Gartner believes that software and hardware companies do better in 2013 than last year. I hope so this happens, it would be good for the industry. Gartner Says Worldwide IT Spending Forecast to Reach $3.7 Trillion in 2013. That would be 4.2 percent increase from 2012 spending. At the moment uncertainties surrounding prospects for an upturn in global economic growth are the major retardants to IT growth. According to the IT market research form Forrester IT market will grow globally by 3.3 per cent this year in U.S. dollar terms. Europe continues to decline (except Nordic countries, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), and growth is slower in Japan and India.
Worldwide IT spending increases were pretty anemic as IT and telecom services spending were seriously curtailed last year. Gartner believes that this uncertainty is nearing resolution and thus Earth’s anemic IT budgets to bounce back in 2013. Wall Street Beat: 2013 IT Spending Forecasts Look Upbeat article mentions that fiscal cliff deal will help unlock spending on mobility, analytics, collaboration and security technology.
According to the EPA, the average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year. There is again a Campaign To Remove Paper From Offices. A campaign started by HelloFax, Google, Expensify, and others has challenged businesses to get rid of physical paper from their office environment in 2013. The Paperless 2013 project wants to move all documents online. The digital tools that are available today. The paperless office technology is here – we just need to use it more than our printers.
Intel x86 and ARM duopoly will continue to dominate this year. Both of the processor will sell well on their own main application fields, and they try to push to each others territories. This means that ARM tries to push to servers and x86 is trying to push more heavily to mobile devices.
Software manufacturers aim to hardware business: Microsoft, Valve, Google etc..
Still IT buyers expect too much from software they buy. This has happened earlier for long time and I expect that to continue. IT systems are easier to develop than user brains, but still system that are hard to learn are pushed to users.
IT service companies sill “sell air”. It is a good business to sell promises first and then when you get money try to do make the promised product with it. And are you sure that the backups your service provider makes can really be restored?
This year will not be a year for Linux on desktop. The fact that currently Amazon’s top selling laptop runs on Linux does not change that. Linux is more heading to smart phones and tablets that to win normal desktop.
Gaming on Linux gets boost. Valve released Steam gaming system for LinuxUbuntu users have run to use Steam game service (at the moment 0.8% of Steam users use Ubuntu, the service was started to as beta on December 2012). Valve will release this year it’s own Linux based Steam Box gaming console. Exclusive interview: Valve’s Gabe Newell on Steam Box, biometrics, and the future of gaming.
Windows 8 slow start continues. Windows 8 sales are well below projections. Computer sales dropped after release of Windows 8. U.S. consumers hesitant to make switch to Windows 8. Uncertainty could turn Windows 8 into the next Vista. Independent report says that Windows 8 Even Less Popular Than Vista and Microsoft voice says that its new OS are chugging along quite nicely, thank you very much, in much the same fashion as Windows 7 before it. Who to believe? Let’s wait and see what happens. I expect that some users will get Significant booting challenges on EFI systems when upgrading to Windows 8.
Interest in Java will decrease compared to other languages for various reasons, recent security issues playing part on that. C Beats Java As Number One Language According To TIOBE Index. It happened already.
Software optimization becomes again talked about when CPU usage on cloud system is easily measured and costs money. Cost-Aware Architectures will be talked bout. Keeping control over cost, architecturally, is just plain hard. Usually engineers we are remarkably badly trained in thinking about cost, but corporate bean counters can now start to ask how we save cost in running the software in cloud. Pinterest Cut Costs from $54 to $20 Per Hour by Automatically Shutting Down Systems.
The world of smart connected devices (desktops, notebook, tabs and smartphones) is becoming bigger and bigger on the expense of traditional PC manufacturers. At the end of 2012 HP is still top of PC league, but trailing fourth in all-devices rankings. Samsung leads the pack in terms of device shipments and Apple is next. Lenovo is the third biggest shifter of devices on the planet. The bets for increased sales are being placed behind smartphones and tablets.
It’s deja vu all over again. You see the phrase “any time, any place, anywhere” in relation to mobile access. Mobile devices bring back that old client-server feeling. The realization dawned that client-server brought with it as many problems as it solved. Following a period of re-centralisation using Web-based architectures, it looks as if we are beginning to come full circle. When the next generation is getting all excited about using mobile apps as front-ends for accessing services across the network, we can’t help noticing parallels with the past. Are HTML5 and cross-platform development and execution environments are now with us to save us? In the real world, the fast and reliable connectivity upon which this model depends just isn’t there in most countries at the moment.
End of netbooks as we know it. Netbook sales go to zero. All major manufacturers in this category has ended making netbooks. They have been replaced with booming tablet sales.
Tablet PC shipments are expected to reach more than 240 million units worldwide in 2013, easily exceeding the 207 million notebook PCs that are projected to ship, according to NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report. The market that has been dominated by one major player, Apple, but Android tablets are quickly getting more market share.
Thin client devices seem to be popping up here and there. Dell introduces HDMI stick that turns any screen into a thin client PC. And so will several other small stick computers coming. Raspberry Pi pocket computer is selling like hot pies (nears one million milestone).
Directly soldered to board CPUs are already norm on smart phone, tablets and some laptops. There will be more and more questions when manufacturers start to drop CPU sockets on the computers. Rumors about Intel Corp.’s plan to abandon microprocessor sockets in the future has been flowing and official response has been:
Intel to Support CPU Sockets for Foreseeable Future. AMD Vows Not to Drop Microprocessor Sockets in Next Two Years. Question is still when transition to BGA starts to happen on desktop PCs.
USB speed will increase again this year. So there is again a new USB version. The future of USB 3.0 coming mid-year with data speeds doubling to 10Gbps. USB 3.0 speed to DOUBLE in 2013 article tells that USB 3.0 – aka SuperSpeed USB – is set to become 10 gigabits per second super-speedy, with a new specification scheduled for a mid-2013 release. The aim is to brings USB closer to the class-leading Thunderbolt standard. It is expected that the new specification ends to consumer hardware a year later.
