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:
Surprisingly, says Ars Technica’s review of Amazon’s $50 Fire tablet, it doesn’t suck.
“There’s simply very little reason to spend more when you can get 90 percent of the functionality for a fraction of the price,”
Amazon’s $50 Fire tablet reviewed: Surprisingly, it doesn’t suck
It won’t win any speed or design awards, but it does everything a tablet needs to.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/amazons-50-fire-tablet-review-suprisingly-it-doesnt-suck/
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Composable infrastructure’: new servers give software more to define
Cisco, Intel, IBM and HP are bridging virtualisation and the software-defined data centre
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/26/composable_infrastructure_servers_that_give_software_more_to_define/
“Composable infrastructure” is a term you’re about to start hearing a lot more, and the good news is that while it is marketing jargon behind the shiny is pleasing advances in server design that will advance server virtualisation and private clouds.
The new term has its roots in server virtualisation, which is of course an eminently sensible idea that anyone sensible uses whenever possible. Intel and AMD both gave server virtualisation a mighty shunt forward with their respective virtualisation extensions that equipped their CPUs with the smarts to help multiple virtual machines to do their thing at once.
Servers have changed shape and components in the years since server virtualisation boomed. But now they’re changing more profoundly.
Exhibit A is the M-series of Cisco’s UCS servers, which offer shared storage, networking, cooling and power to “cartridges” that contain RAM and CPU. Cisco’s idea is that instead of having blade servers with dedicated resources, the M-series allows users to assemble components into servers with their preferred configurations, with less overhead than is required to operate virtual machines that span different boxes or touch a SAN for resources.
In a composable infrastructure world, APIs make it possible for code to whip up the servers it wants. That’s important, because composable infrastructure is seen as a bridge between server virtualisation and the software-defined data centre. The thinking is that infrastructure that allows itself to be configured gives software more to define, which is probably a good thing.
HP has announced it plans to get into the composable caper and like Cisco uses the “composable infrastructure” moniker.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s newest product is another shot at Apple
http://fortune.com/2015/10/26/microsoft-flagship-store/
The tech giant is opening a store on Fifth Avenue in New York, four blocks from Apple’s famed glass cube store.
Microsoft’s first-ever flagship store opens on New York City’s upscale Fifth Avenue shopping strip at noon Eastern on Monday, as the tech giant expands its retail footprint in an ongoing effort to challenge Apple’s brick-and-mortar success.
Since 2009, Microsoft has launched more than 110 retail locations in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico
Tomi Engdahl says:
Robin Wauters / Tech.eu:
Skype, Spotify, and others create European Tech Alliance lobbying group to influence policy-making
European tech companies create new EU lobbying group, headed by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström
http://tech.eu/brief/european-tech-alliance/
Today sees the launch of the European Tech Alliance, which aims to represent Europe’s technology ‘scale-ups’ to influence policymaking at EU governments and institutions.
Headed by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, now the founder and CEO of VC firm Atomico, the brand new lobbying group intends to “share their experience of building their businesses in Europe with policymakers” and “contribute to the Commission’s Digital Single Market strategy“.
“We have formed an alliance to share our collective experience with policymakers and challenge mindsets about Europe, technology, and the Internet. There are so many European tech company success stories. We think we will be able to help European leaders understand that Europe is good at tech and show how policymakers can clear the way for the tech industry to grow further.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stacey Higginbotham / Fortune:
Intel acquires cognitive computing software startup Saffron
Intel buys Saffron AI because it can’t afford to miss the next big thing in tech again
http://fortune.com/2015/10/26/intel-buys-saffron/
The deal will pit Intel against IBM.
Intel is buying Saffron AI, a startup in Cary, North Carolina that makes a cognitive computing platform that is reminiscent of IBM’s Watson technology. The chip giant announced the deal Monday but did not disclose a price.
Saffron’s software takes in a variety of data on a topic provided by the client and then parses similarities and relationships to “learn” about that topic. Saffron has purportedly created software that mimics human reasoning and memory that it applies to problems for clients as well as its own natural language processing
Intel’s role in this digital overload is threefold. First it wants to put as many chips as it can into what are called the edge devices—the laptops, watches, gateways or any devices that we may interact with or that gathers information from the world and feeds it back to the network.
The second opportunity is where Intel feels at home, which is in making general purpose chips for the servers that process all of this information and generally power the data centers that comprise “the cloud.”
But the third opportunity is a mix of both of those things and is where the Saffron acquisition enters the picture. As the computer industry demands more from processors, it’s trying to turn what were general-purpose chips into something that’s designed to do a very specific job.
At a certain level, an industry demands dedication, and that is happening in computing when it comes to artificial intelligence. That’s one reason Intel is spending $16.7 billion to buy Altera.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Businesses must embrace digital transformation
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/business-intelligence/5488/businesses-must-embrace-digital-transformation
Hitachi Data Systems’ research revealed 81 per cent of companies aren’t set up with the digital age in mind
Hitachi Data Systems has revealed most businesses aren’t prepared for modern working, particularly when it comes to digital transformation and the use of cloud services.
The research, which questioned 200 IT decision-makers from UK organisations with more than 1,000 employees, revealed a staggering 81 per cent don’t think their companies are set up for the digital age, which puts cloud-based systems and services at the forefront of processes.
Additionally, 75 per cent of IT leaders are unable to make informed investment decisions, because the data is not available to show how investments should be made and business strategies are not clear enough.
However, nine out of ten IT leaders recognise that effectively storing, retrieving and analysing data can identify future revenue streams, yet 87 per cent said they are facing barriers to using big data.
“Technology plays an integral role in helping UK organisations transform to thrive in a digital economy, but only if there is consensus about which technologies are relevant to future growth and about the ability to adapt to these known priorities,” explained Richard Gadd, UK managing director at Hitachi Data Systems.
“This isn’t about innovating for innovation’s sake, it’s about UK organisations having the ability to garner valuable business insights to make informed technology investments that will drive future growth and enable [them] to redefine business agility.”
Another surprisingly high statistic from the research was that 90 per cent of IT leaders don’t think their organisation is agile enough to respond to the changes in the industry they work in, meaning they are likely to lag behind forward-thinking competitors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kangaroo is an amazing $99 Windows 10 portable PC
http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/26/kangaroo-is-an-amazing-99-windows-10-portable-pc/
InFocus today debuted the Kangaroo, a $99 Windows 10 portable PC that “goes anywhere and works with any screen.” The term “mobile desktop” may seem like an oxymoron, but that really is the best description: Picture your typical desktop PC tower shrunk down to the size of a phablet sans screen; just like any desktop, you’ll still need to connect a mouse, keyboard, and monitor. Kangaroo is available on Newegg now, and will go on sale at the Microsoft Store by mid-November.
The pitch is simple: Kangaroo offers the power of a cheap full-sized computer with the convenience and mobility of a cell phone. The black satin aluminum device is powered by an Intel Cherrytrail (Z8500) SOC, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (only about 18GB is free when you first start it, but storage is expandable via a microSD card), and an on-board battery (up to four hours of “casual use”). The standalone Kangaroo Dock, which you can swap out for other future docks, includes an HDMI port and two USB ports.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Now Displaying Full-Screen Windows 10 Upgrade Notifications on Windows 7
http://news.softpedia.com/news/microsoft-now-displaying-full-screen-windows-10-upgrade-notifications-on-windows-7-495283.shtml
Earlier this year, Microsoft started showing Windows 10 upgrade notifications on Windows 7 computers in order to make sure that everyone was aware of the free offer that was available to those running a previous version of the operating system.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Slashdot: Open Tools For Logbooks and Note-taking?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/15/10/26/130236/ask-slashdot-open-tools-for-logbooks-and-note-taking
I’m a sysadmin and I like to record my daily work in a logbook: technical notes, work progress, actions from meetings, etc. I started with the word processor on the venerable Psion Series 3a but for about 10 years I’ve been using Amaya.
