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:
Apple starts manufacturing new iPads
Tech giant’s suppliers are said to have started working on an iPad with a 9.7 inch screen
http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/technology/apple-starts-manufacturing-new-ipads-1.1894554
Apple’s suppliers are understood to have started manufacturing new iPads, as the company works to reinvigorate sales of the tablet computers after two straight quarters of declines.
Mass production of a full-sized iPad with a 9.7-inch screen is already under way, with an unveiling projected for the end of this quarter or early next, according to sources. The timing is crucial as Apple ramps up a new product push for the lucrative end-of-year holiday shopping season.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Auralux Release For Browsers Shows Emscripten Is Reaching Indie Devs
http://games.slashdot.org/story/14/08/13/0343243/auralux-release-for-browsers-shows-emscripten-is-reaching-indie-devs
Porting C++/OpenGL based games using Emscripten and WebGL has been an approach pushed by Mozilla for some time now. Games using the technology are compatible with most modern browsers and require no separate install.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Getting IT Talent In Government Will Take Culture Change, Says Google Engineer
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/08/12/2242205/getting-it-talent-in-government-will-take-culture-change-says-google-engineer
Mikey Dickerson, a site reliability engineer at Google, who was appointed Monday by the White House as the deputy federal CIO, will lead efforts to improve U.S. Websites. Dickerson, who worked on the Healthcare.gov rescue last year, said that one issue the government needs to fix is its culture
Tomi Engdahl says:
White House’s new IT engineer is sharp, witty, and blunt
To attract ‘creative snowflakes,’ the government has to change its culture, says Google engineer
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9250329/White_House_s_new_IT_engineer_is_sharp_witty_and_blunt_
Dickerson not only gave a blistering critique of Healthcare.gov, he offered advice about how to get computer engineers to take government jobs. That may be one of the reasons why Dickerson was hired by the White House.
Dickerson’s specialty, as he describes it, “is how to make big distributed systems work technically.”
“You don’t have to think that the engineers are the creative snowflakes and rock stars that they think they are, you don’t have to agree with any of that,” Dickerson said. “I’m just telling you that’s how they think of themselves, and if you want access to more of them, finding a way to deal with that helps a lot.”
Engineers want to make a difference, Dickerson said, and he has collected the names of 146 engineers who would be willing to take unpaid leave from their jobs to work on a meaningful project.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The quiet before the next IT revolution
http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/the-quiet-the-next-it-revolution-247959
Now that the technologies behind our servers and networks have stabilized, IT can look forward to a different kind of constant change
If you look at the struggles IT has gone through in the past few decades, you can see several clearly defined eras, each shorter than the last. Coming through to today, eras seem to be measured in mere months, not years.
But in IT, we are actually seeing a bit of stasis. I don’t mean that the IT world isn’t moving at the speed of light — it is — but the technologies we use in our corporate data centers have progressed to the point where we can leave them be for the foreseeable future without worry that they will cause blocking problems in other areas of the infrastructure.
Within the course of a decade or so, we saw networking technology progress from 10Base-2 to 10Base-T, to 100Base-T to Gigabit Ethernet. Each leap required systemic changes in the data center and in the corporate network.
Another area that has stabilized is server infrastructure. Virtualization has completely revolutionized server deployments, obviously, and we are now in a place where many pitfalls of server administration no longer exist.
Even the desktop system has changed completely. Gone are the bulky tower PCs that were constantly getting kicked under desks.
Of course, the cloud explosion has eliminated many internal services completely, as long as you’re willing to place a certain amount of critical data and applications in the hands of others.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell The Man shrieks: ‘We’ve got a Bitcoin order, we’ve got a Bitcoin order’
$50k of PowerEdge servers? That’ll be 85 coins in digi-dosh
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/11/dell_bitcoin_poweredge/
The privately held maker of PCs and other gear for enterprises and consumers last month began a trial to allow US customers to use Bitcoin in exchange for goods and services.
Presumably this is the largest, if the not first order to be transacted in this way by Dell, which had previously claimed to be done with “cutting out the middleman”.
Customers in the US can sign up for a wallet from Coinbase, a Bitcoin processing player, and Dell is waving a 10 per cent discount on any Alienware systems – up to $150 – to anyone paying in this way.
“We will be gauging customer demand during the US pilot and make decisions about expansion to other countries at that time,
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Haswell paradox: The best CPU in the world… unless you’re a PC enthusiast
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/157337-the-haswell-paradox-the-best-cpu-in-the-world-unless-youre-a-pc-enthusiast
Intel’s Haswell is a bit of a puzzle. On the one hand, this is the fastest single-threaded chip in the world — but on the other, it’s hard to get excited about a chip that’s only a few percent faster, consumes more power, and has weaker overclocking potential than its predecessor.
