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.
2,130 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Health Data Is a Big Data Challenge
http://www.cio.com/article/753795/Why_Health_Data_Is_a_Big_Data_Challenge?taxonomyId=600010
There’s no shortage of health data, and it’s growing at a rapid clip, but experts in the field cite challenges around making that information useful, readable and relevant to the physicians and patients who need it most.
However, with the sharp rise in the volume of health data being created — growing at an annual rate of 40 percent, according to research firm IDC — there emerges the familiar big data challenge of having too much of a good and useful thing. How do you glean insights from these ballooning data sets?
“Healthcare has so much promise around this,”
Carmichael’s approach: Offer slick visual overlays onto the datasets that can present them with an appropriate level of context, such that nontechnical workers can quickly grasp their import “without heavy reliance on IT resources.”
There’s no larger single holder of health data than the federal government, where agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention preside over massive stores of health-related datasets. Increasingly, those agencies are turning that information over to the public, bringing it online in a searchable, machine-readable format
For the companies that gather their own data in the field, offering technologies such as sensors that relay health information from patients or sending SMS messages to communicate with patients, the collection and use of data can pose other challenges.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HHS, FDA Expand Access to Open Health Data
http://www.cio.com/article/753615/HHS_FDA_Expand_Access_to_Open_Health_Data
The Obama administration has released new datasets on adverse drug events and Medicare pricing. This offers researchers and developers alike a chance to build novel applications and identify cost trends, all in the name of improving efficiency and providing better healthcare while lowering costs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
My my, Intel, that’s one speedy NVMe flash card you have there
Did I say one? I meant three of the critters
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/03/intel_pcie_nvme_flash_card/
NVMe is a standard way of accessing non-volatile memory, meaning host operating systems need only have a single standard driver instead of specific drivers for each supported PCIe flash card. SATA Express is an implementation of NVMe.
There are three products in the Intel NVMe familiy; DC P3700, P3600 and P3500. Capacities range up to 2TB and random read IOPS up to 460,000.
We expect Seagate/LSI and Fusion, and all PCIe flash card manufacturers, to move to NVMe in time.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel SSD DC P3700 Review: The PCIe SSD Transition Begins with NVMe
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 3, 2014 2:00 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8104/intel-ssd-dc-p3700-review-the-pcie-ssd-transition-begins-with-nvme
In 2008 Intel introduced its first SSD, the X25-M, and with it Intel ushered in a new era of primary storage based on non-volatile memory. Intel may have been there at the beginning, but it missed out on most of the evolution that followed. It wasn’t until late 2012, four years later, that Intel showed up with another major controller innovation.
Once again Intel found itself at the forefront of innovation in the SSD space, only to let others catch up in the coming years. Now, roughly two years later, Intel is back again with another significant evolution of its solid state storage architecture.
Nearly all prior Intel drives, as well as drives of its most qualified competitors have played within the confines of the SATA interface. Designed for and limited by the hard drives that came before it, SSDs used SATA to sneak in and take over the high performance market, but they did so out of necessity, not preference.
We saw a quick transition from 3Gbps to 6Gbps SATA for SSDs, but rather than move to 12Gbps SATA only to saturate it a year later most SSD makers set their eyes on PCIe. With PCIe 3.0 x16 already capable of delivering 128Gbps of bandwidth, it’s clear this was the appropriate IO interface for SSDs. Many SSD vendors saw the writing on the wall initially, but their PCIe based SSD solutions typically leveraged a bunch of SATA SSD controllers behind a PCIe RAID controller. Only a select few PCIe SSD makers developed their own native controllers. Micron was among the first to really push a native PCIe solution with its P320h and P420m drives.
Bandwidth limitations were only one reason to want to ditch SATA. The other bit of legacy that needed shedding was AHCI, the interface protocol for communication between host machines and their SATA HBAs (Host Bus Adaptors).
NVMe drives do require updated OS/driver support. Windows 8.1 and Server 2012R2 both include NVMe support out of the box, older OSes require the use of a miniport driver to enable NVMe support. Booting to NVMe drives shouldn’t be an issue either.
NVMe is a standard that seems to have industry support behind it. Samsung already launched its own NVMe drives, SandForce announced NVMe support with its SF3700 and today Intel is announcing a family of NVMe SSDs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
I am NOT a PC repair man. I will NOT get your iPad working
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/06/something_for_the_weekend_repeat_technology_repairman/
My new neighbours are asking me what I do for a living. It’s at this point that I make the mistake that I’ll be regretting for years to come. I tell them that I’m an IT journalist.
I work in a home ‘office’ – a closet by the front door – and often a computer paper’s testing ‘lab’ – a dungeon with Ethernet ports – and I write about flatbed scanners.
Naturally, I suggest that he would have more success if he takes the iPad out of its box, reads the instructions and – what the hell, let’s throw caution to the wind – switches the fucker on. But it’s all useless: what he really wants is for me to do it for him.
When I reveal that I’m an IT journalist, they begin telling me about their printer problems and posing questions about Windows device drivers.
What I should do is send them to a local PC repair shop. The problem is that I don’t trust them. Judging from my own experiences when getting proper IT kit fixed by qualified engineers at registered service centres – all the time-wasting, cock-ups and rip-offs – I can hardly expect some back-street hoodlum to play fair with my nice neighbours.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Data Centre > Storage
Is it THE END OF BIG DATA? Quarta Horribilis for high-end storage
People will be talking about the terrible 2014 Q1 for years
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/06/idcs_quarter_from_hell/
IDC has just revealed one of the worst storage quarters for a couple of years as buyers went on a high-end storage strike.
