IT seems to be growing again. Gartner forecasts worldwide IT spending will increase 4.5% this year to $3.68 trillion, driven by artificial intelligence, big data analytics, blockchain technology, and the IoT.
Digital transformations are fashionable. You won’t find an enterprise that isn’t leveraging some combination of cloud, analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to better serve customers or streamline operations. But here’s a hard truth about digital transformations: Many are failing outright or are in danger of failing. Typical reasons for failing are not understanding what is digital transformation (different people understand it differently), lack of CEO sponsorship, talent deficiency, resistance to change. Usually a technology-first approach to digital transformation is a recipe for disaster. Truing to just push trough technically unfeasible transformation idea is another way to fail.
The digital era requires businesses to move with speed, and that is causing IT organizations to rethink how they work. A lot of IT is moving off premises to SaaS providers and the public cloud. Research outfit 451 standout finding was that 60 per cent of the surveyed enterprises say they will run the majority of their IT outside the confines of enterprise data centres by the end of 2019. From cost containment to hybrid strategies, CIOs are getting more creative in taking advantage of the latest offerings and the cloud’s economies of scale.
In 2018 there seems to be a growing Software Engineering Talent Shortage in both quantity and quality. For the past nine years, software engineers have been at the top of the hardest to fill jobs in the United States. And same applies to many other countries including Finland. Forrester projects that firms will pay 20% above market for quality engineering talent in 2018. Particularly in-demand skills are data scientists, high-end software developers and information security analysts. There is real need for well-studied, experienced engineers with a formal and deep understanding of software engineering. Recruiting and retaining tech talent remains IT’s biggest challenge today. Most CIOs are migrating applications to public cloud services, offloading operations and maintenance of computing, storage and other capabilities so they can reallocate staff to focus on what’s strategic to their business.
The enterprise no longer is at the center of the IT universe. It seems that reports of the PC’s demise have been greatly exaggerated and the long and painful decline in PC sales of the last half-decade as tailed off, at least momentarily. As the sales of smartphones and tablets have risen, consumers had not stopped using PCs, but merely replaced them less often. FT reports that PC is set to stage a comeback in 2018, after the rise of smartphones sent sales of desktop and laptop computers into decline in recent years. If that does not happen, then PC market could return to growth in 2019. But the end result is that PC is no longer seen as the biggest growth driver for chip makers. An extreme economic shift has chipmakers focused on hyperscale clouds.
Microservices are talked about a lot. Software built using microservices is easier to deliver and maintain than the big and brittle architectures or old; these were difficult to scale and might take years to build and deliver. Microservices are small and self-contained, so therefore easy to wrap up in a virtual machine or a container (but don’t have to live in containers). Public cloud providers increasingly differentiate themselves through the features and services they provide. But it turns out that microservices are far from being one-size-fit-for-all silver bullet for IT challenges.
Containers will try to make break-trough again in 2018. Year 2017 was supposed to be the year of containers! It wasn’t? Oops. Maybe year 2018 is better. Immature tech still has a bunch of growing up to do. Linux Foundation’s Open Containers Initiative (OCI) finally dropped two specifications that standardise how containers operate at a low level. The needle in 2018 will move towards containers running separately from VMs, or entirely in place of VMs. Kubernates gains traction. It seems that the containers are still at the point where the enterprise is waiting to embrace them.
Serverless will be talked about. Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Serverless architectures refer to applications that significantly depend on third-party services (knows as Backend as a Service or “BaaS”) or on custom code that’s run in ephemeral containers (Function as a Service or “FaaS”), the best known vendor host of which currently is AWS Lambda.
Automation is what everybody with many computers wants. Infrastructure automation creates and destroys basic IT resources such as compute instances, storage, networking, DNS, and so forth. Security automation helps keeping systems secure. It bosses want to create self-driving private clouds. The journey to self-driving clouds needs to be gradual. The vision of the self-driving cloud makes sense, but the task of getting from here to there can seem daunting. DevOps automation with customer control: Automatic installation and configuration, Integration that brings together AWS and VMWare, workflows migration controlled by users, Self-service provisioning based on templates defined by users, Advanced machine learning to automate processes, and Automated upgrades.
Linux is center of many cloud operations: Google and Facebook started building their own gear and loading it with their own software. Google has it’s own Linux called gLinux. Facebook networking uses Linux-based FBOSS operating system. Even Microsoft has developed its own Linux for cloud operations. Software-defined networking (SDN) is a very fine idea.
Memory business boomed in 2017 for both NAND and DRAM. The drivers for DRAM are smartphones and servers. Solid-state drives (SSDs) and smartphones are fueling the demand for NAND. NAND Market Expected to Cool in Q1 from the crazy year 2017, but it is still growing well because there is increasing demand. Memory — particular DRAM — was largely considered a commodity business.
Lots of 3D NAND will go to solid state drives in 2018. IDC forecasts strong growth for the solid-state drive (SSD) industry as it transitions to 3D NAND. SSD industry revenue is expected to reach $33.6 billion in 2021, growing at a CAGR of 14.8%. Sizes of memory chips increase as number of layer in 3D NAND are added. The traditional mechanical hard disk based on magnetic storage is in hard place in competition, as the speed of flash-based SSDs is so superior
There is search for faster memory because modern computers, especially data-center servers that skew heavily toward in-memory databases, data-intensive analytics, and increasingly toward machine-learning and deep-neural-network training functions, depend on large amounts of high-speed, high capacity memory to keep the wheels turning. The memory speed has not increased as fast as the capacity. The access bandwidth of DRAM-based computer memory has improved by a factor of 20x over the past two decades. Capacity increased 128x during the same period. For year 2018 DRAM remains a near-universal choice when performance is the priority. There is search going on for a viable replacement for DRAM. Whether it’s STT-RAM or phase-change memory or resistive RAM, none of them can match the speed or endurance of DRAM.
PCI Express 4.0 is ramping up. PCI-standards consortium PCI-SIG (Special Interest Group) has ratified and released specifications for PCIe 4.0 Specification Version 1. Doubling PCIe 3.0’s 8 GT/s (~1 GB/s) of bandwidth per lane, PCIe 4.0 offers a transfer rate of 16 GT/s. The newest version of PCI Express will start appearing on motherboards soon. PCI-SIG has targeted Q2 2019 for releasing the finalized PCIe 5.0 specification, so PCIe 4.0 won’t be quite as long-lived as PCIe 3.0 has been. So we’ll See PCIe 4.0 this year in use and PCIe 5.0 in 2019.
