Computer technologies for 2013

1,455 Comments

1. August 16, 2013 at 11:56 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Why Some Startups Say the Cloud Is a Waste of Money
   http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/memsql-and-amazon/

   Eric Frenkiel is through with convention and conformity. It was just too expensive.

   In Silicon Valley, tech startups typically build their businesses with help from cloud computing services — services that provide instant access to computing power via the internet — and Frenkiel’s startup, a San Francisco outfit called MemSQL, was no exception. It rented computing power from the granddaddy of cloud computing, Amazon.com.

   But in May, about two years after MemSQL was founded, Frenkiel and company came down from the Amazon cloud, moving most of their operation onto a fleet of good old fashioned computers they could actually put their hands on. They had reached the point where physical machines were cheaper — much, much cheaper — than the virtual machines available from Amazon. “I’m not a big believer in the public cloud,” Frenkiel says. “It’s just not effective in the long run.”

   Frenkiel’s story shows that while cloud computing is suited to many tasks — including getting your startup off the ground or running a modest website — it doesn’t make sense for others. When Zynga’s online gaming empire expanded to epic sizes in 2012, the company made headlines in shifting much of its operation off the Amazon cloud and into its own data centers, but smaller operations are making the move too.

   “I don’t know how much this is written about,” says Kit Colbert, an engineer at VMware, whose software is used by cloud services as well as in private data centers. “Within IT departments, public clouds do tend to get more expensive over time, especially when you reach a certain scale.”

   This past April, MemSQL spent more than $27,000 on Amazon virtual servers. That’s $324,000 a year. But for just $120,000, the company could buy all the physical servers it needed for the job — and those servers would last for a good three years. The company will add more machines over that time, as testing needs continue to grow, but its server costs won’t come anywhere close to the fees it was paying Amazon.

   Frenkiel estimates that, had the company stuck with Amazon, it would have spent about $900,000 over the next three years. But with physical servers, the cost will be closer to $200,000. “The hardware will pay for itself in about four months,” he says.

   “The public cloud is phenomenal if you really need its elasticity,” Frenkiel says. “But if you don’t — if you do a consistent amount of workload — it’s far, far better to go in-house.”

   Geolocation outfit Geoloqi moved off of Amazon in 2011 — but then moved back a year later. “We reached a point where we needed to be able to scale faster than would have been practical with physical servers,”

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2. August 16, 2013 at 12:00 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Ex-Facebookers Feed Zuck’s Code Into New Data Revolution
   http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/07/memsql/

   Nikita Shamgunov and Eric Frenkiel first met during Facebook bootcamp. Like every other new engineer hired by the company, they spent a good eight weeks in the hacker equivalent of Parris Island, fixing bug after bug after bug inside the world’s largest social network, coming to terms with the swashbuckling Facebook culture, and mentally winding their way through the sweeping software systems that juggle data inside the house that Zuck built.

   “It’s very much like bootcamp in that most graduate — but some don’t,” Frenkiel says. “Even if you pass a series of interviews, they still want to see you perform for eight weeks — for 10 weeks — before you actually join a team.”

   MemSQL offers what’s called an “in-memory database.” Much like a Facebook creation known as Scuba, it spreads information across the memory systems inside dozens of computer servers, bypassing the (much slower) hard disks that traditionally house the world’s information. The end result is a system that lets you retrieve and analyze data at unusually high speeds.

   At Facebook, Scuba provides a means of instantly diagnosing problems with the enormous network of hardware and software that drives the company’s web service, but MemSQL expands on this mission. It can help analyze the ins and outs of practically anything, from email marketing campaigns to trading activity on a stock exchange. “Zynga uses us,” Frenkiel says, “and so does Morgan Stanley.”

   MemSQL is at the forefront of a much larger effort to move the world’s digital data off the hard disk and into memory — a trend that will ultimately let us juggle “Big Data” not only with greater speed but with greater accuracy. Inside the data centers that underpin its popular web services, Yahoo is shifting towards a in-memory tool known as Spark, which does all sorts of data analysis, and MemSQL is just one of several in-memory databases, which can handle both data analysis and the high-speed data transactions that are an integral part of so many websites. In other words, they can drive things like online user accounts and product purchases and maybe even bank payments.

   These databases — which also include names such as NuoDB and VoltDB and SAP’s Hana — are just beginning to find their way in the world.

   The idea of a database that runs in computer memory is hardly new. TimesTen, an in-memory database offered by software giant Oracle, dates back to the mid-1990s. But as Frenkiel explains, MemSQL represents a new breed of in-memory database — an in-memory database specifically designed to operate across a large number of machines.

   The new in-memory databases can handle more data more quickly, but they also give you the power to treat all that data as a whole. This is called “consistency,” and basically, it means that someone looking at the data from one place sees the same thing as someone looking at it from another. If you don’t have consistency, you can’t analyze your data with complete accuracy — and you certainly can’t handle something as delicate as online bank transactions. “People care about whether their bank accounts remember their money,” says Barry Morris, founder and CEO of NuoDB.

   Over the past several years, we’ve seen the rise what the pundits call “NoSQL” databases, including MongoDB and Cassandra. This is a loose term, but generally, it refers to a new breed of web-centric database designed to scale across many machines.

   They can’t use the familiar SQL language that businesses have long used to query their data, and typically, they can’t maintain consistency across large datasets. With traditional SQL databases, for instance, you can use a command to instantly “JOIN” two separate datasets, so that you can then analyze them collectively. That’s not something you can typically do with NoSQL.

   Frenkiel and his MemSQL co-founder Shamgunov bill their creation as antidote to the limitations of the NoSQL brigade.

   The point, Gross says, is that the entire database world is evolving. So many databases — whether they’re tagged NoSQL or NewSQL — are inching towards a new reality where we can store data across an enormous number of machines but still change and analyze it as if it was stored on a single system.

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3. August 16, 2013 at 12:03 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Plague of game dev harassment erodes industry, spurs support groups
   http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/15/4622252/plague-of-game-dev-harassment-erodes-industry-spurs-support-groups

   The greatest threat to the video game industry may be some of its most impassioned fans. Increasingly, game developers are finding themselves under attack by some of the very people they devote their lives to entertaining. And this growing form of gamer-on-game-developer cyber harassment is starting to take its toll.

   Developers, both named and those who wish to remain anonymous, tell Polygon that harassment by gamers is becoming an alarmingly regular expected element of game development. Some developers say the problem was among the reasons they left the industry, others tell Polygon that the problem is so ubiquitous that it distracts them from making games or that they’re considering leaving the industry.

   The problem has become so pronounced that International Game Developers Association executive director Kate Edwards tells Polygon that the organization is looking into starting support groups and that while the harassment isn’t yet having a major impact on game development, “we’re at the cusp of where it could.”

   Fans are, by definition, fanatical.

   Online harassment, no matter the reasoning, is always about power and positioning, about putting people in their place, said Nathan Fisk, lecturer at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

   “I think fans harass developers for a range of reasons, but again, it is always about power and position,”

   ” Harassment silences and repositions content creators in ways that protect the interests of certain fan groups, which again is no justification for the kinds of abusive behavior and language seen online today.”

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4. August 16, 2013 at 1:40 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Nokia to launch Windows RT tablet in September, alleged pictures leak
   http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/16/4627220/nokia-windows-rt-tablet-pictures-leak-rumor

   Nokia is planning to launch its first Windows RT tablet in September. Sources familiar with Nokia’s plans have revealed to The Verge that the company will unveil its tablet at a special launch event in New York next month. Nokia has been courting developers for the event, and it’s tentatively scheduled for September 26th

   codenamed Vanquish, that features Qualcomm’s quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor and Windows RT. Nokia’s tablet will include LTE support, and will be made available on AT&T in the US.

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5. August 16, 2013 at 2:01 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Goodbye paper? Artificial Light recharging e-paper test

   Five Finnish media companies in the field tests in October-November, a new type of artificial light-loading, affordable, ePaper Solutions, newspaper distribution. Hundreds of test users receive on a daily basis for reading the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper in the morning and evening version.

