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:
DOE Announces a High Performance Computing Fortran Compiler Agreement
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/21/doe-announces-a-high-performance-computing-fortran-compiler-agreement/
The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its three national labs this week announced they have reached an agreement for an open-source Fortran front-end for Higher Performance Computing (HPC). The agreement is with IBM? Microsoft? Google? Nope, the agreement is with NVIDIA, a company known for making graphics cards for gamers.
The heart of a graphics card is the graphics processor unit (GPU) which is an extremely powerful computing engine. It’s actually got more raw horsepower than the computer CPU, although not as much as many claim. A number of years ago NVIDIA branched into providing compiler toolsets for their GPUs. The obvious goal is to drive sales. NVIDIA will use as a starting point their existing Fortran compiler and integrate it with the existing LLVM compiler infrastructure. That Fortran, it just keeps chugging along.
NNSA, national labs team with Nvidia to develop open-source Fortran compiler technology
https://www.llnl.gov/news/nnsa-national-labs-team-nvidia-develop-open-source-fortran-compiler-technology
The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (link is external) (NNSA) and its three national labs today announced they have reached an agreement with NVIDIA’s PGI® (link is external) software to create an open-source Fortran compiler designed for integration with the widely used LLVM compiler infrastructure.
LLVM is a collection of reusable compiler and tool chain technologies with a modular design that facilitates support for a wide variety of programming languages and processor architectures.The Fortran front-end module created through this project will be derived from NVIDIA’s PGI Fortran compiler, which has been used in production across a variety of high performance computing systems for more than 25 years. PGI® software is a leading supplier of software compilers and tools for parallel computing,
The project is being spearheaded by the Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in response to the need for a robust open-source Fortran solution to complement and support the burgeoning use of LLVM and the CLANG C++ compiler in the HPC community.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jake Muncy / Wired:
PlayStation 2 Emulation Coming to PS4, Sony Confirms
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/playstation-2-emulation-coming-to-ps4-sony-confirms/
Sony is working on bringing PlayStation 2 titles to the PlayStation 4, the company confirmed to WIRED Thursday evening.
“We are working on utilizing PS2 emulation technology to bring PS2 games forward to the current generation,” a Sony representative told WIRED via email. “We have nothing further to comment at this point in time.”
It seems as if the first PS2 games using this emulation software to run on PS4 are already out: a bundle available now at retail that includes a PS4 console and the Star Wars: Battlefront game also includes a selection of bonus classic games: Super Star Wars, Star Wars: Racer Revenge, Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter, and Star Wars: Bounty Hunter.
Emulators mimic the environment of a specific computing environment, in this case the environment of the PlayStation 2 console. This allows PS2 games to run on the PS4 as if they were on their native machine, but in higher resolution in some cases.
Sony’s comments indicate that the PS2-to-PS4 initiative is bigger than just the Star Wars bonus games. The big question is, how will this emulation work when it goes wide?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed:
Facebook’s David Marcus on how humans work alongside AI automation to power Facebook M and whether such a service can scale
Here’s How Facebook M’s Artificial Intelligence Works
Facebook’s David Marcus says M is already a lot more than just people pretending to be robots.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/time-to-meet-the-wizard-facebooks-messenger-head-pulls-back#.xaeBneeJm
Marcus described what he claims is the process behind the scenes when people communicate with M. After someone sends M a message via Messenger, “a response is actually formulated by the AI engine, and the trainers have the ability to let that response go, or one of those responses that are suggested go, or write a completely different one, or do something else,” Marcus said. The AI, intriguingly, always takes a stab at the answer first.
The trainers are a group of a few dozen human contractors working in Facebook’s headquarters. These humans, as Marcus explained it, review each of the AI’s responses and decide whether they’re good enough to pass along, or whether they need revising. When the trainers revise, the AI watches and learns: “With every single one of these interactions, that data is fed back into that AI instance that will then use the data to learn how to automate more and more answers or how to get better and better at those things,” Marcus said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs Spend a Third of Their Time On Security
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/11/22/1431237/cios-spend-a-third-of-their-time-on-security
Much has been discussed about the potential security risks of an Internet of Things future in which billions of devices and machines are all talking to each other automatically. But the IoT market is exploding at a breakneck pace, leaving all companies scrambling to figure out the security piece of the puzzle now, before it’s too late. In fact, some experts believe this issue will be what separates the winners from the losers, as security concerns either stop companies from getting into the IoT market, or delay existing IoT projects and leave the door open to swifter competition. That’s likely why, according to CIO Magazine’s annual survey, CIOs are spending a third of their time on security.
These 4 responsibilities just jumped to the top of CIOs to-do list
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2015/11/these-4-responsibilities-just-jumped-top-cios-do-list
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): CIO Magazine’s State of the CIO Survey does a great job bringing to light the activities, concerns, opportunities, challenges currently on the minds of IT leaders. Did you notice any big shifts in how CIOs are spending their day-to-day?
Adam DennisonDennison: Absolutely. There were four key areas where we saw big jumps this year, but time spent on security was the most noticeable change. It came as no surprise that our 2015 survey reflected a heightened sense of responsibility in this arena. The year before was commonly dubbed “the year of the breach” in IT circles, so we were not shocked to see that time spent on security management jumped from 24 percent in 2014 to 31 percent in 2015. The trend was also reflected when survey respondents were asked what their CEO’s top priorities for the CIO were for the coming year. Cybersecurity jumped from the number eight priority in 2014 to number four in 2015.
It’s clear that security is no longer a functional task for a CIO. It’s not a back-office afterthought. It has become a boardroom discussion, and it’s paramount in any initiative that CIOs are going to undertake in the foreseeable future. If IT leaders want to embrace the sexy, new technologies they are hearing about today—the SMAC stack, third platform, Internet of Things, etc—security is going to be upfront and at the center of the discussion. And as CIOs spend more of their time on security, budgets will follow.
TEP: Were there any surprising takeaways for CIOs in the survey results this year?
Dennison: It’s clear that the job of understanding the customers is falling increasingly to the CIO, and it will become more and more critical to their success. CIOs are feeling the pressure to become more customer friendly as the expectations of “always-on,” hyper-connected consumers create new demands on IT. Quite literally, some of their jobs depend on it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 adds Insights to warn when it’s doomed to fail
If it were a cartoon character, it would be Droopy
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2435742/red-hat-enterprise-linux-72-adds-insights-to-warn-when-its-doomed-to-fail
RED HAT has announced general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.2 after a successful beta period. The company works to a fast development cycle as version 6.7 was released only in July.
The new version includes improvements to security, networking and system admin, as well as further work with containerisation.
Also new in this edition is compatibility with Red Hat Insights, the company’s new analytics add-on designed to reduce downtime and increase IT efficiency by proactively spotting risks and problems that could lead to a technical failure. Red Hat Insights offers intelligent predictive system protection for up to 10 RHEL systems at no extra cost.
Jim Totton, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s Platforms Business Unit, said: “With the launch of RHEL 7 in June 2014, Red Hat redefined the enterprise open source operating system.
“RHEL 7.2 continues this effort, delivering new capabilities for containerised application deployments and significant networking enhancements while retaining our focus on delivering a stable, reliable and more secure platform for the most critical of business applications.”
A new disaster recovery application known as Relax and Recover allows administrators to create local ISO-based backups that can be centrally archived and remotely replicated if the worst happens.
A development preview of RHEL for the ARM architecture has been released
Tomi Engdahl says:
OpenBSD’s native hypervisor emerges
By all means start rummaging, but expect breakage in this very early code
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/23/openbsds_native_hypervisor_emerges/
The native OpenBSD hypervisor promised in September has emerged.
Kernel dev Mike Larking has posted news of the hypervisor, but hosed down expectations along the way.
“An early rough cut of the vmm subsystem is now in the tree,” he wrote. “This includes both the kernel parts and userland parts.”