USB type C is on the way to becoming the most common PC and peripheral interface. The USB C connector has become faster more commonplace than any other earlier interface. USB C is very common on smartphones, but the interface is also widespread on laptops. Sure, it will take some time before it is the most common. In 2021, the C-type USB connector has almost five billion units, IHS estimates.
It seems that the after-shocks of Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities on processors will be haunting us for quite long time this year. It is now three weeks since The Register revealed the chip design flaws that Google later confirmed and the world still awaits certainty about what it will take to get over the silicon slip-ups. Last pieces of farce has been that Intel Halts Spectre, Meltdown CPU Patches Over Unstable Code and Linux creator Linus Torvalds criticises Intel’s ‘garbage’ patches. Computer security will not be the same after all this has been sorted out.
What’s Next With Computing? IBM discusses AI, neural nets and quantum computing. Many can agree that those technologies will be important. Public cloud providers increasingly provide sophisticated flavours of data analysis and increasingly Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Central Banks Are Using Big Data to Help Shape Policy. Over the past few years, machine learning (ML) has evolved from an interesting new approach that allows computers to beat champions at chess and Go, into one that is touted as a panacea for almost everything. 2018 will be the start of what could be a longstanding battle between chipmakers to determine who creates the hardware that artificial intelligence lives on.
ARM processor based PCs are coming. As Microsoft and Qualcomm jointly announced in early December that the first Windows 10 notebooks with ARM-based Snapdragon 835 processors will be officially launched in early 2018, there will be more and more PCs with ARM processor architecture hitting the market. Digitimes Research expects that ARM-based models may dominate lower-end PC market, but don’t hold your breath on this. It is rumoured that “wireless LTE connectivity” function will be incorporated into all the entry-level Window 10 notebooks with ARM processors, branded by Microsoft as the “always-connected devices.” HP and Asustek have released some ARM-based notebooks with Windows 10S.
Sources:
Ohjelmistoalan osaajapula pahenee – kasvu jatkuu
PC market set to return to growth in 2018
PC market could return to growth in 2019
PC sales grow for the first time in five years
PCI-SIG Finalizes and Releases PCIe 4.0, Version 1 Specification: 2x PCIe Bandwidth and More
Hot Chips 2017: We’ll See PCIe 4.0 This Year, PCIe 5.0 In 2019
Outsourcing remains strategic in the digital era
8 hot IT hiring trends — and 8 going cold
EDA Challenges Machine Learning
The Battle of AI Processors Begins in 2018
How to create self-driving private clouds
ZeroStack Lays Out Vision for Five-Step Journey to Self-Driving Cloud
2017 – the year of containers! It wasn’t? Oops. Maybe next year
2018′s Software Engineering Talent Shortage— It’s quality, not just quantity
How Central Banks Are Using Big Data to Help Shape Policy
Digitimes Research: ARM-based models may dominate lower-end PC market
Intel Halts Spectre, Meltdown CPU Patches Over Unstable Code
Spectre and Meltdown: Linux creator Linus Torvalds criticises Intel’s ‘garbage’ patches
Meltdown/Spectre week three: World still knee-deep in something nasty
What’s Next With Computing? IBM discusses AI, neural nets and quantum computing.
PCI Express 4.0 as Fast As Possible
Microsoft has developed its own Linux!
Microsoft Built Its Own Linux Because Everyone Else Did
Facebook has built its own switch. And it looks a lot like a server
Googlella on oma sisäinen linux
Is the writing on the wall for on-premises IT? This survey seems to say so
12 reasons why digital transformations fail
7 habits of highly effective digital transformations
857 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
NVIDIA Develops NVLink Switch: NVSwitch, 18 Ports For DGX-2 & More
by Ryan Smith on March 27, 2018 1:20 PM EST
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12581/nvidia-develops-nvlink-switch-nvswitch-18-ports-for-dgx2-more
Back in 2016 when NVIDIA launched the Pascal GP100 GPU and associated Tesla cards, one of the consequences of their increased server focus for Pascal was that interconnect bandwidth and latency became an issue. Having long relied on PCI Express, NVIDIA’s goals for their platform began outpacing what PCIe could provide in terms of raw bandwidth, never mind ancillary issues like latency and cache coherency. As a result, for their compute focused GPUs, NVIDIA introduced a new interconnect, NVLink.
With 4 (and later 6) NVLinks per GPU, these links could be teamed together for greater bandwidth between individual GPUs, or lesser bandwidth but still direct connections to a greater number of GPUs. In practice this limited the size of a single NVLink cluster to 8 GPUs in what NVIDIA calls a Hybrid Mesh Cube configuration, and even then it’s a NUMA setup where not every GPU could see every other GPU. Past that, if you wanted a cluster larger than 8 GPUs, you’d need to resort to multiple systems connected via InfiniBand or such, losing some of the shared memory and latency benefits of NVLink and closely connected GPUs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NVIDIA’s DGX-2: Sixteen Tesla V100s, 30 TB of NVMe, only $400K
by Ian Cutress on March 27, 2018 2:00 PM EST
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12587/nvidias-dgx2-sixteen-v100-gpus-30-tb-of-nvme-only-400k
Ever wondered why the consumer GPU market is not getting much love from NVIDIA’s Volta architecture yet? This is a minefield of a question, nuanced by many different viewpoints and angles – even asking the question will poke the proverbial hornet nest inside my own mind of different possibilities. Here is one angle to consider: NVIDIA is currently loving the data center, and the deep learning market, and making money hand-over-fist. The Volta architecture, with CUDA Tensor cores, is unleashing high performance to these markets, and the customers are willing to pay for it. So introduce the latest monster from NVIDIA: the DGX-2.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux on Windows 10: Microsoft releases new tool to get more distros on Windows
http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-on-windows-10-microsoft-releases-new-tool-to-get-more-distros-on-windows/
Microsoft’s open-source tool should make it easier to run distros on Windows 10′s Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Tomi Engdahl says:
User fired IT support company for a ‘typo’ that was actually a real word
So the support company fired the user. Twice. And doubled its fees too
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/29/on-call/
On-Call Welcome once more to On-Call, The Register’s weekly reader-contributed story of tech support trauma.
