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:
DisplayLink demos 5K display connectivity over single USB cable
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2015/01/displaylink-demos-5k.html
This week at the 2015 International CES in Las Vegas, DisplayLink, the consortium for USB graphics technology, is demonstrating the latest commercially available Dell UltraSharp 5K monitors connected over a single, standard universal USB cable providing 5120×2880 resolution
DisplayLink said the demonstrated solution both solves the 5K connectivity problem and equally enables non-5K PC, notebooks, and tablets to connect to 5K displays over a standard universal “Plug-and-Display” USB 3.0 cable connection. DisplayLink uses a standard off-the shelf Microsoft Surface Pro III, connected over a standard USB 3.0 cable to a DisplayLink-based docking station, to Dell’s new 5K UltraSharp UP2715K, 27” Monitor, enabled by DisplayLink’s latest 5K chipset.
“5K monitors with 5120×2880 resolutions were just released in Q4. DisplayLink is demonstrating dramatically simplified 5K connectivity to any PC,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adults-only Chrome add-on grabs you by the Googlies
Chrome’s remote control features come to iOS if you’re 17 or over
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/13/adults_only_chrome_addon_now_lets_ithings_grab_you_by_the_googlies/
Google’s Chrome Remote Desktop app does what it says on the can: install it in Google’s browser and it becomes possible to drive the host Mac, PC or Chromebook from another similarly-equipped machine.
As of today it’s also possible to drive a machine from iOS, as Google has been kind enough to release an app for the iPhone or iPad. If you are at least 17 years or age.
it does give sysadmins another option to reach out and touch endpoints.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia drives Tegra to TFlops
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/ces/4438221/Nvidia-drives-Tegra-to-TFlops?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_productsandtools_20150112&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_productsandtools_20150112&elq=b70c2a1ab86a401b9645b1f85acd62b4&elqCampaignId=21125
Nvidia kicked off International CES, held in Las Vegas Jan 6-9, with three major announcements for mobile and automotive computing. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled the Tegra X1, a 256-core “mobile superchip” with more than a teraflop of processing power and 16-bit floating point.
The 20nm X1 is both a compliment to and a step up from last year’s Tegra K1. It has eight 64-bit CPU cores in a 4×4 configuration, and is able to stream 4K video at 60 Hz. “Tegra X1 is able to run state-of-the-art engines that any desktop computer can run” on less than 10 W, Huang told attendees.
Intel rolls 14nm Broadwell in Vegas
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/ces/4438203/Intel-rolls-14nm-Broadwell-in-Vegas?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_productsandtools_20150112&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_productsandtools_20150112&elq=b70c2a1ab86a401b9645b1f85acd62b4&elqCampaignId=21125
Intel announced at CES 2015 the Broadwell family, its fifth-generation Core processors. The 14 new chips are essentially versions of the company’s 22nm Haswell architecture made in its new 14nm process, providing enhancements it hopes encourages PC and notebook users to upgrade.
Intel will offer dual and quad-core chips — 10 processors at 15W (both Core i5 and i7 chips) with Intel HD graphics, and four 28W products with Intel Iris Graphics spanning i3, i5, and i7 lines. The dual-core chips have 1.9 billion transistors, a 35% increase over the prior generation, and a 133 mm2 footprint that is approximately 50mm2 smaller than its predecessors. The 15W chips have data rates up to 3.1 GHz while 28W i7 cores hit up to 3.4 GHz.
A notebook using a new i7 can last up to 10.1 hours while idle at 4W, an increase of 60 minutes for similarly configured systems using the prior generation. During video playback, the same chip saw a 90 minute battery increase to 8.7 hours while operating at approximately 4.5W.
Broadwell will power “a diverse range of form factors” from notebooks to so-called two-in-one tablet/notebook hybrids that are “seeing great retail sales momentum,” she said. In addition, OEMs will announce the first Broadwell-based Chromebooks this month with the first systems in market in February.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NoSQL Pioneer Basho Scores $25M To Attempt A Comeback
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/12/early-nosql-pioneer-basho-scores-25m-to-return-to-glory/
Basho was once a rising star in the NoSQL space, but over time other vendors began to move in, and it lost a step or two — then came a big turnover of key personnel last year.
Back in 2008 when it launched, there weren’t that many NoSQL vendors to compete with Basho, but over the years the company seemed to lose its mojo and other vendors like Couchbase, MongoDB and DataStax came along to fill the void and grab the bulk of the funding. Hadoop also began to chip away at the company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Toshiba tosses out uber-slim THREE TERABYTE HDD
Didn’t need no steenkin’ shingles, either
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/13/toshibas_mighty_mini_mq03abb300_hdd/
Toshiba has launched a 3TB small-form-factor hard drive, which must set some sort of record, surely.
Its MQ03ABB300 – what sexy names these suckers have – is a 2.5-inch disk drive with four platters each holding 750GB. That makes the drive 15mm thick (high in HDD parlance) and suitable for external drive use.
It is a straightforward drive employing perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) with no shingling to increase track density and so hoist capacity upwards.
What about competing drives?
HGST has a 1.5TB Travelstar 5K1500 spinning at 5,400rpm with 500GB/platter.
Seagate’s Samsung unit has a 2TB Spinpoint MT9 with three platters
WD has a 2TB Green drive
Toshiba has stolen a march on its competitors with this 3TB drive. It’s the largest capacity 2.5-inch disk drive out there, but for how long?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Global PC market’s not dead, it’s just resting – Gartner
Rival beancounter IDC not so sure
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/01/13/q4_global_pc_market/
The PC market never really died, it was just resting – at least according to our man at Gartner, who leaned on the latest global sales data to prove there’s some life left yet in the form factor.
According to preliminary stats, sales into channels grew one per cent in Q4 to 83.7 million boxes as retailers and disties took delivery of more stock in anticipation of a mini return to consumer spending.
More Reading
HP boss Meg Whitman shuffles exec pawns just before biz splitsIt’s a TAB-tastrophe – 83 million fewer units to ship in 2014Toshiba: We’ll STAY in PCs! We’ll just axe a few bodsSamsung abandons Chromebooks, laptops, PCs in EuropeSony set to axe 5,000 workers worldwide as it flings PC biz overboard
Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, said the impact of tablets is “lessoning” amid high levels of penetration.
“The PC market never died,” he told us, “but it shrank to a smaller size of users that are perhaps more engaged”.
The US market led the PC shipment recovery, with sales up 13.1 per cent to 18.1 million units, units were up in EMEA by 2.8 per cent to 26.5m and two per cent in Asia Pacific to 26.6m.
Lenovo maintained its lead at the top, with sales up 7.5 per cent to 16.28 million PCs, taking market share to 19.4 per cent. But it was challenged in Q4 by HP’s growth of 16 per cent and market share of 18.8 per cent. For the year, Lenovo extended its lead at the top.
