Gartner believes that software and hardware companies do better in 2013 than last year. I hope so this happens, it would be good for the industry. Gartner Says Worldwide IT Spending Forecast to Reach $3.7 Trillion in 2013. That would be 4.2 percent increase from 2012 spending. At the moment uncertainties surrounding prospects for an upturn in global economic growth are the major retardants to IT growth. According to the IT market research form Forrester IT market will grow globally by 3.3 per cent this year in U.S. dollar terms. Europe continues to decline (except Nordic countries, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), and growth is slower in Japan and India.
Worldwide IT spending increases were pretty anemic as IT and telecom services spending were seriously curtailed last year. Gartner believes that this uncertainty is nearing resolution and thus Earth’s anemic IT budgets to bounce back in 2013. Wall Street Beat: 2013 IT Spending Forecasts Look Upbeat article mentions that fiscal cliff deal will help unlock spending on mobility, analytics, collaboration and security technology.
According to the EPA, the average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year. There is again a Campaign To Remove Paper From Offices. A campaign started by HelloFax, Google, Expensify, and others has challenged businesses to get rid of physical paper from their office environment in 2013. The Paperless 2013 project wants to move all documents online. The digital tools that are available today. The paperless office technology is here – we just need to use it more than our printers.
Intel x86 and ARM duopoly will continue to dominate this year. Both of the processor will sell well on their own main application fields, and they try to push to each others territories. This means that ARM tries to push to servers and x86 is trying to push more heavily to mobile devices.
Software manufacturers aim to hardware business: Microsoft, Valve, Google etc..
Still IT buyers expect too much from software they buy. This has happened earlier for long time and I expect that to continue. IT systems are easier to develop than user brains, but still system that are hard to learn are pushed to users.
IT service companies sill “sell air”. It is a good business to sell promises first and then when you get money try to do make the promised product with it. And are you sure that the backups your service provider makes can really be restored?
This year will not be a year for Linux on desktop. The fact that currently Amazon’s top selling laptop runs on Linux does not change that. Linux is more heading to smart phones and tablets that to win normal desktop.
Gaming on Linux gets boost. Valve released Steam gaming system for LinuxUbuntu users have run to use Steam game service (at the moment 0.8% of Steam users use Ubuntu, the service was started to as beta on December 2012). Valve will release this year it’s own Linux based Steam Box gaming console. Exclusive interview: Valve’s Gabe Newell on Steam Box, biometrics, and the future of gaming.
Windows 8 slow start continues. Windows 8 sales are well below projections. Computer sales dropped after release of Windows 8. U.S. consumers hesitant to make switch to Windows 8. Uncertainty could turn Windows 8 into the next Vista. Independent report says that Windows 8 Even Less Popular Than Vista and Microsoft voice says that its new OS are chugging along quite nicely, thank you very much, in much the same fashion as Windows 7 before it. Who to believe? Let’s wait and see what happens. I expect that some users will get Significant booting challenges on EFI systems when upgrading to Windows 8.
Interest in Java will decrease compared to other languages for various reasons, recent security issues playing part on that. C Beats Java As Number One Language According To TIOBE Index. It happened already.
Software optimization becomes again talked about when CPU usage on cloud system is easily measured and costs money. Cost-Aware Architectures will be talked bout. Keeping control over cost, architecturally, is just plain hard. Usually engineers we are remarkably badly trained in thinking about cost, but corporate bean counters can now start to ask how we save cost in running the software in cloud. Pinterest Cut Costs from $54 to $20 Per Hour by Automatically Shutting Down Systems.
The world of smart connected devices (desktops, notebook, tabs and smartphones) is becoming bigger and bigger on the expense of traditional PC manufacturers. At the end of 2012 HP is still top of PC league, but trailing fourth in all-devices rankings. Samsung leads the pack in terms of device shipments and Apple is next. Lenovo is the third biggest shifter of devices on the planet. The bets for increased sales are being placed behind smartphones and tablets.
It’s deja vu all over again. You see the phrase “any time, any place, anywhere” in relation to mobile access. Mobile devices bring back that old client-server feeling. The realization dawned that client-server brought with it as many problems as it solved. Following a period of re-centralisation using Web-based architectures, it looks as if we are beginning to come full circle. When the next generation is getting all excited about using mobile apps as front-ends for accessing services across the network, we can’t help noticing parallels with the past. Are HTML5 and cross-platform development and execution environments are now with us to save us? In the real world, the fast and reliable connectivity upon which this model depends just isn’t there in most countries at the moment.
End of netbooks as we know it. Netbook sales go to zero. All major manufacturers in this category has ended making netbooks. They have been replaced with booming tablet sales.
Tablet PC shipments are expected to reach more than 240 million units worldwide in 2013, easily exceeding the 207 million notebook PCs that are projected to ship, according to NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report. The market that has been dominated by one major player, Apple, but Android tablets are quickly getting more market share.
Thin client devices seem to be popping up here and there. Dell introduces HDMI stick that turns any screen into a thin client PC. And so will several other small stick computers coming. Raspberry Pi pocket computer is selling like hot pies (nears one million milestone).
Directly soldered to board CPUs are already norm on smart phone, tablets and some laptops. There will be more and more questions when manufacturers start to drop CPU sockets on the computers. Rumors about Intel Corp.’s plan to abandon microprocessor sockets in the future has been flowing and official response has been:
Intel to Support CPU Sockets for Foreseeable Future. AMD Vows Not to Drop Microprocessor Sockets in Next Two Years. Question is still when transition to BGA starts to happen on desktop PCs.
USB speed will increase again this year. So there is again a new USB version. The future of USB 3.0 coming mid-year with data speeds doubling to 10Gbps. USB 3.0 speed to DOUBLE in 2013 article tells that USB 3.0 – aka SuperSpeed USB – is set to become 10 gigabits per second super-speedy, with a new specification scheduled for a mid-2013 release. The aim is to brings USB closer to the class-leading Thunderbolt standard. It is expected that the new specification ends to consumer hardware a year later.
Higher resolutions will become commonplace. Earlier full HD was a target. Now high end devices are aiming to “retina” and 4K resolutions. Panasonic shows off 20-inch Windows 8 tablet with insane 4K resolution Qualcomm outs Snapdragon 800 and 600: up to 2.3GHz quad-core, 4K video, due by mid 2013.
Solid state storage becomes cheaper and cheaper. You can get ssd-storage at as low as less than one dollar per gigabyte. Moore’s Law may not be running out of steam in memory as we have an insatiable appetite for memory these days. Nowadays our tastes are changing from DRAM to nonvolatile flash memory used in SSD device. For example Kingston just unveiled the world’s first 1TB USB stick and SSD drives are also getting bigger every day. We are already encountering floating-gate scaling problems for NAND flash and answer to the scaling problem appears to be growing devices “up”.