The mis-spelled word was “Manger”,
But the customer was appalled at their desired word – “Manager” -being mangled and told Pete his incompetence and failure to install a spell-checker meant his support contract was over, effective immediately.
“I pointed out that ‘Manger’ is a real word, wished her a Merry Christmas, and pulled the plug on the contract myself,” Peter told us.
Three months later, the customer was back, “begging for forgiveness.”
“We doubled her charges, but she agreed,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Happy as Larry: Why Oracle won the Google Java Android case
Get a licence or build something new. It’s really that simple
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/29/oracle_google_android/
One piece of paper. Just one lousy piece of paper. That’s the difference between success and a potential $8.8bn payout.
Google’s lucky streak finally ran out this week. Its defense for using Oracle’s copyrighted Java code in Android – without paying the database giant a penny in royalties – collapsed in a US Federal appeals court, just as I predicted it would in 2016. Why was I so confident back then that Oracle would prevail?
Copyright can be incredibly detailed and complicated, nightmarishly so when there are overlapping bundles of rights, as in music. But the principles of intellectual property are always straightforward, and this is what judges must ultimately consider. And this was a very straightforward case. Google didn’t have that one vital bit of paper.
Google had copied Sun Microsystems’ Java – it took the technology then built useful new bits on it for Android – without a license. Internally, Google’s Android team knew they should get a license and said so, but Sun, which at the time was in its Kumbaya era under its ponytailed CEO Jonathan Schwartz, hadn’t got round to getting Google’s signature on the paperwork.
Specifically, the alarm was raised far and wide that an Oracle win would set back fair use, or lead to the copyrighting of software-to-software interfaces (otherwise known as APIs).
Once again, it’s helpful to turn to the law.
So Oracle was on firm ground, as Java ticked the boxes required: it was, to use the technical terms, an original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression.
Fair use has an unusual and far more significant role in US copyright law than it does in any other legal system, and Google would like to see it written into global law, but that’s a story for another day. As the Federal Court notes in its judgement, Google had a high hurdle to cross: “Because fair use is an affirmative defense to a claim of infringement, Google bears the burden to prove that the statutory factors weigh in its favor.”
Fair use has hurdles
Here’s why Google failed. The burden was now on Google to show that constructing Android from Java was fair use. Google had to address four factors.
Was the new work a transformation of previous material, or copied verbatim? What was the nature of the work – was it factual or fictional, or based on unpublished material? Was the amount copied reasonable or substantial? And did it affect the market value of the original?
Make your own damn operating system
Google clearly had the choice of making a cool new OS, or getting a Java license and building on that. The ads giant is, right now, working on a cool new OS called Fuchsia that’s hopefully lawyer-proof, and we can expect to hear a lot more about it.
To sum up, then: Google knew it needed a licence, didn’t get one, and tried to bluff it out.
Tomi Engdahl says:
”The Windows era at Microsoft, long in eclipse, is officially history. Microsoft said on Tuesday that it was splitting up its Windows engineering team and that the leader of its Windows business was leaving.” #AI #Windows #Microsoft #cloud
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/technology/microsoft-reorganizes-to-fuel-cloud-and-ai-businesses.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple, in a very Apple move, is reportedly working on its own Mac chips
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/02/apple-in-a-very-apple-move-is-reportedly-working-on-its-own-mac-chips/?utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=facebook
Apple is planning to use its own chips for its Mac devices, which could replace the Intel chips currently running on its desktop and laptop hardware, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Bloomberg reports that Apple may implement the chips as soon as 2020.
Intel may be the clear loser here, and the market is reflecting that. Intel’s stock is down nearly 8% after the report came out
Apple, too, is not the only company looking to design its own silicon, with Amazon looking into building its own AI chips for Alexa in another move to create a lock-in for the Amazon ecosystem.
Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs From 2020, Replacing Intel
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/apple-is-said-to-plan-move-from-intel-to-own-mac-chips-from-2020
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nearly 40% of American gamers play at work
https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2018/04/02/nearly-40-american-gamers-play-work/
A new survey, released last week, suggests a good chunk of gamers are spending time on their favorite hobby at work — meaning several of you reading this article are gaming when you shouldn’t be.
The survey, compiled by Limelight Networks, was taken by over 3,000 gamers across six countries: the US, UK, France, Germany, South Korea, and Japan. The questions ranged from “How many hours do you spend playing video games per week?” to “Will you continue to play online games or make purchases from a gaming website that has previously experienced a security breach or been hacked?”
Perhaps one of the most subversive questions was “How often do you play video games during work?”
According to the findings, almost 40 percent of American gamers play at work at least once a month. Among gamers in all of the survey’s countries, almost 35 percent of respondents ages 18-25 have gamed at work. 8.6 percent responded they play games at work daily. That’s a lot of potential productivity lost.
The survey leaves out one crucial bit of information: the games played while working. I’m sure we’ve all played the odd game of Solitaire or Candy Crush over a five-minute break without losing too much momentum, but several rounds of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds is going to be a bit more disruptive.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why a merged Apple OS is one mash-up too far
Cupertino faces a Windows 8 moment
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/03/apple_own_mac_chips_analysis/
Comment It’s come full circle. Young reporters joining a prestigious tech publication 20 years ago were quietly advised to focus on only three companies in what we then called “Client Computing”. Who were they?
Intel, because no other chip company mattered – nobody could produce powerful PC chips at scale. Microsoft, because, well, it was Microsoft, and it looked invincible. And Dell, because it was a lean mean production machine that turned Intel reference designs into PCs with minimum cost.
The argument for the inevitable historical triumph of the horizontal model went like this: the PC was a commodity, and customers wouldn’t pay the extra pennies for the value of an integrated manufacturer – they just saw it as an unwarranted profit margin. Apple was the great example of the fate that awaited a company that ignored the horizontal ideology.
