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:
Ina Fried / Re/code:
Intel, Microsoft, HP, Dell and Lenovo Unite for Big PC Advertising Push — Intel and Microsoft are teaming with three leading PC makers on a new ad campaign designed to make potential computer buyers more aware of all the things a modern PC can do. — The campaign, with the slogan …
Intel, Microsoft, HP, Dell and Lenovo Unite for Big PC Advertising Push
http://recode.net/2015/10/14/intel-microsoft-hp-dell-and-lenovo-unite-for-big-pc-advertising-push/
Intel and Microsoft are teaming with three leading PC makers on a new ad campaign designed to make potential computer buyers more aware of all the things a modern PC can do.
The campaign, with the slogan “PC Does What?” is set to be announced Thursday at a Webcast featuring the companies’ top marketing executives, according to sources familiar with the companies’ plans. It will feature TV, print and online advertisements, sources said.
The fact that Intel, Microsoft, HP, Dell and Lenovo all want to see more PCs sold is hardly news. But that they have gotten together on a unified campaign is a first.
Historically, much of the PC industry’s advertising has been subsidized by Intel and Microsoft, whose profit margins are far larger than those who make PCs. But typically they work individually with each PC maker rather than as a group.
As for the campaign, it will run in the U.S. and China
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell buying EMC: Is this the end times, or the road to salvation?
In any case, the enemy is now Amazon
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/16/dell_bought_emc_is_this_the_end_salvation/
Sysadmin Blog: Dell bought EMC. The internet promptly lost its mind. Make no mistake, the Dell-EMC merger is a pretty big deal. Everyone has news, thoughts and analysis on the subject.
The most common phrase I hear is “two garbage trucks colliding”. Comments about dinosaurs have been spread as well. I think the doom and gloomers have got it all wrong.
One thing that seems to have been missed by umpteen pundits is the importance of Dell still being a private company after the merger – this changes everything. Mega-mergers go south for a number of reasons, but underneath most of those failures is that everyone must dance to the tune of the sociopathic quarterly thinkers on Wall Street.
Dell does not have to do this. Dell is a privately held company and has the leisure of thinking and acting on long-term plans.
Now, there is a caveat: Dell (the man) does not get to run around and have Dell (the company) do whatever he wants. He is beholden to the other shareholders of the company, now more than ever. Those shareholders have taken a monumental financial risk in backing this merger and they’re going to demand satisfaction.
Being private changes the game. There are a limited number of shareholders, and they all know each other.
Dell was in a good place even before looking at what the EMC merger brings to the table. Combined, I think Dell and EMC might just be the most viable contender on the field.
Too many people can’t separate EMC II (the storage company) from EMC (the holding company). EMC is a company that owns several other companies, some of which own other companies.
EMC II (the part that makes storage hardware and software to store data) has hardware, software and services which do the same things as some of the stuff Dell has. It also does the same things as some of the stuff VMware has.
Don’t underestimate the value of Pivotal or Virtustream. I realise that today’s data centre nerds want nothing to do with either company, but that actually doesn’t matter.
If you don’t understand Openstack and why it’s important, you aren’t going to think the Dell/EMC merger makes any sense, nor why the efforts around it are informing the design of the next generation of computing.
Openstack may succeed or it may fail, but the key is that it is trying to bring together infrastructure from any and all vendors in a transparent fashion and provide automation, orchestration and self-service. Basically it lets you build a “cloud” of your own but isn’t vendor-locked. It acknowledges the reality that today’s data centres are heterogeneous environments.
Don’t underestimate the value of EMC II’s experience solving hardware and software integration issues. EMC knows more about enterprise storage than any other company on the planet, and enterprise storage is – next to information security – the hardest thing there is to design and build in IT.
The storage bits don’t matter so much. What matters is the experience of integrating complicated and outright miserable software with eleventy squillion odd quirks onto commodity hardware that falls over in a gentle breeze. Designing not only the hardware and software, but the development, support and business processes to put out equipment that the whole world quite literally bets people’s lives on is what I’m talking about.
RSA is critical, and was irresponsibly underused and horrifically mismanaged under EMC’s stewardship.
The problem with security is that most of those working in IT today – either at the sharp end or the business end – treat it as an afterthought. People who actually live and breathe information security are their own category, separate and distinct from other nerds.
Dell/EMC will have to make some security purchases in the future to flesh out its security offerings
Information security is going to be one of the most important revenue streams of the next 50 years of computing, if not the most important. Though RSA is overlooked by almost everyone in this acquisition, it is the seed of the future for a large part of Dell’s revenues. Properly cared for it may be to Dell what VMware was to EMC.
This is great for new startups
A whole bunch of talented people who are experienced in the business-oriented aspects of running a company will be available very shortly. Yes, I’m talking about the inevitable layoffs. Dell and EMC are dancing around this in analyst calls, but readers of The Register have seen this movie before.
The cuts are coming, and they’re going to be both savage and sweeping.
These startups will shed experienced executives and engineers who will then go forth and make new startups learning lessons from their previous attempts.
VMware is a licence to print money
VMware needs a less political environment to shine. Under Dell, I expect this will happen. I fully expect a “hands off” approach that has far less interference than VMware experienced under EMC. I
Dell (the company) is maintaining only a 28 per cent stake in VMware. Dell (the man) intends to buy up enough of the remaining shares to call the shots.
Like Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba, it doesn’t really matter if VMware competes with Dell, or even if VMware wins. What matters is that VMware makes oodles and oodles of cash and Dell (the company) gets enough of that to really invest in next generation technologies that will keep them alive through the coming industry consolidation.
Dell’s enemy isn’t overlap between the storage offerings of Dell, EMC and VMware. Dell’s enemy is Amazon. If Dell is to survive it needs to out-innovate, out-price and out-think Amazon. Dell can only do that if it hires the best minds, does shedloads of R&D and has a stable source of income that won’t go away if it fails to execute on some element of its other efforts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft now awfully pushy with Windows 10 on Win 7, 8 PCs – Reg readers hit back
Torch and pitchfork time after Redmond force-feeds update
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/15/pushy_windows_10/
Have you noticed Microsoft being a little too eager in pushing its Windows 10 upgrade lately?
You’re not alone.
The Reg news tip inbox has been awash the past few days with readers reporting that the newest version of Windows has been forcing itself onto computers amid other operating system updates, and sometimes even downloading itself after users thought they had opted out.
“In the latest raft of MS updates, the “optional” Windows 10 option on this Windows 7 PC was pre-ticked. Can that be right?”
Tomi Engdahl says:
All in the name of Liberty: OpenStack 12 set free!
It scales! It virtualises! It helps you containerise yourself! Is it also still too weird?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/16/all_in_the_name_of_liberty_openstack_12_set_free/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bitfusion: Bringing Supercomputing to the Masses
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328031&
Medium-sized companies are conceiving incredibly innovative ideas that rely on computing power if they could get access to supercomputers. Bitfusion Boost is here to help them.
Bitfusion.io is on a mission to “bring supercomputing to the masses.” These days, a lot of scientific, medical, and technological development relies on humongous amounts of compute power. If we visualize the technology company landscape as a pyramid, relatively few mega-companies are perched on the pinnacle. These companies have the resources to implement massive supercomputers and to throw PhD computer scientists at their applications (figuratively, not literally) in order to wrest the most out of the hardware.
