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:
IT expert of fear: the future users will know more of their machine as IT support
In 2020, the IT experts to keep parts in addition to leading to listen and talk. Aruba Networks commissioned survey, 88 percent of IT experts believed that communication skills are the key to the future.
BYOD era (Bring Your Own Device) is a major challenge for the IT rules of communication of the users. 31 per cent of the respondents believe that the average user to know the future of their machine actually more than the organization’s IT department.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/itosaajan+pelko+tulevaisuudessa+kayttajat+tietavat+enemman+laitteestaan+kuin+ittuki/a907589?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-07062013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Addictions already at the age of one? Kids chose the tablet computer instead of the mother
Experiment, babies were given the choice, it pass over to his mother, or iPad. Time after time, the digital toy irresistible attraction to beat breast cylinders. Playful test was performed in New York’s Upper West Side neighborhood mothers’ group.
One of the mothers, Suzy Wolfson, says he is concerned about the 13-month-old son to the use of the tablet.
- I feel guilty when he is sitting with a tablet, but at the same time I know that I can get him to eat dinner, if you will give him an iPad, Wolfson says.
Tablet Computer manufacturers are discovering the children’s interest in tablet computers
Source: http://www.iltalehti.fi/digi/2013060617118108_du.shtml
Tomi Engdahl says:
Storage sale has an extraordinary change
The external servers, in use, hard disk recording sales fall for the first time in four years, estimates research firm IDC.
Last year, servers, external storage devices sales reached almost USD 6 billion, exactly 5.97 billion dollars (4.50 billion euros). This year, the net sales will decline to $ 5.91 billion, IDC estimates.
The research firm notes, however, that the storage capacity based on recordings sold more. In the first quarter of the year was sold 26.4 percent more storage space than the same period a year earlier.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/tallennusmyynnissa+poikkeuksellinen+muutos/a907774?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-07062013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Enter the Dragon: The Chinese superputer set to win the Top500 crown
Full specs on the 17-megawatt ‘Sky River’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/10/inside_chinas_tianhe2_massive_hybrid_supercomputer/
The Chinese government can keep a secret probably as well as any organisation on the planet, but pride will get the best of anyone – at least some of the time.
And so it is that Xiangke Liao, the professor from the National University of Defense Technology has outed the details of the “Tianhe-2″ massively parallel supercomputer at the International HPC Forum in Changsha, China.
The Tianhe-2 machine is significant for a number of different reasons. First, once again China is taking the top-flopper crown away from the United States, and has left supercomputing efforts in Europe and Japan in the dust – at least in terms of raw floating point performance.
Tianhe-2 also shows, for those who don’t already get it, that China is deadly serious not only about massively parallel computing, but in using petascale and someday exascale computing as a means of bolstering its military, its industry, and the climate modeling that both are, to varying degrees, dependent upon.
That said, the fact that Tianhe-2 is based on Intel Xeon processors and Xeon Phi coprocessors shows that despite China’s efforts to deliver its own MIPS-derived Godson processors as well as its own variants of the Sparc processor, it has not been able to get a completely indigenous machine into the field that sits atop the Top500 list, or even among the highest ranking machines.
Tianhe-2 is also noteworthy because it is the first time since the ASCI Red machine was installed at Sandia National Laboratories – one of the big Department of Energy facilities in the US – that Intel is at the pinnacle of the Top500 rankings with a machine that is based solely on its motors.
Sure, the Tianhe-1A machine that topped the list three years ago had Xeon processors, but it also had Nvidia Tesla coprocessors. And Nvidia was bidding on the upgrade to Tianhe-2, but Chipzilla apparently made the Chinese government an offer it wouldn’t refuse.
According to the report put together by Dongarra, Tianhe-2 is currently installed at NUDT, not in a particularly optimal layout, and will eventually be moved to the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou (NSCC-GZ) by the end of the year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows NT grandaddy OpenVMS taken out back, single gunshot heard
End of the line for HP’s legendary big iron beast
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/10/openvms_death_notice/
HP has announced the end of support for OpenVMS, the ancient but trustworthy server operating system whose creator went on to build Windows NT.
OpenVMS started out as VAX/VMS on Digital Equipment Corporation’s VAX minicomputers, then later was ported to DEC’s fast Alpha RISC chips – before the Compaq acquisition of Digital led to their untimely demise.
OpenVMS also sports world-class clustering abilities
It also ran LAN Manager, the basis of Windows NT networking
HP never really promoted its acquisition and OpenVMS suffered from a lack of development compared to HP-UX, itself suffering from competition from Linux.
development moved to India in 2009, OpenVMS has been living on borrowed time. Now, it’s run out.
Tomi Engdahl says:
For the first time, a third of American adults own tablet computers
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Tablet-Ownership-2013/Findings.aspx
A third (34%) of American adults ages 18 and older own a tablet computer like an iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Google Nexus, or Kindle Fire—almost twice as many as the 18% who owned a tablet a year ago.
Almost every major demographic group experienced significant year-to-year growth in tablet ownership between April 2012 and May 2013. In several cases, groups that already had the highest levels of tablet ownership saw the greatest percentage point increases over the past year:
Among parents with minor children living at home, tablet ownership rose from 26% in April 2012 to 50% in May 2013 (an increase of 24 percentage points).
Tablet ownership among adults living in households making at least $75,000 per year rose from 34% to 56% (22 percentage points).
Tablet ownership among college graduates rose from 28% to 49% (21 percentage points).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Now websites can send push notifications — not just apps
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/06/now-websites-can-send-push-notifications-not-just-apps/
At least on the new version of OS X. Untying news alerts from apps is a small step towards a more sophisticated, customizable real-time system for connecting news to the readers who want it.
Apple will support two kinds of push notifications for OS X Mavericks: OS X Website Push Notifications and Local Notifications.
Local notifications are built on a web standard and require (a) some JavaScript and (b) the website in question being open on your computer. So if you have NYTimes.com open in a tab and there’s a big story, the Times could push a notification to the desktop. That’s not new; Chrome and Safari (and maybe more) have supported that for some time, and Apple currently supports it in Snow Leopard.
