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:
‘Silent’ staff stood by as £100m BBC IT project tanked – DG
Hang on. They DID speak up…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/23/bbc_dmi_hall/
The BBC’s new director general Tony Hall says staff should have spoken up about the catastrophic Digital Media Initiative (DMI).
The utopian media storage project cost the BBC almost £100m since 2010 (and some £81m before then) before it was formally abandoned in May, with the corporation opting to use off-the-shelf software tools instead.
“The thing that worried me most about DMI is the fact that people said we knew all about that, but no one said. That’s a problem of culture where fingers are pointed and people don’t feel they can own up and say something’s wrong,” said Hall in an interview, we learn from Ariel, the BBC’s staff mag.
Shifting the blame to the workers, rather than the management, for the project’s failings is odd – since the DMI’s shortcomings were widely known. The only deliverable the BBC will keep is the Fabric archive database, which was far slower and harder to use than the systems it replaced. “Research that would have taken an hour now takes four,” notes one producer.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Government IT procurement: “there is nothing to do with the actual act of trade”
“Offshoring is often reverse passing in the efficiency.”
His experience, for example, Help-Desk staff change frequently outsourcing, and training people again is a tedious process.
The procurement critique:
“Stupid job, where the trade is done in Excel optimization. This action has nothing to do with the actual act of trade, “Ahto claims.
According to him, the typical quality of the invitation to tender and procurement criteria have equal weights. Almost all providers will get a perfect score on the quality, so the price will determine the winner.
“But can it be that all the services would be of uniform quality,” Ahto recalls.
The company’s future Director of the Office Hemminki Sääksjärvi wonders why no one does anything the law of contract, even if it is criticized by almost everyone.
Ahdon the Procurement Act to create nonsensical terms and conditions to which the provider is obliged to answer in the affirmative and hope for the best. They may, for example, requires that the provider is responsible for the third party IPR.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/julkiset+ithankinnat+tympivat+quotei+ole+mitaan+tekemista+todellisen+kaupanteon+kanssaquot/a924243
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP to offer SAP’s HANA-as-a-service
Cloudy In-memory caper to kick off in Australia and New Zealand
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/26/hp_to_offer_hanaasaservice/
HP has announced it will offer SAP’s in-memory database HANA in as-a-service mode, an offering The Reg revealed was under discussion back in March 2013.
Details of just what is on offer are sketchy for now. HP has not made a price list available, saying only “Pricing will vary according to client need.” Nor has the company released details of the hardware that will power the service.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Happy birthday MIDI 1.0: Slave to the rhythm
Part Two: The notes in the machine
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/26/part_two_midi_spec_1_is_30_happy_birthday_musical_instrument_digital_interface/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Lost Decade
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
Once upon a time, Microsoft dominated the tech industry; indeed, it was the wealthiest corporation in the world. But since 2000, as Apple, Google, and Facebook whizzed by, it has fallen flat in every arena it entered: e-books, music, search, social networking, etc., etc. Talking to former and current Microsoft executives, Kurt Eichenwald finds the fingers pointing at C.E.O. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates’s successor, as the man who led them astray.
Microsoft’s low-octane swan song was nothing if not symbolic of more than a decade littered with errors, missed opportunities, and the devolution of one of the industry’s innovators into a “me too” purveyor of other companies’ consumer products. Over those years, inconsequential pip-squeaks and onetime zombies—Google, Facebook, Apple—roared ahead, transforming the social-media-tech experience, while a lumbering Microsoft relied mostly on pumping out Old Faithfuls such as Windows, Office, and servers for its financial performance.
Amid a dynamic and ever changing marketplace, Microsoft—which declined to comment for this article—became a high-tech equivalent of a Detroit car-maker, bringing flashier models of the same old thing off of the assembly line even as its competitors upended the world. Most of its innovations have been financial debacles or of little consequence to the bottom line. And the performance showed on Wall Street; despite booming sales and profits from its flagship products, in the last decade Microsoft’s stock barely budged from around $30, while Apple’s stock is worth more than 20 times what it was 10 years ago.
How did this jaw-dropping role reversal happen? How could a company that stands among the most cash-rich in the world, the onetime icon of cool that broke IBM’s iron grip on the computer industry, have stumbled so badly in a race it was winning?
The story of Microsoft’s lost decade could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success. For what began as a lean competition machine led by young visionaries of unparalleled talent has mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things.
In those years Microsoft had stepped up its efforts to cripple competitors, but—because of a series of astonishingly foolish management decisions—the competitors being crippled were often co-workers at Microsoft, instead of other companies. Staffers were rewarded not just for doing well but for making sure that their colleagues failed. As a result, the company was consumed by an endless series of internal knife fights. Potential market-busting businesses—such as e-book and smartphone technology—were killed, derailed, or delayed amid bickering and power plays.
That is the portrait of Microsoft depicted in interviews with dozens of current and former executives, as well as in thousands of pages of internal documents and legal records.
“They used to point their finger at IBM and laugh,” said Bill Hill, a former Microsoft manager. “Now they’ve become the thing they despised.”
“I see Microsoft as technology’s answer to Sears,” said Kurt Massey, a former senior marketing manager. “In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Sears had it nailed. It was top-notch, but now it’s just a barren wasteland. And that’s Microsoft. The company just isn’t cool anymore.”
Cool is what tech consumers want. Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft.
No, really.
One Apple product, something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975. In the quarter ended March 31, 2012, iPhone had sales of $22.7 billion; Microsoft Corporation, $17.4 billion.
While Microsoft was once the hippest company on earth, its beginnings could be traced to the Holy Bible for nerds—Popular Electronics.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Top 10 Steve Ballmer quotes: ‘%#&@!!’ and so much more
The Monkey Boy rap dance? It’s in there!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/24/top_10_steve_ballmer_quotes_from_microsoft_history/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Poisonous Employee-Ranking System That Helps Explain Microsoft’s Decline
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/stack_ranking_steve_ballmer_s_employee_evaluation_system_and_microsoft_s.html
There were many reasons for the decline of Microsoft under Steve Ballmer, including, as I wrote this morning, its lack of focus and its habit of chasing trends rather than creating them. But one that’s not obvious to outsiders was the company’s employee evaluation system, known as “stack ranking.” The system—and its poisonous effects on Microsoft’s corporate culture—was best explained in an outstanding Vanity Fair feature by Kurt Eichenwald last year.
Anyone interested in Microsoft or business administration should read the full piece.
But here’s an excerpt from the part where Eichenwald explains stack ranking:
At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. …
For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions; those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door. …
“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.” Worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors—who were also ranked—focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate. …
So while Google was encouraging its employees to spend 20 percent of their time to work on ideas that excited them personally, Ballmer was inadvertently encouraging his to spend a good chunk of their time playing office politics. . Why try to outrun the bear when you can just tie your co-workers’ shoelaces?