2013 in storage is dominated by flash and file systems. We will finally see some all-flash arrays starting to ship from the big boys – and this will bring credibility to some of the smaller players. Management tools are going to be big again. Expect a lot of pain as infrastructure teams try to make things just work.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language index
https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language
The TIOBE Programming Community Index has it wrong : C# is the language of the year, not Objective-C. Indeed, according to the PYPL index, C# had the biggest growth in popularity share this year : +1.8 %.
Over a 5-year period, Python is the language whose popularity is growing the fastest; it is already the second most popular in the US
The PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language index is created by analyzing how often language tutorials are searched on Google
Tomi Engdahl says:
Understanding SSD over-provisioning
http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4404566/Understanding-SSD-over-provisioning
The over-provisioning of NAND flash memory in solid state drives (SSDs) and flash memory-based accelerator cards (cache) is a required practice in the storage industry owing to the need for a controller to manage the NAND flash memory. This is true for all segments of the computer industry—from ultrabooks and tablets to enterprise and cloud servers.
Essentially, over-provisioning allocates a portion of the total flash memory available to the flash storage processor, which it needs to perform various memory management functions. This leaves less usable capacity, of course, but results in superior performance and endurance. More sophisticated applications require more over-provisioning, but the benefits inevitably outweigh the reduction in usable capacity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD, Intel and Nvidia start 2013 with bold chip statements at CES
Analysis 2013 already shaping up to be a hot year in the chip market
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/feature/2234976/amd-intel-and-nvidia-start-2013-with-bold-chip-statements-at-ces
BOTH AMD and Intel made important chip architecture announcements at CES, while Nvidia announced its latest Tegra 4 system-on-chip, all of which look set to make 2013 a vintage year in the consumer semiconductor market.
Ivy Bridge processor architecture below the 10W TDP threshold
AMD on the other hand, announced next generation accelerated processing units (APUs), claiming it has signed big brands to use its chips, something that it desperately needs if it is to win the shelf space battle against Intel.
AMD’s problem is not with its chips but rather the machines that use its chips. AMD has long played the budget game, trying to get its chips into cheap, and in many cases nasty, machines. The trouble is that consumers these days – recession or no recession – are increasingly choosing to buy premium, or at least perceived to be premium, electronics.
Apple is the obvious example in both laptops and smartphones, but there are others. Lenovo’s Thinkpad range still remains popular despite carrying a significant price premium over most of the other laptops found in PC World, Best Buy or most other retail outfits.
AMD had a terrible 2012 with very few positives
Intel, on the other hand, flexed its manufacturing muscle at CES by showing off 7W Ivy Bridge chips for use in selected ultrabook designs.
Although Intel’s 7W Ivy Bridge chips are still nowhere near the low power utilisation level required to get into smartphones – Intel has no plans to put Ivy Bridge or Haswell processors into smartphones, instead relying on various incarnations of its Atom chip architectures – it once again shows just how far Intel can push x86 thanks in large part to the design generation lead in manufacturing it holds over some other chip designers and foundries.
Aside from servers, Intel can also pitch the low power Ivy Bridge chip at all-in-one machines and even high-end 4K resolution internet televisions that require ever increasing processing power.
Intel also brought out a few Atom chips for smartphones and tablets
Unlike AMD, Intel can sit on its big announcement of 2013, which everyone knows is Haswell.
Meanwhile, Nvidia showed off Tegra 4, a quad-core chip with a significant graphics boost.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Tablets Will Kill Smart Boards In Classrooms
http://www.informationweek.com/why-tablets-will-kill-smart-boards-in-cl/240145886
I have used all sorts of “smart” classroom tools and devices.
As a CIO in higher education, my budgets have felt the strain of some of these devices. Some were good and some were bad and, all too often, the ROI was hard to show. But now, finally, classroom devices are becoming smarter with the advent of tablet computing.
Now we have a device that can do much of what’s needed for classroom teaching and is as compact as a folder or small notebook (the paper kind). I was an early tablet adopter in the hope that my dreams had come true. For the most part, they have, with some caveats.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Exclusive Interview With Ray Kurzweil On Future AI Project At Google
http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/10/exclusive-interview-with-ray-kurzweil-on-future-ai-project-at-google/
In an exclusive with Singularity Hub, Ray Kurzweil gave one of his first interviews since the December announcement that he joined Google full time as Director of Engineering. Speaking with Singularity Hub Founder Keith Kleiner, Ray discusses his new role
Now if you’ve been following Singularity Hub’s coverage of personal assistants like Siri, Evi, and the latest, Maluuba, as well as Google Voice Search, then you know that natural language recognition is one of the highest priorities for tech companies today.
That’s exciting because it means that holding sophisticated conversations with computers — in much the same way that Dave Bowman does with HAL 9000 in the movie 2001 – is going to become a reality very soon.
As Kurzweil points out, the hurdle currently is that language is hierarchical
Tomi says:
IDC report claims consoles will remain top in gaming through 2014 and beyond
http://www.slashgear.com/idc-report-claims-consoles-will-remain-top-in-gaming-through-2014-and-beyond-10264847/
A report from the International Data Corporation claims that consoles will remain at the top of the totem pole in the world of gaming for the foreseeable future. Of those gaming consoles, the Xbox 360 is the best selling device, according to the NPD Group. For now, tablets, smart TVs, and set-top boxes are not a threat to consoles in the grand scheme of things.
Likewise, the IDC report says that discs will be the main source of gaming revenue for quite some time despite the rough last two years developers and publishers have had. Game disc sales are expected to stabilize next year and then rise in 2014. This isn’t to say that discs’ digital counterparts aren’t having an effect, with the report stating that disc sales are expected to decline by 3-percent annually through 2016.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Who Controls Vert.x: Red Hat, VMware, Neither?
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/01/12/1756239/who-controls-vertx-red-hat-vmware-neither
“Simon Phipps sheds light on a fight for control over Vert.x, an open source project for scalable Web development that ‘seems immunized to corporate control.’ ‘Vert.x is an asynchronous, event-driven open source framework running on the JVM. It supports the most popular Web programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, Groovy, Ruby, and Python. It’s getting lots of attention”
“The dustup also illustrates how corporate politics works in the age of open source: As corporate giants grasp for control, community foresight ensures the open development of innovative technology carries on.’”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Forrester: IT spending facing challenges in 2013
Particularly in Europe, and in servers and storage
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/11/forrester_it_spending_2013_2014_forecast/
The prognosticators have been reading their tea leaves, analyzing entrails, and gazing into their balls to try to figure out what the IT spending picture will look like, and the news from Forrester Research is much the same as El Reg is seeing elsewhere: growth will be a bit slow in the current year, and improving out beyond that.
