Here is my collection of trends and predictions for year 2014:
It seems that PC market is not recovering in 2014. IDC is forecasting that the technology channel will buy in around 34 million fewer PCs this year than last. It seem that things aren’t going to improve any time soon (down, down, down until 2017?). There will be no let-up on any front, with desktops and portables predicted to decline in both the mature and emerging markets. Perhaps the chief concern for future PC demand is a lack of reasons to replace an older system: PC usage has not moved significantly beyond consumption and productivity tasks to differentiate PCs from other devices. As a result, PC lifespan continue to increase. Death of the Desktop article says that sadly for the traditional desktop, this is only a matter of time before its purpose expires and that it would be inevitable it will happen within this decade. (I expect that it will not completely disappear).
When the PC business is slowly decreasing, smartphone and table business will increase quickly. Some time in the next six months, the number of smartphones on earth will pass the number of PCs. This shouldn’t really surprise anyone: the mobile business is much bigger than the computer industry. There are now perhaps 3.5-4 billion mobile phones, replaced every two years, versus 1.7-1.8 billion PCs replaced every 5 years. Smartphones broke down that wall between those industries few years ago – suddenly tech companies could sell to an industry with $1.2 trillion annual revenue. Now you can sell more phones in a quarter than the PC industry sells in a year.
After some years we will end up with somewhere over 3bn smartphones in use on earth, almost double the number of PCs. There are perhaps 900m consumer PCs on earth, and maybe 800m corporate PCs. The consumer PCs are mostly shared and the corporate PCs locked down, and neither are really mobile. Those 3 billion smartphones will all be personal, and all mobile. Mobile browsing is set to overtake traditional desktop browsing in 2015. The smartphone revolution is changing how consumers use the Internet. This will influence web design.
The only PC sector that seems to have some growth is server side. Microservers & Cloud Computing to Drive Server Growth article says that increased demand for cloud computing and high-density microserver systems has brought the server market back from a state of decline. We’re seeing fairly significant change in the server market. According to the 2014 IC Market Drivers report, server unit shipment growth will increase in the next several years, thanks to purchases of new, cheaper microservers. The total server IC market is projected to rise by 3% in 2014 to $14.4 billion: multicore MPU segment for microservers and NAND flash memories for solid state drives are expected to see better numbers.
Spinning rust and tape are DEAD. The future’s flash, cache and cloud article tells that the flash is the tier for primary data; the stuff christened tier 0. Data that needs to be written out to a slower response store goes across a local network link to a cloud storage gateway and that holds the tier 1 nearline data in its cache. Never mind software-defined HYPE, 2014 will be the year of storage FRANKENPLIANCES article tells that more hype around Software-Defined-Everything will keep the marketeers and the marchitecture specialists well employed for the next twelve months but don’t expect anything radical. The only innovation is going to be around pricing and consumption models as vendors try to maintain margins. FCoE will continue to be a side-show and FC, like tape, will soldier on happily. NAS will continue to eat away at the block storage market and perhaps 2014 will be the year that object storage finally takes off.
IT managers are increasingly replacing servers with SaaS article says that cloud providers take on a bigger share of the servers as overall market starts declining. An in-house system is no longer the default for many companies. IT managers want to cut the number of servers they manage, or at least slow the growth, and they may be succeeding. IDC expects that anywhere from 25% to 30% of all the servers shipped next year will be delivered to cloud services providers. In three years, 2017, nearly 45% of all the servers leaving manufacturers will be bought by cloud providers. The shift will slow the purchase of server sales to enterprise IT. Big cloud providers are more and more using their own designs instead of servers from big manufacturers. Data center consolidations are eliminating servers as well. For sure, IT managers are going to be managing physical servers for years to come. But, the number will be declining.
I hope that the IT business will start to grow this year as predicted. Information technology spends to increase next financial year according to N Chandrasekaran, chief executive and managing director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest information technology (IT) services company. IDC predicts that IT consumption will increase next year to 5 per cent worldwide to $ 2.14 trillion. It is expected that the biggest opportunity will lie in the digital space: social, mobility, cloud and analytics. The gradual recovery of the economy in Europe will restore faith in business. Companies are re-imaging their business, keeping in mind changing digital trends.
The death of Windows XP will be on the new many times on the spring. There will be companies try to cash in with death of Windows XP: Microsoft’s plan for Windows XP support to end next spring, has received IT services providers as well as competitors to invest in their own services marketing. HP is peddling their customers Connected Backup 8.8 service to prevent data loss during migration. VMware is selling cloud desktop service. Google is wooing users to switch to ChromeOS system by making Chrome’s user interface familiar to wider audiences. The most effective way XP exploiting is the European defense giant EADS subsidiary of Arkoon, which promises support for XP users who do not want to or can not upgrade their systems.
There will be talk on what will be coming from Microsoft next year. Microsoft is reportedly planning to launch a series of updates in 2015 that could see major revisions for the Windows, Xbox, and Windows RT platforms. Microsoft’s wave of spring 2015 updates to its various Windows-based platforms has a codename: Threshold. If all goes according to early plans, Threshold will include updates to all three OS platforms (Xbox One, Windows and Windows Phone).
Amateur programmers are becoming increasingly more prevalent in the IT landscape. A new IDC study has found that of the 18.5 million software developers in the world, about 7.5 million (roughly 40 percent) are “hobbyist developers,” which is what IDC calls people who write code even though it is not their primary occupation. The boom in hobbyist programmers should cheer computer literacy advocates.IDC estimates there are almost 29 million ICT-skilled workers in the world as we enter 2014, including 11 million professional developers.
The Challenge of Cross-language Interoperability will be more and more talked. Interfacing between languages will be increasingly important. You can no longer expect a nontrivial application to be written in a single language. With software becoming ever more complex and hardware less homogeneous, the likelihood of a single language being the correct tool for an entire program is lower than ever. The trend toward increased complexity in software shows no sign of abating, and modern hardware creates new challenges. Now, mobile phones are starting to appear with eight cores with the same ISA (instruction set architecture) but different speeds, some other streaming processors optimized for different workloads (DSPs, GPUs), and other specialized cores.