The exit of the Sony and Samsung brands from the PC market benefited the major players, Gartner said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Growth of Chrome, Bing, all-in-ones, ultraslim, convertibles, and tough systems similarly make PCs more compelling and competitive,” said Lauren Loverde, IDC veep of the PC tracker.
But she warned that 2015 would not see a repeat of the XP support issue, and the deflationary affects of Bing and Chrome on PC average sales prices “cast a shadow of doubt on the strength of the market going into 2015”.
Source: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/01/13/q4_global_pc_market/
Tomi Engdahl says:
PHP vs. Node.js: the Battle For Developer Mind Share
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/01/13/0434242/php-vs-nodejs-the-battle-for-developer-mind-share
Simplicity vs. closures, speed of coding vs. raw speed — InfoWorld’s Peter Wayner takes a look at how PHP and Node.js stack up against each other. “It’s a classic Hollywood plot: the battle between two old friends who went separate ways.”
PHP vs. Node.js: An epic battle for developer mind share
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2866712/php/php-vs-node-js-an-epic-battle-for-developer-mind-share.html
Here’s how the old guard and upstart darling of the server-side Web stack up against each other
In the programming language version of this movie, it’s the introduction of Node.js that turns the buddy flick into a grudge match: PHP and JavaScript, two partners who once ruled the Internet together but now duke it out for the mind share of developers.
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In the old days, the partnership was simple. JavaScript handled little details on the browser, while PHP managed all the server-side tasks that existed between port 80 and MySQL. It was a happy union that continues to support many of the crucial parts of the Internet. Between WordPress, Drupal, and Facebook, people can hardly go a minute on the Web without running into PHP.
But then some clever kid discovered he could get JavaScript running on the server. Suddenly, there was no need to use PHP to build the next generation of server stacks. One language was all it took to build Node.js and the frameworks running on the client. “JavaScript everywhere” became the mantra for some.
Of course, the ending isn’t written yet. For every coder crowing about the purity of Node.js and the simplicity of JavaScript everywhere, there’s another who’s happy with the deep code base and long-understood stability of PHP.
Where PHP wins: Mixing code with content
Where Node wins: Separating concerns
Where PHP wins: Deep code base
Where Node wins: Newer code means more modern features
Where PHP wins: Simplicity (sort of)
Where Node wins: Complexity of closures and more
Where PHP wins: No client app needed
Where Node wins: Service calls are thinner than HTML-fat PHP calls
Where PHP wins: SQL
Where Node.js wins: JSON
Where PHP wins: Speed of coding
Where Node.js wins: Raw speed
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big Yellow brings in Boeing bods to bolster Big data bid
Symantec also licensing technology from network monitor Narus
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/13/symantec_turns_to_boeing_for_big_data_security_expertise/
Symantec is acquiring 65 security engineers from Boeing as a part of a deal to beef up its expertise in Big Data, prior to a split between its security and storage divisions later this year.
As part of the deal Big Yellow is also licensing technology from Boeing’s Narus security division, which develops network-monitoring technologies used by customers including the US government.
Boeing bought Narus in 2010, four years after the security tools developer was dragged into controversy with claims by a whistle-blower that its technology was used by AT&T to fulfil the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretap program, Bloomberg notes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Grew 1 Percent in Fourth Quarter of 2014
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2960125
Lenovo Solidifies Top Spot in 2014 Rankings; HP Narrows the Gap with Strong Fourth Quarter
Tomi Engdahl says:
Meet Flink, the Apache Software Foundation’s Newest Top-Level Project
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/01/13/1341211/meet-flink-the-apache-software-foundations-newest-top-level-project
Open source data-processing language Flink, after just nine months’ incubation with the Apache Software Foundation, has been elevated to top-level status, joining other ASF projects like OpenOffice and CloudStack. An anonymous reader writes
“The data-processing engine, which offers APIs in Java and Scala as well as specialized APIs for graph processing, is presented as an alternative to Hadoop’s MapReduce component with its own runtime. Yet the system still provides access to Hadoop’s distributed file system and YARN resource manager.”
Inside the Apache Software Foundation’s newest Top-Level Project: Apache Flink
Read more: http://sdtimes.com/inside-apache-software-foundations-newest-top-level-project-apache-flink/#ixzz3OiRPvvd3
Tomi Engdahl says:
Guest View: Making the freemium model work beyond consumerized IT
http://sdtimes.com/guest-view-making-freemium-model-work-beyond-consumerized/
Freemium, a mix of “free” and “premium” has started to pop up regularly as part of the menu you can choose from when it comes to getting your hands on software—from open-source software, to software you can buy on perpetual licenses and install on-premises, and every combination in between.
Users like the bottom-up freemium model, where they can use the software first and pay when it delivers value. Software companies get sales and renewals if products perform. So everyone’s interests are aligned. Little surprise we’ve seen the list grow with the likes of Dropbox, LinkedIn, Yammer, Skype and more recently BIRT iHub F-Type, with both free and paid-subscription functions available.
Read more: http://sdtimes.com/guest-view-making-freemium-model-work-beyond-consumerized/#ixzz3OiRiSDP2
Tomi Engdahl says:
South Africa Begins Ambitious Tablets In Schools Pilot Project
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/01/13/168232/south-africa-begins-ambitious-tablets-in-schools-pilot-project
“Guateng province — which is home to Johannesburg and Pretoria and is the richest state in sub-Saharan Africa — has just kicked off a pilot project to replace textbooks with tablets in seven government schools. If successful, the project will be extended to all 44 000 schools in the area”
Gauteng’s textbook free school project launches: everything you need to know
http://www.htxt.co.za/2015/01/13/gautengs-textbook-free-school-project-launches-everything-you-need-to-know/
Lesufi told journalists at a press briefing that he sees the one tablet per learner project, officially known as “Classrooms of the Future” as a major step towards improving public education in South Africa.
Boitumelong school itself will open for the 2015 term tomorrow, but pupils and teachers arrived early to demonstrate the learning platform that will be used in this and six other pilot schools over the academic year. Lesufi says that he wants to investigate whether or not using tablets encourages pupils to work harder and with more enthusiasm in class, and added that by digitising the teaching tools it will be harder for teachers to play truant.
“We can monitor when teachers log-in,” he said, “I really hope that this helps with some of the social problems that we have in this country.”
Firstly, the MEC says, he’s met with mobile networks to force them to deliver on their licencing commitments to provide connectivity for the pupils using LTE.
The school has a fibre line which feeds its WiFi network, and each tablet has an LTE modem built-in which pupils can use for home study.
When quizzed about security, both in terms of the physical devices and preventing children accessing inappropriate content, Lesufi was relatively vague insisting that each tablet has a tracking device fitted – which we presume to be one of the Find-my-Android software suites rather than a physical tracker – and can only be used for educational purposes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Triple-Level Cell Memory Makes Gains in Storage
SLC to fade as TLC sees uptake
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325264&
Two years after entering the client segment, triple-level cell (TLC) is expected to gain further traction in the data center, but in the long term conventional NAND growth with slow as 3D takes over.