But having to keep the news site open in a tab is an obvious limitation.
The new model — OS X Website Push Notifications — is more promising, even if they’ll be limited only to Macs (not iOS, not Windows, not Android).
So it seems like a process similar to the one used to send regular ol’ iPhone push notifications.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Introducing the Xbox One game console was told the list price: the device is sold for $ 499 (about 380 EUR) price.
Competitor to Nintendo’s Wii U will cost around 230 euros, and Sony’s PlayStation 4′s price will be a little over $ 300.
The current Xbox is currently the best-selling video game console of the U.S. market, but Microsoft has not announced a sales target for Xbox one.
Source: http://www.3t.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/teknologia/uusi_xbox_one_on_odotettua_kalliimpi
Tomi Engdahl says:
XP’s End Will Do More For PC Sales Than Win 8, Says HP Exec
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/06/11/1630224/xps-end-will-do-more-for-pc-sales-than-win-8-says-hp-exec
whether the demand for XP replacement systems could help sales more than Windows 8. His response was unequivocal: ‘Yes, significantly more, especially on the commercial side,’ he said. Lore said 40% to 50% of business users remain on XP systems.”
Comments:
For the business users still running XP, I don’t see them flocking to buy new Windows 8 hardware. They are still on XP because either the software they run won’t run on anything else, or they are small businesses that don’t have an IT budget. As long as the hardware and software works, they aren’t going to go out and buy new systems.
Until the first big virus hits that exploits a security hole that won’t be fixed. When you realize you machines that can’t be patched and will continuously be infected you may think differently about corporate security.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD Making a 5 GHz 8-Core Processor At 220 Watts
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/06/11/2014241/amd-making-a-5-ghz-8-core-processor-at-220-watts
“It looks like the rumors were true; AMD is going to be selling an FX-9590 processor this month that will hit frequencies as high as 5 GHz.”
” You can expect the the FX-9590 to need 220 watts or so to run at those speeds and a pretty hefty cooling solution as well. Performance should closely match the recently released Intel Core i7-4770K Haswell processor so AMD users that can handle the 2.5x increase in power consumption can finally claim performance parity.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Video Gamers See the World Differently
http://games.slashdot.org/story/13/06/11/2332256/video-gamers-see-the-world-differently
“Hours spent at the video gaming console not only train a player’s hands to work the buttons on the controller, they probably also train the brain to make better and faster use of visual input, according to Duke University researchers”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will PCIe Flash Become Common In Laptops, Desktops?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/06/11/2242247/will-pcie-flash-become-common-in-laptops-desktops
“With Apple announcing that it is now using PCIe flash in its MacBook Air and it has plans to offer it in its Mac Pro later this year, some are speculating that the high-speed peripheral interface may become the standard for higher-end consumer laptops and workplace systems
Tomi Engdahl says:
1-in-10 e-tomes ‘are self-published’… most are ‘rubbish’ says book ed
Publishing man scoffs at go-it-alone writers, ursines still fouling in forests
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/11/ebook_self_published_market_share/
Self-published ebooks now account for 12 per cent of the entire digital book market, according to new research, and also have up to a fifth of the genre fiction market.
A full 20 per cent of crime, romance, sci-fi, fantasy and humour ebooks sold are self-published, although authors who go it alone in graphic novels, food and drink and children’s non-fiction ebooks are only nabbing five per cent of the sales, Bowker Market Research found.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP gets closer to Google with reseller deal
HP gets ready to pour Chocolate Factory apps through channel
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/12/hp_google_reseller/
HP has joined forces with Google to sell collections of HP gear along with Google’s Apps software.
The HP SMB IT in a Box program was announced by HP at its HP Discover conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, alongside news of HP entering the Google Apps Reseller program.
HP has traditionally had a strong relationship with Microsoft via the Windows and Office software ecosystems, but this appears to have cooled slightly.
Given Windows 8′s soporific reception by consumers and other Microsoft missteps, it strikes us that it’d make sense for a company such as HP to try to develop a better relationship with Google.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple previews radically redesigned Mac Pro: ‘Can’t innovate anymore, my ass’
http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/10/4412350/apple-new-mac-
pro-wwdc-2013
Apple’s long-neglected Mac Pro is finally getting some attention. The desktop has been completely redesigned and, like the company’s refreshed laptops, the rebooted Mac Pro line makes use of new Intel processors. But it isn’t shipping just yet.
“This is without a doubt the future of the pro desktop.” The new Mac Pro will be one-eighth the size of the old 40-pound Mac Pro.
All of the ports on the new Mac Pro are located on the back, but as a user rotates the computer, it senses that it’s being moved and automatically illuminates the I/O panel, making the ports easier to see.
Like the old Mac Pro, the new computer will still have a handle built into the top of the machine.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google to punish sloppy mobile webmasters
Sick of 404s on mobiles? So’s Mountain View
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/12/google_gets_bolshie_with_dodgy_mobe_site_errors/
Google’s blog post uses just a couple of examples of configuration errors: faulty redirects or unrenderable video.
And videos – such as the infamous auto-plays that are becoming a staple of newspaper sites – are an obvious snafu: if you’re presenting Adobe Flash video, it’s not going to work on an iPhone or newer Android.
There’s also the howler of incorrectly handling the mobile robot – which would, of course, automatically spoil the search rank of your mobile site.
“To improve the search experience for smartphone users and address their pain points, we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users,” the post says.
Google’s main advice is that detecting the user agent and redirecting to different HTML links is bad practice anyhow: far better, The Chocolate Factory says, to use the same HTML and use different CSS media queries for rendering.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SSDs: New King of the Data Center?
http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/ssds-new-king-of-the-data-center/
Flash storage is more common on mobile devices than data-center hardware, but that could soon change.