Just another new USB connector type will be pushed to market. Lightning strikes USB bosses: Next-gen ‘type C’ jacks will be reversible article tells that USB is to get a new, smaller connector that, like Apple’s proprietary Lightning jack, will be reversible. Designed to support both USB 3.1 and USB 2.0, the new connector, dubbed “Type C”, will be the same size as an existing micro USB 2.0 plug.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft is killing off Clip Art in favor of Bing Images
Farewell, ’90s illustrations
http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/1/7315751/microsoft-killing-off-clip-art
Back in the ‘90s, Clip Art took over Word and PowerPoint files thanks to the thousands of office workers and students who used the images as a way to “improve” their documents. These days there are a large number of free images available on the web, and Microsoft is recognizing this by killing off its Clip Art portal in recent versions Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. “The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop,” explains Microsoft’s Doug Thomas. “Usage of Office’s image library has been declining year-to-year as customers rely more on search engines.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Questioning potential career impacts of ‘Big Data’ datacenters on IT professionals
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/11/greengrid-bigdata-it-impacts.html
At its annual forum, The Green Grid has emphasized how suddenly ‘Big Data’ has exploded onto the technology scene with new applications, new products, new terminology, and lots of hype. But what does ‘Big Data’ really connote at the level of practical infrastructure and, moreover, what does it mean for the IT professional?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Understanding SSD over-provisioning
http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4404566/Understanding-SSD-over-provisioning
The over-provisioning of NAND flash memory in solid state drives (SSDs) and flash memory-based accelerator cards (cache) is a required practice in the storage industry owing to the need for a controller to manage the NAND flash memory. This is true for all segments of the computer industry—from ultrabooks and tablets to enterprise and cloud servers.
Essentially, over-provisioning allocates a portion of the total flash memory available to the flash storage processor, which it needs to perform various memory management functions. This leaves less usable capacity, of course, but results in superior performance and endurance. More sophisticated applications require more over-provisioning, but the benefits inevitably outweigh the reduction in usable capacity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Should you call on comms suppliers when you go for a BYOD setup?
Help is at hand
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/03/byod_comms/
BYOD (bring your own device) has its ups and its downs but it is becoming more and more popular and those of us in IT management need to learn to live with it.
So assuming we have bitten the bullet and decided to go with BYOD, is it something we can do all on our own or should we be getting third parties involved? Are we compelled to involve them for some technological reason?
Users in the office with their own devices are the entry level for technology requirements in this field. You have a fundamental requirement to give them a way of connecting securely and reasonably conveniently to the corporate network and to make applications available to them in a form that supports as many endpoint devices as possible.
Third-party operators don’t really fit in here, then. Or do they?
The point is this: BYOD is a crap name because it implies the concept of bringing your own computing device into the office to work on. It should be called something like UYOD: use your own device.
BYOD done properly is all about allowing your users to do their jobs seamlessly – without having to swap between devices when walking in and out of the office – from wherever they happen to be (within reason).
Your operators and comms suppliers are relevant in every scenario
Your mobile provider is key to how you deal with users roaming the planet and wanting to use your applications.
If your fixed-line internet provider has a mesh agreement, that’s another path to global Wi-Fi connectivity for no extra cost.
And finally: in many cases there is no such thing as connecting to the corporate systems. Cloud-based services are growing in popularity and the telcos are growing quickly in the cloud service market.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft hikes support charges by NINETY TWO PER CENT
$259 per call becomes $499. And a Merry Christmas to you too, Satya
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/03/microsoft_hikes_support_charges_by_ninety_two_per_cent/
Microsoft has quietly all-but-doubled the cost of ad hoc professional support in the United States.
Visit this page, click the “For Business” tab and then select the “Support for Small and Medium Business” option and you’ll see that Redmond now charges US$499 for a single professional support incident, or US$1,999 for a five-pack.
Microsoft of course offers Premier support, often with regular payments. These price hikes seem a decent signal that Microsoft’s rather keen on that kind of arrangement.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Chrome on Windows ‘completely unusable’, gripe users
Recent versions of browser attract performance, stability complaints
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/28/google_chrome_on_windows_completely_unusable_complain_users/
The main reported problems are slow performance, crashes, or the browser becoming unresponsive.
What is the cause? Suggestions vary, ranging from problems with extensions, to issues with Chrome’s use of GPU acceleration (making the video drivers a critical component), or problems caused by the NaCl (Native Client) component, which lets you run compiled C and C++ code in the browser.
Malware is another possibility, though that would not explain cases where Chrome runs badly when other browsers are unaffected.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Federal grand jury subpoenaed documents from L.A. Unified
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-fbi-agents-take-ipad-documents-from-la-school-district-20141202-story.html
A. school district officials turned over 20 boxes of documents Monday in response to a federal grand jury subpoena for documents related to its troubled iPad project, officials confirmed Tuesday afternoon.
The subpoena asked for documents related to the bidding process as well as to the winning bidders in the $1.3-billion effort to provide a computer to every student, teacher and campus administrator.
The contract, approved in June 2013, was with Apple to supply iPads; Pearson provided the curriculum as a subcontractor.
The investigation is a broad one
The FBI seizure was part of the first law-enforcement investigation of technology effort.
A public report on the project, prepared by board member Monica Ratliff, concluded that there were problems with how the bidding process was carried out and, later, with how the project was managed.
The initial rollout last year in the iPad project, at 47 schools, encountered numerous problems. Students deleted a security filter so they could freely browse the Internet, and many teachers felt poorly prepared to use the devices. Within months, the board decided to move more slowly, while also trying out other devices and curricula.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The pace of change has never been greater in enterprise communications and collaboration. A new set of capabilities, empowered by the combination of Mobility, the Cloud, Video, software architectures and Unified Communications, is changing expectations for what IT can deliver. The phrase “Communications Transforming Business” is becoming the new normal.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Network servers will be delivered in the third quarter, slightly more than 2.5 million, says Gartner. The amount is a percentage point higher than a year earlier. Money for server manufacturers made 1.7 per cent more than the previous year.
As the server for a long time continued the trend continued. X86-based machines supply grew in July-September than one per cent and in euro terms the growth was 7.4 per cent. At the same time, a UNIX machine delivery volumes shrank by 17 per cent.