“I’m not going to explain all the how-tos at this point,” Larkin added “This is because vmmctl is going to have a pretty significant change coming in shortly, and anything I would write here on ‘how to use it’ is just going to end up changing anyway.”
Larkin nonetheless reckons “there is enough there for people to start playing with running OpenBSD VMs.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
If IT leaders want to embrace the sexy, new technologies they are hearing about today—the SMAC stack, third platform, Internet of Things, etc—security is going to be upfront and at the center of the discussion.”
Source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/11/22/1431237/cios-spend-a-third-of-their-time-on-security?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
SMAC = Social Mobile Analytics Cloud
Tomi Engdahl says:
Micron Commits to Pushing OpenMP Standard
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328322&
Micron is the latest company to join the OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB), a group of vendors and research organizations driving the standard for the popular shared-memory parallel programming model.
The memory vendor is one of 14 software and hardware vendors that comprise the OpenMP ARB’s permanent members who have a long-term interest in creating projects for OpenMP. There are nine auxiliary members with an interest in the standard but don’t create or sell OpenMP products, including NASA, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the Sandia National Laboratory and the University of Houston.
“More users are requiring access to software, tools and programming models,” he said. “OpenMP has a great legacy in supporting shared memory programming models.” As Micron is now constructing non-volatile DIMMs (NVDIMMs), said Leidel, as well as pushing development on DRAM and hybrid memory cube (HMC), it’s recognizing the need to solve problems in ways that are portable between platforms, and OpenMP is great for supporting heterogeneous memory architectures.
The fields for which the OpenMP standard might find use are fairly broad, added van Waveren, and there are more and more use cases, from auto manufacturers doing car crash simulation and analysis to aerospace companies running simulations to reduce drag on wings.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 10 to companies over the next year
Companies transition to the Windows 10 operating system is not yet in practice even started, but Gartner believes Windows 10 to spread the fastest of Microsoft platforms.
Gartner believes that many companies will undertake pilot the Windows 10 as early as next spring. These projects are then exported to a wider use during the rest of the year.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3642:windows-10-yrityksiin-ensi-vuoden-aikana&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open Visual Studio, becoming the best development platform
Microsoft turning more open to developers do not have any words. The company’s target is hard: to get the Visual Studio environment that the developer’s tool that works was the target then Windows, Linux, Android or iOS.
Microsoft began opening last November, when it is told to export the .NET development environment open and platform-independent. In the spring of published pre-release version development platform for Mac and Linux versions.
Now the company has taken another step forward last week Connect development event.
For example, the Visual Studio code editor published an open source project at GitHub.
Visual Studio code editor works so linux, OS X than Windows and Microsoft according to the preview version has been downloaded for over one million times.
Visual Studio announced the Connect event in the expansion, which supports Linux debugging code, or error checking GDB debugger through it.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3639:avoimesta-visual-studiosta-tulossa-paras-kehitysalusta&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Klint Finley / Wired:
Automattic, in move away from PHP, launches new, open sourced admin interface for WordPress.com built on Node.js and React, releases Mac OS X app — WordPress.com Gets a New Face and Joins the JavaScript Age — The popular blogging site WordPress.com unveiled a new admin interface today …
WordPress.com Gets a New Face and Joins the JavaScript Age
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/wordpress-com-gets-a-new-face-and-joins-the-javascript-age/
The popular blogging site WordPress.com unveiled a new admin interface today for managing blogs, posting content, and reading other people’s sites. If you’re a regular user, you’ll notice a new look and feel. If you’re a code geek, you’ll notice something more remarkable below the surface: JavaScript instead of PHP.
If you run the open source version of WordPress on your own server, you can activate the new interface on your own site through the plugin Jetpack.
Tomi Engdahl says:
6 proven strategies for evaluating and prioritizing IT projects
http://www.cio.com/article/3007575/project-management/6-proven-strategies-for-evaluating-and-prioritizing-it-projects.html
Within most large organizations – as well as smaller businesses – time and resources are in short supply yet high demand, making project selection more difficult. Evaluating and prioritizing projects can be complex, but this vital first step can negatively impact the business if not assessed carefully.
1. Become involved in strategic level planning
The first step for a program, portfolio or project manager is to become involved in strategic level planning. Sit down with the leadership team to gain a full understanding of the direction of the business, the timing, and their overall vision; there is no such thing as too much detail here.
2. Identify project drivers
Talk with management to identify which of the following drivers are motivating each proposed project.
Competitive advantage
Cost savings/financial benefit
Operational efficiency/process improvement
Legislative/legal/ tax implications
Improving quality
Risk reduction
Growth/ business opportunities
3. Quantify strategic value
Ask management to discuss the various projects they are considering to determine the impact and desired project outcomes. This will help to better understand and quantify the strategic value, immediate and/or long-term impact as well as anticipated benefits of each project being considered. The risks of not starting certain projects on schedule will also have to be weighed carefully.
4. Determine factors that may impact project success
Additional factors that should carefully be considered are the return on investment (ROI), budgeted funds, available resources, and timing, and if there are any dependencies or limitations (among other factors). Company budgets and timing are almost always limited, making it impossible to take on all project ideas conceived.
5. Create an evaluation and prioritization matrix
Once you have gathered all the applicable information from management and other sources, create a project evaluation and prioritization matrix to identify and rate each project in terms of criteria.
6. Close the loop
After projects have been carefully weighted and prioritized, before initiating any of the projects sit down again with management and review the project evaluation and prioritization matrix, and any other findings, to ensure expectations are clear with all parties involved. This allows management an additional opportunity for added input, and to confirm if they are in agreement with your findings.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Use a bunch of USB Flash drives in a RAID array.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dougISKs2vQ
I experimented with creating a striped RAID array using 8 USB flash drives.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fake Sony 1000 GB USB flash drive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xJfC3jCPXM
Tomi Engdahl says:
Myke Hurley / The Pen Addict:
Apple Pencil review: closest in offering a true handwriting experience on a digital device — Apple Pencil Review — (This is a guest post by Myke Hurley. You can find more of Myke’s work at Relay FM and can follow him on Twitter @imyke.) — In all of the press shots and in all of the reviews …
Apple Pencil Review
http://www.penaddict.com/blog/2015/11/23/apple-pencil-review
In all of the press shots and in all of the reviews, the focus of the Apple Pencil is on how amazing it is for artists to draw and create beautiful graphics, but this isn’t what I was interested in when Apple announced the Pencil. Sure, I like to doodle and scribble as much as the next person, but all I wanted to know was if the Apple Pencil would give me the digital handwriting experience I had wanted for so long.
TL;DR: It does. But more on that shortly.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NetApp, now much more object storage than you’d think
Acquisitions finally being developed and put to use
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/24/netapp_more_objectstorage_than_youd_think/
NetApp, the company usually known for its FAS appliances, is putting a lot of effort into making its object storage platform, StorageGRID, more competitive. And it’s coming around to what I’ve been saying for a long time now: end users need “Flash & Trash” or, put more professionally, a two-tier storage strategy.
Previously, I’ve been very skeptical about NetApp’s product strategy with ONTAP everywhere and the unified storage thing. It worked for a while, enabling NetApp’s success, but it’s no longer enough to cover all end-user needs.
Fortunately, it seems things are quickly changing and NetApp is finally embracing a different, more open-minded, approach.
Bycast StorageGRID was one of those acquisitions.
