Computer trends 2017

I did not have time to post my computer technologies predictions t the ends of 2016. Because I missed the year end deadline, I though that there is no point on posting anything before the news from CES 2017 have been published. Here are some of myck picks on the current computer technologies trends:

CES 2017 had 3 significant technology trends: deep learning goes deep, Alexa everywhere and Wi-Fi gets meshy. The PC sector seemed to be pretty boring.

Gartner expects that IT sales will growth (2.7%) but hardware sales will not have any growth – can drop this year. TEKsystems 2017 IT forecast shows IT budgets rebounding from a slump in 2016, and IT leaders’ confidence high going into the new year. But challenges around talent acquisition and organizational alignment will persist. Programming and software development continue to be among the most crucial and hard-to-find IT skill sets.

Smart phones sales (expected to be 1.89 billion) and PC sales (expected to be 432 million) do not grow in 2017. According to IDC PC shipments declined for a fifth consecutive year in 2016 as the industry continued to suffer from stagnation and lack of compelling drivers for upgrades. Both Gartner and IDC estimated that PC shipments declined about 6% in 2016.Revenue in the traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure segment decreased 10.8 per cent year over year in the third quarter of 2016. Only PC category that has potential for growth is ultramobile (includes Microsoft Surface ja Apple MacBook Air). Need for memory chips is increasing.

Browser suffers from JavaScript-creep disease: This causes that the browing experience seems to be become slower even though computer and broadband connections are getting faster all the time. Bloat on web pages has been going on for ages, and this trend seems to continue.

Microsoft tries all it can to make people to switch from older Windows versions to Windows 10. Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses as malware attacks that could have been avoided by upgrading to Windows 10. Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses. Microsoft: Windows 7 Does Not Meet the Demands of Modern Technology; Recommends Windows 10. On February 2017 Microsoft stops the 20 year long tradition of monthly security updates. Windows 10 “Creators Update” coming early 2017 for free, featuring 3D and mixed reality, 4K gaming, more.

Microsoft plans to emulate x86 instructions on ARM chips, throwing a compatibility lifeline to future Windows tablets and phones. Microsoft’s x86 on ARM64 Emulation is coming in 2017. This capability is coming to Windows 10, though not until “Redstone 3″ in the Fall of 2017

Parents should worry less about the amount of time their children spend using smartphones, computers and playing video games because screen time is actually beneficial, the University of Oxford has concluded. 257 minutes is the time teens can spend on computers each day before harming wellbeing.

Outsourcing IT operations to foreign countries is not trendy anymore and companied live at uncertain times. India’s $150 billion outsourcing industry stares at an uncertain future. In the past five years, revenue and profit growth for the top five companies listed on the BSE have halved. Industry leader TCS too felt the impact as it made a shift in business model towards software platforms and chased digital contacts.

Containers will become hot this year and cloud will stay hot. Research firm 451 Research predicts this year containerization will be US $ 762 million business and that Containers will become 2.6 billion worth of software business in 2020. (40 per cent a year growth rate).

Cloud services are expected to have  22 percent annual growth rate. By 2020, the sector would grow from the current 22.2 billion to $ 46 billion. In Finland 30% of companies now prefer to buy cloud services when buying IT (20 per cent of IT budget goes to cloud).Cloud spend to make up over a third of IT budgets by 2017. Cloud and hosting services will be responsible for 34% of IT budgets by 2017, up from 28% by the end of 2016, according to 451 Research. Cloud services have many advantages, but cloud services have also disadvantages. In five years, SaaS will be the cloud that matters.

When cloud is growing, so is the spending on cloud hardware by the cloud companies. Cloud hardware spend hits US$8.4bn/quarter, as traditional kit sinks – 2017 forecast to see cloud kit clock $11bn every 90 days. In 2016′s third quarter vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 8.1 per cent year over year to $8.4 billion. Private cloud accounted for $3.3 billion with the rest going to public clouds. Data centers need lower latency components so Google Searches for Better Silicon.

The first signs of the decline and fall of the 20+ year x86 hegemony will appear in 2017. The availability of industry leading fab processes will allow other processor architectures (including AMD x86, ARM, Open Power and even the new RISC-V architecture) to compete with Intel on a level playing field.

USB-C will now come to screens – C-type USB connector promises to really become the only all equipment for the physical interface.The HDMI connection will be lost from laptops in the future. Thunderbolt 3 is arranged to work with USB Type-C,  but it’s not the same thing (Thunderbolt is four times faster than USB 3.1).

World’s first ‘exascale’ supercomputer prototype will be ready by the end of 2017, says China

It seems that Oracle Begins Aggressively Pursuing Java Licensing Fees in 2017. Java SE is free, but Java SE Suite and various flavors of Java SE Advanced are not. Oracle is massively ramping up audits of Java customers it claims are in breach of its licences – six years after it bought Sun Microsystems. Huge sums of money are at stake. The version of Java in contention is Java SE, with three paid flavours that range from $40 to $300 per named user and from $5,000 to $15,000 for a processor licence. If you download Java, you get everything – and you need to make sure you are installing only the components you are entitled to and you need to remove the bits you aren’t using.