But now we’ve come full circle. Steve Jobs ignored the ideology, and Apple went on to become the richest company in the world. What had worked for the PC industry (and still does) wasn’t replicated elsewhere. Most computing isn’t done on a PC any more.
Home brew
Apple is reportedly preparing to boot out Intel from its Macs, and use its own chips instead. This comes from an authoritative source: Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. In the decade since Apple purchased PA Semiconductor in 2008, it has been introducing more homegrown silicon across its product range with amazing results. The A11 chip outperforms the Intel chip inside a MacBook Pro – at least on some benchmarks. On single core tests and general workloads an Intel chip is still a superior choice.
Nevertheless it’s close enough now to be a serious proposition. The NeXTSTEP OS was designed to be portable 30 years ago, and both MacOS and iOS are branches of the same NeXTSTEP tree. Last year Apple began to share an Arm version of the MacOS kernel for the first time. It’s the other part of Gurman’s Apple roadmap – the merged software platform codenamed “Marzipan” – that doesn’t look so plausible. Marzipan entails merging (or if you prefer “reuniting”) the branches of the old MacOS X so that iPad and iPhone apps run on future versions MacOS.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should
For years, Apple has argued that it didn’t make sense to merge a keyboard and mouse-first UX and a touch-first UX because the two got on happily.
“We don’t believe in having one operating system for PC and mobile,” Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly said. “We think it subtracts from both, and you don’t get the best experience from either. We’re very much focused on two.”
That’s as true today as it was in 2015, and it will still be true in 2020, the reported date for Apple CPU-powered Macs. And who are we to argue?
Apple succeeded in the past two decades by filling in very obvious (in retrospect) unmet needs.
And it can go horribly wrong – just ask Microsoft. In 2012 Microsoft turned Windows from a keyboard-and-mouse-first UX to a touch-first UX. This was imposed on Windows by Steven Sinofsky in a brutal manner, resulting in a lot of unhappy customers. Microsoft could have created a touch-first version of Windows for tablets but wanted every single Windows user to feel the pain – so they got the message Microsoft was about touch and tablets. It was three years before it switched back, with Windows 10. A mashup AppleOS doesn’t have to be imposed quite as brutally, but it poses another problem for Apple.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel outside: Apple ‘prepping’ non-Chipzilla Macs by 2020 (stop us if you’re having deja vu)
Plus: Samsung overtakes in semiconductor revenues
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/02/intel_arm_apple_macs/
Apple is once again reportedly working on switching out Intel processors for its own homegrown, presumably 64-bit Arm-compatible, CPUs in Macs.
The changeover could happen as early as 2020, according to Bloomberg today.
Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs From 2020, Replacing Intel
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/apple-is-said-to-plan-move-from-intel-to-own-mac-chips-from-2020
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ian Cutress / AnandTech:
Intel debuts new 8th Gen CPUs: i9 and i7 chips with 6 cores at 45W for laptops, U-Series chips with Iris Plus graphics at 28W, 17 desktop Coffee Lake CPUs, more — The march from Intel for everything to be under the ‘8th Gen Intel Core’ branding is now at its climax: today is the official launch …
Intel Expands 8th Gen Core: Core i9 on Mobile, Iris Plus, Desktop, Chipsets, and vPro
by Ian Cutress on April 3, 2018 3:01 AM EST
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12607/intel-expands-8th-gen-core-core-i9-on-mobile-iris-plus-desktop-chipsets-and-vpro
The march from Intel for everything to be under the ‘8th Gen Intel Core’ branding is now at its climax: today is the official launch of several new 8th Gen products spread across four of five new categories. The headline is that Intel’s mobile platform will now get Core i9 and Core i7 products with six cores at 45W, along with some 28W U-series mobile chips with Iris Plus graphics. Desktop also gets some extra chips, filling out the Coffee Lake stack for desktop users, and vPro is littered around both mobile and desktop. Also on the plate is new branding for 8th Gen Core products being used with Intel’s Optane drives, new mobile and desktop chipsets which include wireless capabilities and USB 3.1, and Intel’s new ‘Thermal Velocity Boost’ which promises more frequency in devices that can handle the thermal stress.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Larry Dignan / ZDNet:
Intel sells embedded software unit Wind River to TPG for an undisclosed sum, after acquiring the company in 2009 in a deal valued at $884M
Intel sells Wind River to TPG
http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-sells-wind-river-to-tpg/
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Wind River gets more investment and Intel gets more focus. Intel bought Wind River in 2009 in a deal valued at $884 million.
Intel’s initial rationale for acquiring Wind River was to be more involved with embedded devices. Wind River was one of Intel’s early efforts to diversify into software.
Wind River has become a key player in the industrial Internet of things, edge computing and the broader device market. Large customers include Boeing, NASA, Huawei, Siemens and Northrop Grumman. TPG partner Nehal Raj said Wind River will be independent and the plan is to “build on its strong foundation with investments in both organic and inorganic growth.”
The product portfolio for Wind River includes:
VxWorks, an operating system.
Software defined infrastructure software.
Helix device cloud;
And automotive systems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sean White / The Mozilla Blog:
Mozilla says it is building Firefox Reality, a new cross-platform web browser designed from the ground up to work on standalone VR and AR headsets — Today, we primarily access the Internet through our phones, tablets and computers. But how will the world access the web in five years …
Mozilla Brings Firefox to Augmented and Virtual Reality
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/04/03/mozilla-brings-firefox-augmented-virtual-reality/
Why is this important?
This is the first cross-platform browser for mixed reality.
Other solutions for browsing and accessing the web on stand-alone headsets exist, but they are closed, and platform specific. Firefox Reality will be independent and will work on a wide variety of devices and platforms.
This is the only open source browser for mixed reality.
Just like our Firefox browser for the desktop, all of Firefox Reality is open source. Not only does this make it easier for manufacturers to add the browser to their platform, but it provides a level of transparency that our users have come to know and expect from Mozilla.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why WooCommerce is losing against Shopify and why that’s really bad news
https://blog.woocart.com/why-woocommerce-is-losing-against-shopify-and-why-thats-really-bad-news/
The two most popular eCommerce platforms today are Shopify and WooCommerce. They are also complete opposites: one is a proprietary software run by a billion dollar US corporation, the other is an open source platform to which thousands of people contribute and millions of people use for free.