   Initially, the project will focus on journalistic content distribution, and further study materials for distribution.

   Helsingin Sanomat told that the Journal is to find out whether the newspaper to replace the order with separable reader.

   EPaper ecosystem to form a five Finnish companies: Leia Media, Sanoma News, Bluegiga, Anygraaf and DNA.

   The project is based partners TiViT Next Media research program

   Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/hyvasti+paperi+keinovalolla+latautuva+epaperi+testissa/a921571

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6. August 16, 2013 at 4:33 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   QNAP Partners with ZyXEL for Affordable 10G NAS Solutions
   by Ganesh T S on August 15, 2013 4:45 PM EST
   http://www.anandtech.com/show/7223/qnap-partners-with-zyxel-for-affordable-10g-nas-solutions

   Small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) and datacenter operators are minimizing the footprints of their computing equipment using virtualization. Heavily virtualized environments require a good network backend (efficient IP-SANs and / or fast NAS units along with 10G-enabled switches). However, NAS units and switches with 10G functionality are currently not very cost-effective.

   QNAP already has powerful and affordable rackmounts capable of accepting 10G add-on cards

   ZyXEL’s NAS ambitions have been restricted to home consumer versions. Therefore, teaming up makes a lot of sense for both QNAP and ZyXEL.

   .

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7. August 19, 2013 at 10:02 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Celebrity endorsements: Turning tech companies around since 2010
   Op-ed: HTC’s big budget campaign is the latest questionable investment.
   http://arstechnica.com/staff/2013/08/celebrity-endorsements-turning-tech-companies-around-since-2010/

   HTC is struggling. Second quarter revenue fell sharply and the company is warning investors that it’ll post a loss for the third quarter of this year.

   But Chief Marketing Officer Ben Ho has big plans to turn the company around. The smartphone veteran has signed up Iron Man star Robert Downey, Jr. for a two-year deal. Downey will feature in HTC’s new billion dollar “Change” campaign.

   In picking a big-name actor to not only front its campaign, but also help shape it, HTC is following a well-trodden path. Got an ailing tech company that needs help becoming trendy, relevant, and, well, profitable? The answer is easy: pay big bucks to get a celebrity to endorse you.

   Perhaps the finest example of this phenomenon is the recent example of BlackBerry, neé RIM.
   The Canadians duly appointed singer-songwriter Alicia Keys as its “Global Creative Director.” The synergies are obvious. Keys uses BlackBerrys and is creative, and BlackBerry wants to sell more BlackBerrys, so uh. Yeah.
   Naturally, the campaign has been fantastically successful, with BlackBerry cementing its position as a phone platform nobody wants to buy—the third place spot has now been firmly ceded to Windows Phone

   But other celebrities are less disciplined. Oprah Winfrey raised a few laughs when her tweet endorsing Microsoft’s Surface tablets was made from an iPad.

   Lady Gaga, well-known imaging expert and worthy replacement for the genius that was Edwin Land, was hired in 2010 by the resurrected corpse of the Polaroid Corporation.

   Not every company that seeks celebrity inspiration is trying to resurrect an ailing brand or flog struggling products. Intel has gone this route too. Intel is a company in one of those awkward positions. It wants consumers to demand its products—hence da-dum-da-dum—but it essentially doesn’t sell any products to consumers.
   Intel gave punctuation-abusing singer-songwriter will.i.am an Intel ID badge and the title “director of creative innovation.”
   Intel wanted the musician to collaborate on devices such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Devices that, let’s not forget, Intel doesn’t build and doesn’t sell.

   HTC went this very route when in 2010 it paid $309 million for a 50.1 percent stake in Beats Audio, the overpriced headphone company created by rapper Dr Dre and producer Jimmy Iovine. Famous for its “Beats By Dre” branding
   HTC later sold 25 percent of the company back to Dre and Iovine for $150 million, retaining a 25.1 percent stake.

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8. August 19, 2013 at 10:04 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Mozilla to ship ‘Metro-ized’ Firefox Dec. 10
   If all goes well, touch-enabled Windows 8 browser will ship as part of Firefox 26
   http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9241675/Mozilla_to_ship_Metro_ized_Firefox_Dec._10

   Mozilla will launch Firefox for Microsoft’s Windows 8 “Modern” user interface in mid-December, more than a year after the operating system’s launch, according to the open-source developer’s planning documents.

   Called the “Preview Release,” the touch-ready browser will be packaged with Firefox 26 for the Windows desktop. Firefox 26 is slated to ship Dec. 10.

   Work on the browser — a so-called “Metro-ized” version of Firefox — will continue up until release, Mozilla said in notes from a planning meeting Wednesday published on its website.

   Third-party browser makers face unique hurdles in Windows 8. Only the default browser — which is set by the user — can run in the Modern UI; during setup, Windows 8 assigns Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) as the default browser; when Windows 8.1 ships in October, IE11 will be set as the default.

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9. August 19, 2013 at 10:47 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Dalton Caldwell: App.net may not have won yet, but we are still fighting the good fight
   http://gigaom.com/2013/08/17/dalton-caldwell-app-net-may-not-have-won-yet-but-we-are-still-fighting-the-good-fight/

   Dalton Caldwell says App.net may not be the size of Facebook or Twitter, but it has proven that there is a market need for an open platform for developing social apps, a goal he believes is worth fighting for.

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10. August 19, 2013 at 12:24 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Facebook’s request to the flash industry: ‘Make the worst flash possible’
    Counterintuitive, perhaps – but eminently sensible
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/13/facebook_calls_for_worst_flas_possible/

    Flash Memory Summit Flash-memory designers may currently be focused solely on improving speed and endurance, but Facebook’s director of capacity engineering and analysis wants something completely different from them.

    “The Facebook ask of the industry is make the worst flash possible,” Facebook’s Jason Taylor told his keynote audience at the Flash Memory Summit on Tuesday in Santa Clara, California. “Just make it dense and cheap.”

    What Taylor was talking about was flash to be used in “cold storage” – not only for rarely accessed data such as logs and metrics that Facebook uses to do its analytics, but also user content that’s rarely – if ever – accessed.

    “Photos, video – essentially, after you first create these, they’re almost never updated,” he said. “The majority of that data will probably be written once and read never – really, it’s sad.”

    Slow, low-endurance flash would be ideal for such an application. “Write-once, read-never is probably the spec for a lot of this,” he said, noting that when you want to keep something for a very long time and essentially never touch it, write speeds could be up to 10 times as slow as current flash, and the user experience would be hardly compromised.

    Facebook currently handles its “cold storage” by assembling a rack of hard drives that sit in racks, spun down, and are only spun up, individually, when a request is made.

    Cold storage that’s done using flash, however, doesn’t have the same spin-up latency as does hard drive–based cold storage.

    Cold flash wouldn’t need to be fast and long-lived

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11. August 19, 2013 at 12:36 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    12 simple rules: How Ted Codd transformed the humble database
    Near misses and lucky escapes for a multi-billion-dollar baby
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/19/ted_codd_90_relational_daddy/

    Anniversary Edgar – or Ted – Codd is one of the most influential figures in computing. Born 90 years today*, Codd – who passed away in 2003 – was the man who first conceived of the relational model for database management.

    Relational databases are today ubiquitous – on your PC, in your smartphone, in your bank’s ATMs, inside airline reservation systems – so it’s easy to be blasé about his contribution, but Codd worked in a different world.

    You needed to be a programming nerd or rocket scientist with a theoretical background to build even a functioning database.

    Codd’s contribution was revolutionary: first, it separated the data from the computing and from the application, and second, it described a framework for storing and retrieving data using simple rows and tables.

    It was a model everybody could buy into – and they did.

    Codd’s idea was to databases as the GUI from Xerox Parc was to PCs; relational brought databases to the masses. Decades later, analyst IDC pegs the worth of the global relational database market at about $28bn – and it’s growing at 7.6 per cent a year.

    The breakthrough earned Codd a Turing Award.