Microsoft wasn’t the first company to adopt this sort of ranking system. It was actually popularized by Jack Welch at GE, where it was known as “rank and yank.” Welch defended the practice to the Wall Street Journal in a January 2012 article, saying, “This is not some mean system—this is the kindest form of management. [Low performers] are given a chance to improve, and if they don’t in a year or so, you move them out. “
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple said to have tested 64-bit ‘A7′ chips for iPhone 5S, 31% speed increases reported
http://9to5mac.com/2013/08/25/apple-said-to-have-tested-64-bit-a7-chips-for-iphone-5s-31-speed-increases-reported/
As Apple’s iPhone 5S event approaches, some new details about the new device’s internals are emerging. Clayton Morris has claimed on Twitter that the iPhone 5S’s A7 processor is “running at about 31% faster” than the iPhone 5′s A6 chip. The iPhone 5′s A6 chip is dual-core, and it seems like the iPhone 5S will also remain dual-core.
However, there could be a major differentiator: 64-bit. We’ve independently heard claims that some of the iPhone 5S internal prototypes include 64-bit processors.
It’s unclear if 64-bit will make the cut, but it’s been in testing. We’re told that the 64-bit processing will assist the A7 chip in making animations, transparencies, and other iOS 7 graphical effects appear much more smoothly than on existing iOS Devices…
It’s likely that the upcoming fifth-generation iPad will gain the same chip, if not a more advanced one to support the additional pixels.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 8.1 is ready for its October 17th release
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/24/4652054/microsoft-windows-8-1-rtm
Microsoft has finalized its Windows 8.1 update. Sources familiar with the company’s Windows plans have revealed to The Verge that the software maker completed the development of Windows 8.1 earlier this week — stamped as build 9600 for Release to manufacturing (RTM). The completion of the 8.1 development comes just over a month after the company promised to finalize the software in “late August.” Providing there are no final bugs that require the 9600 build to be recompiled, the final copy will be shipped to PC makers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook isn’t making you depressed, but the internet is
Status update: the link between Facebook and depression isn’t so simple
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/22/4647916/facebook-isnt-making-you-depressed-the-internet-is
Another day, another “Facebook makes you miserable” headline. For the last few years, the social network, which now claims nearly 700 million daily users worldwide, has been the subject of an endless stream of stories in the media and sociology journals claiming that it’s “making people depressed.”
Dozens of articles by reputable publications like NPR and The Economist piled on to the latest piece of evidence: a study by the University of Michigan which measured the moods of just 82 people, all of whom were college-age — hardly a representative sample of the company’s 1 billion users worldwide. Even though the researchers’ conclusions were based on college students, the media attention they received was not. It seems we want to believe Facebook makes us sad, even if the evidence is thin and stale.
“The number of Facebook friends was negatively associated with emotional and academic adjustment among first-year students.”
A study by the University of Canterbury in 2008 set out to determine how internet use impacted people, but quickly realized that measuring “internet use” as a whole was moot.
“Spending a lot of time on Facebook relates to low self-esteem, a finding that parallels the relationship between internet use and self-esteem,” says Dr. Maria Kalpidou, lead researcher on a study in 2011 about Facebook use among college students, but by only counting time spent on the service, we’re missing a big part of the picture. “The number of Facebook friends was negatively associated with emotional and academic adjustment among first-year students,” says Kalpidou, “but positively related to social adjustment and attachment to institution among upper-class students.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The biggest-little revolution: 10 single-board computers for under $100
http://www.edn.com/design/diy/4419990/The-biggest-little-revolution–10-single-board-computers-for-under–100
Since the coming of the Raspberry Pi Model B, single-board computers (SBCs) have become a prevalent force in the development world. These pocket-sized devices have taken the online maker community in particular by storm, providing PC functionality to a plethora of open-source projects in amazingly compact, cost-effective, and low-power platforms.
It’s not an overstatement to say these tiny computers have engendered a technological revolution of their own by pushing the limits of technological creativity achievable in the palm of one’s hand. As an added benefit, SBCs have served as cheaply obtainable educational tools for teaching the ever-important concepts of computer science to the younger generation. Test engineers, those seeking to build one-off projects, and hobbyists have embraced, and appreciate, this mini computer platform. Similar to how the smartphone changed how we use phones, SBCs are poised to change how we approach embedded systems development.
The following slideshow introduces a series of some of the most unique SBCs that have hit the market to date—all which can be purchased for under (or very nearly) $100.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is Intel within ARM’s reach? Pedestrian Detection shows the way
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/systems-interface/4419918/Is-Intel-within-ARM-s-reach–Pedestrian-Detection-shows-the-way
Comparing smart-phone performances – and the SOC and processor cores that drive them – has been a hotly discussed topic of late. More so now, since Intel is trying to challenge ARM in the low-power mobile space with the Atom processor, while ARM is trying to challenge Intel in the server space with the Cortex-A53 and A57.
Computer vision in layman’s terms can be described as analytics that can gleaned from a video or an image. Face detection and recognition are easily understood examples of computer vision.
So why use a computer vision algorithm for benchmarking? Vision algorithms are very compute intensive, and with increasing availability of processing power, these algorithms are finding more application in the real-world. Unlike other compute intensive tasks of earlier days like graphics and video codecs, vision algorithms usually don’t have a dedicated engine inside the processors to accelerate them.
It proves beyond reasonable doubt, that A15 does indeed give nearly twice the performance of an A9, at the same clock, though one must admit that the A15 with a bigger L2 cache has a little bit of an unfair advantage over A9.
To be fair to Intel, [email protected] using only C optimizations, managed to almost keep up with the fully optimized code on A15, though we suspect that the compiler may have already done a great job to use SSE instructions using our data-parallelism friendly C code. Besides Intel has higher clocks (core i7 can run at 3.8GHz in turbo mode) and hyper-threading, which would help in a multi-threaded environment, to fall back on.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is IT deparment immortal?
http://www.dilbert.com/2013-08-24/
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Dearth of Tech IPOs Could Expose Stock Rally
Just 16% of New U.S. Listings This Year Have Been Technology or Internet Companies
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887324906304579034891252064678-lMyQjAxMTAzMDIwNTEyNDUyWj.html
Initial public offerings from technology-related companies and booming U.S. stock markets usually go together—such as Priceline.com and 1999. Not this year.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average has climbed 15% since Jan. 1, even after declining 3% this month largely on jitters about corporate earnings and expectations that the Federal Reserve will scale back stimulus measures in the coming months. At the current pace, the number of IPOs in the U.S. could hit 200, the most since 2007
Yet just 16% of new U.S. listings this year have been technology or Internet companies, according to Dealogic. By that measure, 2013 could be the second-worst showing since at least 1993. In 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, 69% of all IPOs were tech-related stocks.