Amaya is a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web.
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
Comments:
Sometimes we just like to use something else after doing the same thing for 10 years. There is no harm in asking to see if there is an alternative.
As long as something still works, find new ways to enjoy what you have.
Emacs org mode can do notes perfectly, comes with selective archiving, and you can even schedule tasks and even record what time you spend on what. It’s free form, exports to plenty of useful formats, the table mode is plain genius, and, of course, it’s Emacs.
While Google Keep is cross platform, it isn’t FLOSS but I still haven’t found anything that matches it.
Pros:
Major cross Platform support: Windows (Chrome app), Mac (Chrome app), Linux (Chrome app), iOS, Android
Offline note taking support
Syncing across platforms
Quick
Multi media input types: Text, lists, audio, image/photo,
Reminders
Can be shared
No services to manage
Cons:
Not FLOSS
No public API
May disappear because it is a good product :-/
I would similarly also suggest Microsoft’s OneNote for all the same reasons. It’s probably the best Microsoft product that you’re not using.
Note: This solution has been available for many years and will be available for many more years without any changes. Also – there are some benefits where pen and paper (With date) is considered reliable in court – computer notes may not be because of the lack of dating and change control.
Back when I was in support I used to open up Notepad and put .LOG on the first line. When you do that, every time you open Notepad it puts the time and date on a line for you. It was quick and easy to do that while on the phone. I
Site logs are a terrific means of communicating and they’ve saved my butt many times. I’ve used elog very, very successfully:
https://midas.psi.ch/elog/
FYI, here’s the open source alternatives listed for Amaya on the alternativeto site for all platforms (sorry about the trail-offs in some of the descriptions, but I’m not digging down that far):
KompoZer
Bluefish Editor
BlueGriffon
NVU
Quanta Plus
ACE (Ajax Code Editor)
Openbexi
Tomi Engdahl says:
PCIe Update: Power, IoT, storage, OCuLink, simulation, and equalization
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/eye-on-standards/4439823/PCIe-Update–Power–IoT–storage–OCuLink–simulation–and-equalization
Low power, IoT, mobile apps, and anticipation of Gen 4 headlined the 2015 PCI-SIG Developer’s conference—though traditional PCIe applications on HPC (high performance computing) and PC (not as high performance computing) platforms remained the standard’s leading role.
First things first: PCIe stands for peripheral component interface express. It has been around for decades and shows every sign of fulfilling a prophecy made three years ago: “All future client-based storage attachments will use PCI-Express.”
When we say IoT (internet of things), what we really mean is low power and big data from billions of networked gadgets.
Ramin Neshati, Intel engineer and PCI-SIG’s Marketing Workgroup Chair, as well as the seer who made the above prophecy, emphasized that “The Low Power Initiative is not new!” Half swing specifications that operate at 400 mW have been around since the 2.5 Gb/s first generation of PCIe. There will be a new 200 mW quarter swing state included in Gen 4. Their goal for standby L1 sub-states is to get down to microwatts.
PCIe has been going mobile for years with M-PCIe adapted to operate over MIPI’s low-power M-PHY.
PCIe’s prowess stands out in moving the massive amount of data created by IoT doodads.
Neshati’s prediction from 2012 about PCIe storage is embodied in NVMe (non-volatile memory express)—the spec for PCIe-SSD interconnects. The proliferation of SSD (solid state drive) storage renders several support features for spinning disks in SAS (serial attached SCSI; small computer system interface) and SATA (serial advanced technology attachment) nearly obsolete. Without that overhead, NVMe is a friendlier technology. Now add in SFF-8639 (small form factor) connectors that support everything, and PCIe makes an obvious hot-pluggable backbone for high-density SSD storage attachments.
The spec covering the best acronym in the business, OCuLink (optical/copper link) is out for final review. Neshati said that it’s “pretty much done.” Expect to see version 1.0 of the spec this autumn. OCuLink specifies wide bandwidth (up to 32 Gb/s in PCIe gen 3) cables that can be many meters long. It’s up to the manufacturer whether they use fibers or wires, as long as the cables comply with the signal integrity specifications.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs Say New Talent and Old Tech Don’t Mix
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/10/28/228252/cios-say-new-talent-and-old-tech-dont-mix
Usually when an article references “what keeps IT leaders up at night,” it’s a chance to talk about “shadow IT,” losing control of tech spending, hackers, or some other overly-hyped concept. Adam Dennison, publisher at IDG Enterprise, opposes this interview tactic and says that “reports of pain are greatly exaggerated.” IT leaders don’t mind shadow IT or sharing control of the IT budget (in fact, they want others in the business to have some skin in the game), and they understand that they are probably being hacked. What they DO care about is talent. Dennison points out gaps in data, security, and app development, based on IDG’s recent survey, and he says CIOs tell him that finding the right IT talent that is also able to articulate what the business needs to succeed with technology is very difficult.
Talent, not shadow IT or hackers, is what keeps CIOs up at night
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2015/10/talent-not-shadow-it-or-hackers-what-keeps-cios-night
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): Shadow IT, hackers, losing control of tech spending – these are highly cited as top of mind concerns for CIOs today. How have your conversations with CIOs supported or contradicted those key pain points?
Dennison: I’ve spoken with a lot of CIOs in my role and at various events, and while those are indeed issues they deal with every day, I think the reports of “pain” are greatly exaggerated. For example, many of the CIOs I know have started referring to shadow IT as shadow innovation. Rather than staying awake from worry, CIOs are trying to figure out how they can adapt a cool technology project that someone is leading in marketing or in the retail arm, learn from it, and bring it across the whole organization. CIOs tell me that shadow IT happens, they expect it, and that it ebbs and flows. If it escalates into a problem, then CIOs take full responsibility
Increasingly fractured budgets is another pain point that is routinely touted to be plaguing IT leaders, often backed up by the three year-old Gartner prediction that by 2017 the CMO would be spending more on IT than the CIO.
You could say security and hackers are worrisome for CIOs, but again, I don’t think it’s keeping them up at night. They understand that they’re probably being hacked. And if they haven’t been yet, they’re going to be. More worrisome is how to find enough time in the day to get out in front of the issue and manage their overall risk profile so that when security issues do arise, they are fully prepared. But getting through the massive to-do list on any CIO’s desk in a given day is a problem that isn’t going to go away any time soon.
TEP: If these concerns aren’t keeping CIOs up at night, what is?
Dennison: There is one pain point that I hear from almost every CIO I speak with, and this one may in fact be keeping them up at night: talent. And I’m not just referring to talent shortages (our most recent CIO survey revealed talent gaps in the areas of data, security, and app development). The issues with talent go beyond hiring as CIOs struggle to build and retain teams that can handle the fast-moving, ever-changing needs of digital transformation.
