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:
Super Computer 13: GPUs would make terrific network monitors
An off-the-shelf Nvidia GPU is able to easily capture all the traffic of a 10Gbps network, Fermilab research finds
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/112113-sc13-gpus-would-make-terrific-276246.html
A network researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has found a potential new use for graphics processing units — capturing data about network traffic in real time.
GPU-based network monitors could be uniquely qualified to keep pace with all the traffic flowing through networks running at 10Gbps (gigabits per second) or more, said Fermilab’s Wenji Wu.
Wenji presented his work as part of a poster series of new research at the SC 2013 supercomputing conference this week in Denver.
Network analysis tools face an extreme challenge in keeping up with all of the traffic of today’s larger networks, he said. Adding to the strain, network administrators increasingly expect to inspect operational data in real-time, as it is happening.
For processing, today’s commercial monitoring appliances typically rely on either standard x86 processors or customer ASICs (application specific integrated circuits).
Both architectures have their limitations, Wenji noted. CPUs don’t have the memory bandwidth or the compute power to keep pace with the largest networks in real time. As a result, they can drop packets.
ASICs can have sufficient memory bandwidth and compute power for the task, but their custom architecture is difficult, and expensive, to program.
GPUs can offer all of these capabilities, Wenji said. They have “a great parallel execution model,” he said, noting that they offer high memory bandwidth, easy programmability, and can split the packet capturing process across multiple cores.
In the latest Top500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, 38 machines used Nvidia GPUs to boost their output.
Wenji has built a prototype at Fermilab to demonstrate the feasibility of a GPU-based network monitor, using a Nvidia M2070 GPU and an off-the-shelf NIC (network interface card) to capture network traffic. The system could easily be expanded with additional GPUs, he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Certifications For High School Credits In Australia
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/11/21/1854240/microsoft-certifications-for-high-school-credits-in-australia
“High school students in Queensland, Australia would be able to do Microsoft certifications online and get credits . The exam fees will be free for students and courses include Microsoft’s products like Sharepoint and SQL Server.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wintel is DEAD: Intel lusts for Android, Chrome OS, Windows FOUR-way
‘Embarassed’ Chipzilla admits it was crap at keeping up in ARM-dominated mobile world
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/22/intel_end_of_wintel/
Intel and Microsoft no longer dominate the personal computing industry as the once fearsome Wintel alliance, Intel has acknowledged. Now the chip giant has announced a broad push to get its silicon into devices running Windows’ rival operating systems.
Intel’s PC chief Kirk Skaugen admitted the demise of the ages-old alliance at the company’s investor relations day on Thursday, by announcing specific and detailed plans to enhance Intel hardware’s support for “the tier-one operating systems” of Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and iOS (and Windows). It’s worth noting that Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems are both powered by the open-source Linux kernel, once much hated by Microsoft’s top brass.
“For the last decade we’ve essentially been 100 per cent Microsoft on the client,” Skaugen said. “We’re starting to see out of emerging markets demand for Android. [There's] certainly strong demand for Apple [We] will support what the market desires.”
Pretty much every smartphone on the planet is ARM powered, along with a healthy chunk of tablets, TVs and plenty of other gadgets.
“I was personally embarrassed that we seemed to have lost our way,” said Intel chairman Andy Bryant at the event, when discussing the way Intel had failed to get into tablets and ultra-mobiles quickly. “We’re paying a price for that right now.”
Though Skaugen said Intel is seeing “stabilization [in PCs] led by mature markets and industry,” the world has changed, and the company has come to acknowledge that its new commercial reality is a multi-device, multi-OS one – rather than one dominated by Microsoft Windows, which hasn’t fared at all well in the mobile computing arena.
“We’re right in the middle of yet another transition,” Skaugen said. “We’re embracing OS choice based on meeting what the market wants.”
It plans to scale Android up to 64-bit x86 processors, he said, and wants to work hard to make it easier for Google’s OS to use some of Intel’s underlying enterprise capabilities like vPro security. The company hopes to have Android “scale from Atom to the high-end of the core processing family”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Richard Stallman decides Emacs should go WYSIWYG
GNU Daddy revives 25 year-old ambition to get graphical
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/22/richard_stallman_decides_emacs_should_go_wysiwyg/
Here’s what he’s after:
25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do [sic] WYSIWG word processing. That is why we added text properties and variable width fonts. However, more features are still needed to achieve this.
Could people please start working on the features that are needed?”
Some feel a WYSIWYG Emacs is a decent idea. Others point out that LibreOffice meets the Free Software Foundation’s specifications.
Stallman’s response is:
“I have occasionally used LibreOffice, and that sort [sic]fo WYSIWYG editing is very convenient for things that don’t need the power of TeX.
However, every time I am unhappy that (1) it is missing all the other capabilities of Emacs and (2) it is incompatible with Emacs. I would really like to be able to use Emacs to do this WYSIWYG editing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Review: Puppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. Salt
The leading configuration management and orchestration tools take different paths to server automation
http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/review-puppet-vs-chef-vs-ansible-vs-salt-231308
The proliferation of virtualization coupled with the increasing power of industry-standard servers and the availability of cloud computing has led to a significant uptick in the number of servers that need to be managed within and without an organization. Where we once made do with racks of physical servers that we could access in the data center down the hall, we now have to manage many more servers that could be spread all over the globe.
This is where data center orchestration and configuration management tools come into play. In many cases, we’re managing groups of identical servers, running identical applications and services. They’re deployed on virtualization frameworks within the organization, or they’re running as cloud or hosted instances in remote data centers.
Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt were all built with that very goal in mind: to make it much easier to configure and maintain dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers. That’s not to say that smaller shops won’t benefit from these tools, as automation and orchestration generally make life easier in an infrastructure of any size.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Switch to e-books was ‘an unmitigated disaster’, says school principal
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/education/switch-to-ebooks-was-an-unmitigated-disaster-says-school-principal-29767084.html
The ‘book to e-book’ move was deemed a disaster following major technical issues with the majority of the HP Elite Pad tablet devices.
