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:
Twitter’s Strange Flight to Quality
Whale fails at 2010 World Cup
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327691&
Twitter found a formula for quality software engineering – the hard way. The popular messaging service “let a thousand flowers bloom” among its programmers for many years, until its software garden got overgrown and it hired the equivalent of an expert landscaping team.
The problem first came to a head at the World Cup in 2010. Every time a team scored a goal in a big game it brought Twitter to a standstill. “Our ‘fail whale’ became the first Internet error page with a fan club,” said Peter Siebel, a senior staff engineer at Twitter.
Part of the problem was the company’s fragmented code base. Its key program was the largest application ever built on Ruby on Rails and was called the Monorail. Companies acquired in 2008 brought in engineers who started what eventually became other major services, some based on Java and some on the Scala language. In addition, the company had two data repositories, one in separate open source and proprietary versions.
“The two repositories had round-trip dependencies on each other, and publishing and updating items was becoming very difficult,” said Siebel in a talk at the At Scale event here. “People in each group were trying to optimize their service, and no one had enough horsepower to fix issues before they became a real problem — It was a mess,” he added.
“After the outstanding World Cup performance from our software, we needed to do something,” said Siebel.
The crashes provided a motivation for a slow migration of Monorail off Ruby on Rails and a consolidation on Java and Scala efforts. Ultimately, “we had three kinds of Scala – one that wanted to be Ruby, one that wanted to be Java and one that wanted to be Haskell,” he said.
By the time the 2014 World Cup came along, Twitter was able to handle maximum loads of 35.6 million tweets after a goal.
One of Twitter’s big lessons was to create a software tiger team to clean up small niggling problems for design teams before they become major snafus.
“If you wait too long to address a problem like Twitter did you can acquire a lot of tech debt,” said Seibel. Such teams can “jump into code, fix something the original team never had time to and then get out,” he said.
Seibel created the formula below to calculate the approximate size of “engineering effectiveness” teams and organization needs based on its overall size and productivity goals.
For example, companies with 100 software developers only need about two central Ninja coders to reap the productivity benefits of effectively having one extra engineer for free.
Companies with a thousand coders, about Twitter’s size, should hire a central engineering team of about 255.
“To get theses boosts, you need to standardize, and you only get them if gains affect a large number of people,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
CODING PEEP SHOW offers chance to hire devs as they program
Watch live vids of developers going at it and pay up for exclusive private sessions
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/15/coding_peep_show_offers_chance_to_hire_devs_as_they_program/
Software development streaming outfit https://www.livecoding.tv/ has just done something rather interesting to the profession of software development by turning it into a just-in-time resource.
livecoding.tv bills itself as an “educational livestreaming platform where people code products live.” The site’s founded on the premise that developers quite like the idea of streaming their desktops while the code in order to secure feedback and mentoring from peers. The company now says that idea’s taken root to the tune of 140,000 members from 194 countries and 3000 cities.
As of last week those members can also opt-in to having a “Hire Now” button appear on the live video streams of their programming efforts. The idea is that the programmer will happily code away in a live stream and that potential employers will select the best-looking ones – in terms of code quality – for a spot of work.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP To Jettison Up To 30,000 Jobs As Part of Spinoff
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/09/15/2244200/hp-to-jettison-up-to-30000-jobs-as-part-of-spinoff
Hewlett-Packard says its upcoming spinoff of its technology divisions focused on software, consulting and data analysis will eliminate up to 30,000 jobs. The cuts announced Tuesday will be within the newly formed Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is splitting from the Palo Alto, California company’s personal computer and printing operation.
HP to jettison up to 30,000 jobs as part of spinoff
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HEWLETT_PACKARD_JOB_CUTS?SITE=TXMCA&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
The spinoff is scheduled to be completed by the end of next month, dooming 25,000 to 30,000 jobs within HP Enterprise. The target means 10 to 12 percent of the 252,000 workers joining HP Enterprise will lose their jobs as part of the company’s effort to reduce its expenses by $2 billion annually.
Roughly 50,000 workers will remain at HP Inc., which become the new name for the company retaining the PC and printer operations.
HP has already jettisoned 55,000 jobs during past few years under CEO Meg Whitman, who will be the leader of spun-off HP Enterprise.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Juniper sees 30m virtual reality headsets shifted by 2020, as China lifts ban
Rise in VR mirrors rise in online adult viewing. An opportunity?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/16/juniper_reckons_30_million_virtual_reality_headsets_will_be_shifted_by_2020/
Crystal ball gazers at Juniper have looked far into the future and seen that by 2020 some 30 million virtual reality headsets will be shifted globally.
Hardware retail revenue from VR headset sales will exceed $4bn (£3bn) by 2020, it said. According to the analyst house the “watershed year” for the virtual reality will be 2016, with three million shipments expected.
Oculus, Sony, and HTC are all expected to launch key VR products over the next 12 months.
According to Bhas, the tech will not just be the preserve of couch potatoes, but will be further used in military training, medical and nuclear facilities, as consumer mass production makes the tech cheaper.
He said: “The market just begun to flourish. The driving focus is on consumer side. But we believe the market will then expand.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Italian military to switch to LibreOffice and ODF
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/italian-military-switch-libreoffice-and-odf
The Italian military is transitioning to LibreOffice and the Open Document Format (ODF). The Ministry of Defense will over the next year-and-a-half install this suite of office productivity tools on some 150,000 PC workstations – making it Europe’s second largest LibreOffice implementation. The switch was announced on 15 September by the LibreItalia Association.
The migration project will begin in October and is foreseen to be completed at the end of 2016.
The deployment of LibreOffice will be jointly managed by the two organisations, announces LibreItalia. The NGO will help the ministry to ready trainers in different parts of the military, and the Ministry is to develop a series of online courses to help with the switch to LibreOffice. The material is to be made public using a Creative Commons licence.
Italy’s Agency for the Digitalization of the Public Sector (AGID) congratulates the Ministry of Defence, writes the LibreItalia statement. “It hopes that other organisations may follow.”
Not alone
The project is also one of Europe’s largest. The largest European public administration using free software office suites is the French Interior Ministry, with some 240,000 desktops. In France, many ministries use open source office suites such as LibreOffice
government of Extremadura (Spain) confirmed that 10,000 PCs
The city of Munich (Germany) runs LibreOffice on 17,018 workstations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Ara-project developed a smart phone, which could be assembled into a variety of modular building blocks – like a Lego construction. Berlin’s IFA Acer proposed to be built in the same way PC concept. Europe Revo Build microcontrollers will be available during October. It has attracted mixed reviews.
Revo Build M1-601 consists of a model of the basic unit cube, the dimensions of which are five inches per side.
Revo can Buildiin magnetic connections enable to draw new functional modules. They may work as part of the machine or with other PCs. One of the first modules is the hard drive, such by offers 500 GB and one terabyte modules. Hard disk can be changed on the fly.
Other connected modules such as wireless charging platform, and audio module, which includes speakers and microphones. Add a connected USB modems is coming soon.
After the device received by the IFA trade fair response has been twofold. Others consider the idea to put together its own micro own needs. On the other hand, analysts are of the Pit after some time in your device: according to them, the desktop is simply over time, and can not be restored with any tricks.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3321:kokoa-pc-mikro-legopalikoista&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amir Efrati / The Information:
Apple developing platform to power and unify its Web services like iCloud and iTunes, based on Siri’s which uses open-source Mesos — Apple Unifies Cloud Services Platform Amid Open-Source Push — Like other tech companies that run Web services, Apple has long relied on open source software.