One of the biggest additions in Haswell is the full integration of the voltage regulator onto the CPU die. Instead of relying on the motherboard to produce a variety of power rails for different parts of the chip (memory controller, PCIe controller, GPU), Haswell has a fully-integrated voltage regulator (FIVR) that takes a single input (~1.8V) and splits it into all the required rails. The end result is an overall reduction in system power (~20%), comparable idle CPU/GPU power, but a sizable increase in load power consumption (~10%).
This obviously makes Haswell ideal for mobile computing, where there’s a lot of idling and puttering around the interwebs. These power savings are so extensive that they could equate to a 25% battery life improvement over Ivy Bridge. On the desktop, though, where you might be playing games, editing photos, or encoding videos, Haswell only just scrapes a victory from Ivy Bridge.
The fully-integrated voltage regulator and higher power consumption under load mean that Haswell is actually worse than Ivy Bridge at overclocking.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Peer Pressure! Business Pushing the Cloud on Enterprise IT
How to react when business execs want to jump on this tech trend — and IT isn’t ready
http://www.cio.com/article/2463167/data-center-cloud/peer-pressure-business-pushing-the-cloud-on-enterprise-it.html
When you graduated from high school, you might have thought peer pressure was mostly over.
Thanks to cloud computing, that may not be the case for some IT executives.
IT administrators are increasingly dealing with business executives who are pushing them to move enterprise data and apps into the cloud – whether they are ready or not.
For some IT execs, the still unanswered questions include: Will cloud computing save money and manpower? Is a Service Level Agreement needed?
“The cloud is getting so much attention and chat time that all of a sudden there is an urgency,” said Jeff Kagan, an independent analyst. “Tomorrow the cloud will be tested and trusted. However, today it’s still the wild, wild West. IT executives know this but they get pressure from their chief executives to jump into the cloud because it’s becoming the new code word for success. And no one wants to be last.”
“Absolutely, there is peer pressure,”
“The CEO or business leaders hear that they can get a service that sounds like it’s half the cost with the maximum flexibility. Then they go to the CIO and start pushing.”
“I recommend first that IT not get defensive, as there are some enormous benefits to the cloud,” he said. “Take the time to do a side-by-side analysis of what it would take to move certain applications to the cloud versus keeping it in-house. Explain that it requires a thorough analysis, because there’s business risk in making a bad decision. They can then explain the risks and costs of downtime to revenues, cost, security, and compliance.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Disables TSX Instructions: Erratum Found in Haswell, Haswell-E/EP, Broadwell-Y
by Ian Cutress on August 12, 2014 8:20 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8376/intel-disables-tsx-instructions-erratum-found-in-haswell-haswelleep-broadwelly
One of the main features Intel was promoting at the launch of Haswell was TSX – Transactional Synchronization eXtensions. In our analysis, Johan explains that TSX enables the CPU to process a series of traditionally locked instructions on a dataset in a multithreaded environment without locks, allowing each core to potentially violate each other’s shared data. If the series of instructions is computed without this violation, the code passes through at a quicker rate – if an invalid overwrite happens, the code is aborted and takes the locked route instead. All a developer has to do is link in a TSX library and mark the start and end parts of the code.
News coming from Intel’s briefings in Portland last week boil down to an erratum found with the TSX instructions.
Intel has had numerous issues similar to this in the past, such as the FDIV bug, the f00f bug and more recently, the P67 B2 SATA issues. In each case, the bug was resolved by a new silicon stepping, with certain issues (like FDIV) requiring a recall, similar to recent issues in the car industry. This time there are no recalls, the feature just gets disabled via a microcode update.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Programming Startup Famo.us Gets $25 Million to Make JavaScript More Famous
http://recode.net/2014/08/13/programming-startup-famo-us-gets-25-million-to-make-javascript-more-famous/
Famo.us, an unusual programming startup that allows users to make nifty mobile apps using JavaScript, has raised $25 million in additional funding and added high-profile investor Jerry Murdock to its board.
As Famo.us wonkishly describes it: “Famo.us is the only JavaScript framework that includes an open source 3-D layout engine fully integrated with a 3-D physics animation engine that can render to DOM, Canvas, or WebGL.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open Source Businesses Programming
Ask Slashdot: Corporate Open Source Policy?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/14/08/13/171230/ask-slashdot-corporate-open-source-policy
Comments:
Having a solid Contributor License Agreement process in place would probably be a good idea. That way, it’s clear who owns the code that comes in and encourages people to contribute while defining a (necessary evil) process for doing so. You’ll lose random passers-by, but just one passer-by who gets litigious could be more of a headache than it’s worth.
