It seems that PC market seems to be stabilizing in 2016. I expect that the PC market to shrinks slightly. While mobile devices have been named as culprits for the fall of PC shipments, IDC said that other factors may be in play. It is still pretty hard to make any decent profits with building PC hardware unless you are one of the biggest players – so again Lenovo, HP, and Dell are increasing their collective dominance of the PC market like they did in 2015. I expect changes like spin-offs and maybe some mergers with with smaller players like Fujitsu, Toshiba and Sony. The EMEA server market looks to be a two-horse race between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell, according to Gartner. HPE, Dell and Cisco “all benefited” from Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s EMEA x86 server organisation.
Tablet market is no longer high grow market – tablet maker has started to decline, and decline continues in 2016 as owners are holding onto their existing devices for more than 3 years. iPad sales are set to continue decline and iPad Air 3 to be released in 1st half of 2016 does not change that. IDC predicts that detachable tablet market set for growth in 2016 as more people are turning to hybrid devices. Two-in-one tablets have been popularized by offerings like the Microsoft Surface, with options ranging dramatically in price and specs. I am not myself convinced that the growth will be as IDC forecasts, even though Company have started to make purchases of tablets for workers in jobs such as retail sales or field work (Apple iPads, Windows and Android tablets managed by company). Combined volume shipments of PCs, tablets and smartphones are expected to increase only in the single digits.
All your consumer tech gear should be cheaper come July as shere will be less import tariffs for IT products as World Trade Organization (WTO) deal agrees that tariffs on imports of consumer electronics will be phased out over 7 years starting in July 2016. The agreement affects around 10 percent of the world trade in information and communications technology products and will eliminate around $50 billion in tariffs annually.
In 2015 the storage was rocked to its foundations and those new innovations will be taken into wider use in 2016. The storage market in 2015 went through strategic foundation-shaking turmoil as the external shared disk array storage playbook was torn to shreds: The all-flash data centre idea has definitely taken off as a vision that could be achieved so that primary data is stored in flash with the rest being held in cheap and deep storage. Flash drives generally solve the dusk drive latency access problem, so not so much need for hybrid drives. There is conviction that storage should be located as close to servers as possible (virtual SANs, hyper-converged industry appliances and NVMe fabrics). The existing hybrid cloud concept was adopted/supported by everybody. Flash started out in 2-bits/cell MLC form and this rapidly became standard and TLC (3-bits/cell or triple layer cell) had started appearing. Industry-standard NVMe drivers for PCIe flash cards appeared. Intel and Micron blew non-volatile memory preconceptions out of the water in the second half of the year with their joint 3D XPoint memory announcement. Boring old disk disk tech got shingled magnetic recording (SMR) and helium-filled drive technology; drive industry is focused on capacity-optimizing its drives. We got key:value store disk drives with an Ethernet NIC on-board and basic GET and PUT object storage facilities came into being. Tape industry developed a 15TB LTO-7 format.
The use of SSD will increase and it’s price will drop. SSDs will be in more than 25% of new laptops sold in 2015. SSDs are expected to be in 31% of new consumer laptops in 2016 and more than 40% by 2017. The prices of mainstream consumer SSDs have fallen dramatically every year over the past three years while HDD prices have not changed much. SSD prices will decline to 24 cents per gigabyte in 2016. In 2017 they’re expected to drop to 11-17 cents per gigabyte (means a 1TB SSD on average would retail for $170 or less).
Hard disk sales will decrease, but this technology is not dead. Sales of hard disk drives have been decreasing for several years now (118 million units in the third quarter of 2015), but according to Seagate hard disk drives (HDDs) are set to still stay relevant around for at least 15 years to 20 years. HDDs remain the most popular data storage technology as it is cheapest in terms of per-gigabyte costs. While SSDs are generally getting more affordable, high-capacity solid-state drives are not going to become as inexpensive as hard drives any time soon.
Because all-flash storage systems with homogenous flash media are still too expensive to serve as a solution to for every enterprise application workload, enterprises will increasingly turn to performance optimized storage solutions that use a combination of multiple media types to deliver cost-effective performance. The speed advantage of Fibre Channel over Ethernet has evaporated. Enterprises also start to seek alternatives to snapshots that are simpler and easier to manage, and will allow data and application recovery to a second before the data error or logical corruption occurred.
Local storage and the cloud finally make peace in 2016 as the decision-makers across the industry have now acknowledged the potential for enterprise storage and the cloud to work in tandem. Over 40 percent of data worldwide is expected to live on or move through the cloud by 2020 according to IDC.
Open standards for data center development are now a reality thanks to advances in cloud technology. Facebook’s Open Compute Project has served as the industry’s leader in this regard.This allows more consolidation for those that want that. Consolidation used to refer to companies moving all of their infrastructure to the same facility. However, some experts have begun to question this strategy as the rapid increase in data quantities and apps in the data center have made centralized facilities more difficult to operate than ever before. Server virtualization, more powerful servers and an increasing number of enterprise applications will continue to drive higher IO requirements in the datacenter.
Cloud consolidation starts heavily in 2016: number of options for general infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services and cloud management software will be much smaller at the end of 2016 than the beginning. The major public cloud providers will gain strength, with Amazon, IBM SoftLayer, and Microsoft capturing a greater share of the business cloud services market. Lock-in is a real concern for cloud users, because PaaS players have the ancient imperative to find ways to tie customers to their platforms and aren’t afraid to use them so advanced users want to establish reliable portability across PaaS products in a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment.
Year 2016 will be harder for legacy IT providers than 2015. In its report, IDC states that “By 2020, More than 30 percent of the IT Vendors Will Not Exist as We Know Them Today.” Many enterprises are turning away from traditional vendors and toward cloud providers. They’re increasingly leveraging open source. In short, they’re becoming software companies. The best companies will build cultures of performance and doing the right thing — and will make data and the processes around it self-service for all their employees. Design Thinking to guide companies who want to change the lives of its customers and employees. 2016 will see a lot more work in trying to manage services that simply aren’t designed to work together or even be managed – for example Whatever-As-A-Service cloud systems to play nicely together with their existing legacy systems. So competent developers are the scarce commodity. Some companies start to see Cloud as a form of outsourcing that is fast burning up inhouse ITops jobs with varying success.
There are still too many old fashioned companies that just can’t understand what digitalization will mean to their business. In 2016, some companies’ boards still think the web is just for brochures and porn and don’t believe their business models can be disrupted. It gets worse for many traditional companies. For example Amazon is a retailer both on the web and increasingly for things like food deliveries. Amazon and other are playing to win. Digital disruption has happened and will continue.
Windows 10 is coming more on 2016. If 2015 was a year of revolution, 2016 promises to be a year of consolidation for Microsoft’s operating system. I expect that Windows 10 adoption in companies starts in 2016. Windows 10 is likely to be a success for the enterprise, but I expect that word from heavyweights like Gartner, Forrester and Spiceworks, suggesting that half of enterprise users plan to switch to Windows 10 in 2016, are more than a bit optimistic. Windows 10 will also be used in China as Microsoft played the game with it better than with Windows 8 that was banned in China.
Windows is now delivered “as a service”, meaning incremental updates with new features as well as security patches, but Microsoft still seems works internally to a schedule of milestone releases. Next up is Redstone, rumoured to arrive around the anniversary of Windows 10, midway through 2016. Also Windows servers will get update in 2016: 2016 should also include the release of Windows Server 2016. Server 2016 includes updates to the Hyper-V virtualisation platform, support for Docker-style containers, and a new cut-down edition called Nano Server.
Windows 10 will get some of the already promised features not delivered in 2015 delivered in 2016. Windows 10 was promised coming to PCs and Mobile devices in 2015 to deliver unified user experience. Continuum is a new, adaptive user experience offered in Windows 10 that optimizes the look and behavior of apps and the Windows shell for the physical form factor and customer’s usage preferences. The promise was same unified interface for PCs, tablets and smart phones – but it was only delivered in 2015 for only PCs and some tablets. Mobile Windows 10 for smart phone is expected to start finally in 2016 – The release of Microsoft’s new Windows 10 operating system may be the last roll of the dice for its struggling mobile platform. Because Microsoft Plan A is to get as many apps and as much activity as it can on Windows on all form factor with Universal Windows Platform (UWP), which enables the same Windows 10 code to run on phone and desktop. Despite a steady inflow of new well-known apps, it remains unclear whether the Universal Windows Platform can maintain momentum with developer. Can Microsoft keep the developer momentum going? I am not sure. In addition there are also plans for tools for porting iOS apps and an Android runtime, so expect also delivery of some or all of the Windows Bridges (iOS, web app, desktop app, Android) announced at the April 2015 Build conference in hope to get more apps to unified Windows 10 app store. Windows 10 does hold out some promise for Windows Phone, but it’s not going to make an enormous difference. Losing the battle for the Web and mobile computing is a brutal loss for Microsoft. When you consider the size of those two markets combined, the desktop market seems like a stagnant backwater.
