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:
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft cancels Project Astoria for porting Android apps to Windows 10, still working on tools for porting iOS and Win32 apps — Microsoft: Our Android Windows 10 bridge is dead, but iOS, Win32 ones moving ahead — Microsoft’s iOS bridge will be the only Microsoft toolkit …
Microsoft: Our Android Windows 10 bridge is dead, but iOS, Win32 ones moving ahead
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-our-android-windows-10-bridge-is-dead-but-ios-win32-ones-moving-ahead/
Microsoft’s iOS bridge will be the only Microsoft toolkit for bringing mobile code to all Windows 10 devices, including Xbox, Microsoft officials said a day after buying mobile-tool vendor Xamarin.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Don’t Laugh: Yahoo’s Open Source AI Has a Secret Weapon
http://www.wired.com/2016/02/dont-laugh-yahoos-open-source-ai-secret-weapon/
Yet another tech giant is sharing its artificial intelligence know-how with the world. Today Yahoo published the source code to its CaffeOnSpark AI engine so that anyone from academic researchers to big corporations can use or modify it.
Yahoo may not be known as much for its technological prowess these days. But it did incubate Hadoop, an open source, wildly popular data crunching platform used by Facebook, Twitter and scores of other companies. And when it comes to AI, it has a unique asset. When training artificial intelligence systems, the data matters as much as the algorithms. And Yahoo has one of the more interesting data sets around in the form of Yahoo-owned photo site Flickr.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jack Clark / Bloomberg Business:
Google’s DeepMind Forms Health Unit to Build Medical Software
More: ResearchBuzz, Business Insider and Telegraph
Google’s DeepMind Forms Health Unit to Build Medical Software
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-24/google-s-deepmind-forms-health-unit-to-build-medical-software
Tomi Engdahl says:
MIT Technology Review:
Google unveils PlaNet neural network that outperforms humans at guessing the location of an image — Google Unveils Neural Network with “Superhuman” Ability to Determine the Location of Almost Any Image — Guessing the location of a randomly chosen Street View image is hard, even for well-traveled humans.
Google Unveils Neural Network with “Superhuman” Ability to Determine the Location of Almost Any Image
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600889/google-unveils-neural-network-with-superhuman-ability-to-determine-the-location-of-almost/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chinese Conglomerate Pulls Out of WD Investment
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329049&
There’s been a bit of a bump in the road for Western Digital as is looks to close its acquisition of SanDisk, as China-based conglomerate Unisplendour earlier this week cancelled plans to invest nearly US$3.8 billion in Western Digital for a 15% stake in the company.
The Hong Kong-based subsidiary of Chinese technology conglomerate Tsinghua Unigroup changed its mind after a decision by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to investigate the proposed investment. CFIUS is an inter-agency committee authorized to review transactions that could result in control of a U.S. business by a foreign person in order to determine their effect on national security.
The withdrawal from the deal by Tsinghua is not really a surprise, said Sean Yang, research director of DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce. “CFIUS has been getting serious about China foreign investment in American companies,” the Taiwan-based analyst said in an email interview with EE Times.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung Doubles UFS Capacity, Performance
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329042&
Samsung has doubled the capacity and speed of its Universal Flash Storage (UFS) memory, announcing what it said is the industry’s first 256GB UFS aimed for use in high-end mobile devices.
The update coincided with this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Samsung is now mass-producing the embedded memory based on the UFS 2.0 standard, the company said in a news release. To put its capacity into perspective, one 256GB UFS chip can store about 47 full HD movies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SCO vs. IBM looks like it’s over for good
And the winner is IBM. And the lawyers milking the case for 13 long years
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/29/sco_vs_ibm_over/
The long-running SCO vs. IBM case looks like it might just be over.
A new filing (PDF) scooped up by the good folks at Groklaw sees both SCO and IBM agree to sign off on two recent decisions in which SCO’s arguments advancing its claims to own parts of Unix were slapped down by the US District Court.
Tomi Engdahl says:
6 sensor-rich devices to augment reality
http://www.edn.com/design/sensors/4441450/6-sensor-rich-devices-to-augment-reality?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_consumerelectronics_20160224&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_consumerelectronics_20160224&elqTrackId=c2f67d8e15014f12bc55f9e337d87986&elq=ff98e0443d6f439888de89ddebff6534&elqaid=30997&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=27096
AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) are about to take the tech world by storm, with 2016 expected to see an explosion in AR/VR offerings. Companies big and small are racing to develop devices, whether they are accessories for their console systems or standalone systems in their own right.
On the next pages, we look at several of the better known devices and what types of sensors are making AR/VR a true consumer reality.
castAR
Valve/HTC Vive
Oculus Rift
Microsoft Hololens
Playstation VR
Bonuses: Google cardboard and Samsung Gear VR
Tomi Engdahl says:
Crowd-funded OpenShot 2.0 delivers graphic Linux package
iMovie? KDenLive? Cut! I’m a believer
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/29/openshot_2_review/
It’s been nearly two and a half years since the OpenShot video editor released an update. The long-awaited OpenShot 2.0 was beginning to feel like vaporware until a Kickstarter campaign raised more than $45,000 and promised a cross-platform release.
The Kickstarter backers got their first look at OpenShot 2.0 beta at the end of last year, but now everyone can try it out. There are downloads available for Mac, Windows and Linux (Ubuntu PPA)
As I noted in my review of video editors for Linux, OpenShot was once the go-to standard for video editing on GNOME-based distros. And now with 2.0, OpenShot is back and better than ever.
