Here is my collection of trends and predictions for year 2014:
It seems that PC market is not recovering in 2014. IDC is forecasting that the technology channel will buy in around 34 million fewer PCs this year than last. It seem that things aren’t going to improve any time soon (down, down, down until 2017?). There will be no let-up on any front, with desktops and portables predicted to decline in both the mature and emerging markets. Perhaps the chief concern for future PC demand is a lack of reasons to replace an older system: PC usage has not moved significantly beyond consumption and productivity tasks to differentiate PCs from other devices. As a result, PC lifespan continue to increase. Death of the Desktop article says that sadly for the traditional desktop, this is only a matter of time before its purpose expires and that it would be inevitable it will happen within this decade. (I expect that it will not completely disappear).
When the PC business is slowly decreasing, smartphone and table business will increase quickly. Some time in the next six months, the number of smartphones on earth will pass the number of PCs. This shouldn’t really surprise anyone: the mobile business is much bigger than the computer industry. There are now perhaps 3.5-4 billion mobile phones, replaced every two years, versus 1.7-1.8 billion PCs replaced every 5 years. Smartphones broke down that wall between those industries few years ago – suddenly tech companies could sell to an industry with $1.2 trillion annual revenue. Now you can sell more phones in a quarter than the PC industry sells in a year.
After some years we will end up with somewhere over 3bn smartphones in use on earth, almost double the number of PCs. There are perhaps 900m consumer PCs on earth, and maybe 800m corporate PCs. The consumer PCs are mostly shared and the corporate PCs locked down, and neither are really mobile. Those 3 billion smartphones will all be personal, and all mobile. Mobile browsing is set to overtake traditional desktop browsing in 2015. The smartphone revolution is changing how consumers use the Internet. This will influence web design.
The only PC sector that seems to have some growth is server side. Microservers & Cloud Computing to Drive Server Growth article says that increased demand for cloud computing and high-density microserver systems has brought the server market back from a state of decline. We’re seeing fairly significant change in the server market. According to the 2014 IC Market Drivers report, server unit shipment growth will increase in the next several years, thanks to purchases of new, cheaper microservers. The total server IC market is projected to rise by 3% in 2014 to $14.4 billion: multicore MPU segment for microservers and NAND flash memories for solid state drives are expected to see better numbers.
Spinning rust and tape are DEAD. The future’s flash, cache and cloud article tells that the flash is the tier for primary data; the stuff christened tier 0. Data that needs to be written out to a slower response store goes across a local network link to a cloud storage gateway and that holds the tier 1 nearline data in its cache. Never mind software-defined HYPE, 2014 will be the year of storage FRANKENPLIANCES article tells that more hype around Software-Defined-Everything will keep the marketeers and the marchitecture specialists well employed for the next twelve months but don’t expect anything radical. The only innovation is going to be around pricing and consumption models as vendors try to maintain margins. FCoE will continue to be a side-show and FC, like tape, will soldier on happily. NAS will continue to eat away at the block storage market and perhaps 2014 will be the year that object storage finally takes off.
IT managers are increasingly replacing servers with SaaS article says that cloud providers take on a bigger share of the servers as overall market starts declining. An in-house system is no longer the default for many companies. IT managers want to cut the number of servers they manage, or at least slow the growth, and they may be succeeding. IDC expects that anywhere from 25% to 30% of all the servers shipped next year will be delivered to cloud services providers. In three years, 2017, nearly 45% of all the servers leaving manufacturers will be bought by cloud providers. The shift will slow the purchase of server sales to enterprise IT. Big cloud providers are more and more using their own designs instead of servers from big manufacturers. Data center consolidations are eliminating servers as well. For sure, IT managers are going to be managing physical servers for years to come. But, the number will be declining.
I hope that the IT business will start to grow this year as predicted. Information technology spends to increase next financial year according to N Chandrasekaran, chief executive and managing director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest information technology (IT) services company. IDC predicts that IT consumption will increase next year to 5 per cent worldwide to $ 2.14 trillion. It is expected that the biggest opportunity will lie in the digital space: social, mobility, cloud and analytics. The gradual recovery of the economy in Europe will restore faith in business. Companies are re-imaging their business, keeping in mind changing digital trends.
The death of Windows XP will be on the new many times on the spring. There will be companies try to cash in with death of Windows XP: Microsoft’s plan for Windows XP support to end next spring, has received IT services providers as well as competitors to invest in their own services marketing. HP is peddling their customers Connected Backup 8.8 service to prevent data loss during migration. VMware is selling cloud desktop service. Google is wooing users to switch to ChromeOS system by making Chrome’s user interface familiar to wider audiences. The most effective way XP exploiting is the European defense giant EADS subsidiary of Arkoon, which promises support for XP users who do not want to or can not upgrade their systems.
There will be talk on what will be coming from Microsoft next year. Microsoft is reportedly planning to launch a series of updates in 2015 that could see major revisions for the Windows, Xbox, and Windows RT platforms. Microsoft’s wave of spring 2015 updates to its various Windows-based platforms has a codename: Threshold. If all goes according to early plans, Threshold will include updates to all three OS platforms (Xbox One, Windows and Windows Phone).