Your Year in Review, Unsung Hero article sees the following trends in 2017:

  • A battle between ASICs, GPUs, and FPGAs to run emerging workloads in artificial intelligence
  • A race to create the first generation of 5G silicon
  • Continued efforts to define new memories that have meaningful impact
  • New players trying to take share in the huge market for smartphones
  • An emerging market for VR gaining critical mass

Virtual Reality Will Stay Hot on both PC and mobile.“VR is the heaviest heterogeneous workload we encounter in mobile—there’s a lot going on, much more than in a standard app,” said Tim Leland, a vice president for graphics and imaging at Qualcomm. The challenges are in the needs to calculate data from multiple sensors and respond to it with updated visuals in less than 18 ms to keep up with the viewer’s head motions so the CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, sensor fusion core, display engine, and video-decoding block are all running at close to full tilt.

 


932 Comments

  1. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Toshiba Launches World’s First 14TB HDD with Conventional Magnetic Recording
    https://www.eeweb.com/profile/eeweb/news/toshiba-launches-worlds-first-14tb-hdd-with-conventional-magnetic-recording

    Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation announced the launch of the MG07ACA Series, the world’s first enterprise 14TB Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) HDD. Using a 9-disk, helium-sealed design, the new MG07ACA Series provides the power-efficient capacity and storage density needed by cloud-scale and enterprise storage solution providers to achieve their TCO objectives.

    “We have raised the bar with the new MG07ACA Series 9-disk helium-sealed design,” said Akitoshi Iwata, Vice President of Storage Products Division, Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation. “By utilizing an innovative design, we continue to improve the benefits that high-capacity disk storage can deliver to our broad global customer base.”

    Reply
  2. Tomi Engdahl says:

    IBM Unveils Industry’s Most Advanced Server Designed for Artificial Intelligence
    https://www.eeweb.com/profile/eeweb/news/ibm-unveils-industrys-most-advanced-server-designed-for-artificial-intelligence

    IBM unveiled its next-generation Power Systems Servers incorporating its newly designed POWER9 processor. Built specifically for compute-intensive AI workloads, the new POWER9 systems are capable of improving the training times of deep learning frameworks by nearly 4x allowing enterprises to build more accurate AI applications, faster.

    The new POWER9-based AC922 Power Systems are the first to embed PCI-Express 4.0, next-generation NVIDIA NVLink and OpenCAPI, which combined can accelerate data movement, calculated at 9.5x faster than PCI-E 3.0 based x86 systems.

    The system was designed to drive demonstrable performance improvements across popular AI frameworks such as Chainer, TensorFlow and Caffe, as well as accelerated databases such as Kinetica.

    Reply
  3. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The 8 biggest IT management mistakes
    https://www.cio.com/article/3240943/leadership-management/biggest-it-management-mistakes.html

    Sure, nobody’s perfect. But for those in charge of enterprise technology, the fallout from a strategic gaffe, bad hire, or weak spine can be disastrous. Here’s how to avoid (or recover from) big-time IT leadership mistakes.

    Everybody makes mistakes. Most are harmless, some are embarrassing but forgivable, and some can take your career — or your company — down with them.

    Some of the most common IT gaffes include becoming trapped in a relationship with a vendor you can’t shake loose, hiring or promoting the wrong people, and hiding problems from top management until it’s too late to recover.

    When you’re in charge of enterprise technology, the risks are much higher and the fallout from mistakes can be much worse. So we’ve ranked them by order of severity: Level 1 (an embarrassing story you’d tell over a beer, but maybe not right away); Level 2 (one you can recover from, but don’t expect to be on the fast track for promotion); and Level 3 (you’re fired).

    IT management mistake No. 1: Vendor lock-in
    Severity Level: 2

    IT management mistake No. 2: Treating the cloud like it’s an extension of your data center
    Severity: 2

    IT management mistake No. 3: Over-engineering the business case
    Severity: 1

    IT management mistake No. 4: Hiring below your skill level
    Severity: 2

    IT management mistake No. 5: Promoting the wrong internal candidate
    Severity: 2

    IT management mistake No. 6: Applying agile methodology to core systems
    Severity: 3

    IT management mistake No. 7: Saying yes too often
    Severity: 2

    IT management mistake No. 8: Hiding problems
    Severity: 3

    6 hard truths IT must learn to accept
    https://www.cio.com/article/3233244/it-strategy/6-hard-truths-it-must-learn-to-accept.html

    The rise of shadow IT, shortcomings in the cloud, security breaches — IT leadership is all about navigating hurdles and deficiencies, and learning to adapt to inevitable setbacks.

    1. Shadow IT has come out of the shadows
    2. You can’t do everything in the cloud
    3. Your systems have already been hacked
    4. Your software is unpatched and insecure
    5. You’ll never have enough bandwidth
    6. IT is still relevant — but only if it adapts

    Reply
  4. Tomi Engdahl says:

    6 trends shaping IT cloud strategies today
    https://www.cio.com/article/3137946/cloud-computing/6-trends-that-will-shape-cloud-computing-in-2017.html#tk.cio_rs
    From cost containment to hybrid strategies, CIOs are getting more creative in taking advantage of the latest offerings and the cloud’s economies of scale.