The user interface has been completely reworked and features much more intuitive and easy-to-use editing tools. Perhaps the most useful of these is the timeline as the center of the app.
Feature-wise, OpenShot competes well with just about any video editor short of Avid or Final Cut Pro, which most users won’t need or even want. OpenShot 2.0 manages to strike a nice balance between complexity and full-featured to deliver a video editor that should keep just about everyone short of Hollywood pros happy.
http://www.openshot.org/download/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Computers read 1.8 billion words of fiction to learn how to anticipate human behaviour
https://thestack.com/cloud/2016/02/26/computers-read-1-8-billion-words-of-fiction-to-learn-how-to-anticipate-human-behaviour/
The quest to create virtual assistants that can understand and anticipate human behaviour and needs is one of the current lodestars of artificial intelligence research, but is challenged by the diversity and limitations of available datasets, as well as the expense and complexity involved in generating new proprietary ones.
Researchers at Stanford University decided to approach the problem by using descriptions of everyday human activities found in online fiction, namely 600,000 stories from 500,000 writers at online writing community WattPad – input totalling 1.8 billion words – to inform a new knowledge base called Augur, designed to power vector machines in making predictions about what an individual user might be about to do, or want to do next.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VMware’s GPL violation case rolls into German court
Hamburg Court allows proceedings after considering kernel dev Christoph Hellwig’s right to action
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/01/vmwares_gpl_violation_case_rolls_into_german_court/
Proceedings have begun in the German case probing whether VMware’s ESXi is in violation of the Gnu Public Licence
The case emerged last March, when ace kernel developer Christoph Hellwig alleged that ESXi hypervisor has pinched parts of the code he wrote for the Linux kernel. That’s a big no-no under version 2 of the GPL.
So off to court the matter went, but not without incident. In preliminary filings, VMware argued that Hellwig has no right to bring the case. Hellwig countered that his extensive contributions to the kernel mean he’s as good a person as anyone to make a claim.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What I learned about the future from playing Minecraft VR
http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2016/03/01/what-i-learned-about-the-future-from-playing-minecraft-vr/
Minecraft is one of the jewels in the world of VR, and Minecraft for Windows 10 will be able to support VR, with aid from the Microsoft Xbox controller included in any pre-order, practically out of the box for those waiting patiently for their commercial Rift to be in their hands at the end of the month. Microsoft said support would be available sometime in the Spring, so it’s likely that this will be one of the high-quality inaugural experiences VR fans are hoping to chase after.
And it’s exactly what you should be playing.
the core principle of the game is that: mining and crafting
Although Minecraft is familiar and its movement speeds work forgivingly with VR, it can be hard to position your face and body in relative space near your computer.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google-Backed SSD Endurance Research Shows MLC Flash As Reliable As SLC
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/03/01/0529250/google-backed-ssd-endurance-research-shows-mlc-flash-as-reliable-as-slc
New research results Google is sharing via a joint research project now encompasses SSD use over a six year span at one of Google’s data centers. Looking over the results led to some expected and unexpected findings. One of the biggest discoveries is that SLC-based SSDs are not necessarily more reliable than MLC-based drives.
This is surprising, as SLC SSDs carry a price premium with the promise of higher durability (specifically in write operations) as one of their selling points.
Google Data Center SSD Research Report Offers Surprising Results, SLC Not More Reliable Than MLC Flash
Read more at http://hothardware.com/news/google-data-center-ssd-research-report-offers-surprising-results-slc-not-more-reliable-than-mlc-flash#jx46W6hk9zvWB4Mu.99
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft to unify PC and Xbox One platforms, ending fixed console hardware
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/01/microsoft-to-unify-pc-and-xbox-one-platforms-ending-fixed-console-hardware
Head of Microsoft’s gaming division effectively confirms Xbox is becoming a new kind of PC/console hybrid
Microsoft is planning to unify its PC and Xbox One gaming platforms into one ecosystem running Universal Windows Applications (UWAs), the head of the company’s Xbox division Phil Spencer has announced. It also looks likely that the Xbox One will become more PC-like with backwards compatible hardware upgrades in the future.
This is, he explained, the culmination of the company’s vision over the past year. In January 2015, Microsoft announced that it was bringing an Xbox app to Windows 10 PCs, allowing cross-platform play and a cohesive friends list across both platforms. Then, in November, the Xbox One was updated to be compatible with Windows 10, bringing a new interface and features to the console. In late-January, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told attendees at the dotNet conference in Madrid that UWAs would be coming to Xbox One, but did not specify in what capacity.
The Xbox chief ended his keynote by reiterating the importance of the PC as a gaming platform. He promised that UWAs will support multiple different graphics processors and that issues with V-Sync ( a setting that matches the game framerate with your monitor’s screen refresh rate) would be resolved.
“PC gaming is as important as its ever been in the company,” he said. “Windows is a critical franchise. Over 40% of the people running Windows 10 are playing games. We want to work hand in hand with our partners to make sure we have the best platform we can have.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
x86 SoC Series Spans Wide Application Range
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329071&
At Embedded World last week chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced an expansion of its Embedded G-series systems on chip (SoCs) to span a range of applications from “top to bottom” in gaming, imaging, industrial control, and other common x86 applications. In addition to the release of an entry-level G-series line — the LX family — AMD has announced two new 3rd-generation G-series lines that offer pin compatibility with AMD’s higher-performing Embedded R-series SoCs. The result is an ability for designers to scale their software across broad performance, price, and power alternatives.
