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:
Siri Will Soon Understand You a Whole Lot Better
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/siri_ai/
Now, nearly five years later, neural network algorithms are hitting the mainstream, making computers smarter in new and exciting ways. Google has used them to beef up Android’s voice recognition. IBM uses them. And, most remarkably, Microsoft uses neural networks as part of the Star-Trek-like Skype Translate, which translates what you say into another language almost instantly. People “were very skeptical at first,” Hinton says, “but our approach has now taken over.”
One big-name company, however, hasn’t made the jump: Apple, whose Siri software is due for an upgrade. Though Apple is famously secretive about its internal operations–and did not provide comment for this article–it seems that the company previously licensed voice recognition technology from Nuance—perhaps the best known speech recognition vendor. But those in the tight-knit community of artificial intelligence researchers believe this is about to change. It’s clear, they say, that Apple has formed its own speech recognition team and that a neural-net-boosted Siri is on the way.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Actions Licenses ARM for 64-Bit Tablets
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322938&
The iPad was the undisputed king of the consumer high-end tablet market until last year, but new Android-based devices such as the Sony Xperia Z2 and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S are giving Apple a run for its money.
Many other tablet OEMs are looking to introduce high-performance 64-bit tablets. Actions Semiconductor will start providing its first systems on chips (SoC) in late 2014, making it easier for the Chinese company to develop high-end devices.
Actions announced that it has signed a license agreement for the 64-bit ARM Cortex A50 processor family, making it one of China’s leading technology design companies delivering an ARM-based 64-bit chip for tablet devices.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
VAIO computers return after Sony sells the brand
The new VAIO Corporation is here
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/1/5859994/vaio-is-back
The iconic VAIO PC brand has been resurrected today, following Sony’s sale of the struggling business to investment fund Japan Industrial Partners.
The deal was set to close in July, and now the new VAIO Corporation is selling the VAIO Fit and VAIO Pro computers in Japan. The PCs come without Sony branding, but at least for now are being offered at Sony’s own online store.
The new company will have no more than 240 employees, the message says, but will retain VAIO’s DNA. VAIO Corporation was officially founded today, with Sony taking a 5 percent investment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
FreeDOS Is 20 Years Old
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/06/30/2232245/freedos-is-20-years-old
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 9 will be all desktop unless you have a tablet
Or you really, really like tiles
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2352947/windows-9-will-be-all-desktop-unless-you-have-a-tablet
MICROSOFT IS TARGETING Windows 8.x refuseniks with desktop friendly changes in Project Threshold, the operating system that is expected to become Windows 9, unless of course, the marketing team decides to give it a new name to distance it from its latest offering.
According to Mary-Jo Foley at Zdnet, whose Microsoft related predictions are usually reliable, the next version of the flagging Windows OS will owe more to its heritage and less to the recent past.
With the present market share of Windows 7 at over 50 percent, the company is now desperate to shake the shonky reputation that Windows 8.x has acquired.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Analyst: Chinese buyers shunning IBM, EMC, Oracle and Cisco
Government nudging locals towards home-grown kit when possible
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/01/analyst_chinese_buyers_shunning_ibm_emc_oracle_and_cisco/
For years, the world’s largest technology vendors have assumed that China represents a colossal opportunity, albeit with an unusual set of hoops to jump through in order to do business.
That view now seems a little dated according to Frank Liu, analyst firm Forrester’s chap covering converged infrastructure and big data in China.
Liu yesterday wrote that Chinese technology management professionals need to “start looking closely at domestic IT vendors.”
One reason to do so is that China’s government is sending not-so-subtle signals about its preferences, through recent news items questioning the security of Windows 8 and the suitability of IBM kit for local banks. China has also made much of Edward Snowden’s revelations, especially those alleging US-derived technology offers surveillance facilities.
Liu also argues that Alibaba’s move from IBM servers, EMC storage and Oracle databases to x86 servers, PCIe storage and open source databases has set a “trend” other local business will follow.
Global titans are already feeling the pinch in China
Tomi Engdahl says:
Summertime blues: Microsoft insiders brace for cuts
http://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/summertime-blues-microsoft-insiders-brace-for-cuts/
It’s that time of year for Microsoft to slim down. This year, expect bigger than normal cuts, given that the software giant’s $7.2 billion buyout of Nokia brought with it 25,000 new mouths to feed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung Release First SSD With 3D NAND:
Samsung 850 Pro 512GB Full Review – NAND Goes 3D!
