It seems that PC market seems to be stabilizing in 2016. I expect that the PC market to shrinks slightly. While mobile devices have been named as culprits for the fall of PC shipments, IDC said that other factors may be in play. It is still pretty hard to make any decent profits with building PC hardware unless you are one of the biggest players – so again Lenovo, HP, and Dell are increasing their collective dominance of the PC market like they did in 2015. I expect changes like spin-offs and maybe some mergers with with smaller players like Fujitsu, Toshiba and Sony. 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.
Tablet market is no longer high grow market – tablet maker has started to decline, and decline continues in 2016 as owners are holding onto their existing devices for more than 3 years. iPad sales are set to continue decline and iPad Air 3 to be released in 1st half of 2016 does not change that. IDC predicts that detachable tablet market set for growth in 2016 as more people are turning to hybrid devices. Two-in-one tablets have been popularized by offerings like the Microsoft Surface, with options ranging dramatically in price and specs. I am not myself convinced that the growth will be as IDC forecasts, even though Company have started to make purchases of tablets for workers in jobs such as retail sales or field work (Apple iPads, Windows and Android tablets managed by company). Combined volume shipments of PCs, tablets and smartphones are expected to increase only in the single digits.
All your consumer tech gear should be cheaper come July as shere will be less import tariffs for IT products as World Trade Organization (WTO) deal agrees that tariffs on imports of consumer electronics will be phased out over 7 years starting in July 2016. The agreement affects around 10 percent of the world trade in information and communications technology products and will eliminate around $50 billion in tariffs annually.
In 2015 the storage was rocked to its foundations and those new innovations will be taken into wider use in 2016. The storage market in 2015 went through strategic foundation-shaking turmoil as the external shared disk array storage playbook was torn to shreds: The all-flash data centre idea has definitely taken off as a vision that could be achieved so that primary data is stored in flash with the rest being held in cheap and deep storage. Flash drives generally solve the dusk drive latency access problem, so not so much need for hybrid drives. There is conviction that storage should be located as close to servers as possible (virtual SANs, hyper-converged industry appliances and NVMe fabrics). The existing hybrid cloud concept was adopted/supported by everybody. Flash started out in 2-bits/cell MLC form and this rapidly became standard and TLC (3-bits/cell or triple layer cell) had started appearing. Industry-standard NVMe drivers for PCIe flash cards appeared. Intel and Micron blew non-volatile memory preconceptions out of the water in the second half of the year with their joint 3D XPoint memory announcement. Boring old disk disk tech got shingled magnetic recording (SMR) and helium-filled drive technology; drive industry is focused on capacity-optimizing its drives. We got key:value store disk drives with an Ethernet NIC on-board and basic GET and PUT object storage facilities came into being. Tape industry developed a 15TB LTO-7 format.
The use of SSD will increase and it’s price will drop. SSDs will be in more than 25% of new laptops sold in 2015. SSDs are expected to be in 31% of new consumer laptops in 2016 and more than 40% by 2017. The prices of mainstream consumer SSDs have fallen dramatically every year over the past three years while HDD prices have not changed much. SSD prices will decline to 24 cents per gigabyte in 2016. In 2017 they’re expected to drop to 11-17 cents per gigabyte (means a 1TB SSD on average would retail for $170 or less).
Hard disk sales will decrease, but this technology is not dead. Sales of hard disk drives have been decreasing for several years now (118 million units in the third quarter of 2015), but according to Seagate hard disk drives (HDDs) are set to still stay relevant around for at least 15 years to 20 years. HDDs remain the most popular data storage technology as it is cheapest in terms of per-gigabyte costs. While SSDs are generally getting more affordable, high-capacity solid-state drives are not going to become as inexpensive as hard drives any time soon.
Because all-flash storage systems with homogenous flash media are still too expensive to serve as a solution to for every enterprise application workload, enterprises will increasingly turn to performance optimized storage solutions that use a combination of multiple media types to deliver cost-effective performance. The speed advantage of Fibre Channel over Ethernet has evaporated. Enterprises also start to seek alternatives to snapshots that are simpler and easier to manage, and will allow data and application recovery to a second before the data error or logical corruption occurred.
Local storage and the cloud finally make peace in 2016 as the decision-makers across the industry have now acknowledged the potential for enterprise storage and the cloud to work in tandem. Over 40 percent of data worldwide is expected to live on or move through the cloud by 2020 according to IDC.
Open standards for data center development are now a reality thanks to advances in cloud technology. Facebook’s Open Compute Project has served as the industry’s leader in this regard.This allows more consolidation for those that want that. Consolidation used to refer to companies moving all of their infrastructure to the same facility. However, some experts have begun to question this strategy as the rapid increase in data quantities and apps in the data center have made centralized facilities more difficult to operate than ever before. Server virtualization, more powerful servers and an increasing number of enterprise applications will continue to drive higher IO requirements in the datacenter.
Cloud consolidation starts heavily in 2016: number of options for general infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services and cloud management software will be much smaller at the end of 2016 than the beginning. The major public cloud providers will gain strength, with Amazon, IBM SoftLayer, and Microsoft capturing a greater share of the business cloud services market. Lock-in is a real concern for cloud users, because PaaS players have the ancient imperative to find ways to tie customers to their platforms and aren’t afraid to use them so advanced users want to establish reliable portability across PaaS products in a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment.
Year 2016 will be harder for legacy IT providers than 2015. In its report, IDC states that “By 2020, More than 30 percent of the IT Vendors Will Not Exist as We Know Them Today.” Many enterprises are turning away from traditional vendors and toward cloud providers. They’re increasingly leveraging open source. In short, they’re becoming software companies. The best companies will build cultures of performance and doing the right thing — and will make data and the processes around it self-service for all their employees. Design Thinking to guide companies who want to change the lives of its customers and employees. 2016 will see a lot more work in trying to manage services that simply aren’t designed to work together or even be managed – for example Whatever-As-A-Service cloud systems to play nicely together with their existing legacy systems. So competent developers are the scarce commodity. Some companies start to see Cloud as a form of outsourcing that is fast burning up inhouse ITops jobs with varying success.
There are still too many old fashioned companies that just can’t understand what digitalization will mean to their business. In 2016, some companies’ boards still think the web is just for brochures and porn and don’t believe their business models can be disrupted. It gets worse for many traditional companies. For example Amazon is a retailer both on the web and increasingly for things like food deliveries. Amazon and other are playing to win. Digital disruption has happened and will continue.
Windows 10 is coming more on 2016. If 2015 was a year of revolution, 2016 promises to be a year of consolidation for Microsoft’s operating system. I expect that Windows 10 adoption in companies starts in 2016. Windows 10 is likely to be a success for the enterprise, but I expect that word from heavyweights like Gartner, Forrester and Spiceworks, suggesting that half of enterprise users plan to switch to Windows 10 in 2016, are more than a bit optimistic. Windows 10 will also be used in China as Microsoft played the game with it better than with Windows 8 that was banned in China.
Windows is now delivered “as a service”, meaning incremental updates with new features as well as security patches, but Microsoft still seems works internally to a schedule of milestone releases. Next up is Redstone, rumoured to arrive around the anniversary of Windows 10, midway through 2016. Also Windows servers will get update in 2016: 2016 should also include the release of Windows Server 2016. Server 2016 includes updates to the Hyper-V virtualisation platform, support for Docker-style containers, and a new cut-down edition called Nano Server.
Windows 10 will get some of the already promised features not delivered in 2015 delivered in 2016. Windows 10 was promised coming to PCs and Mobile devices in 2015 to deliver unified user experience. Continuum is a new, adaptive user experience offered in Windows 10 that optimizes the look and behavior of apps and the Windows shell for the physical form factor and customer’s usage preferences. The promise was same unified interface for PCs, tablets and smart phones – but it was only delivered in 2015 for only PCs and some tablets. Mobile Windows 10 for smart phone is expected to start finally in 2016 – The release of Microsoft’s new Windows 10 operating system may be the last roll of the dice for its struggling mobile platform. Because Microsoft Plan A is to get as many apps and as much activity as it can on Windows on all form factor with Universal Windows Platform (UWP), which enables the same Windows 10 code to run on phone and desktop. Despite a steady inflow of new well-known apps, it remains unclear whether the Universal Windows Platform can maintain momentum with developer. Can Microsoft keep the developer momentum going? I am not sure. In addition there are also plans for tools for porting iOS apps and an Android runtime, so expect also delivery of some or all of the Windows Bridges (iOS, web app, desktop app, Android) announced at the April 2015 Build conference in hope to get more apps to unified Windows 10 app store. Windows 10 does hold out some promise for Windows Phone, but it’s not going to make an enormous difference. 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.
Older Windows versions will not die in 2016 as fast as Microsoft and security people would like. Expect Windows 7 diehards to continue holding out in 2016 and beyond. And there are still many companies that run their critical systems on Windows XP as “There are some people who don’t have an option to change.” Many times the OS is running in automation and process control systems that run business and mission-critical systems, both in private sector and government enterprises. For example US Navy is using obsolete operating system Microsoft Windows XP to run critical tasks. It all comes down to money and resources, but if someone is obliged to keep something running on an obsolete system, it’s the wrong approach to information security completely.
Virtual reality has grown immensely over the past few years, but 2016 looks like the most important year yet: it will be the first time that consumers can get their hands on a number of powerful headsets for viewing alternate realities in immersive 3-D. Virtual Reality will become the mainstream when Sony, and Samsung Oculus bring consumer products on the market in 2016. Whole virtual reality hype could be rebooted as Early build of final Oculus Rift hardware starts shipping to devs. Maybe HTC‘s and Valve‘s Vive VR headset will suffer in the next few month. Expect a banner year for virtual reality.
GPU and FPGA acceleration will be used in high performance computing widely. Both Intel and AMD have products with CPU and GPU in the same chip, and there is software support for using GPU (learn CUDA and/or OpenCL). Also there are many mobile processors have CPU and GPU on the same chip. FPGAs are circuits that can be baked into a specific application, but can also be reprogrammed later. There was lots of interest in 2015 for using FPGA for accelerating computations as the nest step after GPU, and I expect that the interest will grow even more in 2016. FPGAs are not quite as efficient as a dedicated ASIC, but it’s about as close as you can get without translating the actual source code directly into a circuit. Intel bought Altera (big FPGA company) in 2015 and plans in 2016 to begin selling products with a Xeon chip and an Altera FPGA in a single package – possibly available in early 2016.
Artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning will be talked about a lot in 2016. Neural networks, which have been academic exercises (but little more) for decades, are increasingly becoming mainstream success stories: Heavy (and growing) investment in the technology, which enables the identification of objects in still and video images, words in audio streams, and the like after an initial training phase, comes from the formidable likes of Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others. So-called “deep learning” has been enabled by the combination of the evolution of traditional neural network techniques, the steadily increasing processing “muscle” of CPUs (aided by algorithm acceleration via FPGAs, GPUs, and, more recently, dedicated co-processors), and the steadily decreasing cost of system memory and storage. There were many interesting releases on this in the end of 2015: 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. Also IBM Turns Up Heat Under Competition in Artificial Intelligence as SystemML would be freely available to share and modify through the Apache Software Foundation. So I expect that the year 2016 will be the year those are tried in practice. I expect that deep learning will be hot in CES 2016. Several respected scientists issued a letter warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) in 2015, but I don’t worry about a rogue AI exterminating mankind. I worry about an inadequate AI being given control over things that it’s not ready for. How machine learning will affect your business? MIT has a good free intro to AI and ML.
Computers, which excel at big data analysis, can help doctors deliver more personalized care. Can machines outperform doctors? Not yet. But in some areas of medicine, they can make the care doctors deliver better. Humans repeatedly fail where computers — or humans behaving a little bit more like computers — can help. Computers excel at searching and combining vastly more data than a human so algorithms can be put to good use in certain areas of medicine. There are also things that can slow down development in 2016: To many patients, the very idea of receiving a medical diagnosis or treatment from a machine is probably off-putting.
Internet of Things (IoT) was talked a lot in 2015, and it will be a hot topics for IT departments in 2016 as well. Many companies will notice that security issues are important in it. The newest wearable technology, smart watches and other smart devices corresponding to the voice commands and interpret the data we produce - it learns from its users, and generate appropriate responses in real time. Interest in Internet of Things (IoT) will as bring interest to real-time business systems: Not only real-time analytics, but real-time everything. This will start in earnest in 2016, but the trend will take years to play out.
Connectivity and networking will be hot. And it is not just about IoT. CES will focus on how connectivity is proliferating everything from cars to homes, realigning diverse markets. The interest will affect job markets: Network jobs are hot; salaries expected to rise in 2016 as wireless network engineers, network admins, and network security pros can expect above-average pay gains.
Linux will stay big in network server marker in 2016. 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. Linux will also run many parts of out Internet infrastructure that moves the bits from server to the user. Linux will also continue to rule smart phone market as being in the core of Android. New IoT solutions will be moist likely to be built mainly using Linux in many parts of the systems.
Microsoft and Linux are not such enemies that they were few years go. Common sense says that Microsoft and the FOSS movement should be perpetual enemies. 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. Microsoft is already 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.
Web browsers are coming more and more 64 bit as Firefox started 64 bit era on Windows and Google is killing Chrome for 32-bit Linux. At the same time web browsers are loosing old legacy features like NPAPI and Silverlight. Who will miss them? The venerable NPAPI plugins 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 from Firefox. It was already removed from Google Chrome browsers with very little impact. Biggest issue was lack of support for Microsoft’s Silverlight which brought down several top streaming media sites – but they are actively switching to HTML5 in 2016. I don’t miss Silverlight. Flash will continue to be available owing to its popularity for web video.
SHA-1 will be at least partially retired in 2016. Due to recent research showing that SHA-1 is weaker than previously believed, Mozilla, Microsoft and now Google are all considering bringing the deadline forward by six months to July 1, 2016.
Adobe’s Flash has been under attack from many quarters over security as well as slowing down Web pages. If you wish that Flash would be finally dead in 2016 you might be disappointed. Adobe seems to be trying to kill the name by rebranding trick: Adobe Flash Professional CC is now Adobe Animate CC. In practive it propably does not mean much but Adobe seems to acknowledge the inevitability of an HTML5 world. Adobe wants to remain a leader in interactive tools and the pivot to HTML5 requires new messaging.
The trend to try to use same same language and tools on both user end and the server back-end continues. Microsoft is pushing it’s .NET and Azure cloud platform tools. Amazon, Google and IBM have their own set of tools. Java is on decline. JavaScript is going strong on both web browser and server end with node.js , React and many other JavaScript libraries. Apple also tries to bend it’s Swift programming language now used to make mainly iOS applications also to run on servers with project Perfect.
Java will still stick around, but Java’s decline as a language will accelerate as new stuff isn’t being written in Java, even if it runs on the JVM. We will not see new Java 9 in 2016 as Oracle’s delayed the release of Java 9 by six months. The register tells that Java 9 delayed until Thursday March 23rd, 2017, just after tea-time.
Containers will rule the world as Docker will continue to develop, gain security features, and add various forms of governance. Until now Docker has been tire-kicking, used in production by the early-adopter crowd only, but it can change when vendors are starting to claim that they can do proper management of big data and container farms.
NoSQL databases will take hold as they be called as “highly scalable” or “cloud-ready.” Expect 2016 to be the year when a lot of big brick-and-mortar companies publicly adopt NoSQL for critical operations. Basically NoSQL could be seem as key:value store, and this idea has also expanded to storage systems: We got key:value store disk drives with an Ethernet NIC on-board and basic GET and PUT object storage facilities came into being.
In the database world Big Data will be still big but it needs to be analyzed in real-time. A typical big data project usually involves some semi-structured data, a bit of unstructured (such as email), and a whole lot of structured data (stuff stored in an RDBMS). The cost of Hadoop on a per-node basis is pretty inconsequential, the cost of understanding all of the schemas, getting them into Hadoop, and structuring them well enough to perform the analytics is still considerable. Remember that you’re not “moving” to Hadoop, you’re adding a downstream repository, so you need to worry on systems integration and latency issues. Apache Spark will also get interest as Spark’s multi-stage in-memory primitives provides more performance for certain applications. Big data brings with it responsibility – Digital consumer confidence must be earned.
IT security continues to be a huge issue in 2016. You might be able to achieve adequate security against hackers and internal threats but every attempt to make systems idiot proof just means the idiots get upgraded. Firms are ever more connected to each other and the general outside world. So in 2016 we will see even more service firms accidentally leaking critical information and a lot more firms having their reputations scorched by incompetence fuelled security screw-ups. Good security people are needed more and more – a joke doing the rounds of ITExecs doing interviews is “if you’re a decent security bod, why do you need to look for a job”
There will still be unexpected single points of failures in big distributed networked system. The cloud behind the silver lining is that Amazon or any other cloud vendor can be as fault tolerant, distributed and well supported as you like, but if a service like Akamai or Cloudflare was to die, you still stop. That’s not a single point of failure in the classical sense but it’s really hard to manage unless you go for full cloud agnosticism – which is costly. This is hard to justify when their failure rate is so low, so the irony is that the reliability of the content delivery networks means fewer businesses work out what to do if they fail. Oh, and no one seems to test their mission-critical data centre properly, because it’s mission critical- So they just over-specify where they can and cross their fingers (= pay twice and get the half the coverage for other vulnerabilities).
For IT start-ups it seems that Silicon Valley’s cash party is coming to an end. Silicon Valley is cooling, not crashing. Valuations are falling. The era of cheap money could be over and valuation expectations are re-calibrating down. The cheap capital party is over. It could mean trouble for weaker startups.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel admits to Skylake bug that freezes Windows and Linux systems
Could affect industries that rely on complex computational workloads
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2441458/intel-admits-to-skylake-bug-that-freezes-windows-and-linux-systems
Tomi Engdahl says:
Whatever the Android-ChromeOS mashup looks like, it’s gotta be better looking than this
Remix OS 2.0 leaps out of China
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/13/remix_os_alpha/
If you’ve ever wondered what Android would look like as a desktop PC OS, then try this for size: Remix OS from China.
It’s a very rough-around-the-edges build of Android-x86 – an ongoing port of Google’s open-source OS from ARM gadgets to x86 PCs – with some closed-source stuff to create a multitasking desktop with moving windows, an application bar, and so on, but with Android’s look-and-feel. It tries its best to map keyboard shortcuts and mouse movements to the normally fingertip-driven user interface.
If you’re wondering what the upcoming Android-ChromeOS mashup will look like, this could be it but hopefully with a lot more polish.
Version 2.0 of Remix OS for PC was released on Tuesday as an alpha-quality download for developers and the techno-curious to toy with. You’re expected to write the .ISO image of the operating system to a USB 3.0 flash stick, and boot from that. It should work on real hardware, if it’s supported, or in a virtual machine: El Reg was able to get it going in Parallels by creating a generic 64-bit Linux guest and supplying the .ISO as a bootable DVD.
The OS is developed by Beijing-based Jide, which was founded in 2014 by three ex-Google engineers; their startup also touts an Android-powered tablet and a ‘droid PC, both of which sport ARM system-on-chips.
The Next Evolution of Android PC.
http://www.jide.com/en/remixos-for-pc
Built on the Android-x86 project, Remix OS for PC unlocks our next phase of development for Remix OS and introduces a whole new range of versatility to how and where you can Remix
Tomi Engdahl says:
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Gartner: Global PC shipments fell 8.3% in Q4 2015, Apple only company in top 5 to see growth — The PC market ended its poor year with another negative quarter. Both Gartner and IDC agreed: PC shipments were down globally, again. — Gartner estimated worldwide PC shipments fell 8.3 percent to 75.7 million units in Q4 2015.
Gartner: Global PC shipments fell 8.3% in Q4 2015, Apple only company in top 5 to see growth
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/12/gartner-global-pc-shipments-fell-8-3-in-q4-2015-apple-only-company-in-top-5-to-see-growth/
The PC market ended its poor year with another negative quarter. Both Gartner and IDC agreed: PC shipments were down globally, again.
Gartner estimated worldwide PC shipments fell 8.3 percent to 75.7 million units in Q4 2015. The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, and Apple.
IDC, meanwhile, estimated worldwide PC shipments dropped 10.6 percent to 71.9 million units in the ourth quarter. The firm noted “the year-on-year decline in 2015 shipments was nevertheless the largest in history, surpassing the decline of -9.8% in 2013.” The top five vendors in IDC’s results were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, and Apple.
“The fourth quarter of 2015 marked the fifth consecutive quarter of worldwide PC shipment decline,” Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. “Holiday sales did not boost the overall PC shipments, hinting at changes to consumers’ PC purchase behavior. On the business side, Windows 10 generally received positive reviews, but as expected, Windows 10 migration was minor in the fourth quarter as many organizations were just starting their testing period.”
““However, PC replacements should pick up again in 2016, particularly later in the year. Commercial adoption of Windows 10 is expected to accelerate, and consumer buying should also stabilize by the second half of the year.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here’s What Happens To Your Eyes When You Look at Multiple Screens
http://time.com/4171966/digital-device-eye-strain-screens/?xid=homepage
If you don’t spend a few hours of your day staring at a screen, then statistically, you’re a digital freak. Nearly 90% of Americans use their devices for at least two hours a day.
And a growing number of us—70%—are glued to multiple screens at once. All that eyeballing comes at a cost, according to a new survey by the Vision Council.
The survey polled more than 10,000 adults and found that 65% of Americans experience digital eye strain—physical discomfort, like getting dry, irritated eyes, blurred vision, headaches and neck or back pain—after staring at a screen for hours.
But people who used just one device fared better than those using multiple screens: only 53% of them had symptoms of digital eye strain, compared to 75% of digital multitaskers.
