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:
Microsoft’s new Xbox will include improved Siri-like speech recognition
http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/7/3958546/new-xbox-speech-recognition-like-siri
Microsoft will greatly improve its speech recognition technology inside the next Xbox, The Verge has learned. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s Xbox plans have revealed that Durango, the codename for the next Xbox, will support wake on voice, natural language controls, and speech-to-text. The improved capabilities mean that Xbox users will be able to walk into a room and simply say “Xbox on” to wake up the new Xbox.
We understand that Microsoft is also investigating scenarios where a Kinect sensor will detect individuals in a room and suggest appropriate multiplayer games after a user queries the Xbox using voice.
Microsoft will fully detail its new Xbox at E3 this year
Tomi Engdahl says:
LibreOffice 4.0 ships with new features, better looks
Slowly closing the gap with Microsoft Office
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/08/libreoffice_40_ships/
The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 4.0, the latest version of the free software competitor to Microsoft Office that spun off from the OpenOffice.org effort in 2010, describing it as nothing less than “the free office suite the community has been dreaming of since 2001.”
Among other improvements, version 4.0 is more compatible with Microsoft’s Rich Text Format (RTF) and DOCX file formats
LibreOffice Writer can now import ink annotations from both formats, in addition to supporting a number of new DOCX features, such as floating tables and inline comments.
“We’re trying to become this sort of Swiss Army Knife of file formats,”
In addition, LibreOffice has added support for the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) protocol, which allows the office suite to communicate directly with a variety of remote servers, including Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Nuxeo, and SAP NetWeaver Cloud Service, among others.
According to Meeks, LibreOffice 4.0 now includes an automatic layout system that can adapt based on the user’s locale and the text that needs to be displayed, to make sure everything is a good fit.
One handy new feature for presenters is a new Impress Remote Control App, which allows a speaker to control an Impress slide deck using an Android smartphone. Unfortunately, however, this feature still has a few wrinkles that need ironing, so it’s currently only available for some Linux distributions.
Meeks explained that LibreOffice releases are timed to go out a couple of months before the major Linux distributions ship their new versions, so that LibreOffice 4.02 will likely be the first build of the new version of the suite to ship with Fedora or Ubuntu.
The Document Foundation has been talking about online and mobile versions of LibreOffice for some time, but although Meeks says these things exist and are still being developed, they still have a way to go before they are ready for wide distribution.
“Fitting into the 50MB limit for the Android app store is a bit of a problem with the whole office suite, even when we start ripping out the UI base code,”
As for developing a complete, integrated suite of office applications and online services, however – the way Microsoft is doing with its Office 365 offering, for example – the Document Foundation’s Vignoli says the opportunity is wide-open … for someone else.
“We do not see The Document Foundation offering the complete solution, as this would be a departure from our objectives,”
Tomi says:
Apple now nearly as big as Microsoft Windows in personal computing sales
By Daniel Eran Dilger
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/07/apple-now-nearly-as-big-as-microsoft-windows-in-personal-computing-sales
Apple has passed Microsoft in profitability and revenues, but now the company is approaching a new, nearly unfathomable milestone: surpassing Windows in terms of global personal computing unit share.
Apple’s share of conventional PC device sales is now over 20 percent, thanks to the rapid adoption of iPad.
However, Apple’s success with Macs and iPads has been overshadowed by the growth of iPhone.
As a result, the number of personal computing devices sold by Apple have now hit a quarterly record total just shy of 80 million units: 75 million iOS devices and 4.1 million Macs
Global sales of PC (including Macs) have remained essentially flat at around 90 million per quarter, meaning that Apple’s personal computing sales are now approaching 90 percent of the sales of Windows, which has represented the world’s largest computing platform for decades.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Watson’s medical expertise offered commercially
http://news.yahoo.com/watsons-medical-expertise-offered-commercially-173205800.html
The Watson supercomputer is graduating from its medical residency and is being offered commercially to doctors and health insurance companies, IBM said Friday.
IBM Corp., the health insurer WellPoint Inc. and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center announced two Watson-based applications — one to help assess treatments for lung cancer and one to help manage health insurance decisions and claims.
Both applications take advantage of the speed, huge database and language skill the computer demonstrated in defeating the best human “Jeopardy!” players on television two years ago.
In both applications, doctors or insurance company workers will access Watson through a tablet or computer. Watson will quickly compare a patient’s medical records to what it has learned and make several recommendations in decreasing order of confidence.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Enterprise Information Workers Favor Microsoft Tablets and Apple Phones
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/02/08/enterprise-information-workers-favor-microsoft-tablets-and-apple-phones/
Information workers in the enterprise sector would like a Microsoft tablet but an Apple phone, according to Forrester Research’s annual Mobile Workforce Adoption Trends survey of 10,000 enterprise staff
For tablets, preferences were 32% Microsoft Surface, 26% iPad and 12% Android tablet. For phones, the figures were 33% iPhone, 22% Android and just 10% Windows Phone.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux developers working on uniting Windows 8 Secure Boot fixes
http://www.zdnet.com/linux-developers-working-on-uniting-windows-8-secure-boot-fixes-7000011094/
Summary: There are now two major ways to boot and install Linux on Windows 8 PCs, but soon they’ll only be a single unified method.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Next Xbox Has Mandatory Kinect, Game-Swapping and New Controllers, According To Leaked Info
http://kotaku.com/5982986
The next-generation Xbox—the one that will follow the still-popular Xbox 360—will run multiple games at once, require game installations, and will only work when a much-improved version of the popular but divisive Kinect sensor array is plugged in, according to a source who says he has access to development hardware.
Those are a just a few details about the new console, codenamed Durango, that were shared with us by a person with access to next-gen information.
Like Sony, Microsoft refuses to acknowledge that their next-gen system is in the works and that people are making games for it.
None of the details that follow have been confirmed by Microsoft.