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Samsung-850-Pro-512GB-Full-Review-NAND-Goes-3D
Samsung has certainly been pushing the envelope in the SSD field. For the past two years straight, they have launched class leading storage products, frequently showing outside-the-box thinking. Their 840 PRO series was an impressive MLC performer to say the least, but even more impressive was the 840 EVO, which combined cost-efficient TLC flash with a super-fast SLC cache.
If you’re going “Hey, they just changed the label from 840 to 850!”, well, think again. This SSD might have the same MEX controller as its predecessor, but Samsung has done some significant overhauling of the flash memory itself.
The newer type of flash (second from left) is called Charge Trap Flash. It hadn’t really caught on in the 2D world, but it works extremely well with the particular process Samsung has chosen.
Building chips in this fashion is not exactly easy. Stacking a bunch of layers is not that big of a deal, but then etching deep holes through all layers, and then applying coatings from the inside-out
The trick up Samsung’s sleeve is that since they are stacking vertically, they don’t need to pack things in so tightly on the horizontal plane. This enabled Samsung to take a step back on the lithography side of things, meaning V-NAND is made on a 30nm process.
Tomi Engdahl says:
DON’T BOTHER migrating legacy apps to the cloud, says CTO
You’ll just be disappointed, says UBS gros fromage
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/27/forget_about_cloud_migration/
The president of the Open Data Centre Alliance has given sage advice to CIOs contemplating how they migrate their legacy platforms into the cloud: forget it and just dump your old code.
But Correy Voo, whose day job is as infrastructure CTO at UBS, added this was likely a temporary dilemma as the coming wave of tech bosses, who’ve grown up with theoretically unlimited resources at their fingertips, will not even contemplate such a move.
“Don’t try to lift a legacy platform and make it a cloud process. There are some things that just will not fit a cloud environment,” Voo told an audience at the Cloud World Forum event in London last week.
An application developed to deal with the constraints of the 80s and 90s, or even early noughties, would never take full advantage of the new platform, he argued. Banks and other financial institutions, many of which are members of the ODCA, will have stacks of such apps languishing on mainframes or other aging platforms.
“I’m not saying it’s impossible – it’s certainly possible if you want to throw a lot of time and effort at it,” he told The Register “But…if I want to buy something brand new like a 4K TV I don’t want to play low definition material on it.”
“In my view the users in some ways are being cheated because they don’t get the full capability of that investment.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cisco doesn’t make hyper-converged gear, but if it did, it’d probably look like this
IT giant can have our recipe for free
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/02/cisco_is_unhyperconverged/
Cisco is big in converged systems but nowhere in hyper-converged ones.
What we mean by that is that Cisco is big in converged systems, such as VCE’s Vblocks and the Cisco-NetApp FlexPods, but it doesn’t have systems in the Nutanix and Simplivity class, which are more integrated than the Vblock and Flexpod systems.
Now that Dell has an OEM deal with Nutanix, and VMware has its Project Marvin, maybe it’s time for Cisco to think seriously about getting in on the hyper-converged act
Tomi Engdahl says:
According to Gartner, the world of IT spending will increase this year to 2.7 trillion euros, or 2700 billion. Boggling amount is 2.1 percent higher than last year, but less than in previous forecasts were evaluated.
New equipment is placed in the money this year, a total of nearly 503 billion euros.
The server theaters have invested nearly EUR 103 billion.
IT services are purchased in the world this year to 710 billion euros.
Telecom/networking services 1200 billion euros.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1550:it-investoinnit-2-7-biljoonaan-euroon&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT spending growth to be slower than expected in 2014 due to pricing pressure, Gartner says
http://www.cio.com/article/2449062/it-spending-growth-to-be-slower-than-expected-in-2014-due-to-pricing-pressure-gartner-says.html
IT research firm Gartner has cut its forecast for global IT spending by about one-third for this year, blaming a tougher competitive environment and subsequent pressure on vendors to lower prices.