Meanwhile, the middle of the pyramid is occupied by the aforementioned “masses” — medium-sized companies conceiving incredibly innovative ideas that rely on computing power if they are ever to see the light of day.
It’s now possible to create a very respectable computing environment that boasts a mix of multiple CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and so forth, and to do so without breaking the bank. Alternatively, it’s possible to run one’s applications in the cloud on a baffling and bewildering mixture of computing resources.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM cuts down IT support staff w/ Mac deployment, says 5% of Mac users call help desk vs 40% for PCs
http://9to5mac.com/2015/10/15/ibm-mac-support/
Deploying Macs to employees has helped IBM significantly reduce its IT staff and cut down on time and costs, the company’s VP of Workplace-as-a-Service Fletcher Previn explained at a recent talk during the JAMF Nation User Conference (JNUC). Previn offered some insight into how offering Macs has improved efficiency for the company’s internal IT staff since IBM for the first time started offering its employees Macs as an official alternative to PCs back in May.
Previn noted that “Every Mac that we buy is making and saving IBM money,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Updategate: Microsoft is now installing Windows 10 by default in Windows Update
‘Whoops. Our bad. Sorry,’ it quoths
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2430786/updategate-microsoft-is-now-installing-windows-10-by-default-in-windows-update
MICROSOFT HAS taken another enthusiastic turn in its desire to get people to upgrade to the new Windows 10 operating system.
It now appears that some users of Windows 7 and 8 are being updated without even asking.
We reported a month ago that Microsoft is downloading images of Windows 10 to computers whose owners hadn’t opted for the upgrade, in some cases taking up 6GB of the hard drive.
Microsoft has yet to fully answer our concerns surrounding Updategate, but we had a note yesterday from our original tipster, Mike Wallace, observing that a number of patches for Windows have been reissued.
Then this morning, in Ars Technica, our worst fears were realised: Windows 10 is manifesting automatically.
Windows 10 upgrade installing automatically on some Windows 7, 8 systems
Microsoft says that the optional update was enabled by mistake.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/windows-10-upgrade-installing-automatically-on-some-windows-7-8-systems/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nothing new: Linux runs the web
Alexa statistics show that servers, nothing has changed in the past year:
The most visited million to 96.3 per cent from the server is running Linux.
According to statistics:
Generic Linux web server market share in September was 40.9 per cent.
Ubuntu runs 21.3 per cent of web servers.
CentOS share is 19.1 percent
Debian share is 13.8 percent
Fifth, the most popular platform is Windows with less than 1.9 per cent market share
FreeBSD’s slice of the market are recognized in their opening 1.8 per cent.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3460:ei-mitaan-uutta-linux-jyllaa-webissa&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
China to consume nearly 30% of the world’s flash, 21% of DRAM
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2993841/data-storage-solutions/china-to-consume-nearly-30-of-the-worlds-flash-21-of-dram.html
15nm and 16nm process flash have become the industry’s mainstream technologies
Chinese domestic DRAM and NAND flash consumption is dramatically increasing with the rise in popularity of Chinese PCs and smartphones, according to a new report from TrendForce.
China this year will purchase $12 billion worth of DRAM and $6.67 billion worth of NAND flash, representing 21.6% and 29.1% of the global revenues for those markets, respectively.
“Increasing shipments of Chinese-branded PCs and smartphones in recent years have contributed to the overall DRAM demand,” said Avril Wu, assistant vice president at DRAMeXchange. “China’s top PC maker Lenovo and the global PC market leader HP are neck on neck on shipments, and this is an indication that the Chinese brand vendors’ purchasing power in the DRAM market is getting stronger every year.”
According to TrendForce’s smartphone shipment report for the third quarter of this year, seven of the world’s top 10 smartphone vendors hail from China.
Additionally, server growth in China has been spurred by the popularity of the Internet of Things in recent years. The country has already consumed nearly 20% of the world’s server DRAM supply this year.
“Clearly, China’s economic growth is closely tied to the DRAM industry,” TrendForce stated in a news release.
Solid-state drives (SSDs) currently lead the market in NAND flash demand, and the uptake of SSDs in notebooks is also climbing rapidly. Another demand driver comes from smartphone eMMCs (Embedded MultiMediaCard technology), which have seen a sharp increase in their densities as well.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Legos Can Teach Us About Software Design
http://recode.net/2015/10/16/what-legos-can-teach-us-about-software-design/
Lego attracted generations of customers primarily because they do not force us to adhere to a strict system of what you can build and what you can’t. However, this is not the norm for many of our other human tendencies. We seem to have an instinctive need to organize the world into strict hierarchies, like the Dewey Decimal System, the taxonomy of species and the pages of Wikipedia. The problem with strict hierarchies is they work in their existing environment for predetermined purposes. But they fail when new, disruptive creations come along that don’t fit that categorization.
We see this in software design. Decades after playing with Lego as a small boy, I realized that the same open, flexible design pattern also makes for great software platforms. Because the most powerful software must adapt to changing environments and needs in markets that didn’t exist when the software was designed.
Here is the basic approach to open design in software: First, develop an open, flexible framework that can take forms or perform functions defined by its users (not the software vendor). Then ship it with some built-in “happy path” templates or usage scenarios that allow customers to be productive and solve problems immediately. But don’t hard-wire these templates and usage scenarios. When customers come across new and novel problems to solve — ones that were never even envisioned by the original developers — provide extensive training and support to extend the behavior of that framework.
The largest Web companies in the world follow this open design pattern. It’s also why they invest in open source software. Not because it’s free of costs, but because open source software can be redesigned by companies to fit their own special needs, and needs unimaginable today.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Celebrating 20 Years of OpenBSD With Release 5.8
http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/15/10/18/1617256/celebrating-20-years-of-openbsd-with-release-58?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell-EMC deal could be a game-changer for mobile networks, too
Ericsson and Huawei better watch their backs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/19/dell_emc_deal_integrated_supplier_option_mobile_carriers/
As carriers race towards virtualisation, software-defined networking and increasingly complex back office IT platforms, they will increasingly bump into suppliers from the data centre world.
IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and others are already very familiar to them, but now there will be a new powerhouse, if Dell’s record-breaking $67bn takeover of storage supplier EMC goes through.
The deal will give Dell an end-to-end play for cloud and telco providers, as well as enterprises, encompassing servers, storage and virtualisation, and it will pose a very interesting alternative for mobile network operators to set against the claims of Ericsson and Huawei, as well as the IT giants.
The future of VMware
There had been talk, amid the speculation that a deal was in the offing, that EMC’s majority-owned VMware virtualisation unit would be spun out. But that would have seen the loss of a crown jewel, and the risk of turning a full IT platform provider into a box shifter. In fact, VMware will remain inside Dell/EMC, though it will remain a publicly traded company even when its parent becomes part of privately held Dell.
VMware and Dell both emphasised, on the former’s investor call to discuss the deal, that the virtualisation technology was one of the hearts of the matter. This is not a takeover geared to consolidation and cost efficiency, welcome as those will be when up against the might of Huawei on the full-service front, or a potentially reinvigorated, post-reorganization HP.
“This deal is about accelerating growth opportunities [through SDN],” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. In particular, those opportunities lie in the IoT and the big data it generates. Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, said on the call: “There are more opportunities now than in history of man. There is massive telemetry with sensors being built into everything imaginable, generating massive amounts of data.” Now Dell will be able to provide all the devices to underpin that, from PCs to servers to storage, said the firm (skimming neatly over its many failed forays into mobile devices).