But WooCommerce is slowly losing in this game. It is built on top of WordPress, therefore a compromise solution, and with a complex installation process that either needs an experienced developer or a huge amount of time and patience by the new user. Compare that to Shopify’s few clicks to a full store online and you see why people flock to it.
But Shopify winning is bad for everyone but Shopify. First, it’s bad for the users. Shopify is a proprietary platform, a walled garden where any investments into it are lost the minute you leave.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Larry Dignan / ZDNet:
Intel sells embedded software unit Wind River to TPG for an undisclosed sum, after acquiring the company in 2009 in a deal valued at $884M
Intel sells Wind River to TPG
http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-sells-wind-river-to-tpg/
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Wind River gets more investment and Intel gets more focus. Intel bought Wind River in 2009 in a deal valued at $884 million.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Overview of gaming laptops using Intel 6-core CPUs, including Samsung Notebook Odyssey Z, Acer Nitro 5, Gigabyte AERO 15/15x, Asus ROG Zephyrus M, Asus ROG G703 — Gaming laptops are getting faster and thinner — Intel unveiled its first Core i9 chip for laptops earlier today …
These are the gaming laptops using Intel’s new 6-core processors
Gaming laptops are getting faster and thinner
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/4/3/17192022/intel-6-core-processor-gaming-laptops-list
Intel unveiled its first Core i9 chip for laptops earlier today, and updated Core i5 and i7 processors that include 6 cores of power instead of the usual quad-core processors. All of these new processors are primarily designed for gaming and high-performance laptops, so expect to see a number of new notebooks shipping with these new processors. While processors don’t matter as much to gaming (outside of VR) as a modern GPU, a number of OEMs are announcing new laptops today that pair Intel’s latest processor with Nvidia graphics cards.
Here’s everything from Acer, Asus, Gigabyte, and Samsung that use Intel’s latest processors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal:
Private fundraising widens gap over the public market with $2.4T raised last year in the US, fueling the rise of Silicon Valley unicorns and coin offerings
The Fuel Powering Corporate America: $2.4 Trillion in Private Fundraising
https://www.wsj.com/articles/stock-and-bond-markets-dethroned-private-fundraising-is-now-dominant-1522683249?mod=e2twfr
The boom is transforming how companies grow, concentrating investing in fewer hands and raising concerns about oversight
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia: One Analyst Thinks It’s Decimating Rivals in A.I. Chips
https://www.barrons.com/articles/nvidia-one-analyst-thinks-its-decimating-rivals-in-a-i-chips-1522703007
The fastest-growing part of chip maker Nvidia’s (NVDA) business is its “data center” chips product line, driven in part by sales of graphics chips — “GPUs” — that are widely used for artificial intelligence tasks such as machine learning.
That division looks to have a very bright future, according to one analyst who attended Nvidia’s annual “GTC” conference last week.
“What Nvidia did with their announcements last week was to cause everyone, including Intel (INTC), but also startups, to re-examine their roadmaps,” says Hans Mosesmann of Rosenblatt Securities.
I chatted with Mosesmann by phone on Friday. Mosesmann, who has a Buy rating on Nvidia stock, and a $300 price target, foresees the company having something of a lock on the A.I. chip market.
Move Over Moore’s Law, Make Way for Huang’s Law
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/computing/hardware/move-over-moores-law-make-way-for-huangs-law
Graphics processors are on a supercharged development path that eclipses Moore’s Law, says Nvidia’s Jensen Huang
Tomi Engdahl says:
We listed the most common errors in it management.
1 One trader’s trap
Manufacturers are attracted to IT management by their beautiful promises and cheap prices. And once they’ve come up on their occasions, they will never get out of it.
2 Surprising the cloud as a continuation of the data center
“The benefits of a public cloud can only be enjoyed when infrastructure is designed to build on the public cloud,” he says. “Server migration to the cloud is not enough. We must also change our own thinking and way of working. ”
3 Excessive adjustment of the business model
IT Managers have been spotted until saturation, so that a good business model must first be developed to get approval for large IT expenses. Thus, managers may explore different options on a weekly basis.
“If you go through multiple, far-flung business models without the support of committed business leaders, you’re just making things worse for yourself.”
4 Agile development in core systems
IT managers understand, however, that part of IT infra will remain out of reach when cloud services become more common and business demands a higher response rate.
But the agile development enabling Docker containers and microcomputers to run in the cloud can cause fierce damage to the core systems that fall under the command of IT Managers. Nuclear systems are, for example, e-mail, telephone services, ERP and backend systems, “says Kudelski Security’s Technology Director Andrew Howard .
“If the elements of a nuclear system are applied to agile development mechanisms, they are exposed to risks,”
5 Inability to Refuse
The best leaders of it are often accused of preventing innovation. But there is a bigger problem if they do not know how to set bans, and in doing so, they may lose their security in their systems, says Richard Henderson of Absolute Security Strategy.
“IT and security people often make calls from high pampas whose demands are dangerous,” he says. “It’s not unusual, too, that business units develop cloud-based tools or services without the need for information management,” he said.
6 Hiding the Problems
When a big project starts to go to the forest, many IT executives try to bury the problem and hope to be able to fix it before the top management finds it, says Oktan Mark Settle . In general, this only exacerbates the situation. At a time when the bouncing boss finally admits that a new code has dropped the system for 48 hours or that the budget is exceeded by millions of euros, his credibility is gone.
“The sooner you reveal the mistake you made, the better,” he says. “Bad news does not turn out to be better. And the sooner the issue will start to fall, the more likely the project will be revitalized. ”
It’s got to get in touch with economic and business prospects even when the crisis is not yet in place. It’s not necessarily easy for technology-oriented people, but these skills need to be learned, Settle says.
Source: https://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/it-pomon-6-kamalaa-mokaa-yksi-on-ylitse-muiden-6717330
Tomi Engdahl says:
Take the software bundle for software robotics to work – we tested 3 options
The job description of each IT worker includes tasks that could be left by the software bob to be handled. Often, they are, for example, transferring information from one system to another by cutting and gluing or making a certain predetermined operation depending on the simple variable.