Older Windows versions will not die in 2016 as fast as Microsoft and security people would like. Expect Windows 7 diehards to continue holding out in 2016 and beyond. And there are still many companies that run their critical systems on Windows XP as “There are some people who don’t have an option to change.” Many times the OS is running in automation and process control systems that run business and mission-critical systems, both in private sector and government enterprises. For example US Navy is using obsolete operating system Microsoft Windows XP to run critical tasks. It all comes down to money and resources, but if someone is obliged to keep something running on an obsolete system, it’s the wrong approach to information security completely.
Virtual reality has grown immensely over the past few years, but 2016 looks like the most important year yet: it will be the first time that consumers can get their hands on a number of powerful headsets for viewing alternate realities in immersive 3-D. Virtual Reality will become the mainstream when Sony, and Samsung Oculus bring consumer products on the market in 2016. Whole virtual reality hype could be rebooted as Early build of final Oculus Rift hardware starts shipping to devs. Maybe HTC‘s and Valve‘s Vive VR headset will suffer in the next few month. Expect a banner year for virtual reality.
GPU and FPGA acceleration will be used in high performance computing widely. Both Intel and AMD have products with CPU and GPU in the same chip, and there is software support for using GPU (learn CUDA and/or OpenCL). Also there are many mobile processors have CPU and GPU on the same chip. FPGAs are circuits that can be baked into a specific application, but can also be reprogrammed later. There was lots of interest in 2015 for using FPGA for accelerating computations as the nest step after GPU, and I expect that the interest will grow even more in 2016. FPGAs are not quite as efficient as a dedicated ASIC, but it’s about as close as you can get without translating the actual source code directly into a circuit. Intel bought Altera (big FPGA company) in 2015 and plans in 2016 to begin selling products with a Xeon chip and an Altera FPGA in a single package – possibly available in early 2016.
Artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning will be talked about a lot in 2016. Neural networks, which have been academic exercises (but little more) for decades, are increasingly becoming mainstream success stories: Heavy (and growing) investment in the technology, which enables the identification of objects in still and video images, words in audio streams, and the like after an initial training phase, comes from the formidable likes of Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others. So-called “deep learning” has been enabled by the combination of the evolution of traditional neural network techniques, the steadily increasing processing “muscle” of CPUs (aided by algorithm acceleration via FPGAs, GPUs, and, more recently, dedicated co-processors), and the steadily decreasing cost of system memory and storage. There were many interesting releases on this in the end of 2015: Facebook Inc. in February, released portions of its Torch software, while Alphabet Inc.’s Google division earlier this month open-sourced parts of its TensorFlow system. Also IBM Turns Up Heat Under Competition in Artificial Intelligence as SystemML would be freely available to share and modify through the Apache Software Foundation. So I expect that the year 2016 will be the year those are tried in practice. I expect that deep learning will be hot in CES 2016. Several respected scientists issued a letter warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) in 2015, but I don’t worry about a rogue AI exterminating mankind. I worry about an inadequate AI being given control over things that it’s not ready for. How machine learning will affect your business? MIT has a good free intro to AI and ML.
Computers, which excel at big data analysis, can help doctors deliver more personalized care. Can machines outperform doctors? Not yet. But in some areas of medicine, they can make the care doctors deliver better. Humans repeatedly fail where computers — or humans behaving a little bit more like computers — can help. Computers excel at searching and combining vastly more data than a human so algorithms can be put to good use in certain areas of medicine. There are also things that can slow down development in 2016: To many patients, the very idea of receiving a medical diagnosis or treatment from a machine is probably off-putting.
Internet of Things (IoT) was talked a lot in 2015, and it will be a hot topics for IT departments in 2016 as well. Many companies will notice that security issues are important in it. The newest wearable technology, smart watches and other smart devices corresponding to the voice commands and interpret the data we produce - it learns from its users, and generate appropriate responses in real time. Interest in Internet of Things (IoT) will as bring interest to real-time business systems: Not only real-time analytics, but real-time everything. This will start in earnest in 2016, but the trend will take years to play out.
Connectivity and networking will be hot. And it is not just about IoT. CES will focus on how connectivity is proliferating everything from cars to homes, realigning diverse markets. The interest will affect job markets: Network jobs are hot; salaries expected to rise in 2016 as wireless network engineers, network admins, and network security pros can expect above-average pay gains.
Linux will stay big in network server marker in 2016. Web server marketplace is one arena where Linux has had the greatest impact. Today, the majority of Web servers are Linux boxes. This includes most of the world’s busiest sites. Linux will also run many parts of out Internet infrastructure that moves the bits from server to the user. Linux will also continue to rule smart phone market as being in the core of Android. New IoT solutions will be moist likely to be built mainly using Linux in many parts of the systems.
Microsoft and Linux are not such enemies that they were few years go. Common sense says that Microsoft and the FOSS movement should be perpetual enemies. It looks like Microsoft is waking up to the fact that Linux is here to stay. Microsoft cannot feasibly wipe it out, so it has to embrace it. Microsoft is already partnering with Linux companies to bring popular distros to its Azure platform. In fact, Microsoft even has gone so far as to create its own Linux distro for its Azure data center.
Web browsers are coming more and more 64 bit as Firefox started 64 bit era on Windows and Google is killing Chrome for 32-bit Linux. At the same time web browsers are loosing old legacy features like NPAPI and Silverlight. Who will miss them? The venerable NPAPI plugins standard, which dates back to the days of Netscape, is now showing its age, and causing more problems than it solves, and will see native support removed by the end of 2016 from Firefox. It was already removed from Google Chrome browsers with very little impact. Biggest issue was lack of support for Microsoft’s Silverlight which brought down several top streaming media sites – but they are actively switching to HTML5 in 2016. I don’t miss Silverlight. Flash will continue to be available owing to its popularity for web video.
SHA-1 will be at least partially retired in 2016. Due to recent research showing that SHA-1 is weaker than previously believed, Mozilla, Microsoft and now Google are all considering bringing the deadline forward by six months to July 1, 2016.
Adobe’s Flash has been under attack from many quarters over security as well as slowing down Web pages. If you wish that Flash would be finally dead in 2016 you might be disappointed. Adobe seems to be trying to kill the name by rebranding trick: Adobe Flash Professional CC is now Adobe Animate CC. In practive it propably does not mean much but Adobe seems to acknowledge the inevitability of an HTML5 world. Adobe wants to remain a leader in interactive tools and the pivot to HTML5 requires new messaging.
The trend to try to use same same language and tools on both user end and the server back-end continues. Microsoft is pushing it’s .NET and Azure cloud platform tools. Amazon, Google and IBM have their own set of tools. Java is on decline. JavaScript is going strong on both web browser and server end with node.js , React and many other JavaScript libraries. Apple also tries to bend it’s Swift programming language now used to make mainly iOS applications also to run on servers with project Perfect.
Java will still stick around, but Java’s decline as a language will accelerate as new stuff isn’t being written in Java, even if it runs on the JVM. We will not see new Java 9 in 2016 as Oracle’s delayed the release of Java 9 by six months. The register tells that Java 9 delayed until Thursday March 23rd, 2017, just after tea-time.
Containers will rule the world as Docker will continue to develop, gain security features, and add various forms of governance. Until now Docker has been tire-kicking, used in production by the early-adopter crowd only, but it can change when vendors are starting to claim that they can do proper management of big data and container farms.
NoSQL databases will take hold as they be called as “highly scalable” or “cloud-ready.” Expect 2016 to be the year when a lot of big brick-and-mortar companies publicly adopt NoSQL for critical operations. Basically NoSQL could be seem as key:value store, and this idea has also expanded to storage systems: We got key:value store disk drives with an Ethernet NIC on-board and basic GET and PUT object storage facilities came into being.
In the database world Big Data will be still big but it needs to be analyzed in real-time. A typical big data project usually involves some semi-structured data, a bit of unstructured (such as email), and a whole lot of structured data (stuff stored in an RDBMS). The cost of Hadoop on a per-node basis is pretty inconsequential, the cost of understanding all of the schemas, getting them into Hadoop, and structuring them well enough to perform the analytics is still considerable. Remember that you’re not “moving” to Hadoop, you’re adding a downstream repository, so you need to worry on systems integration and latency issues. Apache Spark will also get interest as Spark’s multi-stage in-memory primitives provides more performance for certain applications. Big data brings with it responsibility – Digital consumer confidence must be earned.