“What we’re finding is that Millennials especially are very comfortable working on multiple screens and multiple devices,”
Several factors contribute to digital eye strain, including how close you are to your screen. People typically hold small devices 8-12 inches away from their faces, a closeness that decreases blinking rates, the report says. “Blinking is crucial to keeping the ocular surface well protected from environmental assaults and our eyes from drying out,” Bazan says. “They’ll become dry and irritated, and vision will become blurry as well.” That’s where the urge to rub your eyes at the end of a long workday comes from.
Blue light, the high-energy visible light emitted by your digital devices, is another contributor. “That light is so close to ultraviolet, which has been known to cause damage on the cells of the eyes for years now,”
“When we look at ink on paper, our eyes know at what distance the ink and paper is and we can lock the focus on.” Pixels on a screen, on the other hand, are hard points of focus and compete for our eyeballs, he says. “Since a pixel is a hard target, we see that our focusing system is always in a state of trying to find exactly where the pixel is. That constant focusing causes strain.”
What is Digital Eye Strain?
https://www.thevisioncouncil.org/content/digital-eye-strain/adults
On average, nearly nine in 10 adults (88 percent) spend more than two hours each day using a digital device, with one in 10 people spending at least three-fourths of their waking hours on a digital device. This constant exposure to technology is a shock to our eyes with 65 percent of Americans reporting symptoms of digital eye strain, such as dry, irritated, eyes, blurred vision, eye fatigue, neck and back pain and headaches.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch:
Slack, Snapchat, Udacity, Vice, Pinterest among 50 unicorns hiring the fastest; Warby Parker, Kabam, Jawbone, BuzzFeed, among 50 unicorns losing most employees
The 50 Unicorns Hiring The Fastest And The 50 Losing The Most Employees
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/13/the-50-unicorns-hiring-the-fastest-and-the-50-losing-the-most-employees/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gaurav Seth / Windows Blog:
Microsoft open-sources ChakraCore, a standalone version of the JavaScript engine that powers its Edge browser — ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open — In a December 2015 talk at JSConf US, we announced that we would be open-sourcing the key components of the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge.
ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/01/13/chakracore-now-open/
In a December 2015 talk at JSConf US, we announced that we would be open-sourcing the key components of the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge. Today, we are excited to share with you that we’ve just made the sources for ChakraCore available under the MIT License at the ChakraCore GitHub repository. Going forward, we’ll be developing the key components of Chakra in the open.
https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore
Tomi Engdahl says:
Programming Trends To Look For This Year
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/13/1261560/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity_1462_5610836225840740265#.ojwuxm:cyA0
There has never been a more exciting time for technologists and developers worldwide. The number of active development languages and frameworks, as well as development tools and learning avenues, continues to soar.
Despite all these resources at our fingertips (or perhaps because of this abundance), it may not be obvious where industry trends are leading us.
The latest version of JavaScript
Officially released in June 2015, the latest version of ECMAScript (ES6) – better known by most as JavaScript – is poised to make one of the biggest splashes in web development since the previous version (ES5) was released in 2009.
Among these features are block-scoped variables and functions, constants, arrows to simplify closure syntax, string interpolation, classes, modules and much more.
This latest version of JavaScript is quickly gaining support in popular browsers. Microsoft Edge version 13 leads the way with nearly 80 percent of features supported. This year will certainly see feature support within Edge, Chrome and Firefox continue to climb dramatically.
Meanwhile, developers can begin using the majority of what ES6 has to offer by using a transpiler, such as Babel, to compile ES6 code into fully compatible ES5 JavaScript that works in modern browsers.
Dominance of Backend as a Service
Over the coming years, modern development will continue to shift away from creating fully enclosed, totally self-managed applications. Rather, development will increasingly concentrate on utilizing third-party services to handle a large chunk of the monotonous yet necessary aspects of the project, such as cloud storage, push notifications and user administration.
Easy image management and deployment
Although Backend as a Service is meeting the developer need to easily link projects to cloud storage and social networking APIs, many applications still rely on localized development stacks and well-provisioned servers to function properly. Unfortunately, server provisioning is inherently difficult and time-consuming. Not surprisingly, we see a meteoric rise in automated provisioning and containers.
Services such as Packer and Docker allow engineers to quickly generate machine images with explicit versions of OS, libraries, languages and frameworks.
Increased reliance on functional programming languages
As modern applications require ever more bandwidth, storage and processing, it is clear that single-machine models cannot scale to match these requirements (and haven’t for some time). To truly scale a system, one should parallelize it as much as possible, leading to a rising need for functional programming languages such as Haskell, Clojure, Scala and Erlang. Accordingly, there is increasing need for developers who are capable and productive in these technologies.
Where imperative programming relies heavily on mutable state (changing an object’s value during execution), functional programming focuses on immutable state, in which a declared object retains its value throughout the process. Functional languages, therefore, provide a massive benefit over common imperative or object-oriented languages: they are inherently designed to support parallelism and heavy concurrency.
Shift toward material design and commonality of patterns
Flat design has been all the rage in recent years as a minimalist approach to modern UI creation, but 2016 may bring a focus toward material design. Apple has been a big proponent of flat design, which shies away from stylistic elements that appear three-dimensional. Microsoft got there first with the “Metro” design introduced 10 years ago by Zune, then Windows Phone 7 and today with Windows 10.
Summary
This will be an exciting year for web software, from the bottom foundation technologies all the way to the user experience. With ECMAScript6, a ubiquitous web language gets an update. With BaaS and deployment containers, much of the cost and headache of basic features and provisioning can be removed. Functional languages move toward the mainstream and reframe how we approach parallelism.
Tomi Engdahl says:
USA Today:
Udacity will refund tuition to students who do not find a job within 6 months of completing Nanodegree
Degree gets you a tech job — or your money back
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/01/13/degree-gets-you-tech-job-your-money-back/78703230/
SAN FRANCISCO — A leading purveyor of online education is willing to guarantee its graduates a job in tech, or their money back.
Udacity, the massive open online course pioneer led by former Google car head and Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun, announced Wednesday that it will refund students who do not find employment within six months of completing one of four so-called Nanodegrees.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the degrees are in the super hot technology disciplines of Android Developer, iOS Developer, Machine Learning Engineer and Senior Web Developer. The new program, called Nanodegree Plus, costs $299 per month, up from $199 for standard Nanodegree courses. On average, a Udacity degree is earned by studying 10 hours a week for between six to nine months.
A nine-month-long Udacity Nanodegree Plus class would cost $2,700. The average starting salary for an Android developer is $88,000, according to Glassdoor.
According to Udacity, some 4 million people have taken the company’s free courses, which consist mainly of online videos. But some 11,000 students have enrolled in one of Udacity’s 12 fee-based Nanodegree programs and 1,000 have graduated as of November 2015.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC Shipments Fall For 4th Straight Year
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328672
Global PC shipments declined again in 2015, the fourth consecutive year of contraction in what has traditionally been the most important market for the semiconductor industry, according to market research firms.
Just 276.2 million PC units shipped in 2015, the first time since 2008 that the PC market did not break the 300 million unit mark, according to International Data Corp. (IDC). It was the fourth consecutive year of declining shipments for PCs.
”Most PC users have delayed an upgrade, but can only maintain this for so long before facing security and performance issues,”
http://www.eetimes.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=48699&piddl_msgid=354736#msg_354736
That is old news.
HangLai 1/13/2016 12:30:03 PM
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One should not just consider desktop PC, server and laptop alone, if IDC were to sum up all the computing devices, the total sum is at least 5% higher than the year before. Thus the chip industry, such as memories, CPU and other APU, micro-controller are still in a growth mode. PC sale # is old news, has far less important factor to the world economy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Seagate Unveils 10 TB Helium-Filled Hard Disk Drive for Cloud Datacenters
by Anton Shilov on January 13, 2016 8:00 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9955/seagate-unveils-10-tb-heliumfilled-hard-disk-drive?
Seagate Technology on Wednesday introduced its first helium-filled hard disk drive. The novelty is designed for cloud datacenters that require maximum amount of storage and enhanced reliability. By filling its HDDs with helium, Seagate can substantially increase their capacity and lower power consumption while using current magnetic recording technologies. At present, two major customers of the company are already evaluating the new hard drives. Volume shipments of the HDDs will start later.
The helium-filled Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5-inch HDD with 10 TB capacity incorporates seven perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) platters with 1.43 TB capacity each as well as 14 heads. The manufacturer claims that the new drive features an advanced caching sub-system to increase performance.
Seagate claims 2.5 million hours MTBF for its helium-filled HDD, which is significantly higher compared to traditional enterprise-class drives.
Typically, Seagate’s Enterprise Capacity HDDs feature 7200 revolutions per minute (RPM) spindle speed as well as special top and bottom attached motors (in a bid to reduce vibration), but the manufacturer did not confirm such details about its 10 TB helium-filled hard disk drive. Since hermetically sealed HDDs feature significantly different internal architecture, many actual specs of the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 10 TB may differ from predecessors.
The new hermetically sealed helium-filled hard drives from Seagate use either Serial ATA-6 Gb/s or SAS-12 Gb/s interfaces and can be installed into various environments. The manufacturer did not reveal sector sizes of the new HDDs, but typically modern high-capacity hard drives have 4 KB sectors and can support 512-byte sectors via emulation.
The density of helium is one-seventh that of air, which reduces drag force acting on the spinning disk stack and lowers fluid flow forces affecting the disks and the heads. By filling hard drives with helium, makers of HDDs can install up to seven platters into one industry-standard 3.5/1-inch hard drive, reduce power consumption of HDD motors and improve accuracy of arm’s positioning. All three benefits are crucial for modern datacenters.
By expanding capacity of its top-of-the-range Enterprise Capacity 3.5-inch HDD to 10 TB (up 2 TB from 8 TB, or by 25%), Seagate increases capacity per rack to 2400 TB (up from 1920 TB), which significantly bolsters storage density in a datacenter while decreasing power consumption per terabyte.
Seagate said last year that it had experimented with helium-filled hard disk drives for about 12 years.
At present, Alibaba and Huawei, who both said that the new hard drives help them to reduce their costs, evaluate Seagate’s Enterprise Capacity 10 TB HDDs
Seagate itself predicted recently that in 2016 its 8 TB hard drives would be its most popular high-capacity models.
Mobile devices, Big Data analytics, 4K ultra-high-definition video, modern workloads and emerging devices generate tremendous amounts of data, which greatly increases storage requirements for datacenters. Since technologies like two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) and heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) are not ready for commercial hard drives just not, helium-filled HDDs will gradually gain importance for companies like Alibaba or Netflix. So far, HGST has shipped over four million helium-filled hard drives and in in the recent quarters adoption of such HDDs intensified among its customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Engineering ethics and software concerns
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/engineering-ethics-and-software-concerns/a6e1941a5446d4a883f868f892869c3d.html
Virtual machines can solve many problems while keeping operations flowing smoothly, but when companies are duplicating software via virtual machines, this brings up some ethical issues that need to be addressed.