There’s been a quite spectacular slump in the storage business in the first 2014 quarter, according to the beancounters’ Storage Tracker. Notwithstanding the digital-universe-drowning-us-in-Big-Data narrative, the actual storage market shrank this quarter.
Here’s the bare bones IDC statement:
“The total (internal plus external) disk storage systems market generated $7.3 billion in revenue, representing a decrease of -6.9 per cent from the prior year’s first quarter and a sequential decline of -17 per cent compared to the seasonally stronger 4Q13.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why there’s no power button on the Pure Storage FlashArray
http://www.purestorage.com/blog/why-theres-no-power-button-on-the-pure-storage-flasharray/
At Pure Storage we’re pretty serious about challenging and re-thinking conventional wisdom in the storage space. One of the simplest and best illustrations of this is the lack of a big power button (a.k.a. shut-down procedure) on the FlashArray. In traditional storage arrays shutting down the storage array is kind of a big, scary, fingers-crossed kind of deal
The dreaded “double failure”
If you look at legacy storage architectures and analyze why they occasionally are subject to data loss or corruption, it turns out that most of those data loss events are the result of double failures. Something relatively minor fails (maybe a drive fails, maybe a controller, maybe an internal switch…), which triggers one of the software resiliency “features” of the array, and this software kicks-in to save the array and work around the problem. But here’s where the fun starts…often that resiliency code is a very under-exercised code path. It was written years ago to protect against some arcane failure case, tested well then, and then started to age in the code base. It’s a fail safe, so almost no one uses it, and thus, its a magnet for software bugs…
Pure’s philosophy: No un-exercised code
When we started designing the HA and resiliency features of the FlashArray, this mantra of no un-exercised code was a minor religion within the Pure team, and you can see that religion manifest itself in several areas of the code:
Parity re-builds: we felt RAID re-build code should be just as reliable and performant as the normal read/write path…so we designed an array that constantly reads from parity as part of normal operations…
Stateless HA architecture: we built the FlashArray so that controller failure/fail-overs were nothing to be afraid of. Controllers are stateless (no persistent data in them, including in-flight writes), and HA events are designed to be a non-event
No shutdown procedure: the FlashArray has to be able to handle a full power loss with ease…full power loss code is some of the least exercised code in the industry. Our insight? Let’s make turning the array off and pulling the power one and the same.
By now you have the answer: you just pull the power cords.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Snooping on a NetApp event: New cloudy OS on its way
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/06/netapp_tells_the_analysts_whats_what/
Social media can deliver multiple micro-glimpses of previously closed events, like a NetApp analysts event in San Francisco yesterday which revealed a new OS – Cloud ONTAP – and a coming Connect product for mobile access.
Georgens says: “software-defined is NOT the same as software-only”
Georgens: “If it is ‘truly’ SW-defined storage, then the value proposition MUST remain the same no matter what HW is used.”
Georgens: We can use Amazon for ‘disk-as-a-service’ resource, provide value-add management on top, become more pervasive”
Georgens: customers want the cloud to be a seamless extension of what they have on premise
Georgens: “There is lock-in in the cloud. Data has mass, and it’s hard to move.”
This is a new version or variant of NetApp’s storage array operating system, Data ONTAP. It delivers storage resources using Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure, and integrated on-premise and off-premise data management
NetApp will debut NetApp Connect later this year. It will address mobile endpoint data access, multi cloud storage environments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Chatbot Has ‘Passed’ The Turing Test For The First Time
http://io9.com/a-chatbot-has-passed-the-turing-test-for-the-first-ti-1587834715
A Russian chatterbot named “Eugene Goostman” has become the first to pass the Turing Test – an assessment of machine intelligence first proposed in 1950 by visionary mathematician, logician and codebreaker Alan Turing – by convincing 1 in 3 judges that it was a 13-year-old non-native-English-speaking Ukrainian boy.
“Eugene” and four other computerized contenders took part Saturday at the Turing Test 2014 Competition at the Royal Society in London. Each chatterbox was required to engage in a series of five-minute text-based conversations with a panel of judges. The rules stipulate that a computer passes the test if it is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the judges it was human, the only machine-contender at the competition – indeed, if the event’s independent verifiers are to be believed, the only machine-contender in history – to do so.
“Having a computer that can trick a human into thinking that someone, or even something, is a person we trust is a wake-up call to cybercrime [and the] Turing Test is a vital tool for combatting that threat,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The software company Microsoft has recently published a Surface device to the third generation of his family, but this time only to Intel’s x86 architecture PC-based model.
When the Surface Pro version becomes narrower and lighter, thus decreasing the difference between a “tablet-Windows” and the genuine copy of Windows 8′s from. However, the big difference is that the latter drives the traditional Win32 applications.
Windows Group Vice President Tom Toivonen will not admit that the mobile technology of the ARM architecture in Windows RT would have been rejected.
“Microsoft still has three Windows: Windows Phone, Windows RT and Windows 8 Pro., This has not changed. Admittedly, Windows phones, and RT devices are approaching each other strongly.”