Amateur programmers are becoming increasingly more prevalent in the IT landscape. A new IDC study has found that of the 18.5 million software developers in the world, about 7.5 million (roughly 40 percent) are “hobbyist developers,” which is what IDC calls people who write code even though it is not their primary occupation. The boom in hobbyist programmers should cheer computer literacy advocates.IDC estimates there are almost 29 million ICT-skilled workers in the world as we enter 2014, including 11 million professional developers.
The Challenge of Cross-language Interoperability will be more and more talked. Interfacing between languages will be increasingly important. You can no longer expect a nontrivial application to be written in a single language. With software becoming ever more complex and hardware less homogeneous, the likelihood of a single language being the correct tool for an entire program is lower than ever. The trend toward increased complexity in software shows no sign of abating, and modern hardware creates new challenges. Now, mobile phones are starting to appear with eight cores with the same ISA (instruction set architecture) but different speeds, some other streaming processors optimized for different workloads (DSPs, GPUs), and other specialized cores.
Just another new USB connector type will be pushed to market. Lightning strikes USB bosses: Next-gen ‘type C’ jacks will be reversible article tells that USB is to get a new, smaller connector that, like Apple’s proprietary Lightning jack, will be reversible. Designed to support both USB 3.1 and USB 2.0, the new connector, dubbed “Type C”, will be the same size as an existing micro USB 2.0 plug.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Smartphones take large LCDs out of the game
http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/en/smartphones-take-large-lcds-out-of-the-game.html?cmp_id=7&news_id=222921177&vID=209#
The effects of the penetration of portable smart devices has brought LCD monitor shipments to an historical 10-year record low in the first quarter (Q1) of 2014, reports NPD DisplaySearch in its Quarterly Desktop Monitor Shipment & Forecast.
The market analyst firm says the total desktop monitor shipments reached only 34.2 million, a level unseen since the third quarter (Q3) of 2004, when LCD monitors, including CRTs, fell to 33.3 million units.
Desktop monitor shipments in Q1 2014 decreased 3 percent, quarter over quarter (Q/Q), and 2 percent on yearly basis
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloudy plague will KILL storage vendors, say Gartner mages
The dinosaurs, the weak and the young are all at risk
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/22/cloudy_plague_will_kill_storage_vendors_say_gartner_mages/
“Peak Array” theory, the idea that today’s storage vendors and their products don’t have long to live, has received another endorsement from the on-stage Mages at analyst outfit Gartner’s IT operations and data centre summit in Sydney.
Chandrasekaran said all storage vendors, regardless of size, are suffering from “compressed differentiation.” Features that once represented a year or two of competitive advantage are now replicated in three to six months. Users are therefore willing to wait for their incumbent providers to catch up rather than in acquiring new kit and starting a new vendor relationship.
Another problem for all players, he said, is that there are no longer many performance differentiators of note to distinguish one vendor from its rivals. With grunty multi-core Xeons supplanting the ASICs that once made a storage controller special and and solid state disks both now bog standard
What then of his four scenarios?
Tomi Engdahl says:
EMC’s Project Nile: Elastic Cloud Storage isn’t stretchy enough to fit me
Something’s going to happen here – but WHAT!?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/22/storagebod_emc_project_nile_elastic_cloud_storage/
EMC have finally turned Project Nile into a product and given it the wonderful name of “Elastic Cloud Storage”; there is much to like about it. But before I tell you about those, I’ll point out one thing.
For a product called “Elastic Cloud Storage” it’s not very elastic. At least, not when compared to current public cloud offerings – unless there is a very complicated finance model behind it, and even then it might not be that stretchy.
One of the things that people really like about public cloud storage is that they pay for what they use: if their consumption goes down then their costs go down.
Now EMC can probably come up with a monthly charge based on how much you are using; they certainly can do capacity on demand.
ECS isn’t as elastic as public cloud and this might become very important … unless EMC are relying on the fact that storage demands never seem to go away.
Competitors?
RedHat have an opportunity now with Ceph; especially amongst those who hate EMC for being EMC. IBM could do something with GPFS. HP have a variety of products. There are certainly smaller competitors as well.
And then there’s VMware with VSAN, which I still don’t understand!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Foresees Ads On Your Refrigerator, Thermostat, and Glasses
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/05/21/1852216/google-foresees-ads-on-your-refrigerator-thermostat-and-glasses
“We expect the definition of “mobile” to continue to evolve as more and more “smart” devices gain traction in the market. For example, a few years from now, we and other companies could be serving ads and other content on refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT giants are waiting for the hard times – ” will have to think how to match ”
For large service areas may be facing tough times, even if outsourcing can be expected to continue.
It worked for a long time , the houses will have to think they are offered by the traditional solutions to their customers or cloud. At the same time should be preceded by the question , eat cloud cover traditional IT solution for the evening. The new cloud companies will not again have to think about the same questions.
According to him, the future will be like fewer new contracts , as many of the big companies have already outsourced a lot of their IT.
Source: http://summa.talentum.fi/article/tv/uutiset/65819
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP drops $100 quad-core Android tablet into US market
Hewlett-Packard has undercut its $150 Android Slate 7 with a $100 tablet. And it’s quad-core, to boot..
http://www.cnet.com/news/hp-starts-selling-100-quad-core-android-tablet-in-us/
Quad-core doesn’t get much cheaper than this.