There have been just 22 tech and Internet listings this year, raising $3.2 billion, the slowest annual pace in four years.
“Tech IPOs in particular require investors to have pretty strong faith in the future, because you’re buying these things on the cusp,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago. “Robust appetite for tech IPOs is a fabulous indicator of investor enthusiasm.”
Companies learned that they may need to postpone going public until they have convinced investors of their unassailable scale. They have used private financing, which is abundant in Silicon Valley, to buy time to hone their strategies. This may mean a slower pace of IPOs, and that some companies never get to the finish line. But it could also herald better-performing deals over the longer term if companies are better prepared, some executives and investors say.
Twitter is weighing an IPO next year, people familiar with the company’s plans said.
Online “cloud” data storage firm Box Inc. has said it is also preparing a possible 2014 IPO.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel developing 3D laptop cameras that can follow your glare and read your emotions
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047425/intel-bringing-vision-3d-to-laptop-and-tablet-cameras.html
From mundane 2D devices, integrated cameras in laptops and tablets in the future will change into powerful 3D tools that can sense movement, track emotion, and even monitor reading habits of children, according to Intel.
Intel is developing a “depth sensing” camera, which is an enhanced version of a 3D camera that can go deeper inside images to “bridge the gap between the real and virtual world,” said Anil Nanduri , director of perceptual products & solutions at Intel.
The webcam enhancements will help the computer understand a human better, bring new levels of interactivity to 3D games, and make webconferencing fun by blanking out the background and adding a green screen, Nanduri said.
Such depth cameras will be integrated into laptops and ultrabooks in the second half of 2014. The technology will initially appear in external webcams such as Senz3D external webcam, which was jointly developed by Logitech and Intel, and will become available in the coming quarters. The camera technology will ultimately trickle down to tablets and smartphones, Nanduri said.
You are not going to look for a case [for a device] anymore, you’ll just point that device, and the cameras will recognize what you have. It’ll know the model number…and it’ll print [the case] for you, or you go to the store, they will print it for you,” Nanduri said.
With the help of eye tracking, it could also track how well somebody is reading and use that information as an evaluation tool. For example, it could track reading, and tell if kids are stuck on words, how much they read, or whether they need help with specific words.
“Having the capabilities to say—they read about 80 percent of the lines, they had difficulty with these words—that kind of intelligence for educational tools is phenomenal,” Nanduri said.
There are already 3D cameras out there, but Intel is trying to tack on the algorithm and hardware features that make images more meaningful.
“Kinect was a good initial version of a depth camera more from a long range perspective. When Intel started looking at it, we were primarily looking at it primarily as more personal interaction, short range, which is probably a meter or meter-and-a-half range of interaction,” Nanduri said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nokia Sirius: a 10.1-inch Windows RT tablet that looks like a Lumia
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/26/4659436/nokia-sirius-windows-rt-tablet-specifications
Nokia is preparing to back Windows RT by launching a 10.1-inch tablet soon. Sources familiar with Nokia’s plans have revealed to The Verge that the tablet, codenamed Sirius, will be launched shortly. While prototype pictures of the device leaked earlier this month, we understand that the final design more closely resembles Nokia’s Lumia Windows Phone products.
We’re told that Nokia’s tablet will be thinner than the current iPad, and lighter at just over a pound in weight. The body of the device will be colored, and Nokia plans to include a 6-megapixel camera at the rear with a 2-megapixel shooter at the front. The 10.1-inch display that Nokia is planning to use will run at 1920 x 1080 resolution
Tomi Engdahl says:
With no early Windows 8.1 RTM bits, what’s a developer to do?
http://www.zdnet.com/with-no-early-windows-8-1-rtm-bits-whats-a-developer-to-do-7000019910/
Summary: Microsoft won’t allow new Windows 8.1 apps to be published Windows Store until October 18, nor will the company be providing RTM bits early to devs for testing. So what should devs do now?
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.
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.
That was due to a number of increasingly problematic issues on the immediate horizon — including a potentially nasty proxy fight, continued business performance declines and, perhaps most of all, that Ballmer’s leadership was becoming a very obvious lightning rod.
As AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski wrote on Friday: “Here’s one metric by which Ballmer will be judged harshly. On the last day of 1999, the day before he took over as CEO, Microsoft’s market capitalization was $600 billion. On the day before he announced his intention to retire, it was less than $270 billion.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel last week the appointment of a new Executive Director Brian Krzanich will take to reform the structure of the company at high speed.
Krzanichin internal memo soon found their way to Reuters and other news agencies in the hands.
Intel has created a whole new new devices (New Devices) division. It has been appointed to lead Mike Bell.
The new structure should enable Intel’s long-term objective: access to a major processor and supplier of smart phones and tablets.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=31:uusi-intel-pomo-pani-heti-tuulemaan&catid=13:news&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Microsoft CEO: Elop’s tip-top, bookies say. Sandberg? Long shot
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57600465-71/new-microsoft-ceo-elops-tip-top-bookies-say-sandberg-long-shot/
The lads at Ladbrokes have announced the odds for who might be the new Microsoft CEO. Nokia’s CEO is favorite.
It’s all very well to speculate who might be the next CEO of Microsoft, but there are people who have an inside track.
No, not the Microsoft board. Its members haven’t seemed entirely sure what they’ve been doing for years.
The favorite, perhaps unsurprisingly, is former Softie and now Nokia CEO Stephen Elop at 5-1. There are many who believe that his very familiarity with Microsoft, and especially Windows Phone, makes him the ideal candidate.
Running him very close is current Softie COO Kevin Turner at 6-1, with recent Softie Steve Sinokfsy at 8-1.
Lookie, there’s Netflix CEO (and former Microsoft board member) Reed Hastings at 16-1. He must know where at least some of the corpses are hidden.
Google’s overtly self-confident Vic Gundotra lurks at 25-1. Former Steve Jobs wunderkind Scott Forstall is at 33-1.
And there at 40-1 drifts Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
Oh, and Tim Cook’s 100-1, in case you wondered.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Moore’s Law Dead by 2022, Expert Says
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319330&
Moore’s Law — the ability to pack twice as many transistors on the same sliver of silicon every two years — will come to an end as soon as 2020 at the 7nm node, said a keynoter at the Hot Chips conference here.
While many have predicted the end of Moore’s Law, few have done it so passionately or convincingly. The predictions are increasing as lithography advances stall and process technology approaches atomic limits.
“For planning horizons, I pick 2020 as the earliest date we could call it dead,” said Robert Colwell, who seeks follow-on technologies as director of the microsystems group at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “You could talk me into 2022, but whether it will come at 7 or 5nm, it’s a big deal,” said the engineer who once managed a Pentium-class processor design at Intel.