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/windows_rt_kypsa_haudattavaksi
Tomi Engdahl says:
DARPA gamifies open-source software testing
But can you use it to test game software? Eh?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/09/darpa_builds_computer_game_to_test_open_source_software/
Secret-squirrel military tech bureau DARPA has designed a series of computer games which can help to verify open source software.
It is working on the games under the auspices of its Crowd Sourced Formal Verification programme.
The idea is to perform the soft of software verification which is generally conducted by technical experts.
“There are not enough human experts or available time to demonstrate that software is secure and reliable – so what we’ve done is repackage what human experts would normally do and produce tens of thousands of game levels for players on the internet to play games for us,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sony ‘overtakes’ rival Nintendo in console sales
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27758215
Sony has overtaken Nintendo for the first time in eight years, based on the total number of game consoles sold.
Sony sold 18.7 million systems in the last financial year – which ended in March – compared to Nintendo’s tally of 16.3 million video games machines.
The news is not surprising.
Sony’s PlayStation 4 has emerged as the bestselling “new-gen” console. But demand for Nintendo’s Wii U – with its touchscreen controller – has lagged far behind the original Wii, which was the most popular hardware of the last generation.
The figures also include sales of the older PS3 and original Wii, in addition to Nintendo’s 3DS and Sony’s PlayStation Vita handhelds.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Enterprise storage vendors cosy up to small businesses
A narrowing gap
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/09/smb_storage/
The storage landscape is changing. The storage products and skills needed for a small firm have so far been very different from those needed in large enterprises. Yet we now have some storage vendors delivering enterprise-class products aimed at workgroups, while some enterprise buyers choose mid-range products to save money.
And all the while we see the rise of cloud services that promise enterprise-grade capability and scalability to everyone, including small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
The SMB market is perhaps changing the most rapidly.
For our purposes, SMB means any business not large, rich or sophisticated enough to have separate teams of server, storage and networking specialists.
In some ways this lack of specialisation is a strength. Increasingly, the industry needs agility and multi-disciplinary skills – people who can understand the needs and speak the language of IT, networking and the business, and work quickly to solve business problems.
So there is potentially an advantage in being a generalist, although it might take some time to convince the specialists of that.
“Sometimes I think the enterprise can learn a lot from SMBs because they tend to be early adopters, whereas enterprises tend to lag,”
reporting and monitoring software has improved beyond recognition in the past few years. “IT needs these tools so it can communicate with the business,”
“For example, if the business is complaining about slowness, IT needs to know if there are twice as many people actually using the system as the business thinks. Or perhaps it is using twice as much storage, or there are twice as many people using it on Monday mornings.”
“Large enterprises and SMBs are becoming more alike,” he says, adding that as the underlying technology becomes more efficient and hardware needs diminish, helped in part by server virtualisation, so it becomes practical to run what would once have been a major software implementation on a far smaller scale.
“Enterprises do have different problems to solve,” he says. “They often need deep integration with existing systems and they may have very complex workflows which require custom development and integration.
Vendors are also trying to find pricing strategies that fit SMB budgets yet avoid tempting enterprises into saving cash by buying the SMB version.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Don’t believe the hyper-converged hype: Why are we spending stupid amounts on hardware?
Isn’t it called the software-defined data centre?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/09/hyper_converged_kit_what_for/
In a software-defined data centre, why are some of the hottest properties hardware platforms?
There are plenty of newly formed startups that will come to mind: highly converged, sometimes described as hyper-converged, servers.
I think that it demonstrates what a mess our data centres have got into that products such as these are attractive. Is it the case that we have built-in processes that are so slow and inflexible that a hardware platform that resembles a games console for virtualisation becomes attractive?
Surely the value has to be in the software: so have we got so bad at building our data centres that it makes sense to pay a premium for a hardware platform? There is certainly a large premium for some of them.
Now I don’t doubt that deployment times are quicker, but my real concern is why we have got to this situation.
It really doesn’t matter how quickly you can rack, stack and deploy your hypervisor if it takes you weeks to cable it to to talk the outside world or give it an IP address
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Embraces Docker, the Next Big Thing in Cloud Computing
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/eric-brewer-google-docker/
Google is putting its considerable weight behind an open source technology that’s already one of the hottest new ideas in the world of cloud computing.
This technology is called Docker. You can think of it as a shipping container for things on the internet–a tool that lets online software makers neatly package their creations so they can rapidly move them from machine to machine to machine. On the modern internet–where software runs across hundreds or even thousands of machines–this is no small thing. Google sees Docker as something that can change the way we think about building software, making it easier for anyone to instantly tap massive amounts of computing power. In other words, Google sees Docker as something that can help everyone else do what it has been doing for years.
‘Google and Docker are a very natural fit. We both have the same vision of how applications should be built.’
Tomi Engdahl says:
South African Schools To Go Textbook Free
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/06/09/1916224/south-african-schools-to-go-textbook-free
“South African education authorities are about to embark on an ambitious plan to take their schools textbook free, using the familiar refrain of one-tablet-per-child to do so.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vita TV becomes PlayStation TV in the US, Europe and Canada for $99 this fall
http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/09/playstation-tv/
The Vita TV is coming to America! It’s just going to get a bit of an identity change first. Now the micro-console will be called PlayStation TV for North American and European audiences. The good news is that it will only be $99, while still giving you access to the library of PS Now games and the ability to remotely access titles on your local network.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alienware refits its Steam Machine with Windows and will launch it as a living-room PC
http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/09/alienware-refits-its-steam-machine-with-windows-and-will-launch-it-as-a-living-room-gamer-pc/
Alienware is launching its Alpha console-like gaming PC at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show today. But instead of running Valve’s Steam OS, the machine will run Microsoft’s Windows operating system and use an Xbox 360 wireless controller.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP targets supercomputers with Project Apollo
Box shipper explains why it’s plunging hot servers into water-cooled cages
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/10/hp_project_apollo_hpc_gear/
HP is imprisoning powerful Intel Xeons inside water-cooled cages … for science!
