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:
Toshiba: 99 percent of our business sales are Windows 7
http://www.zdnet.com/toshiba-99-percent-of-our-business-sales-are-windows-7-7000021712/
Summary: The PC maker, which recently revamped its range of business devices, says Windows 8 has barely made a dent in its enterprise customer base, despite the push away from Windows XP.
“Tell us something we don’t know,” you’re probably saying.
Windows 8 is slowly making its way to millions of desktops, laptops, and tablets around the world. Despite a marginal increase in its usage share by roughly a percentage point each month, it still has an install base of many tens of millions.
But Microsoft’s success in the software space is on the most part at the behest of the device manufacturers — one being Toshiba, which has, according to latest Gartner figures, a declining worldwide PC share of 5.7 percent. In the second quarter, it shipped about 850,000 desktops and notebooks.
She explained, first and foremost, that most enterprise customers are either in the midst of or have just completed their migration to Windows 7. But Windows 8 remains “some distant plan in the future,” likely to be pushed on by the soon-to-be-released Windows 8.1, which will be out by the end of October.
“Windows 7 is clearly the enterprise operating system at this time,” she said. “But there are pockets of the corporate population that use [detachable] tablets, and might be running Windows 8.”
Enterprise customers ‘not thinking’ about Windows 8 right now
Toshiba offers a bevy of devices running Windows 8, including most of its notebook range. While these are generally marketed towards consumers, its business line-up tends to focus on giving the option to run Windows 7.
Zwerling said the focus was on “Windows XP to Windows 7,” and not Windows XP to Windows 8.
One of the primary reasons is many enterprise customers were skittish by the Windows XP end-of-life deadline in April 2014, and began their migration to Windows 7. But also, Microsoft doesn’t make it all that easy — though, far from impossible.
Also, Windows 8′s user interface was a tough hurdle for many enterprise customers accustomed to Windows XP to jump to. Windows 7 still had a relatively familiar design, but the way the upgrade paths were structured did not make the migration entirely seamless.
´No plans’ for Windows RT
According to IDC’s Jay Chou a few weeks ago: “Advances in PC hardware, such as improvements in the power efficiency of x86 processors remain encouraging, and Windows 8.1 is also expected to address a number of well-documented concerns.”
With Toshiba snubbing Windows RT, just a few days after Dell announced it would bail on its own range of ARM-powered laptops, it leaves just Microsoft developing its own Windows RT-based devices under its Surface moniker.
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.
Way back in 2000, just before the dot-com bust, I wrote a weekly column for CIO magazine, and I spent months covering “the technology workforce crisis.” The big issue was the cap that the U.S. government had put on H‑1B visas and the strong need that companies had for developers and other technologists. Then along came the dot-com bust, and the news (and my column) was all about layoffs and identifying the real goats in the Internet debacle.
As the economy recovered from the bust, we all took a more balanced view of technology hiring. Companies needed good technology people, and they were able to recruit them pretty easily or augment their teams offshore.
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?
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:
Qualcomm Reveals Neural Network Progress
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319767&
iologically inspired neural processing units (NPUs) were recently described by Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego, Calif., at the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference. Qualcomm chief technology officer (CTO) Matt Grob described a new generation of NPUs and design tools that they hope to make available to developers next year.
At the conference, Grob showed videos of what it calls its Zeroth Robot prototype — named after Isaac Asimov’s Zeroth Law of Robotics (that no robots shall harm a human). These robots were not powered by a conventional computer, but instead by biologically inspired NPUs modeled on the human brain and created in cooperation with Brain Corp, which receives funding from Qualcomm Ventures and operates its labs inside Qualcomm’s facility.
Grob promised that after proving out its neural processing units in robotics applications, Qualcomm envisions using these chips in its core business, mobile handsets.
“Mobile is a very challenging design environment, we are under constraints for power, performance, size,” said Grob at EmTech. “And it turns out a brain is an incredibly high-performance system with these same features — very power efficient — with incredible density of performance when you consider what its doing.”
“A brain is nothing like that, so we are looking to biology to inspire us for a new generation of processors,” said Grob at EmTech. “The brain possesses superior capabilities for image recognition as well, so we are trying to understand why that is and bring that to bear.”
Instead of performing a million processing steps with less than 10 parallel execution units, as is done by today’s multi-core processors, the brain does the opposite — it solves the same problems by performing less than 10 processing steps but with a million parallel execution units, according to Grob. The brain is also very power efficient, he explained, consuming only about 20 watts at a cost of under a quarter of a cent per hour, whereas simulating the brain on a conventional von Neumann computer would take up to 50 times more power.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tape rocks for storage – if you don’t need to, um, access your data
SSDs wait in the wings, sharpening their scythes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/14/tape_the_death_watch/
Tomi Engdahl says:
MS Word deserves DEATH says Brit SciFi author Charles Stross
‘A tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/14/ms_word_deserves_death_says_brit_scifi_author_charles_stross/
British science fiction author Charles Stross has published a mighty rant on the subject of Microsoft Word, which he is attempting to will out of existence.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Two-sided printing is foolish partial optimization
there was a technical error, and the reasons are two: the iPad, it is difficult to copy information from one application to another, and double-sided printed paper was the paper second half ignored.
The iPad difficulties in business operation are guaranteed to be familiar to all who are in the tablet PC ever tried to use business use. PowerPoint Road, as well as word processing or spreadsheet software of file processing is painfully awkward, when Apple wanted to hide the existence of the file. The most obvious way is to use Dropbox to transfer files, or any other cloud service. Such is suitable for individual files, but may be quite a crazy brave, if you are going to do this kind of business files.
Another case ballots for the technical problem on behalf of the two printing.
I think that duplex printing is absolutely absurd. Using both sides of sheets of paper to save paper, maybe a little, but the importance of saving is marginal, in any case, when the paper can be recycled.
In return, double-sided printed material is very difficult to deal with.