    In 1970, Codd published the paper that changed history, A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks (PDF). In a paper which famously opened: “Future users of large data banks must be protected from having to know how the data is organised in the machine”, he proposed substituting the hierarchical or navigational structures used to build databases with tables of rows and columns.

    It was simple and sensational. But IBM wouldn’t bite.

    At the time, databases fell in to two camps: IBM’s IMS (Information Management System) used a hierarchical system
    CODASYL was the second approach, and used a navigational database model which allowed you to define your database’s schema and its language.

    The problems were clear: neither scaled. Data was hardwired into either a top-down or a language or schema silo chosen by the database builder.

    Rows and tables were simple. They were agnostic about type and everybody understood the principle.

    The final piece of the relational puzzle slotted into place a year or two later, when IBMers Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce followed up with SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language), which later became SQL, giving physical form to the relational theory.

    SQL was ratified as a vendor-neutral standard with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1986 and six years later saw publication of what’s considered the breakthrough SQL spec, which managed to fill a number of gaps.

    Relational blossomed as it sucked on the data of the time: sales numbers, customer stats – text-based information. Relational imposed a rigid structure, but within it was the freedom and fluidity that everybody needed.

    As the 2000s approached, relational faced its next challenge: unstructured and non-text-based data – audio, video, graphics – plus the desire of corporate folk to quickly retrieve, serve and understand that data on a huge scale.

    SQL was judged too slow thanks to its centralised structure, and a new movement gave birth to NoSQL – databases that use a key value to describe an object and which are therefore known as key-value stores.

    Key-value stores are capable of recognising non-text data – music, video, graphics and so on. These stores include Cassandra, Cloudant, CouchDB, SimpleDB and Google AppEngine DataStore.

    The use of NoSQL has become widespread thanks to the rise of users like Google, Amazon clouds, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, which serve and store huge amounts of unstructured data using distributed servers.

    But for all its advantages there are problems.

    There’s no common NoSQL standard: you build on a database-by-database basis.

    Also, having eschewed SQL, many of first-generation NoSQL data stores voluntarily surrendered the ACID properties that are the hallmarks of relational and made it so suited to business.

    But later NoSQL startups have re-embraced the faith.

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12. August 19, 2013 at 12:40 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Experiences and Realities of a Homesourced IT worker
    http://tidbitsfortechs.blogspot.fi/2013/08/the-realties-of-working-from-home-in-it.html

    In news articles around the web and in the Real World, you can read all about the movement companies are making toward having workforces that are primarily home based. Yet, on the other end of the spectrum Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made headlines when she ended all telecommuting and brought everyone in-house.

    Other companies have small corporate offices with a few desks and some basic staff, and the balance of their staff works from home. I wish to take you through my journey in working from home in the IT world and share some facts that I’ve accumulated along the way.

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13. August 19, 2013 at 1:05 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Code By Voice Faster Than Keyboard
    http://www.i-programmer.info/news/99-professional/6263-code-by-voice-faster-than-keyboard.html

    Is it possible that we have been wasting our time typing programs. Could voice recognition, with a little help from an invented spoken language, be the solution we didn’t know we needed?

    About two years ago Tavis Rudd, developed a bad case of RSI caused by typing lots of code using Emacs. It was so severe that his hands went numb and he could no longer work. After trying all of the standard “conventional” solutions, such as different keyboard and generally paying attention to the ergonomics of his work station, nothing helped. As he puts it:
    “Desperate, I tried voice recognition”.

    If you have tried voice recognition, especially if it was a few years ago, you probably think that the project is doomed to failure.

    This is where the creativity comes into the picture. The Dragon Naturally Speaking system used by Rudd supported standard language quite well, but it wasn’t adapted to program editing commands. The solution was to use a Python speech extension, DragonFly, to program custom commands. OK, so far so good, but … the commands weren’t quite what you might have expected. Instead of English words for commands he used short vocalizations – you have to hear it to believe it. Now programming sounds like a conversation with R2D2. The advantage is that it is faster and the recognition is easier – it also sounds very cool and very techie.

    After a lot of practice, there are around 2000 commands, it is claimed that the system is faster than typing. So much so that it is still in use after the RSI cleared up.

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14. August 19, 2013 at 1:08 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Zalman launches world’s first CPU liquid cooler using nanofluids
    http://www.geek.com/chips/zalman-launches-worlds-first-cpu-liquid-cooler-using-nanofluids-1567407/

    The options for air and water cooling your CPU have expanded greatly over the years. It’s now possible to get some very quiet air cooling solutions, but the trade off is that the heatsink you fit inside your case is very large and heavy. Water cooling on the other hand may be more expensive, but it is quieter and moves the bulk away from your CPU. It’s also improving

    Zalman is claiming that the Reserator 3 is the world’s first liquid cooler to use nanofluids. What’s that then? It involves adding refrigerant nanoparticles to the fluid that gets pumped around inside the cooler transporting the heat produced by a CPU to the radiator and fan where it is expelled.

    Zalman believes it can offer better cooling, and rates the Reserator 3 as offering up to 400W of cooling while remaining very quiet.

    The Reserator 3 pumps up to 90 liters of water every hour

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15. August 19, 2013 at 1:23 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    The Metro experiment is dead: Time to unleash Windows Phone+
    How Microsoft can capture the mobile market – properly
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/08/microsoft_metro_analysis/

    Analysis Is this the moment for Windows Phone 8, the overlooked diamond in the Redmond rough, to shine?

    Now that Microsoft bigwigs have realised that cramming their desktop operating system into a touchscreen tablet format was unwise, to put it generously, how about scaling up the smartphone cousin to capture the exploding mobe market and the tablet world? That’ll leave desktop users in peace with a desktop OS.

    When panic breaks out at Microsoft, the company makes terrible decisions: the “Kill Java” panic of the mid-1990s is an example of the company behaving as if its very existence was at stake, and behaving badly. In 2010, Apple’s iPad caused another such fright.

    In response, the early strategy was a bold but simple one: encourage third-party developers to create a new library of apps using a central Metro programming interface, allowing the software to run on Windows 8-powered PC desktops, ARM tablets, x86 slabs, laptop hybrids, smartphones and more without a rewrite for each targeted device.

    Except it didn’t actually turn out that way. Under Windows chief Steven Sinofsky, the Windows 8 desktop team developed a messianic fervour. It became obsessed by distractions such as the Microsoft-specified Surface laptop-tablet computers and the ARM port of Windows 8, Windows RT. The team wouldn’t work with the Windows Phone 8 group to develop the crucial common programming interface the aforementioned strategy needed.

    The pain was real enough, though. Windows 8 insisted on replacing the familiar desktop with the Metro screen of noddy widgets, which may look nice on a tablet but is absurd on a 1,900-pixel wide monitor when you’re trying to do some work. It simply caused confusion and inconvenience for consumers and enterprise users.

    Businesses didn’t have the training budget to retrain their staff to use the new Metro interface, or if they did, they were happy to sit on the cash instead. So Microsoft found itself sacrificing an enterprise IT upgrade cycle in order to maintain Metro-everywhere.

    The Charge of the Metro Brigade may have made sense when the route to gaining tablet market share involved simplifying a PC into something that could be operated by a fingertip and slotted comfortably into an A5 envelope. But the market has changed in the past three years: smartphones grew bigger and became more sophisticated. With five-inch displays now common place and “phablets” appealing way beyond gadget geeks to reach some unlikely parts of the market, it now makes more sense to enhance Windows Phone rather than cripple the desktop.

    Windows Phone 8, Redmond’s operating system for mobiles, is truly a jewel, and by contrast to Windows 8 desktop, it is well liked by its users.

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16. August 19, 2013 at 1:25 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Microsoft warns of post-April zero day hack bonanza on Windows XP
    Beginning April 2014, patches will bring new threats
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/16/microsoft_warns_itll_be_handing_out_zero_days_for_windows_xp/

    Microsoft has a Windows XP problem: people still like it and aren’t willing to upgrade just yet. So it’s warning users that if they don’t upgrade soon, hackers will lie in wait each new Patch Tuesday to reverse-engineer a full set of new vulnerabilities.