The industry has seen increasing sales of solid-state drives (SSDs) as a replacement for traditional hard drives, according to IHS iSuppli Research. Nearly all of these have been sold for ultrabooks, laptops and other mobile devices that can benefit from a combination of low energy use and high-powered performance.
But businesses have lagged the consumer market in adoption of SSDs, largely due to the format’s comparatively small size, high cost and the concerns of datacenter managers about long-term stability and comparatively high failure rates.
That’s changing quickly, according to market researchers IDC and Gartner.
Datacenter- and enterprise-storage managers are buying SSDs in greater numbers for both server-attached storage and mainstream storage infrastructure, according to an IDC study published in April.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Java EE 7 melds HTML5 with enterprise apps
New release arrives with GlassFish, NetBeans support
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/13/java_ee_7_release/
Oracle has announced public availability of Java EE 7, the first major release of the enterprise formulation of Java since the database giant took control of the platform in 2010. The last version shipped way back in 2009.
Support for HTML5 and related technologies is one of the key themes of this release. Among the new APIs included with Java EE 7 are version 2.0 of the Java API for Asynchronous RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) and new APIs to support WebSockets and JSON processing.
Equally notable, however, are some of the planned features that didn’t make it into this release.
Oracle had said Java EE 7 was going to be “the best application server for the cloud,” complete with built-in support for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments and multitenancy.
“Partially this has been due to a lack of maturity in the space for provisioning, multi-tenancy, elasticity, and the deployment of applications in the cloud,” Java EE 7 specification lead Linda DeMichel said at the time. “And partially it is due to our conservative approach in trying to get things ‘right’ in view of limited industry experience in the cloud area when we started this work.”
Project GlassFish has also released GlassFish 4.0, the latest version of the open source reference implementation of the Java EE standard.
In addition, Oracle’s NetBeans IDE has been updated to version 7.3.1, bringing full support for Java EE 7 development and deployment to GlassFish 4.
Tomi Engdahl says:
BYOD beyond the noise
Don’t just think about it, build it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/13/byod/
A lot has been said about the strategic advantages (and problems) of BYOD, but much less about how to build a wireless infrastructure for it.
We examine what business can learn from universities, where BYOD has been normal for several years, and how to budget and make a business case for the upgrades you will need.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your License Is Your Interface
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/06/12/2126225/your-license-is-your-interface
“License-free software has become a thing. Only 14.9% of repositories on GitHub have a license, according to recent Software Freedom Law Center research.”
“Your License Is Your Interface.”‘ He adds, ‘A license similarly defines the interaction between the software, or more precisely the creators of the software, and users.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your License Is Your Interface
http://www.outercurve.org/Blogs/EntryId/99/Your-License-Is-Your-Interface
Over the past year, there’s been a great deal of discussion about unlicensed code on GitHub. James Governor started the discussion by tweeting that “younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software.” Our own Stephen Walli responded by comparing code sharing without licensing to a “software transmitted disease.”
Aaron Williamson provided the hard numbers showing that only 14.9% of repositories on GitHub have a license.
As developers know, an interface is the formal description of how software interacts with users, including other software. Interfaces have two purposes, one obvious and one more subtle. The more obvious purpose is documenting the software’s expected behavior.
The more subtle purpose is actually a flipside of the first purpose: preventing unintended behavior.
A license similarly defines the interaction between the software, or more precisely the creators of the software, and users. Just like an interface, a license defines intended behavior of users of the software, such as the four essential freedoms or the ten pillars of the Open Source Definition. Just like an interface, a license prevents unintended behavior of users of the software, which depending on the open source license, may disclaim the original author of liability for use of the software, prohibit redistribution without recognizing the original author or prohibit distribution of derivatives under a more restrictive license. When it comes to legal use and distribution of your software, your license IS your interface.
When you don’t provide a license to published code, the consequences are similar to released software with an unclear interface. When an interface is vague or misleading, users guess at how they should use the software.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Solid state memory gains on HDDs
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/other/4416353/Solid-state-memory-gains-on-HDDs
Flash memory is starting to be used in equipment that’s not necessarily mobile or small, specifically challenging the hard disk drive in PCs and even enterprise servers in the datacenter.
As mobile technology has gained steam, it raised the profile of solid state memory.
the chips are least 50 percent per gigabyte more expensive than traditional hard disk drives.
Now that pricing limitation seems to be evaporating. According to market research company IHS, solid state disks (SSDs) will account for more than a third of worldwide PC storage shipments by 2017, about seven times what they are today. SSD shipments in PCs will rise to 227 million units in 2017, compared with 31 million in 2012, while shipments of PC hard disk drives will fall 14 percent, from 475 million in 2012 to 410 million in 2017.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Five trends spotted at this year’s Computex
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/other/4416250/Five-trends-spotted-at-this-year-s-Computex
1. Taiwan ODMs in a panic
Most notably, Computex showed that “Taiwan ODMs are in a panic,”
The Taiwan ODMs are trying to get some traction in the world of tablets and smartphones at a time when the space is completely dominated by Samsung and Apple.
2. Bad omen for U.S. SoC vendors/Taiwan ODMs
“The most remarkable trend from Computex was the rapid shift to low-end tablets and smartphones.”
It’s clear that as unit growth in smartphones/tablets shifts to lower prices, “Chinese SoC vendors are doing extremely well,” wrote the Deutsche Bank report.
3. Notebook vs. desktop
This year’s Computex also underscored the changing dichotomy of notebooks and PCs, according to an industry observer.
While notebook sales are clearly being affected by the strong growth of tablets, “the volumes of desktop PC have been sold on the same basic trajectory that they were on before the tablet phenomenon came into the limelight,
Some observers appear to believe that because desktops are less affected by tablets, several in the ODM community in Taiwan are now finding it more appealing to work on desktop enhancements in order to maintain or grow their market shares, despite declines in total unit counts for desktops. One observer described it as “Sort of like what happened before when PCs started to replace terminals.”