To date, TLC has been primarily used in USB drives, flash memory cards, low-cost smartphones, client solid state drives (SSDs), said Gregory Wong, principal analyst with Forward Insights, but it’s starting to see use in the iPhone 6 and he anticipates it make further incursions into high-end smartphones and enterprise data center SSDs in 2015 and 2016.
The research firm expects 3-bits-per-cell and 3D to be the focal point of NAND technology evolution over the next year, noting that Samsung commercialized 3D NAND in 2014, but adoption will still be slow until late 2016, when all vendors will have commercialized it. Until then it will continue to be an multi-level cell (MLC) and TLC world, he said.
MLC will continue to be used in smartphones, tablet and SSDs through 2016, said Wong, and likely some Android-based smartwatches as they gain popularity next year, while single-level cell (SLC) continues to be used in consumer applications such as set-top boxes, digital cameras, printers and mobile devices. However, its volume has declined as mobile devices and cameras have moved to MLC. The main growth for SLC will come from industrial and automotive applications, said Wong.
One of the reasons TLC is seeing growth and finding viability in data center applications is smarter controllers that address concerns such as endurance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Scripting Languages You May Not Know
http://news.dice.com/2015/01/13/scripting-languages-may-know/
Scripting languages are used in everything from games and Web pages to operating-system shells and general applications, as well as standalone scripts. They allow the harried developer to do his or her job without engaging in the full compile-test-edit lifecycle; with a script, it’s just edit-and-run.
Many of these scripting languages are common and open to modification. In a gaming environment such as Skyrim, the developers relied on a scripting language called Papyrus; Microsoft Office depends on Visual Basic for Applications, a special version of Visual Basic used to extend Word, Excel, and Outlook. But the most famous scripting language is probably JavaScript, now standardized as ECMAScript, which allows scripting in browsers.
While you may very well know Perl, Python, VBA, JavaScript, and others, here are five other scripting languages with which you may be unfamiliar
Tomi Engdahl says:
ChaiScript
an easy to use embedded scripting language for C++.
http://chaiscript.com/
Header Only
There are no external tools requied, no preprocessor, no libraries, just your C++11 compliant compiler.
ChaiScript is licensed with the BSD license and is free to use in your free or commercial projects.
Portable
ChaiScript is fully tested for 32bit and 64bit on Windows (MSVC2013), clang++ and g++.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Computing Teachers Concerned That Pupils Know More Than Them
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/8169-computing-teachers-concerned-that-pupils-know-more-than-them.html
A survey of UK schools carried out by Microsoft and Computing at School reveals some worrying statistics that are probably more widely applicable.
The UK is working hard to introduce a new emphasis on computer science at school but, as always, the problem is getting the teachers up to speed. With computing there is the added difficulty that if a teacher is a good programmer or just a good sys admin then they can probably earn a lot more elsewhere.
The survey revealed that (68%) of primary and secondary teachers are concerned that their pupils have a better understanding of computing than they do. Moreover the pupils reinforced this finding with 47% claiming that their teachers need more training. Again to push the point home, 41% of pupils admitted to regularly helping their teachers with technology.
On the plus side, 69% of the teachers said that they enjoyed teaching the new computing curriculum and 73% felt confident in delivering it. However, 81% still thought that they needed more training, development and learning materials.
The real problem is that people who know about computing aren’t generally lured into teaching.
Tomi Engdahl says:
XenServer takes half a step forward, none towards hybrid cloud
Version 6.5 won’t frighten Microsoft or VMware, but the app delivery caper is moving
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/14/xenserver_takes_half_a_step_forward_none_towards_hybrid_cloud/
Citrix has released XenServer 6.5 and, as foreshadowed with the July 2014 preview named “Creedence”, has focussed on its own application delivery strengths and the needs of cloud operators rather than the wider enterprise computing market.
Citrix isn’t spinning it that way: it reckons the new 64-bit kernel, addition of Intel’s trusted execution technology and the ability to use more GPUs add up to a package fit for lots of workloads anywhere. But the company is emphasising the new release’s fitness for hosting XenDesktop and in service provider roles, rather than the enterprise.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Suck on this, Larry: NoSQL pair hit the G-spot
Basho and MongoDB go far beyond the A-B-Cs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/14/basho_mongodb_g_round_funding/
There has been plenty of talk about open-source databases growing faster than those belonging to tech dinosaurs like Oracle, but nothing tells a story quite like cash.
MongoDB and Basho, pioneers in NoSQL, yesterday separately announced that they are each receiving further wads of cash from the venture-capital angels.
Open-source document database MongoDB is to receive $80m from its backers and maker of the Riak NoSQL key-value data store, Basho, is taking $25m from its own.
I would call these two companies startups, but that’s stretching a point: MongoDB was founded in 2007 and Basho in 2008.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CES 2015: Dell, Lenovo and HP showcase potential of Intel’s 5th-gen Core chips
Analysis Gives us a glimpse of the slimmer form factors to come
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/feature/2389993/ces-2015-dell-lenovo-and-hp-showcase-potential-of-intel-s-5th-gen-core-chips
Tomi Engdahl says:
SanDisk vows: We’ll have a 16TB SSD WHOPPER by 2016
Flash WORM has a serious use for archived photos and videos
25 Nov 2014
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/25/sandisk_intel_stalls_and_well_have_16tb_ssd_by_2016/
Intel is well behind the curve with its 10TB flash drive, slated for 2016, claims a SanDisk enterprise storage bigwig, adding that the flash memory storage provider will have a 16TB drive by then.
Brian Cox, SanDisk’s senior director in marketing for enterprise storage, said the company’s 4TB drive technology would develop at a 2X/year capacity pace, with an 8TB drive next year, and 16TB in 2016.
SanDisk has its X300 client SSD using triple-level cell (TLC) flash.
Cox also sees a flash WORM (Write Once Read Many) use case with archived photos and videos for Facebook, Flickr and NetFlix. TLC flash can be used as the archived data is not rewritten and the technology’s write endurance limitations don’t matter so much.
The implication we draw from this is that we could see, in theory, a 24TB TLC SSD from SanDisk in two years or so.
El Reg thinks that cost/GB balanced (when put against faster access than spun-down disk also tape) will be crucial. How much extra will customers be willing to pay for the faster access and hence better user experience? Will, for example, tape 2 x $/GB be acceptable when data access latency is in microseconds and not seconds? What is an acceptable premium?
BiCS (Bit Cost Scalable NAND) is SanDisk’s 3D NAND technology. It will be used instead of current 2D or planar NAND when it makes economic sense. Cox estimates it’s a couple of years or so away
Tomi Engdahl says:
At the base of software testing lies a paradox. It’s generally accepted that dynamic testing can check only a tiny number of possible states of a software-based system. Due to the huge size of the state space, it is almost impossible to foresee the consequences of a software change on the overall system and select the required tests. Dynamic testing appears to be useless. Despite this shortcoming, we nevertheless are able to create useful tests that detect real problems.