    Reply
  5. Tomi Engdahl says:

    12 ‘best practices’ IT should avoid at all costs
    https://www.cio.com/article/3200445/it-strategy/12-best-practices-it-should-avoid-at-all-costs.html#tk.cio_rs

    From telling everyone they’re your customer to establishing a cloud strategy, these “industry best practices” are sure to sink your chances of IT success.

    1. Tell everyone they’re your customer
    2. Establish SLAs and treat them like contracts
    3. Tell dumb-user stories
    4. Institute charge-backs

    Reply
  6. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Shadow IT: How today’s CIOs grapple with unsanctioned tech
    https://www.cio.com/article/3240987/it-strategy/shadow-it-real-world-stories-of-unsanctioned-tech.html
    Thanks to the cloud and mobile devices, ‘shadow IT’ has become a key concern for CIOs in every industry. Here, CIOs share their real-world experiences reining in tech outside their formal control.

    Reply
  7. Tomi Engdahl says:

    x86 is more common on servers

    Servers were sold in July-September by $ 14.7 billion, which is 16 percent more than a year earlier. According to Gartner, growth is now based on companies that build their own cloud and hybrid paired solutions.

    Sales of X86-based servers grew by 5.3 per cent in terms of number of devices and 16.7 per cent in money spent.

    Sales of RISC and Itanium-based UNIX servers decreased by 18.3 percent in cash. Traditional central machines sold 54.5 percent less than in the previous year.

    Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is still the largest server vendor, but only marginally ahead of Dell. HPE’s server sales were $ 3.14 billion in the third quarter, with Dell’s nearly $ 3.1 billion.

    Third biggest is IBM’s $ 1.1 billion sales

    China’s Inspur Electronics is fourth with nearly $ 1.1 billion in net sales (domestic China).

    Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/7293-x86-yleistyy-palvelimissa

    Reply
  8. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Intel mixed the processor names

    Intel introduced yesterday more CPUs for more affordable PCs. The new titles are Pentium Silver and the new Celeron. Both of these novelties are based on the Gemini Lake architecture of Atom Circuits. He has to be quite an enthusiast to stay on track in Intel’s naming strategy.

    Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/7295-intel-sekotti-prosessoriensa-nimet

    Reply
  9. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Gartner Says Worldwide Server Revenue Grew 16 Percent in the Third Quarter of 2017; Shipments Grew 5.1 Percent
    https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3837163

    In the third quarter of 2017, worldwide server revenue increased 16 percent year over year, while shipments grew 5.1 percent from the third quarter of 2016, according to Gartner, Inc.

    “The third quarter of 2017 produced continued growth on a global level with varying regional results,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. “A build-out of infrastructure to support cloud and hybrid-cloud implementations was the main driver for growth in the server market for the period.”

    “x86 servers increased 5.3 percent in shipments for the year and 16.7 percent in revenue in the third quarter of 2017. RISC/Itanium Unix servers declined globally, down 23.5 percent in shipments and 18.3 percent in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter last year. The ‘other’ CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a decline/increase of 54.5 percent,” Mr. Hewitt said.

    Reply
  10. Tomi Engdahl says:

    7 critical skills for managing remote workers
    https://www.cio.com/article/3241027/hiring-and-staffing/7-critical-skills-for-managing-remote-workers.html

    Remote workers face unique challenges compared to on-site colleagues. A good manager — armed with the following seven skills and management practices — can ameliorate these obstacles.

    Remote and flexible work opportunities are quickly becoming a differentiator for attracting and retaining top tech talent. But remote workers face unique challenges that on-site colleagues don’t, according to a new study from authors and social scientists Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield, including unequal treatment and gossip, according to the study.

    The study, which surveyed 1,153 employees, found the following troubling trends for remote workers:

    52 percent of remote employees feel on-site colleagues don’t treat them equally
    67 percent feel colleagues don’t fight for their priorities
    41 percent feel colleagues say bad things about them behind their back
    64 percent feel colleagues make changes to projects without consulting them
    35 percent feel colleagues lobby against them

    Worse, remote employees who experience these challenges have a harder time resolving them, according to the study. In fact, when encountering one of these issues, 84 percent say the concern dragged on for a few days or more, and 47 percent admitted to letting it drag on for a few weeks or more.

    1. Frequent and consistent check-ins
    2. Face-to-face or voice-to-voice
    3. Exemplify stellar communication skills
    4. Explicit expectations
    5. Always available
    6. Collaborative tech know-how
    7. Prioritize relationships

    The keys to a successful remote work strategy
    Getting remote work right is tough. But with a mission-driven approach and effective technology, a productive remote work strategy can really pay off.
    https://www.cio.com/article/3233200/hiring-and-staffing/the-keys-to-a-successful-remote-work-strategy.html

    Reply
  11. Tomi Engdahl says:

    8 hot IT hiring trends — and 8 going cold
    Recruiting and retaining tech talent remains IT’s biggest challenge today. Here’s how companies are coping — and what’s cooling off when it comes to IT staffing.
    https://www.cio.com/article/3224907/hiring-and-staffing/8-hot-it-hiring-trends-and-8-going-cold.html

    Reply
  12. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Meet the wireless keyboard that never needs to be recharged
    http://bgr.com/2017/12/11/best-wireless-keyboard-for-mac-windows-pc/

    Wireless keyboards are the way to go, obviously, but changing batteries or recharging your keyboard is a pain in the butt — even if you only have to do it once every month or two. What you might not know, however, is that there are wireless keyboards that never need to be recharged. Check out the Logitech K750 Wireless Solar Keyboard, which is available for both Windows PCs and for Mac computers.

