-the-world-needs-openstreetmap
“Over the past six months, we’ve all grown a bit more skeptical about who controls our data, and what they do with it. An article at The Guardian says it’s time for people to start migrating en masse away from proprietary map providers to OpenStreetMap in order to both protect our collective location data and decide how it is displayed.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group- court
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/15/siliconvalley-collusion-lawsuit-idUSL2N0KP02P20140115
Roughly 60,000 Silicon Valley workers won clearance to pursue a lawsuit accusing Apple Inc, Google Inc and other companies of conspiring to drive down pay by not poaching each other’s staff, after a federal appeals court refused to let the defendants appeal a class certification order.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel shelves cutting-edge Arizona chip factory
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/14/us-intel-arizona-idUSBREA0D1F920140114
Intel Corp (INTC.O), hit by slumping personal computer sales, has put off opening a major chip factory that President Barack Obama once held up as an example of U.S. manufacturing potential.
The “Fab 42″ facility built in Chandler, Arizona, originally slated as a $5 billion project that in late 2013 would start producing Intel’s most advanced chips, will remain closed for the foreseeable future while other factories at the same site are upgraded, said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy.
Intel is the world’s top chipmaker but it was caught off guard by smartphones and tablets, a computing revolution that has cut into demand for PCs, the company’s core business.
Global PC shipments fell 10 percent in 2013
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD says its next PC chip trumps Intel with 12 ‘compute cores’ and smoother gaming
http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/14/amd-kaveri-pc-processor/
A decade ago, AMD brought us the first dual-core x86 processor. Then, starting in 2008, the company came out with tri-core and quad-core designs in quick succession, leading up to octa-core chips in 2011′s FX range as well as in the latest AMD-powered game consoles.
Today, we’re looking at a fresh leap forward, albeit one that will take a bit of explaining: a desktop and laptop chip called Kaveri, which brings together up to four CPU cores and eight GPU cores and gives them unheard-of levels of computing independence, such that AMD feels justified in describing them collectively as a dozen “compute cores.”
Marketing nonsense? Not necessarily.
The reason AMD calls the GPU cores inside Kaveri “compute cores” is that they’re said to be fundamentally different to the GPU cores in other PC processors. This difference lies in the fact that they’re able to function as equal citizens: Instead of relying on the CPU to orchestrate their workload, they can access system memory directly and take on tasks independently — almost like a CPU core does. The only difference is that they can’t take on the same types of tasks as a CPU, as they’re better suited to simple parallel chores rather than complicated serial processing.
As things stand, software developers are already able to exploit the GPU for general computing using tools like OpenCL, which can be used to accelerate anything from Photoshop to big spreadsheets. But OpenCL requires reams of code and a lot of inefficient to-ing and fro-ing between the GPU and CPU — all of which, AMD says, will be drastically reduced if developers latch onto HSA. That’s a big “if,” of course, but now that AMD has recruited a bunch of partners into its HSA Foundation, and now that it has managed push its silicon into millions of households via next-gen games consoles, developer interest looks more likely, and Kaveri’s compute cores at least bring it some future-proofing as a result.
Kaveri apparently took four years to develop, due to all the extra gubbins AMD has squeezed onto it, including HSA, Mantle and TrueAudio. This also explains why Kaveri chips are priced significantly higher than their predecessor, Richland: The lower-specced A8-7600 will start at $119, rising to $152 for the A10-7700K and, as we’ve mentioned, $173 for the flagship A10.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Explained: How LSI and Oracle cooked up magical flash-embiggening sauce
It’s all about compression, baby
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/lsi_oracles_magic_flash_card_sauce_explained/
Oracle and LSI have magicked up a way for LSI’s Nytro server flash cards to hold more data than they’re seemingly physically capable of holding and called it Dynamic Logical Capacity (DLC). How does it work?