Two-sided printing is the most foolish savings, which leads to poor usability. The process terms, this is a prime example of how knowledge is partial optimization process will result in poor outcome.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/blogit/ossi/kaksipuoleinen_tulostus_on_typeraa_osaoptimointia
Tomi Engdahl says:
C++ programming guide published, October 14, 1985
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4422623/C–programming-guide-published–October-14–1985
A C++ programming guide, The C++ Programming Language, was written by the language’s creator Bjame Stroustrup and published in 1985.
The language became an IOS standard in September 1998, but before the release of ISO/IEC 14882:1998: Programming Language C++, the book served as the documentation for the language. The fourth edition of the book was released in May 2013.
Tomi Engdahl says:
These professionals are screaming for choice – 68% would pay more pay if you find
Service Cloud Technology to develop a report commissioned by Citrix reveals that many constantly available network services providers in the Nordic companies is a shortage of skilled professionals to network management. More than a quarter of the companies said in the report of expert professionals are hard to find.
Up to 57 percent of all online companies offering their services would cost more pay for job seekers, which dominates the multi-service network solutions. Technology and communications services companies among the figure was 68 per cent.
In Finland, the most popular channels in the network management professionals were finding new jobs on LinkedIn, and service. In the future, the need for skilled professionals will only grow.
When companies move their services to the physical form of virtual, they need to find a reliable technologies in order to provide the time and place independent of the services safely and effectively. Therefore, the need for IT experts who are familiar with functional and flexible solutions.
The study involved more than half of the companies offering their services online, either in part or in full. Nearly 60 per cent of the respondents of the Finnish companies operating online. The vast majority, more than 80 per cent of the Finnish companies to rely on an external partner network management, but in most cases only part of the work is outsourced. Only a fifth of outsourcing network management announced its entirety.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/uutisia/naista+ammattilaisista+on+kiljuva+pula++68++maksaisi+enemman+palkkaa+jos+loytaisi/a938146
Tomi Engdahl says:
GTA broke seven world records
The game won the following records:
1 The most sold video game in one day
2 Most in a day entertainment product ever sold.
3 The fastest sales reached more than a billion entertainment product.
4 The fastest sales reached more than a billion video game.
5 Most wins in one day produced a video game.
6 Most wins in one day produced entertainment product.
7 The history of the most watched video game trailer.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/uutisia/gta++rikkoi+seitseman+maailmanennatysta/a938147
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lessons From the Healthcare.gov Fiasco
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/10/14/1740222/lessons-from-the-healthcaregov-fiasco
“Despite costing $400 million (so far) and employing an army of experienced IT contractors (such as Booz Allen Hamilton and CGI Group), the Website is prone to glitches and frequent crashes, frustrating many of those seeking to sign up for a health-insurance policy.”
Nonetheless, the debacle offers some handy lessons in project management for Websites and portals of any size: know your IT specifications, choose management capable of recognizing the problems that arise, roll out small if possible, and test, test, test.
“fiasco speaks to an unfortunate truth about Web development”
“forgetting or mishandling the basics of successful Web construction can lead to embarrassing problems.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Silicon Motion Releases Controllers for USB 3.0 Flash Drives
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319777&
the new SM3267 device.
Silicon Motion claims that the controller enables an “industry-leading” data transfer rate of up to 160MB/s read, which is a 30 percent to 50 percent improvement from most single-channel USB 3.0 flash drive controllers in the market today. (The controller is also specified with a 60MB/s write rate.)
The company backs up its claim to cost effectiveness with integration. Specifically, Fan says this integration includes a crystal oscillator, a 5V to 3.3V low dropout oscillator (LDO) and a 5V to 1.2V DC-DC converter. Though he wouldn’t reveal the controller’s cost, Fan said “the integration of the above components enable customers to save 15 percent to 20 percent of their BOM cost.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rattling technical change on the way – “will take millions of jobs”
“Intelligent machines” pose a huge global upheaval in the next few years, predicts research firm Gartner. Computer controlled systems are revolutionizing many areas, and will also bring serious negative consequences – to Finland.
Research firm Gartner presented its views on the future of last week at the event. According to the company one of the changes is particularly revolutionary. Gartner believes that the emergence of intelligent machines is “the greatest revolution in the history of information technology.” Effects can be seen widely in the society.
Intelligent machines refers to a variety of new systems. The most famous examples are self-drive cars which render the movement of people and goods. Wildest visions of personal cars will change largely automated robot taxis.
Similar transitions are seen in other areas. Intelligent assistants technology is developing rapidly. Get a taste of the given example, Apple’s Siri technology and the IBM Watson computer system. In the coming years, such systems can begin to replace people in some positions.
The same phenomenon can be seen in the industry and other business systems. Work for which only people thought to be able to, is starting to emerge automated intelligent machines.
Good jobs will go – and not compensated by
Intelligent machines can take in the coming years millions of middle-class jobs. This can also lead to significant problems.
For new types of jobs are being created, but much more slowly than the jobs lost, Gartner estimates. Intelligent machines may increase global unemployment.
“Information technology sector is changing rapidly worldwide: new technologies such as cloud services, as well as changes in customer requirements have led to the rapid modernization of existing information systems with standardized and less labor-intensive applications,”
If Gartner’s predictions are true, the phenomenon seems to Finland, which is struggling to industrial jobs to exit with. Intelligent machines taking jobs away from those areas which are to be replaced by industry, reduced demand for labor.
Gartner estimates that the technology is advancing rapidly until 2020. After automatic systems quickly begins to become common in various areas.
Forecast is in line with what, for example, auto manufacturers have previously estimated. Several brands have introduced a self-representing automotive technology. At least Google, Nissan and Mercedes-Benz have promised that the robot cars would be on sale by 2020.
Gartner’s view is that the need to start preparing for the future now. For example, if corporate IT managers will rest on their laurels, the 2020′s disaster to surprise them. After that, they will soon be unemployed by 2023, Gartner warns.