The LX family targets applications that need high performance with advanced multimedia and display capabilities at relatively low power. The chips contain two of AMD’s 64-bit “Jaguar” x86 cores, the Radeon Graphics Core Next (GCN), and a security processor along with error correcting memory.
The other two new families go a step further in performance
Tomi Engdahl says:
Agam Shah / Computerworld:
DisplayPort 1.4 to support 8K displays, work with USB-C — Big changes are coming to the popular DisplayPort display standard, with version 1.4 promising support for 8K displays. — DisplayPort 1.4 will allow 8K displays to hook up to laptops, smartphones and other devices via a USB Type-C port
DisplayPort 1.4 to support 8K displays, work with USB-C
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3039966/computer-hardware/displayport-14-to-support-8k-displays-work-with-usb-c.html
DisplayPort 1.4 graduates from supporting 4K, though it’s not certain when devices will be compatible with the new standard
Big changes are coming to the popular DisplayPort display standard, with version 1.4 promising support for 8K displays.
wearables opener primary idge
Wearables in the enterprise? Yes, really!
Think wearables are just a consumer fad? Think again. Here’s how companies like DHL, Lee Company and
Read Now
DisplayPort 1.4 will allow 8K displays to hook up to laptops, smartphones and other devices via a USB Type-C port. The new standard was announced by VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) on Tuesday.
The USB Type-C connector is already gaining popularity, so DisplayPort 1.4 will be easy to implement in devices. There’s another 8K connector called SuperMHL under development that requires new ports but can also be slapped on USB Type-C connectors.
4K TVs are gaining popularity, but will be replaced by 8K in the coming years. Sharp was to first to retail an 8K TV for a whopping $133,000.
Microsoft to support 8K video resolutions with Windows 10
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2899929/microsoft-to-support-8k-video-resolutions-with-windows-10.html
8K displays aren’t here yet, but Microsoft’s looking forward with Windows 10
Microsoft is looking beyond 4K with Windows 10 and bringing 8K support to the operating system, years before TVs, monitors and content for that display resolution become widely available.
The 8K support for Windows 10 will be for displays larger than 27 inches, according to a slide presented at Microsoft’s WinHEC trade show in Shenzhen, China, last week.
wearables opener primary idge
Wearables in the enterprise? Yes, really!
Think wearables are just a consumer fad? Think again. Here’s how companies like DHL, Lee Company and
Read Now
Large-screen TVs based on the 8K resolution have wowed many at trade shows like CES, but it’s still many years away from adoption. Users are still moving to from conventional HD to the new 4K standard, and it could be many years until PC displays start supporting 8K.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Market Views: Hard Drive Shipments Drop by Nearly 17% in 2015
by Anton Shilov on March 2, 2016 12:00 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10098/market-views-2015-hard-drive-shipments
While no one is writing off the PC market entirely, since it’s heyday nearly a decade ago the PC market has been in a slow decline for some time, and that decline has yet to bottom out. Sales of personal computers declined by roughly 25 – 30 million units year-over-year, hitting an eight-year low in 2015 due to economic trends, weak international currencies, and competition from tablets and smartphones in some markets. Shipments of PC components naturally dropped alongside weak PC sales, but hard drive sales in particular have made for an interesitng observation: for 2015, declines of HDD sales greatly outpaced the regress of the PC market. Based on estimates from Western Digital and Seagate (see counting methodology below), the total available market of hard drives contracted by nearly 100 million units year-over-year in 2015.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM brings down large axe on staff in the US
After rumors of upcoming layoffs, Big Blue kicks off round of ‘mass’ cuts
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/02/ibm_layoffs/
IBM axed a wedge of workers today across the US as part of an “aggressive” shakeup of its business.
Big Blue was due to lay off some staff at its Global Technology Services (GTS) wing in America back in January. That headcount chop was postponed, with the cuts being pushed back to this week and with more than GTS workers affected.
Many of those losing their jobs are being offered a maximum of one month of severance pay – much less than the amount offered in previous rounds of cuts. This squeeze on payouts was introduced in January. They’ll also get 90 days to clear their desks and find new work.
“IBM is aggressively transforming its business to lead in a new era of cognitive and cloud computing,” a Big Blue spokesman told The Register this afternoon.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nearly all cloud ERP projects will ‘fail’ by 2018, reckons Gartner
Cost overruns, complexity… stop me if this sounds familiar
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/02/postmodern_erp_disaster_gartner/
Anybody who thinks cloud ERP is the answer to their monolithic, on-premises vendor pain is wrong – according to Gartner, anyway.
Gartner has projected a near 100 per cent fail rate for cloud ERP projects by 2018.
Ninety per cent of those rolling out what the mega-analyst has defined as “post-modern ERP” will succumb to the traditional ERP headaches of higher costs, greater complexity and failed integration by 2018.
Their Achilles Heel will be lack of an application integration strategy and related skills.