Manufacturers HP is the clear leader. In the third quarter it sold nearly 570,000 a server. The value of sales reached nearly 3.4 billion dollars. HP’s share of the server market is almost 27 per cent.
IBM and Dell compete in terms of money market right place. The companies’ market shares are 17 to 19 per cent.
The fastest server sales has increased from Cisco (now 6.2 per cent market share).
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2156:yli-2-5-miljoonaa-palvelinta&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Developers offering Mozilla-like experience will work on Firefox-like experience for iThings
Moz caves after years of stalling
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/04/mozilla_firefox_ios/
A software house offering a Mozilla-like experience has confirmed it will end its years-long standoff with Apple – and bring a Firefox-like browser to iPhones and iPads.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Who is taking the hyperconverged piss at Simplistic.io?
Startup Simplistic Storage may not be what it seems
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/04/who_is_taking_the_hyperconverged_piss_at_simplisticio/
There’s a new storage company making waves: “Simplistic Storage”.
Simplistic’s motto is “Simplistic – its more than just a name it’s everything we are.”
The company’s lead product is called “Panacea”, which it says “removes the perceived need for expensive disaster recovery solutions to protect your equipment from hazards and outages that can cause multi-million dollar losses.”
At this point you’ve probably figured out that the company and its site are works of satire. And quite good satire, too, at least for the few tens of thousands of people around the world who care enough about storage to know a decent storage joke* when they hear one.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The age of the hybrid cloud desktop hypervisor is upon us
VMware workstation 11 arrives, complete with cloudy connection
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/04/the_age_of_the_hybrid_cloud_desktop_hypervisor_is_upon_us/
VMware has sent version 11 of its Workstation desktop virtualisation product down the slipway.
The new released has a slew of enhancements one would expect from a new release: there’s support for newer OSes like Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Suse Enterprise Linux 12 and Ubuntu 14.10. You can now handle higher-resolution screens of up to 3200×1800, which seeing as Workstation is a tool aimed at developers will be handy because it will be possible to mimic the colossal screens of modern laptops.
There’s also support for Intel’s Haswell architecture, booting VMs with EFI support is allowed and it’s now possible to donate 2GB of video memory to a VM. And it’s now possible to run 20 virtual networks inside the desktop hypervisor, and to run virtual disks of up to 8TB and VMs with 16 vCPUs.
The self-destructing virtual machines launched back in October have also made it into Workstation.
But the most interesting item is integration with VMware’s very own cloud, vCloud Air, as Workstation can now “scale … virtual machines in the external cloud.”
It’s apparently possible to “… connect to vCloud Air and upload, run, and view virtual machines right from the Workstation 11 interface.” And to do more or less the same thing to and from a private cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung’s Open Source Group Is Growing, Hiring Developers
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/12/03/1752233/samsungs-open-source-group-is-growing-hiring-developers
The new Open Source Innovation Group at Samsung is now 40 people strong, including 30 developers, devoted full-time to working on upstream projects and shepherding open source development into the company. The group is hiring aggressively and plans to double the size of the group in the coming years. Their first targets are project maintainers and key contributors to 23 open source projects that are integral to Samsung’s products, including Linux, Gstreamer, FFmpeg, Blink, Webkit, EFL, and Wayland.
Samsung’s Open Source Group is Growing, Hiring Developers (Video)
http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/797530-samsungs-open-source-group-is-growing-hiring-developers-video
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Can We Get Business to Care about Freedom, Openness and Interoperability?
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/how-can-we-get-business-care-about-freedom-openness-and-interoperability
They use our stuff. Why not our values too?
At this point in history, arguments for using Linux, FOSS (free and open-source software) and the Internet make themselves. Yet the virtues behind those things—freedom, openness, compatibility, interoperability, substitutability—still tend to be ignored by commercial builders of new stuff.
For example, US health care, like pretty much every business category, is full of Linux and FOSS, and is to some degree connected on the Net. Yet, it remains a vast feudal system of suppliers that nearly all work to lock doctors, hospitals and labs into dependency on closed, proprietary, incompatible, non-interoperable and non-substitutable systems.
We are seeing the same thing start to happen already with the Internet of Things (IoT), about which Bruce Sterling has written a brilliant essay titled The Epic Struggle of The Internet of Things. “The first thing to understand about the ‘Internet of Things’”, he says, “is that it’s not about Things on the Internet. It’s a code term that powerful stakeholders have settled on for their own purposes. They like the slogan ‘Internet of Things’ because it sounds peaceable and progressive. It disguises the epic struggle over power, money and influence that is about to ensue. There is genuine Internet technology involved in the ‘Internet of Things’. However, the legacy Internet of yesterday is a shrinking part of what is at stake now.”
One dividing line is between standards and platforms built on them. This is also the line between infrastructure and commerce in the “layers of time”
FOSS building materials are all at the Infrastructure layer. So are the standards that create the Net and the Web: TCP/IP, HTTP and the rest. These and countless thousands (millions?) of standards and code bases support boundless freedom and generativity for everything that’s built on them and with them, up at the Commerce and Fashion-Art levels.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Future of Popular Coding Tool In Doubt After Public Split
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/io-js/
Node.js, a popular and influential tool for building and running modern internet services, has split in two.
Late yesterday, some of its primary developers “forked” this open source project, creating a new version of the tool they call Io.js. The group was unhappy with the stewardship of Node’s official sponsor, cloud computing company Joyent, so they’ve chosen to fashion a new version on their own.
“We don’t want to have just one person who’s appointed by a company making decisions,” says Mikeal Rogers, a Node community organizer involved in the fork. “We want contributors to have more control, to seek consensus.”
The split highlights the tensions that often exist between the corporate sponsor of an open source project and the many other coders and businesses who use it and help build it. Docker, the company behind a new approach to cloud computing that has exploded in popularity in the past year and half, is in a similar boat
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Confirms That It’s Designing Kid-Friendly Versions of Its Services
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/12/04/0129206/google-confirms-that-its-designing-kid-friendly-versions-of-its-services
USA Today reports that rumors about Google working on specific services catering to young kids are true. From the article: “With Google processing 40,000 search queries a second — or 1.2 trillion a year — it’s a safe bet that many of those doing the Googling are kids.