To new technologies, on the other hand will be treated with caution. This is a major technological and social upheaval, and the journey will certainly bends. Technology may not be ready for years, and the initial prices are high. Also, the legislation may have surprises in store, for example, automated systems caused by accidents can lead to serious issues.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/hurja_tekninen_muutos_tulossa_vie_miljoonia_tyopaikkoja
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux only needs one ‘killer’ game to explode, says Battlefield director
http://www.polygon.com/2013/10/12/4826190/linux-only-needs-one-killer-game-to-explode-says-battlefield-director
It would only take one “killer” game for the Linux platform to explode its way into mainstream gaming, DICE creative director Lars Gustavsson told Polygon, revealing that the development studio would “strongly” like to get into Linux.
“We strongly want to get into Linux for a reason,” Gustavsson said. “It took Halo for the first Xbox to kick off and go crazy — usually, it takes one killer app or game and then people are more than willing [to adopt it] — it is not hard to get your hands on Linux, for example, it only takes one game that motivates you to go there.”
Valve’s recently announced Steam OS and Steam Machines are healthy for the console market, Gustavsson said when asked for his opinion on Valve’s recent announcements. He believes the products will open up the market to explore new, and perhaps better, ways of consuming games.
“Basically for different ways of accessing customers and giving them possibilities of play, I think it is super exciting,”
The only thing I know is that from five or ten years from now gaming and especially how you consume it won’t look like it does today. I do think with streaming services and new input devices and so on, it wouldn’t surprise me if there is less need of hardware and more on demand gaming experience.”
“I think, hopefully, competition usually means a better experience for the customer. Sometimes. You know, was the VHS tape better than BetaMax? VHS won,” he continued. “So it does not always go in the right direction but overall I think it is healthy with competition. It is truly welcomed, so that we can have better games in the future.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
In the future, the need for skilled professionals will only grow. Up to 57 percent of the on-line service providing companies would pay more pay for job seekers, which dominates the multi-service network solutions
“User demand 24/7 to reach the services places new demands on businesses. If the cry is not answered, it can affect even the company’s commercial success. Companies should first solve part of the recruiting challenges. Only then is the time to think about what kind of technology allows the network to support the company’s strategic growth, “said Citrix Systems Finland Kim Mashal release.
Quocirca to carry out a survey involving 300 IT professionals from the Nordic countries, the UK and Ireland.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/hallitsetko_verkot_toita_tiedossa
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gartner’s Dark Vision for Tech, Jobs
http://www.cio.com/article/741312/Gartner_s_Dark_Vision_for_Tech_Jobs?page=1&taxonomyId=3123
Science fiction writers have long told of great upheaval as machines replace people. Now, so is research firm Gartner. The difference is that Gartner, which provides technology advice to many of the world’s largest companies, is putting in dates and recommending immediate courses of action.
- Science fiction writers have long told of great upheaval as machines replace people. Now, so is research firm Gartner. The difference is that Gartner, which provides technology advice to many of the world’s largest companies, is putting in dates and recommending immediate courses of action.
The job impacts from innovation are arriving rapidly, according to Gartner. Unemployment, now at about 8%, will get worse. Occupy Wall Street-type protests will arrive as early as next year as machines increasingly replace middle-class workers in high cost, specialized jobs. In businesses, CIOs in particular, will face quandaries as they confront the social impact of their actions.
Machines have been replacing people since the agricultural revolution, so what’s new here?
In previous technological leaps, workers could train for a better job and achieve an improvement in their standard of living. But the “Digital Industrial Revolution,” as the analyst firm terms it, is attacking jobs at all levels, not just the lower rung. Smart machines, for example, can automate tasks to the point where they become self-learning systems.
Smart machines “are diagnosing cancer, they are prescribing cancer treatments,” said Kenneth Brandt, a Gartner analyst. These machines “can even deliver [treatment] to the room of the patient.”
Gartner sees all kinds of jobs being affected: Transportation systems, construction work, mining warehousing, health care, to name a few. With IT costs at 4% of sales for all industries, there’s very little left to cut in IT, but there is a great opportunity to cut labor.
The companies on the leading edge of this trend include Amazon, which spent $775 million last year to acquire Kiva Systems, a company that makes robots used in warehouses. Google is also on the forefront, with its effort to develop driverless cars.
This shift will affect employment, said Brandt, at Gartner’s Symposium ITxpo. “We believe there will be persistent and higher unemployment.”
The broader intent of the research is to get CIOs to consider the impact of smart machines on their organizations, along with the rise of new positions, such as chief digital officer. Gartner recommends that businesses move quickly to form teams to focus on the issue of smart machines.
From 2020 to 2030, “you are going to see the first human-free enterprise — nobody is involved in it, it’s all software, communicating and negotiating with one another,” said Diane Morello, a Gartner analyst, who has looked at how smart machines will reshape employment.
Morello said companies increasingly will recognize that smart machines are part of the workforce. “Human beings are not the only workforce,” she said.
“It’s definitely easy to see a dystopian future,”
While the first phase of the revolution may benefit the robber barons, or in this case the Silicon Valley titans, Hansen said, “eventually there is a huge economic potential that actually dwarfs the initial potential” as people figure out how “to tap into all these unused resources” or people idled by changes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A web page that lasts forever: the plan to stop “link rot” in law and science
http://gigaom.com/2013/10/14/a-web-page-that-lasts-forever-the-plan-to-stop-link-rot-in-law-and-science/
Many links cited by influential science journals and the Supreme Court are broken – the result is a growing memory hole in the places where scholars expect to find an authoritative source of knowledge. The good news is a solution is at hand.
The good news is that libraries have a plan to fix the problem. This weekend, the Times Higher Education website published a feature that looks at Perma CC, a site that is creating etched-in-stone digital references for scholars and lawyers.