Gartner defined “post-modern ERP” as systems that are federated and loosely coupled and no longer from a single, monolithic provider – such as Oracle or SAP. This is what defined the big ERP rollout wave during the 1990s that, presumably, Gartner defines as the “modern” ERP age.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reports Coming In Of Mass IBM Layoffs Underway In The U.S.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/16/03/02/2145223/reports-coming-in-of-mass-ibm-layoffs-underway-in-the-us
Last week, IBM reported to investors that its workforce at the end of 2015 was almost as big as its workforce at the end of 2014 (within less than 1 percent), in spite of a year in which 70,000 employees left the company, to be replaced with new hires and acquisitions. Today reports are coming in that massive layoffs across the United States are underway, likely one-third of the U.S. workforce, according to one soon-to-be-laid-off-IBMer. In addition, a recent change in IBM’s severance policy may leave workers with less cash than anticipated
Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/computing/it/reports-coming-in-of-mass-us-layoffs-underway-today-at-ibm
Last week, IBM reported to investors that its workforce at the end of 2015 was almost as big as its workforce at the end of 2014 (within less than 1 percent), in spite of a year in which 70,000 employees left the company, to be replaced with new hires and acquisitions.
By the end of this week, the picture may look quite different. Today reports are coming in that big layoffs across the United States are underway, likely one-third of the U.S. workforce, according to one soon-to-be-laid-off IBMer. (At the end of 2015, IBM had approximately 378,000 employees worldwide; it no longer breaks out numbers for individual countries.)
Tomi Engdahl says:
Thunderbolt comes to Linux
Dell has said that its future laptop XPS 13 Developer Edition will include a high-speed third-generation Thunderbolt interface. At the same time Thunderbolt makes her debut on Linux machines, because the Dell machine runs Ubuntu Linux.
Thunderbolt is Intel and Apple jointly developed bus technology, which was introduced last year. The data is transferred via a whopping 40 gigabits per second, which is twice as fast as the previous version, or Thunderbolt 2.
Third version of the big change is the fact that the physical bus interface supports USB Type-C standard
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4072:thunderbolt-tulee-linuxiin&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung Ships 15.38TB SSD With Up To 1,200MBps Performance
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/03/03/0528241/samsung-ships-1538tb-ssd-with-up-to-1200mbps-performance
Samsung announced it is now shipping the world’s highest capacity 2.5-in SSD, the 15.38TB PM1633a. The new SSD uses a 12Gbps SAS interface and is being marketed for use in enterprise-class storage systems where IT managers can fit twice as many of the drives in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack compared to an equivalent 3.5-inch drive. The PM1633a sports random read/write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000 IOPS, respectively.
Samsung ships the world’s highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3040208/data-storage/samsung-ships-the-worlds-highest-capacity-ssd-with-15tb-of-storage.html?nsdr=true
Tomi Engdahl says:
Flash memory’s density surpasses hard drives for first time
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3030642/data-storage/flash-memorys-density-surpasses-hard-drives-for-first-time.html
HDD makers will roll out new tricks to increase areal density in the next two years
NAND flash memory has surpassed hard disk drive (HDD) technology in areal density for the first time, according to a new report from a market research firm.
During a presentation at the 2016 IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco last week, Micron shared data showing NAND flash has moved past HDDs in areal density, according to Coughlin Associates.
At last year’s ISSCC, Samsung white papers indicated that its 3D NAND flash products had reached 1.19Tbits per square inch (Tbpsi) and said in 2016 they would reach 1.69Tbpsi.
This year, Micron revealed it had demonstrated areal densities in its laboratories of up to 2.77Tbpsi for its 3D NAND. That compares with the densest HDDs of about 1.3Tbpsi. Tom Coughlin, Coughlin Associates president, noted the flash advancements in a column in Forbes.com last week.
The announced hard drive products from the third quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2015 had an increased areal density of about 60%, So HDDs have not stopped evolving,” Coughlin said.
“On the other hand, flash memory is getting denser with technology announcements of 2.77Tbspi, higher than any announced HDD areal density. This is a new development. So flash is developing and certainly getting competitive in terms of areal storage density, but the chips are still more expensive to make than disks and the raw costs of storage will likely remain less for HDDs for some time to come.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Beep, beep – it’s our 2016 buzzword detector. We see you, ‘complexity’
Get ready to soak legacy vendors
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/03/2016_buzzword_complexity/
Sysadmin blog: A new marketing push by legacy tech vendors that I expect will be particularly beloved by old school storage vendors is afoot: prepare for the “complexity” onslaught. The answer to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) claims made by the likes of public cloud or hyperconvergence vendors is going to be money funneled into endless blog posts and presentations about how complex these solutions are.
There’s a certain vagueness about the use of the term complexity required for this marketing to work. For example, marketers are going to need to avoid distinctions between operational and technical complexity.
Something can be technically complex, but if you don’t need to fix it, does it matter?
We are nearly at this tipping point with a lot of IT infrastructure. Instead of fixing individual components or mucking about with configurations, we can just chuck the whole thing (or reset to defaults) and continue on with actually using our infrastructure instead of wasting effort fixing it.
For vertically integrated infrastructure elements like hyperconverged appliances, the yearly support contract with the vendor covers problem resolution.
If zero downtime was a huge deal for you, then you had a disaster recovery plan in place and tested it regularly. If not, then a few hours of downtime probably isn’t going to end your business. The same sort of arguments apply to the public cloud.
Yes, the public cloud does stop working occasionally. Like any other collection of computers it can and will go phut without warning, usually because a human did something silly. Oh well.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CEOs force CIOs, CMOs into digital transformation bunker
http://www.cio.com/article/3040448/cio-role/ceos-force-cios-cmos-into-digital-transformation-bunker.html
CIOs and CMOs who value their jobs are collaborating on digital transformations that require them to map out and connect customer interactions across every touchpoint. But this isn’t happening as much as it should.
