I did not have time to post my computer technologies predictions t the ends of 2016. Because I missed the year end deadline, I though that there is no point on posting anything before the news from CES 2017 have been published. Here are some of myck picks on the current computer technologies trends:
CES 2017 had 3 significant technology trends: deep learning goes deep, Alexa everywhere and Wi-Fi gets meshy. The PC sector seemed to be pretty boring.
Gartner expects that IT sales will growth (2.7%) but hardware sales will not have any growth – can drop this year. TEKsystems 2017 IT forecast shows IT budgets rebounding from a slump in 2016, and IT leaders’ confidence high going into the new year. But challenges around talent acquisition and organizational alignment will persist. Programming and software development continue to be among the most crucial and hard-to-find IT skill sets.
Smart phones sales (expected to be 1.89 billion) and PC sales (expected to be 432 million) do not grow in 2017. According to IDC PC shipments declined for a fifth consecutive year in 2016 as the industry continued to suffer from stagnation and lack of compelling drivers for upgrades. Both Gartner and IDC estimated that PC shipments declined about 6% in 2016.Revenue in the traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure segment decreased 10.8 per cent year over year in the third quarter of 2016. Only PC category that has potential for growth is ultramobile (includes Microsoft Surface ja Apple MacBook Air). Need for memory chips is increasing.
Browser suffers from JavaScript-creep disease: This causes that the browing experience seems to be become slower even though computer and broadband connections are getting faster all the time. Bloat on web pages has been going on for ages, and this trend seems to continue.
Microsoft tries all it can to make people to switch from older Windows versions to Windows 10. Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses as malware attacks that could have been avoided by upgrading to Windows 10. Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses. Microsoft: Windows 7 Does Not Meet the Demands of Modern Technology; Recommends Windows 10. On February 2017 Microsoft stops the 20 year long tradition of monthly security updates. Windows 10 “Creators Update” coming early 2017 for free, featuring 3D and mixed reality, 4K gaming, more.
Microsoft plans to emulate x86 instructions on ARM chips, throwing a compatibility lifeline to future Windows tablets and phones. Microsoft’s x86 on ARM64 Emulation is coming in 2017. This capability is coming to Windows 10, though not until “Redstone 3″ in the Fall of 2017.
Parents should worry less about the amount of time their children spend using smartphones, computers and playing video games because screen time is actually beneficial, the University of Oxford has concluded. 257 minutes is the time teens can spend on computers each day before harming wellbeing.
Outsourcing IT operations to foreign countries is not trendy anymore and companied live at uncertain times. India’s $150 billion outsourcing industry stares at an uncertain future. In the past five years, revenue and profit growth for the top five companies listed on the BSE have halved. Industry leader TCS too felt the impact as it made a shift in business model towards software platforms and chased digital contacts.
Containers will become hot this year and cloud will stay hot. Research firm 451 Research predicts this year containerization will be US $ 762 million business and that Containers will become 2.6 billion worth of software business in 2020. (40 per cent a year growth rate).
Cloud services are expected to have 22 percent annual growth rate. By 2020, the sector would grow from the current 22.2 billion to $ 46 billion. In Finland 30% of companies now prefer to buy cloud services when buying IT (20 per cent of IT budget goes to cloud).Cloud spend to make up over a third of IT budgets by 2017. Cloud and hosting services will be responsible for 34% of IT budgets by 2017, up from 28% by the end of 2016, according to 451 Research. Cloud services have many advantages, but cloud services have also disadvantages. In five years, SaaS will be the cloud that matters.
When cloud is growing, so is the spending on cloud hardware by the cloud companies. Cloud hardware spend hits US$8.4bn/quarter, as traditional kit sinks – 2017 forecast to see cloud kit clock $11bn every 90 days. In 2016′s third quarter vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 8.1 per cent year over year to $8.4 billion. Private cloud accounted for $3.3 billion with the rest going to public clouds. Data centers need lower latency components so Google Searches for Better Silicon.
The first signs of the decline and fall of the 20+ year x86 hegemony will appear in 2017. The availability of industry leading fab processes will allow other processor architectures (including AMD x86, ARM, Open Power and even the new RISC-V architecture) to compete with Intel on a level playing field.
USB-C will now come to screens – C-type USB connector promises to really become the only all equipment for the physical interface.The HDMI connection will be lost from laptops in the future. Thunderbolt 3 is arranged to work with USB Type-C, but it’s not the same thing (Thunderbolt is four times faster than USB 3.1).
World’s first ‘exascale’ supercomputer prototype will be ready by the end of 2017, says China
It seems that Oracle Begins Aggressively Pursuing Java Licensing Fees in 2017. Java SE is free, but Java SE Suite and various flavors of Java SE Advanced are not. Oracle is massively ramping up audits of Java customers it claims are in breach of its licences – six years after it bought Sun Microsystems. Huge sums of money are at stake. The version of Java in contention is Java SE, with three paid flavours that range from $40 to $300 per named user and from $5,000 to $15,000 for a processor licence. If you download Java, you get everything – and you need to make sure you are installing only the components you are entitled to and you need to remove the bits you aren’t using.
