Gartner: Global PC shipments fell 8.3% in Q4 2015, Apple only company in top 5 to see growth
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/12/gartner-global-pc-shipments-fell-8-3-in-q4-2015-apple-only-company-in-top-5-to-see-growth/

The PC market ended its poor year with another negative quarter. Both Gartner and IDC agreed: PC shipments were down globally, again.

Gartner estimated worldwide PC shipments fell 8.3 percent to 75.7 million units in Q4 2015. The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, and Apple.

IDC, meanwhile, estimated worldwide PC shipments dropped 10.6 percent to 71.9 million units in the ourth quarter. The firm noted “the year-on-year decline in 2015 shipments was nevertheless the largest in history, surpassing the decline of -9.8% in 2013.” The top five vendors in IDC’s results were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, and Apple.

“The fourth quarter of 2015 marked the fifth consecutive quarter of worldwide PC shipment decline,” Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. “Holiday sales did not boost the overall PC shipments, hinting at changes to consumers’ PC purchase behavior. On the business side, Windows 10 generally received positive reviews, but as expected, Windows 10 migration was minor in the fourth quarter as many organizations were just starting their testing period.”

““However, PC replacements should pick up again in 2016, particularly later in the year. Commercial adoption of Windows 10 is expected to accelerate, and consumer buying should also stabilize by the second half of the year.”

Mozilla developer James Long has posted a sort of internal monologue on the difficulties of being a hobbyist open source project maintainer. He says, “I hugely admire people who give so much time to OSS projects for free. I can’t believe how much unpaid boring work is going on. It’s really cool that people care so much about helping others and the community. … There are two roles for any project: starters and maintainers. People may play both roles in their lives, but for some reason I’ve found that for a single project it’s usually different people. Starters are good at taking a big step in a different direction, and maintainers are good at being dedicated to keeping the code alive.

Starters and Maintainers
December 29, 2015
http://jlongster.com/Starters-and-Maintainers

I am definitely a starter. I tend to be interested in a lot of various things, instead of dedicating myself to a few concentrated areas. I’ve maintained libraries for years, but it’s always a huge source of guilt and late Friday nights to catch up on a backlog of issues.

From now on, I’m going to be clear that code I put on github is experimental and I’m not going to respond to issues or pull requests. If I do release a production-ready library, I’ll already have someone in mind to maintain it. I don’t want to have a second job anymore.

Here’s to all the maintainers out there. To all the people putting in tireless, thankless work behind-the-scenes to keep code alive, to write documentation, to cut releases, to register domain names, and everything else.

Debian founder and Docker employee Ian Murdock has died at 42
http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/30/debian-founder-and-docker-employee-ian-murdock-has-died-at-42/

Docker today announced that Ian Murdock, a member of the startup’s technical staff and a former Sun and Salesforce employee known for founding the Debian Linux operating system, has passed away. He was 42.

A cause of death was not provided in the blog post announcing the news.

“Ian helped pioneer the notion of a truly open project and community, embracing open design and open contribution; in fact the formative document of the open source movement itself (the Open Source Definition) was originally a Debian position statement,”

In the past few years Docker has popularized Linux containers, and there is significance in his arrival at the startup, as he is highly regarded in the Linux world. Many Debian users responded to the Monday tweets with sympathy and support.

In Memoriam: Ian Murdock
http://blog.docker.com/2015/12/ian-murdock/

Toshiba Radius 12 review: A 4K laptop with compromises
It has one of the best screens of any notebook. Too bad about the battery life, though.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/12/24/toshiba-radius-12-review/

It ticks off almost all the right boxes, with a 4K, Technicolor-certified screen option and a 2.9-pound design — particularly impressive for a convertible like this with a 360-degree hinge.

Summary

Toshiba’s Radius 12 convertible has the ingredients of a great ultraportable laptop, but unfortunately, it would seem that its greatest asset is also its greatest weakness: That gorgeous 4K, Technicolor-certified screen option results in worst-in-class battery life.

