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:
Desktop Top Browser Share Trend
http://www.netmarketshare.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 8′s readings ugly – XP’s amazing
Windows 8 operating system will be permanently outcast, telling fresh Net Applications figures. Windows 8.1 will soon take over the responsibility, but the challenge is considerable. Instead, Windows XP, the situation is amazing.
Windows 8′s popularity has been painfully slow, and in September the growth figure was one of the worst. According to Net Applications in Windows 8′s user share rose by only 0.6 percentage points equal to eight per cent.
The situation is peculiar, since the new operating system’s popularity grew more slowly than its predecessor. Windows 7′s share grew by 0.8 percentage points to 46.4 per cent. Users, therefore, still prefer to opt for Windows 7 to Windows 8
Although Windows 8.1 will be published later this month, the operating system is already visible in the Net Applications figures. The prerelease use accounts for 0.9 per cent.
Windows XP’s popularity continues to staggeringly high. 12-year-old operating system life cycle ends permanently in just over six months later, when the distribution of security updates until April. Despite this, almost one-third of the world’s Windows computers running on XP.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/windows_8_n_lukemat_rumia_xp_n_hammastyttavia
Tomi Engdahl says:
They’re (Almost) All Dirty: The State of Cheating in Android Benchmarks
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on October 2, 2013 12:30 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-android-benchmarks
Looking at the table above you’ll also notice weird inconsistencies about the devices/OEMs that choose to implement the cheat/hack/festivities.
Final Words
As we mentioned back in July, all of this is wrong and really isn’t worth the minimal effort the OEMs put into even playing these games. If I ran the software group at any of these companies running the cost/benefit analysis on chasing these optimizations vs. negativity in the press it’d be an easy decision (not to mention the whole morality argument). It’s also worth pointing out that nearly almost all Android OEMs are complicit in creating this mess. We singled out Samsung for the initial investigation as they were doing something unique on the GPU front that didn’t apply to everyone else, but the CPU story (as we mentioned back in July) is a widespread problem.
The majority of our tests aren’t impacted by the optimization. Virtually all Android vendors appear to keep their own lists of applications that matter and need optimizing. The lists grow/change over time, and they don’t all overlap. With these types of situations it’s almost impossible to get any one vendor to be the first to stop. The only hope resides in those who don’t partake today, and of course with the rest of the ecosystem.
The unfortunate reality is this is all going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
The hilarious part of all of this is we’re still talking about small gains in performance. The impact on our CPU tests is 0 – 5%, and somewhere south of 10% on our GPU benchmarks as far as we can tell. I can’t stress enough that it would be far less painful for the OEMs to just stop this nonsense and instead demand better performance/power efficiency from their silicon vendors. Whether the OEMs choose to change or not however, we’ve seen how this story ends. We’re very much in the mid-1990s PC era in terms of mobile benchmarks. What follows next are application based tests and suites. Then comes the fun part of course. Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung are all involved in their own benchmarking efforts, many of which will come to light over the coming years. The problem will then quickly shift from gaming simple micro benchmarks to which “real world” tests are unfairly optimized which architectures. This should all sound very familiar. To borrow from Brian’s Galaxy Gear review (and BSG): “all this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Abomination of Ebooks: They Price People Out of Reading
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/10/how-ebook-pricing-hurts-us-in-more-ways-than-you-think/
This is not one of those rants about missing the texture, touch, colors, whatever of paper contrasted with the sterility of reading on a tablet. No, the real abomination of ebooks is often overlooked: Some are so ingrained in the product itself that they are hiding in plain sight, while others are well concealed beneath layers of commerce and government.
The real problem with ebooks is that they’re more “e” than book, so an entirely different set of rules govern what someone — from an individual to a library — can and can’t do with them compared to physical books, especially when it comes to pricing.
The collusion of large ebook distributors in pricing has been a public issue for a while, but we need to talk more about how they are priced differently to consumers and to libraries. That’s how ebooks contribute to the ever-growing divide between the literary haves and have-nots.
The Danger of the “E” in Ebooks
We need to stop thinking of and talking about ebooks as books, and more as we would an app or a software package: Ebooks are computer code that display text and pictures instead of instructing our tablets to do some task. Not only can we not legally fiddle with such proprietary software, but we can’t “buy” it, either — we lease it, according to terms and conditions set by the manufacturer.
The same applies to ebooks. We don’t buy them, we lease them. It may be a long-term lease, but a lease just the same. There are limits and restrictions on use for all ebooks, and confusingly, those limits and restrictions vary depending on which company is offering the product.
It’s for this reason that we should stop using terminology like “bestseller lists” — when it really should be “most leased” lists — because that language of physical books reinforces a very dangerous notion of ownership. Buyers of physical books can do whatever they want with them, from loaning to friends as many times as they like to reselling at a used-books store. (Note that when a book owner does this, she gets that money — not the publisher.)
Unfortunately, such lending in the digital world comes with restrictions. Apple’s iBooks can only be read on an Apple appliance. Amazon’s [proprietary format] ebooks can only be read on Kindle software, lent only once, and only for 14 days (and then only by someone in the Amazon Prime program, which of course costs extra).
The other way ebooks reinforce the divide is through their pricing structures. The only ones who win are the big e-tailers, not the authors or even the publishers and definitely not the libraries.
But even though the ebook will cost consumers $6.50 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, libraries would pay $78 (through library ebook distributors Overdrive and 3M) for the same thing.
Somehow the “e” in ebooks changes the pricing game, and drastically. How else does one explain libraries paying a $0.79 to $1.09 difference for a physical book to paying a difference of $71.50 just because it’s the electronic version? It’s not like being digital makes a difference for when and how they can lend it out.
In another wrinkle: Random House, which jacked up its ebook prices to libraries 300 percent last year, limits the number of check-outs per ebook. This means libraries have to lease another “copy” when they reach a certain threshold … as if the ebook had died or something. In fact, that’s the problem some authors have with ebooks — not just that they earn less money on them, but that “They never degrade. They are perpetual. That harms writers directly,” as historian and novelist David O. Stewart has observed.
These authors don’t mind the high prices charged to libraries because they don’t even like libraries to begin with
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Slashdot: Can Valve’s Steam Machines Compete Against the Xbox One and PS4?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/10/02/1828227/ask-slashdot-can-valves-steam-machines-compete-against-the-xbox-one-and-ps4
“Valve has announced SteamOS, Steam Machines, and a Steam controller — the components necessary for it to create a viable living-room gaming experience. Valve’s strategy with these releases seems pretty clear: create a platform based on openness (SteamOS is a Linux-based operating system), in contrast to the closed systems pushed by console rivals such as Sony and Microsoft.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
GTA Online Runs Into an Online Roadblock
http://games.slashdot.org/story/13/10/02/2229251/gta-online-runs-into-an-online-roadblock
“CNET reports that Grand Theft Auto Online, the biggest entertainment release of the year with more than $1 billion in annual sales, is having some trouble getting the gamers online. The title, which launched on game consoles Tuesday morning, is experiencing server issues that have locked out some gamers and made it difficult for those who have gotten in to play the game. Fifteen million people purchased the game when it was released last week”
“a conservative estimate I would expect about two million players to log on to GTA Online within the first 24 hours”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Software Rendering Engine GPU-Accelerated By WebCL
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/02/1844250/software-rendering-engine-gpu-accelerated-by-webcl
“OpenGL and DirectX have been the dominant real-time graphics APIs for decades. Both are catalogs of functions which convert geometry into images using predetermined mathematical algorithms (scanline rendering, triangles, etc.)”