Your Year in Review, Unsung Hero article sees the following trends in 2017:
- A battle between ASICs, GPUs, and FPGAs to run emerging workloads in artificial intelligence
- A race to create the first generation of 5G silicon
- Continued efforts to define new memories that have meaningful impact
- New players trying to take share in the huge market for smartphones
- An emerging market for VR gaining critical mass
Virtual Reality Will Stay Hot on both PC and mobile.“VR is the heaviest heterogeneous workload we encounter in mobile—there’s a lot going on, much more than in a standard app,” said Tim Leland, a vice president for graphics and imaging at Qualcomm. The challenges are in the needs to calculate data from multiple sensors and respond to it with updated visuals in less than 18 ms to keep up with the viewer’s head motions so the CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, sensor fusion core, display engine, and video-decoding block are all running at close to full tilt.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Putin says the nation that leads in AI ‘will be the ruler of the world’
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/4/16251226/russia-ai-putin-rule-the-world
The Russian president warned that artificial intelligence offers ‘colossal opportunities’ as well as dangers
Tomi Engdahl says:
IEEE Drives Definitions for Quantum Computing
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332216&
The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA), the global standards-setting body within IEEE, is taking the lead to establish standard definitions for quantum computing.
Dubbed IEEE P7130, the organization’s Standard for Quantum Computing Definitions project is pursuing the loft goal of making quantum computing more accessible to a larger group of contributors, including developers of software and hardware, materials scientists, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, climate scientists, biologists and geneticists.
In an interview with EE Times, IEEE Quantum Computing Working Group chair William Hurley said IEEE P7130 will define terms related to the physics of quantum computing, including quantum tunneling, super position, quantum entanglement, as well as other related terms and terminology that will be updated as technological advances are made. As the growth and advancement ramps up in quantum computing, the industry is fragmented and lacks a communications framework, he said.
IEEE P7130 is pulling together players from across the quantum computing space — including IBM, which has more than three decades of working with quantum information under its belt — as well as Canadian startup 1Qbit, which develops general purpose algorithms for quantum computing hardware and works with a variety of classical, quantum and otherwise non-standard processors. Academia is also represented through the Tokyo Institute of Technology, said Hurley, and participants will continue to be added as they express interest.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ex-Baidu Scientist Blazes AI Shortcut
Native support for 3D tensor operation
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332226
n Wu, formerly a distinguished scientist at Baidu, has pulled a new AI chip company out of his sleeve, called NovuMind, based in Santa Clara, Calif.
In an exclusive interview with EE Times, Wu discussed the startup’s developments and what he hopes to accomplish.
Established two years ago, with 50 people, including 35 engineers working in the U.S. and 15 in Beijing, NovuMind is testing what Wu describes as a minimalist approach to deep learning.
Tomi Engdahl says:
80% of IT projects in public sector delayed due to IR35 – report
Half of gov techies quit following tax clampdown, says survey
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/04/80_per_cent_of_it_projects_in_the_public_sector_delayed_due_to_ir35_says_report/
The vast majority of UK government IT projects are suffering delays due to freelancers quitting over the IR35 tax clampdown, according to a survey of contractors.
Of 405 IT freelancers surveyed by Contractor Calculator, 79 per cent said the projects they have been working on were delayed as a result of contractors leaving.
In April, the government shifted responsibility for compliance with the IR35 legislation from the individual contractor to the public body or recruitment agency. The Treasury says it hopes to raise £185m for 2017/18 by bringing public sector contractors within the scope of the legislation.
However, the overall number of freelancers leaving as a result of the changes is lower than previously thought, with 48 per cent jumping ship. In previous surveys more than 80 per cent had threatened to walk once the changes came into force.
A number of major IT “transformation” projects are under way across the public sector, many heavily reliant on contractors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The use of Linux rose to record highs
Windows share in computer operating systems dropped to 90.7% in August. The bigger news is that according to Netmarketshare figures, the share of linux users rose to 3.37 percent. The growth of Linux was the fastest in the last year.
At the same time, the number of Apple MacOS users dropped from just six percent to 5.94 percent. According to analysts, it seems that Windows is now moving to Linux, not MacOS.
Windows is still massive, or more than 90 percent. Microsoft’s concern is that Windows 10 still does not become popular at the company’s pace. At the end of July, its share of Windows users was 27.6 percent. Windows 7 still accounted for nearly 50 percent
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6778-linuxin-kaytto-nousi-ennatyslukemiin
Tomi Engdahl says:
Barb Darrow / Fortune:
HPE plans to acquire Boston-based Cloud Technology Partners, which helps clients deploy cloud computing on multiple vendors, to be HPE’s 5th acquisition in 2017 — Hewlett-Packard Enterprise said Monday that it will acquire Cloud Technology Partners, a Boston-based company …
HPE Shopping Spree Continues With Purchase of This Cloud Specialist
http://fortune.com/2017/09/05/hpe-buys-cloud-technology/
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise said Tuesday that it will acquire Cloud Technology Partners, a Boston-based company that helps business customers plan and build cloud computing capabilities.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Seven-year-old CTP works with businesses to determine which cloud technology—be it from Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google, or the non-vendor aligned OpenStack—is best for the customer’s needs. It then helps corporate customers plan out how they will run their information technology on that cloud (or clouds, if spread out across multiple vendors).
This is HPE’s fifth technology acquisition this year. In January, it snapped up data center hardware company Simplivity for $650 million. In March, it purchased Nimble Storage for $1.09 billion. Terms for the other two acquisitions—cloud analytics specialist Cloud Cruiser in January and security analytics player Niara the following month—were not disclosed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Natasha Singer / New York Times:
Tech companies are courting influential teachers with various incentives to promote their products, raising ethical concerns
Silicon Valley Courts Brand-Name Teachers, Raising Ethics Issues
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/technology/silicon-valley-teachers-tech.html
One of the tech-savviest teachers in the United States teaches third grade here at Mapleton Elementary, a public school with about 100 students in the sparsely populated plains west of Fargo.