I was at Wright when I first heard about VMWare and virtual machines. While multiple versions of RSLogix5000 can be installed on a computer at the same time, the same is not true of Allen-Bradley’s human-machine interface (HMI) software, FactoryTalk Studio. In order to install the newest version, the old version has to be uninstalled. This creates a problem when you need to support old customers while designing for new ones.
A virtual machine solves this problem; an entire hard drive can be cloned along with its software installations. This allows several different operating systems to be installed on the same computer. The user can start up VMWare, open the old version of software, and modify customer’s programs in their original version.
As I travel around the country and talk to a lot of different people in the controls industry I realize that a lot of people use virtual machines for their programming software. Sometimes it’s because they can’t run old software on a 64-bit operating system, or maybe because the software doesn’t play well with other software on the same machine.
I recently installed VMWare on a Microsoft Windows 7 machine so that I can run my old DVT software (Microsoft Windows XP) on my laptop that has Camtasia installed on it. Since the DVT software was free, there are no licensing issues associated with that. VMWare, VirtualBox, and Microsoft Windows VirtualPC are also free (for the basic versions) so no problem there, either.
The operating system (OS) itself is another story. Microsoft Windows charges for all of their operating systems, but if you are duplicating one off of an existing machine you own you are bypassing their fee. In my case, since the laptop I am cloning is about 10 years old, and I don’t use it, I think I’m OK.
However, it’s easy to create a new virtual machine and pass it around on a USB stick, and I know of a few cases where that is standard procedure. In this case, very expensive licensed software along with the OS can propagate freely.
For a while, Allen-Bradley and Siemens have been ahead of the license duplication issue by requiring activation of each instance online. Cloning an OS is a different issue, though. I don’t see how they can ever prevent piracy outside of requiring users of their software to go online and validate after each power-up. This is not practical for most programmers in the field, so I don’t see that ever happening.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The world’s first 13TB SSD is here
Be prepared to fork out around $13,000 for the drive.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3021886/hardware/the-worlds-first-13tb-ssd-is-here.html
If you have around US$13,000 to spare, the world’s first 13TB solid-state drive could be yours.
Fixstars on Wednesday announced the mammoth SSD-13000M, which will ship by the end of February. SSDs today have no more than 6TB of storage, and the 13TB drive more than doubles that capacity.
An official price hasn’t been determined by Fixstars. But a rough estimated selling price is around $1 per gigabyte, or $13,000, said Shien Zhu, a spokesman for Fixstars.
The 13TB drive will be sold directly by Fixstars and won’t be available through online retail stores or sites. The company is targeting the SSD at enterprises
The 2.5-inch drive plugs into SATA 6 slots on motherboards. It has sequential read speeds of 580MBps (megabytes per second) and write speeds of up to 520MBps
Competitors haven’t indicated they would catch up to the 13TB capacity. SanDisk has said it would release 6TB and 8TB SSDs this year. Samsung has said it would release a 4TB SSD this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD’s ARM SoC Seeks Sockets
Server chip lacks big design wins at debut
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328681&
Advanced Micro Devices is in production with its first ARM-based server SoC. So far, only three relatively small companies have publicly agreed to use the A1100, aka Seattle, mainly in storage and communications appliances, and one analyst said the chip will not compete directly with Intel’s Xeon server processors.
The 64-bit chip was among the early examples of a running ARM-based server processor from a major chip maker. AMD hopes the A1100 powers platforms for building out the software ecosystem for ARM servers.
The 32W chip runs at 2 GHz and uses eight ARM A57 cores, 4 Mbytes L2 cache, and supports DDR4 memory at up to 1,866 MHz as well as support for two Gbit Ethernet controllers. Since it was first announced more than a year ago rivals including Applied Micro, Broadcom, Cavium, Huawei and Qualcomm have raised their sights, announcing plans for ARM-based server processors in FinFET processes using dozens of cores.
“The 28nm Seattle is not a competitive server processor relative to Intel’s 22nm and 14nm offerings such as the Xeon E3 and Xeon D,” said David Kanter, an analyst with The Linley Group and Real World Technologies. “The power efficiency is relatively unimpressive at 4W/core for an A57 (this power includes memory controllers, I/O, etc.), probably due to the older process technology and the standard ARM core,” he said.
The A1100 will find sockets in networking and storage appliances as well as Web servers, said Scott Aylor, corporate vice president of AMD’s enterprise group.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs challenged to get disruptive and be more courageous in their digital vision
http://www.cio.co.uk/insight/strategy/cios-challenged-get-disruptive-3630546/
CIOs have been challenged to demand more from their CEOs, build digital platform businesses, lead transformation and innovation programmes, and use emerging digital technologies to disrupt and reimagine rather than optimise current business processes by IT analyst, research and advisory firm Gartner.
While vice president and Gartner Fellow Dave Aron said that CIOs – particularly in the EMEA region – were leading digital transformation and innovation efforts and staving of the threat of Chief Digital Officers treading on their toes, Aron warned that CIOs might not be being brave enough, and analyst peer Mark Raskino suggested CIOs should request and expect CEO involvement to drive the digital agenda.
Aron’s team of researchers found that 43% of EMEA CIOs said that they were were leading digital transformation, and 33% responded they were leading innovation programmes at their organisations, while the growth of the CDO role had stalled with the majority of CIOs fighting back to take on digital leadership and only 30% performing a role described by Aron as “functional IT leadership”.
What is Bimodal IT? It’s not two-speed, it’s about making your Samurais and ninjas work together according to Gartner analyst Dave Aron
Getting disruptive
However, Aron questioned whether CIOs who said they were overseeing transformation and the digital impacts on their business were being bold enough. The study found that CIOs are focusing on increased revenue from better operations and more business conducted through digital channels.
Business as a Platform
Gartner’s latest theme, following on from last year’s focus on so-called Bimodal IT, was for organisations of all sizes to become platform businesses.
“As digital deepens, it’s clear that hardcoded business and operating models won’t suffice,” Aron said. “What’s changed is that there’s a shift to platform thinking. Business executives need to look at their business as a hierarchy of processes, in terms of their business models, delivery mechanisms, talent and leadership. Platform concepts need to penetrate all aspects of a business.
“Even if your business isn’t directly susceptible to platform thinking now, platform thinking will make your business successful.”
What is Bimodal IT?
Gartner had not coined the term to advocate having a two-speed organisation, Aron said, with its combination of old-style and modern IT practices, with two separate organisations focusing on innovation and keeping the lights on respectively. Instead, it was about interdisciplinary teams offering different skills.
“Bimodal IT is not two-speed,” Aron said. “It’s about Samurais and ninjas. You don’t want an army of ninjas because it would be too chaotic, and you don’t want your innovation done by Samurais because it would be too boring.
“The end game is to recognise who your Samurais are and who are your ninjas and have them working together.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
You, yes YOU: DevOps’ people problem
Chucking a copy of The Phoenix Project at the team ain’t the answer
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/15/devops_people_problem/
You’ve no doubt heard of DevOps. This is the process of getting developers and sysadmins working together closely on the same team to support a company’s custom-written software.
I know, I know, Dear Reader: you’ve been doing this ever since operating that AS/400; no one really needs weekly releases; and, of course, the favorite: “this is just the current way for consultants to make money.”
All signs point towards DevOps being not only all those things, but actually A Thing on its own. Ever since starting my career as a programmer, and through being an industry analyst, strategist, and, now, marketer, I’ve been motivated by the quest of learning how to improve the software development and delivery process. DevOps seems like the current, best method.
Things are not too joyous when it comes to IT actually delivering on this dream of helping companies innovate. When I want to gin up an excuse to drink heavily, one of my favorite charts to look at is this one from the Cutter consortium.
When it comes to innovation, over 3 short years IT has plummeted in usefulness. To put it bluntly: IT sucks.
You’re doing CD? Yeah, sure…
Continuous Delivery (CD) is yet another one of those things that most people say they’ve done since the days of mainframes … but reality is usually different, as seen by one study
A fair number of people think they’re doing continuous delivery, but when compared to the textbook definition, they’re more like dabblers, picking and choosing practices that are easiest and leaving out the rest.
Trying is the first step to failing
While longer-running bodies of work like the always excellent, annual Puppet Labs DevOps survey are showing that the ideas work, things are not so rosy when it comes to putting DevOps in place. More often than not when I’ve worked with groups that want their software processes with DevOps, they underestimate the amount of organizational change needed. They view software more like building a Lego kit. Creating good software is more like inventing Lego all over again, each time. Fostering that kind of continuous learning requires putting the process in place that creates metaphoric “innovation factories.” DevOps thinking describes much of how those “factories” run, which is often much different than the status quo.
What I’ve learned is that it’s a meatware problem: people’s default to resist change is what holds back transforming to a DevOps mind-set. This is why the DevOps cult leaders go on and on about “culture.”
Full of fear at work: Blame the boss, or yourself?
Fear inhibits change, but it’s also a great motivator
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/15/fear_inhibits_change_fear_is_the_great_motivator/
Fear is a great motivator. Fear pushes adrenaline. It primes our “fight or flight” response. It primes us for a confrontation. Fear shuts down our higher cognitive functions, priming us for a visceral response, on top of which we layer rationalisation.
Fear ensures continued survival of our species in times of dire straits. When we are afraid, we have only our intuition and built-in responses to draw on. When we are afraid, we can’t accept feedback, respond to things which run counter to our expectations, or learn. And so, a culture in which fear operates is one in which no learning takes place. Fear inhibits change.
In the last 200 years, work has changed significantly. Most of us do not face daily threats to our continued existence. But our fear response remains. We still respond with adrenaline when threatened, or embarrassed; we still shut down; we still lose our capacity for higher reasoning and openness. And it kills improvement at work. It kills creativity. And it’s common.
Needless to say, fear response is a response borne of perception, not reality.
Without learning, we cannot progress; without learning, our companies can’t adapt; without learning, we are doomed to eventual replacement by companies with newer ideas that we couldn’t test
Agile, Lean, Kanban, and DevOps all attempt to remove this fear by explicitly creating conditions where experimentation and learning are encouraged. All too often, however, the adoption of these processes fail, not due to failures in the processes, but due to their incompleteness.
Conclusion
Admitting failure isn’t easy. It can make us feel vulnerable. The alternative is worse. The alternative is not admitting failure, not admitting mistakes, not learning from things we know are, or were, wrong. Companies which can’t learn from mistakes stagnate, and eventually fail.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel sees strong PC chip sales in Q4 despite mammoth market decline
But data centre earnings fail to meet expectations after poor growth
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2442019/intel-sees-strong-pc-chip-sales-in-q4-despite-mammoth-market-decline
INTEL HAS POSTED strong quarterly profits in its fourth quarter earnings, revealing results that were higher than Wall Street was expecting despite a tough year for the PC market.