“Reliance on OpenGL and DirectX could diminish when GPUs are utilized as general ‘large batches of math’ solvers which software rendering engines offload to. “
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elliptic Labs Launches Android SDK For Its Ultrasound-Powered Mid-Air Gesture Tech — Phones With ‘Touchless’ UI Landing In 2H 2014
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/02/elliptic-labs-launches-android-sdk-for-its-ultrasound-powered-mid-air-gesture-tech/
Elliptic Labs, a startup founded back in 2006 which uses ultrasound technology to enable touchless, gesture-based interfaces, has finally pushed its tech into smartphones. It’s been demoing this at the CEATEC conference in Japan this week
Elliptic’s technology is able to work with any ARM-based smartphone
Gesture-based user interfaces which turn mid-air hand movements into UI commands have pushed their way into console-based gaming, thanks to Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral, and also mainstream computing via the likes of the Leap Motion device and webcam-based alternatives. Mobiles haven’t been entirely untouched by ‘touchless’ interfaces — Samsung added limited mid-air gesture support to the Galaxy S4 earlier this year, for instance (and back in 2009 the now defunct Sony Ericsson tried its hand at motion-sensitive mobile gaming) — but most current-gen smartphones don’t have the ability to respond to mid-air swiping.
That’s set to change in 2014, as Elliptic Labs is currently working with several Android OEMs that are building devices that will include support for a gesture-based interface.
Tomi says:
Choose carefully – ecosystems are the digital era Iron Curtain
Smartphones and tablets become more common, the digital world is divided into the 2010s to the Cold War. In today’s iron curtain users to share different camps – moving the user between is often painfully difficult.
In today’s world of the ecosystem typically make up your smartphone or tablet that has emerged around software and services, as well as the services offered by the manufacturers mentioned above for easy sharing. Operating within the ecosystem is easy, for example, settings, and contacts are updated easily one device to another. Typically, the new device is easy to purchase, the settings and the software is updated to the new phone directly from the cloud.
The Iron Curtain to show their strength at the point when the user gets tired of the manufacturer.
If the Used by Apple’s iPhone, the interface begins to annoy, may exchange such as the Windows Phone device to be more difficult than defection from East Germany to the West three decades ago. The difficulty increases if the user has enabled the ecosystem synergies for trusting Apple on desktop and tablet.
Strict ecosystem is intended to offer the user the best possible user experience and bring to the company a competitive advantage. User of the ecosystems are in any case a double-edged sword: one from relying upon the life is easy, but on the other hand for example, the holder of the ecosystem to circumvent the restrictions imposed by the artificial software availability example, it may be difficult or even impossible.
Ecosystems limit the user’s freedom on the other angles. Aside from the time, the ecosystem also requires a money, for example, the smartphone software has to be reproduced. There is nothing to do to prevent users from taking advantage of an operating system such as Microsoft, Apple and Google’s smartphone tablets, but mixed by miss any ecosystem on full synergies.
Microsoft, Apple and Google dominate the ecosystems in a firm grip.
Manufacturers strict management failure seems unlikely. The only loom on the horizon challengers are familiar: an open ecosystem of thinking represent, for example Firefox and Ubuntu Foundation. Both manufacturers dreams of a comprehensive ecosystem of its own, however, are still quite distant.
Ecosystems reign is still a recent phenomenon. It is very interesting to see how manufacturers will develop and refine ecosystem thinking.
In the worst scenarios, migration and cross-use is projected to be adversely affected in the future, which would cause serious problems for many users. User tying is easy to understand ekoysteeminhaltijan point of view, but too tight a digital iron curtain would eventually be the overall development of the extremely detrimental.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/blogit/tekninen_analyysi/valitse_tarkasti_ekosysteemit_ovat_digiajan_rautaesirippu
Tomi says:
Irritating, Microsoft!
Why the information necessary to keep skimp?
Windows 7 insists that it be performed because the folder or any file is open in another program. I do not think so, but in this case, Windows is the president, who have the casting vote in a tie.
After all, this makes no sense. Why can not it be able to tell you what a file or folder to view, open and where? Sure, it knows when that will go to this claim?
Annoying, really annoying like that.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/blogit/tietoja_koneesta/arsyttavaa_microsoft
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Ballmer gets docked for Windows 8, Surface RT
http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-ballmer-gets-docked-for-windows-8-surface-rt-7000021552/
Summary: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recieved 76 percent of the total incentive award for which he was eligible in fiscal 2013. Issues plaguing the Windows division were to blame.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SSHDs Debut On the Desktop With Mixed Results
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/10/03/2145215/sshds-debut-on-the-desktop-with-mixed-results
“Seagate’s solid-state hybrid drives have finally made it to the desktop. The latest generation of SSHDs debuted with a 2.5″ notebook model that was ultimately hampered by its slow 5,400-RPM spindle speed. The Desktop SSHD has the same 8GB flash payload and Adaptive Memory caching scheme. However, it’s equipped with 2TB of much faster 7,200-RPM mechanical storage.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Violin Memory is winning flash-supply race – Quadragon™ rivals
… Just don’t mention how few vendors are actually shifting flash gear
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/04/flash_array_supplier_usage_chart/
IDC’s quarterly storage tracker doesn’t yet reveal flash array vendor use.
What do we see? Violin trounces everybody else in the number of installed arrays and in-pilot/budget-agreed-for-use categories. But the percentage of flash array use amongst the surveyed users is low; just 17 vendors are listed but not one has a greater than 5 per cent in-use status, with most having less than 2 per cent.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The First Personal Platform—for Everything
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/first-personal-platform%E2%80%94-everything
Maybe the biggest thing that ever happened to Linux—at least scale-wise—is virtualization. As I recall, virtualization first materialized in a big commercial way with IBM, which started by putting many Linux instances on System z mainframes.
IBM didn’t call those mainframes “clouds”, but that’s what it hosted. Now we have clouds of clouds of Linux all over the place. Nothing could be more widespread and ordinary. (Of Netcraft’s ten most reliable hosting company sites for June of this year, eight are Linux and two are FreeBSD
Now think about the Internet of Things, often abbreviated IoT. It is generally assumed today that the Internet of Things will require embedded smarts. But in fact, any thing can have a cloud, whether the thing has embedded smarts or not.
By abstracting intelligence away from physical things, we can unburden those things of the need to be intelligent in themselves. In fact, we can enlarge to absolute the variety of things that can have intelligence
Likewise, any company (such as Canon, LaCrosse, Sangean and Garmin) can give every product it sells a unique cloud of its own, with its own QR code, and transfer ownership of that cloud to the customer along with the product itself. If the customer welcomes a relationship with the company, and the company agrees to the customer’s terms of engagement (such as, “respect the privacy of this communication channel in the following ways”), the whole “own cycle” of a product becomes a much richer experience for both the customer and the company. The QR code then becomes what’s called a “TalkTag”—meaning that its purpose is to serve as a way for the customer to signal his or her interest in talking to the company.
Once that happens, both sides can learn far more from each other, in far better ways. If the product is the platform for a genuine two-way relationship, both company and customer are in far better positions to learn from each other. Companies can update manuals and provide notices of firmware updates. Customers can tell companies directly what’s working or not working, how the product might be improved and what new products the company might consider making.
The result, if all goes according to plan, is a true Internet of Things and the reframing of business around fully useful relationships between customers and companies—or, for that matter, between anybody and anything.
Tomi Engdahl says:
W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web’s standards, says it’s OK for your browser to say “I can’t let you do that, Dave”
http://boingboing.net/2013/10/02/w3c-green-lights-adding-drm-to.html
Here’s the bad news: the World Wide Web Consortium is going ahead with its plan to add DRM to HTML5, setting the stage for browsers that are designed to disobey their owners and to keep secrets from them so they can’t be forced to do as they’re told. Here’s the (much) worse news: the decision to go forward with the project of standardizing DRM for the Web came from Tim Berners-Lee himself, who seems to have bought into the lie that Hollywood will abandon the Web and move somewhere else (AOL?) if they don’t get to redesign the open Internet to suit their latest profit-maximization scheme.