Her name is Kayla Delzer. Her third graders adore her. She teaches them to post daily on the class Twitter and Instagram accounts she set up. She remodeled her classroom based on Starbucks. And she uses apps like Seesaw, a student portfolio platform where teachers and parents may view and comment on a child’s schoolwork.
Tomi Engdahl says:
It’s official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower
Put in some chrome and shade
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/05/flat_uis_designs_are_22_per_cent_slower_official/
The mania for “flat” user interfaces is costing publishers and ecommerce sites billions in lost revenue.
A “flat” design removes the distinction between navigation controls and content. Historically, navigation controls such as buttons were shaded, or given 3D relief, to distinguish them from the application or web page’s content.
The mania is credited to Microsoft with its minimalistic Zune player, an iPod clone, which was developed into the Windows Phone Series UX, which in turn became the design for Windows from Windows 8 in 2012 onwards. But Steve Jobs is also to blame. The typography-besotted Apple founder was fascinated by WP’s “magazine-style” Metro design, and it was posthumously incorporated into iOS7 in 2013. Once blessed by Apple, flat designs spread to electronic programme guides on telly, games consoles and even car interfaces. And of course web sites.
Flat designs looked “cleaner” and more “modern” (Microsoft’s subsequent portmanteau term for its Metro design), but there was a price to pay.
The consequence is that users find navigation harder, and so spend more time on a page. Now research by the Nielsen Norman Group has measured by how much. The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on content.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lenovo Looks To Commemorate 25th Anniversary of IBM’s Notebook Brand With Thinkpad 25
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/09/05/224235/lenovo-looks-to-commemorate-25th-anniversary-of-ibms-notebook-brand-with-thinkpad-25?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Lenovo will be marking the 25th anniversary of IBM’s well known notebook with the Thinkpad 25. Andrew Orlowski writes via The Register: “The long-awaited ‘retro’ Thinkpad will be based on the guts of a contemporary T470 laptop, Lenovo’s business workhorse, according to a German certification site. Lenovo inherited IBM’s notebook brand 12 years ago, and with it a design classic.
It’s happening! Official retro Thinkpad lappy spotted in the wild
Anniversary special brings back much-loved features
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/04/retro_thinkpad_spotted_in_the_wild/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Top 5 Worst CPUs
By Steven Walton on September 4, 2017
https://www.techspot.com/review/1481-top-5-worst-cpus/
Earlier this year we updated our CPU buying guide putting Ryzen front and center, and while that guide is due for an update now that Ryzen 3 and Threadripper have landed, those picks are still as valid today as they were back then with the Ryzen 5 1600 offering the best performance for your buck for most users.
Today we’re going to do something a little different just for fun and look at the top 5 worst CPUs released in the last few years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
COM Express Type 7
http://www.congatec.com/en/technologies/com-express/com-express-type-7.html
With the new revision 3.0 of the most successful Computer-on-Module standard a new pinout Type is added to extend the reach of COM Express to server Type applications.
The new Type 7 is not a replacement for the well-established Type 6 pinout. It trades all audio and video interfaces for four 10G Ethernet ports and a total of 32 PCI Express lanes in order to support enhanced micro servers and other server Type applications that only allow for low power consumption but require high computing performance and communication throughput.
Tomi Engdahl says:
STAT:
Investigation finds IBM’s Watson for Oncology program, pitched as an AI-based system for cancer care, falls far short of the expectations IBM created for it — t was an audacious undertaking, even for one of the most storied American companies: With a single machine, IBM would tackle humanity’s …
IBM pitched its Watson supercomputer as a revolution in cancer care. It’s nowhere close
https://www.statnews.com/2017/09/05/watson-ibm-cancer/
Breathlessly promoting its signature brand — Watson — IBM sought to capture the world’s imagination, and it quickly zeroed in on a high-profile target: cancer.
But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn’t living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM’s goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market. And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care.
Tomi Engdahl says:
R.I.P. SPARC and Solaris
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/rip-sparc-and-solaris
Oracle is laying off 983 employees at its Santa Clara facility
The cuts are essentially falling on teams working on the company’s SPARC processor and Solaris operating system, two technologies Oracle picked up when it acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010. This follows layoffs of about 450 from those groups earlier this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Uber Engineering Blog:
Inside Uber’s Michelangelo, its machine learning platform in use for about a year, built with HDFS, Spark, Samza, Cassandra, MLLib, XGBoost, and TensorFlow
Meet Michelangelo: Uber’s Machine Learning Platform
http://eng.uber.com/michelangelo/
Uber Engineering is committed to developing technologies that create seamless, impactful experiences for our customers. We are increasingly investing in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to fulfill this vision. At Uber, our contribution to this space is Michelangelo, an internal ML-as-a-service platform that democratizes machine learning and makes scaling AI to meet the needs of business as easy as requesting a ride.