I recently spoke with the CIO of an Ivy League institution who told me they have a firing problem, not a hiring problem. I’ve spoken with large organizations that have huge staffs, and they worry that they can’t move fast enough to adopt the technology they need because the new IT talent doesn’t want to work on the old stuff, and the old talent doesn’t understand the new stuff.
Finding the right IT talent that is also able to understand and articulate what the business needs to succeed with technology is very challenging. As the lines between business and IT continue to blur, I think resolving this pain point will be critical to a CIO’s digital transformation efforts.
2015 State of the CIO
http://www.cio.com/article/2862760/cio-role/2015-state-of-the-cio.html
Our 14th annual State of the CIO research, based on a survey of 558 IT chiefs, shows that compensation is up, but the job is super-challenging and business expectations are high. CIOs continue to struggle with balancing the need for innovation with the need to keep IT operations humming along efficiently and securely. Some CIOs are perceived as business leaders, or at least partners. But, candidly, some CIOs are falling short, as some business colleagues still see IT as an obstacle to business success.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This Is Not Your Father’s FORTRAN
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/this-is-not-your-fathers-fortran/
Origins and FORTRAN IV
[John W. Backus] suggested to IBM a language to replace assembly language. Development began in 1953 for the IBM 704 and the project reached fruition in 1957. Not only was it the first general purpose high-level language, just beating out COBOL and LISP, but its compiler optimized the code since it needed to compete head-on with assembly language. It was the C compiler of its day in that regard.
That was not the only reason it attained success. Reducing the number of punched cards needed for a program by a factor of 20 over assembly helped considerably.
In those days, you needed to use a key punch to create a deck of punch cards.
GOTO the Future
Despite its age Fortran, as it is now called, continues to survive and possibly even prosper at its job of scientific and engineering calculations. It is true that C++ is now making inroads, but it has a long way to go before it is the king of calculations.
One reason Fortran does well is the extensive collection of legacy code from the previous decades. You don’t rewrite code that took man decades to produce, is debugged, and known to work well. Even the open-source community recognizes this since the GNU compiler suite, usually known for C and C++, includes a modern Fortran compiler. This isn’t really surprising because after the first phases of compilation are completed the generation of the machine code is common to all of the suites’ languages. Those first phases are the easy part.
The language has been regularly updated by the standards committees, including the ANSI standards group once it came into existence. FORTRAN IV came out in 1962. It was followed by updates in ’66, ’77, ’90, ’95, 2003, and 2008. Work is currently proceeding on Fortran 2015 to be released in 2018.
It’s Not Dead, Jim
The language isn’t dead, although it doesn’t show up on the popularity charts. A quick search on LinkedIn found 9 jobs in Houston, and many more around the US, with the requirement of knowing Fortran. Most also wanted C/C++ which reflects how the three languages are commingling. I would expect most of those who use Fortran aren’t using it for hacking so GitHub doesn’t see many uploads, which seems to be a main measure of popularity.
Additionally, Fortran is a niche language and I mean that in a positive sense. Where Fortran is used, it is the language to use. That is, of course, high performance and scientific computing. A few specifics are weather forecasting, climate modeling, and computational physics, astronomy, chemistry, and economics. It’s used by investment houses for financial modeling.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open-Source GPU Drivers Show Less Than Ideal Experience For SteamOS/Linux Gaming
http://games.slashdot.org/story/15/10/29/180222/open-source-gpu-drivers-show-less-than-ideal-experience-for-steamoslinux-gaming
Phoronix’s recent 22-Way SteamOS Graphics Card Comparison showed that NVIDIA wins across the board when it comes to closed-source OpenGL driver performance. However, when it comes to the open-source driver performance for Steam Linux gaming, no one is really the winner.
“Are The Open-Source Graphics Drivers Good Enough For Steam Linux Gaming?” answers that question with “heck no” by its author.
22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA & AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS For Steam Linux Gaming
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=steamos-22-gpus&num=1
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP announces Helion OpenStack 2.0 with SDN and security patch management
Company’s last enterprise hoorah before Splitsville
By Chris Merriman
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2432625/hp-announces-helion-openstack-20-with-sdn-and-security-patch-management
HP HAS USED the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo to announce the arrival of HP Helion OpenStack 2.0, the second iteration of the company’s customised version of OpenStack, and what is likely to be the last major announcement before the company officially splits in two on Monday.
The OpenStack platform is proving hugely popular with a variety of vendors, and the Helion implementation adds a number of new features.
Provisioning of new infrastructure and amending existing infrastructure with zero downtime are joined by rolling upgrade paths that can permeate entire clouds without taking them down.
Patch management is also made continuous so that systems can be patched without even breaking application availability.
Helion OpenStack 2.0 adheres strictly to the OpenStack API and is therefore able to offer cross-compatibility with other OpenStack deployments and the growing number of third-party plugins.
“The configuration, security and scalability advances in HP Helion OpenStack 2.0 enable organisations to deploy OpenStack technology into production with the confidence that they are backed by the experience and support of a trusted end-to-end technology partner.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell and Microsoft buddy up for Azure-based hybrid solution
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/hybrid-cloud/5477/dell-and-microsoft-buddy-up-for-azure-based-hybrid-solution
Announcement at Dell World 2015 will bring managed Azure to companies of all sizes
Not content with acquiring EMC and all the cloudy goodness that brings with it, Dell has announced another new hybrid cloud system of its own, jointly developed with Microsoft.
The snappily named Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft was introduced by Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the Dell World opening keynote and is built around the new Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard.
“We have had a very successful launch of the premium Cloud Platform System and now we’re going to democratise it and make it more accessible to every business [of] any size, by bringing a standard edition of it,” said Nadella.
“We’ve talked a lot about converging hardware [and] this really brings that and hybrid computing to really everyone. So the combination of the work that we’re doing between Azure and CPS I think is the way to deliver hybrid computing and its future to all our customers,” Nadella added.
Michael Dell explained that the two companies have delivered “a number of these larger Cloud Platform Systems together to some of the world’s largest companies and that’s gone very well.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Monica Anderson / Pew Internet:
Report: 68% of US adults now own a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011, 45% own a tablet, no growth in ownership of other digital devices in recent years — Technology Device Ownership: 2015 — 68% of Americans have smartphones; 45% have tablet computers. Ownership of other digital devices has not grown in recent years.
Technology Device Ownership: 2015
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/29/technology-device-ownership-2015/
68% of Americans have smartphones; 45% have tablet computers. Ownership of other digital devices has not grown in recent years.
Today, 68% of U.S. adults have a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011, and tablet computer ownership has edged up to 45% among adults, according to newly released survey data from the Pew Research Center.1 Smartphone ownership is nearing the saturation point with some groups: 86% of those ages 18-29 have a smartphone, as do 83% of those ages 30-49 and 87% of those living in households earning $75,000 and up annually.
At the same time, the surveys suggest the adoption of some digital devices has slowed and even declined in recent years.
For example, e-reader device ownership has fallen. Today, about one-in-five adults (19%) report owning an e-reader, while in early 2014 that share was a third (32%). Ownership of MP3 players has not had a notable decline, but the percentage of adults who own one has hovered around the 40% mark since 2008.
