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.
1,455 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Server sales stall
Servers worldwide deliveries declined in the first quarter by 0.7 per cent a year ago, shows research firm Gartner report. The server transaction value fell again fell to five per cent.
Gartner research director Jeffrey Hewitt, the worldwide server shipments fell everywhere except in the Asia-Pacific region and the United States. Asia, deliveries increased by 1.7 per cent and the value of up to about seven per cent.
Device manufacturer market leader IBM is currently about 25.5 per cent share.
The volume on the HP held the number one plays a role, but its market share fell 4.5 percentage points to 24.9 per cent.
From the largest manufacturers only Dell increased its share to 14.4 per cent
The winners were also smaller manufacturers, which raised the percentage share of the total sales of about 3.7 per cent to 22 per cent market share.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/palvelinten+myynti+sakkasi++dell+kirii/a905008?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-29052013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Global Tablet Shipments to Overtake PCs by 2015, IDC Says
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-28/pc-market-to-decline-7-8-in-2013-as-mobile-devices-gain.html
Global shipments of tablets will eclipse personal computers in 2015, as consumers flock to lower-priced and smaller alternatives to Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPad, market researcher IDC said.
Tablet shipments are projected to grow 45 percent from this year to reach 332.4 million in 2015, compared with an estimated 322.7 million for PCs, according to Framingham, Massachusetts-based IDC. PC shipments may decline 7.8 percent this year, the worst annual drop on record, the researcher said, a revision from its prior projection for a 1.3 percent decrease.
More portable, affordable and backed by hundreds of thousands of applications, tablets are replacing PCs as consumers’ main tool for checking e-mail, browsing websites and accessing music and movies.
IDC said the worldwide average selling price for tablets is seen falling 11 percent to $381 this year, and keep declining as more consumers choose smaller machines
In 2017, 333 million PCs will be sold worldwide, while tablet shipments will reach 410 million, IDC said. IDC, which had previously forecast a “gradual increase in volume” for PCs next year, now projects that the market will contract 1.2 percent in 2014.
Consumers are pushing back upgrades to their PCs and companies are also holding off on spending on replacements for employees’ machines, IDC said. Tablet shipments will overtake laptops this year, the researcher said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Marissa Mayer Is Bringing Back the Internet Portal. Here’s Why
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/05/marissa-mayer-makes-portals-fashionable/
Since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO of Yahoo last year, there’s been a lot of talk about how the famously detail-oriented ex-Googler will “refocus” the company. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mayer is broadening, not narrowing, Yahoo’s scope, cementing its once passé reputation as the original internet “portal.”
The common thread: Yahoo keeps expanding into new areas, even though it was already a sprawling internet conglomerate when Mayer took control, with everything from movie listings to stock quotes to a photo-sharing social network to a news hub to a search engine.
Yahoo’s mission creep is a useful case study in why web companies like Google and Facebook continue to grow their functionality and why startups keep selling to the seemingly bloated leviathans
Once upon a time, the idea of agglomerating lots of functionality in one website seemed like an obsolete throwback, a vain attempt to carry forward the glory days of the online portal in the late 1990s. Portals had their time and place, but it was in the past, the thinking went, during a transitory period when it was expensive to build the most basic interactive website. That financial barrier gave well-capitalized internet companies the opportunity to dominate many verticals at once.
The way of the future was going to be focused sites, like Google.com, whose ultra-bare homepage was about nothing but search (and whose guardian angel of minimalism was reportedly named Marissa Mayer).
So why is Yahoo in the midst of purposely transforming itself into an über portal even as computer users are migrating to super-focused mobile apps and even when its leader made her name touting simplicity and minimalism? And how did Google, once the poster child for focus, end up as a sort of accidental portal, with its own social network, webmail site, online map, and video sharing service, to say nothing of its smartphone manufacturer or set of operating systems?
Because we live in a world where the most valuable information – and especially the demographic and tracking data coveted by online advertisers – does not want to be free, and in fact is hoarded in proprietary databases that can only be assembled if you’re a portal, or look a lot like one. Or at least this is part of the reason.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Commencement Speech for Graduating 2013 CS Majors
Passion isn’t just for romance novels.
http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/a-commencement-speech-for-graduating-2013-cs-majors.html
Being passionate about software is critical to being successful, because the field is a constantly moving target. What will net you $130K today will be done by junior programmers in five years, and unless you’re constantly adding new tools to your belt, you’re going to find yourself priced out of the market. Many of the best projects I’ve ever worked on came to me because I had already gained the skill-set on my own. Play around with new technologies, contribute to open source projects, and you may find yourself with an opportunity to apply those skills on the job, and get them into your resume. You are rarely going to get an opportunity to have your current employer pay for you to learn things, so learn them on your own and be in a position to leverage the skills when a new project comes along. But if you have a passion for technology, you’ll already be doing it, and enjoying it without needing me to tell you to. That’s why passionate people have a leg up.
People in their 20s tend to jump into small, fledgeling companies, and that’s one of the best things you can do.
If you’re passionate, you’ll do the job you’re required to do, and more, but don’t let your employer abuse your enthusiasm. One of my tenets of life has always been that “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” There will be times in your life when you have to step in and fix genuine, unforeseen emergencies, and burn the midnight oil. But if you’re being asked to do it regularly, just because your company didn’t allocate enough resources to see the job through, you’re being played for a patsy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Commencement Speech For 2013 CS Majors
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/05/28/2112255/a-commencement-speech-for-2013-cs-major
Comment:
Show up to work. 99 percent of success is being there.
Be resourceful. Find ways to do your job without complaint or constantly and chronically asking for the next task to be done.
Do these two things and your will be prosperous.