Michelangelo enables internal teams to seamlessly build, deploy, and operate machine learning solutions at Uber’s scale.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alison Snyder / Axios:
Survey of 3,000+ American business executives finds 85% say AI presents a competitive advantage, but just 20% use AI in some way, and 5% use it extensively
Executives say AI will change business, but aren’t doing much about it
https://www.axios.com/how-executives-think-ai-will-change-business-2481977981.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Mannes / TechCrunch:
Microsoft and Facebook partner to launch Open Neural Network Exchange format, letting AI developers switch between frameworks easily — Facebook and Microsoft announced ONNX, the Open Neural Network Exchange this morning in respective blog posts. The Exchange makes it easier …
Facebook and Microsoft collaborate to simplify conversions from PyTorch to Caffe2
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/07/facebook-and-microsoft-collaborate-to-simplify-conversions-from-pytorch-to-caffe2/
Facebook and Microsoft announced ONNX, the Open Neural Network Exchange this morning in respective blog posts. The Exchange makes it easier for machine learning developers to convert models between PyTorch and Caffe2 to reduce the lag time between research and productization.
Facebook has long maintained the distinction between its FAIR and AML machine learning groups. Facebook AI Research (FAIR) handles bleeding edge research while Applied Machine Learning (AML) brings intelligence to products.
Choice of deep learning framework underlies this key ideological distinction. FAIR is accustomed to working with PyTorch — a deep learning framework optimized for achieving state of the art results in research, regardless of resource constraints.
Unfortunately in the real world, most of us are limited by the computational capabilities of our smartphones and computers. When AML wants to build something for deployment and scale, it opts for Caffe2. Caffe2 is also a deep learning framework but it’s optimized for resource efficiency, particularly with respect to Caffe2Go that’s optimized for running machine learning models on underpowered mobile devices.
The collaborative work Facebook and Microsoft are announcing helps folks easily convert models built in PyTorch into Caffe2 models.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook ties JavaScript code together with Yarn
Package management client hits 1.0
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/08/facebook_spins_yarn_to_tie_javascript_code_together/
Facebook, known for telling tales about about users it doesn’t have, has spun another sort of yarn.
The ad gavage network on Thursday released Yarn 1.0, the latest update to the open source JavaScript package manager introduced last year with the help of Google, Exponent and Tilde.
Yarn is an alternative to npm (Node Package Manager), the default package manager for Node.js installations.
Both Yarn and npm, backed by a company called npm, make JavaScript development more tolerable by managing the code libraries that become unavoidable when developing modern web applications.
Yarn and npm, as client applications, connect to the npm registry, home to almost half a million packages, to fetch however many bundles of code are required by the application in question.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM To Invest $240 Million To Develop AI Research Lab With MIT
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/09/07/2316241/ibm-to-invest-240-million-to-develop-ai-research-lab-with-mit?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
IBM will spend $240 million over 10 years to develop an artificial intelligence research lab with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pooling the organizations’ resources as competition intensifies to produce breakthroughs in the field. Bloomberg reports:
The MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab will fund projects in four broad areas, including creating better hardware to handle complex computations and figuring out applications of AI in specific industries, the Armonk, New York-based company said Thursday in a statement.
IBM to Invest $240 Million to Develop AI Research Lab With MIT
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-07/ibm-to-invest-240-million-to-develop-ai-research-lab-with-mit
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM pitched its Watson supercomputer as a revolution in cancer care. It’s nowhere close
https://www.statnews.com/2017/09/05/watson-ibm-cancer/
Breathlessly promoting its signature brand — Watson — IBM sought to capture the world’s imagination, and it quickly zeroed in on a high-profile target: cancer.
But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn’t living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM’s goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market. And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care.
STAT examined Watson for Oncology’s use, marketing, and performance in hospitals across the world, from South Korea to Slovakia to South Florida. Reporters interviewed dozens of doctors, IBM executives, artificial intelligence experts, and others familiar with the system’s underlying technology and rollout.
At its heart, Watson for Oncology uses the cloud-based supercomputer to digest massive amounts of data — from doctor’s notes to medical studies to clinical guidelines. But its treatment recommendations are not based on its own insights from these data. Instead, they are based exclusively on training by human overseers, who laboriously feed Watson information about how patients with specific characteristics should be treated.
IBM executives acknowledged Watson for Oncology, which has been in development for nearly six years, is in its infancy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
MIT and IBM partner on $240M research lab, named MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, with 10-year research agreement focused on AI and its applications
IBM and MIT pen 10-year, $240M AI research partnership
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/06/ibm-and-mit-pen-10-year-240m-ai-research-partnership/
IBM and MIT came together today to sign a 10-year, $240 million partnership agreement that establishes the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab at the prestigious Cambridge, MA academic institution.
The lab will be co-chaired by Dario Gil, IBM Research VP of AI and Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering.
Big Blue intends to invest $240 million into the lab where IBM researchers and MIT students and faculty will work side by side to conduct advanced AI research.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why open source success is increasingly dependent on corporate cash
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-open-source-success-is-increasingly-dependent-on-corporate-cash/
The myth of the lone open source developer is real, but successful open source projects depend on corporate involvement, a new study finds.
Though the best projects share modularity and a strong initial code base as common elements of success, for the last decade it has been clear that cash is king (queen) in determining outsized open source success.
In short, to spot an open source winner, follow the money.
By Kohn’s estimate, 23 of the 30 highest-velocity open source projects are backed by companies (sometimes organized around a foundation). Such projects include Kubernetes, Linux, Ansible, Elasticsearch, Cloud Foundry, and OpenStack. Not included in the list, though surely representative of the same phenomenon, are MySQL, MongoDB, and other corporate projects.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Container adoption still low barks Cloud Foundation
Lots of bennies, but can be time-consuming
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/11/container_adoption_still_low_says_cloud_foundation/
It’s no secret that switching to containers is difficult. According to some IT pros contacted by containerization tech firm Cloud Foundry [PDF], it’s so difficult that their adoption is still dragging in the enterprise sector.
