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 says:
NSA Fallout: Tech Firms Feel a Chill Inside China
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303789604579198370093354680-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwNDExNDQyWj
Big U.S. computer and software companies are reporting a sudden chill in sales to China, and some blame increased government hostility toward the U.S.
In the latest sign, computer-networking-gear maker Cisco Systems Inc. said Wednesday that orders from China in the latest quarter fell 18% from the same period a year earlier.
Earlier, International Business Machines Corp. , Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft Corp. all reported declining sales to China in their most recent fiscal quarters.
Tomi says:
Tech Leaders Warn IT Talent Shortage Could Curb Hiring Plans
http://www.cio.com/article/743238/Tech_Leaders_Warn_IT_Talent_Shortage_Could_Curb_Hiring_Plans?page=1&taxonomyId=3123
Technology companies are looking to hire more employees over the next year, but worry that there will not be enough qualified IT jobs candidates to fill the vacancies
In an economy marked by conflicting indicators, technology companies are looking to hire more employees over the next year, but worry that there will not be enough qualified candidates to fill the vacancies, according to a new survey from the trade group Technology Councils of North America.
TECNA’s poll of more than 1,700 technology executives highlighted the contrasting views of the business climate that have marked the shaky economic recovery.
“Mixed economic messages have been the pattern for several years now. A few indicators will show positive improvement, while a few will show weakness,” says Bob Moore, TECNA’s executive director.
“Consequently,” Moore adds, “it can be difficult to reconcile conflicting signals.”
Amid that tepid optimism, tech leaders fret over shortfalls in the talent pool that could stall their hiring plans. Sixty-three percent of respondents said that they intend to add staff in the next 12 months. That figure was even higher among executives at small and midsized business, segments in which more than 70 percent of respondents are looking to expand their workforce.
Tomi says:
Schiller: ‘Almost everyone’ at Apple works on iPhones, not Macs or anything
Fruity company bet its bottom dollar on Jesus mobe
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/16/without_the_iphone_we_would_be_nothing_apple_confesses/
Apple’s head of marketing has told a court that the iPhone was a “bet-the-company product” which could have brought Cupertino crashing to the ground.
Appearing at a damages retrial against Samsung, Phil Schiller said the fruity firm had gambled everything on the iPhone. But after Steve Jobs rolled the dice, “almost everyone” at Apple is now working on the iPhone in some capacity, he said.
Tomi says:
Health-care Web site’s lead contractor employs executives from troubled IT company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/health-care-web-sites-lead-contractor-employs-executives-from-troubled-it-company/2013/11/15/6e107e2e-487a-11e3-a196-3544a03c2351_story.html
The lead contractor on the dysfunctional Web site for the Affordable Care Act is filled with executives from a company that mishandled at least 20 other government IT projects, including a flawed effort to automate retirement benefits for millions of federal workers, documents and interviews show.
CGI Federal, the main Web site developer, entered the U.S. government market a decade ago when its parent company purchased American Management Systems, a Fairfax County contractor that was coming off a series of troubled projects. CGI moved into AMS’s custom-made building off Interstate 66, changed the sign outside and kept the core of employees, who now populate the upper ranks of CGI Federal.
Tomi says:
Finnish Internet Users are Most Avid Consumers of Online News
http://www.comscoredatamine.com/2013/11/finnish-internet-users-are-most-avid-consumers-of-online-news/?utm_content=buffer81c4f&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer
News and information sites capture a large proportion of the European online audience with 8 in 10 internet users accessing one of these sites in September 2013. Across the 18 European markets measured by comScore, 338 million people visited a news or information website via a desktop or laptop during the month. The top 3 sites in that category were Yahoo! ABC News Network, BBC and Mail Online.
Tomi says:
Bitcoin Mining Chips, a High-Tech Arms Race
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-14/2014-outlook-bitcoin-mining-chips-a-high-tech-arms-race
The easiest way to get a Bitcoin is to buy one.
Mining Bitcoins is already a specialist’s game. Butterfly Labs and KnCMiner build special Bitcoin-mining hardware that they sell to individuals and groups of people who pool their money to amass lots of computers. Then there’s the Bitcoin discussion forum user known as BitFury, believed to be a self-taught chip designer from Ukraine, who “designed a chip at his kitchen table,” de Castro says. “He’s made a huge pile of cash” by selling machines using the chips on his website.
BitFury and other first-wave Bitcoin hardware makers will face competition in 2014 from a second wave of designers, who aim to speed the mining process with special chips known as application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs. The circuits’ creators include HashFast, which has used cutting-edge chip design techniques to produce computers that sell for $11,700 each. CoinTerra has raised $1.5 million
The latest and greatest equipment from these companies should begin arriving in December, kicking off what the startups hope will be a massive spending spree by Bitcoin miners. “It really is an arms race,” says David Kanter, a chip analyst and consultant. “If you’re one of the first people to get one of these, then boom, you will make some real money. But once everyone has one, it’s back to square one.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sony sells over 1 million PlayStation 4 consoles in just 24 hours
http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/17/5113704/sony-playstation-4-1-million-sales
Sony’s next-gen PlayStation 4 console is off to a good start. The company announced today that it has sold over 1 million consoles in just 24 hours. Sony’s PlayStation 4 only launched on Friday in the US and Canada, so it’s an impressive start for just two regions. “We are thrilled that consumer reaction has been so phenomenal,” says Andrew House, president and group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi sales pass two million
‘Bit of a shock’ say Pi guys
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/17/raspberry_pi_passes_two_million_sales/
The Raspberry Pi foundation has announced that it has sold two million of the tiny computers.