Source: http://webinar.techonline.com/19454?keycode=xxxxxx&elq=563db472b70a4752a95f7e84e1849865&elqCampaignId=21159
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Mainframe Is Dead! Long Live the Mainframe!
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/01/15/0218238/the-mainframe-is-dead-long-live-the-mainframe
The death of the mainframe has been predicted many times over the years but it has prevailed because it has been overhauled time and again. Now Steve Lohr reports that IBM has just released the z13, a new mainframe engineered to cope with the huge volume of data and transactions generated by people using smartphones and tablets. “This is a mainframe for the mobile digital economy,” says Tom Rosamilia. “It’s a computer for the bow wave of mobile transactions coming our way.” IBM claims the z13 mainframe is the first system able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day and has a host of technical improvements over its predecessor
IBM brings out a new mainframe about every three years, and the success of this one is critical to the company’s business. Mainframes alone account for only about 3 percent of IBM’s sales. But when mainframe-related software, services and storage are included, the business as a whole contributes 25 percent of IBM’s revenue and 35 percent of its operating profit.
Tomi Engdahl says:
C’mon, Brocade: QLogic’s left the Fibre Channel game. Flat revenues again?
Plus: Is storage firm REALLY shopping itself…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/25/peg_levelling_at_brocade/
Brocade is a member of the flat revenue Earth society, with its mix of annual and quarterly Fibre Channel and Ethernet revenues hardly changing between last year and this year.
Brocade’s fourth fiscal 2014 quarter revenues of $564m were up by one per cent year-on-year, up from $559m a year ago, and also up three per cent sequentially.
Q4 2014 SAN product revenue was $325m, flat year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter.
He says Brocade is positioned well for the “new IP”: one that is “optimised for the unique requirements of the cloud, social, mobile, and Big Data.” Sounds pretty much like last year’s IP – but this one is “open software-driven, agile, and [has] secure networking architectures.”
New software-defined networking apps will be delivered next year.
That’s a big ask for Brocade as a software-defined network, when using commodity hardware, doesn’t command proprietary gear margins.
Meanwhile, Ader’s conclusion is that “the growth outlook for Fibre Channel is challenged and that the IP side of the business faces stiff competition.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bubble-licious: Good times here again for UK tech startups – research
VCs pumping in that money like it’s 2001
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/24/tech_startups_investors_easily_funded_bubble_research/
The level of venture capitalist (VC) investment being pumped into UK and Irish tech companies is now “reminiscent” of the early 2000s, with funding for the third quarter of 2014 double that of a year ago, according to research.
Overall investment for the whole of 2014 is expected to be up 70 per cent to £1.6bn across 350 companies, compared with 2013.
“These levels of growth are reminiscent of the 1999/2000 period,” said chief executive Stuart McKnight. “But we are some way off the peak in November 2000 when 67 deals were completed in one month,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brainwave Monitoring Software Improves Distracted Mindst
http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2013/cg_2.html
Imagine moving an object using only your mind. Software company Unique Logic’s Time on Task exercise makes that feat possible, at least on a computer screen. The game, which is designed to teach people how to sustain their attention in order to complete tasks, involves getting a forklift operator to transport a stack of crates from the ground onto the back of a big rig. It doesn’t seem like a particularly interesting plot, except for the fact that, instead of using a remote control to dictate the action, you’re using your concentration—measured by sensors that detect patterns of brainwave activity—to induce the operator to complete the job.
The inspiration for this attention-training game, one of many specialized software programs available under the company’s Play Attention educational product line, began with NASA Langley Research Center scientist Alan Pope’s research in the late 1980s on pilots and automated flight systems. Pope wanted to evaluate what degree of automation on flight decks was most beneficial. “Automation tends to free a person up to become bored and disengaged,” he says. “Our purpose was to figure out when automation goes too far, based on brainwave activity.”
Benefits
In the 20 years since Unique Logic’s founding, Freer has continued to expand upon the ways that EEGs can be used to improve people’s lives. He has since founded Freer Logic, which offers software products—utilizing a variety of algorithms he has developed—that help with monitoring drowsiness, improving workplace and sports performance, and encouraging relaxation, just to name a few.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Node.js fork io.js hits version 1.0 – but don’t call it production-ready
Server-side JavaScript runtime makes major version break
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/14/io_dot_js_version_1_0/
The io.js JavaScript software development runtime, a fork of Node.js, has reached version 1.0, lapping the version numbering of the original project on which it was based.
Prominent Node.js developer Feodr Indutny created io.js in December 2014 after clashing with Joyent, the company that maintains Node.js, over the project’s governance model. The io.js project is not managed by any one company, but is instead maintained by a technical committee.
One key advantage of io.js is that the project’s developers are committed to running it against recent build’s of Google’s V8 JavaScript engine. Node.js also runs on V8, but the forthcoming version will only bundle V8 version 3.26.33, while io.js 1.0.1 is built against version 3.31.71.4.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Don’t RELAX! Euro tech market still ‘volatile’ – Datatec
Logicalis in recovery mode as distie wing Westcon flies
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/01/15/datatec_fiscal_15_interim/
The company said: “It seems clear that an economic recovery is underway in the USA but elsewhere in Europe and Emerging Markets economic conditions remain mixed and capital and currency market volatility has increased.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
SystemD Gains New Networking Features
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/01/14/2030259/systemd-gains-new-networking-features
A lot of development work is happening on systemd with just the recent couple of weeks seeing over 200 commits. With the most recent work that has landed, the networkd component has been improved with new features. Among the additions are IP forwarding and masquerading support (patch).
Systemd Gains IP Forwarding, IP Masquerading & Basic Firewall Controls
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=systemd-networkd-IP-Forward
Among the additions to systemd this week are IP forwarding and masquerading support. Systemd’s .network files now have IPForward and IPMasquerade options. This is the minimal support needed and these settings get turned on by default for container network interfaces. The IP forwarding option controls the forwarding sysctl setting of the network interface and the masquerading controls a firewall rule for exposing traffic coming from that interface as coming from the localhost to all other interfaces.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Citrix goes into the mouse business
VDI outfit makes a point about fat fingers and Apple’s Bluetooth-on-fondleslabs ban
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/16/citrix_goes_into_the_mouse_business/
Citrix is getting into the mouse business.
The company threw a Summit this week where it shoved new versions of XenServer and XenMobile out the door. It also revealed the “X1”, a mouse that works with its Citrix Receiver app.
Receiver is the client needed to access applications and/or desktops groomed by XenApp or XenDesktop.
Citrix’s schtick is that running Windows or Windows apps on an iPad is a great way to mobilise your organisation, thereby bringing about disruptive agility and so on.
But there’s one small problem: Apple doesn’t let Bluetooth mice work on iPads.
It’s a limited-edition device for now, and Citrix is asking folks to explain why they want one in order to win one. A properly productised version of the rodent is in the works.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Xen accelerates ARM server race with version 4.5
1TB memory for guests on ARM and lots of VM-wrangling fun for admins
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/16/xen_accelerates_arm_server_race_with_version_45/
Version 4.5 of the Xen hypervisor is upon us.