It works like this: a scholar (or anyone else) can submit a link to Perma CC, which is managed by a coalition that includes universities, libraries and the Internet Archive. According to Perma CC, the group will create a permanent URL and store the page on its servers and on mirror sites around the world.
Readers who encounter Perma.cc links can click on them like ordinary URLs. This takes them to the Perma.cc site where they are presented with a page that has links both to the original web source (along with some information, including the date of the Perma.cc link’s creation) and to the archived version stored by Perma.cc.
There is also a process for scholars and librarians to “vest” certain URLs so that they become an official, permanent citation for law and science journals.
This process appears to be a long overdue solution. Here are some more stats cited by the Times Higher Education feature:
Link rot at influential science journals rises from 4 percent at three months to 10 percent at 15 months to 13 percent after 27 months.
98.3 percent of web pages change in some way within six months, while 99.1 percent do within a year
At three Harvard legal journals, over a 12-year period, 70 percent of the links no longer worked
Tomi Engdahl says:
News Flash: Oracle Still Hates Open Source Software
http://readwrite.com/2013/10/15/oracle-opens-both-barrels-on-open-source-software-in-military-whitepaper#awesm=~okpylAMOCbLS5r
Oracle wants the U.S. Department of Defense to believe open source costs more and is less reliable. Too bad the DOD knows better.
It’s no wonder that Google, Red Hat and others have been abandoning Oracle’s most visible open-source project, MySQL. After all, Oracle has a highly conflicted relationship with open source. Nowhere is this conflict more apparent than in a new white paper Oracle released for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) in which Oracle suggests open source costs more and is less reliable.
Unfortunately for Oracle, the DOD has its own white paper on open source—several, actually—which directly contradicts Oracle’s key arguments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel says hardware bargains to multiply this fall: $99 tablets, $299 Haswell laptops, $349 2-in-1 hybrids
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/15/intel-says-hardware-bargains-to-multiply-this-fall-99-tablets-299-haswell-laptops-349-2-in-1-hybrids/#9fwY8pkKDgkZFyJM.99
Tomi Engdahl says:
U.S. to reduce IT spending
U.S. Federal Government to reduce IT spending dramatically. In the financial year 2014 the central government to use it to invest in $ 70 billion, compared to a peak in 2010, the money used for the ten billion dollars more.
The federal IT investments on the ground at the point just in the current budget period. In subsequent years, the budget investment will grow slowly until 2019.
Savings through joint services, the transition to the cloud and data center consolidation through the association of Tech America Foundation says.
The new strategy of the federal Seeking greater savings by breaking contracts and choosing the cheapest options, Research Organization more.
Although the agreement should arise, ongoing budget cuts may have a large impact on IT service providers. IT companies will inevitably face financial difficulties, and they have to Hodgkins estimates that reducing the number of personnel,
“Some IT companies performance declines this year, the federal cutbacks,” he says.
Public administration side of IT staff salaries have been frozen for the third year in a row, and some of the service providers have already had to lay off our people.
“Few IT specialist no longer wants to go to work in public administration, even though the skills they bring to the high demand,”
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/usa+supistaa+itrahankayttoa/a938581
Tomi Engdahl says:
All new not-so-agile Intel: 14nm Broadwell chip delayed to 2014
Mixed messages from King Krzanich
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/16/intel_seeks_faster_product_deployment_but_delays_14nm_broadwell_chip/
One of the biggest tasks Intel CEO Brian Krzanich has set himself is reconfiguring the company so that it’s quicker to build and deploy new products.
So it’s a pity he has had to delay the rollout of 14-nanometer Broadwell processor chips until the first quarter of next year due to problems with quality control.
“It’s simply a defect density issue,” Krzanich said of the silicon issues. “As we develop these technologies, what you do is continually improve the defect densities and they result in the yield, the number of dies per wafer.
In a call to analysts after the release of the firm’s latest quarterly results Krzanich said he wanted to speed up Intel’s production and design responsiveness so that the company could react faster to changing market conditions, potentially making changes in products up to three months before they ship without harming quality.
Intel was responding well to the changes he said, but the company was still a year or 18 months away from where Chipzilla has that kind of flexibility, according to Krzanich.
With regards to the market in general Krzanich and Intel’s CFO Stacy Smith reported that overall the signs for Intel were good,
Chipzilla’s “cloud revenues” (their words) are up 40 per cent on the previous quarter; high-performance computing was up 27 per cent; storage was up 20 per cent; and embedded systems revenues are up 21 per cent.
As for its traditional PC business Smith predicted that consumer sales in Europe and North America have bottomed out
Tomi Engdahl says:
The joys of maintenance programming
http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=122
You’ll learn how to program better
You’ll learn how to optimize
You’ll learn new (to you) skills and tools
You’ll learn to value data and databases
Clients will appreciate everything you do
You will have better specs and clear constraints
Easier to walk away from bad clients
Agile by default
You’ll learn about business
You’ll learn people skills
You’ll get follow-on business and referrals
Your work won’t be off-shored
But you may end up maintaining the results of your client’s off-shoring experiments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Violin gangs up with Microsoft: Psst, big biz, want an all-flash Windows Server box?
‘The future of the data centre is memory’ – storage firm CEO
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/16/violin_memory_enters_the_server_business/
Flash array front runner Violin Memory can now run Windows Server inside its high-end arrays, giving the server OS access to up to 64TB of NAND with the ability to run all Windows enterprise applications in solid state storage.
Violin and Microsoft have partnered to make Windows Server 2012 R2 use Violin flash better. Microsoft has rewritten parts of the Windows Server 2012 kernel to optimise it for flash, and Violin Memory rewritten parts of its vMOS operating system to optimise data paths for the Microsoft software.
Microsoft Systems Center 2012 R2 is also supported natively.
Violin’s 6000 and 6200 series arrays can run Windows server, but not the smaller 3000 series products.