I’m not sure if the idea of a contributor license as you suggest is in the spirit of open source.
In particular, make sure you actually own the copyrights or have a distribution license for everything you intend to open source. All it takes is one lazy cowboy coder and Google to screw your whole project. Also, understand the license you intend to distribute under, and what licenses are incompatible with it.
Or does corporate America avoid this entire opportunity/entanglement/briar patch?
Yes, to a large degree, and they’re stuck in the last century. IP has always been an imaginary government monopoly meant to enhance the business interests of a certain caste; originally that was the author/inventor, but that ship has long sailed – now it’s corporate profits almost exclusively (and you may find exceptions that prove the rule).
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to Motivate Your IT Team After a Setback
http://www.cio.com/article/2464171/careers-staffing/how-to-motivate-your-it-team-after-a-setback.html
It can be difficult enough to manage and motivate your teams when things are going well, but keeping morale high and people productive is even tougher if you’ve suffered a setback – a failed project, layoffs, losing a major client – or if personal issue are affecting a member of your team.
Employee morale is critical to a business’ success or failure, says Piera Palazzolo, senior vice president at Dale Carnegie Training. Managers need to have their finger on the pulse of the workplace and be able to respond accordingly if they notice employees aren’t living up to their full potential, she says.
“Morale’s important because it directly affects creativity and also productivity,” Palazzolo says. “If your employees are in a slump, they’re just going through the motions, robotically, and they’re not engaged or motivated. You’re not making the best use of your available talent,” she says.
Tomi Engdahl says:
somewhat surprising is that Gartner says the “cloud computing” is not just hype anymore, but becoming a mainstream technology.
Source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/08/14/0236217/gartner-internet-of-things-has-reached-hype-peak
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chromebooks to break out of US schools: Netbook 2.0 comeback not just for children
Google-powered laptops in … except if you want to buy them from Dell, it seems
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/11/analyst_sees_upswing_in_chromebook_orders_education_usa/
It may be a niche, but the market for Chromebooks will grow, according to research company Gartner. The analyst has predicted 5.2 million of the Google OS-powered laptops will be sold this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hey, biz bods: OpenStack will be worth $3.3bn by 2018
Anything that simple to use has got to be complex to set up
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/08/14/open_stack_channel_451/
OpenStack looks like it will inject some $3.3bn into the market by 2018, growing from $890m this year according to 451 Research’s recent Open Stack Pulse 2014 report.
Much of that (roughly 70 per cent) will be from public cloud providers like Rackspace and HP, but a fair amount will come from private cloud build-out. Unless sentiment changes, companies will be looking to keep cloud safely ensconced on their own enclaves (our surveys*) show companies consistently preferring private and hybrid cloud deployments over purely public cloud. We’re seeing strong interest in OpenStack for these private clouds.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What’s in your toolbox? Why the browser wars are so last decade
The new reality of picking a web winner
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/14/browser_tools_bake_off/
Desktop browsers have reached a point where there isn’t a huge amount of daylight between them. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera are all on a pretty even playing field when it comes to features and speed.
Safari and Internet Explorer lag a little bit when it comes to the bleeding edge of web standards because they update less frequently, but both are capable.
The pressure to differentiate is more intense than ever for Microsoft, Google, Firefox, Apple and Opera Software.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The End of a Necessary Evil: Collapsing the Memory Hierarchy
http://www8.hp.com/hpnext/posts/end-necessary-evil-collapsing-memory-hierarchy#.U-yG32NsUil
It turns out that today’s computers spend most of their time and energy shuffling data between tiers of storage and memory. In modern systems, this hierarchy can be more than 10 layers deep. In geek land, we call this “the volatility chain.” We’re all so used to this that few of us ever think to question it. But on the face of it, this is an odd way to go about computing. Why not hold all your data in main memory, all of the time?
In this post, I want to take a look at how we came to work the way we do, and what comes next.
It’s a question of scarcity. To keep up with the processor, you need the fastest memory possible. Since the 1970s, the fastest memories have required continuous power. Computers have always been built with as much fast memory as a user can afford, and the required capacity comes from cheaper, but slower, technologies. The memory hierarchy evolved because fast memory is expensive to both buy and run. A primary task of an operating system is to manage this hierarchy, delivering the right data to applications on demand and filing away the results.