Danny O’Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the wrangle at the W3C and predicts that, now that it’s kosher to contemplate locking up browsers against their owners, we’ll see every kind of control-freakery come out of the woodwork, from flags that prevent “View Source” to restricting embedded fonts to preventing image downloading to Javascript that you can’t save and run offline. Indeed, some of this stuff is already underway at W3C, spurred into existence by a huge shift in the Web from open platform to a place where DRM-hobbled browsers are “in-scope” for the WC3.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Much like “cloud” computing, “embedded” computing has a fairly flexible definition. One thing is certain, however, and that is that Linux is perfect for the embedded world, however you define it. With its breathtaking variety of hardware support and unassuming happiness living behind the scenes, the embedded market may be the vehicle Linux finally uses to take over the world. Year of the desktop? Pshaw, more like year of “the everything else”, with a little desktop on the side!
Source: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/october-2013-issue-linux-journal-embedded
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ex-Amazon Engineer Builds Library for World’s Software Code
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/10/runnable/
In 2004, Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos decreed that any software built by an Amazon engineer must be shared with every other engineer at the company.
Google does something similar, and it makes good sense. The idea is to ensure that they never build the same thing twice.
“It created a huge discovery problem,” Kumar says. “There were hundreds of thousands of components and services.”
As it turns out, many other outfits face much the same problem — even if they don’t share code in the way Amazon does. In building software, modern companies rely on all sorts of code and tools they don’t develop themselves. This includes open source software that’s freely shared with the world at large, but also application programming interfaces, or APIs, that provide hooks into online services across the web. The open source search engine Ohloh spans 20,656,731,705 lines of publicly available code, and the API tracking site The Programmable Web lists over 10,000 publicly available APIs.
But Kumar offers a solution. Inspired by his time at Amazon, Kumar created a service called Runnable, a means of finding and using all the software “building blocks” that are freely available across the web.
It’s early days for the service, which is still in the beta testing stage, but the aim is provide a way of not only searching for tools, but actually testing them.
In order to test code for you, Runnable must also host it. All the code in questions sits on the service itself, and it spans several programming platforms, including PHP, JavaScript and Node.js, and Ruby on Rails.
http://runnable.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows domination is the end – the consequences unpredictable
The so-called “Wintel axis” (Windows and Intel) was dominated by information technology for more than twenty years. Each party dominance is now eroded, and the Windows share will decline this year to a record low. This can have a profound impact on even the PC computers.
Wintel duo triumph was even a few years ago convincing. Microsoft Windows computer operating systems accounted for over 90 per cent. Apple Mac or Linux machines, devices are not just able to challenge Windows.
Intel’s dominance in the processors were similar. The company’s market share of PC CPUs moved from 80 to 90 percent of readings. AMD’s face competitors were weak.
The situation has come to a radical change in the mobile devices. Current tablets and smartphones can be calculated using a computer. They are used in exactly the same tasks as traditional machines, and even the performance difference is not dramatic.
These mobile computers sold in huge numbers, but in the Windows and Intel have not been successful. The research firm IDC, the share of Windows tablets was a paltry 4.5 percent in the spring. Market shared their Android and Apple’s iPad. Smartphones, the situation is similar. Windows market share was only 3.7 percent.
In addition, Intel has not been successful on mobile devices, especially smartphones. Market shares are calculated as a percentage, although the situation, particularly tablets are getting better and better. Mobile devices are mainly used in the ARM processors used by many different manufacturers.
Windows share “computer like devices’ operating systems dropped to a record low this year. Research firm Gartner estimates that Windows devices full-year sales of around 340 million copies. Included are pc machines in addition to Windows tablets and Windows Phone smartphones.
At the same time, the world is sold around 300 million Apple Mac, iPad, iPhone, tablets and phones. Android tablets, PCs and smart phones sales would be about 870 million units. Windows market share would fall in this way for about 22 per cent.
If we include the traditional mobile phones (more than 800 million devices), Windows share will fall to just over 14 per cent. It is in any case quite a collapse of the windows a few years ago to 90 per cent of control.
Until now, a turning point has been mainly about the rise of mobile devices. In traditional PC machines “Wintel” duo has dominated the same way as before. It seems, however, that the revolution is creeping into the PC machines.
This change is reflected first of all operating systems. Android’s massive popularity has led to the fact that the PC manufacturers to bring Android to laptop computers. In addition, Google’s Chrome OS platform using the Chromebook machines are growing in popularity.
At the same time, Apple Macs market share will increase. These trends are likely to chip away a substantial share of the Windows PC machines in the coming years.
Processors have seen a similar trend. ARM processor power is growing all the time. They may gradually gain ground in the light pc-engine processor.
Microsoft and Intel understand the situation very well. Both invest in therefore, strongly mobile products.
If companies do not succeed in changing the trend of PC makers in the coming years may be very different than it is today.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/windowsin_ylivalta_on_loppu_seuraukset_arvaamattomia
Tomi says:
Steam Machine Prototypes Use Intel CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs
http://games.slashdot.org/story/13/10/04/1935259/steam-machine-prototypes-use-intel-cpus-nvidia-gpus
“”Valve has revealed their first Steam Machines prototype details. The first 300 Steam Machine prototypes to ship will use various high-end Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs while running their custom SteamOS Linux distribution. The Intel Haswell CPU + NVIDIA GPU combination should work well on Linux with the binary drivers.”
Steam Machines Prototypes: Intel CPU, NVIDIA GPU
Posted by Michael Larabel on October 04, 2013
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ3NzQ
The first Steam Machines prototype are very high-end PC hardware. Valve says they’re all “off the shelf” parts and the only custom hardware in these prototypes (aside from the Steam controller) is the enclosure/case. Valve will also be opening up the CAD design for the enclosure should anyone want to build their own.
For the high-end prototypes, they’ll all be powered by NVIDIA GPUs and use Intel CPUs. The GPUs will be a mix of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780s, GTX 760s, GTX 660s, and TITANs. The CPUs will be some Intel Core i7 4770, Core i5 4570, and i3 CPUs. The RAM will be 16GB of DDR3-1600MHz memory and storage will be a 1TB HDD with 8GB SSD hybrid.
Tomi says:
MongoDB slurps $150m in mammoth funding round
$1.2bn valuation makes NoSQL database worth more than MySQL
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/04/mongodb_huge_funding/
Database upstart MongoDB has slurped $150m of filthy valley lucre to fund development of the NoSQL database in a sector dominated by the lumbering giants of Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.
The huge funding round was announced on Friday. Salesforce*, EMC and Altimeter Capital participated, along with existing investors Intel Capital, NEA, Red Hat, and Sequoia Capital.
MongoDB is a non-relational document-oriented database that has seen widespread developer uptake by young startups and (some) enterprises.
It has high availability through replicated servers with automatic master failover, automatic sharding for load balancing, and server-side JavaScript execution for built-in MapReduce querying.
By comparison, Sun paid $1bn for relational database MySQL in 2008, at a time when MySQL was far more established – it claimed 50,000 copies of the database a day were being downloaded versus MongoDB’s claim of 5m downloads over its multi-year lifetime. Based on conversations with sources familiar with the company we also believe MySQL was making significantly more money at the time of its acquisition than MongoDB made in 2012.
So why does the company even need $150m?
“We’re competing with products that have over 30 yrs of development in them [they are] extremely mature, extremely feature rich,” Schireson explained.
Tomi says:
Prolong the working life of your cloud apps
Plan for the future with ALM
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/04/cloud_alm/
Application lifecycle management (ALM) is a critical foundational concept. We haven’t always called it this – and no doubt there will be new names as marketing requires them – but the idea has been there all along.
In the past few years we have started to formalise processes around this concept, just in time for the cloud to come along and change everything.
ALM is simple to understand and fiendishly complex to implement. The concept is that all applications have a lifespan: they are conceived, created, maintained and then retired.
Maintenance includes both development and operational issues such as patching, feature additions, versioning and scaling.
From one viewpoint, this is the definition of our industry.