As gauged in US dollars, Bartels and his team reckon that IT spending will be up 3.3 per cent to $2.09 trillion, and if you reckoned the sales in local currencies around the world, the growth would be more like 5.4 per cent.
IT consulting and systems integration – one of the big IT job producers these days – will rake in a $404bn pile of cash, up 3.6 points. A category combining IT outsourcing and hardware support services will bring in $399bn (up 5.2 per cent) this year
Hardware was not a fun business to be in unless you were Apple in 2012, with flat PC sales and a 4 per cent decline in server revenues for the year, according to Forrester’s analysis
The only reason why PCs were flat in 2012 is because Forrester counts them as PCs, and it is tablets that are going to help push up PC sales this year by around 4 per cent in the current projections put forth by Bartels. Those projections call for both server and storage revenues to decline, and for other peripheral sales to only increase by 3 per cent, a slowdown compared to 2012.
By geography and reckoned in local currencies, Bartels says IT spending will rise by 7.5 per cent in the United States this year, with Europe slowing to eight-tenths of a per cent growth in local currencies and translating into a 3.2 per cent drop as measured in US greenbacks. The Asian IT sector will see 4 per cent growth in 2013, which works out to 2.9 percent growth when converted to US dollars.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Security vendors warn users to disable Java after zero day exploit is found
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2235878/security-vendors-warn-users-to-disable-java-after-zero-day-exploit-is-found
A JAVA ZERO DAY EXPLOIT has been found in the wild and security vendors are advising users to disable Java support in their computers in order to stay safe.
According to Trend Micro, the flaw is being used by toolkits like the Blackhole Exploit Kit (BHEK) and the Cool Exploit Kit (CEK) to distribute ransomware, particularly Reveton variants.
To prevent this exploit, Trend Micro recommends that users consider whether they really need Java in their systems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pinoccio Microcontroller to Crowdfund the Internet of Things
http://www.wired.com/design/2013/01/pinoccio-indiegogo/
Sometimes, when the Internet of Things talks to itself, you get left out. With all that data flying from car to phone to home without any user interaction, you could be forgiven for feeling a little out of control.
Enter Pinoccio, an Indiegogo-funded microcontroller designed to let you build and link projects to each other and to the web. It’s essentially a DIY “Internet of Things” controller in a tiny, programmable package.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CES postscript: The touch laptop, like it or not
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57563657-75/ces-postscript-the-touch-laptop-like-it-or-not/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title
Touch is coming in a big way to Windows 8 laptops. And if Intel has its druthers, pretty much everything coming down the pike will be touch-capable.
The laptop was reinvented at CES.
Or maybe I should say there was a vigorous attempt to reinvent the laptop. Because we won’t know how successful touch has been until next year this time.
Intel’s CES booth — still a large presence in the CES Central Hall — had one basic unmistakable message: touch has arrived.
Windows 8 convertibles, detachables, touch-screen laptops, and just plain tablets from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Samsung, Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Toshiba, Sony, and others blanketed Intel’s booth.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chinese industry
From guard shack to global giant
How did Lenovo become the world’s biggest computer company?
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21569398-how-did-lenovo-become-worlds-biggest-computer-company-guard-shack-global-giant
LENOVO started humbly. Its founders established the Chinese technology firm in 1984 with $25,000 and held early meetings in a guard shack. It did well selling personal computers in China, but stumbled abroad. Its acquisition of IBM’s PC business in 2005 led, according to one insider, “to nearly complete organ rejection”.
Given all this, its recent success is startling. In the third quarter of last year, Gartner, a consultancy, declared Lenovo the world’s biggest seller of PCs, ahead of Hewlett-Packard (HP).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s partners fly the Windows 8 flag, but the future is Surface
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/13/3867246/microsoft-ces-2013-partners-fly-the-windows-8-flag
Microsoft might not have been at CES this year, but its partners and OEMs were out in full force. A quiet showing from Redmond at a time when the company is trying to push Windows 8 to the world could be seen as an unusual move, but looking around the show this week it made a lot of sense. Why waste millions of dollars on a CES booth to promote Windows 8 when your struggling PC OEMs can do it for you?
And that’s exactly what happened.
Sony had rows of Windows PCs with specific areas of focus on photography, applications, and more. While Samsung had an equally impressive range of Windows 8 devices and Panasonic unveiled a 20-inch 4K Windows 8 tablet.
If last year’s CES was a focus on Android tablets, this year was very much Windows despite Redmond’s absence.
As Intel struggles to conquer the mobile market, it’s essential for the company to push the latest Windows release and support the health of the PC industry. It hasn’t been a great start to the new year for PC manufacturers and Intel, with reports of an 11 percent year-over-year drop of notebook PC sales.
The traditional Wintel relationship that used to generate an increase of PC purchases and excitement around a Windows release is starting to show signs of cracks. It’s not the first time that PC sales have taken a plunge, but this time it feels a little different. There’s a huge amount of competition trying to take sales away from Windows PCs, and a weakened global economy with a focus on low-cost mobile devices vying for consumers’ dollars.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Touchscreen Laptops, Whether You Like Them Or Not
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/13/01/13/027203/touchscreen-laptops-whether-you-like-them-or-not
“With CES all wrapped up, an article at CNET discusses a definite trend in the laptops on display from various manufacturers this year: touchscreens. Intel and Microsoft are leading the way, and attempting to grab the industry’s reins as well”
Tomi Engdahl says:
CES postscript: The touch laptop, like it or not
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57563657-75/ces-postscript-the-touch-laptop-like-it-or-not/
Touch is coming in a big way to Windows 8 laptops. And if Intel has its druthers, pretty much everything coming down the pike will be touch-capable.
The laptop was reinvented at CES.
Or maybe I should say there was a vigorous attempt to reinvent the laptop. Because we won’t know how successful touch has been until next year this time.
Tomi Engdahl says:
With a few tweaks to 3PAR, HP might crash all-flash array party
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/14/3par_flash_extensions/
Taking HP statements at face value, it would seem its flash array storage strategy is to extend its StorServe (3PAR InServ) disk-based storage arrays into the all-flash array world. This would mean taking on flash array start-ups like Pure Storage, SolidFire and Whiptail and facing down tech giant EMC – with its coming XtremIO product – and IBM, with its TMS RamSan line. Can this unique strategy work?
We’re looking at a next-generation 3PAR ASIC that can handle solid state storage along with InServ OS extensions to do the same, with the aim of delivering comparable or better performance than start-up and/or stand-alone all-flash arrays.
Tomi Engdahl says:
You know flash is king when disk giant Seagate grows SSD line
Plus: Might elbow its way into PCIe server flash card market
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/14/seagate_samsung_pcie/
Seagate is going to expand its solid state drive (SSD) line this year using co-developed Samsung controller technology and introducing its first multi-level cell drive.