(sits down to great cheers for having ended the speech in 30 seconds)
Tomi Engdahl says:
German Official Criticizes Xbox One’s Data Collecting
Kinect’s all-seeing eye rubs Comissioner Peter Schaar the wrong way.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/28/german-privacy-official-xbox-one-is-twisted-nightmare
A lot of people were wowed last week when Microsoft showed off the responsiveness of the new generation Kinect perched on top of the forthcoming Xbox One, but not everyone is thrilled by the advances the company has made in facial recognition. Escapist reports that when German website Spiegel asked Germany’s Federal Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar about the technology, he called it a “monitoring device.”
“The Xbox continuously records all sorts of personal information about me. Reaction rates, my learning or emotional states,” Schaar said. “They are then processed on an external server, and possibly even passed on to third parties. Whether they will ever deleted, the person cannot influence.”
With Microsoft deliberately keeping things under wraps, folks like Schaar are concerned that more damaging facts are obscured from the public. Most importantly, that information about individual users will filter back to the Seattle-based company’s main data banks, acting a little more Big Brother than most people would be comfortable with.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tim Cook: iOS 7 is the one Jony Ive has been working on for WWDC
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/05/29/tim-cook-ios-7-is-the-one-jony-ive-has-been-working-on/
“Yes, Jony [Ive] is really key,” Cook said in response to a question about whether the design chief would have his fingerprints on the next version of iOS, due to be unveiled next month.
Cook touted the elegance of a design that melded hardware and software tightly as something that Apple focused on, which was the point of the recent executive shakeup.
Cook said that the future of iOS and OS X would be announced at WWDC next month.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google adds in-app payments to the latest Chrome build as it prepares to bundle Google Wallet in its browser
http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/05/28/google-adds-in-app-payments-to-the-latest-chrome-build-as-it-prepares-to-bundle-google-wallet-in-its-browser/
Google has been recently pushing hard to have its payment service, Google Wallet, integrated across its various others products and services. The latest is an apparent move to support in-app payments for Chrome packaged apps.
The included Chrome Wallet Service app is now part of Chrome Canary.
This button won’t actually do anything. It will, however, let you play with the Chrome in-app payment sample app available on GitHub.
Chrome packaged apps are written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but launch outside the browser, work offline by default, and access certain APIs not available to Web apps.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kinect sensor for Windows to launch in 2014
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/sensor-ee-perception/4415130/Kinect-sensor-for-Windows-to-launch-in-2014
So you have to wait another year for the new Kinect for Windows sensor. Featuring much of what is available in the recently announced Kinect for Xbox One, the Windows version will also include higher fidelity, skeletal tracking, active infrared technology for less-than-bright conditions, high-definition camera, and a broader field of view.
The sensor will include a noise isolating multiple microphone array, and a Time-of-Flight technology
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why almost everyone gets it wrong about BYOD
http://www.infoworld.com/t/byod/why-almost-everyone-gets-it-wrong-about-byod-219241
Whoever owns the device, mobile use should encourage enablement, but too many organizations fall into control trap
BYOD is pretty clear: It’s bringing your own device. It isn’t the company’s device or your best friend’s device. It’s your device, and you own it. Because you own the device, you have certain rights to what is on the device and what you can do with the device. This is the crux of every issue that comes with BYOD programs.
You have to realize that most companies gravitate toward BYOD programs because they believe they can save money.
But savings shouldn’t be your focus. There’s a lot more to BYOD than saving money, which many companies are now starting to realize. If they let their employees use or at least choose their own devices, they find that their employees are more likely to use the devices as tools. They tend to work more hours each week than non-mobile-equipped employees.
You want employees to use mobile technology because they end up working more and often more flexibly. Whether you go BYOD or you provision employees’ devices that you buy (called COPE, for “corporate-owned, personally liable”), the real effort is to provide them access to the organization’s data ecosystems so that they can be productive with those devices.
There is no difference between the BYOD and COPE models. When you get started with your mobile program, you have to create policy.
You create apps that are designed to work with their devices, not crapplications based on legacy thinking.
What about all the issues that everyone is talking about with BYOD? These issues are all based on ownership. When you design your processes, you need to realize you can’t rely on the legacy thinking of owning the device anymore. You have to build solutions that can live in a world where the user may own the device. You may not have rights to wipe their devices. You may not even be allowed to look at what they do on the devices if it isn’t work-related.
The good news is that plenty of tools allow you to isolate all your business data from employees’ personal data. Those tools can let you wipe business data from their devices without touching their photos and private emails. There are ways to back up your data and protect it so that you can handle e-discovery investigations and meet the needs of legal, security, and human resources.
the balance between enablement and management varies across the world; in Europe, for example, privacy laws can dictate that if you put data on users’ device, they now own that data. There are ways to work around this, but it becomes more complicated.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Everyone Gets It Wrong About BYOD
http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/05/29/2145223/why-everyone-gets-it-wrong-about-byod
Comment:
BYOD means I/T loses some control over it (Score:5, Insightful)
by Jailbrekr (73837) on Wednesday May 29, 2013 @07:09PM (#43855429) Homepage
BYOD means you can no longer trust your own network because you no longer have the same level of control over the devices on it. And if you do not trust your own network, you need to increase your security costs substantially and provide other resources that you would otherwise not need to offer. So while you’re saving around $1000 per year per user on hardware, you’re spending more on licensing for NAC and VDI/RDP/ICA. You also need to amp up the local tier1/2 support because now without standards they’re going to be spending more time dealing with more types of machines. Any gains made by standardization will be utterly destroyed.
BYOD is a short sighted, stupid idea thought up by someone who sure as hell has no experience with I/T support.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Erects Fake Brain With … Graphics Chips?
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/05/gpus-in-the-data-center/
Your brain is a collection of neurons — tiny cells that use electro-chemical signals to send and receive information. But as Google builds an artificial brain that will help drive everything from its web search engine to Google Street View to the voice-recognition app on Android smartphones, it’s using very different materials. Among them: graphics microprocessors, the same sort of silicon chips that were first designed to process images and videos on your desktop computer.
Though GPUs were designed for processing images and video and games, Google is using them in a more general way, as you would normally use a machine’s main microprocessor, or CPU. But because they’re so good at processing large amounts of information in parallel, completing many small tasks at the same time, GPUs can be applied to almost any computing task that require some hefty horse power.