Higher resolutions will become commonplace. Earlier full HD was a target. Now high end devices are aiming to “retina” and 4K resolutions. Panasonic shows off 20-inch Windows 8 tablet with insane 4K resolution Qualcomm outs Snapdragon 800 and 600: up to 2.3GHz quad-core, 4K video, due by mid 2013.
Solid state storage becomes cheaper and cheaper. You can get ssd-storage at as low as less than one dollar per gigabyte. Moore’s Law may not be running out of steam in memory as we have an insatiable appetite for memory these days. Nowadays our tastes are changing from DRAM to nonvolatile flash memory used in SSD device. For example Kingston just unveiled the world’s first 1TB USB stick and SSD drives are also getting bigger every day. We are already encountering floating-gate scaling problems for NAND flash and answer to the scaling problem appears to be growing devices “up”.
2013 in storage is dominated by flash and file systems. We will finally see some all-flash arrays starting to ship from the big boys – and this will bring credibility to some of the smaller players. Management tools are going to be big again. Expect a lot of pain as infrastructure teams try to make things just work.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft enabling Flash by default in Internet Explorer 10 starting March 12th
http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/11/4090878/microsoft-enabling-flash-by-default-windows-8-rt-march-12
Microsoft has just announced that it will permit Flash content to run by default in both Windows RT and Windows 8 beginning tomorrow, March 12th. Until now, compatibility in Internet Explorer 10 has been limited to a select number of sites whitelisted by Microsoft. (Windows 8′s traditional desktop mode has offered full Flash support from the get-go.) But moving forward — and after users apply a software update — the inverse will be true. Microsoft has apparently concluded that web developers have made sufficient progress in bringing touch interactivity to Flash content.
“As a practical matter, the primary device you walk around with should give you access to all the Web content on the sites you rely on. Otherwise, the device is just a companion to a PC.” That last tidbit seems like a clear shot directed at the iPad, which has lacked support for Flash since its release in 2010.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP, SAP talking HANA-as-a-service
New acronym! IMCaaS (In-memory-computing-as-a-service)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/12/hp_hana_as_a_service/
HP and SAP are discussing the possibility of introducing an as-a-service edition of the software giant’s Hana in-memory computing product.
Anita Paul, senior director of HP’s industry transformation consulting practice for Asia Pacific and Japan today told The Reg she will shortly meet SAP to discuss creating the service.
Amazon Web Services recently started offering Hana-as-a-service in its usual elastic mode of operation. SAP can also boast several hardware partners for the platform, with IBM, Cisco, Fujitsu and HP, among others, all capable of cooking up a box with the correct specifications.
Sysadmins’ lives may be a little complicated when customers decide they prefer on-premises operations
Tomi Engdahl says:
Upbeat IT directors plan fewer job cuts in 2013
http://www.itpro.co.uk/staffing/19395/upbeat-it-directors-plan-fewer-job-cuts-2013
Optimism returns to IT departments, as numbers plotting job and budget cuts fall.
A new report suggests IT directors are feeling more optimistic about the future, with fewer of them anticipating job and budget cuts this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
High Tech Vending Machines Transform IT Support At Facebook
http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/03/13/0013237/high-tech-vending-machines-transform-it-support-at-facebook
“installing custom-made vending machines around the Facebook campus that dispense computer accessories instead of snacks and sodas. When Facebook engineers spill coffee on their keyboard (a common mishap), they head to a nearby vending machine instead of hitting up their IT guy or just grabbing a replacement from a nearby cabinet. They swipe their badge, key in their selection and voila — a brand new keyboard drops down for them to take. According to Campos, they’ve reduced the cost of managing replacement accessories by about 35%. While products found in the vending machines are free, items are clearly marked with price tags so employees can see the retail value of each accessory they take”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel releases Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 dev code, adds dual-boot option for Windows 8
http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/12/intel-android-jelly-bean-4-2-2-dev-code/
Intel’s in the tricky position of playing Android iteration catch-up — but it’s getting better at it.
The company’s Open Source Technology Center devs have been working on the Android Open-Source Project to ensure it works well on Intel-powered devices, whether that’s PCs for debugging and testing or those still-rare Intel smartphones. Now powered by the Linux 3.8 kernel, there’s a new interactive installer, plus the new ability to dual-boot on a Windows 8 system.
Tomi Engdahl says:
MSFT: Win 8 Failing to Stem Tablet Tide, Says Nomura
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2013/03/13/msft-win-8-failing-to-stem-mobile-tide-says-nomura/
Windows 8, which went on sale at the end of October, has proven “awkward,” writes Sherlund, given that it is trying to bridge the PC and the tablet world, though the situation may improve with time:
Some of the reason is Windows 8’s awkwardness and compromise in trying to bridge the two platforms and some is that it will take time to deliver more compelling form factors and lower prices and a richer ecosystem of developers and apps for the Microsoft store. There is room for skepticism after the sluggish start so far with Windows 8, but there is also reason for optimism about the second half of calendar 2013 when several improvements converge.
The best hope for Win 8 at the moment are the enterprise customers
Tomi Engdahl says:
Educational Linux distro provides tech-bundle for kids and educators
http://opensource.com/education/13/3/ubermix-linux
How are we going to teach the next generation about open source and Linux? More importantly, how can we get the right technology into classrooms to empower our educators to teach our children the open source way?
The opportunities that open source presents to education and academics is growing each day. Opensource.com highlights individual tools like Scratch and TuxPaint that are starting to make an impact—but, what about an entire education distribution?
Enter Ubermix.
Ubermix is a Linux distribution built by educators, for educators, and for students, “with an eye towards student and teacher empowerment.” That’s why the “desktop” looks like a mobile phone. And it comes pre-installed with tons of open source applications that are geared toward education and creativity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Surface Tablet Is Said to Fall Short of Predictions
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-14/microsoft-s-surface-tablet-is-said-to-fall-short-of-predictions.html
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) has sold about 1.5 million Surface devices, people with knowledge of the company’s sales said, a slow start in its bid to crack the fast-growing tablet market to make up for slumping personal-computer demand.
Microsoft has sold little more than a million of the Surface RT version and about 400,000 Surface Pros since their debuts, according to three people
The poor reception for Surface, unveiled last year, adds to challenges facing Microsoft’s Windows unit, which brings in a quarter of the company’s revenue.