4. Logic and memory trading places
Deutsche Bank research analysts wrote, “Memory vendors are likely to generate better return on invested capital (ROIC) from low-end devices than SoC vendors.” It’s because unit growth is not offset by an increase in supply,” the research note said.
in DRAM, vendors continue to prioritize mobile and specialty DRAMs, which have higher die sizes on average but this added cost is more than offset by higher blended average selling price and gross margin.
5. ARM in servers? No so much
Maybe it’s time for investors on ARM SoC companies to face up to reality. Despite some expectations that ARM SoCs will start moving into high-end average selling price markets such as notebooks and servers,
“We found that the facts support the opposite view.”
“We note very little interest in Windows RT devices and with the exception of Marvell’s storage win at Facebook we saw little traction for ARM Server SoCs.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finally. Office 365 is available for the iPhone, lets you edit any Word, Excel and PowerPoint file
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/06/14/finally-office-365-is-available-in-the-app-store-lets-you-edit-any-word-excel-and-powerpoint-file/
After so many years of speculation, it’s finally happened. At long last, an app encompassing Microsoft’s popular Office applications is available for iOS owners.
It’s called ‘Office Mobile for Office 365 subscribers’,
For users with an Office 365 subscription, it means they can access, view and edit any file previously saved in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Powerpoint.
The introduction will undoubtedly be welcomed by all Office 365 subscribers, as it significantly increases the perceived value of the service.
The app pulls all of the users’ files from the cloud, meaning that Office documents can be stored and downloaded from SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro and SharePoint. There’s also device syncing, so recent documents that have been edited or accessed on one device – say a desktop PC or Windows RT tablet – will be shown in the iOS app through the recent documents panel. Similarly, when the user opens a document from SkyDrive or SkyDrive Pro, it will open up at the exact place where they last stopped reading – regardless of which device they previously accessed it from.
Office 365 is a cloud-based service, but that doesn’t mean that the user needs an Internet connection to get to work. The app saves recently viewed and edited documents automatically, so that they’re always available – regardless of where the user is at the time. Documents can then be viewed and edited offline, with changes being submitted to the cloud when the user connects to a new network.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Girls, beer and C++: How to choose the right Comp-Sci degree for you
You’re just a child. But trust me, I’m a headhunter
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/14/how_to_choose_a_computer_science_degree/
You choose your degree when you’re still a child
You haven’t done computer science yet
The word “heuristics” may be new to you because your “computer science” A level lacked any depth and you haven’t picked up enough theory off your own back: proper grown-up computer science is maths and more maths, so your degree course may come as a shock to you.
My day job is as a City headhunter and so some people care about what I think about universities.
C and C++
A marker for a serious comp-sci degree is that C and C++ classes are mandatory, signalling that the department heads don’t believe their students are too stupid to learn those programming languages. When asking around as to why not all universities teach the language used to write serious software (Windows, Oracle, Linux, Firefox, Excel, HFT trading systems, the London Stock Exchange, your TV’s firmware, the code churning out much of the CGI in films), the reply was that “it’s too hard”.
I teach C++ and the course has lectures that include slides headed “Cruel and Unusual Pointers”, “Why the hell did it just do that?”, and “What do these syntax errors really mean?”.
For all their talk of helping you get a good job on graduation, careers departments at UK universities are pathetically under-resourced.
Beer is good
Your decision on where exactly you’re going to study computer science is going to affect your life on the same scale as whom you marry, unless you’re dim-witted enough to let your parents choose who sleeps with you, and that requires more than a carefully orchestrated meeting with an academic and some flattering pictures on the walls.
Ask the students about the quality of teaching. Not just the lectures, but how they tutor you when you hit a problem or think of a cool new idea.
Girls taking A-level computing are so few that it’s likely only one of you will read this piece and frankly you won’t like it
Tomi Engdahl says:
World’s smallest dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 module?
http://linuxgizmos.com/tiny-cortex-a9-module-runs-linux-and-android/
Variscite announced what it calls “the world’s tiniest Cortex-A9 system-on-module,” measuring 52 x 17mm. The Linux- and Android-compatible DART-4460 module is based on a 1.5GHz dual-core TI OMAP4460 SoC, is available with up to 1GB of DDR2 RAM and 8GB eMMC flash, and can run at 400MHz on only 44mA, says the company.
The DART-4460 is designed for devices ranging from “the lightest tablet” to “the most compact multimedia system,” says Variscite.
Tomi says:
Red Hat ditches MySQL, switches to MariaDB
http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/60292-red-hat-ditches-mysql-switches-to-mariadb
Red Hat will switch the default database in its enterprise distribution, RHEL, from MySQL to MariaDB, when version 7 is released.
According to news from the Red Hat summit which concludes in Boston on Friday, RHEL 7 will also include MongoDB.
The switch was expected to happen after Red Hat’s community distribution Fedora announced earlier this year that it would be moving to MariaDB. But it will come as a major jolt to Oracle, the owner of MySQL. (openSUSE, the community distribution of SUSE, announced a switch to MariaDB at the same time as Fedora.)
Once RHEL makes the switch, it will flow on to CentOS, a distribution that provides RHEL without the trademarks, hence making it free in terms of cost. CentOS is widely used by small businesses.
MariaDB is a fork of MySQL that was begun by Ulf Michael Widenius under his new company, Monty Program. Widenius is one of the three co-founders of the original MySQL.
Earlier this year, Monty Program merged with SkySQL
“I presume there is not much love lost between Red Hat and Oracle (particularly since the “Oracle Linux” stuff started) but I’m pretty sure this move won’t make Oracle any happier,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Software-Defined Data Centers: Seeing Through the Hype
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/06/15/1546243/software-defined-data-centers-seeing-through-the-hype
Tomi Engdahl says:
If Office Hits The iPad, Even Fewer People Would Buy A Surface
http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/14/if-office-hits-the-ipad-even-fewer-people-would-buy-a-surface/
Remember this ad? The ad where Microsoft attempted to position the iPad as a chopstick-playing toy and the Surface as a PowerPoint-editing machine?