Apple Unifies Cloud Services Platform Amid Open-Source Push
https://www.theinformation.com/apple-unifies-cloud-services-platform-amid-open-source-push
Like other tech companies that run Web services, Apple has long relied on open source software. But unlike most others, Apple has largely done so secretly, hampering its hiring and causing other problems. Now some within Apple are hoping that is going to change.
The tech firm is developing a technology platform that can power all of its Web services, such as iCloud and iTunes
The new platform is based on the one Apple developed to run Siri which uses open-source infrastructure software called Mesos.
Tomi Engdahl says:
MariaDB bakes native encryption into 10.1RC – with some Google loving
No performance sacrifice, open source DBMS developer says
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/16/mariadb_bakes_google_encryption_into_101rc/
MariaDB is beefing up security with the latest upgrade of the open source database, MariaDB 10.1, courtesy of encryption technology donated by Google. The upgrade can be downloaded today as a release candidate and general availability is slated for October.
By migrating to 10.1, current MariaDB and MySQL users can natively and transparently encrypt their databases “without sacrificing performance and cost” and without having to make changes to existing applications.
New security features in 10.1 include better password management, role based control improvements and, Google’s contribution, data-at-rest- encryption – all lovely for compliance with data protection regulations.
MariaDB Corp. contrasts its upgrade with the approach taken by commercial DMBS providers, which typically use expensive and slow third party extensions for database encryption
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Reg readers really think will affect IT in the next three years…
Cloud, analytics, even politics
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/16/what_changes_will_have_the_biggest_impact_on_your_it_in_the_next_three_years/
Drivers of change
The rate at which businesses are evolving is expressed very clearly in the quotes, and not only from an internal perspective but among the customer base as well. One reader, for example, highlighted the following as having the biggest impact:
“The pace of change of our customer base in adopting new technologies.”
Established technologies on the rise
Cloud
It will be no surprise to readers that Cloud in all its forms, Public, Private and Hybrid are expected to have big impacts in the near future.
Mobility
Beyond cloud, another topic that comes through prominently is mobility, with the trends in home and personal use again being highlighted as a big factor, along with the emergence of a multi-device world:
“Evolution and adoption rates for mobile consumer tech.”
“Security related issues are the key driver at this point.”
Security
But despite this increasing prominence, some respondents face challenges internally getting security to be a higher profile item
New tech beginning to gain ground
Beyond the now well established areas of cloud, mobility and security, a few new faces also showed up as being expected to have an important impact in the next three years. Most prominent of these is ‘big data’ and analytics
“We’re a concert venue plus shops cafes and sports facilities and everything is becoming digitised – IoT and M2M communication”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bigger – and better? How your IT infrastructure budget will change
You’ll spend more – but it’ll be worth it, says Dave Cartwright
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/16/it_infrastructure_budget_trends/
I was reading in a report recently that the majority of firms intend to increase their overall investment in IT infrastructure over the next two years. Which got me wondering: will this be in-house infrastructure? And if not, where will the money go outside the organisation?
Regardless of where the organisation’s applications live there’s going to be some basic requirement for networking and infrastructure. Increasingly, desktops and laptops will give way to tablets and mobile handsets – which in many cases are more expensive than the traditional PCs they replace.
Companies are slow at upgrading applications. If you’re using Office 2010 in your company this is nothing unusual, despite its successor having been released over two years ago – and this is only on the desktop.
At the server things are frequently slower. As of May 2015 some 11 million Windows Server 2003 installations remain, according to Microsoft, despite it going end-of-life in July 2015
Moving forward, the software rental model will grow both in terms of annual subscriptions à la Microsoft Enterprise Agreement but, more commonly, thanks to people simply buying Software as a Service (SaaS).
The rental model of SaaS is generally justified to the beancounters by telling them that instead of spending a boatload this year and then upgrading in three years’ time, we’re spending roughly a third of that boatload a year for evermore – an attractive cashflow option in many cases.
But the overall spend will be greater, of course, because in the past we simply haven’t upgraded every three years on our on-premise service.
In short
So, then: in the future we’re going to spend more money by moving our core apps to the cloud: it’ll cost more but we’ll get more in return and deem it justifiable.
We’ll ramp up our spend on enabling technology and portable devices, which is far from cheap, and will upgrade frequently in a market where instead of power increasing slowly and prices coming down quickly, power increases quickly but with no cost reduction.
And we’re going to rent our software and let someone else run the servers – and spend two or three times as much in some cases because deciding not to upgrade application X this year isn’t an option.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Obama’s IT reforms saved about one per cent of spending
Report finds small, squandered, savings from cloud moves and bit barn consolidation
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/17/obamas_it_reforms_saved_about_one_per_cent_of_spending/
In 2010 the US federal government decided it needed a data centre consolidation initiative and a 25-point “25-point implementation plan to reform federal information technology management ((PDF) to save dough and improve efficiency, but a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit suggests neither outcome has been achieved.
The name of the GAO report – Information technology Reform: Billions of Dollars in Savings Have Been Realized, but Agencies Need to Complete Reinvestment Plans (PDF) – tells you a lot about the document’s contents. The headline figure is “… an estimated total of US$3.6 billion dollars in cost savings and avoidances between fiscal years 2011 and 2014” of which “Slightly more than half of the savings and avoidances were from data center consolidation and optimization efforts.”
The Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Treasury, and the Social Security Administration “accounted for about $2.5 billion (or 69 percent)” of the savings, leaving the other 22 agencies in the program with meagre savings. Two agencies – NASA and the Office of Personnel Management – reported no savings. In NASA’s case that’s understandable, seeing as it just-about-invented OpenStack and so had a head start on cloudy capering.
There’s some good news for US taxpayers in that shared services worked, which isn’t always the case, and group buying of software licences made some nice inroads.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Are Non-Technical Certifications Worth Earning?
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/09/16/209224/are-non-technical-certifications-worth-earning
Everybody knows that certain technical certifications can boost your career. For developers and others, though, is it worth earning non-technical certifications such as the PMP (Project Management Professional), CRISC (which certifies that you’re good at managing risk)? The short answer, of course, might be
Non-Technical Certifications for Tech Pros
http://insights.dice.com/2015/09/16/non-technical-certifications-for-tech-pros/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_
Project Management Professional Certification
ITIL
CRISC
CISSP (And Others)
Cloud Computing
Tomi Engdahl says:
SAP CEO McDermott loses AN EYE, almost his life in horror plunge
‘I’m still alive, and that’s not a given after such a bad accident’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/17/sap_ceo_mcdermott_loses_an_eye_almost_his_life_in_horror_plunge/
SAP boss Bill McDermott lost an eye in an accident that almost killed him, it emerged on Wednesday.
SAP chairman and cofounder Hasso Plattner added in a separate interview: “He almost bled to death, and was unconscious … he told us so last week.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Mozur / New York Times:
China asks US tech firms to pledge compliance for questionable practices including sharing user data and intellectual property — China Tries to Extract Pledge of Compliance From U.S. Tech Firms — HONG KONG — The Chinese government, which has long used its country’s vast market as leverage …
China Tries to Extract Pledge of Compliance From U.S. Tech Firms
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/technology/china-tries-to-extract-pledge-of-compliance-from-us-tech-firms.html?_r=0
The Chinese government, which has long used its country’s vast market as leverage over American technology companies, is now asking some of those firms to directly pledge their commitment to contentious policies that could require them to turn user data and intellectual property over to the government.