Spending will rise 2.1 percent to US$3.7 trillion in 2014, down from the 3.2 percent growth rate Gartner had predicted for 2014.
The downgraded forecast isn’t necessarily a cause for concern, said Gartner managing vice president Richard Gordon in an interview.
“In the context of an improving global economic situation, to have IT spending be anemic, in the low single digits, might be a surprise on the face of it,” he said. But customers aren’t necessarily cutting back on spending, Gordon said. “They’re getting better deals for their money and spending their money carefully.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Uncovering the Virtues of Virtual Desktops
http://www.cio.com/article/2449510/cloud-computing/uncovering-the-virtues-of-virtual-desktops.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Most In-Demand Marketing Tech Skills
http://www.cio.com/article/2449009/careers-staffing/158055-The-Most-In-Demand-Marketing-Tech-Skills.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Overclocking to 5GHz? We put Intel Devil’s Canyon CPU to the test
Haswell refresh that’s hot to trot
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/30/review_intel_devils_canyon_cpu/
Currently, at the time of writing, there are just two SKUs of the new processors, the 3.5GHz Core i5-4690K and the flagship 4GHz Core i7-4790K, which, as luck would have it, is the one I’ll be looking at shortly.
The new CPUs are compatible with the recently rolled out 9 series Z97 motherboards.
When the i7-4790K was launched, Intel was heard claiming that an overclocked 5GHz was possible on air cooling. Well you might be lucky and find the golden ticket chip that does, but like so many others that have tried for that magic number and fell short, the chip I received only just managed 4.8GHz but even that wasn’t stable enough to be deemed a success. The fastest speed I could get my example to run without it fighting back with BSODs was 4.7GHz.
With a 4GHz base clock on all the cores, Intel’s i7-4790K is without doubt a powerful CPU
Tomi Engdahl says:
WebODF: JavaScript Open Document Format Editor Deemed Stable
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/07/02/1349208/webodf-javascript-open-document-format-editor-deemed-stable
WebODF (an Open Document Format editor written entirely using Javascript and natively rendering the XML document using CSS) 0.5.0 has been released, and the developers are declaring this release stable enough for every day use.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft seeks Office for Android testers as it readies tablet version
Touch-friendly Office Android apps coming before Windows version
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/2/5863717/microsoft-office-android-tablets-beta
Tomi Engdahl says:
ARM Launches Juno Reference Platform For 64-bit Android Development, Bakes In Linaro Support
http://hothardware.com/News/ARM-Launches-New-Reference-Platform-For-64bit-Developers-Bakes-In-Linaro-Support/#!7C4vF
One of the trickiest aspects to launching a major new platform update is the chicken and egg problem. Without any hardware to test on or take advantage of, developers are leery of committing to supporting new hardware features. Without software that takes advantage of new hardware capabilities, customers aren’t willing to pay for new equipment.
The Juno development platform combines several of ARM’s most advanced technologies, including the ARMv8 instruction set, all on a single board. The product supports big.Little in an asymmetric configuration; each board ships with two Cortex-A57s, four Cortex-A53s, and a modest Mali T-624 core.
All this hardware needs an OS to run on — which is why ARM is announcing a 64-bit port of Android as part of this new development board. By including AOSP support as well as additional hooks and features from Linaro, ARM wants Juno to be a sort-of one-stop shopping product for anyone who needs to test, prototype, or design a 64-bit product for the ARM ecosystem. The Android flavor that’s coming over isn’t an ancient port — it’s based on Linaro Stable Kernel 3.10 and compiled with GCC 4.9. 32-bit ports and OpenEmbedded ports will also be available.
One thing I want to clarify is that these kinds of products don’t come cheap. Nvidia turned heads earlier this year when they announced a Tegra K1 development board for just $192, but the vast majority of these types of specialty products are expensive So why buy a chip from ARM when you could buy a device from Samsung, Nvidia, or Qualcomm and develop on that?
Many ARM vendors do their own custom work
Tomi Engdahl says:
With 45,000 Pre-Orders, The New Oculus Rift Will Start Arriving Around July 14th
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/01/oculus-rift-dk2-shipping-date/
Back in March, the second generation of Oculus’ work-in-progress virtual reality headset went up for pre-order for $350. No one knew exactly when the new headset would actually ship, outside of a target window of “sometime in July”.