    “The very first month that Microsoft releases security updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will reverse engineer those updates, find the vulnerabilities and test Windows XP to see if it shares those vulnerabilities,” said Tim Rains, Microsoft’s director of trustworthy computing, in a blog post.

    “If it does, attackers will attempt to develop exploit code that can take advantage of those vulnerabilities on Windows XP. Since a security update will never become available for Windows XP to address these vulnerabilities, Windows XP will essentially have a ‘zero day’ vulnerability forever.”

    He points out that from July 2012 through July 2013, Windows XP received 45 patches, 30 of which were relevant to Windows 7 and 8 as well, and there is considerable flaw cross-over found among the three operating systems. XP is also by far the most malware-infected operating systems, he points out.

    Hackers have learned to get around XP systems like Data Execution Prevention (DEP), Rains warned, although it has forced attackers to up their game somewhat. The threat landscape has also changed significantly since the last service pack for XP came out in 2008 – five years is a very long time in the malware industry, after all.

    Despite the ending of free XP security updates on April 8 of next year, Rains says he still meets businesses that run XP on some systems and plan to continue doing so until the hardware fails. According to recent data, 15 per cent of IT managers running XP don’t even realize support is ending, and they are going to have to shell out for premium support for security holes.

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17. August 19, 2013 at 1:26 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Windows 8.1: So it’s, er, half-speed ahead for Microsoft’s Plan A
    A desktop failure gambling on slablet success
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/28/windows_8_point_one_review/

    Microsoft’s task with Windows 8.1 is to make the operating system more accommodating to users with no interest in Metro, while also improving the tablet side to inject some life into the struggling Modern app ecosystem. Although that seems a big ask, it is worth noting that Windows 8.0 shares the same core code as the well-regarded Windows Server 2012, suggesting that there is a solid base.

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18. August 19, 2013 at 1:33 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Sidekiq
    http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/sidekiq

    From my perspective, one of the best parts of being a Web developer is the instant gratification. You write some code, and within minutes, it can be used by people around the world, all accessing your server via a Web browser. The rapidity with which you can go from an idea to development to deployment to actual users benefiting from (and reacting to) your work is, in my experience, highly motivating.

    Users also enjoy the speed with which new developments are deployed. In the world of Web applications, users no longer need to consider, download or install the “latest version” of a program; when they load a page into their browser, they automatically get the latest version. Indeed, users have come to expect that new features will be rolled out on a regular basis. A Web application that fails to change and improve over time quickly will lose ground in users’ eyes.

    We measure the speed of our Web applications in milliseconds, not in seconds, and in just the past few years, we have reached the point when taking even one second to respond to a user is increasingly unacceptable.

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19. August 19, 2013 at 1:42 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Forrester: Yammer place a SharePoint shortcomings

    SharePoint’s shortcomings communication tool can compensate by using the Yammer, recommends that the analyst firm Forrester. The two service integration solves many issues of cooperation.

    Forrester, more than 100 million users in SharePoint is a strategic investment for many businesses. The service features alone do not usually enough, since there are shortcomings, particularly in the assimilation of the users and the company’s internal communication areas.

    The company recently conducted a survey in which SharePoint firms to notify users lack that went bad user learning to use the system. In addition, among other things, generally poor SharePoint experience, and un-fulfilment of service expectations.

    The report prepared by Rob Koplowitz notes that SharePoint gaps is particularly suitable for Microsoft Yammer.

    Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer last year to 1.2 billion dollars, or about 900 million euros. The company announced in June its intention to invest in the future even more SharePoint compatibility.

    Microsoft does not, of course, Yammer, free of charge.

    Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/forrester+yammer+paikkaa+hyvin+sharepointin+puutteita/a922343

    Reply
20. August 20, 2013 at 11:36 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Tech industry slips into a surprising slump
    http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tech-slump-20130819,0,871392.story

    After a six-year boom ignited by the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, tech firms are in the unusual position of being laggards in the U.S. economy’s recovery.

    In a surprising turn, the tech industry is in a slump even as the U.S. economy picks up steam.

    Though there are still bright spots among companies that help manage data or provide cybersecurity, many of the industry’s biggest companies — Microsoft, Google, IBM and Dell — are struggling to figure out the changes in the way businesses and consumers are buying and using technology.

    Microsoft is among the tech industry’s biggest players struggling to navigate the changes in the way businesses and consumers are buying and using technology. In its disappointing summer earnings report Microsoft took an ugly $900-million write-down because of poor sales of its Surface tablet

    It’s not a bust — not yet at least. And it isn’t as serious as the 2000 dot-com crash, when tech’s fortunes quickly deteriorated. Indeed, on the ground in Silicon Valley, there is a bit of a disconnect because competition for hiring remains intense.

    But in recent months, tech earnings have plummeted as tech companies have reported slower growth or declines. Venture capital has fallen almost 7% this year. And tech stocks have lagged the broader stock market this year.

    “What I’ve seen is that a lot of the tech heavyweights are having challenges,” said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. “There’s a fundamental shift in the marketplace that many people are grappling with. What we’re seeing is a transitional period.”

    And tech finds itself in the unusual position of being a laggard in the economy’s recovery.

    “Technology remains a big drag on earnings growth,” Zacks Investment Research analyst Sheraz Mian wrote in a recent report. “The sector’s earnings picture is very poor.”

    Companies continue to shift from buying their own hardware and software to renting computing power through cloud-based services in which files are kept at massive data centers in far-flung locations. These save money for buyers but generate less revenue for sellers.

    Consumers, meanwhile, appear to be showing signs of fatigue after embracing so many new gadgets in recent years.

    PC sales have been devastated by tablets. But now tablets are losing steam, with even Apple reporting a decline in iPad sales in the most recent quarter.

    Worldwide tablet shipments fell nearly 10% in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, according to an August study from IDC.

    Reply
21. August 20, 2013 at 11:45 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Groupon Takes Affiliate Marketing (And Ad Tech) Into Its Own Hands, Launches Groupon Partner Network
    http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/19/groupon-takes-affiliate-marketing-and-ad-tech-into-its-own-hands-launches-groupon-partner-network/

    Groupon’s latest step forward in its ambition to become the default network for local commerce is taking the company into ad tech waters. Today, it is launching the Groupon Partner Network, a new platform to manage all of the company’s affiliate marketing related to the deals and other products it sells.

    The move will ultimately mean that Groupon pays less to third parties each time a deal gets purchased by a user, but Groupon also is promising, at least for now, that it will also mean better returns for publishers who elect to become affiliate marketing partners of Groupon’s. Unless September 30, those who sign up get commissions of 10%-12% for Groupon Local deals, 6%-8% for Groupon Getaways, and 5%-8% percent for Groupon Goods. It’s not disclosing what cuts will be after that period.

    The platform also offers a kind of dashboard to partners, which includes real-time reports to track how well affiliate deals are performing

    Longer term, this also lays the groundwork for what Groupon may end up doing to use the platform to promote services outside of its own. “It’s in discussion to open this to third parties,”

    Reply
22. August 20, 2013 at 11:55 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    The ‘Mood Graph’: How Our Emotions Are Taking Over the Web
    http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/08/move-over-social-graph-its-time-for-the-mood-graph-and-that-might-not-be-a-good-thing/

    Recently, URL shortener Bitly announced a beta version of its tool for “Feelings”, a “fun bookmarklet to express how you feel about the content you’re sharing”. Its tagline, however, is even more telling: “Because you don’t ‘like’ everything.” This is a subtle jab at Facebook’s Like button, even though Facebook, too, provided a way earlier this year for its users to more broadly express how they feel by selecting from a dropdown menu of options (happy, sad, tired, etc.) and emoji.

    All of this is especially interesting when you consider the most recent research finding, released this past week, that Facebook may “provide an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection,” but “rather than enhancing well-being … [it] may undermine it.”

    Oh, the irony: Facebook keeps expanding the emotional bandwidth of its interface, yet its users are still depressed.