Closing the circle
There are many takeaways from this story:
Object storage rocks. All vendors are investing in it and end users of any size are looking at it as a potential solution for their infrastructures
NetApp is finally exiting from the ONTAP-everywhere loop (or, at least, this is what I take way from the effort it is putting into StorageGRID)
As a consequence, StorageGRID is improving release after release, by adding features, integrations and options to its ecosystem, and when new options come for free it’s always good news
In my opinion, NetApp is also targeting the appliance sweet spot for new object storage deployments. The top of the high-end market is already in the hands of a few vendors such as Scality, HGST, DDN or the now-IBM, Cleversafe
There are many projects starting now, in a range from a few hundred terabytes to few petabytes, where an appliance-based approach, cloud tiering, a robust ecosystem and integrations make the difference
Tomi Engdahl says:
Robert McMillan / Wall Street Journal:
IBM makes its System ML machine learning software freely available to share and modify through the Apache Software Foundation — IBM Turns Up Heat Under Competition in Artificial Intelligence — Programmers of artificial intelligence software got a new tool to work with Monday …
IBM Turns Up Heat Under Competition in Artificial Intelligence
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/ibm-turns-up-heat-under-competition-in-artificial-intelligence-1448362800-lMyQjAxMTE1MjIzNDgyMTQxWj
Programmers of artificial intelligence software got a new tool to work with Monday, when International Business Machines Corp. announced that a proprietary program known as SystemML would be freely available to share and modify through the Apache Software Foundation.
The letters ML stand for “machine learning,” a hot technology in Silicon Valley that enables computers to find common patterns in large amounts of data. Machine learning has been used to teach computers tasks such as predicting phrases entered into search engines, recognizing faces in photos and detecting unusual moves in stock prices.
IBM is one of the three companies this year to make available proprietary machine-learning technology under an open-source license. Facebook Inc. in February, released portions of its Torch software, while Alphabet Inc.’s Google division earlier this month open-sourced parts of its TensorFlow system.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Firefox maker Mozilla: We don’t need Google’s money anymore
http://www.cnet.com/news/firefox-maker-mozilla-we-dont-need-googles-money-anymore/
The organization once banked on the millions that Google paid for search traffic from the Firefox browser. Now it relies on Yahoo, Baidu and others, and it expects revenue to grow.
Mozilla is doing just fine without the millions of dollars it once pulled in from Google.
The developer behind the widely used Firefox browser said Wednesday that it no longer relies on Google for its revenue and is confident new search-engine deals will bring in even more money. For years, Google in effect sponsored Mozilla by paying for Web searches launched through Firefox.
In 2014, that deal accounted for most of the nonprofit organization’s $330 million in revenue, according to financial results just now released for that year.
Mozilla, based in Mountain View, California, ditched the global Google deal at the end of last year, moving instead to regional deals with other search engine companies, notably Yahoo in the United States, Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 IT leaders share the technologists they’d invite to Thanksgiving dinner
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2015/11/10-it-leaders-share-technologists-theyd-invite-thanksgiving-dinner
For CIOs and IT executives, Thanksgiving is a time to unplug and take a short break from big data, the Internet of Things, cybersecurity, digital innovation, and all the other daily stresses of their job. However, if given the chance to host one of the legendary minds of the technology community – past or present – who wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to collaborate over the cranberry sauce.
For this article, we asked IT executives which techies they would share their Thanksgiving dinner with. Here’s what they said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How sports and movie commentaries can speed up the development of artificial intelligence
https://thestack.com/world/2015/11/25/artificial-intelligence-neural-networks-sports-commentaries/
A small team of Indian researchers have leveraged the country’s love of the national sport to consider how cricket commentaries could teach neural networks to understand what’s actually happening in a cricket match.
One of the core challenges that recurs in current scientific research using neural networks is the extent to which computers can usefully learn on their own. It’s a subject that crops up frequently in research around self-driving vehicle AIs, which still rely on manually tagged or annotated databases, yet which need to learn to interpret information in a meaningful and useful way, in real time.
In the field of image recognition, and most specifically in video recognition, manual mark-up and annotation is labour-intensive and prone to produce deceptive results. However a growing number of researchers are beginning to consider the possibilities for neural networks to repurpose commentary which has been produced for other reasons, such as the text versions of commentaries for sports events and scene-descriptive (Closed Caption) commentaries for movies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PuppetLabs Introduces Application Orchestration
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/puppetlabs-introduces-application-orchestration?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
Everybody loves Puppet! Or at the very least, an awful lot of people USE Puppet and in the IT world, “love” is often best expressed by the opening of one’s wallet. I know, in the FOSS world wallets are unnecessary, and Puppet does indeed have an Open Source version. However, once one gets to enterprise-level computing, a tool designed for enterprise scale is preferable and usually there is a cost associated.
Puppet was originally started as an open source project by Luke Kanies in 2005, essentially out of frustration with the other configuration management products available at the time. Their first commercial product was released in 2011, and today it is the most widely used configuration management tool in the world with about 30,000 companies running it. According to our own surveys, better than 60% of Linux Journal readers use some form of Puppet already and you must like it too as it regularly finishes at or near the top in Readers’ Choice awards.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft and Linux: True Romance or Toxic Love?
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/microsoft-and-linux-true-romance-or-toxic-love-0?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
Every now and then, you come across a news story that makes you choke on your coffee or splutter hot latte all over your monitor. Microsoft’s recent proclamations of love for Linux is an outstanding example of such a story.
Common sense says that Microsoft and the FOSS movement should be perpetual enemies. In the eyes of many, Microsoft embodies most of the greedy excesses that the Free Software movement rejects. In addition, Microsoft previously has labeled Linux as a cancer and the FOSS community as a “pack of thieves”.
We can understand why Microsoft has been afraid of a free operating system. When combined with open-source applications that challenge Microsoft’s core line, it threatens Microsoft’s grip on the desktop/laptop market.
In spite of Microsoft’s fears over its desktop dominance, the Web server marketplace is one arena where Linux has had the greatest impact. Today, the majority of Web servers are Linux boxes. This includes most of the world’s busiest sites. The sight of so much unclaimed licensing revenue must be painful indeed for Microsoft.
Handheld devices are another realm where Microsoft has lost ground to free software. At one point, its Windows CE and Pocket PC operating systems were at the forefront of mobile computing. Windows-powered PDA devices were the shiniest and flashiest gadgets around. But, that all ended when Apple released its iPhone. Since then, Android has stepped into the limelight, with Windows Mobile largely ignored and forgotten. The Android platform is built on free and open-source components.
The rapid expansion in Android’s market share is due to the open nature of the platform.
Losing the battle for the Web and mobile computing is a brutal loss for Microsoft. When you consider the size of those two markets combined, the desktop market seems like a stagnant backwater. Nobody likes to lose, especially when money is on the line. And, Microsoft does have a lot to lose. You would expect Microsoft to be bitter about it. And in the past, it has been.
Microsoft has fought back against Linux and FOSS using every weapon at its disposal, from propaganda to patent threats, and although these attacks have slowed the adoption of Linux, they haven’t stopped it.
So, you can forgive us for being shocked when Microsoft starts handing out t-shirts and badges that say “Microsoft Loves Linux” at open-source conferences and events. Could it be true? Does Microsoft really love Linux?
Of course, PR slogans and free t-shirts do not equal truth. Actions speak louder than words. And when you consider Microsoft’s actions, Microsoft’s stance becomes a little more ambiguous.
On the one hand, Microsoft is recruiting hundreds of Linux developers and sysadmins. It’s releasing its .NET Core framework as an open-source project with cross-platform support (so that .NET apps can run on OS X and Linux). And, it is partnering with Linux companies to bring popular distros to its Azure platform. In fact, Microsoft even has gone so far as to create its own Linux distro for its Azure data center.
On the other hand, Microsoft continues to launch legal attacks on open-source projects directly and through puppet corporations.
Opening .NET Core ultimately will make it possible for .NET developers to produce cross-platform apps for OS X, Linux, iOS and even Android–all from a single codebase.
From a developer’s perspective, this makes the .NET framework much more attractive than before. Being able to reach many platforms from a single codebase dramatically increases the potential target market for any app developed using the .NET framework.