Tomi Engdahl says:
iPad to face greater challenges for market share, says analyst
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57568872-37/ipad-to-face-greater-challenges-for-market-share-says-analyst/
The iPad will see increasing competition not just from 7-inch tablets but potentially from new touch-screen ultrabooks, forecasts a Citi analyst.
The market share for Apple’s 10-inch tablet will continue to shrink this year despite the debut of a fifth-generation model, predicts Citi analyst Glen Yeung.
The larger iPad has already been hurt by demand for its own smaller sibling. Following the launch of the iPad Mini in October, fourth-quarter sales of the 10-inch version dropped by 9 percent in the U.S. and by 26 percent in Japan year over year, Yeung said in an investors note released yesterday.
But the Mini wasn’t the only thorn in the side of the 10-inch iPad.
Consumers gravitated toward other 7-inch tablets, such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, and Google’s Nexus 7. Overall, the market share for 7-inch tables jumped to 41.2 percent in the fourth quarter from 12.6 percent in the second quarter of 2012. Over the same time, the share held by 10-inch tablets fell to 40.6 percent from 67.3 percent.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cache ‘n’ carry: What’s the best config for your SSD?
How to gain solid-state performance with out losing hard drive capacity
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/12/feature_what_the_best_solid_state_disk_configuration/
The idea of using a low-capacity SSD to store the most frequently accessed files or parts of files in order to access them more quickly than a mechanical hard drive can serve them up – a technique called SSD caching – has been around for some time, but it wasn’t until the arrival of Intel’s Smart Response Technology with the company’s Z68 chipset, released in 2011, that the technology began to be implemented in personal machines rather than servers.
Intel’s thinking was to get ordinary users into the SSD game by allowing then to put small, cheap solid-state drives into their systems alongside existing, large capacity HDDs rather than suggest they swap out the latter for a more expensive yet not as capacious SSD. The cache drive approach brings almost all of the benefits of SSD – fast boot times and file access – without having to break the bank to get a large storage space.
Intel’s Smart Response Technology (SRT) first appeared a couple of years ago in version 10.5 of the company’s Rapid Storage Technology (RST) Raid software for the Sandy Bridge chipset, but it was initially only enabled on the Z68 desktop chipset and a couple of mobile products.
The Two types are Enhanced (Write-Through) and Maximised (Write Back).
In 2012, Apple launched what it calls Fusion Drive technology on the latest incarnations of the iMac and the Mac Mini. Currently there are only two Fusion Drive options available, both using a 128GB MLC NAND SSD.
Probably the most useful alternatives to SRT are the solid-state cache drives offered by the likes of Corsair, Crucial and OCZ with their Accelerator, Adrenaline and Synapse products. These three and others use Nvelo’s Dataplex caching software. The software works with AMD as well as Intel chipsets – so it’s the obvious choice for folk with a dislike of Chipzilla products – but doesn’t support chipsets produced by Nvidia.
In Windows 7, Microsoft turned off file defragmentation for SSDs, but with Windows 8 it’s back, albeit in a different guise.
As soon as any of the cache methods are used, the system boots up much more quickly than the standard mechanical drive alone, though that’s no great surprise. The fact it’s a 30-second improvement is very impressive.
So is SSD caching a viable option? If you’re on a very limited budget or you just want to kick start your existing desktop system without the hassle of re-installing the OS or messing about with the Bios, then using a cache drive is undoubtedly the best way to go to get an instant performance boost without spending too much money or putting you to too much effort.
However, if you are building a system from scratch then the 120/128GB SSD for the OS and applications, and a separate high-capacity HDD for data makes more sense. This can still be a less expensive approach than a single, high-capacity SSD.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Home Server vs. VPS – a quick Cost and Performance analysis
http://tidbitsfortechs.blogspot.fi/2013/02/home-server-vs-vps-quick-cost-and.html
Which is cheaper: Running a server from home, or renting a VPS (Virtual Private Server)?
I did some research, and came up with the following:
1) A system such as this one takes roughly 150w of power to run, at the most.
2) My local utility charges 6.6 cents per kilowatt/hr.
So, plug in the numbers. There are 730 hours in the average month. Take 730 times 150 watts, divide by 1000 and you get 109.5 killowatt hours used, and at 6.6 cents per kw/hr that’s 722.7 cents, or $7.23/mo.
VPS: $27.15/mo or $325/yr
Home: $7.23/mo or $86.76/yr
Extrapolate that into a year, and thats $238/yr saved! For that money, I can afford to replace the power supply or hard drive in the home server if it dies. Its a LOT cheaper.
Overall it is VERY cost effective for us to run the home server.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft blazes trail to next PC
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57564837-75/microsoft-blazes-trail-to-next-pc/
commentary With its serious processor, and its guts-behind-the-glass design, Microsoft’s Surface Pro may well be the template for the new PC. And device makers should pay attention.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Opera formally adopts WebKit as its Web browsers reach 300 million users
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/13/opera-300-million-users-webkit/
Opera has announced that its range of Web browsers is now being used by 300 million people each month to navigate the Internet across mobile phones, PCs, tablets and more. The Norwegian firm is marking the milestone with the announcement that it will transition its browsers over to the open-sourced WebKit, in a move that will eventually end the development of its own rendering engine.
Mobile remains the area where Opera is seeing the most traction. Spurred by deals with global operators and handset makers, the company announced last month that its Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers clocked a record 229 million active users during December 2012.
Mini is the more popular option and is available for almost every mainstream device, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry,
The move towards the open-sourced WebKit engine — Opera is also committing to Chromium — will bring further benefits to Opera users across all platforms. In adopting it, Opera removes the need to continue the development of its own rendering engine, which frees up resources to develop new features and build new products.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tablets’ ascendancy: due in no small part to PCs’ stagnancy
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/brians-brain/4406788/Tablets–ascendancy–due-in-no-small-part-to-PCs–stagnancy
Innumerable cyber-ink has been spilled in recent years, particularly since the unveiling of the first-generation iPad in the spring of 2010, regarding the supposedly looming “post-PC” era. The combination of increasingly powerful smartphones and larger-screen tablet devices, so says the theory, will steadily eat into the laptop and (particularly) desktop PC installed base, sooner or later effectively leading to the obsolescence of legacy computer form factors…with the ironic exception of “cloud”-located servers feeding (and being fed with) data to (and from) those ascendant mobile computing and communications devices.