By contrast, Apple Inc. sold 22.9 million iPads in the quarter that ended in December. Worldwide tablet shipments reached 128.3 million units in 2012, according to IDC. Apple’s iPad accounted for 51 percent of the market.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows Phone 9 testing begins; also, Windows 9 gets a mention from Microsoft
http://msftkitchen.com/windows-phone-9-testing-begins-also-windows-9-gets-a-mention-from-microsoft
With all the excitement and speculation surrounding Windows Blue as of late, I thought I would take a jaunt around a few trusty avenues to see if anyone was making mention of products beyond Blue — namely, Windows 9 and Windows Phone 9.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PS4 not worth the cost, says Nvidia
http://www.gamespot.com/news/ps4-not-worth-the-cost-says-nvidia-6405300
Chip-maker Nvidia didn’t want to work with Sony “at the price those guys were willing to pay.”
Nvidia passed on its hardware being used in the PlayStation 4 due to the “opportunity cost.”
Announced by Sony earlier this month, the upcoming PS4 is powered by rival chip-maker AMD. The company is also strongly rumoured to be behind the hardware of the next Xbox, but Nvidia does not appear to be troubled by the loss.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The inside story of Lenovo’s ThinkPad redesign
http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/17/the-inside-story-of-lenovo-thinkpad-redesign/
“When you talk to end users about ports, they’ll tell you how much they need them. They’ll talk about the vast number of USB devices that they have. It’s easy to hear that and determine that you need five or more ports based on what these people report. When you watch these people work, however, and you’re more overt in your methods — you rarely see that happening.
Sometimes, there’s a conflict between what someone reports they need and what they require.”
“They always ended up preferring something thinner when you ask them to think about choices and ask them to tell you what’s most important.”
“People today prioritize the visual aesthetic more so than ever before — it’s hugely important.”
Aesthetics are so important, in fact, that Lenovo has finally flipped the exterior lid logo so that it’s properly situated when viewing it as a bystander.
Having 18 months to receive feedback, iterate, slash-and-burn, listen a little more and hammer on additional prototypes was liberating.
“It’s a little like editing a book — you never feel like you’re done,” she said. “But, of course, there are realities like schedules and roadmaps. We were very fortunate in this project to have started it early, so we didn’t have to rush through it. Along the way, we kept a close eye on how things were progressing — if something wasn’t up to par, we kept going.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Five reasons not to trust IT staff … and five reasons why you should
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/iaas/5373/five-reasons-not-trust-it-staff-and-five-reasons-why-you-should
A recent survey by service provider Six Degrees revealed that IT people are less trusted than politicians, lawyers, estate agents and, gulp, journalists.
Can you trust the IT department? Here are some reasons why not – and some reasons why you should.
Why not trust:
The IT department has no business acumen
Lack of clarity on technical know-how
Staff do things differently in the IT department
Favouritism
The IT department is focused on the past
Five reasons why you should trust the IT department:
You can work with them
Under the right conditions, IT bosses will love the cloud.
They’re just not convinced yet
“The cloud could make their life easier,”
Everyone loves the IT department now
“The IT department can be a key component in delivering business value,”
Stop treating IT like a cost and they will work better for you.
It’s a powerful weapon that just needs handling
The IT department is like an anchor – you need to use it tactically
Stability
The IT department won’t go bust on you and leave you high and dry.
IT managers are fairly conservative
… They’re not salespeople
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hardware
Build a BONKERS gaming PC
Money to burn? Put it to use building a monstrously powerful games rig
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/18/feature_build_a_bonkers_pc/
There is a select band of gamers who will only be satisfied by a huge amount of graphics and processing power. For them, the only thing to do is build a bonkers gaming PC.
The sensible and cautious way to proceed, then, is to do things in stages. Buy the case and power supply; install the motherboard, CPU and memory; hook up the cooling; bung in some storage followed by a few graphics cards and – voila – you have a bonkers PC. The slow and steady approach will take you a few weeks but should avoid commonly made mistakes
Alternatively, you can finalise your plans, go for broke and order a stack of hardware in one hit and that way keep the carriage costs to a minimum while also saving time.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rackspace: Why we’re designing our own cloud servers
Just what will it take to compete with Amazon and Google
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/18/rackspace_server_fleet_open_compute/
Any cloud computing provider that wants to operate at scale and compete against its peers is under pressure to build some kind of custom hardware. It may, in fact, be necessary to compete at all.
That is what Rackspace, which is making the transition from website
hosting to cloud systems, believes.
“were buying motherboards, processors, and everything piecemeal, and we assembled these tower-chassis form-factors on metal bread racks and it was really not very sexy.”
“We mimicked what the enterprise would do in their data centre to go win business from those enterprises,”
Rack servers evolved and matured
“Now,” said Engates, “we are basically back to our own designs because it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to put cloud customers on enterprise gear. Clouds are different animals – they are architected and built differently, customers have different expectations, and the competition is doing different things.”
Rackspace has been pretty quiet about what it has been doing with Open Compute up until earlier this year, and part of that is Rackspace’s decision to radically change its business with both OpenStack and Open Compute.
The custom Open Compute machines cost anywhere from 18 to 22 per cent less to build than the bespoke boxes from HP and Dell that make up about 18 per cent of the Rackspace server fleet, which is about 16,300 of the 90,525 boxes that were running at the end of December across the cloud company’s data centres.
“We have all kinds of horses in the barn, but for the past 18 months, we have been only dealing in high-density compute with boxes completely maxed out. We will run almost 20 kilowatts per cabinet, so it is very dense compute,” said Roenigk.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia, Continuum team up to sling Python at GPU coprocessors
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/18/nvidia_continuum_pyhton_on_cuda_gpu/
The Tesla GPU coprocessor and its peers inside your Nvidia graphics cards will soon speak with a forked tongue. Continuum Analytics has been working with the GPU-maker to create the NumbaPro Python-to-GPU compiler.