Moore’s Law was a rare exponential growth factor that over 30 years brought speed boosts from 1 MHz to 5 GHz, a 3,500-fold increase. By contrast, the best advances in clever architectures delivered about 50x increases over the same period, he said.
“I don’t expect to see another 3,500x increase in electronics — maybe 50x in the next 30 years,” he said. Unfortunately, “I don’t think the world’s going to give us a lot of extra money for 10 percent [annual] benefit increases,” he told an audience of processor designers.
Tomi says:
If you go to the basic micro unsaleable at the moment, much better not to go to the servers, all manufacturers. According to Gartner, the myth of servers during the second quarter, up 12.4 billion dollars, or about 9.3 billion euros. Amount is 3.8 per cent lower than a year earlier.
Europe servers were sold in April-June was 3.1 billion dollars, 2.3 billion euros. The fall was 4.6 per cent per year.
Dips are not a huge dramatic, but according to Gartner, server market is currently in bad shape. Growth is really only in the Asian market.
Were sold in Europe in the second quarter, slightly more than 550 thousand server machine. The number is 35 000 fewer than a year earlier. X86 server sales declined by 4.7 per cent in Europe, and UNIX servers by as much as 22.6 per cent.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=289:palvelimia-myydaan-vahemman&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
U.S. Losing Ground In Mobile App Market
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/29/u-s-losing-ground-in-mobile-app-market/
If mobile apps are the post-PC era’s software industry, the U.S. may be losing its edge. According to new findings mobile analytics firm Flurry released this morning, the U.S. isn’t leading in the creation of mobile applications, having slipped from 45 percent of worldwide app market share in 2011, to 36 percent in 2013, in terms of where apps are being built. Positioned against what the software industry looked like in 2008, where U.S. businesses produced around 68 percent of software units sold, it’s clear that the mobile app industry is one that’s becoming truly global in nature.
“U.S. made apps only account for 16 percent of total time spent in apps in China,” writes Flurry’s Simon Khalaf, noting also that the size and growth rate of the Chinese app market will soon push U.S.-built apps’ portion of the Chinese app market even lower.
The concern here is that U.S. developers have been slow to think about localization efforts, having ridden the app wave so far resting on the fact that English is one of the world’s more dominant languages. Some other countries, meanwhile, have had a head start in terms of globalizing their mobile applications, the report finds. Developers in Finland, Denmark, Bulgaria, and Slovenia have been taking advantage of the localization opportunities, for instance. There are also many worldwide app hit makers outside the U.S., including Finland’s Rovio (Angry Birds), Russian Zepto Labs (Cut the Rope) and Australian Half Brick Studios (Fruit Ninja).
The cost of producing apps is still relatively inexpensive which helps contribute to the increasing globalization of the app market, along with the ease of distribution offered by app stores.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sometimes it’s not all about the technology
http://techonline.com/electrical-engineers/education-training/tech-papers/4418679/Sometimes-its-not-all-about-the-technology?cid=NL_EDN_DesignIdeas_20130829&elq=73ef57e77ffc46de8377cfc5199a92b5&elqCampaignId=953
Dell Computer made its name providing custom-built PCs, but that philosophy extends into industrial, embedded, and intelligent systems, too. The company has become a technology outsourcing partner for large OEMs around the world who don’t want to deal with the logistical problems of on-site service, stocking spares, providing upgrades, and all the other headaches a product developer should provide. Instead, Dell handles the back-end chores behind the scenes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SSD performance measurement: Best practices
http://www.edn.com/design/test-and-measurement/4420083/SSD-performance-measurement–Best-practices-
This article takes you through the types of measurements and tools you need to measure enterprise SSD performance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Silicon daddy: Moore’s Law about to be repealed, but don’t blame physics
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/27/moores_law_will_be_repealed_due_to_economics_not_physics/
Hot Chips Moore’s Law, which promises exponentially increasing transistor counts due to chip-manufacturing process shrinkage, is about to hit the wall. As Intel Fellow Mark Bohr once told The Reg, “We just plain ran out of atoms.”
But there’s one industry veteran, however, who looks at the reason for the repeal of the semiconductor industry’s defining law from a different angle, after its nearly 50-year run.
“When Moore’s Law ends, it will be economics that stops it, not physics,” declared Robert Colwell of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office, speaking on Monday at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University.
“Follow the money,” he advised.
Colwell believes that 2020 will be the earliest date for the Law’s demise. “That’s only seven years away,” he reminded his audience. “I’m thinking seven nanometers. You could talk me into 2022 – you might even be able to talk me into five nanometers, I don’t know, but you’re not going to talk me into one nanometer, you’re not going to be able to talk me into femtometers or whatever.”
As a chip architect at Intel, Colwell says that his job was to “stay out of the way” of Moore’s Law, seeing as how the vast amount of historical improvements in semiconductors have been attributable far more to scaling than to progress in microarchitectures.
Harkening back to 1980 when he was at Bell Labs working on a 1MHz 32-bit processor, Colwell reckons that the improvements in semiconductor scaling since then have led to a 3500X improvement in chip performance. But what about design innovations such as pipelining, caches, superscalar architectures? Not so much, he says – a 50X improvement at best.
If that designer’s chip could provide a 50 per cent improvement in performance or power consumption, Colwell says, it would likely find a market. “But how about 20 per cent? How about 10 per cent? How far down are you willing to go and still think that you’ve got something you can sell?”
From his point of view, such small improvements wouldn’t justify the cost of creating a 10 per cent chip. Customers wouldn’t buy it, so chipmakers wouldn’t manufacture it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC Outlook Further Lowered as Mature Markets Projected to Outgrow Emerging Markets in 2013, According to IDC
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24293513
FRAMINGHAM, Mass., August 29, 2013 – Worldwide PC shipments are now expected to fall by -9.7% in 2013, further deepening what is already the longest market contraction on record, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker. The new forecast reflects not only a continued expansion of mobile device options at the expense of PCs, but also marked the cessation of emerging market growth that the industry had come to rely on in recent years. The market as a whole is expected to decline through at least 2014, with only single-digit modest growth from 2015 onward, and never regain the peak volumes last seen in 2011.
“The days where one can assume tablet disruptions are purely a First World problem are over,” said Jay Chou, Senior Research Analyst, Worldwide Quarterly PC Trackers at IDC. “Advances in PC hardware, such as improvements in the power efficiency of x86 processors remain encouraging, and Windows 8.1 is also expected to address a number of well-documented concerns. However, the current PC usage experience falls short of meeting changing usage patterns that are spreading through all regions, especially as tablet price and performance become ever more attractive.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Thought the PC market couldn’t get any worse? HAH! Think again
Prepare yourselves for a mid-teens decline, vendors
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/28/idc_2013_pc_forecast/
Any PC makers dreaming of a sales rebound this year are picking up the pieces of that shattered aspiration: beancounters at IDC reckon the number of computers shipped will be worse than first feared.