It’s magic
It is the details that matter. ALM treats many elements as black boxes. This is where the operations or development guys wave their magic wands and something occurs.
With the rapid uptake of cloud computing and the rise of the DevOps movement, the shape of the pretty charts and the responsibility arrows are changing.
Not so long ago, most developers had things pretty easy. They had enormous power to dictate the environments their applications ran in, and they didn’t have that many environments to worry about.
If you were writing end-user applications you had a choice of Windows or Apple – and it was considered acceptable simply to ignore Apple.
Server-side stuff was much more difficult. There were a dozen different varieties of Unix and Linux that mattered, and each did things just differently enough to make installing and running your application a bit of a pig.
Windows became a force within the IT industry. The main Unix platforms started to consolidate while Linux and BSD took off.
The web emerged as an application delivery mechanism. Standards were created, abandoned, extended, abused and ignored. Browser development stalled for years while new security bugs threatened everything on the internet – which turned out to be a lot more than should ever have been allowed near it.
Peace and harmony
Now we have cloud services. You can roll your own, rent resources from a local service provider or go with one of the heavy-hitter cloud providers.
Developers don’t need to fight with operations to get a new environment spun up to work in. They can fill out a form on a web page and have a virtual machine configured to their specifications in minutes.
The operations team does not need to fight with developers to scale applications.
Patches and operating system changes can be tested easily and well in advance of mainstream deployments. Workloads can be moved from on-premises to service provider to public cloud and back again. A nirvana of chaos avoidance is waiting for all, if only we’d embrace it!
Such, at least, is the marketing hullabaloo. Some of it – in fact a lot of it – is actually pretty accurate.
No matter how many layers of abstraction we try to build between the code and the hardware that runs the workload, ALM is still a very real consideration.
ALM will become synonymous with change management. The vision of project managers who deal with IT will move from the tactical to the strategic.
Instead of developing with an eye only on the immediate problem, or the budgets and worries or the upcoming quarterly review, design and development will encompass years. What is the useful lifetime of this application? One year? Two years, perhaps, or even 10?
If you dedicate yourself to a cloud provider, will it still be there decades from now?
The goliaths probably will be. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are no Nirvanix. They are not going to up and close shop with two weeks notice; if they did, the economies of entire nations would probably implode.
That doesn’t prevent a slower, more lingering death.
Like it or not, ALM’s strategic thinking is becoming a basic requirement of development. “Buy exactly the same computers our developers use and set up your whole network just like their test lab” simply won’t fly, no more so than “IE6 only” is a viable option for websites today.
The tools today have changed the landscape so thoroughly that it may well be easier for departments to fund a guerrilla IT version of their own skunkworks project rather than try to cut through the red tape of internal IT.
Tomi says:
Apple Now Holds 10% of All Corporate Cash: Moody’s
http://blogs.wsj.com/cfo/2013/10/01/apple-now-holds-10-of-all-corporate-cash-moodys/
Apple Inc.’s $147 billion cash hoard now counts for nearly 10% of all corporate cash held by nonfinancial companies, according to an analysis by Moody’s.
U.S. nonfinancial companies held $1.48 trillion in cash as of June 30
Corporate cash is still concentrated in just a few hands, with the top 50 holders accounting for 62% of the total. The companies with the five largest cash holdings – Apple, Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. , Cisco Systems Inc. and Pfizer Inc. – held more than one quarter of the cash.
The technology sector had the largest amounts of cash in its coffers, holding some $515 billion, followed by the health care and pharmaceuticals industries which held $146 billion in cash.
Tomi says:
Google is building Chrome OS straight into Windows 8
http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/5/4806562/google-building-chrome-os-into-windows-8
Google unveiled its Chrome Apps initiative recently to launch apps that exist outside of the browser and extend its reach into more of a platform, but it looks like the company has a whole lot more planned. Over the past few weeks, Google has been updating its developer version of the Chrome browser to run what’s essentially Chrome OS within Windows 8′s “Metro” mode.
Google’s true Trojan horse
While Chrome Apps may have appeared to be Google’s Trojan horse, a Chrome OS running inside Windows 8 is the ultimate way for the company to create its own app ecosystem on top of Windows.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google is building Chrome OS straight into Windows 8
http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/5/4806562/google-building-chrome-os-into-windows-8
Google unveiled its Chrome Apps initiative recently to launch apps that exist outside of the browser and extend its reach into more of a platform, but it looks like the company has a whole lot more planned. Over the past few weeks, Google has been updating its developer version of the Chrome browser to run what’s essentially Chrome OS within Windows 8′s “Metro” mode.
Chrome traditionally runs on the desktop in Windows 8, but you can set it to launch within the Windows 8 Start Screen into a special “Metro-style” mode.
The new updates are very different from the existing stable channel version of Chrome in Windows 8 that simply presents a fullscreen browser. In the latest dev channel release the UI and functionality is identical to Chrome OS.
While the Chrome browser acts as a Windows 8 application, it’s using a special mode that Microsoft has enabled specifically for web browsers. The software maker allows browsers on Windows 8 to launch in its “Metro-style” environment providing they’re set as default. The applications are listed in the Windows Store and they’re still desktop apps, but the exception allows them to mimic Windows 8 apps and access the app contracts and snapping features of the OS. While Chrome will obviously run in this mode on Windows 8, Microsoft does not permit this type of behavior on Windows RT.
At the moment Chrome’s new mode on Windows 8 is a little buggy and it crashes occasionally, but it’s clear where Google is heading. While Chrome Apps may have appeared to be Google’s Trojan horse, a Chrome OS running inside Windows 8 is the ultimate way for the company to create its own app ecosystem on top of Windows.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stallman’s GNU at 30: The hippie OS that foresaw the rise of Apple – and is now trying to take it on
Provided we all dump Android for Replicant, yeah?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/07/stallman_thiry_years_gnu/
GNU fans have celebrated their software movement’s thirtieth birthday – a movement that started as rebellious bits and bytes of tools, and is now a worldwide phenomena.
Today, servers, PCs, mobile phones, tablets, and all manner of devices run operating systems and applications that owe their genesis to the idea of software freedom articulated by GNU founder Richard Stallman.
n September 1983 he announced he was creating GNU: Gnu is Not Unix. And, for his second trick, the Emacs programmer founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and wrote the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) – the lifeblood of the whole project.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The IT Talent Problem
http://ww2.cfo.com/it-value/2013/05/the-it-talent-problem/
Business-savvy IT executives can be hard to come by, and that’s a big problem if your company relies on technology to exist (it does). Maybe it’s time to start growing your own.
Enter the 2010s. With cloud, mobility, big data and consumerization, companies are in even greater need of technology talent than they were in the late 1990s, and that talent is in even shorter supply. Computer science enrollments are at an all-time low; baby boomer workers are retiring and taking all of that legacy-systems knowledge with them; and Silicon Valley is hot again. Would that young, brilliant developer rather join the next Zynga or upgrade the payroll systems at your insurance company?
If you had a magic wand, what one talent problem would you solve? Responses poured in and addressed challenges around recruiting, developing leaders, and retaining the talent that they currently have. But more than 70 percent of readers would use their magic wand to do only one thing: give business skills to their technologists. Their people, they worry, are so narrowly focused on the technology that they fail to see the forest through the trees. They do not understand the business context of their technology work, nor can they have a meaningful discussion with the leaders of the business areas their technology supports.
This lack of business-savvy technology talent is a serious problem for every company that relies on technology to exist (which is, of course, every company). Those beautifully “blended executives,” who can talk technology in one meeting and can talk business in another, are rare birds. Yet with technology moving directly into the revenue stream of your company, you need them, and your need is only going to increase.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OLPC’s New $150 Android Tablet Is on Sale at Walmart
http://www.wired.com/design/2013/07/olpcs-new-150-android-powered-tablet-in-schools-and-walmart-shelves/
Founded in 2005, the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child staked out an ambitious goal early on: building a usable laptop for kids of developing nations at an aggressively low price point. Since then, they’ve distributed some 2.5 million computers in over 60 countries. A few years back, they changed their focus to tablets. Now, OLPC’s first consumer-facing device, the Yves Behar-designed, Android-powered XO tablet, is available at WalMart for $150.