Topical data certainly seems to support the theory. A recent analyst report, for example, concludes that when tablets are included in the definition of the term “personal computer,” they accounted for one in three personal computer shipments in the fourth quarter of last year. The outcome, this and other analysts agree, is the result both of dramatic tablet shipment increases and the fact that “shipments of traditional PCs contracted last year for the first time since 2001.”
What’s fueling this tablet ascendance? Industry pundits rightly point to the advantages inherent to the upstart, deriving from its processor and operating system-and-application foundations…a thin and lightweight, high-resolution screen-dominated form factor, with day-long battery life and good-enough responsiveness. Intel’s Ultrabook campaign was, in fact, arguably developed precisely to attack the tablet form factor’s only tangible Achilles’ heels, software incompatibility and the lack of a physical keyboard, by striving to deliver tablet-like performance and power consumption while simultaneously supporting tactile input and the full Windows application ecosystem.
But these factors, although valid, don’t completely comprehend the situation in my mind. Another notable factor, in my opinion, derives from the admittedly elementary observation that people like to buy things. They buy things when they’re happy. They buy things when they’re sad (the so-called “retail therapy” phenomenon).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel, Facebook collaborate on new data center rack technologies
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/january/intel-facebook-data-center-rack.html
Intel and Facebook announced that the companies are collaborating to define the next generation of data center rack technologies to enable the disaggregation of computing, network and storage resources. In a follow-on announcement, Quanta Computer unveiled a mechanical prototype of the companies’ new silicon photonics rack architecture, the better to demonstrate the potential for total cost, design and reliability improvements via disaggregation.
Rack disaggregation refers to the separation of those resources that currently exist in a rack, including computing, storage, networking, and power distribution into discrete modules.
The mechanical prototype from Quanta Computer is a demonstration of Intel’s photonic rack architecture for interconnecting the various resources, showing one of the ways computing, network and storage resources can be disaggregated within a rack. Further, Intel says it will contribute a design for enabling a photonic receptacle to the Open Compute Project (OCP), and will work with Facebook, Corning and others over time to standardize the design.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How The Web Became Just Another App Store
And how Google and Apple have taken control of it.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/the-web-is-now-an-app-store
Opera, one of the last of a shrinking pool of independent browsers, is officially changing the way it displays the internet. Soon, rather than using its own rendering engine, Presto, it will render websites using a version of WebKit. This is the same engine used by Google’s Chrome, the most popular browser in the world right now, as well as Apple’s browser, Safari.
It’s also the same engine that underpins both Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPad and the default browser in Android — the two most popular mobile browsers by far.
WebKit, in other words, has orchestrated and executed one of the largest, and quietest, coups in tech history.
- WebKit is the only major rendering engine that’s growing
- WebKit is synonymous with mobile
- And phones and tablets are taking over
- It’s not too early to call it: WebKit has won.
This means that soon, creating a website will mean something different than it ever has before — rather than trying to build a website that’s compatible with nine different browsers based on four different engines, web developers will be creating sites that work with WebKit, and increasingly similar variations thereof. They will be building apps instead of sites, on WebKit technology instead of web technology. The process, in other words, will become more and more like creating an app for an app store; like building an iPhone app minus the human approval process.
This doesn’t mean that the all-web-app future, which has gotten off to numerous false start
WebKit’s dominations is also an early death knell for web standards as we know them today. When following official World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards is in developers’ best interest — when it ensures their sites will work for most people — web standards have power. When there’s a true WebKit monopoly, that power shifts to WebKit and the browsers that use it. In international relations terms, the W3C is the UN, and WebKit is a growing empire that controls a majority of its member countries.
“Now,” the post continues, with a hint of desperation, “it’s very easy to adapt a WebKit-optimized site to also support IE10.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC sales drop continues: -12%
PC-to-sales fell sharply at the end of last year, says research firm Gartner.
Delivery of the equipment fell in October-December a year ago by 12 per cent to 15.3 million pieces. Full-year PC shipments declined by 8 per cent to 58 million copies.
Western Europe PC shipments in Q4 2012
HP 21.5%
Acer 11.4%
Lenovo 11.4%
Asus 11.2%
Dell 8.7%
Other 35.8%
“The Western European PC market is down-reaching spiral,”
Year 2012 was the second consecutive year, when sales fell. However, the fall was less severe than in 2011, when the PC market declined by 14 percent.
Second consecutive weak year also demonstrates that the PC market problems are not merely economic situation, a new operating system or lightest portable too high costs.
Gartner expects that users will no longer buy the aging of the second or third home PC instead of a new device corresponding to a tablet PC. Research firm predicts PCs margins rise also at the same time, taking home the elect device requires more demanding performance.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/pcmyynnin+syoksy+jatkuu+12/a878902?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-14022013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Computers Shown To Be Better Than Docs At Diagnosing, Prescribing Treatment
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/02/13/2110251/computers-shown-to-be-better-than-docs-at-diagnosing-prescribing-treatment
“Applying the same technology used for voice recognition and credit card fraud detection to medical treatments could cut healthcare costs and improve patient outcomes by almost 50%, according to new research. Scientists at Indiana University found that using patient data with machine-learning algorithms can drastically improve both the cost and quality of healthcare through simulation modeling.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP is building Android tablets, and maybe a smartphone
http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3985600/hp-is-building-android-tablets-and-maybe-a-smartphone
ReadWrite is reporting, and we can confirm, that Hewlett-Packard is building Android tablets. The company is ramping up efforts to create mobile devices, and is considering an Android smartphone as well
HP will soon announce a tablet featuring Nvidia’s new Tegra 4 chip in the near future
Our source, however, says that while the timeline sounds accurate, the details are still up in the air.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP To Adopt Android For Upcoming Mobile Devices
http://readwrite.com/2013/02/13/hp-to-adopt-android-for-upcoming-mobile-devices
Having failed to carve out a place for itself in the post-PC era, Hewlett-Packard is now taking drastic measures — by adopting Google’s Android operating system to run a series of upcoming mobile devices.