There is a similar pattern with computer ownership. Today, 78% of adults under 30 own a laptop or desktop computer, compared with 88% who did so in 2010. Smartphone ownership, on the other hand, has surpassed both of these devices, with 86% of 18- to 29-year-olds owning one in 2015. In other words, as smartphones came to prominence several years ago, younger owners perhaps did not feel as much of a need as their older peers to have other kinds of devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Quentin Hardy / New York Times:
Meg Whitman seeks reinvention for HP as the company splits into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Sunday — Meg Whitman Seeks Reinvention for HP as It Prepares for Split — PALO ALTO, Calif. — When Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive, was preparing to cleave her company in two …
Meg Whitman Seeks Reinvention for HP as It Prepares for Split
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/technology/meg-whitman-seeks-reinvention-for-hp-as-it-prepares-for-split.html?_r=0
PALO ALTO, Calif. — When Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive, was preparing to cleave her company in two, she feared reliving a shoe disaster from early in her career.
Ms. Whitman was an executive in charge of the Keds brand at Stride Rite a few decades ago as the company was making a transition to a new “high-tech” warehouse. The transition was bungled, and for nine months the problem could not be fixed.
When HP splits in two on Sunday after a year of planning, what is left will bear little resemblance to the engineering-driven company founded more than 75 years ago in a garage not far from Stanford University.
Continue reading the main story
Related Coverage
Carly Fiorina spoke to a trade show in 2005 while she was chief executive of Hewlett-Packard.
As a Boss, Carly Fiorina Was a Contradictory Figure at Hewlett-PackardOCT. 26, 2015
As chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, Léo Apotheker oversaw its acquisition of Autonomy, the British software company, in 2011.
Common Sense: Léo Apotheker May Have Been Worse H.P. Chief Than Carly FiorinaOCT. 8, 2015
Meg Whitman, chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, envisions two companies: one that looks a bit like the IBM of the West and the other like Compaq Computer, which it acquired.
Meg Whitman Finds a Vision for HPOCT. 6, 2014
Workers on a Hewlett-Packard assembly line. The company’s sales are down sharply as consumers move away from the machines that made it a market leader.
Shifting Tech Scene Unsettles Big PlayersAUG. 21, 2013
DealBook: Hewlett’s Loss: A Folly Unfolds, by the NumbersNOV. 20, 2012
On one side will be HP Inc., which will largely consist of personal computers and printers. On the other, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or HPE, which will sell the computer servers, data storage, networking, software and consulting services that run a modern company. Each company is expected to have annual revenue of about $50 billion and will be among America’s 500 largest public companies.
“We’re leaving behind a company that was very large, running two businesses that were very different,” Ms. Whitman said in an interview at her headquarters last week. “We’re creating two new big companies, not bite-sized morsels, with real capabilities to change things.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linus looses Linux 4.3 on a waiting world
EXT3 filesystem bites the dust, graphics and virtual Linux desktops get some extra love
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/02/linus_looses_43_on_a_waiting_world/
With fewer ugly incidents than might have been expected, and after an expletive-laden rant directed not at a coder but at code, Linux Torvalds has announced that Linux 4.3 has gone general availability.
His note to the Linux Kernel Mailing List note that most of the changes from release candidate 7 were dominated by changes to networking code.
“We had a network update and a late fix for a x86 vm86 mode bug introduced by the vm86 cleanups, but other than that it’s just a collection of various small oneliners all over,”
Support has arrived for graphics provided by Intel’s Skylake and AMD’s R9 Fury “Fiji” graphics processors. Support for the EXT3 filesystem is gone – it’s a subset of EXT4 so the pain shouldn’t be acute. There’s also OpenGL 3.3 support for VMware, to advance the cause of Linux on the virtual desktop.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linus Torvalds fires off angry ‘compiler-masturbation’ rant
Post starts with ‘Christ people. This is just sh*t’ and gets angrier from there
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/01/linus_torvalds_fires_off_angry_compilermasturbation_rant/
Linux Lord Linus Torvalds has unloaded as only he can in a post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List.
At issue is some new networking code that popped up in what was hoped to be the final version of Linux 4.3. Torvalds’ first words on the code were:
Christ people. This is just sh*t.
Torvalds is grumpy because some new code has created conflicts.
“The conflict I get is due to stupid new gcc header file crap,” he writes. “But what makes me upset is that the crap is for completely bogus reasons.”
The conclusion to the post is blunt:
“Get rid of it. And I don’t *ever* want to see that shit again.”
The rant is entirely impersonal: it rails against code, not people.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘T-shaped’ developers are the new normal
Don’t go chasing waterfalls
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/02/t_shaped_developers_are_the_new_normal/
When I joined QA nearly eight years ago I did so in a time of wonderfully ordered roles and responsibilities. It was a world of web developers, designer, application programmers and database administrators. Each sat in their own little area worrying about only their little part of the puzzle with clear definitions of responsibility.
This venerable model heralded the age of web and app development, but it also contained the seeds of its own destruction, creating a world of silos, isolated and closed knowledge – a world of “not my problem”.
As these complex systems have matured the effort, and the risks, to change a product have become significant and difficult to achieve. As this era, and the solutions built around it, draws to an end, something new awaits.
The modern developer requires clear methodologies to work with, a supportive organisational culture and tools that automate the simple tasks. This cultural change does not just apply to software developers – business leaders drive this change and provide the tools for their organisation to thrive.
With Windows 10 comes the end of the full product upgrade – from now on small iterative changes will be the norm
A more agile way of working
The Agile, Lean and DevOps movements are the cornerstone of the new generation of developers. Technologically adept professionals want the ability to self-manage, define priorities and work in a fluid way.
Agile allows us to create efficient metrics, openness and accountability.
Lean allows us to explore the work that has gone before, destroying bottlenecks in our systems. The new upstart DevOps use tools and organisational change to create scalable services and products, taming change and integration, where all stakeholders are expected to understand part of each other’s role.
This is the world where every problem is your problem. To succeed the team needs everyone all in, sharing responsibility, success and failure.
Work like a ninja
To achieve this way of working you need a more rounded IT professional, or what the industry refers to as T-shaped developer. A T-shaped developer has one or more deep skill-sets of knowledge complemented with broad generalist knowledge across an entire solution.
Sometime known as full-stack developers, these rounded individuals are the most in-demand devs – in a modern world that wants staff who can do front end, can make middleware sing and utilise the terminal on their chosen operating system like a ninja, and knows how to test.
Almost all of these new devs work in the world of open source – the closed shop shrink-wrapped products of the Microsoft and Adobe heyday draws to a close – and public open source solutions, software and services rise to replace them. The developers of today cut their teeth on Linux and OS X and they use languages like SCALA, Python and Ruby, instead of .NET and Java.
Rapid change
This phase of machine-led, digital development is one of rapid change – many organisations are conducting root and branch reviews across their entire skill set.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Coding Academies Are Nonsense
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/23/coding-academies-are-nonsense/
Coding as a profession has recently catapulted from the dark rooms of nerdom into the shining light of mainstream appeal, and few people are better off for it. 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.
Perishable And Full Of Promises
I see coding shrinking as a widespread profession. Not because software is going away, but because the way we build software will fundamentally change. Technology for software creation without code is already edging toward mainstream use. Visual content creation tools such as Scratch, DWNLD and Telerik will continue to improve until all functionality required to build apps is available to consumers — without having to write a line of code.