The government distributed a document to some American tech companies earlier this summer, in which it asked the companies to promise they would not harm China’s national security and would store Chinese user data within the country, according to three people with knowledge of the letter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The letter also asks the American companies to ensure their products are “secure and controllable,” a catchphrase that industry groups said could be used to force companies to build so-called back doors — which allow third-party access to systems — provide encryption keys or even hand over source code.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Seagate close to open-sourcing Kinetics object storage platform
Keep your eye on the OpenStack summit
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/24/seagate_to_opensource_kinetics_at_openstack_summit/
Seagate will hand over some of its Kinetic Storage platform to the world at the coming OpenStack summit in Vancouver, Canada, The Register has learned.
Kinetic is the object storage platform Seagate has built to make it possible to so useful work with its Ethernet-equipped disk drives. Seagate’s ambition is to cut arrays out of the loop, allowing software to talk directly to disks instead of having to do all that pfaffing about with storage area networks. By cutting arrays and file systems out of the loop, Seagate reckons it can save users some cash and also speed things up.
Seagate already publishes some libraries and other other developer resources, but appears to have come to the conclusion that radical re-architecting of infrastructure and applications isn’t the sort of thing that happens when a technology’s inventor holds all the cards.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle: Over here, look over here! At the cloud! No, not at our glum licensing numbers
Hurd n’ Catz talk up fast-growing cloud business as other units see drops
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/16/oracle_quarter_cloud_bluster/
Enterprise IT giant Oracle is once again pointing to a growing cloud business to gloss over lackluster financial numbers in other parts of its business.
Big Red on Wednesday said that its $8.4bn in first-quarter [PDF] revenues (ending August 31) were down 2 per cent over the same period in 2014, when it logged $8.5bn. Earnings per share were 53 cents, just above analyst estimates of 52 cents.
Oracle stock was down 1.54 per cent in after-hours trading.
In reporting the numbers, Oracle co-CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd played up the continued growth of Oracle’s cloud operations. Cloud SaaS and PaaS revenues were up 34 per cent at $451m on the quarter, while cloud IaaS was up 16 per cent with a $160m take.
“We feel very good about the progress of our cloud transition and clearly customers are migrating to the cloud,”
The rising cloud figures, however, were tempered by drops in other areas of Oracle’s business. Software license updates and product support, which accounted for a whopping $4.69bn of Oracle’s $8.4bn total quarterly revenues, saw a 1 per cent drop from the same period a year ago.
Oracle laying off its Java evangelists? Er, no comment, says Oracle
Soon-to-be-redundant chap in pink slip slip on Facebook
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/04/oracle_reportedly_lays_off_java_evangelists/
Oracle appears to be making redundancies in the ranks of its Java evangelists team.
One of the evangelists, Simon Ritter, has taken to Facebook to say: “I’ve heard it said that you should try something new every day. Yesterday I thought I’d see what it was like to be made redundant.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cade Metz / Wired:
Software needed to run every Google internet service spans 2B lines of source code, all in a single repository available to all 25K engineers — Google Is 2 Billion Lines of Code—And It’s All in One Place — How big is Google? We can answer that question in terms of revenue or stock price …
Google Is 2 Billion Lines of Code—And It’s All in One Place
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/google-2-billion-lines-codeand-one-place/
How big is Google? We can answer that question in terms of revenue or stock price or customers or, well, metaphysical influence. But that’s not all. Google is, among other things, a vast empire of computer software. We can answer in terms of code.
Google’s Rachel Potvin came pretty close to an answer Monday at an engineering conference in Silicon Valley. She estimates that the software needed to run all of Google’s Internet services—from Google Search to Gmail to Google Maps—spans some 2 billion lines of code. By comparison, Microsoft’s Windows operating system—one of the most complex software tools ever built for a single computer, a project under development since the 1980s—is likely in the realm of 50 million lines.
So, building Google is roughly the equivalent of building the Windows operating system 40 times over.
The comparison is more apt than you might think. Much like the code that underpins Windows, the 2 billion lines that drive Google are one thing. They drive Google Search, Google Maps, Google Docs, Google+, Google Calendar, Gmail, YouTube, and every other Google Internet service, and yet, all 2 billion lines sit in a single code repository available to all 25,000 Google engineers. Within the company, Google treats its code like an enormous operating system. “Though I can’t prove it,” Potvin says, “I would guess this is the largest single repository in use anywhere in the world.”
Google is an extreme case. But its example shows how complex our software has grown in the Internet age—and how we’ve changed our coding tools and philosophies to accommodate this added complexity. Google’s enormous repository is available only to coders inside Google. But in a way, it’s analogous to GitHub, the public open source repository where engineers can share enormous amounts of code with the Internet at large.
The two internet giants are working on an open source version control system that anyone can use to juggle code on a massive scale. It’s based on an existing system called Mercurial. “We’re attempting to see if we can scale Mercurial to the size of the Google repository,” Potvin says, indicating that Google is working hand-in-hand with programming guru Bryan O’Sullivan and others who help oversee coding work at Facebook.
That may seem extreme. After all, few companies juggle as much code as Google or Facebook do today. But in the near future, they will.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Kills a Top-of-the-Line Processor
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/09/17/1947213/intel-kills-a-top-of-the-line-processor
In June of this year, Intel announced a processor branded as Broadwell-C. Now, the company has confirmed that the part was cancelled but would not give an official reason. Why did Intel kill the Broadwell-C?
Intel kills a top-of-the-line processor
http://www.itworld.com/article/2984695/hardware/intel-kills-a-top-of-the-line-processor.html
Economics trump performance in a chip with great potential.
Products are usually cancelled because the vendor struggles to make them work properly, but Intel has cancelled one chip for undisclosed reasons that may be more financial than performance-related.
Intel did confirm to me that the part was cancelled but would not give an official reason beyond it was responding to market demands.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud casts deep shadows over disk backup market
EMC first, daylight second, but sales dipping sharply and Microsoft in the wings
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/18/cloud_casts_deep_shadows_over_disk_backup_market/
Abacus-wielder IDC has run its eye over the “purpose-built backup appliance” (PBBA) market and proved, if it were necessary to do so again, that by golly things are changing quickly in the storage caper.
EMC dominates the market for such PBBAs, taking in US$414.4m in 2015′s second quarter to claim 57.1 per cent of the market.
But the news isn’t all good because EMC’s business was off by 16.9 per cent, more than double the industry’s eight per cent slump in the quarter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft has developed its own Linux. Repeat. Microsoft has developed its own Linux
Redmond reveals Azure Cloud Switch, its in-house software-defined networking OS
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/18/microsoft_has_developed_its_own_linux_repeat_microsoft_has_developed_its_own_linux/
Sitting down? Nothing in your mouth?
Microsoft has developed its own Linux distribution. And Azure runs it to do networking.
Redmond’s revealed that it’s built something called Azure Cloud Switch (ACS), describing it as “a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux” and “our foray into building our own software for running network devices like switches.”
Kamala Subramanian, Redmond’s principal architect for Azure Networking, writes that: “At Microsoft, we believe there are many excellent switch hardware platforms available on the market, with healthy competition between many vendors driving innovation, speed increases, and cost reductions.”