IT security continues to be a huge issue in 2016. You might be able to achieve adequate security against hackers and internal threats but every attempt to make systems idiot proof just means the idiots get upgraded. Firms are ever more connected to each other and the general outside world. So in 2016 we will see even more service firms accidentally leaking critical information and a lot more firms having their reputations scorched by incompetence fuelled security screw-ups. Good security people are needed more and more – a joke doing the rounds of ITExecs doing interviews is “if you’re a decent security bod, why do you need to look for a job”
There will still be unexpected single points of failures in big distributed networked system. The cloud behind the silver lining is that Amazon or any other cloud vendor can be as fault tolerant, distributed and well supported as you like, but if a service like Akamai or Cloudflare was to die, you still stop. That’s not a single point of failure in the classical sense but it’s really hard to manage unless you go for full cloud agnosticism – which is costly. This is hard to justify when their failure rate is so low, so the irony is that the reliability of the content delivery networks means fewer businesses work out what to do if they fail. Oh, and no one seems to test their mission-critical data centre properly, because it’s mission critical- So they just over-specify where they can and cross their fingers (= pay twice and get the half the coverage for other vulnerabilities).
For IT start-ups it seems that Silicon Valley’s cash party is coming to an end. Silicon Valley is cooling, not crashing. Valuations are falling. The era of cheap money could be over and valuation expectations are re-calibrating down. The cheap capital party is over. It could mean trouble for weaker startups.
933 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
AI, VR, bots and YOU? A survivor’s guide to The Future™
Keeping your head while those in Silicon Valley lose theirs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/05/the_future_approach_with_caution/
We’re at an inflection point, or – rather – the point before that inflection point. We are in the pre-countdown-phase for virtual reality or augmented reality or perhaps machine learning or bots, say onlookers. But which is it? Or will it be none of these?
For Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the future is definitely virtual reality, which he says is “going to change they way we live and work and communicate”.
The boyish CEO is personally leading the charge on VR, so you’d expect him to be bullish.
For Facebook, VR represent the next way to engage with users and attract advertisers trying to target them.
Ads, after all, are Facebook’s primary source of income.
Microsoft is running cheek-by-jowl with Facebook on VR: at BUILD last week, the firm brought its version of VR a step closer by shipping pre-ordered HoloLens kits to developers. Price might pose something of a barrier, though: $3,000 per kit.
Google also released a Cardboard SDK for Apple’s iOS – the rival mobile platform to its Android.
Tomi Engdahl says:
UbuntuBSD
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/ubuntubsd?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
In the world of free software, you have more choices. Because your system is made up of free, reusable components, you could cobble together a similar system that meets your needs. And, you can release it so other users can benefit too.
That’s exactly what happened in the case of UbuntuBSD. When Canonical decided to adopt systemd in Ubuntu, some users were far from pleased. Jon Boden was one of them. But, thanks to the flexibility of FOSS software, he was able to build his own version of Ubuntu without systemd—and his solution is quite intriguing.
Plenty of Ubuntu derivatives exist in the world, but until now, they all had one thing in common: they’re all Linux OSes. With UbuntuBSD, Jon broke the mold by using a FreeBSD base.
The new UbuntuBSD distribution provides a simple text-based installer. It has an option to install the XFCE desktop environment, along with most of the packages you would find in Xubuntu.
Although BSD and Linux are very similar, they aren’t identical. The two projects have a very different history and include different features. They have a common ancestor in UNIX but both have evolved in different directions. These differences mean that BSD isn’t a perfect replacement for the Linux kernel.
BSD does include a Linux compatibility layer that allows it to run the majority of Linux native binaries, but there are exceptions. Applications that rely on some low-level Linux system call will crash on BSD. And, then there are high-level applications that depend on systemd itself. This includes the GNOME desktop environment and other popular user apps.
That said, most of the target users for the new distribution are experienced administrators who are well aware of those dependencies. In fact, it’s the tangled web of interdependencies that systemd has added to the Linux ecosystem that has motivated this project. For many, that’s reason enough to move away from mainstream Ubuntu.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Psst, you want NoSQL? We got NoSQL, says MariaDB: v10 now out
New CONNECT engine lets MySQL fork reach into non-relational databases
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/01/mariadb_10_release/
MySQL fork MariaDB has, with version 10 out today, shown it has woken up to the importance of giving its users access to non-relational databases.
New in v10 is the CONNECT engine, which can hook the MariaDB database system to outside sources of data, and Cassandra-compatibility features. CONNECT can access information managed by NoSQL software, such as Riak and MongoDB, giving admins read/write access to data through traditional SQL commands, along with some other features.
“With CONNECT, MariaDB has one of the most advanced implementations of [Management of External Data] (MED) without the need of complex additions to the SQL syntax (foreign tables are “normal” tables using the CONNECT engine),” Team MariaDB explained on its site.
Though much of the press materials attached to this release played up this feature, it’s worth noting that MySQL has had a similar capability for several years via its implementation of the Memcached API for slurping NoSQL data into its InnoDB storage engine.
Besides the CONNECT engine and Cassandra capabilities, MariaDB 10 also has new features based on technology developed at Google (parallel replication), and Chinese web giant Taobao (per-thread memory usage, multi-source replication, and others), and it’s also gained dynamic columns.
MariaDB Enterprise costs $5,000 per server per year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
TSA Paid $1.4 Million For Randomizer App That Chooses Left Or Right
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/04/04/2227200/tsa-paid-14-million-for-randomizer-app-that-chooses-left-or-right?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Transport Security Administration (TSA) use a Randomizer app to randomly search travelers in the Pre-Check lane. The app randomly chooses whether travelers go left or right
The documents he received reveals the TSA purchased the Randomizer iPad app for $336,413.59.
the contract for the TSA Randomizer app was won by IBM. The total amount paid for the project is actually $1.4 million
Comment:
Seriously, 80%-85% of the bid covers dealing with the US government. Multiple thousand-documents over the course of years, flying back and forth for pointless meetings, and maybe you eventually get paid.
Here are my rates as a developer , for similar software delivered:
Order online, by submitting my order form: $159
Email me and discuss: $500
Meetings to discuss, demo (local businesses): $1,500
Local government bureaucracy: $8,000
Federal government: $400,000
Tomi Engdahl says:
Steve Lohr / New York Times:
MIT Media Lab launches Data USA, the most comprehensive visualization of US public government data — Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through — For years, the federal government, states and some cities have enthusiastically made vast troves of data open to the public.
Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/technology/datausa-government-data.html
For years, the federal government, states and some cities have enthusiastically made vast troves of data open to the public. Acres of paper records on demographics, public health, traffic patterns, energy consumption, family incomes and many other topics have been digitized and posted on the web.
This abundance of data can be a gold mine for discovery and insights, but finding the nuggets can be arduous, requiring special skills.
A project coming out of the M.I.T. Media Lab on Monday seeks to ease that challenge and to make the value of government data available to a wider audience. The project, called Data USA, bills itself as “the most comprehensive visualization of U.S. public data.” It is free, and its software code is open source, meaning that developers can build custom applications by adding other data.
http://datausa.io/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Novet / VentureBeat:
Salesforce acquires MetaMind, a deep learning startup backed by Marc Benioff and Khosla Ventures; services to be discontinued in May — Salesforce buys hot deep learning startup MetaMind, services shutting down May 4 — Salesforce has acquired MetaMind, a deep learning startup backed
Salesforce buys hot deep learning startup MetaMind, services shutting down May 4
http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/04/salesforce-buys-hot-deep-learning-startup-metamind-services-shutting-down-may-4/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jim McGregor / Forbes:
NVIDIA announces new Tesla P100 GPU with 15B+ transistors, 16GB of High-Bandwidth Memory for deep learning, manufactured using latest 16nm FinFET process
NVIDIA Reinvents The GPU For Artificial Intelligence (AI)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2016/04/05/nvidia-reinvents-the-gpu-for-artificial-intelligence-ai/#5fa1c72715b7
At a time when PCs have become rather boring and the market has stagnated, the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has become more interesting and not for what it has traditionally done (graphical user interface), but for what it can do going forward. GPUs are a key enabler for the PC and workstation market, both for enthusiast seeking to increase graphics performance for games and developers and designers looking to create realistic new videos and images. However, the traditional PC market has been in decline for several years as consumer shift to mobile computing solutions like smartphones. At the same time, the industry has been working to expand the use of GPUs as a computing accelerator because of the massive parallel compute capabilities, often providing the horsepower for top supercomputers. NVIDIA has been a pioneer in this GPU compute market with its CUDA platform, enabling leading researchers to perform leading edge research and continue to develop new uses for GPU acceleration.
NVIDIA introduced the Telsa P100 platform. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang described the Tesla P100 as the first GPU designed for hyperscale datacenter applications. It features NVIDIA’s new Pascal GPU architecture, the latest memory and semiconductor process, and packaging technology – all to create the densest compute platform to date. Using the industry’s latest 16nm FinFET manufacturing technology, the Tesla P100 features over 15 billion transistors on a 600mm2 die.