That would be the $99.99 HP 7 Plus, which is now available in the US market, after debuting in Europe a few months ago.
The quad-core processor is a 1GHz A31 provided by Allwinner Technology. The chip is based on the somewhat dated ARM Cortex A7 architecture.
So it’s not the fastest mobile processor on the planet, but it gets the job done for $100.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Trouble With IBM
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-22/ibms-eps-target-unhelpful-amid-cloud-computing-challenges
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Impact of Video Games on Our Minds
https://learni.st/users/SteveSegovia/boards/28443-the-impact-of-video-games-on-our-minds?utm_source=outbrain&utm_medium=paid_cpc&utm_campaign=games
Over the past few decades, video games have become a powerful influence on the way we learn about and perceive the world around us. Let’s take a look at the various effects and benefits of video games upon the human mind.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Computers can impact on children’s ability to learn, says union
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-27513174
A teaching union in Northern Ireland is calling for urgent action over the impact of modern technology on children’s ability to learn at school.
The Association of Teacher and Lecturers (ATL) is concerned at how long children spend on computers and digital gadgets outside school.
It said some pupils were unable to concentrate or socialise properly.
The impact of digital technology is the focus of the union’s annual regional conference in Belfast on Thursday.
Mark Langhammer of the ATL said: “We’re hearing reports of very young children who are arriving into school quite unable to concentrate or to socialise properly because they’re spending so much time on digital games or social media.
“We’d like the Department of Education to issue guidance to all parents on the maximum amount of time which young children should spend on these devices, and on how kids can use digital technology safely and sensibly.”
“We readily appreciate that digital technology can have huge benefits for children,” he said.
“But there seems to be a real lack of awareness about its potential dangers, and we think the Department of Education needs to take action to make parents much more aware of the issues.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP’s performance improved , but up to 16 000 still getting fired
HP’s earnings in the first quarter continued to grow , but the company will still continue to layoffs. The company started its efficiency program two years ago and so far it has been dismissed for 34 , 000 employees .
Layoffs continue in the fall, when the company plans to cut 11 000 to 16 000 jobs. After the layoffs , HP has reduced the total up to 50 000 jobs , which means about 15 per cent of the total workforce.
PCs and notebook manufacturing unit was the only growth figures reported by department. HP , the result was affected by the transition from Windows XP to newer versions of Windows. Printers, technology and business services company earnings declined from last year.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/hpn+tulos+parani+mutta+jopa+16+000+saamassa+silti+potkut/a989585
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Filesystems for Linux
http://www.linux.org/threads/new-filesystems-for-linux.5943/
Developers are always making new filesystems. Four relatively new (2008-2009) filesystems now available to Linux include Tux3, HAMMER, UBIFS, and the Reliance Nitro filesystem.
Tux3 was made by Daniel Phillips and introduced to the Linux kernel v2.6.x in July 2008. This open-source filesystem uses the B-Tree structure and is like other typical Unix inode filesystems (like ext4).
The second new filesystem to discuss is HAMMER which is the default filesystem used by DragonFlyBSD.
HAMMER is known for its great crash and error recovery. HAMMER also uses snapshots to help maintain the integrity of files.
Another new filesystem available to Linux is the Unsorted Block Image File System (UBIFS). This is another raw flash drive filesystem that is an improvement over JFFS2, but is comparable to LogFS. UBIFS supports caching, unlike JFFS2. UBIFS supposedly operates faster and more efficiently than JFFS2.
The Reliance Nitro filesystem
This embedded flash filesystem is supposedly a very fast and fault tolerant filesystem. Reliance Nitro is a proprietary filesystem that users must purchase.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CERN openlab Whitepaper on Future IT Challenges in Scientific Research
https://zenodo.org/record/8765/files/CERNopenlabWhitepaperonFutureICTChallengesinScientificResearchV1.3.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Storage faithful tremble as Gartner mages prep flashy array quadrant
Who’s in… and who’s out
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/20/gartners_flashy_mq/
Gartner’s unveiling of all-flash array rankings in its Magic Quadrant – expected in July this year – has been eagerly anticipated.
Our understanding is that the following suppliers are included in Gartner’s tentative list:
Cisco Invicta
EMC XtremIO
IBM FlashSystem
Kaminario K2
Huawei (OceanStor Dorado)
Netapp EF540/550
Nimbus Gemini
Pure Storag FA-400s
Skyera
Solidfire
Violin Memory
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud computing aka ‘The future is trying to KILL YOU’
The brutal tech truth that links the problems of Rackspace, Dell, HP, IBM, Oracle, SAP, others
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/17/cloud_computing_doom_analysis/
What do all ailing enterprise IT companies have in common? Trouble in their core businesses due to the rise of cloud computing.
Just how serious are the effects?
Rackspace was reported on Thursday to be in talks with Morgan Stanley to help it partner or sell
SAP is reported to be carrying out some “unavoidable” layoffs
IBM has agreed to sell its server division
EMC has had to create a new strategic software package named “ViPR”
HP has partnered with Asian manufacturing giant Foxconn
Oracle’s proprietary hardware division has consistently failed
Cisco is being hit by a slowdown in its traditional business
a few companies benefiting immensely from this shift. For example:
Cloudera received hundreds of millions of dollars from Intel
Amazon’s Amazon Web Services division is on track to pull in almost $4bn in revenue this year
MongoDB – the anti-Oracle database startup whose tech is deployed widely on clouds
Startups – both frivolous and not-so-frivolous – are being given huge valuations
Google and Facebook: two advertising giants raking in phenomenal amounts of cash entirely due to the strength of their technical expertise.