The milestone is remarkable because two million is a nicely large number but more so because the Pi guys have noticed that sales are accelerating ahead of projections.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook: Updates to Data Use Policy, Statement of Rights and Responsibilities Take Effect
https://www.facebook.com/notes/10153503594325301
Tomi Engdahl says:
Salesforce.com Unveils Salesforce1 Platform
Companies should create their own “Internet of customers,” according to Salesforce.com
http://www.cio.com/article/743351/Salesforce.com_Unveils_Salesforce1_Platform
Salesforce.com aims to establish its image as a full-blown CRM (customer relationship management) development platform built for the world of social media and mobile devices with the launch of Salesforce1, which will be unveiled this week at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
While Salesforce.com has long offered the Force.com development platform to customers and partners, Salesforce1 is more than just a rebranding of the same technology, according to the company.
In addition, Salesforce1 includes a new mobile application for administrators that allows them to take actions such as remotely resetting passwords, deactivating users and receiving information about scheduled maintenance from Salesforce.com.
Much has been made of the “Internet of things,” but that phrase misses the point, Peachey said. “Every company needs to create their own Internet of customers.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
XtremIO in SSD brickup ballsup: ‘We have seen over 150 … so far’
Don’t worry, failure rate is ‘really a non-issue’, says exec
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/18/xtremio_kit_has_high_initial_flash_death_rate/
An EMC exec has admitted that the SSDs inside the company’s flagship XtremIO all-flash arrays have a high failure rate after installation.
He said: “I am not too happy about our field hardware failure rate for many reasons. However, the vast majority of failures – we have seen over 150 X-Bricks so far – [pauses] in real customer environments … [and] another 200 systems internally. I think we have seen a lot of DOAs in terms of drives.”
“One of the cool things that we built into XtremIO is XDP, our data protection algorithm. So, even if a few drives do fail – which again, happens in any system – XDP protects the array and offers leading flash drive endurance. Again, it’s a non-issue.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sony PS4 Goes Monolithic, Says Chipworks
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320109&
We proudly partnered with iFixit for the Sony PS4 launch and lined up outside of EB Games in Ottawa for the midnight release. Excitement was in the air, to say the least. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been seven years since Sony released their Playstation 3.
The new PS4′s design blends Sony’s traditional jet black color with a slim and lustrous look. It’s very similar in size to Sony’s second generation PS3 and slightly more compact than its rival Xbox One. One of the first things we noticed was that Sony’s engineers managed to find a way to fold the power supply inside the box, leaving clumsy gamers with no peripheral power brick to trip over.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Marvell Does Comms for Sony PS4
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320106&
Marvell supplied a comms ASIC and the Wi-Fi controller in the Sony PS4, according to a teardown by Chipworks. Two of the companies chips in the new game console were among the few surprising finds of the teardown.
The Sony PS4 can download content while in standby mode and most subsystems are turned off. “The PS4′s dedicated network processor appears to be a custom ASIC by Marvell, judging from the package markings,” Chipworks said in its teardown.
Tomi Engdahl says:
GCC 4.9 Coming With Big New Features
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/11/18/0128226/gcc-49-coming-with-big-new-features
“When GCC 4.9 is released in 2014 it will be coming in hot on new features”
“For a quick list: OpenMP 4.0, Intel Cilk Plus multi-threading support, Intel Bay Trail and Silvermont support, NDS32 port, Undefined Behavior Sanitizer, Address Sanitizer, ADA and Fortran updates, improved C11 / C++11 / C++14, better x86 intrinsics, refined diagnostics output. Bubbling under are still: Bulldozer 4 / Excavator support, OpenACC, JIT compiler, disabling Java by default.”
Tomi says:
Game Play Has No Negative Impact on Kids, UK Study Finds
http://www.gamesandlearning.org/2013/11/15/game-play-has-no-negative-impact-on-kids-uk-study-finds/
A massive study of some 11,000 youngsters in Britain has found that playing video games, even as early as five years old, does not lead to later behavior problems.
The University of Glasgow study used surveys of mothers in a massive millennial survey to track behavior over time. The idea was to study whether researchers could draw a connection between screen time and behavioral or emotional troubles later.
This survey relied on parents reporting average screen time and later behavioral problems, but the size of the research pool – more than 13,000 families – left researchers confident their results were solid.
It was one of the first real studies that examined games in connection with television viewing while also assessing them separately. It also runs counter to some research in the U.S. with older children that has found connections between screen time and attention issues.