Those responsible for the new release are chuffed to report they’ve packed a couple of dozen big new features in this time around, doubling the 4.4 release’s count. And there’s more to come: some useful stuff couldn’t be squeezed into this release.
But before we get to those features, let’s cast our eyes to the major contributors list. As one would expect, the likes of Intel, AWS, AMD, Citrix, Oracle and Verizon Cloud have been big contributors (so’s the NSA, but don’t say it too loud).
And this time around Cavium also makes the list. That’s Cavium as in the mob that last year revealed a 48-core ARM SoC. That Xen can now allocate a terabyte of RAM to guest VMs should therefore not surprise, nor will the Xen folks’ belief that this is a big advance that brings ARM servers into play like never before. The new release can also boot using UEFI and supports AMD’s Seattle 64-bit server SoC.
Overall this looks a solid release that will please Xen users running just about any application, which may or not be a good thing seeing as the hypervisor is being advanced as suitable for running anything from a colossal cloud to a very small device. It also gives ARM server aspirants a … erm … shot in the arm.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stephen O’Grady / tecosystems:
Apple’s Swift rises from 58th in Q3 ’14 to 22nd in Q1 ’15 in Redmonk’s language ranking list that uses Github and Stack Overflow data — The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2015 — With two quarters having passed since our last snapshot, it’s time to update our programming language rankings.
The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2015
http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/01/14/language-rankings-1-15/
1 JavaScript
2 Java
3 PHP
4 Python
5 C#
5 C++
5 Ruby
8 CSS
9 C
10 Objective-C
11 Perl
11 Shell
13 R
14 Scala
15 Haskell
16 Matlab
17 Go
17 Visual Basic
19 Clojure
19 Groovy
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ian King / Bloomberg:
Intel reports net income of $3.7B, record revenues of $14.7B, EPS of $0.74 for Q4; Q1 sales estimated to be a modest $13.7B
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-15/intel-sales-forecast-misses-estimates-signaling-deeper-pc-slump.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Derrick Harris / Gigaom:
Facebook open sources deep learning tools; head of AI research pledges to “start building things in the open”
Facebook open sources tools for bigger, faster deep learning models
https://gigaom.com/2015/01/16/facebook-open-sources-tools-for-bigger-faster-deep-learning-models/
Facebook on Friday open sourced a handful of software libraries that it claims will help users build bigger, faster deep learning models than existing tools allow.
The libraries, which Facebook is calling modules, are alternatives for the default ones in a popular machine learning development environment called Torch, and are optimized to run on Nvidia graphics processing units. Among the modules are those designed to rapidly speed up training for large computer vision systems (nearly 24 times, in some cases), to train systems on potentially millions of different classes (e.g., predicting whether a word will appear across a large number of documents, or whether a picture was taken in any city anywhere), and an optimized method for building language models and word embeddings (e.g., knowing how different words are related to each other).
FAIR open sources deep-learning modules for Torch
https://research.facebook.com/blog/879898285375829/fair-open-sources-deep-learning-modules-for-torch/
Progress in science and technology accelerates when scientists share not just their results, but also their tools and methods. This is one of the reasons why Facebook AI Research (FAIR) is committed to open science and to open sourcing its tools.
Many research projects on machine learning and AI at FAIR use Torch, an open source development environment for numerics, machine learning, and computer vision, with a particular emphasis on deep learning and convolutional nets. Torch is widely used at a number of academic labs as well as at Google/DeepMind, Twitter, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and many other companies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why IT Went Hybrid (And Why It Matters)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2014/01/14/why-it-went-hybrid/
Talk of hybrid IT is all the rage. Gartner predicts that “Nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017,” while James Staten at Forrester writes, “Too late, you are already hybrid.”
The details depend on the fine print of the forecast, and how broadly you think about “IT” or “cloud.” But whatever the specifics, there’s broad agreement that IT departments are becoming more hybrid. That is to say, they source their infrastructure and applications from more and more different places, in more and more different forms.
Parts of IT have long been outsourced in one form or another—through service bureaus, co-location facilities, managed service providers, or other types of external agencies.
Today’s moves to a hybrid model started out being driven by the consumer Internet, and by startups taking a “public-cloud first” approach. The result is that many new applications are widely being delivered in the form of Software-as-a-Service—this is especially true for those tasks that are common across companies, such as collaboration, email, and customer relationship management.
At the same time, Amazon Web Services (AWS) pioneered a model whereby pay-as-you-go computing was only a credit-card away.
The reality is that the vast bulk of organizations will be hybrid—not just private nor just public. The implications of increasingly hybrid IT fall into two main areas: technological and organizational
The challenge of hybrid is to avoid creating isolated islands that can’t communicate or exchange data. My advice is to maximize the portability of applications and data among different providers and between on-premise infrastructure and off-premise providers.
While larger organizations will doubtless continue to have some specialized IT roles, more and more IT managers will need to become generalists. They’ll have to adapt to broader roles that reflect less focus on narrow technology stovepipes—like storage, networking, or virtualization.
“We need to be innovation leaders for the organization, offering new capabilities and showing how technology can be deployed to further business advantage.”
The Bottom Line
Something needs to change. And hybrid is an important part of that answer.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Importance of Hybrid Cloud and Why It Matters
http://www.metaoptionitsolutions.com/blog/cloud-management-services/the-importance-of-hybrid-cloud-and-why-it-matters.aspx
If you are going to avail the mesmerizing benefits of cloud computing, you must want to choose the best option. When it comes to cloud computing, there are three options available to go with such as:
Public cloud
Private cloud
And Hybrid cloud
In case of going with private cloud, you can either run and manage all the operations yourself or hire a third-party. In private cloud, companies get unlimited power and security, but it is very expensive to use. On the other hand, public cloud utilizes a network that can be used by public and accessible through the internet. It is certainly just opposed to direct or private cloud.
There is no doubt that a private cloud offers an organization great control, but is very costly to run. Public cloud can be swiftly and effortlessly accessed. It offers cost savings via offloaded maintenance as well as scalability duties, but it is significant to monitor reliability and security.
Therefore, if you neither want to go with a private cloud nor with public cloud, you need to go with the third alternate called hybrid cloud. Actually, hybrid cloud is a blended form of private and public cloud. It means that companies can easily avail the benefits of both i.e. private and public cloud if they go with hybrid cloud.
Many companies certainly want to store confidential and precious data on their private cloud app, while availing the cost efficient and dynamic nature of popular public cloud for enterprise resources planning and billing. Companies can easily turn to public cloud infrastructure when they find their limit is exceeded.
Why You Will Go to a Single, Hybrid Cloud
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141201051600-2527944-why-you-will-go-to-a-single-hybrid-cloud
Here’s why — the primary functions of leveraging the cloud as it pertains to data are distinctly three:
offsite data protection
long-term secure archiving
secure file sharing to any device
When you look at the landscape (cloudscape?), what do you see? Many companies trying to grab marketshare with their initial offering that does one of the above. And most of them trying to add on capability to do more than one as they see they are being replaced by multi-function competitors.