    Reply
  13. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Todd Spangler / Variety:
    Nintendo says it has sold 10M Switch consoles since its release 10 months ago, meaning it may top first-year sales of the Wii, its best-selling console to date

    Nintendo Switch Has Sold 10 Million Units to Date
    http://variety.com/2017/digital/games/nintendo-switch-10-million-console-sales-1202636150/

    Reply
  14. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Optimizing The Data Center With PCI Express 4.0
    https://semiengineering.com/optimizing-the-data-center-with-pci-express-4-0/

    While PCIe 4.0 took a long time to get here, there are big benefits ahead.

    PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), also known as PCIe, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard designed to replace older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. Officially launched in 2003, PCIe was rapidly adopted by chip, system and software designers and emerged as the dominant interface standard for connecting peripherals to the CPU.

    Modern CPUs rely on the following primary interconnect types: memory interconnects, primarily supported by DDR4 today; high speed chip-to-chip cache coherent interconnect, typically supported by proprietary standards; and low speed links such as USB and SATA for low-level management and configuration. For almost everything else, there is PCIe. Easily scalable via multi-lane links, PCIe has always been backwards compatible and extensively supported by all modern OSs, software and drivers. Not surprisingly, PCIe has been widely deployed throughout the data center, enterprise and client PC markets.

    Reply
  15. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Data Centre Arrow Storage
    Storage Wars: Not very long ago, a hop, skip and a jump away…
    Rebel firms have been seduced by the dark side and Darth Reg must bring balance to the force
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/19/storage_roundup/

    Storage wars are ongoing across the galaxy and of course every supplier claims the force is with them. Here’s the latest news overheard from the wretched hive of scum and villainy otherwise known as the storage industry.

    Reply
  16. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: Enabling Fortran on GPUs for HPC Applications
    https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/blog/post/teaching-an-old-dog-new-tricks-enabling-fortran-on-gpus-for-hpc-applications-39343ba9-7a9c-42b2-a409-dd1ca876cb07?contactid=1&PC=L&c=2017_12_19_esd_newsletter_update_v12_december

    Fortran seems to have survived the test of time – it has been around for over half a century now. There are still legacy Fortran applications being actively maintained, and quite a few of these are scientific high performance computing (HPC) type applications in areas such as astronomy, weather and climate modeling. Despite its age, Fortran is being carried forward for the foreseeable future.

    The GNU Fortran (GFortran) compiler project is an active open source project to develop and maintain a Fortran language front-end and runtime libraries for the GNU Complier Collection (GCC). The Fortran language itself has evolved substantially since the popular FORTRAN 77 many of us first encountered way back in our undergraduate computer science classes.

    Fortran 2018 (formerly Fortran 2015) is now expected to be released next year.

    The Sourcery Tools Team from Mentor, a Siemens Business, has recently made a significant contribution towards enabling Fortran for HPC applications by adding OpenACC and OpenMP parallel computing directives support to the GFortran compiler and Mentor’s Sourcery CodeBench GFortran Lite solution for AMD® silicon. This enables Fortran developers to generate code for AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) CPU + GPU architectures.

    Reply
  17. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The Fundamental Principles of a Data Center Operations Plan
    http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/industry-perspectives/fundamental-principles-data-center-operations-plan

    Developing an effective, and adaptable plan for successful operations requires the adoption of specific principles to guide these efforts that require IT to think holistically about their operational goals and how they intend to achieve them.

    Principle 1: Experience is the Best Teacher
    Principle 2: Designed Through the Eyes of an Operator
    Principle 3: Flexibility and Control
    Principle 4: Training and Certification Program
    Principle 5: Focus on Eliminating Errors

    Summary

    Planning for the operation of your data center is a critical, and often, overlooked element of the new data center process. Effective operational processes and procedures are not the result of rigid adherence to past modes of operation or ad hoc efforts devoid of any underlying guiding foundation. Developing an effective, and adaptable plan for successful operations requires the adoption of specific principles to guide these efforts that require IT to think holistically about their operational goals and how they intend to achieve them.

    Reply
  18. Tomi Engdahl says:

    How to kill a dead project
    https://www.cio.com/article/3243084/project-management/how-to-kill-a-dead-project.html

    Think you might have a zombie IT project on your hands? Killing it can be challenging. It takes just the right mix of forensics and logistical know-how, and a lot of political will.

    hat do the zombie apocalypse and many businesses have in common? Answer: dead things that refuse to lie down and be still.

    The dead, brain-eating things businesses have a hard time killing are shambling, resource-eating projects.