A principal has called the move to switch students from books to tablets “an unmitigated disaster” and has ordered new books for the first year classes.
The ‘book to e-book’ move was deemed a disaster following major technical issues with the majority of the HP Elite Pad tablet devices.
Families of students at the Mountrath Community College in Laois paid €550 for the devices at the beginning of the school-year.
They did have the option to pay for the tablets in instalments.
“We had a number of issues with the devices,” principal Martin Gleeson told independent.ie.
Students experienced problems such as tablets failing to switch on, tablets spontaneously going into sleep mode, devices looping while performing automatic repairs, system board failures and issues with wi-fi.
Principal Gleeson said it was “an informed decision” to choose the HP Elite tablet.
“A year and a half’s worth of research was put into choosing the right device for us.
“We wanted a device that was effectively a computer in tablet form for our students, so it would have a word processor, sufficient memory etc,” he continued.
Tomi says:
XBOX ONE and PS4, you’ll make us RUN OUT of INTERNET
The internet is finite, warn Blue Coat killjoys
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/22/xbox_one_patching_web_meltdown/
Web puritans Blue Coat are predicting that the end of internet days because of the release of Xbox One and rival PlayStation 4 gaming consoles.
That’s the stark message from a preposterous article – titled Will Xbox One and PS4 finally break the internet? – that reached our inbox on Friday morning.
Today, some of us will be lucky enough to play on Microsoft’s latest gaming console, the Xbox One. But will next generation gaming, which focuses on online gaming and streaming, bring the end of internet as it is today?
The internet is finite and all users of PS4 and Xbox One must download “Day One” patches of 500 MB to operate the machine from Sony and Microsoft servers. As it happened with the release of iOS 7, extra traffic on the network will affect the online experience of gamers and non-gamers.
Blue Coat, which sells security appliances that handle web content filtering, has a huge vested interest in talking up the threat of impending network doom. Its warning are far from restricted to the gaming arena. It’s also a prophet of doom when it comes to football’s World Cup.
Blue Coat started out as a provider of web security, URL-blocking and WAN optimisation products.
The deep packet inspection capabilities of its products have proved to be of interest well beyond the business world to ISPs and government in countries with questionable records on human rights, including Syria, Bahrain, Burma (Myanmar), China, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.
Tomi says:
Google underwrites Firefox another year, even as Chrome outpaces it
Mozilla’s 2012 finances show it propped up by search yet again
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/23/mozilla_2012_annual_report/
The good news for the Mozilla Foundation is that its revenues for calendar year 2012 were nearly double what they were the previous year. The bad news is that the lion’s share of those funds once again came from internet advertising mega-giant Google.
But Mozilla doesn’t realize revenues from its software development activities directly. The Firefox browser and Mozilla’s other products are all available to download free of charge.
Instead, the foundation relies on “royalties,” which it says includes proceeds from sales of various merchandise on its websites, but mainly involves payments from internet companies for clicks coming from users of Firefox’s built-in search box. In 2012, 97.9 per cent of Mozilla’s revenues came from these royalties.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NYT: Healthcare.gov Project Chaos Due Partly To Unorthodox Database Choice
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/11/24/1437203/nyt-healthcaregov-project-chaos-due-partly-to-unorthodox-database-choice
“The NY Times has just published a piece providing more background on the healthcare.gov software project.”
” decision to use database software, from a company called MarkLogic, that managed the data differently from systems by companies like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tension and Flaws Before Health Website Crash
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/us/politics/tension-and-woes-before-health-website-crash.html?pagewanted=all
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why the Chief Digital Officer Role Is on the Rise
http://www.cio.com/article/743421/Why_the_Chief_Digital_Officer_Role_Is_on_the_Rise
Whether you think it’s part of a transitional period or here for the long-term, the Chief Digital Officer role is gaining ground as more conventional companies look to invest in an enterprise-wide digital transformation.
The CDO is not there to make technology decisions or run the company infrastructure. It’s a transformative role that is being used to break up the siloed functions within organizations. The CDOs are more about analyzing the data and how it relates to the business and customer experience. “The way to best describe the CDO is that you need to be a silo-buster connecting different disciplines and departments,” says Gilman.
Tomi Engdahl says:
2013 Top 10 Data Disasters
http://www.krollontrack.com/data-recovery/data-disasters/?elq=~~eloqua..type–emailfield..syntax–recipientid~~&elqCampaignId=~~eloqua..type–campaign..campaignid–0..fieldname–id~~
We gathered the Top 10 list of Data Disasters of 2013 from around the globe. Our engineers recover data daily from the most incredible situations. Our Top 10 Data Disasters is only a sample of the recoveries completed in 2013. Don’t forget to visit our Data Disaster Hall of Fame after reading this year’s list.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why the Cloud Requires a Totally Different Data Center
If there’s one mind-blowing statistic about Amazon Web Services, it’s the company’s scale.
http://www.cio.com/article/743387/Why_the_Cloud_Requires_a_Totally_Different_Data_Center
f there’s one mind-blowing statistic about Amazon Web Services, it’s the company’s scale.
The cloud is a nascent technology, but AWS is already a multi-billion-dollar business and its cloud is reportedly five times bigger than its 14 top competitors combined, according to Gartner. Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) stores more than a trillion files and processes 1.5 million requests per second. DynamoDB, the AWS-designed NoSQL database, is less than a year old and last month it already had more than 2 trillion input or output requests.
Supplying all those services at that scale requires a lot of hardware. The cloud division is growing fast though, which means that AWS is continually adding more hardware to its data centers. A A
How does AWS keep up with all that? The man who directs the strategy behind it, AWS Vice President and Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton, shared insights into this at the company’s re:Invent customer conference in Las Vegas last week. In a nutshell, “Scale is the enabler of everything,” he says.