The industry has developed all kinds of tricks to mask the delays caused by the memory hierarchy. Most use sophisticated algorithms to predict and deliver that data that will be needed next, such as caching and prefetching commonly used data.
If we could find a memory technology that is as fast and durable as DRAM, and as cheap as Flash and hard drives, we could combine—collapse—multiple layers of hierarchy. We call this combination of main memory and mass storage “universal memory.” Suddenly, the job of the operating system becomes massively simplified.
Universal memory remains a somewhat controversial topic. There are those who regard it as little better than a myth. After all, each of the technologies we use today excels at its assigned task. Wouldn’t forcing a compromise technology into use for multiple tiers result in a poorer experience for the end user?
We believe that Memristor memory, which is being commercialized by HP, is the ideal universal memory vehicle. It’s fast, incredibly energy-efficient and can be packed extremely tightly on a chip.
metal roof says:
Hi there! Do you know if they make any plugins to
safeguard against hackers? I’m kinda paranoid about losing everything I’ve worked hard on.
Any tips?
Tomi Engdahl says:
I don’t know any plug-ins specific to safeguarding against hackers.
Actually safeguarding against hackers is much wider topic than what could be solved with a plug-in module.
It involves general system security issues, keeping everything up-to-dated, keeping everything backed, have tested process to restore system from backups when needed, monitoring so that you know when you get hacked etc…
When you are paranoid about losing everything, first thing you need to work on is the back-up and restore issues.
Frequent backups and way to restore the data successfully is the key to protect against loosing data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
M’soft Plugs FPGAs in Datacenter
China’s Baidu adopts FPGAs, too
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1323500&
Next year, Microsoft will start plugging Altera FPGA cards into new servers it deploys to run its Bing search service. Someday it might make such cards a standard part of the million servers in its datacenters.
That’s the goal for Andrew Putnam, part of a Microsoft Research that led to the current use of FPGAs for Bing. It talks at the annual Hot Chips event here Putnam and an engineer from China’s search giant Baidu described their parallel efforts.
FPGAs are not a natural fit for cost-sensitive datacenters, but it turns out they make sense. “We started out focusing on Bing which needed help because it was not fast enough, not that we wanted to get FPGAs in the datacenter — we looked at software, then GPUs and then FPGAs,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Blue Screen Stop 0×050 error reported for systems installing KB2976897, KB2982791, and KB2970228
http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/blue-screen-stop-0×050-error-reported-systems-installing-kb2976897-kb2982791-and-kb2970228-248363
Two Microsoft kernel-mode driver updates are triggering BSOD error message on some Windows systems
Details at this point are sparse, but it looks like three different patches from this week’s Black Tuesday crop are causing Blue Screens with a Stop 0×50 error on some systems. If you’re hitting a BSOD, you can help diagnose the problem (and perhaps prod Microsoft to find a solution) by adding your voice to the Microsoft Answers Forum thread on the subject.
Problematic kernel-mode driver updates aren’t unusual at all. Now that Microsoft is releasing more of them, problems seem to be cropping up more frequently.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Daimler Employees Can Set Emails to Auto-Delete During Vacation
Workers can look forward to coming back to an inbox exactly as they’d left it.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/daimlers-german-employees-can-set-emails-to-auto-delete-during-vacation/376068/
The Stuttgart-based car and truckmaker said about 100,000 German employees can now choose to have all their incoming emails automatically deleted when they are on holiday so they do not return to a bulging in-box.
The sender is notified by the “Mail on Holiday” assistant that the email has not been received and is invited to contact a nominated substitute instead. Employees can therefore return from their summer vacation to an empty inbox.
“Our employees should relax on holiday and not read work-related emails,” said Wilfried Porth, board member for human resources. “With ‘Mail on Holiday’ they start back after the holidays with a clean desk. There is no traffic jam in their inbox. That is an emotional relief.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft considered renaming Internet Explorer to escape its checkered past
The team hasn’t completely ruled out the possibility of rebranding the browser.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/microsoft-considered-renaming-internet-explorer-to-escape-its-checkered-past/
Microsoft has had “passionate” discussions about renaming Internet Explorer to distance the browser from its tarnished image, according to answers from members of the developer team given in a reddit Ask Me Anything session today.