Another important point made by Dell at its press conference – and one which may make HP shiver – is the private firm’s ability to innovate rapidly, and also to play a long game without the pressure of the quarterly results call and the activist investor.
Full platform for operators
The focus on IoT, big data and cloud services is predictable, but Dell is not confining itself to the classic enterprises with which it has dealt for so long. It certainly has service providers, including carriers and cloud operators, in its sights. Here, an increased software defined network and integration element will be critical for it to add value and find its place between IBM on one hand, and Ericsson or Huawei on the other. Telcos have generally been poor at building their own cloud platforms, and so a one-stop-shop will be welcome.
One analyst, Heavy Reading’s Caroline Chappell, commented: “There you have it – a complete software defined data centre solution, hardware and all. From a service provider (not enterprise) perspective, this is good for Dell which has struggled to articulate a strong telco cloud story on the grounds that it is only a box company in a market where telcos in particular want help building/integrating end-to-end cloud.”
Particularly interesting will be the reaction of Cisco, which aims to be a powerhouse in the carrier cloud and the virtualised telco, and which has been very close to VMware and EMC in the past.
Pivotal, actually a joint venture between EMC and VMware, is particularly interesting in the IoT. Most importantly, it powers the Predix big data analytics platform which GE (an investor in Pivotal) has created for the Industrial Internet, and which the manufacturing giant aims to turn into a global service based around de facto standards it is driving.
The combined company will, naturally, be run by Michael Dell
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Blood on the carpet’ ahead for outsourcers, says analyst research
Decline in mega deals points to crisis (of sorts) for system integrators
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/19/blood_on_the_carpet_ahead_for_outsourcers_says_isg/
Spare a thought for those poor multinational outsourcers, who continued to work a lot harder just to maintain the same level of business seen in the last quarter, due to the worldwide trend away from mega deals.
According to analyst house ISG, for the third quarter this year, global IT outsourcing spend remained flat at $5.6bn (£3.6bn), while contract awards increased 20 per cent to 344 deals.
Compared with the same period two years ago, the global market is down 30 per cent.
Europe faired slightly better for the quarter, with a flat market of $2.7bn (£1.7bn) compared with 2014, and an increase in the number deals up by seven per cent.
“Deals are getting smaller, more innovation is needed by clients and it is often smaller clients that are in a better position to deal that,”
“Some outsourcers are slightly better placed than others, and some are going to fight it out in the infrastructure game, competing with the likes of Amazon,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Diversity Issue Silicon Valley Isn’t Trying To Fix: Age Discrimination
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/10/19/1313248/the-diversity-issue-silicon-valley-isnt-trying-to-fix-age-discrimination
The tech industry has recognized it isn’t as welcoming to women or minorities as it should be, and is loudly taking steps to solve that issue. Major companies are now releasing diversity reports to highlight their efforts. But as Stephen Levy points out, none of them seem interested in doing something about a different diversity issue that’s been pervading Silicon Valley for years: age discrimination.
And as of last year, the average age at Google was 30; at Facebook, 28; LinkedIn, 29, and Apple, 31. In comparison, the average age in more traditional tech industries like data processing or web publishing was almost 10 years higher than Silicon Valley/Internet firms.
How Can We Achieve Age Diversity in Silicon Valley?
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-can-we-achieve-age-diversity-in-silicon-valley-11a847cb37b7
Silicon Valley has always been prone to buzzwords, often annoying and almost always overused. The latest is an exception: diversity. Suddenly, there’s an explosion of discussion, press, conference panels and even executive attention devoted to expanding the workforces of tech companies into something other than enclaves of white and sometimes Asian males. One result has been a trend towards releasing diversity reports that show how incredibly far we have to go.
In Silicon Valley there is one underrepresented group in particular — one that by law is entitled to fair treatment in hiring and employment practices — that not only has failed to enter this conversation, but is often regarded as anathema when it comes to headcount.
And that is people over 40. Or 45. Or 50, or 60. You know…old people.
In my view, age information should be included in those diversity reports, to underline the need for change— and, even more important, those in charge of company cultures should view age diversity as a plus.
Right now, that’s not happening.
Tomi Engdahl says:
You know what storage needs? More doughnuts to flatten us up
Flatter hierachies, fewer hops: Rockport and the Torus interconnect
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/19/rockport_and_the_torus_interconnect/
The hierarchy of adapters, switches, routers and directors involved in storage networking is unwieldy, complex and costly and needs replacing with a flatter scheme of direct connections between servers and storage devices. That’s the networking message from start-up Rockport Networks.
It says that current fat tree and spine-and-leaf network architectures tend to prevent economical scalability and hinder cloud computing and analytics. It’s better to rethink storage network architecture, indeed network architecture, than to try and software-define current networking hardware to gain relatively marginal scalability, flexibility and cost-savings.
Its idea is that storage and server nodes in a network should be directly interconnected using a Direct Interconnect (torus mesh) of optical cables.
This is not a new thing. Torus mesh connectivity has been used to interconnect high performance computing environments for years.
Rockport says Direct Interconnect is widely recognised as the most effective way to connect; it is also recognised as a very complex way to cable things together. The company claims it has solved the cabling challenge, with high radix connectivity and simplified cabling with short runs. Direct interconnect is the most efficient way to interconnect data nodes in the data centre and provides dramatic linear scalability, it says.
Ditch the switch
The networking nodes can be servers and filer arrays in scale-out cluster form with the data messages dealing with file IO requests. Each node will have Rockport software running in a chip with ports to the Direct Interconnect mesh. There is no longer any need for switches or routers, so rack space devoted to these can be recovered and used for processors running virtual machines, meaning more chargeable resource and income for cloud service providers.
Today, the Rockport solution can perform at 200Gbit/s comprised of 8 x 25Gbit/s ports per data node with internodal hop delays equal to 80 nanoseconds; PCIe-class bandwidth rate. Rockport contrasts this with a server-to-server connection using three switches and taking up to 3.12msecs. In effect the network is moved closer to compute.
Rockport’s software operates at layer 2, the data link layer or node-to-node data transfer, in the OSI model. The network is not sniff-able and has inherent security. Rockport says its network can scale from 80Gbps to 200Gbps to 800Gbps without any switching hardware. It can also scale up to more than 160,000 nodes in a single mesh.
If a server (node) goes down, then data is redirected. The network is fault-tolerant, with up to 8 paths per node
ESG Founder and senior analyst Steve Duplessie says of Rockport’s scheme: “It’s not the hardware anymore. Switching is a software function. The whole idea of the core/edge hierarchical switch architecture seems way last century with today’s CPU capabilities. Why not have a flat horizontal network that gets fatter when necessary – based on application requirements? Scale out networking – no need for scale up.”
Oprea says servers could well need 1Tbit/s interconnect bandwidth by 2020.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel, Microsoft, HP, Dell and Lenovo form supergroup to save the PC
Remember, PCs can do things too
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2430828/intel-microsoft-hp-dell-and-lenovo-form-supergroup-to-save-the-pc
BOX-FLOGGING BUSINESSES Intel, Microsoft, HP, Dell and Lenovo have united to produce an advertising campaign designed to remind people that there is more to life than tablets, smartphones and games consoles.