AWS has optimized its hardware for its specific use cases, he says. AWS has built custom compute, storage and networking servers, which allow the company to customize down to a granular level. Its storage servers are “far denser” than anything on the market and each weighs more than a ton, Hamilton says. Most recently AWS customized its networking gear to create routers and protocol stacks that provision high performance workloads.
AWS even customizes its power consumption processes. The company has negotiated bulk power purchase agreements with suppliers to get the energy needed to power its dozens of data centers across nine regions of the globe
Even with all the customization, AWS can’t always predict exactly how much of its resources will be used. If AWS can increase its utilization, its costs will be lower because it will get more bang for its buck from the hardware.
There will still be under-utilization, but AWS has tried to turn that into an advantage. The introduction of spot-instances, which allow customers to place bids on excess instances, enables this.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Code.org: More Money For CS Instructors Who Teach More Girls
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/11/24/187255/codeorg-more-money-for-cs-instructors-who-teach-more-girls
“The same cast of billionaire characters — Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Eric Schmidt — is backing FWD.us, which is lobbying Congress for more visas to ‘meet our workforce needs,’ as well as Code.org, which aims to popularize Computer Science education in the U.S. to address a projected CS job shortfall.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
New research aims to teach computers common sense
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-research-aims-to-teach-computers-common-sense/2013/11/24/c7806b98-552e-11e3-bdbf-097ab2a3dc2b_story.html
Researchers are trying to plant a digital seed for artificial intelligence by letting a massive computer system browse millions of pictures and decide for itself what they all mean.
The system at Carnegie Mellon University is called NEIL, short for Never Ending Image Learning. In mid-July, it began searching the Internet for images 24/7 and, in tiny steps, is deciding for itself how those images relate to each other. The goal is to recreate what we call common sense — the ability to learn things without being specifically taught.
It’s a new approach in the quest to solve computing’s Holy Grail: getting a machine to think on its own using a form of common sense. The project is being funded by Google and the Department of Defense’s Office of Naval Research.
“Any intelligent being needs to have common sense to make decisions,” said Abhinav Gupta, a professor in the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Surprising Truth: Technology Is Aging in Reverse
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/12/worlds-not-ending-but-technologys-aging-backwards/
Building on this so-called Lindy effect (in the version later developed by the great Benoît Mandelbrot), I propose the following:
For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable like technology, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.
So the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.
To which I respond: The Lindy effect is not about every technology, but about life expectancy — which is simply a probabilistically derived average.
It’s because the world is getting more technological, that the old has a huge advantage over the new.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google claims MOOCs SOLVE code-for-kids teacher training problem
Shock finding as Big G learns free online stuff can attract, engage, lots of people
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/24/google_says_moocs_solve_codeforkids_teacher_training_problem/
Google’s latest contribution to the global movement that advocates teaching kids to code as the solution for every problem has discovered something revolutionary: if you put good content online, lots of people will read it and some of them may even engage with it.
The revelation comes from Google Research, which has run its eye over the numbers emerging from Harvard University’s Creative Computing Online Workshop, a six-week massively online open course (MOOC) “for educators who want to learn more about using Scratch and supporting computational thinking in the classroom and other learning environments.”
Google’s now touting the course as a tremendous success because it “… had 2600 participants, who created more than 4700 Scratch projects, and engaged in 3500 forum discussions, compared to the ‘in-person’ class held last year, which reached only 50 educators.
The findings are, however, a long way short of representing the “Unique Strategies for Scaling Teacher Professional Development” Google’s blog post claims
And of course let’s not imagine that just because teachers learn Scratch they’re ready to teach computational thinking to kids across several years of school, as will be required under Australia’s nearly-complete Digital Technologies Curriculum.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Software Is Reorganizing the World
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/software-is-reorganizing-the-world-and-cloud-formations-could-lead-to-physical-nations/
For the first time in memory, adults in the United States under age forty are now expected to be poorer than their parents. This is the kind of grim reality that in other times and places spurred young people to look abroad for opportunity. Indeed, it is similar to the factors that once pushed millions of people to emigrate from their home countries to make their home in America. Our nation of immigrants is, tautologically, a nation of emigrants.
Yet while our ancestors had America as their ultimate destination, it is not immediately obvious where those seeking opportunity might head today. Every square foot of earth is already spoken for by one (or more) nation states, every physical frontier long since closed.
With our bodies hemmed in, our minds have only the cloud — and it is the cloud that has become the destination for an extraordinary mental exodus. Hundreds of millions of people have now migrated to the cloud, spending hours per day working, playing, chatting, and laughing in real-time HD resolution with people thousands of miles away … without knowing their next-door neighbors.
The concept of migrating our lives to the cloud is much more than a picturesque metaphor, and actually amenable to quantitative study.
Perhaps the single most important feature of these states of mind is the increasing divergence between our social and geographic neighbors, between the cloud formations of our heads and the physical communities surrounding our bodies. An infinity of subcultures outside the mainstream now blossoms on the Internet — vegans, body modifiers, CrossFitters, Wiccans, DIYers, Pinners, and support groups of all forms. Millions of people are finding their true peers in the cloud, a remedy for the isolation imposed by the anonymous apartment complex or the remote rural location.
Yet this discrepancy between our cloud subculture and our physical surroundings will not endure indefinitely. Because the latest wave of technology is not just connecting us intellectually and emotionally with remote peers: it is also making us ever more mobile, ever more able to meet our peers in person.
The future of technology is not really location-based apps; it is about making location completely unimportant.
When physical goods themselves can’t be digitized, our interface to them will be.
Silicon Valley is nothing special. The geography of physical concentration is incidental and not worth fighting over.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Xbox One vs. PS4: Microsoft More Profit Per Console
Comparing Bill of Materials Costs
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320199&
Microsoft comes out punching with a significant upgrade to the Xbox franchise console and a true competitor to Sony’s PS4 while delivering per-unit profits.