Tomi Engdahl says:
DARPA Uses Preteen Gamers To Beta Test Tomorrow’s Military Software
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/08/14/1828254/darpa-uses-preteen-gamers-to-beta-test-tomorrows-military-software
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sony: We don’t “feel the need to go out and buy outright exclusivity”
But exec admits to giving “financial support” to attract exclusive indie games.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/08/sony-we-dont-feel-the-need-to-go-out-and-buy-outright-exclusivity/
This week’s gaming news has been dominated by Microsoft’s controversial decision to buy timed Xbox exclusivity for the next Tomb Raider game. While this is not an unusual practice historically, a Sony executive is trying to make some hay by saying the PlayStation 4 doesn’t need to buy exclusive games. Except when it does…
So basically, Ryan is saying that Sony doesn’t buy exclusivity for PS4 games… except when it does, for indie games.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP storage revenue downturn? It’s just a ‘kink’, says exec
A blip on the radar
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/01/hp_storage_revenues_blip/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft to deliver Windows ‘Threshold’ tech preview around late September
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-to-deliver-windows-threshold-tech-preview-around-late-september-7000032668/
Summary: Microsoft is aiming to make available a technology preview of Windows Threshold around late September or early October.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Project Aims To Build a Fully Open SoC and Dev Board
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/08/15/2220252/project-aims-to-build-a-fully-open-soc-and-dev-board
“A non-profit company is developing an open source 64-bit system-on-chip that will enable fully open hardware, ‘from the CPU core to the development board.’ The ‘lowRISC’ SoC is the brainchild of a team of hardware and software hackers from the University of Cambridge, with the stated goal of implementing a ‘fully open computing eco-system, including the instruction set architecture (ISA), processor silicon, and development boards.’
Comments:
From the article they are using TSMC, which is one of the largest silicon foundries (ASIC manufacturing) in the world.
As for the all out open-source, they also make clear on the project page that hardware patents on the chipset instruction is supposedly strangling innovation for processors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 9 preview could materialize as soon as next month
“Threshold” preview rumored for a late September or early October release.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/windows-9-preview-could-materialize-as-soon-as-next-month/
Microsoft could be shipping a preview release of the next major version of Windows—codenamed “Threshold” and expected to be named “Windows 9″—in either late September or early October, according to sources speaking to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. The preview will be widely available to anyone who wants to install it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google to drop Microsoft-designed touch Web spec, stick with Apple tech
Chrome will stick with Apple’s Touch Events over Microsoft’s Pointer Events.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/google-to-drop-microsoft-designed-touch-web-spec-stick-with-apple-tech/
Developers on the Blink browser engine, the core component that powers both Google’s Chrome browser and Opera, announced Friday that they’re dropping support for the Pointer Events specification originally devised by Microsoft.
There are two competing specifications for handling touch input in the browser. The first, Touch Events, was devised by Apple and integrated into WebKit. While Touch Events was part of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) standards track, for a long period they were held up in patent limbo, with Apple claiming that it owned patents that covered the specification and refusing to offer a royalty-free license for those patents. During this period of uncertainty, W3C stopped work on Touch Events.
In response to this, Microsoft devised a similar but different specification, which it called Pointer Events.
Since the work on Pointer Events started, the patent issues surrounding Touch Events have been largely resolved, with W3C deciding that Apple’s patents were irrelevant and as such no license was necessary.
Even with this work resuming, Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla all worked to implement Pointer Events in their browsers. Google’s Blink engine, being derived from WebKit, already includes Touch Events.
But Google has announced that this work is stopping. The company’s developers gave three reasons for the change. The first is that Mobile Safari only supports Touch Events, making it difficult for Pointer Events to ever gain traction, much less win out. Second, the way Pointer Events worked caused performance issues for WebKit and Blink not found in Touch Events. Third, Pointer Events precluded implementing some common design concepts such as pull-to-refresh.
Mozilla’s work on Pointer Events seems so far to be continuing.
Google’s new plan is to extend Touch Events in such a way as to do what Pointer Events offered.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
The gentle, dependable workhorse that everyone relies on and nobody owns
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/why-email-will-never-die/375973/?single_page=true
“E-mail is dead, or at least that’s what Silicon Valley is banking on,” wrote Businessweek tech reporter Ashlee Vance.
Getting an email address was once a nerdy right of passage for Gen-Xers arriving on college campuses. Now, the kids are waging a war of indifference on poor old email, culling the weak and infirm old-people technology.
You can’t kill email! It’s the cockroach of the Internet, and I mean that as a compliment. This resilience is a good thing.
Email is actually a tremendous open platform on which new, innovative things can and have been built. In that way, email represents a different model from the closed ecosystems we see proliferating across our computers and devices.
For all the changes occurring around email, the experience of email itself has been transformed, too. Email is not dying, but it is being unbundled.
Email was a newsfeed. With the proliferation of newsletters, email alerts, flash sale emails, and other email-delivered content, one’s email client became a major site of media consumption. It was a feed as much as an inbox.