Yeah, that’s why we can’t have nice things.
Microsoft just released Office for the iPhone. It lets users edit any Word, Excel or PowerPoint document. As the oh-so-catchy name states, Office Mobile for Office 365 subscribers is Office Mobile for Office 365 subscribers only, meaning the app is essentially $100 a year. It’s not “Office for iOS.” It’s just a way to open and partially edit Office files for those saps paying for Microsoft’s pricey cloud platform.
But forget about a native iPad app. Microsoft can’t kill the only legitimate selling point of its struggling Surface tablet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix
Zombie lawsuit back and wants to suck the brains out of Linux
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/17/sco_ibm_lawsuit_resumes/
IBM’s lawsuit with SCO over just who owns Unix has crawled out of the grave and seems set to shuffle back into US courts.
For the uninitiated, or those who’ve successfully tried to forget this turgid saga, a b rief summary: SCO in 2003 sued IBM for doing something nasty to bits of Unix it owned. Or felt it owned. SCO also sued Novell, which it felt did not own some copyrights for Unix.
Many private school educations later for the offspring of the lawyers involved SCO lost against Novell. By this time SCO was out of cash with which to keep up the fight against Big Blue, so the matter hibernated for a while.
That stasis persisted until early may when SCO applied to get things going again.
likely scenario is that this case drags on for years longer and that the lawyers involved start to eye off yachts now that the kids have left home.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Top500: Supercomputing sea change incomplete, unpredictable
A mix of CPU and hybrid systems jockey for HPC hegemony – and lucre
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/17/top500_supercomputing_phase_change_incomplete_and_not_precisely_predictable/
ISC 2013 If you were thinking that coprocessors were going to take over the Top500 supercomputer rankings in one fell swoop, or even three or four, and knock CPU-only systems down to the bottom of the barrel – well, not so fast.
While GPU and x86 coprocessors are certainly the main computation engines on some of the largest systems that made it onto the June 2013 HPC system rankings, it’s going to take years before such offload engines are the norm – it takes time to port code and get the big bucks needed to put together hybrid machines. Besides, existing machines have to go through their economic life cycles of five years or so.
But make no mistake about it: the HPC racket is in the midst of a transition that will be as jarring and dramatic as the shift from single processor, symmetric multiprocessing, and constellation systems in the 1980s and early 1990s to Linux-based clusters and other massively parallel systems in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
With coprocessors offering ridiculously better floating point performance per chip plus lower electricity use and cost, the CPU is just not the answer any more except for workloads that really need a fast execution pipeline. In years hence, when memory, fabric interconnect, coprocessors, and likely central processors will all be crunched down to single chip packages, we won’t even be talking about coprocessors any more. This will simply be the way computing is done.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google builds new system to eradicate child porn images from the web
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/10122452/Google-builds-new-system-to-eradicate-child-porn-images-from-the-web.html
Google, the internet giant, is to create a global database of child abuse images – which it will share with its rival companies – in a bid to eradicate child pornography from the web.
The new database, which is expected to be operational within a year, will allow child porn images which have already been “flagged” by child protection organisations such as the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to be wiped from the web in one fell swoop.
Google is also setting up a £1.27 million ($2 million) fund available to independent software developers to produce new tools to combat child pornography, it announced.
Scott Rubin, Google’s spokesman, said: “We are creating an industry-wide global database of ‘hashed’ images to help all technology companies find these images, wherever they might be.
“They will then be blocked and reported.”
John Carr, a government adviser on child internet safety, said: “This is an important moment. It should focus the minds of other industry leaders in relation to how they are going to join the fight.
“We know that the best way to tackle what is some of the most horrific content online is by working with others from all over the world to combat this on a global platform.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Don’t wait to check your parachute until you’re out of the plane
Does it do what it says on the tin? Credit insurance, that is
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/06/17/lost_meelions_on_reseller_failures_credit_is_a_risky_biz/
Business failure and insolvency are so rarely a cheery subject. But it’s kinda funny how frequently companies hit by high-value losses almost immediately say “we had insurance”, as if to say the loss will not be felt too hard.
It’s tempting to boast that your debt is insured when it isn’t: it makes the loss seem less troublesome or deflects attention. Even if it is insured, the level of recovery available, given the type of policy you hold, may still leave you picking up between 10 and 20 per cent of the loss value, and that’s if your claim is accepted by an insurer in the first place.
Four principal insurers are predominant in the IT sector, and service vendors, distributors and some larger resellers
A business insures its buildings, its employees and other valuable assets, so understandably the type and scope of cover held is vital.
Nobody likes paying for insurance, but the pain of losing something of great value with no return is generally too terrible to contemplate
For a business, the biggest asset by far is the value of its accounts receivable ledger; in other words the amount owed by clients on open credit terms. Depending on the nature of the business, this can be as high as 75 per cent of total assets and generally not lower than 40 per cent.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bone up on fresh EU privacy law – or end up in the clink, IT biz warned
Resellers no longer just flogging boxes – now they must offer legal advice
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/06/17/channel_needs_to_prep_for_eu_data_protection/
McAfee Channel Summit Technology resellers, distributors and service providers need to be ready for the freshly proposed European Data Protection law, IDC has said.
The analyst’s research director of European security software Kevin Bailey said that end users were already preparing for the new rules of the incoming regulation, but the technology channel needs to get its act together too.
“The channel should be fully conversant on what the EU data protection regulation is about,” he said at the McAfee EMEA Channel Summit.
“[And] when the EU data protection regulation comes in – you will get fined, you will get put into jail if you breach it.”
The draft bill, which was put forward by European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding in January last year, proposes a single law on how to handle data across the member states, rather than the patchwork national laws that cover the region now.
Bailey also said that resellers and distributors would need to think about more than just shifting products in the future.
“I think the role of any route to market is more consultative going forward and less about products,” he said.
“The days are gone of moving boxes, it’s about having an opinion you take to your customer and through that offering a service.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Banks do not reject cobolia
Banks will remain enduring cobol programming language, believes that the quality of the measurement guru Bill Curtis. The main reason is the security of Java greater reliability and performance.