The company announced on Monday that it has developed two new classes of server for high-performance computing workloads as it prepares to go against traditional supercomputer makers like Cray, Fujitsu, IBM, SGI, and others for the lucrative high-margin revenues of supercomputer land.
Bit-flippers have been building high-performance computing clusters out of HP gear for decades, mind, but this marks the first time HP has created some packed-up products explicitly for that market.
HP’s approach has led to the Apollo 8000, an HPC system which uses liquid cooling to cram as many as 144 servers into a rack with an 80kw power draw.
This system uses a technology called “dry-disconnect” cooling that uses sealed heat pipes to circulate treated water past the cores, draining off heat more efficiently than air. It pairs this with an HVAC power distribution system and an iCDU (cooling) Rack to give the server its high efficiency.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP Simplivity buyout rumours: Could it be worth HALF a BILLION?
Converged systems’ corporate convergence could continue
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/10/hp_simplivity_acquisition_rumours/
HP is said to be in talks to buy Simplivity, a startup whose main offering is the Omnicube converged server/storage/networking systems.
The Omnicube is a so-called hyper-converged system, designed from the ground up to eliminate the data centre chaos of independent server, storage and networking products that have to be separately acquired, integrated and operated.
It is suspected that EMC has its own hyper-converged offering development.
Both Simplivity and Nutanix are growing strongly and their scale-out boxes could be used by both public and private cloud providers.
Buying Simplivity and replacing some of its components with its own would be a short cut to selling a converged system by HP.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PCIe hard drives? You read that right, says WD
Slow storage device jumps onto the SATA Express bus
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/03/wd_demos_pcie_connected_disk_drive/
WD will demo PCIe-connected disk drives at the Computex tech conference in Taipei, using a SATA Express interface.
SATA Express has been enabled with partners, and is offered on Intel series-9 chipset motherboards. WD says it provides a route to faster speeds and lower power consumption. SATA revision 3.2 delivers 16Gbit/s. PCIe v4.0 provides 15.754Gbit/s per lane; generation-three provided 7.877Gbit/s per lane.
A specification was unveiled in 2013 and what WD and its partners are showing at Computex is a prototype drive.
The partners include ASUS and GIGABYTE. According to the marketing bumf, the prototype uses “standard AHCI drivers and is compatible with all known, currently supported client operating system releases.”
System builders are told by WD that SATA Express will enable them to access SSDs, SSHDs (hybrid disk+flash drives) and HDDs through a single PCIe bus connection. The flexibility of that should be appealing.
With both Seagate and Western Digital subsidiary HGST offering Ethernet-connected drives
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP unveils federated backup that won’t get your back up … it hopes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/10/let_backup_get_your_backup_less/
Meg Whitman’s mega firm is federating backup appliances to ease the pain of managing multiple silos and claims management overhead is reduced by 75 per cent through no more “physical mapping of backup jobs to individual backup appliances”.
The news came at HP’s Discover bash in Las Vegas, where it unveiled StoreOnce Federated Catalyst, Catalyst being its deduplicating backup software running on the StoreOnce backup-to-disk appliances.
The idea is to group a bunch of separate StoreOnce appliances into a federation offering a single logical pool of backup capacity that holds more than 17PB of data. The federation is used for provisioning and management of backup jobs
The new backup federation technology is designed “to support aggregation across devices and even hybrid cloud environments,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
H-P to Challenge IBM In Supercomputing With Apollo
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/06/09/h-p-to-challenge-ibm-in-supercomputing-with-apollo/
Hewlett-PackardHPQ +0.18% is taking on International Business MachinesIBM -0.08% in high-end supercomputers, the latest sign that H-P is doubling down on technology hardware while IBM pulls back from the market.
On Monday, H-P announced two new computer server products under the new Apollo brand name. One of the machines, the H-P Apollo 6000, combines up to 160 low-end servers in one rack that H-P says will offer high performance computing capabilities that are superior to existing systems while using up to about half of the energy. These types of systems sell for less than $100,000, but can go as high as $500,000, says research firm IDC.
The other system, the H-P Apollo 8000, will be the world’s first completely liquid-cooled supercomputer that lets H-P compete for the first with IBM and Cray in the high end of the market, says Antonio Neri, H-P’s head of servers and networking. Those machines typically sell for $500,000 at the low end, but can easily reach into the millions of dollars or more.
“We are redefining the energy of data centers,” says Neri, who says the supercomputer requires 28% less energy than air-cooled systems. “It is a huge opportunity for us.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
No, A Computer Did Not Just Pass The Turing Test
http://www.buzzfeed.com/kellyoakes/no-a-computer-did-not-just-pass-the-turing-test
Many media outlets are reporting that a computer programme pretending to be a 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine passed the Turing test for artificial intelligence on Saturday.