The benefits of packing software and services inside of containers are clear: your code becomes much easier to install and run on multiple platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The teeny tiny problem is that configuring and managing the services, instead of dropping it inside a resource-hogging but easy-to-use virtual machine, can be very time-consuming.
Cloud Foundry Foundation
Global Perception Study
Hope Versus Reality, One Year Later
An Update on Containers
https://www.cloudfoundry.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Container-Report-2017-1.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Survey ranks on-premises data centers as lowest investment priority for IT
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/pt/2017/08/survey-ranks-on-premises-data-centers-as-lowest-investment-priority-for-it.html?cmpid=enl_cim_cim_data_center_newsletter_2017-09-12
For this year’s study, more than 200 IT organizations were surveyed during the first half of 2017. According to the report, data centers now have the lowest priority for new spending among a list of five categories. Top priority is given to the development of business applications, a category in which 54 percent of respondents plan increased spending. However, only 9 percent have plans to increase data center spending, which the study attributes to increasing reliance on cloud infrastructure, cloud storage, and SaaS, a conclusion borne out by 32 percent of respondents indicating they plan increased spending on network infrastructure.
Survey: On-Prem Data Centers Lowest Investment Priority for IT Shops
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/business/survey-prem-data-centers-lowest-investment-priority-it-shops
Investing in private data centers isn’t as much of a priority for IT organizations as it was just several years back. That’s a takeaway from IT researcher Computer Economics’ annual IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks report, which for 28 years has taken a deep-dive into the financial and strategic management of information technology. For this year’s study, more than 200 IT organizations were surveyed during the first half of 2017.
According to the report, data centers now have the lowest priority for new spending among a list of five categories. Top priority is given to the development of business applications, a category in which 54 percent of respondents plan increased spending. However, only 9 percent have plans to increase data center spending, which the study attributes to increasing reliance on cloud infrastructure, cloud storage, and SaaS, a conclusion borne out by 32 percent of respondents indicating they plan increased spending on network infrastructure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
X86 rises, UNIX drops, central machine disappears
According to statistics, the delivery volume of x86 servers grew by 2.5 per cent in April-June. In terms of money, growth was 6.9 percent. At the same time, sales of RISC / Itanium or UNIX machines decreased by 21.4 percent. The group “Others”, consisting mainly of mainframe power machines, fell by nearly 30 percent.
Of the manufacturers, HPE continued to be the number one with a market share of 23%, although its sales nearly shrunk by 10%. Dell EMC managed to grow slightly and already reached close to 20% market share. IBM, Cisco, and Huawei hold positions with three to five small differences.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6821&via=n&datum=2017-09-12_15:24:30&mottagare=31202
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linus Torvalds’ lifestyle tips for hackers: be like me, work in a bathrobe, no showers before noon
Also be curious and constructive by working on Linux instead of breaking it
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/12/linus_torvalds_hacker_recruitment_aspiration/
In an on-stage interview with Linux Foundation founder and executive director Jim Zemline at the Open Source summit in Los Angeles on Monday, Torvalds admitted that “I have long since gotten over the fact that the UPS guy brings me a package from Amazon at 3:00PM and I am still in my bathrobe.”
Torvalds later invited hackers to adopt his lifestyle in two ways, first explaining that while coding a kernel in his bathrobe is far from glamorous he derives immense satisfaction from the many uses to which Linux is put. That makes his job fun, an outcome he feels is more likely to be attainable when working in technology than in other fields.
He therefore encouraged anyone looking for a career to pursue technology, but said he wants to make a special effort to recruit those who work on the dark side of tech.
Asked about the state of Linux security, he said the kernel development team does its very best and finds fuzzing tools are improving its potency. “We will always have bugs where we overlooked some detail and a smart person comes in and says ‘Hey, that is a bug I can take advantage of’.”
Even if the kernel team gets better at security, he said “absolute” security is impossible because someone will build a project on the kernel that introduces a vulnerability.
Hence his interest in recruiting more hackers.
“I am always very impressed by people who are attacking our code,” he said. “Sometimes I get the feeling these smart people are doing bad things, but I wish they were on our side because they are so smart and they could help us.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ben Smith / BuzzFeed:
Google, Facebook, and Amazon are on a dangerous collision course with political power in the US
There’s Blood In The Water In Silicon Valley
The bad new politics of big tech.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/theres-blood-in-the-water-in-silicon-valley
The blinding rise of Donald Trump over the past year has masked another major trend in American politics: the palpable, and perhaps permanent, turn against the tech industry. The new corporate leviathans that used to be seen as bright new avatars of American innovation are increasingly portrayed as sinister new centers of unaccountable power, a transformation likely to have major consequences for the industry and for American politics.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM Goes All Out for AI
MIT partnership gets $240M to go beyond deep learning
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332273&
IBM is investing $240 million in joint development work with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to take artificial intelligence to the next level in humanlike capabilities over the next 10 years. The new MIT-IBM Watson AI Laboratory, collocated with IBM’s Watson Health and IBM Security headquarters at Kendall Square (near the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass.), will gather more than 100 AI experts to advance AI capabilities, physical architectures, and applications, particularly to expand Watson’s expertise in health care and cybersecurity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AI Chip Rides Novel Networks
BrainChip card taps SNNs, public financing
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332265&
An emerging company with a novel machine-learning technology and equally unique financial structure debuted its first hardware product today. BrainChip rolled out an FPGA-based accelerator for its spiking neural network (SNN) software and hopes to deliver an ASIC within two years to expand its existing markets.