“However, what the cloud and enterprise networks find challenging is integrating the radically different software running on each different type of switch into a cloud-wide network management platform. Ideally, we would like all the benefits of the features we have implemented and the bugs we have fixed to stay with us, even as we ride the tide of newer switch hardware innovation.”
(Translation: Software-defined networking (SDN) is a very fine idea.)
But it appears Redmond couldn’t find SDN code to fits its particular needs, as it says ACS “… focuses on feature development based on Microsoft priorities” and “allows us to debug, fix, and test software bugs much faster. It also allows us the flexibility to scale down the software and develop features that are required for our datacenter and our networking needs.”
ACS is designed to use the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI), an OpenCompute effort that offers an API to program ASICs inside network devices.
That experience clearly includes Linux, not Windows, as the path to SDN.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Problem With Putting All the World’s Code in GitHub
http://www.wired.com/2015/06/problem-putting-worlds-code-github/
The ancient Library of Alexandria may have been the largest collection of human knowledge in its time, and scholars still mourn its destruction. The risk of so devastating a loss diminished somewhat with the advent of the printing press and further still with the rise of the Internet. Yet centralized repositories of specialized information remain, as does the threat of a catastrophic loss.
Take GitHub, for example.
GitHub has in recent years become the world’s biggest collection of open source software. That’s made it an invaluable education and business resource. Beyond providing installers for countless applications, GitHub hosts the source code for millions of projects, meaning anyone can read the code used to create those applications. And because GitHub also archives past versions of source code, it’s possible to follow the development of a particular piece of software and see how it all came together. That’s made it an irreplaceable teaching tool.
The odds of Github meeting a fate similar to that of the Library of Alexandria are slim.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Engineers in a Golden Age of Code
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327716&
Software engineering is today’s hot profession, underpaid grunt work, all of the above and everything in between.
We’re living in a golden age of software. So much code is being written and re-written at a time when the underlying technology is evolving at a heady pace, but the benefits for software developers themselves seem to be mixed at best.
I got a taste of the new reality this week sitting in packed sessions in the At Scale conference hosted by Facebook. In one session, a senior staff engineer from Twitter talked about how the company’s engineers built the largest application to use the relatively new Ruby on Rails Web framework that has ridden up and down the hype curve, then needed to migrate it and prune back separate, sometimes competing systems developed in Java and Scala.
“I am bombarded every day with new ideas from developers,” he told me after his talk.
All engineers like to make stuff, a trait that goes viral in the hands of software engineers who can spin up code for a new subsystem during a coffee break. New languages and techniques sometimes make code shops look like overgrown gardens, the Twitter engineer said.
For its part, Facebook wants to harness the chaos by inspiring engineers to create open source code.
To some extent, Facebook wants to make software a commodity.
Like Facebook, Google sees the Android mobile OS as a giveaway in its effort to win eyeballs on smartphones and tablets. It’s a relatively new tactic, one that has proven powerful enough to force Microsoft to give away the latest version of Windows, software that was once the most expensive component of a PC.
Of course, much of today’s deluge of code remains a proprietary differentiator. Amazon, Apple and Google put abstraction layers on top of their most precious code so they can sell businesses and consumers access to their cloud services.
Cloud giants like Amazon, Facebook and Twitter provide jobs for thousands of young coders.
There’s no doubt in my mind that software technology is evolving faster than ever. I think it remains an open question how that fact will affect the profession of software engineering. Coders
Tomi Engdahl says:
Man the lifeboats! Datos IO develops tech to recover next-gen DBMS
Recovery tools for MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra and others
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/18/datos_io_declares_its_developing_tech_to_recover_nextgen_dbms/
Datos IO is a new database recovery startup which claims it’s reinventing recovery for next-generation databases.
The company says five of the top ten databases in distributed applications for mobile, social, the cloud and the Internet of Things are open-source and scale-out, not traditional RDMS: MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, SQLite and Redis. Enterprises using them must be able to recover corrupted or inaccurate data, but these next-gen databases lack the recovery tools needed.
It believes it has devised “the industry’s first distributed versioning platform that guarantees repair-free recovery across all scale-out databases and provides enterprises with a single state of truth for their distributed applications”. A tester said it “solves recovery for eventually consistent, multiple clustered and distributed databases”.
Datos IO says it can deliver orchestrated repair and free restores, and has the industry’s first semantic deduplication. We don’t know what that means yet, but this is an early-stage company still developing and proving its technology.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Live Coding now lets you hire a developer and watch them work in real-time
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/10/live-coding-now-lets-you-hire-a-developer-and-watch-them-work-in-real-time/
Live Coding, which is like Twitch for developers, has added a service that allows viewers to actually hire someone they’ve been watching.
The aptly named “Hire a streamer” service works exactly as it sounds. Via the profile of a developer you’ve seen coding on the site, a ‘hire me’ button lets you request their time. The service is completely opt-in for developers, so not everyone will be for-hire.
When you click on the ‘hire me’ button, you’ll be met with a list of disciplines that developer is familiar with, and their hourly rate. Once you’ve booked a session, the money is held in escrow (transactions happen via the site) until the developer has completed the work.
Those who hire developers will be able to see them work in real-time. You can also choose to have your session streamed privately, or publicly.
How to Hire a Streamer for Private Sessions
http://blog.livecoding.tv/2015/09/09/how-to-hire-a-streamer-for-private-sessions/
You can hire a streamer for code review, backend architecture review, solving technical issues, preparing for exams, helping on homework, building modules or new products from scratch.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google shouldn’t worry while EU commissars fight over policing tech giants
That’s another fine turf war you’ve got me into
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/18/internet_platforms_brussels_turf_war_google_facebook/
Try getting through a day without using Google, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal or a music service. Even if you heroically avoid stepping on any of their properties, it’s likely that your activity will have been tracked and recorded.
Few things affect your online life more than “platforms”. They’re almost impossible to avoid, and the markets in which they operate are dominated by large (mostly) Silicon Valley companies.
That’s why they’re often referred to as “plantations” – they take the place of a market economy, and sharecropping is the only option you have if you’re going to work on one.
The UK parliament has launched a parallel inquiry into these internet “platforms”, mirroring the EU Commission’s inquiry. We gave you leaks of the latter this week.
Both the commission and the UK want to know whether the platforms are treating their suppliers fairly, or whether they’re abusing a monopolistic position.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Thanks To Valve, More Than 1,500 Games Are Now On Linux
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/09/19/1529247/thanks-to-valve-more-than-1500-games-are-now-on-linux
The Steam Store crossed the threshold this morning of having 1,500 games natively available for Linux.
Steam Crosses 1,500 Games Natively Available For Linux
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=steam-1500-linux&num=1
Today marks a huge milestone for Steam on Linux: 1,500 games are natively available! This is quite significant while Windows is at 6,464 and OS X is at 2,323.
New games continue to be ported to Linux and offered via Steam almost daily. This is all while the Steam Linux market-share is below 1%. Heck, even stats well outside the gaming space show Linux desktop use at less than 2%.
While the Linux gaming marketshare right now is very tiny, game developers continue porting to Linux in anticipation of a return on investment down the road as more gamers try out SteamOS as well as the numerous Linux-based Steam Machines that are still scheduled to start shipping later this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A 2-Minute Walk May Counter the Harms of Sitting
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/a-2-minute-walk-may-counter-the-harms-of-sitting/?_r=0
With evidence mounting that sitting for long stretches of time is unhealthy, many of us naturally wonder how best to respond. Should we stand up, or is merely standing insufficient? Must we also stroll or jog or do jumping jacks?