Ryan Smith / AnandTech:
NVIDIA announces Quadro M5500 video card for notebooks, fast enough to meet Oculus and Vive specs, details broader VR plans for professional market
NVIDIA Announces Quadro M5500 For Notebooks, Details Professional VR Plans
by Ryan Smith on April 4, 2016 9:00 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10219/nvidia-announces-quadro-m5500-details-professional-vr-plans
In fact it’s VR where we’ll start today, as NVIDIA’s professional visualization group is releasing some news a day ahead of tomorrow’s formal kickoff. NVIDIA is pitching products and technologies for both consumer and professional use, and today they are detailing their professional VR plans for the show. To kick things off, they are announcing a new notebook Quadro video card, the Quadro M5500.
Much like its consumer counterpart, the GeForce GTX 980 for Notebooks, the Quadro M5500 is a new SKU for high-end desktop replacement style laptops that incorporates a fully enabled GM204, and an even higher TDP to support it. The significance of this new Quadro module – beyond now being the fastest mobile Quadro – is that it’s the only mobile Quadro fast enough to meet HTC and Oculus’s hardware recommendations, as the M5000M falls short.
The trade-off, of course, is that as performance approaches desktop levels, so have the power requirements The M5500 has a TDP specification of 150W, a full 50% higher than the 100W TDP of the M5000M. Consequently this is a video card for true desktop replacement style laptops, as it takes a very large cooling system to handle so much heat.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your pointy-haired boss ‘bought a cloud’ with his credit card. Now what?
Shadow IT: Pray he didn’t link the… oh for @£$%^&
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/04/shadow_it_danger/
Sysadmin blog Shadow IT strikes fear into the hearts of many businesses. Unfortunately, most businesses fear shadow IT for all the wrong reasons.
It is easy to have a discussion about Shadow IT with different areas of the business by talking about risks that affect them directly. Legal can be made afraid by bringing forth the bogeymen of data sovereignty and data locality. Executives and finance people can be made to flinch by showing them the real costs of using the public cloud over a three-year period versus doing it all in house.
IT nerds can be made to fret about shadow IT simply by talking about “losing control”. For some, losing control of something IT related is an existential threat to their job. For most IT types, however, losing control of anything is simply antithetical to their nature and they’re working double-time to squash it.
None of these issues, however, are the really big reason to fear shadow IT. They are symptoms, not the root cause. The root cause of the problems brought about by shadow IT is groupthink.
We all like to laugh at the Dilbert cartoons where the Pointy Haired Boss reads something silly in his magazine and then demands that one of the characters implement it. Are we in the cloud yet? Have you tried virtualizing it? Ha ha, we all laugh, that silly PHB.
But there’s a public cloud now. With the wave of a credit card the PHB, the secretary or anyone else can actually do these things. IT by magazine isn’t some theoretical concept. It’s a real thing that can and does happen in the real world. It could be happening in your organization today, and you might never know it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nick Summers / Engadget:
IKEA launches IKEA VR Experience, a kitchen showroom app for HTC Vive now on Steam, as a pilot that runs through August
Ikea made a kitchen showroom in VR
Don’t want to go to the store? No problem.
http://www.engadget.com/2016/04/05/ikea-htc-vive-kitchen-vr-app/?sr_source=Twitter
Ikea has tried this before with augmented reality, and now it’s going a step further with virtual reality. Through Steam, the company has made an app for the HTC Vive which puts you in a make-believe kitchen.
There are three different room styles to choose from, and you can change the color of the cabinets and drawers using the Vive’s wand controllers. Of course, it’s unlikely that these limited options will match up with the exact kitchen you’re looking to buy. Ikea has stressed, however, that the app is merely an experiment as it explores “the possible implications of (virtual reality) for the home.” The company will, however, be making improvements to the app based on player feedback up until August, when the “pilot test” ends and the experience is presumably pulled from Steam.
Thanks to the Vive’s room-scale motion tracking, you can walk around and perform some basic tasks, such as opening drawers, recycling vegetables and placing a frying pan on the stove. These interactions pale in comparison to Job Simulator, but they should, at least a little, help you imagine what it would be like to have the kitchen in your home.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ian Hamilton / UploadVR:
A look at Google’s Tilt Brush, a VR painting app for HTC Vive, retails for $30 but comes bundled with Vive preorders
Tilt Brush is the System-Seller the HTC Vive Needs
http://uploadvr.com/tilt-brush-is-the-system-seller-the-vive-needs/
I placed my pre-order believing this software from Google to be the first example of a soon-to-be-very-large subset of VR experiences — creativity tools.
Tilt Brush costs $30 but is bundled with Vive pre-orders.
The software teaches each new user the basic functions — sketch with one hand and access tools on the other.
A spectator mode shows others in the room what someone inside Tilt Brush sees. Hook up spectator mode to a streaming service like Twitch and a potentially global audience could watch you make things live. Spectators see an outline of your head-mounted display and controllers moving through space.
You could play a game of Pictionary with friends or take requests over the Internet for a live interactive art show. Talk to your viewers using a microphone.
Works you make in Tilt Brush can be shared as GIFs or screenshots for traditional consumption on social media
With enough talent, or practice, you could produce breathtaking works of art. Or just play a game of Pictionary. It’s up to you.
It’s still very early days, but this first public version of Tilt Brush lays the foundation for a new class of art and creativity tool.
Every great computing platform needs creativity tools like Microsoft Paint and Adobe Photoshop, and Tilt Brush is the first of its kind for VR.
Tilt Brush
http://store.steampowered.com/app/327140/
Tilt Brush lets you paint in 3D space with virtual reality. Unleash your creativity with three-dimensional brush strokes, stars, light, and even fire. Your room is your canvas. Your palette is your imagination. The possibilities are endless.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 10 64-bit now most popular OS among Steam gamers
For the first time, Windows 7 64-bit runs out of Steam supremacy.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/04/windows-10-64-bit-most-popular-os-steam-gamers/
Microsoft’s Windows 10 64-bit has become the most popular operating system among Steam gamers for the first time, surpassing Windows 7 64-bit OS.
According to a recent Steam Hardware Survey conducted in March, 36.97 percent of the platform users logged in from computers running Windows 10 64-bit operating system—a 2.96 percent increase from February. At the same time, the share of Windows 7 64-bit decreased slightly to 32.99 percent.
Technically speaking, however, Windows 7 remains the most popular OS on Steam, as its 64-bit and 32-bit versions have a combined share of 39.96 percent—narrowly beating Windows 10′s 38.28 percent share.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chat App Kik Beats Facebook To Launching a Bot Store
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/04/06/0143253/chat-app-kik-beats-facebook-to-launching-a-bot-store
“Messengers are the new browsers and bots are the new websites,” Kik’s Mike Roberts told The Next Web. The messaging app that’s big with America’s youth has launched a bot store and developer platform to support it. The Kik Bot Shop offers mini-apps that you can add to your account and either chat to directly or use in your chats with others.
Kik beats Facebook to launching a bot store
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2016/04/05/kik-bots/#gref
Pretty soon, any messaging app that doesn’t have a platform for bots will be seriously left behind. “Messengers are the new browsers and bots are the new websites,” as Kik‘s Mike Roberts puts it to me.
With this in mind, the messaging app that’s big with America’s youth has today launched a bot store and developer platform to support it.
The Kik Bot Shop offers mini-apps that you can add to your account and either chat to directly or use in your chats with others.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD Climbs Bristol Ridge
New processors improve on compute, power
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329365&
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) unveiled its new mobile 7th generation of FX A-Series processors, code named Bristol Ridge yesterday (April 5). The Bristol Ridge AMD FX processors will be featured in a new notebook and offer improved multitasking performance, ultra-HD video streaming and all-day battery life.
Bristol Ridge will debut in the HP ENVY x360 and is available in dual- and quad-core Excavator x86 CPU configurations. True to AMD’s graphics-forward approach, the processors will also use Radeon R7 or R5 GPUs.
“AMD has a lot to do on the processor side to bust Intel,” said Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
Bristol Ridge was designed with gaming and video in mind
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia Rolls Pascal, GPU Server
Deep learning next killer app for GPUs?
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329368&
At its annual GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia announced what it claims is the biggest 16nm FinFET chip to date as well as a high-end system packing eight of them. The Tesla P100 chip and the DGX-1 server are its latest graphics processing engines targeting deep learning algorithms.
In a keynote void of the computer games on which the company was built, chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang showed ways everything from next generation cloud services to cars will use emerging artificial intelligence techniques.