As well as the x86 processors used for VMS these arrays are fitted with additional dual-CPU, multi-core X86 processors to run Windows Server. We are told by a Violin spokesperson that the power of the processors used for Windows “will certainly increase in the future”, leading us to expect more cores and CPUs.
Violin says its 6000 and 6200 series products deliver more than 1 million IOPS and scale from 8TB to 64TB of memory capacity. They have high-availability with sub-second failover and I/O access latency is measured in microseconds.
“The future of the data centre is clearly memory,” said Don Basile, Violin Memory CEO. “Violin’s scale-out memory platform for Windows is the ideal solution for running massive scale clouds.”
Flash array vendors such as Nimbus Data, Pure Storage and others could add server blades to their arrays and partner with Microsoft as Violin has done. They might all be more attracted to the idea if running VMware servers in their arrays and, no doubt, the ESX engineers inside VMware are looking at the idea already.
Violin might even be looking at VMware as a future option. By going with Windows and Hyper-V it has the flashed Windows Server market pretty much to itself, at least for a while, and its resellers should be able to present customers with Windows Server hardware that can run far, far more apps per CPU, and bigger apps – big data apps even – than virtually anything else.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Backing up your VMware environment? Don’t lose control…
A tale of agents and three letter acronyms
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/16/backing_up_your_vmware_environment/
Is your VMware back up under control? No, we thought not. Virtualisation has achieved many wonderful things – but it has complicated data protection and backup, where organisations see increasing recovery times, a lack of granularity, and inconsistency between back up and disaster recovery regimes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to develop unmaintainable software
http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=249
My typical client usually has been told by other developers that they need to throw everything away and start from scratch. Most programmers don’t like maintaining code, and they especially don’t like maintaining someone else’s code. When writing code programmers often ask the wrong questions when they talk about maintainability
Here are some things you can do in your own software projects to keep me in business:
Don’t use version control
Customize your development environment. A lot.
Create an elaborate build and deployment environment
Don’t set up testing/staging platforms
Write everything from scratch
Add dependencies to specific versions of libraries and resources…
… But don’t protect or document those dependencies
Use a bunch of different programming languages and stay cutting-edge
Where’s the programming advice?
Tomi Engdahl says:
The myth of maintainability
http://mattduvall.com/blog/myth-of-maintainability/
“Will this be maintainable in the long term?” – a comment on every code review ever
What do we exactly mean by maintainability as developers? Will the code be easy to understand for the next person to read it? This is readability, which could be seen as a factor in maintainability, and is valid. The more pressing interpretations tend to be along the lines of extensibility, abstraction, and hand-wavy higher level design or architecture.
The problem with the latter interpretations is the possible misunderstanding of why we write software. Software exists to drive a business need, add business value, and in the end — generate revenue. Let’s not waste time (and these discussions usually end up just wasting time).
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM’s Q3 mixed, hardware business thumped
http://www.zdnet.com/ibms-q3-mixed-hardware-business-thumped-7000022046/
Summary: IBM’s earnings were better than expected for the third quarter, but sales fell short. The systems and technology division saw sales fall 19 percent from a year ago.
By unit, IBM’s systems and technology business took the biggest hit with sales falling 19 percent. IBM said Power Systems revenue was down 38 percent and System x sales fell 18 percent.
Software revenue was up 1 percent and services revenue fell 3 percent in the third quarter. Growth markets sales fell 9 percent in the third quarter.
IBM did note that cloud revenue was up more than 70 percent year to date and third quarter sales topped $1 billion. Of that sum, $460 million was cloud services.
By region, IBM took the biggest hit in Asia Pacific as third quarter sales fell 15 percent to $5.5 billion. Americas revenue fell 1 percent to $10.3 billion. Europe, Middle East and Africa sales were up 1 percent to $7.3 billion.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Xbox Live Compute gives free cloud tech to all devs, including dedicated servers
http://www.vg247.com/2013/10/15/xbox-live-compute-gives-free-cloud-tech-to-all-devs-including-dedicated-servers/
Microsoft is making its Xbox One cloud servers free for all developers to use, including dedicated server support for all multiplayer games.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft reveals Windows 8.1′s mysterious Movie Moments app, other app improvements
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2054397/microsoft-reveals-windows-8-1s-mysterious-movie-maker-app-other-app-improvements.html
Microsoft didn’t show much of the Movie Moments interface in its blog post, but it doesn’t seem to be made for heavy-duty editing. The “simple app”—as Microsoft calls it—will be able to trim videos, add music, and slap captions on your videos, as shown in the example below.
Fresh Paint, Photos, and Camera
Three other cornerstones of Microsoft’s creative endeavors are also receiving slight makeovers.
Like Movie Maker, Microsoft’s utterly superb Fresh Paint app will be available in the Windows Store, rather than being baked in to the operating system itself.
The Camera app packs a fun new panorama mode based on Microsoft’s killer Photosynth app, along with the newfound ability to capture individual photos while shooting videos.
The tweaks in Windows 8.1′s creative apps are only the beginning. Virtually every app has been overhauled in the update, and several new apps have been baked into the operating system re-do.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 8.1: Best Experience of Your Web with Sites and Apps together
http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/10/16/windows-8-1-best-experience-of-your-web-with-sites-and-apps-together.aspx
With the general availability of Windows 8.1, you’ll get the best experience of your sites and apps together on your favorite Windows device.
In Windows 8.1, IE11 delivers an experience that is fast, fluid and perfect for touch. IE11 puts your web sites first, delivering the best web on Windows across the full range of Windows devices and screen sizes that’s equally great for touch, mouse, and keyboard. You can have as many open tabs as you want, and side-by-side browsing with your favorite sites and Windows Store apps together.
Live tiles for apps and sites
Windows 8.1 with IE 11 introduces support for live tile notifications when you pin your favorite web sites. Your pinned sites can now be alive with activity, pulling data directly from the websites so your Start screen is updated with the latest posts, scores or stocks – information from the Web right on your Start screen.
