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:
How many Linux users are there anyway?
It depends on how you count them
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-many-linux-users-are-there-anyway/
True, desktop Linux has never taken off. But, even so, Linux has millions of desktop users. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the numbers.
There are over 250 million PCs sold every year.
NetMarketShare reports 1.84 percent were running Linux. Chrome OS, which is a Linux variant, has 0.29 percent.
StatCounter. By its count desktop Linux has 1.48 percent, with Chrome OS coming in at 1.03 percent.
By DAP’s count, Linux is bundled in with 0.6 percent other. Chrome OS, according to DAP, has more users: 1.3 percent
Tomi Engdahl says:
Servers move to FPGA time
The long FPGA technology was really only for two uses: small, programmable circuits with circuit boards, on the one hand, and on the other, as a protoboard of large system circuits. Now Intel announces a new era has begun.
According to Intel, Intel FPGAs are now coming to the market with enhanced server processor cards. Fujitsu has already announced its first FPGA-enabled server, the Primergy series. The Dell EMC’s PowerEdge servers come with three new FPGAs.
For server cards, Intel has integrated the Altera Arria 10 GX circuits purchased in the autumn of 2015. Of the traditional Xeon processors, they differ primarily so that circuits can be programmed with various algorithms that execute precise applications.
FPGA-specific computing can be used in artificial intelligence, data analysis, financial server, and many other heavy computing applications. The algorithms developed for these purposes can be run with an FPGA acceleration card that connects the server to the Xeon processor on the PCIe bus.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/7872-palvelimet-siirtyvat-fpga-aikaan
Tomi Engdahl says:
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Apple open sources FoundationDB core, three years after acquiring the database company — Apple owned-company FoundationDB today announced that the FoundationDB core has been open sourced with the goal of building an open community with all major development done in the open.
Apple Open Sources FoundationDB
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/04/19/apple-open-sources-foundationdb/
By open sourcing the project to drive development, FoundationDB is aiming to become “the foundation of the next generation of distributed databases.
The vision of FoundationDB is to start with a simple, powerful core and extend it through the addition of “layers”. The key-value store, which is open sourced today, is the core, focused on incorporating only features that aren’t possible to write in layers. Layers extend that core by adding features to model specific types of data and handle their access patterns.
The fundamental architecture of FoundationDB, including its use of layers, promotes the best practices of scalable and manageable systems. By running multiple layers on a single cluster (for example a document store layer and a graph layer), you can match your specific applications to the best data model. Running less infrastructure reduces your organization’s operational and technical overhead.
The source for FoundationDB is available on Github as of today
https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Is Forming a Team to Design Its Own Chips
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-18/facebook-is-forming-a-team-to-design-its-own-chips
Social network could use semiconductors for consumer devices
Move follows Apple’s chip efforts, early work by Google
Tomi Engdahl says:
Timescale is leading the next wave of NYC database tech
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/21/timescale-db/?utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=facebook
Unsurprisingly, the city’s hunger for data has led to waves of database companies finding their home in the city.
As web applications became increasingly popular in the mid-aughts, SQL databases came under increasing strain to scale, while also proving to be inflexible in terms of their data schemas for the fast-moving startups they served. That problem spawned Manhattan-based MongoDB, whose flexible “NoSQL” schemas and horizontal scaling capabilities made it the default choice for a generation of startups.
At the same time that the NoSQL movement was hitting its stride, academic researchers and entrepreneurs were exploring how to evolve SQL to scale like its NoSQL competitors, while retaining the kinds of features (joining tables, transactions) that make SQL so convenient for developers.
they realized they would need a real-time database to process the data streams coming in from devices. “There are a lot of time series databases, [so] let’s grab one off the shelf, and then we evaluated a few,” Kulkarni explained. They realized what they needed was a hybrid of SQL and NoSQL
the team decided to build on top of Postgres, a popular open-source SQL database.