We are comparing three software bots with different starting points and uses. All tested applications are placed in the so-called “robotic desktop automation” category, ie they are intended to automate the use of desktop applications. By contrast, the robot applications (robot process process automation) are more generally focused on large processes in backend systems.
Do not necessarily need to be able to program when doing desktop automation. In triplicate, WorkFusion and UIPath provide a graphical user interface where automation is created using ready-made elements. SikuliXis also gets started without programming, but in more complicated automations, the knowledge of Python is compulsory.
There is a big difference in how the software bots design the interfaces of the applications they control.
SikuliX and WorkFusion are based on plain surface automation. That is, they are looking for predefined graphical elements on the screen and performing various actions like clicks, text input, or keystrokes. However, surface automation is sensitive to appearance changes.
UIPath, on the other hand, understands components of user interfaces, such as html code elements on the web pages or windows application interface structures. It always fails, such as virtualization solutions or remote applications, whereby UIPath also switches to surface automation.
UIPath Community Edition
4.5 / 5
Price: free (with limitations)
+ Not just surface automation
+ Extensive management tools
- Steep learning curve
UIPath is one of the market leaders in desktop automation. Thanks to its management tools it is suitable for the larger organization.
Work Fusion
3.5 / 5
Price: free
+ Control Tower is handy
+ Analytics and management
- Complex automations are difficult
Workfusion is a free rpa application that is intended for use by a larger organization. There is, among other things, a comprehensive range of control and analytical tools to monitor and manage the activities of the boom army.
SikuliX
3/5
Price: free
+ Open source code
Easy to use
- Thin interface
- The programming skills are almost indispensable
SikuliX is an open-source alternative to automating desktop programs. It is based solely on the recognition of graphic elements from the screen. From its user interface, SikuliX is rugged, especially compared to commercial applications. However, it is clear.
Sikulix automations are built step-by-step with built-in image capture tools. Simple things succeed with Sikulix easily, and the ready-made commands reach a fairly long way.
However, the difficulty is rapidly growing in more complex tasks, and Python programming expertise is essential.
Source: https://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/ota-ohjelmistorobotti-toihin-testasimme-3-vaihtoehtoa-6708476
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux 4.16 arrives, keeps melting Meltdown, preps to axe eight CPUs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/03/linux_kernel_4_16_released/
Kernel team mulls ditching chip architectures nobody used
And here’s some fair warning: version 4.17 is set to remove support for eight CPU architectures. That would mean Linux will no longer officially work on blackfin, cris, frv, m32r, metag, mn10300, score, nor tile, if developer Arnd Bergmann’s changes are accepted.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Introducing Intel’s First-ever core™ I9 Mobile Processor.
https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/04/8th-gen-intel-core-h-series-product-brief.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Upgrade Your Mac With A Touchscreen, For Only A Dollar
https://hackaday.com/2018/04/05/upgrade-your-mac-with-a-touchscreen-for-only-a-dollar/
Imagine how hard it could be to add a touch screen to a Mac laptop. You’re thinking expensive and difficult, right? How could [Anish] and his friends possibly manage to upgrade their Mac with a touchscreen for only a dollar? That just doesn’t seem possible.
The trick, of course, is software. By mounting a small mirror over the machine’s webcam, using stiff card, hot glue, and a door hinge. By looking at the screen and deciding whether the image of a finger is touching its on-screen reflection, a remarkably simple touch screen can be created, and the promise of it only costing a dollar becomes a reality. We have to salute them for coming up with such an elegant solution.
Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware
https://www.anishathalye.com/2018/04/03/macbook-touchscreen/
Project Sistine is a proof-of-concept that turns a laptop into a touchscreen using only $1 of hardware, and for a prototype, it works pretty well! With some simple modifications such as a higher resolution webcam (ours was 480p) and a curved mirror that allows the webcam to capture the entire screen, Sistine could become a practical low-cost touchscreen system.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Firefox Reality, A Browser For VR Devices
https://hackaday.com/2018/04/06/firefox-reality-a-browser-for-vr-devices/
Mozilla have released Firefox Reality, in their words “a new web browser designed from the ground up for stand-alone virtual and augmented reality headset“. For now it will run on Daydream and GearVR devices as a developer preview, but the intended target for the software is a future generation of hardware that has yet to be released.
Readers with long memories may remember some of the hype surrounding VR in browsers back in the 1990s, when crystal-ball-gazers who’d read about VRML would hail it as the Next Big Thing without pausing to think about whether the devices to back it up were on the market.
It could be that this time the hardware will match the expectation, and maybe one day you’ll be walking around the Hackaday WrencherSpace rather than reading this in a browser. See you there!
They’ve released a video preview that disappointingly consists of a 2D browser window in a VR environment. But it’s a start.
Firefox Reality: Bringing the Immersive Web to Mixed Reality Headsets
https://blog.mozvr.com/firefox-reality-bringing-the-immersive-web-to-mixed-reality-headsets/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch:
Apple says the planned update to the Mac Pro will not arrive until 2019, and it has formed the Pro Workflow Team to focus on professional users — A year ago, I visited the Apple campus in Cupertino to figure out where the hell the new Mac Pro was. I joined a round-table discussion …
Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro will be shaped by workflows
Yes, Mac Pro is coming in 2019
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/05/apples-2019-imac-pro-will-be-shaped-by-workflows/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Digitally transforming into an intelligent work campus
https://www.zdnet.com/sponsored-article/digitally-transforming-into-an-intelligent-work-campus/
Enterprises are shifting their attention to AI, using machine learning and algorithms — sitting in the cloud — to solve the problems encountered during digital transformation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How and why CIOs should support an open internet
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2018/3/how-and-why-cios-should-support-open-internet?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
Vint Cerf, Mei Lin Fung, and David Bray discuss the key initiatives of People-Centered Internet – and how tech leaders can get involved
Tomi Engdahl says:
Computer system transcribes words users “speak silently”
http://news.mit.edu/2018/computer-system-transcribes-words-users-speak-silently-0404
Electrodes on the face and jaw pick up otherwise undetectable neuromuscular signals triggered by internal verbalizations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to get started with the Foreman sysadmin tool
https://opensource.com/article/17/8/system-management-foreman?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
Foreman offers a powerful set of system management tools, from process automation to security compliance and more. Here’s how to get started.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bring JavaScript to your Java enterprise with Vert.x
https://opensource.com/article/18/4/benefits-javascript-vertx?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
Refresh your enterprise toolbox with the powers of JavaScript without leaving your JVM deployments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 open source technology trends for 2018
https://opensource.com/article/17/11/10-open-source-technology-trends-2018?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
What do you think will be the next open source tech trends? Here are 10 predictions.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Scrum is dead: Breaking down the new open development method
https://opensource.com/business/15/11/open-development-method?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
Tomi Engdahl says:
The implications of Open Source on the future of humanity
https://medium.com/@magnusnm/open-source-and-its-implications-55e57e4288a0
Homepage
Go to the profile of Magnus Nyborg Madsen
Magnus Nyborg Madsen
I write and read about technology, hardware development, engineering, organisational transparency and open source. My favourite super hero is Iron Man.
