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:
This is the next step in circuit technology: eFPGA
As we step into a new era, the next logical step seems to be to combine an FPGA chip with a processor or CPU: embedded FPGA.
FPGA and CPU integration
There is obviously an inevitable in-field integration of the CPU and FPGA matrix. The ongoing work with Intel and Microsoft illustrates the complementary nature of CPU and FPGA technologies.
Intel bought Altera for nearly $ 17 billion to develop modules that use both Altera FPGAs and Intel microprocessors to accelerate data center functionality. Microsoft’s Catapult program, on the other hand, argues that data center servers could double their computing capacity if the FPGA chip was integrated into each server to accelerate Bing searches, Azure cloud services, and Microsoft 365 office applications.
This need for better performance, lower costs, and lower power consumption demonstrates a lot of faith in these artifacts. It is therefore inevitable that these two architectures will begin to unite in the same circuit in which the FPGA matrix is integrated into the CPU as IP blocks to improve performance.
Embedded FPGA era
One can safely say that the integration of the FPGA partition into the system circuits is the natural development of system integration in microelectronics. For this reason, Achronix has developed an embedded Speedcore FPGA (Embedded FPGA), which allows SoC designers to define the optimum size, power consumption, and resource configuration required by their own application for the FPGA block. Speedcore users can define the number of LUT lookups, embedded memory blocks, and DSP blocks, and define Speedcore elements, IO port connections, and, in general, make certain compromises between power consumption and performance
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/kolumni/6531-tama-on-seuraava-askel-piiritekniikassa-efpga
Tomi Engdahl says:
Patrick Klepek / Waypoint:
Palmer Luckey pledges $2,000 per month to a crowdfunding campaign for software that makes Oculus exclusives playable on HTC Vive
Palmer Luckey Donating Thousands to Software That Breaks Oculus Exclusivity
https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/43dyjp/palmer-luckey-donating-thousands-to-software-that-breaks-oculus-exclusivity
The co-founder, who left Facebook a few months after a political controversy, hasn’t fully left VR behind.
Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey may not longer be part of the virtual reality revolution he helped spearhead, but he’s not entirely out of the world of VR. Revive, a piece of software that enables Oculus-exclusive games to be played on HTC’s Vive headset, recently revealed that Lucky is now contributing $2,000 per month to a crowdfunded development campaign.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/thanks-palmer-2-12239793
Tomi Engdahl says:
Modularity Finally Approved For Java 9
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/07/01/1825244/modularity-finally-approved-for-java-9?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
With a new round of voting completed this week, the Java Community Process Executive Committee passed by a 24-0 vote the Java Platform Module System public review ballot,
The road to Java 9: Modular Java finally gets OK’d
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3203931/java/the-road-to-java-9-modular-java-finally-gets-okd.html
IBM, Eclipse Foundation, Red Hat, and others decide to stand out of the way of the controversial technology’s deployment in Java 9
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big Data Makes Big Waves
Efforts expand tools and data sets
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331733&_mc=RSS_EET_EDT
Big Data Algorithms, Languages Expand
Companies follow Stanford in DeepDive
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331735&_mc=RSS_EET_EDT
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big Data, Little Devices
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1330223&_mc=RSS_EET_EDT
lthough big data does mean big opportunity to make money, when you clear out the puffery, we are still not at the starting gate.
The mantra echoes from classrooms to boardrooms. The topics range from health policy and healthcare transformation to the Panama papers—“it is all about the data.” Unprecedented proliferation of data particularly by ways of mobile and cellular technologies creates business opportunities every day. Single automobiles for instance are expected to generate gigabytes of data every second; auto manufacturers are increasingly attempting to tackle this growth in demand for internet of things—data transmission, storage, and processing capacity.
These datawaves are the new cyberstead—real estate for the taking on an opening cyber frontier. Here vendors scramble for a piece of the action, name and rename stuff for sales and marketing purposes. Big Data—Clouds, Lakes—the entire landscape with Peaks and Valleys probably looming on the horizon, all designed to convince buyers that existing skills and technologies cannot handle the Yodabytes deluge. The race is on to manipulate market forces and differentiate product offerings to attempt to ensure competitive advantage and survival. The carnival barkers promise the holy grail of push-button system solutions and cradle-to-grave data capture, storage, structuring, integration, security, maintenance, and good-looking reports—for a modest fee!
Beyond the hype and noise is very little meat, said Abhay Parasnis, Adobe Systems’ chief technology officer, at the company‘s annual Data Science Symposium in San Jose at Adobe’s offices in May. There is power in these data assets, he said, and along with the multipoint mobile world and the cloud, they represent a paradigm shift and a disruption in all industries. Data science—previously known as statistics—provides the skills required to capitalize on these assets, to clean them and cluster.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big Data Reshapes Silicon
The view of Compute 2.0 from Bristol
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331781&_mc=RSS_EET_EDT
he huge data sets collected by web giants such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook are fueling a renaissance of new chips to process them. Two of the latest efforts will be described at an annual conference on computer architecture in late June.
Stanford researchers will describe Plasticine, a reconfigurable processor that sports nearly 100x better performance/watt than an FPGA while being easier to program. Separately, two veteran designers at Nvidia were part of a team that defined an inference processor that delivers more than twice the performance and energy efficiency of exiting devices.
The chips represent tips of an iceberg of work. Intel acquired three machine-learning startups in the past year. Rival Samsung, along with Dell EMC, invested in Graphcore (Bristol, U.K.), one of a half-dozen independent startups in the area.
Meanwhile, Nvidia is racking up rising sales for its GPUs as neural network training engines. Simultaneously, it is morphing its architecture to better handle such jobs.
Google claims that neither its massive clusters of x86 CPUs nor Nvidia’s GPUs are adequate. So it has rolled out two versions of its own accelerator, the TPU.
“This is Compute 2.0; it is absolutely a new world of computing,” said Nigel Toon, chief executive of Graphcore. “Google eventually will use racks and racks of TPUs and almost no CPUs because 98 percent of its revenues come from search,” a good application for machine learning.
Tomi Engdahl says:
One-third of Brit IT projects on track to fail
Not just the government that is crap at IT…
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/03/onethird_of_projects_on_track_to_fail/
Nearly 40 per cent of IT projects in the UK are on course to fail, according to a survey of 182 project managers.
That is according to the research commissioned by Axelos, the joint venture set up in 2014 by the government and Capita, to develop, manage and operate qualifications in the project management methodology PRINCE2.
Over the last year as many as 31 per cent of British projects have failed, it said.
Asked why IT projects fail, responded blamed: significant changes to the project brief (45 per cent); unrealistic timeframes (41 per cent); an incomplete understanding of the risks (48 per cent); projects not resourced with the right people (42 per cent); lack of a clearly defined goals (49 per cent), and overrun budgets (32 per cent).