Email was one’s passport and identity. Before Facebook became a true alternative for verifying one’s identity on the web, the email address was how one accomplished serious things on the Internet.
Email was the primary means of direct social communication on the Internet. Email was how to send a message to someone, period.
Email was a digital package-delivery service. After FTP faded from popularity, but before Dropbox and Google Drive, email was the primary way to ship heavy digital documents around the Internet.
Email was the primary mode of networked work communication. Most companies would have a hard time functioning without email, the French company Atos’s successful email ban notwithstanding.
Looking at this list of email’s many current uses, it is obvious that some of these tasks will leave its domain
While email’s continued evolution is significant, what it has retained from the old web sets it apart from the other pretty, convenient apps. Email is an open, interoperable protocol.
Last, Silicon Valley startups seem to be able to offer the great experiences that they do because they centralize our information within their server farms. But email proves that this is not necessarily the case. Progress can come from much more distributed decision-making processes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?
A perspective on whether Moore’s law will hold, as well as whether it matters.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/08/are-processors-pushing-up-against-the-limits-of-physics/
The biggest problem Markov sees here is the struggle to extract greater parallelism from code. Even low-end smartphones now have multiple cores, but we’ve still not figured out how to use them well in many cases.
Overall, however, one comes away with the sense that the greatest limitation we face is human cleverness. Although there are no technologies on the horizon that Markov seems to be especially excited about, he’s also clearly optimistic that we can either find creative ways around existing roadblocks or push progress in other areas to such an extent that the roadblocks seem less important.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 8.1 Update Crippling PCs With BSOD, Microsoft Suggests You Roll Back
http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/08/18/0016223/windows-81-update-crippling-pcs-with-bsod-microsoft-suggests-you-roll-back
Right on schedule, Microsoft rolled-out an onslaught of patches for its “Patch Tuesday” last week, and despite the fact that it wasn’t the true “Update 2″ for Windows 8.1 many of us were hoping for, updates are generally worth snatching up. Since the patch rollout, it’s been discovered that four individual updates are causing random BSoD issues
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hello, HP Stream 14: A $199 Windows laptop aimed squarely at the Chromebook market
http://gigaom.com/2014/08/18/hello-hp-stream-14-a-199-windows-laptop-aimed-squarely-at-the-chromebook-market/
Microsoft isn’t taking the low-cost Chromebook threat lightly. Instead it’s working with partners to create $199 to $249 Windows laptops and it has enlisted HP’s help with the HP Stream 14. It even comes with cloud storage for 2 years, just like a Chromebook.
I expect many other similar low-cost laptops to arrive by year’s end, since last month Microsoft publicly acknowledged the threat of Chromebooks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Seeks New Customers: Kids
https://www.theinformation.com/Google-Seeks-New-Customers-Kids
Google has been working to overhaul its Web services so it can legally allow children to use them, as it becomes more willing to tolerate hairy legal requirements in exchange for growth.
The contemplated features include a dashboard for parents to oversee their kids’ activities, a child-safe version of YouTube and requiring people who sign up for a Google account on devices powered by Google’s Android software to share their age.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Moves to Target Kids Under 13
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/18/google-moves-to-target-kids-under-13/
Google GOOGL +1.54% plans to offer accounts to children under 13 years old for the first time, a move that will take the world’s largest Internet search provider into a controversial and operationally complex new market.
Accounts on Google services such as Gmail and YouTube are not officially offered to children, though there is little to stop them from logging on anonymously or posing as adults to sign up for accounts.
Now Google is trying to establish a new system that lets parents set up accounts for their kids, control how they use Google services and what information is collected about their offspring, according to a person familiar with the effort.
Google and most other Internet companies tread carefully because of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. The law imposes strict limits on how information about children under 13 is collected; it requires parents’ consent and tightly controls how that data can be used for advertising. (Companies are not liable if customers lie to them about user ages).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Salary Requests skyrocket in the United States
In the United States in the IT sector is now the job seeker market.
In the United States in the IT sector is now the job seeker market. Jobs is sufficient, as a recent survey, 70 percent of IT recruitment executive directors intends to hire additional people. No wonder, then, that the applicants’ salary requests are harder than before.
Local employers turning has come as a surprise: they reached the last four years to get used to the fact that IT professionals were in oversupply. Now the situation is reversed for the benefit of job seekers.