Nvidia asked CodeEval.com, which does programming projects and contests, for some sense of what hackers prefer, and the chart above shows what programming languages were in use across more than 100,000 code samples. As you can see, Python came out ahead of Java, which has nearly three times the programmers (supposedly). The conventional wisdom is that there are around 10 million Java programmers in the world.
Nvidia did not do the Python integration with its CUDA programming environment for its Tesla GPU coprocessors and various video cards. But it helped in a way when it ditched its own C and C++ compilers for its GPUs and moved to the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) toolchain back in December 2011.
One of the purposes of making the LLVM toolchain at the heart of the CUDA environment and tossing out its own Parallel Thread Execution, or PTX, toolchain was to get more languages supporting processing directly on GPUs. The Portland Group (PGI) Fortran compilers, which were originally done with the PTX toolchain when they came out in 2009, have been shuffled to LLVM, and now Continuum has done the work to make its Python stack hook into LLVM and speak proper GPU.
The NumbaPro tool is part of Continuum’s Accelerate add-on for its commercial-grade Anaconda Python distribution. The Anaconda tool is completely free and runs on 32-bit and 64-bit Linux and Windows distributions and 64-bit Mac OS operating systems running on Intel-based Apple gear.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lenovo: Windows 8 is so good, everyone wants Windows 7
We’ll just leave Redmond’s latest OS on this DVD, over here. When you want it
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/03/18/lenovo_windows8_meh/
You don’t notch up 15 consecutive quarters of growth in a declining market without doing something right – so what’s PC maker Lenovo doing right?
Well, many things. But it can’t do any harm that Lenovo is protecting enterprises from the waterboarding torture of the Microsoft Windows 8 operating system. The majority of Lenovo’s enterprise shipments have Windows 7 installed; the touchscreen-friendly Windows 8 is discreetly bundled on its own separate disc.
Lenovo has learned from the Windows Vista experience that the official Microsoft “downgrade” path can be painful. So the machines are “downgraded” to Windows 7 by default. Of course, that’s exactly what customers want – and Lenovo is reaping the benefit of listening to those customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
ITU Aims At 20Mbps Broadband For All By 2020
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/03/19/0027253/itu-aims-at-20mbps-broadband-for-all-by-2020
“commitment that would require countries around the world to ensure that everybody can access broadband internet speeds of 20Mbps from just $20 by 2020. Easier said than done, especially in poorer countries.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Electronics Arts CEO Ousted In Wake of SimCity Launch Disaster
http://slashdot.org/story/13/03/18/2147254/electronics-arts-ceo-ousted-in-wake-of-simcity-launch-disaster
Tomi Engdahl says:
Next-Gen Intel Chip Brings Big Gains For Floating-Point Apps
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/03/18/1839230/next-gen-intel-chip-brings-big-gains-for-floating-point-apps
“Tom’s Hardware has published a lengthy article and a set of benchmarks on the new “Haswell” CPUs from Intel.”
“floating point applications are almost twice as a fast”
Core i7-4770K: Haswell’s Performance, Previewed
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-4770k-haswell-performance,3461.html
A recent trip got us access to an early sample of Intel’s upcoming Core i7-4770K. We compare its performance to Ivy Bridge- and Sandy Bridge-based processors, so you have some idea what to expect when Intel officially introduces its Haswell architecture.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NPD: US homes now hold over 500m Internet-connected devices with apps, at an average of 5.7 per household
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/18/npd-us-homes-now-hold-over-500m-internet-connected-devices-with-apps-at-an-average-of-5-7-per-household/
There are now more than 500 million devices in US homes connected to the Internet. Furthermore, the average number of devices per US Internet household has grown from 5.3 devices just three months ago to 5.7 today.
NPD says PC penetration among US Internet connected households this quarter is “nearly ubiquitous at 93 percent” but was “virtually unchanged” over the last quarter.
“Even with this extraordinary growth in the smartphone and tablet market, PCs are still the most prevalent connected device in U.S. Internet households, and this is a fact that won’t be changing any time soon,”
“However, when you look at the combined number of smartphones and tablets consumers own, for the first time ever it exceeded the installed base of computers.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs Can Be Catalysts for Change in the Postdigital Enterprise
http://www.cio.com/article/730249/CIOs_Can_Be_Catalysts_for_Change_in_the_Postdigital_Enterprise?page=1&taxonomyId=3154
In the postdigtal enterprise, analytics, mobile, social, cloud and cyber will become the new basis for competition. This coming change presents an opportunity for the CIO to become the CEO’s most trusted adviser.
For CIOs, it is the best of times and the worst of times. Five macro forces—analytics, mobile, social, cloud and cyber—are disrupting the nature of IT and carrying businesses into the postdigital era.
The possibility is there for the CIO role to fade into irrelevance, with IT becoming a utility that’s managed as a distributed function across the business. But the opportunity is also there for the CIO to become the catalyst for transforming the business, a trusted adviser that helps CEOs navigate the digital business environment.
“The postdigital era, like the post-industrial era, reflects a ‘new normal’ for business and a new basis for competition,” says Mark White, principal and CTO of Deloitte Consulting. “In post-industrial times, we didn’t forego industrialization, we embraced it. The postdigital era is similar, but with digitalization as its core.”
“CIOs are in a unique position to be the harbingers of change,”
“At the same time, the five postdigital forces are changing the very nature of IT,” Gandhi and Briggs say. “Mobile has destroyed constraints based on physical location. Users now expect that the power of the enterprise should be available at the point where decisions are made and where business is transacted—no matter where that is. Social is flattening internal hierarchies, rewriting the possibilities of global collaboration inside and outside of organization boundaries and allowing engagement with consumers as individuals—customer segments of one.
Analytics are unlocking insights from data to support human decision-making—from big data and transactional data to visualization techniques to fuel descriptive, predictive and prescriptive decision and action. Cloud has changed the economics and cadence of technology investments. On the subscriber side, a growing collection of services is available for subscription—with an acquisition model that is elastic in both cost and capacity.