SNNs are related but different from the convolutional neural nets (CNNs) now widely used and, some say, hyped by web giants for jobs like voice and image recognition. SNNs use a simpler, one-shot training method and are well-suited to tasks such as face recognition in low-resolution and noisy environments such as surveillance video. To date, BrainChip’s products are used mainly by law enforcement and security.
The BrainChip accelerator packs six SNN cores in a Xilinx Kintex chip on a PCI Express board processing video at up to 600 frames/s at about 15 W max. It provides as much as a six-fold performance boost for the BrainChip Studio software for x86 computers that the company rolled out in July at a cost starting at $4,000 per video channel. The company first described its architecture in late 2015.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols / ZDNet:
Oracle will work with IBM and Red Hat to move Java Enterprise Edition to open source, using Eclipse Foundation
Oracle prepares to spin off Java EE to Eclipse Foundation
http://www.zdnet.com/article/oracle-prepares-to-spin-off-java-ee-to-eclipse-foundation/
Oracle confirms it’s spinning Java EE to an open-source foundation with IBM and Red Hat’s support.
Oracle is continuing to free up Java Enterprise Edition (EE), Java’s enterprise middleware platform, from its once iron-grip. In a blog post, Oracle Software Evangelist David Delabassee said, “After careful review, we have selected the Eclipse Foundation.”
Oracle has recently admitted that “although Java EE is developed in open source with the participation of the Java EE community, often the process is not seen as being agile, flexible, or open enough, particularly when compared to other open-source communities. We’d like to do better.”
Delabassee said, “First, we have reached out to IBM and Red Hat, the other largest contributors to the Java EE platform, to solicit their support for this new direction. Oracle, IBM, and Red Hat are collaborating on an ongoing basis to refine an approach that we can collectively support.” This is not the way Oracle used to do things.
Oracle’s Java EE partners are pleased with this move.
Interesting times are ahead for Java EE users and developers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD Ryzen beats Intel Core i7 as a heater (that’s also a server)
Distributed cloud company now working on Ryzens that warm your shower
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/14/qarnot_drops_intel_adopts_amd/
French cloud concern Qarnot wants to use AMD processors to heat water.
No, this isn’t a cruel joke at the expense of thermally inefficient silicon. Instead it’s a deliberate plan to use CPUs’ heat-producing powers for good. Qarnot makes a device called the “ Q.rad” that uses three CPUs to provide heat and serve as a node in a distributed cloud dedicated to jobs like rendering VFX or financial risk analysis.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Leverages FPGAs for Real-Time AI
https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/microsoft-leverages-fpgas-real-time-ai/99071007157383?ADTRK=UBM&elq_mid=1001&elq_cid=876648
Microsoft’s Project Brainwave is a deep learning platform that uses the flexibility of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to deliver high-performance artificial intelligence.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Oracle beats Q1 estimates with $9.2B revenue, up 7% YoY, vs. $9.02B expected, as cloud revenue rises 51% YoY to $1.5B
Oracle shares rise after earnings, revenue beat estimates
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/14/oracle-earnings-q1-2018.html
Oracle beat estimates on revenue and earnings per share. Cloud revenue came in above revenue estimates.
The company recently tied part of its executives’ compensation to cloud growth.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Video Game Odyssey: How Magnavox Launched the Console Industry
https://hackaday.com/2017/09/14/retrotectacular-a-video-game-odyssey/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Daniel Terdiman / Fast Company:
Facebook opens an AI lab in Montreal led by Joelle Pineau, an AI expert at McGill University; Facebook has a total of about 100 people dedicated to AI research
Facebook’s New Lab Bolsters Montreal’s Bragging Rights As An AI Hub
https://www.fastcompany.com/40465968/facebooks-new-lab-bolsters-montreals-bragging-rights-as-an-ai-hub
Between the new AI lab and others in Silicon Valley, New York, and Paris, Facebook will have a total of 100 people dedicated to AI research.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux 4.14 ‘getting very core new functionality’ says Linus Torvalds
Memory management wonks, this release is for you. And also you Hyper-V admins
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/18/linux_4_14_rc1_released/
Linus Torvalds has unsentimentally loosed release candidate one of Linux 4.14 a day before the 26th anniversary of the Linux-0.01 release, and told penguinistas to expect a few big changes this time around.
“This has been an ‘interesting’ merge window,” Torvalds wrote on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. “It’s not actually all that unusual in size – I think it’s shaping to be a pretty regular release after 4.13 that was smallish. But unlike 4.13 it also wasn’t a completely smooth merge window, and honestly, I _really_ didn’t want to wait for any possible straggling pull requests.”
Hence the Saturday release, instead of his usual Sunday.
Torvalds also says this merge window included “some unusual activity.”
“ For example, on the x86 VM side, 4.14 doesn’t just have_one_ new core memory management feature, but three: 5-level page tables, ASID support (it’s called ‘PCID’ on x86 for reasons that are not good) and the AMD memory encryption support. So the fact that we had a few hiccups is very understandable, and in fact it should amaze everybody just how smoothly the 5-level page table code integration seems to have gone, for example.”
Once this version’s done it will also see Linux be a better guest under Hyper-V, the end of support for the venerable MIPS R6000 CPU, and the arrival of support for Zstd file compression.