Source: http://summa.talentum.fi/article/tv/uusimmat/83709
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux-on-the-desktop pioneer Munich now considering a switch back to Windows
City Hall claims that users aren’t happy with Linux, costs are higher than expected.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/08/linux-on-the-desktop-pioneer-munich-now-considering-a-switch-back-to-windows/
The world is still waiting for the year of Linux on the desktop, but in 2003 it looked as if that goal was within reach. Back then, the city of Munich announced plans to switch from Microsoft technology to Linux on 14,000 PCs belonging to the city’s municipal government. While the scheme suffered delays, it was completed in December 2013. There’s only been one small problem: users aren’t happy with the software, and the government isn’t happy with the price.
The switch was motivated by a desire to reduce licensing costs and end the city’s dependence on a single company. City of Munich PCs were running Windows NT 4, and the end of support for that operating system meant that it was going to incur significant licensing costs to upgrade. In response, the plan was to migrate to OpenOffice and Debian Linux. Later, the plan was updated to use LibreOffice and Ubuntu.
German media is reporting that the city is now considering a switch back to Microsoft in response to these complaints. The city is putting together an independent expert group to look at the problem, and if that group recommends using Microsoft software, Deputy Mayor Josef Schmid of the CSU party says that a switch back isn’t impossible.
Schmid describes two major problems. The first is the issue of compatibility; users in the rest of Germany that use other (Microsoft) software have had trouble with the files generated by Munich’s open source applications. The second is price, with Schmid saying that the city now has the impression that “Linux is very expensive” due to custom programming. Schmid also appears to be an Outlook fan, bemoaning the loss of a single application to crosslink mail, contacts, and appointments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Windows 8 App Store Is Full of Scamware
http://slashdot.org/story/14/08/18/186223/microsofts-windows-8-app-store-is-full-of-scamware
Windows 8 brought a lot to the table, with one of its most major features being its app store. However, it’s not a feature that Microsoft seems too intent on keeping clean. As it is today, the store is completely littered with misleading apps and outright scamware.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Security Hardening with Ansible
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/security-hardening-ansible
Ansible is an open-source automation tool developed and released by Michael DeHaan and others in 2012. DeHaan calls it a “general-purpose automation pipeline”
Not only can it be used for automated configuration management, but it also excels at orchestration, provisioning of systems, zero-time rolling updates and application deployment. Ansible can be used to keep all your systems configured exactly the way you want them, and if you have many identical systems, Ansible will ensure they stay identical. For Linux system administrators, Ansible is an indispensable tool in implementing and maintaining a strong security posture.
Ansible can be used to deploy and configure multiple Linux servers (Red Hat, Debian, CentOS, OS X, any of the BSDs and others) using secure shell (SSH) instead of the more common client-server methodologies used by other configuration management packages, such as Puppet and Chef (Chef does have a solo version that does not require a server, per se). Utilizing SSH is a more secure method because the traffic is encrypted.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gartner: Internet of Things Has Reached Hype Peak
Big data and the cloud are becoming mainstream, market watcher says
http://www.cio.com/article/2464174/cloud-computing/gartner-internet-of-things-has-reached-hype-peak.html
The Internet of Things has reached the height of its hype, according to Gartner.
Each year the research firm puts out a Hype Cycle of emerging technologies, a sort of report card for various trends and buzzwords. This year, IoT tops the list
Along with IoT, wearable user interfaces and natural-language question answering (that’s the technology behind asking a device a question and having it speak the response) are also just about at the top of their hype. All three of those technologies are expected to be commonplace in the market within 5 to 10 years, Gartner predicts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel, MTK Carve Tablet Shares; China’s Actions Faces Turmoil
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1323540&
China’s tablet market is in turmoil, with stagnant growth and fierce competition from phablets featuring cellular network connectivity. Intel and MediaTek are aggressively pursuing the white-box tablet market, forcing the retail price for locally branded seven-inch tablets below $50.
Caught in the middle is Actions Semiconductor in Zhuhai, China. It has been counting on action in the white-box tablet market.
In discussing app processors designed into tablets, Zhou said that a dual-core SoC was at the high end last year but has moved into the mainstream. The price for such a dual-core SoC “is down by 50% compared to a year ago.”
Actions’ survival now hinges on future products “enabled by 28nm process technology and 64-bit CPU for tablets,” according to the CEO.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Haswell Bug Won’t Bite Many
TSX error confined to some big databases
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1323564&
A bug found in Intel’s Haswell processors may have the potential to disrupt some large database operations, but most users will likely not encounter any issues. The transactional synchronization extensions (TSX) built into Haswell add hardware transactional memory support, but aren’t generally invoked by typical PC applications, analysts said.