It’s a bit of a Hail Mary pass for HP, which has fallen years behind its rivals in the mobile space. It’s also a big win for Google, which adds another powerful partner to the Android ecosystem.
HP’s first Android device will be a high-end tablet that is powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 4 chip
Sources also say that HP is currently exploring the launch of an Android-powered smartphone, but recent comments from CEO Meg Whitman indicate HP will not offer a mobile phone this year.
It’s unclear how many mobile OSes HP will support going forward, but the news that it is going down the Android path is a significant win for Google. Android has been slowly evolving towards the desktop PC market, and HP could be the partner that helps Google turn the corner in that area.
“HP supporting Android at this point in time is deeply strategic,”
HP Reportedly Working On Android Smartphones And Tablets, Despite webOS Failures
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/13/hp-reportedly-working-on-android-smartphones-and-tablets-despite-webos-failures/
HP is looking into getting back into the mobile hardware game, according to a new report from ReadWrite which the Verge says is being confirmed from their own sources.
After HP CEO Meg Whitman took over, she announced that the company would ultimately offer a smartphone to keep up with the fact that for many in the developing world, such a device is now their first and maybe only computer. That launch isn’t planned for 2013, however, Whitman later stated.
But back in late 2011, Whitman did make statements to the effect that HP could create webOS-powered tablets again in 2013. While these reports suggest webOS is likely off the table, HP could stick to Whitman’s target plan of fielding a tablet device based on a mobile OS this year, but one based on Android instead of its own product, which it has since open-sourced.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia CEO: ‘I believe in tablets wholeheartedly,’ but smartphones will take a little longer
http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3986216/nvidia-ceo-i-believe-in-tablets-wholeheartedly-but-smartphones-will
Tegra has made a name for itself, but LTE is no longer optional
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang sure loves his slates. “Yes, I believe in tablets. I believe in tablets wholeheartedly,” he told investors this afternoon. The company co-founder has good reason to say so: Nvidia’s Tegra line of mobile processors, which appear in Microsoft’s Surface RT and the Google Nexus 7, have driven record results.
Huang hinted that his company will be filling orders for new Windows RT tablets soon with its new Tegra 4 chip. “It stands to reason that there are many more Win RT Tegra 4 tablets in development,” he said.
“We know what it’s like on top of a Tegra 4, and it rocks.”
Qualcomm made tremendous headway last year with the introduction of its Snapdragon S4 because it had an integrated LTE modem, a highly desirable feature that delivers speedy wireless data while also saving power.
Nvidia is sampling its first LTE modem to tablet manufacturers, but it won’t have an integrated one until later this year, and Huang admits that’s the key to being competitive. “Smartphones… this is an area where we’ll need to have an LTE modem to be successful.
Nvidia is no longer just a GPU firm; it’s officially a mobile processor company as well. As of today, they’re so important to the company’s business that Nvidia has decided to break out mobile chipsets in its financial results.
Tomi Engdahl says:
JavaScript expert: WebKit, get your bug-ridden house in order
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57569342-93/javascript-expert-webkit-get-your-bug-ridden-house-in-order/
Dave Methvin, a leader of the influential jQuery programming tool, says WebKit is plagued with old bugs. He’s not optimistic Opera will help improve the browser situation.
“Each release of Chrome or Safari generates excitement about new bleeding-edge features; nobody seems to worry about the stuff that’s already (still!) broken,” complained Dave Methvin, president of the jQuery foundation and a member of the core programming team that builds the widely used Web programming tool, in a blog post.
“jQuery Core has more lines of fixes and patches for WebKit than any other browser. In general these are not recent regressions, but long-standing problems that have yet to be addressed.”
he’s worried that WebKit’s success and priorities means that some aspects of Web programming are sliding back into the dark days when old versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer ruled the Web
Tomi Engdahl says:
PCs’ stagnancy: More examples, and a resurrection strategy
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/brians-brain/4406804/PCs–stagnancy–More-examples–and-a-resurrection-strategy
If you’ve never tried an SSD-based system, I highly recommend a test drive; you’ll likely be amazed with the much faster operating system boot and application-launch responsiveness. The improvement is particularly dramatic when you migrate from an HDD to an SSD on an otherwise identical legacy computer.
Solid-state storage can truly make an old system feel brand new again. And unfortunately for both systems and microprocessor manufacturers, such a cost-effective upgrade will likely squelch your near-term motivation to tackle a complete computer replacement.
Speaking of upgrades, I’ve come across several recent editorial projects that discussed the results of dropping a new graphics card into an older PC.
All of this has Intel and AMD in a bit of a pickle; the companies’ CPUs are increasingly no longer the primary arbiter of system performance. Historically, per-core clock speed increases were the predominant motivation for consumers to open up their wallets and regularly upgrade their computers. That all changed roughly a decade ago, when Intel’s 90-nm process-based “Prescott” Pentium 4 struggled to achieve 3+ GHz speeds, suggesting that thermal constraints had effectively put an end to the era of predictable clock frequency increases over time.
Instead, both companies are now predominantly focused on using that same transistor budget to gobble up other system functions that historically relied on stand-alone ICs. The core logic chipset is now effectively gone, for example, subsumed into the CPU. And over time, the GPU will increasingly suffer the same fate.
The other capability that Moore’s Law continues to deliver (as long as leakage current can be controlled, that is) is a reduction in the amount of energy required to complete a given computing task. This improvement comes about due to both ongoing lowering of the voltage powering transistors and architectural improvements that minimize the number of transistor toggles per system clock edge.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia revenues fight the PC tide, but annual profits pinched
Tegra 4 ready for Q2 launch
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/nvidia_q4_f2013_numbers/
Graphics chip and processor wannabe Nvidia turned in its numbers for its final quarter of fiscal 2013 after markets closed on Wednesday, and the top and bottom lines were more or less in line with expectations, given the cutthroat nature of the PC, smartphone, and tablet markets these days.