Tomi says:
Top500: Red dragon still rules as graphical power leaves applecart largely untouched for now
Where IS that ‘ceepie-geepie’ takeover?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/18/top500_supercomputing_coprocessor_revolution_takes_a_breather/
he Top500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers has been released, and the list of the top five systems could very well be simply a Xerox copy of the previous list, which came out back in summer.
In the June rankings, the number one spot was taken by the massively parallel Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2) at China’s National Super Computer Center. Number two was Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan, a Cray XK7 system; the third spot was the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system; fourth was Fujitsu’s K computer at Japan’s RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science; and fifth was a second BlueGene/Q system, Mira, at the Argonne National Laboratory.
Tomi says:
IBM and Nvidia: We’ll make your DATA CENTRE like a SUPERCOMPUTER
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/18/ibm_nvidia_partner_to_build_nextgen_hpc_boxes_and_enterprise_software/
SC13 IBM and Nvidia have announced a partnership to “bring supercomputer performance to the corporate data center,” in the words of Nvidia’s accelerated computing honcho Ian Buck, with systems based on Nvidia Tesla GPUs and IBM Power8 CPUs, and to accelerate IBM enterprise software using Nvidia GPUs.
“This is the biggest technology endorsement that we’ve received,” said Sumit Gupta, the general manager of Nvidia’s HPC-focused Tesla biz, to The Register. “It is definitely going to give us a lot of wind behind our backs to add to all the other momentum we have.”
IBM is already a leader in the HPC space with their BlueGene/Q systems, and Gupta said he believes that leadership will be enhanced when the next generation of IBM systems, due next year, arrives, accelerated by Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs.
In addition to the hardware partnership, IBM will GPU-accelerate a broad range of their ‘big data’ enterprise database applications – specifically business intelligence, predictive analytics, and risk analytics.
“And they’re standardizing on our GPUs for acceleration,” Gupta said.
For Nvidia, the advantages are clear.
Tomi says:
If this doesn’t terrify you… Google’s computers OUTWIT their humans
‘Deep learning’ clusters crack coding problems their top engineers can’t
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/15/google_thinking_machines/
Google no longer understands how its “deep learning” decision-making computer systems have made themselves so good at recognizing things in photos.
This means the internet giant may need fewer experts in future as it can instead rely on its semi-autonomous, semi-smart machines to solve problems all on their own.
The claims were made at the Machine Learning Conference in San Francisco on Friday by Google software engineer Quoc V. Le in a talk in which he outlined some of the ways the content-slurper is putting “deep learning” systems to work. (You find out more about machine learning, a computer science research topic,
Learning “how to engineer features to recognize that that’s a shredder – that’s very complicated,” he explained. “I spent a lot of thoughts on it and couldn’t do it.”
“Machine learning can be difficult because it turns out that even though in theory you could use logistic regression and so on, but in practice what happens is we spend a lot of time on data processing inventing features and so on. For every single problem we have to hire domain experts,” he added.
“We want to move beyond that … there are certainly problems we can’t engineer features of and we want machines to do that.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Decades ago, computing was saved by CMOS. Today, no hero is in sight
HPC headman sees the future – and it ain’t pretty
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/19/decades_ago_computing_was_saved_by_cmos_today_no_hero_is_in_sight/
SC13 The general chair of the SC13 supercomputing conference thinks the semiconducting industry has reached a tipping point more radical – and uncertain – than it has gone through in decades.
“We’ve reached the end of a technological era where we had a very stable technology,” Bill Gropp, Thomas M Siebel Chair in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told a group of reporters at the conference in Denver, Colorado, on Monday.
“We’re about to get back to where we were about 25 years ago, when the technology suddenly changed on us,” he said.
“There was this niche technology that wasn’t very good called CMOS,” he said. “But it was mature enough to build components. It was kind of slow – sort of okay.”
Equally fortunately, there was a giant company willing to take a risk on this sort-of-okay technology. “IBM made a big gamble and decided to switch from ECL,” Gropp said. “They adopted CMOS, built a machine that was slower than previous generation machines, but had a technology that was starting its ramp up.”
And, to borrow a cliché, the rest is history.
CMOS scaling is petering out, even if such long-awaited life-extenders as extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) ever see the economically feasible light of day. Sooner or later you simply run out of atoms, as Intel Fellow Mark Bohr one told The Register.
But things are different today than during those ancient times when ECL hit the wall, Gropp says. “The problem is that right now we don’t have a CMOS. We don’t have a technology that is ready to be adopted as a replacement for CMOS.”
“We have a number of candidates. It’s not that we don’t have anything,” Gropp said, citing such possibile CMOS replacements as RSFQ [rapid single flux quantum] superconducting logic and carbon nanotubes. But those and other candidates are, to put it kindly, not ready for prime time.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What took you 2 years? LSI finally rolls out next-gen SandForce kit
Drawn-out dev cycle after acquisition
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/19/lsi_sandforce_update/
LSI has finally brought the drawn-out development process for the next generation SandForce controller to a close. It now has third-generation controllers supporting four times bigger flash drives and both PCIe and SATA interfaces from a single ASIC. Bye-bye SAS.