The National Audit Office said, in its progress report on major government projects, that 37 out of the 106 projects due to finish by 2021 are “in doubt or unachievable if action is not taken to improve delivery.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
15 Devices (Including 6 Laptops) Awarded FSF’s ‘Respects Your Freedom’ Certification
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/07/02/205201/15-devices-including-6-laptops-awarded-fsfs-respects-your-freedom-certification
This week the Free Software Foundation awarded its coveted ‘Respects Your Freedom’ certification to 15 products — more than doubling the number of certified products (from 12 to 27) since the program began in 2012.
Fifteen new devices from Technoethical now RYF-certified to respect your freedom
http://www.fsf.org/news/fifteen-new-devices-from-technoethical-now-fsf-certified-to-respect-your-freedom
he Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to fifteen devices from Technoethical (formerly Tehnoetic): the TET-N150HGA, the TET-N300, the TET-N300HGA, the TET-N300DB, the TET-N450DB, the TET-BT4, the TET-X200, the TET-X200T, the TET-X200S, the TET-T400, the TET-400S, the TET-T500, the TET-X200DOCK, the TET-T400DOCK, and the TET-D16. The RYF certification mark means that the products meet the FSF’s standards in regard to users’ freedom, control over the product, and privacy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore says Windows 10 Timeline feature will be delayed until after Fall Creators Update — Microsoft revealed its new Timeline feature of Windows 10 earlier this year, noting it would arrive in the upcoming Fall Creators Update. Timeline is designed to allow Windows 10 users …
Microsoft delays its Windows 10 Timeline feature
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/3/15915028/microsoft-windows-10-timeline-feature-delay
Microsoft revealed its new Timeline feature of Windows 10 earlier this year, noting it would arrive in the upcoming Fall Creators Update. Timeline is designed to allow Windows 10 users to switch between multiple devices, including Android and iOS phones. While Windows 10 testers had expected to be trying out the feature in time for the Fall Creators Update, Microsoft has confirmed it has delayed Timeline to its next major Windows 10 update.
“Timeline won’t be in the Fall Creators Update,”
The next major Windows 10 update after that should arrive in March 2018.
Timeline will effectively let you pick up where you left off, across Windows 10 devices and iOS and Android phones. It’s really designed to be a quick way to move from one machine to another, much like Apple’s continuity feature in iOS and macOS.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung’s secret VR headset prototype has eye and hand tracking
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/7/3/15915938/samsung-standalone-exynos-vr-iii-headset-prototype-gaze-tracking
A VR eye-tracking company called Visual Camp just spilled about a secret standalone VR headset prototype that Samsung showed at MWC in March behind closed doors, as spotted on Liliputing. It’s labeled “Exynos VR III,” to differentiate it from the Exynos VR II which presumably came before it. It’s powered by a 10nm SoC with Mali G71 graphics — something that sounds a lot like the Exynos 9 Series chip. It’s capable of powering dual “WQHD+” displays (2560 x 1440 or something close to that) at 90Hz, or one 4K display at 75Hz, although it’s unclear what screen is inside the headset in this picture. It’s also enormous.
The headset has gaze tracking — hence the Visual Camp press release — in addition to hand tracking and facial expression recognition.
The press release does mention foveated rendering, made possible by the gaze tracking, which concentrates rendering power wherever the eyes are actually focused.
Last year it was reported that Samsung was working on a standalone headset
Tomi Engdahl says:
If 282-page doc on new NVMe drive spec is tl;dr, you’re in luck
What are we getting? Endurance
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/03/new_nvme_drive_spec_should_increase_endurance/
NVMe drives could last longer because of a feature in the new NVM v1.3 specification (282-page PDF).
The spec’s new features are:
Sanitise to erase SSD-stored data – optional
Virtualisation to assign SSD storage to virtual machines – optional
Streams: optimise data placement to increase endurance for NAND-based SSDs – optional
Device self-test – optional
Boot partitions – optional
Telemetry – optional
Management enhancements – optional
Identify namespace: return list of Namespace Identifiers to host – mandatory
Host-controlled thermal management: mechanism for host to configure controller to automatically transition between active power states or perform vendor-specific thermal management actions – optional
Timestamp – optional
Emulated controller performance enhancement: not typically supported by a physical/hardware-based NVMe controller – optional
For the virtualisation feature, the NVMe model has primary controllers (which may be SR-IOV Physical Functions) and secondary controllers (which may be SR-IOV Virtual Functions) that may be used to flexibly assign resources, like queues, from a primary controller to a secondary controller.
http://www.nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/NVM_Express_Revision_1.3.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
TITSUP* servers and software cock-ups… ®
* Those with Total Inability to Support Usual, um, Performance
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/03/male_escort_says_he_gave_up_it_to_do_something_more_meaningful/
Tomi Engdahl says:
ARM SoCs Take Soft Roads to Neural Nets
NXP, Q’comm tap inference libraries, extensions
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331963
NXP is supporting inference jobs such as image recognition in software on its i.MX8 processor. It aims to extend its approach for natural-language processing later this year, claiming that dedicated hardware is not required in resource-constrained systems.
The chip vendor is following in the footsteps of its merger partner, Qualcomm. However, the mobile giant expects to eventually augment its code with dedicated hardware. Their shared IP partner, ARM, is developing neural networking libraries for its cores, although it declined an interview for this article.
NXP’s i.MX8 packs two GPU cores from Vivante, now part of Verisilicon. They use about 20 opcodes that support multiply-accumulates and bit extraction and replacement, originally geared for running computer vision.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux 4.12 kernel lands: ‘Go forth and use it’ quoth Linus Torvalds
‘No reason to delay’
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/03/linux_412_kernel_lands_go_forth_and_use_it_quoth_linus_torvalds/
As anticipated last week, version 4.12 of the Linux kernel landed Sunday amid a storm of … well, placidity, as it happens.
Linus Torvald’s release announcement is suitably low-key for something he expected to land without fuss. “Things were quite calm this week, so I really didn’t have any real reason to delay the 4.12 release”, he writes.
The “just plain big” release has “also nothing particularly odd going on in the tree – it’s all just normal development, just more of it that usual.”
Linux 4.12
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/7/2/164
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ubuntu Kylin, a Linux Distribution with a Microsoft Windows Experience
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/ubuntu-kylin-linux-distribution-microsoft-windows-experience?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
Ubuntu Kylin is an open-source Linux distribution based on Ubuntu since 2013, mainly developed by a Chinese team alongside dozens of Linux developers all over the world. It contains the basic features you would expect from Ubuntu, plus features a desktop environment and applications. As far as we know, Ubuntu Kylin is one of the most suitable Linux distributions for users who are farmiliar with Microsoft Windows, including its desktop environment, office suite and various applications.