This meant they created systems – in Google’s case, GFS and MapReduce, which are the basis of Hadoop – in which it would be trivial to add another server, or ten servers, into a system and see a gain in performance. This triggered a movement away from integrating hardware with software and towards making software not care about hardware in the slightest, other than as additional capacity.
Google and, later, Facebook, were able to start designing their own data center systems out of cheap components
The cycle of change spins ever faster
HP, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Dell, and other big incumbents should be extremely worried: every trend in technology points to a future that has no bias toward their current profit-generating businesses. The growth days are over and winter has arrived, forcing these companies to battle each other to maintain margins and shipments, and distracting them from the threats coming from below.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell is expanding its recycling program of old equipment . The aim is to recycle old equipment for new equipment collected in plastic material.
Next month we will go on sale OptipPlex 3030 -all-in -one machine is the first use for recycled materials . Starting next year, a growing number of notebook , desktop PC and the display on the rear panel is used for processing of plastics, Dell’s environmental director Scott O’Donnell says.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/dell+alkaa+valmistaa+kierratyspceita/a989661
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP: You know what’s hot right now? Cold storage
Facebook’s onto something… Right?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/25/hp_thinks_cold_storage_is_hot/
Cold storage is hot, according to Meg Whitman, HP’s CEO, who spoke of her “excitement” in the Q2 results earnings call.
Cold storage is the storage of old data that can’t be thrown away and needs to be instantly accessed when needed, ideally faster than tape. The archetypal use case is Facebook’s user photos.
Facebook’s Open Compute Project, an initiative to have bare bones compute, storage and networking gear built to its specs, has an Open Vault specification.
A couple of points:
HP already sells LTO-6 tape libraries but that doesn’t meet the OCP spec
HP is working with Foxconn to build lower-cost servers for hyperscale-type environments, such as Google, Facebook and so on.
In the face of a significant transition of server supply from branded mainstream products like ProLiants to Taiwanese white box servers HP has allied itself with a white box manufacturer.
The Vulture thinks HP could be cooking up an OCP-compliant cold storage product to be built by Foxconn.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP Delivers a Big-Name, 7-inch Android Tablet For $100: Comes With Compromises
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/05/25/205234/hp-delivers-a-big-name-7-inch-android-tablet-for-100-comes-with-compromises
“Ars Technica reports that HP is back in the $100 tablet market, and this time with a tablet that’s intended to be priced there instead of just a fire sale. The new offering lacks Bluetooth and GPS, among other features you might wish for in a tablet, and the screen is surrounded by a hefty bezel”
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP’s newest 7-inch Android tablet is just $100
A Benjamin buys a 7-inch, 1024×600 display, but it doesn’t get you Bluetooth or GPS.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/05/hps-newest-7-inch-android-tablet-is-just-100/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google: ‘EVERYTHING at Google runs in a container’
Ad giant lifts curtain on how it uses virtualization’s successor TWO BILLION TIMES A WEEK
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/23/google_containerization_two_billion/
Google is now running “everything” in its mammoth cloud on top of a potential open source successor to virtualization, paving the way for other companies to do the same.
Should VMware be worried? Probably not, but the tech pioneered by Google is making inroads into a certain class of technically sophisticated companies.
That tech is called Linux Containerization, and is the latest in a long line of innovations meant to make it easier to package up applications and sling them around data centers. It’s not a new approach – see Solaris Zones, BSD Jails, Parallels, and so on – but Google has managed to popularize it enough that a small cottage industry is forming around it.
Google’s involvement in the tech is significant because of the mind-boggling scale at which the search and ad giant operates, which in turn benefits the tech by stress-testing it.
“Everything at Google runs in a container,” Joe Beda, a senior staff software engineer at Google, explained in some slides shown at the Gluecon conference this week. “We start over two billion containers per week.”
The company is able to do this because of how the tech works: Linux containerization is a way of sharing parts of a single operating system among multiple isolated applications, as opposed to virtualization which will support multiple apps with their own OS on top of a single hypervisor.
This means that where it can take minutes to spin up a virtual machine, it can take seconds to start a container because you aren’t having to fire up the OS as well.
Google began its journey into containerization in the mid-2000s when some engineers donated a tech named cgroups into the Linux kernel.
The kernel feature cgroups became a crucial component of LXC, LinuX Containers, which combines cgroups with network namespaces to make it easy to create containers and the ways they need to connect with other infrastructure.
That is, until startup Docker came along.
“The technology was not accessible/useful for developers, containers were not portable between different environments, and there was no ecosystem or set of standard containers,”
“Docker’s initial innovation was to address these issues,” he writes, “by providing standard APIs that made containers easy to use, creating a way for the community to collaborate around libraries of containers, working to make the same container portable across all environments, and encouraging an ecosystem of tools.”