Who needs to code when you can use visual building blocks or even plain English to describe intent? Advances in natural-language processing and conceptual modeling will remove the need for traditional coding from app development. Software development tools will soon understand what you mean versus what you say. Even small advances in disambiguating intent will pay huge dividends. The seeds are already planted, from the OpenCog project to NLTK natural-language processing to MIT’s proof that you can order around a computer in your human language instead of code.
ROI Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
Running an academy is a wonderful short-term business idea. Not only is coding a ready new career option, but it appeals to the human desire to build stuff. Coding lets you build interactive digital content, and, as such, folks are enamored by the idea of it.
The Boring Truth About Learning To Code
In more than 20 years of personal experience with coding, interacting with kids trying to learn code and observing users learning GameSalad, I’ve noticed that the vast majority of folks hit a wall early in the process. Academies like Code Academy boast 24 million+ users, but have few success stories, likely for the same reason. Most people fall off the wagon because they don’t understand the mind of the computer and, as such, find translating their intent into programming language hopelessly difficult.
Put succinctly, coding is writing text files in foreign languages containing instructions suitable for an absolute idiot to follow. Unlike human readers, computers cannot infer meaning from ambiguous text. So, to code, one must become very good at deconstructing problems into their most basic steps and spelling them out for the idiot box.
Try Before You Buy
Line by line, a programming language is nothing but a list of excruciatingly detailed instructions suitable for the computer to follow. Before signing up for a coding academy, let alone a free class, aspirants should ask themselves these questions:
Would I like to type text files for hours a day?
Do I enjoy decomposing problems into detailed lists of instructions?
Am I good at abstract conceptual thinking?
Am I comfortable being a digital construction worker?
Those who answer yes to the above questions might want to try coding. It is a skill that anyone with intelligence and determination can learn — which is why the profession has so many autodidacts. But programmers are a natural resource. Only so many people have the will and ability to do it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Free Option Turns Old Windows XP Laptops into Chromebooks
http://www.inc.com/ross-rubin/a-free-option-turns-old-windows-xp-laptops-into-chromebooks.html
No longer supported by Microsoft, Windows XP is vulnerable to security threats and can’t be freely and easily updated to Windows 10. Those who are happy to live online, though, now have a free and relatively easy way to turn these devices into Chromebooks.
Now, though a company called Neverware has created a relatively simple way to turn these laptops (or desktops) into Chrome OS devices using the simple, secure and speedy operating system developed by Google. Dubbed CloudReady, the process involves downloading a file and then tracking down a Web app called the Chromebook Recovery Utility to send it to a USB flash drive. Once the flash drive is ready the PC must be set o boot from the flash drive.
As with many “live” Linux installations, you can try out Chrome OS from the flash drive. This is a good option to make sure things work although it will be slow. Once satisfied, you can install Chrome OS but make sure you do a complete backup of anything you want on the old PC as it will be completely erased and replaced with Chrome.
http://www.neverware.com/free/#freedetails
Tomi Engdahl says:
Making it Easier to Upgrade to Windows 10
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/10/29/making-it-easier-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft now lets you create Windows 10 apps without knowing a line of code
Brings in untrained foot soldiers to bolster its app store
By Chris Merriman
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2433022/microsoft-app-studio-now-lets-you-create-apps-without-knowing-a-line-of-code
MICROSOFT HAS RELEASED a major update to the Windows App Studio which will allow users to become developers without a lick of code, and without going via Visual Studio.
The new release creates Windows Universal Apps, which can be run on any Windows device, using information and resources imported from elsewhere in what five or six years ago we would have called a ‘mashup’.
Even the shopfront is taken care of, as the Studio package will also create screenshots to populate your entry in the Windows Store.
Even the shopfront is taken care of, as the Studio package will also create screenshots to populate your entry in the Windows Store.
Also new is an ‘immersive simulator’ which will allow you to run your new app in full screen, without leaving the safety of the development environment.
Anyone who built an app in Windows 8.1 can convert it to a Universal app quickly and easily in App Studio with a single click of the ‘Convert’ button.
Your app in 4 steps
http://appstudio.windows.com/en-us
Tomi Engdahl says:
GNU Hurd 0.7 and GNU Mach 1.6 Released
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/11/01/1333247/gnu-hurd-07-and-gnu-mach-16-released?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Halloween brought us GNU Hurd 0.7, GNU Mach 1.6, and GNU MIG 1.6. The new Hurd comes with filesystem driver improvements, provides a new rpcscan utility, and the Hurd code has been ported to work with newer versions of GCC and GNU C Library. The Mach microkernel has updates for compiler compatibility
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP is now two companies. How did it get here?
http://www.cio.com/article/3000014/hp-is-now-two-companies-how-did-it-get-here.html#tk.rss_hardware
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google: Chrome OS Is Here To Stay
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/02/google-chrome-os-is-here-to-stay/
By now you have probably seen the WSJ report that says Google plans to fold its Chrome operating system into Android and phase it (and the “Chromebook” name) out over time. Google today published a story on virtually every blog it owns that denies this. “While we’ve been working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems, there’s no plan to phase out Chrome OS,” Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s senior VP for Android, Chrome OS and Chromecast, writes today.
It’s no secret that Google has already added some Android features to Chrome OS over time. Indeed, you can already use a select number of Android apps on your Chromebook today.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Financial Times:
Activision Blizzard to buy King Digital Entertainment, the company behind the Candy Crush games, for $5.9B — Activision to buy Candy Crush’s King for $5.9bn — Activision Blizzard has agreed to acquire King Digital Entertainment, the London-based group behind the hugely popular Candy …
‘Candy Crush’ owner King sold to Activision Blizzard for $5.9bn
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/680ccbd2-81d4-11e5-8095-ed1a37d1e096.html#axzz3qRtQXqM1
Activision Blizzard is to pay $5.9bn to acquire King Digital Entertainment, the London-based group behind the hugely popular Candy Crush Saga mobile games, in the gaming industry’s biggest deal since Microsoft bought Minecraft last year.
the company is paying a huge sum for one of the largest communities of mobile gamers in the world.
The deal gives the combined group more than 500m monthly active users across almost 200 countries
Peter Kafka / Re/code:
Analysis: King generated massive but eroding profits, and like most mobile game makers, couldn’t launch another megahit — Candy, Crushed. — What would you do if you found a gold mine? — Would you keep it to yourself and sell as much as gold as you could dig out, for as long as you could?
Candy, Crushed.
http://recode.net/2015/11/02/candy-crushed/
What would you do if you found a gold mine?
Would you keep it to yourself and sell as much as gold as you could dig out, for as long as you could?
Or would you sell it to investors, and promise to make even more money for them?
King Digital, the people who brought you Candy Crush, chose the second path. It didn’t work out, so now they’re selling the company again.
Here’s all you need to know about what happened to King: It went public back in March 2014, at $22.50 a share, and fell immediately, down to $18.08. It’s selling today to video game heavyweight Activision, for $18 a share.
And here’s the (slightly) longer version:
In the iPhone/Android era, a megahit game is something close to a perpetual money machine. Once you find one, it will keep making money for you for a very long time, because a small percentage of its players will pay you for power-ups and other virtual goods.
That money machine will decline over time, as other games capture people’s imaginations/credit card accounts, but it’s going to keep making money. In the last three months of 2013, Candy Crush generated an astonishing $493 million for King. In the last three months ending in June of this year, Candy Crush generated $206 million for King. Still astonishing. But smaller.