That ‘more’ is the teddy that we all grew up with, the one that is gathering dust and losing its shine. It is the PC. So desperate is the PC for love that the firms have come up with a promotional campaign that might have you reaching for the remote, or maybe a desktop computer.
The campaign is called PC does what? and we guess it’s supposed to be pronounced ‘PC does whaaaaaat?’
It’s not exactly the desktop that is being promoted here, but rather the new take on it. One of the things that the PC can do is be thin. Another is able to swivel its screen around, while another is 30 percent better at graphics than another, undisclosed piece of five-year-old hardware.
PCs do things, is the message, and they are things that could surprise peope
we reckon that the message here is ‘Buy a new computer. Please.’
Tomi Engdahl says:
China finally says yes to WD-HGST union
But sales, brands must extend betrothal 2 more years
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/19/mofcom_says_yes_wd_hgst_merger/
MOFCOM, the Chinese trade regulator which has been holding up the integration of WD and HGST, is relaxing its “hold separate” restriction and integration can start now. But the two brands and sales forces must stay separate for two more years.
Western Digital can “integrate substantial portions of its HGST and WD subsidiaries” while continuing “to offer both HGST and WD product brands in the market and maintain separate sales teams for two years from the date of the decision.”
This will enable Western Dig’ to start combining operations, sharing technology, such as helium-filled drives, and saving substantial costs, with $400m in annual operating expense savings mentioned.
Western Digital bought competitor HGST in March 2012 for $4.8bn.
We expect Helium drive technology to spread into WD’s disk product line promptly and for the two sets of products to start reducing overlap
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reuters:
IBM reports Q3 net income of $2.96B, revenue down for 14th consecutive quarter to $19.28B, a 13.9% drop year-over-year; stock down over 4% after hours
IBM revenue falls more than expected, cuts profit forecast
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/19/us-ibm-results-idUSKCN0SD2BH20151019
International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) posted a bigger-than-expected drop in revenue and cut its full-year profit forecast, as a stronger U.S. dollar accentuated weakness in demand from China and emerging markets.
It was the 14th quarter in a row that IBM has posted a reduction in revenue, as the world’s largest technology services company gets rid of low-margin businesses, but has so far failed to make up the shortfall with newer initiatives in the more lucrative area of cloud computing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CNET:
The massive 27-inch Lenovo Yoga Home tablet is a tabletop PC with a 1920×1080 native resolution, three-hour battery life, starting at $1499 available in October — The massive 27-inch Lenovo Yoga Home tablet brings back the tabletop PC — This big all-in-one doubles as a futuristic touchscreen tabletop perfect for sharing.
The massive 27-inch Lenovo Yoga Home tablet brings back the tabletop PC
http://www.cnet.com/products/lenovo-yoga-home-900/
Mark Walton / Ars Technica UK:
Lenovo Yoga 900 improves on Yoga Pro 3 by ditching Core M for Skylake, gets full keyboard, starts at $1,199
Lenovo Yoga 900: Core M ditched for full-fat Skylake, sensible keyboard returns
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/10/lenovo-yoga-900-core-m-ditched-for-full-fat-skylake-sensible-keyboard-returns/
New Yoga fixes faults of Pro 3 but keeps the the same design and crazy hinge.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal:
Sky-high valuations begin to backfire on some Silicon Valley companies trying to raise more money or go public
Tech Startups Feel an IPO Chill
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/tech-startups-feel-an-ipo-chill-1445309822-lMyQjAxMTE1NTIwMDgyMjA2Wj
Sky-high valuations are starting to backfire on some Silicon Valley companies that are trying to raise more money or go public; Dropbox stalls
Dropbox Inc. had no trouble boosting its valuation to $10 billion from $4 billion early last year, turning the online storage provider’s chief executive into one of Silicon Valley’s newest paper billionaires.
But the euphoria has begun to fade. Investment bankers caution that the San Francisco company might be unable to go public at $10 billion, much less deliver a big pop to recent investors and employees who hoped to strike it rich, according to people familiar with the matter.
Still, the company is a portent of wider trouble for startups that found it easy to attract money at sky’s-the-limit valuations in the continuing technology boom. The market for initial public offerings has turned chilly and inhospitable, largely because technology companies have sought valuations above what public investors are willing to pay.
So far this year, only 14% of IPOs in the U.S. were done by tech companies, the smallest percentage since at least the mid-1990s, according to Dealogic.
The data suggest that even some of the most promising startups in Silicon Valley might be worth far less in the eyes of the rest of the investment world. The risk is that the lackluster reception for tech startups in the stock market could ricochet through companies that are still private.
Some venture capitalists and executives at startup companies aren’t worried. They say startups have never been cheaper to build and are maturing faster than fledgling companies did in the last tech boom, partly because the smartphone era creates an easily reachable market of two billion people.
Fast-growing revenue streams help young companies continue to attract investors and stay private longer.
That same magnetic appeal is pushing valuations higher and higher.
More than two-thirds of venture-capital-backed private companies in the U.S. valued at $1 billion or more are backed by a public-market investor
Relentless scrutiny
In private funding rounds, a company only has to convince one investor to set the valuation and then brings in other investors. Prices usually are based on multiyear financial projections. In contrast, startups that go public face relentless scrutiny of their results and forecasts. Their stock prices fluctuate daily.
Among the nine U.S.-listed IPOs since 2014 by venture-backed technology companies that were valued at $1 billion in private fundraising rounds and have since reported annual results, only three have met or exceeded analysts’ consensus profit forecast for that year, according to FactSet.
Online storage is fast becoming commoditized, and Dropbox now competes with Apple, Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc., the world’s four largest tech companies by stock-market value.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bank’s Severance Deal Requires IT Workers To Be Available For Two Years
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/10/19/222207/banks-severance-deal-requires-it-workers-to-be-available-for-two-years
dcblogs points out this story at Computerworld about a severance agreement that requires laid-off IT employees to be available to help out for two years. The article reads in part: “SunTrust Banks in Atlanta is laying off about 100 IT workers as it moves work offshore. But this layoff is unusual for what it is asking of the soon-to-be displaced workers: The bank’s severance agreement requires terminated employees to remain available for two years to provide help if needed, including in-person assistance, and to do so without compensation”
Bank’s severance deal requires IT workers to be on call for two years
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2994787/it-careers/bank-s-severance-deal-requires-it-workers-to-be-on-call-for-two-years.html
Credit: Thinkstock
Employees said SunTrust requires laid-off IT workers to be available to help by phone or in person — without additional pay
Many of the affected IT employees, who are now training their replacements, have years of experience and provide the highest levels of technical support. The proof of their ability may be in the severance requirement, which gives the bank a way to tap their expertise long after their departure.
The bank’s severance includes a “continuing cooperation” clause for a period of two years, where the employee agrees to “make myself reasonably available” to SunTrust
The severance is seen by affected employees as a requirement to provide ongoing technical assistance as needed.
Cooperation agreements are uncommon for mid-level employees and typically apply only to C-Level executives, such as the CFO and CEO, and then usually when there is ongoing litigation, said several attorneys who handle these types of agreements. The SunTrust severance also requires the laid-off workers be available for depositions, hearings and other proceedings.
Tomi Engdahl says:
White House to Feds: Stop buying new PCs, laptops right now
Bean counters halt new gear purchases while it tries to figure out ordering system
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/19/omb_pc_orders/
The Obama Administration has ordered US federal agencies to hold off on purchasing new PCs in hopes of patching up a broken ordering system.
