Gartner believes that software and hardware companies do better in 2013 than last year. I hope so this happens, it would be good for the industry. Gartner Says Worldwide IT Spending Forecast to Reach $3.7 Trillion in 2013. That would be 4.2 percent increase from 2012 spending. At the moment uncertainties surrounding prospects for an upturn in global economic growth are the major retardants to IT growth. According to the IT market research form Forrester IT market will grow globally by 3.3 per cent this year in U.S. dollar terms. Europe continues to decline (except Nordic countries, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), and growth is slower in Japan and India.
Worldwide IT spending increases were pretty anemic as IT and telecom services spending were seriously curtailed last year. Gartner believes that this uncertainty is nearing resolution and thus Earth’s anemic IT budgets to bounce back in 2013. Wall Street Beat: 2013 IT Spending Forecasts Look Upbeat article mentions that fiscal cliff deal will help unlock spending on mobility, analytics, collaboration and security technology.
According to the EPA, the average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year. There is again a Campaign To Remove Paper From Offices. A campaign started by HelloFax, Google, Expensify, and others has challenged businesses to get rid of physical paper from their office environment in 2013. The Paperless 2013 project wants to move all documents online. The digital tools that are available today. The paperless office technology is here – we just need to use it more than our printers.
Intel x86 and ARM duopoly will continue to dominate this year. Both of the processor will sell well on their own main application fields, and they try to push to each others territories. This means that ARM tries to push to servers and x86 is trying to push more heavily to mobile devices.
Software manufacturers aim to hardware business: Microsoft, Valve, Google etc..
Still IT buyers expect too much from software they buy. This has happened earlier for long time and I expect that to continue. IT systems are easier to develop than user brains, but still system that are hard to learn are pushed to users.
IT service companies sill “sell air”. It is a good business to sell promises first and then when you get money try to do make the promised product with it. And are you sure that the backups your service provider makes can really be restored?
This year will not be a year for Linux on desktop. The fact that currently Amazon’s top selling laptop runs on Linux does not change that. Linux is more heading to smart phones and tablets that to win normal desktop.
Gaming on Linux gets boost. Valve released Steam gaming system for LinuxUbuntu users have run to use Steam game service (at the moment 0.8% of Steam users use Ubuntu, the service was started to as beta on December 2012). Valve will release this year it’s own Linux based Steam Box gaming console. Exclusive interview: Valve’s Gabe Newell on Steam Box, biometrics, and the future of gaming.
Windows 8 slow start continues. Windows 8 sales are well below projections. Computer sales dropped after release of Windows 8. U.S. consumers hesitant to make switch to Windows 8. Uncertainty could turn Windows 8 into the next Vista. Independent report says that Windows 8 Even Less Popular Than Vista and Microsoft voice says that its new OS are chugging along quite nicely, thank you very much, in much the same fashion as Windows 7 before it. Who to believe? Let’s wait and see what happens. I expect that some users will get Significant booting challenges on EFI systems when upgrading to Windows 8.
Interest in Java will decrease compared to other languages for various reasons, recent security issues playing part on that. C Beats Java As Number One Language According To TIOBE Index. It happened already.
Software optimization becomes again talked about when CPU usage on cloud system is easily measured and costs money. Cost-Aware Architectures will be talked bout. Keeping control over cost, architecturally, is just plain hard. Usually engineers we are remarkably badly trained in thinking about cost, but corporate bean counters can now start to ask how we save cost in running the software in cloud. Pinterest Cut Costs from $54 to $20 Per Hour by Automatically Shutting Down Systems.
The world of smart connected devices (desktops, notebook, tabs and smartphones) is becoming bigger and bigger on the expense of traditional PC manufacturers. At the end of 2012 HP is still top of PC league, but trailing fourth in all-devices rankings. Samsung leads the pack in terms of device shipments and Apple is next. Lenovo is the third biggest shifter of devices on the planet. The bets for increased sales are being placed behind smartphones and tablets.
It’s deja vu all over again. You see the phrase “any time, any place, anywhere” in relation to mobile access. Mobile devices bring back that old client-server feeling. The realization dawned that client-server brought with it as many problems as it solved. Following a period of re-centralisation using Web-based architectures, it looks as if we are beginning to come full circle. When the next generation is getting all excited about using mobile apps as front-ends for accessing services across the network, we can’t help noticing parallels with the past. Are HTML5 and cross-platform development and execution environments are now with us to save us? In the real world, the fast and reliable connectivity upon which this model depends just isn’t there in most countries at the moment.
End of netbooks as we know it. Netbook sales go to zero. All major manufacturers in this category has ended making netbooks. They have been replaced with booming tablet sales.
Tablet PC shipments are expected to reach more than 240 million units worldwide in 2013, easily exceeding the 207 million notebook PCs that are projected to ship, according to NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report. The market that has been dominated by one major player, Apple, but Android tablets are quickly getting more market share.
Thin client devices seem to be popping up here and there. Dell introduces HDMI stick that turns any screen into a thin client PC. And so will several other small stick computers coming. Raspberry Pi pocket computer is selling like hot pies (nears one million milestone).
Directly soldered to board CPUs are already norm on smart phone, tablets and some laptops. There will be more and more questions when manufacturers start to drop CPU sockets on the computers. Rumors about Intel Corp.’s plan to abandon microprocessor sockets in the future has been flowing and official response has been:
Intel to Support CPU Sockets for Foreseeable Future. AMD Vows Not to Drop Microprocessor Sockets in Next Two Years. Question is still when transition to BGA starts to happen on desktop PCs.
USB speed will increase again this year. So there is again a new USB version. The future of USB 3.0 coming mid-year with data speeds doubling to 10Gbps. USB 3.0 speed to DOUBLE in 2013 article tells that USB 3.0 – aka SuperSpeed USB – is set to become 10 gigabits per second super-speedy, with a new specification scheduled for a mid-2013 release. The aim is to brings USB closer to the class-leading Thunderbolt standard. It is expected that the new specification ends to consumer hardware a year later.
Higher resolutions will become commonplace. Earlier full HD was a target. Now high end devices are aiming to “retina” and 4K resolutions. Panasonic shows off 20-inch Windows 8 tablet with insane 4K resolution Qualcomm outs Snapdragon 800 and 600: up to 2.3GHz quad-core, 4K video, due by mid 2013.
Solid state storage becomes cheaper and cheaper. You can get ssd-storage at as low as less than one dollar per gigabyte. Moore’s Law may not be running out of steam in memory as we have an insatiable appetite for memory these days. Nowadays our tastes are changing from DRAM to nonvolatile flash memory used in SSD device. For example Kingston just unveiled the world’s first 1TB USB stick and SSD drives are also getting bigger every day. We are already encountering floating-gate scaling problems for NAND flash and answer to the scaling problem appears to be growing devices “up”.
2013 in storage is dominated by flash and file systems. We will finally see some all-flash arrays starting to ship from the big boys – and this will bring credibility to some of the smaller players. Management tools are going to be big again. Expect a lot of pain as infrastructure teams try to make things just work.
1,455 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Beyond Google Reader: CommaFeed
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/beyond-google-reader-commafeed
Now that Google Reader is officially gone, most folks have settled on a replacement of some sort. In fact, a few months ago I even went through the process of installing Tiny Tiny RSS as a viable and powerful replacement. At the time, there was only one feature I sorely missed, the “next unread blog” link. Approximately three days before Google Reader shut down for good, I found the holy grail of RSS readers: CommaFeed.
CommaFeed is an open-source project written in Java. It’s offered as a free Web-based solution at https://www.commafeed.com. Although the interface is similar to Google Reader, it feels slightly stripped down.
Tomi Engdahl says:
$79 Nymi bracelet aims to replace passwords and keys with your heartbeat
http://www.geek.com/mobile/79-nymi-bracelet-aims-to-replace-passwords-and-keys-with-your-heartbeat-1569351/
It’s a new “wearable authentication device” called Nymi, and its creators think it can replace your passwords and keys — or at least make them a whole lot more secure.
Clasp the Nymi around your wrist, press your fingertip to the sensor on the top, and it springs to life. Built-in LEDs and a vibration motor let you know it’s active, and you can also program them to deliver notifications from your smartphone (Nymi supports Bluetooth 4.0).
Nymi authenticates you by reading your heartbeat the way an electrocardiograph does: by monitoring its electrical activity.