Tomi Engdahl says:
It had to happen: Now you can code with emoji
Can’t type. Too emoj
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2449779/it-had-to-happen-now-you-can-code-with-emoji
CODING HAS never been so stupid! As the art of programming a computer becomes essential for day-to-day life, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a way of coding without even being able to read.
Enter Emojicode, which can be used to make cross-platform applications without the need for, you know, words.
“Emojicode is an open source, high-level, multi-paradigm, object-orientated programming language consisting of emojis. It allows you to build fast cross-platform applications while having a lot of fun,” the company explained.
Emojicode is available on GitHub as an open source project and is “delimiter-less, object-orientated, imperative, high-level and hybrid”, according to the firm. In other words, all things to all nerds with the added bonus of pictures of pizza slices.
There is a downside, however. In order to run at the speeds it does, especially given that it has to translate the emojis into something useful (echoes of BASIC, anyone?), there’s no error checking, so if you get anything wrong your app will crash.
https://github.com/emojicode/emojicode
http://www.emojicode.org/
Tomi Engdahl says:
What is Shashlik
http://www.shashlik.io/what-is/
The goal of Shashlik is to provide a way to run Android applications on a standard Linux desktop as easily and simply as possible.
Under the hood
The easiest way to run an Android app correctly is to simply run Android. It’s a linux base that we can nest inside our session. OpenGL and graphics are all rendered on the host ensuring fast performance.
Shashlik provides an incredibly stripped down Android base which boots directly into the loaded app, but with a running activity manager and daemons so that intents still work correctly.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tim Sweeney / Guardian:
Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney says Microsoft wants to lock PC game distribution and commerce with Universal Windows Platform, urges industry to fight it — Microsoft wants to monopolise games development on PC. We must fight it — Developers must oppose this, or else cede control of their titles
Microsoft wants to monopolise games development on PC. We must fight it
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/04/microsoft-monopolise-pc-games-development-epic-games-gears-of-war
Microsoft is looking to dominate the games industry ecosystem with its aggressive new UWP initiative. Developers must oppose this, or else cede control of their titles
With its new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative, Microsoft has built a closed platform-within-a-platform into Windows 10, as the first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem and monopolising app distribution and commerce.
In my view, this is the most aggressive move Microsoft has ever made. While the company has been convicted of violating antitrust law in the past, its wrongful actions were limited to fights with specific competitors and contracts with certain PC manufacturers.
This isn’t like that. Here, Microsoft is moving against the entire PC industry – including consumers (and gamers in particular), software developers such as Epic Games, publishers like EA and Activision, and distributors like Valve and Good Old Games.
Microsoft has launched new PC Windows features exclusively in UWP, and is effectively telling developers you can use these Windows features only if you submit to the control of our locked-down UWP ecosystem. They’re curtailing users’ freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Email pioneer Ray Tomlinson dead at 74
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/web-culture/email-pioneer-ray-tomlinson-dead-at-74-20160306-gnbspq.html
Raymond Tomlinson, the godfather of email, died Saturday morning of a suspected heart attack. He was 74.
Tomlinson, who was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012, is best known for rescuing the @ symbol from obscurity and, in the process, shaping the way we talk about being online.
He was also a key driver in the development of standards for the “From”, “Subject”, and date fields found in email messages today.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/web-culture/email-pioneer-ray-tomlinson-dead-at-74-20160306-gnbspq.html#ixzz42A6MqWTa
Tomi Engdahl says:
MAME is now FOSS. That’s great news, but think about the amount of work that went into making this happen. MAME is 19 years old, and that means everyone who has contributed to the project over the years needed to sign off on this initiative.
MAME is now Free and Open Source Software
http://mamedev.org/?p=422
After 19 years, MAME is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license! Many thanks to all of the contributors who helped this to go as smoothly as possible!
We have spent the last 10 months trying to contact all people that contributed to MAME as developers and external contributors and get information about desired license. We had limited choice to 3 that people already had dual-license MAME code with.
Tomi Engdahl says:
RIP Good Times? Venture Capital Funding, Unicorn Births, And Mega-Deals Plummet in Q4’15
https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital-fall/
2015 was a banner year for VC activity…until the end.
Uh oh.
In Q3’15, funding to VC-backed companies hit levels last seen during the dot com boom. There was a new unicorn birthed every 4th day. $100M+ financings were commonplace.
Good times.
2015 was shaping up to be a banner year for venture capital… and then Q4 happened.
Today, we released an early snapshot of the KPMG International & CB Insights 2015 Venture Pulse Report, which highlights the drastic funding and deal shift we saw in Q4.
For Silicon Valley, the Hangover Begins
With venture-capital investors increasingly nervous, once-hot tech startups are retrenching
http://www.wsj.com/articles/for-silicon-valley-the-hangover-begins-1455930769
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD to fix slippery hypervisor-busting bug in its CPU microcode
Patch for Piledriver chips emitted this week to kill off potentially exploitable glitches
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/06/amd_microcode_6000836_fix/
AMD will release on Monday new processor microcode to crush an esoteric bug that can be potentially exploited by virtual machine guests to hijack host servers.
Machines using AMD Piledriver CPUs, such as the Opteron 6300 family of server chips, and specifically CPU microcode versions 0×6000832 and 0×6000836 – the latest available – are vulnerable to the flaw.
When triggered, the bug can glitch a processor core to execute data as software, which crashes the currently running process. It is possible for a non-root user in a virtual machine to exploit this defect to upset the host system, or trick the host kernel into executing malicious code controlled by the user.