    You know the ones. They’re projects where the meetings continue, team members still charge their time, but not only is there no forward progress, no two people seem to even agree which direction “forward” is.

    But while everyone knows how to kill a real zombie (chop off its head), killing a dead project isn’t quite so simple.

    There are three equally difficult steps to dead-project killing. The first is identifying the zombie. The second is persuading those who can kill it to kill it. The third is shutting it down. The first is forensic. The second is primarily political. The third is a matter of logistics.

    When to kill (and when to recover) a failed project
    https://www.cio.com/article/3223729/project-management/when-to-kill-and-when-to-recover-a-failed-project.html

    Admitting project failure is never easy, but sometimes the kill decision turns out to be the best decision. Here’s how to know when to scrap and when to save a failing project.

    Reply
  19. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Seagate’s lightbulb moment: Make read-write heads operate independently
    Multi Actuator arms will boost data access as capacities grow
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/19/seagate_disk_drive_multi_actuator/

    Seagate is increasing IO performance in disk drives by separating read-write heads into two separate sets which can operate independently and in parallel.

    The heads are positioned at one end of actuator arms which rotate around a post at their other end to move the heads across the platter surfaces. Thus, with an eight-platter drive, each read-write head is positioned above the same cylindrical track on each platter and reads or writes to and from the same disk blocks on each platter’s surface.

    “Half the drive’s recording heads will operate together as a unit, while the other half will operate independently as a separate unit,” Seagate said. “This enables a hard drive to double its performance while maintaining the same capacity as that of a single actuator drive.”

    The dual actuator technology helps unlock additional IOPS [input/output operations per second] and allows cloud providers to make effective use of the new capacity gains.”

    Currently, operating systems read and write data to a single disk drive. With this dual actuator arm set, the drive is divided into two logical drives. We imagine this will need to be exposed to operating systems and to applications such as storage array controllers, databases and other disk block-addressing pieces of code.

    “The host computer can treat a single Dual Actuator drive as if it were two separate drives,” Seagate added. “This means the host computer can ask a single high-capacity drive to retrieve two different data requests simultaneously – delivering data up to twice as fast compared with a single-actuator drive.”

    The first iteration of this technology is having dual actuators. More may be forthcoming. It solves a problem with disk drive IO density falling as drive capacity rises. Disk IO latency will remain the same but a physical disk drive’s sequential IO performance will rise.

    Seagate said the technology is in “development to be deployed on products in the near future”.

    Reply
  20. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Jillian D’Onfro / CNBC:
    Eric Schmidt to step down as executive chairman of Alphabet’s board of directors, will transition to technical adviser and continue to serve on the board

    Eric Schmidt is stepping down as the executive chairman of Alphabet
    https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/eric-schmidt-is-stepping-down-as-the-executive-chairman-of-alphabet.html

    Eric Schmidt is transitioning from Alphabet’s executive chairman to a “technical advisor” role
    The company expects the board to appoint a non-executive chairman at its next meeting in January

    Reply
  21. Tomi Engdahl says:

    How Two Guys and an Internet Forum Built a Kickass Computer
    https://www.wired.com/story/how-two-guys-and-an-internet-forum-built-a-kickass-computer/

    The China trip was only supposed to last 10 days. For Konstantinos Karatsevidis, the 23-year-old CEO of a new gadget maker called Eve, it was just a quick check-in to make sure production was rolling smoothly on his latest product. Karatsevidis and the rest of the nine-person Eve team have spent the last few years building the V, a laptop-tablet hybrid in the mold of the Microsoft Surface, working in remarkable concert with a teeming community of users and fans to create the exact product they wanted. All that was left to do was make it, perfectly, tens of thousands of times in a row. Which Karatsevidis learned is harder than it looks.

    The 10-day trip stretched into a month and a half, during which Karatsevidis changed his flight home to Finland six different times. “I was living in the factory, basically, with the guys from my team,”

    Karatsevidis feels real pressure to get the V done, and get it right. Not just to appease the 4,208 people who backed Eve on Indiegogo more than a year ago, giving the company $1.4 million. Not for everyone else who pre-ordered, and has waited through months-long shipping delays.

    Mostly Karatsevidis feels he owes it to the thousands of members of Eve’s online forum, who spent the last 18 months helping the team conceive of and build this thing. They decided the form factor. They picked most of the specs. They even chose the name. Eve’s product development doubled as a wild experiment in crowd-sourcing, in which Karatsevidis and his team let users design their ideal gadget and entrust Eve to build it. All those users, and some of the biggest players in the PC industry, are watching to see if Eve can turn a seemingly insane idea—asking a bunch of people on the internet for their opinions, and actually listening to them—into a killer product.

    At first, Karatsevidis and Malhonen spent their time crawling Alibaba, looking for tablets they could tweak and sell.

    But they wanted more control and flexibility, and since Karatsevidis knew a bit about manufacturing

    Karatsevidis and Malhonen found a manufacturer at an electronics fair in Shenzhen that had a tablet design ready to go. They changed a couple of parts, named the device the T1, and started selling it on their website for $159 in late 2014. With a little press and some good reviews, Eve was off and running.