It’s widely quoted that a machine must fool the interrogator only 30% of the time in order to pass, but Turing himself never set a pass rate.
This is not the first time a chatbot has been said to have passed a Turing test.
So there’s no need to start welcoming our robot overlords (yet).
Tomi Engdahl says:
No, A ‘Supercomputer’ Did NOT Pass The Turing Test For The First Time And Everyone Should Know Better
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140609/07284327524/no-computer-did-not-pass-turing-test-first-time-everyone-should-know-better.shtml
So, this weekend’s news in the tech world was flooded with a “story” about how a “chatbot” passed the Turing Test for “the first time,” with lots of publications buying every point in the story and talking about what a big deal it was. Except, almost everything about the story is bogus and a bunch of gullible reporters ran with it, because that’s what they do.
Basically, any reporter should view extraordinary claims associated with Warwick with extreme caution. But that’s not what happened at all. Instead, as is all too typical with Warwick claims, the press went nutty over it, including publications that should know better.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Firefox 30 Available, Firebug 2.0 Released
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/06/10/2113250/firefox-30-available-firebug-20-released
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cheap, backwards-compatible PCIe 4.0 on track for 2016
16GT/sec interconnect dependent on the kindness of strangers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/10/cheap_backwardscompatible_pcie_40_on_track_for_del2015del_2016/
Development of the fourth generation of PCI Express – unsurprisingly dubbed PCIe 4.0 – is moving along nicely, but don’t expect the final specification to be completed until at least late 2015 or more likely early-to-mid 2016.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that moving up to the new 16 gigatransfers-per-second standard
“No funny encoding changes this time around, nothing new – it’s basically a straight-up 16-gig,”
“It’s mostly a PHY evolutionary play at this point,” Neshati said. “Very little in terms of protocol changes, very little in terms of link-level management changes. So, same equalization – well, maybe a bit more robust equalization – but no new back channel and all the various things that happened in PCI Express 3.0.”
You will, for example, be able to plug a PCIe 1.0 device into a PCIe 4.0 connector – and vice versa – and the system will detect and negotiate down to the lowest common denominator.
Backwards compatibility is an investment-saver, and the PCI-SIG is all about keeping costs down. For example, the doubling of the link bandwidth from PCIe’s 8GT/sec won’t require any exotic materials, Neshati said. In keeping with the PCI-SIG’s commitment to low-cost, high-volume deployments, PCIe 4.0 PHYs will still be fabricated using good ol’ FR-4 glass epoxy electrical insulator as their foundation.
“I think ‘big data’ will like this more than others,”
“Graphics can surprisingly go with gen-three for a long time,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
PCIe eyes the Internet of (the next big) Things
Low-power tweaks open door to BEEELLIONs of devices – but do they need PCIe?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/11/pcie_eyes_the_internet_of_the_next_big_things/
PCI Express – aka PCIe – is already firmly established as the go-to interconnect of choice in the server, workstation, and PC markets, so the standard’s champion, the PCI-SIG, is seeking new worlds to conquer – and where else would it look for new territory than in the buzzmarket du jour, the Internet of Things?
“The ‘PCI-ness’ of PCI Express – in terms of its software architecture, device discovery, self-enumerating bus, power management – all of those things are very well-suited for Internet of Things and low-power, small form-factor devices,” PCI-SIG marketing workgroup chair Ramin Neshati told reporters at the group’s developers conference last week in Santa Clara, California.
Those low-power IoT devices are right up PCIe’s alley, Neshati said, especially considering the standard’s “half-swing” or “low-swing” mode, which halves the required launch voltage of PCIe from 800 to 400 millivolts.
He also touted M-PCIe, which is the PCI-SIG’s link-layer adaptation of PCIe designed to run over the MIPI alliance’s single-lane, low-power, multi-speed M-PHY physical layer.
Essentially, M-PCIe allows system designers to take their existing PCIe implementations and easily scale them for low-power devices built using the popular M-PHY.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Who’s going to look after the computers that look after our parents?
Welcome to the internet of old things people….
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/16/the_internet_of_old_people/
If some of the biggest tech vendors have their way, it’ll be somewhere in between, with our golden years spent nostalgically noodling around on tablets, telling wellness apps how we feel, while our movements, activities and vital statistics are remorselessly hoovered up into the cloud.
On a recent visit to IBM’s Emerging Technology Services Lab in Hursley, researchers showed us technology on both a large scale and a small scale.
The large scale was a project they’d carried out for the municipal government in Bolzano, a city in Italy where a quarter of the population is over 65.
On the small scale, students at Hursley produced a business plan for a remote care system, centred on tablet app and a website operated by a “remote” carer.
Internet of Older People
The sensors being rained down on oldies by the likes of Fujitsu in Dundalk and IBM in Bolzano will undoubtedly throw up shedloads of data. But will it be of any use?
At the Dundalk Institute for Technology, what initially looks like blandly abstract art work to match the Ikea-supplied interior turns out to be histograms showing residents’ movements. Increasing numbers of blank spots could be a precursor of depression, or other physical illnesses, as could increased restlessness at night.
This data is collected in parallel to information from wellness apps on iPads or iPhones or PCs. Residents are regularly questioned on a variety of health issues. Some emerging problems might be spotted in close to real-time, while in other cases analysis after the fact might flag up more serious ailments.