Seagate and Samsung have a flash chip supply and controller partnership.
Just over a year ago, Seagate bought Samsung’s disk drive business as part of its reaction to Western Digital buying Hitachi GST
Both Seagate and Western Digital appear to realise that the performance data access market is moving away from fast spinning hard drives into a high-end pure-flash market and a mid-range/low-end hybrid solid state hard drive (SSHD) market. Flash is where the strongest growth prospects are – for both Seagate and WD.
A move into the PCIe flash card for servers space from Seagate would be logical.
Samsung has invested in PCIe server flash card market leader Fusion-io
Tomi Engdahl says:
x86 vendors move away from old strategies to compete with ARM
Frequency and core count take a back seat to efficiency
theinquirer.net/inquirer/feature/2235641/x86-vendors-move-away-from-old-strategies-to-compete-with-arm
ARM chip vendors might soon have to drop claims that the x86 and AMD64 instruction sets cannot scale down to the low power levels needed to run smartphones and tablets.
CES saw AMD and Intel push their respective x86 and AMD64 architectures further into the smartphone and tablet markets with dual and quad-core chips that they hope can take the fight to ARM vendors such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Nvidia and Samsung. For a long time ARM vendors and ARM itself have chanted the mantra that ARM is inherently a low-power instruction set, especially compared to the cumbersome x86 and AMD64 instruction sets, which is theoretically true, but practically it might be becoming obsolete.
Although Intel’s Medfield Atom chip ended up in largely nondescript smartphones in 2012, the firm did surprise many with its performance in Motorola’s Razr I handset.
Credit should be given to both AMD and Intel for bringing the power consumption of chips with x86 and AMD64 instruction sets to levels at which they can compete with those of ARM vendors. However while the two firms might be able to compete right now, ARM vendors do not have to rely on leading-edge process nodes to meet the same power requirements.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pc-deliveries fall 4.9 percent in the October-December, research firm Gartner shows preliminary figures.
Previously, it was believed that the people own the future normal PC and the tablet PC. The research company estimates here, however, that people will start to use more and more pure flat screen computers, for example, the consumption of content. Demanding tasks are performed on shared PC in home.
So many homes is the future Gartner estimates that only one pc. As the old right equipment ages, their place will no longer be purchased new pc hardware goes, but the use of the tablet PC.
“Some people in the future holds both devices, but we believe that they are more the exception than the rule,”
This was launched by low-cost tablet computers entering the market last year.
Windows 8 arrival did not significantly affect PC delivery volumes in the fourth quarter.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/gartner+pcmyynnissa+tapahtuu+mullistus/a870207?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-14012013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs: Don’t listen to tech vendors on ICT skills, listen to US
Computer Science should count as an actual science
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/14/corporate_it_report/
An alliance of CIOs at some of the biggest companies and organisations operating in Britain has issued a call to action, saying that it’s time the government stops listening to technology firms on IT issues and starts paying attention to the people that actually use the technology.
The assembled IT bosses say that the skills shortage can’t be fixed by simply training up more young people: the report notes that numbers of Computer Science graduates have been falling, but even so some 17 per cent were unable to find work in 2011. In the CIOs’ view this shows that the real shortage is of experienced “mid level” types as opposed to newbies.
The report adds that there should be greater efforts to ensure that schools have properly trained IT teachers who actually know relevant stuff, perhaps to be achieved by industrial placements.
However the report does suggest that even once somebody has managed to graduate in Computer Science they may struggle to find work in IT because “there are either no jobs or the positions are outsourced/given to overseas graduates … Businesses have made matters worse through outsourcing ICT jobs, particularly to Asia.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
With licensing and cost issues, can Thunderbolt break out of its niche?
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/01/with-licensing-and-cost-issues-can-thunderbolt-break-out-of-its-niche/
Enthusiasm may have waned, but the technology should continue to spread in 2013.
Intel launched Thunderbolt in February 2011, choosing Apple as its first OEM partner. Almost two years later, the high-speed interconnect is still an expensive, niche connectivity option, despite the fact that it has spread to Windows PCs and numerous vendors have announced Thunderbolt-compatible products. As the standard begins to mature, will the technology begin to break out of its niche?
It’s hard to say with absolute certainty, but it appears that the groundwork laid in 2012 may slowly start to pay off in 2013.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT Robots May Mean the End of Offshore Outsourcing
http://www.cio.com/article/721800/IT_Robots_May_Mean_the_End_of_Offshore_Outsourcing?page=1&taxonomyId=3195
Robotic automation and autonomic systems–such as those that enable nonengineers to create software or intelligently manage IT infrastructure–could be an offshore-outsourcing killer.
Take U.K.-based startup Blue Prism, which makes a software development toolkit and methodology designed to enable business users to create software robots to automate rules-driven business processes.
Blue Prism calls it “robotic automation.” James R. Slaby, research director for sourcing security and risk for outsourcing analyst firm HfS Research calls it “the newest labor option in the global business services toolkit” and “offshore killer.”
“It’s the automation of various business functions: taking work traditionally done by humans and implementing it in software. And that resulting software runs largely unattended to execute those functions, as opposed to requiring human interpretation and input of data,” Slaby says.
“Indian vendors have thousands of staff doing similar work now with high rates of turnover and rising costs due to inflation. Autonomics are making the offshoring of tasks irrelevant.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Group Hug” Board Allows Swappable CPUs in Servers
http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/group-hug-board-allows-swappable-cpus-in-servers/
It’s finally happened: a swappable daughtercard will allow AMD, Intel, and even ARM CPUs to be interchanged, thanks to a new Open Compute specification.
AMD, Intel, ARM: for years, their respective CPU architectures required separate sockets, separate motherboards, and in effect, separate servers. But no longer: Facebook and the Open Compute Summit have announced a common daughtercard specification that can link virtually any processor to the motherboard.
AMD, Applied Micro, Intel, and Calxeda have already embraced the new board, dubbed “Group Hug.” Hardware designs based on the technology will reportedly appear at the show. The Group Hug card will be connected via a simple x8 PCI Express connector to the main motherboard.
It’s hard to overstate the potential of the technology. Although many other components within a server—including power supplies, hard drives, memory and I/O cards—have long been replaceable, processors have not.
while a standard has been provided, it may be some time before the real-world appearance of servers built on the technology.
Customization of servers will increase exponentially as a result
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Shatters the Computer Server Into Tiny Pieces
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/facebook-server-pieces/
As the man at the center of Facebook’s Open Compute Project, Frankovsky spent the last two years rethinking the very essence of the computer hardware that runs the company’s massive social network — and sharing his ever-evolving data center ideology with the rest of the tech world. He’s a kind of hardware philosopher. And now he looks like one too.