In addition, the company opted to make the database fully open source.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD wants to steal more market share with 2nd-generation Ryzen desktop processors
Dean Takahashi@deantak April 19, 2018 8:35 AM
https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/19/amd-wants-to-steal-more-market-share-with-2nd-generation-ryzen-desktop-processors/
Advanced Micro Devices is launching its second-generation Ryzen desktop chips today with the goal of addressing a much larger swath of the PC processor market.
With the launch of its Zen-based processors in 2017, Advanced Micro Devices saw a rare gain in market share — from 8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 to 12 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017 — against its arch rival Intel, according to market researcher Mercury Research.
That’s a small dent in the armor of Intel Inside, but it represents some of the biggest gains in years for AMD, whose Zen-based architecture can process 52 percent more instructions per clock than the previous generation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A State of the Hard Drive Address
https://www.ebnonline.com/author.asp?section_id=3226&doc_id=283377
here is no disputing that being a hard-drive vendor is tough today. Solid-state drives (SSD) are eating into market share at an ever-increasing pace, while hard disk drive (HDD) capacity growth has effectively stalled for at least the next two years.
We have reached a major watershed in the storage industry and face the difficulties of finding the road home. Just looking at bottom line data …how much revenue, how many drives … is insufficient to identify even the next two years of industry roadmap. Will SSD take over bulk secondary storage? Will they completely replace enterprise drives? Will mobiles such as tablets move to SSD? Do the numbers even tell the story?
Let’s look at some facts. From 2010 to 3Q 2017, total HDD quarterly shipments have steadily fallen from around 170 million units to about 100 million units. The primary cause of this is HDD replacement by flash solutions. Market segments are unevenly hit.
Enterprise drives, for years the gold mine of the industry, have lost ground quite rapidly, since SSD prices and HDD prices in this class have been close for some years. The much higher performance of the SSD is the deal clincher here. Enterprise HDD declined from 32 million to around 20 million annually. Note that all-flash Arrays also ate into market share for RAID arrays
At the other end of the spectrum, small SSDs own the tablet space.
External hard drives and consumer electronics drives have been stable segments at about 100 million units each over the last 5 years.
The only bright area for HDD is the nearline segment which is up from 36 million units in 2013 to 40 million units in 2017.
We can expect the downward trend to continue.
Nearline storage will come under serious price pressure as die costs fall and as QLC (a 40% increase in per-die capacity) and 3D NAND both mature. Moreover, the fact that 100 terabyte (TB) SSDs are announced for mid-2018 delivery means that SSDs will have a 5x capacity per box advantage over the 14TB drives that lead the HDD pack.
Technology
In the context of hard drives, technology means either HAMR (Seagate) or MAMR (WD). Both approaches seek to soften the magnetic surface in a tiny are to make writing the bit easier and to shrink bit size. HAMR uses a laser on the recording head, while MAMR applies microwaves.
Both techniques are difficult to design, never mind build in huge quantities, leading to delays getting to market. 2018/2019 is the current bet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How open source databases are sucking revenue out of legacy vendors’ pockets
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-open-source-databases-are-sucking-revenue-out-of-legacy-vendors-pockets/
Open source databases have ballooned into a $2.6 billion market, but it’s all the money that is not being paid for them that will cause the most hurt.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Zac Bowden / Windows Central:
Sources: Microsoft is working on a new edition of Windows 10, codenamed Lean, that is 2GB smaller than the normal edition, aimed at devices with 16GB storage — Windows 10 Lean is Windows 10 on a diet. Featuring a much smaller footprint, Windows 10 Lean is designed for devices with 16GB …
Windows 10 ‘Lean’ is a smaller edition of Windows 10 for devices with 16GB of storage
https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-10-lean-smaller-edition-windows-10-devices-16gb-storage
Microsoft is working on a new edition of Windows 10 that Microsoft internally calls ‘Windows 10 Lean’ that, once installed, is a whole 2GB’s smaller in size compared to a normal edition of Windows 10 like Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro. This SKU was first spotted on Twitter thanks to its inclusion in the latest Redstone 5 preview build, but with no official announcement from Microsoft detailing what this new edition of Windows 10 is for, I decided to do some digging.