    One thing about the T1 bugged Karatsevidis, though: Everyone had all these good ideas about how to make it even better. He’d find suggestions in comments, in forums, and in feedback from buyers. So Karatsevidis decided to steer into the feedback loop, and enlist all these ideas before they even started designing their next product.

    The Eve founders went to Microsoft’s Finland team and asked for help in figuring out how things work. Microsoft directed them to the Hong Kong Electronics Fair

    The guy turned out to be an Intel bigwig, to whom Karatsevidis immediately pitched his idea. He was going to build a laptop-tablet thing, he said, but he was going to crowdsource everything about it. “That’s a bullshit idea,” the guy said, and walked away. A few steps later, he turned around and came back. “No,” he said, “this is the future.” The Intel exec (who Karatsevidis declines to identify) is now a key mentor to Eve, and helped introduce the company to everyone worth knowing in the manufacturing world.

    Over and over, that crowdsourcing pitch got Eve noticed. Microsoft and Intel both wound up investing in the project; even the Finnish government gave Eve a grant.

    The eve.community website opened on January 6, 2016. Pretty quickly, users started to introduce themselves

    On January 18, Malhonen wrote a post called “The Project: ‘Pyramid Flipper’—a PC when you need it, a tablet when you like it.” This was what he and Karatsevidis had decided to build next. Why Pyramid Flipper? Because they wanted to invert the way things were normally done, putting users at the top and corporate bullshit at the bottom.

    The community won arguments with the Eve founders, making clear that pen support mattered when Karatsevidis didn’t think so.

    In every discussion, a few familiar tropes emerged. Somebody always wanted something impossible, like months-long battery life. Somebody would try and make everything about their specific needs. Somebody always just wanted to tell everyone else they sucked. But in every case, sanity prevailed. And the community, growing all the time, dreamed up a shockingly reasonable device. The Pyramid Flipper they imagined shared a lot in common with the Microsoft Surface, only with better battery (and a slightly bulkier body), more ports, and a more efficient processor. When it came time to name the thing, the place almost ate itself alive.

    Once they’d finalized the basic specs and design, Karatsevidis and Malhonen built the prototype of the V. Once that came back, and they were confident this thing was going to work, they launched the Indiegogo campaign in November of 2016. “The idea behind Indiegogo was that none of your money is used for development,” Karatsevidis says. They’d paid for that with help from their partners and the leftover T1 profit.

    The campaign was a huge success—it hit its goal in four minutes—to a degree that worried the Eve founders.

    By the end of the campaign, Eve had thousands of orders to fill, $1.4 million to spend, and nearly 3,000 people in its community.

    “We were like, ‘OK guys, that’s it. Indiegogo’s successful, we’ve finished development, we’re ready to ship! That’s it.’”

    A few weeks later, Karatsevidis recanted in a long post in the Eve forums. “This week has been a long one,” he began, before detailing the problem they were having with the V’s screen supplier. They’d pre-ordered 15,000 displays, paid in cash, and the screens that came in were straight-up terrible. They had yellow stains, dead pixels, light bleed everywhere. “Fortunately, our screen supplier has stock and they will send us new screens already next week,” he wrote. Except the next batch, which took a month to arrive, came back the same way. Ditto the next batch. Eve couldn’t switch suppliers, since this one already had their money, and nobody else made the screen they needed.

    Eventually Eve found a new display supplier, they got everything swapped in, and by October had entered into full mass production.

    After all the debates and polls, you’d think the Eve V would be the sort of too-many-cooks device that everyone built and nobody likes. A camel is just a horse designed by committee, after all. But somehow, against all odds, Eve made a terrific device. Sure, the final V has a couple of quirks, like a backspace key marked “Oops!” and a design that won’t exactly wow a Best Buy shopper, but it’s a shockingly impressive device.

    Reply
  22. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Ananya Bhattacharya / Quartz:
    In 2017, India’s IT industry saw tens of thousands of layoffs amid slowdown in revenue, increasing automation, which is making many entry-level IT jobs obsolete

    56,000 layoffs and counting: India’s IT bloodbath this year may just be the start
    https://qz.com/1152683/indian-it-layoffs-in-2017-top-56000-led-by-tcs-infosys-cognizant/

    For Indian techies, 2017 was the stuff of nightmares.

    One of the top employment generators until a few years ago, India’s $160 billion IT industry laid off more than 56,000 employees this year. Some analysts believe this spree was worse than the one during the 2008 financial crisis. Meanwhile, hiring plummeted, with entry-level openings having more than halved in 2017, according to experts.

    Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys, two of India’s largest IT companies and once leaders in job creation, reduced their headcounts for the first time ever. Even mid-sized players like Tech Mahindra retrenched several employees.

    “Digitisation and automation brought about disruption in traditional roles, which means that most of the IT firms found themselves reassessing the capability of the talent pool to stay market relevant,” Arun Paul, vice-president of human resources at Incedo, an IT service management company, told Quartz.