Tomi Engdahl says:
WordPress has adverse reaction to Facebook’s React.js licence
Automattic is willing to delay an update and rewrite code if it means legal certainty
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/18/wordpress_drops_facebooks_react_js/
Automattic, the developer of the popular content management system WordPress, has decided to stop using Facebook’s React.js library, citing legal concerns.
WordPress’ founding developer Matt Mullenweg explains the decision by noting that Automattic has used React since 2015, when it put the code to work in the “Calypso” update that emerged in 2016. At the time, WordPress’ legal people felt there was no problem with React and developers liked it so much they planned to use it again in another big update called Gutenberg.
But since that decision The Apache Software Foundation has prohibited the use of React in any of its projects, on grounds that it “includes a specification of a PATENTS file that passes along risk to downstream consumers of our software imbalanced in favor of the licensor, not the licensee”. That specification concerns Facebook’s own patents and is designed to protect The Social Network™ from what it sees as “meritless patent litigation”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM Open Sources Their Own JVM/JDK As Eclipse OpenJ9
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/09/16/2152225/ibm-open-sources-their-own-jvmjdk-as-eclipse-openj9?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
IBM has open sourced their JDK/JVM implementation named J9 as OpenJ9.
https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/oj9_faq.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
History of zero pushed back 500 years by ancient Indian text
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2147450-history-of-zero-pushed-back-500-years-by-ancient-indian-text/
The symbol “0” is a familiar sight, but its origins are far from certain. A recent batch of carbon dating is causing the history of mathematics to be rewritten, as it has discovered zeros dating back to a period 500 years before previously seen.
. It was originally thought that manuscript was from the 9th century, but the dating methods revealed that the oldest pages are from somewhere between 224 AD and 383 AD.
This means that the manuscript predates a 9th century inscription of zero on the wall of a temple in Gwalior, India, which was previously considered to be the oldest recorded example of a zero.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CPU or FPGA for image processing: Which is best?
http://www.vision-systems.com/articles/print/volume-22/issue-8/features/cpu-or-fpga-for-image-processing-which-is-best.html?cmpid=enl_vsd_vsd_newsletter_2017-09-18
As multicore CPUs and powerful FPGAs proliferate, vision system designers need to understand the benefits and trade-offs of using these processing elements.
This increase in performance means designers can achieve higher data throughput to conduct faster image acquisition, use higher resolution sensors, and take full advantage of some of the latest cameras on the market that offer the highest dynamic ranges. An increase in performance helps designers not only acquire images faster but also process them faster. Preprocessing algorithms such as thresholding and filtering or processing algorithms such as pattern matching can execute much more quickly. This ultimately gives designers the ability to make decisions based on visual data faster than ever.
As more vision systems that include the latest generations of multicore CPUs and powerful FPGAs reach the market, vision system designers need to understand the benefits and trade-offs of using these processing elements. They need to know not only the right algorithms to use on the right target but also the best architectures to serve as the foundations of their designs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cade Metz / New York Times:
How a slowdown in Moore’s Law led to the rise of specialized chips like FPGAs and GPUs for AI and other applications in computing — New technologies are testing the limits of computer semiconductors. To deal with that, researchers have gone looking for ideas from nature.
Chips Off the Old Block:
Computers Are Taking Design
Cues From Human Brains
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/16/technology/chips-off-the-old-block-computers-are-taking-design-cues-from-human-brains.html
New technologies are testing the limits of
computer semiconductors. To deal with that,
researchers have gone looking for ideas from nature.
After years of stagnation, the computer is evolving again, and this behind-the-scenes migration to a new kind of machine will have broad and lasting implications. It will allow work on artificially intelligent systems to accelerate, so the dream of machines that can navigate the physical world by themselves can one day come true.
This migration could also diminish the power of Intel, the longtime giant of chip design and manufacturing, and fundamentally remake the $335 billion a year semiconductor industry that sits at the heart of all things tech, from the data centers that drive the internet to your iPhone to the virtual reality headsets and flying drones of tomorrow.
“This is an enormous change,” said John Hennessy, the former Stanford University president who wrote an authoritative book on computer design in the mid-1990s and is now a member of the board at Alphabet, Google’s parent company. “The existing approach is out of steam, and people are trying to re-architect the system.”
The existing approach has had a pretty nice run. For about half a century, computer makers have built systems around a single, do-it-all chip — the central processing unit — from a company like Intel, one of the world’s biggest semiconductor makers. That’s what you’ll find in the middle of your own laptop computer or smartphone.
Now, computer engineers are fashioning more complex systems.
newer machines are dividing work into tiny pieces and spreading them among vast farms of simpler, specialized chips that consume less power.
Changes inside Google’s giant data centers are a harbinger of what is to come for the rest of the industry. Inside most of Google’s servers, there is still a central processor. But enormous banks of custom-built chips work alongside them, running the computer algorithms that drive speech recognition and other forms of artificial intelligence.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Daniel Eran Dilger / AppleInsider:
Geekbench benchmarks: Apple’s A11 Bionic is 25% faster in single core and 80% faster in multicore than A10 Fusion, beats i5 MacBook Pro and all other phones
With iPhone 8, Apple’s Silicon Gap widens as the new A11 Bionic obliterates top chips from Qualcomm, Samsung & Huawei
http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/09/18/with-iphone-8-apples-silicon-gap-widens-as-the-new-a11-bionic-obliterates-top-chips-from-qualcomm-samsung-huawei
By Daniel Eran Dilger
Monday, September 18, 2017, 02:10 am PT (05:10 am ET)
Official benchmarks posted by Geekbench show that Apple’s A11 Bionic delivers a huge jump in performance over last year’s A10 Fusion used in iPhone 7, with scores that are not just far beyond other mobile ARM competitors’ latest chips, but higher than the base Intel Kaby Lake Core i5 processor Apple uses in its 13 inch MacBook Pro.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AI: This Decade’s Worst Buzz Word
https://hackaday.com/2017/09/18/ai-this-decades-worst-buzz-word/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Slashdot Asks: Which IT Hiring Trends Are Hot, and Which Ones Are Going Cold?