The statisticians believe the market in Western Europe will decline 16.3 per cent to just shy of 47 million units in 2013, compared to the 15.5 per cent decline it previously predicted and equating to 500,000 fewer PCs.
The downgrade follows a disappointing back-to-school period in June, a continued assault on notebook sales by slabs, and modest expectations for the impact of Windows 8.1, due out later this year.
“Demand remains weak, particularly in consumer, and we expect channel players’ orders to continue be at the lower level,” he told us.
Microsoft has completed its Windows 8.1 makeover, but Gornicki claimed the features will not be attractive enough to pull in the punters.
The business-to-business space will also remain in a “negative” spiral, and the vital back-to-school summer shopping season failed to meet sales expectations for vendors and channel partners, “demand was weaker than expected”, he said.
“People have been putting off buying a new notebook and there was no compelling reason to buy. But with the advent of touch, as the price comes down to a more manageable level, we will see a rebound in traditional notebooks.”
IDC reckons consumers will be happy to pay a €50 (£43) price premium for touchscreen notebooks or ultrabooks versus traditional clam shells – but at present the average difference was in the order of €200 (£172).
Tomi says:
‘Project Spark’ lets you build your video game as you go
http://blogs.technet.com/b/firehose/archive/2013/08/21/everyone-s-a-game-designer-with-project-spark.aspx
It all started with a question: “What if people could do whatever they wanted in a video game?”
Henry Sterchi is standing in front of a large Perceptive Pixel touchscreen, introducing the game his team has worked on for the past two years. On the screen a character stands alone in an empty world, a tiny blip surrounded by a sea of blank pixels.
Sterchi then starts to swipe his fingers across the screen. Mountains, rivers, and forests spring into existence. He paints a field of flowers and bores a tunnel through the earth for kicks.
In less than 10 minutes he’s created an impressively detailed world. He then picks up an Xbox controller, plops his character (informally known as “The Creator”) down into the world and starts exploring.
This is “Project Spark,” a digital canvas that lets users create, play and share their own worlds, games and stories. Players use a powerful set of tools to create and customize worlds for Windows 8 devices, Xbox One and Xbox 360 using touch, mouse and keyboard, or an Xbox controller. What they can create is bound only by imagination, said Sterchi, creative director on “Project Spark.”
At GamesCom 2013 on Tuesday, the “Project Spark” team announced that soon everyone will get a chance to be a creator. The team also announced the official beta launch dates for “Project Spark” – invitations will begin rolling out to registered beta participants starting at the end of October 2013 for Windows 8 devices and January 2014 for Xbox One creators. Players can register for the beta at http://www.joinprojectspark.com.
Tomi says:
Microsoft takes second run at platform cloud
Windows Server 2012 R2 tries to rehabilitate PaaS tech
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/30/microsoft_paas_windows_azure/
Microsoft is taking a second run at platform-as-a-service clouds with a set of features to be included in Windows Server 2012 R2 that may give Redmond some credible tech to take on a field flush with rivals.
When Windows Azure launched in 2009 many media and analyst reports (El Reg excluded) thought the future for platform-as-a-service seem bright: money would be made, Microsoft would make a smooth transition into the heavens where it would rain Bezos’s infrastructure-as-a-service Amazon Web Services cloud out of existence and, once again, Ballmer would be the king of software.
It didn’t pan out that way.
Something about the proprietary nature of platform-as-a-service seemed to unnerve developers, with few choosing the technology over more modifiable, component based IaaS clouds, like AWS.
Both Windows Azure and Google’s App Engine floundered, with neither service drawing enough devotees to quell the rise of Amazon. Years later, the two tech titans flip-flopped on their PaaS-first attitude and came out with infrastructure-as-a-service clouds (Azure and Google Compute Engine).
Now, Microsoft is putting the PaaS credentials back into Azure with a renewed focus on the technology as it boosts the cloud tech of the 2012 R2 version of Windows Server via the “Windows Azure Pack”.
New features include 64-bit worker processes for developers that need a huge memory footprint for their applications, IPv6 support for both HTTP and encrypted HTTP traffic, and native WebSocket Protocol Support.
By implementing WebSocket Protocol Support, Microsoft says developers will be able to build applications around apps that push data out to devices automatically (“push” models) rather than apps that instead phone-home occasionally (“pull” models).
Tomi says:
Snowden is great news for hybrid cloud says VMware
Customers don’t want no steeenking NSA sniffing their data
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/27/vmware_says_snowdens_great_news_for_hybrid_cloud_business/
VMworld 2013 Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent of the online snoopery in the US are good for business, say VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and COO Carl Eschenbach.
Speaking today at VMWorld 2013 the, pair were asked if Snowden’s leaks are changing customers’ attitudes to public clouds. Both answered in the affirmative.
“We have clearly seen sensitivity has increased since Snowden’s disclosure,” Gelsinger said, adding that he’s now feeling a bit smug about VMware’s plan to offer hybrid cloud services deeply integrated with on-premises IT, an arrangement under which users can keep confidential data in their own data centres.
“This re-enforces that our strategy is the right one,” he said. The strategy is playing particularly well outside the USA. “As we go to foreign countries it is critical infrastructure be on their soil,” he said.
Eschenbach concurred, saying “the US government is validation that users will leverage hybrid clouds. It is not if but when people take advantage of hybrid cloud.”
Tomi says:
Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments
Why educational technologies should be more like graphing calculators and less like iPads. An Object Lesson.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/go-ahead-mess-with-texas-instruments/278899/
Tomi says:
Big VC funding and new technology makes enterprise storage sexy. Really!
http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/30/big-vc-funding-and-new-technology-makes-enterprise-storage-sexy-really/
It’s shocking, I know, but the storage industry has more juice than Ryan Braun leaving a Biogenesis clinic.
Approximately two years after Fusion-io’s IPO, yet another in a lengthening list of flash storage start-ups, Violin Memory, has also filed for an IPO. What on earth is going on?
The underappreciated technology ecosystem behind flash storage, the memory technology capable of turning a smartphone into a bottomless media repository, or a USB thumb drive into your digital life-on-a-stick is hurtling its diminutive self toward a gargantuan market opportunity, fueled by a massive, continuous infusion of venture capital and sparked by innovation rooted in physics and chemistry, the literal kind.
IDC predicts that we will be generating 40 zettabytes annually by 2020. (Trust me, that’s big. A single zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 1 billion terabytes.) Sensors, surveillance video, photos, medical devices, financial market data, social and location data, and other creators of structured and unstructured information are demanding more capacity and real-time performance, and they’re getting them.