On the provider side, cloud presents opportunities to monetize information and services in new ways—new or adjacent business models for many sectors, not just high tech, media and entertainment. Cyber security and privacy are part of a constant conversation—guiding innovation in emerging spaces in advance of regulatory concerns, while also dealing with relentless and growing threats.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
ARM head legs it from core body: CEO Warren East retires
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/19/arm_warren_east_retiring/
ARM Holdings’ chief executive Warren East is stepping down after nearly 12 years leading the British tech success story.
East, 52, is retiring on 1 July, 2013, and will be replaced by 45-year-old ARM president Simon Segars, processor core designer ARM confirmed this morning.
ARM chairman John Buchanan said in a statement that East had transformed ARM during his tenure – from a single processor product line found mainly in mobile phones and other handheld gadgets to a broad portfolio of technologies used in nine billion chips.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia says FPGAs choke video processing performance
Can’t feed the GPU fast enough
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2255611/nvidia-says-fpgas-choke-video-processing-performance
SAN JOSE: AT THE GPU TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE (GTC) today, Nvidia said its graphics cards are usually IO bound by field programmable gate array (FPGA) video capture boards.
Nvidia often promotes its work to the video industry claiming its GPUs accelerate the workflow for video editors. However the firm said that the performance of its GPUs is limited by the amount of data that can be fed from video capture devices that typically use FPGA boards.
He said, “The transfers are important. For video processing you are IO bound primarily. It’s not just a question about just throwing everything at the GPU you have to balance it all across a heterogeneous architecture. So that’s another thing that prompts us to primarily put stuff on the CPU and use the GPU as a co-processor. There’s certain things you have to do on the GPU, anything with motion graphics should be going to the GPU, you don’t want to do anything on the CPU.”
“Part of the IO bound-ness actually comes from the PCI [Express] bus.”
“Codecs are still [running] on the CPU. So you go from storage host memory, CPU uncompressed and pass that information around. What if the codecs are on the board?”
Page injected, “Don’t move the full frame, move the compressed frame and then either decompress by CUDA or dedicated silicon.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Acceleware says most CUDA applications are memory bound
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2255592/acceleware-says-most-cuda-applications-are-memory-bound
Acceleware said at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) today that most algorithms that run on GPGPUs are bound by GPU memory size.
Both AMD and Nvidia provide general purpose GPU (GPGPU) accelerator parts that provide significantly faster computational processing than traditional CPUs, however they have only between 6GB and 8GB of local memory that constrains the size of the dataset the GPU can process. While developers can push more data from system main memory, the latency cost negates the raw performance benefit of the GPU.
Kelly Goss, training program manager at Acceleware, said that “most algorithms are memory bound rather than GPU bound” and “maximising memory usage is key” to optimising GPGPU performance.
The point Goss was making is that GPU computing is relatively cheap in terms of clock cycles relative to the time it takes to fetch data from local memory, let alone loading GPU memory from system main memory.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Slowing China Shipments Push PC Market From Bad to Worse
http://allthingsd.com/20130318/slowing-china-shipments-push-pc-market-from-bad-to-worse/
Research firm IDC has published its latest take on the state of the personal computer market, and depending on how you look at it — and where you work — it appears to be a case of going from bad to worse.
Slower-than-expected shipments in China brought on in
The market is now expected to decline by 7.7 percent, which is 2 percentage points worse than previously expected. And it could get still worse. The firm won’t rule out a further drop into a double-digit percentage decline before a possible recovery mid-year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Inside AnandTech 2013: Power Consumption
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2013 2:11 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6826/inside-anandtech-2013-power-consumption
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ovum research shows IT services market endured a dismal end to 2012
http://ovum.com/press_releases/ovum-research-shows-it-services-market-endured-a-dismal-end-to-2012/
Last year was the worst for IT services contract activity since 2002, according to research from Ovum. Performance in the three months to the end of December 2012 fell well below the levels seen in the same period of 2011, ensuring that annual IT services contract activity fell to its lowest level for 10 years, both in terms of total contract value (TCV) and deal volume.
In Ovum’s latest analysis of the IT services market* the TCV of deals announced in the fourth quarter of 2012 was $20.8bn, down 34 percent on the same period of the previous year. The number of deals fell 17 percent in the same period and there was a notable lack of megadeals (contracts valued at $1bn or more). While the level of activity in 4Q12 represented a slight improvement on the previous three months of the year, with TCV up 10% from the third quarter of 2012, annual TCV was down on the previous 12 months across both the public and private sector, with the private sector enduring its worst year since 1998 in TCV terms.
“The ongoing economic uncertainty afflicting key markets for IT services such as the US and Europe was a major factor behind the weak performance of the industry in 2012,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Technology That Engineers Love Not Thinking About
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=2732&doc_id=260355&&cid=NL_Newsletters+-+DN+Daily
When I purchase a new product, whether online or at a store, nine times out of 10 everything works without a hitch.
Just like many of you, I’ve gotten used to and expect things to just work, update, sync, connect, and arrive on time every time. I often forget how much work goes on behind the scenes to make the products or services we rely on every day work as expected.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Checkboxes that kill your product
http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill
A little historical baggage can be a dangerous thing when multiplied by a few hundred million individuals
In the currently shipping version, Firefox ships with many options that will render the browser unusable to most people, right in the main settings UI.
How did we get to this point with Firefox? Most of these options exist for historical reasons — whenever there’s a new feature, it often gets a checkbox to turn it off. The other common case is when a feature isn’t obviously useful to everyone, and it’s hard to make an obvious choice about whether to have it enabled by default or not — so we build in a switch.
Design by committee often looks like a row of checkboxes.
What I do want to put the focus on, however, is that you have to perform an audit of your product every so often and see how the people using your product have changed, and what kind of functionality that made sense at the time may not make much sense anymore.
Firefox is very customizable! In fact, it’s so customizable that we allow you to make the browser unusable with a single click.
As Privacy Engineer Monica Chew at Mozilla asks, “Is it really worth having a preference panel that benefits fewer than 2% of users overall?” — obvious spoiler alert: The answer is no.