Tomi Engdahl says:
FreeDOS Is 23 Years Old, and Counting
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/freedos-23-years-old-and-counting?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
The FreeDOS Project has just reached its 23rd birthday! This is a major milestone for any free software or open-source software project.
If you don’t know about FreeDOS, it’s a small project that replaces MS-DOS, which was the mainstay operating system for most personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s. During that era, I was a huge MS-DOS fan. I used DOS for everything and considered myself a DOS “power-user”. I even wrote my own utilities and tools to expand the MS-DOS command-line environment and make DOS more useful.
So I was understandably distressed in 1994 when I read via various tech magazines that Microsoft planned to eliminate MS-DOS with the next version of Windows.
But what to do? If Microsoft killed MS-DOS, what would be left for those of us who preferred typing at the DOS command line? Sure, there was Linux, but Linux couldn’t run MS-DOS applications—and there were a lot of great DOS applications.
I decided to create my own version of DOS. And on June 29, 1994
Our “PD-DOS” project (for “Public Domain DOS”) quickly grew into FreeDOS. And 23 years later, FreeDOS is still going strong!
Today, many people around the world install FreeDOS to play classic DOS games, run legacy business software or develop embedded systems. These days, I think that still represents most of the usage of FreeDOS.
FreeDOS has become a modern DOS, due to the large number of developers that continue to work on it. You can download the FreeDOS 1.2 distribution and immediately start coding in C, Assembly, Pascal, BASIC or a number of other software development languages. The standard FreeDOS editor is quite nice, or you can select from more than 15 different editors, all included in the distribution. You can browse websites with the Dillo graphical web browser, or do it “old school” via the Lynx text-mode web browser. And for those who just want to play some great DOS games, you can try adventure games like Nethack or Beyond the Titanic, arcade games like Wing and Paku Paku, flight simulators, card games and a bunch of other genres of DOS games.
You can find FreeDOS at http://www.freedos.org o
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ubuntu ‘weaponised’ to cure NHS of its addiction to Microsoft Windows
Take 750,000 smartcards, millions of PCs, mix in a week-long hackathon
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/30/nhsbuntu_nhs_revolution/
A quiet revolution has been rumbling in Leeds, in the north of England. It may not seem revolutionary: a gathering of software developers is scarcely going to get people taking to the barricades in these uncertain times, but the results of this particular meetup could shape access to NHS PCs in the coming years.
The gathering in question was a week-long hacking session that ended today. Its mission was to find a way to deploy NHSbuntu, a flavour of the open-source Linux distro Ubuntu built for the NHS, on 750,000 smartcards used to verify clinicians accessing 80 per cent of applications – excluding those for clinical use – on millions of health service PCs.
If successful, NHSbuntu would replace the current system using Windows. Ultimately, the aim is to replace Windows on the desktop, too. Smartcard recognition has been the huge barrier.
One of the brains behind the project, Rob Dyke – partner at Neova, an open-source health specialist – told me of the Leeds gathering: “We think we’ll get it working this week and another week to weaponise it.”
Dyke explained the thinking behind NHSbuntu. “One of the key drivers was the immense amount we spend on desktop licensing – it’s at least £100m every year, according to figures from Digital Health Intelligence. That’s being spent on Windows XP – although that’s as widely used as you’d expect – and Windows 7.”
What a way to run a railroad
The reference to Windows XP is an uncomfortable reminder that the WannaCry attack that hit the NHS in May stripped bare a system that relied heavily on unpatched Windows software, leaving to many health insiders questioning if there could be a better way to run software projects.
The NHS is trying to avoid situations where it has monolith systems that don’t work
Power of community and collaboration
Standing at the heart of all these open source efforts is Peter Coates, whose day job title is head of ecosystems development, NHS Digital. He is also one of the main drivers behind the open source initiatives within the NHS, especially as the person responsible for Code4health. He says the fight for open source is as much a fight against the big players as it is a fight for the technology itself.
We are a very, very long way from being on a level playing field when it comes to choosing between open-source and proprietary software
https://www.nhsbuntu.org/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 10 quick tips: 6 ways to speed up your PC
Try these methods to make your machine zippier and less prone to performance problems.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3029168/microsoft-windows/windows-10-quick-tips-5-ways-to-speed-up-your-pc.html
1. Change your power settings
If you’re using Windows 10’s Power saver plan, you’re slowing down your PC. That plan reduces your PC’s performance in order to save energy.
To do it, launch Control Panel, then select Hardware and Sound > Power Options. You’ll typically see two options: Balanced (recommended) and Power saver.
2. Disable programs that run on startup
One reason your Windows 10 PC may feel sluggish is you’ve got too many programs running in the background — programs that you may never use, or only rarely use. Stop them from running, and your PC will run more smoothly.
Start by launching the Task Manager: Press Ctrl-Shift-Esc or right-click the lower-right corner of your screen and select Task Manager.
Click the Startup tab. You’ll see a list of the programs and services that launch when you start Windows.
To stop a program or service from launching at startup, right-click it and select “Disable.
3. Disable shadows, animations and visual effects
Windows 10 has some nice eye candy — shadows, animations and visual effects. On fast, newer PCs, these don’t usually affect system performance. But on slower and older PCs, they can exact a performance hit.
4. Launch the Windows troubleshooter
Windows 10 has a very useful, little-known tool that can sniff out performance problems and solve them. To launch it, type troubleshooting into the search box, and click the “Troubleshooting Control Panel” icon that appears. Then click “Run maintenance tasks” in the System and Security section of the screen that appears. A screen titled “Troubleshoot and help prevent computer problems” will appear. Click Next.
The troubleshooter will find files and shortcuts you don’t use, identify any performance and other issues on your PC, report them to you and then fix them
5. Get help from the Performance Monitor
There’s a great tool in Windows 10 called the Performance Monitor that can, among other things, create a detailed performance report about your PC, detail any system and performance issues, and suggest fixes.
To get the report, type perfmon /report into your search box and press Enter.
6. Kill bloatware
Sometimes the biggest factor slowing down your PC isn’t Windows 10 itself, but bloatware or adware that takes up CPU and system resources. Adware and bloatware are particularly insidious because they may have been installed by your computer’s manufacturer. You’d be amazed at how much more quickly your Windows 10 PC can run if you get rid of it.
Check also:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3182846/microsoft-windows/how-to-fix-five-windows-10-headaches.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jay Greene / Wall Street Journal:
Microsoft reorganizes global sales group to focus on cloud services, according to internal email; source says the move will lead to layoffs in the thousands
Microsoft Revamps Its Global Sales Team
Company doesn’t disclose job cuts, though layoffs in thousands are still expected
https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-revamps-its-global-sales-team-1499110388
Tomi Engdahl says:
Programmers are debating the ethics of secretly automating their jobs and working a couple of hours a week
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/programmer-debate-secretly-automating-their-jobs-2017-7
Over the past week, programmers have been having a huge discussion on the ethics of secretly automating their jobs, after one of them posted a question about it on Stack Overflow, a self-help site for programmers.
