Here are comes my long list of computer technology trends for 2015:
Digitalisation is coming to change all business sectors and through our daily work even more than before. Digitalisation also changes the IT sector: Traditional software package are moving rapidly into the cloud. Need to own or rent own IT infrastructure is dramatically reduced. Automation application for configuration and monitoring will be truly possible. Workloads software implementation projects will be reduced significantly as software is a need to adjust less. Traditional IT outsourcing is definitely threatened. The security management is one of the key factors to change as security threats are increasingly digital world. IT sector digitalisation simply means: “more cheaper and better.”
The phrase “Communications Transforming Business” is becoming the new normal. The pace of change in enterprise communications and collaboration is very fast. 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.
Global Citizenship: Technology Is Rapidly Dissolving National Borders. Besides your passport, what really defines your nationality these days? Is it where you were live? Where you work? The language you speak? The currency you use? If it is, then we may see the idea of “nationality” quickly dissolve in the decades ahead. Language, currency and residency are rapidly being disrupted and dematerialized by technology. Increasingly, technological developments will allow us to live and work almost anywhere on the planet… (and even beyond). In my mind, a borderless world will be a more creative, lucrative, healthy, and frankly, exciting one. Especially for entrepreneurs.
The traditional enterprise workflow is ripe for huge change as the focus moves away from working in a single context on a single device to the workflow being portable and contextual. InfoWorld’s executive editor, Galen Gruman, has coined a phrase for this: “liquid computing.” The increase in productivity is promised be stunning, but the loss of control over data will cross an alarming threshold for many IT professionals.
Mobile will be used more and more. Currently, 49 percent of businesses across North America adopt between one and ten mobile applications, indicating a significant acceptance of these solutions. Embracing mobility promises to increase visibility and responsiveness in the supply chain when properly leveraged. Increased employee productivity and business process efficiencies are seen as key business impacts.
The Internet of things is a big, confusing field waiting to explode. Answer a call or go to a conference these days, and someone is likely trying to sell you on the concept of the Internet of things. However, the Internet of things doesn’t necessarily involve the Internet, and sometimes things aren’t actually on it, either.
The next IT revolution will come from an emerging confluence of Liquid computing plus the Internet of things. Those the two trends are connected — or should connect, at least. If we are to trust on consultants, are in sweet spot for significant change in computing that all companies and users should look forward to.
Cloud will be talked a lot and taken more into use. Cloud is the next-generation of supply chain for IT. A global survey of executives predicted a growing shift towards third party providers to supplement internal capabilities with external resources. CIOs are expected to adopt a more service-centric enterprise IT model. Global business spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will reach an estimated $174.2 billion in 2014 (up a 20% from $145.2 billion in 2013), and growth will continue to be fast (“By 2017, enterprise spending on the cloud will amount to a projected $235.1 billion, triple the $78.2 billion in 2011“).
The rapid growth in mobile, big data, and cloud technologies has profoundly changed market dynamics in every industry, driving the convergence of the digital and physical worlds, and changing customer behavior. It’s an evolution that IT organizations struggle to keep up with.To success in this situation there is need to combine traditional IT with agile and web-scale innovation. There is value in both the back-end operational systems and the fast-changing world of user engagement. You are now effectively operating two-speed IT (bimodal IT, two-speed IT, or traditional IT/agile IT). You need a new API-centric layer in the enterprise stack, one that enables two-speed IT.
As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up. Although fears that technology will displace jobs are at least as old as the Luddites, there are signs that this time may really be different. The technological breakthroughs of recent years — allowing machines to mimic the human mind — are enabling machines to do knowledge jobs and service jobs, in addition to factory and clerical work. Automation is not only replacing manufacturing jobs, it is displacing knowledge and service workers too.
In many countries IT recruitment market is flying, having picked up to a post-recession high. Employers beware – after years of relative inactivity, job seekers are gearing up for change. Economic improvements and an increase in business confidence have led to a burgeoning jobs market and an epidemic of itchy feet.
Hopefully the IT department is increasingly being seen as a profit rather than a cost centre with IT budgets commonly split between keeping the lights on and spend on innovation and revenue-generating projects. Historically IT was about keeping the infrastructure running and there was no real understanding outside of that, but the days of IT being locked in a basement are gradually changing.CIOs and CMOs must work more closely to increase focus on customers next year or risk losing market share, Forrester Research has warned.
Good questions to ask: Where do you see the corporate IT department in five years’ time? With the consumerization of IT continuing to drive employee expectations of corporate IT, how will this potentially disrupt the way companies deliver IT? What IT process or activity is the most important in creating superior user experiences to boost user/customer satisfaction?
Windows Server 2003 goes end of life in summer 2015 (July 14 2015). There are millions of servers globally still running the 13 year-old OS with one in five customers forecast to miss the 14 July deadline when Microsoft turns off extended support. There were estimated to be 2.7 million WS2003 servers in operation in Europe some months back. This will keep the system administrators busy, because there is just around half year time and update for Windows Server 2008 or Windows 2012 to may be have difficulties. Microsoft and support companies do not seem to be interested in continuing Windows Server 2003 support, so those who need that the custom pricing can be ” incredibly expensive”. At this point is seems that many organizations have the desire for new architecture and consider one option to to move the servers to cloud.
Windows 10 is coming to PCs and Mobile devices. Just few months back Microsoft unveiled a new operating system Windows 10. The new Windows 10 OS is designed to run across a wide range of machines, including everything from tiny “internet of things” devices in business offices to phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops to computer servers. Windows 10 will have exactly the same requirements as Windows 8.1 (same minimum PC requirements that have existed since 2006: 1GHz, 32-bit chip with just 1GB of RAM). There is technical review available. Microsoft says to expect AWESOME things of Windows 10 in January. Microsoft will share more about the Windows 10 ‘consumer experience’ at an event on January 21 in Redmond and is expected to show Windows 10 mobile SKU at the event.
Microsoft is going to monetize Windows differently than earlier.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.
Microsoft is pushing Universal Apps concept. Microsoft has announced Universal Windows Apps, allowing a single app to run across Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 for the first time, with additional support for Xbox coming. Microsoft promotes a unified Windows Store for all Windows devices. Windows Phone Store and Windows Store would be unified with the release of Windows 10.
Under new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft realizes that, in the modern world, its software must run on more than just Windows. Microsoft has already revealed Microsoft office programs for Apple iPad and iPhone. It also has email client compatible on both iOS and Android mobile operating systems.
With Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome grabbing so much of the desktop market—and Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Google’s Android browser dominating the mobile market—Internet Explorer is no longer the force it once was. Microsoft May Soon Replace Internet Explorer With a New Web Browser article says that Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system will debut with an entirely new web browser code-named Spartan. This new browser is a departure from Internet Explorer, the Microsoft browser whose relevance has waned in recent years.
SSD capacity has always lag well behind hard disk drives (hard disks are in 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB). Intel and Micron will try to kill the hard drives with new flash technologies. Intel announced it will begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year as part of its joint flash venture with Micron. Later (next two years) Intel promises 10TB+ SSDs thanks to 3D Vertical NAND flash memory. Also interfaces to SSD are evolving from traditional hard disk interfaces. PCIe flash and NVDIMMs will make their way into shared storage devices more in 2015. The ULLtraDIMM™ SSD connects flash storage to the memory channel via standard DIMM slots, in order to close the gap between storage devices and system memory (less than five microseconds write latency at the DIMM level).
Hard disks will be still made in large amounts in 2015. It seems that NAND is not taking over the data centre immediately. The huge great problem is $/GB. 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 – for SSD capacity to match disk by 2018 we would need roughly eight times more flash foundry capacity than we have. 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. At present solid-state drives with extreme capacities are very expensive. I expect that with 2015, the prices for SSD will will still be so much higher than hard disks, that everybody who needs to store large amounts of data wants to consider SSD + hard disk hybrid storage systems.
PC sales, and even laptops, are down, and manufacturers are pulling out of the market. The future is all about the device. We have entered the post-PC era so deeply, that even tablet market seem to be saturating as most people who want one have already one. The crazy years of huge tables sales growth are over. The tablet shipment in 2014 was already quite low (7.2% In 2014 To 235.7M units). There is no great reasons or growth or decline to be seen in tablet market in 2015, so I expect it to be stable. IDC expects that iPad Sees First-Ever Decline, and I expect that also because the market seems to be more and more taken by Android tablets that have turned to be “good enough”. Wearables, Bitcoin or messaging may underpin the next consumer computing epoch, after the PC, internet, and mobile.