In other words, it is possible on some AMD-powered servers for a normal user in a guest virtual machine to escape to the underlying host and take over the whole shared server. Although it is rather tricky to exploit – for one thing, it requires precise timing – AMD has a fix ready for operating system makers to distribute to affected users from this week.
“AMD is aware of the potential issue of unprivileged code running in virtual machine guests on systems that make use of AMD Opteron 6200/6300,” a spokesman told The Register.
Tomi Engdahl says:
BorgBackup 1.0.0 Released
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/16/03/06/1635235/borgbackup-100-released
After almost a year of development, bug fixing and cleanup, BorgBackup 1.0.0 has been released. BorgBackup is a fork of the Attic-Backup project — a deduplicating, compressing, encrypting and authenticating backup program for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and other unixoid operating systems (Windows may also work using CygWin, but that is rather experimental/unsupported).
http://borgbackup.readthedocs.org/en/stable/
BorgBackup (short: Borg) is a deduplicating backup program. Optionally, it supports compression and authenticated encryption.
The main goal of Borg is to provide an efficient and secure way to backup data. The data deduplication technique used makes Borg suitable for daily backups since only changes are stored. The authenticated encryption technique makes it suitable for backups to not fully trusted targets.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Mobile App is the New Endpoint
http://www.securityweek.com/mobile-app-new-endpoint
The landscape of enterprise endpoints has shifted dramatically in the last few years, as typical endpoints have evolved from laptops to mobile devices—a shift that’s likely to grow as mobile devices offer increased screen sizes and resolutions, better onscreen keyboards and more processing power.
Recently, Apple CEO Tim Cook was widely quoted as saying that he doesn’t even travel with a laptop anymore; he gets along fine with just an iPad and an iPhone. Cook can leave his laptop behind because software is evolving, too, from desktop applications to self-hosted web applications, to SaaS, and now to mobile apps. Using the apps on his two iOS devices, Cook can do everything he needs to do when he’s on the road.
Security Considerations
As the perimeter of the enterprise erodes and devices exist in a more distributed environment, enterprise teams have the complicated task of figuring out what they can still manage. In this day of BYOD devices and zero-trust operating environments, IT and security professionals gain nothing from trying to manage the unmanageable—which is just as well, because the device is no longer the endpoint that matters.
The new endpoint is the mobile app: it’s our interface with the user and the point at which data and transactions come into the enterprise, or service provider or retailer or financial institution. It’s the new focus of users’ interactions and the workflows they rely upon to make themselves more productive. It’s the new vault for the things that matter in their lives—their organizations’ proprietary information and their own HR records, the private health information they share with their doctors and their kids’ social security numbers for school. Mobile apps have quickly become where all of us store our most vital data.
And attackers know that the money is where the data resides. They know that security is often overlooked in the rush to release mobile apps, leaving an open door to data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sam Byford / The Verge:
Google’s DeepMind has defeated Go champion Lee Se-dol in first of five matches in historic AI victory
Google’s DeepMind defeats legendary Go player Lee Se-dol in historic victory
http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/9/11184362/google-alphago-go-deepmind-result
Tomi Engdahl says:
How can CIOs stay relevant?
http://www.cio.com/article/3041504/cio-role/how-can-cios-stay-relevant.html
In a world of ‘shadow IT’ services, CIOs need to adapt if want to avoid being relegated to little more than technicians.
What’s the point of a CIO?
It’s a brutally frank question. But in a world where business units can sign up for “shadow IT” services in minutes to get anything from CRM to analytics to data storage to email, do organizations really need a C-level technology expert anymore?
CIO Feb 2016 digital issue cover
Download CIO’s latest digital issue
Inside: Making the CIO/CMO relationship work, Ford’s shift to bimodal IT & much more!
Read Now
The good news for CIOs is that the answer is probably “yes.” The bad news is that they are going to have to change and adapt if they want to have any chance of staying relevant.
That’s certainly the view of Jim Cole, a senior vice president at Hitachi Consulting. “The role of the CIO remains relevant to the extent they are strategists first, technologists second,” he warns.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Flash storage: Has the hype become reality?
Fulsome flash developments feed fast progress
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/09/royal_flash_hypeness_become_real/
Is the flash storage business a hype-filled wonderland or is flash-based technology making real inroads into IT?
Flash arrays provide much faster access to data, because of SSD’s lower latency compared to disk drives but they are more expensive to buy. This can be justified by looking at potentially lower total cost of ownership over five years taking into account power, cooling and rack array space uptake.
You could also look at cost per storage transaction if that gets factored into your budget calculations.
New all-flash arrays from startups don’t have the same width and maturity of data management services that traditional-style arrays have. When these existing array architectures have SSDs added to them, with their controller software updated to use the SSDs well, then such hybrid arrays can provide an attractive middle way between slower, all-disk arrays, and costlier and probably faster all-flash arrays lacking data services.
Modern array use of SSDs, and newer SSDs, ensure longer endurance than earlier SSDs, through management to minimise the write rate to individual blocks on flash chips. Flash arrays can provide greater IO rates than disk drive arrays, and do so in in a smaller space, not needing multiple spindles to increase the overall UO rate.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Qualcomm ARM server chips try on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for size
While Linaro slings data center ARM chips into new developer cloud
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/09/qualcomm_red_hat_enterprise_linux/
Qualcomm and Red Hat are busy porting the latter’s enterprise-friendly flavor of Linux to Qualy’s upcoming 64-bit ARM server processors, we learned today.