    Behavior-altering interfaces are packaged as fun little emojis and innocuous, ‘handy-dandy buttons’.

    Constraints Change Communication in Surprising Ways

    Companies Want Us to Box Our Emotions In

    We’re actually not that much closer to getting a computer to understand our intent at a deeper level than we were 30 years ago, even though user interfaces and the infrastructure behind them have continued to evolve on the surface. Despite significant advances in machine learning, it’s extremely difficult (or not practically efficient) for computers to understand and process natural language, automate sentiment analysis, or determine ambiguous context.

    It’s easier to create systems that encourage users to code themselves into standardized categories, to box themselves in.

    The Game of Moods Begins

    People aren’t mindless puppets. We like to make meaning on our own terms: we lie; we play games. It’s possible, therefore, that users will find new ways to manipulate and use the tools that enable mood graphs. People are known for finding ingenious ways to subvert platforms.

    Or, what happens when an entire government can track our moods, as they are already doing in India? (The implications are even more nefarious when you couple that with the country’s massive ID program).

    Reply
23. August 20, 2013 at 1:05 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Upcoming ‘Supervised User’ Feature of Google Chrome
    http://browserfame.com/2056/chrome-supervised-account-preview

    As we have seen earlier, Chrome is set to get less-privileged accounts soon. These user accounts, now termed as “Supervised Accounts”, would have less privileges as compared to the standard users and can be used for granting limited and controlled access to other users. For example, it can be used by parents to control browsing activities and other settings for their kids.

    Currently, this supervised user management is under development

    Reply
24. August 20, 2013 at 1:10 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Survey Says: Use of Open-Source Will Increase in 2013
    http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1365&doc_id=266590&cid=nl.dn14

    The open-source movement continues to gain traction in 2013 among core groups, according to a survey released by electronics distributor Newark element14. The results conclude that more professional engineers, hobbyists, and students will all use open-source software and hardware for one or more design projects this year.

    Of those surveyed, more than half (56 percent) of professional engineers will use BeagleBone and Arduino in 2013. For hobbyists, that number jumps to 82 percent, and for students, 85 percent. Additionally, more than half (52 percent) of professional engineers are more likely to use open-source software in 2013, as well as 81 percent of hobbyists and 77 percent of students, as compared to years past.

    What do these findings mean for the engineering and design communities? Perhaps most importantly, these numbers demonstrate how engineers’ opinions about open-source are changing. Traditionally, open-source designing in the commercial space were seen as a risk. With the sheer availability of open-source tools and resources in recent years, those fears are being mitigated by increased adoption.

    Relatedly, platforms like BeagleBone and Arduino were once predominately exclusive to hobbyists, but now professional engineers and even students are using them. The gap is closing across these groups, demonstrating how technology is expanding design platform choices.

    Reply
25. August 20, 2013 at 2:11 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Information Management Executives worry: the cloud problems eating money

    IT Services does not take cloud services without reservation – especially the hidden charges is frightening.

    Compuware survey showed that 79 percent of IT executives mourn the cloud problems resulting from the use of monetary expenditure.

    According to management, the biggest drawback of the software operational problems due to poor user experience.

    In addition, poor usability can cause a blow brand and customer loyalty.

    Also, the availability of the cloud, the operation and management of the damage caused by a loss of income.

    “Surprisingly, many companies do not foresee any problems, but the fire to put it out as and when they are up,” said Compuware Vice President Petri Ahveninen the company’s release.

    According to the survey, almost three in four companies use cloud applications, monitoring operations and the management of obsolete ways.

    “The most common applications are monitored only the availability and uptime of the more important would be to get information about the end-user experience of the response time, the rendering of the page, and on the interaction of the time,” says Compuware.

    Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/tietohallintojohtajat+murehtivat+pilviongelmat+syovat+rahaa/a922712

    Reply
26. August 20, 2013 at 3:27 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Automation Myths
    The NSA Can’t Replace 90% of Its System Administrators
    http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/08/automation-myths.html

    In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA’s domestic surveillance activities, the NSA has recently announced that they plan to get rid of 90% of their system administrators via software automation in order to “improve security.” So far, I’ve mostly seen this piece of news reported and commented on straightforwardly. But it simply doesn’t add up. Either the NSA has a monumental (yet not necessarily surprising) level of bureaucratic bloat that they could feasibly cut that amount of staff regardless of automation, or they are simply going to be less effective once they’ve reduced their staff.

    I talked with a few people who are intimately familiar with the kind of software that would typically be used for automation of traditional sysadmin tasks (Puppet and Chef). Typically, their products are used to allow an existing group of operations people to do much more, not attempting to do the same amount of work with significantly fewer people. The magical thinking that the NSA can actually put in automation sufficient to do away with 90% of their system administration staff belies some fundamental misunderstandings about automation. I’ll tackle the two biggest ones here.

    1. Automation replaces people. Automation is about gaining leverage–it’s about streamlining human tasks that can be handled by computers in order to add mental brainpower.

    2. Automation increases security. Automation increases consistency, which can have a relationship with security. Prior to automating something, you might have a wide variety of people doing the same thing in varying ways, hence with varying outcomes. From a security standpoint, automation provides infrastructure security, and makes it auditable. But it doesn’t really increase data/information security (e.g. this file can/cannot live on that server)–those too are human tasks requiring human judgement.

    Reply
27. August 20, 2013 at 3:28 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Xen’s triumphant return to CentOS
    Posted by Jim Perrin at 4:05 PM Thursday, June 20, 2013
    http://www.bit-integrity.com/2013/06/xens-triumphant-return-to-centos.html

    Xen is once again a functional and supported platform on CentOS

    It’s not all sunshine though. For the purists, this does require replacing the stock kernel and libvirt, as well as a minor gotcha involving the bnx2 network driver.

    Reply
28. August 21, 2013 at 10:26 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Intel, Unisys partner on a new range of servers
    The two will work on a new platform for mission-critical loads and help people migrate off legacy RISC systems.
    http://www.itworld.com/hardware/369712/intel-unisys-partner-new-range-servers

    Intel and Unisys are set to introduce on September 9 a new kind of secure computing platform designed to as a replacement platform for RISC systems running mission-critical cloud and big data workloads. Unisys is taking the lead on this and it will be shown at its Universe client-centered event taking place in Chicago.

    The new platform will combine Unisys’s advanced secure partitioning technology, or sPar, with Xeon-based servers. Unisys has made sPar available for Xeon-based servers for some time but plans to announce new ones at the event.

    We know some details of the new servers already. Unisys will adopt Intel’s Integrated I/O to increase input/output speed using PCI Express 3.0, and it will incorporate Intel’s Turbo Boost Technology 2.0, which manages cores to shut down those not being used to save power and give a boost in performance to individual cores that need it. And it will incorporate Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES NI) for faster, more efficient high-volume encryption.

    The new Unisys platform will support Linux, Windows and migrated Unix application workloads on the same platform and provision them across all delivery models – from high-availability mission-critical environments to public clouds – with levels of security and performance required for each workload.

    Not said yet is whether or not these will be custom chips from Intel. Late in July, Intel announced it was going into the custom chip business, a big change from its long-time off-the-rack MO. Intel now offers a custom chip for major customers, assuming you are big enough, of course.

    Its first customers are eBay and Facebook. They will get customized versions of low-power Xeon E3 System-on-Chips (SoCs) design using the 14 nanometer Broadwell architecture coming out next year.

    Reply
29. August 21, 2013 at 11:34 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Japan’s unwanted IT workers dumped in ‘forcing-out rooms’
    Firms bore unwanted workers into bailing
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/21/boredom_rooms_japan_electronics_firms/

    Some of Japan’s biggest technology companies send certain employees to “boredom” or “forcing-out” rooms where they’re forced to undertake menial tasks designed to make them quit.

    A New York Times report detailed the experience of 51-year-old Sony employee Shusaku Tani who refused to take early retirement after his position at the Sony Sendai Technology Center was eliminated.

    With no job left for Tani and others like him at the firm, Sony decided to put them in an oidashibeya – which can be translated as “forcing-out room” or less accurately “boredom room”.