It’s proof that sometimes, even the most quixotic dreams demand a slow and steady grind. In its eight-year existence, OLPC has weathered criticism about its hardware, its prices, its implementation and more. As the group has found, building a robust laptop for $100 ain’t easy. But the latest version of their device shows that even in the noblest projects, iteration yields results.
The new tablet, designed by Yves Behar and his team at Fuseproject and manufactured by Vivitar, is still very much a kids’ affair. Its 7″ touchscreen is ensconced in a slime-green case, complete with a handy carrying ring on one corner. By default, it boots into a kid-friendly user interface that organizes digital activities around the idea of “dreams” rather than applications.
This time, though, that custom-UI runs on top of Android 4.2, instead of OLPC’s open-source Sugar OS, so you can boot into the real thing if your kid is sick of thinking about her career and just wants to play Cut the Rope. And that’s important. In some ways, you can see the XO as an acknowledgement that a decent tablet for kids looks a lot like, well, a decent tablet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chromium To Support Wayland
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/10/07/2212245/chromium-to-support-wayland
“Chromium developers have started porting Chromium to X11 alternatives such as Wayland.”
“Different projects based on Chromium/Blink like the Chrome browser, ChromeOS, among others can be enabled now using Wayland.’”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft watches iPads flood into world’s offices: Right, remote desktop clients. It’s time
Windows Server 2012 R2 embraces iOS and Android
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/08/microsoft_rdp_android_ios_clients/
Microsoft will release its own apps to manage all the iOS and Android devices that are flooding into organisations as part of the Bring Your Own Device trend. They will be available for download from app stores later this month.
The official Remote Desktop (RDP) clients were announced on Monday along with a new RDP client for Mac OS X.
The iOS and Android clients are completely new and the Mac client has been given a complete overhaul.
There is already an abundance of third-party Windows RDP clients in the Apple and Google app stores, but the iOS and Android RDP clients announced Monday are the first code to come from Microsoft itself.
It’s part of a move from Microsoft to broaden support for BYOD using a suite of tools for managing services, PCs and devices in the Windows Server 2012 R2 and Systems Center 2012 R2.
But while Microsoft is surrendering the end point argument and accepting that users are running Apple and Google devices at work rather than Windows 8 or Surface machines, Redmond will still get paid.
A full Remote Desktop Services (RDS) setup requires CALs (Client Access Licenses) for each user or device, so even iPad users end up forking out for using Windows.
The price of the Data Center edition of Windows Server 2012, meanwhile, is also going up – as reported. The Server, which offers unlimited virtualisation, will jump 20 per cent to $6,155 for a pair of processors, according to the new licensing data sheet.
The new clients support RemoteApp, which lets you run an individual application remotely, as well as a full remote desktop. This means you can have the odd experience of seeing apps like Excel and Internet Explorer 11 running on an iPad or Android tablet. A similar RDP client already exists for Windows RT, enabling users to run x86 desktop applications that would otherwise be unavailable for users of the ARM build of Windows, found in Microsoft’s Surface RT (and hardly anywhere else).
An RDP client can be handy for home users, who can use it to connect to a Windows desktop from an iPad at home, but the market Microsoft has in mind is enterprise device management. The new apps work alongside several other features in the Server 2012 R2 wave of updates on 18 October.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ubuntu 13.10: Meet the Linux distro with a bizarre Britney Spears fixation
Search me, baby, one more time
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/01/ubuntu_second_beta_review/
On the surface, based on the second beta just released, Ubuntu 13.10 is shaping up to be a solid, if slightly dull, Linux distro.
There have been no major visual changes to the desktop and only a couple of expanded features for the Unity Dash
Ubuntu 13.10 is, however, something of an iceberg – the bulk of what’s new is hidden away under the surface. Ubuntu 13.10 marks the arrival of Mir, Canonical’s new graphics stack designed to replace the ageing X Server.
Mir is Ubuntu’s replacement for the X Window System and is designed to help one escape the confines of the desktop. Mir will allow Canonical to run Ubuntu on mobile and tablet devices, as well as the desktop, sharing a common code base among the various form factors.
Mir is currently at something of a halfway point and is dubbed “xMir” at the moment, a name that hints at the fact that, thus far, Mir is not quite ready for prime time. That’s not to say it doesn’t work, or is buggy. In fact, it’s neither.
So, provided you’re using open-source drivers for your graphics card, Mir isn’t going to give you any hassle.
It’s those of you using proprietary drivers that won’t be seeing Mir just yet. The “x” in xMir refers to the fact that Mir is, for now, shipping with good old X server and will, when faced with unsupported drivers, gracefully fallback to X.
The real arrival of Mir (without the “x”) won’t happen until next year when Ubuntu 14.04 arrives.
Smart Scopes – widgets that let you search for things – made their controversial debut with last year’s Amazon Scope, which creepily mixed shopping suggestions with local document search results.
For example, a search for “firefox” will bring up not just local results like the Firefox app and any documents you might have that contain the word, but also the Wikipedia entry, stories on Reddit, books on Amazon and many others depend on which Scope you have enabled.
I find Smart Scopes to be a mixed bag. They can be fun, especially the scopes that connect to your online accounts. When you log in to online services Smart Scopes can provide some serendipity, like bringing up photos you’ve long since forgotten about, or Wikipedia entries that offer some little bit of trivia about something you’re searching for.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Baked in Britain, the millionth Raspberry Pi
7 October 2013 Last updated at 23:17 GMT
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24435809
For British computing this is quite a day. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that a million of the tiny cheap computers aimed at transforming education have now been made in the UK.
When the Pi was launched in February last year, the device was made in China. But a few months on, production was brought home to Sony’s Pencoed factory in South Wales.
The Pi has been exported around the world and looks set to become the best-selling British computer since the 1980s – though as it retails at about £30, it will never earn the revenues that the likes of the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro achieved.
“I remember being told this was an unsaleable product,” says Upton, satisfied at having proved the doubters wrong. “But we’ve already surpassed the sales of the BBC Micro – my childhood computer. There was a latent need for something like this.”
Tomi says:
How DirecTV overhauled its 800-person IT group with a game
http://www.citeworld.com/social/22534/directv-game-jive-thrive-sparkologee
A couple years ago, DirecTV decided that its IT organization was too timid. The group was too reluctant to share its mistakes with one another, which led to repeated errors, and too afraid to start bold new projects.
Sven Gerjets, the senior vice president of IT at the company, knew that had to change. “The IT organization is pretty critical to moving the business forward. But like everywhere else, consumerization was making everybody believe everything should be easy and fast. We had to address that fear of failure,” he told CITEworld.”
Initially, Bacon recorded a video that was meant to encourage staffers to share information about a particular type of IT failure.
But how would they get people to watch the video? That was when they almost stumbled onto the solution: Turn it into a game.
The team knew it would have to use an internal video platform anyway — they couldn’t share the videos on YouTube and risk them becoming public. So as they built the platform sharing video, they added game elements into it. IT staffers would receive points for each video they watched, and would be able to compete with one another for bragging rights.
The tactic worked amazingly well. Three weeks later, with no additional prompting, more than half the staff was participating.
Next, to increase engagement, they rolled out a program called “Zero to Hero,” where newcomers to the game could win tickets to a hockey match by becoming the top point-winner over the next three days.
While that got engagement to 75%, it also created a problem. The F12 team was using enterprise version of Thrive Metrics to measure user sentiment about the game, and while they saw engagement rising, they also saw a steep increase in negative sentiment — apparently, early participants were upset because they weren’t eligible for the newest contest.