There will be new tiny PC form factors coming. Intel is shrinking PCs to thumb-sized “compute sticks” that will be out next year. The stick will plug into the back of a smart TV or monitor “and bring intelligence to that”. It is likened the compute stick to similar thumb PCs that plug to HDMI port and are offered by PC makers with the Android OS and ARM processor (for example Wyse Cloud Connect and many cheap Android sticks). Such devices typically don’t have internal storage, but can be used to access files and services in the cloud. Intel expects that sticks size PC market will grow to tens of millions of devices.
We have entered the Post-Microsoft, post-PC programming: The portable REVOLUTION era. Tablets and smart phones are fine for consuming information: a great way to browse the web, check email, stay in touch with friends, and so on. But what does a post-PC world mean for creating things? If you’re writing platform-specific mobile apps in Objective C or Java then no, the iPad alone is not going to cut it. You’ll need some kind of iPad-to-server setup in which your iPad becomes a mythical thin client for the development environment running on your PC or in cloud. If, however, you’re working with scripting languages (such as Python and Ruby) or building web-based applications, the iPad or other tablet could be an useable development environment. At least worth to test.
You need prepare to learn new languages that are good for specific tasks. Attack of the one-letter programming languages: From D to R, these lesser-known languages tackle specific problems in ways worthy of a cult following. Watch out! The coder in the next cubicle might have been bitten and infected with a crazy-eyed obsession with a programming language that is not Java and goes by the mysterious one letter name. Each offers compelling ideas that could do the trick in solving a particular problem you need fixed.
HTML5′s “Dirty Little Secret”: It’s Already Everywhere, Even In Mobile. Just look under the hood. “The dirty little secret of native [app] development is that huge swaths of the UIs we interact with every day are powered by Web technologies under the hood.” When people say Web technology lags behind native development, what they’re really talking about is the distribution model. It’s not that the pace of innovation on the Web is slower, it’s just solving a problem that is an order of magnitude more challenging than how to build and distribute trusted apps for a single platform. Efforts like the Extensible Web Manifesto have been largely successful at overhauling the historically glacial pace of standardization. Vine is a great example of a modern JavaScript app. It’s lightning fast on desktop and on mobile, and shares the same codebase for ease of maintenance.
Docker, meet hype. Hype, meet Docker. Docker: Sorry, you’re just going to have to learn about it. Containers aren’t a new idea, and Docker isn’t remotely the only company working on productising containers. It is, however, the one that has captured hearts and minds. Docker containers are supported by very many Linux systems. And it is not just only Linux anymore as Docker’s app containers are coming to Windows Server, says Microsoft. Containerization lets you do is launch multiple applications that share the same OS kernel and other system resources but otherwise act as though they’re running on separate machines. Each is sandboxed off from the others so that they can’t interfere with each other. What Docker brings to the table is an easy way to package, distribute, deploy, and manage containerized applications.
Domestic Software is on rise in China. China is Planning to Purge Foreign Technology and Replace With Homegrown Suppliers. China is aiming to purge most foreign technology from banks, the military, state-owned enterprises and key government agencies by 2020, stepping up efforts to shift to Chinese suppliers, according to people familiar with the effort. In tests workers have replaced Microsoft Corp.’s Windows with a homegrown operating system called NeoKylin (FreeBSD based desktop O/S). Dell Commercial PCs to Preinstall NeoKylin in China. The plan for changes is driven by national security concerns and marks an increasingly determined move away from foreign suppliers. There are cases of replacing foreign products at all layers from application, middleware down to the infrastructure software and hardware. Foreign suppliers may be able to avoid replacement if they share their core technology or give China’s security inspectors access to their products. The campaign could have lasting consequences for U.S. companies including Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Intel Corp. (INTC) and Hewlett-Packard Co. A key government motivation is to bring China up from low-end manufacturing to the high end.
Data center markets will grow. MarketsandMarkets forecasts the data center rack server market to grow from $22.01 billion in 2014 to $40.25 billion by 2019, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.17%. North America (NA) is expected to be the largest region for the market’s growth in terms of revenues generated, but Asia-Pacific (APAC) is also expected to emerge as a high-growth market.
The rising need for virtualized data centers and incessantly increasing data traffic is considered as a strong driver for the global data center automation market. The SDDC comprises software defined storage (SDS), software defined networking (SDN) and software defined server/compute, wherein all the three components of networking are empowered by specialized controllers, which abstract the controlling plane from the underlying physical equipment. This controller virtualizes the network, server and storage capabilities of a data center, thereby giving a better visibility into data traffic routing and server utilization.
Large data center operators will be using more and more of their own custom hardware instead of standard PC from traditional computer manufacturers. Intel Betting on (Customized) Commodity Chips for Cloud Computing and it expects that Over half the chips Intel will sell to public clouds in 2015 will have custom designs. The biggest public clouds (Amazon Web Services, Google Compute, Microsoft Azure),other big players (like Facebook or China’s Baidu) and other public clouds (like Twitter and eBay) all have huge data centers that they want to run optimally. Companies like A.W.S. “are running a million servers, so floor space, power, cooling, people — you want to optimize everything”. That is why they want specialized chips. Customers are willing to pay a little more for the special run of chips. While most of Intel’s chips still go into PCs, about one-quarter of Intel’s revenue, and a much bigger share of its profits, come from semiconductors for data centers. In the first nine months of 2014, the average selling price of PC chips fell 4 percent, but the average price on data center chips was up 10 percent.
We have seen GPU acceleration taken in to wider use. Special servers and supercomputer systems have long been accelerated by moving the calculation of the graphics processors. The next step in acceleration will be adding FPGA to accelerate x86 servers. FPGAs provide a unique combination of highly parallel custom computation, relatively low manufacturing/engineering costs, and low power requirements. FPGA circuits may provide a lot more power out of a much lower power consumption, but traditionally programming then has been time consuming. But this can change with the introduction of new tools (just next step from technologies learned from GPU accelerations). Xilinx has developed a SDAccel-tools to to develop algorithms in C, C ++ – and OpenCL languages and translated it to FPGA easily. IBM and Xilinx have already demoed FPGA accelerated systems. Microsoft is also doing research on Accelerating Applications with FPGAs.
Universal Memory for Instant-On Computing will be talked about. New memory technologies promise to be strong contenders for replacing the entire memory hierarchy for instant-on operation in computers. HP is working with memristor memories that are promised to be akin to RAM but can hold data without power. The memristor is also denser than DRAM, the current RAM technology used for main memory. According to HP, it is 64 and 128 times denser, in fact. You could very well have a 512 GB memristor RAM in the near future. HP has what it calls “The Machine”, practically a researcher’s plaything for experimenting on emerging computer technologies. Hewlett-Packard’s ambitious plan to reinvent computing will begin with the release of a prototype operating system in 2015 (Linux++, in June 2015). HP must still make significant progress in both software and hardware to make its new computer a reality. A working prototype of The Machine should be ready by 2016.
Chip designs that enable everything from a 6 Gbit/s smartphone interface to the world’s smallest SRAM cell will be described at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in February 2015. Intel will describe a Xeon processor packing 5.56 billion transistors, and AMD will disclose an integrated processor sporting a new x86 core, according to a just-released preview of the event. The annual ISSCC covers the waterfront of chip designs that enable faster speeds, longer battery life, more performance, more memory, and interesting new capabilities. There will be many presentations on first designs made in 16 and 14 nm FinFET processes at IBM, Samsung, and TSMC.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux on the desktop is so hot there’s now a fight over it
Citrix joins VMware in virtual penguin desktop ploy
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/07/linux_on_the_desktop_is_so_hot_theres_now_a_fight_over_it/
Citrix has made good on its April promise to deliver virtual Linux desktops, today announcing it’s ready to roll out penguin-powered pretend PCs.
The company snuck the penguin-powered desktops into Feature Pack 2 for XenApp and XenDesktop 7.6. For now, Citrix says says you can choose from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Workstation and Server, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and Server 11 Service Pack 3, the two distros the company says its customers have asked for the most.
Citrix is pitching virtual Linux desktops at a couple of markets, one of which is users of Windows apps. It’s just as easy to pipe a Windows app into Citrix Receiver on Linux as it is Citrix Receiver on any other operating system. Users of “2D applications ranging from mission critical research and development environments for chip-design, high performance computing projects, financial and scientific modeling, big data analysis and engineering tools” are also welcome. Citrix also knows that vertical market customers who’ve invested in Linux apps, “particularly in oil and gas, manufacturing, digital media and entertainment industries,” are keen on Linux desktops.