So what have we learned? There are a lot of options in our products that are used by very few people, and some of them can have disastrous effects. We’re trying to design software that can be used by everyone — that also means we have to keep them safe and not make it so easy to break a product they rely on every day.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Before you choose a supplier of IT …
Well planned is half done. Sorry cliche. IT system projects between just seems like no one has heard of it. The end result looks more like a half-planned.
good advice system projects: hiring the first service designer, and after that think of the project supplier.
Good advice. IT system projects all boils down to good design. It all starts with the design. The design is useful, the system projects a good word, even though I do not believe that it is in constant use.
Basically, the whole thought of Aalto University strives for good design. Good design is not just a tradition and beautiful aesthetics but functionality. A good designer will have to integrate the overall purpose, functionality, and culture surrounding structures.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/blogit/uutiskommentti/ennen+kuin+valitset+ittoimittajan/a888247?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-20032013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia introduces its own Grid-based server: the Visual Computing Appliance
Nvidia has become a big advocate of cloud computing via a huge grid of processors (with graphics chips included) in data centers. And today, the world’s biggest standalone graphics chip maker announced that it will introduce its own server to enable that cloud computing.
That means the users don’t need to have powerful PCs of their own to run applications such as cloud-based games, Huang said.
“Grid VCA is Nvidia’s first-integrated system product,” Huang said.
The move shows that Nvidia is willing to move directly to the market rather than go through partners such as Hewlett-Packard or Dell. At the same time, Nvidia’s has 75 partners for its Grid computing technology, including Dell and HP.
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/19/nvidia-introduces-its-own-grid-based-server-the-visual-computing-appliance/#26B1U1QUpKhm8OsU.99
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia CEO unveils next two gens of Tegra, dubbed Logan, Parker
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57574952-94/nvidia-ceo-unveils-next-two-gens-of-tegra-dubbed-logan-parker/
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang today talked up the chipmaker’s next two generations of mobile chip, saying the Tegra chip line will show a 100-times improvement in strength from the first chip to the fifth.
The current Tegra chip, Tegra 4, hit the market earlier this year. The next generation, coming later this year, is code-named Logan, while the fifth generation of Tegra is code-named Parker, Huang said at the company’s GPU developers’ conference.
Logan will incorporate Nvidia’s Kepler GPU, which currently is dominating the discrete graphics market. It also will include CUDA, Nvidia’s programming model for GPUs that allows users to do many tasks at once.
“In five years time, we’ll increase Tegra by 100 times,” Huang said. “Moore’s Law would suggest an eightfold increase.”
Huang also unveiled Kayla, a development platform for CUDA and OpenGL, an API for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics. Kayla is powered by the Tegra 3 quad-core ARM processor and a next-generation Kepler GPU. It will be available this spring from ARM-based PC providers.
Meanwhile, Huang today also unveiled Nvidia’s next-generation GPUs. The Kepler architecture, which is currently shipping in devices, will be followed by Maxwell in 2014.
Volta comes next. That GPU will have a new technology called stacked memory. Nvidia said it will solve one of the biggest challenges today, which is memory bandwidth for GPU. Volta will take a leap forward and will stack the DRAM on the same silicon substrate. It will carry DRAMs stacked on top of one another.
Huang also introduced the GRID “Visual Computing Appliance,” which is designed to let businesses deliver ultrafast GPU performance to any Windows, Linux, or Mac client on their network.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia and ARM: It’s a parallel, parallel, parallel world
Big changes coming to the CUDA programming model
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/20/the_future_of_cuda/
GTC 2013 Nvidia envisions a future in which ARM processors and the GPU-maker’s CUDA parallel-computing platform and programming model will work together in perfect harmony, and the company has a raft of planned CUDA enhancements to not only make that coexistence seamless, but to enhance that programming environment for discrete GPUs, as well.
“If we look five years out, we expect that ARM will be a very important platform for CUDA,”
Today, there’s no SoC that combines ARM compute cores with a CUDA-enabled GPU, but that’s about to change. Nvidia’s next Tegra processor, code-named “Logan”, will incorporate CUDA 5 support when it hits full production early next year, and its follow-on, “Parker”, will upgrade that capability in a processor that Nvidia president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang promises will have 100 times the performance of 2011′s Tegra 2.
Harris and his team’s work on CUDA aims to make the notoriously difficult parallel programming challenge smoother.
Harris and his team’s work on CUDA aims to make the notoriously difficult parallel programming challenge smoother.
Harris wrapped up his talk with his vision of an ARM-heavy future, when he says “it will be very common to be programming on the CUDA platform on ARM processors, on ARM systems across various industries and architectures.”
And on discrete GPUs, as well. “Of course, we’re Nvidia, so we envision GPUs everywhere,” Harris said
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia welds together ARM-Kepler ceepie-geepie system for the impatient
Development board for CPU-GPU hybrid apps, or nodes in a parallel cluster perhaps
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/20/nvidia_kayla_arm_kepler_system/
GTC 2013 Graphics chip maker Nvidia is also an ARM processor maker, and it wants hybrid ARM-GPU chips just as much as you want them. And in the meantime, if you just can’t wait, the company is working with Italian electronics manufacturer Seco to kick out another ceepie-geepie card that can be used for software development or to build a parallel system if you want to play around.
Kayla definitely sets the stage for the future “Logan” Tegra 5 processors, due next year perhaps. The Logan chips will marry a Tegra ARM processor complex with a Kepler GPU, while the “Parker” Tegra 6 chip will sport a custom 64-bit ARMv8 processor and a “Maxwell” GPU all on the same chip.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft starts to roll out Windows 8 in embedded flavors
Full and cut-down Windows for dumber devices
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/20/windows_8_embedded_launch/
Microsoft has announced the general availability of two flavors of Windows 8 for embedded systems; the Standard and Pro editions.
“Windows Embedded 8 coupled with the full breadth of Microsoft technologies for intelligent systems helps enterprises gain lasting competitive advantages in retail, manufacturing, healthcare and a variety of industries.”
The Pro edition is basically a full version of Windows 8 with some extra software tweaks to suit various embedded device manufacturers, while the Standard edition allows vendors to strip out the parts of Windows 8 they don’t need.
In both cases some attributes of the Windows 8 not-Metro interface can be partially stripped out.