This anonymous programmer said he was starting to feel guilty about how he quietly turned his whole job into less than two hours of work a week by writing a bunch of scripts.
All the work he was hired to do is getting done, but he works from home and hasn’t told his boss about the scripts. He basically spends his day taking care of his son, and fears if he reveals the scripts, he’ll be let go, not for unethical behaviour, but because the company will use the scripts and won’t need him.
Interestingly, of the dozens of programmers who commented, people were split on whether or not his behaviour was unethical.
Secrets and fake-outs
The people on Stack Overflow generally leaned toward calling this situation unethical. One user, Magisch even suggested the guy was “defrauding your employer.”
Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I’ve automated my job?
https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-unethical-for-me-to-not-tell-my-employer-i-ve-automated-my-job
Tomi Engdahl says:
Connectivity’s value is almost erased by the costs it can impose
The internet made information flow on the cheap, but making it anti-fragile will cost plenty
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/13/mark_pesce_column/
The great advantage of a browser-based programming environment is that nothing gets lost – it’s all saved to the cloud as you type it in. But what happens when the link dies, or the cloud chokes?
Thankfully, my code reappeared within a few minutes. But my faith was shaken, and I’ve since taken to saving my Glitch programs into a text file on my local machine – once burned, twice shy.
Which got me thinking about the increasingly fragile nature of our connected culture.
Twenty-five years ago almost nothing was connected to the Internet. Today, many things are – at least some of the time – and it’s only when connected that they realise their full capacity. A smartphone shorn of network access cannot be an object of fascination. The network activates, piping intelligence into our toys, making them irresistible.
That intelligence comes with some costs; the most obvious is our increasing dependency on that connection. People get lost on hikes as they fall out of mobile range and lose the mapping apps that keep them oriented. We’ve come to expect intelligence with us all the time. Losing connectivity is coming to feel like losing a bit of our mind.
Another cost – and the bigger worry – is that this connected intelligence isn’t entirely benevolent. Every connection is a way into a device that may have something of value – credit card numbers, or passwords, or Bitcoins. The same intelligence that activates can also try to harvest that information, or even poison those devices, turning them against their owners.
We’ve reached a very delicate point, where the value of connected intelligence is almost entirely countered by the costs it can impose. If things become just a little more hostile out there (with four billion people using the Internet, that’s pretty much assured) the scales could tip in favour of disconnection, isolation, and a descent into a kind of stupidity we haven’t seen in many years.
There’s no easy answers for any of this. It’s unreasonable to expect that businesses will turn the clock back on the productivity gains made from connectivity, but it’s equally unreasonable to assume any of those businesses are prepared for an onslaught of connected hostility.
In this sort of high-pressure environment, where the wrong decision quickly becomes a fatal one, we have no choice but to evolve our responses, rapidly. It feels as though we got the benefits of connected intelligence for free; it’s only just now that we can see that bill is being presented – and it’s a whopper.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The market value of Asia’s largest company, the internet giant Tencent, fell by about $ 15 billion on Tuesday, when the company’s share priceed more than four percent on the Honkong Stock Exchange, according to Financial Times .
The reason for the decline is Tencent’s decision to set time limits for the company’s popular Honor of Kings game. The game has produced $ 876 million for the company alone in the first quarter of the year. The game is played every day by an estimated 50 million users.
The time limit is Tencent’s response to the repeated criticism of authorities and citizens that the new game is too addictive. Investors are concerned that the problems with mobile games are reaching China’s capital city’s attention in Beijing.
Criticism on the game has grown since the 17-year-old boy had a heart attack after playing without interruption for 40 hours. Due to the restrictions that are now in place, the game can not be played more than two hours a day. In addition, players under the age of 12 can not play after 21 o’clock.
Soirce: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/pelijatti-muutti-yhdesta-ainoasta-pelista-yhden-pienen-asian-arvo-laski-15-miljardia-yhdessa-paivassa-6661722
Tomi Engdahl says:
George Anadiotis / ZDNet:
Wanli Min, Alibaba’s chief data scientist, on firm’s approach to AI, cloud computing, and balancing the need for explainable systems vs black box nature of ML
Alibaba: Building a retail ecosystem on data science, machine learning, and cloud
http://www.zdnet.com/article/alibaba-building-a-retail-ecosystem-on-data-science-artificial-intelligence-and-cloud/
What does it take to compete in a global arena in which retail and cloud are increasingly intertwined? Domain-specific data science and machine learning for the masses, according to Alibaba.
Tomi Engdahl says:
X86: Approaching 40 and Still Going Strong
Nearly Four Decades of Consistent Investment and Improvement
https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-still-going-strong/
It’s been nearly 40 years since Intel introduced the first x86 microprocessor, the Intel 8086. Launched on June 8, 1978, it paved the way for the first IBM Personal Computer and literally changed the world. Through discipline, imagination and the relentless advancement of Moore’s Law, Intel continues to innovate, introducing enhancements to its x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) with every new generation of microprocessors. Intel’s innovations have achieved spectacular commercial success, and Intel carefully protects its intellectual property rights in these inventions.
Benefits of x86 ISA Innovation
Intel’s investment in instruction set innovation over the past 40 years has enabled far-reaching advancements in computing and provided great benefits for consumers, businesses and entire industries.
Protecting x86 ISA Innovation
Intel invests enormous resources to advance its dynamic x86 ISA, and therefore Intel must protect these investments with a strong patent portfolio and other intellectual property rights. The following graph shows that relentless instruction set innovation translates into a deep and dynamic patent portfolio with over 1,600 patents worldwide relating to instruction set implementations.
Intel carefully protects its x86 innovations, and we do not widely license others to use them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Seth Archer / Business Insider:
Nvidia and Baidu announce broad AI partnership that outlines cooperation on self-driving, cloud, and home assistant tech
Nvidia jumps after announcing an AI partnership with Baidu (NVDA)
http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/nvidia-stock-price-rising-after-announcing-ai-partnership-with-baidu-2017-7-1002149994
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nat Levy / GeekWire:
Microsoft announces general availability of Workplace Analytics tool, an Office 365 add-on, to let managers track employee productivity
New Microsoft tool aims to make teams more efficient by learning how they spend their days
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/new-microsoft-tool-aims-make-teams-efficient-learning-spend-days/
Microsoft today released a new tool that lets company leaders track how teams spend their time.
The new program, Microsoft Workplace Analytics, is now generally available to purchase as an add-on for Office 365 enterprise plans. Alym Rayani, a director at Microsoft Office 365, described the new program as something like Fitbit for work productivity. It uses metadata that comes out of other Office 365 programs like Outlook and measures things like time spent in email, meeting time, and how often people work after-hours.