Tomi says:
Google App Engine PHP Runtime now available to everyone
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.fi/2013/10/google-app-engine-php-runtime-now-available-to-everyone.html
At Google I/O earlier this year, we added PHP, the fourth language runtime on Google App Engine in Limited Preview. Today we’re moving to Preview, making PHP on App Engine available for everyone immediately. It is no longer necessary to whitelist your application for deployment.
PHP is one of the world’s most popular programming languages for web programming today. Since the runtime was launched at Google I/O earlier this year, thousands of developers around the world have started using App Engine for PHP, taking advantage App Engine’s legendary scalability and ease of use to run popular PHP products like phpMyAdmin, Drupal and phpBB and frameworks such as Laravel, Silex and CodeIgniter. And as you would expect, you can use Google APIs such as Drive and Google+ on App Engine.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Study: Big Data spending to reach $114B by 2018, driven largely by salaries
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/09/abi-big-data-study.html
ABI Research states that global spending on ‘Big Data’ by organizations will exceed $31 billion in 2013. The firm’s new study further projects spending in the market to grow at a CAGR of 29.6% over the next five years, reaching $114 billion in 2018. The forecast includes the money spent on internal salaries, professional services, technology services, internal hardware, and internal software.
“We estimate that in Big Data initiatives, salaries account for about half of the current spending, with the other half allocated to vendors’ products and services,” reveals ABI senior analyst Aapo Markkanen.
Going forward, ABI Research expects significant innovation in the market for Big Data, especially in the field of analytics.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PLX, FCI team to demo PCIe data center connectivity over optical cabling
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/09/pcie-over-optical-cabling.html
PLX Technology (NASDAQ: PLXT), a specialist in PCI Express (PCIe) silicon and software connectivity for enabling emerging data center architectures, and FCI, a manufacturer of connectors and interconnect systems, are collaborating on a live demonstration of PCIe over optical cabling, showcased at the 39th European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) event in London (September 23-25). PLX and FCI are demonstrating the use of FCI’s new mini-SAS high-density (MSHD) active optical cable (AOC) to provide 32Gbps (PCIe Gen3, x4) optical connectivity in a small-form-factor solution.
The demonstration highlights how a PLX PCIe switch card connects to a PLX five-bay PCIe expansion card through the use of a standard MSHD connector and FCI’s new MSHD AOC. The expansion card allows any devices connected (such as PCIe adaptors, solid-state drives and NIC cards) to interact with the main motherboard/server as if it were a device installed inside the chassis. The demonstration platform can be used by those interested in developing system solutions for PCIe over non-standard PCIe cabling.
“We have seen a significant number of customers coming to PLX and asking for high-density, high-performance, low-cost connectivity solutions to expand PCI Express outside the box,” comments Reginald Conley, vice president, applications engineering, PLX. “To be effective and meet the needs of a wide range of PCI Express users, these solutions must possess what we call the ‘triple threat’ connectivity option — copper, optical and AOC. In doing so, the widest range of performance and cost metrics can be met, and Mini-SAS HD has the potential to be one such solution.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Disney invents touchscreen that lets you feel textures
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/08/disney-invents-touchscreen-that-lets-you-feel-textures/
The company that brought you the first animated feature film and the multiplane camera may be at work on its most game-changing invention yet: Flat touchscreens that let you feel the shape and texture of pictured objects, almost like they were actually there.
The technology is called “tactile rendering of 3D features,” and an early version of a rendering algorithm has already been developed by engineers at Disney Research in Pittsburgh. The process behind it is, predictably, both technical and confusing, but the basic premise is that small, electronic pulses can trick your fingers into perceiving bumps and texture, even if the surface is actually flat.
That’s not a new discovery — scientists have known since 2001 that friction is the predominant force that lets you perceive textures. But Disney’s findings, which the company will present at a user interface symposium in Scotland this week, suggests sweeping applications in devices we already use, like smartphones and tablets.
“Touch interaction has become the standard for smartphones, tablets and even desktop computers, so designing algorithms that can convert the visual content into believable tactile sensations has immense potential for enriching the user experience,” Ivan Poupyrev, the director of Disney’s Interaction Group, said in a release.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Board Said to Work on Hiring New CEO This Year
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-10/microsoft-board-said-to-work-on-hiring-new-ceo-this-year.html
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s board is working toward having the successor to Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer in place by the end of this year and is winnowing a list of candidates, said people with knowledge of the discussions.
Board members have already spoken with candidates such as Ford Motor Co. (F) CEO Alan Mulally; former Nokia Oyj (NOK1V) CEO Stephen Elop
The precise timing of a CEO announcement will depend on negotiations over matters like compensation and, in the case of an external candidate, departure from their current company, said the people.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Acer’s $249 C720 Chromebook launched: Thinner, longer lasting, and Haswell
A big leap in battery life could drive sales of the lilliputian Chromebooks.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/acers-c720-chromebook-launched-thinner-longer-lasting-and-haswell/
Acer C720 Chromebook, promises 8.5 hours of battery life, in a new, thinner body, and with an all-new, Haswell-based Intel Celeron 2955U processor inside. The 1.4GHz dual-core CPU will boost performance over the 1.1GHz Sandy Bridge-based Celeron that preceded it, while cutting power consumption (its battery life is rated at a respectable 8.5 hours).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Design Quality and Customer Delight as Sustainable Advantages
http://daringfireball.net/2013/10/design_quality_as_a_sustainable_advantage
“The business buyer, famously, does not care about the user experience. They are not the user, and so items that change how a product feels or that eliminate small annoyances simply don’t make it into their rational decision making process.”
“The attribute most valued by consumers, assuming a product is at least in the general vicinity of a need, is ease-of-use. It’s not the only one — again, doing a job-that-needs-done is most important — but all things being equal, consumers prefer a superior user experience.”
In a sense, there are two rational Apple bear arguments. The first is that it doesn’t matter whether Apple can create superior products and experiences — the low-end competitors will eventually reach a “good enough” point that will disrupt Apple’s business.
I think Thompson has made a good argument in this piece that such logic does not pertain to consumer markets, especially ones where fashion, style, and design are important attributes. Cell phones have always been about fashion and design.
How do you quantify delight?
The second Apple bear argument comes from those who think Apple has already lost its design and experience advantage — that devices from Samsung, Amazon, Google and whoever else have already equalled or surpassed Apple’s, and at lower prices to boot.
So, as I see it, the first group of Apple bears is wrong about whether design quality can create a sustainable advantage in the phone and tablet markets. The second group is wrong about whether Apple’s products even are superior in design to those of its competitors. These are very different arguments, and largely at odds with each other.
There is a third school of Apple bears, whose philosophy is perhaps best and almost certainly most-frequently espoused by Henry Blodget. This school holds, more or less, that while design quality may allow for a sustainable advantage in some fields, it does not for software platforms. That once one software platform achieves a large majority market share, developers will inevitably flock to that platform, no matter if it’s technically and/or aesthetically inferior, based on market share alone.
Put another way, this third strain of Apple bear subscribes to the theory that iOS is the new Mac, Android is the new Windows, and Apple is about to see the 1990s all over again.
What I see with the Mac is a platform whose darkest hours were not the result of minority market share, but rather coincided with a loss of design and technological leadership over its competition.
Their hardware was un-sexy, slow, and confusingly marketed. Their OS was technically deficient (remember “cooperative multitasking”?) and just plain looked old next to Windows 95. In short, Apple’s design had faltered across the board.
The recovery of the Mac platform had a reverse correlation to the Mac’s market share. The single decision that came closest to bankrupting Apple was the decision to license Mac OS to hardware cloners — a decision that was all about attempting to increase market share for the sake of increasing market share. What the Mac’s success, throughout its entire history, does correlate to is the degree which its design qualities — hardware and software, engineering and aesthetics — were deemed superior to that of its commodity competition by consumers at the high end of the market.