Intel’s PC chip revenue declined by just one percent to $8.76bn from a year earlier. A decline doesn’t sound very positive, but it’s quite an impressive feat considering that research firm IDC reported a PC shipment decline of 10.6 percent in the last quarter of 2015, the largest recorded since it started tracking PC shipments.
However, the good news was overshadowed by revenue figures from Intel’s data centre group, which includes sales of chips for server systems to power the cloud. Intel’s data centre revenue rose by five percent in Q4, much lower than the eight percent increase in the previous quarter and the double digit percentage analysts were expecting.
But it was a different story in the previous quarter when Intel saw growth in the data centre, Internet of Things (IoT) and non-volatile memory businesses. The firm said that quarterly revenue of $14.5bn, which was flat year over year, was “above the midpoint of outlook”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Has Toughest Interview Process For Developers, But Not the Worst
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/01/15/025258/google-has-toughest-interview-process-for-developers-but-not-the-worst
A casual survey of candidates’ reactions to the interview processes of the biggest tech companies in the world shows Google as having one of the most grueling hiring gauntlets in the sector — but Twitter’s is perceived as the worst.
Which Tech Companies Have the Worst Interview Process?
https://getvoip.com/blog/2016/01/13/tech-interview-process/
Searching for a job can be a long and daunting task. You have to research companies, edit your resume, and carefully craft cover letters. Even then, according to Interview Success Formula’s 2013 study, you only have a 20% chance of actually getting an interview. And once you get an interview, the hiring process is much longer than in the past. The job interview process has increased nearly 17% since 2010 according to Glassdoor. On average, it now takes 22.9 days, up from 19.6.
After reading these studies, we wanted to learn how the job hiring processes of major companies stacked up.
In addition to analyzing the hiring process, we also looked at the interviewees experience. Was it positive or negative? Hard or easy?
It turns out, an easy interview process did not always correlate to a positive interview experience, and a difficult interview process didn’t always correlate to a negative experience.
The interview process itself, on average, ranged from two weeks to four weeks. Surprisingly, the length of time the process took did not seem to influence an interviewee’s experience. While Cisco, Yahoo, and Uber had the shortest interview process of two weeks, only interviewees at Cisco had an overwhelmingly positive interview experience.
Although this data is specific to software engineers, we believe that it still exemplifies how the hiring process in many industries goes beyond just the traditional phone call and in-person interview. Today, there are multiple rounds of phone/Skype screenings and test projects before you even qualify for an onsite interview.
Though the job hiring process may seem intimidating, there are plenty of resources available that can help you ace an interview.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Baidu Releases Open Source Artificial Intelligence Code
http://news.slashdot.org/story/16/01/17/1318228/baidu-releases-open-source-artificial-intelligence-code
Chinese web services company Baidu has released a new artificial intelligence software called WARP-CTC. The code is apparently capable of speech recognition, particularly for short segments, that exceeds human capability. The source code uses an approach called ‘connectionist temporal classification’
Baidu releases open source AI code
https://thestack.com/world/2016/01/15/baidu-releases-open-source-ai-code/
Baidu, a massive Chinese web company along the lines of Google, has released artificial intelligence software WARP-CTC on GitHub. WARP-CTC, developed at Baidu’s Silicon Valley AI lab, was created to improve speech recognition in Baidu’s end-to-end speech recognition program Deep Speech 2.
WARP-CTC functionality in Deep Speech 2 has been shown to allow speech recognition in English and Mandarin, and in some cases the program is better at speech recognition than humans. Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist for Baidu, stated, “For short phrases, out of context, we seem to be surpassing human levels of recognition.”
WARP-CTC builds upon an AI fundamental called connectionist temporal classification.
The WARP-CTC software released today includes a simple C interface and the bindings for Torch, a scientific computing framework. This should allow users to easily incorporate WARP-CTC into existing deep learning projects. Company Nervana is also incorporating WARP-CTC into their program neon, a Python-based deep learning library.,
Baidu seems to be following in the footsteps of Google, which released an open-source AI program in November called TensorFlow. TensorFlow is also used to improve speech recognition as well as a number of AI applicable functions – web searches, translation and more. The idea was that Google, as a large corporation heavily invested in research and development, was years ahead of the curve in terms of AI advancement. By sharing their code as an open source, and providing these tools to interested parties, they could advance machine learning world wide.
The same philosophy exists at Baidu.
https://github.com/baidu-research/warp-ctc
Tomi Engdahl says:
Guess how much IT spending slumped last year? $216 billion
It’s all about the money, money, money…
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2016/01/18/spending_forecast/
Some $216bn less was splashed on tech goods and services last year versus 2014 – the equivalent to ten per cent of UK GDP, or, if you prefer, almost three times the size of the output of Oman.
This is the preliminary findings from Gartner mages, who told us the drop in spending to $3.52 trillion was the sharpest decline since they’d begun reading the tea leaves tracking IT spending.
The appreciating US dollar versus most if not all of the other major currencies across globe was to blame, as the cash spent in regions was converted back into American money, the base tender of the tech world.
The forex factor forced US vendors to subsequently raise some prices to protect margins – the UK was less impacted by this than other areas including mainland Europe – and this then dampened customer demand.
Currency volatility is expected to be less of a factor in 2016, said Gartner research veep Richard Gordon, who forecast that most segments of IT will expand. IT spending is estimated to reach $3.536 trillion at the end of this calendar year, up 0.6 per cent on last.
“The IT market is still very competitive and the growth rates reflect a market that is mature.”
The data centre system sector was the only area to report an expanding waistline last year, up 1.8 per cent to $170bn – the hyper scale trend among services providers and hosting firm fuelled this.
Enterprise software is forecast to jump 5.3 per cent to $326bn, driven by further SaaS deployments, security, IoT, analytics and licensed on-premise wares that still require maintenance.
IT services, an area of the market that is more discretionary and the first to be cut when times get tougher, is predicted to recover, growing 3.1 per cent to $940bn.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Says Xbox 360 Servers Are Not Shutting Down in November 2016
A rumor that’s been going around about Xbox 360 servers
http://games.softpedia.com/blog/microsoft-says-xbox-360-servers-are-not-shutting-down-in-november-2016-499034.shtml
The rumor that Xbox 360 servers are going to be shut down at the end of the year has been squashed by Microsoft.
Xbox 360 was launched all the way back in 2005, which means that it only recently celebrated its tenth birthday. This really puts the age of that console into perspective, but it’s nice to notice that, even so, it is still getting games. The user base for Xbox 360 is pretty consistent, which means that Microsoft is not ready to pull the plug just yet. At least, that is the theory.
Microsoft now has a newer console on the market, the Xbox One, and it would very much want people to buy it. The problem is that many users still have the older one, and they don’t want to.
That can be solved by stopping the support for Xbox 360, with the hope that people will move onto Xbox One. The flaw in that logic is that those gamers might also choose PlayStation 4 to replace Xbox 360, or nothing at all.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s HoloLens won’t have a full panoramic field of vision
Don’t scare the horses, but this might not live up to the hype
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2442204/microsofts-hololens-wont-have-a-full-panoramic-field-of-vision
MICROSOFT HAS FLESHED out more information about the much touted HoloLens augmented reality Judge Dredd headset.
Microsoft tech evangelist Bruce Harris told delegates some new juicy details at an event in Tel Aviv, most notably the product’s battery life which is said to be up to 5.5 hours, but more realistically 2.5 hours if you’re really hammering it. It sounds like it’s going to restrict you spending too long in marathon gaming sessions.
There’s no consumer release date for the product yet, but we’re told that developers will start to receive test units this quarter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Devs complain GitHub’s become slow to fix bugs, is easily gamed
Open letter calls on site to be more responsive and accelerate own development
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/19/githubs_become_impenetrable_and_unresponsive_say_devs/
More than 1,100 maintainers of GitHub projects have put their names to an open letter expressing frustration that the famous software hub is ignoring them.
Their key complaints are:
Issues getting filed with no content, because GitHub lacks any kind of mandatory issues template;
Upvoting isn’t controlled, so issues accumulate spam in the form of “+1”s that don’t add any information;
It’s too easy to ignore contribution guidelines when creating issues and pull requests.
“We’ve waited years now for progress on any of them. If GitHub were open source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a community—we’re very good at that!”,
Tomi Engdahl says:
Outsourcing spend declining for 2016, says research
Better drink up that bubbly guys, the good times are coming to an end
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/19/outsourcing_on_downward_decline_for_2016_research/
IT outsourcing spend in Europe will continue its downward spiral this year, as cloud infrastructure purveyors gain a stronger foothold in the market and further push down mega deals, according to research.
During 2015, European IT outsourcing spend fell by eight per cent to £5.3bn, as the number of large infrastructure awards dropped sharply and value was lower on smaller deals overall, according to the ISG outsourcing index.
It said Europe is currently the world’s largest outsourcing market. Global IT outsourcing spend fell 12 per cent to £10.4bn.
John Keppel, partner and president of ISG, said unlike the American market, the likes of cloud infrastructure suppliers such as AWS have yet to win any big deals. “In 2016 we will start to see a much more significant uptake in Europe,” he said.
Keppel said: “In America, AWS’s services revenue is something to be reckoned with, and not just AWS but lots of infrastructure cloud service providers,” he said. “Volume-wise, there is plenty of activity with digital projects and initiatives. All of these have a cloud computing component.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Minecraft mod adds a BASIC renderer for code within code within code
LET us$ = “:o”
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2442282/minecraft-mod-adds-a-basic-renderer-for-code-within-code-within-code
MAD STUFF in Minecraft is at the more trivial end of the news canon, but we’ve always believed it’s valid because it’s just so damned cool what people with too much time on their hands can do with Microsoft’s 8-bit virtual world game.
A YouTuber by the name of SethBling has managed to create a functioning interpreter for BASIC, the programming language that launched 1,000 careers, using nothing more than Minecraft’s standard rulesets.
It will come as no surprise to learn that it’s not without its faults. It has glitches and slows down from the already slow 20Hz refresh clock speed of Minecraft the more you use it. But it works.
We’ve already seen the entire game ported to a smartwatch, a virtual chip fabricator built within the confines of a world, and even a complete map of Great Britain built in all its blocky glory.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Remix OS in Violation of GPL and Apache Licenses
http://news.slashdot.org/story/16/01/18/179245/remix-os-in-violation-of-gpl-and-apache-licenses
You may have heard recently of the Remix OS, a fork of Android that targets desktop computing. The operating system, which was created by former Google employees and features a traditional desktop layout in addition to the ability to run Android apps, was previewed on Ars Technica a few weeks ago, but it was not actually released for end-users to download until earlier this week.
Android-based operating system, for which source code is not readily available, violates both the GPL and the Apache License.
The Popular Android-based Remix OS Violate GPL and Apache License
https://tlhp.cf/remix-os-violate-gpl/
My small personal research found that Remix OS developers have a zero tolerance for the code licenses and work of other peoples.
Part 1. Unetbootin
Part 2. Android-x86
Tomi Engdahl says:
Virtual reality is, despite the expensive price point one step closer to the lives of consumers, believes the consulting firm Deloitte in its report.