VMware, which released its own virtual Linux desktops in June is going after similar markets, claiming its also fit for 3D duties.
we now have two big enterprise IT concerns backing Linux desktops
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jack Schofield / ZDNet:
Microsoft details Project Westminster, one of four bridges for converting apps on other platforms into Universal Windows apps
Microsoft plugs Westminster as one of its four bridges to the future of Windows Universal Apps
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-plugs-westminster-as-one-of-its-four-bridges-to-the-future-of-windows-universal-apps/
Project Westminster is a way of converting web-based apps into Windows 10 apps. That and three other bridges — to convert Android, iOS, and Win32 programs — are part of Microsoft’s attempt to create the world’s best app store.
Microsoft programmer Kiril Seksenov has published Project Westminster in a nutshell, a short and readable guide to converting web-based apps into Universal Windows Apps that can run on a wide range of Windows 10 devices.
This is just one of the four bridges announced at the Build2015 conference, the others being bridges for Android and Apple iOS apps, and for traditional Windows programs.
What Microsoft calls “Hosted Web Apps” are apps that run mainly on the web, but are packaged and distributed via the Windows Store. This allows for apps that can be updated on the fly (web app publishers just update their servers) but can also exploit local features (such as Live Tiles and Cortana voice commands) and local content.
The main drawback with hosted web apps is that users may try to run them when they don’t have an internet connection. However, Seksenov says: “Navigation to a local page can be done using the ms-appx:/// or ms-appx-web:/// protocols, allowing you to load html/css/JS from inside the package for an offline experience.”
Seksenov says that Project Westminster is “agnostic” to developer preferences and workflows
Programmers can use their favourite text editor, code repository and hosting site. Obviously, Microsoft might prefer it if they used Visual Studio and Azure, but they can use Atom, GitHub and Amazon AWS if they want.
Project Westminster in a nutshell
http://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2015/07/06/project-westminster-in-a-nutshell/
While building Hosted Web Apps, Project Westminster is agnostic to the developer workflow that you’ve chosen. Simply put, you can keep using your favorite code editor, source control and hosting service while developing your website.
Once your website is published as a Hosted Web App in the Windows 10 Store you are able to continuously deploy updates by pushing changes to your servers – no need to re-submit your app to the Store. You also gain the opportunity to integrate with the platform by directly calling into the Windows namespace from JavaScript hosted on your servers without the need for packaged code.
Project Westminster represents an evolution in our continued Web App investment. HTML/JavaScript apps have existed on the platform since Windows 8. However, they were restricted to packaged apps.
A Standards approach
Developers who build for the web do so to build apps that run in any browser or on any platform. For that reason we are also contributing to the development of the W3C Manifest for Web Apps. When complete, this will be a single, common manifest that will support web apps in all environments.
In the meantime, Microsoft along with other developers in the community have been supporting a new open source project called Manifoldjs. Manifoldjs is the simplest way to build hosted apps across all platforms. Manifoldjs starts with the W3C manifest and from it, builds hosted apps for Windows 10, along with apps for iOS, Android, FireFoxOS and Chrome.
You can use Manifoldjs to generate apps on the website, or as a command line tool. Once you have node.js installed, just simply type “npm install manifoldjs –g” and you’re set. Find out more about Manifoldjs by visiting the project’s website at http://www.manifoldjs.com .
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC slide continues
Sold in the world this year to nearly 2.5 billion different computers, when including also mobile phones. According to Gartner, the PC machine, ie desktop and laptop downturn continues.
This year, desktops and laptops sold 251 million copies. Next year the figure drops to 243 million, and in 2017 already 233 million. In practice, this means that manufacturers are fighting all the time the shrinking of the pot.
The only growing PC manufacturers for the device class is defined by Gartner of ultra light equipment, such as Microsoft’s Surface and Apple’s Macbook Air.
According to Gartner, mobile phones sold this year to 1.94 billion shares. Growth continues in 2017, but rather slow pace.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3053:pc-n-luisu-jatkuu&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Crider / Android Police:
Logitech rebrands some products to Logi, keeps Logitech for iconic wares and corporate name
Logitech Is Changing Its Brand Name To Logi For… Reasons, At Least On Some Products
http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/07/08/logitech-is-changing-its-brand-name-to-logi-for-reasons-at-least-on-some-products/
the Switzerland-based computer accessory company was founded in 1981
When the entire family upgraded to laser mice, an insane and futuristic luxury in the early 2000s, the friendly Logitech logo was emblazoned on all of them.
It won’t be anymore. Or at least it might not be. Maybe. Perhaps. Logitech has announced that it is shifting its brand, or at least portions of its huge brand of computer and mobile accessories, to a new name. From now on the brand name is “Logi,” pronounced… actually, the company’s press materials and blog post don’t say how it’s pronounced.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
Google debuts $15 Chromecast Ethernet adapter, product sells out in hours — Google’s Chromecast gets a hardwired Ethernet adapter — If you have Wi-Fi problems, you can now directly plug into your network. — Google’s Chromecast is one of the easiest-to-use and most widely supported …
Google’s Chromecast gets a hardwired Ethernet adapter
If you have Wi-Fi problems, you can now directly plug into your network.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/googles-chromecast-gets-a-hardwired-ethernet-adapter/
Tomi Engdahl says:
How China’s stock market drop affects tech companies
https://www.techinasia.com/simple-guide-chinas-stock-market-trouble-affects-tech-companies/
Unless you’ve been living under a rock recently, you’re probably aware that all is not well in China’s stock markets. After hitting an all-time high in mid June, China’s markets have dropped by nearly a quarter, shedding in excess of US$3 trillion (yeah, that’s trillion with a T) in value.
China has been quick to respond to the drop, halting IPOs, cutting interest rates, lowering reserve requirements, and pumping billions of stimulus dollars into the markets to bring prices back up
Stock prices are down, no matter where you’re listed
For tech companies listed in China, the signs aren’t great. The government’s measures have helped prop up stock prices, but this is disproportionately affecting state-owned enterprises.
Foreign-listed tech companies that planned to delist and re-list in China are now in purgatory
Fintech startups may be in trouble
Over the past few months, a ton of new finance tech startups have sprung up or raised funding, offering online and mobile investment platforms in an attempt to capitalize on the increased interest in China’s domestic markets as stock prices rocketed up. Many of these startups would have died anyway – the market can only support so many mobile investment platforms – but their demise will be accelerated by this drop in the market
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel’s Software Chief Out; Botched McAfee Deal To Blame?
http://slashdot.org/story/15/07/09/0118216/intels-software-chief-out-botched-mcafee-deal-to-blame
Renee James, Intel’s president and head of the company’s software group has departed, supposedly to “pursue other opportunities.” But a high-profile heir apparent doesn’t just leave voluntarily, and it seems likely that she is in part taking the fall for Intel’s acquisition of McAfee, the promised synergies of which have failed to materialize.
Why is Renee James leaving Intel?
http://www.itworld.com/article/2945138/business/why-is-renee-james-leaving-intel.html
She could be “pursuing other opportunities,” but there is likely another explanation
There were some fireworks at Intel in advance of the Fourth of July as several Intel executives left the company in a pretty big shakeup by Intel standards.
But according to Citibank research analyst Christopher Danely, James wasn’t doing all that well at her main job. He called her departure a positive, “due to the lack of growth and low profitability of its software business under the leadership of James.”
Danely also said he believed James was largely responsible for leading Intel’s $7.7 billion acquisition of McAfee in 2011, a merger that made absolutely no sense to anyone but a McAfee shareholder. He added that Intel’s software business had grown just 2.5% CAGR in the last three years.
“The McAfee deal has been a major disappointment in our view as there are virtually no synergies between Intel’s core silicon business and McAfee security software. When Intel acquired the McAfee business it generated 2010 revenue of $2.1 billion with operating margins of roughly 11%. We estimate McAfee revenues have remained roughly flat since the company was acquired, while operating margins have declined to the mid-single digit range,” Danely wrote.
When you say “software,” Intel is hardly the first company that comes to mind. It makes chips, first and last and always. It has some compiler technology, which is said to be quite good, but really, you just don’t think of software as a big part of Intel. That’s why the McAfee purchase made absolutely no sense. But Otellini was CEO and he and the board of directors approved it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel’s tablet CPU share to DROP: analyst
Chipzilla will struggle to sell 50 million CPUs into mobile devices says Digitimes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/09/intels_tablet_cpu_share_to_drop_analyst/
Researchers at Taiwan’s Digitimes have bad news for Intel: it just isn’t going to sell many chips for mobile devices.
Intel’s thrown a lot of time, money and effort at mobile devices, but its efforts have resulted in red ink, a re-org to combine mobile and desktop products, and rumours of imminent layoffs.