“Deep learning is not just research anymore it’s going to be in every industry,” said Huang. He called the emerging neural network algorithms “a new computing model” and “one of biggest things to happen to computing,” spawning a “$500 billion opportunity over the next 10 years that will be in every industry and application.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Corporate IT investments not progressing – the money spent on the purchase of a cloud
Rear Over the years, a staggering growth rate of IT investment are not making a comeback for some time, research firm Gartner predicts. While companies continue to move to the cloud and take in order to maintain competitiveness in the use of new technology, it ratio of consumption this year is approximately the previous year’s level and growth is slow until the 2020s.
Gartner estimates that worldwide IT: the amount of money spent of GDP this year is approximately 3.49 trillion Dollars, or about EUR 3.07 billion. as measured by standardized exchange rates, the increase is 1.6 per cent, Gartner estimates. Compared to last year the growth rate is slower. Gartner predicts continued growth of 2-3 per cent level until 2020.
Despite the slow growth of companies do not shy away from investing in new technology
Companies save on IT costs at the same time, when they are investing in, for example, the digital transition
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/yritysten-it-investoinnit-junnaavat-paikallaan-rahat-kaytetaan-pilven-ostoon-6539577
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cognitive Computing Platform Unites Xilinx and IBM
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329377&
Xilinx and IBM announced that they will enable FPGA-based acceleration within the SuperVessel OpenPOWER development cloud services offered on ptopenlab.com.
SuperVessel is a first-of-its-kind open access cloud service that acts as a virtual R&D engine for application developers, system designers, and academic researchers to create, test and pilot solutions for emerging applications including deep analytics, machine learning and the Internet of Things (IoT).
The open access cloud service will leverage Xilinx’s SDAccel Development Environment, hosted in SuperVessel, for application developers to describe their algorithms in OpenCL, C, and C++ and compile directly to Xilinx FPGA-based acceleration boards.
SDAccel Application Development on SuperVessel OpenPOWER Cloud
http://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/software-zone/sdaccel/supervessel.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM Neurocomputer Detailed
TrueNorth innards, aspirations revealed
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329372&
IBM unveiled details about the state of development and its future plans for TrueNorth—its neuromorphic mixed-signal chips based on the human brain. Its chip architecture, array of evaluation boards, reference systems and software ecosystem were described by their architect at the International Symposium on Physical Design 2016
At ISPD, IBM expressed it aspirations for its brain-like computers, hoping they will become a household name for applications from ultra-smart Internet of Things (IoT) to ultra-smart cars to ultra-smart cameras, ultra-smart drones, ultra-smart medical devices and of course ultra-smart supercomputers.
In his invited paper “Design and Tool Flow of IBM’s TrueNorth: An Ultra-Low Power Programmable Neurosynaptic Chip with 1-Million Neurons” IBM’s Low-Power Neuromorphic Circuit Designer, Filipp Akopyan described the company’s hardware, software and growing ecosystem of support.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vendor: Do we need Quality of Service with shared storage arrays?
Awesome network or not, we need to look at the bigger picture
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/08/do_we_need_storage_qos/
recently had a discussion with a vendor (who shall remain nameless) as to whether we really needed Quality of Service (QoS) in shared storage arrays. His thinking went as follows: if we have a storage array and network with sufficient bandwidth/IOPS, then why bother implementing QoS?
At first this seems like a reasonable assumption; if I have more resources than required, what’s the problem, as I can cater for all requirements. To think this through whether it makes sense, let’s step back and look at how persistent storage has been delivered over the past 15-20 years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft rethinks the Windows application platform one more time
Plan to bring most Windows apps to the Store, never mind security
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/07/microsoft_rethinks_the_windows_application_platform_one_more_time/
Build 2016 “There are 16 million Win32 or .NET apps in the world. When we built the Universal Windows Platform, we left them behind. And that was dumb,” said Microsoft Distinguished Engineer John Sheehan, speaking at the Build conference last week in San Francisco.
Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is based on the Windows Runtime, the environment once known as Metro, which was introduced with Windows 8 in an attempt to reinvent the operating system.
The Windows Runtime had several goals. One was to bring Windows into the world of tablets, with a user interface designed with touch in mind. Another was to enable users to install and remove applications easily and cleanly, via the Windows Store or custom business portals. Thirdly, the Windows Runtime was intended to be secure, with each application sandboxed both from the operating system and from other applications. Only a safe subset of the Windows API was available, and access to the file system was restricted to an isolated app-specific area, or to standard locations for things like documents and pictures – subject to the user’s consent.
The long-term strategy seemed to be that users would gradually use more Store apps and fewer legacy desktop apps, until the moment came when most Windows apps used the new model and Microsoft would be able to lock down the operating system to be more like Apple’s iOS, which is less vulnerable to malware and to intrusive third-party software that damages the user experience.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Continuous code reviews. Now.
https://sputnik.ci/
Sputnik checks quality of contributions to your GitHub projects saving your time.
It runs Checkstyle, PMD, FindBugs, Scalastyle, CodeNarc, JSLint for you.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Strategy Analytics: 12.8M VR units will be sold in 2016 for $895M; 77% of revenue will go to Oculus, HTC, Sony; 87% of units will be smartphone-based VR devices — VR headsets to generate $895M in revenue in 2016 — Market researcher Strategy Analytics said it expects global virtual …
VR headsets to generate $895M in revenue in 2016
http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/07/vr-headsets-to-generate-895m-in-revenue-in-2016/
Market researcher Strategy Analytics said it expects global virtual reality headset revenues will reach $895 million in 2016.
About 77 percent of that value will be accounted for by newly launched premium devices from Oculus, HTC, and Sony. These three brands however will only account for 13 percent of volumes in 2016 as lower priced smartphone-based devices will dominate share of the 12.8 million unit virtual reality headset market. Strategy Analytics said it sees 2016 as a pivotal year for virtual reality given a confluence of factors and also one where managing expectations will be paramount given a dearth of available content and the technical limitations of entry-level virtual reality.
Oculus VR launched the $600 Oculus Rift on March 28, and HTC launched the SteamVR-based HTC Vive this week. Sony plans to launch the PlayStation VR headset in October. Meanwhile, Google Cardboard has been distributed for free far and wide, and Samsung launched its mobile-based VR device, the Samsung Gear VR, last November.
Tomi Engdahl says:
First Look at Samsung’s 48L 3D V-NAND Flash
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1329360&
The highly anticipated Samsung’s 48 layer V-NAND 3D flash memory is out in the market, and we at TechInsights have the first look.
Samsung had announced its 256 Gb 3-bit multi-level cell K9AFGY8S0M 3D V-NAND as early as August 2015, stating that it would be used in a variety of solid state drives (SSD), and would be on the market in early 2016. True to their word, we managed to find them in their 2 TB capacity, mSATA, T3 portable SSD
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 Top Tech Companies Poised For Massive Layoffs
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329394&
Tech workers across the nation may witness a massive pink slip parade this year, should one Wall Street analyst’s prediction of more than 260,000 tech layoffs in 2016 come true. Here’s at a look at the top 10 companies on his list and why they are there.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM Neurocomputer Detailed
TrueNorth innards, aspirations revealed
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329372&
IBM unveiled details about the state of development and its future plans for TrueNorth—its neuromorphic mixed-signal chips based on the human brain. Its chip architecture, array of evaluation boards, reference systems and software ecosystem were described by their architect at the International Symposium on Physical Design 2016 (ISPD, April 3-6, Santa Rosa, Calif.) ISPD 2016 is an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) conference on next-generation chips sponsored by Intel, IBM, Cadence, Global Foundries, IMEC, Oracle, Synopsys, TSMC, Altera, Xilinx and other stellar chip makers worldwide.
At ISPD, IBM expressed it aspirations for its brain-like computers, hoping they will become a household name for applications from ultra-smart Internet of Things (IoT) to ultra-smart cars to ultra-smart cameras, ultra-smart drones, ultra-smart medical devices and of course ultra-smart supercomputers.
Akopyan said IBM’s target for its TrueNorth chips was Edge-of-the-Net and Big Data solutions, where massive amounts of real-time data need to be processed by ultra-low-power devices—namely its low-cost 5.4 billion transistor neurosynaptic chips that nevertheless consume a mere 700 milliWatts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC sales while a steeper decline
PCs were sold in the first quarter, according to Gartner, a total of 64.8 million shares. The amount is 9.6 percent lower than a year earlier. The direction is again clearly downwards.
Late last year already showed that the decline in PC sales would have stopped, but the figures for January-March, tell a different story. The quarter was also the first since 2007, when the three months were sold less than 65 million in a personal computer.
Manufacturers mark can be said that the biggest manufacturers lost.
Who then increased? Asus and Apple managed to sell slightly more laptops
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4248:pc-myynti-taas-jyrkempaan-laskuun&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s revenue is roughly one hundred billion US dollars – from which the Windows operating system accounted for about 15 per cent last year. Windows sales is not just grown over the past ten years.