Even this year, the majority of the commercial activities will focus on video games, but in the future virtual reality may be present in the most varied situations.
“Technology events in the field of virtual reality has generated a lot of enthusiasm. On the other hand the enthusiasm is based on only a few minutes in the experiment, and therefore does not give an accurate picture of future demand in the consumer market, ”
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2016/01/15/raportti-virtuaalitodellisuus-ja-kaytetyt-alypuhelimet-suosioon/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Lilly / Maximum PC:
Intel announces sixth generation Core vPro processors with Intel Authenticate, an embedded multifactor authentication technology — Intel Bakes Multifactor Authentication into 6th Generation Core vPro Platform — Intel Authenticate brings security to a new level
Intel Bakes Multifactor Authentication into 6th Generation Core vPro
http://www.maximumpc.com/intel-bakes-multifactor-authentication-into-6th-generation-core-vpro-platform/
Intel Authenticate brings security to a new level
Today is a “big day for business,” Intel says, and that’s because the world’s largest semiconductor maker announced the availability of its 6th generation Core vPro processor family.
It’s Skylake meets vPro, which means better performance and enhanced security. Starting with the former, Intel’s pitch focuses on businesses rocking older laptops. Compared to a 5-year-old laptop, Intel points out its 6th generation Core and Core vPro processors offer 2.5 times the performance and 3 times the battery life, while waking up 4 times faster. And on the desktop, businesses can expect a 60 percent performance jump compared to its 4th generation architecture (Haswell).
“Older laptops can cost businesses $4,203 per year, for every three PCs, in maintenance and lost productivity. ”
Increased Security
There have been a lot of security breaches over the past couple of years. According to Intel, over half of today’s data breaches start with misused or stolen credentials.
To buck this trend, Intel is previewing a new security solution called Intel Authenticate. It’s an embedded multifactor authentication technology that uses a combination of up to three identifying factors at the same time, those being something you know, something you have, and something your are.
“By doing so, the most common software based attacks that steal user credentials through viruses or malware are rendered ineffective. Intel delivers a secure PIN, a Bluetooth proximity factor with your Android or iPhone, a logical location factor with vPro systems and fingerprint biometrics. IT can choose the number and combination of factors they desire depending on their security needs and preferences for their users,” Garrison explains, Vice President and General Manager of Intel Business and Client Platforms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rachel King / ZDNet:
AMD beats Q4 estimates with net loss of $102M on $958M in revenue, down 23% YoY, as PC slump hits processor sales; stock slides 6%
AMD beats Q4 estimates but losses continue amid PC slump
http://www.zdnet.com/article/amd-beats-q4-estimates-but-losses-continue-amid-pc-slump/
Wall Street was bracing for a loss of a dime per share on $954.74 million in revenue.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Larry Dignan / ZDNet:
IBM reports Q4 earnings of $4.5B on revenue of $22.1B, down 9% year-over-year, as shift to cloud and a stronger dollar impacts sales
IBM Q4 2015 results better than expected, 2016 outlook weak
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-q4-2015-financial-results-and-2016-outlook/
Updated: IBM is facing slowing hardware, software and services sales amid the shift to the cloud as well as a stronger U.S. dollar.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New York Times:
Microsoft acquires MinecraftEdu, a modified version of Minecraft tailored for use in schools, used in 7K classrooms in over 40 countries
Microsoft Acquires Minecraft App for Schools
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/technology/microsoft-acquires-minecraftedu-tailored-for-schools.html
When Microsoft acquired the creator of the game Minecraft in 2014, the giant software company instantly got a cachet bump with children, picking up a blockbuster game app for a generation that didn’t depend on its products the way their parents did.
Now Microsoft hopes Minecraft can help it in classrooms, another area where its once-mighty grip has been shaken by companies like Google and Apple.
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it had acquired MinecraftEdu, a modified version of Minecraft tailored for use in schools. Over the last several years, MinecraftEdu has attracted a strong following and is used in over 7,000 classrooms in more than 40 countries.
The modifications to the game were created by a start-up, TeacherGaming, that Microsoft is not acquiring. Microsoft declined to say how much it was paying for MinecraftEdu.
While Minecraft is known as a game, it is more akin to a digital sandbox, inside which players can construct anything they want, much of it out of block-shaped materials. The creative, rather than destructive, possibilities of Minecraft have caught the eyes of educators, who see it as a supplemental learning tool for everything from anatomy and earth science to math and literature.
In short, Minecraft continues to be a huge success a year and a half after Microsoft bought Mojang, the Swedish creator of the game, for $2 billion. But it has not yet buttressed other Microsoft businesses the way company executives had hoped.
“To be sure, Minecraft itself continues to be a very successful and popular franchise,” Mr. Dawson said, “but I’m not seeing any evidence that Microsoft is somehow benefiting beyond the performance of Minecraft itself as a stand-alone entity.”
Classrooms could be a test of whether Microsoft can use Minecraft to achieve broader company objectives.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CB Insights:
CB Insights and KPMG: funding to VC-backed companies worldwide reached a record $128.5B in 2015, but slowed down in Q4
https://www.cbinsights.com/research-venture-capital-2015
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Novet / VentureBeat:
Ex-Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich’s startup Brave launches open-source browser for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android that blocks tracking ads by default — Mozilla cofounder Brendan Eich’s startup, Brave, launches browser for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android — Brave Software, the new startup …
Mozilla cofounder Brendan Eich’s startup, Brave, launches browser for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/20/brave-browser/
Brave Software, the new startup from JavaScript creator and Mozilla cofounder Brendan Eich, is releasing today an early version of its new web browser that displays websites quickly, by blocking programmatic ads, and replaces them with Brave’s own ad inventory.
The browser is now available for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android under an open-source license in a version 0.7 release. That’s a reflection that the browser is still in a developmental stage, and there are, indeed, bugs for the team to fix, but when you take it for a ride, as I did, you see that it’s the start of something very interesting.
https://brave.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ronny Kerr / VatorNews:NEW
Machine learning company Maluuba raises $6.2M Series A, plans to broaden its voice search technology, expand into automotive and IoT sectors
Maluuba raises $6.2M Series A for machine learning
http://vator.tv/news/2016-01-20-maluuba-raises-62m-series-a-for-machine-learning
Supporting mobile technology companies like LG and Qualcomm, Maluuba picks up new funding
Headquartered in Waterloo, Canada, Maluuba started out with the launch of a “Siri for Android” technology, which partially explains the interest from Samsung, consistently one of the world’s top Android phone manufacturers.
Over the past few years, the company has expanded its global footprint significantly, now enabling machine technology in over 50 million smart devices, including smartphones, smart TVs, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. That technology is now supported in over 10 languages and supports various original equipment manufacturer (OEMs), including LG.
“The next phase for Maluuba is applying natural language learning to their voice search technology to make the experience between people and their devices – from smartphones to automobiles – more seamless, accurate and easier than ever,” said CEO Sam Pasupalak in a statement to VatorNews.
Read more at http://vator.tv/news/2016-01-20-maluuba-raises-62m-series-a-for-machine-learning#hl5wtwPwFzmT5qxL.99
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tap the Potential of Shadow IT
Give employees tools they love while keeping your company safe
https://apps.google.com/learn-more/tap_the_potential_of_shadow_it.html?utm_source=Techmeme&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=na-us-en-gafw-social-all-trial%2520&utm_content=techmeme-post4
IT and business leaders today are grappling with the ever-increasing use of personal devices and unauthorized apps at the office, often referred to as “Shadow IT.”
This rapidly emerging trend comes as a natural response to employees looking for ways to create and collaborate with the same ease, efficiency and freedom that they do in their everyday lives. While the rise of Shadow IT can pose numerous security risks to companies, it also offers unique opportunities for businesses to rethink their traditional tools and processes in ways that both support productivity and innovation while minimizing risk.
At Google, we believe companies should not have to choose between agility and security. This white paper examines the role of IT in the new landscape, offering insights from IT and businesses that have leveraged Google Apps for Work to empower employees with collaboration tools they know and love while providing robust security and controls that protect data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VMware to axe 900 jobs – sources
Virtzilla not to be outdone by cost-cutting dominant shareholder EMC
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2016/01/25/vmware_job_cuts/
VMware is mimicking cost-cutting actions at alpha shareholder EMC by pushing through its own job cull: 900 roles, to be specific, or some five per cent of the 18k-strong global workforce.
The axe is being shined by Virtzilla, reportedly to counter a weaker sales pipeline and share price drop. Let’s face it, nothing gets financial analysts’ attention like an old-fashioned cost purge.
EMC, which currently owns an 81 per cent stake in VMware – the other 19 per cent was floated in 2007 – revealed just prior to Christmas it was slashing costs by $850m.
This is ahead of Dell’s $67bn acquisition of EMC, a deal that doesn’t sit well with some VMware investors who are concerned Dell will get the company on the cheap as part of a buy-back plan.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe
http://news.slashdot.org/story/16/01/25/079236/saxobank-predicts-universal-basic-income-for-europe
Saxo Bank, an investment bank based in Denmark, has released a list of its outrageous predictions for 2016. Among these predictions, economist Christopher Dembik claims that Europe will consider the introduction of a universal basic income to ensure that all citizens can meet their basic needs in the face of rising inequality and unemployment.
http://www.saxobank.com/documents/op2016/ebook-2016-en.pdf
The irony in this year’s batch of outrageous predictions is that some of them are “outrageous” merely because they run counter to overwhelming market consensus. In fact, many would not look particularly outrageous at all in more “normal” times – if there even is such a thing!
In other words, it has become outrageous to suggest that emerging markets will outperform, that the Russian rouble will be the best-performing currency of 2016, and that the credit market will collapse under the weight of yet more issuance.
More than anything, we encourage you to join the debate – whether you agree or want to push back and
argue the other side. It is this process of discussion and thinking outside the box that is at the heart of Saxo’s now quite long history of outrageous predictions
Silicon Valley’s unicorns brought back down to earth
The first half of 2015 had the lowest number of venture capital deals in 25 years as VC firms
rushed to plough money into so-called unicorns – startups valued above $1 billion each.
This rush to capture everything that might have blockbuster potential inflated the bubble in
unlisted US tech firms.
2016 will smell a little like 2000 in Silicon Valley with more startups delaying monetisation
and tangible business models in exchange for adding users and trying to achieve
critical mass.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Panasonic teams with Facebook for optical data archiver
Susan Nordyk -January 21, 2016
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4441260/Panasonic-teams-with-Facebook-for-optical-data-archiver?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_productsandtools_20160125&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_productsandtools_20160125&elq=356eb3da29cb476ab096456b65f3af6f&elqCampaignId=26647&elqaid=30479&elqat=1&elqTrackId=08f42ef14a8e4836b4ac945fb1b5bbd2
Jointly developed with Facebook, Panasonic’s freeze-ray is an optical disc-based data-archive system intended for large-scale cold storage in data-center and enterprise networks. The system offers an efficient and sustainable way to store and access cold data—infrequently or never accessed data stored for the long term—providing Facebook users long-term access to their digital photos and videos.