From Microsoft’s point of view, it would gain a huge army of developers. Microsoft profits by selling training, certification, technical support, development tools (including Visual Studio) and proprietary extensions.
Moving beyond .NET, Microsoft is drawing a lot of attention to its Linux support on its Azure cloud computing platform. Remember, Azure originally was Windows Azure. That’s because Windows Server was the only supported operating system. Today, Azure offers support for a number of Linux distros too.
There’s one reason for this: paying customers who need and want Linux services. If Microsoft didn’t offer Linux virtual machines, those customers would do business with someone else.
It looks like Microsoft is waking up to the fact that Linux is here to stay. Microsoft cannot feasibly wipe it out, so it has to embrace it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
So why exactly are IT investors so utterly clueless?
I wash my hands of the whole matter
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/27/so_why_exactly_it_investors_utterly_clueless/
One of the things that used to drive me mad, and helped drive me out, was being surrounded by divs and flakes, with their embarrassingly daft app launches, misconceived proofs-of-concept, childishly incompetent business plans and – despite their frank incompetence – their six-figure salaries.
Unfortunately, this one dubious advantage was bulldozered by the knowledge that I was surrounded by millions of pounds sloshing between dopey investors and every dipshit Bitcoin development wanker to knock on their doors with yet another brain-dead scheme to lose their money.
Jealous? Perhaps. However, it is difficult to hold anything against the entrepreneurs themselves: they’re trying it on, and if it works, good luck to them. What riles me is how thick the investors are.
Someone’s created a website that looks like a cup of tea? Give him £50,000! You’ve invented a wristwatch selfie stick? Have £100,000! What that, you say, you want to develop an app that launches apps for running apps? Sounds cool, take £1m!
Can they not see that they are pouring hard cash into products with all the substance of a dick-swinging hipster’s electronic cigarette exhalation? Don’t they realise they’re investing money into no-hope projects that are simply faking it?
Worse, in today’s crowdfunding climate, we’re all idiots with money to burn. And it’s funnier because private individuals like us don’t even understand the difference between an investment and a loan. We are shocked and get angry when told that the crowdfunding project we invested in has failed after spending all our money.
Well, duh? As the presenter of Kickstarter Crap points out, while genuine commercial products are sold with the safety net of a returns policy, crowdfunding operates with a fuck-you-dumbass policy.
Wise up, that’s what investment means: for every four failed startups, you hope that fifth one will keep going long enough for you to sell it off to an even stupider investor for even more money before they find out the truth.
The thing is, so many of these startups sound so plainly idiotic, I am beginning to suspect that their very idiocy is part of their appeal. It’s as if their utter pointlessness and overwhelming unlikelihood of success is what makes them so attractive.
Consider those nutty stories that pop up from time to time about no-frills airlines: charging money for tap water, making passengers stand up, removing the toilets, dispensing with the wings, etc. None of them is true but they get reported anyway and the net result is always the same: sales for those airlines goes up, not down.
This all comes to mind yet again when my inbox informs me that a British tech startup called imertec (the self-conscious lower-case ‘i’ at the beginning of the name already makes me want to commit an equally self-conscious act of violence) has launched a Crowdcube campaign to develop an app that shows health workers how to wash their hands. It wants £360,000.
Let me run that by you again. How to wash your hands. £360,000.
You certainly do not need £360,000 of development cash to explain how to wash your hands, nor indeed another £520 to purchase the Epson Moverio BT-200 virtual reality glasses that are required to run imertec’s app.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple’s Swift also bends servers
Apple announced a one and a half years ago, Swift new programming language, which was to make iOS applications coding even easier. Now Swift’s popularity grows, Apple hopes that it will be encoded in implanted servers mobile apps.
This server version of the Swift’s full name is given as imported from GitHub language obeys the name Perfect. The idea is simple: developers should be able to encode the server side application in the language in which the smartphone application is coded.
Currently, Perfect can be run only on Mac OS X, so the server use remains marginal. However, Apple has already acknowledged that Swift will open up
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3670:applen-swift-taipuu-myos-palvelimiin&catid=13&Itemid=101
More: https://github.com/PerfectlySoft/Perfect
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Silverlight gets Firefox reprieve for 64-bit users
But Mozilla still pledges cull of NPAPI and Silverlight from Firefox in 2016
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2429763/mozilla-pledges-cull-of-npapi-and-silverlight-from-firefox-in-2016
MOZILLA HAS ANNOUNCED that its Firefox browser is joining Google Chrome in ending support for NPAPI plugins.
The venerable standard, which dates back to the days of Netscape, is now showing its age, and causing more problems than it solves, and will see native support removed by the end of 2016.
However, it has just been confirmed that Mozilla has agreed that 64-bit users of the browser will be able to hang on to Silverlight until then, rather than the more immediate switch off that was planned.
Very little impact was caused when Google removed support in Chrome, except a lack of support for Microsoft’s Silverlight which brought down several top streaming media sites including Sky Go and BT Sport.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT pros average 52-hour workweek
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3008472/careers/it-pros-average-52-hour-workweek.html
Employees in small IT departments tend to work more hours than those in large IT departments
It’s no surprise that a majority of IT pros work more than 40 hours per week, but it’s interesting to learn that some are putting in significantly longer workweeks, according to new survey data from Spiceworks.
Among 600 IT pros surveyed, 54% said they work more than 40 hours per week. At the high end of the overtime group, 18% of respondents said they work more than 60 hours per week, and 17% said they top 50 hours per week. The average workweek among all respondents is 52 hours, Spiceworks reports.
The data comes at a time when hiring managers say it’s tough to hire experienced talent and IT pros say they’re more willing to switch jobs for a better offer. Companies claim to be boosting pay and increasing benefits and perks to entice employees – yet technical talent averages 10+ hours per day, according to the Spiceworks data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Thanksgiving/Black Friday Online Sales Hit $4.5B, 34% Of Purchases Made On Mobile — The first two days of the holiday sales period have netted $4.45 billion in U.S. online purchases, with mobile devices — led by smartphones — accounting for a record $1.5 billion of that amount …
Thanksgiving/Black Friday Online Sales Hit $4.5B, 34% Of Purchases Made On Mobile
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/28/thanksgiving-online-sales/#.ojwuxm:4T9G
The first two days of the holiday sales period have netted $4.45 billion in U.S. online purchases, with mobile devices — led by smartphones — accounting for a record $1.5 billion of that amount, with $2.72 billion spent on BlackFriday and $1.73 billion on Thanksgiving. The figures come from Adobe, which has been tracking some 4,500 sites, including 80% of the top 100 retailers.
IBM says Black Friday outpaced that with the average basket size of $134.45, and sales up 20.7% on a year ago with popular items including Apple Watch, Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4, and TVs from Samsung, Sony and LG.
The number of people buying goods online and by mobile during the holiday season continues to grow, but the average value of what they are buying may be falling.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lenovo and Razer unite to build a new range of gaming PCs
Collaboration starts with desktop towers, but will extend into entirely new product development as well
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/27/9806328/lenovo-razer-gaming-pc-partnership-dreamhack
The world’s biggest PC vendor is getting serious about gaming, and it’s recruited one of gamers’ favorite peripherals brands to help it establish its legitimacy. Lenovo and Razer today announce a major new partnership that will see them co-brand a range of Razer Edition Lenovo PCs, starting with the Y series of desktop towers that made their debut at IFA in September. The first prototype product of this collaboration is on show over at the Dreamhack Winter LAN party in Sweden today, and the two companies have ambitions to extend their relationship into joint product development as well.