Tomi Engdahl says:
It’s the games, stupid: Sony to make ‘about $18′ on each PlayStation 4
But wait – Microsoft hopes to make a bit of cash too
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/19/sony_makes_just_18_profit_on_each_playstation_4/
According to a teardown report from analyst IHS, Sony is making just $18 on each Playstation 4. This may not sound like much, but it marks a massive improvement from the days in which the Japanese firm made huge losses on the sale of games consoles.
According to the report, each Playstation 4 costs Sony about $381 to manufacture (including parts and assembly) and sells for around $400.
“If Sony could build the PS4 for a lower cost it would do so, but if history is any indicator, it would also lower its retail price,” says Andrew Rassweiler, an analyst with IHS.
Taken alone, this figure might sound like much of a coup for Sony. However, the Playstation 3 was sold at a huge loss, with every $599 Playstation 3 costing just over $800 to produce.
The most expensive part of the Playstation 4 is the $100 processor chip made by Advanced Micro Devices, followed by the $88 spent for 16 discrete memory chips.
Each Playstation controller costs about $18 to build and contains an audio chip from Wolfson Microelectronics, Qualcomm Bluetooth chips and a motion sensor from Bosch. Mean old Sony are only giving gamers one controller in each box.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
How Munich rejected Steve Ballmer and kicked Microsoft out of the city
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-munich-rejected-steve-ballmer-and-kicked-microsoft-out-of-the-city/
Breaking up with Microsoft is hard to do. Just ask Peter Hofmann, the man leading the City of Munich’s project to ditch Windows and Office in favour of open source alternatives.
The project took close to a decade to complete, has seen the city wrestle with legal uncertainties and earned Munich a visit from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, whose pleas to the mayor of Germany’s third largest city not to switch fell on deaf ears.
Munich says the move to open source has saved it more than €10m, a claim contested by Microsoft, yet Hofmann says the point of making the switch was never about money, but about freedom.
“If you are only doing a migration because you think it saves you money there’s always somebody who tells you afterwards that you didn’t calculate it properly,” he said.
“That was the experience of a lot of open source-based projects that have failed,” Hofmann noted. They were only cost-driven and when the organisation got more money or somebody else said ‘The costs are wrong’ then the main reason for doing it had broken away. That was never the main goal within the City of Munich. Our main goal was to become independent.”
Munich is used to forging its own path. The city runs its own schools and is one of the few socialist, rather than conservative governments, in Bavaria.
The decision to ditch Microsoft was also born of necessity. In 2002 the council knew official support for Windows NT, the OS used on 14,000 staff machines at the council, would soon run out. The council ordered a study of the merits of switching to XP and Office versus a GNU/Linux OS, OpenOffice and other free software.
“Windows has developed from a pure PC-centred operating system, like Windows 3.11 was, to a whole infrastructure. If you’re staying with Microsoft you’re getting more and more overwhelmed to update and change your whole IT infrastructure [to fit with Microsoft],” according to Hofmann, whether that be introducing a Microsoft Active Directory system or running a key management server.
Free software was ruled the better choice by Munich’s ruling body, principally because it would free the council from dependence on any one vendor and future-proof the council’s technology stack via open protocols, interfaces and data formats.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gates chokes up, WEEPS to Microsoft shareholders amid talk of CEO hunt
First Ballmer, now Bill. Who isn’t getting tearful at Redmond?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/19/gates_cries_ballmer/
Bill Gates today delivered an emotional speech to the Microsoft shareholders, choking up as he described his history with the company and the search for a successor for his friend Steve Ballmer.
“We’ve got a commitment to see that the next CEO is the right person, for the right time, for the company we both love,” said Gates, with a trembling voice and much throat clearing. “We share a commitment that Microsoft will succeed as a company that makes the world a better place.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Live gameplay streaming on Xbox One delayed until 2014
Twitch app will let you watch, but not broadcast, on launch day.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/11/live-gameplay-streaming-on-xbox-one-delayed-until-2014/
Just days ahead of the Xbox One’s Friday North American launch, Microsoft has announced that the ability to stream live Xbox One gameplay through gaming-focused site Twitch.tv will not be available until early 2014.
“We know the ability to instantly broadcast gameplay is something the gaming community is excited about, and we are too,” the company said in a blog post this morning. “We are working to ensure the initial Twitch on Xbox One broadcasting experience meets the expectations of the Twitch community, so while this feature won’t be available right away, we’ll let you know as soon as it is ready. Our goal is to deliver it during the first part of 2014.”
Direct-from-the-console streaming was one of the most enjoyable new features we found in our evaluation of the PlayStation 4, which supports simple, live gameplay broadcasts through both Twitch.tv and Ustream. Twitch search results list hundreds of streams from PS4 gamers, and Sony’s Head of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida was among those trying out the feature in a popular stream on the eve of last Friday’s launch.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Download White Paper: Standardized Operating Environments for I.T. Efficiency
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/download-white-paper-standardized-operating-environments-it-efficiency
The Red Hat® Standard Operating Environment SOE helps you define, deploy, and maintain Red Hat Enterprise Linux® and third-party applications as an SOE.