Docker’s approach has been remarkably successful and has led to partnerships with companies like Red Hat, the arrival of Docker containers on Amazon’s cloud, and integration with open source data analysis project Hadoop.
Google’s take on containerization is slightly different, as it places more emphasis on performance and less on ease of use. To try to help developers understand the difference, Google has developed a variant of LXC named, charmingly, lmctfy, short for Let Me Contain That For You.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Containers At Scale
by Joe Beda
https://speakerdeck.com/jbeda/containers-at-scale
How Google uses containers internally and how you can apply those lessons on the Google Cloud Platform and beyond
Tomi Engdahl says:
team coming to Linux gaming leader – and the monopoly
Many praised for its commitment, the company announced that Valvea Linux.
Valve boss Gabe Newell told the disappointment heavily on Microsoft’s Windows 8, and a desire to offer Linux players the chance to enjoy the game by Valve’s own production easily and transparently.
Valve’s resources for this change was the book and the opportunity .
In the past, co- developer of Canonical’s Ubuntu was made , but in the end SteamOS the Debian was chosen as the basis , apparently because of legal issues .
Valve kept his promise , turned his own penguin their game and did it very well : Valve’s games run on Linux, even slender than the Windows versions of Windows.
Valve’s Linux gained a foothold is not only a good thing. Steam is quickly becoming a monopoly in Windows and Linux inside , and at the same time , it is already a synonym for digital game sales.
There are other players in the Linux side , however, so far can be found.
Steam to Linux version is barely a year old and it’s already all relevant factors to the game -winning publishers under their own flag .
A monopoly , and the limitations are opposed to Linux , the players will soon be faced with a dilemma : which of the two large monopoly , VALVE and Microsoft, is less obnoxious alternative?
Source: mbnet.fi/artikkeli/tietokoneet/steamista_tulossa_linux_pelaamisen_airue_ja_monopoli
Tomi Engdahl says:
Capacity planning: How to plan ahead and keep your Oracle database healthy
Capacity planning: A DBA primer
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/26/oracle_dba_workshop_capacity_planning/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle’s Ellison urges real- time calculation
Rounds of real-time and memory-resident database technology commercialization will rise because of the Oracle czar Larry Ellison has advanced the company’s bet against SAP’s Hana- technology.
The latest technology will be packed packed into the company’s 12c database.
IBM , Microsoft, and Teradata , as well as a number of smaller companies are working on their real-time database offers.
Source: http://summa.talentum.fi/article/tv/uusimmat/66626
Tomi Engdahl says:
Digital Foundry: hands-on with Project Morpheus
In-depth analysis of Sony’s VR headset – and why PS Move is the real game-changer.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-hands-on-with-project-morpheus
Sony is actively investigating alternative technologies to address the blurring problem with OLED first and foremost in its deliberations. Elsewhere, we found that the 960×1080 per eye resolution is actually far more impressive than we thought it would be. Remember that those pixels need to accommodate both your focus and peripheral vision. On the 640×768 per eye first-gen Rift, the result was the perception of a disappointingly miniscule resolution, with a highly distracting “screen door” effect where you could see between the pixels.
This is far less of an issue with Morpheus, and we were pleasantly surprised by how good image quality is in an environment where resolution remains at a premium.
Sony hasn’t ruled out a higher-resolution screen either: PS4′s HDMI 1.4a support should – in theory – accommodate a 2560×1440 output at 60Hz, and assuming a full-blooded Morpheus release sometime next year, there should be plenty of mobile screens for the company to choose from. However, our money is still on a 1080p panel for the retail headset
However, in comparing Morpheus to what we’ve seen from Oculus VR, it’s perhaps surprising to discover that a truly transformative element of the proposition comes from a piece of hardware that you might already own: PlayStation Move. Our aspirations for the hardware were never fully realised, but the hook-up with Morpheus is a match made in heaven – in fact, if there is to be a struggle for market leadership with Oculus (and potentially Microsoft), the existing motion controller is undoubtedly one of the strongest weapons in Sony’s arsenal.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Darpa Turns Oculus Into a Weapon for Cyberwar
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/darpa-is-using-oculus-rift-to-prep-for-cyberwar/
For the last two years, Darpa has been working to make waging cyberwar as easy as playing a video game. Now, like so many other games, it’s about to get a lot more in-your-face.
At the Pentagon Wednesday, the armed forces’ far-out research branch known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency showed off its latest demos for Plan X, a long-gestating software platform designed to unify digital attack and defense tools into a single, easy-to-use interface for American military hackers. And for the last few months, that program has had a new toy: The agency is experimenting with using the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset to give cyberwarriors a new way to visualize three-dimensional network simulations–in some cases with the goal of better targeting them for attack.
“You’re not in a two-dimensional view, so you can look around the data. You look to your left, look to your right, and see different subnets of information,
Tomi Engdahl says:
Registry Hack: Get Windows XP Security Updates until 2019
Monday, May 26, 2014 Wang Wei
http://thehackernews.com/2014/05/registry-hack-get-windows-xp-security.html
Microsoft ended its support for Windows XP officially more than a month ago on April 8, 2014.
While some companies and organizations who were not able to migrate their operating system’s running Windows XP to another operating system before the support phase ended, are still receiving updates by paying Microsoft for the security patches and updates.