For the full year, the GPU business was up 2 per cent to $3.25bn
On the processor front, Tegra CPU sales were down sequentially thanks to lower revenues for Tegra 3 chips ahead of the launch of Tegra 4 processors
The Tegra 4 chips made their debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January, and include a quad-core Cortex-A15 chip with a fifth Cortex training wheel for low-power computing as well as a 72-core custom GPU.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Many IT professionals are drawn by the savings that Linux® brings to the data center but are concerned about the potential uptime and data protection risks that arise from trusting their business-critical applications to “free” or native software. Native Linux solutions also prove challenging with required manual scripting and lack of automated operations and management.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Flexible paper computer looking to change the way people use tablets and computers
http://www.electronicproducts.com/Videos/Flexible_paper_computer_looking_to_change_the_way_people_use_tablets_and_computers_2.aspx
A collaborative project between Queen’s University, Plastic Logic, and Intel Labs has yielded one of the more exciting unveilings at the start of CES 2013: a flexible paper computer.
Dubbed the “PaperTab” tablet, the device looks and feels like a normal piece of paper, however, it’s fully interactive with a flexible, hi-resolution 10.7” touchscreen plastic display powered by a second generation Intel Core i5 Processor.
“Using several PaperTabs makes it much easier to work with multiple documents,” says Roel Vertegaal, Director of Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab. “Within five to ten years, most computers, from ultra-notebooks to tablets, will look and feel just like these sheets of printed color paper.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s ‘Blue’ wave is coming to more than just Windows
http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-blue-wave-is-coming-to-more-than-just-windows-7000010998/
Summary: Blue isn’t just the codename of the next version of Windows. It also is the codename for updates to Windows Phone, Windows Server and Windows Services, I’m hearing.
As we’ve known for a few months, the Windows client team at Microsoft is working on its first “feature-pack” update for Windows 8, supposedly due this summer/fall, which is codenamed “Blue.”
But it turns out Blue isn’t a Windows thing only
Blue represents a major change in how Microsoft builds, deploys and markets software and services. To date, many Microsoft teams like Windows, Windows Live and Windows Server have been focused on delivering major platform updates every two to three years. The challenge is to get them to pivot around yearly platform updates, the first of which will hit as part of the Blue wave.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NVIDIA Brings Android Development to Visual Studio with ‘Nsight Tegra’
http://blogs.nvidia.com/2013/02/nvidia-introduces-nsight-tegra-to-assist-android-developers/
Most are comfortable with the Microsoft Visual Studio “kitchen,” but struggle to work efficiently in the Android development environment. NVIDIA Nsight Tegra, Visual Studio Edition gives these developers a familiar set of tools to code for Android.
While Android offers powerful development tools, it doesn’t necessarily keep the silverware in the same drawer. This is particularly true for game developers transitioning from PC and console game development to mobile games.
90 percent of game developers creating AAA game titles for the PC, XBOX 360, Playstation, Wii and even some mobile gaming platforms use Microsoft Visual Studio to help manage the development process.
Nsight Tegra brings a complete native Android Development environment into Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. That allows developers to create Android applications without having to give up the Visual Studio development environment they already know.
“Having a solid debugger has already been a godsend”
You need to join the Tegra Registered Developer Program to download and try Nsight Tegra
Tomi Engdahl says:
IDC: Outsourcing sector needs rescue fund for cloudy customers
2e2 collapse to hit channel, customers, investors
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/02/15/outsourcing_rescue_fund/
The outsourcing industry should develop a voluntary crisis fund to give protection to customers should their services provider hit the wall.
This was proposed by IDC in light of 2e2′s recent high profile collapse that left some customers scrambling for alternative suppliers, and highlighted the pitfalls of outsourcing.
One solution is to create a “voluntary shared rescue fund” along the lines of the Association of British Travel Agents bond, said IDC associate veep Douglas Hayward.
Hayward said hosting and cloudy firms could hold a pot of cash in escrow to be used so that hosted data can be transitioned to new providers should the need arise.
“This could be marketed either as an industry-wide service, or as an optional value-added service to be bought by clients when signing a hosting/outsourcing contract,” he said.
Another option is for hosting firms to guarantee regular data backups are made to third party DR providers who are obliged to hand over the data to the customer in the event the hosting entity goes pop.
“That option, however, would be costly and arguably wasteful, not to mention bad for the environment, by generating huge volumes of duplicated data in independent data centres.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The computer that never crashes
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729045.400-the-computer-that-never-crashes.html
A revolutionary new computer based on the apparent chaos of nature can reprogram itself if it finds a fault
OUT of chaos, comes order. A computer that mimics the apparent randomness found in nature can instantly recover from crashes by repairing corrupted data.
Dubbed a “systemic” computer, the self-repairing machine now operating at University College London (UCL) could keep mission-critical systems working. For instance, it could allow drones to reprogram themselves to cope with combat damage, or help create more realistic models of the human brain.
Today’s computers work steadily through a list of instructions: one is fetched from the memory and executed, then the result of the computation is stashed in memory.
He and UCL’s Christos Sakellariou have created a computer in which data is married up with instructions on what to do with it. For example, it links the temperature outside with what to do if it’s too hot. It then divides the results up into pools of digital entities called “systems”.
Each system has a memory containing context-sensitive data that means it can only interact with other, similar systems. Rather than using a program counter, the systems are executed at times chosen by a pseudorandom number generator, designed to mimic nature’s randomness. The systems carry out their instructions simultaneously, with no one system taking precedence over the others, says Bentley. “The pool of systems interact in parallel, and randomly, and the result of a computation simply emerges from those interactions,” he says.