Even if someone was to swipe your Nymi, it wouldn’t be any use to him or her. Without sensing that your heart is thumping out its specific pattern, your Nymi won’t authenticate. It’s got proximity sensors, too, so you don’t need to worry about someone flicking through the contents of your phone while you’re in the bathroom. Nymi knows to unlock your device when it’s close to your wrist.
Initially, Nymi will support Windows, OS X, Android, and iOS, allowing you to unlock your device and log in to apps and websites without pressing a key. Bionym, the company behind Nymi, has much bigger plans for the inexpensive authenticator, though.
It wants to convince other hardware manufacturers
to integrate Nymi support into their products.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Everyman’s mobile management is eroding the role of information management
The business world is going mobile regime change. Information Management Leaders lose their positions as directors of the divisions acquire, they need mobile applications and content.
Anyware to say, sales manager may decide, without the IT department for approval of what mobile content and applications of their subordinates need Cio.com write .
Forrester has come to similar, but IT managers even more unnerving results. Announced in the spring Tracking the Renegade Technology Buyer called the report showed the IT budgets of non-procurement technology is a growth industry.
Mobile Iron is by no means the only lob the gambler. Technology companies, well-known for Salesforce.com aspire to new customers to the business units.
“Running is a mobile management revolution, a kind of renaissance, which simply just need to take place,”
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/jokamiehen+mobiilihallinta+rapauttaa+tietohallinnon+asemaa/a927568
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mobile Management Spurs Power Shift in the Enterprise
http://www.cio.com/article/738935/Mobile_Management_Spurs_Power_Shift_in_the_Enterprise
Who owns mobility in the enterprise? It’s not the CIO. The business side is seizing power for mobile application development and management, and software vendors are quickly adjusting to service this nontechnical target market.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Making Sense of security
Terms, such as business continuity, data integrity, confidentiality and non-repudiation are rife with security professionals in the speech.
Security encryption familiar with the science often talk about the involuntary either a theory or a stumble in his speech on the other hand numerous to detail. Thus the terms in the firewall configuration, ad federation or aes encryption will go smoothly over many listener.
Information Security is responsible for the company and its management, data security, the practical implementation of it largely. The management, however, feels more at ease annoying because the mind does not have a map in which the concepts of information security professionals in the fall. What to do? What would be the security is one film that would explain it all?
To understand the method to the security concept is to share the locations where security is implemented in practice.
These are, first, self-knowledge in data centers and the access to the data network (mobile data), such as terminals, as well as man himself. A person can be in several roles, the end-user, administrator, or even unauthorized intruder.
Information
Key data stores are typically located in data centers, and their security is largely a center of the physical environment and the self-protection of technical data.
This could be compared to even a bank vault. It is important to prevent physical access to unauthorized individuals.
Access
Access to the service is done by using a terminal device via a data network. Society as a whole is highly dependent on computer networks.
Modern techniques and information can be hijacked from computer networks without the subject being noticed.
Fortunately, this is there an antidote – the encryption.
The data network through a thief could also try to get access to the vault. This, in turn, prepares for firewalls.
Access to data through the network therefore takes place, but this requires the terminal and the necessary software.
Terminal security as are often the Achilles’ heel. Because of this, the company’s clients can be “certified”, meaning that they are encoded, and the company’s network to identify its “own people”. Add to this the lock code, up to date anti-virus and any device data encryption, are already relatively safe waters.
As a person who owns the device, he can easily forget that a work-related data is owned by the company, and therefore it must be protected.
The fact that the user has the appropriate body, for example, to ensure two-way authentication, the password is sent after logging on, say, a person’s cell phone. This ID and password theft is not enough, but thief must be in possession of the person’s phone.
The authorization for the service within the system of processes and information is shared in such a way that a given user role access to a specific part of the area.
Man
Despite all of the technical implementation, data security loopholes in
The weakest link in security is typically a human, user or third party, such as an administrator or a criminal, either inadvertently or intentionally harmful activity.
Big brother
Security is the interesting thing is that the motive of the perpetrator is not always a crime, or self-interest.
Some people try to mess up just because they have the know-how. Others believe that they have a duty to share confidential information on all the others.
The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights of privacy is a fundamental human right. Security is so important that it is governed by national and international level.
And an even bigger cousin
After all this, we should all feel safe to feel … what about the NSA’s PRISM program, a top-secret documents now in Russia that sits on the CIA and the NSA worked with Edward Snowden revealed?
It is not difficult to imagine that terrorists and criminals hunt collecting massive databases. This ‘big data’ analytics combined, and terrorist communication networks revealed.
These methods inquiry in power will certainly increase, but the eyebrows to rise. In practice, you just have to trust that the information gathered from a democratic state – makes it to the credit card company or the state security agency – used for the wrong purposes.
It is clear that the State intelligence has always been, and always will be. State security is considered more important than the individual’s privacy.
Seven brothers and fluoroscopy
The only way to avoid a possible traffic monitoring is to go to the wilderness of spruce stump up and live a self-sufficient and leave the cell phone and credit cards at home.
That happens quite a bit, but rather the trend is to share everything possible about oneself in public. This could say that now, but it is stupid to tell too much. It is good to remember that a large part of the data will never be destroyed, because its destruction cost more than the store.
Secret Science civic literacy
Since almost all actions are based on processes and knowledge, it is not available for isolated operations into its own islet. The same applies to the information security. It must, however, be able to talk intelligibly.
Although in the end the security of information, both in practice and can be divided according to whether that knowledge, access to information, or the user. So there you have it.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/blogit/CIO_100_blogi/tolkkua+tietoturvaan/a927303
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jonathon Fletcher: The Forgotten Father of the Search Engine
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/09/05/0332255/jonathon-fletcher-the-forgotten-father-of-the-search-engine
“If you were under the impression that Brin and Page invented the search engine while working out of a garage somewhere in Silicon Valley then think again. The first practical web-crawler with a searchable index, JumpStation, was running out of Stirling University, Scotland, twenty years ago this year, long before Google came into existence.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jonathon Fletcher: forgotten father of the search engine
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23945326
As Google celebrates its 15th birthday, the web giant has become a byword for information retrieval.
Yet 20 years ago, in a computer lab at the University of Stirling in Scotland, Mr Fletcher invented the world’s first web-crawling search engine – the very technology that powers Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the major search tools on the web today.
In 1993, the web was in its infancy.
Mosaic, the first popular browser with an interface that resembles the ones we use today, had just been released, and the total amount of web pages numbered in the thousands.
But the question of how to find things on the web had not been solved.
While building a web server for the university, Fletcher realised the What’s New page was fundamentally flawed.
Because websites were added to the list manually, there was nothing to track changes to their content. Consequently, many of the links were quickly out-of-date or wrongly labelled.
“With a degree in computing science and an idea that there had to be a better way, I decided to write something that would go and look for me.”
That something was the world’s first web crawler.
Mr Fletcher called his invention JumpStation. He put together an index of pages which could then be searched by a web crawler, essentially an automated process that visits, and indexes, every link on every web page it comes across. The process continues until the crawler runs out of things to visit.
Ten days later, on 21 December 1993, JumpStation ran out of things to visit. It had indexed 25,000 pages.
To date, Google has indexed over a trillion pages.
“I would say that he is the father of the web search engine,”
However, while Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are household names, Mr Fletcher, who now lives in Hong Kong, has received little recognition for his role in the evolution of the internet.
The fact that his project was ultimately abandoned may not have helped.
As JumpStation grew, it required more and more investment – something which the University of Stirling was not willing to provide.
“It ran on a shared server,” explains Mr Fletcher. “There wasn’t a lot of disk space and back then disks were small and expensive.”
But despite the disappointment Mr Fletcher suffered, his pioneering technology would be the foundation of all subsequent web search engines.
“The web community in 1993 was very small,” says Prof Sanderson. “Anybody who was doing anything on the web would’ve known about JumpStation.
“By the middle of 1994 it was becoming clear that web search engines were going to be very important. Google didn’t come out until 1998 and what Jonathon was doing was in 1993.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s Trojan horse: how Chrome Apps will finally take on Windows
The web alone is not enough
http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/5/4696618/google-chrome-apps-chrome-os-windows-os-x-blink
Today, on Chrome’s fifth birthday, Google is announcing the rollout of what it’s calling Chrome Apps. Don’t feel bad if you’re confused by the name. Chrome has been serving up web apps since 2010 when the Chrome Web Store opened up alongside the launch of the Chrome OS. Chrome Apps, however, are different than what’s been offered before. They comprise Google’s bid to elevate the browser into a true app platform — one that it thinks could one day be a legitimate rival to Windows, OS X, and someday iOS and even Android.