SOE is a specification for a tested, standard selection of computer hardware, software, and their configuration for use on computers within an organization.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst
by Sarah Green | 1:00 PM November 13, 2013
http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/research-cubicles-are-the-absolute-worst/
What probably gets under my colleagues’ skin much more is how noisy I am: the muttered curses when my computer gives me the blue screen of death or the impromptu phone calls with authors that end up lasting an hour (sorry guys!). A full 30% of workers in cubicles, and roughly 25% in partitionless offices, were dissatisfied with the noise level of their workspaces.
The worst part, according to the data, is that these office workers can’t control what they hear — or who hears them. Lack of sound privacy was far and away the most despised issue in the survey, with 60% of cubicle workers and half of all partitionless people indicating it as a frustration.
Given that other studies have shown we only spend 35% of our time at our work stations, though, I it seems reasonable for a cost-minded manager to assume that we should just abolish the office, despite its popularity with workers. Make everything modular. Let the collaboration flow.
Not so fast. Previous research, cited by Kim and de Dear, has already shown that “the loss of productivity due to noise distraction… was doubled in open-plan offices compared to private offices, and the tasks requiring complex verbal process” — the most important tasks, you might argue — “were more likely to be disturbed than relatively simple or routine tasks.” In this paper, Kim and de Dear show that this loss of productivity is not offset by increased collaboration. “Ease of interaction” was barely an issue — less than 10% of all office workers cited it as a problem, no matter what kind of workspace they had. In fact, people in enclosed offices found it even less of an issue than workers in cubicles and workers in open layouts. (Perhaps because enclosed offices obviate the all-too-common challenge of finding a private place to talk.)
The bottom line: workers in enclosed offices were by far the happiest, reporting the least amount of frustration on all 15 of the factors surveyed. Workers in cubicles with high partitions were the most miserable, reporting the lowest rates of satisfaction in 13 out of those 15 factors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia, Micron Debut High-End Processors
Intel may counter with integrated Phi
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320124&
Nvidia and Micron announced new high-end co-processors at the opening of Supercomputing 2013 today. Meanwhile, an online analysis said the next generation of Intel’s Xeon Phi, which competes with them both, will be an integrated device.
Supercomputers have become a key testing ground for massively parallel co-processors because they typically are made of clusters of the most powerful chips available. Nvidia’s new Tesla K40 is likely to have the biggest impact in this space. The graphics chip vendor dominates the Top 500 systems where its GPUs are used in 38 of 53 systems employing accelerators, thanks in part of the maturity of its Cuda programming environment.
Nvidia claims the Tesla K40 GPU provides a 40 percent boost over its existing chip and supports 12 GBytes GDDR5, twice as much memory as the prior GPU. The K40 packs 2,880 cores to deliver up to 4.29 teraflops single-precision and 1.43 teraflops double-precision peak floating-point performance. The chip also uses PCI Express Gen3, doubling I/O performance of the PCIe Gen2 links on the previous part.
The K40 is available now and is expected to appear in high-performance servers from Appro, Asustek, Bull, Cray, Dell, Eurotech, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SGI, Supermicro, and Tyan. Engineers can try out the chip for free on remotely hosted clusters.
Intel’s Xeon Phi is quickly gaining ground in high-end systems, finding sockets in 13 Top 500 systems in the latest rankings, including Tianhe-2, the world’s largest supercomputer. The next generation of the chip, called Knights Landing, is expected to use a new custom core to work as a standalone chip rather than a co-processor, according to an analysis published today.
Knights Landing is a 14nm version expected to ship in late 2014 of Intel’s current Knights Corner version of Xeon Phi. The chip “will [be] a bootable device, in contrast to Knights Corner which must be attached to an x86 server CPU via the PCI-E slot,” said David Kanter, principal of Real World Technologies, in his online post.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why the father of PHP doesn’t like programming
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/13/why-the-father-of-php-doesnt-like-programming/
PHP‘s creator Rasmus Lerdorf did not intend to create an entirely new programming language.
Over 20 years ago, the Danish software engineer was looking for a better way to fix what he described as a “young problem.” The PHP project kicked off in 1995 and would eventually become a server-side scripting language and general-purpose programming language used by tech giants like Facebook, Yahoo, and Etsy.
Lerdoff: PHP wasn’t written because I wanted to write a language. It was to solve a problem. No one had come up with the right tools yet. Honestly, I am passionate about solving problems — I don’t like programming. It’s tedious. I’m an engineer who will use whatever tools I have [and] if I don’t have a tool, I’ll make a new one. There is no mission to write another language.
Lerdoff: PHP was supposed to be a thin layer on top of a bunch of C++ code, which is what I did at Yahoo. Facebook rolled everything out in PHP instead of translating that to C++.