Google to revamp its products with 12-and-younger focus
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/12/03/google-products-revamped-for-under-13-crowd/19803447/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google goes after the under twelves: New search engine, YouTube and Chrome apps to target children
Google hopes apps will make web safer you children to use
Has created special lab at its Googleplex HQ to study children
Recent study said iPad has now number one brand among 6-12 year olds
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2859976/Google-goes-twelves-New-search-engine-YouTube-Chrome-Apps-target-children.html#ixzz3Kwf1Kzaw
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Tomi Engdahl says:
Consumer-Grade SSDs Survive Two Petabytes of Writes
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/12/04/1745218/consumer-grade-ssds-survive-two-petabytes-of-writes
The SSD Endurance Experiment previously covered on Slashdot has reached another big milestone: two freaking petabytes of writes. That’s an astounding total for consumer-grade drives rated to survive no more than a few hundred terabytes. Only two of the initial six subjects made it to 2PB.
The SSD Endurance Experiment: Two freaking petabytes
The survivors soldier on to another really big number
http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle bypasses SAS/SATA controllers in flashy new servers
NVM Express said to deliver 32 Gb/sec bandwidth to each SSD
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/05/oracle_bypasses_sassata_controllers_in_flashy_new_servers/
Oracle has revealed two new servers and a proprietary design that does away with SAS/SATA controllers in ways the company says makes them perform very, very, well when stocked full of flash.
The basics: the two new beasts are called the X5-2 and the X5-2L. Both are two-socket affairs and use Intel’s Xeon E5-2600 v3 silicon. The X5-2 is a 1U pizza box and the X5-2L’s form factor lets it stack horizontally or vertically into 2U chassis.
The interesting part is something Oracle calls “NVM Express” (NVMe) and says will “…. improve the bandwidth to each flash drive by over 2.5 times, compared to conventional SSDs … by eliminating the SAS/SATA controller from the path completely.” Oracle says it’s built “ … four PCIe lanes directly to the NVM Express SSD itself” and can therefore “provide 32 Gb/sec bandwidth to each drive.”
This won’t work for any old SSD: you need an Oracle NVMe-ready SSD, of which four will fit into a conventional 2.5 in drive bay.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why tech giants create new programming languages, and how Go and Swift reflect their creators
Code of Ages
Go and Swift take another step up the programming-language ladder
https://medium.com/backchannel/my-computer-language-is-better-than-yours-58d9c9523644
If you are a very large, rich technology company today, it seems it is no longer enough to have your own humongous data centers, luxurious buses, and organic lunch bars. You need your very own programming language, too.
Google has Go, first conceived in 2009. Facebook introduced Hack last spring. And Apple unveiled Swift not long after.
In war, as George Orwell had it, the winners write the history books. In tech, the winning companies are writing the programming languages. The Internet was built on open standards and code, but the era of social networks and the cloud is dominated by corporate giants. And they are beginning to put their unique stamps on the thought-stuff of digital technology
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM’s Watson Analytics enters public beta
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-watson-analytics-enters-public-beta/
Summary:IBM has made it cognitive analytics package more widely available.
IBM has launched the public beta of Watson Analytics, its set of cloud-based predictive and analytics tools.
The move to public beta for Watson Analytics on Thursday follows its private beta launch this September. IBM said at the time of the beta releas the service will be made available under a freemium model through iOS, Android mobile devices and the web.
Watson Analytics is a cognitive service that’s meant to bear some of the load executives face when preparing data, while making it easier to run predictive analyses and use ‘visual storytelling’, such as using graphs, maps and infographics to illustrate a point.
Watson Analytics is one piece of IBM’s $1bn gamble that it can commercialise Watson. The company claims it has 22,000 registrations for Watson Analytics since launching in September.
Currently, the beta lets users look at visualisations of their data to find patterns and relationships, and experiment with its Watson’s predictive capabilities. Soon, it will let users create their own dashboards and infographics.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mesosphere Announces First Data Center OS And $36M In Funding
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/07/mesosphere-releases-first-data-center-os-and-announces-36m-in-funding/
Mesosphere, the commercial entity built on top of the open source Apache Mesos project, announced some major milestones today, starting with $36M in Series B funding along with the early release of what they are calling the first data center operating system.
the bigger news was the announcement of their first data center operating system (DCOS). This is a new kind of operating system that operates on the scale of the entire data center, which means instead of controlling a single machine, the operating system sits on top of the data center and enables administrators to treat all of the resources in the data center as a single, virtual entity. This allows for much simpler management and lets administrators spin servers and software up and down as needs require much more quickly than with current methods.
The virtual machine allowed you to make the best use of your resources on a single machine, but Mesosphere wants to take that concept a step further and allow you to apply that same principle to the entire data center. Because today’s applications tend to work across multiple servers, no matter how many ways you break down a single machine’s resources, it’s just not going to suffice anymore.
The virtual resource pool is designed to span thousands of machines. In fact, Mesosphere mentioned a reference customer running 50,000 nodes on DCOS, and they believe they can scale to 500,000 nodes by the end of next year.
Administrators can operate the DCOS from a command line or use a graphical user interface to quickly drag and drop resources from a library to the command line panel. This gives administrators the ability to start multiple instances of any software in the library very quickly. The library includes popular open source products by default such as Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra, Apache Hadoop and Google Kubernetes, or customers can add internal software packages.
Apache Mesos
http://mesos.apache.org/
Program against your datacenter like it’s a single pool of resources
Apache Mesos abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively.
Mesos is built using the same principles as the Linux kernel, only at a different level of abstraction. The Mesos kernel runs on every machine and provides applications (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Elastic Search) with API’s for resource management and scheduling across entire datacenter and cloud environments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Don’t call it a netbook (or a “Chromebook killer”)—HP’s $200 Stream 11 reviewed
Windows adds much-needed versatility, but low-end hardware limits it anyway.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/chromebook-in-the-streets-windows-in-the-sheets-hps-200-stream-11-reviewed/
Netbooks never really went away—it’s just that no one calls them netbooks anymore. The label became a byword for cheap, plasticky, slow, cramped little laptops that no one would make the mistake of buying twice, but these devices are still around. Sometimes they look like convertibles or even tablets with keyboard accessories, but companies that stopped making “netbooks” never stopped trying to make a device that could provide some facsimile of the Windows PC experience for two or three hundred bucks.