The new apps look and behave much like the native apps you find on Windows and OS X. They’re built using web technologies, but also with Chrome-specific code that means they won’t be able to run on other web browsers — they’re truly Chrome apps.
They can exist outside of your browser window as distinct apps, work offline, and sync across devices and operating systems. They can also access your computer’s GPU, storage, camera, ports, and Bluetooth connection.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A new breed of Chrome Apps
http://chrome.blogspot.fi/2013/09/a-new-breed-of-chrome-apps.html
Today we’re unveiling a new kind of Chrome App, which brings together the speed, security and flexibility of the modern web with the powerful functionality previously only available with software installed on your devices
If you’re using Windows or a Chromebook, you can check them out in the “For your desktop” collection in the Chrome Web Store (Mac & Linux coming soon).
Tomi says:
Why cards are the future of the web
http://insideintercom.io/why-cards-are-the-future-of-the-web/
Cards are fast becoming the best design pattern for mobile devices.
We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content. Content being broken down into individual components and re-aggregated is the result of the rise of mobile technologies, billions of screens of all shapes and sizes, and unprecedented access to data from all kinds of sources through APIs and SDKs. This is driving the web away from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated together into one experience.
Twitter is moving to cards
Google is moving to cards
Everyone is moving to cards
Cards give bursts of information
Cards can be manipulated.
Cards are the new creative canvas
It’s already clear that product and interaction designers will heavily use cards. I think the same is true for marketers and creatives in advertising. As social media continues to rise, and continues to fragment into many services, taking up more and more of our time, marketing dollars will inevitably follow. The consistent thread through these services, the predominant canvas for creativity, will be card based. Content consumption on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Line, you name it, is all built on the card design metaphor.
I think there is no getting away from it. Cards are the next big thing in design and the creative arts. To me that’s incredibly exciting.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IFA 2013: Highlights from the German technology show
Column Chasing the biggest announcements in consumer technology
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/opinion/2293242/ifa-2013-highlights-from-the-german-technology-show
Comment: “Most companies are releasing gimmicks because the PC industry is suffering from maturity and the economic crisis in the UK, Asia and the U.S. Some folks will buy anything because they are bored… That’s who the gimmicks are for.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
SME Masterclass: How to incorporate digital technology into your business
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/festival-of-business/10284249/SME-Masterclass-How-to-incorporate-digital-technology-into-your-business.html
If words like app and cloud make your head hurt, you need to take action, fast. The good news is it need not be as painful as you think.
The new wave of digital technologies such as smart phones, the cloud, apps, social media and interactive websites are transforming the way that SMEs can do business. The big problem is knowing where to start, and how to do it right. Here’s how:
1. Work out what problem you are actually trying to solve.
2. Put away your ZX81 manual. The good news is that all the technology you need for your business has already been invented – so there is no need to start writing software from scratch or commissioning someone to do it for you.
3. Get your employees on board. Give them the latest digital devices and apps to use in their work so they start to become digital tech savvy without realising it.
4. Decide what the end goals are for your business.
5. Don’t put your head in the sand. Don’t think you can get away with not engaging with new technology. You can’t. The new small businesses coming up behind yours have been set up with all this new digital technology built-in right from the start. That puts them at a huge competitive advantage
6. Don’t wait to be forced into it – act now.
7. Make the technology you adopt easy and pleasant for your customers to use. There is a reason Apple has become one of the most successful companies in the world – it’s because design and user experience matters.
8. Maintain it and keep it updated.
- technology is moving so fast that you need to constantly monitor it and assess it to ensure that it is doing all the things you need it to do.
Tomi says:
Fire in China Memory Chip Plant Could Slow PC and Phone Shipments
http://allthingsd.com/20130906/fire-in-china-memory-chip-plant-could-slow-pc-and-phone-shipments/
If you were planning on maybe upgrading the memory on your desktop or notebook PC, or servers, you might want to get it done quickly or wait for a while.
A fire at a plant in China owned by Korea’s SK Hynix is likely to cause a disruption in the world’s supply of memory chips. The plant in Wuxi, China, is said to be responsible for as much as 10 percent of the world’s supply of DRAM chips, and about half of SK Hynix’s production capability.
DRAMexchange, a research firm that tracks the ebb and flow of the memory chip market, estimated that SK Hynix accounted for about 30 percent of the world’s share in the second quarter of the year. The other two major suppliers are South Korea’s Samsung and Micron in the U.S.
SK Hynix is a big supplier to Apple, and its chips have been seen in the iPhone.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NSA Revelations Cast Doubt on the Entire Tech Industry
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/tech-industry-tainted/
Six years ago, two Microsoft cryptography researchers discovered some weirdness in an obscure cryptography standard authored by the National Security Agency. There was a bug in a government-standard random number generator that could be used to encrypt data.
According to Thursday’s reports by the ProPublica, the Guardian, and The New York Times, classified documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden appear to confirm what everyone suspected: that the backdoor was engineered by the NSA. Worse still, a top-secret NSA document published with the reports says that the NSA has worked with industry partners to “covertly influence” technology products.
That sounds bad, but so far, there’s not much hard evidence about what exactly has been compromised. No company is named in the new allegations. The details of the reported modifications are murky. So while much of the internet’s security systems appear to be broken, it’s unclear where the problems lie.
The result is that the trustworthiness of the systems we used to communicate on the internet is in doubt. “I think all companies have a little bit of taint after this,” says Christopher Soghoian, a technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union.
The latest documents show that the NSA has vast crypto-cracking resources, a database of secretly held encryption keys used to decrypt private communications, and an ability to crack cryptography in certain VPN encryption chips. Its goal: to crack in a widespread way the internet’s security tools and protocols.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A fire at a factory in China could make all your gadgets more expensive this year
http://qz.com/121893/a-fire-at-a-factory-in-china-could-make-all-your-gadgets-more-expensive-this-year/
Everything from smartphones to laptops to tablets could get a little more costly due to a fire this week at a Korean firm’s factory in Wuxi, China, where a substantial portion of the world’s memory chips are made. The Sept. 4 inferno at SK Hynix’s fabrication facility sent the price of benchmark 2-gigabyte Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) up 19% to a three-year high.
High demand from Chinese tablet and smartphone manufacturers has already caused a spike in DRAM prices this year, with prices nearly doubling from November to May. The cost of the industry standard 2-gigabit DRAM jumped 30 cents to $1.90 the day after the fire, and rose another $.10 to $2.00 on Friday.
Market research firm TrendForce said it would take half a year for SK Hynix to rebuild, leading to higher prices throughout the fourth quarter. The firm’s customers include Apple, Lenovo, Dell and Sony
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hynix says fire did not cripple China chip-making plant
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/04/us-hynix-suspension-idUSBRE9830SP20130904
the South Korean chipmaker said on Wednesday, adding that a fire at the facility caused one minor injury but did not cripple critical equipment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finnish Hospitals in a hurry to upgrade computers – Patient data at risk
Hospital districts new to the tens of thousands of computers during this winter – otherwise the patient data is at risk of falling into the wrong hands, writes Yle.
Microsoft will end in April next year the security updates for Windows XP operating system, widely used in Finnish hospitals and health centers.
The problem is that when you run out of upgrades, hackers can feel free to take advantage of the operating system of programming errors. Hospital districts have now launched a big update operation due to a matter, to write Yle.
- It is certain that if the hospital districts have until next spring after the Windows XP machines in use, computers do not do security updates, and it is a real problem
YLE asked the medical district, how well they are able to update the machine in time. According to the answers of about 60 per cent of hospital districts to be successful, the rest do not.
Source: http://www.iltalehti.fi/digi/2013090917462832_du.shtml
Tomi Engdahl says:
Enterprise storage: A history of paper, rust and flash silicon
Has anything really changed since the punch card era?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/09/transitions_and_heads/
The story of data storage is one of ever decreasing circles. What started as holes punched into cards, then into tape, became hard disks, floppy disks, then hard shiny disks, until eventually circles are no longer involved at all.
It is also the story of transitions from one medium to another as the IT industry searched for ways to hold data and deliver access to it fast enough to keep processors busy.
Here’s a rough timeline, showing the overlap between key technologies.