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has put a hold on new desktops and notebooks while it sorts through what it says are “thousands” of new system orders every year.
OMB said that because agencies lack a standardized way to order, maintain, and replace their IT infrastructure, officials are forced to seek out their own contracts and purchase orders to get new PCs, leading to huge accumulated costs in waste.
“There is no need for thousands of contracts to purchase common laptops and desktops,” the OMB said in its order late last week.
Tomi Engdahl says:
First Firms Blocked Porn. Now They Scan for Child Sex Images
Only Ericsson wanted to talk about it.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-19/first-firms-blocked-porn-now-they-scan-for-child-sex-images
Tomi Engdahl says:
openSUSE Leap: Middle ground between cutting edge and conservative
Version 42.1: Life, the universe and everything
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/20/opensuse_leap_opensuse_leap_adoption/
Linux distributions need to walk a fine line. On the one hand users want rock-solid foundations; this is why conservative distros like Debian have long ruled the server. But on the other hand, you want the most up-to-date apps on your desktop, hence the popularity of Ubuntu (rather than Debian) for laptops and PCs.
This can actually be refined a bit more, because the ideal would be to take the underlying tools, the low-level system elements from something really conservative and stable and the userland applications from a latest and greatest source.
If that sounds ideal to you then you might want to have a look at the new project from openSUSE: openSUSE Leap – due next month but now in beta. The core of Leap is SUSE Enterprise Linux, but the userland applications are maintained by openSUSE.
“Maintaining a distribution is a lot of work,” said the openSUSE Leap wiki, “by basing openSUSE on SLE (SUSE Linux Enterprise), the core of openSUSE will be maintained by SUSE engineers … The openSUSE project can then replace and add the bits and pieces of software that contributors want and are willing to maintain.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
At last, UK customers are buying PCs again
As for Europe’s other major territories … less said the better
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/10/20/q3_pc_market_uk_context/
The Brit PC market showed signs of life in Q3, according to official stats from distributors – but the same could not be said for much of the rest of Western Europe.
Sales-out data tracked by Context showed a little over one million (1.056m) notebooks, desktops and workstations found their way into the loving arms of a customer in Q3, up 11.2 per cent year-on-year.
More Reading
We snubbed Microsoft’s Surface Pro wooing, says Lenovo exec
Toshiba CEO: Yeah, we MAY need to chop some heads
Lenovo stock: The channel iceberg is melting
Dell CEO: Very few will survive the PC bloodbath
Insiders BAFFLED: HP split-up inexplicably NOT a disaster
The only other countries in the region to report upward moving sales included Spain (+17.5 per cent), Denmark (+11.2 per cent) and Austria (+4.9 per cent).
The business environment was less busy; with notebooks up 3.1 per cent to 289k and desk-based machines flat with the same period a year ago at 188k.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook, Google, IBM and Lenovo are technology industry LGBT standard bearers
Zuckerberg lead the pack when it comes to positive promotion and inclusion
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2431178/facebook-google-ibm-and-lenovo-are-technology-industry-lgbt-standard-bearers
A STUDY OF THE MOVERS and shakers in the technology industry has found another imbalance to go alongside the gender one: a low proportion of senior lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) staffers.
“In a complex business like ours, we need to be creative about how we solve problems and when we have outstanding employees from a diverse range of backgrounds we consider problems from multiple viewpoints and ultimately develop better solutions.
“Diversity also helps us better understand our customers. At Lenovo we actively celebrate difference and believe it has been one of the reasons behind our success.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Diversity Issue Silicon Valley Isn’t Trying To Fix: Age Discrimination
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/10/19/1313248/the-diversity-issue-silicon-valley-isnt-trying-to-fix-age-discrimination
The tech industry has recognized it isn’t as welcoming to women or minorities as it should be, and is loudly taking steps to solve that issue. Major companies are now releasing diversity reports to highlight their efforts. But as Stephen Levy points out, none of them seem interested in doing something about a different diversity issue that’s been pervading Silicon Valley for years: age discrimination.
And as of last year, the average age at Google was 30; at Facebook, 28; LinkedIn, 29, and Apple, 31. In comparison, the average age in more traditional tech industries like data processing or web publishing was almost 10 years higher than Silicon Valley/Internet firms.
How Can We Achieve Age Diversity in Silicon Valley?
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-can-we-achieve-age-diversity-in-silicon-valley-11a847cb37b7
Silicon Valley has always been prone to buzzwords, often annoying and almost always overused. The latest is an exception: diversity. Suddenly, there’s an explosion of discussion, press, conference panels and even executive attention devoted to expanding the workforces of tech companies into something other than enclaves of white and sometimes Asian males. One result has been a trend towards releasing diversity reports that show how incredibly far we have to go.
In Silicon Valley there is one underrepresented group in particular — one that by law is entitled to fair treatment in hiring and employment practices — that not only has failed to enter this conversation, but is often regarded as anathema when it comes to headcount.
And that is people over 40. Or 45. Or 50, or 60. You know…old people.
In my view, age information should be included in those diversity reports, to underline the need for change— and, even more important, those in charge of company cultures should view age diversity as a plus.
Right now, that’s not happening.
Tomi Engdahl says:
About that IBM hardware revenues dive: Blame storage, says CFO
We’re switching focus, though, says money man
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/20/ibm_storage_hardware_revenues_decline/
IBM’s storage hardware revenues declined by 19 per cent year-on-year in its third 2015 quarter, continuing a four-and-a-half year fall.
IBM CFO Martin Schroeter put IBM’s revenue declines in the context of IBM switching from declining businesses to growing ones: “As we transform our business, we invest where we see higher value over the longer term. We drive growth in the areas where we’re investing, while other areas decline as we shift the business. And we expect to expand margins in our move to higher value. This is how we transform from one era to the next.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Develops Linux ‘Software GPU’ That’s ~29-51x Faster
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/10/20/2213215/intel-develops-linux-software-gpu-thats-29-51x-faster
Intel is open-sourcing their work on creating a high-performance graphics software rasterizer that originally was developed for scientific visualizations. Intel is planning to integrate this new OpenSWR project with Mesa to deploy it on the Linux desktop as a faster software rasterizer than what’s currently available (LLVMpipe). OpenSWR should be ideal for cases where there isn’t a discrete GPU available or the drivers fail to function. This software rasterizer implements OpenGL 3.2
Tomi Engdahl says:
Virtualization does not disappear
Many tasks are handled browser and operating workloads in the cloud. It is a good question, what do we need any more virtualization.
In-depth answer is that we need an IT virtualization, more than ever before. It also sold more than ever.
Virtualization is for all IT layers.
Virtualization allows IT companies to automate their processes
VMware’s strategy is to eliminate silos of information technology, ie boundaries of virtualization. Bins can be found in the cloud, applications, and devices.
Changes are fast company in the world. Often the winners are those capable of reacting rapidly. Applications must be on the market as fast and hard as well as the IT infrastructure has to adapt flexibly to changes.
Virtualization is automation in addition to, above all, the management of information technology.
Application development is a hot topic Container technology. It means the development and roiminnan applications demarcation of independent container.
“Developers love the containers. But it’s maintenance, they are tricky, ”
When a developer wants to create a container application, he does it usually inside virtual machine.
Photon is released as open source.