The program is an extension of MyAnalytics, an Office tool that shows individuals how they spend their time. Both tools are the result of Microsoft’s 2015 acquisition of VoloMetrix, a Seattle startup that helped large corporations quantify employee efficiency.
“It’s that concept of looking at how you spend your time in meetings, on emails, after-hours,”
Transform your organization with Microsoft Workplace Analytics
https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/07/05/transform-your-organization-with-microsoft-workplace-analytics/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Baidu acquires Seattle-based natural language startup Kitt.ai, which helps build and power chatbots and voice-based apps across multiple platforms and devices
Baidu acquires natural language startup Kitt.ai, maker of chatbot engine ChatFlow
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/05/baidu-acquires-natural-language-startup-kitt-ai-maker-of-chatbot-engine-chatflow/
China’s search giant Baidu has made another acquisition to continue its push into artificial intelligence, and specifically to help it carve out a place for itself as a platform for developers who want to create chatbots and other services based on natural language technology.
Baidu has acquired Kitt.ai, a profitable startup based out of Seattle that has developed a framework to build and power chatbots and voice-based applications across multiple platforms and devices (presumably named after this Kitt).
It was also announced on stage at Baidu’s developer event in Beijing, confirmed in a blog post from Kitt.ai
The company had released three products, all of which will remain operational as before: Snowboy (“a customizable hotword detection engine”), NLU (“a multilingual natural language understanding engine”), and ChatFlow (a multi-turn conversation engine that we covered here), and appeared to be built as a cross-platform service, improving its ubiquity.
http://kitt.ai/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Darker Side Of Machine Learning
https://semiengineering.com/darker-side-machine-learning/
Machine learning needs techniques to prevent adversarial use, along with better data protection and management.
Machine learning can be used for many purposes, but not all of them are good—or intentional.
While much of the work underway is focused on the development of machine learning algorithms, how to train these systems and how to make them run faster and do more, there is a darker side to this technology. Some of that involves groups looking at what else machine learning can be used for. Some of it is simply accidental. But at this point, none of it is regulated.
“Algorithms people write algorithms,” said Andrew Kahng, professor at the University of California at San Diego. “In general, algorithms used inside chip design have been deterministic and not statistical. Humans can understand how they work. But what folks expect in this world of deep learning is gleaned from fitting a neural network model on a classic Von Neumann machine, doing tenfold cross-validation, and that’s it. You get statistically likely good results. But that’s not something that IC designers and concepts of signoff and handoff — or, even, the concept of an ASSP/SOC product — know how to live with.”
But what happens when the data is bad or the data is corrupted on purpose? This might come down to the DNA of the engineer and the product sector, according to Kahng.
That data can be corrupted inadvertently, as well. Bias is a well-known problem in training systems, but one that is difficult to prevent.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PCs will get pricier and you’re gonna like it, say Gartner market shamans
Vendors upping tags while consumers want better products
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/05/pcs_will_get_more_expensive_and_youll_like_it_gartner_says/
PCs should become more expensive this year but consumers will continue to buy them, Gartner has read in the tea leaves.
The market analysis firm has realised that PC components (we’re looking at you, DRAM and SSDs) are getting more expensive around the world. And although vendors are absorbing some of the costs, they’re also being forced to raise the bills.
Gartner analyst Ranjit Atwal said consumers can expect about a 5-10 per cent increase in end costs this year compared to last. Woo-hoo. He attributes this to an appetite for better components.
The quarterly update of Gartner’s annual forecast also remains optimistic that PC shipments will increase, although they’re slightly down this year. Two-hundred-and-seventy million units were shipped in 2016, which is predicted to be followed by 262 million this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows Insiders with SD cards turn into OneDrive outsiders
Microsoft’s decided only NTFS devices are allowed
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/06/windows_insiders_with_sd_cards_turn_into_onedrive_outsiders/
Microsoft has tried to DoS its forum servers, by changing its OneDrive consumer policy to only support cloud backups of NTFS-formatted drives without warning users first.
Unsurprisingly, that’s lit up the forums with complaints, because people only found out when OneDrive popped up error messages.
As the Redditor who posted that note observes, that means even Redmond creations like the Resilient File System (ReFS) are blocked – not to mention SD cards formatted to FAT32.
A similar restriction applies to Windows 8.1, as stated in this support document (last republished July 5, but the policy may well be older):
OneDrive can sync only with folders on a drive formatted with the NTFS file system, which is most commonly a hard disk drive on your computer, or an external hard disk drive. Portable storage, such as USB flash drives or solid state memory drives, use a different file system and won’t sync with OneDrive.
This complaint at a Microsoft support forum identifies yet another alienated user base – a user with an SDHC card supplementing the 32 GB storage on their lightweight laptop.
It seems that non-NTFS support wasn’t part of Microsoft’s game plan, but the company forgot to tell users. Redmond responded to The Register’s inquiry with the following statement:
“Microsoft OneDrive wants to ensure users have the best possible sync experience on Windows, which is why OneDrive maintains the industry standard of support for NTFS.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Virtual Machine, In Google Sheets
http://hackaday.com/2017/07/05/a-virtual-machine-in-google-sheets/
In the last couple of decades we have become used to the browser taking over so many of the desktop functions for which we used to rely on stand-alone software. Email clients, calendars, office suites and much more can now be found in the cloud, courtesy of the usual technology companies.
Google Docs, for instance has a full-featured built-in scripting language called Apps Script, that gives your full control of a document or spreadsheet with the help of a bit of Javascript. When [Brian Steffens] saw this it piqued his interest, so of course he had to in his words “do something weird with it”. The result of his efforts is the Google Sheets Virtual Machine, a virtual computer in software using spreadsheet cells as memory, stack, and registers.
Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets
https://briansteffens.github.io/2017/07/03/google-sheets-virtual-machine.html
I recently noticed that Google Docs has a pretty full-featured scripting system called Apps Script. It lets you write JavaScript to do some pretty useful things:
Run code in response to events like documents opening or cells changing
Make custom Google Sheets spreadsheet functions for formulas
Use services like Google Translate to translate text or Gmail to send email
Add new menu items to the Google Docs interface with your custom features
So naturally I had to do something weird with it. Behold: the Google Sheets Virtual Machine generating fibonacci numbers!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Combined Handset, PC Shipments Expected to Decline
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331979&
SAN FRANCISCO — Combined shipments of PCs, tablets and smartphones are projected to decline in 2017 for the third consecutive year as a lull in new technologies being brought to market continues to stifle consumer demand, according to market research firm Gartner Inc.
However, the rate of decline for new device shipments is expected to decline considerably this year, and the incorporation of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual personal assistance (VPA) in more products is forecast to drive considerable growth in future years, the market research firm said.