Adding the Razer aesthetic will be just the start for Lenovo, however, as the big Chinese company is conscious of how savvy gamers are and promises this partnership is about more than just marketing. Future Lenovo gaming PCs will also benefit from Razer’s software expertise, which has been demonstrated with things like Razer Comms, Synapse, and Cortex, a suite of useful tools for managing and optimizing settings for games. Razer also has a loyal and vocal fan base, which Lenovo says will be heeded in the development and refinement of future products.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OLPC’s modular heir hits the crowdfunding trail
The only thing slower than the original XO is the timeline for delivery of new kiddie-tab
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/30/olpcs_modular_heir_hits_the_crowdfunding_trail/
One Education, the Australian offshoot of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has hit the crowdfunding trail to find the resources needed to build its heir to the project’s XO computer.
As we’ve previously reported, One Education’s new “Infinity” is a modular computer that allows users to swap out the device’s battery, camera, screen and radio. The idea is that as kids grow, they need different hardware, but that it is expensive wasteful to buy complete new computers every time a child outgrows or wears out a component.
One Education has also made Android its OS of choice, offering a rather richer ecoystem than the original XO.
Last August, the organisation offered pre-sales for its first 1,000 devices. Now the outfit has taken to crowdfunding to get the next batch out the door.
Those who contribute to the campaign as individuals will need US$249 to get their hands on an Infinity and patience because it won’t ship until September 2016. That’s rather a long time to wait for a modestly-specced tablet, especially when those worried about obsolescence of kids’ computers can pick up a Raspberry Pi Zero for the price of a coffee or landfill Android kit at supermarkets for very reasonable prices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
All hail Firefox Dev Edition 44 – animations, memory and all
Going from from ‘pah’ to ‘hang on, a minute’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/30/firefox_developer_edition_44/
When Mozilla released the first Firefox Developer Edition there wasn’t much difference from the regular Firefox release, but all that changed recently.
Firefox DE 44, delivered in early November, packs in a wealth of new features and improvements, particularly for anyone working with HTML5 and CSS3 animation.
The Developer Edition’s Page Inspector tool adds an animation panel that allows developers to step through animations node by node and easily scrub, pause, and inspect each animation on the webpage.
The animation panel also ties into the DOM inspector so it’s easy to switch between global and detail views of your animation. The animation panel also offers a visual cubic-bezier editor for tweaking any easing you need to apply to animations.
There’s one other way to inspect memory, though you’ll need to turn it on each time you need it since it uses quite a bit of memory itself, namely “allocation stack.” With that activated (look for the checkbox at the top of the Memory Panel) you can quickly reference the actual code that created each object in memory.
That means, if you’ve got some huge object you want to re-factor, you can quickly see exactly which lines of code in your app created it.
Equally useful, though rougher around the edges, is the new WebSocket Debugging API. This API allows for monitoring WebSocket frames.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The hidden pitfalls of going freelance in IT
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3007722/it-careers/the-hidden-pitfalls-of-going-freelance-in-it.html
Independence has its upsides and downsides. IT pros lend firsthand advice on the challenges of going solo
The life of an independent IT contractor sounds attractive enough: the freedom to choose clients, the freedom to set your schedule, and the freedom to set your pay rate while banging out code on the beach.
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But all of this freedom comes at a cost. Sure, heady times for some skill sets may make IT freelancing a seller’s market, but striking out on your own comes with hurdles. The more you’re aware of the challenges and what you need to do to address them, the better your chance of success as an IT freelancer.
Selling yourself from afar
You can’t get a gig without the client signing off, and often getting key stakeholders to accept you as a valued partner can be challenging — especially when the work is remote.
“In order for a project to be successful, the client has to buy into you and the vision for the project,” says Nick Brattoli, founder and lead consultant at Byrdttoli Enterprise Consulting.
“This is exacerbated in the IT world, because more often than not, you are going to be working remotely,”
In addition, at many companies the tech-savvy people running a project will know what needs to be done to meet the desired outcomes. “But once that’s all figured out, it is very hard to convince the people above them to go through with it,” Brattoli says. “Where technology is concerned, people who are less tech-savvy are going to be wary of any new changes to infrastructure.”
To get around these challenges, Brattoli recommends onsite travel to help generate buy-in; proposing various solutions of varying costs for a project; and constant communications after getting initial buy-in to manage expectations as much as possible.
Navigating non-negotiable agreements
Most companies have standard agreements in place to protect confidentiality and restrict competition. Such forms are usually non-negotiable, even for full-time employees
“A freelancer will usually have no leverage to negotiate the restrictive covenants, or the scope of confidentiality,” Jaskiewicz says. This creates several risks, he says. For one, a signed form might prevent a freelancer from being able to make good on future job opportunities or require the freelancer to give ownership of a work product to the employer, without commensurate compensation for what the freelancer gives up.
Furthermore, such restrictions can accumulate rapidly over a career, making it hard to keep track of what you can or can’t do when presented with future job opportunities.
“The freelancer must keep careful records — and constantly update one’s own knowledge — of the restrictions to which he or she is subject,” Jaskiewicz says.
The alternative is to pay a lawyer to check each new job against all prior agreements, which is an economically unrealistic proposition for most freelancers.
A practical alternative (on the confidentiality side, at least) is to request the “standard” exceptions to confidentiality, Jaskiewicz says. These include prior knowledge, public knowledge, independent development without use of confidential information, receipt of information from a third party not bound by confidentiality with the disclosing party, and compelled disclosure (that is, in response to a subpoena or deposition).
Dealing with anti-IT sentiments
Many people “just don’t get or trust IT,” says Marc Weaver, an IT consultant who recently formed his own company to provide cloud database solutions.
Even within IT departments there can be issues with your presence as a freelancer.
“When a consultant is placed in a team of permanent employees, there is sometimes some resentment toward the consultant, as they are usually earning more,” Weaver says.
This mistrust is even more pronounced when you want to change the way things are done — even if it’s part of your contract.
“People immediately start panicking,” Weaver says. “They would rather have the painfully slow manual process that needs intervention on a daily basis than one that runs automatically and rarely breaks.”
Riding out harsh realities and drumming up new business
Providing IT expertise, as with other types of freelancing, can be feast or famine. “At the first scent of an economic downturn, projects get canceled or postponed and IT consultants are either let go or not hired,” Weaver says.
Keeping up with technology changes
As anyone in IT knows, technology and how it’s used are constantly shifting. Freelancers especially are challenged when it comes to staying current with the ever-changing technology landscape.
“The resources available to a freelancer may not be sufficient to get trained on new technology, nor put that training into practice in a business environment to engrain the skills,”
Reconciling agile development with fixed-bid contracts
Many companies have adopted agile development methodologies to iterate their projects faster in hopes of gaining a competitive edge.
“This has been a boon for software developers — both for full-time and freelancers,” says Damien Filiatrault, CEO and founder of Scalable Path, a network of more than 1,000 freelance developers. “Demand is high, supply is tight, and projects are numerous.”
But for freelancers, there remains a major disconnect between traditional fixed-bid contracting and agile software development projects, Filiatrault says. “Lots of time needs to be spent up front specifying functionality and scope before work even begins on a fixed-bid project,” he says.
Working in agile, where the client’s objectives evolve over time, is hamstrung by the fixed-bid contract.
Coping with communications gaps
Even within the same company, IT and non-IT people often don’t communicate well with each other. This can be an issue for freelancers as they try to stay in sync with clients.
“It is very true that engineers and non-engineers speak pretty much different languages,” Akhtar says. “The way an engineer looks at a problem and how a nontechnical person may look at a problem is very different.”
Managing your time
While time management is a challenge that applies to almost any profession, IT freelancers are in a unique position because they might be called in to address issues when they least expect it — throwing schedules into turmoil.
“Once you start to grow your business, time management becomes pivotal,” Brattoli says. “In order to grow, you need to manage your full-time job, your current freelancing projects, growing your business, training, and your personal life.”
Those working solo especially need to use their time wisely.