The thing about creating a megahit game in the iPhone/Android era is that there’s no flywheel effect: A megahit gives you resources to market other games, which is nice. But no one has been able to prove that making one megahit lets you make other megahits. Ask Rovio, the people behind Angry Birds.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Myth Busting: SSDs are Faster than SDs – or Are They?
http://logic.nl/News/Myth-Busting-SSDs-are-Faster-than-SDs-%E2%80%93-or-Are-The.aspx
At the request of a customer in the banking machines segment, Datalight recently completed an investigation of some performance differences they were seeing between SD and SSD on their embedded target. The findings left us scratching our head a bit. On the surface, SSDs and SDs have some things in common (beyond having S and D in their names) but many differences as well.
Both media types are NAND based, but SD cards tend to be small and have fewer resources on-board than do their SSD cousins. The interface to the system is also quite different as most SSDs communicate via the faster SATA interface. So, the specs say that SSDs are faster than SD. And yet in our investigation, we found many use cases where SSDs were actually slower. In some performance tests we have done, we can see that comparing SDs and SSDs does not really seem to be fair: When looking at just the numbers, SD cards seem to be up to 10x faster than SSD when it comes to writing under some conditions – and that initially surprised us. Let’s talk about what we saw, and what it means to you – the user of such devices.
While we do want to share what we saw, there is a big caveat – our investigation thus far has been limited in scope, running under Microsoft Windows Embedded Compact 2013, and Wind River’s VxWorks 7.0. Although we tested cards/drives from more than one manufacturer during our testing, the number of brands was limited. Still, the information was interesting enough to us that we thought you might be interested in it too.
Experimenting with different transaction settings, you can determine what settings work best for your use case. No one setting works for everyone
Tomi Engdahl says:
iFixit:
The Microsoft Surface Book earns a 1 out of 10 repairability score with RAM and processor soldered to motherboard and heavily glued components — Microsoft Surface Book Teardown — Step 1 — Microsoft Surface Book Teardown Just what is a “surface book”?
Microsoft Surface Book Teardown
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Book+Teardown/51972
Tomi Engdahl says:
Slack’s Stewart Butterfield says email is ‘the cockroach of the internet’ and we’ll be living with it for the next 30 years
http://uk.businessinsider.com/slack-stewart-butterfield-email-is-the-cockroach-of-the-internet-2015-11?r=US&IR=T
Anyone who has used Slack — the chatroom app for teams in workplaces — will tell you that it has one massive positive side effect on your working life: It reduces the amount of internal email you receive from your colleagues.
Once your company is on Slack, gone are the reply-all emails where someone just says “Thanks!” Those crushing inboxes full of dozens, hundreds or thousands of unread emails, seem so much less urgent when your company is on Slack.
But Slack founder Stewart Butterfield, speaking at Web Summit in Dublin on Tuesday, said those of you hoping that Slack will kill off email altogether might have a long wait.
“Email will be the cockroach of the internet,” he said, when asked whether Slack will kill email. “I think we’ve got another 30 or 40 years of email left.”
The reason email survives — even though everyone seems to hate it — is that “email has many benefits, it’s the lowest common denominator for official communications,” Butterfield said. “But it’s a terrible way to manage internal communications.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft imposes deadline for manufacturers to sell Windows 7 and 8.1 PCs
Starting October 16, 2016, manufacturers may no longer sell PCs running Windows 7 or 8.1
http://www.winbeta.org/news/microsoft-imposes-deadline-manufacteres-sell-windows-7-8-1-pcs
Customers who own a Windows 7 or 8 PC, in need of a replacement PC, and aren’t ready to get familiar with Windows 10, have a deadline to buy a new PC running their familiar version of Windows. Microsoft has confirmed on its Windows Lifecycle Fact Sheet web page that PC manufacturers have until October 31 of next year to sell off all their stocks of computers running Windows 7 Professional or Windows 8.1.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is the world ready for a bare-metal OS/2 rebirth?
IBM and Arca Noae to free 1990s operating system from its virtualized cage
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/03/os2_returns_arca_noae/
A US software company has signed on with IBM to release a new native build of Big Blue’s OS/2.
Arca Noae said its “Blue Lion” build of OS/2 will run on the bare metal of PCs without the need for an emulator or hypervisor.
Those still using the 28-year-old operating system and its applications typically run the stack in a virtualized environment on modern reliable hardware.
Designed by IBM and Microsoft as a successor to Windows on IBM PCs, OS/2 failed to gain a major foothold in the computer market, but nonetheless continued development throughout the 1990s. The last build from IBM was released in 2001 and official support ended in 2006. You can read our insider’s tale of OS/2 here and here.
Despite IBM’s defeat, OS/2 lingered on in various specialist applications as well as embedded systems, such as bank ATMs and ticket kiosks. It has since maintained a niche following, and is still supported by third parties.
Arca Noae hopes its new version of OS/2 will help to expand that audience and end the reliance on virtualization software.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Guess who: Storage chip maker [blank] can’t wait for all-storage-chip data centers
It’s Intel, we’re talking about Intel
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/03/intels_allflash_data_center/
Intel is pushing the idea of an all-flash data center so it can make up for slowing processor revenue growth by selling 3D NAND and XPoint chips and SSDs.
Here is a re-envisaged copy of a slide Jerry Xu, Intel’s general manager for NVM (non-volatile memory) solutions in China, showed at the Huawei Storage Summit in Shenzhen, Nov 3.
It shows the storage and memory hierarchy in use today in data centers which have adopted SSDs. This is a quite straightforward graphic with DRAM (memory) for the hot data, warm data in PCIe NAND SSDs, and cold data stored on cheap and slow SATA disk drives. Some call this scheme flash and trash storage.
There is a third storage tier for even colder data (frozen?), which is an archive using either SATA disk drives or old-school tape media.
We see that DRAM has a 10GB/sec bandwidth and about a 100 nanosecond latency. PCIe SSDs have around a 3.2GB/sec bandwidth and a latency under 100 microseconds, many times slower than DRAM.
The poor sluggish SATA disks run at 6Gbit/s, meaning about 540MB/sec (so slow) and have a near 50 millisecond latency; glacial compared to PCIe NAND.
Tomorrow:
We have the same 3-layer pyramid with hot, warm, and cold layers, but the four data tiers have all moved up one layer so that DRAM is now above the pyramid, with the same bandwidth and latency characteristics as before. Below that, things are different and the media in the layers is generally much faster.
Hot data lives firstly in 3D XPoint DIMMs with nanosecond-class latency, about 250ns, and a 6GB/sec bandwidth. Slightly less hot data resides in NVMe 3D XPoint SSDs, which have a much longer latency of about 10 microseconds, a tenth of the access latency of PCIe SSDs in the Storage and Memory Hierarchy Today slide above. But they can store more data than the socket and physical size-limited XPoint DIMMs.
Warm data moves to NVMe 3D NAND SSDs. These have a PCIe 3.0 x2 link running at around 3.2GB/sec with latency approaching 100 microseconds. Thus it’s pretty much the same as the warm data scheme used today, with the proviso that 3 NAND should provide higher capacity at a lower cost/GB than today’s 2D or single-layer planar flash.
The cold tier is split in two like the hot tier. First are NVMe 3D NAND SSDs, and below them are SATA or SAS disk drives for customers who don’t want to pay a flash premium when archiving data. The SATA speed is 6Gbit/s again and minutes can be taken moving a disk from offline to on-line.