Why is the latter happening? Because corporate IT does not want to have to support and/or protect themselves from the vagaries each of these products provide. They need something, but having half a dozen different products (Barracuda, Mozy, Panzura, Twinstrata, Dropbox, Egnyte, etc.) that are “one-trick ponies”, exacerbates the IT challenges. Now, you can say that each of these can do more than one thing. And you would be correct, but you’d no longer be working with an optimized tool-set. You would begin making allowances for the products inherent shortcomings because it wasn’t built from the ground up with the additional features in mind.
So, all of your data should be in the cloud, right?
That’s a big, “Well, it depends…”, but is most likely a bad idea. For reasons of business continuity, having data locally as well as redundantly in the cloud, saves you from internet connection outages as well as in-house hardware device outages. It gives you the right piece of mind for when something is needed immediately, and it can be delivered at GbE LAN speeds. But when something is needed to be accessed while on the road, it too can be available on demand. Actually, with the right solution, on demand can be anticipated and immediately available on your mobile or remote device.
Which is why, in the end, you will be going to single, hybrid cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A New Generation of Data Requires Next-Generation Systems
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/a-new-generation-of-data-requires-next-generation-systems/
The global explosion of data is a huge opportunity to do things in new ways and make the world work better. Yet, at the same time, this data tsunami threatens to overwhelm and disrupt the data centers that are the heart of the new app economy.
The need for a new era of enterprise data technology is reaching a critical point. Businesses could keep building ever-larger data centers, each jammed full of tens of thousands of servers sucking up enough electricity to power 80,000 or more homes. But these structures are already the size of small towns, and the systems inside won’t be able to support the transactions, analytics and security issues that are heading their way, and do it at the speed users expect.
We need to do far more with less, which would be good for business, good for society, and ultimately good for the planet.
There is no question that demand for centralized data processing is going through the stratosphere. We’re at the early stages of what analyst firm IDC calls the third platform, and what Gartner Group calls the “nexus of forces” sweeping the industry. The so-called first platform was the mainframe era, running from the 1960s to 1980s. The second began with the personal computer and ran through the Internet era, until the rise of the smart phone around 2007. The third platform is evolving in response to the unprecedented demands created by the combination of mobility, social media, cloud computing, and data from sources that never before generated data, like Fitbits or sensors in cars or coffee machines.
The third platform requirements are driving more of life and business online, spiking up electronic events and information. Cyber Monday mobile traffic accounted for 41.2 percent of all online traffic, up 30.1 percent over 2013, according to the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. A new report from Juniper Research finds that mobile phone and tablet users will make 195 billion mobile commerce transactions annually by 2019, up from 72 billion this year, or about 197 million transactions per day.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Hits Revenue Record in 2014
PC and tablet groups exceed goals
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325317&
Intel reported better than expected financial results and a record-breaking full year revenue of $55.9 billion. In a conference call highlighting his first full year, Intel’s CEO said the company is “in a very different place” than it was 12 months ago and finished the year with a strong fourth quarter.
2014 revenue grew 6% while operating income rose 29% to $15.3 billion and net income hit $11.7 billion. Intel generated approximately $20.4 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $4.4 billion, and used $10.8 billion to repurchase 332 million shares of stock. Fourth quarter revenue was $14.7 billion and operating income was reported at $4.5 billion, with a net income of $3.7 billion.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SSDs, USB Drives, SD Cards Debut at CES
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325285&
Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show was rife with wearables and the most advanced televisions, but also was the launch pad for a number of memory and storage vendors to introduce new flash-based offerings.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Buggy? Angry? LET IT ALL OUT says Linus Torvalds
‘I’m not a nice person and I don’t care about you’ says Linux Lord
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/19/got_bugs_got_anger_just_get_them_out_says_linus_torvalds/
Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has articulated views on security at Linux.conf.au, and seems to be closer to Google’s way of thinking than Microsoft’s.
Torvalds, along with Debian lumonary Bdale Garbee, Samba man Andrew Tridgell, and kernel coder Rusty Russell spent an hour answering conference attendees’ questions last week. That session has now made it to YouTube.
During a discussion about Linux security, Torvalds (at about 50:00) says “I’m a huge believer in just disclosing … somewhat responsibly … but security problems need to be made public. And there are people argue, and have argued for decades, that you never want to talk about security problems because that only helps the black hats. The fact is that I think you absolutely need to report them and and you need to report them in a reasonable time frame.”
What’s reasonable? Torvalds says on the kernel security mailing list the disclosure time is five working days, “which for some people is a bit extreme.”
“In other projects it might be a month, or a couple of months,” he continues. “But that’s so much better than the years and years of silence which we used to have.”
Torvalds did, however, seem to be more sympathetic to Google’s approach of giving vendors 90 days to disclose a flaw than other approaches that see vendors sit on bugs until they are ready to release a fix.
“I am a really unpleasant person. Some people think I am nice and some people are then shocked when they learn different. I’m not a nice person and I don’t care about you,” he told the conference.
“I care about the technology and I care about the kernel,”
Keynote: Linus Torvalds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAop_8l6_cI
Tomi Engdahl says:
Employees Not Following Policy is the Biggest Threat to Endpoint Security, IT Pros Say
http://www.securityweek.com/employees-not-following-policy-biggest-threat-endpoint-security-it-pros-say
For all the talk about technology, many IT professionals feel security comes down to one unavoidable factor – the end user.
In the 2015 State of the Endpoint study by Ponemon Institute, researchers found that 78 percent of the 703 people surveyed consider negligent or careless employees who do not follow security policies to be the biggest threat to endpoint security. In addition, 63 percent agreed that employees operating from home offices and other offsite locations have significantly increased endpoint risk throughout the organization.
Tomi Engdahl says:
British Fraud Office Ends HP-Autonomy Inquiry
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/british-fraud-office-ends-hp-autonomy-inquiry/?_r=0
The Serious Fraud Office of Britain said on Monday that it had closed its investigation into suspected accounting and disclosure abuses connected to Hewlett-Packard’s $11 billion purchase of the British technology company Autonomy.
The investigation, started in early 2013, followed accusations from HP in 2012 that Autonomy had carried out a series of accounting abuses that forced the United States tech giant to write down $8.8 billion from its takeover of the British company.
After reviewing the Autonomy sale, the British authorities said on Monday that they would end their investigation, though a similar inquiry by the American authorities into potential accounting abuses would continue.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Want a cheap Office-tastic tablet? Microsoft Windows takes on Android
Linx 8 tablet NOT BAD – unless you use Google Mail
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/20/want_a_cheap_tablet_now_windows_takes_on_android/
With little fanfare, the Windows tablet market is changing. Step into your local supermarket, and you may see Windows tablets on show priced below equivalent Android devices.
A sensible purchase?