Digitimes now says that 2015 will see just 10.8 million Intel-powered Android tablets reach punters, “down from 14.23 million shipped a year earlier.” There’s some growth for Chipzilla in Android handsets, more than 10 million of which are expected to have Intel inside this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Unite promises low-cost business collaboration
Compute power in the conference room lets firms make use of existing resources
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2416770/intel-unite-promises-low-cost-business-collaboration
INTEL IS PUSHING the benefits of its Unite technology for cost-effective collaboration, enabling employees to easily set up a meeting where they can share screens and other content using a variety of endpoint devices and existing meeting room resources.
Unite was announced by Intel at the Computex show in Taiwan last month, and is designed to drive compute power into the conference room to enable new capabilities, as well as allowing businesses to make use of existing resources such as projectors and screens that they may already have installed.
The technology comprises Unite software that the customer purchases ready installed on a mini PC based on Intel’s Core vPro platform. This essentially acts as the central hub for meetings, enabling users to view content or share their own screen via wireless connectivity, and even include colleagues connecting remotely via the internet.
Chad Constant, director of marketing for Intel’s business client platforms, said that it is designed to offer a cost-effective solution for collaboration that lets customers reuse assets, rather than being a rival for technologies such as Microsoft’s Surface Hub hardware coming later this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
All-flash is a synonym for a tough market
Startup success not guaranteed
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/09/allflash_is_a_synonym_for_a_tough_market/
Last week NetApp launched a new line of all-flash arrays (AFAs) called AFF. It’s based on a specialised version of ONTAP, which has added particular optimizations to read/write data paths. It’s not the notorious FlashRay yet, but it’s not that bad and it has something to say… especially if you are already a NetApp customer.
New entrants do it better
There is no doubt we are not talking about the top notch implementation for a flash array. Startups like Pure, Solidfire, Kaminario and others designed their product from the ground up just a few years ago. They started from scratch without constraints and without a legacy to maintain.
They have a modern design, in some cases more scalable, efficient in the way they manage flash, and easier to use. Sometimes they have some particular features that make the difference. If you start building a brand new infrastructure, the advantages can be really relevant and even the worry of working with a startup might vanish!
Unfortunately, in most cases, this isn’t what always happens. Enterprise IT infrastructures are usually already in place, and moving to flash storage is a necessity for just a small part of existing applications that need to be supported by much more predictable, fast and agile storage systems. I’m not talking about pure speed in this case; fast and agile can mean many things, like faster provisioning, faster resource reallocation, faster migrations and so on.
Flash is just a feature
Flash is an enabler for a more agile storage infrastructure, but it’s not the only one. And in many cases infrastructure and organization complexity transform flash into a mere feature.
At the moment, on a capacity basis, only 4 per cent of storage sold is flash. The rest is disk. Four per cent is much less than what is usually deemed to be active data in a traditional enterprise (it runs from 10 to 20 per cent).
It will take some time before flash becomes as important as disk in the data center, and in the meantime a lot of things will happen.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 things you need to avoid SNAFUs in your data centre
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/24/10_tips_for_avoiding_data_centre_mistakes/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Running a Town Over Twitter
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/07/07/1910227/running-a-town-over-twitter
You may call Jun an ancient town — it was founded by Romans 2,200 years ago. But Jun’s mayor is known worldwide for using the latest technology to run the city. Back in 1999, when he was deputy mayor, the town declared internet a basic universal right for its citizens. And now political parties run “virtual” campaigns without printing posters. But the most impressive accomplishment of Jun’s mayor is running the entire town administration and public services using Twitter.
2,200-year-old Andalusian town runs on Twitter
http://www.citiesofthefuture.eu/2200-year-old-andalusian-town-runs-on-twitter/
Jun, a small Andalusian town founded by the Romans 2,200 years ago, is using Twitter to reduce bureaucracy, serve its citizens, and run a more efficient administration.
Mayor José Antonio Rodríguez Salas (@JoseantonioJun) has encouraged all Jun residents to get a Twitter account to communicate easily with the town government. That way they can report issues about public services and infrastructure, send suggestions, participate in the town decisions and “talk” to the mayor and council members directly.
Jun [pronounced “Hoon”] is one of several commuter towns around the provincial capital of Granada and has a population of 3,800. Its local economy depends heavily on Granada but also has a long tradition of pottery.
The town prides itself on making use of the latest technology to streamline the administration and provide efficient public services. But this isn’t its first foray. It had already made history in December 1999 when it declared internet access a basic public service and universal right for its citizens.
Twitter is used for all town services, including the street sweeper, who can be called by residents if they see something that needs cleaning. In order to use the services residents are required to have a Twitter account in their name (a third of them now have one) and register it at the town hall, so town employees know they’re dealing with actual residents. The town also provides free training courses to any residents who are not confident about using the technology.
All public employees have a Twitter account, including the town’s police officer (@PoliciaJun), the town electrician, and the street sweeper (@BarredoraJun).
With such high citizen participation the mayor was able to reduce the police force from four officers down to just one. He is very proud of reducing bureaucracy to the minimum and doing all the paperwork on Twitter.
The town’s success using Twitter has not gone unnoticed by the social media giant and, earlier this year, it sent its chief data scientist MIT professor Deb Roy to investigate how Twitter can be used to run the entire town. Jun was also visited by Twitter’s former CEO Dick Costolo last April.
Professor Roy was impressed with the town’s commitment to use the best available tools to serve its residents and with how Twitter has become a suitable platform for small towns and communities.
“Jun is the exception rather than the rule, with a very committed and technologically confident mayor who has pursued this project for 16 years,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux 4.2-rc1 Is One of the Largest Kernel Releases of Recent Times
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/07/05/2139251/linux-42-rc1-is-one-of-the-largest-kernel-releases-of-recent-times
Linus Torvalds ended the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window today by releasing Linux 4.2-rc1. He quickly wrote, “I thought this release would be one of the biggest ones ever, but it turns out that it will depend on how you count.”
https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/7/5/218
New Features Of The Linux 4.2 Kernel
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-42-features&num=1
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Goes Into a Decision To Take Software From Proprietary To Open Source
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/07/06/1950215/what-goes-into-a-decision-to-take-software-from-proprietary-to-open-source
It’s not often that you get to glimpse behind the curtain and see what led a proprietary software company to open source its software. Last year, the networking software company Midokura made a strategic decision to open source its network virtualization platform MidoNet, to address fragmentation in the networking industry
Scalable open virtual networking with MidoNet
http://opensource.com/business/15/1/scalable-open-virtual-networking-midonet
Networking is an important part of any modern datacenter. As open source continues to grow in virtualization solutions, virtualized networking is an important part of the picture. MidoNet, an open source network virtualization platform for Infrastructure-as-a-serivice (IaaS) clouds like OpenStack cloud software, is gaining traction as a way to implement networking solutions.
What is MidoNet?
MidoNet is a production-grade network virtualization solution that allows operators to build isolated networks in software that overlays the existing hardware-based network infrastructure. It addresses the shortcomings in OpenStack Neutron by replacing the default Open vSwitch (OVS) plugin with the MidoNet plugin.
Modern distributed applications have unique networking and security requirements to ensure application availability and performance.
It is often a challenge for network administrators to keep up with new infrastructure requests or make changes to support rapid prototyping and continuous delivery.
Why open source?
The benefits of open source software development for customers are evident. Cross-vendor collaborative engineering led to technological breakthroughs, code stability through peer reviews and rapid issue identification and resolution. Midokura made a strategic decision to open source its software to address the fragmentation in the networking industry. The decision to give away fours years of engineering to the open source community was deliberate with far reaching implications.
Midokura Enterprise MidoNet is already a proven, scalable virtual networking solution for leading service providers like KVH Asia and Zetta.IO. It was apparent to Midokura that multiple networking vendors were trying to sell proprietary solutions and have little to no incentive to invest in the default configuration in OpenStack.
MidoNet is modeled after other open source communities like Ubuntu and OpenStack. MidoNet gained initial support from the leading semiconductor vendors active in the Linux open source communities like Fujitsu and Broadcom and Ethernet and infiniband vendors like Mellanox. Industry analysts made commentary about the adoption of OpenStack closely mirroring to that of Linux. MidoNet parallels OpenStack adoption as evidenced by the top three Linux distributions (Red Hat, Canonical/Ubuntu, and SUSE) getting onboard at the onset. Much like some of the other open source projects, it is no surprise to see the first wave of adopters coming from large-scale cloud providers like IDC Frontier (subsidiary of Yahoo Japan) and HP Helion Eucalyptus and regional cloud providers like Zetta.io in Norway and KVH Asia.