Word on the Oculus fan forums was that the company would announce more details today, and sure enough: the company has just announced that the first DK2 (Developer Kit #2) headsets should start arriving by the week of July 14th.
The bad news: even with that sweet, sweet Facebook cash behind them, they can’t keep up with pre-orders
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia preparing a Shield Tablet successor to its Android game console
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/2/5863719/nvidia-shield-successor-tablet
The Shield Tablet looks set to be a hybrid two-in-one device that will show off the power of the Tegra K1 chip
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 7, XP and even Vista GAIN market share again
Windows 8.x failure to launch confirmed
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/03/windows_7_xp_and_even_vista_gain_market_share_again/
Whatever Microsoft is doing to get punters adopting Windows 8.x isn’t working, at least if the latest figures from Netmarketshare showing its older operating systems growing faster than its latest progeny are any guide.
We’ve now tracked Netmarketshare’s data for nine months and as the table below shows, Windows 7 has enjoyed steady growth over that period. Windows XP has also had its moments
Even Windows Vista managed to grow by market share over the last couple of months.
Tomi Engdahl says:
No, modular Java isn’t dead. It’ll be in Java 9 – honest
Project Jigsaw, nixed from Java 8, is back and ready for Phase Two
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/03/project_jigsaw_phase_two/
Despite significant delays, Oracle is once again moving forward with Project Jigsaw, a major undertaking that aims to allow Java developers to break their programs down into independent, interoperable modules.
Jigsaw was first intended to be a major features of Java 8. By 2012 Big O decided that waiting for Jigsaw to be ready would delay the entire Java 8 release, so work on the module system was postponed until a later version.
The first three steps will involve figuring out how to break the JDK down into modules, modularizing the source code, and then finally modularizing the binary images. The fourth and last step will be to introduce the module system itself, in the form that developers will use for other programs outside the JDK.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Denies Office Ban in China
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Denies-Office-Ban-in-China-449181.shtml
China is slowly becoming forbidden land for Microsoft, but the Redmond-based tech giant is trying to solve all local issues with its products by discussing with government officials every single issue that might prevent them from adopting its software.
After Windows 8, Microsoft Office might have a similar fate in China
Microsoft has told us in a mailed statement that Windows 7 is pushed as a potential replacement for Windows 8 until talks come to a conclusion
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows users: You get a patch! And you get a patch! And you get a patch! Everybody gets…
But not you, Windows XP. No Patch Tuesday for you
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/03/patch_tuesday_coming_up_and_servers_are_getting_a_bumper_dose/
Microsoft has issued its usual warning to admins ahead of this month’s Patch Tuesday – and servers are getting some serious fixes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Desktop Top Operating System Share Trend
http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=11&qpcustomb=0
Tomi Engdahl says:
BYOD Users Work Longer and Earlier
http://www.cio.com/article/2449817/byod/byod-users-work-longer-and-earlier.html
Are your employees more productive using their own smartphone or tablet as part of a BYOD program? This seems to be one of the trickier questions in the mobile in the enterprise debate.
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Sure, employees enjoy the convenience of carrying one phone rather than a corporate phone and a personal phone. Conventional wisdom also says a BYOD policy makes an employee more accessible after-hours, over weekends and during vacations.
According to a recent survey, the average BYOD-carrying employee works an extra two hours and sends 20 more emails every day.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Girl gamers sexism row: Top e-sports federation finds reverse gear
You can enter ‘female’ or ‘all’ categories – but there’s no ‘male’ section
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/03/gamers_are_all_or_female_says_international_esports_federation/
Tomi Engdahl says:
China approves Lenovo’s purchase of IBM’s x86 server business
But American suspicion lingers on
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2353811/china-approves-lenovos-purchase-of-ibm-x86-server-business
Tomi Engdahl says:
By 2045 ‘The Top Species Will No Longer Be Humans,’ and That Could Be a Problem
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/07/06/0039234/by-2045-the-top-species-will-no-longer-be-humans-and-that-could-be-a-problem
Louis Del Monte estimates that machine intelligence will exceed the world’s combined human intelligence by 2045. … “By the end of this century most of the human race will have become cyborgs. The allure will be immortality.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
By 2045 ‘The Top Species Will No Longer Be Humans,’ And That Could Be A Problem
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/louis-del-monte-interview-on-the-singularity-2014-7#ixzz36gGEjAGM
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs, IT Hiring Managers Optimistic, But Challenges Remain
http://www.cio.com/article/2449634/careers-staffing/cios-it-hiring-managers-optimistic-but-challenges-remain.html
A majority of CIOs and IT managers plan to hire tech pros in the second half of 2014, according to two recent industry surveys — but salary pressures and high turnover rates still present tech workforce challenges.