TechInsights Teardown costing shows both companies can profit from sales of their gaming consoles this holiday season. In fact, they used many similar parts to optimize their investment in the next generation of gaming consoles. Though AMD came out as a big winner in the APU (integrated CPU and GPU), there are choice design differences around both the processor design and the use of memory in each device.
The TechInsights bill of materials for the Microsoft Xbox One amounts to $331. Based on this — and when the estimated costs for the peripherals are included — TechInsights believes Microsoft will have a gross profit of approximately $100 per console sold. This is far better than the $43 Sony will make per complete unit.
Though Microsoft seems to have generated more profit per console, it remains to be seen how the devices will compare as developers invest in building radical new games for the powerful platforms.
AMD at the heart of gaming
From a technology standpoint, both systems have an AMD chip at their heart. The Xbox One and the PS4 run nearly identical 28-nm AMD eigh-core APU (two Quad-Core Jaguar modules), yet Microsoft has overclocked its version to run at 1.75 GHz, versus the PS4′s 1.6 GHz. However, the difference really lies in the GPU.
Both companies used GPU modules nested within the processor package, but the Sony PS4 contains 1,152 cores, versus the Xbox’s 768.
The approach to system memory is the significant variation between these two gaming consoles.
Interestingly both manufactures chose to use Marvell for connectivity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Micron’s Automata Exploits Parallelism to Solve Big Data Problems
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320203&
Micron unveiled what it claims is a fundamentally different new processor architecture at Supercomputing 2013 that speeds up the search and analysis of complex and unstructured data streams. The sneak peak of its Automata Processor (AP) architecture was accompanied by the establishment of a Center for Automata Computing at the University of Virginia.
“Many of the most complex, computational problems that face our industry today require a substantial amount of parallelism in order to increase the performance of the computing system,” said Dlugosch.
Conventional SDRAM is organized into a two-dimensional array of rows and columns and accesses a memory cell for any read or write operation. The memory, said Dlugosch, is not used to store data; it is used to stream back analysis of data. The AP architecture uses a DDR3-like memory interface and will be made available as single components or as DIMM modules.
Micron will also make available graphic design and simulation tools and a software development kit (SDK) to help developers design, compile, test, and deploy their own applications. A PCIe board populated with AP DIMMs will be available to early access application developers so they can begin plug-in development of AP applications. Samples of the AP and the SDK will available in 2014.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cisco untroubled by mega-clouds fleeing its proprietary ASIC grip
Prison warden gets ready to sell powerful inmates skeleton keys
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/25/cisco_asic_sdn_response/
“Maybe we are doing hardware-defined networking … but if I can put that same box with better performance and better programmability in your data center, cheaper than a white box out of Taiwan, do you care?”
What is becoming clear, though, is that just as Intel has acknowledged the death of Wintel and woken up to the multi-device, multi-OS world, and server vendors like HP and Dell are beginning to churn out designs reminiscent of the low-cost ODM white box servers, Cisco too is being forced to relinquish some control in exchange for retaining share in a turbulent market.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What’s wrong with Britain’s computer scientists?
And why is it so hard for comp-sci grads to get jobs?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/25/uk_computer_science_graduate_employment_woes/
Opinion Simon Hettrick is Deputy Director and Policy & Communications Leader of the Software Sustainability Institute, which is based at the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford and Southampton.
In the UK, there are more unemployed graduates in computer science than in any other discipline. In an attempt to understand the issue, David Willetts, the Minister of State for Universities and Skills, held a workshop in November 2013 that brought together leading representatives from industry and academia, and the Software Sustainability Institute.
If you want good quality graduates you need to start young, so the first focus is schools. Programming has just been introduced to the national curriculum, which is a great first step. Now we need teachers who are both knowledgeable and – most importantly – passionate about computer science. Computer science is all too often taught by people whose first degree, and general interest, lies in another domain. We must attract talented computer scientists into teaching so that they can pass on their excitement about the subject to the next generation.
You don’t have to dig deep to discover that doctors, lawyers – and even scientists and politicians – are seen as having a more exciting time than computer scientists.
Portrayal of computer science careers is poor, so we need big industry, SMEs and academia to develop a showcase of the different and appealing careers that computer scientists enjoy.
There is a need for new role models. Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace are truly inspiring people, but they don’t represent today’s computer scientists.
computer science needs its Brian Cox or James Dyson.
Getting more women to choose computer science requires work on a number of fronts.
The geek image of computer science came under attack, because it was blamed for putting women off studying the subject.
Once in university, computer scientists need to attain the skills that will make them ready for employment in three key areas: technical skill, domain expertise and business management. It’s not just the programming and software engineering that’s important, employable graduates also need knowledge about a domain in which they can apply their computer science, and an understanding of how business works. Business skills – notably entrepreneurship and innovation – are best learned through practice and experience, so there’s a very strong case for expanding the number of work placements: summer placements, “year in industry” placements, sandwich courses and other schemes.
In the fast-paced world of computer science, it’s important to keep learning. Continued professional development is needed not just to keep up to date with the latest technologies
Tomi Engdahl says:
Julie Larson-Green: Yes, MICROSOFT is going to KILL WINDOWS
The question is: Which one?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/25/microsoft_weve_got_one_too_many_windows/
Microsoft’s hardware chief has given the strongest indication yet that Microsoft has too many operating systems.
“We have the Windows Phone OS. We have Windows RT and we have full Windows. We’re not going to have three,” Julie Larson-Green told the audience at a UBS investor event. Larson-Green looks after the “Devices and Studios Engineering Group”, the part of Redmond where the Surface hardware and the Xbox games console is built.
In the yawning absence of a clear roadmap, or even a CEO for that matter, Microsoft’s operating system strategy has to be inferred – a modern kind of Kreminology.