Curtis has become known for the quality of software measurement, the global CMM standard developer.
Cobol comes to keeping the popularity of several of the financial sector, despite the difficulties, says Curtis. Although outdated systems, it can cause up to hundreds of millions of losses, such as Java, a modern programming language shift would cause huge error in the peak.
“Overall, the code re-writing would be a nightmare,” he says.
Curtis criticized cobolia, inter alia, due to a multitude of code. Average cobol module is about 600 lines of code, the Java module reading should be about 30 lines.
“COBOL in the case of the system together problems and the frequency correlation is strong. The number is exponential, “he says. In Java, while modularity is taken into account from the beginning.
Since cobol mainframe computer works basis and is rarely caught in the web, they are also more likely to act clumsy. They have also been tested thoroughly decades.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/cio-uutiset/pankit+eivat+hylkaa+cobolia/a909852?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-17062013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Adds Support For Google Cloud Messaging, Git And Custom APIs To Azure Mobile Services
http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/14/microsoft-adds-support-for-google-cloud-messaging-to-azure/
Microsoft today announced a number of updates to its Azure Mobile Services that include support for Git source control, custom APIs and Android push notifications through Google Cloud Messaging to its mobile backend service. Azure users now also get a free 20MB SQL database for mobile services and web sites for 12 months.
gcm-logoThe highlight of today’s update is clearly support for Android push notifications in Azure Mobile Service’s Notification Hubs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD has to throw the x86-based processors aside: mobile chips to servers
The chip manufacturer AMD’s server strategy is built upon chips for smartphones.
The company plans to announce its first servers targeted at the ARM chip technology work in the second half of next year. These chips will replace the company’s energy efficient x86 processors.
AMD recently revealed information about new, code-named Seattle known chips. 64-bit arm chips can have up to 16 cores, in addition, they are four times faster than the quad-core and low-power X-series Opteron processors.
The first Seattle-series Armit AMD plans to sell the x86 chips in parallel. However, the company expects that over time, Armit displace x86 chips.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/amd+on+heittamassa+x86suorittimet+syrjaan+mobiilisirut+palvelimiin/a909995?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-18062013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia’s graphics brawn powers supercomputing brains
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57589580-76/nvidias-graphics-brawn-powers-supercomputing-brains/
The company’s graphics chips are finding a foothold in neural networks, a biology-inspired form of computing that is moving from research to commercial tasks like Google’s photo recognition.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Can Red Hat do for OpenStack what it did for Linux?
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/061713-red-hat-openstack-270908.html?hpg1=
Red Hat hopes freshly-announced commercial OpenStack cloud computing distribution will propel it through next decade of growth
Red Hat made its first $1 billion commercializing Linux. Now, it hopes to make even more doing the same for OpenStack.
Red Hat executives say OpenStack – the open source cloud computing platform – is just like Linux. The code just needs to be massaged into a commercially-hardened package before enterprises will really use it. But just because Red Hat successfully commercialized Linux does not guarantee its OpenStack effort will go as well.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Containers—Not Virtual Machines—Are the Future Cloud
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/containers—not-virtual-machines—are-future-cloud
Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Service sell virtual machines. EC2 revenue is expected to surpass $1B in revenue this year. That’s a lot of VMs.
It’s not hard to see why there is such demand. You get the ability to scale up or down, guaranteed computational resources, security isolation and API access for provisioning it all, without any of the overhead of managing physical servers.
But, you are also paying for lot of increasingly avoidable overhead in the form of running a full-blown operating system image for each virtual machine. This approach has become an unnecessarily heavyweight solution to the underlying question of how to best run applications in the cloud.
Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Service sell virtual machines. EC2 revenue is expected to surpass $1B in revenue this year. That’s a lot of VMs.
It’s not hard to see why there is such demand. You get the ability to scale up or down, guaranteed computational resources, security isolation and API access for provisioning it all, without any of the overhead of managing physical servers.
But, you are also paying for lot of increasingly avoidable overhead in the form of running a full-blown operating system image for each virtual machine. This approach has become an unnecessarily heavyweight solution to the underlying question of how to best run applications in the cloud.
Containers now can be used as an alternative to OS-level virtualization to run multiple isolated systems on a single host.
There is a good reason why we buy by the virtual machine today: containers used to be terrible, if they existed in any useful form at all. Let’s hop back to 2005 for a moment. “chroot” certainly didn’t (and still doesn’t) meet the resource and security isolation goals for multi-tenant designs. “nice” is a winner-takes-all scheduling mechanism. The “fair” resource scheduling in the kernel is often too fair
VMs are fairly standardized; a system image running on one expects mostly the same things as if it had its own bare-metal computer. Containers are not very standardized in the industry as a whole. They’re very OS- and kernel-specific (BSD jails, Solaris Zones, Linux namespaces/cgroups). Even on the same kernel and OS, options may range from security sandboxes for individual processes to nearly complete systems.
Containers have to run the same kernel as the host, but they can optionally run a completely different package tree or distribution. Containers are fairly transparent to the host system.
Containers Now Offer the Same Features as VMS, but with Minimal Overhead
We have a goal that new installations of Fedora and other major distributions, like Ubuntu, provide out-of-the-box, standard API and command-line tools for managing containers, binding them to ports or IP addresses and viewing the resource reservation and utilization levels. This capability should enable other companies eventual access to a large pool of container hosts and flavors, much as Xen opened the door to today’s IaaS services.
Tomi says:
Project Cauã: revolutionising IT for the masses
‘Maddog’ Hall’s plan for a server in every high rise and millions of jobs…
http://news.techworld.com/data-centre/3453406/project-cau-revolutionising-it-for-masses/
Project Cauã, the Free and Open Source Software and Hardware (FOSSH) project conceived by Linux International executive director Jon “Maddog” Hall to make it possible for people to make a living as a systems administrator, is set to launch in Brazil next month.