“I can’t comment on what Google is doing. But it’s a natural fit. GPUs love big problems,” says Ian Buck, a engineer at graphics chip maker Nvidia who founded the CUDA project, a software platform that helps developers build applications for GPUs. “They’re designed to process huge amounts of information in parallel. Mimicking the human brain — where you have billions of neurons all firing at the same time — is really just one big parallel simulation.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD rolls ‘Kyoto’ server processors
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4415257/AMD-rolls–Kyoto–server-processors
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) Wednesday (May 29) launched a new family of low power server processors that the company claims offer twice the performance at greater power efficiency than Intel Corp.’s top performing Atom processor.
AMD’s Opteron X-Series processors, formerly codenamed Kyoto, are described as the highest density, most power efficient “small core” on the market. This category of chips includes the Intel Atom S1260, Intel’s highest performing Atom chip, AMD said.
The X-Series processors are being integrated into future Hewlett-Packard Co. Moonshot microservers set to be available in the second half of this year, AMD said.
“The sever market is undergoing the death of ‘one size fits all’ and the emerging of a better matching of work to processor type,” Feldman said.
While server chips in the past were valued for their brute horsepower regardless of the application, new more of today’s servers are scaled to handle less intensive applications, he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IDC: Outsourcing sector needs rescue fund for cloudy customers
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/02/15/outsourcing_rescue_fund/
The outsourcing industry should develop a voluntary crisis fund to give protection to customers should their services provider hit the wall.
This was proposed by IDC in light of 2e2′s recent high profile collapse that left some customers scrambling for alternative suppliers, and highlighted the pitfalls of outsourcing.
One solution is to create a “voluntary shared rescue fund” along the lines of the Association of British Travel Agents bond, said IDC associate veep Douglas Hayward.
Hayward said hosting and cloudy firms could hold a pot of cash in escrow to be used so that hosted data can be transitioned to new providers should the need arise.
“This could be marketed either as an industry-wide service, or as an optional value-added service to be bought by clients when signing a hosting/outsourcing contract,” he said.
Another option is for hosting firms to guarantee regular data backups are made to third party DR providers who are obliged to hand over the data to the customer in the event the hosting entity goes pop.
“That option, however, would be costly and arguably wasteful, not to mention bad for the environment, by generating huge volumes of duplicated data in independent data centres.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The good and the bad in Hyper-V’s PowerShell
Look, no GUI
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/30/hyper_v_powershell_hands_on/
As the great virtual war between Microsoft, VMware and various also-rans has rumbled on, many column inches have been devoted to Microsoft’s Hyper-V Server.
You can light up a cluster of 64 nodes and 8,000 virtual machines if you choose, it is said. Hyper-V server is free, you don’t have to pay Microsoft a dime.
That’s a great marketing spiel but how usable is it in the real world?
Hyper-V Server is as fully featured as the Datacenter edition of Windows Server, at least when it comes to virtualisation, clustering and relevant storage.
The drawback is that it doesn’t natively have a GUI in any real sense. It is a server core-style installation: PowerShell or remote management tools only.
Today, we explore the PowerShell side of the family.
For anything in Hyper-V Server to work you need to set up trust between systems. Hyper-V’s higher functions (Live Migration, for example) rely on a host’s ability to perform tasks on another host.
Enabling the GUI remote management tools requires a similar level of trust, one that I will cover in a future article.
Virtualisation without networking starts to drift into the pointless realm of IT administrative exercises. If we are going to have virtual machines that are of any use to us we should set up some networks.
No Hyper-V Server setup is complete without setting up a failover cluster so that if one of the nodes fails your virtual machines will restart on the other node. Failover clusters also make live migrations easier and are generally a good thing.
Setting up Failover Clustering is remarkably easy, although it can quickly become complex depending on how far down the rabbit hole you choose to go.
When someone lays it all out for you, PowerShell looks like an easy and effective way to administer your Hyper-V servers. Don’t be fooled: it both is and it isn’t all that it is cracked up to be.
If you happen to be running a large data centre or are a dedicated Hyper-V administrator, then PowerShell is amazing. It can perform complex tasks on a huge array of systems and virtual machines in the blink of an eye.
The flip side of the coin is that PowerShell is not the right choice for the casual administrator.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Server Sales Are Down As Cloud Apps Abound At The Expense Of IBM, Enterprise Giants
http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/29/server-sales-are-down-as-cloud-apps-abound-at-the-expense-of-ibm-enterprise-giants/
Gartner Research reports worldwide server sales are down 5 percent for the first quarter of the year, with IBM, HP and other members of the top five taking the biggest hit. Server shipments declined 0.7 percent.
But the drop in server sales is not at all surprising. Cloud apps are popping up by the thousands across the market, as the developer movement speeds up. But these apps are not surfacing from that souped-up x86 server made for big workloads. Developers instead are turning to the cloud. Enterprise companies are buying fewer of those high-priced machines that customers once bought when IT budgets were plentiful.
These numbers don’t mention Google, Facebook or Amazon but they might as well, because they are buying up servers. But not the Rolls Royce versions; they’re buying the budget-variety, cheap machines as stripped-down as they can get them and are having servers made for them by the gross from companies like Quanta, which is killing it in the server business. Quanta is selling one out of every seven servers sold.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Beauty of Xbox One: A New Approach to Design
http://news.xbox.com/2013/05/xbox-one-beauty-of-xbox-one
“Xbox has always had something to say. It’s always been bold with a strong personality,” said Carl Ledbetter, Creative Director, Industrial Design. “Xbox One needs to serve our most loyal gaming fans and deliver unique entertainment experiences, so its design has to make an appropriate statement that reflects its capability as an all-in-one entertainment system.”