    Here he apparently browses the web and reads books all day before preparing a daily report on his activities and leaving for home.

    In other cases, skilled employees have apparently been forced to undertake data entry or repetitive assembly line work.

    It’s unclear how extensive this practice is in Japan although the NYT referred to local media reports claiming that Panasonic, NEC and Toshiba, among others, use the technique.

    Boring workers to career death may be a symptom of labour laws that make it difficult for corporates to lay off staff without good reason.

    “We consider that the biggest reason why the Japanese electronics industry is getting weak is the strict employment policy in Japan,” Gartner analyst Hiroyuki Shimizu told The Reg.

    “It is almost impossible for Japanese companies to flexibly restructure their human resources. It is also difficult to close factories in Japan, as a lot of people are laid off.”

    Over the past 20 years, company execs have therefore been focussed on technology areas where they have the most human resources and assets rather than where they can differentiate, he explained.

    Shimizu gave the example of the Sony Walkman, which the firm is still developing even though Apple has the dominant global market share in that area.

    “Sony keeps focusing on the development of sound quality, even though many users hate Sony’s music content management software ‘X-Application’,” he said.

    Reply
30. August 21, 2013 at 11:43 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    This Software Won’t Let You Look Away
    The creepiest educational technology yet
    http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/this-software-wont-let-you-look-away/278812/

    It’s hard to imagine a creepier educational technology than “FocusAssist,” a new feature announced by online training company Mindflash last week. Designed to be used in corporate training courses on iPad, FocusAssist, according to Businessweek:

    uses the tablet’s camera to track a user’s eye movements. When it senses that you’ve been looking away for more than a few seconds (because you were sending e-mails, or just fell asleep), it pauses the course, forcing you to pay attention–or at least look like you are–in order to complete it.

    Yeesh. FocusAssist forces users to pay attention to Mindflash’s videos.

    I was immediately creeped out by this. FocusAssist forces people to perform a very specific action with their eyeballs, on behalf of “remote organizations,” so that they may learn what the organization wants them to learn. Forcing a human’s attention through algorithmic surveillance: It’s the stuff of A Clockwork Orange.

    But maybe everything just sounds creepier when you talk about it in corporatese. Is FocusAssist as insidious as it sounds?

    Reply
31. August 21, 2013 at 2:52 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Aug. 20, 2013, 2:08 p.m.
    Why The Washington Post uses WordPress and empathetic design
    http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/why-the-washington-post-uses-wordpress-and-empathetic-design/

    Post has adopted WordPress and what it lets them do that other CMSes haven’t. From the description:

    The Washington Post used a user-centered design philosophy to radically shift our development process to launch dozens of successful new blogs, platforms and tools in the past year. This philosophy is the reason why we use WordPress.

    Here’s Yuri’s writeup of an earlier iteration of this talk. From that:

    We concentrate so much on the front end, a lot of times we forget about the people who use the system more than anyone. We the people. The reporters, photographers, editors. People like Ezra Klein. People like me.

    Everyone hates their CMS. The problem is enterprise software isn’t build for us. It’s built for people who buy enterprise software, not for users. Newspaper CMSes were built to handle every problem ever. They can do newspaper pagination and online management and make waffles.

    This makes doing simple things difficult and change near impossible because each change has to worry about every feature. Features rarely help and more often than not they complicate everything else you do going forward.

    Reply
32. August 21, 2013 at 3:24 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Linux more and more popular server operating system in companies

    A recent study shows that as many as 83 percent of companies use open source Linux operating systems on their server.

    The respondent IT managers say that the main reasons for using Linux are lower total cost of ownership, superior performance and independence of IT providers.

    The survey (meade behalf of Suse) shows that Linux has reached a strong position in the corporate server operating system environments.

    The survey revealed that the main reasons for the growth are lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for Linux to better performance. Independence, were more important to almost 60 per cent of the respondents.

    The majority of the respondent companies use Linux operating systems on their server enviroment. More than 40 percent of companies use Linux as the main platform for the server or one of the major server platforms.

    Linux continues to expand as a business-critical application server platform. The respondents are using or planning to use Linux as a platform for the next 12 months databases (69 percent), data storage (62 percent) and business analytics (62 percent), customer data (42 percent) and enterprise resource planning (31 percent).

    Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/selvitys+linux+yha+suositumpi+palvelinkayttojarjestelma+yrityksissa/a923011?s=u&wtm=tivi-21082013

    Reply
33. August 22, 2013 at 9:27 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Goldman Invests $40 Million in Salesforce Rival SugarCRM
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-21/goldman-invests-40-million-in-salesforce-rival-sugarcrm.html

    SugarCRM Inc., a maker of sales-tracking software, raised $40 million from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to speed global expansion as it takes on larger rivals Oracle Corp. (ORCL) and Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM)

    The Cupertino, California-based company will use the cash to invest in research and development as well as sales and marketing, Chief Executive Officer Larry Augustin said in an interview. Sugar 7, the latest version of SugarCRM’s customer-relationship management software, will debut in October.

    “We think the opportunity for CRM is vastly underpenetrated,” Augustin said. “We figure there are 450 million to 500 million people in customer-facing roles. Today, commercial CRM companies serve maybe 20 million of them.”

    SugarCRM, founded in 2004, added 600 new customers in the second quarter, bringing the total to 6500 commercial clients. Most individual users run a free version of the program, and paying customers are charged $35 to $100 per user per month. Sales rose 30 percent in the second quarter from the same period a year earlier, about half the growth rate for all of 2012.

    “The CRM market is ripe for technologies and products that change the face of how enterprises conduct business with their customers,” Munfa said in today’s statement. “SugarCRM, with its user-centric vision and product design, has stepped up to meet a real market need.”

    Reply
34. August 22, 2013 at 12:04 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Linux Hackers Rebuild Internet From Silicon Valley Garage
    http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/coreos-the-new-linux/

    Alex Polvi is living the great Silicon Valley archetype. Together with some old school friends, he’s piecing together a tech revolution from inside a two-car Palo Alto garage.

    nside that Palo Alto garage — the door open to the Silicon Valley summer sun, and the camping gear stacked against the wall — Polvi and his colleagues are fashioning a new computer operating system known as CoreOS. This isn’t an OS for running desktop PCs or laptops or tablets. It’s meant to run the hundreds of thousands of servers that underpin the modern internet.

    The project is based on Google’s ChromeOS, the new-age laptop operating system that automatically updates itself every few weeks, but unlike ChromeOS, it can run more than just your personal machine. It can run every web service you ever visit, no matter how big. And it will let the companies that run those services evolve their online operations much more quickly — and cheaply — than they can with traditional server software.

    “We’ve borrowed a lot of concepts from the browser world,” Polvi explains, “and applied them to servers.”

    You can think of CoreOS as a new substrate for the internet. Web giants such as Google and Amazon and big Wall Street financial outfits, including the NASDAQ stock exchange, have built similar server operating systems for their own use, but with CoreOS — an open source software project — Polvi’s startup is creating something anyone can use. “We’re building Google’s infrastructure for everyone else,”

    The CoreOS project is still in its infancy

    Kroah-Hartman says he’s been wanting to build something like CoreOS for over half a decade. Traditionally, server operating systems, including most Linux distros, are built to be replaced every few years. Over those years, developers may spruce them up with security patches and other updates, but more ambitious upgrades are too much of a hassle, and in the end, the OS — and the software built atop it — starts to ossify. With CoreOS, the idea is to build an OS that you can instantly replace whenever you like, without breaking the software applications that run on it.

    If you own a Chromebook, you get a new operating system every six weeks or so — and all you have to do is reboot your machine.

    “This has not only narrowed the window for security vulnerabilities in browsers, it has moved the entire web forward,” says Polvi, pointing out that new model has helped speed the arrival of HTML5, the standard means of building applications that run in web browsers.

    The CoreOS project is a fork of Google’s ChromeOS code, meaning Polvi and company grabbed the open source code and started reshaping it for the project at hand. The result is a super streamlined server operating system that can evolve as quickly as ChromeOS.