Mar 22
The implications of Open Source on the future of humanity
Crossroads — towards transparency, freedom and opportunity?
There are many problems in the world, caused by many different things.
This is obvious; it’s possible to discuss the details, but the fact of the matter is, there are a lot of things happening that we’re not entirely sure what to do with. I’m going to attempt to discuss a few of those issues, as well as what I feel is the common thread among them.
Climate change. A tough issue, and quite abstract for the average person trying to make good decisions. How do we give people the ability to support those who pollute the least? How are we supposed to overcome the incentives of… well, every company, to at least project a sense of “we’re working for the environment”, regardless of what actions they’re actually taking, for the sake of PR and trying to convince people that they’re doing their best not to harm our environment?
Inequality. I think most people agree that total equality is a bad idea for many reasons. Most people probably also agree that extreme inequality, especially if it’s caused by manipulative behavior and corruption, is a bad idea. But how do we give people the opportunity to lift themselves up on a global scale? How do we steer around that manipulation that is, again, so heavily incentivized for companies who want to make a lot of money?
Education. How do we give more people access to meaningful knowledge and insight and skills that are applicable? We have the internet, and huge things are happening, especially in certain areas — one very interesting such area in which people learn in a different manner than in most other areas is software development. There are so, so many people who achieve unbelievable things through developing software skills without anything but a computer and an internet connection. What can we learn from that?
Access to technology. Technological development is one of the main differentiators between humans and other animals, but there’s a large disparity in our access to the benefits it brings. One thing is on a global scale — companies are so afraid of their “intellectual property” diffusing to places where they can’t control it. Another is just in any given community, where often times, companies who want to enter a given field have to invent the wheel from scratch at a huge cost instead of just building from the current newest development. I‘ve seen people postulate that “Humans could do anything if we would just cooperate instead of compete” — what if there was an actual mechanism by which people were incentivized to work together while retaining the benefits of healthy competition?
Lack of inspiration. According to Gallup, 85% of people worldwide are not engaged or actively disengaged in their work¹, doing it (supposedly) because they have to in order to make ends meet and make money. Man, this one really kills me inside. 85% — Forbes published an article in 2011, where they stated the number, again according to Gallup, to be 70%. We are not headed in the right direction here, obviously.
In fact, I think that last point is so crucial, because people who are inspired and engaged and who feel like they make a difference seems, to me, to be one of the main drivers of making the world a better place, and who doesn’t want that? On top of this, people want flexibility — they want to have influence over when they work², and where they work³.
Inspiration comes not just from what you’re doing, but how you’re doing it. Bad management, poor leadership and excessive bureaucracy is such a big sink of productivity, it’s incredible. In the US alone, it’s estimated to lead to a loss of about a trillion dollars yearly⁴. This is not to mention all the stress it creates in the workplace.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tips from a software engineer for a balanced life
https://opensource.com/business/16/10/all-things-open-interview-kent-c-dodds?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Essential Career Skill Everybody Needs — But 90% Of People Lack
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2018/03/29/the-essential-career-skill-everybody-needs-but-90-of-people-lack/#3b4f761414ed
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/data-is-not-the-new-oil/?utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=facebook
Tomi Engdahl says:
Algorithms Can’t Tell When They’re Broken–And Neither Can We
https://www.fastcompany.com/40549744/algorithms-cant-tell-when-theyre-broken-and-neither-can-we?utm_campaign=Technology+Review&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social
When algorithms go haywire (and they do) we often don’t know what caused the problem, or even that the problem exists.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Leadership Is The Secret To An Open Source Business Model
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/04/02/leadership-is-the-secret-to-an-open-source-business-model/#446c489865c7
Tomi Engdahl says:
Through the looking glass: Security and the SRE
https://opensource.com/article/18/3/through-looking-glass-security-sre?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
It’s time to take a more proactive approach to system security. Here’s how chaos engineering can play a key role.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Recode:
Interview with Tim Cook covering US tax reform, the changing job landscape, diversity, DACA, why everyone should learn to code, privacy as a right, free speech
Full transcript: Apple CEO Tim Cook with Recode’s Kara Swisher and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes
https://www.recode.net/2018/4/6/17206532/transcript-interview-apple-tim-cook-msnbc-kara-swisher
Education, iPhones, privacy and Facebook were all big topics of discussion.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon spent nearly $23 billion on R&D last year — more than any other U.S. company
Tech companies claimed the top five spots again this year.
https://www.recode.net/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-development-rd
Tech companies claimed the top five spots in the U.S. for research and development spending again last year, investing a combined total of $76 billion. Amazon was at the top of the list, spending $22.6 billion in 2017, 41 percent more than in 2016 (when it also topped the list).
Amazon has poured resources into AWS, Alexa and technologies like computer vision to support ambitious projects such as the Amazon Go cashierless store of the future. Amazon has also recently been the target of President Trump’s Twitter attacks accusing the company of not paying its share of taxes and for exploiting the U.S. Postal Service.
R&D spending is important not only as it contributes to a company’s own innovation and dominance, but also for its contribution to national productivity, accounting for about 3 percent of the GDP.