Nowadays, if you want a new processor, you need, well, a new server. But Frankovksy and the Open Compute Project aim to change that, sharing the new design with anyone who wants it.
“By modularizing the design, you can rip and place the bits that need to be upgraded, but you can leave the stuff that’s still good,” Frankovsky says, pointing to memory and flash storage as hardware that you don’t have to replace as often as the processor. “Plus, you can better match your hardware to the software that it’s going to run.”
The new design is still a long way from live data centers. At this point, it’s just a specification for a motherboard slot that processors will plug into.
the modular processor spec is a natural extension of earlier hardware design “open sourced” by Facebook.
In May, at the previous summit, Frankovsky unveiled a new breed of server rack capable of holding its own power supplies, which meant you could separate the power supply from the servers housed in the rack. “You don’t have to embed a new power supply every time you install a new CPU,” Frankovsky said then.
Now, the Facebook and others have also separated the processor from the server. Basically, Facebook has offered up the spec for the motherboard slot that processors can plug in to, and four companies — Intel, AMD, AppliedMicro, and Calxeda — have already built preliminary hardware that uses this spec.
At the same time, Intel has released the specifications for a 100-Gigabit silicon phonics bus that will sit in the rack and connect these modular servers connect to networking switches, the devices that tie your servers to a larger network of machines. In short, the project is working to split servers into a many pieces as possible — all of which you can install or remove with relative ease.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Better Way to Cloud
http://www.eeweb.com/company-blog/texas_instruments/a-better-way-to-cloud/
Building on the success of cloud computing, many companies are considering cloud architectures for new services and solutions and we are entering a second phase of cloud architecture evolution. In this phase, the centralization benefits of cloud architectures are being applied to an expanding range of applications and services.
The first generation of cloud applications is primarily based on generic compute processors that are deployed in general-purpose servers.
To most technologists cloud computing is about applications, servers, storage and connectivity.
Designers of the next wave of cloud applications, particularly compute-intensive applications, recognize that many applications will perform better and more economically if their specialized processing needs are addressed with targeted, rather than generalpurpose, processors and server elements.
What is needed is a better way to cloud, where data centers are constructed using purpose-built servers that address the needs of specialized applications yielding unmatched energy efficiency and performance.
Differences between cloud computing and embedded processing in the cloud
There are several scenarios for cloud computing and storage. Probably the best understood are consumer applications that simplify storing content such as photographs, videos and music on cloud servers. From these servers content is made available to a variety of devices and the devices are kept in sync.
In another scenario, cloud computing focuses on harnessing pools of computing and enterprise class servers as separate assets that can be maintained and managed by third-party vendors. E-mail and web servers are prime examples. Using sophisticated virtualization techniques, these assets can be shared by many enterprises
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open source, middleware-enabled technology in military operations
http://www.eetimes.com/design/military-aerospace-design/4405117/Open-Source–middleware-enabled-technology-in-military-operations?Ecosystem=communications-design
During the majority of the last twenty-plus years, efficient military grade information technologies have remained the province of comparatively few nations due to factors of complexity, availability and expense.
This de facto technological quarantine has largely evaporated over the last five or so years due to the proliferation of powerful, lightweight and readily available integration and knowledge management tools many of which are available under open source software licenses. These technologies have the potential to create what is effectively RMA 2.0, marked by a global democratization of military information dominance technologies.
Pushing “power” to the edge elements of an organization refers to that organization’s ability to achieve a high degree of operational agility through the provision, over a robust, networked grid, of timely relevant C2 information that the edge elements can use to autonomously synchronize their actions to achieve command intent. “Power to the Edge” has become the dominant information and management philosophy in Western defense establishments
Open standards rather than interoperable interfaces;
Common enterprise services rather than separate infrastructures; and
Commerical-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) based, net-centric capabilities rather than customized, platform-centric stovepiped IT.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finns must learn how to use information technology more quickly than in competing countries, requires ICT 2015 working group published its final report today.
The group task was to relieve mass redundancies of Nokia and its subcontractors, and think about the impact of measures to promote the competitiveness of Finland.
The committee’s proposals:
- Build a unified national service architecture
- To strengthen the ICT infrastructure
- The creation of an open data ecosystem
- A 2023-ICT research -, development and innovation program
- Launch of municipal services, digitization
- Increase the number of game education and the quality of
- To increase the field of information security education and research.
- Launch of the mobile industry’s R & D project and increase research
- In big data area of training.
- Establish a funding program for early-stage and growth-stage companies’ financing needs
- Liberated from products of the ICT skills of an exportable
- Simplification of the jungle and the law of service
- Speed up the digitization of services, ministries
- Appointment of the Government in connection with ICT experts
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/alapietilan+tyoryhma+suomi+saadaan+nousuun+tietotekniikalla/a871123?s=u&wtm=tivi-17012013
Tomi Engdahl says:
Race is on for EU’s $1.3 billion science projects
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_22376841
Teams of scientists from across the continent are vying for a funding bonanza that could see two of them receive up to (euro) 1 billion ($1.33 billion) over 10 years to keep Europe at the cutting edge of technology.
The contest began with 26 proposals that were whittled down to six last year. Just four have made it to the final round.
They include a plan to develop digital guardian angels that would keep people safe from harm; a massive data-crunching machine to simulate social, economic and technological change on our planet; an effort to craft the most accurate computer model of the human brain to date; and a team working to find better ways to produce and employ graphene — an ultra-thin material that could revolutionize manufacturing of everything from airplanes to computer chips.
The two winners will be announced by the European Union’s executive branch in Brussels on Jan. 28.
Henry Markram said CERN’s success was the best example of how polling European resources can put the continent at the forefront of science. CERN announced last year that they have finally found solid evidence of the elusive Higgs boson particle that scientists have been hunting for 50 years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
We’ve Got Our Eyes on This: Tobii Gaze
Capacitive touch-based input revolutionized computing in the 2000s, but the next generation of desktop and mobile products will rely on a new form of interaction: eye tracking.
Tobii, a pioneer in this field, demonstrated a prototype of its eye-tracking technology at CES 2012, and then polished it to perfection for this year’s show.
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/01/the-best-of-ces-2013/?pid=4334&viewall=true
Tomi Engdahl says:
Python Scripts as a Replacement for Bash Utility Scripts
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/python-scripts-replacement-bash-utility-scripts
For Linux users, the command line is a celebrated part of our entire experience. Unlike other popular operating systems, where the command line is a scary proposition for all but the most experienced veterans, in the Linux community, command-line use is encouraged. Often the command line can provide a more elegant and efficient solution when compared to doing a similar task with a graphical user interface.
With bash and other similar shells, a number of powerful features are available, such as piping, filename wild-carding and the ability to read commands from a file called a script.