    Reply
  23. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The hounds of storage track converged and hyper-converged beasts
    Sniff… sniff. They can’t be far. These animals just ate 1.96 EB!
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/24/idc_goes_tracking_across_the_converged_landscape/

    Tech market researcher IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker has found that worldwide converged systems market revenue increased 10.8 per cent year over year to $2.99bn during the third quarter of 2017 (3Q17) – and that the market inhaled a massive 1.96 EB of new storage capacity during the quarter, up 30 per cent on the year.

    IDC splits this market into three sections: certified reference systems & integrated infrastructure, hyper-converged systems, and integrated platforms.

    Certified reference systems are converged system architectures, such as the Cisco-NetApp FlexPod. Integrated infrastructure are these systems supplied pre-built and pre-tested, with Dell EMC’s VxBlock being the classic example.

    There were revenues of $l.44bn for the certified reference systems and integrated infrastructure segment in the quarter

    It’s obvious that the Integrated Infrastructure sub-segment saw falling revenues. The market leader in this category is Dell, with $697.2m in sales and a 48.3 per cent share.

    Hyper-converged systems sales grew 68.0 per cent y-on-y to $1bn, 33.5 per cent of the total converged systems market revenue.

    Dell was top canine, with a 30.6 per cent share, having grown 158.3 per cent to $306.8mn in revenue y-o-y.

    Second was Nutanix, market leader a year ago,

    HPE also saw triple-digit growth of 144.4 per cent to $35.6m.

    The hyper-converged and converged reference architecture areas of the storage market are the hottest one of all, and now dominated by incumbent players, counting Nutanix as an incumbent.

    We think Scale Computing is making progress in the hyper-converged area but would be surprised if many other players in the Others category outgrew the market.

    Reply
  24. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Nvidia to end driver support for 32-bit PCs
    https://www.neowin.net/news/nvidia-to-end-driver-support-for-32-bit-pcs

    Just yesterday, Nvidia released its new GeForce 388.71 WHQL driver. As it turns out, that could be one of the last to support 32-bit operating systems, according to a support page listed by the company.

    Release 390 will be the last to support the legacy architecture, and according to Ars Technica, that is likely to arrive in January. Nvidia also says that it will support critical security fixes for an additional year, but 32-bit machines won’t get any new features, optimizations, or enhancements.

    Indeed, there are reasons that some people may still be on a 32-bit version of an OS, and that includes legacy software. 64-bit flavors of Windows can’t run 16-bit software, but 32-bit Windows can.

    Nvidia to cease producing new drivers for 32-bit systems
    Bit by bit, the PC world is continuing to drop its legacy support.
    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/12/nvidia-to-cease-producing-new-drivers-for-32-bit-systems/

    While most people have probably made the switch by now, yet another reason to drop 32-bit operating systems and move to 64-bits is coming. Version 390 of Nvidia’s graphics drivers, likely to arrive in January, will be the last to contain support for 32-bit versions of Windows (7, 8/8.1, and 10), Linux, and FreeBSD.

    There will be another year of security updates for 32-bit drivers, but all new features, performance enhancements, and support for new hardware will require the use of a 64-bit operating system and 64-bit drivers.

    Reply
  25. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Ubuntu 17.10 PULLED: Linux OS knackers laptop BIOSes, Intel kernel driver fingered
    Free as in thank God I’m not paying for this
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/21/ubuntu_lenovo_bios/

    Canonical has halted downloads of Ubuntu Linux 17.10, aka Artful Aardvark, from its website after punters complained installing the open-source OS on laptops knackered the machines.

    Specifically, the desktop flavor of Artful Aardvark, released in October, has been temporarily pulled – the server builds and other editions remain available. A corrected version of 17.10 for desktops is due to be released soon.

    The cockup mainly affects Lenovo computers, although other systems may also fall foul: selected Acer, HP, Toshiba and Dell hardware are said to be hit, too.

    Many users are reporting issues with BIOS corruption with 17.10. This seems to stem from enabling the intel-spi-* drivers in the kernel, which don’t appear to be ready for use on end-user machines.”

    Intel’s SPI driver is a piece of kernel-level software that allows the operating system to access and rewrite the firmware’s flash storage on the motherboard via a serial communication interface.

    Seemingly, a gremlin within this code causes the firmware’s data to become write protected, triggering further failures.

    We’re told Canonical will remove the SPI driver from its kernel, and rerelease Artful Aardvark.

    If your BIOS is already affected by this blunder, you may have to replace the firmware’s flash memory chip – or the whole motherboard – if reseting the BIOS or this suggested workaround, or some other remedy, do not resolve the matter.

    Reply
  26. Tomi Engdahl says:

    EU Consortium Targets Exascale Computing SoC
    https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332784

    Following three successive Mont-Blanc projects since 2011, the three core partners Arm, Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Bull (Atos Group) have come together to develop the next generation of industrial processor for high performance computing (HPC). The latest project is looking to pave the way to a future low-power European processor and ecosystem for exascale computing systems, with new European Commission Horizon2020 funding of 10.1 million Euros (about $12 million).

    The Mont-Blanc 2020 consortium also includes CEA, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Kalray and SemiDynamics.