By the beginning of April, Microsoft will also release a Windows Industry edition, which is specifically designed for point of sale devices and other specialized hardware.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/defend-open-web-keep-drm-out-w3c-standards
There’s a new front in the battle against digital rights management (DRM) technologies. These technologies, which supposedly exist to enforce copyright, have never done anything to get creative people paid. Instead, by design or by accident, their real effect is to interfere with innovation, fair use, competition, interoperability, and our right to own things.
That’s why we were appalled to learn that there is a proposal currently before the World Wide Web Consortium’s HTML5 Working Group to build DRM into the next generation of core Web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME. Its adoption would be a calamitous development, and must be stopped.
All too often, technology companies have raced against each other to build restrictive tangleware that suits Hollywood’s whims, selling out their users in the process. But open Web standads are an antidote to that dynamic, and it would be a terrible mistake for the Web community to leave the door open for Hollywood’s gangrenous anti-technology culture to infect W3C standards. It would undermine the very purposes for which HTML5 exists: to build an open-ecosystem alternatives to all the functionality that is missing in previous web standards, without the problems of device limitations, platform incompatibility, and non-transparency that were created by platforms like Flash. HTML5 was supposed to be better than Flash, and excluding DRM is exactly what would make it better.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The companies are in trouble: the cloud is unknown
According to a recent survey conducted by the British companies have problems when proper information on cloud services for workers with nowhere to be found.
Brian Nicholson of Manchester School of Economics, says that the university has made on missing a very valuable information. They do not know how the service should be done and they do not know the risks that the transmission of data over the cloud can cause.
“Students graduate from universities without a knowledge of these commercial practices,” he laments
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/yritykset+ovat+pulassa+pilvea+ei+tunneta/a888414?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-21032013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia says upgrading a Grid VCA server will void the warranty
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2256406/nvidia-says-upgrading-a-grid-vca-server-will-void-warranty
Nvidia announced its Grid VCA server yesterday at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) as a way for customers to stream workstation applications such as AutoCAD and Solidworks to Apple Macs and relatively low specification workstations. However the firm said today that those who buy Grid VCA servers and upgrade the hardware will void the warranty.
Jeff Brown, GM of Nvidia’s Professional Solutions Group, said that the firm will sell the Grid VCA to be treated “as an appliance”. When Nvidia or any other hardware vendor says something will be treated as an appliance it usually means that customers simply buy the machine, install it and perhaps pay a subscription fee without being able to open the box.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia claims that fabbing big chips is not difficult
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2256404/nvidia-claims-that-fabbing-big-chips-is-not-difficult
CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia admitted at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) today that physically large GPUs have difficulty passing verification.
With Nvidia’s Volta GPU architecture stacking DRAM on the same silicon substrate as the GPU, it will require the firm to increase the size of its chips.
Nvidia’s decision to stack DRAM will bring both performance and capacity benefits but it will result in the firm sending larger chip designs to TSMC.
Typically fabs such as TSMC, Globalfoundries and UMC are judged on their yield, that is, the percentage of chips that pass verification. Gupta is indeed right when he says that it isn’t harder to fab larger chips, but the probability of a chip having a defect goes up as chip size – either in physical dimensions or more commonly transistors – increases.
Tomi Engdahl says:
EMC fires anti-Dropbox torpedo to sink off-site biz clouds
In Syn’city, the IT bosses rule the data
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/18/syncplicity_isilon_atmos/
Data centre haunter EMC is testing its Isilon and Atmos storage systems with Syncplicity – the corporate-friendly Dropbox contender it bought in May.
EMC gobbled Syncplicity specifically for its ability to share content and synchronise files in businesses’ private clouds.
It’s hoped workers will be able to pass around sensitive materials on their various smart mobile devices without corporate content controllers losing track of which user was accessing which document.
This can happen when employees get the Dropbox habit and protected company information accidentally leaks into the wild with admin staff having no idea who’s seeing what.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NVIDIA Updates GPU Roadmap; Announces Volta Family For Beyond 2014
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6846/nvidia-updates-gpu-roadmap-announces-volta-family-for-beyond-2014
NVIDIA has publically updated their roadmap with the announcement of the GPU family that will follow 2014’s Maxwell family. That new family is Volta, named after Alessandro Volta, the physicist credited with the invention of the battery.
At this point we know very little about Volta other than a name and one of its marque features, but with how NVIDIA operates that’s consistent with how they’ve done things before.
In any case, Volta’s marque feature will be stacked DRAM, which sees DRAM placed very close to the GPU by placing it on the same package, and connected to the GPU using through-silicon vias (TSVs). Having high bandwidth, on-package RAM is not new technology, but it is still relatively exotic.
The advantage of stacked DRAM for a GPU is that its locality brings with it both bandwidth and latency benefits.
NVIDIA is targeting a 1TB/sec bandwidth rate for Volta, which to put things in perspective is over 3x what GeForce GTX Titan currently achieves with its 384bit, 6Gbps/pin memory bus (288GB/sec). This would imply that Volta is shooting for something along the lines of a 1024bit bus operating at 8Gbps/pin, or possibly an even larger 2048bit bus operating at 4Gbps/pin.
With TSMC shaking up its schedule in an attempt to catch up to Intel on both nodes and technology, the lack of a date ultimately is not surprising since it’s difficult at best to predict when the appropriate node will be ready 3 years out.
Coming from their investor meeting the question came up, and while it wasn’t specifically denied we were also left with no reason to expect Volta to be using FinFET, so make of that what you will.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia’s skirt-chasing chips ogle babes, eyeball Twitter and YouTube
Like what that stranger’s wearing? Snap a pic for image-matching GPU
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/21/nvidia_frocks/
These addresses are usually chock-full of demonstrations showing where we are in terms of state-of-the-art graphics, scientific and technical computing, entertainment, and now: finding dresses. In this demonstration, Huang leafed through the latest edition of In Style magazine.
Using this GPU-accelerated technology, shoppers can snap pics from magazines, newspapers, clothes people on the bus are wearing, stuff on the shelves in the high street, or anything they take a fancy to; and then pull up similar or matching products to purchase online.