Crucially, the systemic computer contains multiple copies of its instructions distributed across its many systems, so if one system becomes corrupted the computer can access another clean copy to repair its own code. And unlike conventional operating systems that crash when they can’t access a bit of memory, the systemic computer carries on regardless because each individual system carries its own memory.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tech Industry Sets Its Sights on Gambling
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/technology/tech-industry-sets-its-sights-on-gambling.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Silicon Valley is betting that online gambling is its next billion-dollar business, with developers across the industry turning casual games into occasions for adults to wager.
At the moment these games are aimed overseas, where attitudes toward gambling are more relaxed and online betting is generally legal, and extremely lucrative. But game companies, from small teams to Facebook and Zynga, have their eye on the ultimate prize: the rich American market, where most types of real-money online wagers have been cleared by the Justice Department.
Legislative progress, though, is slow. Opponents include an influential casino industry wary of competition and the traditional antigambling factions, who oppose it on moral grounds.
“Gambling in the U.S. is controlled by a few land-based casinos and some powerful Indian casinos,”
Overseas, online betting is generating an estimated $32 billion in annual revenue — nearly the size of the United States casino market. Juniper Research estimates that betting on mobile devices alone will be a $100 billion worldwide industry by 2017.
“Everyone is really anticipating this becoming a huge business,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Mozilla Matters And Won’t Switch To WebKit
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/15/why-mozilla-matters-and-wont-switch-to-webkit/
Earlier this week, Opera announced that it would stop working on its own Presto layout engine and switch to WebKit. It’s obvious that the open source WebKit engine currently has a lot of momentum behind it, with Google, Apple and now Opera backing it. As Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich wrote last night, however, don’t expect Mozilla to switch engines anytime soon. Mozilla, thanks to its not-for-profit status (something most people are probably not even aware of), has a mission that’s very different from the other vendors.
If Mozilla were a more traditional business, though, Eich admits that “Mozilla would probably have to do what Opera has done. But we’re not just a business, and our desktop share seems to be holding or possibly rising — due in part to the short-term wins we have been able to build on Gecko.”
If WebKit’s momentum continues, our browsers will soon be little more than the Chrome around WebKit. This kind of monoculture can’t be good for the Web and is a reason to cheer on Firefox and even Internet Explorer, no matter how you feel about it.
Technically, using WebKit would also involve significantly larger switching costs for Mozilla than for Opera, Eich argues.
Mozilla, however, is deeply invested in XUL, it’s own XML-based language for building user interfaces, and losing that in order to switch to WebKit would also involve losing the “the benefits of the rich, broad and deep Firefox Add-ons ecosystem.”
Having its own engine also means Firefox can work on projects like Firefox OS and Firefox for Android. Eich is especially bullish about Servo, the next generation of the Gecko engine Firefox currently uses. He argues that Servo, which will better support multicore CPUs and massively parallel GPUs, is a bit ahead of Apple’s and Google’s work on multi-threading their browsers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Monday, February 18, 2013, 08:58 pm
Mac Pro no longer available from European Online Apple Stores
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/18/mac-pro-no-longer-available-from-european-apple-online-stores
With European sales of Apple’s Mac Pro desktop set to stop on March 1 as new regulatory requirements become active, the computer has been made unavailbable in most of the company’s online storefronts in the region.
In late January, Apple announced that it would be halting sales of the venerable Mac Pro on March 1 due to incompatibility with Amendment 1 of Regulation IEC 60950-1. According to Apple, the aging desktop platform is incompatible with the revised standard’s requirement for protected fan blades.
Tomi Engdahl says:
EN 60950-1:2006/A1:2010 includes the following significant changes from EN 60950-1:2006/A11:2009.
Modified requirements for bridging resistors (1.5.7.1 and 1.5.7.2)
Additional requirements for VDR (1.5.9.4)
Modified marking requirement for equipment with multiple MAINS SUPPLY connections (1.7.1.1)
Modified compliance criteria for LPS (2.5 c)
Additional and modified requirements for safety interlocks (2.8.4)
Modified requirements for minimum creepage distances (Table 2N)
Additional requirements for rack-mounted equipment that should comply with Annex DD (4.2.1)
Additional requirements for rotating solid media (4.2.11)
Additional requirements for UV radiation (4.3.13.3 & 4.3.13.4)
Modified requirement for LEDs whose compliance standard is changed to IEC 62471 (4.3.13.5)
Additional requirements for protection against moving fan blades (4.4.5)
Additional requirements for evaluation of IC current limiters (Annex CC)
Additional requirements for the mounting of rack-mounted equipment (Annex DD)
Additional requirements for household and home/office document/media shredders (Annex EE)
Source: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/80587/what-are-the-regulatory-requirements-that-will-halt-the-sale-of-the-mac-pro-in-e
Tomi Engdahl says:
GameStop’s Mayan Apocalypse
http://www.goozernation.com/index.php/news/item/240-will-the-next-generation-mean-the-end-for-gamestop?
The rumor mill is saying the next generation of consoles might not play used games. What does this mean for retailers such as Amazon, GameStop, and Best Buy? Will gamers flock to the one console that can still play used games? GoozerNation speculates if the Mayan apocalyspse draws near for used game sales
If none of the consoles can play used games I could see the price of games coming down.
PC gaming is an entirely different topic. That is an industry where pirating has been going on for years. Although they have tried to combat it with CD keys etc, PC games are getting so cheap digitally that it makes sense to just buy them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 7 Still Being Sold On Up To 93% of British PCs
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/02/19/1411246/windows-7-still-being-sold-on-up-to-93-of-british-pcs
Customers quickly began to specify systems with Windows 7, those with Windows 8 “took delivery and wanted to change back to Windows 7″ – a process the firm described as a “nightmare”.