There is no longer any tape in this tier.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Who Said FORTRAN is Dead?
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/01/who-said-fortran-is-dead/
NASA has an urgent need for a FORTRAN developer to support the Voyager spacecraft. Popular Mechanics interviewed Voyager program manager [Suzanne Dodd] who is looking to fill [Larry Zottarell’s] shoes when he retires.
The two Voyagers were some of the first NASA spacecraft to use computers. The resources are limited in the three 40 year-old computers found on each probe. They handle the spacecraft’s science and flight software. The software is a little more recent having been updated only 25 years ago in 1990.
A big problem is a lot of the engineering design materials are no longer in existence. People’s memories of the events and reasons for decisions made that long ago are bit hazy. But NASA does have an emergency list of those former engineers when questions arise.
This Is Not Your Father’s FORTRAN
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/this-is-not-your-fathers-fortran/
Tomi Engdahl says:
No Pascal, not a SNOBOL’s chance. Go Forth!
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/03/no-pascal-not-a-snobols-chance-go-forth/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Tries To Guess Your Email Responses
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/11/03/2018233/google-tries-to-guess-your-email-responses
Google’s research blog today announced a new feature for their Inbox email app: a neural network that composes short responses to emails you receive. For example, if somebody emails you an invitation to an event, the app will detect that by scanning the words in the message and present you with three options for a quick response. Google says, “A naive attempt to build a response generation system might depend on hand-crafted rules for common reply scenarios. But in practice, any engineer’s ability to invent ‘rules’ would be quickly outstripped by the tremendous diversity with which real people communicate.”
Computer, respond to this email.
Machine Intelligence for You
http://googleresearch.blogspot.fi/2015/11/computer-respond-to-this-email.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Firefox 42 arrives with tracking protection, tab audio indicators, and background link opening on Android
http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/03/firefox-42-arrives-with-tracking-protection-tab-audio-indicators-and-background-link-opening-on-android/
Mozilla today launched Firefox 42 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include tracking protection, tab audio indicators, and background link opening on Android.
Firefox 42 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play.
Mozilla doesn’t break out the exact numbers for Firefox, though the company does say “half a billion people around the world” use the browser. In other words, it’s a major platform that web developers target — even in a world increasingly dominated by mobile apps.
The new private browsing mode goes further than just not saving your browsing history (read: porn sites) — the added tracking protection means Firefox also blocks website elements (ads, analytics trackers, and social share buttons) that could track you while you’re surfing the web, and it works on all four platforms.
Firefox 42 … answer to the ultimate question of life, security bugs and fully private browsing?
SSL/TLS library flaws found, anti-analytics missiles deployed
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/04/mozilla_patches_up_firefox_flaws/
Mozilla has released Firefox 42 and Firefox ESR 38 38.4, which include fixes for worrying security vulnerabilities in the web browser.
The November 3 update squashes at least three bugs that can be potentially exploited to achieve remote code execution.
Two Mozilla engineers, Tyson Smith and David Keeler, uncovered two flaws (CVE-2015-7181 and CVE-2015-7182) in NSS, a toolkit used by Firefox to encrypt web traffic over SSL/TLS.
By exploiting “a use-after-poison and buffer overflow in the ASN.1 decoder,” a malicious HTTPS website can potentially inject arbitrary evil code into the connecting browser and execute it, it appears. That seems a particularly neat way to install malware on PCs.
These programming blunders are fixed in NSS versions 3.19.2.1, 3.19.4, and 3.20.1, which are used in Firefox 42 and Firefox ESR 38 38.4.
Other applications that use the open-source toolkit for encrypting internet traffic must be rebuilt with a non-vulnerable version of the libraries, and pushed out to people to install.
The WebRTC and Login Manager components have also been updated and the browser tab view now includes an indicator icon and mute option for pages that automatically play audio.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fedora 23 Released
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/11/03/2119228/fedora-23-released
Today marks the release of Fedora 23 for all three main editions: Workstation, Cloud, and Server. This release brings GNOME 3.18, Libre Office 5.0, and Fedora Spins — alternate desktops that provide a different experience. Fedora 23 also includes a version optimized for running on ARM-based systems.
Release Notes for Fedora 23
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/23/html/Release_Notes/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft and Red Hat Reach Linux Deal
Red Hat’s version of the Linux operating system to be available to users of Microsoft Azure cloud service
http://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-and-red-hat-reach-linux-deal-1446642000
Microsoft Corp. and Red Hat Inc., longtime rivals from conflicting camps of the software industry, plan to collaborate in the cloud.
The companies are announcing a partnership Wednesday to make Red Hat’s version of Linux operating system available to the users of Microsoft Azure
Tomi Engdahl says:
Emacs gets new maintainer as Richard Stallman signs off
Long-time contributor John Wiegley steps into the chair
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/05/wiegley_new_emacs_maintainer/
Long-time contributor to Emacs and author of Emacs Muse John Wiegley has assumed the role of maintainer of the project.
Promising an official announcement “soon”, Wiegley said he’d accepted the role after a meeting with Richard Stallman:
“Richard and I met at MIT yesterday, where I officially accepted the role as maintainer of Emacs. An announcement is forthcoming, once we dot the i’s and cross the t’s”.
Wiegley was in Boston for a Haskell meet-up.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft gives OEMs a deadline: one year, then no more new Windows 7 PCs
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-sets-end-of-sales-date-for-windows-7-pcs/
Want to buy a new Windows 7 PC? Better get busy, because there are only 364 shopping days left. As promised, Microsoft is providing one year’s notice to PC makers on Windows 7′s end of life. The clock starts now.
Tomi Engdahl says:
One in Four Steam Gamers Now Running Windows 10
http://news.softpedia.com/news/one-in-four-steam-gamers-now-running-windows-10-495688.shtml
Windows 10 is very close to reaching an 8 percent market share worldwide, but in the meantime, adoption seems to be going much better on Valve’s Steam platform, which has become the leading service for buying and playing games on a PC.
Right now, Windows is the number one operating system on Steam, but there’s absolutely no surprise here, given the fact that the same rankings have been there for a very long period of time. But what’s more important is that, last month, Windows 10 was the only Windows version to gain share, while all its predecessors, be they Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, lost users.
If the same trend is maintained, Windows 10 has big chances to overtake Windows 7 by the end of the year and become the most-used operating system by gamers across the world.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Network jobs are hot; salaries expected to rise in 2016
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2999150/careers/network-jobs-are-hot-salaries-expected-to-rise-in-2016.html
Wireless network engineers, network admins, and network security pros can expect above-average pay gains.
Network professionals continue to be among the toughest IT talent to find and hire – a situation that will drive up salaries in the coming year.
Sometimes networking doesn’t get the publicity of “in vogue” tech topics such as mobility, cloud computing or big data, “but we continue to see that it’s critical for organizations, and finding highly skilled people to fill those roles is a struggle,” says John Reed, senior executive director of Robert Half Technology.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Will the Big Data Craze Play Out?
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/how-will-big-data-craze-play-out?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Offers More Insight On Its 3D Memory
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/11/04/1742230/intel-offers-more-insight-on-its-3d-memory?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
When Intel and Micron Technology first announced the 3D XPoint memory in July, they promised about 1,000 times the performance of NAND flash, 1,000 times the endurance of NAND flash, and about 10 times the density of DRAM. At OpenWorld last week, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich disclosed a little more information on the new memory, which Intel will sell under the Optane brand, and did a demo on a pair of matching servers running two Oracle benchmarks.