Xbox One is developed to be the ultimate gaming and entertainment system, so the design team at Microsoft had to make every aspect of the experience —ranging from its appearance, to how users interact with its software —modern and sophisticated
Tomi says:
Asus launches the first consumer-oriented 4K monitor, yours for around $5,000
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/157058-asus-launches-the-first-consumer-oriented-4k-monitor-yours-for-around-5000
Asus has announced that its 31.5-inch PQ321 monitor, which appears to be the first consumer-oriented 4K desktop monitor, will go on sale in the US in June. There is no official word on pricing, but our guess is that it should be around $5,000
Asus’s PQ321 is 31.5-inch 16:9 IGZO (Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide) monitor with a resolution of 3840×2160 (4K or UHD). which equates to 140 pixels per inch (surpassing Retina quality, if you’re sitting more than a couple of feet away).
Tomi says:
How smart developers generate lousy code
http://www.itworld.com/it-management/358823/how-smart-developers-generate-lousy-code
Most experienced developers can think of a time when they worked on a team with other accomplished programmers. Yet the code quality was anywhere from “eh” to “oh god you didn’t actually ship that did you?!” Here’s how this can happen, and what to do to minimize the chances it’ll happen to you.
The people you’re working with affect the code more than you do, in aggregate. In fact, codebases grow to resemble their creators’ relationships over time. As a result, many of the forces guiding our day-to-day software design decisions are social – and invisible.
Mei has found – in her experience and research reading – that good predictors of good code include:
The technical qualifications of the humans involved
Previous experience with the code base
Good communication among team members
The best of those indicators? The one that most commonly predicts quality results? Good team communication.
Among her fixes:
Pair programming.
Create opportunities for informal communication.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Asus announces new Transformer Pad Infinity with 2560 x 1600 display, coming this fall
http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/3/4390698/asus-announces-new-transformer-pad-infinity-with-2560-x-1600-display
Tomi Engdahl says:
IE10 blows past IE7 and IE6′s combined market share, Firefox gains too, but Chrome hits 21-month low
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/01/ie10-blows-past-ie7-and-ie6s-combined-market-share-firefox-gains-too-but-chrome-hits-21-month-low/
The browser war continues into the middle of 2013.
At 55.99 percent, Internet Explorer’s growth seems to be slowing.
At 20.63 percent, Firefox appears to be finally moving above its stable one-fifth-of-the-market mark.
At 15.74 percent, Chrome took yet another beating in May
Tomi Engdahl says:
SSD Flash Storage Is Transforming Tomorrow’s Business
http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2013/01/14/flash-ssd-1/
Developed from EEPROMs (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory), flash memory was invented by Dr. Fujio Masuoka while he was working for Toshiba, circa 1980.
However, it wasn’t until 1987 that Masuoka-san designed a type of flash memory suitable for mass storage, known as NAND flash.
For businesses, one of the most attractive uses of flash is to replace hard disks. Flash memory does not have the mechanical limitations of hard drives, so an SSD has better speed, noise, and power consumption. Flash-based SSDs are gaining traction for mobile storage devices; but they’re also used in high-performance desktop computers, servers and enterprise-scale storage systems.
The cost of SSDs is still higher than that of hard disks, but those costs are falling fast.
Flash has a finite number of write/erase cycles. However, this has improved enormously over the past few years, from 100 cycles, to 10,000 to as many as 100,000 cycles.
Flash is Fast
Flash has a much faster access time than hard disks.
Even the slowest current SSD gives you far better real-world performance than does the fastest conventional hard drive—perhaps100 times as fast.
The transformation happening at the consumer level may be moving upstream faster than many predicted. And with advances in software that make flash easier to manage and protect, this transformation is gaining even more support from forward-looking IT professionals.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wanted for the Internet of Things: Ant-Sized Computers
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514101/wanted-for-the-internet-of-things-ant-sized-computers/
A computer two millimeters square is the start of an effort to make chips that can put computer power just about anywhere for the vaunted “Internet of Things.”
If the Internet is to reach everywhere—from the pills you swallow to the shoes on your feet—then computers will need to get a whole lot smaller. A new microchip that is two millimeters square and contains almost all the components of a tiny functioning computer is a promising start.
The KL02 chip, made by Freescale, is shorter on each side than most ants are long and crams in memory, RAM, a processor, and more.
“The Internet of things is ultimately about services, like your thermostat connecting to the Internet and knowing when you’re coming home,”
Freescale will start offering the KL02, and some slightly larger microcontrollers, with Zigbee or low-power Bluetooth wireless integrated later this year. Wireless connectivity is added by adding the guts of a radio chip to the current designs. The company is also working to refine technology for packaging chips and other components together to enable many more millimeter-scale computers.
“All these heterogeneous things need to come together and be integrated,” says Karimi, “but we have to figure out how these components can coexist without degrading their performance.”
“Such wafer-scale packaging is getting close to ‘smart dust’ design points,”
Karimi agrees that batteries are a problem, saying that Freescale is working with partners developing energy harvesting components—of heat, radio waves, or light—that could power very small devices.
KL02: Kinetis KL02 Chip-Scale Package (CSP)
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=KL02
Tomi Engdahl says:
Destination Korea: an emerging market for IT services
Outsourcers set to look East for $16 BILLION market
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/03/ovum_report_korea_outsourcing_market/
South Korea is being touted as the latest outsourcing market for global IT services firms to target, and could even emerge as an offshoring destination in its own right in the future, according to analyst outfit Ovum.
The IT analyst’s latest Emerging Outsourcing Opportunities reportclaims the South Korean IT services market is now one of Asia’s most mature, and will grow by 7 per cent over the next three years to be worth $16.4bn by 2016.
This offers global giants like IBM and Capgemini the opportunity to cash in if they can overcome the formidable local presence of large local chaebol incumbents including Samsung SDS, LG CNS and SKC&C, which between them control almost 50 per cent of the market.