We thought it might be a paging mechanism – but we were dead wrong. The card compresses the data it is sent and can reach a 2:1 compression ratio, depending on the data. With 50 per cent compression of the data, a 1TB Nytro card can hold 2TB of raw data.
This increases cache-hit rates and thereby increases server application performance. It reduces the cost/GB of the Nytro PCIe flash card storage and also the GB/watt measure.
The Nytro card reports its free space via an API, enabling the host system to send data up to the point its free capacity is used up.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dropbox and Uber: Worth Billions, But Still Inches From Disaster
http://www.wired.com/business/2014/01/dropbox-uber/
Dropbox went dark over the weekend.
According to the company, the widespread outage was the result of a bug it introduced while updating the hundreds of computer servers that drive its massively popular file-sharing service. But the problem was bigger than that. The San Francisco-based startup not only faced countless complaints from users across the net, it was forced to deflect rumors that the service was hacked, something that turned out to be a hoax.
On one level, a dust-up like this is just part of life as a startup. Things go wrong, people get upset, problems are solved, lessons are learned. But the stakes are higher when you’re Dropbox — or any other tech startup that has ascended to the misty heights of the billion-dollar club.
The most successful tech giants — think Google and Facebook — have been able to insulate themselves from the big SNAFU by performing well for long enough that we become inescapably dependent on them.
For many of us, Gmail would have to delete our entire accounts before switching became even plausible anymore. But even for billion-dollar companies still in a period of massive growth, such cushions aren’t always there to catch them. If they fall, the landing could still be hard.
Do One Thing, Do It Best
In an interview with WIRED this past fall, Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston acknowledged that his company has almost no margin for error. If Dropbox accidentally destroyed just one person’s file, he said, it could erode the trust of all its users. “This is like the same sort of genre of problem as the code that you use to fly an airplane. Even if it’s a little bug, it’s a big problem.”
The risk for Dropbox is that at its core, it essentially does only one thing: It syncs your files across all your devices. On the one hand, this single-mindedness has brought Dropbox its tremendous success.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Flash storage will be fast and furious in 2014
We look in the rear view mirror before racing down the road ahead
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/flash_in_2013/
Flash had a fantastic year in 2013 with an enormous number of developments.
It was a year of generally positive flash transitions, with cell geometry shrinking, all-flash arrays springing up, flash companies being bought, flash companies crashing back to earth after inflated IPOs or just crashing, and happiness spraying out like sunshine from three hybrid flash/disk array suppliers.
Still, some things became apparent from under the drowning flood of product and technology flash news. There began to be a general acceptance that access to I/O intensive random data was best done using flash rather than disk and that all-flash arrays definitely had a role as the best container for networked storage of hot, random data. Disk was as good as flash for streaming data and also much cheaper on a $/GB basis.
We didn’t see triple layer cell (TLC) NAND push into enterprise applications in 2013, TLC flash being slow and having a ridiculously short write endurance level.
flash foundries prefer to make single and multi-layer cell (SLC and MLC) on their foundry production lines because these command higher volumes and deliver a better return on manufacturing investment.
There was the beginning of a transition towards 1X (19nm-10nm) flash cell geometries from the 2X (29nm – 20nm) technology
One thing that didn’t happen was the emergence of any non-volatile technology to take over from flash. It’s generally agreed that flash technology may be unable to develop usable enterprise flash storage with acceptable endurance down at 15nm and below. Phase Change Memory and varieties of Resistive RAM, such as HP’s Memristor, are still future tech, with 3D NAND taking up the capacity slack
Micron expects to commence 3D NAND production sample shipments before mid-2014,
SSDs steadily developed in the year but, really, the action was elsewhere, with SSDs being a maturing technology
There was a steady iteration of hybrid flash-disk drive technology products, using a small slug of flash cache – less than 24GB typically – and firmware to detect hot files and put them on the flash.