Windows 10 Lean is Windows 10 on a diet. Featuring a much smaller footprint, Windows 10 Lean is designed for devices with 16GB of storage and ensures those devices can remain up to date.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sui-Lee Wee / New York Times:
A look at China’s “programmer motivators”, attractive women hired at tech firms to chat up, fan, and calm male coders, as well as give massages to ease stress
Wanted at Chinese Start-Ups: Attractive Women to Ease Coders’ Stress
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/business/china-women-technology.html
China’s vibrant technology scene is searching for people like Shen Yue. Qualifications: Must be attractive, know how to charm socially awkward programmers and give relaxing massages.
Ms. Shen is a “programmer motivator,” as they are known in China. Part psychologist, part cheerleader, the women are hired to chat up and calm stressed-out coders. The jobs are proliferating in a society that largely adheres to gender stereotypes and believes that male programmers are “zhai,” or nerds who have no social lives.
“They really need someone to talk to them from time to time and to organize activities for them to ease some of the pressure,” said Ms. Shen, a 25-year-old who has a degree in civil engineering from a university in Beijing.
While China’s tech scene has produced companies that rival Facebook, Google and Amazon in power and wealth, the work culture in many ways trails even bro-dominated Silicon Valley.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Released, This is What’s New
Lots of changes to lust after in latest long-term support release
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/04/ubuntu-18-04-download-release-features
But before you rush off to download a copy be sure to swt up on all the new Ubuntu 18.04 features, changes and improvements this release brings – because honestly there are there a lot of changes.o
Codenamed ‘Bionic Beaver’, the Ubuntu 18.04 release is the first long-term support edition of the popular Linux-based Ubuntu operating system in two years. It comes with 5 years of support and updates from Canonical.
Which is huge — you won’t have to upgrade again until well into the next decade!
New Ubuntu 18.04 features include the GNOME Shell desktop, a slate of updated software, and a promising preview of next-gen open source technology Wayland.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel shares surge 7% on earnings beat, strong outlook
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/intel-shares-surge-8-on-earnings-beat-strong-outlook-2018-04-26
Data-center revenue soars, PC-based sales show surprise gain
ntel Corp. shares rallied in the extended session Thursday after the chip maker’s quarterly results and outlook topped Wall Street estimates and sales to data centers came in stronger than expected.
Intel INTC, +2.28% shares rallied 7% after hours, following a 3.3% gain to close at $53.05 in the regular session. The strong results follow similarly positive reports from chip makers Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD, +1.90% and Qualcomm Inc. QCOM, +0.93% . Strength in the chip space is sorely needed given that the PHLX Semiconductor Index SOX, -0.04% has struggled recently to maintain gains for the year. The SOX index closed at a 1.2% gain for 2018 following a 2.1% advance Thursday.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The next major Windows 10 update is launching on Monday
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/27/the-next-major-windows-update-will-launch-on-monday/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
After a brief delay (though Microsoft won’t confirm or deny this), Microsoft today announced that the Windows 10 April 2018 Update will be available as a free download to users worldwide on Monday, April 30, with the broader rollout starting May 8.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Do-it-yourself vs. Red Hat OpenStack Platform
https://verticalindustriesblog.redhat.com/do-it-yourself-vs-red-hat-openstack-platform/?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
The beauty of open source software is that anyone can download the code and then install, configure and use it. The challenge is doing so in a production environment at scale. That’s what communications service providers (CSPs) face as they build out platforms at scale to operate cloud environments that serve millions of users. These cloud platforms include compute, networking and storage hardware as well as software to automate, manage, monitor and secure the platform.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Who’s Firing? (Qualcomm, GoPro, and IBM—Again) Who’s Hiring? (Facebook, Apple, Amazon)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/whos-firing-qualcomm-gopro-and-ibmagain-whos-hiring-facebook-apple-amazon
Tomi Engdahl says:
CPU utilization is wrong
https://opensource.com/article/18/4/cpu-utilization-wrong?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
Everyone uses %CPU to measure performance, but everyone is wrong, says Netflix’s Brendan Gregg in his UpSCALE Lightning Talk
In his Lightning Talk, “CPU Utilization is Wrong,” Brendan explains what CPU utilization means—and doesn’t mean—about performance and shares the open source tools he uses to identify reasons for bottlenecks and tune Netflix’s systems. He also includes a mysterious case study that’s relevant to everyone in 2018.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s new open-source tech turns iPads, Surface Pros into big touchscreen
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-new-open-source-tech-turns-ipads-surface-pros-into-big-touchscreen/
Microsoft reveals modular mobile system for multi-player games, analytics, air-traffic control, and trading-desks.