Gartner expects combined shipments of PCs, tablets and smartphones to decline by just 0.3 percent this year to 2.3 billion units. By contrast, combined shipments of these devices declined by 3 percent in 2016 and nearly 1 percent in 2015. The market research firm expects combined device shipments to return to growth next year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wow, Linux 4.12 Really Was a HUGE Release [Stats]
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/07/linux-kernel-4-12-was-a-very-big-release
The arrival of the Linux Kernel 4.12 at the weekend brought a boat load of big changes (including two I/O schedulers) but do you know how big it is?
Well, it’s easy to see in this chart shared by kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman which details exactly how big the release is.
“Linux 4.12 is big, really big, like bigger than you thought big,” Gregs says in an update on his Google+ profile.
It took 63 days to create Linux 4.12, during which a total of 14,570 commits were made across 59,806 files.
With 24,170,860 million lines of code in the Linux kernel 4.12 that works out at a boggling 795.58 lines of code added per hour.
From Linus Torvalds
Date Sun, 2 Jul 2017 16:37:36 -0700
Subject Linux 4.12
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/7/2/164
Tomi Engdahl says:
OpenBSD Will Get Unique Kernels On Each Reboot
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/07/05/2327234/openbsd-will-get-unique-kernels-on-each-reboot
A new feature added in test snapshots for the upcoming OpenBSD 6.2 release will create a unique kernel every time an OpenBSD user reboots or upgrades his computer. This feature is named KARL — Kernel Address Randomized Link — and works by relinking internal kernel files in a random order so that it generates a unique kernel binary blob every time. Currently, for stable releases, the OpenBSD kernel uses a predefined order to link and load internal files inside the kernel binary, resulting in the same kernel for all users.
OpenBSD Will Get Unique Kernels on Each Reboot. Do You Hear That Linux, Windows?
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/openbsd-will-get-unique-kernels-on-each-reboot-do-you-hear-that-linux-windows/
A new feature added in test snapshots for OpenBSD releases will create a unique kernel every time an OpenBSD user reboots or upgrades his computer.
This feature is named KARL — Kernel Address Randomized Link — and works by relinking internal kernel files in a random order so that it generates a unique kernel binary blob every time.
Currently, for stable releases, the OpenBSD kernel uses a predefined order to link and load internal files inside the kernel binary, resulting in the same kernel for all users.
KARL should not be confused with ASLR — Address Space Layout Randomization — a technique that randomizes the memory address where application code is executed, so exploits can’t target a specific area of memory where an application or the kernel is known to run.
“It still loads at the same location in KVA [Kernel Virtual Address Space]. This is not kernel ASLR!,” said de Raadt.
Instead, KARL generates kernel binaries with random internal structures, so exploits cannot leak or attack internal kernel functions, pointers, or objects.
“A unique kernel is linked such that the startup assembly code is kept in the same place, followed by randomly-sized gapping, followed by all the other .o files randomly re-organized. As a result the distances between functions and variables are entirely new. An info leak of a pointer will not disclose other pointers or objects. This may also help reduce gadgets on variable-sized architectures, because polymorphism in the instruction stream is damaged by nested offsets changing.”
“As a result, every new kernel is unique,” de Raadt says.
“It’s not implemented in Linux,” Turbureanu said. “This looks like a great idea,” the expert added, regarding the possibility of having this feature ported to the Linux kernel.
Instead, the Linux project has just added support for Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR), a feature that ports ASLR to the kernel itself, loading the kernel at a randomized memory address.
This feature was turned on by default in Linux 4.12, released last week. The difference between the two is that KARL loads a different kernel binary in the same place, while KASLR loads the same binary in random locations. Same goal, different paths.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tape lives! The tape archive bit bucket is becoming bottomless
SpectraLogic’s LTO-8 pre-purchase programme and 190TB+ cartridge forecast
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/06/spectras_lto8_prepurchase_programme/
Library vendor SpectraLogic is preparing for upcoming 12TB LTO-8 format tape drives with a pre-purchase programme and a 190-plus TB cartridge on the way.
LTO-8 doubles capacity and increases throughput by 42 per cent over the current LTO-7 format generation. It will support LTFS, WORM and AES 256-bit encryption and has a 1019 bit error rate.
The improvements come from tape media areal density increases and the use of new read/write heads. LTO-8 drives will utilise tunnelling magnetoresistive (TMR) drive heads, instead of the giant magnetoresistive (GMR) drive heads used in previous LTO tape drive generations.
This latest LTO format lags behind IBM’s proprietary TS1155 drive with its 15TB raw capacity. However, LTO-8 storage is cheaper than IBM’s, according to Spectra.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jason Toff / Google:
Google debuts Blocks, a free VR app for creating 3D objects, available on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive — Today, it takes complex software and a specific skillset to create compelling VR and AR experiences. That software also requires building 3D objects on a 2D screen—something our brains aren’t wired to do.
https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/blocks-easily-create-3d-objects-vr/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft plans thousands of job cuts in a sales staff overhaul to fuel cloud growth
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/06/microsoft-will-layoff-thousands-of-employees.html
Microsoft announced a major reorganization on Thursday that includes layoffs.
Microsoft’s layoffs will mostly affect sales, and thousands of jobs will be cut.
Most of the changes will affect employees outside of the U.S.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Device growth has stopped
Traditional PCs are sold this year to 203 million. Cell phones are therefore mainly selling smart phones with just over 1.9 billion pieces. Gartner’s forecast, however, draws attention to the fact that sales of various IT equipment are no longer on the rise.
For equipment manufacturers, it is good that the market no longer shrinks in size. When a shared cake is no longer growing, companies try to stand out with innovations. For consumers, this can be a very good thing.
The traditional computer market will shrink next year to 195 million units sold and 2019 to 191 million. Only sakes of ultra light devices (mainly Macbook Air and Surface laptops) are up.
Nearly 1.6 billion smart phones were sold last year, or 85 percent of all mobile phones. Mobile sales will continue to grow in the coming years, but very slowly. In 2018, 1934 million units will be sold.
Nearly 1.6 billion smart phones were sold last year, or 85 percent of all mobile phones. Mobile sales will continue to grow in the coming years, but very slowly. In 2018, 1934 million units will be sold.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6543-laitekasvu-on-pysahtynyt
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft announces Microsoft 365 subscriptions for businesses with Office and Windows combined — Microsoft is announcing Microsoft 365 today, a new way for businesses to purchase Office and Windows together. While the software giant has sold Office 365 and Windows 10 to businesses …
Microsoft 365 bundles Office and Windows together for businesses
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15946450/microsoft-365-office-windows-ignite-launch
Microsoft is announcing Microsoft 365 today, a new way for businesses to purchase Office and Windows together. While the software giant has sold Office 365 and Windows 10 to businesses in many different ways, Microsoft 365 Enterprise combines Office 365 Enterprise, Windows 10 Enterprise, and Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility and Security features into a single subscription.