“However, changes are afoot and in certain markets, especially financial services”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Computex: Acer reveals upgraded Aspire S7 ultrabook with Intel Haswell
Now features a WQHD display with 2,560×1,440 resolution but costs £1,250
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2272112/computex-acer-reveals-upgraded-aspire-s7-ultrabook-with-intel-haswell
“To make sure no compromise on visual experience we have introduced support for WQHD display,” Wong said. “We could call it a Retina display,”
The new S7 ultrabook also touts improved battery life, but Acer didn’t say how long.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ballmer at work on Microsoft restructure — report
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57587284-75/ballmer-at-work-on-microsoft-restructure-report/
Ballmer is reportedly considering changing his company’s structure around focusing its efforts on “devices and services.”
Microsoft, the world’s most dominant software giant, might not be focused on software much longer.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is currently in the process of managing a “major restructuring” that would modify his company’s focus, All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher is reporting on Monday, citing people who claim to have knowledge of Microsoft’s plans. Rather than base its business on software, as it has since its inception, Microsoft would transition to a “devices and services company,” Swisher’s sources say.
Microsoft has, of course, been a software company since its inception. And given how important Windows and Office are to its bottom line, it’s unlikely those platforms will be pushed aside.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Slideshow: The top 5 fastest supercomputers and their power management challenges
http://www.edn.com/design/power-management/4415242/Slideshow–The-top-5-fastest-supercomputers-and-their-power-management-challenges
Tomi Engdahl says:
ARM aims at mid-range with three processors
http://www.eetimes.com/design/communications-design/4415492/ARM-targets-mid-range-with-three-processors
LONDON – Processor IP licensor ARM Holdings plc has announced a main and graphics processor pairing plus a video rendering core to address the mid-range performance ground between its Cortex-A9 and A15 levels of performance. The Cortex-A12 processor core and the Mali-T622 GPU provide such features as virtualization, big-little processing and GPU-compute aimed at price points for mid-range mobile devices, ARM said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs Should Be Prepared for Litigation Disasters
http://www.cio.com/article/733720/CIOs_Should_Be_Prepared_for_Litigation_Disasters
IT departments usually have careful plans for what to do in natural disasters, but they need a litigation-readiness plan, too, so they’ll be ready to handle ediscovery requests
Just as CIOs should have contingency plans for a network crash, they need a litigation-readiness plan for responding to legal requests for electronically stored information, a process called ediscovery.
Timeliness is critical. Responding inefficiently after notice of a triggering event often results in the loss of data, which can lead to legal sanctions against the company and avoidable costs.
Upon receiving notice, team members must be prepared to immediately identify relevant data sources, communicate requirements to preserve data (called a legal hold), and suspend automatic data-purging operations, such as the routine recycling of tapes or auto-deletion of emails.
Tomi Engdahl says:
UK:
Government touts £10bn savings as IT spending streamlined
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2272215/government-touts-gbp10bn-savings-as-it-spending-streamlined
“For years the governments had fritted away billions on disastrous IT projects,” he said at an event in Whitehall attended by V3. “So we set about scrutinising how every pound was spent and negotiating better deals with better suppliers.”
“The government cloud opens up tremendous potential for contracts to be concluded swiftly as well as working with small and medium enterprises,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC processors for major reform has been published. Intel has introduced a new Haswell processor family, that is, the fourth-generation Core processors. Revolution is in the air feel. Focusing is not a traditional performance. Haswell chips promise instead of Intel’s largest-ever improvement in battery life, and up to twice more output for mobile graphics.
Intel to update the PC processor alternately chip manufacturing technology and processor architecture. Now is the time for major reform of the architecture. The fourth-generation Core processors have been, above all, the battery life conditions. It becomes longer time up to 50 percent.
The battery has an extended duration, the number of different techniques. Power management has been improved over the processor, for example, the idle power consumption is calculated. The processor is able to turn off parts of the processor that are not in use. Haswell chips manufactured in 22nm technology, and the processors used in new 3D transistors.
Intel believes the processor changes to encourage manufacturers to create new types of tablets, ultra-thin machines, as well as the properties of a compound the spread of hybrid machines.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/pc_prosessorien_mullistus_intelin_haswell_julkaistu
Tomi Engdahl says:
ARM claims mobile processor superiority over Intel’s Silvermont
http://www.techhive.com/article/2040582/arm-claims-processor-superiority-over-intels-silvermont.html
The seesaw mobile processor battle between ARM and Intel continued at Computex, with ARM claiming it offered better performance per watt for mobile devices than Intel’s upcoming chips.
ARM’s processors go into most smartphones and tablets, but now Intel is challenging it in the mobile device market with its x86 Atom chips. The processor companies are competing on power and performance. Intel has said it has managed to match ARM on battery life in smartphones and tablets with its current Atom processors, and will take the lead with its upcoming Atom chips based on the new Silvermont architecture.
But ARM executives dismissed that claim during a news conference at Computex in Taipei on Monday, saying the company’s processor designs continue to offer more performance at low power consumption levels, and that it will continue to lead in battery life.
ARM’s processors today—including the high-end Cortex A15 and low-end A7 chips—will beat Intel’s chips based on the Silvermont, said Hurley. Intel has said its Atom chips will be more power efficient and faster than previous Atom chips.
Unlike Intel, ARM-based chips do not have 3D transistor stacking features. But ARM is catching up on that, Hurley said. Third-party chip manufacturers GlobalFoundries and TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.), which make ARM-based chips for companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia, are expected to implement 3D transistors in 2014 or 2015.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel: Haswell is biggest ‘generational leap’ we have EVER DONE
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/04/intel_doubles_down_on_2in1s_at_haswell_launch/
Computex As expected, Intel took centre stage on the first day of Computex proper on Tuesday to launch its long-awaited lineup of Haswell processors, with Chipzilla heralding the 2-in-1 form factor in which many of these new chips will find themselves as a “new era” in computing.
Attendees at the show could be forgiven for thinking this was 2012 all over again. Last year it was all about Ivy Bridge and Windows 8 based devices while in 2013 the hype in Taipei is focused on Haswell and the upcoming Windows 8.1.