Microsoft has released open-source hardware designs and software for a new semi-rigid modular mobile system called SurfaceConstellations
The designs, developed by engineers at Microsoft Research and University College London, offer a way to tailor multi-screen workspaces using 3D printed brackets, multiple tablets, and ‘link modules’ that coordinate information between the connected devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Fall of Eclipse
https://movingfulcrum.com/the-fall-of-eclipse/
How did the once King of Java IDEs get here?
If there is one single point in time that can be attributed to the demise of Eclipse, its the launch of Eclipse 4.
Eclipse was tiding along nicely during the Eclipse 3.x era
Eclipse 3.x was a fast, native looking IDE adding useful features on each release. Intellij’s Swing based UI was having a tough time keeping up with the native widgets of Eclipse. With Eclipse 4, all that took a U-turn. We had a super slow, buggy and plain ugly UI.
Not a product
Eclipse.org always seemed more interested in promoting the Eclipse Foundation than the IDE. The website feels like a collection of independent projects which are not maintained.
Ugly as sin
Bitter but true.
Ever since Eclipse 4, the Eclipse UI took a turn for the ugly. The awful coloring of the toolbar, the terrible looking icons with jagged edges, dark theme that gave you a seizure, no support for retina display (until very recently). Combine this with an unmaintained website stuck in 2000s, the ugly bugzilla bug tracker, the mailing lists where noone talks.
Every time you were using Eclipse, you felt that the only reason for doing so was because you were too poor to afford Intellij.
Intellij Community Edition
All that said, Eclipse JDT remained a solid IDE for pure Java development and the go-to choice for students and open source projects looking for a free IDE.
This was killed by the launch of Intellij Community Edition.
Intellij Community and the free Android Studio meant that you literally had no reason to use Eclipse any longer for Java. You had a better IDE, and it was free.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5 Eclipse tools for processing and visualizing data
https://opensource.com/education/16/4/5-great-eclipse-scientific-workbenches?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
Gone are the days of scientists processing data by hand. Scientific tools are rapidly scaling to meet the increasing demands of their users, both in terms of complexity and sheer volumes of data.
In various domains, highly sophisticated scientific workbenches have been developed to enable scientists and researchers to quickly make sense of their data in a reproducible way. Several scientific workbenches have been built on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) framework and offer up open source environments for processing and visualizing data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
First Big Steps Toward Proving the Unique Games Conjecture By ERICA KLARREICH
April 24, 2018
https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-close-in-on-unique-games-conjecture-proof-20180424/
The latest in a new series of proofs brings theoretical computer scientists within striking distance of one of the great conjectures of their discipline.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open Sourcing Encryption in Transit for Redis
https://aws.amazon.com/cn/blogs/opensource/open-sourcing-encryption-in-transit-redis/?sc_channel=sm&sc_campaign=Open_Source&sc_publisher=TWITTER&sc_country=Global&sc_geo=GLOBAL&sc_outcome=adoption&trk=_TWITTER&sc_content=blog&linkId=50950777
Amazon Web Services announced today at redisconf that it is open sourcing encryption-in-transit for Redis, the leading in-memory key-value data store. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis added the encryption-in-transit feature last year to help our customers encrypt their Redis data sets and satisfy compliance requirements.