Why we changed our software from proprietary to open source
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2015/7/why-we-changed-our-software-proprietary-open-source
Why would a software company choose to change its product from proprietary to open source? It turns out there are many good reasons, says Dan Mihai Dumitriu, CEO and CTO of networking software company Midokura. In this interview with The Enterprisers Project, Dumitriu explains the benefits.
TEP: How did you come to decide to take your software open source?
Dumitriu: We saw a movement toward open sourcing infrastructure technology such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with OpenStack and Eucalyptus. The IaaS cloud software is the first time we see open source lead the category over the proprietary solutions. For example, in the operating system category, the adoption of Linux followed Microsoft. To us, this was an indicator that a sea of change was happening.
With the adoption of open IaaS cloud, we also saw Ceph gaining user traction and users showing a strong preference for open source storage solutions over proprietary in block storage. We took a step back to consider our own market and saw a gap for an open source networking solution. So we took the leap by open sourcing the code behind MidoNet so that open source MidoNet can take the lead in the virtual networking category, much as OpenStack and also Ceph are doing.
TEP: What drawbacks did you have to consider in your decision to go open-source?
Dumitriu: Being proprietary was a barrier to adoption. Users could not evaluate the software without a legal agreement and speaking with a sales rep. With cutting edge technology, users have an expectation to try the software and to understand how things work under it. They are also generally reluctant about bringing new technologies with unknown security risks into their environment. While all software has known vulnerabilities, with open source software, users can review the source code, run security audits, assess the exposure for themselves, and then decide.
TEP: Once you’d decided to go open source, how was that communicated to your team?
Dumitriu: The decision to go open source was a culmination of several years of deliberation and deep involvement with our engineers. Engineers at all levels took part in our business, marketing and technical discussions. We ensured that the final decision was not a surprise to anyone as the entire company was involved in all aspects.
TEP: How did that decision change how your engineers do their work?
Dumitriu: From a technical standpoint, engineers work pretty much the same as before, given that we modeled our software development processes similarly to OpenStack. Prior to our decision to open source, we had already adopted tools commonly favored by the open source community because they were helpful for managing our globally distributed team.
TEP: What advice would you pass along to other CTOs about going open source?
Dumitriu: CTO to CTO: Get ready for things to slow down when you engage the community, but if you’re willing to forgo the immediate returns and see the big picture, with an active community, you will be far more successful in five years than if you go it alone.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Robert McMillan / Wall Street Journal:
Gartner and IDC say global PC shipments fell 9.5% and 11.8% respectively YoY in Q2 2015, marking the sharpest decline in nearly two years
PC Sales Continue to Fall
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/09/pc-sales-continue-to-fall/
Worldwide PC shipments saw their sharpest decline in nearly two years in the second quarter of 2015, dealing continued damage to retailers and makers of computers, chips and PC software.
Shipments fell 9.5 percent, year on year, to 68.4 million units, according to the research firm Gartner. Rival researcher IDC, which doesn’t include tablets in its tally, tracked an 11.8 percent drop, year on year, to 66.1 million shipments during the quarter. Both firms released PC sales reports on Wednesday.
Lenovo remained the world’s top PC vendor, with 20.3% share, followed by HP HPQ -0.20% (18.5%) and Dell (14.55), according to IDC. The PC market appeared to be consolidating, however, as the top three vendors gained share at the expensive of smaller PC vendors.
“This year, we expect the market to be down by close to 4 percent compared to 2014,” said Mikako Kitagawa, a principal analyst at Gartner.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Are Certifications Worth the Time and Money?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/07/09/2221211/are-certifications-worth-the-time-and-money
Having one or more certifications sounds pretty sensible in today’s world, doesn’t it? Many jobs demand proof that you’ve mastered a particular technology. But is the argument for spending lots of time and money to earn a certification as ironclad as it seems? In a new column, developer David Bolton argues ‘no.’ Most certifications just prove you can pass tests, he argues, not mastery of a particular language or platform; and given the speed at which technology evolves, most are at risk of becoming quickly outdated.
Comments:
I would never ever hire a programmer because of their certifications. I hire because of expertise, period. Certifications are a rip-off.
The problem is how to judge expertise on a resume.
So certifications get you past the HR filter.
Only then do you get to talk to someone who (in theory) knows programming/whatever enough to evaluate your actual expertise.
So, what is it worth to get past that first hurdle?
Not just resume. I talk to them. Ask them questions. Usually, I know if I’ll hire them within ten minutes. If they have a passion for programming. I never regretted hiring a programmer.
However to filter out on the fact they don’t have a certificate (or degree) means to lose out on some of the better programmers.
Certificates are _great_ for filtering. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people. The ones with certificates on their resume’s never got past the first few minutes of a phone screen. Now it’s even easier, they never get a call. I encourage everyone who isn’t sure their skills are strong enough to get certifications and put them on their resume.
5 Reasons Certifications Aren’t Worth It
http://insights.dice.com/2015/07/09/5-reasons-certifications-arent-worth/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_
If you’re attempting to master a subject or industry whose fundamentals don’t change much—medicine and engineering come to mind—then a test (or a series of tests) is a good way of verifying that you have the knowledge necessary to operate within that sphere.
But software is different. It evolves quickly, and knowledge that’s relevant today will seem hopelessly outdated sooner than you think.
Yes, I’m exaggerating for effect, but the principle holds: The evolution of technology makes many certificates obsolete pretty quickly (with some exceptions—some software, like the Linux kernel, doesn’t change all that rapidly).
The Certifiers Are… Who?
In theory, anyone can set up a certification business: Create a few online tests, charge x for taking a course online, pay for a little marketing, and—hey, presto—you’re ready to issue certificates. But what can online tests really verify?
I’m a little cynical of programmer tests that demand exact syntax knowledge, for example. Such things only test a small part of what programmers do—and with the increasing sophistication of IDEs, I’m betting that many programmers rely on automation and other tools to get the bulk of their work done. For example, iOS 8 added over 4,000 new APIs, and I certainly haven’t used more than a small fraction of them.
Employers Don’t Really Care
Recruiters sometimes have trouble determining a developer’s degree of technical experience, and so insist upon certificates or tests to judge abilities. If you manage to get past them to the job interview, the interviewer (provided they’re also a developer) can usually get a good feel for your actual programming ability and whether you’ll fit well with the group.
It’s a Rip-Off
there’s a whole certification-related ecosystem that seems designed solely to extract money for training and certificates
It Only Proves You Can Pass Tests
Certificates are only as good as the people who create the certificate tests.
Conclusion
I’m obviously not a fan of formal certification. While many jobs require one or more, lots of tech pros have forged perfectly fine careers without them. Don’t let the complicated world of certificates impede you from pursuing what you want.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC sales go OFF A CLIFF to under 300 million a year
Everybody went backwards – some by 20 per cent – during Q2
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/10/pc_sales_go_off_a_cliff_to_under_300_million_a_year/
The PC market had a horror second quarter, according to new data from analyst outfits Gartner and IDC.
Gartner’s blaming Windows 10 for the slowdown: the firm reckons buyers are holding on to their cash before the OS drops, in order to buy machines with Microsoft’s new baby pre-installed. Others are holding off because the US dollars surge has enfeebled local currencies and pushed up PC prices. Principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa therefore reckons 2015 is a blip and that slow and steady growth will return by 2016.
66.1 million PCs shipped in 2015′s second quarter, an 11.8 per cent year-on-year drop.
Things are bad all over the world. Gartner says US sales were off 5.8 per cent, at just over 15 million units. EMEA racked up 18.6 million machines pushed into the channel, down 15.7 per cent, while the Asia-Pacific clocked 24.2 million units moved and a 2.9 per cent dip.
There’s the odd spot of sunshine in Gartner’s numbers, as Lenovo and Dell can at least point to increased market share.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gartner, Gartner, on the wall? Who is the fairest IT backup biz of all?
It’s YAMQ time – Yet Another Magic Quadrant
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/09/gartner_gives_enterprise_backup_players_market_rankings/
Gartner geeks have issued another rapturous rectangle, otiose oblong, or even a queer quartet of spell-binding squares to do with enterprise backup software and integrated appliances. Yes, it’s magic quadrant time again.