In your correspondant’s view, this technology isn’t confined only to dresses.
The company also demonstrated that it’s possible to capture a particular pattern and then search for clothing that has the same, or a similar, look. To my untrained eye, it looked to do a pretty good job.
So – aside from everyone who likes to shop for clothes – who will use this technology? The online shops that want to make it quicker and easier for potential customers to comb through their vast inventories of goods.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Chromebook Pixel: Google must think we’re fools
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/brians-brain/4409938/The-Chromebook-Pixel–Google-must-think-we-re-fools
Sound good? Well, hold onto your hats. The Wi-Fi-only variant of the Chromebook Pixel for sale now costs … drum roll … $1299. The LTE-inclusive model shipping next month is … $1449 (plus a Verizon cellular data subscription, of course). If you’ve priced a MacBook Air, or the Microsoft Surface or another Ultrabook, you know how poorly the Chromebook Pixel stacks up in this regard, even though it contains a fraction of the competitors’ system memory and mass storage capacities. Not to mention its inherent operating system limitations. Does a touchscreen (versus the MacBook Air) mated to an ultra-high-resolution display, along with a built-in (versus USB-tethered) LTE transceiver, counterbalance these shortcomings? I’d tactfully offer that the answer to this question is an emphatic “no”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Firefox Nightly Now Includes OdinMonkey, Brings JavaScript Closer To Running At Native Speeds
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/firefox-nightly-now-includes-odinmonkey-brings-javascript-performance-closer-to-running-at-native-speeds/
Browsers today are able to execute JavaScript code significantly faster than just a few years ago, but even as our web apps now look more like desktop apps, JavaScript performance is still a far cry from what you can expect from a native program written in something like C or C++. To bridge this gap, Mozilla launched the asm.js project a while back and today, this code has landed in Firefox Nightly. OdinMonkey, Firefox’s name for its asm.js optimization module, allows developers to write their code in C or C++, compile it to JavaScript using Emscripten and run it at a speed that is within 2x of native performance.
Unless the project hits any roadblocks, Mozilla expects OdinMonkey to ship with the stable version of Firefox 22 in June.
Asm.js is a strict subset of JavaScript that “can be used as a low-level, efficient target language for compilers.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
13 Tips for Keeping IT Projects Under Control
http://www.cio.com/article/730342/13_Tips_for_Keeping_IT_Projects_Under_Control?source=cioartmor
How do you keep IT projects under control? Project managers and project management experts share their top tips for keeping IT projects on schedule.
1. Appoint the right project manager for the job.
2. Support the project manager with the right team.
3. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of your project team.
4. Scope out the project then strip it down.
5. Prioritize tasks and come up with guidelines for when priorities conflict.
6. Actively monitor projects, as well as your team.
7. Use project management software.
8. Hold weekly meetings.
9. Manage change.
10. Take a hard line against scope creep.
11. Create milestones for every member of the team–and celebrate them when met.
12. Consider using agile methodology.
13. Track time.
Tomi Engdahl says:
2012 Free Software Award winners announced
http://www.fsf.org/news/2012-free-software-award-winners-announced-2
Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF’s annual Free Software Awards at a ceremony on Saturday, March 23rd
One nomination for OpenMRS read, “OpenMRS is more than a electronic medical record system platform. It is a community of medical professionals, software engineers, and healthcare workers that dedicate their time and skills to help improve the lives of people in the world’s poorest nations.”
OpenMRS joins an impressive list of previous winners, including 2011 winner GNU Health.
More information about both awards, including the full list of previous winners, can be found at http://www.fsf.org/awards.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Glimpse of a Truly Elastic Cloud
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/03/24/0350217/a-glimpse-of-a-truly-elastic-cloud
“Virtual servers in the future may stop using OSes entirely. As recently demonstrated OS-less platforms may change our understanding of how long does it take to bring a server up. A demo server gets created, booted up, configured, runs an application and shuts down in under 1 second.”
“The demo uses a new Erlang runtime system capable of running directly on Xen hypervisor.”
A glimpse of a truly elastic cloud
http://erlangonxen.org/blog/glimpse-truly-elastic
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reliant on Dell for PCs? Start looking around, says Gartner ball-gazer
Mr D may bail on computers before you do, says man
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/03/22/gartner_warning_dell_pc_customers/
Can it really be that enterprise customers should make sure they have an emergency raft ready to head to the shores of rival PC makers should Dell jettison its desktop and notebook portfolio when it goes private?
Yes indeed, says Gartner research director Adrien O’Connell, who reckons Dell will not quit this year but may do further down the line.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows Blue 9364 Screenshots Show Feature Enhancements
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/03/24/2330210/windows-blue-9364-screenshots-show-feature-enhancements
“Assuming this is all completely legitimate, the most obvious change pertains to the Metro UI,”
Windows Blue Build Shows Improved UI and Multitasking
http://hothardware.com/News/Windows-Blue-Build-Shows-Improved-UI-and-Multitasking/
More details have emerged surrounding Windows Blue, the worst-kept secret in tech. Windows9Beta leaked word of a Windows Blue build that was available “somewhere on the Internet”, and apparently at least one WinForum.eu forum user found it, installed it, and let loose a barrage of screenshots.
Do we need another Windows OS?
Microsoft made a case this week for Windows RT. Is it necessary?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57575958-75/do-we-need-another-windows-os/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title
As a counterpoint, Tom Mainelli, research director of tablets at market researcher IDC, told CNET earlier this month that “Microsoft decided to have a smartphone OS, then have Windows RT and Windows 8. I think the distinctions get lost on folks. I think they might be better served by putting more muscle behind Windows 8. Try to make that successful rather than trying to do three OSes.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows Blue leaks online, includes smaller Live Tiles, new side-by-side Snap Views, and IE 11
http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/24/4141286/windows-blue-screenshots-leak-smaller-live-tiles-options-ui
An early build of Windows Blue, the next version of Windows, has leaked online on the same day that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer celebrates his 57th birthday. Build 9364, a partner version that was originally compiled on March 15th, has been made available on file sharing sites and includes some of the new changes that Microsoft is building into its significant Windows 8 update.