“The developers taking open source technologies faster than other use. They want to download the code, study it and experiment on your own, ”
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/virtualisointi-ei-katoa-6059252
Tomi Engdahl says:
Antitrust: Commission fines suppliers of optical disc drives € 116 million for cartel
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-5885_en.htm
The European Commission has fined eight optical disc drive suppliers a total of €116 million for having coordinated their behaviour in relation to procurement tenders organised by two computer manufacturers, in breach of EU antitrust rules.
The European Commission has fined eight optical disc drive suppliers a total of €116 million for having coordinated their behaviour in relation to procurement tenders organised by two computer manufacturers, in breach of EU antitrust rules.
Optical disc drives (“ODDs”) read or record data stored on optical disks, such as CDs, DVDs or Blu-ray.
Eight suppliers engaged in the illegal practices covered by this decision, namely Philips, Lite-On, their joint venture Philips & Lite-On Digital Solutions, Hitachi-LG Data Storage, Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology, Sony, Sony Optiarc and Quanta Storage.
Under the Commission’s 2006 Leniency Notice, Philips, Lite-On and their joint venture Philips & Lite-On Digital Solutions received full immunity from fines as they were the first to reveal the existence of the cartel.
The cartelists also avoided leaving traces of anticompetitive arrangements by preferring face-to-face meetings and ensured that the competitors’ discussions were not revealed to customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Official: WD buys SanDisk
19 billion smackeroos wing their way to SanDisk shareholders
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/21/wd_buying_sandisk/
Consolidation in the storage industry is speeding up. One week after Dell decides to buy EMC for $67bn, Western Digital is using Unisplendour money to buy SanDisk for $19bn to create an enterprise and consumer flash powerhouse.
Speculation about a SanDisk purchase by Western Digital has been intense, following in from the $3.8bn Unisplendour investment in Western D.
With this acquisition Western Digital says it will double its addressable market and, crucially, “enable Western Digital to vertically integrate into NAND, securing long-term access to solid state technology at lower cost.” The SanDisk joint venture with Toshiba remains intact and brings WD NVMe and 3D fla
Both Western Digital and SanDisk boards have approved the deal, which is expected to close in the third 2016 quarter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Graphics Expand in the Cloud
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328071&
Graphics are increasingly moving to the cloud for a broad range of users. Vendors delivering remote GPU capabilities will face off at the second-annual Virtualize event in Silicon Valley next week.
Remote graphics servers will “play a meaningful but minority role,” said Jon Peddie, principal of market watcher Jon Peddie Research that is hosting the event. In areas where workstations have had limited success such as with mechanical engineers using AutoCAD, “we expect remote workstation products to outsell traditional desk-side workstations,” he said.
A small Israeli company was the first to use virtualization on GPUs. Graphics chip designer Nvidia was quick to pick up on the technology and now ships its own branded rack-based graphics systems.
Rival AMD followed, selling boards to graphics server makers. It also added capabilities in its GPUs and hypervisor drivers so users could deliver predictable amounts of graphics computing to individual users. Other vendors ranging from processor giant Intel to IP provider Vivante also support the growing trend.
Mechanical engineers are the biggest users of remote graphics. But the market is diverse and includes users in medicine and pharmaceuticals, media and entertainment, as well as energy and science sectors.
The event will include talks from startups about emerging ways to deliver graphics computing. They include browser-based applications using HTML5 and WebGL to deliver display data from apps run on remote graphics servers as well as so-called cloud-paging services the download graphics apps to a client that disappear from the client once the app is closed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PCs Live, Says Dell with Refresh
Desktops target emerging markets
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328058&
Amid a declining PC market, Dell announced at its annual Dell World event here a refreshed line up with systems targeting emerging markets.
With desktop shipments generally declining at a faster rate than notebooks, Dell aimed new small form factor systems at business users in China, Southeast Asia, and parts of Europe with cost sensitivity and a more traditional workforce that goes into an office.
“There’s still 50%-60% of the workforce especially in emerging markets, using desktops,” Raza Haider, executive director for Dell’s Latitude and OptiPlex PCs, told EE Times. “Engineering desktops…into smaller and smaller form factors is allowing companies to deploy desktops in very flexible, and in many cases, new usage models — we think the desktop is absolutely here to stay,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Digital Health of Body, Mind and Community
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328066&
Words, data, sounds and images can be digitized easily, but can medicine be digitized; can health care be transmitted by ones and zeroes?
I recently attended the Health 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley (www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/health-20-presents-the-final-agenda-for-the-9th-annual-fall-conference-2015-300133997.html) where leaders in health care met with innovators and entrepreneurs in the digital realm to find common ground and a common path forward.
Certainly, the digital revolution is coming to health care. And the impact will be as beneficial, and as disruptive, as it has been in music, publishing, the auto industry, and so many other fields.
Everyone involved in heath care in any way—from parents struggling to insure their children, to hospital executives facing closure of their facilities—knows the current system is broken beyond repair. We cannot bend the cost curve, health industry leaders say; we have to break it.
‘Analog’ health care that we’ve known since childhood—of physicals and workups done with needles and stethoscopes—is going digital, even as the need for health care increases due to longer life expectancies.
Numerous issues delayed the transition to digital health, doctor-patient confidentiality, and FDA regulations among others, but it’s happening now and accelerating rapidly.
Physicians must now learn about big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), open source, and analytics. And at the same time, digital engineers have to become familiar with ACA, ACO, EHR, HIPPA and HIMSS.
And looking out only 5-10 years, Artificial Intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and the merging of human and machine intelligence will force us to rethink the very notion of what it means to be alive; to be human; to be conscious. To have a soul?
And in spite of HIPPA’s tight security, what if the data is breached, destroying doctor-patient confidentiality? The entire practice of medicine is based on Trust: only a physician can ask a stranger to disrobe; only surgeons are allowed to cut open another’s body.
There are many issues before us as we begin this epoch-making transition to digital health care. And for everyone involved, whether MD, EE, VC or retiree, it’s the first day of school.
But to fulfill the promise of digital health care fully, it is necessary to go beyond re-active cures and prevention practices, to the pro-active practice of wellness.
And it is here that the traditional notion of ‘health care’ opens up to a much wider vista.
The ultimate success of the merging of digital technology and health care depends on the creation of a truly holistic approach to medicine; one that goes beyond curing and preventing, to living a healthy life in a healthy society.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Updategate: Developer creates app to block unwanted Windows 10 updates
Exclusive But you can change your mind
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2425381/microsoft-is-downloading-windows-10-to-your-machine-just-in-case
A FORMER HP employee has designed an app to give users of Windows 7 and 8 control over if and when they wish to upgrade to Windows 10.
Win10WiWi (Windows 10, When I Want It) reclaims storage taken up with unwanted upgrade files, removes and hides the Windows Updates causing the actions to be triggered and ensures that no telemetry data is being recorded, all with a few button clicks.
What’s particularly neat, however, is that designer Yves Gattegno has also ensured that the process is reversible, allowing users to update to Windows 10 in the same few clicks.
Gattegno, founder of French consulting company SysStreaming, told The INQUIRER: “I think that it is really great from Microsoft to offer the possibility of a free upgrade to their latest operating system, but users should have the choice not to do so.
“There are many reasons why a particular user would not want to upgrade to Windows 10, including not wanting to take the risk to break something that is working. If it is working, don’t fix it!”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell looks to become ‘enterprise solutions powerhouse’ with raft of products and services
Outlines a number of changes to help businesses make their IT strategies “future ready”
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2431486/dell-looks-to-become-enterprise-solutions-powerhouse-with-raft-of-products-and-services
AUSTIN: DELL HAS UNVEILED a slew of products, softwares and services for the enterprise in a bid to more aggressively become a onestop-shop for business requiring various IT needs.