Punched cards – 1930s – 1980s
Paper tape – 1950s – 1990s
Magnetic tape – 1951 – present day
Rotating disk – 1956 – present day
Flash memory – 1990s to present
Storage is required by a computer because its memory loses all its data when it’s switched off; DRAM is volatile.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Opera Launches Coast, A Slick New WebKit-Based iPad Browser
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/09/opera-launches-coast-its-new-webkit-based-ipad-browser/
About a year and a half ago, a small team at Opera started working on a new browser for tablets and today, it is launching the result of this project: Opera Coast, a new, almost chrome-less browser for the iPad.
As Huib Kleinhout, the head of the Coast project at Opera told me last week, the new web-browsing app was born out of the frustration that browsers really haven’t changed all that much since the days of Mosaic, even though the devices we browse the web with have changed quite a bit.
Kleinhout believes, browsers also need to change and Coast is Opera’s first attempt at building a new tablet-optimized browser.
“People don’t use the browser as a power tool,” Kleinhout said about how people use browsers on their tablets. The idea behind Coast is to remove most of the complexities – and often unnecessary user interface elements – of today’s browsers. “On a tablet, browsers felt outdated, and that bothered me,”
Coast features almost no user interface elements except for a “home” button at the bottom of the screen and a smaller button in the bottom right corner to show you the sites you recently visited. Virtually all of the interaction with the browser happens through gestures.
Instead of regular bookmarks, Coast uses its own iOS-like homescreen with large icons for your most-visited sites.
Talking about the philosophy behind this very sparse design, Kleinhout noted that it shouldn’t be the browser’s job to show share buttons, for example (a thinly veiled swipe at some of Mozilla’s latest projects). Instead, the sites themselves should determine how users interact with them.
Unlike Opera Mini and the company’s earliest attempts at launching iOS browsers, Coast does not use Opera’s server-side rendering service and relies on Apple’s own built-in rendering engine instead.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Making the ultimate creative content OS from bits of Windows, Mac, and Linux
New Mac Pro leaving you cold too? ÜberCreate OS 1.0 would be the OS to end them all.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/making-the-ultimate-creative-content-os-ubercreate-os-1-0/
So in effect, this is a guide on how to create the ultimate OS for creatives by taking what OS X, Windows, and Linux do right—and wrong—for serious creative professional work. The end result should be a guide on how to make ÜberCreate OS 1.0.
Good image, PDF, and video codec support out of the box
All the major OSes have no problem showing a slideshow of TIFFs, even compressed 16-bit ones. But for professional image format support, OS X can’t currently be beat.
Movie format and codec support
Because of QuickTime’s close ties to the legacy Mac OS, video and audio format support was ahead of its time on the Mac. With the spread of ripped movies and the Web, it’s become commonplace in all OSes to handle a variety of media formats. Windows 8 will play many .mov files without the need for QuickTime—still much reviled on Windows—and Ubuntu offers interactive installers for most codecs. Because Linux generally uses VLC or FFMPEG libraries, many distros have exceptional out-of-the-box codec support.
Advanced hardware support in the OS, resolution independence, and expanded driver control
Where Apple fares much better than the others is with 4K/HighDPI monitor support (this is still a minefield on Windows and Linux for various reasons). Luckily, recent Linux developments have seen its multi-monitor support expand beyond two displays without having to go movie hacker on config files.
Search everywhere, clear-text content indexing, and expanded metadata handling
The search capabilities of your OS are obviously important to working efficiently—less time is spent digging through folders. Being able to search for images by their size, format, and everything is now a commonplace feature of search in all OSes
Intuitive methods of dealing with visual content and flexible inter-application workflows
Nowadays, much collaborative design work is done through Dropbox and Google drive, since people don’t need to work on-site anymore. When you can’t walk over to someone’s desk, an OS’ digital filing system needs to step up to help in this modern work environment.
Multitasking
It seems almost ridiculous to have to bring up multitasking today, but yes, it is still an issue. I’m not going to go on at length about MACH versus Linux kernels because, between OS X and Linux, multitasking is pretty much the same. But Windows is an entirely different beast.
OS-wide scripting support
If you are a professional, you probably use things like templates and well-honed workflows and lots of hotkeys to save time. But scripting goes beyond those things to make you an efficiently working beast. Before Photoshop had its Actions scripts, we would use a plugin that much the same thing, and on OS less-than-X, many applications supported AppleScript to get expanded functionality. It is still used widely in desktop publishing.
This is the power of a ton of built-in UNIX command line tools meeting the OS’ GUI scripting frameworks. There is nothing like this on any other OS, and third-party efforts to emulate Automator fall flat due to the lack of OS-wide support and frameworks. For all the work that Microsoft has done on improving Powershell, there is zero exposure of these tools to use it in a GUI context.
Downtime reduction tools: Flexible ghosting and backup
Time Machine—or to put it a more platform-agnostic way, a backup system that is tied to the OS—is crucial to reducing down time.
In the enterprise Linux world, the solution to this problem is to put the system and the user data in separate partitions so you can reinstall the OS without wiping the user data.
Windows has both Windows 7 Backup and Restore and Windows 8 File History, but neither option does system file backups. Windows 8 has a “Refresh your PC” option that does something similar
Tomi Engdahl says:
Seagate to Ship 5TB HDD in 2014 using Shingled Magnetic Recording
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 9, 2013 8:00 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7290/seagate-to-ship-5tb-hdd-in-2014-using-shingled-magnetic-recording
It’s not just planar NAND that’s running into physical limits lately. According to Seagate, its latest 1TB platter 3.5″ drives have shrunk read/write heads as small as they can physically go. Similarly, tracks on those platters are placed as close together as physically possible. Pushing areal density is important to increase overall capacities (no one wants to see more platters per drive), but if we’re at physical limits today then it’s time for some architectural changes to push capacities going forward.
Seagate’s solution is something it calls Shingled Magneting Recording (SMR). The process is pretty simple. Track size is traditionally defined by the size of the write heads, as they are larger than the read heads. The track width is larger than necessary from the perspective of reading data back in order to decrease the chances of reading data from adjacent tracks. Seagate’s SMR exploits this reality.
SMR shrinks the guard space between tracks and allows tracks to overlap one another, like roofing shingles. Although data is written to the entire width of the track, a smaller/trimmed portion of the track (the width of the read head) is all that the drive cares about. By allowing tracks to overlap, areal density can continue to scale without further shrinking the size of the heads.
The obvious downside of SMR is actually very NAND flash-like. When writing data sequentially to an empty platter, SMR is full of advantages. When you’re writing to a series of tracks that already contains data, the SMR writing process is actually destructive.
At worst, overwriting some sectors will force a re-write of an entire band, not an entire platter.
Seagate claims it has already shipped 1 million SMR enabled drives (I didn’t actually know any SMR drives had been shipping), but plans on using the technology to increase areal densities beginning next year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How even agile development couldn’t keep this mega-project on track
http://www.zdnet.com/how-even-agile-development-couldnt-keep-this-mega-project-on-track-7000020336/
Summary: The scheme sold as the world’s biggest agile software project, the UK’s £2.4bn Universal Credit programme, has run into cost overruns and delays. So what went wrong?
According to a report by the government watchdog the NAO published last week, the UK government has had to write off at least £34m on the programme and delay the national launch for the project.
Agile is a flexible approach to running an IT project and an alternative to traditional ‘waterfall’ methods, which generally lock down specifications for a IT system at the start and then test the entire system close to the end of the project.
Agile development methodologies such as Scrum instead favour the delivery of systems as a series of smaller software modules, which can be pushed out to users at regular intervals so their feedback can inform subsequent software iterations. But it according to agile methodology specialists and the NAO which has examined the project, there have been a number of misteps in the government approach.
That delay suggests there was not enough of an iterative feedback loop built into the programme, according to Jose Casal-Gimenez, chairman of the BCS agile methods specialist group and expert on Kanban and Lean agile methodologies. “It wasn’t agile enough in this fundamental area,” he said, adding that in his view there wasn’t enough emphasis on “real-world testing” and learning from user feedback.
Contract constraints
Setting out requirements for suppliers too rigidly at the start of the programme can hinder an agile deployment, as seems to have been the case for Universal Credit.
“The procurement decisions appear to have been taken before agile was even thought of as a delivery approach and appear to be at odds with agile delivery,” Casal-Gimenez said.
Contracts need to provide freedom for software to evolve with each new iteration — a key plank to how agile works — otherwise the nature of the methodology may see suppliers’ bills go up and up.