https://ask.slashdot.org/story/17/09/18/2016250/slashdot-asks-which-it-hiring-trends-are-hot-and-which-ones-are-going-cold
Recruiting and retaining tech talent remains IT’s biggest challenge today, writes Paul Heltzel, in an article on what trends are heating up and what’s cooling off when it comes to IT staffing. “One thing hasn’t changed this year: Recruiting top talent is still difficult for most firms, and demand greatly outstrips supply,” writes Heltzel.
8 hot IT hiring trends — and 8 going cold
https://www.cio.com/article/3224907/hiring-and-staffing/8-hot-it-hiring-trends-and-8-going-cold.html
Recruiting and retaining tech talent remains IT’s biggest challenge today. Here’s how companies are coping — and what’s cooling off when it comes to IT staffing.
Whether you’re looking to expand your team or job searching yourself, read on to see which IT hiring practices are trending and which ones are falling out of favor.
Hot: Workplace flexibility
Cold: Full-time remote work
Hot: Blended workforces/flexible staffing
Cold: Gig economy hype
Hot: Soft skills
Cold: Perks you don’t actually want
Hot: Security jobs
Cold: Actual job security
Cold: Actual job security
Cold: Hiring from outside of the company
Hot: Importing talent from Silicon Valley
Cold: Finding top talent
Hot: AI-based recruiting
Cold: Slow, outdated hiring experience
Hot: Increased compensation for talent
Cold: Diversity in the workplace
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s data hoarding is like homeopathy. It doesn’t work – study
Boffins find search quality unaffected no matter how much information web giant amasses
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/19/data_hoarding_doesnt_make_search_better/
Data, it has been argued, is the new oil – the fuel for the information economy – but its importance to search engines may be overstated.
In a paper published Monday through the National Bureau of Economic Research, Lesley Chiou, an associate professor at Occidental College, and Catherine Tucker, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, all in the US, argue that retaining search log data doesn’t do much for search quality.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What do you call an all-in-one PC that isn’t? ‘Upgradeable’, says HP
Screens-on-a-stalk and replaceable HDD and RAM may not a revolution make
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/19/hp_eliteone_1000_aio_g1/
All-in-one PCs look pretty and make for tidy desks but don’t often feature in business settings because bonding a monitor and a computer reduces maintenance options.
HP Inc’s therefore had a crack at what it’s calling an “upgradeable” all-in-one that – erm – isn’t really an all-in-one at all.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle softly increments SPARC M7 to M8, then whispers: We’ll still love you, Solaris, to 2034
And possibly beyond
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/19/oracle_sparc_m8_solaris/
With little fanfare, Oracle formally tore the wraps off its SPARC M8 data-center-class processors and servers on Monday.
The House of Larry Ellison unveiled the fifth-generation successor to the fourth-generation SPARC M7, along with five server models, and a commitment to support its Solaris operating system for at least another 17 years. That’s all the way to 2034 and potentially beyond.
The M8, first sighted and described in July, is a modest uptick from the M7. That’s the M7 unveiled in 2015 with some anti-malware mechanisms, plus encryption and SQL query hardware acceleration built in.
The M8 is clocked to 5GHz, topping the M7′s 4.13GHz.
Interestingly, you can have up to eight M8 processors per machine, whereas the M7 supported a maximum of 16.
Oracle believes you want fewer chips per box. The M8 can handle up to 8TB of RAM, whereas the M7 can hit 16TB due to the higher socket limit.
Beyond that, the M8 and the M7 are pretty much the same on paper. Both have 32 cores – the M8′s are codenamed “SPARC Next” whereas the M7′s are dubbed “Sonoma” – and eight threads per core.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stack Overflow launches Salary Calculator for developers
https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/19/stack-overflow-launches-salary-calculator-for-developers/
Stack Overflow today launched Salary Calculator, a tool that lets developers check out typical salaries across the industry. The calculated results are based on five factors: location, education, years of professional coding experience, developer type, and technologies used professionally.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Leverages FPGAs for Real-Time AI
https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/microsoft-leverages-fpgas-real-time-ai/99071007157383?ADTRK=UBM&elq_mid=1111&elq_cid=876648
Microsoft’s Project Brainwave is a deep learning platform that uses the flexibility of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to deliver high-performance artificial intelligence.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s AI is so good it steered Renault into bottom of the F1 league
Does someone need to take the handbrake off this thing?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/18/microsoft_ai_powers_renault_formula_one_team/
Microsoft on Sunday bragged its artificial intelligence technology is behind the, er, success of the massively underperforming Renault Formula One team.
In a poorly timed bit of marketing, the Redmond software giant talked up its partnership with the racing team just as the latter finds itself sitting 433 points behind leader Mercedes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stack Overflow + Salary Calculator = your worth
In case you were wondering what Git, SQL and JS skills will get you, new online tool measures your value
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/19/stack_overflow_salary_calculator/