The question some commentators are asking is: If the predicted uptick in sales didn’t work after Ivy Bridge/Win8, what’s different this time around?
the 22nm Tri-Gate chips are touted as offering 50 per cent more battery life for notebooks than Ivy Bridge and double the graphics performance, with power consumption as low as 6W (SDP) – the biggest “generational leap” in Intel’s history.
What that means effectively is over 9 hours of active use battery life and up to 13 days on standby in some models, with wakeup speeds eight times faster than in a four year old machine running a Core i5 processor, Chipzilla said.
“Two years ago we talked about reinventing [the notebook] with the ultrabook and today we’re talking about 2-in-1. It’s PC performance and tablet-like mobility in one,” he said.
The plan, he added, is that the ultrabook will continue to serve as a high-spec’d premium format, driving innovation and momentum for everything beneath it to make notebooks thinner, faster, lighter and touchscreen.
The PC market could certainly do with a lift. IDC predicted last week that Worldwide PC shipments will fall by 7.8 per cent this year as users delay PC purchases and increasingly look to tablets and smartphones to satisfy their computing needs.
However, the key to Haswell and Intel’s 2-in-1 strategic success may be, quite simply, price.
machines featuring these Silvermont-based processors will hit the stores this autumn for $399.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SequenceL: An Elegant and Efficient Approach to Exploiting the Power of Parallelism
http://rtcmagazine.com/articles/view/103079
Parallelizing complex code efficiently across multiple processor cores gets to be a task beyond human ability. SequenceL is a high-level language that can automatically analyze and output parallel code as C++ and OpenCL to run on a variety of today’s multicore processors.
In 2004 CPU providers made a major shift; rather than increasing the clock speed to increase the performance of each new chip generation, they began to add more processors cores to the chip. Clock speeds had risen to about 4 GHz
“green” was increasingly becoming a factor in datacenter environments
As one datacenter manager shared, “You don’t worry about power and cooling until you run out.”
That shift put the challenge on software developers to effectively use these cores. Initial efforts focused on simple partitioning for dual core processors. Next were optimized libraries for compute-intensive functions that could run across multiple cores. As core counts increased, so did programming complexity, such that true parallel programming has become necessary, a skill that had been reserved for the most elite of programmers. The latest processors have a heterogeneous mix of cores, with specialized cores such as (GP)GPUs added to traditional CPU cores. This looks good on paper because GPUs deliver outstanding floating point performance per watt. Unfortunately, this once again makes the programming challenge much harder, since not only do they require parallelization, but also a very different—and relatively low level—programming language such as CUDA or OpenCL.
The simple fact is humans don’t write large scale parallel code well, nor do they want to keep rewriting it every time a processor evolution occurs. Embedded system developers work in an environment with both time-to-market pressure and high software quality requirements.
Current approaches such as pthreads, OpenMP and MPI, coupled with tools that analyze code for parallelisms, leave the hard work to the user, and it is complex and tricky work for the majority of programmers. These also pose a major QA challenge to test for race conditions and deadlocks. Clearly these approaches have no hope to scale to the even higher core counts and heterogeneous processors on the vendor’s roadmaps.
The SequenceL Language and Compiler
SequenceL may be new to most readers, but it has been in development for more than 20 years. Dr. Daniel Cooke, Dr. Nelson Rushton and Dr. Brad Nemanich worked with NASA over a more than 20 year period while at Texas Tech University, with NASA and other agencies providing over $10 million in research grants.
NASA originally wanted to develop a specification language that was easy to read but could also be executed, to eliminate both the ambiguity and the need for software prototyping and its associated costs. They discovered that SequenceL was so readable that programs required no additional documentation, and a plug-in can readably be added to the Eclipse IDE
SequenceL is a Turing complete, domain-independent, functional programming language.
A key focus from the beginning was to maintain a compact language (~15 grammar rules compared to 150+ for JAVA). To that end, the inventors chose not to re-invent I/O, instead relying on C++
Writing parallel code for problems that are not EP is much more difficult and fraught with errors, but not in SequenceL. In each of these non-EP cases, the SequenceL code was written in a fraction of the time of the single-threaded code and worked correctly.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows ‘Blue’: Microsoft blows it
http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/windows-blue-microsoft-blows-it-219820
The forthcoming preview of Windows 8.1 is full of minor adjustments that do almost nothing to fix what’s really wrong with Windows 8
If you like Windows 8, you’ll like — maybe even love — Windows 8.1 “Blue.” But if you’re a denizen of the old-fashioned Desktop world, without a yearning for touch and/or you don’t want your PC to act like a smartphone, Windows 8.1 will disappoint — big time.
The Start button that isn’t and other minor Desktop changes
Unless you live in a Faraday cage, you already know that Windows 8.1 will have a Start button. If you’ve read past the first sentence in the gushing announcements of that “victory” for users, you also know that the Start button isn’t anything at all like the Start button in Windows 7 (or XP, for that matter).
Right now, in Windows 8, if you click in the lower-left corner of the Desktop, you’re sent to the Metro Start screen. In Windows 8.1, if you click in the lower-left corner of the Desktop, you get sent to the Metro Start screen. The only difference is that Win8.1 will have a visible Start button, not the invisible version used in Windows 8. I guess somebody at Microsoft figured the presence of a Start button would mollify the 1.4 billion people who click on Start and expect to see a Start menu. The returned Start button is definitely is not the Start menu that people really miss.
The bottom line: Windows 8.1 “Blue” is more of the same nonsense
There’s a lot coming down the pike in Win8.1, but it’s mostly more of the same, now piled higher.