Specifically, the pair are “collaborating” to bring Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview to Qualcomm’s 24-core ARMv8-A silicon shown off in October. Red Hat’s ARM dev preview is, as it sounds, a work-in-progress ARM build of RHEL.
“Qualcomm Technologies (QTI) and Red Hat successfully booted Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM on QTI’s Server Development Platform (SDP),” Qualy said in a statement on Wednesday.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bill Gates Pleased with Microsoft’s Increased Focus on Linux
http://news.softpedia.com/news/bill-gates-applauds-microsoft-s-increased-focus-on-linux-501523.shtml
There was a time when Microsoft and Linux users just couldn’t get along and undoubtedly, there still are users on both sides that can’t stand each other. But at the same time, Microsoft is increasingly focusing on the Linux world, and the latest announcement that SQL Server would arrive on Linux is living proof.
Bill Gates, the man who founded the software empire and who’s now just a technical adviser to CEO Satya Nadella, so he’s more or less involved in the making of every important decision for the company, said during an AMA discussion on Reddit that Microsoft is trying to adapt to the changing market and focusing more on Linux is the right thing to do.
“I think it shows Satya looking at how the market is changing and being willing to change how things have been done. His embrace of the cloud and mobile including doing software on other people’s mobile platforms are also great examples of that,” he said.
Microsoft announced yesterday plans to bring SQL Server relational database management system (RDBMS) to Linux kernel-based operating systems, with the first rollout to take place in 2017.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New MIT Code Makes Web Pages Load 34 Percent Faster in Any Browser
http://gizmodo.com/new-mit-code-makes-web-pages-load-34-percent-faster-in-1763744831
Internet connections get faster but websites get more complex—and that means we often still have to wait an age for pages to load. Now, a new technique from MIT that helps browsers gather files more efficiently could change that.
“As pages increase in complexity, they often require multiple trips that create delays that really add up,” explains Ravi Netravali, one of the researchers, in a press release. “Our approach minimizes the number of round trips so that we can substantially speed up a page’s load-time.” The new system, known as Polaris, was been developed by the University’s at Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Hit enter after a URL or click on a link and your browser busies itself gathering a series of objects—HTML files, JavaScript, pictures and who knows what else. Each object is evaluated, then added to the page you’re looking at.
That’s where Polaris comes in. What it does is log all the dependancies and inter-dependancies on a web page. It compiles all of these into a graph for the page that a browser can use to download page elements more efficiently.
The good news is that Polaris is written in JavaScript. That means that it could be introduced to any website—it’d just have to be running on the server in question, so it’d automatically kick in for any page load—and used with unmodified browsers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Releases First Public Preview of RTVS Under MIT and GPLv2 Licenses
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/16/03/09/1834230/microsoft-releases-first-public-preview-of-rtvs-under-mit-and-gplv2-licenses
Microsoft has released the first public preview of RTVS (R Tools for Visual Studio), an extension for Visual Studio that adds support for the R (GNU S) programming language. The product is open source, and while most of the code is under the MIT license, some components are GPLv2, in accordance with the R license.
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/rtvs-vs.aspx
Tomi Engdahl says:
R you ready? Open source stats come to Visual Studio
R Tools for Visual Studio, in da house
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/10/open_source_stats_visual_studio/
There’s no longer any particular surprise to hear the words “Microsoft” and “open source” in the same sentence: in the latest addition to its stable, Redmond is wrapping the venerable statistical package R in its warm embrace.
The company has offered a first look at R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS) here.
While commercial users gravitate towards packages like SPSS (now owned by IBM), R is nearly ubiquitous in the academic world.
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/rtvs-vs.aspx
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell Expanding into Industrial PC, IIoT Markets
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329122&
Personal computer giant Dell is branching out into a new market, the company revealed at Embedded World. It is applying its proven quality, reliability, and global reach to the industrial PC market with the introduction of two purpose-built industrial PC families: the Embedded Box PC 3000 and 5000 series. The ruggedized, fanless PCs are part of Dell’s IoT product portfolio and target Industrial IoT edge computing and gateway applications.
“We looked at the IIoT landscape,” said Andy Rhodes, Dell’s executive director of commercial IoT solutions in an interview with EE Times, “and saw that edge gateways were missing in the portfolio of available systems. Also, a lot of things at the edge were embedded PCs, mostly legacy systems that wouldn’t be replaced with something entirely different.” In addition, he noted, the IT departments of companies contemplating the adoption of IIoT technology want to use the same tools they have in IT to manage their OT and edge systems.
Dell saw opportunity in the situation, Rhodes said, despite the existing ecosystem of industrial PC providers offering modular products based on industry standard buses such as PC/104 and compactPCI. “The embedded PC companies can’t supply large volumes quickly,” Rhodes noted, “and it’s hard to validate and certify the final configurations
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM to erase 14,000 people from the payroll – Wall St analyst
Jobs to be bundled on a plane and flown to lower labour cost countries
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/10/ibm_to_erase_14000_people_from_the_payroll_wall_st_analyst/
Up to 14,000 IBMers worldwide could leave under the latest redundancy programme, according to Wall Street moneymen.
In a research note from Bernstein that was sent to customers and us, senior research analyst Tony Sacconaghi, said it appears IBM is taking “meaningful workforce rebalancing actions”.
He highlighted a $1bn Japanese tax gain Big Blue has received, and pointed out that in the past the company had matched the proceeds from dispositions or IP sales with workforce restructuring expense.