Together with the Start screen team in Windows, we designed the live tile support for sites to enable all the same tile sizes and layouts that apps enjoy. We set out to make it as easy as possible for developers to build live tile notifications using the existing RSS feeds for their sites, and we built BuildMyPinnedsite.com to help developers to create beautiful tiles and live notification support with just a few clicks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Information management, ensure business continuity
E-mail inaction may already jeopardize the business of many companies and organizations. Until a few years ago, an email was considered less critical service.
Information technology has become so insidiously essential part of business, the failure of even minor disturbances can actually stop working for the day, and customer service.
Information technology is also becoming more complex, and different IT systems of the operation is not without its problems. A small fault in a subsystem may accumulate broadspectrum.
Changes and updates are made to the system a lot. Cyber-attacks has become more common and more criminals tools are rapidly developing.
Good design and implementation services are a basic requirement for continuity.
What is critical to the business service is, the more robust precautionary measures are needed.
Proofing is done, inter alia, technical arrangements, such as duplicate systems and service solutions. The business critical services that require different levels of service and time than non-critical.
As well as technical solutions to higher levels of service at a price. Investment management of the business is not difficult, when identifying potential business losses.
Service consists of the technical infrastructure, application integration, as well as the related service processes. The plan should extend to the whole service package.
In addition to monitoring and measurement of the expected emergence of a terrible incident.
Completely reliable service is almost impossible to plan, and a price tag of at least the formation of a very high level.
Technical equipment will be failures and human errors either not be completely eliminated. And abnormal situations must be prepared.
It is not indifferent to how the service problems will be resolved. Is the service organization clear what is business critical systems, and the order in which they are to return to the source?
Fault messages must start quickly, and it will provide reliable information to the right people in a clear and understandable way. Experienced and skilled personnel will lead to a situation – be it a weekend or evening.
When your organization is mapped to it’s business risks and contingency plans prepared for possible problem situations?
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/blogit/ict_standard_forum/tietohallinto+varmista+liiketoiminnan+jatkuvuus/a938376
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 8.1 will be distributed today, and Windows 8 devices will get it for free. Windows update brought many reforms.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/windows_8_1_tulee_tanaan_paljon_uudistuksia
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 8.1 Rolls Out Today
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/17/1217246/windows-81-rolls-out-today
“The newest iteration of Windows has begun rolling out, and is winning positive reviews. (Here’s an in-depth review from Ars, and a more concise one from Wired — both give 8.1 a thumbs-up).”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft unleashes Windows 8.1 on world: Ooh, is that a new pair of boots?
Classic or Notro bootup – plus the Start button is back
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/17/windows_8_point_1_surface_two/
Microsoft did something on Thursday that it really didn’t want to do: take a step back from Windows 8.
If you’ve already got Windows 8 or Windows RT, you get the update for free from the Windows Store. Windows 8.1 will be available on new systems and for sale as a boxed product tomorrow, 18 October. Not all apps in the Windows Store will be ready for 8.1 today but, Microsoft said, will be ready Friday.
The staggered release comes five months after Microsoft revealed it was doing a U-turn on “key elements” of Windows 8.
That U-turn transpired to be the ability to boot to the Classic desktop rather than simply forcing people into the new Metro UI – as well as the return of a Start button with a Start screen that’s become an application launcher. On the application design side, things have become more flexible with users now being able to size and layer apps, where before they were set to a fixed size and apps had to be locked side-by-side.
Microsoft has been blogging about the updated apps and services for Windows 8.1 to try and stimulate consumer uptake
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bricks do not strike
Bricks are not convinced yet
Redmond’s vision a year ago launched the Windows 8 operating system combined the PC and the mobile world. The most recent information can be used to plan the failed laconically noted: tablets is going badly, and PC-to-market plow. Today we officially launched in Windows 8.1 to try and fix the errors predecessor.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/blogit/tekninen_analyysi/tiilet_eivat_vakuuta_vielakaan
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel’s 14nm Broadwell Delayed Because of Low Yield
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/10/17/1933258/intels-14nm-broadwell-delayed-because-of-low-yield
“Intel has put back the delivery of its 14nm Broadwell desktop chip by a quarter because of a manufacturing issue that leaves it with too high a density of defects.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD makes money for a change, market says ‘meh’
Increase in desktop CPU revenue and console boost can’t excite Wall Street
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/18/amd_makes_money_for_a_change_market_says_meh/
Perennial chip challenger Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has posted a profit for 2013′s third quarter, a turnaround that has failed to excite investors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
DDR4 You Can Use Now
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319818&
After seven years of development, JEDEC released the DDR4 DRAM standard (JESD79-4) last fall. The standards committee recognized the ever-increasing performance demands placed on memory and knew that a simple update wouldn’t be enough.
The DDR4 architecture represents a major departure from that of previous DRAM standards, affording significant performance improvement, dramatic reductions in power demand, and compatibility with 3D architectures. Typically, a couple of years elapses between the release of a standard and broad availability of product.
Given the rapid evolution of the technology, however, DDR4 is expected to mature quite a bit more rapidly than its predecessors, with broad deployment hitting in 2014. Indeed, at the recent Intel Developers Forum (IDF), companies demonstrated working systems
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google boss: PC era is over
The world’s dominant search engine company and advertising giant Google topped the July-September, analysts’ earnings forecasts. The interim report as CEO Larry Page announced the PC era to be over.
Google CEO Larry Page on the PC equipment reign has been left behind, and has entered a multi-device era. Google’s positive economic figures are based on the new simpler tools for mobile ad pricing and better analytics, the company’s Senior Vice President Nikesh Arora said
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/google_pomo_pc_aikakausi_on_ohi
Tomi Engdahl says:
Transformative Programming
Flow-based, functional, and more
http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/10/transformative-programming.html
“Small pieces loosely joined,” David Weinberger’s appealing theory of the Web, has much to say to programmers as well. It always inspires me to reduce the size of individual code components. The hard part, though, is rarely the “small” – it’s the “loose”.