“Hard-nosed contract managers within large suppliers will see this as a change to the requirements and will often want to charge for each iteration,”
Too much, too fast?
Adopting agile development can’t be rushed, particularly at large organisations where hundreds of people have never delivered a project using the methodology.
Underestimating how hard it is to successfully transition to agile delivery is a common mistake organisations make, according to Casal-Gimenez.
“Agile is very hard in some ways. It appears to be very simple when people talk about it, but it’s very hard to implement,” Casal-Gimenez said.
“Organisations that are very hierarchical will have a challenge dealing with the differing mindsets surrounding collaboration, work and being comfortable with mistakes.
“The bigger the organisation, the more complex and the more traditional an organisation is the longer it will take.
“The risk here is that many organisations have less patience than it takes to change. If you try to do too much, too quickly there is usually a day of reckoning where people lose patience.”
What would have been an agile approach?
Casal-Gimenez believes the Universal Credit programme may now be more on track for truly agile delivery following the DWP’s decision to pilot the system at a single job centre in Greater Manchester, providing benefits to just 1,000 claimants.
“They can the start learning from that and putting in the bare bones of Universal Credit and then add more benefits, locations or claimants.
“It feels like a more realistic way of tackling the big challenge of connecting and creating lots of different complex systems.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ubuntu: One OS, one interface, all devices
http://www.zdnet.com/ubuntu-one-os-one-interface-all-devices-7000018613/
Summary: Canonical believes that Ubuntu can be one operating system and Unity the one interface you need for your PC, your smartphone, and your tablet. Here’s how they’ll do it.
For years, Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical has been pursuing a single dream: One operating system and one interface, Unity, for PCs, tablets, and smartphones. That dream is now becoming a reality.
The recent headlines have been about Canonical’s crowd-sourcing of its hybrid smartphone/PC, Ubuntu Edge, but Canonical’s plan of one integrated operating system and interface for all platforms predates it by years. While Unity is known better as an easy-to-use Linux desktop interface for beginners, Canonical has been aiming Unity at the smartphone and tablet market since it was introduced in October 2010.
It’s only now that this plan is coming into focus for those who don’t follow Ubuntu like a hawk.
Bacon said, “Unity is all about getting rid of the computer. Its focus is helping users focus on content.”
Instead of buttons or on-screen icons, Unity uses the edges of the display. Specifically, the top of the screen is used for indicators and settings . The left edge holds the Launcher, which is a bar of icons that’s similar to the Mac OS X dock. On the bottom edge you’ll find the controls for the app that’s currently on the screen. Finally, the right edge gives you access to multi-tasking functionality. To access any of them from a touchscreen you simply swipe from the edge to the display’s center. With a mouse, you move to the edge of the screen, click, and pull to the center of the screen.
You see the point? It all looks and works the same regardless of the platform.
To help developers work with this Ubuntu version provides not just a software developer kit (SDK) but an app design guide as well. In addition, Ubuntu provides its own app font set, global patterns to make sure all apps behave consistently, and design building blocks to help make certain all your apps look like they’re all part of the Unity family.
Can Canonical pull this off? Well, technically, they already have. The bigger question is: “Will the device vendors and carriers let them do it?”
The ultimate question, of course, is will you buy into this? Well, you’ll get your chance. The US’s biggest phone carrier, Verizon, will be offering Ubuntu smartphones and there’s a carrier-group of international phone carriers that are also backing Ubuntu.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Compiler Optimization: Getting the Most out of High-Level Code
http://rtcmagazine.com/articles/view/103234
Given the size of today’s projects, it is now imperative to write code in a high-level language, specifically C. But that makes code optimization all the more desirable. Here are some of the techniques and technologies of how a compiler optimizes your code for minimal footprint, highest performance, or in an optimized combination.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Tale of Two MySQL Bugs
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/09/09/2259206/a-tale-of-two-mysql-bugs
“Last May I encountered a relatively obscure performance bug present in both MySQL 5.5.x and MariaDB 5.5.x (not surprising since they share the same codebase).”
“On May 31 Oracle got their bug report; within 24 hours they had confirmed the bug — pretty impressive. But since then, it’s been radio silence”
“Within a week, a MariaDB developer had analyzed the bug and committed a patch.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC Display Orders Plummet in July
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319429&
Eight of the nine leading PC brands reduced their purchases of liquid crystal display (LCD) panels in July, resulting in a decline of 23 percent compared with July 2012, according to market research firm IHS.
Some 14.9 million units shipped in July 2013, down from 19.3 million units in July 2012, and down 18 percent from 18.1 million units in June 2013.
The eight leading PC brands — Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba — all cut their orders. In contrast, Apple raised its order on an annual basis to meet demand for the MacBook Air notebook computer.
The order declines came after a near-disastrous second quarter for mobile PC sales, with a sequential drop in shipments of 5.1 percent, the first such drop since the second quarter of 2002, said IHS.
“Notebook brands during the third quarter typically increase their purchases of LCD panels as they prepare to launch new mobile PC models for the second half of the year,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fab Fire Causes DRAM Price Surge
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319418&
A fire at a wafer fab belonging to SK Hynix in Wuxi, China, is likely to push up the price of DRAMs used in personal computers and smartphones in the second half of 2013. After the reports of the fire emerged, the spot market for DRAMs showed jumps of up 20 percent, according to the DRAMexchange website, although this was partly born of uncertainty awaiting information on the extent of the damage.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Want to boost app performance? Think of the server and tune ‘er to NUMA
And maybe chuck in some flash-based DIMMs, too
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/10/60east_amp_numa_tuning/
The HPC on Wall Street conference was hosted in the Big Apple on Monday, and while there was a lot–and we mean a lot–of talk about big data, one presentation stood out as being potentially much more useful in the long run than all of the big data bloviations.
The talk was given by one of the founders of a financial services software maker, who walked the audience through his company’s efforts to boost performance through coding apps to be aware of the underlying NUMA architecture of servers.
The techies from 60East Technologies, the maker of the AMPS (Advanced Message Processing System) publish/subscribe messaging system that was created to be the engine behind financial services applications, are also beta-testing flash-based DIMM memory sticks from Diablo Technologies to “crank up the AMPS”, as founder and CEO Jeffrey Birnbaum put it.
Financial apps: Latency, latency, latency
Much of financial applications is taking data from multiple sources, aggregating it, parsing it, and then streaming it out to multiple subscribers. And with such streaming applications – and especially the trading and other applications that depend upon those streams – latency is everything. And so even in a two-socket server, the latencies between local memory access in one socket and remote memory access in the other socket can make a big difference to the performance of the overall application.
Birnbaum says that in a typical two-socket Xeon E5 server, local memory access is on the order of 100 nanoseconds. But if you have to jump over to the main memory associated with the second socket in the system, any accesses through the QuickPath Interconnect that links the two sockets using non-uniform memory access (NUMA) clustering can take anywhere from 150 to 300 nanoseconds, with 300 nanoseconds not being unusual for outliers.
Programmer? I hardly NUMA…
60East employed a number of tools to tune up AMPS 3.5 for two-socket NUMA Xeon E5 servers. The first is the libnuma, which is used to set memory access policies in the Linux kernel.
The company also made use of Pin from Intel, which is used to check for memory references in the code.
With the MCS flash DIMMs in the two-socket server, the AMP software was able to push 4.16 million messages per second, compared to 1.18 million messages per second without it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big Jump For Tablet Storage: Seagate Intros 5mm Hard Disk For Tablets
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/09/09/1625254/big-jump-for-tablet-storage-seagate-intros-5mm-hard-disk-for-tablets
“Seagate on Monday took the wraps off a hard drive designed for tablets that brings 7x the storage capacity of a 64GB device with the same performance as a Flash drive.”
“The 2.5-inch drive is 5 mm thin and weighs 3.3 ounces. As for capacity, the drive has 500GB”
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD’s beating HEART of Internet of Things: 64-bit ARMs head for gadgets
New system-on-chips are not aimed at servers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/10/amd_reveals_embedded_roadmap_for_2014/
AMD has announced the roadmap for a chunk of its business that’s critical to its effort to “transform” the company from its dependence on PCs and x86 servers: the embedded market.
Perhaps one indication of AMD’s aggressiveness can be deduced from the code names of its next four embedded parts – they’re all named after birds of prey: “Adelaar”, “Steppe Eagle”, “Bald Eagle”, and “Hierofalcon”.
For Reg readers – IT types as you are – it’s perhaps that fourth ornithological exemplar that may be of most interest: it will be the embedded version of the 64-bit, ARM-based “Seattle” Operton server chip that was unveiled this June.