A new study offers some helpful perspective, suggesting that even a few minutes per hour of moving instead of remaining in a chair might substantially reduce the harms of oversitting.
As most of us have heard by now, long bouts of sitting can increase someone’s risk for diabetes, heart disease, obesity, kidney problems and premature death. These risks remain elevated even if someone exercises but then spends most of the rest of his or her waking hours in a chair.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Parm Mann / HEXUS.net:
AMD Chief Architect of Microprocessor Cores Jim Keller departs company again after 3 years — Legendary CPU architect Jim Keller leaves AMD — AMD has experienced its fair share of high-profile departures this year, but today’s exit is arguably the one that will resonate with the enthusiast community and AMD’s most fervent fans.
Legendary CPU architect Jim Keller leaves AMD
http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/86585-legendary-cpu-architect-jim-keller-leaves-amd/
AMD has experienced its fair share of high-profile departures this year, but today’s exit is arguably the one that will resonate with the enthusiast community and AMD’s most fervent fans.
Jim Keller, former Chief Architect of Microprocessor Cores, will leave the company today to pursue other opportunities.
Well known for his work during AMD’s heyday, Keller (pictured) was involved in the creation of the original Athlon architecture, K7, and then served as a lead architect on K8. After playing an instrumental role in developing the world’s first native x86-64 bit architecture, Keller later joined Apple and helped develop the company’s A4 and A5 SoCs before rejoining AMD in 2012 to spearhead the firm’s upcoming Zen architecture.
“Jim’s departure is not expected to impact our public product or technology roadmaps, and we remain on track for “Zen” sampling in 2016 with first full year of revenue in 2017.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft sues recycling contractor after sales of stolen Office software
http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2015/09/microsoft-sues-recycling-contractor-after-sales-of.html
Microsoft is suing an electronic recycling contractor after employees allegedly stole and sold millions of dollars worth of software that was supposed to be destroyed.
This isn’t the first time Microsoft has sued a recycling company.
The strategy is to enforce its copyright no matter the size of the company. If Microsoft lets the alleged thefts go, it would suggest the company doesn’t care about its trademarks and make them harder to enforce.
Microsoft earlier this year sued a Tampa recycling company for selling computers with unauthorized copies of Windows 7.
The primary complaints are that the company violated its contract with Microsoft and acted with negligence when it failed to supervise employees and protect Microsoft property.
Tomi Engdahl says:
It’s alive! Farmer hides neglected, dust-clogged server between walls
No, silly, the green screen isn’t the computer. Let’s follow the wires
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/farm_break_wall_to_find_server/
Yes, dear readers, Matt’s colleagues down on the farm had placed the server “inside an empty space with no ventilation between drywall panels.”
Matt tells us: “It’s a common trope in computers, the ‘server hidden in the wall’, but I never personally expected to see it.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
What IT Professionals Earn Around the World
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/09/21/what-it-professionals-earn-around-the-world/?mod=trending_now_2
Information technology professionals continue to be one of India’s most competitive exports. Despite rising incomes in India, a mid-career IT professional in the South Asian nation still earns only about a third of what he or she could earn in the U.S., according to a survey of salaries at almost 10,000 companies worldwide.
The figures don’t take into account purchasing power parity – the principle that the same number of dollars can buy different amounts in different countries – but the findings could still mean tech companies are tempted to move more jobs to India.
“Lower-level roles are being moved to regions where talent is cheaper; the jobs that remain in Western Europe and the United States may be fewer in number but are more demanding and complex,” Rajesh Kumar, the chief executive of MyHiringClub.com said in a statement.
“However, there is an increasing evidence of India’s growing stature and presence in the high-end value chain, where cost advantages may not be the only drivers to future growth,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Storage unicorn nonet graces list of $1bn+ tech startups
Unicorn handlers cross fingers, hope Pure Storage IPO will open floodgates
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/22/storage_unicornality_nonet/
It’s got to be a bubble, don’t you think? How is it sustainable that we have 145 startups, each valued at over a billion dollars? Nine of them are storage startups, by the way.
TechCrunch has compiled a table of 145 startup unicorns – companies valued at more than a billion dollars.
The storage unicorns in the list are:
Dropbox at $10.35bn and $600m funding – File sync ’n’ share
Cloudera at $4.1bn and $1.94bn funding – Big Data, Hadoop and analytics
Pure Storage at $3.23bn and $470m funding – All-flash arrays
Nutanix at $2.14bn and $312m funding – Hyper-converged infrastructure appliances
MongoDB at $1.35bn and $311m funding – Scale-out, distributed databases
Infinidat at $1.2bn and $230m funding – Relatively old-style but re-invented high-end enterprise arrays
Actifio at $1.1bn and $208m funding – Copy data management
Simplivity at $1.93bn and $277m funding – Hyper-converged infrastructure appliances
Tintri at $1bn and $260m funding – VM-centric hybrid array
Box, which has now IPO’d, was the only previous storage unicorn in TechCrunch’s list,
CrunchBase Unicorn Leaderboards
http://techcrunch.com/unicorn-leaderboard/
This curated leaderboard of private companies with post-money valuations of $1 billion or more is based on CrunchBase data. New companies are added to the list as they reach the $1 billion valuation mark.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Office 2016 for Windows: The spirit of Clippy lives on
New look, new features, same old issues, but quietly impressive nonetheless
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/22/microsoft_releases_office_2016_for_windows/
First Look Microsoft has released Office 2016 for Windows, over two and half years after the launch of Office 2013 in January of that year.
The Office team has been busy in the intervening period – and not just with Office 2016. March 2014 saw the release of Office for iPad, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote in touch-optimised versions, which pack a lot of features behind a simplified user interface.
This was followed by versions for iPhone, Android tablets and phones, and Office mobile apps for Windows 10, all of which have similar features and, we are told, are built from the same code base.
Office also has a cloud component, via integration with Office 365, Microsoft’s hosted email and productivity suite. The core cloud product is SharePoint Online, for document storage and collaboration, which includes Office Web Apps for creating and editing documents in the browser.
Microsoft’s Office strategy seems to be about supporting Office 365 and maintaining its position as the dominant format for business documents by supporting all the most popular platforms, rather than focusing on the Windows product suite.
This strategy, along with the fact that the core products are more than mature – Excel for Windows goes back to 1987, Word to 1989 – may be the reason why Office 2016 is not replete with new features.
For years, Word experts have recommended against using the Master Document feature for long documents, because they corrupt, and this release is unlikely to be different. Outlook’s user interface remains convoluted for advanced tasks
Will Microsoft ever fix such issues? Dream on.
Office 2016 restores upper and lower case menus and adds a new “colourful” theme as the default – an improvement, in my view.
“Tell Me” is the latest effort to make Office easier to use. Some will remember Clippy and “it looks like you’re writing a letter” in Office 97. Unlike Clippy, “Tell Me” does not get in the way, but functions as a kind of search-driven user interface. It responds to the Alt-Q keyboard shortcut and works well if you would rather not pick up the mouse, or are not sure where to find a command.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Things you should know about the hard work of home working
Firstly, the family dining table ISN’T an office
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/22/work_from_home_perils/
Working from home is often seen as the Holy Grail of the IT worker. No more getting up early to get ready for work. No more spending thousands of pounds a year for a season pass only to get squished in a carriage like a sardine.