There was one other big flash technology development in the year; SMART Storage announced it had stuffed flash chips into a memory DIMM-type module, using Diablo Technologies IP, and so arrived at flash on a server’s memory bus with access latency below that of PCIe flash.
The number of PCIE flash card suppliers multiplied as everyone and their brother tried to get in on the server app flash acceleration game
Tomi Engdahl says:
Using Hadoop for data on Google’s cloud? Google would rather you didn’t
And it’s got just the replacement for it: a shiny ‘Google Cloud Storage Service’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/google_hadoop_connector/
Google wants to shift heavy users of its cloud services away from an open-source, community-developed filesystem and into its own proprietary Colossus tech.
The upgrade was announced by the web overlord in a blog post on Tuesday that announced admins could now store Hadoop-destined data directly in Google’s closed-sourced Colossus-based “Google Cloud Storage Service”, and threw mud at the traditional Hadoop File System (HDFS) plugin.
Since Hadoop’s genesis at Yahoo! in the 2000s it has become a standard component of any data analyst’s open-source toolkit, and its development is stewarded by companies including Cloudera and Hortonworks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Crippling server ‘leccy bill risks sinking OpenBSD Foundation
We need $20k right now and someone to pay our future bills, is anybody game?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/17/openbsd_money_appeal/
The project behind OpenBSD risks going dark after receiving a crippling server electricity bill which it needs help to pay off.
The OpenBSD Foundation has revealed it needs to stump up $20,000 in the second appeal for help it has issued since December. It seems the first appeal didn’t net it enough to settle the bill in full.
The Foundation wants somebody to not only pay the bill but also to permanently take on the cost of running its servers – otherwise it risks going out of business.
“OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on,”
OpenBSD project coordinator Theo de Raadt said, in his first warning of the looming fiscal crisis on 2 December
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel confirms it will axe 5,400 workers in 2014
Last year saw hiring – this year will see the reverse
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/17/intel_to_slash_5400_employees_in_2014/
ntel plans to cut its workforce by approximately 5,400 employees this year, a company spokesman told The Reg.
After the workforce reduction was revealed by Reuters, Intel senior manager of corporate and financial PR Chris Kraeuter confirmed to us that there will be a reduction of “about 5 per cent” of the company’s 107,600 employees during this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Array with you: IBM takes on upstarts with new RamSan flash cram
Up to 48TB of the fast flashy stuff
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/17/ibms_flashfilled_xservers_and_new_flash_array/
Big Blue has burst onto the all-flash array scene afresh with a million-plus IOPS box; its first in-house FlashSystem since buying TMS a year and a half ago
The FlashSystem 840 is IBM’s latest iteration of its FlashSystem 720, 810 and 820 product range. It has up to 48TB of eMLC NAND capacity in its 2U rack enclosure (not a lot compared to Skyera’s promised skyEagle with its 500TB in 1U, but hefty enough). In theory a rack full of 840s would hold 1.44 petabytes of flash.
The system retains the FPGA hardware design of its predecessor. It features what IBM calls “MicroLatency technology that significantly speeds data access times from milliseconds to microseconds (less than 135 microseconds).”
Read latency is 135µs while write latency is 90µs. Interestingly the 820 latency range was 25 to 100 microseconds – so it’s quite a bit faster.
Host connectivity is via 16Gbit/s Fibre Channel, 40Gbit/s InfiniBand and FCoE/10GbitE ports. With 8GB/sec read and 4GB/sec write bandwidth I
What has improved is RAS and data protection.
Where the 820 had a hot spare module, the 840 has a hot-swap flash modules – these aren’t SSDs by the way
The FlashSystem 810 can have a RAID-0 scheme with data striped across the flash modules. With the 820 data protection advanced to what was called 2-dimensional RAID (Variable Stripe RAID and system-wide RAID 5) across the modules. The 840 offers both RAID-0 and 2D-RAID and variable-striped RAID.
The 840 can encrypt data at rest with AES-XTS 256 bit encryption.