While RT is the more sophisticated API, Windows Phone appears to be winning the internal political battle, with stories suggesting it has been freed to scale up to 7-inch and 10-inch tablets.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kdenlive Developer Jean-Baptiste Mardelle Is Missing
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/11/24/2251210/kdenlive-developer-jean-baptiste-mardelle-is-missing
“While there’s many Kdenlive fans out there for the KDE-focused open-source video editor, it seems new development efforts around the project have ceased.”
Comments:
Since it’s open source, it can be forked and can continue development. With close sourced software, once development halts, for whatever reason, nobody else can work on it.
So this is actually an example why Open Source software rocks
I do agree that when an open source software project goes stagnant because one or more active developers quit, it’s rather indicative of the fact that just because the source is available that there is no guarantee whatsoever that somebody else will pick it up. But at least they can.
I’ve noted in my career that you see this happen to proprietary products (of all types). Unless the product has large well organized team and good cash flow to support it, the departure of a keep person often results in the product becoming an orphan. The hurdle of training up a new staff member is too large compared to other things the company could spend money on, and the product dies.
Closed source software development will stop when it doesn’t make money. It might be because the software is no longer relevant or because it sucks, but always because it is not making any more money for the developer(s). Open source projects can continue on if they suck or if they don’t. There is no filter in that regard.
Tomi Engdahl says:
EMC’s flashy XtremIO? I Xpect it will be great… in a few years
All-flash arrays will work wonders – when we all have all-flash storage environments
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/25/xpect_more/
So we finally have general availability for XtremIO
And that is of course a big *if*: do you really need an all-flash array? Can you use it?
Firstly, I think that you have to point out that presently even under GA, the XtremIO array has some pretty horrible official caveats; no guaranteed non-disruptive upgrade, lack of replication services and the like mean that, in the opinion of this writer, this is nowhere near ready to replace the normal use case for an enterprise array.
Add in today’s fairly limited scalability and it is obvious that this is not a VMAX replacement today. So will it be in future?
At the moment, that is pretty unclear.
Much of what we are coming to expect from a modern array from an architectural point-of-view is here: balanced i/o, no hot spots, no tuning, no tiering and minimal management. Yet without the aforementioned enterprise features such as replication, it all feels a bit undercooked.
If you manage the data silos at the application layer, you might well find that you begin to lose the value of an all-flash array, as you’ll be moving data from the array to another array – doing more I/Os at the host level..
I don’t see XtremIO as replacing the enterprise storage arrays anytime soon
Tomi Engdahl says:
Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/11/25/138233/healthcaregov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality
“The idea that ‘failure is not an option’ is a fantasy version of how non-engineers should motivate engineers.”
“Failure is always an option. Engineers work as hard as they do because they understand the risk of failure.”
” As we now know, programmers, stakeholders, and testers all expressed reservations about Healthcare.gov’s ability to do what it was supposed to do. Yet no one who understood the problems was able to tell the President. Worse, every senior political figure—every one—who could have bridged the gap between knowledgeable employees and the President decided not to.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality/
When a project cannot meet all three goals—a situation Healthcare.gov was clearly in by March—something will give. If you want certain features at a certain level of quality, you’d better be able to move the deadline. If you want overall quality by a certain deadline, you’d better be able to simplify, delay, or drop features. And if you have a fixed feature list and deadline, quality will suffer.
Intoning “Failure is not an option” will be at best useless, and at worst harmful. There is no “Suddenly Go Faster” button, no way you can throw in money or additional developers as a late-stage accelerant; money is not directly tradable for either quality or speed, and adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. You can slip deadlines, reduce features, or, as a last resort, just launch and see what breaks.
Denying this tradeoff doesn’t prevent it from happening. If no one with authority over the project understands that, the tradeoff is likely to mean sacrificing quality by default. That just happened to this administration’s signature policy goal. It will happen again, as long politicians can be allowed to imagine that if you just plan hard enough, you can ignore reality. It will happen again, as long as department heads imagine that complex technology can be procured like pencils. It will happen again as long as management regards listening to the people who understand the technology as a distasteful act.
Comment:
The problem you’ve described is one that’s fundamental to technology, though. The reality is that the vast majority of helpful new uses for technology don’t involve doing anything novel or interesting. They involve applying an existing solution or technique to a new area. Sure, sometimes people get to work at Facebook and design high-availability low-latency distributed database systems… but most of the time, even on the prestige jobs, they’re munging together some existing APIs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s device chief sees a future without three versions of Windows
http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/25/5142850/julie-larson-green-future-windows-versions
Microsoft currently ships Windows RT, Windows 8, and Windows Phone software on a variety of devices, but it’s heading towards a future where just a single version of Windows will exist. Speaking at the UBS Global Technology Conference last week, Microsoft’s head of devices, Julie Larson-Green, hinted strongly that the software giant is finally working to merge its core operating systems. “We have the Windows Phone OS. We have Windows RT and we have full Windows. We’re not going to have three,” says Larson-Green.
The comments follow a similar message delivered by Windows chief Terry Myerson, who sees phones as the future of Windows RT.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
IBM doesn’t make consumer, desktop operating systems anymore for a reason.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big Data is getting too damn big – and nobody is helping to fix this
See that nettle? Time to pop your gardening gloves on, chaps
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/26/_in_with_the_new/
As vendors race to be better, faster and to differentiate themselves in an already busy marketplace, the real needs of the storage teams can be left unmet – and also those of the storage consumer. At times it is as if the various vendors are building dragsters, calling them family saloons and hoping that nobody notices. The problems that I blogged about when I started out blogging seem still mostly unsolved.
Management
Storage management at scale is still problematic; it is still extremely hard to find a toolset that will allow a busy team to be able to assess health, performance, supportability and capacity at a glance. Still, too many teams are using spreadsheets and manually maintained records to manage their storage.