However, sometimes what is needed can become quite complex, and chaining commands together can become unwieldy. In that case, shell scripts are the answer. A shell script is a list of commands that are read by the shell and executed in order.
Shell scripts can be very useful for batch jobs that will be run often and repeatedly. Unfortunately, shell scripts come with some disadvantages
These problems can make shell scripting an awkward undertaking and often can lead to a lot of wasted developer time. Instead, the Python programming language can be used as a very able replacement.
Python is installed by default on all the major Linux distributions.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Demos Optical Data Transfer For Servers
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/01/17/040247/intel-demos-optical-data-transfer-for-servers
“Intel is taking the first steps to implement thin fiber optics that will use lasers and light as a faster way to move data inside computers, replacing the older and slower electrical wiring technology found in most computers today. Intel’s silicon photonics technology will be implemented at the motherboard and rack levels and use light to move data between storage, networking and computing resources”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Java Vs. C#: Which Performs Better In the ‘Real World’?
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/01/17/1451250/java-vs-c-which-performs-better-in-the-real-world
Comment:
When talking about large-scale websites the language is hardly relevent. There are as many high-traffic sites running on C#, Java, PHP or whatever. When facing large scale other factors play a much larger role.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Java vs. C#: Which Performs Better in the ‘Real World’?
http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/java-vs-c-which-performs-better-in-the-real-world/
Java and C# each have their fans (and detractors). But which language wins out in a set of real-world performance tests?
Conclusion
These results are quite interesting. Having I’ve worked as a professional C# programmer for many years, I’ve been told anecdotally that .NET is one of the fastest runtimes around. Clearly these tests show otherwise. Of course, the tests are quite minimal; I didn’t do massive calculations, nor did I do any database lookups. Our space is limited here, but perhaps another day soon I can add in some database tests and report back. Meanwhile, Java is the clear winner here.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel: Everything is absolutely fab-u-lous, particularly in servers
The chip fab edge will buy Chipzilla time in smartphones, tablets
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/18/intel_everything_is_fabulous/
Paul Otellini may be stepping down in a few months as president and CEO at Chipzilla, but you wouldn’t know it by listening to him talk about the company, its strategies to take on a slew of new competition, and evolve to serve new kinds of customers with devices that are largely not Intel Inside.
The story line is much the same as we have heard in the past year: servers are great, storage and networking are growing, the PC business has issues but will rebound as the lines blur between tablets and notebooks with Ultrabook convertibles running Windows 8 and genuine Atom-based tablets become more widely available, and Intel will get some traction in the coming year and into next with Atom-based smartphones.
And, because of its impressive chip manufacturing process lead and prowess as a chip designer, Intel will be able to keep current rivals at bay and blunt the attacks of new ones.
This, of course, is going to take money. A lot of money.
Otellini said on the call that 22 nanometer chips would start ramping in the Xeon and Atom server products in the second half of this year
Otellini said that the Haswell processors would result in the single biggest generation-to-generation change in improved battery life for an Intel processor, something that is enabled through a very sophisticated power management. If the Haswell chip is so good, it will call into question why there is a high-end Atom S Series server chip
The volume of chips and chipsets was flat sequentially and actually down from a year ago, but average selling prices for server, storage, and switch chips were up 5 per cent from a year ago as the mix shifted towards higher priced SKUs and, interestingly enough, good uptake of “MP products,” which is Intel shorthand for servers with more than two processors.
Looking ahead, Smith said on the call that Intel expected for the data center side of the Intel house would return to double digit growth in 2013, helped no doubt in part by the Ivy Bridge refresh coming in the second half.
Intel is looking for low single digit growth for the year in the PC Client Group, which makes chips and chipsets for anything that is not in the data center or in an embedded device. This would be driven by the Haswell ramp for PCs during the first half of the year and extending out from there.
It remains to be seen how well Intel can deploy this process lead over the ARM collective to make dents in the tablet and smartphone spaces, but Otellini said that the market for PCs that were less than one inch thick grew by a factor of 18X in 2012 in the United States and Intel expects to see similar patterns in other markets.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Rogue clouds’ giving IT staffs nightmares
Inefficient storage methods also seen as raising costs in cloud, survey finds
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/011613-rogue-clouds-265854.html
Cloud computing is increasingly being adopted by companies around the world, but IT managers say “rogue cloud implementations” in which business managers sign up for services without getting IT approval is among their biggest challenges.
This is according to a survey on avoiding hidden cloud costs that was sponsored by Symantec with interviews and polling done by ReRez, in which some 94% of the 3,236 information-technology managers in 29 countries said their companies either already were using cloud services or discussing how to do so.
“Rogue clouds” occur if sales and marketing people, for example, order up Salesforce.com without bothering to consult IT or set up Dropbox with outside vendors to share sensitive information. It’s happening to three-quarters of those using cloud, according to the survey, and it occurs more in large enterprises (83%) than in small to midsize ones (70%).
On top of having to deal with rogue clouds, 43% of IT managers relying on cloud-based services said they had “lost data in the cloud,” meaning they either couldn’t find it or had accidentally deleted it,
This means they had to recover it from a backup, but two-thirds doing this saw recovery operations fail at some point.
Some 61% making use of backup procedures for the cloud use three or more methods to do this, which Elliott said might be too many.
Other points of concern revolve around legal issues, such as requests for electronically stored documents that are demanded for what’s known as “e-discovery” purposes in court or otherwise.
41% said they were simply unable to do it at all and never found the requested information.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OpenCompute servers and AMD Open 3.0
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6673/opencomputer-servers-and-amd-open-30
Remember our review of Facebook’s first OpenCompute Server? Facebook designed a server for their own purposes, but quickly released all the specs to the community. The result was a sort of “Open-source” or rather “Open-specifications” and “Open-CAD” hardware. The idea was that releasing the specifications to the public would advance and improve the platform quickly. The “public” in this case is mostly ODMs, OEMs and other semiconductor firms.
The cool thing about this initiative is that the organization managed to convince Intel and AMD to standarize certain aspects of the hardware. Yes, they collaborated. The AMD and Intel motherboards will have the same form factor, mounting holes, management interface and so on. The ODM/OEM only has to design one server: the AMD board can be swapped out for the Intel one and vice versa. The Mini-Mezzanine Slot, the way the power supply is connected, and so on are all standarized.
AMD is the first with this new “platform”, and contrary to Intel’s own current customized version of OpenCompute 2.0, is targeted at the mass market.
Our first impression is that this is a great initiative, building further upon the excellent ideas on which OpenCompute was founded. It should bring some of the cost and power savings that Facebook and Google have to the rest of us.
The fact that the specifications are open and standarized should definitely result into some serious cost savings as vendors cannot lock you in like they do in the traditional SAN and blade server market.