The model will be familiar to anyone forced to ingest the last few years of hype over the so-called “Internet of Things” – sensors and other embedded devices throwing off reams of data, to trigger interventions or provide the raw big data for adaptive algorithms to chomp their way through. The difference is that instead of the info being sucked out of data centre, building facilities, science environments, it’s us (or our parents) who are in this feedback loop.
there seems to be a consensus that keeping older people out of institutions and in the community, ideally in their existing homes, is generally accepted to be a good thing.
use of lightweight Shimmer sensors – produced by an Dublin-based Intel spinout – together with adaptive algorithms to crunch the data
With the sensors, the docs can harvest vast amounts of data as subjects
“Tech does need to be part of that solution but it won’t be all of it and certainly doesn’t replace human contact.”
“That’s the challenge – the core cost whether it’s volunteer or paid staff time is people… it takes a long time to care for someone properly.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Analyst asks (and answers): Can Huawei shake up the data center industry?
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/06/huawei-data-center-play.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Computex 2014: Building a Better Mouse
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1322675&
Despite being the largest tradeshow in Asia, the 2014 Computex appeared to be more about building better solutions around the existing technology, than new innovations, a trend that has been reflected by many of the other major industry events. The problem appears to be a slowing in the innovation of existing platforms and a lull before any real innovation comes from the IoT generation. As with the other major industry events, there were plenty of new devices, but nothing remarkably new.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gung-ho Guangzhou college kids smash LINPACK cluster record
Oh snap! Don’t TELL me you brought K20s to a K40s party
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/11/college_linpack_record_smashed/
In addition to besting their peers, Team Sun Yat-sen also set a new LINPACK cluster competition world record with their 9,272 GFLOP/s score.
All of the top finishers ran either eight or nine nodes, with either 216 or 192 CPU cores, and were all using like amounts of memory. They also jammed their luggage full of NVIDIA Tesla cards to slide into their Inspur-provided clusters at the Guangzhou tourney.
The top teams were flogging NVIDIA K40s, with Sun Yat-sen and HUST sporting eight and nine respectively.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft poised to take Web server crown from Apache
Open sourcery ahead by just 1.5m servers and the lead is narrowing
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/11/microsoft_poised_to_take_web_server_crown_from_apache/
Brace yourself for an almighty burst of self-congratulation from Microsoft, which is poised to take the crown for the world’s most-used Web server.
The news isn’t all bad for Apache and other web servers, because the data above measures all web sites. When the firm considers “active” web servers (definition here), Apache continues to reign supreme with 51.43 per cent of the market, ahead of Nginx on 14.79 per cent and Microsoft’s 11.49 per cent.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Watch this: The .NET ASync story
devtastic training session from QA
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/11/net_async_training_webinar/
Laptops already routinely have four CPUs and in a few years’ time they will probably have a couple of dozen. However, Software doesn’t automatically make use of more than 1 CPU, it takes programmers to do that.
This training session will briefly show the async solutions that .NET has embraced
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP has Chromeboxes with Intel Core i7 chips, but they’ll cost you
Or fine, cheap out and get a Celeron, if you must
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/11/hp_chromeboxes/
HP has started taking orders for its new line of Chromeboxes, but while some carry the low price tags we’ve come to expect from Chrome OS devices, others are surprisingly expensive.
ntel spilled the beans last September that hardware makers would be offering desktop Chrome OS kit with Haswell processors this year, and Asus announced its entry into that field in February. What we hadn’t grasped until now, though, is just how much the high-end CPU options for these devices would add to the cost.
The entry-level HP Chromebox with a dual-core Intel Celeron 2955U processor clocked at 1.4GHz and 2GB of RAM can be had for just $179
Drop a 2.1GHz Intel Core i7 4600U in there, though, and the price goes up – way up. A version like that with 4GB of RAM will cost you a whopping $629
The HP Chromeboxes come sans monitor, keyboard, or mouse.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NO, Microsoft hasn’t given up on .Net, and YES it’s all about cloud
.Net vNext, ASP.Net vNext want to be cloud’s ‘first framework’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/13/dot_net_vnext_aims_for_cloud/
Developers who were worried that Microsoft was retreating from .Net can breathe easier, as the software giant had a host of .Net-related announcements to make at its annual TechEd North America conference this week.
Recent Build developer conferences have been light on .Net content, between Microsoft pushing JavaScript and web technologies for Windows Store apps, and its renewed emphasis on C++ for the desktop.
One of the more significant announcements on Monday was that .Net vNext will include a “cloud optimized mode,” which will be a lightweight version that eliminates libraries that aren’t needed for server-side deployments, such as Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation.
Chelsey says:
At this moment I am going to do my breakfast, later than having my breakfast coming again to read more news.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Tablet Sales Drop Will Push the Hybrid Cloud
http://www.hybridcloudforum.com/269/how-tablet-sales-drop-will-push-hybrid-cloud
The day of reckoning may be coming for tablets: According to NPD, April 2014 was the first time tablet sales were less than they were the previous year. It’s a 4 percent drop, significant enough to say that a million less tablets were sold last month than they were the same month in 2013. As The Next Web notes, it can be interpreted as the tablet market maturing and leveling off (Apple alone sold an estimated 200 million iPads in the past four years). It also shows that mainstream consumers as well as businesses are going to the next big thing.