Microsoft is also offering Microsoft 365 Business, which will debut in public preview on August 2nd and includes Office 365 Business Premium alongside security and management features for Office apps and Windows 10 devices. Both bundles are being announced today Microsoft’s Inspire partner conference today
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft Azure Stack hardware, which allows customers to run private instances of Azure in their datacenters, is ready to order from Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo — Microsoft’s first three server partners are starting to take orders for Microsoft’s hybrid-computing Azure Stack appliances.
Microsoft Azure Stack is ready to order from Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-azure-stack-is-ready-to-order-from-dell-emc-hpe-and-lenovo/
Microsoft’s first three server partners are starting to take orders for Microsoft’s hybrid-computing Azure Stack appliances.
Microsoft’s original three server partners for its Azure Stack hybrid computing appliance are officially taking orders as of today, July 10.
azurestackordernow.jpg
Microsoft hasn’t yet made the final Azure Stack code available to Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo, but the three are expecting to start shipping their first Azure Stack servers to customers within the next couple of months.
Update: A Microsoft spokesperson said today, July 10, that its partners are now “in validation mode based on the code shipped in the Azure Stack Development Kits (ASDK).” The Azure Stack servers should begin shipping to customers starting in September 2017.
Microsoft officials recently made public a downloadable Azure Stack pricing and licensing datasheet, signaling the product’s imminent availability.
Microsoft is describing Azure Stack as “an extension of Azure.” After the initial purchase of Azure Stack, customers will only pay for Azure services that they use from general availability, forward (“pay-as-you-use” pricing). The current one-node offering meant for dev/test will continue to be free after general availability.
Microsoft is touting Azure Stack as a truly consistent hybrid-cloud platform. It will allow users to use Azure public cloud services against data stored in Azure Stack on premises, and deploy the same Azure-services-based applications on both the public Azure cloud and Azure Stack.
https://t.co/5oUnU5hC3m
Tomi Engdahl says:
James Vincent / The Verge:
Google launches internal initiative called PAIR to study and help prevent potential prejudices in AI systems, open sources two tools for examining datasets — The company says its new research initiative will tackle bias in AI and make the technology more accessible
Google wants to make sure AI advances don’t leave anyone behind
The company says its new research initiative will tackle bias in AI and make the technology more accessible
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15947358/google-ai-pair-bias-fairness-equality
For every exciting opportunity promised by artificial intelligence, there’s a potential downside that is its bleak mirror image. We hope that AI will allow us to make smarter decisions, but what if it ends up reinforcing the prejudices of society? We dream that technology might free us from work, but what if only the rich benefit, while the poor are dispossessed?
It’s issues like these that keep artificial intelligence researchers up at night, and they’re also the reason that Google is launching an AI initiative today to tackle some of these same problems. The new project is named PAIR (it stands for “People + AI Research”) and its aim is to “study and redesign the ways people interact with AI systems” and try to ensure that the technology “benefits and empowers everyone.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
Ubuntu now available in the Windows Store, is designed to run in a sandbox inside Windows 10 and focused on running command line utilities like bash or SSH
Ubuntu is now available for download on the Windows Store
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15949096/ubuntu-windows-10-store-linux-distro-sandbox-available-now
Microsoft announced at its Build 2017 developer conference earlier this year that Ubuntu would be heading to the Windows Store, and now the popular Linux distro is available to download.
Ubuntu — like SUSE Linux and Fedora, the other two forthcoming Linux distros heading to the store — runs in a sandbox alongside Windows 10, and offers regular command-line utilities as a standalone installation, with shared access to files and hardware with Windows 10.
In order to install Ubuntu, users will have to navigate to Control Panel (not the newer Windows 10 Settings app) and select the “Turn Windows features on or off” menu. There, you’ll be able to select the “Windows Subsystem for Linux,” which will allow Ubuntu to work following a reboot.
Ubuntu
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/ubuntu/9nblggh4msv6?ranMID=24542&ranEAID=TnL5HPStwNw&ranSiteID=TnL5HPStwNw-zJSg_iUTo7C1oYAdUQxfVw&tduid=(f494d488cb302b13dd2f44552eca92b0)(256380)(2459594)(TnL5HPStwNw-zJSg_iUTo7C1oYAdUQxfVw)()
Ubuntu on Windows allows one to use Ubuntu Terminal and run Ubuntu command line utilities including bash, ssh, git, apt and many more. To use this feature, one first needs to use “Turn Windows features on or off” and select “Windows Subsystem for Linux”, click OK, reboot, and use this app.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ubuntu is the number one in linux
Phoronix has been asking linux users for the most popular distribution versions. Not so big surprise Ubuntu got to the top of the list. 38.9 percent said they were using Ubuntu. Arch Linux mentioned 27.1 percent, and Debian robbed 15.3 percent in the third.
Fedora’s share was 14.8 percent and Linux Mint 10.8 percent.
The vast majority of Linux users, or 62.2 percent, only use Linux on their machines. 29.3 percent, however, use Linux and Windows in parallel to so-called ” dual boot”. The Windows option is used by many, as some applications are still not available to Linux due to, for example, lack of support for the driver.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6556-ubuntu-on-linuxien-ykkonen
More:
2017 Linux Laptop Survey Results
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=2017-laptop-survey
Tomi Engdahl says:
AnandTech:
How Intel’s new “Skylake-SP”-based Xeon server chips, launched today, stack up against AMD’s EPYC line — This morning kicks off a very interesting time in the world of server-grade CPUs. Officially launching today is Intel’s latest generation of Xeon processors, based on the “Skylake-SP” architecture.
Sizing Up Servers: Intel’s Skylake-SP Xeon versus AMD’s EPYC 7000 – The Server CPU Battle of the Decade?
by Johan De Gelas & Ian Cutress on July 11, 2017 12:15 PM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade
This morning kicks off a very interesting time in the world of server-grade CPUs. Officially launching today is Intel’s latest generation of Xeon processors, based on the “Skylake-SP” architecture. The heart of Intel’s new Xeon Scalable Processor family, the “Purley” 100-series processors incorporate all of Intel’s latest CPU and network fabric technology, not to mention a very large number of cores.
Meanwhile, a couple of weeks back AMD soft-launched their new EPYC 7000 series processors. Based on the company’s Zen architecture and scaled up to server-grade I/O and core counts, EPYC represents an epic achievement for AMD, once again putting them into the running for competitive, high performance server CPUs after nearly half a decade gone. EPYC processors have begun shipping, and just in time for today’s Xeon launch, we also have EPYC hardware in the lab to test.