After years of watching and wondering, I’m starting to see a critical mass of developers working within approaches that value loose connections. The similarities may not be obvious (or even necessarily welcome) to practitioners, but they share an approach of applying encapsulation to transformations, rather than data.
The Return of Flow-Based Programming
No Flo and its successful Kickstarter to create a unique visual environment for JavaScript programming reawakened broader interest in flow-based programming. FBP goes back to the 1970s, and breaks development into two categories:
“There’s two roles: There’s the person building componentry, who has to have experience in a particular program area, and there’s the person who puts them together,” explains Morrison. “And it’s two different skills.”
That separation of skills – programmers creating separate black box transformations and less-programmery people defining how to fit the transformations together – created a social problem for the approach. (I still hear similar complaints about the designer/programmer roles for web development.)
Unix Pipes
Sooner or later, every sufficiently fragmented system will look like Unix pipes, feeding the output of one process into the input of another (with a bit of buffering infrastructure). Unix pipes are another old technology.
Unix pipes certainly make it easier for less advanced developers to take advantage of powerful tools created by experts. Despite that echo, though “less advanced” is still pretty advanced. Unix shell scripting still feels a lot like the programming used for the underlying components, and Unix culture and graphical programming may not be a common mix.
Functional Programming
Functional programming gives developers the opportunity to write their code as transformations all the way down to the bottom.
Clean functions – functions without side effects – are effectively pure transformations. Something comes in, something goes out, and the results should be predictable.
Web Services and XML
When I first got into XML, I was thrilled by the open data aspect of it all. Developers could use whatever languages they wanted, and share information between them. The reality, unfortunately, was that such radical openness was terrifying.
XProc gives developers a set of tools for defining pipelines processing XML information.
I’ve also pondered what role REST may play in these conversations. The PUT and DELETE methods are, of course, all about side-effects, and not so much about flow. I don’t yet have a good answer here.
Humans as Transformers
Humans, however, are extremely versatile if unpredictable transformers. We don’t just create information. We can edit, modify, and check it for sanity.
My encounter with flow-based programming has me re-examining my assumptions about how to write programs and use computers. Many different aspects of computing seem to be converging toward that model, at many different scales and levels of granularity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Programmers at Juniper — not Google or Facebook — rake in the most dough
Juniper’s average base salary for coders is about $160,000
http://www.itworld.com/379055/programmers-juniper-not-google-or-facebook-rake-most-dough
What a lucrative profession coding can be — the best paid software engineers have an average base salary of nearly US$160,000, and they work at Juniper Networks, according to a recent survey.
Juniper, a network equipment maker that competes with Cisco Systems, placed first in a ranking of the 25 highest paying companies for software engineers, compiled by the employee reviews site Glassdoor.
Software engineers at Juniper have an average annual base salary of $159,990, way above the national average for software developers, which is $92,790, Glassdoor said.
They’re followed by developers at LinkedIn, with an average base salary of $136,427; Yahoo, at $130,312; Google, at $127,143; and Twitter, at $124,863.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Troubled Obamacare website wasn’t tested until a week before launch
http://washingtonexaminer.com/troubled-obamacare-website-wasnt-tested-until-a-week-before-launch/article/2537381
Federal officials did not permit testing of the Obamacare healthcare.gov website or issue final system requirements until four to six days before its Oct. 1 launch, according to an individual with direct knowledge of the project.
The individual, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the troubled Obamacare website project as suffering from top-level management disarray, changing systems requirements and recurring delays.
The root cause of the problems was a pivotal decision by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials to act as systems integrator, the central coordinator for the entire program. Usually this role is reserved for the prime information technology contractor.
As a result, full testing of the site was delayed until four to six days before the fateful Oct. 1 launch of the health care exchanges, the individual said.
In addition, “The challenge with this project was that the decisions were made very, very late in the project, and no one organization … seemed to know how this complex ecosystem of applications, interfaces, user processes and hardware should all work together.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
DRAMs Back in Black
Profits highest in three years
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319829&
The dynamic random access memory (DRAM) market is back in the black and rising fast, recording its highest profits in nearly three years, according to IHS.
After years of PCs dominating DRAM sales, they consumed less than 50 percent of manufactured DRAMs in 2012 for the first time in 30 years, according to IHS. In this post-PC era, many devices — especially mobile — are using less DRAM per unit, which is slowing the overall growth of the market.
To keep margins healthy in this post-PC era, suppliers have had to tighten their belts and refrain from the over-production woes
“Due to industry consolidation behind three major players — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, which owns Elipida — they are better able to coordinate production, bringing stability to a market going through a major transition away from PCs,” says Robinson.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet Explorer 11 BREAKS Google, Outlook Web Access
The Windows 8.1 train wreck rollout continues apace
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/21/internet_explorer_11_breaks_google_outlook_web_access/
The Windows 8.1 rollout has hit more hurdles: the new version 11 of Internet Explorer that ships with the operating system does not render Google products well and is also making life difficult for users of Microsoft’s own Outlook Web Access webmail product.
The latter issue is well known: Microsoft popped out some advice about the fact that only the most basic interface to the webmail tool will work back in July. It seems not every sysadmin got the memo and implemented Redmond’s preferred workarounds, but there are only scattered complaints out there, likely because few organisations have bothered implementing Windows 8.1 yet.
The Google problem is making greater waves because the company’s search engine often renders badly
Microsoft’s blaming Google for the problem
Tomi Engdahl says:
To Catch Up, Walmart Moves to Amazon Turf
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/technology/to-catch-up-walmart-moves-to-amazon-turf.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
A plucky Silicon Valley company, forced to compete for talented engineers, is trying it all — recruiting billboards on Highway 101
The name of that arriviste company?