Things get no better when you’re boxed into your cubicle space for the entire day. Another bit of you dies inside.
The fact that IT work is one of the most portable professions helps facilitate working from home: you use a keyboard and screen in the office, you can (and probably are) set up with similar at home. You can also tap into the office hub via all manor of network pipes and collaboration mediums.
Working from home is on the rise in the UK as a whole and last year saw a record number of UK staff doing it. According to the Office for National Statistics, 13.9 per cent of all those employed in the UK in the first quarter, some 4.2 million people, were working from home.
But, yes, you’ve guessed it, there are down sides.
Working from home can see you actually toil for longer hours than if you were in the office. You can succumb to a creeping feeling that you have to be seen to do things not just better but as quick, if not quicker, than your colleagues on the mothership.
You will more than likely find yourself doing extra hours just to make sure you have done your “fair share”.
The lines between home and work life can become blurred.
Without defined boundaries as to when you can be disturbed, you may as well just not be at home. The last thing you want whilst on some super-urgent stressful project is for another family member to come along and trot out: “Oh, can you just do this for me?”
These “little” interruptions break concentration and also effectively grants permission for the instigator to carry on doing it.
A large downside that a lot of home workers have to contend with is when not in the office for several weeks, you lose touch with what is going on, and that can have an impact on professional and personal relationships
Yahoo! and Hewlett-Packard in recent years have reined in their work-form-home cultures to, they claim, facilitate a culture that pollinates ideas through informal meetings and conversations around the office.
Non-human distractions can also be very damaging. This is especially true if you have a man cave and acquired the latest box set of your favourite series.
Working from home is a two-way street and your employer needs to benefit from the arrangement, too.
So, you must ensure your work is already tiptop.
You have to have the perception of a self-motivated starter who can deliver. Perception is as important as reality. Asking at the wrong time is the death knell to working from home.
Most large companies have a written work-from-home policy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung sneaks out its TRIM, SMART SSD model – using 3D Magic
SATA’s shunted sideways. Move over for NVMe M.2
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/22/samsung_shrinks_notebook_ssd_using_3d_magic/
A new, thinner and faster SSD from Samsung, using the M.2 form factor, is hitting the retail market next month.
Sammy has taken its 850 PRO SSD with its 2.5-inch form factor and SATA interface and implemented the same 3D V-NAND 32-layer MLC flash in a smaller PCIe M.2 2280 form factor, and given it an NVMe driver.
The result is a physically smaller and much faster SSD with limited capacity due to the M.2 card’s smaller surface area. It comes in 256GB and 512GB capacity points, whereas the 850 PRO goes up to 2TB.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD Trims Carbon Footprint
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327774&
Advanced Micro Devices has put a lot of energy into energy efficiency. At a company event, held here, AMD touted a reduced carbon footprint for its x86 Carrizo processor.
Carrizo users can expect a 46% smaller carbon footprint than that of previous-generation Kaveri, AMD wrote in a company-led study. “Ultimately, an end user that replaces a Kaveri-based notebook computer with a Carrizo-based notebook will save approximately 49 kWh and 34 kg of [greenhouse gas] emissions over the three year service life of the computer.”
The study, conducted by AMD’s Power and Performance Lab, defines “overall life cycle greenhouse gas implications” as the carbon footprint associated with wafer fabrication, assembly, test, packaging and consumer use. However, the study found that 82% of emissions come from the consumer use phase while 18% comes from manufacturing, transportation, and the like.
“In 2013, approximately three billion personal computers used more than 1% of total energy consumed, and 30 million computer servers worldwide used another 1.5% of all electricity, at an annual cost of $14 billion to $18 billion,” AMD Corporate Fellow Sam Naffziger wrote in a white paper. “By 2030, the number of connected devices is estimated to grow to 100 billion. Since virtually all of these products consume electricity, their use contributes to GHG emissions.”
AMD did not provide information on charging laptops specifically impacts the environment, but advocated for power management through improved processor architecture. Its x86 processor Carrizo will ship this year, following much talk about the chip’s innovative design and integration with Windows 10
“We have recognized that [energy efficiency] is a key area and where we have put a lot of scarce engineering, and where we intend to differentiate,” Naffziger told EE Times.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OOPS: Red-faced IDC reissues backup market data
EMC shrunk rather than collapsed
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/23/redfaced_idc_reissues_backup_market_data/
IDC has copped to misplacing the beads on its abacus in the backup appliance market statistics it released last week.
Last week’s release bespoke a deeply troubled Purpose-Built Backup Appliance (PBBA) segment that slumped in the quarter to US$726.1 million.
Rather than the original $414.4 million in the quarter, it turns out EMC pulled $469.9 million – down by a worrying 5.8 per cent, rather than the utterly calamitous 16.9 per cent drop originally reported. That gives the vendor just over 60 per cent of the total market.
Such is EMC’s domination of the market
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michigan sues HP over $49 million project that’s still not done after 10 years
http://www.itworld.com/article/2985143/development/michigan-sues-hp-over-49-million-project-thats-still-not-done-after-10-years.html
State employees are stuck using a legacy system from the 1960s, Michigan says
Hewlett-Packard has faced no end of financial and legal woes in recent months, and on Friday it was hit with one more: A new lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan over a $49 million project the state says is still not completed after 10 years.
The contract dates back to 2005 and called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe-based system built in the 1960s that is used by more than 130 Secretary of State offices.
HP was given a 2010 deadline to deliver a replacement, but it failed to do so
Michigan has paid HP a total of roughly $33 million.
Last week, HP announced that revenue declines have prompted it to cut 25,000 to 30,000 jobs in its enterprise division.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT Departments Try To Avoid Getting “Ubered”
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/09/22/2152243/it-departments-try-to-avoid-getting-ubered
Fortune 500 companies and longstanding corporate giants are losing to startups that are born digital because they can’t keep up or they refuse to acknowledge the ways that technology is changing both business and consumer preferences. Getting “Ubered” is now one of the biggest threats to traditional IT departments as the growing number of unicorns like Airbnb, Spotify, Square, and others take over the economy and win the hearts and minds of increasingly mobile, always-on consumers.
The Unicorn List
http://fortune.com/unicorns/
They’re called “unicorns”—companies that have soared to a $1 billion valuation or higher, based on fundraising. The billion-dollar tech startup was once the stuff of myth, but now they seem to be everywhere, backed by a bull market and a new generation of disruptive technology.
Some say the proliferation of unicorns is a sign of another tech bubble. Others say the valuations are entirely justified. Whatever the answer, we’re clearly living in “The Age of Unicorns,” as we called it in our February 2015 cover story by Erin Griffith and Dan Primack.
See Fortune’s list of unicorn startups below, ranked by valuation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Laptop buying tips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBoe5B-kJMU
Tomi Engdahl says:
How bimodal IT is helping companies hire and retain workers
http://www.cio.com/article/2985258/it-strategy/how-bimodal-it-is-helping-companies-hire-and-retain-workers.html
Bimodal IT is a fairly new concept, but if you embrace it you can empower your workforce. With the right employees in the right work environment, risk takers and more traditional IT pros are much less likely to butt heads.