As we build more silos in the storage-infrastructure, getting a view of the whole estate is harder now than ever.
Mobility
Data mobility across tiers where those tiers are spread across multiple vendors is hard; applications are generally not currently architected to encapsulate this functionality in their non-functional specifications.
Scaling
Although we have scale-out and scale-up solutions, scaling is a problem. Yes, we can scale to what appears to be almost limitless size these days but the process of scaling brings problems. Adding additional capacity is relatively simple; rebalancing performance to effectively use that capacity is not so easy. If you don’t rebalance, you risk hotspots and even under-utilisation.
Deterministic Performance
As arrays get larger, more workloads get consolidated onto a single array – and without the ability to isolate workloads or guarantee performance, the risk of bad and noisy neighbours increases.
Data Growth
Despite all efforts to curtail this, we store ever larger amounts of data. We need an industry-wide initiative to look at how we can better curate and manage data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Microsoft absolutely DOESN’T need its own Steve Jobs
It should differentiate itself by not copying Apple
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/26/microsoft_doesnt_need_its_own_steve_jobs/
Microsoft is a company in transition. Speculation is rampant and everyone in the IT industry seems to have a strong opinion on what Microsoft should – and shouldn’t – do.
Analysts are increasingly lumping PCs in with mobile devices, a trend that’s decidedly bad for Microsoft. Others remain sceptical of the practice and seem to see Microsoft’s future as far less bleak.
Ballmer’s tenure at the helm has been dubbed “Microsoft’s lost decade”. An unflattering term that is misused by many who blithely ignore that Ballmer’s tenure still saw Microsoft grow profits by an average of over 15 per cent per year to a company with a net income of $23bn. We should all hope to fail so well.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Touchscreen PCs expected to take 11 percent of 2013 notebook shipments
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/11/26/touchscreen-pcs-expected-to-take-11-percent-of-2013-notebook-shipments-
Apple has famously compared convertible Windows tablets to combining a toaster and a refrigerator, but competitors are still increasing their output of touchscreen notebooks in hopes of turning around slumping PC sales.
“Anything can be forced to converge,” Cook said. “But the problem is that the products are about tradeoffs. You begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn’t please anyone.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
3D Printers ‘an Acorn’ for Ailing HP
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320245&
Hewlett-Packard will launch a line of 3D printers next year to spark growth. Word of the plan came at the end of a call with financial analysts to discuss marginally upbeat results for the quarter and year.
The computer and printer company aims to release consumer and industrial-grade 3D printers in 2014, leveraging its massive paper printing business. But chief executive Meg Whitman, who first discussed the plan late last month, said on the call that the impact on the still-struggling corporation’s bottom line will be modest for some time.
Printer and PC sales were dropped marginally, though HP claimed its results outperformed declines in the overall industry.
For the fiscal year that ended Oct. 31, HP’s revenue fell 7% to $112.2 billion. The company eked out a $5.1 billion profit following a $12.6 billion loss in 2012.
Networking gear and servers were the only bright spots in otherwise depressed sales for the year. Even in those sectors, sales growth was razor thin. HP reported these fiscal 2013 results.
Networking and server revenue rose 2% from the previous year with a 14.5% operating margin.
Printing revenue fell 1% with a 17.7% operating margin.
Personal systems revenue fell 2% with a 3% operating margin.
Software revenue fell 9% with a 30.8% operating margin.
Enterprise services revenue declined 9% with a 4.4% operating margin.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Flash Shortages Drive SSD Shifts
LSI’s loss is Samsung’s gain
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320207&
The dynamics of the solid-state state drive market are shifting, and for Abhi Talwalkar it’s been a disappointing shift in 2013.
The chief executive of LSI hoped the market for SSD controllers from Sandforce, a startup he purchased in 2011 for $370 million, would grow as much as 35% this year. Instead it grew just 10%.
The growth Talwalkar hoped for went mostly to companies such as Samsung that started selling SSDs using its own NAND flash chips and controllers. Increasingly the relatively small, independent SSD makers Sandforce had been selling some of its controllers to are losing business to vertically integrated giants such as Samsung, Sandisk, and others.
That’s when NAND flash makers cut back capex on fab equipment, believing the memory chip market was in oversupply.
As a result NAND flash prices went up about 20% this year, Talwalkar estimates. At the same time, flash chip makers such as Samsung have been more aggressively making and selling their own SSDs because they represent a more profitable business than chips.
The NAND vendors are winning business because they can make money at lower selling prices than the independents.
“I believe in two to four years 70-80% of client SSDs will come from NAND makers and the rest will come from five to 10 independent SSD makers that have unique business models and/or focus on certain verticals markets or distribution models,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tablets to Make Up Half of 2014 PC Market
Apple top 2013 vendor, Android to dominate in 2014
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320243&
The market watcher Canalys predicted in a report issued Tuesday that tablets will make up half the PC market in 2014.
The research firm said tablets make up 50% of shipments in the total client PC market, which includes desktops, notebooks, and tablets. It expects 285 million tablets to ship in 2014 and 396 million in 2017.
“Expect 2014 to bring a flurry of acquisitions, mergers, and failures as PC hardware vendors of all sizes struggle to maintain their desktop and notebook business while attempting to capitalize on a tablet market that will see great volumes driving limited value,” Canalys said in a press release.
“Apple’s decline in PC market share is unavoidable when considering its business model. Samsung narrowly took the lead in EMEA this quarter and Apple will lose its position to competitors in more markets in the future,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Supercomputer Accelerator Comes to Datacenter
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320223&
At the Supercomputer Conference (SC13, Nov. 17-22, Denver) Nvidia and IBM announced that they will collaborate on accelerating IBM’s enterprise software applications with Nvidia’s graphics processing unit (GPUs) for IBM’s Power System servers. The partners also plan to integrate Tesla’s GPUs with IBM’s Power8 processors.