The next big thing is everything – that is, the Internet of Things – and the hybrid cloud will be virtually essential in this transition. As Bob Violino and Bill Laberis recently pointed out, this year marks the tipping point of connected devices. Communicating to consumers and businesses through PC, mobile, and smartphone isn’t enough anymore – now it is smart light bulbs, compact watches, and prescription glasses. Managing this data will require a flexible and, most importantly, affordable platform.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP Labs working on new computer architecture with new OS and memristor-based memory:
With ‘The Machine,’ HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-11/with-the-machine-hp-may-have-invented-a-new-kind-of-computer
If Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard are spinning in their graves, they may be due for a break. Their namesake company is cooking up some awfully ambitious industrial-strength computing technology that, if and when it’s released, could replace a data center’s worth of equipment with a single refrigerator-size machine.
That’s what they’re calling it at HP Labs: “the Machine.” It’s basically a brand-new type of computer architecture that HP’s engineers say will serve as a replacement for today’s designs, with a new operating system, a different type of memory, and superfast data transfer. The company says it will bring the Machine to market within the next few years or fall on its face trying.
“We think we have no choice,”
A decade ago, it wouldn’t seem as outlandish as it now does for a company such as HP, IBM (IBM), or Sun Microsystems to build a new computer architecture from the ground up. The hardware powerhouses, known as systems companies, all made their own chips, networking technology, and custom OS. Then commodity components became more powerful, and better data center software began to make up for deficiencies in the cheaper hardware. Consumer Web companies such as Google, Amazon.com (AMZN), and Yahoo! (YHOO) advanced new data center designs that were quickly adopted by the mainstream, shrinking the market share of the systems companies.
HP Labs, the company’s R&D arm, was once revered throughout Silicon Valley as a steady source of new products that could open up new markets.
The Machine started to take shape two years ago
Fink and his colleagues decided to pitch HP Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman on the idea of assembling all this technology to form the Machine. During a two-hour presentation held a year and a half ago, they laid out how the computer might work, its benefits, and the expectation that about 75 percent of HP Labs personnel would be dedicated to this one project. “At the end, Meg turned to [Chief Financial Officer] Cathie Lesjak and said, ‘Find them more money,’”
Memory represents perhaps the biggest opportunity for change.
A problem with this architecture, according to computing experts, is that DRAM and the Flash memory used in computers seem unable to keep pace with the increase in data use. Any delivery date has to be taken with some skepticism given that HP has been hyping the memristor technology for years and failed to meet earlier self-imposed deadlines.
“Memristors have been vaporware for a long time,”
“There is a huge difference between research and production.” Papadopoulos says he applauds HP’s plan and hopes it succeeds, but he warns that the OS development alone will be a massive effort.
The Machine isn’t on HP’s official roadmap. Fink says it could arrive as early as 2017 or take until the end of the decade. Any delivery date has to be taken with some skepticism
Tomi Engdahl says:
Deep Learning Resurrects Neural Networks
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322696&
ver 2,200 users — from Fortune 500 companies to hobbyists — have signed up for Ersatz Labs Inc. (San Francisco, Calif.) free deep-learning beta-software service in the clouds over the last year. But now the cat is out of the bag — customers can purchase “Ersatz” either as a cloud-based service or an in-house appliance.
What does it do? Picture the computer in Star Trek: You ask the computer to search calculate some problem; it examines your data and answers.
Ersatz combines the latest brain-like neural network algorithms to search and sift through your big data to come up with hard-to-identify trends that you can turn into actionable intelligence — at least that’s the pitch you get from Ersatz Labs chief executive officer (CEO), who credits the deep-learning breakthrough to the researchers in the field whose latest theories are on what Ersatz is based.
Ersatz was formed to benefit those companies that want the machine learning abilities of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook on their own datasets, and that don’t have the funds or desire to hire a staff of deep learning experts.
The best thing about Ersatz’s deep learning neural networks is that they simplify these complex tasks with an easy-to-use web interface and application programmers interface (API).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oculus expects to sell “north of a million units” for first consumer Rift
Interview: Headset maker aims for 2015 consumer release, possibly sold “at cost.”
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/06/oculus-expects-to-sell-north-of-a-million-units-for-first-consumer-rift/
With a recent high-profile buyout to the tune of $2 billion, you might think Facebook and Oculus are expecting the forthcoming release of the first consumer-targeted Rift VR headset to be an immediate, multimillion-selling, console-level success. But in an E3 interview with Ars Technica, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe scaled back expectations, saying that he’s conservatively hoping for just “north of a million units [in sales]” over the life of the first consumer version of the Oculus Rift.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Introduces “Google My Business,” A New One-Stop Shop To Help Business Get Found Online
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/11/google-introduces-google-my-business-a-new-one-stop-shop-to-help-business-get-found-online/
Google announced a suite of tools this morning for business owners, offering them a one-stop shop to update their business information, add photos, read reviews and, of course, use Google+. The service, called “Google My Business,” seems to be aimed at those who have yet to figure out how to “get on Google” so to speak; in fact, there’s a button that even uses that same expression.
Tomi Engdahl says:
With ‘The Machine,’ HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-11/with-the-machine-hp-may-have-invented-a-new-kind-of-computer#p1
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP Labs and the Future of Technology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJj5h2jAikA
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to improve the quality of outsourcing services
Despite the trend of outsourcing satisfaction with the quality of outsourced services is not at the desired level.
What measures of outsourcing services to improve the quality level of costs without compromising? Will be described in a few key ways from three perspectives: 1) Customer 2) Supplier, 3) Customer and Supplier together. The underlying basis for right and for the right reasons of outsourcing.