Based on 100-Gbyte Blu-ray discs, freeze-ray achieves a storage density of up to 547.2 terabytes (5472 optical discs, 456 magazines) per standard 19-in. rack. A second-generation archive system using 300-Gbyte discs is planned for deployment later this year, boasting a storage density of up to 1641.6 terabytes.
In addition to high-density optical technology, Panasonic contributed key devices, such as optical discs, drives, and related robotics, and library software to control the system in the data center.
http://panasonic.net/avc/archiver/freeze-ray/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux 4.5 Adds Raspberry Pi 2 Support, AMD GPU Re-Clocking, Intel Kaby Lake
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/16/01/24/1329206/linux-45-adds-raspberry-pi-2-support-amd-gpu-re-clocking-intel-kaby-lake
The Linux 4.5 merge window has been open for the last two weeks; that means that the 4.5-rc1 kernel is expected to emerge, with the official kernel following in about eight weeks.
Linux 4.5 is set to bring many new features across the kernel’s 20 million line code-base. Among the new/improved features are Raspberry Pi 2 support, open-source Raspberry Pi 3D support, NVIDIA Tegra X1 / Jetson TX1 support, an open-source Vivante graphics driver
The Many New Features & Improvements Of The Linux 4.5 Kernel
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-45-features&num=1
- While the VC4 DRM driver was previously added as the Raspberry Pi kernel mode-setting driver, the kernels up to now haven’t had the necessary bits for supporting 3D/OpenGL in conjunction with the new VC4 Gallium3D driver from Mesa. However, with Linux 4.5 those needed kernel bits are in place for having a fully open Raspberry Pi 3D driver stack.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Will Not Support Upcoming Processors Except On Windows 10
by Brett Howse on January 15, 2016 9:05 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9964/microsoft-to-only-support-new-processors-on-windows-10
Microsoft has long been the bastion of long term support for older platforms, so today’s support news out of Redmond is particularly surprising. Intel launched its 6th generation Skylake cores back in August, and support on Windows 7 has been not as strong as Windows 10 right out of the gate. It’s not terribly strange that new features like Intel’s Speed Shift will not be coming to Windows 7, but today Microsoft announced that going forward, new processors will only be supported on Windows 10. Skylake will only be supported through devices on a supported list, and even those will only have support until July 2017.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sam Byford / The Verge:
Sony merges PlayStation businesses into US-based Sony Interactive Entertainment — Sony has merged the entire PlayStation business into one new company called Sony Interactive Entertainment. As of April 1st, SIE’s president and CEO will be Andrew House, and the business will be run out of San Mateo, California.
Sony merges PlayStation businesses into US-based Sony Interactive Entertainment
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/26/10832006/sony-interactive-entertainment-playstation-merger-sce-snei
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Microsoft announces first technical preview of Azure Stack, which puts Azure on-premises, to launch January 29 with full release slated for Q4 — Microsoft Announces The First Technical Preview Of Azure Stack — With Azure Stack, Microsoft wants to bring its Azure cloud computing services into its customers’ data centers.
Microsoft Announces The First Technical Preview Of Azure Stack
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/26/microsoft-launches-the-first-technical-preview-of-azure-stack/
With Azure Stack, Microsoft wants to bring its Azure cloud computing services into its customers’ data centers. Today, the company announced that it will launch the first technical preview of Azure Stack later this week on Friday, January 29.
For now, this is a pretty limited version of Microsoft’s overall vision for Azure Stack. It’ll only support a single machine, for example, which is obviously a far cry from the enterprise-scale data center environment Microsoft envisions for the platform. As Microsoft’s Ryan O’Hara told me, though, the plan is to get a full release of Azure Stack into customers’ hands “in the Q4 timeframe.”
In many ways, Azure Stack is the logical next step in Microsoft’s overall hybrid cloud strategy. If you’re expecting to regularly move some workloads between your own data center and Azure (or maybe add some capacity in the cloud as needed), having a single platform and only one set of APIs across your own data center and the cloud to work with greatly simplifies the process. This, O’Hara believes, means Microsoft will be “well-positioned against Google and AWS” because it can more easily connect its data centers to its customers’ data centers than its competitors.
Microsoft describes Azure Stack as a “high-fidelity” version of Azure. For now, though, the plan isn’t to make all the Azure services available on premises. Instead, these earlier versions of Azure Stack will mostly focus on the core components: compute, storage and networks (which isn’t unlike earlier versions of Azure Stack competitor OpenStack, for example).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Firefox 44 arrives with ability for sites to send notifications after webpage closed with the user’s permission and RC4 encryption support discontinued — Firefox 44 arrives with push notifications that sites can send even after users close the page — Mozilla today launched Firefox 44 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.
Firefox 44 arrives with push notifications that sites can send even after users close the page
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/26/firefox-44-arrives-with-push-notifications-that-sites-can-send-even-after-users-close-the-page/
Mozilla today launched Firefox 44 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include push notifications, the removal of RC4 encryption, and new powerful developer tools.
Firefox 44 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The only way is down for NetApp, HP Enterprise and IBM storage – study
Dell-EMC combo to be top dog in 2017 enterprise on-premises spend
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/25/netapp_hpe_and_ibm_storage_declines/
In its inaugural Voice of the Enterprise: Storage Study, 451 Research forecasts public cloud storage spend to double in two years – with NetApp, HPE and IBM falling down the supplier rankings as Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure bulldoze their way in.
We have seen a copy of the report: 451 asked its enterprise research base “which vendor does your organization currently spend the most with on storage in 2015 and which will it spend the most on in 2017?”
The top five suppliers in 2015 were EMC (28.7 per cent), NetApp (12.9 per cent), Dell (12.7 per cent), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (9.9 per cent) and IBM (9.5 per cent). 451 said AWS and Azure muscled their way into the top five in 2017, but what happened to the others?
Public cloud storage spend to double in two years – reliable sources
It’s a pain! Data and storage capacity growth
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/21/public_cloud_storage_spend_to_double/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux Takes Command
http://www.wired.com/brandlab/2016/01/taking-linux-and-the-open-community-to-new-heights/
The open source operating system is fast becoming an essential building block of business, powering everything from drones and TVs to the infrastructure that tackles the toughest tech challenges.
These are exciting times for Linux.
In the past two decades, the open source operating system has gone from being an obscure outlier in the developer community to a critical part of many organizations and business models.
Today, Linux is everywhere, powering everything from massive corporate enterprise systems to the millions of objects that make up the Internet of Things. And you’ll find Linux in products you’d never expect: from drones to phones, from cars to TV sets. The biggest computing systems in the world use Linux — and the smallest as well. Linux even helped land a spacecraft on Mars.
If you’re working with information on a screen there’s a good chance that, somewhere along the way, the vibrant open source community of Linux developers was involved in getting it there. “Open source and Linux is the coal and steel of the 21st century,” says Mike Woster, chief operating officer of the Linux Foundation. “They are the fundamental building blocks of business.”
The collaborative nature of the open source community means that Linux code is improved relentlessly; the best developers on the planet work around the clock to ensure that Linux is flexible, secure, and — most critically — interoperable. “The Linux community is very wide and diverse with many different communities contributing,” says Woster. “That’s a critical part of its strength.”
The role of Linux will continue to grow as computing demands increase, particularly as mobile applications play a bigger part of our daily life and more data moves into the cloud. Today, there are almost as many cell phone subscriptions (6.8 billion) as there are people on earth (7 billion), according to the ITU, the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies.
For businesses struggling to meet those “want it now” expectations, this often means a move to a fast and flexible hybrid of the private and public cloud. They want speed, security, performance, and the ability to scale. “The cloud is really starting to reshape the entire operations process of the enterprise IT team,” says Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, which created the Ubuntu open source software platform. “It’s really driving new business models.”
The need to leverage the attributes of Linux in mission critical deployments led IBM to create LinuxONE, an extremely powerful and reliable system designed for Open Source applications.
As more businesses begin to rely on Linux for their critical computing infrastructure, academic institutions are focusing on teaching Linux-related skills to their tech students. “There’s often a disconnect between the skills that are taught in the classroom and the skills that the industry is looking for,”
Learn more at: http://www.ibm.com/linuxone
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is Blockchain the Most Important IT Invention of Our Age?
http://science.slashdot.org/story/16/01/25/0134243/is-blockchain-the-most-important-it-invention-of-our-age
This article makes a fairly persuasive argument for the utility of the blockchain. It discusses a wide variety of companies and government exploring blockchain to maintain secure records which cannot be altered. One interesting application is to use blockchain to maintain property records in many countries where these records are often incomplete and are easily corrupted (intentionally or unintentionally).
Is Blockchain the most important IT invention of our age?
John Naughton
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/24/blockchain-bitcoin-technology-most-important-tech-invention-of-our-age-sir-mark-walport
The technology behind Bitcoin could revolutionise the way governments provide healthcare, deliver benefits, collect taxes – you name it…
There are not many occasions when one can give an unqualified thumbs-up to something the government does, but this is one such occasion. Last week, Sir Mark Walport, the government’s chief scientific adviser, published a report with the forbidding title Distributed Ledger Technology: Beyond Block Chain. The report sets out the findings of an official study that explores how the aforementioned technology “can revolutionise services, both in government and the private sector”. Since this is the kind of talk one normally hears from loopy startup founders pitching to venture capitalists rather than from sober Whitehall mandarins, it made this columnist choke on his muesli – especially given that, in so far as Joe Public thinks about distributed ledgers at all, it is in the context of Bitcoin, money laundering and online drug dealing. So what, one is tempted to ask, has the chief scientific adviser been smoking?
Before we get to that, however, some background might be useful. A distributed ledger is a special kind of database that is spread across multiple sites, countries or institutions, and is typically public in the sense that anyone can view it. Entries in the database are configured in “blocks” which are then chained together using digital, cryptographic signatures – hence the term blockchain, which is really just a techie name for a distributed ledger that can be shared and corroborated by anyone who has the appropriate permissions.
Most of the early examples of distributed ledgers have no “owner”. Instead anyone can contribute data to the ledger and everybody who has access to the ledger has an identical copy of it at any given time. This means that no individual can prevent someone from adding data to the ledger, and so it can constantly be updated. But it also means that all those in possession of copies of the ledger have to agree that the updates have happened.
Blockchain technology appeared first as the cryptographic engine that powered Bitcoin.
After all, a blockchain is essentially an incorruptible ledger of blocks of data, and that data can be records of just about anything.
Like records of land ownership. Creating and maintaining incorruptible registers of land titles is a huge – and mostly unsolved – problem for developing countries.
The unmistakable message was that this technology could be much more useful than merely securing cryptocurrencies. It might actually turn out to be one of the biggest IT inventions of our time.