Tomi Engdahl says:
7 Awesome Open Source Analytics Software For Linux and Unix
https://www.cyberciti.biz/open-source/7-awesome-open-source-analytics-weblog-analysis-softwares/
Tomi Engdahl says:
5 Important Steps to Survive an IT Emergency
https://blog.paessler.com/5-important-steps-to-survive-an-it-emergency?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=%23B107_Content_Push_2018_04_AllGeos_Link_Ads_Survive+an_IT_Emergency&utm_content=surviveitemergency&hs_fb_account_id=2004489912909367&hs_fb_campaign_id=23842864367280129&hs_fb_adset_id=23842864367510129&hs_fb_ad_id=23842864367900129&hs_parent_creative_id=23842864367520129&source=fb
Tomi Engdahl says:
Things have gotten messy, haven’t they?
https://frankchimero.com/writing/everything-easy-is-hard-again/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Developer Survey Results
2018
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-platforms
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to share files between Linux and Windows
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3269189/linux/sharing-files-between-linux-and-windows.html
Sharing files between Linux and Windows systems is surprisingly easy with some fine accommodations from the Linux community. Let’s look at two very different ways to make this happen.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shelly Banjo / Bloomberg:
A look at the frenzy to hire young talent in the Chinese tech industry, where three-quarters of tech workers are younger than 30 and age discrimination is legal
Over 30? You’re Too Old for Tech Jobs in China
If you’re over 30, don’t bother applying.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-02/china-s-tech-industry-wants-youth-not-experience
Tomi Engdahl says:
Opinion: AMD the underdog bites back, as Intel and Qualcomm struggle in their own ways
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amd-the-underdog-bites-back-as-intel-and-qualcomm-struggle-in-their-own-ways-2018-05-01
The chip companies’ quarterly reports show a divergent path: AMD is growing quickly, Intel is trying to kick-start innovation, and Qualcomm is bogged down in licensing deals
U.S. chip companies Advanced Micro Devices, Intel and Qualcomm last week reported first-quarter earnings, and each had drastically different results and outlooks. They’re on divergent paths, attempting to redefine themselves with varying levels and rates of success.
Let’s break them down.
Tomi Engdahl says:
GIMP 2.10 Officially Released as the Biggest Release Ever, Here’s What’s New
Now available to download for Linux and Windows systems
https://news.softpedia.com/news/gimp-2-10-officially-released-as-the-biggest-release-ever-here-s-what-s-new-520889.shtml
Six years after the release of GIMP 2.8 (yes, time flies when you’re having fun), the GIMP 2.10 open-source and cross-platform image editor and viewer application was officially announced on Friday.
GIMP aims to be the Photoshop alternative for the masses, and it does a very good job at that. The application is usually used by users of open source operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD, but it’s also heavily used by Windows users.
The latest release, GIMP 2.10, is the biggest yet, bringing so many changes that it would be impossible for us to list them all here. Instead, we’ll have a look at the most prominent ones, which include multi-threaded, high bit depth, and hardware accelerated pixel processing.
This is possible thanks to the GEGL porting of the image processing engine inside GIMP, which can now do a lot more than that. Also ported to GEGL (Generic Graphics Library) is the on-canvas preview for all filters that ship by default with GIMP 2.10.
Another interesting change in this release is that color management is now a core feature of GIMP. Also, most preview areas and widgets are now color-managed. Many tools have been improved as well in GIMP 2.10, including Handle transform, Warp transform, and Unified transform tools.
“Basic HiDPI support, new themes, and more”
Basic support for HiDPI (High Dots Per Inch) displays is now provided in GIMP, allowing for automatic or user-selected icon sizes.
Among other noteworthy changes implemented in GIMP 2.10, we can mention support for a handful of new image formats like OpenEXR, WebP, HGT, and RGBE, improved support for numerous existing image formats, much-better PSD importing, as well as editing and viewing of XMP, Exif, DICOM, and IPTC metadata.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Watching the eye became part of the USB standard
For years, the Swedish Tobii Technology has developed a technology that allows different devices to be controlled by the gaze. Now, technology is becoming easier to use when it is accepted into USB standards.