Microsoft has made a few changes to Windows’ licensing to combat these laptops, just as it made changes to Windows XP’s licensing in the late 2000s to counter those early Linux netbooks. Most prominently, a new “Windows 8.1 with Bing” SKU offers OEMs a price cut in exchange for the ability to change the default search engine. And that, along with cheap don’t-call-it-an-Atom chips, is what is letting companies like HP build laptops like the 11-inch and 13-inch Stream laptops for $200 and $230, respectively.
Tomi Engdahl says:
In companies it is possible to increase productivity significantly, when the workers are provided with the tablets. This says a study by Dynamic Markets has made Panasonic’s mandate.
The companies surveyed, 70 percent reported using tablets increased employee productivity, and total factor productivity increased an average of 33 per cent.
“Finland has been involved in the investigation, but there is no reason to doubt that the results apply also in Finnish companies. This view is supported by the Finns feedback from our customers, as well as tablets, the demand for strong growth”
Remarkably is that tablet users themselves were not as sure of productivity growth. Among them, however, 41 per cent of the tablet improved productivity, and productivity growth was estimated at an average of 30 per cent.
20 percent of users were connected, scanner, printer or camera. Place information was used by 18 per cent, 13 per cent of the barcode reader and the payment of 10 percent of users. The tablets were also used to monitor the logistics, taking signatures, certification, as well as a smart card, RFID and NFC tags to track.
Although the tablets increased productivity, with them still have a lot of problems. The users, 68 percent reported that they were not fully satisfied with the work using a tablet.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/kaikki_uutiset/tabletti+kouraan+ja+tyot+sujuvat+33+prosenttia+paremmin/a1034885
Tomi Engdahl says:
Use Windows software on Android – Microsoft couldn’t be app-ier
Run code anywhere, all the time, just in time for Christmas
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/05/microsoft_rolls_out_remoteapp_just_in_time_for_christmas/
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has made getting Windows apps everywhere via the cloud a central theme of his tenure at the top and next week the next stage will begin in this process when RemoteApp rolls out as a commercial service.
Redmond announced RemoteApp at TechEd earlier this year and the system has been in preview for months now. RemoteApp runs Microsoft’s applications on Azure and lets users use them on any internet-connected device.
“Azure RemoteApp is designed to provide scale, agility and global access to corporate applications,” said Redmond’s enterprise mobility team in a blog post.
Microsoft has two packages; Basic and Standard. Basic is aimed at people who are light users and costs $10 a month for 40 hours access, with overage charges that are capped at $17 per user per calendar month.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Walmart’s $99 crap-let will make people hate Windows 8.1 even more
With 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, the E Fun Nextbook will be anything but
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/14/walmart_offering_99_windows_tablet_on_black_friday_and_you_get_just_what_you_pay_for/
Walmart, that well-known purveyor of the finest America has to offer, will flog a $99 Windows 8 tablet for this year’s Black Friday.
As you’d expect at that price, the E Fun Nextbook is an utter dog: it has a 1.8GHz Intel Atom processor with 1GB of RAM – the bare minimum for Windows 8.1 to function.
The tablet has a 0.3Mp camera on the front and a 2Mp cam on the back, so you can videoconference like it’s 1999 all over again.
Other than that you get an 8-inch 1280 x 800 screen, 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 for connectivity, and a miniHDMI port and microSD card slot.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs: Want to get onto the Board? Just ‘running’ IT isn’t enough
Still bitching about ‘the business’? Then you’ve no business being on the board
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/05/register_roundtable_on_it_on_the_board/
For our third round table a few weeks back we took on an issue dear to the hearts of IT execs: getting a seat at the decision making top table. And who better to talk through this one than a roomful of CIOs who were on their own firms’ boards.
Your first tip for moving up is to stop saying “the business”. Stop saying it now and drum into your team that they must desist as well. For the sort of heavy duty outfit our IT execs work in, you’re looking at about 10 per cent (and often more) of the entire workforce being IT pros. If they are not in the “business”, why are they even in the building?
More precisely, it is the very attitude of “them and us”, or “IT is just a cost”, or even “IT is peripheral” that undermines the case for your top table seat. A supermarket chain may depend upon delivery trucks, but no matter how well the guy in charge of maintaining them does his job, he’s never going to be part of strategy.
As one senior exec put it: “If you behave like a cost centre, you will be treated like a cost centre.” And what do we do with costs and cost centres? We make them smaller.
Strategy is not about maintenance. The IT execs were clear that it is the plan for change.
In the past a large percentage of top IT execs were accountants, who specialised in cost control because IT was seen largely as a cost centre and not even a well behaved one as both the size and unpredictable nature of IT spend alienated the rest of management, as did the lack of delivery. Several of the execs share that you need to understand and project that all departments screw up from time to time.
You need to separate “screw-up risk” from “venture risk”. Execs who’ve gotten bogged down in fire-fighting miss the fact that the business need is for them to try changes that may fail, but that also offer an attractive upside.
If IT comes into the cycle too late, then you’ve got an inflexible waterfall model, no matter how agile your other processes. Part of leadership is knowing what to kill early and be in a position to do so, which you aren’t if you’ve been merely handed an objective to produce a plan.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linus Torvalds releases Linux 3.18 as 3.17 wobbles
Seven release candidates is enough
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/08/linus_torvalds_releases_linux_318_as_317_wobbles/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Exclusive NIST Tour Shows Off Quantum Physics’ ARTIQ
Using FPGAs in science
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324797&
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) continues to create new technologies for quantum computing and bettering direct digital synthesizers (DDS) for many applications including telecommunications technology and standards.
ARTIQ (Advanced Real-Time Infrastructure for Quantum physics), a new communications protocol being developed by the Ion Storage Group at NIST, is an open-source control system for laser-cooled trapped ion experiments.