Now a relatively simple method has emerged as a trick for the XP users which makes it possible to receive Windows XP security updates for the next five years i.e. until April 2019.
It makes use of updates for Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 based on Windows XP Service Pack 3, because the security updates which are being released for POSReady 2009 are inevitably the same updates Microsoft would have rolled out for its Windows XP, if it was still supporting XP Operating System.
Microsoft will continue to deliver new security updates and patches for this version of its embedded operating system till April 9th, 2019
Tomi Engdahl says:
Webcast: How to build an open cloud
Saying no to silos
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/27/build_an_open_cloud/
It’s a hybrid world. But proprietary clouds are hard to integrate and less flexible. On the other hand, you’re already using them.
To coordinate your internal and external clouds, migration, administration, data protection, compliance, service levels and support need to be coordinated too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Leadwerks partners with Ubuntu for Linux games development
It’s also available on Steam OS
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2346578/leadwerks-partners-with-ubuntu-for-linux-games-development
LEADWERKS HAS HOOKED UP with Canonical to offer its games development software under Ubuntu Linux, following a successful Kickstarter campaign last summer.
The firms said they will make the Leadwerks Game Engine software development framework available in the Ubuntu Software Center to provide users of the operating system with a powerful tool for rapid game development under Ubuntu Linux.
Leadwerks said that its Game Engine is a powerful and easy to use development tool for building 3D games, and that it has recently grown in popularity due to its rapid development capabilities, royalty-free license, and strong support for C++ and Lua programming.
provides realistic light and shadows on any machine supporting OpenGL 4.
Canonical claims that Ubuntu Linux has 25 million users, including many games developers and even more potential games customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hang on, lads. I’ve got a great idea, says NetApp as it teeters on the edge
Don’t worry about the falling sales, maybe Amazon will pour ONTAP into its mega-cloud
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/22/netapp_fiscal_2014/
NetApp and the Cloud
NetApp wants to provide a seamless private-public cloud data management environment by deploying its operating system, Data ONTAP, on customer premises and in public clouds, even the largest ones run by the so-called hyperscalers.
Georgens said: “We are also looking to embrace the hyperscalers into our data management framework … all of [these] components of the cloud, both the traditional service providers and the hyperscalers, are integral to our overall strategy.”
He’s saying that hyperscalers could use ONTAP to seamlessly integrate their offerings with NetApp’s on-premises installations.
He mentioned working with OpenStack, and 200-plus cloud service providers already providing ONTAP-based services. He said: “The end goal is how do we create a set of services that could be consumed by the enterprise and then afterward the seamless expansion of on-premise computing and the data management that goes with it is very, very, very important to realising the hybrid cloud vision.”
Analysts with dreams of the storage market’s long-term transformation away from on-premises kit to the cloud will say: “See, that’s the impact of the changes we’re talking about.”
NetApp might say: No, it’s not; it’s a tough market but we are on top of things, gaining share, and helping our customers embrace the cloud, not resisting it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft warns against Windows XP security update hack
Hackers discover way to trick Microsoft into continuing to support Windows XP after updates ceased
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/microsoft-windows-xp-security-hack-update
Microsoft has warned against using a hack that allows Windows XP to continue to receive important security updates after Microsoft withdrew support in April.
The hack tricks Microsoft’s update servers into applying security patches to Microsoft’s 13-year-old Windows XP. A small change within Windows XP makes it appear as other versions of Windows that are still supported until 2019.
Microsoft warned that Windows XP customers may face problems if they install the updates. “The security updates that could be installed are intended for Windows Embedded and Windows Server 2003 customers and do not fully protect Windows XP customers,” Microsoft said in a statement released to ZDnet. “Windows XP customers also run a significant risk of functionality issues with their machines if they install these updates, as they are not tested against Windows XP.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The New Normal: Multi-Everything
http://www.cablinginstall.com/whitepapers/2013/06/the-new-normal–multi-everything.html
Today’s IT discussions are filled with terms like Cloud, Virtualization, SANs, BYOD, SaaS, and SLAs. Rarely is the physical layer – Layer 1 of the 7-Layer OSI Model – part of the buzz. All network technologies lead back to that critical, foundational layer and the cabling infrastructure that supports it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PHP Next Generation
http://www.php.net/archive/2014.php#id2014-05-27-1
When we aren’t looking for pictures of kittens on the internet, internals developers are nearly always looking for ways to improve PHP, a few developers have a focus on performance.
Over the last year, some research into the possibility of introducing JIT compilation capabilities to PHP has been conducted.
During this research, the realization was made that in order to achieve optimal performance from PHP, some internal API’s should be changed.
This necessitated the birth of the phpng branch, initially authored by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and Nikita Popov. This branch does not include JIT capabilities, but rather seeks to solve those problems that prohibit the current, and any future implementation of a JIT capable executor achieving optimal performance by improving memory usage and cleaning up some core API’s.
By making these improvements, the phpng branch gives us a considerable performance gain in real world applications, for example a 20% increase in throughput for WordPress.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft demos breakthrough in real-time translated conversations
http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/05/27/microsoft-demos-breakthrough-in-real-time-translated-conversations.aspx
Imagine in the very near future technology allowing humans to bridge geographic and language boundaries to connect mind to mind and heart to heart in ways never before possible.