The technology that helps run a successful business is no longer confined behind the walls of the IT department. It’s slowly seeped into nearly every department within a company. For example, your marketing department might deploy a new cloud technology, without consulting IT. As a result of this growing need for technology across departments, in many enterprises IT has been split into two entities — a trend that Gartner dubbed bimodal IT in 2014.
Bimodal IT breaks down into two camps and the first group resembles a traditional IT structure, with a stronger focus on the most critical aspects of technology in a business. This first group is more practical, and they ensure systems run smoothly and efficiently, while keeping the business safe and secure on the backend. They also keep an eye on the bottom line, cutting costs where necessary.
resume makeover executive
The second group is more focused on innovation and moving the company forward as new technology emerges. It focuses on new business applications, customer-facing software and technology that makes it easier for the business to meet goals and stay ahead of the curve. Unlike the first group, this second camp is not as interested in the bottom line and they are considered risk takers.
Peter Sondergaard of Gartner describes bimodal IT as “one organization operating at two speeds,” and notes that while the two groups may be focused on different aspects of the business, both maintain communication and work together to reach one common goal; increased productivity and innovation.
Part of the shift of bimodal IT stems from the fact that technology providers now target specific departments, rather than selling directly to IT and CIOs.
By defining the two separate camps of l IT, Hurley says it can help target the right hires for the job.
Consequently, by defining these roles, Hurley states it can lead to higher retention rates, since you won’t be unintentionally misleading new employees. “Employees who are more comfortable taking risks are not going to be happy in a job that doesn’t allow them time to explore new technologies. Conversely, those who like to manage and maintain systems aren’t going to be content in a role that requires them to also be visionaries,” says Hurley.
Another benefit of embracing bimodal IT is that it helps create a culture of innovation within the company, according to Hurley. Companies realize now more than ever how crucial it is to stay on top of the latest software and hardware in order to remain relevant in today’s market. Understanding your overall IT goals can help move innovation and empower employees by employing them on the right side of bimodal IT.
Since bimodal IT presents a clear delineation between the practical side of IT and the riskier side, neither one will have to spend much time negotiating with managers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why enterprise digital transformation efforts stall
http://www.itworld.com/article/2984790/it-management/why-enterprise-digital-transformation-efforts-stall.html
Most enterprises are likely to hit a roadblock after the initial stage of digital adoption. Everest Group calls this phenomenon the ‘digital trough.’
Digital transformation is the business buzzword of the year. But if you feel like you’ve come to a standstill in your digital transformation efforts, you are probably not alone.
Enterprises are likely to hit a roadblock after the initial stage of digital adoption, according to a recent survey by outsourcing consultancy and research firm Everest Group. In fact, 43 percent of organizations are going through what Everest has dubbed the “digital trough,” according to a survey of 120 business and IT leaders at North American companies that have embarked on significant digital adoption programs.
The ‘digital trough’
Most organizations experience a honeymoon period at the start of their digital journey. “Investments are flowing, everybody believes in this brave new world they are going to create together,” according to Chirajeet Sengupta, Everest Research vice president member of the IT services research team. “However, the second phase is when things change. Suddenly, everybody starts questioning the value of what they are doing. Investments tend to get constrained, organizational capabilities are stretched and tested, and traditional business processes and organizational behavior are challenged. This is the ‘digital trough’.”
The focus for most enterprises initially embarking on the digital journey is on enablement, according to Everest Group. For example, companies need appropriate storage and compute facilities in the cloud to be able to incorporate big data analytics or Internet of Things technologies into their business processes. They require new security capabilities to manage increased customer data. “At this stage, IT is still in the ‘business of IT’ and business is still in the ‘business of business’,” says Sengupta. “All these initiatives can be measured in terms of traditional IT metrics – unit costs, total cost of ownership, service level agreements. There is no misalignment. Nobody treads on anybody’s toes.”
But as organizations implement these new digital technologies, the challenges begin. Once an enterprise has rolled out an expensive digital project—a big data solution, for example, business leaders want to know what they’re getting for their money. However, “traditional IT metrics of cost-control do a singularly poor job of measuring digital ROI,” Sengupta says. “So everybody starts questioning technology teams.”
And that can land businesses in a digital ditch. And if they don’t overcome the issues that led them there, things will only get worse. “You can go down a spiral of sub-scale investments, sub-optimal returns, and enhanced doubt and scrutiny, until the whole ‘digital thing’ dies a stillborn death,” Sengupta warns. But there are steps IT can take to extricate the business from the digital trough—or avoid it altogether.
“The most important thing is to have a clear view of your strategic objectives,” says Sengupta. “Are you doing things for efficiency or are you doing things for growth?” Having that clarity makes is easier to identify appropriate metrics for digital efforts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bjarne Stroustrup announces C++ Core Guidelines
https://isocpp.org/blog/2015/09/bjarne-stroustrup-announces-cpp-core-guidelines
This morning in his opening keynote at CppCon, Bjarne Stroustrup announced the C++ Core Guidelines (github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines), the start of a new open source project on GitHub to build modern authoritative guidelines for writing C++ code. The guidelines are designed to be modern, machine-enforceable wherever possible, and open to contributions and forking so that organizations can easily incorporate them into their own corporate coding guidelines.
The initial primary authors and maintainers are Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter, and the guidelines so far were developed with contributions from experts at CERN, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and several other organizations. The guidelines are currently in a “0.6” state, and contributions are welcome. As Stroustrup said: “We need help!”
Stroustrup said: “You can write C++ programs that are statically type safe and have no resource leaks. You can do that without loss of performance and without limiting C++’s expressive power. This supports the general thesis that garbage collection is neither necessary nor sufficient for quality software. Our core C++ guidelines makes such code simpler to write than older styles of C++ and the safety can be validated by tools that should soon be available as open source.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Diskicide – the death of disk
Tech Unplugged sees Reg presenter unplugged
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/28/diskicide_the_death_of_disk/
Disk development difficulties
Disk technology is developing to boost capacity while access performance is barely getting a look in.
We have hybrid notebook disks with a flash cache inside the disk enclosure, but these are not very popular, users preferring to have SSDs instead of slightly accelerated disks. SSDs are so much faster than spinning drives. So much more power-efficient and lighter, too, that it’s becoming normal for laptop computers to use them instead of disks.
So for disk, the future is a capacity play. Can shingled recording and heat-assisted recording solve the flash problem disks are facing?
Shingling and HAMR
Shingling disks to increase capacity means that data tracks are partially overwritten, meaning whole blocks have to be re-written if a few bytes change; so performance is slowed. It gives you maybe 20-30 per cent more capacity at the cost of slowing write performance.
Shingling is a sticking-plaster to boost capacity until HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) comes along and also, for Seagate, until helium-filled drives arrive.
HAMR is dauntingly difficult to implement and we’re not likely to see HAMR drives, at least from Seagate, until the second half of 2018. Even then they may not have more capacity than PMR drives.
Seagate is also working on helium-filled drives as a way of increasing capacity, following HGST’s lead. It is also making noises about having two read/write heads per platter, but we have no availability dates.
Disk drive technology has no hope of catching up with flash in performance terms, and its capacity improvement rate seems to be slowing as PMR runs out of steam and replacement tech is difficult and costly to implement.
Hitting the flash wall
Flash has had to face up to its own technology development problem. Single-level cells (SLC or 1bit/cell) have the most endurance at any particular cell size, with 2-bits/cell MLC having a shorter life, and 3-bits/cell TLC having an even shorter working life. Each cell size shrink also shrinks endurance – dramatically.