IDC research institutes figures show that Microsoft’s Windows product sales in 2006 was about $ 13 billion. Since then, the company’s turnover has doubled, but the Windows sales have increased only slightly.
Currently, however, Microsoft is growing in other areas. For example, at the end of the fiscal year ending December Sales Office and Dymnamics products increased by two per cent. Net sales Intelligent Could Division grew by five per cent, in particular, boosted by the sale of Azure. The two groups currently make up about half of Microsoft’s turnover.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4246:windows-ei-enaa-kannata-entiseen-malliin&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 Top Tech Companies Poised For Massive Layoffs
http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/10-top-tech-companies-poised-for-massive-layoffs/d/d-id/1325015
Tech workers across the nation may witness a massive pink slip parade this year, should one Wall Street analyst’s prediction of more than 260,000 tech layoffs in 2016 come true. Here’s at a look at the top 10 companies on his list and why they are there.
VMware
Estimated percentage of jobs to be cut this year: 10% to 15%
Estimated number of cut employees: 1,700 to 2,500
Symantec
Estimated percentage of jobs to be cut this year: 15%
Estimated number of cut employees: 2,800
Yahoo
Estimated percentage of jobs to be cut this year: 30%
Estimated number of cut employees: 3,500
EMC
Estimated percentage of jobs to be cut this year: 15% to 20%
Estimated number of cut employees: 10,000 to 14,000
Cisco Systems
Estimated percentage of jobs to be cut this year: 20%
Estimated number of cut employees: 14,000
HP Inc.
Estimated percentage of jobs to be cut this year: 30%
Estimated number of cut employees: 14,000
Microsoft
Estimated percentage of jobs to be cut this year: 15%
Estimated number of cut employees: 18,000
Oracle
Estimated percentage of jobs to be cut this year: 20%
Estimated number of cut employees: 26,000
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
Estimated percentage of jobs to be cut this year: 30%
Estimated number of cut employees: 72,000
IBM
Estimated Percentage Of Jobs To Be Cut This Year: 25%
Estimated Number of Cut Employees: 95,000
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cade Metz / Wired:
Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook’s future: Messenger bots, AI, live video, virtual reality, and open sourcing key technologies
How Will Zuckerberg Rule the World? By Giving Facebook’s Tech Away
http://www.wired.com/2016/04/mark-zuckerberg-giving-away-facebooks-tech-free/
‘The real goal is to build the community. A lot of times, the best way to advance the technology is to work on it as a community.’
Facebook has designed a 360-degree video camera, and it’s giving the designs away. The plan is part of Zuckerberg’s sweeping effort to move the Internet beyond text and photos and video to a new mode of communication.
More than five years ago, Facebook started open sourcing much of the specialized software it built to drive its online empire, including sweeping database and analysis tools like Cassandra and Hadoop. Then it started sharing designs for the hardware it built to prop up this empire, including computer servers and networking gear, even entire data centers. And just recently, the company said it would give away all sorts of hardware it’s been building as a way of delivering Internet access to all the people on Earth who don’t have it, including drones and communications lasers and wireless antennas.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Facebook releases Bot Engine to help developers build more complex, machine-learning enabled bots, a further development from last year’s Wit.ai acquisition
Facebook releases Bot Engine to create much smarter bots
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/12/facebook-releases-bot-engine-to-create-much-smarter-bots/
Messenger is all about bots now. As expected, Facebook unveiled the Send and Receive API at its F8 conference. It lets you create bots for Messenger to search for things and interact with businesses. But what if you want to use machine learning and create more complex scenarios? Meet the Bot Engine, Facebook’s more powerful bot framework.
The Bot Engine is based on Wit.ai’s work. Facebook acquired Wit.ai last year, and later built M for Messenger using Wit.ai’s platform.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Botlist, a third-party database that catalogs bots across platforms, launches today
Botlist is an app store for bots
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/botlist-is-an-app-store-for-bots/
A new site launching today wants to be the app store for bots. Botlist, as it’s called, is a third-party database that’s a catalog a lot of the bots currently available across platforms, including email, web, SMS, Slack, mobile, apps, and more.
There’s no question that bots are all the rage. Facebook is planning to introduce chatbots on Messenger this week; Microsoft just rolled out bots on Skype and tools that let developers build bots for any platform; popular communication apps like Kik, LINE, Telegram and Slack have their own apps stores filled with bots; and so on.
Why bots, not apps?
For starters, we’ve reached a saturation point with the mobile app stores in developed markets. While there are new apps arriving all the time, many users download almost no new apps per month, according to studies. They’re basically happy with the apps they already have installed – Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Instagram, etc.
Plus, many mobile apps, while arguably easier to use than a mobile website, are accessed so infrequently it doesn’t seem to make sense to have them saved on your phone indefinitely.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Future of Firefox is Chrome
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/04/12/2025215/the-future-of-firefox-is-chrome
Mozilla seems to think a new future for Firefox [lies in Chrome]. While they claim that it is only about new ways of browser design, it is also an open secret that they are running into more and more problems lately with web compatibility. [Senior VP Mark Mayo caused a storm by revealing that the Firefox team is working on a next-generation browser that will run on the same technology as Google’s Chrome browser. The project, named Tofino, will not use Firefox’s core technology, Gecko, but will instead plumb for Electron, which is built on the technology behind Google’s rival Chrome browser, called Chromium.
The future of Firefox is … Chrome
Start your shouting engines
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/11/future_of_firefox_is_chrome/
“Let’s jump right in and say yes, the rumors are true, we’re working on browser prototypes that look and feel almost nothing like the current Firefox,” Mayo wrote in a blog post.
“The premise for these experiments couldn’t be simpler: what we need a browser to do for us – both on PCs and mobile devices – has changed a lot since Firefox 1.0, and we’re long overdue for some fresh approaches.”
The biggest surprise, however, was that the project, named Tofino, will not use Firefox’s core technology – Gecko – but will instead plumb for Electron, which is built on the technology behind Google’s Chrome browser, called Chromium.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Micron, VMware, Supermicro, Nexenta doodle array designs
Cosy club comes up with flashy little reference architecture
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/13/microns_flashy_little_reference_architecture_numbers/
Micron has devised a set of all-flash purpose-built, scale-out product designs in collaboration with VMware, Supermicro and Nexenta.
Micron Accelerated Solution for VMware Virtual SAN Ready Nodes
Micron Accelerated Ceph Storage Solution
Micron Accelerated NexentaEdge Solution
Micron, Supermicro and VMware have designed all-flash Micron Virtual SAN AF-4, AF-6, and AF-8 Ready Nodes. They use the deduplication, compression and erasure coding available in VMware Virtual SAN 6.2. Because of this, Micron says, they can be purchased for as low as $0.44/GB (effective capacity), which includes the full MSRP of all server hardware, software and three years of support.
Tomi Engdahl says:
USB-C adds authentication protocol
When one wire carries data and power, you need to protect against dodgy devices
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/13/usbc_adds_authentication_protocol/
The USB 3.0 Promoter Group has announced it has devised and will adopt a new “USB Type-C Authentication specification.”
The specification means makers of USB devices will be able to encode them with information about their source and function. When connecting to those devices, machines like computers or phones will be able to read that descriptor and choose to connect, or not, depending on policies.
The USB 3.0 Promoter group says “For a traveler concerned about charging their phone at a public terminal, their phone can implement a policy only allowing charge from certified USB chargers.” Or perhaps you’re worried that your organisation’s laptop fleet could be compromised by rogue USB devices, in which case you “can set a policy in its PCs granting access only to verified USB storage devices.” It’s not clear if that will allow organisations to specify individual devices, or just devices whose manufacturers have implemented the spec.
USB-C needs this spec for two reasons. One is that, not to put to fine a point on it, users are idiots.
The second is that there are lots of scumbags churning out second-rate electronics to make a quick buck. We already know that poorly-wired cables capable of frying kit are enough of a menace that Amazon.com recently banned the sale of non-compliant cables on its digital tat bazaar. If devices flag such kit as sub-standard, or refuse to connect to them, it’s therefore a win for all but the junk-slingers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC sales will continue to free-fall – Windows 10 is not the savior
PC sales continue to trend sad, survives IDC and Gartner statistics. The trend has been downward, but is expected to turn for the better during this year.
The research companies IDC and Gartner agree that the pc-business is going badly. According to Gartner, up so badly that PC sales dipped in the first quarter of less than 65 million sold device – the first time since 2007.
According to Gartner, PC devices were sold during the first quarter of 2016 only 64.8 million units. Drops from a year ago was as high as 9.6 percent. decline in PC sales has been going on for a record six consecutive quarters.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/pc-myynti-edelleen-vapaapudotuksessa-windows-10-sta-ei-pelastajaksi-6540466
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finally! The 1st tech IPO of 2016 is on its way
http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/12/investing/first-tech-ipo-dell-secureworks/index.html
The deep freeze in the tech IPO market may finally be melting — thanks to Michael Dell.