Walmart.
The country’s largest retailer, which for years didn’t blink at would-be competitors, is now under such a threat from Amazon that it is frantically playing catch-up by learning the technology business, including starting @WalmartLabs, its dot-com headquarters.
The two retail behemoths, one the king of the physical store and the other the conqueror of the online world, are battling over e-commerce — competing for the most talented engineers, trying to gain the upper hand in the new frontier of same-day delivery and warring over online pricing.
They want to control not just Internet shopping but all shopping. Even as Walmart pours money into technology, Amazon is building a physical presence across the nation, adding warehouses and pickup locations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
In Case You Don’t Realize How Fast Apple’s iPad Business Has Gone Down The Tubes …
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ipad-sales-2013-10?op=1
The iPad Mini and Apple’s larger iPads are still arguably the best tablets of their kind on the market. But they’re also some of the most expensive. Apple, which generates its profit from device sales, is trying to protect its profit margin by maintaining relatively high price points for its iPads. Amazon, Google, and other tablet manufacturers, meanwhile, are selling their tablets at lower price points, in part because they generate their profits from app and media sales rather than device sales.
Apple says it wants to sell the “best” products, not the “most” products, so this pricing strategy is in keeping with that philosophy.
The trouble is that Apple is also trying to ensure that its mobile operating system, iOS, remains the dominant global mobile platform. And in platform markets — markets in which third-parties build apps and sell services on top of a platform — market share is crucial.
By trying to maintain its premium pricing and high profit margin, Apple is likely losing sales that would otherwise help the company capture more of the mobile platform market. That tradeoff helps produce higher profits for Apple today, but it also likely weakens the long-term value of the iOS platform.
In other words, Apple is stuck with what can only be described as a high-quality problem.
The company’s profit margin is so high, and this is producing so much profit, that investors have made it one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. If Apple sacrifices its profit margin and profit to increase its mobile platform market share, investors will probably scream
Apple is so phenomenally profitable that it could reduce its iPad and iPhone prices significantly and still coin money.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tablet shipments to grow 53.4% in 2013, PCs to fall 8.4%
http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/21/tablet-shipments-to-grow-53-4-in-2013-pcs-to-fall-8-4-says-gartner/
It’s a familiar picture for the gadget world: Tablets are on the way up, while traditional PCs are on the decline, according to the latest data from the research firm Gartner.
While the firm expects a 4.5 percent increase of all computing devices this year, that will be mostly led by cheaper gadgets. Tablets shipments will increase by 53.4 percent in 2013, while PC shipments — including desktops, laptops, and “ultramobiles” — will fall by 8.4 percent.
Gartner considers ultramobiles to be thin and light computers that also function as hybrid tablets. Looking at the PC market without that category (which is actually doubling in shipments this year) makes the situation even worse for traditional desktops and laptops, which Gartner expects to decline by 11.2 percent this year. Gartner also expects mobile phone shipments to grow by 3.7 percent this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell’s Project Ophelia Android stick shows up at the FCC as Wyse Cloud Connect
http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/21/dell-project-ophelia-fcc/
The summer passed without signs of Dell’s Project Ophelia Android stick, but it at last appears to be getting close. The thin client has just surfaced at the FCC branded as the (now expected) Wyse Cloud Connect.
MHL-capable HDMI connector, Bluetooth, 802.11n WiFi, a microSD card slot and USB ports
There aren’t any clues as to when Cloud Connect will ship.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LG hints at Chrome OS devices
http://tmwatch.net/2013/10/21/lg-hints-at-chrome-os-devices/
South Korean technology giant LG has lodged a host of Australian trade marks that suggest it is planning to launch a range of Google Chrome OS-based devices.
In the last week, the company has filed trade marks for ‘ChromeOne’, ‘ChromeDesk’ and ‘ChromeStation’, all covering various technology devices.
LG currently partners with Google on the ‘Nexus’ brand of smartphones, including the soon-to-launch Google Nexus 5.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nokia unveils 10.1″ Lumia 2520, a $499 Windows RT 8.1 tablet coming this fall with LTE and a $150 Power Keyboard
http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2013/10/22/nokia-unveils-10-1-lumia-2520-499-windows-rt-8-1-tablet-coming-fall-lte-150-power-keyboard/
At Nokia World in Abu Dhabi today, Nokia unveiled its first tablet: the Lumia 2520. The Windows RT 8.1 device will ship this fall for $499; initial roll out will be in the US, the UK, and Finland, with additional countries to follow “shortly after.”
Much like the Microsoft Surface, the Lumia 2520 is more than just a screen: it pairs with a $150 Nokia Power Keyboard, a wraparound cover that includes a fully functional keypad
While many tablets nowadays ship with a lower-end Wi-Fi model and a higher-end Wi-Fi plus LTE model, Nokia’s tablet comes with 4G LTE and Wi-Fi.
It includes a 6.7 megapixel camera and ZEISS optics
Lumia 2520 comes with HERE Maps. Nokia argues this makes the device the only tablet with “true offline maps.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft buns have not been very good in the oven, when you look at the whole operating systems picture on all devices. Gartner forecasts that Apple is catching up Microsoft’s lead in almost closed. Android runs quite far away from the front of their numbers.
Android’s growth seems to be exploding in recent years: From 505 million units last year to 1115 million units next year.
At the same time Windows only grows 346 million to 368 million units. This year, the Windows device sales are expected to be 332 million.
Apple’s growth is much faster than Microsoft, but it is forecast that pass over into the next year.
Gartner says that Microsoft-Nokia acquisition will not affect the prognosis, since most of the Windows phones will be from Nokia.
Gartner predicts equipment sales to grow this year by 4.5 per cent. It will, however, all other device groups than the traditional PC devices.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/apple_ajaa_microsoftia_kiinni_kayttojarjestelmissa