Here is a look at a fine example, a Linx 8 purchased from Sainsbury’s for £89.99 (even better deals are available online)
Oh, and a bonus of one year’s subscription to Office 365 personal, worth having considering that it costs £59.99 if you buy it separately. You could argue that if you want Office Personal, you might as well buy the tablet;
The operating system is Windows 8.1 with Bing. This is a special free edition that comes with a few strings attached. Specifically, Internet Explorer (IE) must default to the Bing search engine. Attempting to change this via the IE Add-ins dialog gave a mysterious error; however, there is no problem going to Google’s site and installing Chrome if you prefer.
Once the Office install completed, Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, PowerPoint, Access, and OneNote appeared in the Start screen – though they are not pinned to the Start menu, nor to the taskbar, and it would not surprise me if some users struggle to find the applications.
A cheap way of getting Office for your business? Not so. The licence agreement states that “The service/software may not be used for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities,” though this is not mentioned on the tablet packaging.
Visiting OneDrive for the first time is odd. The web page says “Get started with 15GB of storage” but also shows 1.01 TB available. It is an example of not quite joining the dots that make a smooth new user experience.
Google Mail nightmare
My next move was to fire up Outlook, which invited me to set up an email account. I typed in my Gmail details and Outlook searched for settings. However it appeared not to accept the password. I opened Gmail in a browser, and saw the reason. Google now blocks Outlook by default, on the grounds that it is an insecure application. “You can switch to an app made by Google such as Gmail to access your account (recommended) or change your settings so that your account is no longer protected by modern security standards,” said the message.
Google has decided that modern email apps should support OAuth 2.0, coincidentally spreading fear and doubt among users of Microsoft Office.
In mitigation, the Windows 8 Mail app (which runs in the tablet environment) works fine with Gmail, so the answer is to use that, or bravely disable Google’s security measures.
Setting up the Linx 8 did feel like the frontline of a Microsoft-Google battleground, particularly when I hit a page called “Get your Google back”, explaining how to make Windows 8.1 “more familiar” or in other words, de-Binged.
Using the Linx 8 is mostly fun, especially if you already know your way around Windows 8. Usability is better in the tablet environment, as you would expect, and despite the scarcity of decent Store apps there are enough to get by.
Battery life is quoted at five to seven hours, though I struggled to get five
A tablet like this is intriguing because it gives you the choice of Windows or Android at a similar low price. Apple’s iPad is more than twice as much even for a first-generation Mini (£199), a different market.
The Windows option is not horrid. Remarkably, setting up the Linx 8 was less painful than with most Windows machines, where you have to deal with endless trial offers and unwanted software.
This device is both a workable tablet and a capable low-end PC. You have access to desktop applications, including the possibility of custom apps created using Visual Studio or other well-established tools, and deployed without the hassle of app stores or developer settings.
Microsoft still has work to do in making the new user experience pleasant and hassle-free
Microsoft created Windows 8 as an effort to carve space in the tablet market for an operating system made for keyboard and mouse. The idea was that tablet users would live mostly in the new “modern” environment, but could use the desktop when necessary. You can take that approach with the Linx 8 and it works rather well. The value for money is impressive
One of the factors in the failure of Windows 8 was the high price of the tablet devices on offer when it launched in late 2012.
Windows 10 is now on the horizon, and seeding the app market with devices like these does make strategic sense, given that Store apps (or Universal apps) are critical to its success.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SimpliVity claims fivefold sales boost, hugs Cisco tightly
Underdog grows into possible buyout target
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/20/simplivity_posts_record_growth_whats_next/
Things are looking up for hyperconverged vendor SimpliVity, which reported record growth in 2014 on the back of a number of strategic wins and a key partnership with Cisco.
Simplivity is claiming a nearly 500 per cent increase in sales compared to 2013 and has now passed 400 employees worldwide, all of which makes me wonder what the future has in store for them.
What the numbers in the press release translates to in real revenue is still a little up in the air.
“1,500 OmniCube and Omnistack licenses” can probably be translated as “1,500 deployments”.
Expect more out of SimpliVity in 2015 as it ramps up its partner program, but perhaps the most important element will be its partnership with Cisco. El Reg is told that the partnership is doing fairly well for both companies, despite Cisco hedging its bets by partnering with SimpliVity’s competitor, Maxta.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 10: A comfort blanket for Microsoft’s biz users
Win 8, Vista? Pah! Never speak of such things again
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/20/windows_10_review/
Each time there’s a new version of Windows, Microsoft bills it as “the best Windows yet.”
History teaches us that each time Microsoft tries to really stretch itself and push the development envelope on Windows, it backfires.
Windows 8 was the most recent stumble in Microsoft’s journey, with Redmond throwing itself wholeheartedly into a touch-tablet system and throwing out the desktop.
The Microsoft cadre building Windows 8 deliberately pushed aside dissenting voices and the cultural legacy of Windows. In so doing, Microsoft got stuck with one of the least wanted versions of Windows in its history. Before that, Windows Vista was the pariah.
Windows Vista was intended as another landmark effort
In both cases, Microsoft failed to win consumers and business users. On the latter, businesses have been staying in away in droves and Microsoft’s share of the PC and tablet market on Windows 8 is only just a little over 10 per cent.
In both cases it has been Windows 7 that has saved Microsoft’s bacon.
Also, the painful switching between separate Metro and desktop worlds has been greatly reduced and the familiar Start Button is back, including Metro icons.
The word is balance: there is a continuum mode, something that will let Windows and the user flip between desktop and tablet rather than forcing everybody onto a tablets death march with a loaded rifle jabbing you in the small of the back. Charms remain for those who like to swipe their way between apps.
So, sanity returns to the world of Windows? Not quite.
Since the first – supposedly “enterprise” focused – Windows 10 technology preview last year, there have been rumours around more consumer-friendly features.
One is on integration with Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana, the rival to Apple’s Siri and Google’s Now, which made its debut on the unwanted Windows Phone.
Cortana on the phone is used for voice-activated calls and searches, mapping, location and to launch apps.
Also reported is a new Windows browser, codenamed Spartan, which may or may not integrate with Cortana and work with digital inking for stylus input.
Spartan is reportedly not an automatic alternative to Internet Explorer, but rather an app that can be downloaded from the Microsoft app store.
It seems, though, that these glamorous features intended as tinsel to sell the idea that Windows 10 is a big breakthrough and distract from the Windows 8 pullback.
The truth, however, is Microsoft can’t afford to foist another Windows Vista or Windows 8 on its world because this time around there’s no alternative.
Microsoft has now stopped retailers and PC makers from selling and installing Windows 7.
Safe, desktoppy, with a step into tablets as and when it’s needed: Windows 10 looks like the future for all concerned, just not tech fashion zealots.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your entire PC in a mouse
A project is underway to turn an ordinary peripheral into a full-on PC
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/gadgets/117096-your-entire-pc-in-a-mouse.html
A Polish software and hardware developer has taken the idea of a compact PC to a new, and rather small, level, by creating a prototype computer which is entirely housed within a mouse.