We are curious how the final the management hardware and software will turn out.
The previous out of band management solution was very minimal as the first OpenCompute platform was mainly built for the “Hyperscale” datacenters.
Tomi says:
Intel posts a 27 percent drop in fourth quarter profits
Fails to repeat the magic of 2011
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2237404/intel-posts-a-27-percent-drop-in-fourth-quarter-profits-to-round-off-2012
CHIPMAKER Intel posted a 27 percent decline in fourth quarter profits to round out its 2012 fiscal year with 15 percent lower net earnings than last year.
Intel faces challenges in 2013 as the PC market is expected to continue its contraction and there are no guarantees on the firm’s success in the smartphone and tablet markets, while ARM chip vendors are knocking on the door in the server market.
Tomi says:
CES: ‘Phablets’ could lead the post-PC era
Column Tablet fever could be over
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/opinion/2237343/ces-phablets-could-lead-the-postpc-era
AHEAD OF THIS YEAR’S CES in Las Vegas, the internet was rife with talk that tablets were going to steal the show as we edge closer towards a post-PC era.
However, I had a very different experience at this year’s show, as I noticed that tablet fever was distinctly missing. However, although most major mobile phone makers save their big smartphone announcements for Mobile World Congress, I soon saw that “phablet” fever was in full force.
Despite Gartner’s claims earlier this week that tablets will eventually replace PCs, I can’t help but think that the phablet could become the main device driving the post-PC era.
I can’t help but think that this could be a sign that phablets could not only overshadow the PC, but could also put tablets in the shade.
Sure, a phablet isn’t for everybody
smartphones are going to continue to get bigger and bigger. This trend will surely lead consumers away from buying tablets
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Changing Of The Enterprise Guard
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/19/the-changing-of-the-enterprise-guard/
When we decided to focus on selling to enterprises five years ago at Box, we saw some exciting emerging trends: workers needed tools that were far simpler to use; cloud-delivered technology meant that IT departments could spend less time maintaining infrastructure and play a more strategic role in organizations; and with enterprise incumbents getting far too comfortable with the status quo, a massive opportunity opened up for startups to respond to the rapidly changing needs of customers.
A lot has happened in the five years since.
From Wintel To The Four (Or Five) Horsemen
The rise of PCs produced an enterprise IT model that was quite profitable for Microsoft and few others. But today, this model is quickly crumbling. Wintel is giving way to a whole new set of technology platforms, driven primarily by mobility, and the software buyer of 2013 is far more concerned with supporting and securing the devices that leave the office than those that stay within.
“Mobile” doesn’t just introduce a new endpoint for software delivery in the enterprise; it topples the long-standing architecture of the enterprise software world, and with it, long-standing monopolies.
Innovation led by Apple, Samsung, Google and others is irreversibly changing the technology makeup of today’s organizations. While Windows still dominates desktops with ~90 percent market share, they’re behind in smartphone and tablet categories with single-digit penetration.
Rise Of The Cloud Stack
In the previous predominant IT architecture (client-server), leading vendors built an expertise at selling entire application suites
The consequence of this aggregation was that startups had little chance to compete for customer wallet share. Vendors once dominated by being “good enough” at everything, but truly amazing at nothing; today that no longer satisfies customers.
Exploding Markets And Expanding Pies
Today, viral marketing, freemium, and lower-cost acquisition are causing startups like Wave, Base, and Xero to attract hundreds of thousands of SMBs globally to solutions that would have never taken off a decade ago. Together, these companies will dramatically expand the market size of business software – the SMB cloud market is estimated to be nearly $50 billion by 2015 – while addressing a space that is virtually inaccessible to incumbent players.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Trend Against Skeuomorphic Textures and Effects in User Interface Design
http://daringfireball.net/2013/01/the_trend_against_skeuomorphism
The whole default iOS look — the textures, the shadows, the subtle (and sometimes unsubtle) 3D effects — is optimized for non-retina displays.
Retina displays are no longer limited in such ways, and need no phony effects to create interfaces that are beautiful.
Fonts are emblematic of the changes in design enabled by higher resolution displays. In the old days, we used (and needed) screen fonts crafted pixel-by-pixel
what looked best remained fonts that were optimized for the screen, rather than print, use
On retina displays there’s simply no reason not to use any font you want. All fonts render nicely on retina displays.
The trend away from skeuomorphic special effects in UI design is the beginning of the retina-resolution design era. Our designs no longer need to accommodate for crude pixels. Glossy/glassy surfaces, heavy-handed transparency, glaring drop shadows, embossed text, textured material surfaces — these hallmarks of modern UI graphic design style are (almost) never used in good print graphic design. They’re unnecessary in print
Tomi Engdahl says:
Foremay Launches World’s First 2 TB 2.5-inch SATA SSD
http://www.techpowerup.com/178807/Foremay-Launches-World-s-First-2-TB-2.5-inch-SATA-SSD.html
2 TB SSD drives with a standard 2.5″ SATA interface and a thickness of 9.5 mm. The 2 TB SSD drives are offered in Foremay’s SC199 (for mission-critical applications) and TC166 (for terminal computing) product families.
Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T. ), Advanced Power Management (APM) and advanced error correction algorithm
Tomi Engdahl says:
SSD mass storage is known to be an action-packed, and it would be interested to many, but the obstacles are the price of hard drives harder and scarce storage space. An excellent shortcut to happiness is happily invented: ssd cache. It solves so price than the capacity of the problem, whisk ssd’s at top speed and allows joined by any of the traditional hard drive.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/uutiset/ssd_valimuistilla_puhtia_koneeseen
Tomi Engdahl says:
We trust computers to fly jets… why not trust them with our petabytes?
Wait, hold on, software-defined storage ain’t so crazy
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/21/storagebod_18_jan/
For the time being I’ve decided to treat software-defined stuff as a real thing, or at least as something that may become a real thing.
So, software-defined storage?
The role of the storage array is changing; in fact, it’s simplifying. That box of drives will store stuff that you need to have around just in case or for future reference. It’s for data that needs to persist. And that may sound silly to have to spell out, but basically what I mean is that the storage array is not where you are going to process transactions. Your transactional storage will be as close to the compute nodes as possible, or at least this appears to be the current direction of travel.
But there is also a certain amount of discussion and debate about ensuring quality of service from storage systems to guarantee performance and how we implement it in a software-defined manner: how can we hand off administration of the data to autonomous programs?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tech giants don’t invent the future, they package it
Sanding down the rough edges of progress
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/21/open_and_shut/
Enterprise technology vendors have a serious case of “not invented here” syndrome, and it may be challenging the value that they claim to bring to their customers.