Hierofalcon would come with four or eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores, would include 10-gigabit Ethernet and third-generation PCIe, would be baked in a 28-nanometre process, and would have a thermal design point (TDP) of 15 to 30 watts.
Embedded parts have a number of differences from their non-embedded counterparts, not the least of which is how long they will be supported by their manufacturers. Longevity is a big deal to embedded-systems manufacturers, and AMD will commit to seven-year lifecycles for not only Hierofalcon, but also its three birdy brothers.
Iyengar – and, for that matter, CEO Rory Read and the entire AMD braintrust – is putting a lot of stock in the company’s aggressive push into the embedded market. The company has publicly stated that just a few years from now, around 50 per cent of its revenue will be from markets other than PCs and traditional servers.
And their embedded division headman appears confident that such a goal is realistic, considering the new and expanding markets from which those revenues will come.
“The specific point that we’ve made in terms of 50 per cent of our revenues coming from non-PC type [processors],” Iyengar said, “is it does include things such as the dense server – that’s a new application, that’s part of the new 50 per cent. It includes embedded, and it also includes new form factors within the client space – that’s part of the new 50 per cent.”
Looked at that way – and considering that “embedded” includes everything from industrial to military to medical to digital signage to slot machines to networking to communications to thin clients and more – AMD may again emerge as a potent competitor to Intel in the low-power marketplace.
Tomi Engdahl says:
400 million Chinese people can’t speak Chinese: Official
Mandarin? No idea, mate
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/10/mandarin_shocker/
In very agreeable news for those who fear that everyone on homogenised Planet Earth will eventually end up speaking an unholy mix of English, Chinese Mandarin and Spanish – with a soupçon of Portuguese, Russian, Hindi and Javanese thrown in for good measure – the Chinese authorities have admitted that 400 million of their countrymen can’t speak Mandarin.
According to the BBC, that adds up 30 per cent of China’s population unable to communicate in Standard Chinese, aka Putonghua – the most widely spoken language in the world.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Got the CLOUD FEAR? Connected Data has a black ‘n’ blue cone to sell you
Dropbox without all the public cloud malarkey
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/10/wanna_be_in_transports_get_transporter_32/
Connected Data has introduced the second version of its private cloud storage device, Transporter 2, and is hoping to cash in on those users who have been put off by public cloud outages.
This is a file sync ‘n’ share product with a difference; instead of files being copied from your computer to a public cloud service (Box, Dropbox, etc) or to an enterprise’s data centre in a private cloud service (EMC Syncplicity), the Transporter is an on-premise, internet-connected 2TB storage device, peer-to-peer connected to other Transporters, sharing and syncing files between them. There’s no exposure to the public cloud and it can be used by consumers and business users without needing a central data centre.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Following Complaint, Microsoft Makes The Windows 8.1 RTM Build Available To Developers
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/09/following-complaint-microsoft-makes-the-windows-8-1-rtm-build-available-to-developers/
Microsoft announced today that the Windows 8.1 RTM build is available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, approximately one month ahead of the general public. Previously, the company had stated that developers would not be given access to the code prior to its general release.
Windows 8.1 contains a key mix of feature improvements, user-interface upgrades, and other goodies that make the core Windows 8 experience far more palatable, and if I may, enjoyable. The update will be provided for free to all Windows 8 users via the Windows Store, when it is available.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel ships Haswell, the low-powered chip that could save Windows tablets
http://www.citeworld.com/tablets/22385/intel-ships-haswell
After promising to bring power-efficient Haswell processors to tablets, Intel has now started shipping new low-power, fourth-generation Core i3 processors, including one that draws as little as 4.5 watts of power in specific usage scenarios.
The dual-core Core i3-4012Y processor is part of a batch of new Haswell processors that could go into fanless tablets and laptop-tablet hybrids, bringing longer battery life to the devices.
Tablets like Microsoft’s Surface Pro that run on Core processors offer good performance but poor battery life. Intel has claimed that, depending on usage, Haswell dual-core chips will offer up to 50 percent more battery life compared to previous Core chips, code-named Ivy Bridge.
The 4.5-watt chip runs at a clock speed of 1.5GHz.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel CEO announces 14-nanometer processors, predicts sub-$100 tablets
http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/10/intel-ceo-announces-14-nanometer-processors-predicts-sub-100-tablets/
Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich showed off a laptop running on a 14-nanometer Intel system-on-a-chip processor today. During his keynote at the Intel Developer Forum, Krzanich also predicted that there will be tablets with Intel chips in them that will ell for less than $100 this holiday season.
Krzanich and James are promoting Intel’s newest chips for mobile devices and addressing how Intel will break into the business in a bigger way as more of the market transitions from PCs to newer devices such as tablets and smartphones. One of the new chips is code-named Quark, Intel’s tiniest chip yet. Intel’s targeting the “Internet of things” and wearable computing with it.
The transition to mobile remains Intel’s biggest challenge and its greatest opportunity, as competitors who use ARM-based technology dominate that space.
The 14-nanometer chip is codenamed Broadwell and it will be launched for mobile devices and PCs in 2014. Intel will also offer a next-generation Atom chip, based on a code-named Airmont chip architecture, next year. That chip will be five times smaller than today’s Atom chips and have 10 times lower power.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Game over
http://www.asymco.com/2013/09/09/game-over/
In the “Race to a Billion” there is a graph showing Android reported activations and iOS cumulative unit sales alongside cumulative console sales. The contrast between mobile phone platforms and game consoles is striking, with an order of magnitude difference in consumption. The best performing console to date is the Wii with about 100 million units sold so far.
However, that is an incomplete picture of the game platform business primarily because consoles are not the entirety of the business. Mobile (but dedicated) gaming platforms have been sold for some time.
But the Nintendo 3DS, launched two years ago, was meant to kick off the eighth generation, and the PlayStation Vita was Sony’s response. Then the Wii U was also billed as the successor to the Wii. They have so far failed to re-ignite growth. One might reply that they were merely appetizers and that the main course of the next gen are the PS4 and Xbox One.
Will they create growth again? Surely not for Nintendo, but I would argue that not for Sony or Microsoft either. There might be a burst of sales at launch as the hard core gamers upgrade, but they are unlikely to recruit new gamers the way the Wii did. In other words the PS4 and Xbox One are unlikely to win against non-consumption.
That is where mobile is the clear winner. More people will hire mobile devices for their primary gaming activity. And as mobile devices get inexorably better, they will be hired for use in the setting where consoles have been king: the living room.
The implications are that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are beyond the point of no return in this industry. Gaming, as a business, cannot be sustained as a platform independent of a general purpose computer.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Cloud Era Begins for Enterprise Tech
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/the-cloud-era-begins-for-enterprise-tech/?_r=1
Let’s say it: Last summer was the beginning of the end for the old guard in what is still the biggest part of technology – business spending on everything from servers to software. This fall begins a new competition for the hearts and minds of corporate customers.
Consider a few of summer’s events. Dell started to go private in the face of eroding personal computer demand. Hewlett-Packard once again announced lower revenue, and had more executive reshuffles. Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, resigned, then in the last big weekend of summer bought the handset business of a deeply weakened Nokia.
That last step, an effort to build up mobility, is at the heart of Microsoft’s efforts to be relevant in a new world of cloud computing, smartphones and tablets. So was VMware’s announcement that it is building out its cloud business and changing its sales strategy globally.
The world now passing away consisted of business systems dominated by computer servers and personal computers. The new one subsumes these into cloud computing and devices like smartphones and tablets. The inability of companies like Microsoft and Dell to cope quickly enough with this change led to their current problems. The steady, thorough way that companies like Amazon and Salesforce have used the new technology to go after their elders’ business is what makes them contenders.
Other challengers include Google, Workday and NetSuite. There are many more, but these companies in particular have both the assets and the money to build comprehensive offerings in software and services, and also to afford something like service guarantees in what many see as a still-unstable and security-challenged world.
Big data is being sold as a way to build efficiency and gain insights. But for many of these companies, offering big data services is also a way to consolidate data for customers. If you control information, you are almost by default the trusted partner, or what is known in the business as “the single throat to choke if something goes wrong.” Jobs like that pay a premium.