Flash storage is racing quickly to meet the inevitable need. Flash chips will get smaller, store more data more quickly and for less money, and just as the economics and physics hit a wall newer methods will be ready for commercialization. At least, that’s what’s happened throughout history.
Today’s flash memory technology, known as NAND (stands for Negated AND or NOT AND, a boolean operator that provides the logic for storing data), will reach its evolutionary peak in the next few years, when flash chip lithographies get too small to be reliable. That inevitability has sparked schemes to extend the life of NAND, to evolve its architecture, and to replace it completely with other potentially more inventive storage schemes.
Take Skyera, whose CEO and co-founder, Radoslav Danilla, started SandForce, a flash controller company, and before that he was a chip and graphic processor architect at NVIDIA. Skyera’s just-announced skyEagle is a small form-factor (1u) storage appliance that holds a whopping 500 TB flash, delivered at $1.99/GB, which falls closer to the $1.50/GB of traditional disk technology than the $15 – $20/GB of most enterprise-grade flash systems.
Skyera accomplishes this by using consumer-grade flash, which has significantly less reliability (by a factor of 10) than most enterprise-grade flash, but makes up for it with a variety of inventive workarounds. One example: Skyera’s system uses voltage shaping to reduce the voltage applied to the chips, thereby reducing damage and extending the life, and thus reliability of the technology.
Companies like Samsung, one of a small handful of NAND chip manufacturers, are already at work on 3D V-NAND technology, a scheme to stack more NAND cells vertically (the V in V-NAND) to increase capacity. Samsung’s chips also uses a different design to capture and store a charge, and promises better performance and a 40 percent power consumption improvement.
Others are moving in different directions, like using phase change memory, which lowers and raises resistance through crystalization, and spin transfer torque techniques known as Magnetic RAM (MRAM) or resistive RAM (ReRAM). Some of those technologies are starting to see the light of day, says Howard Marks, founder and chief scientist at analyst firm DeepStorage. The first PCM and ReRAM chips are less dense than the current generation of flash, so they are going toward special purpose applications.
On the PCIe side, Fusion-io has been one of the industry’s most visible companies. It went public in June 2011, landed customers like Apple, Facebook, Salesforce.com and HP, boasts Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, and made key acquisitions like NexGen Storage and IO Turbine. But Fusion-io has been in the news lately because the company’s revenue growth has stalled
There’s also new promise beyond the traditional array and PCIe methods of flash deployment. SMART Storage Systems, in partnership with Diablo Technologies, announced that it would put flash on the memory bus, where applications could get the benefits of flash (non volatile, but still very fast and high capacity), but with the access latency of main memory DRAM.
Applications like SAP’s HANA, which uses DRAM for its in-memory database architecture (providing near real-time access to complex data), could be a fit for flash on the memory bus, essentially ushering in more cost-effective implementations of HANA. Marks says that blade servers, where space is at a premium, would also be a logical target for this technology.
Tomi says:
Skyera Unveils skyEagle Series of Next-Generation All-Flash Enterprise Storage Arrays
http://www.skyera.com/news-events/press-releases/skyera-unveils-skyeagle-series-of-next-generation-all-flash-enterprise-storage-arrays/
Skyera’s innovations in Flash controller design and adaptive read-write techniques make the company the only enterprise Flash array supplier capable of utilizing MAN Flash chips, bringing a huge capacity boost to skyEagle without the penalties commonly associated with these chips. As NAND Flash geometries shrink below 20nm with the newest products, the durability and performance of the media are reduced below the standards demanded for enterprise data center environments. However, Skyera’s 100x life amplification technology eliminates those issues.
Tomi says:
Saving Microsoft: Bill Gates Might Return from Retirement as Microsoft Continues To Struggle
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/492927/20130722/bill-gates-microsoft.htm#.UiNciXLbO9L
After recording the biggest 1-day percentage sell-off in the last 13 years, Microsoft might be headed into really tough times. As investors continued to show concerns about the standings of one of the most influential tech companies in the world, Microsoft might have no other option but to bring the man that guided the firm to greater heights. Yes, Bill Gates might actually return to his old post.
The company recorded Friday its worst performance on the trading market since 2000 after its stock finished at $31.40 ($4.04 down), losing $32 billion in the company’s stock value
“The recent reorganization does not fix the tablet or smartphone problem,” Sherlund told CNET.com. “The devices opportunity just received a $900 million hardware write-off for Surface RT and investors may not even like the idea of wading deeper into this territory.”
With this development, there’s speculation about the return of Gates to power as he attempts to put order in the company he founded in the early 70s.
Tomi says:
A vote for Bill Gates as interim Microsoft CEO
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57600539-75/a-vote-for-bill-gates-as-interim-microsoft-ceo/
“There is no clear candidate with the visionary skills to turn the company around other than Bill Gates,” says Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.
The evaluations of Steve Ballmer’s 33 years at Microsoft are winding down, with the focus shifting to who will replace him within the next 12 months.
It’s a job that requires a rare combination of talents, experience and intellect.
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, however, is convinced that Gates is the only person right for the job at this juncture, despite the fact that as Microsoft’s board chairman and an adviser on key development projects he shares responsibility with Ballmer for the company’s successes and failures in recent years.
“There is no clear candidate with the visionary skills to turn the company around other than Bill Gates,” Benioff told CNET. “He wouldn’t just be a magnet for a new vision, but for a talent pool of leadership.”
Benioff suggested that Gates become more of an interim CEO, like Steve Jobs was when he returned to Apple after a 10-year exile, for 36 months.
Microsoft has been hard at work trying to create the future, but with less success than hoped. The most recent example is Surface, the Microsoft designed and manufactured tablet that was supposed to be the company’s answer to Apple’s iPad. In the last quarter, Microsoft had to take a $900 million charge against unsold Surface inventory. In an effort to protect the Windows franchise, Microsoft Office is unavailable for the iPad and Android-powered tablets. That tactic hasn’t slowed down sales of rivals’ tablets.
Tomi says:
New Zealand just abolished software patents. Here’s why we should, too.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/29/new-zealand-just-abolished-software-patents-heres-why-we-should-too/?tid=rssfeed
What’s wrong with the patent system? Most people cite problems with patent trolls or low patent quality. But a recent study by the Government Accountability Office makes it clear that the real problem is more specific: Patents on software don’t work.
The number of software patents has soared in the past two decades.
The rise in patent litigation is a more recent phenomenon.
The proportion of lawsuits initiated by trolls (“patent monetization entities”) and non-trolls (“operating companies”) hasn’t changed much over the past five years.
The GAO says that “many recent patent infringement lawsuits are related to the prevalence of low quality patents; that is, patents with unclear property rights, overly broad claims, or both. Although there is some inherent uncertainty associated with all patent claims, several of the stakeholders with this opinion noted that claims in software-related patents are often overly broad, unclear or both.”