SecureWorks, Dell’s cybersecurity business, filed plans this week to raise as much as $157.5 million in an IPO. The deal could value the Atlanta-based company that has 4,200 clients at nearly $1.5 billion.
It would represent the first tech IPO of 2016. Exactly zero tech companies went public in the first quarter of this year, too scared to try and sell shares just as the stock market had its worst start to the year on record.
It was the first time that there’s been no tech IPO in the first quarter since 2009, when the U.S. was in the throes of the Great Recession. The rest of the IPO market didn’t fare much better, with only a handful of biotech companies going public.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Microsoft, Samsung commit to supporting Facebook’s React Native app development framework for Windows 10 and Tizen platforms, respectively
Facebook’s React Native gets backing from Microsoft and Samsung
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/13/facebooks-react-native-open-source-project-gets-backing-from-microsoft-and-samsung/
React Native was originally developed by Facebook to allow its developers to take React, a framework for helping developers build single-page apps the company developed in-house, and allow them to use these same skills to build native mobile apps for iOS and Android.
As the company announced at its F8 developer conference today, React Native has now been used by more than 500 companies and developers who published apps to Apple’s app store, and more than 200 companies and developers who published apps on Google’s Play store (React Native for Android is newer, which explains at least some of this difference in numbers).
In addition, the company today announced that both Microsoft and Samsung have committed to bringing React Native to Windows 10 and Tizen, respectively.
Tomi Engdahl says:
James Vincent / The Verge:
Google’s updated version of TensorFlow allows for machine learning using distributed computing — Google has given its open-source machine learning software a big upgrade — Last November, Google opened up its in-house machine learning software TensorFlow, making the program that powers …
Google has given its open-source machine learning software a big upgrade
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11420144/google-machine-learning-tensorflow-upgrade
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kareem Anderson / WinBeta:
Marmalade Core, a cross-platform C++ SDK, lets developers create games across iOS, Android, and Windows 10
Cross-platform games made easy with Microsoft’s Marmalade Platform
“Developers can write code once and deploy it to many types of devices using Marmalade Core.”
http://www.winbeta.org/news/cross-platform-games-made-easy-microsofts-marmalade-platform
Beyond its delicious sounding developer name, Marmalade is the backend for Microsoft’s newly announced cross-platform gaming initiative in Windows 10. Using the Marmalade Platform combined with Microsoft’s jam packed Visual Studio, developers can create a gaming experience like none other across iOS, Android, and Windows 10.
Developers can write code once and deploy it to many types of devices using Marmalade Core, a cross-platform C++ SDK, leveraging a platform abstraction API that hides much of the complexity of native platforms.”
“As part of showcasing how Marmalade Core and Visual Studio combine to help create great cross-platform games, we also went hands-on at //build with 2D Kit and 3D Kit.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Facebook working on AI that can automatically tag people in videos, says its director of applied machine learning — Facebook will soon be able to automatically tag your friends in videos — Facebook is making big strides in using its artificial intelligence systems for image recognition …
Facebook will soon be able to automatically tag your friends in videos
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/13/facebook-will-soon-be-able-to-automatically-tag-your-friends-in-videos/
Facebook is making big strides in using its artificial intelligence systems for image recognition, but it’s also working on bringing this technology to video. As the company demoed at its F8 developer conference in San Francisco today, it has a team working on automatically tagging people in videos.
As Facebook’s director of machine learning Joaquin Quiñonero Candela said during his keynote today, the idea here is to allow you to search for people in any of the videos they have shared with you. Say you are on a live video feed with a friend and another friend walks into the video and has a brief conversation with you. Typically, that would be a very ephemeral experience because it would be hard to find this moment again.
Soon, Facebook may be indexing this moment automatically for you and will let you find it again simply by searching for your friend’s name. You could then jump right into the video at exactly the moment your friend walks in.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Storage-class memory just got big – 256MB big, at least
Everspin ships 256MB MRAM samples, says 1GB kit due by year’s end
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/14/everspin_ships_256_megabyte_mram/
Persistent storage that’s just about as fast as RAM is widely held to be a year or three away from giving the server and storage industries a generational shakeup, and that change is now rather closer after US outfit Everspin started shipping samples of 256MB Magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM).
MRAM looks like DDR3 or DDDR4 RAM and motherboards think it quacks like DDR. But MRAM is non-volatile – data doesn’t disappear when power does – while also being rather faster than Flash. Just about everyone who’s anyone in the hardware industry is therefore working on something like MRAM, because really fast persistent storage has lots of lovely uses.
Everspin’s currently the only company selling this kind of stuff, but until today only in 64 megabyte chunks. Giving over a DIMM slot to just 64 megabytes of storage is not going to make MRAM mainstream. 256Mb is therefore a handy step towards making it easier to consider using MRAM more widely. Everspin says it also expects to sample a 1GB MRAM product by year’s end.
The DDR interface is lovely and fast – DDR4 RAM can hit 19,000 MB/s – and Everspin is claiming write times 100,000 times faster than NAND Flash. That speed comes, in part, because there’s no need to traverse SATA interfaces or a network.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hey, tech industry, have you noticed Amazon in the rearview?
It’s time to bring your sales into the 21st century
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/12/hey_tech_industry_have_you_noticed_amazon_in_the_rearview/
Dear IT vendors, I have a very serious question to ask you, both individually and as a group: do you all still want to be in business in 2020? If you answered yes then I must, in the politest possible fashion, also ask: what the fuck is wrong with you?
Amazon is kicking your asses, individually and collectively, and none of you seem to be able to understand why. I have worked with CEOs and serfs, talked to top architects and technical marketers, sales engineers and VPs. With very few exceptions, none of you have managed to put down your crayons long enough look at the page you’re scribbling on and the result is an entire industry that hasn’t the first clue about why the world around it has suddenly become strange and confusing.
Let me try to explain what you’ve missed as simply as I possibly can: Amazon is winning because you can take a credit card, go to their site and minutes later things are working.
There we go. That’s it. It’s that simple. Every other thing Amazon does: culture, technology, APIs…it’s all irrelevant. Ease of use is the only thing that matters for the overwhelming number of today’s IT workloads and this is something that our entire industry simply cannot wrap its mind around.
It is said that science advances one funeral at a time. The IT industry is clearly no different.
Vendor business models, software design and even many datacenter architectures are simply outdated and irrelevant. It’s all from a time when IT was something that only nerds did. IT was the domain of a priestly caste of specialists who decided what to buy, how it was implemented, who got access and so forth.
Tech sales in these halcyon days was a process. It took weeks or months.
Enter the future, stage left. Tech isn’t a series of monopolies any more, and every vendor and fanboy who says that lax, lousy, irritating, degrading or horribly inefficient sales processes are okay because “you shouldn’t run into those problems if you did it right” should have a large moon dropped on them. One that’s covered in acid and on fire.
Remember, this sort of hubris is exactly how mainframes were overrun by PCs: technology became available to and usable by individuals outside the priesthood. In case you hadn’t noticed, that started happening all over again a decade ago.
Vendor after vendor refused to take my money. They wanted me to “engage with a partner”, download a crippleware trial or request a quote or otherwise start the multi-business-day process required to buy a copy of their software and use it to see if the server dun got pwned
After yelling at Twitter, AVG was suggested. Lo and behold, it worked! They let me give them money and in exchange I received goods!
But…but…the channel!
This is where a bunch of sales VPs come whooshing through the door on their slip ‘n’ slides full of bullshit and start bleating plaintively about “the channel”. Believe it or not, folks, I actually know a thing or two about this, and providing people with the instant gratification required to solve the mundane or time sensitive issues in life doesn’t have to come at the expense of the channel.
None of this has to change if you sell through the vendor site!
The website can assign the new customer to a relevant partner based on an algorithm that takes into account factors like customer locality, partner speciality, partner customer loading and so forth. The information about “who to call for support” can be included in the email with the licence key, and make available in to the user on the support section of the website. They log in, they get their partner’s info listed.
You as the vendor forward the new customer’s info on to the vendor in an automated fashion and then can either forward them their take from the sale, or hold that money in trust until the end of the quarter in case manual adjustments needs to be made on partner assignment because the algorithm had an oopsie.
None of this is rocket science. I’ve built these exact systems for other industries. If it works with partner channels in other industries, it can work in tech. Vendors just need to remove cranium from sphincter long enough to realize that the ’80s and ’90s are both long gone and we’re getting awfully close to the ’20s. The 2020s, that is. Banjoes down, gents.
nfrastructure is different!