“I’ve never seen as many IT projects being funded as I am right now. More projects mean a need for more people, so demand is up, but the supply remains stagnant.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Exclusive: Samsung’s virtual reality headset will be called Gear VR, launch at IFA 2014
http://www.sammobile.com/2014/07/08/exclusive-samsungs-virtual-reality-headset-will-be-called-gear-vr-launch-at-ifa-2014/
A month ago, Engadget exclusively reported on Samsung’s upcoming VR device, which is being developed in collaboration with Facebook’s Oculus VR. Today, we can confirm that Samsung is indeed working on a virtual reality device, and it’s called the “Gear VR”. Samsung will be announcing the device, alongside the Galaxy Note 4, at IFA 2014.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Photo of Samsung’s Virtual Reality Headset Leaked – Report
http://topics.dirwell.com/tech/photo-of-samsungs-virtual-reality-headset-leaked-report.html
According to SamMobile, the head gear will work by hooking it to a Samsung Galaxy smartphone through a USB 3.0 dock
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM announced it would invest over the next five years of $ 3 billion a completely new type of computer development. The company plans to get rid of the silicon chip and is looking the other hand, graphene, carbon nanotubes, and other related materials direction. Using the new chip materials IBM aims to develop atomic-scale chips.
Supratik Guha says that the current computer architecture dates from the 1940s.
“Given the nature of the problems we encounter today, we believe the time to take to explore other options,”
Hewlett-Packard announced plans completely new computer architecture research for barely a month ago
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/kaikki_uutiset/ibm+kaataa+3+miljardia+taysin+uudenlaisen+tietokoneen+kehittamiseen++quotatomitason+sirujaquot/a997415
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gartner has introduced its projections on computers, tablets and smartphones market trends for this and the next two years. Much new is not visible. Mobile growth has calmed down and the traditional PC to slow down the slide continues.
This year, the traditional desktop and laptop computers are sold according to Gartner, 276.2 million. The reading is about twenty million less than last year. Next year, the market is shrinking at the same speed, a research institute to predict.
Next year, the ultra portable PCs will be sold 55 million copies, which places a very traditional PC’s eroding.
Tablets sold this year of 256 million shares and 320 million next year. At the same time the year 2015 comes to the point where the tablet sales will overwrite an existing PC sales figures.
Mobile phones sold this year to 1.863 billion shares. The figure is more than 50 million higher than last year. Next year, sales will increase again to around 85 million devices, Gartner estimates.
All in all, a variety of suitable personal computing devices sold this year, more than 2.4 billion pieces.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1562:perinteisen-pc-n-liuku-jatkuu&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
A chat with Microsoft’s CEO: why Apple and Google haven’t won yet
“Guess what, you’re not just a consumer.”
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/10/5888203/a-chat-with-microsofts-ceo-why-apple-and-google-havent-won-yet
Satya Nadella has been CEO of Microsoft for five months, and he’s made it clear he intends to change and re-focus the software behemoth as it navigates the next generation of technological change. To mark the closing of Microsoft’s fiscal year, Nadella released a long, detailed memo laying out his grand vision for the future of Microsoft. He talked about the importance of mobile and the cloud, the end of Microsoft’s focus on devices and services, and laid the foundation for big changes in Redmond. “I consider the job before us to be bolder and more ambitious than anything we have ever done,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tech industry IGNORES customers: ‘It’s a supplier-driven world’
Printer biz boss lifts lid on thing we all knew
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/07/11/technology_industry_profiteering/
Tech manufacturers and their third party suppliers have profiteered by ignoring the real demands of SME customers in the pursuit of extra margin, or so says the CEO at a print hardware and services biz.