Although the announcement was made at SC13, Nvidia and IBM emphasized that their collaboration is aimed not just at high-performance computing (HPC) users but also at moving what has until now been almost exclusively a supercomputer coprocessor — Nvidia’s Tesla — into enterprise-grade servers to help deal with the increasing volume of streaming Big Data in business contexts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Docker 0.7 runs on all Linux distributions – and 6 other major features
http://blog.docker.io/2013/11/docker-0-7-docker-now-runs-on-any-linux-distribution/
This version introduces several major new features, but the most anticipated was definitely standard Linux support. As of today, Docker no longer requires a patched Linux kernel, thanks to a new storage driver contributed by Alex Larsson (see the next feature, “storage drivers”). This means that it will work out-of-the-box on all major distributions, including Fedora, RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, Gentoo, Arch, etc. Look for your favorite distro in our installation docs!
A key feature of Docker is the ability to create many copies of the same base filesystem almost instantly. Under the hood Docker makes heavy use of AUFS by Junjiro R. Okajima as a copy-on-write storage mechanism.
When the docker daemon is started it will automatically select a suitable driver depending on its capabilities.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to Monitor and Control Your Children’s Computer Usage on Windows 8
http://www.howtogeek.com/122363/how-to-monitor-and-control-your-childrens-computer-usage-on-windows-8/
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to View and Disable Installed Plug-ins in Any Browser
http://www.howtogeek.com/139916/how-to-view-and-disable-installed-browser-plug-ins-in-any-browser/
Browser plug-ins like Flash and Java add additional features web pages can use. However, they can also slow things down when in use or add extra security holes, particularly in the case of Java.
Each web browser has a built-in way to view your installed browser plug-ins and choose which are enabled, although this feature is hidden in many browsers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HTG Explains: Why Every User On Your Computer Should Have Their Own User Account
http://www.howtogeek.com/142434/htg-explains-why-every-user-on-your-computer-should-have-their-own-user-account/
Multiple user accounts were once impractical to use on Windows, but they aren’t anymore. If multiple people use your computer – particularly children or guests – you should give each person a separate user account.
This article focuses on details specific to Windows, but the same broad reasons apply on Mac OS X, Linux, and even Android tablets with their new multiple user accounts feature.
Why Not Just Use One Account?
If you use a single user account on your computer, everyone will share the same application settings, files, and system permissions.
Application Settings: When you use a single user account, everyone using the computer will use the same browser. This allows other people to use your online accounts if you stay logged in, view your browser history, dig through your bookmarks, and more.
Files: With multiple people sharing a single user account, no one really has any private files. Anyone using the same user account can view your files.
System Permissions: Other user accounts can be either standard or administrator accounts. If they’re standard accounts, you can use Windows’ built-in parental controls to set limits for your kids’ computer use and view information about it.
This is even more crucial on Windows 8, where you log in with a Microsoft account (like a Hotmail account) by default. If you sign in with your Hotmail account, you’ll remain logged into the modern Mail app while using the computer. Anyone using your user account could pop open the Mail app, even if you logged out of Hotmail or Microsoft’s Outlook.com in your browser.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Micron: Our STACKED SILICON BEAUTY solves the DRAM problem
Logic? You want logic? It’s at the bottom
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/27/micron_engaged_in_consenting_dram_stackery/
Dratted multi-core CPUs. DRAM is running into a bandwidth problem. More powerful CPUs has meant that more cores are trying to access a server’s memory and the bandwidth is running out.
One solution is to stack DRAM in layers above a logic base layer and increase access speed to the resulting hybrid memory cubes (HMC), and Micron has done just that.
Micron chose the Denver Supercomputing show to say it was developing HMC chips for petascale supercomputers. Other target applications include data packet processing, data packet buffering or storage, and processor acceleration – any app suffering memory bandwidth constraints.
At the show, Fujitsu showed a board from a prototype future supercomputer with HMC chips on it. Micron is also part of and has driven the creation of an ecosystem aimed at using HMC chips and interfacing to them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sysadmin job ad: ‘If you don’t mind really bad work-life balance, this is for you’
Games and comics site Penny Arcade posts WORST JOB AD … EVER!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/27/penny_arcade_job_ad/
“We are quite literally looking for a person that can do four jobs: Web Development, Software Development, Sys Admin, and the (dreaded) GENERAL IT for us here that need help configuring a firewall for a dev kit, etc. Sorry, I know that’s the WORST, but it’s absolutely part of the gig.”
The ad doesn’t mention pay, but The Reg imagines it’ll need to be substantial.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Processor chip market soars due to growing demand for smartphones and tablets
Intel still dominates despite decline in market share
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2309583/processor-chip-market-soars-due-to-growing-demand-for-smartphones-and-tablets
PROCESSOR CHIP SALES will increase by almost quarter this year thanks to the growing demand for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, analyst outfit IHS has predicted.
The research firm forecast that worldwide processor shipments will reach 1.5 billion units by the end of this year, up from 1.21 billion in 2012.
“The first half of the year, in particular, yielded solid growth, up 27 percent in the first quarter on an annual basis, and up 24 percent in the second quarter,” IHS said. “Meanwhile, expansion in the third quarter is anticipated at 19 percent, while growth in the fourth-quarter is forecast to come in at 24 percent.”
The main expansion has been seen in mobile, with processor shipments for tablets up from 38.3 million units in the second quarter of 2012 to 53.5 million units for the same period this year, a 40 percent increase. Growth in processor shipments for smartphones was just behind that of tablets, up 38 percent from 147.9 million units to 204.2 million.