The vision of Project Cauã is to promote more efficient computing following the thin client/server model, while creating up to two million privately-funded high-tech jobs in Brazil, and another three to four million in the rest of Latin America.
Project Cauã will aim to put a server system in the basement of all of these tall buildings and thin clients throughout the building, so that residents and businesses can run all of their data and applications remotely.
“In effect it’s kind of like creating a private cloud for every building,” Hall told Techworld.
Each server system will need a systems administrator, who will be the point of contact for any technical issues, and who will be able to change and manage the programs to meet the needs of his or her customers in the building.
People interested in becoming a systems administrator will be able to do their training online and, once they have been certified, receive a license from the government that will enable them to get a bank loan for equipment and installation.
It should, says Hall, reduce the amount of electricity used by present and future desktop computers, make end user computing easier and more efficient and provide better services for various vertical markets by more complete integration of computer technologies.
Tomi says:
Goodbye too big to save
Research firm IDC estimates that companies will buy 138 exabytes storage in 2017. For the current year the research company predicts 28 exabytes record sales.
It is estimated that the annual sales record of more than 30 per cent for the next several years in terms of storage space (slower than the record years). In terms of money growth is much more modest (four per cent annual rate).
In the future advanced technologies are used to reduce storage requirements. Such techniques are as cloud services, efficient compression methods, data, double copies of identification and storage virtualisation.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/hyvasti+liian+iso+tallennus/a910171?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-18062013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
NVIDIA To License Its GPU Tech
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/06/19/0017210/nvidia-to-license-its-gpu-tech
“Today in a blog post, NVIDIA’s General Counsel, David Shannon, announced that the company will begin licensing its GPU cores and patent portfolio to device makers.”
“Shannon points out that NVIDIA did something similar with the CPU core used in the PlayStation 3, which was licensed to Sony. But mobile seems to be the big opportunity now”
Comments:
We want to transition to an IP company.
Then we only have to employ lawyers and executives, and save ourselves the trouble of all that making stuff.
They’re following in the footsteps of Apple and Sega – license out your key strengths to strategic partners, and you’re sure to succeed.
The ONLY company on this planet with an interest in very high-end desktop class GPU technology for their own use is Intel. No-one else has the need (PowerVR fills the gap for most companies that license GPU designs) or the ability to build such a complex design into their own SoC.
Anyone else with an interest in Nvidia GPU capabilities would opt to buy discrete chips from Nvidia, or one of Nvidia’s existing ARM SoC parts.
AMD is currently devastating Nvidia in the high end gaming market. Every one of the 3 new consoles uses AMD/ATI tech for the graphics. EA (the massive games developer) has announced their own games engines will be optimised ONLY on AMD CPU and GPUs (on Xbone, PS4 and PC). Nvidia is falling out of the game.
The x86 space is moving to APUs only. Chips that combine the CPU cluster with the GPU system. Intel’s integrated GPU is pure garbage. However, Intel spends more on the R+D for its crap GPU than Nvidia and AMD combined.
Visual Computing’s Ascent Gives NVIDIA Room to Expand Its Business Model
http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2013/06/18/visual-computings-ascent-gives-nvidia-room-to-expand-its-business-model/
PC sales are declining with the rise of smartphones and tablets. High-definition screens are proliferating, showing up on most every machine. Android is increasingly pervasive. Yesterday’s PC industry, which produced several hundred million units a year, will soon become a computing-devices industry that produces many billions of units a year. And visual computing is at the epicenter of it all.
The consequences of these changes are apparent everywhere. New industry leaders are emerging
For chip-makers like NVIDIA that invent fundamental advances, this disruption provides an opening to expand our business model. Not so long ago, we only made and sold GPU chips, albeit the world’s fastest ones. Five years ago, we introduced Tegra, a system on a chip. More recently, GRID – a complete system that streams cloud games and other graphics-rich content – as well as the SHIELD gaming portable have been unveiled.
So, our next step is to license our GPU cores and visual computing patent portfolio to device manufacturers to serve the needs of a large piece of the market.
The reality is that we’ve done this in the past. We licensed an earlier GPU core to Sony for the Playstation 3. And we receive more than $250 million a year from Intel as a license fee for our visual computing patents
We’ll start by licensing the GPU core based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the world’s most advanced, most efficient GPU. Its DX11, OpenGL 4.3, and GPGPU capabilities, along with vastly superior performance and efficiency, create a new class of licensable GPU cores.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Power Testing: Can Two New Laptops Really Last All Day?
http://allthingsd.com/20130618/power-testing-can-two-new-laptops-really-last-all-day/
Most consumers pay little or no attention to the processors and other chips that power their computers, and rightly so. In recent years, changes to the design of these chips haven’t made major, noticeable differences in everyday computing tasks.
But this month, chip giant Intel introduced a new generation of processors and chips that it claims can dramatically improve something important to almost all users of light laptops: Battery life. In fact, it claims these chips, called the 4th Generation Core processors, can boost battery life by 50 percent while actually improving graphics performance. Intel says the new chips are the first it has designed specifically for the slim, light laptops Windows PC makers call Ultrabooks and Apple calls its MacBook Air line.
These new processors, code-named “Haswell” before the release, have been eagerly awaited for months in an industry that has seen laptop sales suffer at the hands of tablets, partly because tablets typically boast much longer battery life.
For my tests, I chose the latest MacBook Air, introduced last week.
In my tests, I was able to largely confirm Intel’s battery-life claims. This was especially true of the 13-inch MacBook Air I evaluated, whose battery life in my test jumped 65 percent from my last test of the machine, even though it hasn’t been significantly redesigned, except for the inclusion of the new Intel chips, faster Wi-Fi and solid-state storage and a slightly more potent battery.
Their major downside is price.
These prices are much higher than the $600 to $800 Windows buyers have traditionally spent on a well-equipped laptop, but as the new Intel processors spread throughout the industry, there are likely to be less expensive models.