The, er, revelatory piece of info was announced by Steve Francis, boss at print solutions company Danwood.
“This [ICT] industry, more than any I’ve ever met, is dominated by powerful OEMs,” he told us. “[Customers] don’t decide what they want to buy, it’s essentially a supplier-driven world”.
“As a service and support organisation in the channel, our service proposition is typically standardised; it’s a multi-year break/fix service that is not tuned across SMEs,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Unbundling innovation: Samsung, PCs and China
July 10, 2014
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/7/10/unbundling-innovation
It seems pretty clear now that the Android OEM world is starting to play out pretty much like the PC world. The industry has become unbundled vertically between components, devices, operating system and application software & services. The components are commoditised and OEMs cannot differentiate on software, so they are entering a race to the bottom of cheaper and cheaper and more and more commoditised products, much like the PC industry.
The funny thing about this is that part of the original promise of Android was that it would allow OEMs to avoid this. Part of the promise was that because Android was open, OEMs would be free to customise it to differentiate their products on top of a common platform. But of course, it hasn’t really worked out like that. I think there are a couple of reasons why.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The All-Flash Array Market in 2014: Pure, EMC, and HP all Up Their Games – See more at: http://www.purestorage.com/blog/the-all-flash-array-market-in-2014-pure-emc-hp-and-violin-all-up-their-games/?utm_source=techmeme#sthash.Le5FE7R7.dpuf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Virtual desktop bones thrown: Gartner mages see Microsoft rising
What a shock, VMware in the lead
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/15/gartner_vdi_mq_shows_microsoft_gaining_and_citrix_fading/
Gartner’s server virtualisation magic quadrant shows virtualisation juggernaut VMware sitting at the top of the VDI pack for the fifth year running, with Citrix down in the niche player dumps along with Red Hat.
There are just two suppliers in the leader’s quadrant: VMware and Microsoft. Oracle is the only challenger and that by a narrow margin separating it from the niche player’s box. The nichers are Parallels, Citrix, Red Hat and Huawei. There are no “visionaries”, VDI is now a startup-free zone.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SHARE your big data scientist. They’re too costly and rare to keep a whole one – HP exec
Pool the, er, ‘shared resource’ across channel partner base
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/07/15/hp_data_scientist/
Big data is on the strategic priority dashboard of every enterprise tech firm, but coughing a potentially princely sum for skilled people to talk the talk in complex projects may not be commercially viable for some in the channel.
“At some point,” she told El Chan, “partners will need to get a data scientist on board. Data scientists are very expensive people so we are talking to our distributors about how we could pool them across a number of resellers in order to smooth the investment required to build a big data practice”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Business Agility Drives Cloud Adoption
http://www.cio.com/article/2455960/cloud-computing/business-agility-drives-cloud-adoption.html
Companies adopting cloud computing most aggressively say that business agility — not cost — is the primary driver of adoption.
If you’re stuck on using new technologies like cloud just to save money, you’re really losing out
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Power of ITIL and The Problem with Gurus
http://www.cio.com/article/2458042/itil/the-power-of-itil-and-the-problem-with-gurus.html
Is just being good at your job really still enough?
For a long time, it was only results that mattered. As long as you delivered those, people tended not to be overly concerned about how the job got done. It didn’t matter if you had to pull a last-minute all-nighter, or re-jigger everything in the system that could ever be jiggered. You were kind of a black box where needs went in and something came out to meet those needs.
While there’s a lot to be said for having those skills (especially in an emergency) as a way of getting things done, on a day-to-day basis the slap-dash, jury-rig method has a lot of problems. For one thing, what if the person who knows how to do the magic act leaves the company? If your only concern is the outcome and you don’t know how to get to it then you’re out of luck. For another thing, what if he just gets something wrong one day? He hits the wrong button, enters the wrong code and things go haywire? To err, as we all know from experience, is human.
Undocumented processes are very, very difficult to replicate and make it a nightmare to figure out where something went wrong. That’s why ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is so important. It provides a framework to identify, plan, deliver and support IT services.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Exclusive Interview: Best Buy CEO Says Tablet Sales Are “Crashing,” Hope for PCs
http://recode.net/2014/07/30/exclusive-interview-best-buy-ceo-says-tablet-sales-are-crashing-sees-hope-for-pcs/
Re/code has landed in Minneapolis to talk to the folks at Best Buy — the last standing nationwide big-box, bricks-and-mortar consumer electronics retailer, with over 1,000 main stores and hundreds of smaller mobile device stores.