Tobii has, together with Microsoft, Intel and Eyetech DS, developed a USB standard for eye tracking. This makes it possible to use these eye tracking devices with many other standardized USB devices, such as a mouse, keyboard, touch pad, or many more.
It is a USB HID add-on, that is, a protocol that defines the communication between the device to be connected and the host computer. When the connection protocol is part of a generic standard, the next slate can be attached to a PC – or other standard-supporting device – in the pllug-and-play type.
For example, Tobii has developed a device for controlling the tablet without hands. In addition, the company’s technology has implemented Linux-based smart laptops that are capable of tracking the user’s eyesight.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/7942-silman-seuraaminen-tuli-osaksi-usb-standardia
Tomi Engdahl says:
The tablet is shrinking in the dropping market
Tablet computers have already been declared dead. Perhaps the news is premature, but IDC’s recent figures show that the market is slowly falling off. The only bright spot on the market is the sale of Chrome OS-based tablets.
According to IDC, 31.7 million tablets were sold in January-March. The figure is 11.7 per cent lower than a year earlier.
According to IDC, Apple’s iPad Pro and Microsoft Surface were on the rise. The traditional Android tablet, on the other hand, is in trouble. In the case of fish pats, the price is competing to a minimum, and the devices still do not seem like buyers of interest.
The entry of Chrome OS tablets on the market by IDC is a refreshing change.
Apple had a 28.8 percent market share
Samsung’s second-largest market share remained unchanged at 16.7 percent, but the number of equipment deliveries fell to 5.3 million. Huawei increased its figures in a third of the list (10 percent)
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php/13-news/7956-tabletti-kituuttaa-kuihtuvilla-markkinoilla
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gaming addiction classified as disorder by WHO
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42541404
Tomi Engdahl says:
Programmers are having a huge debate over whether they should be required to behave respectfully to each other
http://nordic.businessinsider.com/programmers-debate-requirements-to-behave-respectfully-ccoc-2018-5?r=US&IR=T
A programmer publicly quit a large and popular open-source project earlier this week.
His reason? He was opposed to the project having a Community Code of Conduct that insists all people are welcome and are to be treated with respect.
The CCoC has become a battleground for programmers these days.
Yet even the CEO of the world’s largest open source, Linux company, Red Hat, tells us that the open source world has got to learn to be nicer.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel hits a wall on Moore’s Law; growth in computing power finally slows
http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2018/05/intel_hits_a_wall_on_moores_la.html
Intel has been pushing the laws of physics for years. Now, physics is pushing back.
The chipmaker has again delayed the rollout of its 10-nanometer technology, the next generation of smaller, smarter, faster microprocessors. Originally expected in 2015, Intel now says the chips won’t be widely available before 2019 – and maybe not until late in the year.
A high percentage of the 10nm chips – produced at Intel’s Hillsboro research factories — are plagued with defects that render them useless. As chip features shrink to scales measured in just a few atoms, manufacturing techniques have proven unable to keep up with the rapid pace of advancement Intel has always promised.
Moore’s Law has hit a wall.
Tomi Engdahl says:
14TB hard disk from Toshiba
http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/7966-14-teratavun-levy-tarvitsi-heliumia
Tomi Engdahl says:
How the EU’s Copyright Reform Threatens Open Source—and How to Fight It
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/how-eus-copyright-reform-threatens-open-source-and-how-fight-it?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
Open source is under attack from new EU copyright laws.
Open Source and copyright are intimately related. It was Richard Stallman’s clever hack of copyright law that created the General Public License (GPL) and, thus, free software. The GPL requires those who copy or modify software released under it to pass on the four freedoms. If they don’t, they break the terms of the GPL and lose legal protection for their copies and modifications. In other words, the harsh penalties for copyright infringement are used to ensure that people can share freely.