Amazon is followed in R&D spending by Alphabet, Intel, Microsoft and Apple.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ben Lang / Road to VR:
Leap Motion to release Project North Star, a low-cost open source AR headset dev kit with wide field of view, 1600×1400 display at 120 FPS, robust hand tracking — Over the last few weeks, Leap Motion has been teasing some very compelling AR interface prototypes, demonstrated on an unknown headset.
Leap Motion Reveals North Star, an Open-source AR Headset Prototype With Impressive Specs
https://www.roadtovr.com/leap-motion-reveals-project-north-star-an-open-source-wide-fov-ar-headset-dev-kit/
Over the last few weeks, Leap Motion has been teasing some very compelling AR interface prototypes, demonstrated on an unknown headset. Today the company reveals that the headset is a prototype dev kit, designed in-house, offering a combined 100 degree field of view, low latency, and high resolution. Leap Motion plans to open-source the design of the device, which they’re calling Project North Star.
Founded in 2010, Leap Motion develops leading hand-tracking hardware and software. Though their first piece of hardware was designed for desktop input, the company pivoted into VR, and more recently the AR space, exploring how their hand-tracking tech can enable new and intuitive means of interacting with virtual and augmented information.
They’re calling this work Project North Star, and plan to open-source the design next week, saying that such a headset could cost “under $100 dollars to produce at scale.”
The prototype headset uses side-mounted displays with large ‘bird bath’ style optics (similar to the Meta 2 approach), which afford the device a 1,600 × 1,400 per-eye resolution at 120 FPS, with over 100 degrees of combined field of view, and hand-tracking from the company’s latest hardware which tracks at 150Hz over a 180 × 180 degree area.
The version of Project North Star which Leap Motion plans to open-source is actually a pared back version of an earlier prototype which boasted greater specs
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sysadmin shut down the wrong server, and with it all European operations
Hey Dad, why does your old boss call you ‘The Powerdown Kid’?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/09/who_me/
Bruce’s brain wound down, he was asked to shut down the training server.
Bruce rather hoped this chore would be his last for the day, so “promptly went into the server room and walked up to the server with its console perched on top. I logged in and, without checking, I entered the shutdown command.”
As the training server should have had only the very lightest of workloads, Bruce expected it to shut down swiftly. So when it still hadn’t shut down after a few minutes, he used the command that forced a shutdown.
he realised it had finally switched off.
And with it, all of the company’s European operations had turned off too.
Not many minutes later, all of the company’s team wanted a word with Bruce.
“I was promptly sent home in a taxi,” he told us, and later received a reprimand.
Commendably, however, Bruce’s boss “carried the can for the incident for ‘leaving the junior in charge’ and I continued to work for him for several years afterwards.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
VMs: Imperfect answers to imperfect problems, but they’re all we have
Are you a virtualization hater?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/10/containers_virtualization/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Symantec may violate Linux GPL in Norton Core Router
https://www.zdnet.com/article/symantec-may-violate-linux-gpl-in-norton-core-router/#ftag=RSSbaffb68
For years, embedded device manufacturers have been illegally using Linux. Typically, they use Linux without publishing their device’s source code, which Linux’s GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) requires them to do. Well, guess what? Another vendor, this time Symantec, appears to be the guilty party.
This was revealed when Google engineer and Linux security expert Matthew Garrett was diving into his new Norton Core Router. This is a high-end Wi-Fi router. Symantec claims it’s regularly updated with the latest security mechanisms. Garrett popped his box open to take a deeper look into Symantec’s magic security sauce.
A top Linux security programmer, Matthew Garrett, has discovered Linux in Symantec’s Norton Core Router. It appears Symantec has violated the GPL by not releasing its router’s source code.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sony PlayStation 5 Unlikely To Arrive Until 2020: Gizmodo
https://games.slashdot.org/story/18/04/10/204255/sony-playstation-5-unlikely-to-arrive-until-2020-gizmodo?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
A recent online rumor got people buzzing about a possible 2018 release of PlayStation 5, but that’s probably not going to happen, Gizmodo reports. Citing a source, the outlet says it believes the next PlayStation may not arrive until 2020.
Sources: The PlayStation 5 Is Still A Ways Off
https://kotaku.com/sources-the-playstation-5-is-still-a-ways-off-1825152206
Tomi Engdahl says:
Report: HCI helps simplify data center architecture, but still lacks traction
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/pt/2018/04/report-hci-helps-simplify-data-center-architecture-but-still-lacks-traction.html?cmpid=enl_cim_cim_data_center_newsletter_2018-04-10&pwhid=e8db06ed14609698465f1047e5984b63cb4378bd1778b17304d68673fe5cbd2798aa8300d050a73d96d04d9ea94e73adc417b4d6e8392599eabc952675516bc0&eid=293591077&bid=2062366
HCI is a software-defined IT infrastructure in which key elements of the data center (servers, storage and networks) are virtualized. Despite a number of potential benefits, few organizations have deployed hyper-converged infrastructure technology, according to a new report from WinMagic, a provider of data security products. The company hired market research firm Viga to survey 1,029 IT decision makers in the U.S., U.K., and Germany in November 2017, and found that only 15 percent report having any HCI technology in their infrastructure.
https://www.information-management.com/news/hci-helps-simplify-data-center-architecture-but-still-little-used
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nico Grant / Bloomberg:
IDC reports global PC shipments in Q1 2018 remain unchanged YoY; Gartner found a 1.4% decline due to weaker sales in Asia; HP holds on to top PC vendor spot — Commercial upgrades of desktops and laptops buttressed demand — Dell saw the greatest shipment boost of all major vendors
Global PC Shipments Remain Stagnant; HP Holds On to Top Spot
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-11/global-pc-shipments-remain-stagnant-as-hp-holds-on-to-top-spot
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia Moves Into Top 10 in Chip Sales
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333181
Nvidia cracked the list of top 10 semiconductor vendors by sales for the first time in 2017, joining Qualcomm as the only other strictly fabless chip supplier to attain that distinction last year, according to market research firm IHS Markit.
Nividia’s 2017 sales total of $8.57 billion was good enough for the company to secure the 10th position among chip vendors last year, IHS said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is it Time for Quantum Computing Startups? Maybe
IBM aims to boost quantum computing startups, but warns of a “long revenue desert”
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/start-ups/is-it-time-for-quantum-computing-startups