“A lot of tasks in the IT world involve doing a couple things, waiting a while, then doing some more things,” Brattoli says. “Rather than browsing the Internet without purpose every time you get these blocks of time, do some studying, read some blogs. Train yourself. On those days where you have nothing to do, bid on some jobs online, expand your LinkedIn network, plan out your dinner. Using your time wisely can alleviate a lot of stress.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The world buzzes on “Big Five” pace: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon.
They have huge market shares of the fields and a large impact on the functioning of small businesses and startups.
- For example, Google has a 89 percent share of Internet searches. Almost every one of us merely the first 10 search results list. Search engines look for trends, but their results can already deduce much more
Ekström explained before the finale (Google owned) YouTube competitor whose pieces were considered the most. Google Trends service, and the search engine produced the same answer. Then he went to talk to the German Lena Meyer-Landrut, with and told him: “you win this competition.” The singer did not believe in, but did not drive away at all. On the basis of small talk Ekström wrote the article beforehand and sent it to the newspaper, when the results were announced.
Ekström does not want a consultant, but intends to retain the supplier of their work.
- I find it hard to see a larger journalistic topics than this. Large open-ended questions are many. For example, who can grant a digital identity certificate. In Sweden, it is the task of the banks, but could it be in the future such as Facebook?
Source: http://haloo.atea.fi/pinnalla/maailma-sykkii-big-fiven-tahtiin/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mega Microsoft dev tools update includes Clang codegen for Windows
Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 released
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/01/massive_microsoft_dev_tools_update_includes_clang_codegen_for_windows/
Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 with a ton of new features, including an option to build Windows dynamic libraries with the open source Clang compiler.
The developer team at Microsoft has been in overdrive these last few years, coping with the challenge of keeping up with the company’s ever-changing platform strategy while also maintaining support for its existing runtimes, languages and frameworks.
Microsoft’s mantra today is any device, any platform, which is why Visual Studio comes with toolkits for iOS and Android as well as Windows.
At the same time, it is sticking to its Universal Windows Platform effort, an evolution of the Metro personality in Windows 8, now extended to other device types including Windows Phone, Xbox One and Raspberry Pi.
Next there is the web development platform, ASP.NET, for which version 5.0 is in preview, with full release expected early in 2016. This runs optionally on .NET Core, an open source fork of the .NET Framework which is also consuming substantial development effort.
Another key piece in Microsoft’s developer story is the cloud platform, including not just Azure and its myriad services, but also Office 365.
Visual Studio 2015 is the tool that has to bring all this together, which it does remarkably well considering its scope.
Visual Studio Code: The top five features
Getting started with the new open-source code editor
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/30/visual_studio_code_top_five_features/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here’s why the iPad Pro’s processor is so fast
http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/30/apple-a9x-processor-insights/
Whatever you think of Apple’s products, there’s little doubt that the A9X processor in the iPad Pro is quick — in a few cases, it rivals the performance you’d get from a laptop. But why is it so quick, especially when Apple tends to shy away from high clock speeds, many-core processors and other conventional performance tricks? Thanks to AnandTech and Chipworks, we now have a good idea. They’ve torn down the A9X to reveal that the chip is a series of calculated tradeoffs. It only has two CPU cores and doesn’t even have Level 3 memory cache to keep the processor humming, but it has a monstrous amount of bandwidth (51GB per second) and a whopping 12 graphics cores. That’s twice as many as in the iPhone 6s’ A9 chip, folks. To boot, the A9X is larger than Intel’s latest quad-core desktop processors — Apple has the headroom for components that you don’t see in many PCs.
From these clues, it’s apparent that Apple designed the A9X specifically with the iPad Pro in mind: it knew that it had the space and battery requirements to fit this beast of a processor inside.
More on Apple’s A9X SoC: 147mm2@TSMC, 12 GPU Cores, No L3 Cache
by Ryan Smith on November 30, 2015 10:30 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9824/more-on-apples-a9x-soc
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brian Fagioli / BetaNews:
Google to end support for Chrome on 32-bit Linux, Ubuntu Precise, and Debian 7 in early March 2016
Google killing Chrome for 32-bit Linux
http://betanews.com/2015/11/30/google-killing-chrome-for-32-bit-linux/
If you live in the web browser, using a Linux-based operating system makes a lot of sense. By combining say, Ubuntu and Google Chrome, you can have a very secure and easy-to-use platform running the world’s best web browser. A bloated and heavy Windows 10, for instance, could be unnecessary.
Sadly, if you are like me, and the first thing you install on any fresh Linux-based operating system is Google Chrome, you might be in for a world of trouble. You see, Google is killing Chrome for Linux; well, the 32-bit version at least. Is Google making a big mistake?
“To provide the best experience for the most-used Linux versions, we will end support for Google Chrome on 32-bit Linux, Ubuntu Precise (12.04), and Debian 7 (wheezy) in early March, 2016. Chrome will continue to function on these platforms but will no longer receive updates and security fixes. We intend to continue supporting the 32-bit build configurations on Linux to support building Chromium. If you are using Precise, we’d recommend that you to upgrade to Trusty”, says Dirk Pranke, Software Engineer, Google.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bringing discipline to development, without causing pain
What happens when young developers meet old business
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/01/discipline_pain_devlopment_and_git/
There’s that question you’ve always wanted to ask in an interview when the dialogue has gone really well and you know you’re about to get offered the job, but you don’t want it anyway.
Interviewer: “Great, so do you have any questions that you would like to ask me?” Candidate: “Well, if I’m traveling in a car at the speed of light and I turn the headlights on, does anything happen?” Interviewer: “Gosh, I’m not sure.” Candidate: “Okay thanks, you can keep your job in that case.”
The point is that the workforce is starting to dictate the way it wants to work on its own terms. From the undeniable rise of millennials and their preferred methods for hot desking and so on, to the ‘phenomenon’ of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and all the infrastructural changes it has necessitated… the users, increasingly, get to call the shots.
Systems of meritocracy rule
What this means in practice is a new set of defining principles upon which the software application developer builds his or her system faith. Systems of meritocracy that hinge around the community contribution model of open source are blowing old school thinking out of the water. Seniority and company rank comes from what you have achieved and what value you have added, not from who you know and where you went to school.
Stung by GitSwarm, in a good way
Looking at contemporary approaches in this space, Perforce’s work to partner with GitLab as a web-based Git repository manager and produce the GitSwarm ecosystem is a case in point. Perforce’s Helix is said to give developers the pure Git-based workflow they love, while making projects ‘easy-to-manage’. A team’s work is automatically synchronised to the Helix mainline repository as GitSwarm provides a platform for code reviews, comments and tracking issues.
Technical breakdown
Let’s break this down technically to examine the root of the issue. In doing so we may well find that the bridge between freedom and control tells us more about the shape of enterprise software application development than we first thought.
We can say with some certainty that developers like using Git as a repository manager. They like it because they are attracted to its distributed workflow capabilities, which allow them to frequently switch ‘contexts’ and development code streams. They like this lightweight approach to local branching because it allows them to progress different application elements independently, but still, in unison with (and close proximity to) the main code base in development.
So far then, what’s not to like? We’ve got control, flexibility, and management in a lightweight wrapper that says ‘user friendly’ right there up on the front.
Who cares? DevOps can fix it, right?
You might be wondering at this point, why does all this matter anyway?
We live in a world of DevOps where, even if we end up with large binary assets outside the repository or divided among multiple repositories, we can still coalesce and unify these elements through DevOps magic for builds, testing and onward to releases. Opponents of Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) would argue that this is a Band Aid over a bigger problem and that keeping all the assets in one single store is a more prudent method overall.
The truth is (and don’t shout it out too loud), that source code is often a tiny drop in the binary bucket compared to documents, images, models, audio, video, even entire virtual-machine (VM) environments for the sake of testing and deployment.
Where do we go from here?