Another firm found success by installing a “start menu” tool on Windows 8 machines
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux 3.8 Released
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/02/19/0136213/linux-38-released
“Linux kernel 3.8 has been released. This release includes support in Ext4 for embedding very small files in the inode, which greatly improves the performance for these files and saves some disk space. “
Tomi Engdahl says:
NVIDIA Announces Tegra 4i, Formerly Project Grey, With Integrated LTE and Phoenix Reference Design
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6753/nvidia-announces-tegra-4i-formerly-project-grey-with-integrated-lte
It has been a while since we’ve heard anything about Project Grey, the first NVIDIA SoC with an integrated digital baseband, and the result of NVIDIA’s acquisition of soft-modem manufacturer Icera. Today, NVIDIA is ready to formalize Project Grey as Tegra 4i
First, Tegra 4i includes the familiar 4+1 arrangement of cores we’ve seen since Tegra 3, but instead of Tegra 4′s A15s, 4i includes ARM Cortex A9 CPUs running at a maximum single core clock of 2.3 GHz, we’re still waiting on a breakdown of the clock rates for dual and quad configuration, as well as the shadow core.
The 4i SoC is also built on TSMC’s 28 HPM process, interestingly enough not the 28 HPL process used for Tegra 4. As Tegra 4i appears to be geared towards hitting very high clock speeds, the use of TSMC’s 28nm HPM process makes sense.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell’s Linux Ultrabook gets more pixels, European availability
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/dells-linux-ultrabook-gets-more-pixels-european-availability/
New 1080p screen addresses the biggest problem Ars readers had with the device.
In this case, “1080p” means a 1920×1080p screen. The laptop’s US Dell store page doesn’t specify the panel type, though it does note that it features a brightness of 350 nits and almost a 180 degree viewing angle, so it’s almost certainly an IPS panel.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple accounts for 20% of all 2012 US consumer technology sales revenue
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/19/apple-accounted-for-20-of-all-2012-us-consumer-technology-sales-revenue
Apple was the third-largest consumer technology retailer in the U.S. in 2012, while its products accounted for the largest share of revenue among consumer tech companies.
Apple’s revenue easily beat out rival Samsung, which came in second with 9.3 percent, up from 7 percent in 2011. The rest of the top five saw their share of revenue fall in 2012: HP dipped from 8.9 percent in 2011 to 8.2 percent last year, while Sony and Dell both slid to 4.4 percent and 3 percent, respectively.
As a result, despite the gains seen by Apple and Samsung, retail sales in U.S. consumer technology declined 2 percent to $143 billion in 2012, according to NPD. Sales were also off less than 1 percent in 2011.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ubuntu for tablets revealed with split screen multi-tasking, preview for Nexus slates coming this week
http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/19/ubuntu-for-tablets-revealed/
Here it is: the fourth and final piece of the Ubuntu puzzle. We’ve seen the OS on smartphones, on TVs and of course on desktops, but the tablet version has spent a little longer in its dressing room. Fortunately, Canonical feels that the last stage in its four-screen strategy is now ready for the limelight and has released a video of the software in action.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Source: The PS4 Will Be Out This November, And You’ll Be Able To Control It With Your Phone
http://kotaku.com/5985356
A reliable Kotaku source has informed us that the PlayStation 4, codenamed Orbis, will be out this November in the United States.
Although nothing is confirmed just yet, as we get closer and closer to the release of Orbis, which Sony is expected to officially announce during an event in New York City tomorrow night
Orbis is also following the path first set by Xbox Live: our source says “most” of the PS4′s online features will require a premium subscription to use. Sony’s new online service will be called PlayStation World, our source says, replacing PlayStation Plus.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Firefox 19 launches with desktop PDF viewer, Android themes and lower CPU limits to support 15m more phones
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/02/19/firefox-19-launches-with-built-in-pdf-viewer-on-desktop-theme-support-and-lower-cpu-requirements-on-android/
Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 19 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The improvements include a built-in PDF viewer on the desktop and theme support on Google’s mobile platform.
The biggest addition in this release is PDF.js, a JavaScript library intended to convert PDF files into HTML5, which was started by Andreas Gal and Chris Jones as a research project that eventually picked up steam within Mozilla Labs. Technically, the tool has been in Firefox for many versions, but you had to manually enable it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft job post gives more info about ‘Windows Blue’
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57569770-75/microsoft-job-post-gives-more-info-about-windows-blue/
A new job posting by the company verifies that Windows Blue will include user experience improvements, not just under-the-covers interface tweaks. Bonus: There’s a reference to “Windows Phone Blue” on Microsoft’s job site, too.
If there’s any doubt that the Windows client team is laser-focused on the coming Blue refresh of Windows 8, a new Microsoft job post makes it even plainer.
Blue is the codename for the next wave of Windows-related operating system and services updates from Microsoft, according to my contacts. There will be a Blue update to Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Phone 8 and the Windows Services like Hotmail and SkyDrive — all of which are slated to wash up in roughly the same timeframe, my sources have said. Last year, one tipster told me Microsoft was aiming to deliver Windows Blue around late summer 2013.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sony announces PlayStation 4 with 8-core x86 processor, 8GB GDDR5 memory and DualShock 4 controller
http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2013/02/21/sony-announces-playstation-4/
Today at a gaming event in New York City, Sony announced the PlayStation 4. Sony’s Andy House says that it is the ‘most powerful platform ever’.
The machine runs on standard PC hardware. An x86 processor similar to those used in many windows machines, a standard (though customized) graphics processor and GDDR5 memory. The 8-core processor and GPU are unified, providing 170GPBS bandwidth.
The new system uses a DualShock 4 controller with a touchpad, share button, lightbar and headphone jack. The lightbar mates with a camera system on the PS4 that allows the console to track the depth (distance away) of the player.
The new system uses a DualShock 4 controller with a touchpad, share button, lightbar and headphone jack. The lightbar mates with a camera system on the PS4 that allows the console to track the depth (distance away) of the player.
There is background uploading and downloading, allowing the console to update game and system items in the background even if the main power is off. Digital titles can even be played while they are being downloaded. This is a huge upgrade over the PS3 which was famous for its lame handling of system updates which set game play back by tens of minutes every time you fired up the console while it updates.