“the main goal is a control system that has both high expressivity (you can describe complex experiments with few lines of code) and high timing performance… it’s a middle ground between running the control algorithms on a PC, which has high level programming language but bad timing performance, and running the control algorithms on a dedicated FPGA design, which has excellent timing performance but is a pain to program.”
The system features a high-level programming language that helps describe complex experiments, which is compiled and executed on hardware with nanosecond timing resolution and sub-microsecond latency. The system and procedure utilize various hardware technologies and programming languages such as Python, Migen, MiSoC/mor1kx, LLVM and llvmpy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Displaced IT Workers Being Silenced
http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/12/08/149221/displaced-it-workers-being-silenced
An IT worker who is fired because he or she has been replaced by a foreign, visa-holding employee of an offshore outsourcing firm will sign a severance agreement. This severance agreement will likely include a non-disparagement clause that will make the fired worker extremely cautious about what they say on Facebook, let alone to the media.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Step by flashy step: Toshiba clambers up to next gen SSD
Gen 2 tech flash twins
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/08/toshiba_incremental_steps_to_the_next_generation_of_ssd/
Toshiba has introduced SSDs using second-generation 19nm NAND tech to double the maximum capacity of one, and have a higher endurance rating on the other.
The HK3R2 is the second generation of the HK3R product technology, using the same basic 19nm MLC NAND but with a newer production process enabling a capacity increase to 960GB. Performance is improved in the random write area where 14,000 IOPS is reached with the 960GB drive.
The two new drives have a 6Gbit/s SATA interface and a Toshiba controller with ECC. It’s good that incremental improvements like this can be made, but interest is getting more focussed on any sub-19nm flash Tosh brings out, with a promise of higher SSD capacities. Micron has already produced its M600 using 16nm geometry.
A second focus is 3D NAND, with Tosh foundry partner SanDisk talking about BiCS (Bit-Cost Scalable) technology which Toshiba will obviously produce as well.
Tomi Engdahl says:
MIT Spinoff Funded $143M to Create Sentient Computers
Siri + Watson meet a nice-guy version of Skynet?
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324874&
First IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat the world champion Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997. Then in 2008 the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) authored an open source poker bot — Fell Omen — that could beat humans. Then Apple’s Siri dazzled the world in 2010 by answering natural language questions on the iPhone. The very next year, 2011, IBM pitted its Watson supercomputer (since moved to the cloud) against former winners of the game show Jeopardy. Watson beat them and took the first-place prize of $1 million.
Now a startup with $143 million in funding says, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” describing a sentient distributed artificial intelligence that sounds like a nice-guy version of Skynet from the cinema flick Terminator. According to the technology gurus at Sentient Technologies Holdings Ltd. of San Francisco, the software for sentient computers, which they are already installing at key customer sites, goes beyond natural language recognition, unstructured searching, machine learning, and deep knowledge.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Huge, Unseen Operation Behind the Accuracy of Google Maps
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-maps-ground-truth/
The maps we use to navigate have come a long way in a short time. Since the ’90s we’ve gone from glove boxes stuffed with paper maps to floorboards littered with Mapquest printouts to mindlessly obeying Siri or her nameless Google counterpart.
The maps behind those voices are packed with far more data than most people realize.
Tomi Engdahl says:
No NAND’s land: Flash will NOT take over the data centre
Terry Pratchett was right… it IS a diskworld
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/09/no_flash_datacentre_takeover/
NAND is not taking over the data centre. Estimates of shipped disk and SSD capacity out to 2018 shows disk growing faster than flash.
The world’s ability to make and ship SSDs is falling behind its ability to make and ship disk drives. Analyst Stifel Nicolaus has estimated total capacity shipped in each category out to 2018, using its own and Gartner’s estimates
Flash foundries cost $15bn and up, an amount that seems more in keeping with national infrastructure products than company manufacturing facility spend
The huge great problem is $/GB. New disk technologies such as shingling, TDMR and HAMR are upping areal density per platter and bringing down cost/GB faster than NAND technology can.
Each shrink in NAND geometry seems to require costlier manufacturing processes and more over-provisioning to keep endurance, expressed as drive writes/day for five years, up at acceptable levels. It’s obvious from the chart that 3D NAND, stacking cell layers on top of each other, isn’t going to drive up SSD capacity quickly enough, and cost/GB down fast enough, to be on a par with disk capacity growth.
Let’s do a quick back-of-the-envelope test and say that for SSD capacity to match disk by 2018 we would need roughly eight times more flash foundry capacity. Suppose that’s 20 foundries. It would mean an industry investment of $300bn, and that’s just a very broad estimate.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Relevant is C in 2014?
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/12/09/0418252/how-relevant-is-c-in-2014
Many programming languages have come and gone since Dennis Ritchie devised C in 1972, and yet C has not only survived three major revisions, but continues to thrive.
David Bolton argues that C remains extremely relevant due to a number of factors including newer C compiler support, the Internet (“basically driven by C applications”), an immense amount of active software written in C that’s still used, and its ease in learning. “Knowing C provides a handy insight into higher-level languages
Is C Still Relevant in the 21st Century?
http://news.dice.com/2014/12/08/c-still-relevant-21st-century/
It’s Still Used
There is an immense amount of software written in C that’s still used, including Apache and NGINX Web servers, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Ingres database, GIMP, CPython, Perl 5, PHP, Mathematica, MATLAB and most device drivers.
Is C Still Relevant?
Yes. It’s easy to learn, there’s a lot of it still in use, and plenty of free or open-source compilers. While it may not get you a job, it will give you an excellent grounding in low-level programming. It’s not growing in popularity… but it’s not going away anytime soon either.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Linux Foundation Releases Report Detailing Linux User Trends Among World’s Largest Companies
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2014/12/linux-foundation-releases-report-detailing-linux-user-trends-among
Key findings from this year’s report include:
Linux leads enterprise shift to cloud. Linux remains the go-to choice for the cloud, with 75 percent of enterprises reporting they use Linux as their primary cloud platform. These numbers compare to fewer than 24 percent using Windows and less than two percent using UNIX to support the cloud.
Enterprises consider Linux superior in technical prowess, security, and cost. In fact, 78 percent of enterprises feel Linux is more secure than other operating systems, an important consideration in light of increasing scrutiny on the security of projects that support the world’s software infrastructure.