If you thought Microsoft would suddenly realize it was alienating the world’s largest installed user base and thus backtrack on some of its more controversial Win8 decisions, you’d be dead wrong. Windows 8.1 clearly reiterates Microsoft’s vision of a Jekyll-and-Hyde operating system, with hardly a nod to traditional Desktop customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Windows Red can fix Windows 8: The right strategy for Microsoft
http://www.infoworld.com/d/microsoft-windows/how-windows-red-can-fix-windows-8-the-right-strategy-microsoft-219633
Inside InfoWorld’s proposal to rescue Windows 8 and fulfill Microsoft’s promise to deliver a modern computing experience on both PCs and tablets
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel’s Haswell puts more analog inside
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4415471/Intel-s-Haswell-puts-more-analog-inside
Intel designed an on-chip voltage regulator and external inductors to support it for Haswell, its next-generation x86. What’s not clear is to what extent the work is driving the digital giant into more design of analog components and processes.
Haswell has two power rails coming into its package compared to six for Ivy Bridge, its prior generation CPU. Inside the Haswell package, Intel splits up the two rails into as many as 12.
The Haswell package includes 20 or more Intel-designed inductors, one for each phase of each power rail. The inductors, like the on-die voltage regulator, are Intel made parts, replacing what used third-party analog parts on the motherboard outside the package.
The move shaves $2-$10 off the motherboard bill of materials
“There is a small net adder in power consumption [by putting the voltage regulator on die] but we’re also getting more power rails on the die controlled at finer granularity,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD wants to narrow the boundary between the PC and console
The chip manufacturer AMD is working with the programmers to write applications that can easily port to pc’s and consoles.
The project is part of AMD’s new “Unified Strategy Gaming” concept, which the company hopes that in the future the same games are playable on both consoles and PC, so that they require only minimal changes in code.
AMD announced plans on Wednesday to Taiwan’s Computex trade show.
AMD’s chips will be seen in at least two next-generation game console: PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, both of which use AMD’s x86 architecture-based processor Jaguar and Radeon GPUs.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/amd+haluaa+kaventaa+pcn+ja+konsolin+valista+rajaa/a906949?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-05062013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel’s ‘Thunderbolt 2′ official, coming later this year
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57587687-92/intels-thunderbolt-2-official-coming-later-this-year/
Intel’s next Thunderbolt technology — hitherto known by the code name Falcon Ridge — now has an official moniker. The tech is slated to be built into future Intel chipsets.
Intel has officially dubbed the next version of its high-speed port “Thunderbolt 2.”
The technology was actually revealed at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in April under the code name Falcon Ridge.
Technically, Thunderbolt 2 is a controller chip that doubles the speed of the first-generation port, supporting up to 20Gbps bidirectionally.
Current versions of Thunderbolt are limited to an individual 10Gbs channel each for both data and display, less than the required bandwidth for 4K video transfer, Intel said in a blog post Tuesday.
That means the cables can now support both transferring a 4K video and putting it on screen at the same time.
Also, the “addition of DisplayPort 1.2 support in Thunderbolt 2 enables video streaming to a single 4K video monitor or dual QHD monitors,” Intel said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel to Invest $100 Million in Voice, Gesture Technologies
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887324063304578524851535732348-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwNDEwNDQyWj.html
Intel Capital, the global investment arm of chipmaker Intel Corp., is setting up a $100 million fund to invest in “perceptual” computing technologies like voice and gesture control, company executives said.
The fund will invest over the next two to three years in firms making software and applications with functions like imaging, gesture and voice control, emotion sensing and biometrics, the company said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows XP: One year to go but is it already too late to move?
http://www.zdnet.com/windows-xp-one-year-to-go-but-is-it-already-too-late-to-move-7000013606/
Summary: With Microsoft’s cut-off date for support for Windows XP exactly 12 months away, the options are narrowing for the many organisations that have yet to carry out an OS upgrade.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cerf sees a problem: Today’s digital data could be gone tomorrow
A disk with its data may survive, but the ability to understand it may be lost
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239790/Cerf_sees_a_problem_Today_s_digital_data_could_be_gone_tomorrow_
One of the computer scientists who turned on the Internet in 1983, Vinton Cerf, is concerned that much of the data created since then, and for years still to come, will be lost to time.
Cerf warned that digital things created today — spreadsheets, documents, presentations as well as mountains of scientific data — won’t be readable in the years and centuries ahead.
The data objects are only meaningful if the application software is available to interpret them, Cerf said. “We won’t lose the disk, but we may lose the ability to understand the disk.”
The scientific community collects large amounts of data from simulations and instrument readings. But unless the metadata survives, which will tell under what conditions the data was collected, how the instruments were calibrated, and the correct interpretation of units, the information may be lost.
“If you don’t preserve all the extra metadata, you won’t know what the data means. So years from now, when you have a new theory, you won’t be able to go back and look at the older data,”
What’s needed, Cerf said, is a “digital vellum,” a means as durable and long-lasting as the material that has successfully preserved written content for more than 1,000 years.
Ensuring that people in future centuries have access to this data, is “a hard problem,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Government £6,000 per year per desktop spend a frightening insight into public sector IT
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/opinion/2272990/government-gbp6-000-per-year-per-desktop-spend-a-frightening-insight-into-public-sector-it
The government has always faced criticism that its IT is slow, unwieldy, inflexible, unnecessarily complex and overpriced. It’s one thing when you face this criticism from your rivals, the press or members of the public – but you know you’ve reached a dire point when it’s your own chief operating officer (COO) twisting the knife.
“I came into the office and I pressed my PC and it took me seven minutes to boot up,” he told attendees. “That’s government in the old world, that’s three days of the year I waste of my time booting up.”
Aside from the huge waste in productivity outlined by Kelly, the government seems to be throwing huge amounts down the drain maintaining this outdated kit. The COO said he thought the cost of a single desktop PC was around £6,000 per year – for which he could go and buy 10 Apple iPads.