After all, none of the big technology trends of the past two decades emerged from the bowels of legacy tech vendors, despite their outsized R&D budgets. Open source? Not invented here. Cloud computing? Mobile? Big data? Same answer: none of it was invented by the legacy technology vendors.
Which is not the same as saying that these companies, from IBM to Oracle, provide no value. But the nature of that value is sometimes confused. These companies don’t tend to be the innovators: they are the ones packaging others’ innovations.
In other words, some of the world’s biggest technology brands are just that: brands.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The bigger a company gets, the more bureaucratic it tends to become. While this slows its ability to innovate or, perhaps more accurately, its ability to turn research lab innovations into market-ready products, it does have the benefit of de-risking a technology purchase.
Because of the power of such brands, it has become a truism that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” even if they could have joined Barclays in saving 90 per cent of its IT budget by foregoing legacy vendors’ solutions and instead building with open source and cloud.
CIOs don’t turn to an HP or SAP to save money. Not usually. Nor do they really go to the legacy vendors for cutting-edge innovation. Instead, they look to these incumbent vendors to take cutting-edge innovation and remove the sharp edges. IBM made open source safe for the enterprise. Microsoft and a host of incumbent vendors are doing the same for Hadoop, NoSQL databases, and other essential big data infrastructure. Citrix, HP, VMware and others are doing the same for cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle reveals cloudy engineered systems
Living in your own private Idaho Larrycloud
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/21/oracle_engineered_systems_cloudy_pricing/
Oracle is rolling out private infrastructure as a service clouds, with capacity-on-demand (CoD) pricing, based on its various “engineered systems” setups.
Financial services organizations have very stringent – and significantly higher – capital requirements since the Great Recession. These days every million counts and any shift from the capital expense of the ledger to the operating expenses is welcomed,
That’s why Oracle is taking a trip back to the tail-end of the dot-com boom and rolling out a new CoD pricing program for its engineered systems coupled with a monthly cloud pricing program that allows users to enjoy Oracle gear installed in their very own data center while also enjoying economics that are similar to what Oracle will eventually provide as raw infrastructure services out on the Oracle Cloud. (Oracle offers platform cloud services for running Java applications, middleware, and its eponymous database as a service out on the Oracle Cloud, and also sells Fusion applications running in SaaS mode, but has not yet offered raw and virty compute and storage.
“We’re trying to bring public cloud benefits to a private cloud,” Loaiza said. “This is designed to be a very financially attractive model, and it is a good deal.”
The private cloud deal is pretty straightforward on this server iron. You figure out the configuration of the machine that will meet your peak performance needs.
Oracle bundles this all up and sends you a machine with 75 per cent of the compute capacity activated in the engineered system. All of the other features of the systems – memory, disk, and I/O – are fully configured in the box, but this 25 per cent of CPU capacity is put into stasis mode.
To take part in the private IaaS cloud deal, you have to commit to having the box on site for three years and to calculate the monthly fee that Oracle will charge you, you divide the deal price by 36 and then lop off 20 per cent.
The 25 per cent spare capacity is an all-or-none thing for a month
If you use those latent 25 per cent of the CPUs for high availability – say a node in the cluster crashes – then there is no charge to fire it up.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Atari U.S. operation files for bankruptcy
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-atari-bankruptcy-20130119,0,25279.story
The U.S. operations of iconic but long-troubled video game maker Atari have filed for bankruptcy in an effort to break free from their debt-laden French parent.
Although the 31-year-old brand is still known worldwide for its pioneering role with video games such as “Pong” and “Asteroids,” Atari has been mired in financial problems for decades. Since the early 2000s it has been closely tied to French company Infogrames, which changed its name to Atari S.A. in 2003
It’s not yet clear who might step up to buy Atari Inc.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fedora 18 Spherical Cow review – Bad bad bad
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/fedora-18-kde.html
Encouraged by the very positive trend shown in the last release, I decided to see how well Fedora 18 would behave.
Live session – Buggy
Anything cool?
Nope. Fedora is really boring. You get no codecs, so forget any fun. I did test Youtube in Konqueror, but it actually played a video in HTML5, which is quite nice, but not relevant to our test.
Installation – Worst ever
Fedora 18 comes with a new installer – provided you get it to run. What is immediately apparent is a somewhat over-large interface with would-be friendly fonts and sizes and shapes. And there on, it gets worse. You enter a world of smartphone-like diarrhea that undermines everything and anything that is sane and safe in this most important of software configuration steps.
Two, the interface is completely inconsistent. Confirmation buttons show everywhere, text is spread about, the fonts size and placement is equally chaotic. I could not think of any way to make this any uglier or less friendly.
On top of that, it’s super dangerous, confusing and buggy.
Message to developers
Something to think about for the next release:
The smartphone crap is going too far. I can understand why you want to moronify the user interface for touch devices, but giving a touch-like interface to someone installing a desktop operating system is cretinous. On smartphones, no one will actually be installing anything, so they don’t really need an interface. And on classic computing devices, this new presentation layer is shit. Utter nonsense. Enough with this crap. Enough. Stop it. Give it up already. Let normal people use their systems. I am not interested in this pseudo-touch pseudo-masturbation.
Conclusion
This has to be one of the most underwhelming Fedora releases in a long, long time. It features a most uniquely stupid installation and a sensationally buggy live session, plus a fairly bland post-install experience, with not a single exciting thing to set it apart from so many other distributions. The Spherical Cow is boring at best, completely borked otherwise.
If you ask me, and you should, Fedora 18 ought to be skipped, as it’s outright dangerous.
Tomi says:
You’ve Got 25 Years Until UNIX Time Overflows
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/01/22/1447205/youve-got-25-years-until-unix-time-overflows
“In 25 years, an odd thing will happen to some of the no doubt very large number of computing devices in our world: an old, well-known and well-understood bug will cause their calculation of time to fail. The problem springs from the use of a 32-bit signed integer to store a time value, as a number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on Thursday, 1 January 1970, a practice begun in early UNIX systems with the standard C library data structure time_t. On January 19, 2038, at 03:14:08 UTC that integer will overflow.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
For server cabinets, gray is the new black
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/print/volume-21/issue-1/features/for-server-cabinets-gray-is-the-new-black.html
The pressure to cut power consumption in data centers is leading many facilities managers to get more creative. Having raised temperature and lowered power consumption, these managers are still looking for savings.
It takes more light to illuminate a server room than an operating-room theater. The reason for this is the way light is absorbed by color. The light reflective value (LRV) of a color determines how much light the color absorbs. Black reflects as little as 5 percent of the ambient light while gray-white reflects up to 80 percent of the light.
Changing the color of the server cabinets from black to gray or even white can make a significant difference to the amount of available light in a room and the cost of lighting that room.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Speaking in Tech: ‘VCs hate open source because the path to money is longer’
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/23/speaking_in_tech_episode_42/