Transactional memory is a data-locking technique that can help certain types of multithreaded applications, typically database programs, run faster. Intel published a report documenting the errata, which include incorrect address reports when an exception/interrupt occurs in 64-bit mode, uncorrectable errors resulting in system hang and internal timer errors, and unexpected updates to the last exception record. Intel disabled the bug through a microcode patch.
“TSX is still relatively obscure in terms of usage, so I don’t look at it as being very serious,” said David Kanter, a microprocessor analyst with The Linley Group and Real World Technologies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD Launches Radeon R7 Series Solid State Drives With OCZ
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/08/19/1247208/amd-launches-radeon-r7-series-solid-state-drives-with-ocz
AMD is launching a new family of products today, but unless you follow the rumor mill closely, it’s probably not something you’d expect. It’s not a new CPU, APU, or GPU. Today, AMD is launching its first line of solid state drives (SSDs), targeted squarely at AMD enthusiasts. AMD is calling the new family of drives, the Radeon R7 Series SSD, similar to its popular mid-range line of graphics cards. The new Radeon R7 Series SSDs feature OCZ and Toshiba technology, but with a proprietary firmware geared towards write performance and high endurance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs: Want to hit your IT suppliers where it hurts?
Sit down with The Register and tell us just how hard…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/19/vendor_management_roundtable/
Some IT organisations seem to have their vendors just where they want them. The rest of us? Well, we’re not keen, and we’re starting to get mean.
We’ll be asking the big questions, like how do you know you’re getting the best deal? Can you trust anything these guys tell you?
Whether it’s dealing with evasive outsourcers, cantankerous contractors, sloppy software vendors, or hard-of-hearing hardware suppliers
Tomi Engdahl says:
EnterpriseDB chucks devs free tools to craft NoSQL web apps with PostgreSQL
Prebuilt AWS image comes with all you need preconfigured
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/19/enterprisedb_pgxdk/
Enterprise-class PostgreSQL database vendor EnterpriseDB has launched a free turnkey development environment designed to make it easier for coders to build web applications using PostgreSQL’s new NoSQL capabilities.
The open source PostgreSQL project has been adding NoSQL-like features for the past couple of versions, most notably support for the JavaScript-friendly JSON data format and the JSONB binary storage format.
With its new Postgres Extended Datatype Developer Kit (PGXDK), EnterpriseDB aims to provide developers with a complete, cloud-hosted coding environment with all of the key components required to use PostgreSQL’s NoSQL goodies already enabled and configured.
According to EnterpriseDB, PostgreSQL is often a superior choice for businesses than so-called pure NoSQL products like MongoDB or CouchBase because it offers greater flexibility in the kind of workloads it supports, while also allowing organizations to practice the kind of conventional data management they’re accustomed to using with SQL databases.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD slaps ‘Radeon’ label on Tosh flash: >Beard stroke< Hmm, cunning …
Hey, you wanna SSD with that graphics card, man?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/19/amd_oems_toshiba_ssd_for_pcs/
X86 CPU and Radeo graphics chipper AMD has come out with an SSD line using Toshiba/OCZ componentry.
It's called the Radeon R7-Series, which us a sideways extension of existing graphics processor branding. The SSD uses 19nm Toshibs MLC flash and has been designed, we understand, for balanced read and write workloads.
Storage Review testing showed it to be a respectable performer
It's a neat OEM win for Toshiba
The pricing starts at around $100 for a 20GB entry-level R7, $164 for 240GB and $299 for 480GB.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open Source GPU Released
http://hackaday.com/2014/08/19/open-source-gpu-released/
Nearly a year ago, an extremely interesting project hit Kickstarter: an open source GPU, written for an FPGA. For reasons that are obvious in retrospect, the GPL-GPU Kickstarter was not funded, but that doesn’t mean these developers don’t believe in what they’re doing. The first version of this open source graphics processor has now been released, giving anyone with an interest a look at what a late-90s era GPU looks like on the inside, If you’re cool enough, there’s also enough supporting documentation to build your own.
Right now, the GPL-GPU has 3D graphics acceleration working with VGA on a PCI bus
Tomi Engdahl says:
Steve Ballmer steps down as board member at Microsoft
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/aug14/08-19steveb.aspx
As I approach the six month mark of my retirement and your appointment as CEO
Tomi Engdahl says:
Project Tango Tablet Teardown: Everything You Need For Handheld 3D
http://gizmodo.com/project-tango-tablet-teardown-everything-you-need-for-1623776955
Tomi Engdahl says:
Project Tango Tablet Teardown
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Project+Tango+Tablet+Teardown/28148