Unfortunately there are more challenges ahead. If we get past some basic resolution on our approach to cloning and branch management, then have we provisioned for disaster recovery and high availability in the longer term? If we’re going back to the individual developer level (remember where this argument first started?) then the answer is probably going to be no, isn’t it? But we’re here to discuss the technical bridging challenge between developer freedom and enterprise requirements, so disaster recovery and availability does have to be tabled.
Should the development shop employ standby Virtual Machines (VMs) as a means of mirroring changes between file systems so that storage can be swopped out as needed to provide that disaster recovery backbone? The individual developer doesn’t care so much, so the enterprise had better make sure that it does. What about dashboard controls for higher level project management? What about authentication and security concerns. We haven’t even gone there yet.
The realities we can surmise from this discussion are that developers left in the wild will obviously work differently to the way they will work inside more regimented enterprise development shop systems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Larry Dignan / ZDNet:
Adobe renames Creative Cloud software Flash Professional to Animate as it downplays Flash — Adobe renames Flash Professional to Animate, pivots to HTML5 — Adobe renamed its Creative Cloud software Flash Professional to Animate as it downplays Flash, which is under fire in many camps, and pivots to HTML5 with its messaging.
Adobe renames Flash Professional to Animate, pivots to HTML5
http://www.zdnet.com/article/adobe-renames-flash-professional-to-animate-pivots-to-html5/
Adobe on Tuesday delivered an update to its Creative Cloud, but the biggest switch may be that it renamed its Flash Professional CC to Adobe Animate CC in a move that highlights the pivot from Flash to HTML5.
Officially, the renaming of Flash Professional CC is “to more accurately reflect the content-formats produced by this tool.” Meanwhile, Adobe said that it is working on a new HTML5 video player for the desktop.
The move may be long overdue. Flash has been under attack from many quarters over security as well as slowing down Web pages. Adobe wants to remain a leader in interactive tools and the pivot to HTML5 requires new messaging.
IDC analyst Al Hilwa noted:
This has to do with Adobe’s successful pivot in the capability of its tools to support HTML5. The renaming of Adobe’s animation tools reflect that it now emits HTML5 and is widely used for this purpose and so the new name reflects this important change in the capability and usage patterns seen by its users.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal:
Yahoo board to meet Wednesday for three days to plan future after Starboard increased pressure on company to sell core business last month — Yahoo Board to Weigh Sale of Internet Business — Board to discuss whether to proceed with a plan to spin off its investment in Alibaba …
Yahoo Board to Weigh Sale of Internet Business
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/yahoo-board-to-weigh-potential-sale-of-internet-business-sources-say-1449015461-lMyQjAxMTI1MjA0MjkwNjIyWj
Board to discuss whether to proceed with a plan to spin off its investment in Alibaba, find a buyer for its core business, or both, sources said
Yahoo Inc. ’s board is planning a series of meetings this week to consider selling off the company’s flagging Internet businesses and how to make the most of its valuable stake in Chinese e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
Directors are likely to discuss whether to proceed with a plan to spin off its investment in Alibaba, currently worth more than $30 billion, find a buyer for Yahoo’s gaggle of Web properties, or both, the people said.
Growing concerns around Chief Executive Marissa Mayer’s lack of progress turning around Yahoo and an exodus of top executives have increased pressure on the company’s board to consider her future and alternatives to her turnaround attempt, now in its fourth year.
Much of the value of Yahoo’s $31 billion market capitalization is tied up in two large Asian assets, Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.
That would mean investors are valuing Yahoo’s core business at less than zero if the Asian assets were spun out tax-free.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Mozilla wants to split off its Thunderbird email/chat client to focus on projects like Firefox that have an “industry-wide impact”, says Mitchell Baker memo
Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client, Says Mitchell Baker Memo
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from-mozilla/
The Mozilla Foundation looks like it’s about to take another step in its bid to sharpen its focus on development around its Firefox browser. Mozilla now wants to once and for all hive off support for Thunderbird, the free email, chat and news client it first developed in 2004 but effectively stopped directly updating in in 2012. The plans were revealed in a company-wide memo penned today by chairperson Mitchell Baker. (We have confirmed with Mozilla that it is indeed from her.)
“I believe Thunderbird should would thrive best by separating itself from reliance on Mozilla development systems and in some cases, Mozilla technology,”
Apart from the fact that Mozilla had cut off most development support in 2012, Thunderbird has become a somewhat anachronistic product.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Microsoft’s HoloLens May Change Everything For Industrial And Mechanical Designers
http://www.fastcompany.com/3053986/how-microsofts-hololens-may-change-everything-for-industrial-and-mechanical-designers?partner=rss&utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=webfeeds
By integrating Microsoft’s “mixed reality” system and Autodesk’s Fusion 360 design software, designers can see 3-D holograms of their work.
Soon, product designers will be able to get up close and personal with their creations while they’re still planning them. Rather than just look at digital models on their computer screens, they could walk around a 3-D hologram of the design.
That could soon become a reality in design studios, thanks to Microsoft and design software giant Autodesk. Today, the two companies showed off an early stage integration of Microsoft’s HoloLens “mixed reality” system with Autodesk’s Fusion 360 design software that they hope could make product development much easier and more intuitive.
Often lumped in with virtual reality and augmented reality systems, HoloLens is different, Microsoft argues, because it creates mixed reality holographic experiences that can be manipulated.
With the integration of HoloLens and Fusion 360, everyday industrial designers and mechanical engineers will have a tool that enables “much more effective collaboration [in which they] can see and really interact” with their work, says Ben Sugden, the studio manager for HoloLens.
But by using HoloLens with Fusion 360, people working together on a design can make changes that are instantly reflected.
Tomi Engdahl says:
3 ways CIOs can use outsourcing to save millions on printing
http://www.cio.com/article/3010206/outsourcing/3-ways-cios-can-use-outsourcing-to-save-millions-on-printing.html
CIOs can lead the charge to cut printing expenses with a three-step strategic plan for more efficient print sourcing — and pave the way for increased digital transformation in the process.
Despite the focus on digitalization, businesses remain reliant on printing paper, from marketing materials to invoices to reports. And many companies still provide transactional information to customers that require hard-copy printed documentation, such as proxies and financial statements.
A Fortune 1000 organization can spend upwards of $100 million dollars a year on printing, depending on the industry. Yet due to lack of central oversight and ownership of the print management function, much of that money is wasted. Indeed, some enterprises have trouble estimating of total print costs at all.
“Print is dispersed across a number of different business units — marketing, procurement, facilities and IT,” says Lisa Meath, managing consultant with outsourcing consultancy Alsbridge. “In most cases, however, there’s no big-picture perspective on how and where to drive improvements and costs reductions. Plus there’s no direction regarding where to start and how to create the most beneficial business impact.”
Financial services and insurance, for example, have traditionally been very paper-intensive. And many had invested in internal print capabilities that are increasingly inefficient and obsolete. While outsourcing these operations could save them money, the complexity of transitioning the work to a third party has prevented them from doing so in the past.
1. Assess existing print operations
2. Outsource where appropriate
3. Optimize internal processes
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gartner: EMEA server market is two-horse race between Dell and HPE
Sector is ‘bifurcating’ between Meg’s biz and Texan Mick’s server ops
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/12/02/server_market_q3_2015/
The EMEA server market looks to be a two-horse race between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell, according to Gartner.
HPE, Dell and Cisco “all benefited” from Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s EMEA x86 server organisation at the start of this year, and though the Chinese firm edged into third place, market share remained below that of Big Blue a year ago, Gartner revealed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adobe Flash Is Dead in Name Only
http://www.wired.com/2015/12/adobe-flash-is-dead-in-name-only/
Flash is finally dead. Well, the name is, anyway.
The platform that was until yesterday known as Adobe Flash Professional CC is now Adobe Animate CC. What does that mean? According to an Adobe statement announcing the change, it’s part of an ongoing commitment to “evolve to support multiple standards,” specifically HTML5. In practice, though, the answer is: not much. Meet the new Flash, same as the old Flash, and still a security-addled, closed-off mess.