Despite the use of copyright law to police the GPL and all the other open source licenses, copyright is not usually so benign. That’s not surprising: copyright is an intellectual monopoly. In general, it seeks to prevent sharing—not to promote it. As a result, the ambitions of the copyright industry tend to work against the aspirations of the Open Source world.
One of the clearest demonstrations of the indifference of the copyright world to the concerns of the Free Software community can be found in Europe.
Translated into practical terms, this means that sites with major holdings of material uploaded by users will be required to filter everything before allowing it to be posted. The problems with this idea are evident. It represents constant surveillance of people’s online activities on these sites, with all that this implies for loss of privacy. False positives are inevitable, not least because the complexities of copyright law cannot be reduced to a few algorithmic rules that can be applied automatically. That, and the chilling effect it will have on people’s desire to upload material, will have a negative impact on freedom of expression and undermine the public domain.
The high cost of implementing upload filters—Google’s ContentID system required 50,000 hours of coding and $60 million to build—means that a few big companies will end up controlling the market for censorship systems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Qualcomm Plans Exit From Server Chips
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-07/qualcomm-is-said-to-plan-exit-from-server-chips-amid-cost-cuts
Qualcomm Inc., the biggest maker of mobile-phone chips, is preparing to give up its push to develop processors for data-center servers, an effort that sought to break Intel Corp.’s hold on the lucrative market, according to a person familiar with the company’s plans.
The San Diego-based company is exploring whether to shutter the unit or look for a new owner for the division, which was working on ways to get technology from ARM Holdings Plc into the market for chips that are at the heart of servers, the person said. ARM is one of Intel’s only rivals in developing semiconductor designs, and its architecture is primarily used in less power-intensive products, such as smartphones.
Qualcomm is the largest backer of an effort to find a role for ARM designs in the highest end of the computing market, where individual chips sell for multiple thousands of dollars. Chipmakers have been trying for years to provide owners of large data centers – companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services – with processors to run them, trying to break into a business that Intel dominates with about 99 percent market share.
While abandoning the effort would save Qualcomm the expense of designing some of the most expensive chips that the semiconductor industry produces, it would also be a retreat from the company’s goal of becoming less dependent on the slowing market for mobile-phone parts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s most popular SQL Server product of all time runs on Linux
Yes, you read that right
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/08/microsoft_linux_sql_server/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, GNOME is back—and Ubuntu has never been better
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/ubuntu-18-04-the-return-of-a-familiar-interface-marks-the-best-ubuntu-in-years/
Server users will really like 18.04, but the newest Ubuntu works great for all Linux fans.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to Revive an Old Laptop by Adding a Dock to Run It from Your Smartphone
https://blog.hackster.io/how-to-revive-an-old-laptop-by-adding-a-dock-to-run-it-from-your-smartphone-e19f3ea1d7d6
For most people, the only thing to do with an outdated or broken laptop is throw it away or donate it. Consequently, there is a practically unending supply of old laptops out there that you can get for little or no money. Fortunately, as Cmcinhk shows in this great tutorial, you can bring them back to life using your smartphone.
just about everyone has a surprisingly powerful smartphone that they carry with them at all times. With a bit of electronics know-how and elbow grease, you can take advantage of that fact to make an old laptop useful again. Cmcinhk’s method was tested with an Android phone
The first step is to completely gut the laptop of everything except the LCD. Then you can get the LCD working again by ordering an LCD controller, and connecting it to your phone through a USB-to-HDMI Displaylink adapter.
After that, it’s just a matter of using apps to setup your phone so it acts like a desktop. Depending on how far you want to go with that, you may need to root your phone.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Wayback Machine for Source Code
https://undark.org/article/software-heritage-source-code-archive/
Modern digital life relies on layers of shared and dependent code that is, over time, vulnerable to deletions. Will an archive help?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s obsession with Windows is ending, and I couldn’t be happier
Commentary: It’s all about AI and the web now.
https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-obsession-with-windows-is-ending-and-i-couldnt-be-happier-build-2018-google-io-f8/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0b&linkId=51659878
It was sort of like Where’s Waldo. Except I was thinking “Where’s Windows?”