Gaikai technology will allow you to ‘instantly experience’ any title that you’d like to try. Basically you’ll be able to try out any game demo you like and buy it if you like playing with it. This means that you can choose and play any title online, streaming it nearly instantly before you have to buy it.
Gaikai’s technology is also behind the spectating feature of the PS4 which allows you to share your gaming session with a button push and allows friends to jump in and take over control to help you.
In this announcement, Sony clearly showed that it was targeting the ‘gamers’ out there, rather than Microsoft’s more general push towards capturing household entertainment at large. There were some nods to streaming services like Netflix and more, but the overall presentation seemed oddly focused on the gaming aspects of a ‘living room PC’ when the rest of the industry is branching out from there.
Unfortunately, with no picture of the console, pricing or availability beyond ‘holiday 2013′, it’s hard to make any judgements at this point.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sony Bets On The Past, Forfeits the Future
http://blogs.forrester.com/james_mcquivey/13-02-20-sony_bets_on_the_past_forfeits_the_future
While the technology that goes into the console is definitely of the future, the idea behind the PS4 is rooted firmly in the past. Specifically, the PS4 yearns for a glory day of gaming, around 2006, when Sony’s PS2 was at the top of the gaming business having sold in the neighborhood of 150 million consoles.
PS3
Though the added horsepower and media functionality cost Sony time to market and drove the cost of the box up, Sony believed then — as it appears to still — that engineering excellence would dictate the success of the next generation of game consoles
Let’s see, how did that work for Sony? Today, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is the best-selling and most widely used game console of the current generation.
Most telling is the fact that Sony did not announce a price for the PS4, possibly because they don’t know yet what it will cost to make, but more likely because they don’t know how aggressively they’ll have to subsidize it to sell it.
Given that, I’ll make a bet of my own about the future: Sony will sell fewer PS4s than it did PS3s.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Chinese Google’ Arms Servers With Cellphone Chips
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/baidu-arm/
As Facebook and Amazon continue to flirt with the idea of running their massive web services on computer chips a lot like the one in your iPhone, a third internet giant has already taken the plunge.
Baidu — best described as the Google of China — is now using ultra-low-power ARM processors to help power an online service where people can store their digital data. It’s yet one more sign that such chips are poised to remake the world of computer servers.
Chips based on the ARM architecture run a majority of the world’s smartphones, including the iPhone and most Google Android phones, and now, a wide range of hardware makers are building ARM chips for the computer servers that drive web services and the sweeping software applications used inside big businesses. The idea is to significantly reduce the power and money needed to operate a computer data center, and clearly some big-name buyers are interested.
Facebook has been testing such chips for months, and Amazon data-center guru James Hamilton has publicly endorsed the idea. Today Facebook and Amazon run all their software on beefy server chips such as Intel’s Xeon and AMD’s Opteron, and the hope is that some of the simpler tasks could be handled by smaller chips that consume less power, including ARM chips. But it appears that both companies are awaiting the arrival of 64-bit ARM processors, which can handle far more computer memory than than the 32-bit chips available today.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung develops a programmable mobile GPU
Using the ARM v7 architecture
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2249399/samsung-develops-a-programmable-mobile-gpu
SAN FRANCISCO: KOREAN CHIP DESIGNER Samsung spent Tuesday here at ISSCC showing off its first GPU that’s programmable in OpenCL and OpenGL as well as DirectX, which is part of a processor based on an ARM v7 architecture.
Samsung measured that a 30fps HD 1080p stream can be encoded or decoded by the CPU when it runs at 1.6GHz – and thus consumes a lot of power. If you move the task to the GPU, then the GPU can perform the same task running at only 160MHz, resulting in 10 times lower power consumption.
The maximum speed of the GPU is 333MHz, supporting 60fps HD 1080p processing when running at full tilt.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Best practices for multicore programming
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/other/4407242/Best-practices-for-multicore-programming
Software “best practices” are often a combination of personal experience, corporate knowledge, group-think, and even customer requirements in some cases. As developers work to create new software or migrate existing software to exploit parallelism in multicore architectures, identifying those best practices is a significant challenge – a challenge that the MCA (Multicore Association) has addressed with its release of the MPP (Multicore Programming Practices) guide.
As Markus Levy, MCA President, writes in the forward to the guide, “…it’s really a work in progress” but here’s a little background on the guide
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sony promises PC-based PlayStation 4 for Christmas
AMD x86 tech helps console break out of Cell
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/21/sony_announces_ps4_for_xmas/
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Sony PlayStation 4 – or, as we say in the trade, a PC.
Yes, the PS4 will indeed be based on an octo-core x86-compatible processor, incorporate 8GB of GDDR 5 and will be equipped with a PC-centric GPU. It’ll have a hard drive too, plus the inevitable Blu-ray drive. It will incorporate 802.11n Wi-Fi.
It’s an inevitable move, perhaps. Just as the Mac became a PC running Mac OS X a decade ago, so now PlayStation shifts to the Intel world.
The PS4 also automatically copies the screen buffer to the hard drive, compressing your cool moves and fails in shareable video form. Rather than go down the Wii U route and turn the controller into a second screen, Sony is looking to Android phones and tablets – Apple iDevices too – to take on that role, as well as the PS Vita.
Tomi says:
WSJ: Google developing touch-capable Chromebooks
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21504319
Rumors of a touch-enabled Chromebook have gained added credibility, after a new report from The Wall Street Journal today.
Quoting sources “familiar with the matter”, the publication said that touch-enabled Chromebooks will be sold later this year. However, there’s still no information on availability or pricing. We also have no idea which hardware manufacturer has been tapped by Google to build the Chromebook. With Acer, HP, Lenovo and Samsung selling, or working on Chromebooks, Google has a ready pool of manufacturers to tap on.
If Google does release a touchscreen Chromebook, it would join an increasing number of touch-capable Windows laptops. It could also put pressure on Apple to add touch to its MacBooks.