Sony claims 6½ hours of battery life out of the box for the 13-inch Vaio Pro and in my test it lasted 5 hours and 56 minutes. I estimate you could meet or even exceed Sony’s claim in normal use.
In a second test with the second $150 battery attached, the Sony lasted 11 hours and 52 minutes, compared with Sony’s claim of up to 13 hours. In normal use, I estimate you could approach that 13-hour mark.
Bottom line: Intel has pulled off a major gain in battery life
Tomi Engdahl says:
Virtualisation: Where are my savings?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/save_from_virtualisation/
Three years ago you listened to vendors telling you how much we would all save from virtualisation. It seemed so plausible, but for most of us the savings never arrived. Why not? And what can we do about it?
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM cutting up to 1500 jobs in Australia as cloud computing upsets server market
http://www.brw.com.au/p/tech-gadgets/ibm_cutting_upsets_server_jobs_market_pd67SMPbQzIgF4msTKLfSK
The 1500 jobs on the line at IBM’s Australian operation mirrors the decline in the server market as business customers shift to cloud computing and software-as-a-service.
The acceleration of the cloud trend, which changes the way corporate customers buy technology, has left IBM and other traditional vendors such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell scrambling to adapt.
IBM already has cloud computing services and has indicated it will focus on this as a growth area. IBM has neither confirmed nor denied the reported redundancy program, but a spokeswoman told BRW the business was repositioning.
“IBM is investing in growth areas for the future: Big Data, cloud computing, social business and the growing mobile computing opportunity,”
Traditional vendors hit
Rodney Gedda, an analyst at technology firm Telsyte, says it is not easy to speculate on the rationale for the job cuts since the decision was made behind closed doors, but in general, traditional vendors like IBM have been hit by the trend for businesses to embrace cloud computing and software-as-a-service.
Gedda says IBM’s push into cloud services is the right move but the transformation would not be painless.
Hardware vendors typically describe cloud computing as a sales opportunity on the basis that they sell servers to data centres as well as end-users, but Gedda says this argument is overstated.
“The key difference is that cloud service providers tend to drive a lot of efficiency out of their systems and they even go to the trouble of engineering their own, as well, so they’ll go to OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] and purchase custom servers and they’ll go to manufacturers and get them to build uniquely specced servers for their environment,” Gedda says.
Dramatic decline in hardware
The hardware market is declining rapidly and the falls are even more dramatic in Australia than elsewhere in the world, according to analyst firm Gartner.
In Australia, HP is the dominant player in terms of both number of machines and revenue. IBM is number one globally by revenue but second to HP in Australia
Worldwide server sales also declined in the first quarter but by a more modest 0.7 per cent year on year for shipments and 5 per cent year on year for revenue, according to Gartner.
Alongside the decline in hardware sales, Telsyte’s Gedda says the rise of cloud computing and software-as-a-service meant that modern businesses were much less likely to buy all their technology from a single vendor.
Line-of-business managers and chief marketing officers were making software-as-a-service decisions on an ad hoc basis. This in turn hits traditional vendors in both the hardware and the software space, such as IBM, Dell, and HP.
Gartner figures suggest PC sales, including both desktop and mobile, are also in sharp decline, with an 18 per cent decline in shipments in Australia and an 11 per cent drop worldwide.
Tomi Engdahl says:
99.999 Is Not Enough: An OpenCloud Approach to Delivering Application Uptime and Performance
http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/whitepaper/99999-is-not-enough-an-opencloud-approach-to-delivering-application-uptime-and?cm_mmc=SMB12Display-_-Techmeme-_-AppDev-_-whitepaper
The pressure to keep vital applications online and performing well is extreme. The stakes are high; application downtime means loss of revenue, and application slowdown means loss of customers.
At the same time, it is hard to achieve end-to-end visibility of production environments because they span data centers, vendors, and even internal IT teams. Sometimes the only group that can help troubleshoot problems for an application is the development team; this diverts the time of important resources.
As a result, IT departments remain mired in the present, tied to keeping the application up and running, and expected to avoid problems from the past. Looking strategically toward the future is a luxury many can’t afford, despite the constant demands on IT for the newest and latest.
In this white paper CITO Research examines how Rackspace® Critical Application Services can help clients achieve end-to-end visibility of their application environments, maintain high performance, and help prevent applications from crashing, all at a reasonable monthly cost.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your Feedback Matters – Update on Xbox One
http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/update
For us, the future comes in the form of Xbox One, a system designed to be the best place to play games this year and for many years to come.
So, today I am announcing the following changes to Xbox One and how you can play, share, lend, and resell your games exactly as you do today on Xbox 360. Here is what that means:
An internet connection will not be required to play offline Xbox One games – After a one-time system set-up with a new Xbox One, you can play any disc based game without ever connecting online again.
Trade-in, lend, resell, gift, and rent disc based games just like you do today – There will be no limitations to using and sharing games, it will work just as it does today on Xbox 360.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Java API and Microsoft’s .NET API: A Comparison
http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/java-api-and-microsofts-net-api-a-comparison/
The APIs themselves are complete and offer the essential tools for modern software development. But is one “better” than the other?
Conclusion
The languages provide some powerful ways to call into the APIs. The APIs themselves are complete and offer the essential tools for modern software development. The languages differ on what features they provide for calling into the APIs; for example, Microsoft has its LINQ technology. Further, Microsoft makes more liberal use of static members. Both languages now allow for automatic resource management, and both languages support parameterized types called generics. The APIs are complete. So is one better than the other? I would call it a tie.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Update: As Microsoft Restructuring Nears, Top Execs Fret Over Their Fate
http://allthingsd.com/20130623/update-microsoft-restructuring-nears-as-execs-top-fret-over-their-fate/
According to sources close to the situation, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is likely to unveil his plans to restructure the tech giant to a larger group of senior execs by July 1.
That prospect has many top managers at the company worried
That has meant that most senior execs have largely been left out of the decision-making process related to Ballmer’s goal of solidifying Microsoft into the “devices and services company,
A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.