Microsoft’s three-and-a-half hour opening keynote on Monday
the word “Windows” was mentioned just a little more than a dozen times.
It was even worse for “PC.” That term came up a whopping seven times
What we do care about is AI and the web. Or we will very soon.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rich Woods / Neowin:
Ubuntu will soon be available for ARM64-powered Windows devices, a year after being made available for x64 devices in the Microsoft Store — It was this time last year that Microsoft announced that it was bringing Ubuntu to the Windows Store (now the Microsoft Store), along with other Linux distributions.
Microsoft is bringing Ubuntu Linux to Windows 10 on ARM
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-bringing-ubuntu-linux-to-windows-10-on-arm
It was this time last year that Microsoft announced that it was bringing Ubuntu to the Windows Store (now the Microsoft Store), along with other Linux distributions. If you check out the app in the Store now though, you’ll find that it only works on x64 devices, meaning that you can’t run it on any of the new Windows 10 on ARM PCs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
For the sake of productivity, developers need to learn to say “no”
https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2018/05/13/for-the-sake-of-productivity-developers-need-to-learn-to-say-no/
Whoever coined the mantra ‘The customer is always right’ has never tried to undertake development tasks for clients with grandiose ideas, but zero technical background.
Nowadays, every company might be a software company, but not everyone knows how to effectively manage software development projects. But give them the option, and they will sure as hell try.
Here are three reasons why to get the best results for your clients for development projects, you need to learn how to say no:
1. Not all clients are a good fit for your team
2. Clients are paying for you to be an expert, not a ‘yes man’
3. There is such thing as too much and too little client involvement
Before lean methodologies became popular, it was far too common for companies to spend up to three years on development projects, only to realize that the finished product didn’t actually meet their goals. I believe that when using sprints, there’s no reason that you can’t have a functioning piece of software within three months. But running effective sprints requires our clients to be involved in the process from start to finish.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The State of .NET
in 2018
https://www.telerik.com/campaigns/devcraft/wp-net-standard-2?utm_medium=social-paid&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=devcraft-whitepaper-netstandard2&utm_content=interests-image-only
It has been 17 years since the first beta of the .NET Framework was released and a lot has changed in the world of application development since then. Let’s unpack the new, reinvented .NET Framework, and see how the new .NET standard can make you a better developer.
The Microsoft ecosystem is getting increasingly more open and platform-agnostic
Tomi Engdahl says:
Testing in production: Yes, you can (and should)
https://opensource.com/article/17/8/testing-production?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
Why does testing in production get such a bad rap when we all do it? The key is to do it right.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is serverless the next phase of cloud-native application development?
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/serverless-next-phase-cloud-native-application-development?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
Serverless computing is an emerging category that represents a shift in the way developers build and deliver software systems. By abstracting application infrastructure away from the code, it can greatly simplify the development process while introducing new cost and efficiency benefits. We believe serverless computing and Function-as-a-Service will play an important role in helping to define the next era of enterprise IT, along with cloud-native services and the hybrid cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Social & Collaboration
https://pusher.com/use-cases/social-and-collaboration?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=nodjs-campaign&utm_term=social
Social features that update in realtime can be complicated to build and especially to scale. With Pusher, it’s easy to create activity feeds that update in realtime for your new social network, live comments and interactions for a sports event or a poll that updates the results in realtime. We host and scale realtime connections while you focus on building your product.
Free alternative:
Laravel Echo Server
https://github.com/tlaverdure/laravel-echo-server
NodeJs server for Laravel Echo broadcasting with Socket.io.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Where Kubernetes Is Headed and Why Boring Is Good
https://mobile.serverwatch.com/server-news/where-kubernetes-is-headed-and-why-boring-is-good.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.siili.com/fi/tarinat/ketteraa-ohjelmistokehitysta-ei-kannata-pelata-0?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=content