Some of these older enterprise tech companies, which also include Cisco and Oracle, will make the transition, just as incumbents like I.B.M. made it from mainframe computers to servers and PC’s. Oracle’s approach is to offer a complete system, making it a single throat to choke. I.B.M. already seems to be working both camps in the new world, offering its own systems and consulting with the new players. But just as surely as all of them, in their time, supplanted big incumbents, there will be other companies coming along to topple them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT Pros and BYOD Users See Support Much Differently
http://www.cio.com/article/739361/IT_Pros_and_BYOD_Users_See_Support_Much_Differently
When it comes to providing mobile support to BYOD employees, IT and end users have drastically different perspectives. More than half of tech pros recently surveyed would give themselves a grade of A or B. However, most users would give IT a C or worse. Why the disconnect?
A new report suggests IT might be delivering poor mobile support to BYOD employees even though IT pros think they’re doing a good job. In other words, mobility is becoming a major point of contention in the rocky IT-business relationship — and tech leaders aren’t even aware there’s an issue.
BYOD Isn’t Easy
To be fair, IT has a tough job.
For starters, smartphones and tablets have sold largely on their simplicity. It just works, says Apple. This is a hard standard to live up to for an IT department in charge of security and network bandwidth despite dwindling resources.
A whopping 86 percent of BYOD-ers say they access or save work-related information on their mobile device. Some 5 percent of users admitted losing a personal device used for work, either forgetting it somewhere or having it stolen. Given that many users have more than one device, CDW estimates one in 20 of all devices will be lost or stolen.
While this is bad enough, here’s the punch in the gut: 83 percent of lost smartphones are used in attempts to access corporate data, says Symantec.
Moreover, mobile devices put pressure on the corporate network, leading to network latency and scalability problems. Nearly 40 percent of IT pros say they’ve already seen serious issues tied to network performance.
The problem is only going to get worse, too, as IT pros expect the number of personal smartphones and tablets accessing the network to more than double in the next two years.
In order to corral these dangers, CIOs have had to implement strict end-user guidelines and BYOD policies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel’s Haswell Chips Pushing Windows RT Into Oblivion
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/09/10/2252217/intels-haswell-chips-pushing-windows-rt-into-oblivion
“Intel has started shipping the fourth generation Haswell chips for tablets, which brings power-efficient processors and hence much better battery life to Windows tablets.”
“Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel, Red Hat Working On Enabling Wayland Support In GNOME
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/09/10/1928248/intel-red-hat-working-on-enabling-wayland-support-in-gnome
“After shooting down Canonical’s Mir, Intel and Red Hat teams have increased collaboration on the development of Wayland. Developers at Intel and Red Hat are working together to ‘merge and stabilize the patches to enable Wayland support in GNOME,’”
“Weston won’t be used anymore, so GNOME Shell will become the Wayland compositor.”
“Before Intel’s rejection, GNOME and KDE also refused to adopt Mir.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wintel destined to eventually fail, says Acer founder
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20130910PD203.html
Commenting on recent events in the PC industry at a recent media conference, Acer founder Stan Shih said that the Wintel camp is destined to fail since the two giants have been keeping most of the profits to themselves, which is indirectly pushing many players to Google’s ecosystem.
Since Wintel’s business strategies can no longer create profits for partners, many downstream IT players have turned to other ecosystems to seek profitability, noted Shih, adding that Google’s open platform strategy is not the main attraction prompting IT players to join the Google camp.
Linux is also an open platform, but this has not helped it receive similar attention, Shih noted. For an ecosystem to have a chance of growing and staying strong, it must have leadership adopting strategies that allow all partners to earn profits.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel reveals new Haswell-based Chrome OS kit from old, new partners
Peppy, all-day Chromebooks in time for your holiday shopping
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/11/untel_reveal_haswell_based_chrome_os_devices/
IDF13 Intel has announced that four of its OEM partners will have new devices based on the company’s new “Haswell” chips and running Google’s browser-based Chrome OS on the market in time for the holiday shopping season.
Or, as Intel software and services headman Doug Fisher described it during his keynote at the Intel Developer Form on Wednesday, “the holiday selling season.”
Three of the devices that Fisher unveiled were Chromebooks. One, a 14-inch Chromebook from Chrome OS veteran HP, was built “from the ground up for Chrome,” he said. A second, smaller Chromebook from another vet, Acer, he described as having “a slick, light form factor,” and the third Chromebook was from Toshiba, which is new to the Chrome OS market. All three, he said, will have an “all-day” battery life of nine hours.
The three Chromebooks powered by Haswell chips, he said, “improve battery life by 50 per cent, performance by 15 per cent, and we’re greater than 2X the competition in performance.”
Fisher said that Intel is working closely with Google on Chrome OS optimizations for Intel chippery. “We’re optimizing the kernel,” he said. “We’re optimizing drivers. We’re working in WebKit and [Google's WebKit fork] Blink to optimize that experience – the browser. All aspects of the platform we’re optimizing, to ensure that you get the best performance on Intel.”
Lest you think that Chrome OS, Chromebooks, and Chromeboxes are niche players in the mobile market, Google’s chief of Android, Chrome, and Google Apps Sundar Pichai joined Fisher on the keynote stage to disabuse you of that notion.
“Chrome OS represents a new form of computing,” he said. “We are seeing great momentum there. External analysis estimates that they already represent over 25 per cent of the sub-$300 category. They’re big in education as well; they’re now deployed in over 5,000 schools in the US, which represents over 20 per cent of the school districts.”
Although Chrome OS may very well be finding a firm foothold, it has a way to go before catching up to its older brother. As Pichai pointed out, Android just passed one billion device activations globally, and Google is currently activating over 1.5 million new devices each day.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Concept Videos From 2000 Were Spot-On. So Why Didn’t Ballmer Build Any of It?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-11/microsoft-s-concept-videos-from-2000-were-spot-on-so-why-didn-t-ballmer-build-any-of-it-.html
To regain its place within the vanguard of personal computing, Ballmer’s Microsoft promised to deliver an interconnected set of Web services that could serve up relevant information to users across multiple devices and let them share with family, friends and co-workers. In a statement then, Ballmer said Microsoft would create a “unified platform through which devices and services cooperate with each other.”
Microsoft filmed a bunch of concept videos to illustrate its product ideas.
Cheesiness aside, it’s pretty spot-on, no? There’s personalized content for each family member synchronized across PCs, televisions, tablets, mobile phones and cars; location-aware devices that tell you when friends are nearby; photo-sharing; voice controls — all years before Facebook, Foursquare, or Apple’s iCloud and Siri.
More incredible than the foresight of these videos is how Microsoft failed to execute on nearly all of it. What went wrong? Well, lots of things.
Some of the ideas were simply before their time. Others became bogged down in internecine squabbles between Microsoft fiefdoms, and philosophical debates about whether to keep Windows at the center of this new world or to build a separate platform. And then, the dot-com bubble burst.
The Office group scrapped a planned Internet-based document service called NetDocs. Some of the Windows work in this area got derailed by the late-running train that was Longhorn (later renamed Vista). Microsoft’s early tablet efforts failed, and the company didn’t go back for more until Apple showed them the way.
Business users did get some of the promised technology. SharePoint and Lync provide project sharing, Internet voice calls and teleconferencing. But as Microsoft slapped the .NET name on a variety of products, very few of them fulfilled the initial promise of that first day.
“Had the company executed on even a fraction of its vision, Microsoft wouldn’t be out looking for a new CEO,” said Charles Fitzgerald
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tablet Shipments to Exceed Personal Computers Amid Mobile Shift
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-09-11/tablets-shipments-to-exceed-personal-computers-amid-mobile-shift
Tablet-computer shipments will top personal computers for the first time in the fourth quarter, according to a new report by researcher IDC, as consumers continue to favor mobile devices over laptops and desktops.
Tablet shipments will hit 84.1 million units in the fourth quarter, compared with 83.1 million for PCs, according to data published by IDC today. The total market for Internet-connected devices of desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets will rise 28 percent to $622.4 billion in 2013 and hit $735.1 billion by the end of 2015, the research group said.
The growth of smartphones and tablets is making up for a projected 10 percent decline in PC sales this year. The shift to mobile devices is creating new winners and losers in the technology industry. While Apple Inc. (AAPL:US), Google Inc. (GOOG:US) and Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) have benefited, stalwarts of the PC business such as Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ:US), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT:US) and Intel Corp. (INTC:US) have seen stagnating sales.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The real reasons Apple’s 64-bit A7 chip makes sense
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57602372-94/the-real-reasons-apples-64-bit-a7-chip-makes-sense/
Don’t swallow Apple’s marketing lines that 64-bit chips magically run software faster than 32-bit relics. What the A7 in the iPhone 5S does do, though, is pave the way for Apple’s long-term future.