Customer: Service / services must set clear goals and service objectives in addition to the development of services. Typically, customers are dissatisfied, in particular, that the services do not develop. Customers will not, therefore, feel that the promise of innovation and proactivity is realized. Customers, it is important to understand that your service delivery is fundamentally different from the management of outsourced services. A high-quality experienced by the customer’s operation is needed to achieve the customer’s active contribution in steering the supplier.
The exact description of the contents of the order is important, when the delivery service is purchased from producer. Service providers produce what is ordered.
Development of services and the development of services management is essential to agree in the contract negotiations.
Customers appreciate the clear, highly refined proposals which the supplier has given substance to the benefits of and prepared for at least a preliminary plan for implementing the proposal.
Why data and potential is not being exploited?
In service business, even small actions can have a lot of significance. Good service culture to keep customers happy.
Customers and suppliers, it is important to create a unified, Cross-organizational working culture. Uniform work culture of both organizations requires effort and the right attitude.
The service manual is emphasized, particularly in large and complex deliveries.
ICT outsourcing services continues to be strong. Benefits realization plan is to invest in our new roles clarification and adoption, vendors, active control, process capability in the development and working together for the common cultural creation.
Suppliers should pay special attention to innovation and proactivity as well as the comprehensiveness of services and service culture.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/artikkelit/parhaat_kaytannot/kuinka+parantaa+ulkoistuspalveluiden+laatua/a993173
Tomi Engdahl says:
Panasas: Avoid lengthy RAID re-builds – use our dodgy-file tart-up tech
Triple parity and erasure coding
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/12/lengthy_raid_rebuilds_attacked_by_panasas/
Storage biz Panasas has unveiled boosted hardware and software – and attacked the RAID rebuild problem by rebuilding damaged files instead of complete disks.
As big data gets, well, bigger, and so do disk drives, the time to rebuild a failed drives is extended, so much so so that, in large arrays, a second disk drive can fail before the first is rebuilt, causing data loss. RAID 6 protects against this situation. However disks have reached 6TB and will soon be at 8 and 10TB and rebuild times will continued getting longer, which is one problem in itself, and exposing us to the risk of a third disk failure while two disks are being re-built.
What Panasas’ RAID 6+ does is to end the default rebuilding of an entire failed drive and only rebuild the damaged data components.
It can do this because, at heart, it is an object-based parallel filesystem.
He says that RAID 6+ provides a 150 x increase in reliability compared to RAID 6 and, with the PAS 16 and PanFS v6 “RAID rebuild performance scales linearly.”
Small files have three copies stored, all in flash. Filesystem metadata is quadruple-mirrored. Larger files are striped across storage blades. The system is not given a five or six nines availability rating. Instead Panasas talks about an always-on model. While per-file rebuilds are taking place affected files may not be available, but the remainder of the file estate, so to speak, is.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg Testing Productivity App For Oculus Rift
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/06/11/1914215/bloomberg-testing-productivity-app-for-oculus-rift
“Bloomberg is one of those companies, having designed software that allows Oculus-equipped traders and financial pros to view dozens of virtual “screens,” each one packed with data. The platform is clearly aimed at those Masters of the Universe who stack their real-world desks with four, six or eight screens—the better to take the pulse of the markets. Think of it as a traditional Bloomberg terminal on steroids.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Virtual reality headset Oculus Rift meets the Bloomberg terminal
http://qz.com/218129/virtual-reality-headset-oculus-rift-meets-the-bloomberg-terminal/
The trading desk of the future may well exist in virtual space.
+
Bloomberg LP has built a prototype of its data terminal hooked up to the virtual-reality headset Oculus Rift. The company plans to show off the technology—still a long way from becoming a real product—at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit, which begins today in Sausalito, California.
Putting on the bulky headset transports you to a world of infinite space and, thus, as many screens flashing financial data as you desire. Screen real estate is not an issue here.
It’s early yet for virtual reality, let alone applications of the technology that could work in a financial firm. But Bloomberg is excited enough about the virtual terminal to have demonstrated it last month at a retreat for senior executives.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung bets big on fingerprint scanning in its war with Apple’s iPad
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/13/samsung-bets-big-on-fingerprint-scanning-in-its-war-with-apples-ipad
New Galaxy Tab S is thinner, lighter and first to use a high-resolution OLED screen, but is it enough to beat the iPad Air?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel prods PC market’s corpse, corpse shouts ‘I’M NOT DEAD!’
Chip giant raises revenue expectations after signs of life flicker in biz boxen
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/12/pc_market_growth_intel/
Chipmaker Intel has raised its revenue expectations after discovering that the PC market is less moribund than it imagined.
Chipzilla said on Thursday that “as a result of stronger than expected demand for business PCs,” it was raising its second-quarter growth revenue estimate from $13bn to $13.7bn.
“Intel now expects some revenue growth for the year as compared to the previous outlook of approximately flat,” Intel said. “The change in outlook is driven mostly by strong demand for business PCs.”
This encouraging development comes after Intel said in its first quarter results that it glimpsed “signs of improvement in the PC business”.
Due to its overwhelming dominance of the PC and data center market, Intel is a bellwether for the wider IT industry. By raising revenue expectations, Intel has signaled that things may not be quite as grim in the global economy as they seem.