There are four clear leaders: EMC, CommVault, IBM, and Symantec, with not a lot to separate them. In the Challengers’ box HP sits all alone. Actifio and Veeam keep each other company in the Visionaries’ square while there is an octet of Niche Players: Baracuda Networks, Unitrends, Arcserve, Dell, Asigra, Seagate, Acronis, and FalconStor.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Linux Setup – Neil McGovern, Debian Project Leader
http://www.mylinuxrig.com/post/122864405658/the-linux-setup-neil-mcgovern-debian-project
Neil is being modest when he calls Debian Project Leader a figurehead position. The reality is he coordinates a lot of work. Linux Voice did a nice interview with him and one of the things that came up is that while in his day-to-day work he can tell people what to do, he doesn’t have that option in Debian, which is a community project. To me, that makes his job that much harder.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fortran: 7 Reasons Why It’s Not Dead
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327097&
In the 1950s, IBM programmer John Backus invented a programming language called Fortran. It’s still in use today, and here’s what you need to know about it.
The list of high-tech tools in continuous use since the early 1950s isn’t very long: the Fender Telecaster, the B-52, and Fortran.
Whereas COBOL was created to be a general purpose language that worked well for creating applications for business and government purposes in which reports and human-readable output were key, FORTRAN was all about manipulating numbers and numeric data structures.
Its numeric capabilities meant that Fortran was the language of choice for the first generation of high-performance computers and remained the primary development tool for supercomputers: Platform-specific versions of the language power applications on supercomputers from Burroughs, Cray, IBM, and other vendors.
Fortran: 7 Reasons Why It’s Not Dead
http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/fortran-7-reasons-why-its-not-dead/d/d-id/1321174
GNU Fortran
GNU Fortran is the primary open source version of the Fortran compiler and is widely used both in and out of academia.
Oracle Solaris Studio
IBM’s Fortran Family
HP Fortran
Intel Fortran
Fortran For Raspberry Pi
Fortran For Android
More (And Less) Fortran
Tomi Engdahl says:
More (And Less) Fortran
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=182&doc_id=1327084&
Robert Dewar, Ada pioneer, passed away last week.
Robert Dewar passed away Jun 30 at age 70.
Most readers of this site probably don’t know the name. Dr. Dewar was president and one of the founders of AdaCore, a leading supplier of support and services for Ada developers. He had a long career and contributed to many projects. He and Edmond Schonberg wrote GNAT, the FOSS Ada compiler, which is part of the GNU compiler collection.
Most of us use C or C++, a language that now has ancient roots. Ada is also old, dating to the early 80s, and has been through a number of revisions. In my opinion, we, the embedded community, haven’t given the language a fair chance. Only a few percent of us report using it in real products.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Robinson Meyer / The Atlantic:
How Marketplace Lite, a coders-for-hire team, salvaged healthcare.gov after the “tech surge”
The Secret Startup That Saved the Worst Website in America
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/
How a team of young people, living in a repurposed McMansion in Maryland, helped rebuild Healthcare.gov
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Buhr / TechCrunch:
Forrester: Tablet Sales Have Plateaued But There’s A Future In Business
http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/12/forrester-tablet-sales-have-plateaued-but-theres-a-future-in-business/#.b5imzi:R2bv
As iPhone revenue soars, Apple’s iPad sales dropped 18 percent year-over-year in the final quarter of 2014 and has now hit a plateau, according to a new study from Forrester Research.
Even the new iPad Air didn’t help. But it’s not just Apple’s device that slipped. The study points to an overall plateau in tablet sales worldwide.
The reason for the slump in sales is varied, but saturation in the consumer market may have a lot to do with it. Android tablets have plummeted in price – some to even as low as $50 – making this an incredibly accessible piece of technology for most consumers.
Tablet sales skyrocketed from 2010 to 2013 as Apple, Samsung and others introduced these new pieces of innovation to the market. However, tablet replacement rates are not the same as replacement rates for smartphones. And, as was pointed out in the study, earlier versions of these tablets don’t differ much or offer radically new “must-have” features in the latest models, at least not enough to get consumers to shell out $500 more for a newer device when their old tablet works pretty much the same.
The rise in phablets also has something to do with the lower sales figures. Consumers are using these hybrid devices as a substitute for the bulkier tablets. Around 41 percent of global information workers said their primary smartphone is 5 inches or larger. And 11 percent indicated that their primary tablet is actually a phablet, according to the Forrester study.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM, Nvidia, U.S. Dept. of Energy outline supercomputing centers, collaboration
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-nvidia-u-s-dept-of-energy-outline-supercomputing-centers-collaboration/
Two supercomputing centers of excellence revolve around making sure applications can take advantage of compute horsepower and gathering feedback from developers, engineers and scientists.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
Microsoft unveils GigJam, a Cortana driven, cross-platform, realtime and asynchronous business collaboration app
Microsoft’s New GigJam Collaboration App Deconstructs Tasks Into “Molecules Of Work”
http://www.fastcompany.com/3048474/tech-forecast/microsoft-gigjam
Got a project? GigJam lets you share information on the fly—and hide what’s private—on computers, tablets, and phones.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rachel King / ZDNet:
Intel beats Q2 estimates with revenue of $13.2B; CEO credits growth in Internet of Things, memory, and data center departments — Intel CEO credits solid Q2 results to Internet of Things, data center growth — Also coming soon: Skylake, the code name for Intel’s sixth-generation Core processor aimed
Intel CEO credits solid Q2 results to Internet of Things, data center growth
http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-q2-2015-revenue-earnings-hardware-datacenters/
UPDATED: During the shareholders call on Wednesday, Krzanich provided a little more color on Intel’s chip roadmap with an explainer rooted in Moore’s Law.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brandon Chester / AnandTech:
Samsung announces 8-inch and 9.7-inch Galaxy Tab S2 tablets with new form factor and 4:3 2048×1536 displays, available in August
Samsung Announces The 8.0″ and 9.7″ Galaxy Tab S2 Tablets
by Brandon Chester on July 19, 2015 9:35 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9452/samsung-announces-the-galaxy-tab-s2
As far as specifications go, the Galaxy Tab S2 is improved over the original Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and 10.5 in most respects. Inside it sports Samsung’s Exynos 5433 SoC, which has four Cortex A57 cores with a peak frequency of 1.9GHz, and four Cortex A53 cores that go as high as 1.3GHz. Paired with the SoC is 3GB of LPDDR3 memory plus 32 or 64GB of internal memory, and a microSD slot to expand that by up to 128GB officially.
Tomi Engdahl says:
S.Somasegar / MSDN Blogs:
Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 Available for Download
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2015/07/20/visual-studio-2015-and-net-4-6-available-for-download.aspx
Tomi Engdahl says:
Childhood Tech Exposure Is Slowly Killing The Keyboard
http://hackaday.com/2015/07/20/slowly-killing-the-keyboard/
I see the disturbing trend of moving away from keyboards as input devices — and I’m talking about a real, physical keyboard. This isn’t a matter of one decision that kills the keyboard, but an aggregate that is slowly changing the landscape. If you blink, you’ll miss it. We will not find ourselves in a world without keyboards, but in one where most of the available keyboards suck.
Rise of the Virtual Keyboard Generation
Is swipe-style keying the future of coding?
Tablets are great for screwing around, but when you want to get real work done in a reasonable amount of time, you grab a physical keyboard. In this scenario I don’t see the problem being those in the workforce going away from keyboards; it’s how the younger generations are learning to interact with technology that is troubling. The touchscreen is baby’s first computer. Families gather and the kids are handed their parent’s tablets while the grown-ups watch the game. More and more schools are outfitting classrooms with tablets
Keyboard Erosion
We’ve already seen a strong push into touch-screens on laptops as the tablet market has grown. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
The scenario I hope I never see is laptop companies deciding that the market isn’t demanding keyboards at a high enough rate to make them standard. If you’re already manufacturing a touch-screen on your newest laptop, there’s huge cost savings to getting rid of all those keys.
I know what you’re thinking… just get an external keyboard. Most of the die-hard iPad users who I know have a Bluetooth keyboard built into the case so that they can get the typing work done when they need to. These keyboards are better than a virtual one, but are lacking compared to a proper physical keyboard. Call me old-fashioned but this is not the direction I want to see the computer industry enter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple Reports Record Third Quarter Results
iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac & App Store Drive Revenue Growth of 33%
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/07/21Apple-Reports-Record-Third-Quarter-Results.html
The growth was fueled by record third quarter sales of iPhone® and Mac®, all-time record revenue from services and the successful launch of Apple Watch™.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft:
Earnings Release FY15 Q4: Microsoft Cloud and Hardware Results Drives Fourth Quarter Performance — Microsoft Cloud and Hardware Results Drives Fourth Quarter Performance Commercial cloud annualized revenue run rate now exceeds $8 billion; Computing and Gaming Hardware, including Xbox and Surface …
http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/PressReleaseAndWebcast/FY15/Q4/default.aspx
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:
Microsoft posts $22.2B revenue, $2.1B operating loss in wake of huge Nokia writedown; stock slips 3%
Microsoft’s FQ4 Beats Expectations, Investors Send Stock Lower On Phone Losses
http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/21/microsofts-slips-3-after-reporting-fq4-profit-and-revenue-beat-in-wake-of-massive-phone-writedown/#.b5imzi:m5qp
Following the bell, Microsoft reported its fiscal fourth quarter financial performance, including revenue of $22.2 billion, and adjusted earnings per share of $0.62.