Tomi Engdahl says:
These 4 tech CEOs rarely code, but they’re glad they know how
http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/09/these-4-tech-ceos-rarely-code-but-theyre-glad-they-know-how/
Many of the great technology companies out there today — Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon — have a code-savvy CEO, but these leaders don’t spend much, if any, of their time coding.
Which brings up a couple interesting questions.
VentureBeat spoke with a group of Silicon Valley CEOs to find out how much time they spend coding, and what it means for their business.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 best practices from top coders at Google, Pinterest & more
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/06/10-best-practices-from-top-coders-at-google-pinterest-more/
At VentureBeat’s DevBeat conference next week, we’re doing things a little differently. You won’t be invited to speak on stage if you can’t code, and we’re setting up practical workshops so you’ll actually learn something and not just be lectured to.
A special thanks to Altay Guvench, founder of Silicon Valley tech talent agency 10x Management for helping me compile some philosophical and hands-on advice!
1. Think carefully before you choose your first language
2. You’re no code monkey!
3. Stay agile and don’t stop shipping
4. Stay in control of the testing process
5. If you’re a freelancer, learn to say no, even to money
6. Don’t rest on your laurels — theory matters, but practice matters more
7. Peer review is your secret weapon
8. Avoid premature optimization like the plague
9. You write your code once, but people will read it thousands more times
10. It’s a noble profession. Use your skills for good.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Slideshow: PlayStation 4 Teardown
http://www.designnews.com/document.asp?doc_id=269771&cid=nl.dn14&dfpPParams=ind_184,industry_consumer,aid_269771&dfpLayout=article
Sony has released its PlayStation 4, just in time for the holidays! Before you shell out the cash to buy one for you or your family, (or spend the early morning hours standing outside a store on Black Friday), take a look inside to see it it’s worth your time and/or money.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia to Intel: ‘Which HPC chip brain will win? Let the people decide’
Easy to say when you have the lion’s share of the market already, Little Green
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/nvidia_tesla_man_focuses_on_market_share_in_competition_with_intel/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nintendo preparing a tablet for schools, plays educational games
http://nintendoeverything.com/nintendo-preparing-a-tablet-for-schools-plays-educational-games/
Tweets sent out by Nintendo of America software engineer Nando Monterazo have revealed the existence of a new tablet for schools. It’s mainly designed to play educational games rather than core titles that Nintendo fans are used to.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The tablet memory mark-up scandal
http://blogs.which.co.uk/technology/tablets-2/the-tablet-memory-mark-up-scandal/
It costs tablet manufacturers such as Apple less than £6 to add an extra 16GB of tablet memory. But they’ll charge you as much as £80 for the privilege.
Which? research has uncovered outrageous pricing mark-ups in the tablet industry. If you buy a tablet with extra space for storing your apps and files, you could pay up to £80 for a piece of extra storage that costs manufacturers less than £6 at market prices.
There can be huge differences between tablet manufacturers in what they choose to charge customers for extra storage space.
Most tablet manufacturers don’t produce their own Flash storage. Instead, they buy it from third-party component manufacturers. Although individual deals between suppliers and manufacturers remain secret, Flash memory is a traded commodity, and prices are tracked by market watchers such as DRAMeXchange.
According to market prices of Flash memory tracked by DRAMeXchange from August to October this year, the memory used in tablets costs on average £5.95 for a block of 16GB of storage.
These shocking figures are backed up by industry insiders who buy blocks of storage from the same supply chains used by tablet manufacturers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel to Customize High-End Processors
Future high-end processors promise greater integration
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320146&
Intel revealed its roadmap for the future of technical computing, including customizing its high-end Xeon and Xeon Phi processors, at this week’s Supercomputing Conference (SC13), Nov. 17-22 in Denver. The company promised to start housing memory chips inside the same package with its processors as well as integrating stacked memory dies onto future processors along with integrated high-speed switches and optical fabrics.
“We have the transistor budget to do customized innovation, and secondly we have a design methodology for system-on-chip and an architectural modularity that allows us the ability to work with our customers to customize products at various levels,” said Rajeeb Hazra, Intel’s vice president of the technical computing group and general manager of the datacenter group, in an interview with EE Times. “We are moving forward into workload-optimized architectures at a level of collaboration with our customers that we hadn’t done previously.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big Data May Mimic, Replace Brain
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320149&
Big data analytics may both mimic the human brain and replace it, according to presentations at an IBM symposium here.
Veteran venture capitalist Vinod Khosla called for advances that reduce human error by putting more healthcare decisions into the hands of smart systems. Separately, cognitive computing researcher Jeff Hawkins showed advances in applying techniques used in the neocortex to sorting large datasets.
Today’s medicine relies on doctors’ expert opinions, which are often “based on a series of biases that are more often right than wrong,” said Khosla, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. “I suspect we will need humans out of the loop.”
Khosla cited numerous studies quantifying the impact of human errors in diagnosing and treating health issues. He argued for more work on healthcare sensors and analytics, an area where he is currently investing in several startups including AliveCor, Ginger.io, Kyron, and Quanttus.