Intel offers more insight on its 3D memory
http://www.itworld.com/article/3000877/hardware/intel-offers-more-insight-on-its-3d-memory.html
The company is promising to close the performance gap between memory, CPU, and networking.
While the news of Oracle’s new M7 Sparc processors got the lion’s share of attention at last week’s Oracle OpenWorld, Intel made some pretty big news of its own that a lot of people missed.
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Intel and Micron Technology announced 3D XPoint memory, a 3D stacked memory with extremely high-speed interconnects that can be used like DRAM and like flash storage. When they first announced the new memory last summer, they promised about 1,000 times the performance of NAND flash, 1,000 times the endurance of NAND flash, and about 10 times the density of DRAM.
As systems are currently architected, memory is something of a bottleneck and CPUs are left to wait. Granted we’re talking milliseconds but you get the point. Krzanich said Optane would help speed things up so processors are no longer waiting for data to arrive from memory or storage, in this case flash drives.
Krzanich did a demo on a pair of matching servers running two Oracle benchmarks. One server had Intel’s P3700 NAND PCI Express SSD, which is no slouch of a drive. It can perform up to 250,000 IOPS per second. The other was a prototype Optane SSD. The Optane SSD outperformed the P3700 by 4.4 times in IOPS with 6.4 times less latency.
In a second, undisclosed test, Optane was 7.13 times faster than the current tech with 8.11x the latency performance
Krzanich said Optane is coming next year and will “transform how we think about data and memory and storage.” The company will also come out with Optane DIMMs later this year for early testers, which will combine the performance of DRAM with the capacity and cost of flash.
Intel Shows Off 3D XPoint Memory Performance
http://www.nextplatform.com/2015/10/28/intel-shows-off-3d-xpoint-memory-performance/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Today’s PC is no longer PC -and you can not make money with PC hardware
It is generally considered that the profit margins are low in iron, software and services are profits to be made. But can a PC to make money? Clone Micro has started in Graz, Austria Otmar Freidorfer familiar with the PC-business as well. His answer to the question is short and sweet: – You can not.
Today, no one can make money with normal PC. – Hardware is only the door opener. Money is made services, consultations and corrections. Now Freidorferin company makes a profit, for example, repair services. Dell is an important partner, that’s pay for repairs during the warranty period the equipment. But the iron value? It has fallen to near zero.
- We sell to the public sector, for example, displays, as well as Dell and Samsung. When the authority to buy a 24-inch screen, we make it five euros a profit, he describes contemporary everyday life.
Even ten years ago, everything was easy. Dell was one of the PC manufacturer among the other activities on the market, which seemed to grow forever. Now, the traditional PC market is shrinking all the time. Dell’s Partner Direct event in Vienna was also very clear in the fact that the PC is no longer the PC.
- Not from the PC still give up. Yes computers continue to make money, said marketing director Andreas Schütze. He also admitted that running is a big change. It has been going on for a long time.
- We offer a complete solution for data center tablets. This change is a big process but also sales partners and distributors.
- It is of course difficult to say what the IoT’s, which produces big data and which device is no longer online, Schütze describes the challenges to training.
Sources:
http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3560:pc-lla-ei-voi-tehda-rahaa&catid=13&Itemid=101
http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3559:pc-ei-ole-enaa-pc&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
SPECIAL REPORT: CIOs Say Hybrid Cloud Takes Off
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/10/20/special-report-cios-say-hybrid-cloud-takes-off/
CIOs say they are knitting together a new IT architecture that comprises the latest in public cloud services with the best of their own private data centers and partially shared tech resources. Demand for the so-called hybrid cloud is growing at a compound rate of 27%, far outstripping growth of the overall IT market, according to researcher MarketsandMarkets.
For now, adoption of the hybrid cloud is motivated by the need for improved collaboration and greater flexibility and efficiency, CIOs say. Over time, Gartner Inc.IT +0.29%’s Ed Anderson says, “I start to think of a multi cloud environment as a foundation for a next wave of applications.” He envisions mashups of cloud-based analytics with customer data or data collected by sensors embedded in machines and other objects.
CIOs are demanding a way to combine the best of the cloud with their own localized data centers. Few companies or organizations are willing or able to move all of their IT to the public cloud, yet most of them are eager to move past the anachronism of the isolated, on-premise data center. “We are actively working on our hybrid cloud architecture. It is a high priority for us,” says Ted Ross, CIO of the City of Los Angeles. Benefits include the ability to “virtualize” more hardware by substituting it with less expensive and more versatile software
“The path forward is the cloud. That said, not everything belongs in the cloud, and we are actively sourcing services that allow for a hybrid architecture to acquire best-of-breed solutions that can extend our existing on-premise application base, and ensure privacy and security.”
MarketsandMarkets said it expects the hybrid cloud market to reach $85 billion in 2019, up from $25 billion in 2014, a compound annual growth rate of about 27%. Gartner surveyed attendees at one of its tech conferences and found that nearly 75% of large enterprises represented there planned to have hybrid IT deployments, as it refers to the hybrid cloud, by the end of 2015.
“Hybrid cloud is our foundation and focus,” says Steve Daheb, Oracle Corp.
Cloud pioneer Amazon Web Services says there’s a need for public clouds to integrate into a broader, hybrid environment. “That has been the reality of the work we have done with enterprise customers over the last nine years,” said Ariel Kelman, vice president of worldwide marketing at AWS, a unit of Amazon.com Inc
Hybrid cloud adoption often reflects security preferences. “We have student information, research information, financial information that we feel better about putting under our own peoples’ tutelage,” says Danny Miller, CISO at Texas A&M University System, which uses a hybrid cloud file-sharing platform from Syncplicity.
“Think of the hybrid container as a mixing pot for information coming from the public world with information that you might pull out of your CRM [customer relationship management] system or your ERP [enterprise resource planning system]. There is just stuff that is proprietary that you really don’t want to put out on the Internet,” said Michael D. Rhodin, senior vice president, International Business Machine Corp.’s IBM Watson unit, a hybrid-cloud based decision support system for professionals in a range of industries such as health and wealth management.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Post tablet era starting?
The Finns got tired of the tablet
Some people think that all those who want a tablet in general, have already bought one. This seems to be true at least in Finland, where the tablets sales dropped by 33.6 per cent during the first three quarters.
In fact, sales of consumer electronics declined in all product groups
The smartphone instead of still sold well
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3569:suomalaiset-kyllastyivat-tablettiin&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud will kill tech sales jobs
Feeding the beast that will kill your job
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/09/cloud_will_kill_tech_sales_jobs/
On-premises IT brings tech sales jobs in its wake. Cloud IT kills them.
That’s the thinking of a territory account manager in a storage IT startup. The thought process starts: “There is probably some statistic where, for every IT deal that goes to the cloud, there are 20 traditional tech sales jobs that are eliminated.”
How so? When manufacturers’ sales teams (servers, storage, networking, security, etc…) don’t get the sale, then distribution sales teams, VAR sales teams, and then down the line, affecting all the way to multiple HR, Accounting, and other teams working for these tech companies, will not have jobs.
The net result is that “a lot of upper middle class job positions that simply won’t exist any more”.