The company took a stiff charge in the quarter relating to its writedown of hardware assets that it purchased from Nokia. Using normal accounting methods, Microsoft had operating income of negative $2.1 billion in the quarter.
Microsoft reported that its incomes from selling Windows to OEMs fell 22 percent compared to the year-ago period. That figure is artificially depressed on a ratio basis, given that this time last year saw the death of Windows XP, which drove a spate of Of course, with Windows 10 just days out, Microsoft could be suffering from modest wait-until-new-stuff-is-out syndrome on the demand side of things.
The company picked up 2.8 million new consumer Office 365 subscribers, ending the quarter with 15.2 million.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft says on his blog that the company stopped yesterday extended support for servers on Windows Server 2003 operating system. Support out of the previously announced life-cycle of the product as planned.
Microsoft also reminds its customers that the SQL Server 2005′s extended support ends next spring, exactly 12/04/2016. Nine months may seem a long time for the upgrade, but the upgrade to the company’s systems, depending on the take up to months at a time.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3082:windows-server-2003-n-tuki-loppui&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC sales will slow down faster and faster
Bad news for PC computer manufacturers! According to Gartner, sales of PCs declined in the second quarter by 9.5 per cent from one year ago. The fall is the sharpest since the autumn of 2013.
The market is currently treats PC manufacturers equally. All sales figures fell in April-June. The market leader in Lenovo sales shrank by 6.8 per cent, but it still managed to slightly increase its market share.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3069:pc-myynti-hidastuu-yha-nopeammin&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ruth Reader / VentureBeat:
Facebook, Microsoft, and Dropbox team up to make tech more accessible to people with disabilities
http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/23/facebook-microsoft-and-dropbox-team-up-to-make-tech-more-accessible-to-people-with-disabilities/
Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox, and several other tech notables are coming together to make technology more accessible to people with disabilities.
Together these companies and educational partners like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University, have designed a working group called Teaching Accessibility. The mandate is to develop guides for building technology that everyone can use. The group will examine human-computer interaction, engineering education, and design concepts that better cater to diverse populations.
They’ve timed the announcement of the new alliance to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which then-President George H.W. Bush signed into law on July 26, 1990.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chris Mellor / The Register:
Cisco ends Invicta storage hardware line, a business it entered with $415M Whiptail acquisition in 2013
How to waste two years and lose $415m: Cisco’s now-dead Whiptail deal
A sorry story of whipped tales, angst and attrition
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/24/whipped_tails_acquisition_angst_and_attrition/
Exclusive + analysis Cisco has confirmed that the Invicta all-flash array line is no more, telling The Register: “As part of product lifecycle management, we withdraw technology from the marketplace when necessary to focus our efforts on what is critical for the future of our customers’ business as well as our own.”
The networking goliath added:
Cisco is prioritizing the elements of our portfolio to drive the most value for our customers both now and in the future, and today, we are announcing the End of Life (EoL) for the Invicta Appliance and Scaling System products
When Cisco entered the server business with its UCS line it had high hopes, and they came good. Paul Perez, Mr UCS inside Cisco, had driven the UCS business to near $3bn annual run rate but was hungry for more. We’re told Cisco realized the UCS business could be boosted by adding storage to its serving capabilities.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Edge review: Windows finally has a good browser
Edge is the browser Windows 10 deserves
http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/29/9066255/microsoft-windows-edge-browser-review
For two decades, the default web browsing experience in Windows has been Internet Explorer. Over the years, Microsoft’s home-built browser became bloated, insecure, confusing to use, and just plain hated by many users. A lot of people turned to alternatives, such as Google Chrome, as a result. With Windows 10 (check out our full review here), Microsoft went back to the drawing board and scrapped everything it had done so far with Internet Explorer. It built an entirely new browser from scratch, one that would shed all of the baggage of Internet Explorer and offer a modern, fast web browsing experience for Windows users. That browser is Edge.
Edge comes with Windows 10 out of the box. And I should say up top that Internet Explorer also comes with Windows 10, though it’s buried in the OS, and Microsoft says that’s largely for compatibility with legacy enterprise apps.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Microsoft is giving away Windows 10 for free
A great desktop operating system must be a bridge to the computing platforms that come after mobile
http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/29/9066749/microsoft-windows-10-office-app-free-upgrade-model/in/5910988
When Microsoft released Windows 95 almost 20 years ago, people packed into stores to be among the first lucky buyers to get their hands on this cutting edge new technology. Microsoft had an iron grip on productivity software in the enterprise, but even ordinary consumers were accustomed to paying hundreds of dollars for software. Two decades later, Microsoft is releasing Windows 10. But most people won’t have to rush out and purchase a copy. Anyone with a copy of Windows dating back to Windows 7 can upgrade for free, a first for Microsoft.
The decision to forgo that traditional revenue stream and attempt to broaden the install base of Windows 10 highlights the tough choices Microsoft must make as it tries to claw its way back into the competition for mobile. It also needs to marry the strength of the slowly waning desktop world to its offerings on phone, tablets, consoles, and the cloud. The goal is to create “universal” apps that work on Windows 10 and across Windows mobile, as well as on computing platforms like Xbox and the forthcoming HoloLens.
Along with growing its user base to woo developers, Microsoft hopes it can use a freemium model, giving away more of its core software but monetizing in other ways. The margins will never again be as fat as they were in the glory days of Windows 95, but the number of people who own a personal computing device is now far larger. If Microsoft could capture a significant portion of the smartphone market, the revenue opportunity could be far greater.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Natalie Gagliordi / ZDNet:
IDC: Tablet sales fell 7% YoY to 44.7M units in Q2, but Lenovo, LG, and Huawei grew, pushing Samsung’s and Apple’s market share down to 41% from 45% last year
Tablet shipments drop again amid shrinking market demand: IDC
http://www.zdnet.com/article/tablet-tracker-idc-q2/
Global tablet shipments totaled 44.7 million units in Q2 compared to 48 million during the same period the year prior. Shipments slipped nearly 4 percent compared to just last quarter.
Marked by little hardware innovation and limited vendor upgrades, the tablet market declined seven percent year-over-year during the second quarter, according to new data from IDC.
Global tablet shipments totaled 44.7 million units in Q2 compared to 48 million during the same period the year prior. Shipments slipped nearly 4 percent compared to just last quarter.
Not even industry stalwarts are safe from the effects of shrinking market demand. Apple saw its shipments tablets, including the larger-screen iPad and the iPad Mini, drop 26 percent to 10.9 million compared to the second quarter of 2013.
Samsung maintained its No. 2 position with 7.6 million units shipped and 17 percent market share. Lenovo also held on to its spot at No. 3, shipping 2.5 million units at 5.7 percent market share.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Today’s High-Powered GPUs—Strong for Graphics and for Math
http://intelligentsystemssource.com/todays-high-powered-gpus-strong-for-graphics-and-for-math/?utm_source=Pubpress&utm_medium=email&utm_term=…Read+More&utm_content=ISS+e-Newsletter+July+-+A+Special+Look+at+Chassis+and+Enclosures&utm_campaign=1507_ISS_E-newsletter
Powerful multicore CPUs are increasingly integrating high performance graphics coprocessors on the same die with fast low-latency connections. The parallelism of these coprocessors makes them capable of numeric calculations that rival DSP cores.
Today, to build advanced embedded processing systems for use in applications such as image signal processing and computer vision, defense system designers use multi-core processors, high capacity memory chips, wide bandwidth fabrics and open software developed for commercial markets. In a recent innovation, system designers are increasingly making use of the graphics processing units (GPUs) integrated within a new generation of Intel x86 architecture chips.