The good news, at least, is Adobe seems to acknowledge the inevitability of an HTML5 world. A simple rebranding, though, doesn’t do much to get us there.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Teaching AI to Play Atari Will Help Robots Make Sense of Our World
http://www.wired.com/2015/12/teaching-ai-to-play-atari-will-help-robots-make-sense-of-our-world/
Google is teaching machines to play Atari games like Space Invaders, Video Pinball, and Breakout. And they’re getting pretty good.
At DeepMind, a Google subsidiary based in Cambridge, England, researchers have built artificial intelligence software that’s so adept at these classic games, it can sometimes beat a human player—and a professional, at that. This may seem like a frivolous, if intriguing, pursuit. But it’s a step toward something bigger. If a machine can learn to navigate the digital world of a video game, Google says, it eventually could learn to navigate the real world, too. Today, this AI can play Space Invaders.
Today, AI can play Space Invaders. Tomorrow, it could control the robots that will build our gadgets and toys
Google isn’t the only one with this vision of AI leaping from games to reality.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Consumer SSDs and hard drive prices are nearing parity
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3010395/solid-state-drives/consumer-ssds-and-hard-drive-prices-are-nearing-parity.html
SSDs will be in more than 25% of new laptops this year, more than 40% by 2017
The prices of mainstream consumer SSDs have fallen dramatically every year over the past three, and by 2017 they are expected to be within 11 cents of the per-gigabyte price of hard disk drives (HDDs).
The plummeting prices have also driven the recent adoption of SSDs in laptops. This year, they will be used by manufacturers in about 24% to 25% of laptops, according to a new report by DRAMeXchange, a division of market research firm TrendForce.
windows10 4tiles
What you need to know about Windows 10′s new upgrade
The latest upgrade to Windows 10, codenamed Threshold 2, adds a variety of fixes and tweaks. But there
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Next year, SSDs are expected to be in 31% of new consumer laptops, and by 2017 they’ll be in 41% of them, according to DRAMeXchange senior manager Alan Chen.
“Branded PC vendors and channel distributors are holding back on their SSD purchases due to lower-than-expected notebook sales,” Chen said. “However, 256GB SSDs will be moving close to price parity with mainstream HDDs in 2016, so the adoption of SSDs in the business notebook segment will rise.”
While SSD pricing has dropped dramatically over the past three years, HDD pricing hasn’t.
Next year, SSD prices will decline to 24 cents per gigabyte and in 2017, they’re expected to drop to 17 cents per gigabyte, Chen said. That means a 1TB SSD on average would retail for $170.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft whips out PowerApps – now your Pointy Haired Boss can write software, too!
Yipeeeee!?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/30/microsoft_introduces_powerapps/
Microsoft has announced PowerApps, a new way to create and host applications for its Azure cloud service.
PowerApps is an “enterprise service for innovators everywhere to connect, create and share business apps,” says Application Platform VP Bill Staples.
Sure, but what is this really? Microsoft, it turns out, is still hunting for that mythical thing, a tool for non-programmers to build useful applications. “There simply aren’t enough skilled developers to keep up with demand for business app scenarios,” says Staples.
In this latest effort, the company is combining the existing Azure App Service with a new tool that supposedly enables anyone to create an application with a few clicks.
Azure App Service, which was introduced in March 2015, is the evolution of Azure Web Apps, a managed platform for applications. App Service supports .NET, Node.js, Java, PHP or Python. The underlying virtual machines are only partially abstracted, but Microsoft takes care of patching the operating system and you can auto-scale the infrastructure based on load.
PowerApps is a new visual development tool for building clients for App Service applications. It borrows from previous efforts to attract non-programmers, such as Project Siena (still in beta), an app for building Windows 8 apps, and App Studio (still in beta), a browser-based tool for building apps for Windows 8, Windows Phone and Windows 10.
The PowerApps development tool runs as a Windows application, but “the full authoring tool also works in a browser running on any platform,” according to a Microsoft spokesperson.
PowerApps also support formulae, for which Microsoft has drawn on its Excel spreadsheet application for inspiration. “PowerApps is modeled after Excel. Many of the same formulas that you use in Excel also work in PowerApps,”
Offline applications are supported, thanks to a local data store.
Once your app is complete, you can deploy it. Microsoft is aiming for business users, and you can control permissions based on groups in Azure Active Directory, giving users either view or edit permissions. The company makes play of the idea that PowerApps have enterprise manageability as well as being easy to build.
An app package is built with HTML and JavaScript, and published to the PowerApps cloud service. Native clients are available for iOS, Android and Windows, or the application can be run directly on the PowerApps site.
Microsoft has three different plans for PowerApps, Free, Standard and Enterprise, with pricing helpfully announced as $0, $, and $$.
Introducing Microsoft PowerApps
http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/11/30/introducing-microsoft-powerapps/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is AI Development Moving In the Wrong Direction?
http://search.slashdot.org/story/15/12/03/043239/is-ai-development-moving-in-the-wrong-direction
Artificial Intelligence is always just around the corner, right? We often see reports that promise near breakthroughs, but time and again they don’t come to fruition. The cause of this may be that we’re trying to solve the wrong problem.
efforts like IBM’s Watson and Google’s Inceptionism. His conclusion is that we haven’t actually been trying to solve “intelligence”
A Short History of AI, and Why It’s Heading in the Wrong Direction
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/01/a-short-history-of-ai-and-why-its-heading-in-the-wrong-direction/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Flexible friend: Data’s Big digital journey online
The analogue shift disguised its original purpose
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/03/history_of_technology_1/
Big Data and All That The media appear to suffer from a congenital compulsion to simplify everything down to a level they can grasp. Big data is one of those simplifications: something that can be shoved down a Fat Pipe. Enid Blyton passed away before the IT explosion and only got as far as Big Ears.
I don’t get any pleasure from nursery language and I cringe when seeming adults order their eggs “sunny side up”.
Even if I were to attempt a definition of big data, others would disagree. It is best classified by Alice in Wonderland: “When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean”. Appropriately too, as Lewis Carroll was actually a mathematician who laid some of the foundation stones of symbolic logic.
Mankind has a habit of recording stuff and this invariably involves making marks on some medium that are more or less analogous to the material. When the marks could be made by hand and became standardised so that many could understand them, we had writing. As technology advanced, the marks could get smaller, so more stuff would fit in a reasonable space.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PHP 7.0 arrives, so go forth and upgrade if you dare
You get to play with a T_SPACESHIP operator, and much, much, more
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/03/php_70_arrives_complete_with_ttt_spaceshiptt_operator/
PHP 7.0 was launched today, so we’ve asked @sydphp organiser and #phunconf convener Jack Skinner to explain its significance. Over to you, Jack …
PHP is the language we love to hate and often hate to love. After celebrating it’s 20th birthday earlier this year, it’s clearly here to stay, not least because version 7 arrived today.
From humble beginnings as a dangerous thought from Rasmus, PHP has grown to a monolith by software standards; depending on which benchmark you believe, it drives up to 81 per cent of the web
Upgrade to PHP7 on launch day? I, too, like to live dangerously! But with PHP 7 and its shiny new feature list coming to a repository near you, it’s safe to say PHP isn’t going the way of the dinosaur just yet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mozilla: Five… Four… Three… Two… One… Thunderbirds are – gone
Time you grew up and got your own coders, foundation says
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/01/mozilla_to_kick_thunderbird_out/
Seeking to shift its full attention to Firefox, Mozilla is planning to throw its Thunderbird email client under a bus – er, offload it to the community to develop and support.
The open-source software house said it will begin exploring ways to separate the development of Thunderbird from other Mozilla projects, allowing engineers to be “laser-focused on activities like Firefox.”
“Firefox and Thunderbird have lived with competing demands for some time now,”