For more than a decade, Skype has brought people together to make progress on what matters to them. Today, we have more than 300 million connected users each month, and more than 2 billion minutes of conversation a day as Skype breaks down communications barriers by delivering voice and video across a number of devices, from PCs and tablets, to smartphones and TVs. But language barriers have been a blocker to productivity and human connection; Skype Translator helps us overcome this barrier.
Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Valve: Steam Machines delayed until 2015
On the bright side, it’s Valve’s first delay announcement since Portal 2.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/05/valve-steam-machines-delayed-until-2015/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google blocking extensions not listed in the Chrome Web Store for Windows users
http://9to5google.com/2014/05/27/google-blocking-extensions-not-listed-in-the-chrome-web-store-for-windows-users/
Google announced today that it’s now blocking local Chrome extensions to protect Windows users from malicious software. This means that only extensions coming from the Chrome Web Store can be installed on Chrome for Windows. As an additional safety precaution, Google says that previously installed extensions may automatically be disabled and cannot be restored until they’re hosted in the Chrome Web Store.
Tomi Engdahl says:
China Looks To Linux As Windows Alternative
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/05/27/1916202/china-looks-to-linux-as-windows-alternative
“Once again, after the Red Flag Linux effort that petered out this year, China is considering Linux to sort out its pressing Windows XP issue.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
China looks to Linux as Windows alternative
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/386577,china-looks-to-linux-as-windows-alternative.aspx
China may look at the open source Linux as a replacement for Windows, following an official ban on Microsoft’s Windows 8 for government procured computers.
Chinese Government news agency Xinhua published an article claiming Chinese vendors are using a ban on Windows 8 to push Linux-based OS variants.
StartOS – with its GNOME desktop environment tweaked to look like Windows XP – may be a contender for older systems, thanks to low hardware requirements.
Google’s Android, which is based on Linux, also gets a mention as an alternative to Windows.
Ironically enough, Microsoft’s heightened security stance may be one reason the Chinese government slammed the door shut on Windows 8.
Chinese news reports criticising the built-in malware and security defences in Windows 8. Windows Defender and SmartScreen for Internet Explorer put users at risk of being monitored and endangering national security, he claimed, especially if run on government computers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why did China ban Windows 8?
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/386140,why-did-china-ban-windows-8.aspx
The Chinese government has decided not to buy Windows 8 for fear that like XP, this product too will be left insecure.
But industry observers believe there may be more to the move, reflecting the severe breach in trust between China and the US
China’s official news agency, Xinhua, confirmed the decision to drop Windows 8 on 20 May, saying “China will forbid the use of the Windows 8 operating system (OS) in new government computers, a move to ensure computer security after the shutdown of Windows XP. All desktops, laptops and tablet PCs to be purchased by central state organs must be installed with OS other than Windows 8.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Be a kernel hacker
Write your first Linux Kernel module
http://www.linuxvoice.com/be-a-kernel-hacker/
Ever wanted to start hacking the kernel? Don’t have a clue how to begin? Let us show you how it’s done…
“The easiest way to start kernel programming
is to write a module – a piece of code that
can be dynamically loaded into the kernel.“
Tomi Engdahl says:
Preparing IT clients for an office move
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/print/volume-22/issue-5/features/design/preparing-it-clients-for-an-office-move.html?cmpid=EnlContractorMay292014
In many ways, the complexities of an infrastructure move within a commercial office parallel those of a theatrical performance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Truck roller: Fanless box PC meets in-vehicle connectivity demands
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/05/truck-roller-fanless-pc.html
Industrial computing specialist AAEON has released its AEC-6402 ultra-slim fanless box PC. Merely 20 mm in height, the literally palm-sized system is especially designed for space-critical in-vehicle applications.
Featuring extensive I/O capabilities, the AEC-6402 system’s core is powered by the energy-efficient Intel Atom N2600 1.60 GHz processor and the Intel NM10 Chipset. System integrators specializing in factory/machine automation, transportation, home automation, in-vehicle, law enforcement and environmental surveillance will appreciate the AEC-6402 fanless box PC’s elegant enclosure design.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ryse creator Crytek releases CryEngine ‘game engine as a service’ on Steam (exclusive)
http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/28/ryse-creator-crytek-releases-cryengine-game-engine-service-on-steam-exclusive/
Crytek, the German maker of video games such as Ryse: Son of Rome, has officially released its CryEngine game development engine as a service today on Valve’s Steam digital distribution service.
The company’s goal is to broaden PC game development by making the high-end 3D game technology available to the masses of developers for a subscription fee of $10 a month per developer. Crytek announced the program back in March at the Game Developers Conference. And Steam, the largest digital-distribution software store in the PC industry, is a great place to reach new customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Seagate buys LSI’s flash component assets from Avago for $450 million
http://www.zdnet.com/seagate-buys-lsis-flash-component-assets-from-avago-for-450-million-7000029996/
Summary: LSI’s Accelerated Solutions Division (ASD) and Flash Components Division (FCD) will give Seagate a larger footprint in enterprise flash and solid state storage controllers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Intel-Rockchip Tie-Up Matters
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1322528&
Since 2011, essentially two brands have dominated the global tablet market. One is Apple, and the other is the so-called white box. (Of course, Samsung joined the fray last year.)