Next up are the infrastructure kings and queens, waving their participation trophies and explaining loudly just how none of the above applies to them because they’re special. Enterprises, you see, need SANs and compute, switches and hypervisors. This has to be planed and architected and tested and whatever else.
Bullshit.
Nutanix. SimpliVity. Scale Computing. EMC. HP. Yottabyte. The list goes on. If you count vendors who only sell EVO:Rail there are over 40 hyperconverged vendors on the market. I don’t need no stinking SAN. I don’t need to spread the blood of goats over my switch and burn incense in the hope it works. I can get a cluster, plug it in, turn it on and go.
Or I could go to Amazon with a credit card and…
If I am building out an entire data centre, or buying millions of dollars’ worth of gear then of course I want to engage with the vendor. I want to take advantage of the sale engineers, architects and subject matter experts they retain. I want to plan my network as a whole and, for the most part, stick to that plan.
But some days the boss comes trundling into mission control with a bee in their britches and a problem legitimately needs to be solved right now. Not a sales cycle and three business days’ worth of “back and forth” later. Now.
It’s my job to know the difference. So let me do my job. Sell me your gadget without interference and make it simple to install, configure and use. Yes, do make available the resources to consult with you to make sure that I not making gross errors at an architecture level.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook’s React Native gets backing from Microsoft and Samsung
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/13/facebooks-react-native-open-source-project-gets-backing-from-microsoft-and-samsung/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Visual Studio Code:
Microsoft’s cross-platform Visual Studio Code editor comes out of preview, has passed 500K MAUs; 1K extensions built since launch a year ago — Visual Studio Code 1.0! — Today we’re very proud to release version 1.0 of Visual Studio Code. Since our initial launch one year ago, 2 million developers have installed VS Code.
http://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/04/14/vscode-1.0
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linaro Announces Software Reference Platform for ARM
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linaro-announces-software-reference-platform-arm
With the launch of its Software Reference Platform for ARMv8-A processors, Linaro is proud to enable both a complete end-to-end open-source server software stack and access to enterprise-class ARM-based server hardware for developers. The build for the Linaro Enterprise Group is a complete reference implementation for ARM servers, including open-source boot software and firmware implementing the ARM Trusted Firmware, UEFI and ACPI standards, a Linux 4.4 kernel, tested latest Debian and CentOS distributions, OpenStack, OpenJDK, Hadoop and Spark.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jack Marshall / Wall Street Journal:
comScore: time spent online on desktop devices declined 9.3% in December, 7.6% in January, 2% in February, and 6% in March compared to the same period last year
Has Desktop Internet Use Peaked?
ComScore data show Internet use from desktop devices has declined year-over-year for four straight months
http://www.wsj.com/articles/has-desktop-internet-use-peaked-1460714718
The amount of time people spend accessing the Internet from desktop devices is showing signs of decline, according to online measurement specialist comScore.
Data from the research company indicate overall time spent online in the U.S. from desktop devices—which include laptop computers—has fallen for the past four months, on a year-over-year basis. It dipped 9.3% in December 2015, 7.6% in January, 2% in February and 6% in March.
Over the past few years, some in the media industry have suggested Internet users have been deserting desktops and instead “going mobile.” But there has been little data to support that assertion, at least at the aggregate market level. In fact, before December, desktop Internet use has risen for 13 straight months.
In May 2015, comScore’s data implied that time spent on the Internet from mobile devices was indeed growing quickly, but that desktop Web usage was growing at the same time. Basically, consumers were spending more time online overall.
If desktop Internet use is indeed beginning to decline, companies may begin to reconsider how they should allocate their resources and investments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Clive Thompson / New York Times:
The Minecraft Generation: How Mojang’s virtual sandbox, which sells 10K copies per day, is teaching millions of children to master the digital world
The Minecraft Generation
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html?_r=0
How a clunky Swedish computer game is teaching
millions of children to master the digital world.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Daniel Terdiman / Fast Company:
New study predicts 2M VR headsets will be sold this year, and 36.9M by 2020, but the medium is still six to eight years away from mainstream adoption
It May Take Years For Virtual Reality To Go Mainstream, Says New Report
http://www.fastcompany.com/3058836/vr-gaining-steam-but-not-mainstream-yet-report-finds
There will be 2 million headsets sold by the end of the year, but it could take six to eight years for VR to reach a tipping point.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Anton Shilov / AnandTech:
Intel unveils Apollo Lake next generation platform for cheap Atom-based devices, with first products shipping in the second half of 2016 — Intel Unveils New Low-Cost PC Platform: Apollo Lake with 14nm Goldmont Cores — This week, at IDF Shenzhen, Intel has formally introduced …
Intel Unveils New Low-Cost PC Platform: Apollo Lake with 14nm Goldmont Cores
by Anton Shilov on April 15, 2016 6:00 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10256/intel-unveils-apollo-lake-14nm-goldmont
This week, at IDF Shenzhen, Intel has formally introduced its Apollo Lake platform for the next generation of Atom-based notebook SoCs. The platform will feature a new x86 microarchitecture as well as a new-generation graphics core for increased performance. Intel’s Apollo Lake is aimed at affordable all-in-ones, miniature PCs, hybrid devices, notebooks and tablet PCs in the second half of this year.
The Apollo Lake system-on-chips for PCs are based on the new Atom-based x86 microarchitecture, named Goldmont, as well as a new graphics core that features Intel’s ninth-generation architecture (Gen9) which is currently used in Skylake processors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OpenPOWER Gains Support as Inventec, Inspur, Supermicro Develop POWER8-Based Servers
by Anton Shilov on April 15, 2016 2:00 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10249/openpower-gains-support-as-inventec-inspur-supermicro-develop-power8based-servers
When IBM, Google, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan founded OpenPOWER Foundation three years ago, the initiative was supported by only two server manufacturers: Google, which builds servers for itself, and Tyan. Today, OpenPOWER has expanded significantly in terms of the number of members. Moreover, major server producers, including Inventec, Supermicro, Wistron and some others are developing POWER8-based servers under the OpenPOWER initiative.
IBM to Expand Power Systems: LC Server Family with Support from Supermicro
Last week IBM disclosed plans to expand the lineup of its Power LC servers that are based on the POWER8 microprocessors as well as Linux operating system. In particular, the company intends to add Open Compute Project-compliant systems for big data analytics to the Power Systems LC portfolio, which will be important for the company as well as Open Compute Project in general. In addition, Supermicro will develop two servers that will be sold under IBM’s Power LC brand.
Supermicro is currently working on a 2-way IBM POWER8-based 2U server with up to 512 GB of DDR4 memory, 12 LFF/SFF hot-swap drive bays, and either two NVIDIA Tesla K80 or two Alpha-Data KU3 CAPI adapters (based on the Xilinx UltraScale KU115 FPGA).
Tomi Engdahl says:
The thing about reality: It’s really… persistent
Tech evangelism can overstate its case
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/18/reality_is_persistent/
StorageBod I see quite a few posts about this storage or that storage … how it is going to change everything or has changed everything. And yet, I see little real evidence that storage usage is really changing for many. So why is this?
Let’s take on some of the received wisdom that seems to be percolating.
Object storage can displace block and file?
It depends. Replacing block with object is somewhat hard. You can’t really get the performance out of it – you will struggle with the APIs especially to drive performance for random operations and partial updates.
Replacing file with object is somewhat easier. Most unstructured data could happily be stored as object and it is. It’s an object called a file. I wonder how many applications even using S3 APIs treat Object Storage as anything other than a file-store, how many use some of the extended metadata capabilities?
In many organisations what we want is cheaper block and file. If we can fake this by putting a gateway device in front of object storage, that’s what we will do. The object vendors have woken up to this and that is what they are doing.
All new developers are object storage aficionados?
I’m afraid from my limited sample size; I find this is rarely the case. Most seem to want to interact with file-systems or databases for their persistence layer. Now the nature of the databases that they want interact with is changing with more becoming comfortable with NoSQL databases
Technology X will replace technology Y
Only if Technology Y does not continue to develop and only if Technology X has a really good economic advantage. I do see a time when NAND could replace rotational rust for all primary storage but for secondary and tertiary storage? We might still be a way off.
Storage is either free or really cheap?
An individual gigabyte is basically free; a thousand of these is pretty cheap but a billion gigabytes is starting to get a little pricey.
A terabyte is not a lot of storage?
In my real life, I get to see a lot of people who request a terabyte of storage for a server because hell, even their laptop has this amount of storage. But for many servers, a terabyte is a huge amount of storage … many applications just don’t have this level of requirement for persistent data.
Software-defined is cheaper?
Buy a calculator and factor in your true costs.
Google/Amazon do it, so we can too?
You could but is it really your core business? Don’t try to compete with the web-scale companies unless you are one … focus on providing your business with the service it requires.
Storage administration is dead?
It changed,