The chain, survivor of a breed that once included competitors like Circuit City and CompUSA, is waging a multi-front battle for relevance and even survival. Its foes: Online-only alternatives like Amazon, deep discounters like Walmart and high-touch boutique stores like Apple.
It’s also battling the trend called “show-rooming” in which consumers try out products in a store like Best Buy but then buy online from e-tailers like Amazon. To fight this, it has expanded its price matching to include online sellers.
Re/code: What is happening with the PC? Why is it declining quarter after quarter? Will it turn around?
Hubert Joly: So, we’ve actually had a revival of the PC business at Best Buy [in the company's first quarter]. Part of it was that Microsoft stopped supporting the old version.
Stopped supporting Windows XP?
Yes. So that was good. From a technology standpoint, customers now have a broad range of choices with the tablets and the phones.
The tablets boomed and now are crashing. The volume has really gone down in the last several months. But I think the laptop has something of a revival because it’s becoming more versatile.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD’s new 64-bit ARM board points way to x86 coexistence
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2459780/amds-new-64bit-arm-board-points-way-to-x86-coexistence.html
Advanced Micro Devices is moving closer to a motherboard design that will accept both x86 and ARM chips with the shipment of its first 64-bit ARM board.
The Opteron A1100-Series developer hardware is an uncased computer costing $2,999, and aimed at programmers who want to write applications and drivers for AMD’s unreleased ARM servers, which are expected to become available by early next year.
This is the first ARM-based system released by AMD, which by 2016 hopes to ship servers in which x86 and ARM chips could coexist. The effort to unite x86 and ARM, called Project Skybridge, involves the development of a motherboard to which customers can attach chips based on either architecture.
AMD already sells PCs, tablets and server chips based on the x86 architecture, and is making ARM chips for servers and embedded products. With Skybridge, AMD hopes to bring x86 and ARM into one server and provide more flexibility to customers who want to switch between architectures.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Best PC You Can Build for Under $500
by Jarred Walton on August 1, 2014 11:11 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8320/best-pc-you-can-build-for-under-500
With yesterday’s launch of AMD’s 65W Kaveri APUs, it seemed a good time to give some recommendations for new system builds. We’re starting out at the budget end of the spectrum, however, and pricing/availability on Kaveri generally rules it out. We’ll keep things short and look at two builds, one AMD and one Intel.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Group Test: Linux Text Editors
http://www.linuxvoice.com/text-editors/
Mayank Sharma tests five supercharged text editors that can crunch more than just words.
Two of most popular and powerful plain text editors are Emacs and Vim. However, we didn’t include them in this group test for a couple of reasons.
All the tools, except Gedit and jEdit, were installed on Fedora and Ubuntu via their recommended installation method.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open source IT is the way forward
Column CERN shows the way
By Egan Orion
Fri Aug 01 2014, 13:18
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/opinion/2358469/open-source-it-is-the-way-forward
Linux penguinA PRESENTATION by the European nuclear research organisation CERN at the recent open source convention (OSCON) has provided a glimpse at where IT organisations are going to have to go in order to remain competitive. They will need to leave old legacy proprietary approaches behind and adopt open source.
Years ago, CERN realised that its data management challenge would completely overwhelm it unless it adopted open source methods. Therefore, it proactively developed its own Scientific Linux distribution based on Red Hat Linux and it took an active part in contributing to the development and use of open source hardware and software systems. It has virtualised its systems and employs many of the latest, cutting-edge approaches to capturing, archiving and distributing data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP gives OpenVMS new life
A new roadmap for OpenVMS emerges from an HP agreement
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9250087/HP_gives_OpenVMS_new_life
Last year, HP put OpenVMS on the path to extinction.
Hewlett-Packard has changed its direction on OpenVMS. Instead of pushing its users off the system, it has licensed OpenVMS to a new firm that plans to develop ports to the latest Itanium chips and is promising eventual support for x86 processors.