“It now appears that IBM is likely to do the same in FY Q1 – i.e. realise a $1 benefit to earnings per share in Q1 from the tax settlements and incur a similar amount of restructuring expense.
“We have estimated that it has historically cost IBM about $70,000 to eliminate an employee, which would imply a workforce reduction of about 14,000 employees this quarter,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Peter Bright / Ars Technica:
Epic’s Tim Sweeney is missing the point: the restrictions of the Universal Windows Platform make PCs easier to use and more secure
Tim Sweeney is missing the point; the PC platform needs fixing
Op-ed: Bringing the console model to Windows wasn’t an accident.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/tim-sweeney-is-missing-the-point-the-pc-platform-needs-fixing/
Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian saying that Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform (UWP)—the common development platform that covers Windows, Windows Mobile, HoloLens, and soon, Xbox One—”can, should, must, and will die.” Sweeney’s complaint is that UWP is locked down. By default, UWP apps can only be installed and purchased through Microsoft’s store, and they have to run from a sandboxed environment. So some Windows features are, or will be, only available to UWP apps. In this way, Sweeney says that Microsoft is “curtailing users’ freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers,” especially as Microsoft makes some Windows features UWP-only.
Sweeney wants UWP to either be destroyed or made “open” in the same way that the traditional Win32 API is “open.” This is in three parts: he wants UWP apps to be downloadable and installable from the Web by default (without needing to change any settings or enable sideloading), he wants third parties to be able to create their own storefronts for UWP apps, and he wants it to always be possible for developers to sell directly to users without Microsoft taking a 30 percent cut.
This is a strange complaint for two main reasons. The first issue is that the UWP lock-down is, overall, a positive thing. The second is that there doesn’t appear to be anything preventing third-party downloads, third-party storefronts, and third-party billing right now.
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Ribeiro / PCWorld:
Microsoft will open-source AI development platform based on Minecraft — AIX uses the Minecraft gaming platform for testing new research — Microsoft has decided to open-source a platform used by its researchers to test artificial-intelligence projects. — The AIX platform …
Microsoft will open-source AI development platform based on Minecraft
AIX uses the Minecraft gaming platform for testing new research
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3043895/analytics/microsoft-to-open-source-ai-development-platform-based-on-minecraft.html
Microsoft has decided to open-source a platform used by its researchers to test artificial-intelligence projects.
The AIX platform, which is already being used by Microsoft Research and is available under a private beta to select academic researchers, allows researchers to use the unstructured play in the Minecraft game as a testing ground for their AI research.
AIX will also be made available this summer under an open-source license.
The announcement comes at a time when Google DeepMind is grabbing attention for the Go games being played by its AI program AlphaGo with a key Go player Lee Se-dol. AlphaGo won three straight games of the five-games match in Seoul but on Sunday lost to Lee.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell has for some time offered to developers power their own laptops with the operating system options also include Ubuntu. Now the company says it has received the most effective Skylake processors are based on the XPS 13 models Ubuntu-compatible.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4117:pian-saa-huippulappareita-ubuntulla&catid=13&Itemid=101
More:
XPS 13 Developer Edition launches in US, Ubuntu-based Workstations available worldwide
http://bartongeorge.net/2016/03/10/xps-13-developer-edition-launches-in-us-ubuntu-based-workstations-available-worldwide/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Phillips / Eurogamer.net:
Microsoft announces support for cross-network play, paving the way for Xbox owners to play games with anyone on PC or PlayStation
Microsoft to let Xbox One games connect with PC and other console networks
Issues “open invitation” for Cross-Network Play, starting with Rocket League.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-14-microsoft-will-allow-xbox-one-games-to-connect-with-ps4-players
Microsoft has announced its support for Cross-Network Play, allowing Xbox owners to play games with anyone on PC or PlayStation.
First, the caveats – this invitation has yet to be taken up. There’s no suggestion you’ll be teaming up with clans of Destiny or The Division anytime soon.
Indeed, Microsoft made the announcement in an update on its ID@Xbox indie publishing program, seemingly limiting this move to smaller-scale games for now – rather than AAA system sellers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Deborah Gage / Wall Street Journal:
NoSQL database startup Couchbase raises $30M Series F, in what CEO says is last private funding round before potential IPO
Couchbase Takes $30 Million in Down Round Despite Customer Gains
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2016/03/15/couchbase-raises-30-million-for-promise-of-nosql-databases-growth/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mozilla will release the first tech demo of Servo, its next-generation browser engine, in June
http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/16/mozilla-will-release-the-first-tech-demo-of-servo-its-next-generation-browser-engine-in-june/
In just three months, Mozilla will ask developers to try out Servo, its new browser engine. The news was first revealed in a Google Groups posting, and we reached out to Mozilla for more information. “This June, Mozilla Research plans to release the first tech demo of Servo, a next-generation browser engine focused on performance and robustness,” Jack Moffitt, Servo project lead at Mozilla, confirmed to VentureBeat.
Back in April 2013, Mozilla and Samsung announced plans to develop a “next generation” web browser engine using the Rust programming language.
They wanted to rebuild the browser from the ground up on modern hardware, ignoring old assumptions that had to be made before multi-core and parallel hardware were the norm. The ultimate goal at the time was to bring the technology to Android and ARM, but the two companies did not share a launch timeframe.
Servo has come a long way since then (it’s being developed for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, and Firefox OS), but Moffitt still describes the project in similar terms: “Servo re-imagines the architecture of the browser in the modern landscape of multi-core computers, GPUs, and safer programming languages.”