Why is software-patent quality so low? The GAO speculates that “language describing emerging technologies, such as software, may be inherently imprecise because these technologies are constantly evolving.”
Another problem: the complexity and rapid development cycle of software makes patent research impractical.
Representatives from a software start-up company we spoke with told us that searching for relevant patents before developing new products is unrealistic and diverts already scarce resources
“A few representatives of venture capital and software start-up firms told us that they do not always apply for patents until their companies are well established because patent attorneys are expensive, and the process is time-consuming. They told us that the cost of R&D is low relative to the cost of applying for a patent, so there is minimal incentive in the software industry to patent in order to recoup R&D costs.”
That’s very different from the pharmaceutical industry.
The GAO suggests some modest changes to improve the quality of software patents, such as amending the law to “require more detail for algorithms” in software patents. But policymakers should consider a more radical option: eliminating software patents altogether. There’s little evidence that patents promote innovation in software, and a great deal of evidence that they hinder it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Replacing Steve Ballmer won’t fix Microsoft
Column Dysfunctional corporate culture needs total overhaul
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/opinion/2291694/replacing-steve-ballmer-wont-fix-microsoft
REPLACING STEVE BALLMER won’t fix Microsoft, and given the firm’s recent history and present situation, it’s not inconceivable that the uncertainty and turmoil that result will only further demoralise and disrupt it, thereby hastening its downward trajectory.
Wall Street apparently viewed that sudden surprise development favorably, however, as Microsoft’s share price immediately leapt, and rose more than five percent on the news.
article for the New Yorker magazine
laid out the underlying reason for Microsoft’s failure to execute successfully throughout the past decade. In short, the company has developed a vicious, dysfunctional corporate culture, based on ranking staff against each other and creating internal competition, rather than competition with other companies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Remote control car – real car RC controlled ! (Arduino, remote, pneumatics)
http://hackaday.com/2013/09/01/a-real-car-remote-controlled-with-an-arduino-what-could-go-wrong/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Remote-control-car-My-real-car-RC-controlled-Ardui/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 8 rockets to 7.41% market share as Windows XP falls below 35% mark
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/09/01/windows-8-rockets-to-7-41-market-share-as-windows-xp-falls-below-35-mark/
Just before the results of back-to-school sales and way before the holiday season, Windows 8 appears to have made a significant jump in market share. At the same time, Windows 7′s hold remains strong, and it looks to stay the most popular operating system version for a long time.
Windows 8 hasn’t been growing as quickly as some would have hoped, but recently the numbers have been all over the place.
We attributed June’s big jump to Microsoft releasing its free preview of Windows 8.1, the next version of Microsoft’s operating system, which will be a free update for Windows 8 users available via the Window Store.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux 3.11 released
http://www.paritynews.com/2013/09/03/2578/linux-3-11-released/
Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 3.11 as anticipated.
Announcing Linux 3.11 Torvalds notes that the final version doesn’t bring in a lot more than what is already present in the rc7, but it does include fixes – most of them in networking tree alongside a few in file system as well as sound.
Some of the features of Linux 3.11 include LZ4 compression, Zswap, XFS and EXT4 file system improvements, inclusion of Lustre, new DRM display, Dynamic Power Management (DPM) for Radeon GPUs, AVX2 optimization, Power PC architecture updates, ARM improvements, input device and audio stack improvements among others.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10,000 app devs SLEEP together in four-day code-chat-drink tech orgy camp
Hey, geeks: Hate the great outdoors? Now you can stay in a tent in a big tent
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/03/european_hack_fest_hits_london/
London’s O2 is this week hosting Campus Party – a four-day tech-fest during which as many as 10,000 software developers from across Europe get together for coding, talking and drinking. The marketing people like to call it Glastonbury For Geeks.
Campus Party does have tents – three and a half thousand of them, two geeks to a tent, the rest being day trippers – but that’s where the comparison ends. The tents at Campus Party are in regimented rows, and paid for by a sponsor list which includes just about every company your correspondent remembers campaigning against during his own education: Nestlé, Barclays, American Express, and so on.
There are also thousands of developers, the vast majority of whom are too young to remember the corporate sins of the past.
10,000 geeks in regimented tents under a concrete sky might not be Glastonbury for Geeks, but in honesty it probably stands a greater chance of making the world a better place than any music festival – even if it has to work one build-time error at a time.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP’s published study, 93 percent of business travelers preparing meeting material as a way to counter the meeting.
Regularly work on behalf of traveling among the study consisted of nine European countries and revealed that 54 percent of business travelers to spend at least half of the travel time of travel-related duties.
The worst scenario was the British, because 67 percent of them use more than half the travel time travel in meetings held in preparation . The precise German only 43 per cent of such pressures.
Information technology enables 88 percent of business travelers will be able to follow on work and be productive while traveling. They have 31 percent of the time it takes to read e-mails , 24 percent of the background studies and works 22 percent of the content editing .
The largest productivity, reduce the factors are , however, a lack of internet access . A percentage is 62 Almost as bad is the lack of remote access to standard tools and applications ( 51 per cent).
On the way of working has become HP’s part of the senior persons working days .
“Our study shows this development to which it and the internet have led to . This in turn has resulted in increased , the expectations placed on mobile devices , “said Finnish HP Workstation and output unit director Ari Koskinen .
HP’s investigation also revealed that workers no longer feel the most effective way to work in the office. As many as 73 percent of business travelers is of the opinion that the travel time offers them the opportunity to do nights in arrears and increase productivity . 56 per cent said he gets his best ideas outside of the office .
Despite the high use of technology in eight out of ten feel that way to work with restrictions. They are related to , for example the slow internet connections or unreliable , the duration of the battery equipment , equipment performance, and use of mobile broadband high cost and complexity.
Source: http://www.kauppalehti.fi/etusivu/hp+palavereja+hiotaan+viela+taksin+takapenkilla/201309499463?utm_source=iltalehti.fi&utm_medium=boksi&utm_content=Versio1&utm_campaign=Boksi
Tomi Engdahl says:
Marketing is a continuous data hungry
The research house Gartner has predicted that by 2017 the CMO’s to use it: GDP more money than the CIO’s ever considered.
Other projections, CMO to (Chief Marketing Officer) will be the CIO’s (Chief Information Officer), its biggest customer.
Many experts agree that it’s marketing and relations will depend on the kind of the role of the CIO to take big data, analytics and business intelligence (bi, business intelligence) problems.
“It’s inertia force to come up with their own marketing of IT solutions,” says Zeszut and lists the three types of it’s besetting sin:
1 It solves the problems of the bottom-up
2 It resorts to easy solutions
3 It favors the long and expensive projects
“We need to do a few year’s worth of basic infrastructure work. Then you can see something concrete.”