Lastly, the “network effects” drum that Blodget has been banging for years is certainly a real and important factor. But modern computers — PCs, phones, tablets, all of them — are effectively just clients on one universal platform: the Internet. In the ’90s, as the Mac and Apple waned, compatibility meant connecting to Exchange servers, and reading and writing Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Today, compatibility is a rarely uttered word. Twitter, Facebook, email, and at a lower level, HTTP are available to all platforms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Web daddy Tim Berners-Lee: DRMed HTML least of all evils
‘None of us as users’ like it very much…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/10/berners_lee_on_html_drm/
Tim Berners-Lee has warned against the risk of not standardising digital rights management (DRM) in the HTML specification, saying an approach that “does the least harm” might be the best approach.
Web daddy Lee said Wednesday unless the geeks take charge and devise an acceptable standard, delivering a universal answer to DRM, then the web risks “fragmenting”.
“The W3C does not and cannot dictate what browsers or content distributors can do. By excluding this issue from discussion, we do not exclude it from anyone’s systems,” Berners-Lee said here.
Berners-Lee pointed out the danger of citing “what’s best for the user” in the argument on content protection, saying there are so many different parties involved – end users, browser makers and content distributors.
During discussions about adding DRM to HTML the list of new scenarios and what they might mean for “the user” has grown.
“The best solution will be one that satisfies all of them [users], and we’re still looking for that. If we can’t find that, we’re looking for the solutions that do least harm to these and other expressed wants from users, authors, implementers, and others in the ecosystem,” Berners-Lee said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
21st Century Elite remake to support Oculus Rift virtual reality rig
Immerse yourself in your Cobra Mark III cockpit
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/10/elite_dangerous_to_support_oculus_rift/
Elite fans eagerly awaiting the completion of the classic space trading game’s 21st Century refit, Elite: Dangerous will be pleased to learn that it’ll support the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset when it is completed next year.
“We’ve been playing with the Oculus Rift dev kits and are excited about the potential – just glancing around your cockpit or being totally immersed in a space battle,” enthused wizard programmer and Elite co-creator David Braben.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The legacy IE survivor’s guide: Firefox, Chrome… more IE?
Ask yourself, how many times do you want to rewrite?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/10/ie6_migration_guide/
Windows XP and IE6 users will be thrown to the wolves on 9 April, 2014. That’s when Microsoft finally – after more than a decade – stops releasing security updates for operating system and browser.
Twelve years after it was released, IE6, Microsoft legacy web browser, refuses to die, with usage ranging from 0.2 per cent market share in the US and 0.5 per cent in the UK up to a whopping 22 per cent in China. Britain’s taxman, HMRC was, until recently, running IE6 on 85,000 Windows XP PCs.
That’s despite five browsers since it was released, two of those compatible with Windows XP with application of the appropriate service packs – SPs 2 and 3 at least give you IE7 and IE8.
Those on IE7 and IE8 are relatively safe – until support for these browsers’ release operating system, Windows Vista, expires on 11 April, 2017. But, beware: even now, IE7 and IE8 are in Microsoft’s “extended support mode” – same as IE6. Extended support means you get the security fixes – for now.
It’s time to stop ignoring the IE6 deadline or procrastinating, browser peeps. It might not seem like the end of security updates would be that big of a deal for IE6 – after all, it’s been nearly 15 years now, haven’t attackers found all the vulnerabilities out there already? And just because you’ve got three to four more years doesn’t mean IE7 and IE8 people shouldn’t pay attention, too.
The problem on IE6 is, even if that were true – and it’s not – Microsoft will continue to issue security updates for Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, which means attackers have a script to work from when going after Windows XP.
“The very first month that Microsoft releases security updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will reverse-engineer those updates, find the vulnerabilities and test Windows XP to see if it shares those vulnerabilities.”
In other words, every security update Microsoft releases after April 2014 will serve as a blueprint for how to attack Windows XP. Windows XP won’t necessarily be vulnerable to them all, but all it takes is one.
If you’ve long since left Windows XP behind, you may wonder why others have stuck with it for so long. The answer, particularly in the enterprise sector, is software. Legacy software that would be too expensive, or, in some cases, very time consuming to re-write keeps many a business soldier on with XP.
Much of that software happens to be browser-based – intranet apps written specifically for Internet Explorer 6, Widows XP’s default browser.
The problems for IE6 holdouts – even those on IE7 and IE8 – are problems of history and standards.
IE6 used Microsoft’s Trident rendering engine, optimised in a typically Microsoft way to play Microsoft’s Active X framework for the web, which updated the company’s existing COM and OLE diagramming software.
When Windows XP is swept into the dustbin of computing history, there’s an excellent argument for writing apps that conform to web standards rather than the browser du jour.
Out on the web, this lesson was learned the hard way when IE6 lost market share and websites that required it were forced to change to web standards. These days websites and web apps are developed against web standards and will work in any browser that supports those standards.
If you’ve got legacy apps that require IE6, here’s the good news: if – and when – you bite the bullet and rebuild your apps using HTML standards, your IT department will be free to deploy any web browser it wants.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments in the Third Quarter of 2013 Declined 8.6 Percent
The ‘Back-to-School’ Sales Quarter Experienced Its Lowest PC Volume Since 2008
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2604616
Worldwide PC shipments totaled 80.3 million units in the third quarter of 2013, an 8.6 percent decline from the same period last year, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc. This marks the sixth consecutive quarter of declining worldwide shipments.
“The third quarter is often referred to as the ‘back-to-school’ quarter for PC sales, and sales this quarter dropped to their lowest volume since 2008,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “Consumers’ shift from PCs to tablets for daily content consumption continued to decrease the installed base of PCs both in mature as well as in emerging markets. A greater availability of inexpensive Android tablets attracted first-time consumers in emerging markets, and as supplementary devices in mature markets.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rumors of a number of sources tell us that Microsoft is planning for Windows 9 installed, which would bring major changes to the operating system. Windows 8′s evil committed errors, but Windows 9, they seek to remedy.
Information about Microsoft’s plans to have leaked from a variety of sources.
Operating gaining even more slowly than the unpopular Windows Vista. In addition, the Windows tablets have been only a few percent of the market share.
According to rumors, Microsoft recognizes this, and makes the translation of Windows 9. It would be published in the next year or possibly in 2015.
Windows 8′s biggest problem is the reform of the user interface and the background to the more fundamental difference to other platforms.
Windows 8 were made to two separate user interfaces – the traditional Windows desktop and the new touch interface. Computers were forced to start this new interface, which replaces the traditional Start menu.
At least at the moment, it seems that Microsoft’s strategy has failed badly. Two-interface solution has attracted strong criticism. Consumer sentiment has been seen in the sales figures, which have been exceptionally bad.
Windows 9 – a new beginning?
Many rumors suggest that Microsoft is planning significant changes to the Windows platforms. They corrected the underlying structure of the competitors in the direction.
The insider revelations of well-known Russian Mobile-Review-service by Eldar Murtazin says the same indications. Murtazinin that Microsoft has set up a team to investigate the new operating system, and would be ready in the autumn. The goal is to build a platform connected to phones and tablets, and prepare to enter in 2015.
According to rumors, the change would create opportunities for the reform of the Windows user interface. Windows 8′s unpopular with the two UI solution could be changed to a more traditional format.
Microsoft’s plans may change. Something must be done. Tablets are taking over the traditional PC market, and Microsoft’s position is weak, particularly consumer devices.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/windows_9_mullistus_windowsiin_ja_tabletteihin
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP makes it stand apart
“Windows world will deteriorate quickly”
HP to strong reviews for the traditional Windows-world transformation. Relationship between Microsoft and Intel is about to turn upside down, the company says that Cnetin. HP supports Windows computers for three contestants.
HP’s senior management has made candid comments on the economic analysts at the conference. For example, the comments tell the news service Cnet and Computer World .