    With CoreOS, all applications sit inside “containers” — little bubbles of software code that include everything an application needs to run. These containers then latch onto the main OS through the simplest of interfaces. That means you can easily move applications from OS to OS and from machine to machine — much as you move shipping containers from boat to boat and train to train — but it also means you can easily update the OS without disturbing the applications. “The way we’re able to consistently update the OS — and be nimble — is to make sure we have a consistent way of running applications,” Polvi says.

    Building such a system is far more complicated than it might seem, but Google has already done much of the work with ChromeOS, and the project taps into an existing container project called Docker, which seeks to ease the use of these software building blocks. Like ChromeOS, CoreOS is based on the Linux kernel, and it can run containers much like any other Linux operating system.

    Reply
35. August 22, 2013 at 12:05 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    CoreOS: A new way to think about servers
    http://coreos.com/

    Reply
36. August 22, 2013 at 12:06 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Cloud market revenue to reach $20bn in three years
    http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/3217/cloud-market-revenue-to-reach-20bn-in-three-years

    Revenue generated from cloud computing could reach almost $20 billion (£12.75 billion) by the end of 2016, according to a projection by Market Monitor, a division of analyst house 451 Research.

    That’s according to the company’s Cloud as-a-Service overview report, which forecasts the revenue generated by 309 cloud services providers and technology vendors across 14 sectors.

    It suggests cloud market revenue will increase at 30 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next three years, bringing it close to the $20 billion mark.

    The research has also shown that Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) accounted for the majority of the total market revenue in 2012 and Market Monitor predicts a 37 per cent CAGR for it between now and the end of 2016.

    Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) made up 24 per cent of total 2012 cloud revenue and, according to the organisation, is expected to experience the fastest growth at 41 per cent CAGR to 2016.

    Reply
37. August 22, 2013 at 3:29 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    HP CEO Whitman “Disappointed” by Enterprise Sales in Q3 Results
    http://allthingsd.com/20130821/hp-q3-results-close-but-not-close-enough-as-shares-fall/

    Quarterly results from computing giant Hewlett-Packard just crossed the wires, and they’re close, but not close enough to what Wall Street had wanted to see.

    HP reported a per-share profit of 86 cents on sales of $27.2 billion. While the bottom-line number was in line with what analysts had expected, sales fell slightly short of the $27.3 billion consensus. HP shares fell by more than three percent immediately after the results were reported in after-hours trading.

    It was a tough quarter, no surprise there. PC sales fell about 11 percent, with sales to consumers down 22 percent. Printing revenue fell four percent, despite sales of printing hardware rising by five percent. Sales of printing supplies, once the cash cow at HP, fell four percent.

    Revenue in the enterprise group fell nine percent year on year.

    Reply
38. August 23, 2013 at 1:57 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Ubuntu devs to get 15-min code review, full SDK love – Canonical
    Faster, smoother, sandboxier
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/21/ubuntu_profiles_sandboxing/

    Changes in Ubuntu will speed up the process of building apps and getting them approved for Software Center – but they could leave you more tied into the Linux distro’s software development kit (SDK).

    Canonical has said it is changing the way packages – another name for the apps that make the basic operating system interesting – are developed, downloaded and managed by penguins.

    The company is also rolling out further sandboxing to contain naughty third-party apps and rogue code and to streamline the process for getting packages approved for download from the Ubuntu Software Center.

    For better or worse, though, it sounds like you’ll have to use the Ubuntu SDK instead of cross-platform widget toolkits such as GTK or QT – hard luck for those of you who love your GIMP.

    Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon here revealed future versions of Ubuntu will feature something called “click packages” – a means of automatically wrapping up your project’s code simply by pressing a button available inside the Ubuntu SDK.

    It seems the click packages will be used instead of the Debian packaging format – .deb – used primarily for building the operating system.

    The maintenance of Ubuntu packages is being turned into an online service

    Currently, packages are synched when you update using apt-get that checks back with the Ubuntu archive. Obviously the more packages, the more complicated and slower it is to identify and solve dependency conflicts.

    From now on, all dependency will be on the Ubuntu SDK. “With a click package the software simply depends on the Ubuntu SDK. This means we don’t need to worry about all that complex dependency resolution: we know the dependency, the Ubuntu SDK,” Bacon said.

    Further, information on those dependencies between different modules will be served and stored as a web service.

    Full sandboxing is also being used to help simplify the process for developers uploading and updating their applications in the Ubuntu Software Center. Sandboxing is already provided in the Linux kernel and is on by default from Ubuntu 7.10 onwards using AppArmour.

    According to Bacon, sandboxing will mitigate the need for a full code review of apps trying to get into the Ubuntu Software Center.

    Reply
39. August 23, 2013 at 2:11 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Germany warns: You just CAN’T TRUST some Windows 8 PCs
    Microsoft: You can still buy an ‘insecure’ Win 8 machine sans TPM chip
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/23/nsa_germany_windows_8/

    Microsoft’s new touchy Windows 8 operating system is so vulnerable to data-sniffing that Germany’s businesses and government should not use it, German authorities have warned in a series of leaked documents.

    According to leaked documents that appeared in German weekly Der Zeit, the country’s authorities fear the OS’s baked-in Trusted Computing technology – specifications and protocols including the infamous Secure Boot feature, which work together with hardware loaded with a unique encryption key inaccessible to the rest of the system – means that Germans’ data is not secure.

    Authorities at Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) later clarified that it was the Trusted Computing specs in Windows 8 in conjunction with the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) embedded in the hardware that creates the security issue. BSI released a statement which backtracked slightly and insisted that “specific user groups [using] of Windows 8 in combination with a TPM may well mean an increase in safety [concerns]“.

    Trusted Computing is a controversial bunch of specifications developed by a group of companies including AMD, Cisco, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Wave Systems Corp.

    The tech is designed to stop the use of software and files which do not contain the correct digital rights permissions (thus protecting the property of vendors behind the protocols), including “unauthorised operating systems” (a specific function of the much-maligned Secure Boot). But Secure Boot also protects the users from rootkits and other malware attacks. The set of permissions is automatically updated online, outside of the control of the user.

    A machine that contains a Trusted Platform Module and runs software adhering to the Trusted Computing specifications is, arguably, under the control of the vendor – in this case Microsoft

    A TPM 2.0 chip is being built into more and more computers running Windows 8.

    The newspaper obtained an internal document from Germany’s Ministry of Economic Affairs written at the beginning of 2012. It warned of “the loss of full sovereignty over information technology” and that “the security objectives of confidentiality’ and integrity are no longer guaranteed”.

    It continued: “The use of ‘Trusted Computing’… in this form … is unacceptable for the federal administration and the operators of critical infrastructure.”

    Trusted Platform Module 2.0 is considerably more invasive than older versions.

    “From the perspective of the BSI, the use of Windows 8 in combination with a TPM 2.0 is accompanied by a loss of control over the operating system and the hardware used. This results in new risks for the user, especially for the federal government and critical infrastructure.”

    Reply
40. August 23, 2013 at 2:12 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Misinterpretation of Standard Causing USB Disconnects On Resume In Linux
    http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/08/22/2345221/misinterpretation-of-standard-causing-usb-disconnects-on-resume-in-linux

    “According to a new revelation by Sarah Sharp, misinterpretation of the USB 2.0 standard may have been the culprit behind USB disconnects on resume in Linux all along rather than cheap and buggy devices. According to Sharp the USB core is to blame for the disconnections rather than the devices themselves as the core doesn’t wait long enough for the devices to transition from a “’esume state to U0.’”

    Reply
41. August 23, 2013 at 2:55 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://plus.google.com/116960357493251979546/posts/RZpndv4BCCD
    says:

    Linux may have been causing USB disconnects on resume from device suspend all along.

    Pretty much for my entire career in Linux USB (eight years now?), we’ve been complaining about how USB device power management just sucks. We enable auto-suspend for a USB device driver, and find dozens of different USB devices that simply disconnect from the bus when auto-suspend is enabled.