“Customers want fewer suppliers, not more. And research from our executive summit and CIOs haas told us ‘you’re making our jobs a lot easier.’”
An obvious announcement which Dell discussed in the keynote that highlights the firm’s aim to achieve this growing enterprise focus is the recent buy out of big data company EMC.
Dell announced the purchase of EMC last week, which at $67bn is the largest technology merger of all time, topping Avago Technologies’ $37bn acquisition of Raspberry Pi chipmaker Broadcom in May.
However, a big and relatively newer area that Dell is pushing into with its increasingly focus to provide end-to-end solutions for the enterprise is the Internet of Things (IoT) space with the announcement of the Edge Gateway 5000 series.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Migraine in the mainframe: Unisys reports more losses
Decline chalked up to licence renewal instability
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/22/unisys_reports_more_disappointing_results/
Mainframe maker Unisys posted yet more disappointing results for, recording a net loss of $9.6m (£6m) for its third quarter results. Revenue was $739m (£477m), down 16 per cent on last year.
Anthony Miller, analyst at TechMarketView, noted the firm’s hardware revenue halved and services revenues declined by 8 per cent.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung Demos PCIe NVMe SSD At 5.6 GB Per Second, 1 Million IOPS
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/10/22/0348235/samsung-demos-pcie-nvme-ssd-at-56-gb-per-second-1-million-iops
Samsung decided to show off their latest SSD wares at Dell World 2015 with two storage products that are sure to impress data center folks. Up and running on display, Samsung showcased their PM1725 drive, which is a half-height, half-length (HHHL) NVMe SSD that will be one of the fastest on the market when it ships later this year. It sports transfer speeds of 5500MB/sec for sequential reads and 1800MB/s for writes.
Samsung Demos Crazy-Fast PCIe NVMe SSD At 5.6 GB Per Second At Dell World
Read more at http://hothardware.com/news/samsung-demos-crazy-fast-pcie-nvme-ssd-at-56-gb-per-second-showcases-16tb-ssd-at-dell-world#Wu5JWjpvJ4vQR3Q8.99
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open Source Survey Cites Value
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328002&
In a recent survey commissioned by the Linux Foundation, users of open source code quantified and qualified its value to their R&D operations.
Open source practices have been revolutionizing the way we build software for a while now. Besides providing a wealth of low-cost and well-built components, open source software has been the catalyst behind some of the most exciting new technology developments of our time: cloud computing, software-defined networking, online software delivery and more. Open source practices are also beginning to impact hardware engineering via initiatives such as the maker movement, 3D printing and low-cost platforms such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi.
It’s clear that innovation in the software space today is largely driven by open source, but the value of that innovation hasn’t been as clear. The Linux Foundation recently set out to understand the R&D value of the code developed collectively among more than 500 companies and thousands of developers. This research and resulting data is interesting, and we think important for both business managers and engineers.
Linux Foundation Publication “2014 Enterprise End User Report”
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linux-foundation/linux-end-user-trends-report-2014
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft FY 2016 Q1 Results: Cloud Growth And PC Slowdown
by Brett Howse on October 22, 2015 6:35 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9739/microsoft-fy-2016-q1-results-cloud-growth-and-pc-slowdown
Today Microsoft released their earnings from the first quarter of fiscal year 2016. Revenue fell 12% year-over-year to $20.4 billion for the quarter, driven by a 17% decline in revenue from their More Personal Computing segment. Operating income for the quarter was $5.8 billion, with gross margin at 64.6%. Despite the revenue decline, net income rose 2% to $4.6 billion, with earnings per share beating expectations at $0.57.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell Preps Semi-Custom Servers
DSS systems part of expanding cloud bid
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328093&
Dell unveiled new data center servers at its annual Dell World conference, targeting custom and semi-custom network infrastructure and storage for tier-two cloud providers and other users. The news comes days after the company announced a $67 billion bid for storage giant EMC, aiming for a loftier role in cloud computing.
Dell’s new Datacenter Scalable Solutions (DSS) consist of four new servers using a custom/semi-custom model to serve customers that fall in between the top 10 data centers and mainstream business users. The DSS products are intended to complement Dell’s existing DCS line which is geared for some of the world’s largest data centers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Microsoft Surface Book First Look
by Brett Howse on October 21, 2015 9:01 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9732/the-microsoft-surface-book-first-look
Today is the official launch day for not only Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4, but also the Surface Book which was announced back at the Microsoft Windows 10 Devices event.
The Surface Book is a very interesting take on the Ultrabook by Microsoft. I’ll need some more time with it to get a full review completed, but initial impressions are that it’s a solid device with a great display, a good keyboard, and a generous trackpad. The overall device is not as thin or light as some other Ultrabooks, but generally those don’t pack in 70 Wh of battery and a real GPU. Stay tuned for a full review soon.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP To Shut Down Its OpenStack Based Public Cloud
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/10/23/125231/hp-to-shut-down-its-openstack-based-public-cloud
Hewlett-Packard, which has been backing off on ambitious public cloud plans for a year, is now calling it quits, sunsetting HP Helion Public cloud in January 2016. in a buzzword-laden blog post, the company says its building out support for interoperability with Amazon and Microsoft public cloud offerings to provide options for customers who require such functionality.
Hewlett-Packard throws in the towel on public cloud
http://fortune.com/2015/10/21/hp-public-cloud/
Hewlett-Packard, which has been backing off on ambitious public cloud plans for a year, is now calling it quits, sunsetting HP Helion Public cloud in January 2016.
Hewlett-Packard, which has spent the past year downplaying what had once been an aggressive push into the business of providing a “public cloud,” is exiting that business altogether.
The company will “sunset” its product, HP Helion Public Cloud, on Jan. 31, 2016, according to a new blog post by Bill Hilf, senior vice president of HP Cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will the child be allowed to use the tablet PC? Experts advise
It is not strange, if your children know how to use the tablet computers and other digital devices before they can read.
However, the impact of digital equipment on child development has been the dissenting opinions. In the United States to promote the health of children by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommended the use of digital devices has been quite restrictive.
Now, however, the recommendations have changed. In the background is a group of experts published a report (pdf), which was drawn up by the educational scientists, children’s doctors, neuroscientists, educators, media scholars and representatives of the social sciences.
Still the question is not whether or not the children use the digital devices, but how they are used.
The use of digital equipment can provide benefits, for example, learning, self-discipline and problem-solving. At the same time, parents need to understand the drawbacks of the use of digital devices.
Parents should work together with the children to use the equipment.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/saako-lapsen-antaa-kayttaa-taulutietokonetta-asiantuntijat-neuvovat-6059857
Paper:
Growing Up Digital: Media Research Symposium
https://www.aap.org/en-us/Documents/digital_media_symposium_proceedings.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Patrick Caldwell / Mother Jones:
After billions spent, lack of interoperability among electronic health record providers like Epic still hampers data exchange for many doctors
Epic Fail
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/epic-systems-judith-faulkner-hitech-ehr-interoperability
Nestled in the gently rolling hills of Verona, Wisconsin, a small Madison suburb, is the 1,000-acre “Intergalactic Headquarters” of Epic Systems, the multibillion-dollar company that claims its software manages medical records for 179 million Americans—or 56 percent of the country.