Linux continues its year-over-year growth—at the expense of other operating systems. Linux remains the platform of choice for enterprises running it; more than 87 percent added Linux servers this year, and 82 percent plan to add more in the next year. In fact, deployment on Linux has risen while deployment on Windows continues to fall.
Rapid growth continues to raise concerns about finding Linux talent. The concern among the world’s largest enterprises about finding trained Linux staff remains at just above 40 percent—and is the largest concern cited.
“The way software is built today is modeled after the methodologies and principles used to build Linux, the world’s largest collaborative development project,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Can We Get Business to Care about Freedom, Openness and Interoperability?
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/how-can-we-get-business-care-about-freedom-openness-and-interoperability
They use our stuff. Why not our values too?
At this point in history, arguments for using Linux, FOSS (free and open-source software) and the Internet make themselves. Yet the virtues behind those things—freedom, openness, compatibility, interoperability, substitutability—still tend to be ignored by commercial builders of new stuff.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Osmo: Play Beyond the Screen
https://www.playosmo.com/?utm_source=AdWords&utm_medium=CPC&gclid=CMKJvO3ruMICFYELcwodlFIAig
Osmo is a unique gaming accessory for the iPad that comes with games that will change the way your child plays.
Works with the latest iPads, including the iPad Mini and iPad 2
Top educators from over 2000 schools nationwide, including the Bay Area’s best preparatory institutions, are raving about Osmo’s natural ability to foster creative, social, and emotional learning – and how much their students love it.
Osmo was invented by young parents out of Stanford and Google. Engineers at heart, the founders are personally committed to innovating new technologies that nurture positive play experiences for kids.
Tomi Engdahl says:
RIP Ralph Baer: Father of the games console dies aged 92
Take a moment of silence before firing up your Xbox or PlayStation tonight
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/08/firing_up_a_console_for_gaming_session_tonight_take_a_moment_for_ralph_baer/
Ralph Baer, the engineer and inventor of the first home games console, has died. He was 92.
Few modern gamers know of Baer, but all owe him a debt of gratitude for ushering in the first generation of home systems in the 1970s and helping to inspire the arcade and home console explosions in subsequent decades.
Baer in the early 1970s built the Magnavox Odyssey, considered to be the first commercial home games console, and would later create the wildly popular 1980s memory game Simon.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM, NetApp suffer as storage buyers shun mainstream suppliers
Latest IDC report points to hyperscale data centre jump
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/09/jumping_straight_to_hyperscale_ibm_netapp_suffer_as_buyers_disrupt_the_market/
IDC’s latest disk storage tracker shows the disruptive effects of hyperscale data centres ignoring mainstream suppliers when buying disk storage.
The third quarter 2014 tracker* reports on worldwide total disk storage sales and external storage array sales. For the first time, IDC reports on Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) sales to hyperscale data centres operated by cloud service providers and web application suppliers, such as Facebook.
Tomi Engdahl says:
USB Forum submits itself to electrical probing
International Electrotechnical Commission to run its eye over USB 3.1
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/09/usb_forum_submits_itself_to_electrical_probing/
The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) has ticked off a small-but-significant milestone by submitting its new standards to the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
As we’ve previously noted, the USB-IF has revealed a 10Gbps-capable USB-C connector, and also an ambition for two-way power flows at up to 100W over USB.
The Forum now appears to be sufficiently confident that work is good to go that it’s sent it off to the IEC, the planet’s standards overseer for just about anything electrical that will end up in an individual’s or consumer’s hands. If the Commission signs off on USB Power Delivery, USB-C and USB 3.1 – and the announcement suggests all stakeholders want and expect that to happen – it will give the new USB standards a great deal of momentum and make their speedy arrival more likely.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Canonical Launches “Snappy” Edition Of Ubuntu Core For Container Farms
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/09/canonical-launches-snappy-edition-of-ubuntu-core-for-container-farms/
A few years ago, Ubuntu launched a minimalist “core” version of its operating system for embedded systems. Today, it is launching an alpha version of its new “snappy” edition of Ubuntu Core with transactional updates that is specifically geared toward container farms, large Docker deployments and platform-as-a-service environments. The first place you will be able to see Ubuntu Core in action is on Microsoft Azure (or you could install it on your own servers, of course).
“Ubuntu Core builds on the world’s favourite container platform and provides transactional updates with rigorous application isolation,” said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical. “This is the smallest, safest platform for Docker deployment ever, and with snappy packages, it’s completely extensible to all forms of container or service.” The company’s announcement today calls snappy Ubuntu the “biggest revolution in Ubuntu since we launched our mobile initiative.”
What makes this new Core edition different from Ubuntu’s previous Core versions is that it uses the same Ubuntu AppArmor security system as Ubuntu’s mobile operating system. This ensures that all the applications you install are completely isolated from each other. The company argues that this will make it “much safer to install applications from a wide range of sources on your cloud deployments.” A problem with one application, after all, is much less likely to have any effect on other applications running on the same system.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS control freak can now manage ON-PREMISES servers
Reverse hybrid cloud with a double twist!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/10/aws_control_freak_can_now_manage_onpremises_servers/
Apologies if you’re tired of the word “disruption”, but please tolerate it just one more time because Amazon Web Services has just done something mighty disruptive: allowed its OpsWork control-freak-as-a-service to wrangle on-premises servers.
OpsWorks is an infrastructure automation tool that aims to make it easier to deploy applications, through tricks like scaling of cloud instances, automated provisioning of storage and databases, and package installation.
Until Monday, those tricks applied only to AWS resources.
But the company has now announced that OpsWorks can “deploy and operate applications on any server with an Internet connection including virtual machines running in your own data centers.”
It doesn’t look hard to pull off this trick: AWS says you’ll need to install its command line interface tool and an OpsWork agent for each on-premises workload you want to manage. Next fork over “$0.02 per hour for each on-premises server you use under this arrangement.
Almost all discussions of hybrid cloud have, hitherto, imagined that on-premises workloads would stretch into the cloud. Microsoft and VMware certainly think along those lines, promoting the fac that their respective System Center and vCenter control freaks can treat cloud servers as if they were on-premises servers, but generally imagining that one’s own bit barn is an organisation’s heartland.