The report makes eight recommendations on how to turn enthusiasm for blockchain technology into reality. There needs to be serious ministerial buy-in, for example, which – given our current collection of technologically illiterate tribunes – might be a bit of a stretch. We need working pilot schemes at local and national level. Academia and industry should be co-opted to address the security and other challenges that large-scale deployment will throw up. And of course there is a “need to build capability and skills within government”, not to mention “a cross-government community of interest… to generate and develop potential ‘use cases’ and create a body of knowledge and expertise within the civil service”.
All good stuff. The problem is that the supertanker that is the British state takes a long time to change course. Which is why small countries with techno-savvy administrations like Estonia are already experimenting with blockchain technology. They can turn on a sixpence, or even a Bitcoin.
Research and analysis
Distributed ledger technology: Blackett review
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/distributed-ledger-technology-blackett-review
The great chain of being sure about things
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21677228-technology-behind-bitcoin-lets-people-who-do-not-know-or-trust-each-other-build-dependable
The technology behind bitcoin lets people who do not know or trust each other build a dependable ledger. This has implications far beyond the cryptocurrency
A place in the past
Other applications for blockchain and similar “distributed ledgers” range from thwarting diamond thieves to streamlining stockmarkets: the NASDAQ exchange will soon start using a blockchain-based system to record trades in privately held companies. The Bank of England, not known for technological flights of fancy, seems electrified: distributed ledgers, it concluded in a research note late last year, are a “significant innovation” that could have “far-reaching implications” in the financial industry.
The politically minded see the blockchain reaching further than that. When co-operatives and left-wingers gathered for this year’s OuiShare Fest in Paris to discuss ways that grass-roots organisations could undermine giant repositories of data like Facebook, the blockchain made it into almost every speech. Libertarians dream of a world where more and more state regulations are replaced with private contracts between individuals—contracts which blockchain-based programming would make self-enforcing.
The blockchain began life in the mind of Satoshi Nakamoto, the brilliant, pseudonymous and so far unidentified creator of bitcoin—a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash”, as he put it in a paper published in 2008. To work as cash, bitcoin had to be able to change hands without being diverted into the wrong account and to be incapable of being spent twice by the same person. To fulfil Mr Nakamoto’s dream of a decentralised system the avoidance of such abuses had to be achieved without recourse to any trusted third party, such as the banks which stand behind conventional payment systems.
It is the blockchain that replaces this trusted third party. A database that contains the payment history of every bitcoin in circulation, the blockchain provides proof of who owns what at any given juncture. This distributed ledger is replicated on thousands of computers—bitcoin’s “nodes”—around the world and is publicly available. But for all its openness it is also trustworthy and secure. This is guaranteed by the mixture of mathematical subtlety and computational brute force built into its “consensus mechanism”—the process by which the nodes agree on how to update the blockchain in the light of bitcoin transfers from one person to another.
Running in the shadows
That hash is put, along with some other data, into the header of the proposed block. This header then becomes the basis for an exacting mathematical puzzle which involves using the hash function yet again. This puzzle can only be solved by trial and error. Across the network, miners grind through trillions and trillions of possibilities looking for the answer. When a miner finally comes up with a solution other nodes quickly check it (that’s the one-way street again: solving is hard but checking is easy), and each node that confirms the solution updates the blockchain accordingly. The hash of the header becomes the new block’s identifying string, and that block is now part of the ledger. Alice’s payment to Bob, and all the other transactions the block contains, are confirmed.
This puzzle stage introduces three things that add hugely to bitcoin’s security. One is chance. You cannot predict which miner will solve a puzzle, and so you cannot predict who will get to update the blockchain at any given time, except in so far as it has to be one of the hard working miners, not some random interloper. This makes cheating hard.
The second addition is history. Each new header contains a hash of the previous block’s header, which in turn contains a hash of the header before that, and so on and so on all the way back to the beginning. It is this concatenation that makes the blocks into a chain.
Make a change anywhere, though—even back in one of the earliest blocks—and that changed block’s header will come out different.
And nodes always work on the longest version of the blockchain there is. This rule stops the occasions when two miners find the solution almost simultaneously from causing anything more than a temporary fork in the chain. It also stops cheating.
Energy is contagious
The advent of distributed ledgers opens up an “entirely new quadrant of possibilities”, in the words of Albert Wenger of USV, a New York venture firm that has invested in startups such as OpenBazaar, a middleman-free peer-to-peer marketplace. But for all that the blockchain is open and exciting, sceptics argue that its security may yet be fallible and its procedures may not scale. What works for bitcoin and a few niche applications may be unable to support thousands of different services with millions of users.
Though Mr Nakamoto’s subtle design has so far proved impregnable, academic researchers have identified tactics that might allow a sneaky and well financed miner to compromise the block chain without direct control of 51% of it.
Because miners keep details of their hardware secret, nobody really knows how much power the network consumes. If everyone were using the most efficient hardware, its annual electricity usage might be about two terawatt-hours—a bit more than the amount used by the 150,000 inhabitants of King’s County in California’s Central Valley. Make really pessimistic assumptions about the miners’ efficiency, though, and you can get the figure up to 40 terawatt-hours, almost two-thirds of what the 10m people in Los Angeles County get through. That surely overstates the problem; still, the more widely people use bitcoin, the worse the waste could get.
Yet for all this profligacy bitcoin remains limited. Because Mr Nakamoto decided to cap the size of a block at one megabyte, or about 1,400 transactions, it can handle only around seven transactions per second, compared to the 1,736 a second Visa handles in America. Blocks could be made bigger; but bigger blocks would take longer to propagate through the network, worsening the risks of forking.
The problem is not so much a lack of fixes. It is that the network’s “bitcoin improvement process” makes it hard to choose one. Change requires community-wide agreement, and these are not people to whom consensus comes easily.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Open Sources Deep Learning, AI Toolkit On GitHub
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328796&
On Monday Microsoft joined its peers, including Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, in offering a deep learning framework to support artificial intelligence applications.
The company released its Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) as an open source project on GitHub, thus providing computer scientists and developers with another option for building the deep learning networks that power capabilities like speech and image recognition.
CNTK has been available to academic researchers since last April under a more restrictive license.
There are already several dozen deep learning toolkits and modules available. But the pace at which this technology is appearing has quickened. According to artist and developer Kyle McDonald, the average interval between deep learning framework releases was 47 days in the 2010-2014 period. Last year, he claimed in a tweet, that interval shrank to 22 days.
That may be because AI has become a major focus at leading technology companies. In early 2015, Facebook open sourced modules for the Torch deep learning toolkit. Then in November, Google released TensorFlow. In January this year, Baidu released Warp-CTC. Even Yahoo joined in, releasing a dataset derived from the Yahoo News Feed to fuel machine learning systems.
Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK)
https://github.com/Microsoft/CNTK
Tomi Engdahl says:
Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Marvin Minsky Dead at 88
Father of AI’s influence continues
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328789&
Minsky envisioned a future in which machines will possess intelligence as genuine as our own.
Marvin Minsky—an MIT computer science professor, artificial intelligence pioneer
died on Sunday of a massive cerebral brain hemorrhage at age 88.
Minsky’s career was defined early on in his first book on “automatic computation”—a topic that was too far ahead of its time in 1967 to be recognized as valuable. In 1969 he described artificial intelligence (AI) in his seminal text Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry (1969)—the first text dedicated to neural networks (although their ability to learn had been defined by Donald Hebb as far back as 1949).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Earnings Release FY16 Q2
Microsoft Cloud Strength Highlights Second Quarter Results
Commercial cloud annualized revenue run rate exceeds $9.4 billion; Windows 10 active on over 200 million devices
https://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/PressReleaseAndWebcast/FY16/Q2/default.aspx
REDMOND, Wash. — January 28, 2016 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended December 31, 2015:
· Revenue was $23.8 billion GAAP, and $25.7 billion non-GAAP
· Operating income was $6.0 billion GAAP, and $7.9 billion non-GAAP
· Net income was $5.0 billion GAAP, and $6.3 billion non-GAAP
· Earnings per share was $0.62 GAAP, and $0.78 non-GAAP
During the quarter, Microsoft returned $6.5 billion to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Goodbye Applets: Another Cruddy Piece of Web Tech Is Finally Going Away
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/goodbye-applets-another-cruddy-piece-of-web-tech-is-finally-going-away/
Another piece of old, insecure web infrastructure is about to be killed off.
Oracle says that it’s discontinuing its Java browser plugin starting with the next big release of the programming language. No, Oracle isn’t killing the Java programming language itself, which is still widely used by many companies. Nor is it killing off JavaScript, which is a completely different language that Oracle doesn’t control. What Oracle is getting rid of is a plugin that allows you to run programs known as “Java applets” in your browser.
You not think you even have the Java plugin installed, but if you’ve ever installed Java, or if Java came pre-installed on your computer, then you probably do, even if you never use it. The good news is that Oracle won’t be automatically installing the Java plugin when you install Java anymore. The bad news is that it won’t be providing security updates anymore either, so you should go ahead and uninstall it now. In fact, there’s a good chance you can uninstall Java entirely.
With Microsoft dropping support for old versions of Internet Explorer and Adobe slowly phasing out Flash, it looks like a nightmarish era for web security is finally drawing to an end.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Reaches 1.59 Billion Users And Beats Q4 Estimates With $5.8B Revenue
Facebook Climbs To 1.59 Billion Users And Crushes Q4 Estimates With $5.8B Revenue
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/27/facebook-earnings-q4-2015/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity_1730_8833995700530840123#.ojwuxm:0hzp
By courting users and ad dollars in the developing world, Facebook continued its growth streak. It hit 1.59 billion users today and crushed the street’s estimates in its Q4 2015 earnings with $5.841 billion in revenue and $0.79 earnings per share. That’s up from 1.55 billion users and $4.5 billion in revenue last quarter. Even with Q4 being the holidays, that 29.8% QoQ revenue growth is stunning, and it’s up 51% vs Q4 last year.
Facebook’s monthly user count grew a bit slower at 2.58% quarter over quarter from Q3’s extremely strong 4.02% growth. It shows Facebook is hitting saturation in some markets but still has room to grow in many developing countries.
Though not as flashy as the big monthly number, daily user count is a better way to chart Facebook’s progress. Facebook’s DAU hit 1.04 billion compared to 1.01 billion in Q3, up 2.97%. Facebook’s DAU to MAU ratio, or stickyness, held firm at 65%. That means users aren’t visiting less even as the service ages.
Mobile now makes up a massive 80% of Facebook’s advertising revenue, up from 78% in Q3. $5.63 billion of its total revenue came from advertising, overshadowing Facebook’s old payments business. Mobile-only users now number 827 million, up a swift 13.2% from 723 million last quarter. That’s a testament to Facebook growth in the developing world that largely skipped the full-sized computer age.
Update: Mark Zuckerberg also released a slew of new stats during the Q4 Earnings call:
100 million hours of video watched per day
1 billion users on Groups
80 million users on Facebook Lite
500 million users on Events
123 million events created in 2015
50 million small and medium sized business on Pages