You can compensate for this with better controllers using DSP techniques and better error correction, but when there aren’t enough electrons in a cell at a particular voltage level and the bit value is hard to detect and drifts over time, then there is only so much you can do.
After 16nm it seems we’re unlikely to be able to shrink cell size again, and so flash capacity increases via cell shrinks have hit a wall … but NAND foundries have become able to have multiple layers of NAND, 2D planar layers, laid down in a 3D structure and so raise capacity without shrinking the cell size or increasing the footprint of the flash chip.
Step back the process geometry and build up layers
Samsung is producing 3D flash chips using 4x geometry I understand – that is a cell size between 49 and 40nm along one axis. SanDisk and Toshiba are producing 12nm planar NAND, 1X class. The step back to 4X has the side effect of greatly increasing endurance, and that means that TLC flash, 3 bits/cell, can have enterprise-class endurance and be used in flash arrays.
Storage moving to servers
It’s becoming apparent that there is a trend for primary data to move from disk to flash, and also to move closer to servers.
Possible flash takeover of disk market
Given what we have heard, then, we can construct a scenario in which 2D planar MLC NAND is replacing 15,000 rpm disk drives today to store primary data. 3D TLC NAND will start to replace 10,000rpm disk drives and 3D QLC flash will begin the replacement of 7,200rpm disk drives.
Requiascat in pace hard disk drives and spin no more
So disk can never match flash in performance, and flash is increasing drive capacity more than disk and faster than disk, and also its cost is heading towards parity with disk. Cogito ergo sum – and disk is dead in the data center. Requiascat in pace hard disk drives and spin no more.
What I have described in broad brush strokes is how and why disk drives could be replaced by flash drives. None of the disk drive manufacturers are saying that this will happen. Indeed Seagate resists the idea strongly, saying SSDs and PCIe flash are a data access accelerant, not a disk drive replacement.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Minecraft Is Coming To Oculus Rift In 2016
No official release date … yet
http://www.popsci.com/minecraft-is-coming-to-oculus-rift-in-2016
Details of the virtual reality version of Minecraft are sparse, but it’s clear that it will be one of the first major video games announced for the burgeoning platform. Oculus VR has yet to announce a release date for its virtual reality headset, the Rift, but it has promised eager customers that it will be made available in the first quarter of 2016. When the headset is finally released, Minecraft will be made available in the Windows Store and the Oculus Store for purchase on Oculus consoles.
The announcement was particularly surprising because Oculus is often thought of as a direct competitor to the Microsoft Hololens, a headset made for augmented reality applications. Microsoft proudly marched out the Hololens version of Minecraft at its BUILD developer conference earlier this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dropbox releases its chat app Zulip under an open-source license
http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/09/26/dropbox-releases-its-chat-app-zulip-under-an-open-source-license/
Dropbox has released its recently acquired chat app, Zulip under an open-source Apache license.
According to a blog post by Zulip co-founder Tim Abbott announcing the move, Dropbox has released everything, including the server, Android and iOS mobile apps, desktop apps for Mac, Linux and Windows, and the Puppet configuration necessary for running the Zulip server in production.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vindu Goel / New York Times:
India Replaces China as Next Big Frontier for U.S. Tech Companies — BANGALORE, India — American technology companies desperately want to win over people like Rakesh Padachuri and his family. — Mr. Padachuri, who runs a construction business in this city, the center of India’s technology industry …
India Replaces China as Next Big Frontier for U.S. Tech Companies
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/28/technology/india-replaces-china-as-next-big-frontier-for-us-tech-companies.html?_r=0
Mr. Padachuri said last month during an interview at his home, which is next to a Best Western hotel. There’s barely a need to leave the house — groceries, a birthday cake, even a hairdresser can be summoned via an app.
The Padachuri family’s love of technology helps explain why India and its 1.25 billion residents have become the hottest growth opportunity — the new China — for American Internet companies. Blocked from China itself or frustrated by the onerous demands of its government, companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as start-ups and investors, see India as the next best thing.
“They are looking at India, and they are thinking, ‘Five years ago, it was China, and I probably missed the boat there. Now I have a chance to actually do this,’” said Punit Soni, a former Google executive who was lured back to India recently to become the chief product officer of Flipkart, a Bangalore e-commerce start-up similar to Amazon.
The increasing appeal of India, now the world’s fastest growing major economy, was underscored in recent days.
”For India to keep making progress, it needs to be a leader online,” Mr. Modi said during the Facebook event. He acknowledged that tech companies like Facebook were not connecting people out of pure altruism, but he told Mr. Zuckerberg, “I hope this will not just be something to enhance your company’s bank balance.”
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The overall message to Silicon Valley from Mr. Modi, who posts regularly on Twitter and Facebook: Help India become an Internet powerhouse.
Two years ago, India’s rise as a digital nation was hard to imagine. Internet penetration was modest, mobile phone networks were glacially slow, and smartphones were a blip in a sea of basic phones.
Since 2013, however, the number of smartphone users in India has ballooned and will reach 168 million this year, the research firm eMarketer predicts, with 277 million Internet users in India expected over all.
India already conducts more mobile searches on Google than any country besides the United States. Yet “we are barely scratching the surface of availability of Internet to the masses,” said Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president in charge of search, who emigrated from India to the United States 25 years ago.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bertel King, Jr / Android Police:
Google to launch Pixel C 10.2″ tablet with 308ppi, detachable keyboard, Android Marshmallow in 2015 — [Exclusive] Google Pixel C 10.2″ Tablet With 308ppi, Detachable Keyboard, Lightbar, And Android Marshmallow Coming Later This Year — The Chromebook Pixel launched in 2013, and a replacement followed up in March of this year.
[Exclusive] Google Pixel C 10.2″ Tablet With 308ppi, Detachable Keyboard, Lightbar, And Android Marshmallow Coming Later This Year
http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/09/28/exclusive-pixel-c-10-2-tablet-with-308ppi-detachable-keyboard-lightbar-and-android-marshmallow-coming-later-this-year/
The Chromebook Pixel launched in 2013, and a replacement followed up in March of this year. Now Google plans to expand the Pixel brand to tablets with the Pixel C. And no, it won’t be running Chrome OS.
We’re rating the confidence level of this rumor at an 8 out of 10.
Unlike the first two Pixel devices, the C will be an Android-powered device. Chrome OS is increasingly touchscreen friendly, but for now, Google has opted to go with its already proven mobile OS.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google voice search now faster and works in noisy places
http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-voice-search-now-faster-and-works-in-noisy-places/
If you’ve recently noticed that Google’s voice search is faster and more accurate, it’s thanks to the search-to-advertising giant’s work on recurrent neural networks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Are Enterprise Architects the “Miltons” of Their Organizations?
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/09/29/0126248/are-enterprise-architects-the-miltons-of-their-organizations
InfoWorld recently pointed out that the “architect” part of enterprise architect is a misnomer, because what they are building can’t be a static, unmoving structure or it will fail. Businesses need to remain fluid and flexible as technology and consumer behaviors evolve, so modern enterprise architects must “develop frameworks with constant change as a first principle.”
Why we need enterprise architects now more than ever
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2984914/enterprise-architecture/why-we-need-enterprise-architects-now-more-than-ever.html
In the era of decentralized IT, enterprise architects will find fresh opportunity to help businesses meet their most important objectives