    Reply
  27. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Microsoft acquires Avere Systems, file-storage vendor for Windows and Linux
    http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-acquires-avere-systems-file-storage-vendor-for-windows-and-linux/

    Microsoft plans to integrate Avere’s file system and caching technologies for Windows and Linux clients with its Azure cloud.

    Reply
  28. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Last year, 262.5 million PCs were sold. The market shrank by 2.8 percent from the previous year, but the more worrying for manufacturers is that the PC no longer interests consumers as a device.

    In the United States, the purchasing power of consumers was in good shape during the Christmas season, but PCs did not end up in the present boxes. Instead, there were new smartphones, smart loudspeakers and home digital auxiliaries.

    In October-December, the US sold only 15.2 million PCs. The figure is eight percent lower than in the previous year. The only manufacturer that had sold its sales volume was HP, according to Gartner.

    HP went on to become the biggest PC maker last year, past Lenovo. The company sold 55.2 million micro, which meant a 21% market share. Lenovo dropped to 20.8 percent.

    Dell increased its sales sluggishly, with a market share of 15.2%. Apple’s Macbook sales grew to 19.3 million units, while its market share grew faster than Asus.

    However, Gartner does not yet declare that the PC will disappear completely from the homes. However, it is becoming a more specialized device to perform well-defined tasks. Buyers begin to look at quality and functionality instead of cheap prices.

    Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7390&via=n&datum=2018-01-12_14:37:20&mottagare=31202

    Reply
  29. Tomi Engdahl says:

    IDC: Q4 PC shipments rise for first time in six years
    Research firm IDC said PC market most stable since 2011, led by HP.
    http://www.zdnet.com/article/idc-q4-2017-pc-shipments-rise/

    The PC market is beginning to show some signs of stabling, with traditional PC shipments recording a slightly positive 0.7 percent year-over-year growth worldwide in Q4 2017 and total year-over-year decline of 0.2 percent in full year 2017, according to research released by IDC.

    IDC said 2017 marked the most stable year for the PC market since 2011 with annual shipment volume of 259.5 million units.

    In the holiday quarter, PC vendors shipped 70.6 million units, out performing estimates of a 1.7 percent decline. However despite the small quarterly growth of 0.7 percent, mobile devices are continuing to have a dampening effect on the global PC market.

    Reply
  30. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Video gaming disorder to be officially recognised for first time
    https://www.newscientist.com/article/2157042-video-gaming-disorder-to-be-officially-recognised-for-first-time/

    Can playing too many video games be a mental health condition? In some circumstances, the World Health Organization thinks that it can be, New Scientist has learned.

    The WHO is to include gaming disorder in its International Classification of Diseases for the first time. This widely used diagnostic manual was last updated in 1990, and the latest version – called ICD-11 – is set to be published in 2018.

    The wording of the gaming disorder entry that will be included in ICD-11 is yet to be finalised

    Reply
  31. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Declined 2 Percent in 4Q17 and 2.8 Percent for the Year
    https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3844572

    Amid Market Consolidation, the Top Four PC Vendors Accounted for 64 Percent of Shipments in 2017

    Worldwide PC shipments totaled 71.6 million units in the fourth quarter of 2017, a 2 percent decline from the fourth quarter of 2016, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc. For the year, 2017 PC shipments surpassed 262.5 million units, a 2.8 percent decline from 2016. It was the 13th consecutive quarter of declining global PC shipments, as well as the sixth year of annual declines. However, Gartner analysts said there were some signs for optimism.

    “In the fourth quarter of 2017, there was PC shipment growth in Asia/Pacific, Japan and Latin America. There was only a moderate shipment decline in EMEA,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “However, the U.S. market saw a steep decline, which offset the generally positive results in other regions.

    “The fourth quarter results confirmed again that PCs are no longer popular holiday gift items. This does not mean that PCs will disappear from households,” Kitagawa said. “Rather, the PC will become a more specialized, purpose-driven device.”

    Reply
  32. Tomi Engdahl says:

    PC Market Achieves First Positive Holiday Quarter Shipment Growth in Six Years, According to IDC
    https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43495918

    FRAMINGHAM, Mass., January 11, 2018 – Worldwide shipments of traditional PCs (desktop, notebook, and workstation) totaled 70.6 million units in the fourth quarter of 2017 (4Q17), recording slightly positive (0.7%) year-on-year growth, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The results outperformed the forecast of a 1.7% decline in shipments during the quarter.

    The 4Q17 results further validate the view of a steadying, albeit still weak, traditional PC market, buoyed mainly by commercial upgrades and pockets of improving consumer PC demand. 2017 ended with an annual shipment volume of 259.5 million units, which represents a year-over-year decline of 0.2%. This makes 2017 the most stable year the market has seen since 2011.

    Aside from commercial demand, 2017 was further helped by several other factors. Although the situation improved as the year progressed, the shortage of key components such as SSD (Solid State Drives) acted as a major driver of shipments for much of 2017, with top PC companies vying to lock up supply ahead of price increases and thus boosting orders. In response to the contracting tablet market, companies also returned their focus to the notebook market, shifting the product mix to appeal to key user segments and expanding the number of slim, convertible, and gaming systems.

    Reply

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