Today’s launch is a situation that neither company has been in for quite a while. Intel hasn’t had serious competition in years, and AMD has’t been able to compete. As a result, both companies are taking the other’s actions very seriously.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Krazit / GeekWire:
Ex-Twitter engineers raise $10.5M Series A for microservices management startup Buoyant — Buoyant, a 13-person startup led by former Twitter engineers and now backed by a former member of Twitter’s board of directors, has raised a $10.5 million Series A round to apply lessons learned …
Former Twitter engineers land $10.5M for startup Buoyant, leveraging lessons from the ‘fail whale’
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/two-engineers-helped-kill-twitters-fail-whale-land-10-5m-buoyant-thinks-missing-link-microservices/
Buoyant, a 13-person startup led by former Twitter engineers and now backed by a former member of Twitter’s board of directors, has raised a $10.5 million Series A round to apply lessons learned from revamping Twitter’s infrastructure to simplify the emerging world of microservices.
Microservices are an evolution of software development strategies that has gained converts over the last several years. Developers used to build “monolithic” applications with one huge code base and three main components: the user-facing experience, a server-side application server that does all the heavy lifting, and a database. This is a fairly simple approach, but there are a few big problems with monolithic applications: they scale poorly and are difficult to maintain over time because every time you change one thing, you have to update everything.
So microservices evolved inside of webscale companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter as an alternative. When you break down a monolithic application into many smaller parts called services, which are wrapped up in containers like Docker, you only have to throw extra resources at the services that need help and you can make changes to part of the application without having to monkey with the entire code base.
The price for this flexibility, however, is complexity.
“That’s the biggest lesson we learned at Twitter,” said Morgan, the startup’s CEO. “It’s not enough to deploy stuff and package it up and run it in an orchestrator (like Kubernetes) … you’ve introduced something new, which is this significant amount of service-to-service communication” that needs to be tracked and understood to make sure the app works as designed, he said.
Buoyant’s solution is what the company calls a “service mesh,” or a networked way for developers to monitor and control the traffic flowing between services as a program executes.
Linkerd is the manifestation of its approach,
“we’re only going to be successful as a company if we get Linkerd adoption,” Morgan said.
This approach might sound familiar. In May, Google, IBM, and Lyft released Istio, a different open-source project aimed at accomplished many of these same goals by improving the visibility and control of service-to-service communications.
In a blog post scheduled to go live Tuesday, Buoyant plans to announce that it supports Istio with the latest release of Linkerd, and while the projects appear to be somewhat competitive, the company bent over backwards to emphasize that it sees Istio as a complementary part of a microservices architecture.
https://linkerd.io/
Resilient service mesh for cloud native apps
linker∙d is a transparent proxy that adds service discovery, routing, failure handling, and visibility to modern software applications
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jeremy Kahn / Bloomberg:
Microsoft launches Microsoft Research AI lab, involving 100+ AI scientists, focused on developing general purpose AI, challenging Google’s DeepMind
Microsoft Creates New AI Lab to Take on Google’s DeepMind
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-12/microsoft-creates-new-ai-lab-to-take-on-google-s-deepmind
Microsoft Corp. is setting up a new research lab focused on artificial intelligence with the goal of creating more general-purpose learning systems.
The new lab, called Microsoft Research AI, will be based at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and involve more than 100 scientists from across various sub-fields of artificial intelligence research, including perception, learning, reasoning and natural language processing.
The goal, said Eric Horvitz, the director of Microsoft Research Labs, is to combine these disciplines to work toward more general artificial intelligence, meaning a single system that can tackle a wide-range of tasks and problems. Such a system, for instance, might be able to both plan the best route to drive through a city and also figure out how to minimize your income tax bill, while also understanding difficult human concepts like sarcasm or gestures.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Google acquires Indian AI startup Halli Labs, which was building AI tools to address “old problems and domains” — Some more M&A news in the world of artificial intelligence. Today it was made public that Google has acquired Halli Labs, a very young (its first public appearance …
Google acquires India’s Halli Labs, which was building AI tools to fix ‘old problems’
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/12/google-acquires-indias-halli-labs-which-was-building-ai-tools-to-fix-old-problems/
Some more M&A news in the world of artificial intelligence. Today it was made public that Google has acquired Halli Labs, a very young (its first public appearance was on May 22 of this year) startup based out of Bengaluru, India, that was focused on building deep learning and machine learning systems to address what it describes as “old problems.”
Google has now also confirmed the acquisition with a short statement it provided to TechCrunch.
“We are excited that the Halli Labs team is joining Google,” said spokesperson Taj Meadows. “They’ll be joining our team that is focused on building products that are designed for the next billion users coming online, particularly in India.”
The acquisition is significant for a couple of reasons.
One is that it shows the ongoing interest by the largest tech companies in the world to double down on AI and its many facets, from software through to hardware, and pure research through to practical applications.
Google has been one of the leaders in this field, with extensive programs in house augmented by acquisitions and other efforts. It has snapped up companies like DeepMind in the UK and has forged strong programs with educational institutions to tap into talent early.
The other trend here is that we are continuing to see a significant amount of consolidation in the field of AI.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Facebook plans to unveil a $200 standalone wireless Oculus VR headset for 2018, which will be more compact than the Rift and lighter than Gear VR — The new device will work without being tethered to phone or PC — Company bets gadget will popularize VR as Apple did smartphone
Facebook Plans to Unveil a $200 Wireless Oculus VR Headset for 2018
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-13/facebook-said-to-plan-200-wireless-oculus-vr-headset-for-2018
The new device will work without being tethered to phone or PC
Company bets gadget will popularize VR as Apple did smartphone
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ian Cutress / AnandTech:
AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper CPUs ship in August, with the 12-core, 3.5GHz 1920X costing $799, and the 16-core, 3.4GHz 1950X costing $999; both support 4GHz Turbo — Last night out of the blue, we received an email from AMD, sharing some of the specifications for the forthcoming Ryzen Threadripper CPUs to be announced today.
AMD Threadripper 1920X and 1950X CPU Details: 12/16 Cores, 4 GHz Turbo, $799 and $999
by Ian Cutress on July 13, 2017 9:00 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11636/amd-ryzen-threadripper-1920x-1950x-16-cores-4g-turbo-799-999-usd
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Anon / Android Headlines:
Google releases Backup and Sync as a single desktop backup app, eliminating need for individual uploader tools for Google Drive and Google Photos
Google’s ‘Backup and Sync’ Tool Is Now Available To Download
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2017/07/googles-backup-and-sync-tool-is-now-available-to-download.html
Google has today announced the launch of its new Backup and Sync tool. This is a feature which is now available for both Windows and Mac and essentially looks to ensure that the backing up and the saving of important documents and photos is as easy as possible. In short, Google’s Backup and Sync is a one-stop solution for saving files associated with either Google Drive or Google Photos.