Rockchip, a Chinese designer of ARM-based SoCs, has not only rocked China’s white-box tablet market but also dominated the global market for the last three years, along with its dancing partner (or, more accurately, its biggest competitor) Allwinner, an app processor company based in China.
Since Taiwan’s MediaTek entered the white box market last year, however, everything has changed. Cost, design house, supply chain — competition is everywhere.
So Intel’s decision to enter a strategic agreement with Rockchip is a big deal — not just for the two companies involved, but for everyone in the global tablet market. Intel said in a press release that the arrangement will “expand the breadth of and accelerate the rate at which [Rockchip] brings its Intel architecture and communications-based solutions to market for a range of entry-level Android tablets worldwide.”
Will Intel and Rockchip become a tour de force to break up China’s never-ending cycle of cutthroat competition — solely based on prices — in the tablet market? We certainly hope so.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Achieving the Compute Performance of the Human Brain
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1322543&
Noted technologist, inventor, and futurist Ray Kurzweil once estimated the processing power of the human brain to be about 10 petaFLOPs — 10 times faster than the first petascale supercomputer that was activated in 2008. Today, many experts believe the processing capacity of the human brain is actually far greater, and some speculate that surpassing the capabilities of the human brain will require the vast processing power of “exascale computing.”
The first exascale supercomputers are expected between 2020 and 2022, prompted through research funded by several governments around the world.
Why do we need powerful supercomputers that run at these speeds? More than just matching the processing power of the human brain, powerful supercomputers enable us to better model and predict climate changes, improve medical modeling for personalized medicine, create new drugs in response to rapidly spreading viruses, boost efficiency in aerodynamics and industrial design, and achieve breakthroughs in nuclear physics for controlled fusion and new forms of clean energy.
Is it possible that we will reach exascale computing by year 2022? Yes. Is it possible that we will reach the power efficiency of the human brain by that time? Not a chance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
European companies squander every year, a total of EUR 9.6 billion on failure of IT procurement, survives ERP vendor survey by Sage .
600 self- closing matters revealed in the interview that a medium-sized European companies are wasting an average of 43 000 Euros per year on information technology.
One of the biggest causes of wasted money is the fact that companies are implementing software programs that do not meet business needs. The second reason is that there is not enough education for the new programs.
Of the respondents, one third of Germans said that their companies use the software side by side with the same functions . Two of the same make software maintenance and license fees are eating money.
“Alarm bells should ring . We’re wasting nearly 10 billion every year. It is a little worrisome, ”
“10 years ago, companies wanted something that would take 10 years . Now we want the agility and flexibility that adapts to the changes,”
Also, too perfect system is not worth striving for. If the definitions are too heavy and accurate , they require tailored solutions and the end result is a heavy and complex information system. They are expensive and difficult to be integrated into other software programs.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/haaskaako+firmasi+myos+tietotekniikkaan+kymppitonneja+turhaan/a990593
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP breaks ranks: Foresees data ARCHIVING on Flash
Crazy like a fox, or like a, um, crazy guy or something?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/30/hp_envisaging_archiving_on_flash/
An unearthed HP presentation session shows HP is envisaging cold data storage, archiving, using flash.
“What will soon further ramp the adoption of flash are the superior storage densities offered by solid state drives as they expand to double-digit terabyte capacities per drive, surpassing the maximum densities of hard disk drives ”
Vertically integrated? Think Micron and SanDisk, as well as Samsung.
The Vulture thinks this is the first time a mainstream storage systems vendor is talking about flash-based archiving. Facebook has mentioned it as an ideal archive medium
Tomi Engdahl says:
Watch this: An introduction to Microsoft BizTalk Server
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/30/introduction_to_microsoft_biztalk_server_webinar/
This is a quick walk-through of the capabilities of BizTalk, Microsoft’s integration server.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cheap price works – the Chinese server vendors are conquering the market with U.S.
Chinese manufacturers of server sales grew in the first half , while at the same time, U.S. companies, server shipments fell year -on-year .
Globally, the servers were sold in the first quarter to 2.4 million units, research firm Gartner counts. , Which is 1.4 percent more than the year before.
The entire increase in sales is largely supplied by Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei and Inspur Electronics. These companies were the world’s fourth and fifth largest server vendors.
The largest server vendors are HP, Dell and IBM.
The server purchase is also changed in recent years: Large companies such as Google , Facebook and Amazon ordering parts directly from the manufacturer of servers and build servers themselves . Also large Chinese cloud companies operate in this way.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/halpa+hinta+toimii++kiinalaiset+palvelinmyyjat+valtaavat+markkinoita+yhdysvaltalaisilta/a990706
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Big Benefits of Building Business Apps Faster [Infographic]
http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/2014/05/the-big-benefits-of-building-business-apps-faster-infographic.html?d=70130000000YrTu&nc=70130000000YrTz&other=us_outbrain
Now more than ever, companies in industries across the board have the power to innovate. How? By building custom applications.
And the faster they add this value, the quicker they can differentiate their brand, release new products, acquire more customers, and improve overall competitiveness.
The speed and success of such app development is dramatically increased when using a cloud application platform, also known as Platform as a Service (PaaS).