“Data science will do more for medicine in the next 10 years than biological science,” Khosla told a symposium on cognitive computing at the IBM Almaden Research center here.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is the tide turning? Women filled 60% of tech jobs created this year
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/20/is-the-tide-turning-women-filled-60-of-tech-jobs-created-this-year/
Could America finally be making progress towards getting more women into the tech industry?
New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests we might be.
Of the 39,000 jobs created in tech this year, 60 percent of them were filled by women. Tech career Hub Dice found that this is the first time women have represented a majority of new hires in the past decade.
The tech industry undoubtedly has a gender problem, and the topic of women-in-tech topic has been debated for years. Women make up less than one-third of all employees in the tech sector. Only three percent of tech startups are formed by women and tech companies employ an average of 12.33% female engineers. Women contribute to just 1.2 percent of open source software and 5 percent of patents.
These numbers are dismal, but at last it seems that gains are being made.
The notion that women don’t like technology or aren’t interested in technology is absurd, and building a tech community with a more equal gender distribution is long overdue.
Yes, getting girls interested in STEM education is critical to achieving this goal, and yes, creating flexible work policies for employees with children is important for keeping women in tech as well. Sexism and sexual harassment need to stop, and women need to support each other.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Green supercomputer benchmarks make boffins see red, check blueprints
Top 10 use GPU brawn, but has anyone any bright ideas on better juicy tests?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21/gpu_accelerators_overrun_green500_list_of_energyefficient_hpc_systems/
The biannual Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers has broken new ground in two important ways: for the first time an HPC system broke the 4 gigaflops per watt barrier, and also for the first time all the top 10 systems benefitted from GPU acceleration. Then there’s a third bit of note: the benchmarks are rubbish.
Although Green500 does publish rules governing the running of energy-measurement tests for the submission of scores for ranking, and has collaborated with the Energy Efficient High Performance Computing Working Group (EE HPC WG) on a three-level methodology [PDF] for testing, all the HPCers involved freely admit that much more work needs to be done to clarify the testing and reporting procedures.
“Every center, every system owner and system operator, is responsible to publish the right number,” he said. “It’s just the way that things are done in science, and I hope the supercomputing community adheres to the same rules. I’m not sure, from the numbers I’ve seen, whether this is always the case.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
SSD drives difficult to drain
With a computer and the included hard drive is disabled, especially in business environments, it is very important to ensure that removal, have valuable information into the wrong hands. The spread of SSD-drives will increase the difficulty factor.
Finnish Blancco data destruction specialist says in a statement made a breakthrough in solid-state disks in a safe emptying.
According to the company the problem is a flash memory-based on the complexity of the technology. The plates are emptied difficult security locks, which Blancco will now first in the world they know how to automatically open. It has applied the insights of a patent.
“A secure data destruction ssd discs, disc requires a so-called freeze lock-block demolition. Inhibition after unloading data erasure software can be accessed ssd disk firmware level disposal commands, “describes the data sheet.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/ssd_levyjen_tyhjennys_vaikeaa
Tomi Engdahl says:
Who wants a Xeon-powered, 12-core, RAID 10 … LAPTOP?
Get out your re-enforced asbestos pants, sysadmins, it weighs in at 5.5 kilograms
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21/who_wants_a_12core_xeonpowered_raid_10_laptop/
The exotic laptop lads at Eurocom have just unleashed another in their series of very peculiar contraptions: the Panther 5SE laptop.
Eurocom won’t like us calling it a laptop: the official name is “Mobile Server supercomputer-class laptop”.
Supercomputer is perhaps a bit over the top, even if the computer can pack a 12-core, 24-thread E5-2697 v2 running at 2.7GHz. Eurocom says it’s the first to have built that CPU into a portable.
Eurocom isn’t suggesting sysadmins will lug this 5.5kg, 419 x 286 x 57.9~62.1 mm beast around for daily use. Instead it’s being suggested the Panther is a portable server one could implement during a crisis or in locations where schlepping in a bigger box is out of the question.
The company does believe the laptop could be used on your lap, talking up the 300w power brick as ensuring much of the heat the computer produces will be outside the laptop’s main chassis.
It’s almost certainly possible to buy comparable or superior servers for a better price, but those servers wouldn’t be as easy to fit into the overhead bin on a plane.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Adds Node.js Support To Visual Studio
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/11/21/1757203/microsoft-adds-nodejs-support-to-visual-studio
“Coming from the team that had previously brought you Python Tools for Visual Studio, Microsoft has announced Node.js Tools for Visual Studio, with the release of the first public alpha. NTVS is the official extension for Visual Studio that adds support for Node.js, including editing with Intellisense, debugging, profiling, and the ability to deploy Node.js websites to Windows Azure.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Xbox One Teardown
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Xbox+One+Teardown/19718
After eight years, Microsoft has finally released a proper successor to the Xbox 360—the Xbox One. Will this be the One Xbox to rule them all? Follow us as we journey into the tower of Microsoft’s new console
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft: We’re working unbelievably hard to match demand
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-11-21-phil-harrison
“I can only apologise in advance to anybody who is let down before Christmas,” says Xbox boss Phil Harrison
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google is building a Chrome app-based development environment called Spark
http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/21/google-building-chrome-app-based-development-environment-using-dart-polymer/
Google’s Chromium team never ceases to amaze. Its latest project is a Chrome app-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) codenamed Spark.