Dubbed the Mouse-Box
The Mouse-Box look and works like a conventional mouse, but contains a processor, flash storage, an HDMI connection, and Wi-Fi connectivity.
It is connected to a monitor via the HDMI interface and connects to an Internet connection through standard Wi-Fi.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is D an Underrated Programming Language?
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/01/20/2026221/is-d-an-underrated-programming-language
While some programming languages achieved early success only to fall by the wayside (e.g., Delphi), one language that has quietly gained popularity is D, which now ranks 35 in the most recent Tiobe Index.
The State of D in 2015
http://news.dice.com/2015/01/20/state-d-2015/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_
A large company can push a programming language into the proverbial limelight: just look at C#, Java, and Objective-C and Swift. But a few programming languages can punch above their weight without any help from prominent companies or developers.
While some of these languages achieved early success only to fall by the wayside (e.g., Delphi), one language that has quietly gained popularity is D, which now ranks 35 in the most recent Tiobe Index.
Why D?
Inspired by C++, D is a general-purpose systems and applications language that’s similar to C and C++ in its syntax; it supports procedural, object-oriented, metaprogramming, concurrent and functional programming. D’s syntax is simpler and more readable than C++
In some respects D is old school, like C++. It compiles directly to machine code, then gets linked to an exe and runs directly (no virtual machines here). It’s handy for quick-and-dirty programming as well as for large projects. But the similarity with C++ only goes so far: D has modules instead of namespaces, a garbage collector, simpler templates, immutable types and data structures, Lambda functions, and closures (to name but a few).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook worth more than Portugal? Hell, it’s worth a LOT more than THAT
Zuck should have hired ME
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/21/worstall_weds_facebook/
Facebook has commissioned a report showing what vast amounts of wonderful, beneficial economic activity it is responsible for indicates that the company in fact contributes nothing.
Not that the Wall Street Journal uses quite that language but the message is clear:
“The results are meaningless,” Stanford economist Roger Noll said in an email. “Facebook is an effect, not a cause, of the growth of Internet access and use.” … “The value of smartphones is that they help you read Facebook – in addition to other benefits – not vice versa,” Cowen said, calling the study’s calculations “bad reasoning.”
However, having dismissed this calculation of the economic impact of Facebitch as nothing but a hot, soapy hand job to the corporate ego we do rather face the problem of working out what the hell the contribution of Facebitch to the economy is. And that’s problematic, as a conversation I’ve been having around and about recently reveals. Because in conventional economic statistics that contribution by Facebook is only $12bn globally. And that’s just insane.
So, in the GDP statistics Facebook’s value is the advertising that it sells. That’s the production. T
This led to Marc Andreessen musing on where the heck all the economic growth is. We can see technology roaring ahead but can’t seem to see the results in GDP. Nor in productivity for that matter. So where is the effect of all that roaring technology? Larry Summers then said yup, it’s all a bit of a puzzle but it’s not because this new tech is deflationary, as Andreessen had mused.
A reasonable value to start with is the US average (mean) wage of $24 an hour. We obviously prefer to be on Facebook to working. At the margin that is. Another more reasonable answer is at the minimum wage.
es, yes, I know there’re holes in this reasoning. No, we don’t think that anyone would willingly pay $7.25 an hour to play on social media. But it’s also true that people do this a lot, this social media, and thus they must assign a value to the doing of it.
And thus we can reach an “economic value in consumption” for Facebook, for the US, of $232bn to $769bn. Which is, I agree, a bit mad.
Another way of putting this is that something that Americans spend 32 billion hours a year on, voluntarily, can’t really have an economic value of only $12bn. It’s just nonsense to value people’s time at under 40 cents an hour.
We’ve thus got a vast range of economic values that we can ascribe to the adslinging network. It could be nothing [or indeed less than nothing -Ed] as that editor proposes. It could be $12bn as conventional accounts would have it. It could be $100bn to the US economy and globally,
Tomi Engdahl says:
2015: The Year of the “Boutique” Acquisition
http://exitround.com/2015-year-boutique-acquisition/
2014 has marked one of the most active years in tech M&A history, largely caused by the strong public markets and cash-rich tech majors.
The only more active year was during the tech boom of 2000.
This year we’ve seen an inordinate number of billion dollar venture-backed exits such as Nest (acquired for $3.2B by Google), Beats (acquired for $3B by Apple), Minecraft (acquired for $2.5B by Microsoft), Oculus VR (acquired for $2B by Facebook), Twitch (acquired for $970M by Amazon) and of course the largest venture-backed exit of all time with Facebook’s $19B acquisition of WhatsApp.
As we look to 2015 the sustained strength of the public markets is questionable, with macro economic pressures such as rising interest rates and shaky international markets.
If they cool as expected, we’ll see the traditional acquirers be more spendthrift in their M&A strategies, resulting in fewer billion dollar megadeals.
What won’t change however is the number of new buyers coming to the table. These buyers aren’t your typical Silicon Valley tech acquirers, they are more traditional household companies and brands looking to embrace technology to better reach end users and create greater efficiencies within their own businesses. And their appetite for boutique acquisitions of tech companies is just gearing up.
A “boutique acquisition” is a deal under $100M transaction size where both the product and selling team experience is the primary driver of the deal – and both investors and selling team members see positive and favorable financial gain.
There is certainly no lack of early-stage tech companies out there these days.
While some of these deals are buyers looking purely to acquire talent, many of them are equally as much about acquiring a product or Intellectual Property to fill an important need. In many cases, these boutique acquisitions result in key products for a large company in both the short term and long term,
As you think through your priorities for 2015 consider how you can take advantage of the skyrocketing demand for technology by companies outside of the traditional tech sector.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will the fickle finger of fondleslab fate help Windows 10?
Even if it does, Microsoft’s price genie is hard to rebottle
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/21/will_the_fickle_finger_of_fondleslab_fate_help_windows_10/
For all that, Windows 8 was a bust, failing to lure shoppers away from Apple or Android tablets or get enterprises upgrading from Windows XP and 7.
Microsoft’s touch operating system has just over 10 per cent market share.
Windows 10 is described my Microsoft as the “next chapter” and there’s “single core” that’ll work on a variety of devices, including phones.
The PC market has stabilised from freefall and Gartner expects sales of Windows will grow faster than iOS.
It sounds like the end of Microsoft’s experiment with Windows 8, and the release of Windows 10 this year has come at just the right time. Just don’t expect big, juicy margins Microsoft.
Today’s tablet market is characterised by price consciousness, and with connection to internet services as standard.
To that end, Acer, Asus, Toshiba and Hewlett-Packard last year hit the market with laptops running Windows 8 with Bing, the version of Windows with Bing set as the standard search engine but that (significantly) is available at low-to-no license fee.
The idea is for OEMs to hit the market with cheap devices.
Rather than making money from the license fee, Microsoft’s goal is to cash in on services – bundling things like Office 365 for free for the first year and charged thereafter, when you forget to cancel.