Business needs a quick-fix solutions
As I said, it Zeszutin view their services is progressing too slowly: first build a comprehensive infrastructure, and then start the production of the easiest answers.
Marketing such as business units do things this way. Business needs a quick-fix solutions, half a year is a long time.
“For the above reasons the marketing simply can not be all solution to the problem it’s on or drawn by the analytics hoteisiin” Zeszut amount.
“In the future, the marketing people want to tell their own stories of success itself,” Zeszut expects.
CIO’s can help CMO ia the difficulty, if only the will to do so.
In his opinion, it’s not to stare too much security or for flexibility in cases where services are needed immediately.
“If it focuses on the client, or the marketing department basic questions, it should be clear from the moment in which information is important and what is not. Same applies to the construction of architectures and data organization.”
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/markkinoinnilla+on+jatkuva+datanalka/a927138
Tomi Engdahl says:
3 Lessons CMOs Take Away From IT’s Flawed Approach to Big Data
http://www.cio.com/article/739057/3_Lessons_CMOs_Take_Away_From_IT_s_Flawed_Approach_to_Big_Data?page=3&taxonomyId=3002
There’s no question that data analytics are playing an increasingly important role for marketing departments, but many marketers aren’t getting what they need from the CIO. If IT can’t deliver, CIOs should expect CMOs to go around them.
IT’s 3 Flawed Approaches to Big Data and BI
Zeszut sums up IT’s three flawed approaches to big data and BI as follows:
IT tackles problems from the bottom up. She says IT’s plan seems to be: Gather up a big pile of whatever data we can most easily get our hands on, wait for someone to ask a question, then query the database. Business intelligence is essentially an after-the-fact exploration of data.
1. IT typically pulls in data that’s easy to pull in, rather than pulling in what matters. “There’s an old joke about a guy taking a nighttime walk who sees another person searching under a lamppost,” Zeszut says. “The first guy asks, ‘What are you looking for?’ ‘I lost my keys,’ the searcher replies. ‘Oh, you lost them right around here?’ ‘No, I lost them over there in the dark bushes, but the light is so much better here.’
2. That, Zeszut says, is what IT is doing when it pulls in only the easiest data. It’s true that some of the data that matters most is easy to get (Salesforce data via an API, for instance), but most of it is hard to get. For instance, reams of agency data comes in PDF format. Then there’s PR data and all the data and planning docs in PowerPoint and Excel that hold the keys to marketing performance calibration. That data isn’t easy to access, so it’s probably not coming in to IT’s data warehouse any time soon.
3. IT continues to recommend big, lengthy and expensive data infrastructure projects. When IT presents its plans, they usually conclude with something like, “And then in 2017 we roll out reporting &.” Translation: We need to do years of infrastructure work, and after that you might be able to see something.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Integration projects, the overall architecture will remain at the feet Alongside business
Market-Visio surveyed large and IT-intensive organizations in the integration of development and widespread technologies.
Of special interest were the open-source middleware solutions, which were found to reach a viable alternative in most industries.
The integration needs are growing in all sectors: three out of four respondents said that needs to grow, and two of the three had already been budgeted for integration-related development projects in the next 2-3 years.
However, budgets are tied to specific development projects in general, and only a few people thinking about a comprehensive solution integrations.
“Business wants to get quickly caught the benefits of application-specific understanding of what new applications, platforms and operating results in the implementation of the company’s total architecture”, Research Director Sanna Korhonen Market-Visio release notes.
Open source on the rise
Middleware technologies by far the most common is Microsoft’s BizTalk. By industry, however, the number one place varies from Oracle, IBM, SAP and Microsoft among products.
The vast majority of organizations has at its disposal several middleware products. Also, an open-source middleware will race setups, in particular the public sector but also in services and industry.
The open-source solutions for attracting price and innovative solutions. On the other hand slow down the pace of the doubts of the longevity or product support availability.
“On the other hand the quality of the product life-cycle, and a number of security scratching. Most probably, however, the value of open source solutions in an innovative and fast development cycles and know-how, which also has its own IT to invest.”
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/integraatiohankkeissa+kokonaisarkkitehtuuri+jaa+bisneksen+jalkoihin/a927262
Tomi Engdahl says:
myOpenID to close down for good in February 2014
Users of the OpenID registrar will have to go elsewhere
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/05/myopenid_closes_for_good_2014/
MyOpenID, a major provider of open source authentication system OpenID, is set to close for good on February 1st 2014.
The free service, provided by self-styled “social login” firm Janrain, was first launched back in 2006 as a way for users to authenticate easily by using just one log-in across a range of sites.
However, the number of sites supporting OpenID has dwindled in recent years as users increasingly use their Google or Facebook credentials to log-in to their favourite sites and services.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 8.1 to freeze out small business apps
ISVs can forget about modern apps for shops with under 100 seats
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/05/smbs_to_be_windows_wallflowers/
While Microsoft is happy with the “appification” of Windows, and prepares to go-live with Windows 8.1 on October 18, it’s created a gap between present and future that could be a stumbling block for a bunch of small ISVs.
The kind of company that lives between the consumer and the enterprise will still be able to create and ship its custom software using old-style installers, but Redmond isn’t yet ready to have them move into the app-happy world of the TIFKAM Start screen.
Redmond’s rules are a little odd. If a developer wants to pitch software to World+Dog, no problem: just list the app on Windows Store and hope it flies.
Enterprises that want to control the apps loaded on Windows 8.1 can use side-loading, Redmond’s jargon for loading apps from an internal source. The Windows 8.1 licensing model lets any enterprise with Software Assurance side-load. Alternatively, customers might be large enough to be forking out for the monthly Microsoft InTune subscription, which also includes side-load keys. If the enterprise has neither Software Assurance or an InTune subscription, it has another option, which is to buy side-load keys itself.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon Hiring More Than a 100 Who Can Get Top Secret Clearances
http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/09/04/2233208/amazon-hiring-more-than-a-100-who-can-get-top-secret-clearances
“Amazon’s hiring effort includes an invitation-only recruiting event for systems support engineers at its Herndon, Va., facility on Sept. 24 and 25. Amazon is fighting to win a contract to build a private cloud for the CIA”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Targets Cloud Data Centers with New Atom C2000 Chips
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/09/04/intel-targets-cloud-data-centers-with-atom-c2000-chips/
Intel is bringing its low-power Atom chips to the cloud. Today the chipmaker announced the commercial availability of products based on the new Atom C2000, a low-power chip previously known by the codename Avoton. The new chip is designed to bring the power efficiency of mobile phones into the hyperscale environments of cloud data centers.
Intel said the new 22nm chip will also allow it to expand into areas such as cold storage and entry-level networking, which loom as growth markets as data center operators look beyond servers to improve power efficiency across their entire infrastructure.