Judith Faulkner, Epic’s 72-year-old founder and one of just 18 women on Forbes’ list of self-made billionaires, often dresses in costume (Lucille Ball, a Hogwarts wizard) at the company’s annual meeting
She’s solid on the second two points. Thanks to the White House’s stimulus-era initiative to bring the health care industry into the digital age, her company has grown into the country’s leading vendor of software in the $9.3 billion electronic health records (EHR) sector. Epic pulled in $1.8 billion in 2014 and is expanding at a rate of about 1,000 new employees a year. Kaiser Permanente, CVS’s Minute Clinics, Johns Hopkins, and Mount Sinai all use Epic.
But instead of ushering in a new age of secure and easily accessible medical files, Epic has helped create a fragmented system that leaves doctors unable to trade information across practices or hospitals. That hurts patients who can’t be assured that their records—drug allergies, test results, X-rays—will be available to the doctors who need to see them. This is especially important for patients with lengthy and complicated health histories. But it also means we’re all missing out on the kind of system-wide savings that President Barack Obama predicted nearly seven years ago, when the federal government poured billions of dollars into digitizing the country’s medical records.
“Within five years, all of America’s medical records are computerized,” he announced in January 2009
The expensive (and potentially life-threatening) problems associated with the country’s antiquated, hodgepodge health records system were exactly what the Obama administration set out to solve in early 2009.
Epic is like the Microsoft Office of health care software—more comprehensive than its competitors, even if its individual parts are kind of meh.
In terms of bringing digital records to practices across the country, the HITECH Act has unquestionably succeeded: The percentage of US hospitals using digital records skyrocketed from 9.4 to 75.5 percent between 2008 and 2014. But the HITECH Act didn’t prioritize “interoperability”—the ability to transfer a medical file from one hospital to another. Unless programmers ensure that their system properly integrates with another, a doctor’s computer might spit out something akin to emoticons when queried for key test results.
A 2014 RAND report singled out Epic as a roadblock to interoperability. With the company’s rise, researchers wrote, came an increasingly walled-off system. “By subsidizing ‘where the industry is’ rather than where it needed to go,” the report said, the government propped up an EHR market “that did not have the level of connectivity envisioned by the authors of the HITECH Act.”
Doctors are investing the time to input data, but their offices are still having to fax and mail records like they did a decade ago.
And since last year, Epic has paid lobbyist Bradford Card, the brother of George W. Bush’s former chief of staff, more than $130,000 to convince members of Congress that the company plays well with others. Card has said Epic has been the “subject of misinformation” suggesting “they’re not interoperable, when in fact they are.”
Epic is not the only barrier to a seamless medical records system. Thanks to legislative maneuvering by former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) in 1999, the federal government can’t fund any sort of system with unique health care identification numbers. (Paul saw individual medical IDs as further creep of Big Brother.) Social Security numbers aren’t a good fill-in; they’re not on insurance cards, and in April Obama signed a bill that will strike them from Medicare cards in order to reduce identity theft.
The upshot is that according to a government report released in August, only 56 percent of hospitals had received electronic records from other practices in the past year—and just 40 percent of those had successfully merged the information into their own databases.
Last spring, five Republican senators wrote a letter to federal regulators asking, “What have the American people gotten for their $35 billion investment?” Digitization of records was supposed to “save the Medicaid and Medicare programs $12.5 billion through 2019,” they wrote, but those savings have yet to materialize, and “the cost of sharing data among different vendors” has prevented doctors at competing practices from swapping patient information.
Thanks to the ecosystem set up by Epic and others, I don’t have peace of mind that my medical history would be available in a pinch.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jonah Bromwich / New York Times:
Inside the Unicode Consortium and how it decides which emojis to officially support — How Emojis Find Their Way to Phones — An obscure organization that standardizes the way punctuation marks and other text are represented by computer systems has in recent years found itself at the forefront …
How Emojis Find Their Way to Phones
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/technology/how-emojis-find-their-way-to-phones.html
An obscure organization that standardizes the way punctuation marks and other text are represented by computer systems has in recent years found itself at the forefront of mobile pop culture, with its power to create new emojis.
A new batch is under review, a process that takes months.
The Unicode Consortium is sometimes labeled “mysterious” (as in a recent post from New York magazine) but Mr. Davis said there was nothing shadowy about it. Its work is largely transparent, and information about its history, members and processes are included on its website.
The group includes executives from Apple, Google, Facebook and other technology giants. Mr. Davis is chief internationalization architect at Google. The group meets quarterly; at a meeting in May, they will vote on whether to formally induct the 67 new emojis.
Unicode was started in the late 1980s to develop a standardized code for text characters.
Take Colin Rothfels, who works for a keyboard company. His job title? “Emoji grammarian.”
“We’ve had this vocabulary kind of dropped on us and different kinds of people are finding different ways to use it,” Mr. Rothfels said. “Obviously it’s a very limited language, if you want to call it a language.”
Before the 67 new emojis can be the building blocks of language or personal style though, they will have to be made official.
“These don’t magically appear once we approve them,” Mr. Davis. said. “Manufacturers have to put them on their phones. But once they are approved in the May meeting, then vendors will typically go ahead and start working on them.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg Business:
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s strong earnings highlight the benefit of a head start in cloud services over legacy IT firms
The Cloud Is Raining Cash on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/the-cloud-is-raining-cash-on-amazon-google-and-microsoft
Each company’s impressive earnings can be attributed to a shift in the industry that’s punishing a slew of legacy firms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Coding Academies — Useful Or Nonsense?
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/10/25/2019227/coding-academies—-useful-or-nonsense
Stephen Nichols, CEO of a platform that helps non-coders create simple video games, thinks that so-called coding academies are essentially snake oil. “In 20+ years of professional coding, I’ve never seen someone go from novice to full-fledged programmer in a matter of weeks, yet that seems to be what coding academies are promising, alongside instant employment, a salary big enough to afford a Tesla and the ability to change lives.” His point is reminiscent of Peter Norvig’s in “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.”
Coding Academies Are Nonsense
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/23/coding-academies-are-nonsense/
In 20+ years of professional coding, I’ve never seen someone go from novice to full-fledged programmer in a matter of weeks, yet that seems to be what coding academies are promising, alongside instant employment, a salary big enough to afford a Tesla and the ability to change lives.
It’s an ingenious business model. There’s a dearth of skilled coders in the marketplace to fill the five million computing jobs available in this country. For somewhere between free and $36,000, you learn to program computers in less than a year. If you’re one of the lucky few, you will hit your aha moment with programming and develop a personal passion for it, as well land a real job.
In 15 years, those hard-won skills will be obsolete — if they ever stuck in the first place. Despite their promises, coding academies don’t manufacture coders. They cast wide nets to discover new talent that has not yet been exposed to code. Most people don’t find coding enthralling or interesting enough to continue to pursue it as a career. Given the changing nature of software, they probably shouldn’t.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Why is everyone in such a rush?
Walk into any bookstore, and you’ll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours.
The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else.
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.
It may be that 10,000 hours, not 10 years, is the magic number. Or it might be some other metric; Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) said “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” True expertise may take a lifetime
Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullet identified a three-part plan for finding great software designers:
1. Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.
2. Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect and carefully keep a career file.
3. Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and stimulate each other.