“In tablets, the rise of low-cost devices made in China boosted shipments for Chinese processor vendors such as Allwinner and Rockchip,” IHS said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OCZ Filing for Bankruptcy, Announces Offer From Toshiba to Purchase Assets
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ocz-filing-for-bankruptcy-announces-offer-from-toshiba-to-purchase-assets-2013-11-27?reflink=MW_news_stmp
OCZ Technology Group, Inc. OCZ -2.19% , a leading provider of high-performance solid state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced that on November 25, 2013, it received notices that Hercules Technology Growth Capital, Inc. (“Hercules”) took exclusive control of the Company’s depository accounts
The Company has received an offer from Toshiba Corporation to acquire substantially all of the Company’s assets in a bankruptcy proceeding.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft May Finally Put Windows RT Out To Pasture
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/11/27/2152210/microsoft-may-finally-put-windows-rt-out-to-pastur
“Microsoft may finally be ready to put Windows RT out to pasture. After ignoring pundits, the public, and a staggering $900 writedown, the subsequent lack of sales for the second edition of the RT have finally gotten the message through”
Tomi Engdahl says:
62% of 16 To 24-Year-Olds Prefer Printed Books Over eBooks
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/11/27/1851203/62-of-16-to-24-year-olds-prefer-printed-books-over-ebooks
“According to The Guardian, 62% of readers between the age of 16 and 24 prefer physical copies of books over ebooks. Reasons given were the feel of ‘real books,’ a perceived unfairly high cost for eBooks, and the ease of sharing printed books. “
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Real Problem In Working From Home (It’s Not What You Think)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2013/06/24/working-from-home/
If you give employees the right to telework, be careful!
The very technology that enables telecommuting and working from home could be destroying its value. Although productivity may increase in the short term, working from home may prevent your teams from working effectively.
Command And Control
The intuitive answer would be that many companies worry about losing control of their employees. Teleworkers frequently back this perception by citing difficulties in performance reviews, when compared to their office-based peers.
There may be some truth to these, but neither is the full story.
Yes, remote workers may indeed be more carefree, happier and productive, but that doesn’t mean they’re good for their companies. A company is more than just the work that needs to be done, plus the workers who are there to do it.
A healthy organization has a culture that allows the sharing of values and ideas, the formation of a corporate identity, and the sense of competitive urgency that allows a company to be agile and innovative.
However, working from home can fail to fire up remote workers in the same way as a shared company environment.
Google workers, for instance, are brought into Mountain View on a free wi-fi enabled bus, and they’re encouraged to spend up to 20% of their time on projects other than their own work. Yet when it comes to working from home, the company line is to keep it to the barest minimum, unless it involves putting in extra hours after leaving the office.
Creativity And Institutional Memory
Ultimately a company is only as good as its people. The value of each worker centers on the knowledge they have and the knowledge they can gain.
The Bottom Line
As technological change accelerates and marketplace pressures intensify, companies need to become ever more agile and innovative, just to keep up.
Paradoxically, the very technology that made teleworking a real option is now conspiring to keep workers in the office.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Future of Cloud Computing Now Runs on All Versions of Linux
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/docker-linux/
Docker wants to help developers run their applications anywhere and everywhere. This week, the project got a little closer to that goal by bringing the platform to all major versions of the Linux operating system.
Docker is a tool for bundling everything you need to run a particular application into a single “container.” These containers can be moved from computer to computer — be they physical machines or virtual computer servers — in much the same way a standardized shipping container can be loaded onto any ship or train or loading dock.
Each container runs in isolation of all the other containers on a computer. The idea is to make each application completely portable, eliminating the need to install and configure it on every system on which you run it. It’s not a new idea, but Docker has popularized the approach and has even spawned an operating system designed specifically to work with it called CoreOS.
But up til now, Docker has only been supported on the Debian distribution of Linux. It was possible to install Docker on other Linux distributions, but that could be a tedious affair. But thanks to the latest release — version 0.7 — Docker is now supported on all major Linux distributions, including Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Suse, Gentoo, and Arch Linux.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Man Who Would Build a Computer the Size of the Entire Internet
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/09/docker/all/
With a new open-source software project called Docker, Solomon Hykes wants to build a computer the size of the internet
Google runs its web empire on computers the size of warehouses.
Inside the massive data centers that drive things like Google Search and Gmail and Google Maps, you’ll find tens of thousands of machines — each small enough to hold in your arms — but thanks to a new breed of software that spans this sea of servers, the entire data center operates like a single system, one giant computer that runs any application the company throws at it.
A Google application like Gmail doesn’t run on a particular server or even a select group of servers. It runs on the data center, grabbing computing power from any machine than can spare it. Google calls this “warehouse-scale computing,” and for some, it’s an idea so large, they have trouble wrapping their heads around it.
Solomon Hykes isn’t one of them. He aims for something even bigger. With a new open-source software project known as Docker, he wants to build a computer the size of the internet.
That cartoon whale is the logo for Docker, which Hykes and his 18-person company, dotCloud, unveiled earlier this year. Docker is a way of packaging software applications into their own shipping containers, so you can readily load them and run them on any machine equipped with any flavor of Linux, the open-source operating system that now drives so many of the servers that underpin the internet.
The goal is to foster a world where anyone can treat any pool of machines in much the same way Google treats its private data centers. If you wrap your software in Docker containers, you can readily spread them not only across the machines in your own data centers, but onto popular cloud services such as Amazon Web Services — and back again.
eBay, the web’s online auction house, is now using Docker containers as a means of testing new software inside its data centers. San Francisco startup MemSQL is doing much the same in testing the database software it sells to other businesses, a database that runs across dozens of machines. And another startup, CoreOS, offers a new Linux operating system specifically designed for use with Docker containers.
“Docker is the tool kit you need to get this idea right,” says eBay engineer Ted Dziuba. “It makes it incredibly easy to take an application — any process that runs on a computer — and stick it in its own container.”
“The application includes everything it needs to run,” says Alex Polvi, the founder of CoreOS, the operating system created with Docker in mind. “You don’t have to run some fancy installer. You just use it. It’s ready to go.” In much the same way, you can easily install new software on your iPhone or your Android tablet.