Previously, HP was firmly in the so-called “Wintel” model, in which the operating system was Windows, and came to Intel processors. HP’s executive Dion Weisler says that at that time the company’s business was easy to predict. As long as the Wintel products were in good condition, was selling.
Weislerin the market is changing now more than the previous 30-year period in total. It has now been moved from a number of different operating systems, architectures, processors and other technologies at the time.
The Executive Director Meg Whitman explained to analysts that HP’s traditional close relationship between Microsoft and Intel have changed. Microsoft and Intel is changing the role of HP’s most important partners as a direct competitors.
HP to take new developments into account. Windows have been brought alongside three other operating system, Google’s Android and Chrome OS platforms, and Ubuntu Linux. Intel’s processors are used in parallel with the ARM-based chips.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/windows_maailma_rapautuu_nopeasti
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP no longer playing by Microsoft, Intel rules, exec says
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57606827-75/hp-no-longer-playing-by-microsoft-intel-rules-exec-says/
With Microsoft and Intel becoming “outright competitors,” Hewlett-Packard sees most of the PC growth happening outside the Windows market. That means Android, Chrome, and Ubuntu.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP’s Whitman pegs Microsoft as an ‘outright competitor’ over Surface
CEO acknowledges reality, joins others like Acer, Lenovo to criticize partner’s move into hardware
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9243128/HP_s_Whitman_pegs_Microsoft_as_an_outright_competitor_over_Surface
Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman yesterday blamed part of her company’s problems on competition from long-time partner Microsoft, making HP the U.S.’s largest OEM to publicly find fault with Redmond.
“HP’s traditional highly-profitable markets face significant disruption,” said Whitman on Wednesday in prepared remarks at the start of a day-long presentation to Wall Street. “We are seeing profound changes in the competitive landscape. Current long-time partners, like Intel and Microsoft, are increasingly becoming outright competitors.”
Whitman did not elaborate, but since October 2012 Microsoft has competed directly with its OEM (original equipment manufacturers) hardware partners by selling tablets of its own design, first to consumers and secondly to businesses, including using a traditional OEM strategy of distributors and resellers authorized to sell to enterprises.
Microsoft’s Surface line — the Surface RT launched a year ago and the Surface Pro released in February — has not broken any sales records, but the company has remained bullish about its devices strategy. In less than two weeks, Microsoft will start selling second-generation tablets at prices starting at $449 for the Surface 2 and $899 for the Surface Pro 2.
Both tablets, but especially the Surface Pro 2, have been marketed as 2-in-1 devices that can function as either a hand-held, touch device and, with the addition of the optional-but-really-required cover keyboards, as an ultralight notebook.
According to IDC and Gartner, which each released their third-quarter estimates for PC shipments on Wednesday, HP was the second-largest PC seller during the July-September stretch, behind only Chinese computer maker Lenovo.
Previously, smaller OEMs have expressed displeasure or concern about Microsoft entering their business. Acer, which sold fewer than half the PCs HP did in the third quarter, has been especially vocal in its opposition, and has, like others — Dell for instance — blamed Windows 8′s confusing dual and dueling user interfaces for sluggish sales. Lenovo has also opposed Microsoft’s move into hardware.
HP has put its money where Whitman’s mouth was, releasing a handful of systems powered by alternate operating systems.
his week, for example, the company launched a Chrome OS-powered laptop, the $279 Chromebook 11, which was developed in conjunction with Google.
Today, Acer unveiled a Chromebook at the even lower price of $249.
The bulk of HP’s personal computers, however, remain tied to Windows. Chromebooks, while surging in sales this year compared to 2012, remain a very small part of the total market — even in the U.S., where they are strongest.
At the presentation yesterday, Whitman and other HP executives noted the changed computing landscape, where Microsoft’s OS and Intel processors are no longer the only choices for OEMs.
“We’re in a new world now with multiple operating systems, new architectures, new silicon, new graphics, new subsystems,” said Dion Weisler, the leader of HP’s personal computer division. Later, Weisler acknowledged that HP is pursuing a four-OS strategy that includes not only Windows, but also Android, Chrome OS and Ubuntu, one of the more popular Linux distributions.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Brain’ chips for phones and robots developed
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/360177,brain-chips-for-phones-and-robots-developed.aspx
Qualcomm is developing new computer circuits that mimic neural structures and how the brain processes information, the company said at the EmTech Massachusetts Institute of Technology conference in the United States earlier today.
Qualcomm chief technology officer Matt Grob said by next year, the company and its partners would design and manufacture neural processing units (NPUs) which function in a completely different manner to current processors.
These would be used for a range of different applications, from artificial vision sensors to robot controllers, and possibly brain implants.
NPUs are envisioned to work more like the brain, processing large amounts of information in parallel while being very power efficient, unlike the current sequential Von Neumann computer architecture.
Grob said Qualcomm has worked on recreating neurons with associated software tools to create the chips, and now has a suite ready for commercial design and development.
The chips have been used to build a four-wheeled robot with neurons implemented in hardware that can be trained to learn navigation with simple “good robot!” and “bad robot” commands to teach it where to go and which areas to avoid, instead of complex coding to map out the path.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finnish Doctors Are Prescribing Video Games For ADHD
http://games.slashdot.org/story/13/10/11/1931244/finnish-doctors-are-prescribing-video-games-for-adhd
“Ville Tapio runs a private psychiatry center in Helsinki, and psychiatrists had told him they were reluctant in particular to hand out drugs for patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD drugs are psychostimulants”
“Tapio had an idea to do it better. His alternative? Getting people with mental health concerns to play video games. They’re special video games, of course — ones that can change how your brain works, with a technique loosely termed gameified neuroplasticity therapy.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finnish Doctors Are Prescribing Video Games for ADHD
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/finnish-doctors-are-prescribing-video-games-for-adhd
apio’s alternative? Getting people with mental health concerns to play video games. They’re special video games, of course—ones that can change how your brain works, with a technique loosely termed gameified neuroplasticity therapy.
The idea isn’t totally out of the blue. The University of Helsinki is well known for its neuroscience, with researchers already investigating how brain activity changes when people do different things. Scientists there have already tinkered around with game play, checking out local Helsinki production Angry Birds to test why the game was so addictive, and it’s all part of a push by Finnish developers to build games that do good.
But using games to change people’s brains for health reasons is an ambitious and relatively new concept. Still, Helsinki has the scientists and the gaming companies—Angry Birds developer Rovio is just one—to give the idea a proper look. Now, researchers also have cash: Tapio’s company Mental Capital Care received 790,000 euro in funding from Finnish investment board Tekes last year to test out a game designed to cure the symptoms of ADHD.
The new interest in gaming in treatment is fueled partly because brain wave scanning headsets have come down in cost, making it a more realistic option outside the lab. Neurogames work with EEG headsets, which place small electrodes directly on your scalp to measure brain waves.
Researchers at the University of Helsinki put together a lab test with 50 ADHD sufferers and 40 sessions of a game where they had to lift an on-screen ball with their thoughts. Different types of thinking do different things to the ball. The goal is to exercise specific sectors of the brain.
“We start the gaming treatment by analyzing the person’s brains, and defining the areas of the brain which are too active or not active enough,” said Tapio. “And then we create a gaming plan that will stimulate those areas of the brain.”
The early results show that everyone improved at the game, and there were positive early indications that it had an impact outside the game. The results are to be published in several months.
If the idea turns out to have potential, it could have enormous impact. In the US alone, $143 billion was spent on ADHD treatments, Tapio said. Add in treatments for anxiety, depression, PTSD—which Tapio believes neuroplastic treatment can also help alleviate—and you’re looking at an enormous market.
It’s a big idea. But then we’re still far from swapping the Ritalin for a computer session.
“For several years now we’ve had measurement devices where you can measure your own physical state with different types of approaches. That’s been a hot trend,” he said. “The question so far has been so what? It needs to link into the social context of people.”