Then you pick it up. The machine is so light that it nearly excuses the drab design.

On a practical level, too, the chassis is home to a useful selection of ports, including a full-sized HDMI socket, two USB 3.0 connections, a smaller USB Type-C port, a full-sized SD card reader, a headphone jack and a volume rocker for when the device is in tablet mode. Compare that to the MacBook, which makes do with one measly USB Type-C connection, and doesn’t even come with a dongle in the box.

So far in our tour we haven’t yet powered on the Radius 12, but now would be a good time: The optional 4K display is likely the reason you’re considering buying this in the first place. The glass stretches virtually from edge to edge, with the skinniest of bezels acting as a nominal buffer between the display and the rest of the machine. I remain unconvinced that 3,840 x 2,160 resolution is necessary on a display this small — a slightly lower pixel count would still look sharp and would be less devastating on battery life, and there’s not yet much 4K content to watch anyway. Even so, there’s no question that the pixel density helps make the screen as gorgeous as it is.

Windows 10 app momentum: A flash in the pan or something sustainable?
http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-app-momentum-a-flash-in-the-pan-or-something-sustainable/

There has been a steady trickle of Universal Windows Platform apps arriving in the Windows Store, as of late. Can Microsoft keep the developer momentum going?

The Australian government is urging its citizens to turn off two-factor authentication while abroad.

The myGov website allows Australians to tap into a broad range of government services including tax payments, health insurance, child support, and so on. Since this tends to involve sensitive personal information, it’s wise to protect one’s account with two-factor authentication – such as a one-time code texted to a phone that needs to be given to the website while logging in.

There’s a fear that while citizens are overseas, they may not be able to reliably get these text messages (or be charged an extra fee to receive them) if they try to use myGov. So the advice is: turn off this protection when out the country, and turn it back on again when you return.

Except, of course, that rather misses the entire reason for two-factor authentication, and puts convenience above the actual security of your information.

What’s more, people are significantly more likely to be using online services in less secure settings when they are abroad, making the decision to remove a vital mechanism all the more likely that their accounts will be compromised.

In other words, this is really terrible advice.

The entire point of two-factor auth is to make it so that if someone manages to snatch a look at your username and password, they can’t automatically log into your account.

As such, the Australian government is doing is the exact opposite of what it should be doing, which is educating people about alternative ways to secure their accounts, rather than pushing the crazy message that security is about convenience and that you should simply drop it when it requires a little extra effort,

A white boxer is working with SanDisk to flog flash arrays, making SanDisk even more desirable to WDC.

Taiwan-based Quanta, actually Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), along with Foxcon and SuperMicro, is a so-called “white box” computer supplier, making notebooks, servers and switches to be branded by its customers. Apple is one of its customers, and Amazon, Dell and HP are others.

NAND component and system supplier SanDisk is being bought by WDC for $19bn, and has developed an InfiniFlash array, characterised as a JBOF, Just a Box of Flash, and, like a JBOD, lacking array controller hardware and software. Pricing is said to start at less than $1/GB for the raw flash box, before any data reduction software or hardware functionality is added.

It is partnering with CloudByte, Nexenta and Tegile to develop complete controller HW + SW + JBOF systems usable by customers.

An InfiniFlash array offers up to 512TB of capacity in a 3U enclosure, using 8TB InfiniFlash cards, meaning up to 6PB per rack. With flash chip density increasing we can expect this to double.

This product combo might well meet NetApp/Solidfire and other scale-out flash arrays when being pitched to cloud service providers.

Ubuntu smartphone certainly had to be a big part of this plan, but so far the Ubuntu mobile is certainly less than a million in less than a user.

Ubuntu’s own information, the format used for desktops or laptops around 40 million users.

Linux’s share of computers has remained virtually unchanged for many years. For example, Netapplicationsin statistics show that 1.6 per cent of the network address requests were made in November linux computers.

Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3786:ubuntu-jaa-kauaksi-tavoitteestaan&catid=13&Itemid=101