But then there’s the more concerning issue of the £6,000 a year Kelly thinks is being spent on each public sector PC per year. This is a ludicrous amount, unless the government happens to be providing all staff with a 3D-enabled desktop and printer, or their very own IBM Watson.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mozilla Readies Major Firefox Redesign As It Ponders What The Browser Of The Future Should Look Like
http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/01/mozilla-readies-major-firefox-redesign-as-it-ponders-what-the-browser-of-the-future-should-look-like/
“Maybe we shouldn’t even call it a browser anymore,” Mozilla’s VP of Firefox engineering Jonathan Nightingale told me a few days ago. “‘Browser’ is really an antiquated word. People don’t really browse all that much anymore.” Instead, he argues, we now mostly use our browsers to access sophisticated web apps, web-based productivity tools and social networks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft goes public with Windows 8.1 upgrade policies
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-goes-public-with-windows-8-1-upgrade-policies-7000016419/
Summary: Microsoft is sharing more on how existing Windows 8 and Windows RT users will be able to upgrade to Windows 8.1 ‘Blue’ preview and final.
Microsoft officials have said previously that the company plans to deliver the public preview of Windows 8.1, codenamed “Blue,” via the Windows Store on June 26.
Tomi Engdahl says:
China surpassing U.S. with 54.9 petaflop supercomputer
Intel-based system has China poised to take the global lead in Top500 supercomputing list this month
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9239710/China_surpassing_U.S._with_54.9_petaflop_supercomputer
China has produced a supercomputer capable of 54.9 petaflops, more than twice the speed of any system in the U.S., according to a U.S. researcher who was in China last week and learned the details.
China’s latest system was built with Intel chips, but includes indigenously produced Chinese technologies as well. The Chinese government spent about $290 million on it.
Today, the world’s fastest supercomputer is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The Cray system was running at nearly 18 petaflops, according to last November’s biannual Top 500 list. That list will be updated in mid-June.
With its new supercomputer, China is raising the stakes in supercomputing for the U.S., as well as for Japan and Europe. It is showing a willingness to push for leadership in HPC and the race to develop the next generation of systems, exascale.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC machines have recently been of interest to development. Large PC manufacturers have begun to introduce computers that run Android operating system instead of Windows. Android is a completely different level contender for Windows than traditional Linux . Android-to-PC combination has a set of problems, however.
The new trend to give credibility to the world’s largest PC manufacturer HP. The company announced last month that uses Android as a laptop computer.
Android familiar – Windows 8 guest
Such hybrid devices have been published in recent months, numerous, but they are based on Windows 8 operating system. Sales figures seem to be weak. PC sales have historically experienced large drops, and is named after the large partly to blame for tablets and consumers’ distrust of Windows 8 is on.
Google’s Android platform, bringing PC-to-PC could facilitate both of these problems. Android has become the world’s most widely used mobile operating system. It has become more familiar to consumers as Windows 8
In addition, a hybrid Android devices to access to the Android tablet popularity. Windows 8 tablet sales have been low, but many of the Android tablets have become best-sellers.
Problem: Programs
Android is a tough contender for Microsoft Windows. Android is becoming the world’s most popular operating system. Research firm Canalys recently predicted that by 2017 the world will be sold for over a billion Android devices a year.
“Any more than an eight-inch screen with the Android device user experience is lousy, and it is because of the applications,” analyst Patrick Moorhead estimates
Android applications are usually created for smartphones. When these programs are stretched to larger screens, usability decreases. The problem is particularly evident in the all-in-one devices with large screens.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/pc_mullistus_viritteilla_android_syrjayttaa_windowsia
NOTE: Android is based on Linux
Tomi Engdahl says:
Android PC numbers increase with Acer’s new Haswell desktop
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2040420/android-pc-corps-grow-with-acers-haswell-desktop.html
Android on PCs may be a terrible idea, but that isn’t stopping PC makers from trying it out in a desperate search for alternatives to Windows 8.
Next week, Acer is expected to double down on Android PCs by announcing an overpowered and underpriced all-in-one PC that will rock a fourth-generation “Haswell” Core processor.
The device has already popped up on some PC retailer sites, and Acer reportedly confirmed to CNET that the Haswell-powered AIO is the real deal. We’ll update this report when we reach an Acer representative.
Android’s PC issues
The supposed advantage of an Android PC is that you can get a cheaply priced, family-friendly computer using low-powered hardware that runs apps that users love, like Angry Birds, Facebook, and Twitter. PC makers also save on pricey Windows licensing costs since Android is free.
However, manufacturers must cut a deal with Google to use the search giant’s logo or to preinstall its apps for services like Gmail and Maps.
Once you get past theoretical advantages and into the realities of an Android PC, however, its appeal begins to diminish. The first problem is the dearth of apps designed for large-screen devices.
“Any Android device over 8 inches will provide a lousy experience because of the lack of apps,”
Some great tablet apps are available for Android, such as Flipboard and Google Earth. But for the most part Android’s tablet/large screen device selection is terrible.
Many apps running on Android slates are simply upscaled versions of a smartphone app. It compares poorly to iOS platforms, which support most major apps in both smartphone and tablet versions, with designs for each form factor.
Missing Windows yet?
Even though Acer’s AIO will have touch support, when using a PC sometimes only a mouse and keyboard will do. But Android has flaky support for external mice and keyboards, and is missing PC conventions such as right-click context menus.
Tomi Engdahl says:
WWDC 2013 Roundup: iOS 7, OS X 10.9, MacBooks, ‘Genius-like’ Radio app (plus new tidbits)
9to5mac.com/2013/06/06/wwdc-2013-roundup-ios-7-os-x-10-9-macbooks-genius-like-radio-app-plus-new-tidbits/
Even though Apple has been out of the limelight, the Cupertino company has been hard at work on a slew of new hardware, software, and services products, and the company plans to introduce new versions of iOS, OS X, and the MacBook Air at its WWDC conference next week.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon’s Indie Game Store opens for independent Mac and PC games
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/121548-amazon-s-indie-game-store-opens-for-independent-mac-and-pc-games
Amazon launched on Thursday a dedicated storefront for independent games.
Called Indie Game Store, the marketplace essentially helps developers promote their Mac, PC, or browser-based games through Amazon.