The new app was first noted by developer and Google open-source Chromium evangelist François Beaufort. Here are his observations for the new IDE project:
It is built with Dart, the “new language for scalable web app engineering”.
It contains a GUI widgets library powered by Polymer
It’s public on GitHub and therefore interesting for anyone who wants to know how Dart and Polymer can be used to build the next generation of Chrome Apps.
For those who don’t know, Chrome packaged apps are written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but launch outside the browser, work offline by default, and access certain APIs not available to Web apps. In other words, they’re Google’s way of pushing the limits of the Web as a platform.
Dart meanwhile is Google’s open-source Web programming language, which has an ultimate goal of replacing JavaScript.
Polymer is Google’s library for the Web, built on top of Web Components, and “designed to leverage the evolving web platform on modern browsers.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Non-Linux FOSS: Chrome Desktop Applications
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/non-linux-foss-chrome-desktop-applications
Hopefully by the time you’re reading this, Chrome Desktop Applications will be available for Linux. In the meantime, this is a Windows treat. The ability to make a “single-purpose” browser has been around Chrome/Chromium for a long time, but with the new breed of Chrome Applications, the browser is a base for a standalone, off-line application.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Chairman: “We Seemed to Have Lost Our Way”
http://allthingsd.com/20131121/intel-chairman-we-seemed-to-have-lost-our-way/
Long a beneficiary of the falling cost of computing power, chipmaker Intel acknowledged Thursday that it was beaten at its own game.
Moore’s law, the industry term coined by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, suggests that computing will always get cheaper and smaller, but it was Intel’s rivals that benefitted from the most recent shifts to tablets and mobile devices.
“We’re paying a price for that right now,” Andy Bryant, a longtime Intel executive who now serves as the chipmaker’s chairman, explained Thursday.
“The PC market is beginning to see signs of stabilization,” Krzanich said. It’s still forecast to decline, but that decline is slowing, he said. “What we need to watch is the emerging market.”
PC prices have also been dropping to never before seen lows, including capable computers below $300. In the data center, the company is forecasting continued growth of 15 percent through 2016.
On mobile, Intel has struggled, but Krzanich pointed to a few design wins, the most notable of which is a single Samsung Galaxy tablet model.
“For us, 2013 was a year of establishing a footprint,” Krzanich said.
In the coming year, the goal is to more than quadruple Intel’s tablet business, pushing it to more than 40 million units.
“We’ve got to have that footprint,” Krzanich explained. “We’ve got to have that scale.”
The company wants to bring PC technology to Android, including enterprise support and 64-bit processing. Intel, Krzanich said, will be in tablets throughout the market, including models below $100.
Intel, he said, also allows computer and tablet makers to create a single design that can be loaded with multiple operating systems, whether Windows, Chrome OS or Android.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mozilla’s 2012 Annual Report: 90% of Revenue Came From Google
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/11/21/2321249/mozillas-2012-annual-report-90-of-revenue-came-from-google
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stephen Wolfram
Putting the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica) on Every Raspberry Pi
http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/11/21/putting-the-wolfram-language-and-mathematica-on-every-raspberry-pi/
Today I’m pleased to announce a step in that direction: working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, effective immediately there’s a pilot release of the Wolfram Language—as well as Mathematica—that will soon be bundled as part of the standard system software for every Raspberry Pi computer.
In effect, this is a technology preview: it’s an early, unfinished, glimpse of the Wolfram Language. Quite soon the Wolfram Language is going to start showing up in lots of places, notably on the web and in the cloud. But I’m excited that the timing has worked out so that we’re able to give the Raspberry Pi community—with its emphasis on education and invention—the very first chance to put the Wolfram Language into action.
And with Raspberry Pi there’s something else too: immediately being able to interact with the outside world. Being able to take pure code, and connect it to sensors and devices that do things.
I think it’s pretty amazing that we’re now at the point where all the knowledge and computation in the Wolfram Language can run in a $25 computer.
The command-line Wolfram Language is quite zippy on the Raspberry Pi. The full notebook interface to Mathematica—requiring as it does the whole X Window stack—can be a trifle sluggish by modern standards (and we had to switch a few things off by default, like our new Predictive Interface, because they just slowed things down too much). But it’s still spectacular: the first time Mathematica has been able to run at all on anything like a $25 computer.
And it’s the whole system. Nothing is left out. All 5000+ Wolfram Language functions. All capabilities of Mathematica and its notebook interface.
For me, one of the most striking things about having all this on the Raspberry Pi is how it encourages me to try a new style of real-world-connected computing.