To understand the advantages that an integrated GPU offers for aerospace and defense applications, one needs to understand how GPUs function. At a high level, they lend themselves to two broad classes of processing, both of which are needed by defense applications:
(1) Rendering images for display
(2) Accelerated floating point math operations
Tomi Engdahl says:
Terje Solsvik / Reuters:
Opera Sofware considers sale after lowering growth estimates for the second time in six months, hires investment bankers
Norway’s Opera warns on growth, says firm may be sold
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/08/opera-software-ma-idUSL5N10J09C20150808
OSLO, Aug 8 (Reuters) – Online advertising and browser firm Opera Sofware is considering a sale of the company after missing second-quarter revenue forecasts and cutting its full-year expectations, the board of the Norwegian company said on Saturday
Tomi Engdahl says:
Larry Page / Google:
Google creates holding company called Alphabet with Larry Page as CEO; Sundar Pichai now CEO of Google, other subsidiaries will have own CEOs — Google Announces Plans for New Operating Structure — G is for Google.
Google Announces Plans for New Operating Structure
http://investor.google.com/releases/2015/0810.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Angela Chen / Wall Street Journal:
Google shares up more than 5% in after-hours trading after Alphabet announcement; all Google shares to convert to Alphabet shares
Google Creates Parent Company Called Alphabet in Restructuring
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/google-creates-new-company-alphabet-1439240645-lMyQjAxMTE1MTExMDYxNDAzWj
Sundar Pichai will be CEO of Google as Larry Page will head parent company Alphabet; Sergey Brin to be Alphabet president
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs vastly underestimate extent of shadow IT
http://www.cio.com/article/2968281/cio-role/cios-vastly-underestimate-extent-of-shadow-it.html
New study from Cisco reveals CIOs are operating in the dark, failing to meet end users’ needs for cloud applications and services.
Most CIOs have an inkling that employees in their enterprise have snuck a few applications past the IT department, but a new study by Cisco indicates that they are vastly underestimating the extent that unauthorized apps and services have infiltrated the network.
Consulting with CIOs and analyzing network traffic in a set of large enterprises in a variety of industries, Cisco determined that the typical firm has on the order of 15 to 22 times more cloud applications running in the workplace than have been authorized by the IT department.
That level of pervasive shadow IT can create new security threats and introduce considerable waste into the enterprise, as employees in different business lines purchase duplicative services for common processes like storage and collaboration.
“If they can’t see these cloud services being consumed, they can’t see the risk that’s being incurred,” says Bob Dimicco, global leader and founder of Cisco’s Cloud Consumption Service practice. “[If] you can’t see it, you really can’t manage it.”
And by Cisco’s tally, there is quite a bit that CIOs aren’t seeing. On average, CIOs surveyed estimated that there were 51 cloud services running within their organization. According to Cisco’s analysis, the actual number is 730.
The lion’s share of the unauthorized cloud applications that Cisco identified fall into the categories of Software-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service, with platform-level applications a distant third.
And it cuts across sectors. Even in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, Cisco found between 17 and 20 times more cloud applications running than the IT department estimated.
“The shock to the CIO was the magnitude and the pervasiveness,”
Cisco points to a confluence of factors that have led to the rise of shadow IT, which Dimicco boils down to two overarching trends — “hyper-connectivity” and what he calls “hyper-distributed clouds,” where data can reside across an interconnected set of public and private deployments.
So how is the CIO to respond to the surge in shadow IT? Dimicco outlines two broad options, and sees a clear choice.
On the one hand, CIOs can turn a blind eye to the problem and continue to provision cloud services as they have been, which, it seems clear enough, is not meeting the needs of end users.
Alternatively, he suggests that CIOs and other enterprise leaders rethink how their organizations approach IT on a fundamental level
“Rather than trying to stop it, I’m going to look at it and say this represents hybrid IT,” he says.
“It starts with discovering and identifying what’s being used,” Dimicco says, “and then taking that data and applying it to an informed cloud strategy so the IT organization can be a broker.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why the Freemium Business Model Isn’t What It Used To Be
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/08/11/0147224/why-the-freemium-business-model-isnt-what-it-used-to-be
A few years ago, every enterprise software company was trying freemium — the idea of giving a product away to build users, then charging for additional features. Now, that model seems to be losing favor, except with open source software. Business Insider talks to enterprise founders and VCs to figure out why ‘freemium’ wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
A few years ago, everybody was giving business software away for ‘free’ — here’s why that’s no longer the case
The basic premise behind freemium in the enterprise is that business users would virally adopt your free software and pay for more robust features once they see the real value in your product.
That way, software makers can build a massive platform without spending much on salespeople — the classic textbook play Slack followed to become a $2.8 billion company in less than two years.
“We’d all love to do freemium because we don’t have to hire salespeople,” Storm Ventures’ Jason Lemkin told us. “But what we all kind of figured out is there just aren’t enough businesses in the entire world to get to a $100 million business at freemium.”
Lemkin argues at $10/month per paid user, and at an industry average 2% conversion rate, you would need at least 50 million organic, active users to get to $100 million in annual sales. That’s not impossible but extremely difficult, as only a handful of companies have been able to pull it off so far.
Instead, to reach scale, companies end up moving to the traditional enterprise sales model where freemium becomes less important, Lemkin pointed out.
Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/freemium-losing-favor-in-enterprise-software-2015-8?r=US&IR=T#ixzz3iVBO7mtJ
Tomi Engdahl says:
Techies! Shadow IT means you need to up your game
Employees are not rebelling, they just want things done
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/11/shadow_it_not_rebellion/
Shadow IT is not the result of “rogue employees looking to rebel” the research firm Frost and Sullivan has declared in a review of the hybrid cloud market.
However, IT chiefs can take little comfort from the report as it goes on to explain that lines of business’s installation and use of unauthorised applications is overwhelmingly due to tech departments’ inability to serve up the technology that users actually need.
F&S’s report The New Hybrid Cloud is based on a survey by the firm show that “49 per cent [of employees] are more familiar and comfortable with the unapproved application, so using it helps them get their job done more quickly and easily”.
Another 38 per cent of line of business employees fingered “slow or cumbersome IT approval processes for the needed service”, with almost a quarter stating “the unauthorised app met needs better than IT’s alternative.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the title of the IBM-sponsored report, Frost and Sullivan said the latest generation of hybrid cloud technology left IT departments better tooled up to face down these challenges.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows Server 2003 support has gone. Here’s how to survive
Life after support
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/11/win2k3_support_has_gone_heres_how_to_survive/
Windows Server 2003 End of Support was on July 14th 2015 and we’ve got some very practical tips and advice to help you keep your implementations running safely.
talk through the range of security and management challenges that End of Support can cause and show you how to develop an action plan to prevent them.
http://whitepapers.theregister.co.uk/paper/view/3908/
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD patent filing hints at FPGA plans in the pipeline
Plots response to Intel’s Altera acquisition
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/11/amd_patent_filing_hints_at_fpga_plans_in_the_pipeline/
With Intel in the process of buying venerable FPGA-maker (field programmable gate arrays) Altera and adding FPGA-like customisability to some Xeon silicon, the industry has been anticipating a response from AMD. And perhaps the first fruit of that response are now emerging.
A report from Italy’s Bits and Chips says the company wants to stack its x86 Opteron chips with FPGAs, with its HBM2 (high bandwidth memory) technology providing the high-speed communications.
The Italian report is based on this patent application filed by AMD, titled Die-stacked memory device with reconfigurable logic.
In the patent filing, AMD says it wants to give designers the reconfigurability of FPGAs, but without the on-board real estate penalty of having to design in an extra chip.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Carlyle buys data storage biz Veritas from Symantec for $8 billion
http://fortune.com/2015/08/11/carlyle-buys-data-storage-biz-veritas-from-symantec-for-8-billion/
Carlyle announces the year’s largest tech buyout, agreeing to acquire Veritas from Symantec.
Private equity firm The Carlyle Group CG -3.38% announced this morning that it is acquiring data storage and server management business Veritas from Symantec Corp. SYMC -3.23% for $8 billion. Helping to finance the deal will be GIC, a sovereign wealth fund in Singapore that also is an investor in Carlyle Group funds.
According to a report yesterday from Reuters, Symentec had been seeking to sell Veritas for “several months, but interest from potential buyers was limited because of a tax burden associated with splitting the company.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Corey Doctorow Rails Against the Effect of DRM and the DMCA
http://hackaday.com/2015/08/08/corey-doctorow-rails-against-the-effect-of-drm-and-the-dmca/
If you weren’t at [Cory Doctorow’s] DEF CON talk on Friday you missed out. Fighting Back in the War on General Purpose Computing was inspiring, informed, and incomparable. At the very lowest level his point was that it isn’t the devices gathering data about us that is the big problem, it’s the legislation that makes it illegal for us to make them secure. The good news is that all of the DEF CON talks are recorded and published freely. While you wait for that to happen, read on for a recap and to learn how you can help the EFF fix this mess.