AWS seems to be thinking the other way, suggesting OpsWork will allow its users to address on-premises resources.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fujitsu boss: UK’s 2015 elections won’t make any difference to us
‘They know they need the big companies’ says EMEAI chief
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/10/fujitsu_reins_back_public_biz/
The UK government is unlikely to make any drastic changes to its IT acquisition strategy no matter who scrambles into Number 10 next May, the European boss of public sector IT giant Fujitsu predicts.
Speaking to us at the vendor’s customer event in Munich late last month, he put some flesh on the bones of the plan, pointing to European mega-companies and the defence sector as major targets for the firm.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fedora 21 Released
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/12/09/2059252/fedora-21-released
The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 21. “As part of the Fedora.next initiative, Fedora 21 comes in three flavors: Cloud, Server, and Workstation. Cloud is now a top-level deliverable for Fedora 21, and includes images for use in private cloud environments like OpenStack, as well as AMIs for use on Amazon, and a new “Atomic” image streamlined for running Docker containers.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will tech titans SWALLOW upstart where Apple guru Steve Wozniak works?
Storage blogger gives his take on Primary Data
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/10/could_primary_data_is_the_nicira_of_storage/
I spent just an hour with data centre virtualisation upstart Primary Data (set up by Fusion-io’s founders) during an IT press tour, but I came away both intrigued and puzzled at the same time.
While it has the best vision and ideas I’ve seen in years, at the same time that vision seems incredibly hard to achieve. Everything is so immature that only faith, boatloads of money, and the perfect strategy (all together) will lead this company to success.
With already $60m in funding, an A+ team of storage personalities, a lot of marketing
There are only two possibilities here: either these guys know exactly what they’re doing, or they’re totally out of their minds.
First things first, just speaking about marketing, Primary Data is very adamant that “this is not a software-defined product”. From my point of view it is, but it is so advanced (and better than anything we are used to) that talking about SDS will only diminish the value of the proposition.
The best way I know to describe Primary Data is to compare it with software-defined networking company Nicira. Nicira was acquired from VMware for $1.2bn a while ago, is a pioneer of SDN and its technology is now the basis of VMware NSX.
As with Nicira/NSX we have three major components: the protocol, the virtual switch, and the controller. Translating this in Primary Data terms we have: pNFS (comparable to Openflow), the hypervisor (the Open vSwitch), and the NSX controller (the Data director).
All the storage virtualisation happens in the data hypervisor, which is installed in each single server. This is a very complex piece of software indeed; it is a kernel driver and also does all the protocol conversion (file/file, file/block, file/object).
The Data Director is a policy-based metadata controller, in charge of all data positioning, moving, and so on – as with Nicira, all the magic, the potential and the money is here.
Like Nicira and Openflow, if the storage vendor supports pNFS natively (and seriously), I’m sure there could be some magic here … but at the moment it’s only speculation.
The data hypervisor is a kernel module (a device drivers) and, as such, is something you can implement only if you have complete support from whoever controls the kernel.
It’s not a major problem for Linux, if I understood well. Primary Data will be releasing the data hypervisor to the open source community (as Nicira did), and this would contribute to its adoption and, in the medium/long term, it could become part of standard Linux distributions.
The product is still in beta, very immature and probably limited.
Primary Data has a huge potential, but it is too early to say if, or when, it will be able to exploit all of this.
Tomi Engdahl says:
WD and HGST: We tried to merge our two drive makers, MOFCOM said NO, NO, NO
Chinese regulations cost $$$
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/10/wd_mofcom_and_hgst_drive_manufacture_merger/
Although WD’s acquisition of HGST was approved over two years ago, Chinese regulatory authority MOFCOM is still preventing the full integration of their respective drive-making ops.
The Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China (MOFCOM) has always maintained it was not keen to see WD and its HGST subsidiary move closer until the time was right, meaning at least 24 months since the acquisition which took place in March 2012.
But here we are, 33 months later, and the two parties are as far apart as ever.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Microsoft COO Kevin Turner on Windows: “We’ve got to monetize it differently” — Big changes ahead for Windows: ‘We’ve got to monetize it differently,’ says Microsoft exec — Microsoft Windows has made headway in the market for low-end laptops and tablets this year by reducing …
Big changes ahead for Windows: ‘We’ve got to monetize it differently,’ says Microsoft exec
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/big-changes-ahead-windows-weve-got-monetize-differently-says-microsoft-exec/
Microsoft Windows has made headway in the market for low-end laptops and tablets this year by reducing the price it charges device manufacturers, charging no royalty on devices with screens of 9 inches or less. That has resulted in a new wave of Windows notebooks in the $200 price range and tablets in the $99 price range.
The long-term success of the strategy against Android tablets and Chromebooks remains to be seen.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Glassdoor: Google dethrones Twitter as the best tech company to work for in the U.S., also tops new U.K. list
http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/09/glassdoor-google-dethrones-twitter-as-the-best-tech-company-to-work-for-in-the-u-s-also-tops-new-u-k-list/
Career website Glassdoor today released its seventh annual Employees’ Choice Awards, a list of the 50 best companies to work for in the coming year. Google was elected the number one tech company to work for in 2015, displacing Twitter.
In the last two years, Google placed sixth, and we were surprised it wasn’t higher, so this year’s list makes sense in that regard. Yet it’s worth noting that Google hasn’t just taken the top tech company spot: It is the top company overall.
Last year, Twitter displaced Facebook, which held the top tech company crown for three years straight (2011, 2012, and 2013). This year, Twitter isn’t even on the list.
Both Google and Facebook compensate their engineers very well, so seeing them near the top is never surprising.
Google engineers are clearly happy with the company as of late. Twitter employees, meanwhile, were happier before they experienced its first year as a public company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Moore’s Law And The 30-Year Rule
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/06/moores-law-and-the-30-year-rule/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity
Citations of Moore’s Law are growing exponentially. In fact the number of articles with some mention of the law, which has come to mean computing capacity doubles every 10 months, are accelerating. TechCrunch alone returns 220 pages of results. If you consider the comments, trackbacks, and social mentions, it is only a matter of time before the Internet is just one large recitation.