Apple injected a lot of marketing hyperbole into its claims about the wonders of 64-bit computing when it showed off the A7 processor at the heart of the new iPhone 5S. But there are real long-term reasons that Apple is smart to move beyond the 32-bit era in mobile computing.
The iPhone maker did indeed beat its smartphone rivals to the 64-bit era with the A7, and the processor may indeed vault over its predecessor’s performance.
There’s a reason the computer industry is shifting to 64-bit computing; the main benefit is memory capacity that can exceed 4GB. But just as we saw with 64-bit personal computers arriving over the last decade, 64-bit designs don’t automatically improve performance for most tasks. In fact, there can be drawbacks: it’s likely that 64-bit versions of programs will be bulkier than their 32-bit equivalents.
But Apple is smart to lay the foundations for 64-bit mobile computing now, for three reasons. First, large memory capacity is an academic issue in the mobile market today, but it won’t always be. Second, the 64-bit transition happens to come along with other chip changes that are useful immediately. And third, it gives Apple more flexibility to build ARM-based PCs if it chooses to embrace an alternative to Intel chips.
What is 64-bit computing?
A 64-bit chip can handle memory addresses described with 64-bit numbers rather than 32-bit ones, which means that a computer can accommodate more than 4GB of memory and that chips can do math with integers that are a lot bigger. The 64-bit transition doesn’t have any effect on a lot of computing performance at all.
With servers, 64-bit chips are crucial, because those machines often need gobs of memory for running many tasks simultaneously and keeping as much of it as possible in fast-response RAM. With PCs, 64-bit chips are useful to avoid bumping up against 4GB memory limits, which is about where the mainstream market is today.
On mobile devices, though, the 4GB limit has yet to arrive. E
Why bother with 64-bit mobile chips?
Even if 64-bit computing isn’t some across-the-board speedup technology, there’s a very good reason to adopt it: the future.
But here again, we have to splash a little cold water on Schiller’s enthusiasm.
“The PC world went through the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit, and it took years,” Schiller said. “Today you’re going to see that Apple is going to move the mobile computing system forward from 32-bit to 64-bit in one day.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alternative HMIs: 10 unique ways to interact with tech
http://www.edn.com/design/consumer/4420904/Alternative-HMIs–10-unique-ways-to-interact-with-tech
The technology we use to interact with computers is growing and changing, with many experimental interfaces being developed by different engineers all over the globe. Since the development of the point and draw interface created by MIT’s Ivan Sutherland in the 1950s, many iterations of different human-computer interfaces have come to be.
Some create new tools that act as connections of our bodies into the digital world while others create machines that see our own bodies as digital tools themselves. Debate as to which solution is better will likely remain unsolved as we still heavily depend on the mouse and keyboard to do most CAD. New HMIs (human-machine interfaces) may lead to a creative process that resembles something in the world of Tony Stark and Ironman, rendering a mouse and keyboard obsolete.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Slashdot: Are ‘Rock Star’ Developers a Necessity?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/09/11/2019245/ask-slashdot-are-rock-star-developers-a-necessity
“Do you think so called ‘rock star’ developers are necessary at every company? Personally, I don’t think so, and I equate it to not needing a college degree to work at Walmart. If you give every problem a complexity value from 1 to 10, and your problems never get higher than a 6 or 7, do you need people capable of solving the 10s?”
Comments:
The term “rockstar” is subjective and only douchebags use it. You could be considered a rockstar because you say you are bringing those around you “up” and are probably doing that by learning and training others about what you learn.
Specifically, though, if they are “difficult to work with”, then they probably aren’t the best programmers. In that case, “Rock Star” may actually be a good term… people that are extremely talented at doing something, but do so by their own rules, frequently high, often attention grabbing and lacking focus or team spirit
What you do need are top tier developers, forget what you call them. You can get to the top tier by having raw talent, or by being well disciplined. Working well with others is a boon; building code that is reusable, well factored, documentable and maintainable. If you have five team members each with five different strengths but no one-developer-to-rule-them-all, you can still build a fantastic team and great software. You need programmers who can mentor so that the rest of the team can improve. Toss the people that don’t work well on a team, and while you’re at it toss the managers that prefer hard-to-work-with people, or that can’t manage teams of normal people. This is particularly important if your software is going to grow… individual “rock stars” don’t scale.
I’ve known a lot of top programmers, and consider myself among them. Personally, I like to hire rock-star coders right out of college, before they have a chance to develop all those bad anti-social habits. I love it when a team of awesome programmers all work together effortlessly.
Unfortunately, the typical experience for an awesome coder is to find that he’s carrying the load by himself and getting help from coworkers that’s slightly worse than no help at all. There’s no mentor to show him how to work with his team, and he quickly becomes a lone wolf coder. Once a lone wolf coder develops his style of coding all by himself, it’s pretty darned hard to ever get him integrated into an efficient team.
You’re conflating two unrelated things: Competence and attitude. You might find The No Asshole Rule an interesting source. People who can’t cooperate with other people are not a necessity, no matter how amazing they are.
I just read the book Multipliers [amazon.com]. It is targeted towards managers, but I think it is useful information for just about anyone. This dev (who has so far shown no interest in joining management) certainly took it to heart. The book compares “diminishers” and “multipliers”.
Diminishers, like your company rockstar. They need to know everything and have the last word. They can appear to be a team player when they’re really just using people around them to prop themselves up. They strike fear into people who challenge them. They make large decisions by themselves, or take input from a small inner circle of people. They are at their A game, but diminish other people’s output and potential. When people work with diminishers, they feel like they’re giving 50%. It is a net loss.
Multipliers create an environment where people can give input with confidence, make mistakes, and learn from them. This doesn’t mean they are soft. In return for this they expect greatness and weed out those who can’t give it or who can’t work with the team. They identify genius (described in the book as an innate, exceptional ability which someone may not even realize they have) and try to flourish it. A multiplier can still be at their A game, but puts emphasis toward helping others grow. When people work with multipliers, they feel like they’re giving 150%.
It sounds a lot like some management BS and I’m sure I’m not selling it well,
Tomi Engdahl says:
A quarter of it-the money goes for grinding applications
Organizations’ IT investments will go to a recent survey by a quarter in activities that do not really produce anything: for testing and quality assurance. Their failure to act is admittedly easy to even more expensive.
Reliable applications is considered extremely critical, as well as the reputation of the functions.
“Different technology appliques offer the increasingly important interfaces between the business and its customers. Multiple devices and channels, the end users will no longer tolerate bad working tools or channels, poor usability and security problems or hazards, “Capgemini and Sogeti testing services to leading Michel de Meijer says.
Mobile-side testing to use the amount of money has increased significantly
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/neljannes_it_rahoista_menee_sovellusten_hiomiseen
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tablet Shipments Forecast to Top Total PC Shipments in the Fourth Quarter of 2013 and Annually by 2015, According to IDC
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24314413
The worldwide smart connected device market, comprised of PCs, tablets, and smartphones, is forecast to grow 27.8% year over year in 2013, slightly lower than the 30.3% growth in 2012. The growth will be driven by tablet and smartphone shipments, while the PC outlook has been lowered by 10% in 2013.
As a result, the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Smart Connected Device Tracker expects tablet shipments to surpass total PC shipments (desktop plus portable PCs) in the fourth quarter of 2013 (4Q13). PCs shipments are still expected to be greater than tablet shipments for the full year, but IDC forecasts tablet shipments will surpass total PC shipments on an annual basis by the end of 2015.
Smartphones will continue to ship in high volumes, surpassing 1.4 billion units in 2015 and accounting for 69% of all smart connected device shipments worldwide.
In terms of shipment value, the worldwide smart connected device market will again exhibit double-digit year-over-year growth of 10.6% in 2013, but this growth will gradually slow to just 3.1% in 2017. The tapering revenue forecast reflects the increasing impact of low-cost smartphones and the white box tablet market. Worldwide smart connected device value is expected to be $622.4 billion in 2013, of which $423.1 billion will come from the sub-$350 smartphone and sub-$350 tablet segments collectively.
“At a time when the smartphone and tablet markets are showing early signs of saturation, the emergence of lower-priced devices will be a game-changer,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
No one uses older versions of Internet Explorer by choice
http://bl.ocks.org/erwaller/6511564