    For years, we’ve blamed those devices for being cheap, crappy, and broken. We talked about blacklists in the kernel, and ripped those out when they got too big. We’ve talked about whitelists in userspace, but not many distros have time to cultivate such lists.

    It turns out it’s not always the device’s fault.

    There’s a 10 ms timeout in the USB core, with a simple comment over it “TRSMRCY = 10 msec”. And indeed, in the USB 2.0 spec, section 7.1.7.7, the spec states “The USB System Software must provide a 10 ms resume recovery time (TRSMRCY) during which it will not attempt to access any device connected to the affected (just-activated) bus segment.”

    A software developer would say, “Ok, that means I can access the device after I wait 10 ms.” However, a hardware developer would take a careful look at Table 7-14 and notice TRSMRCY is listed as a minimum value.

    That means the USB ports can be in resume for longer than TRSMRCY. If the USB core attempts to access those ports while the device is still coming out of resume, such as issuing transfers to the device, or resetting the port, the device will disconnect, or transfer errors will occur. This causes the USB core to mark the device as disconnected.

    The maximum time I’ve seen is around 17 ms, and the time is above 10 ms in about 8% of the remote wakeup events I’ve tested.

    This patch is not the “real fix” for solving the issues with the USB core, and I despise fixing things by tweaking timeout values

    Reply
42. August 23, 2013 at 3:29 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Make Windows Better
    Pokki brings your favorite apps to your PC.
    http://www.pokki.com/

    Reply
43. August 23, 2013 at 7:40 pm

    Tomi says:

    Microsoft’s CEO will leave his post

    Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer plans to retire within the year, the company revealed on Friday.

    Notice will be just a few weeks after Ballmer began to organize the company’s business in the new faith.

    The Board of Directors has formed a task force to find a successor.

    Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/microsoftin+paajohtaja+jattaa+tehtavansa/a924033

    Reply
44. August 23, 2013 at 7:43 pm

    Tomi says:

    BILLION DOLLAR BALLMER: Microsoft chief makes $1bn simply by quitting
    Hmm, what could I do to boost the value of my stock portfolio?
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/23/steve_ballmer_watches_personal_wealth_rocket_after_retirement_announcement/

    Steve Ballmer has just seen his personal wealth surge by a cool $1bn after announcing his retirement from Microsoft – which immediately caused the company’s stock to soar close to a 12-month high on Wall Street.

    The software vendor, which trades on Nasdaq under the MSFT banner, saw its shares initially surge by close to 9 per cent following Ballmer’s surprise decision to quit his CEO role after 13 years at the helm of Microsoft.

    He owns 333.252 million shares in Microsoft. Quitting means he’s winning big time, which must make it “the right time” for one of Redmond’s “largest owners”.

    Reply
45. August 24, 2013 at 4:37 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    3D Printing support for Windows 8.1 solidified: as easy as paper
    http://www.slashgear.com/3d-printing-support-for-windows-8-1-solidified-as-easy-as-paper-23294739/

    If the Makerbot 3D scanner weren’t enough to get you excited about the longevity of 3D printing this week, the Microsoft Windows 8.1 exploration of 3D printing standards might. What the team at Microsoft is doing this week is going through how users of the next-generation update of Windows 8 will be able to work with 3D printing from the core of the software. This sort of update means that Microsoft – one of the most influential technology companies in the world – has confidence enough in the future of the 3D printing universe that they’re willing to dedicate real time to it for the common user.

    What you’ll find in Windows 8.1 is a workflow in printing 3D objects that’s (for the most part) as simple as printing traditional 2D ink on paper. In a demonstration offered up by Microsoft this morning, a 3D Systems Cube 2 printer is hooked up with a Lenovo touchscreen all-in-one PC.

    Reply
46. August 24, 2013 at 4:38 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Mark your calendars for Windows 8.1!
    http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/08/14/mark-your-calendars-for-windows-8-1.aspx

    I know a lot of folks are eager to find out when they will be able to get Windows 8.1. I am excited to share that starting at 12:00am on October 18th in New Zealand (that’s 4:00am October 17th in Redmond), Windows 8.1 and Windows RT 8.1 will begin rolling out worldwide as a free update for consumers with Windows 8 or Windows RT devices through the Windows Store. Windows 8.1 will also be available at retail and on new devices starting on October 18th by market. So mark your calendars!

    Reply
47. August 26, 2013 at 10:44 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Ballmer Departure From Microsoft Was More Sudden Than Portrayed by the Company
    http://allthingsd.com/20130825/ballmer-departure-from-microsoft-was-more-sudden-than-portrayed-by-the-company/

    According to sources close to the situation, the departure of CEO Steve Ballmer from Microsoft last week was more sudden than was depicted by the company in its announcement that he would be retiring within the next year in a planned smooth transition.

    It was neither planned nor as smooth as portrayed.

    While the decision to go seems to have technically been Ballmer’s, interviews with dozens of people inside and outside the company, including many close to the situation, indicate that he had not aimed to leave this soon and especially after the recent restructuring of the company that he had intensely planned.

    Instead, sources said Ballmer’s timeline had been moved up drastically — first by him and then the nine-member board, including his longtime partner and Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates — after all agreed that it was best if he left sooner than later.

    Reply
48. August 26, 2013 at 10:45 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Microsoft’s Next Era
    http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/25/microsofts-next-era/

    Moments like this happen only once a generation in the technology industry.

    The announcement of Steve Ballmer’s retirement from his post as CEO of Microsoft puts an end to one of the most powerful and interesting “regimes” in technology history. Symbolically, this is likely the closing chapter of an era that was led by Bill Gates, then collectively by Gates and Ballmer, and then more recently just Ballmer. We think of these as distinct periods, but while Ballmer may not have had the technology visionary chops that famously defined Bill, much of what we saw from Microsoft in the 2000’s was a continuation of the strategy that defined the company in the 90’s.

    The story of Microsoft under Steve Ballmer can be told in two very different ways. The one that took center stage in the public eye narrated Microsoft’s slow response to emerging, low-end software disruptors like Google Apps and Amazon Web Services; a missed mobile-device wave led by Apple and Google, which dramatically weakened the Microsoft monopoly; and a series of failed service launches like the Zune, Windows Vista, and more.

    Reply
49. August 26, 2013 at 10:49 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    How Ballmer Missed the Tidal Shifts in Tech
    http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/how-ballmer-missed-the-tidal-shifts-in-tech/?_r=0

    It’s supposedly a voluntary retirement, but that holds about as much credibility as a public official’s leaving a job “to spend more time with family.” Microsoft has been flailing, and many prominent voices have been calling for Mr. Ballmer to step aside.

    Mr. Ballmer’s time as the head of Microsoft has been baffling.

    He completely missed the importance of the touch-screen phone. (“There is no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,” he said in 2007.) He missed the importance of the tablet, too. Yes, Microsoft now sells attractive phones and tablets, but they came years too late. They have minuscule market share and little influence.

    It doesn’t take a psychologist to understand why Microsoft missed these tidal shifts: It’s always been a PC company. It helped to create the PC revolution, its bread and butter was the PC — and so of course the company kept insisting that the PC was the future.

    It would have taken an exceptional thinker, an out-of-the-box visionary, to admit that the company’s foundation was crumbling. Mr. Ballmer wasn’t that guy.

    Reply
50. August 26, 2013 at 11:32 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Better Late Than Never? Ballmer Product Pipeline Shows a Very Mixed Record for Microsoft.
    http://allthingsd.com/20130824/better-late-than-never-ballmer-product-pipeline-shows-a-very-mixed-record-for-microsoft/

    Larger-than-life CEO Steve Ballmer will be remembered for a lot of things during his 13-year tenure at Microsoft, but what about the actual products he oversaw?

    Overall, it is a very mixed bag, with Microsoft late on every major consumer tech game-changer of Ballmer’s time in office, while rivals like Apple and Google surged ahead. That includes in MP3 players, multi-touch smartphones, multi-touch tablets, search, smart assistants and wireless beaming of video.

    Better late than never? Not so much.

    Reply