Author: Nick Farrell

Windows on subscription gets closer

Posted on February 10, 2015 by - News

windows-10-technical-preview-turquoiseMicrosoft seems to be moving closer to the idea that its Windows operating system will be sold using a subscription as a service.

The subscription, much like Office 365, will be paid once a year but appeared to have been abandoned when Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will be free, for anyone upgrading from Windows 7 or 8.

Even though Microsoft has not fully detailed its Windows 10 pricing strategy, it recently filed for a trademark for ‘Windows 365’, which adds a bit of fuel to the subscription based version of Windows.

A trademark might have been lodged to stop other people using it, but when Microsoft does announce a subscription version of Windows, ‘Windows 365″ would likely be the name.

So far, there has been no sign that Redmond is rushing to release ‘Windows 365’ in the immediate future, as it is pushing Windows 10 at every possible instance. For now, know that Microsoft has claimed this branding right, it could be something seen in the future.

 

Google gets Glass customer

Posted on February 10, 2015 by - News

Joe_90_(TV)Even if the project has been mothballed, Google has found a partner for its Glass project.

Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport in the Netherlands, is trialling Google Glass for use by airport authority officers as a hands-free way to look up gate and airplane information.

Apparently its security officers are testing Google’s wearable computer on travellers passing through the terminal in a bid to better understand the ‘customer journey’.

What this suggests is that the project is never going to be mass market, but will have a function for niche industrial and service industry applications.

Google pulled ‘Glass for the masses’ when it shuttered its Glass Explorer program last month.

The airport started its trial of Glass last month, and has developed a Glass app which lets staff ask the device for gate or aircraft data and have the results displayed via the headset or on their smartphone. The airport hopes to measure the placement distance of barriers on the taxiway just by looking at them, rather than officers having to take measurements manually.

The airport is not committed to Glass beyond trialling it at this point. Any decision about whether the face computers will become a permanent fixture on staff will be taken next year, it said.

 

Intel thinks it has Apple by the short and curlies

Posted on February 9, 2015 by - News

Intel Q4_14_ResultsIt is rare that a company claims to have control of Apple, but it seems that Intel believes that it has Jobs’ Mob wrapped around its little finger.

After ten years working with Apple, there are rumours that Jobs’ Mob is considering ditching Chipzilla and will start making its own Mac chips.  After all Apple already creates its own chips for the iPhone and iPad based on designs from ARM and then has manufacturers like Samsung build them.

The Tame Apple Press thinks that eventually Apple’s ARM chips will be so powerful, Apple won’t need Intel anymore.

But in an interview with Business Insider, Intel’s CFO Stacy Smith brushed off those concerns and  claimed that Intel is so far ahead of the competition when it comes to PC processors that Apple – and just about every other PC maker – has no choice but to use Intel chips.

Smith said that Apple was a  “great partner of ours” and like Intel they like bringing really cool stuff to the market.

Intel’s leadership over the rest of the industry is extending. We’re not delayed relative to the industry. Intel is ahead of the industry, Smith said.

For Jobs Mob that means that if it abandons Intel it will have to lose lots of performance in its new Macs.

Intel thinks that Apple customers would have to take such a big step off performance if Jobs’ Mob abandoned Intel it is not worth it.

Of course, Smith fails to understand that if Apple decided to walk away from Intel, it would simply tell its customers its solution was better and the Tame Apple Press would agree with it. Apple has never been about performance, it has always been about the design and the Apple logo.

 

 

Adblock Plus asks for “security” money

Posted on February 9, 2015 by - News

shut-up-and-take-my-moneyThere have been howls of derision on the interwebs after it was revealed that ad-blocking browser Adblock Plus  has been paid off by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Taboola.

What appeared to have been a brilliant bit of software which kept adverts out of your browser, has turned into something of a debacle.

PC Mag said that  that one digital media company, which asked not to be named, said Eyeo had asked for a fee equivalent to 30 percent of the additional ad revenues that it would make from being unblocked.

What this means is that all you need to do to make a bit of dosh is write an ad-blocking code, it does not even have to work that well, and show up at the Big IT companies and say: “That is a nice bit of advertising, it would be terrible if something happened to it” and collect your cheque.

PC Mag ummed and ahed about how advertising drives the free Web and sites were not staying in business long these days, but the fact that you have to pay people who write anti-advertising software to look the other way does strike us as the central part of the story.

What this means is that the big companies who can afford to pay,  can run adverts while the smaller magazines will see their sites blocked.  In short the big guys win and the little sites are stuffed.

Motorola Solutions thinks selling itself is the solution

Posted on February 9, 2015 by - News

motorola-solutions-partner-expoWalkie-talkie and radio systems maker Motorola Solutions is looking into a possible sale.

According to Bloomberg, potential buyers could include private equity firms and defence contractors including Raytheon, Honeywell and General Dynamics.

The 87-year-old company is working with financial advisers as it looks for a buyer.

We are not holding our breath. The sale process has been going on for several months, and a deal isn’t on the immediate horizon.

Motorola  was split up four years ago into Motorola Solutions and a handset unit after a campaign by billionaire Carl Icahn. The handset business was sold to Google which then sold most of it to Lenovo.

Things are not going that well for Motorola Solutions. It has poor earnings performance, with 2014 earnings dropping 33 percent as sales declined six percent. The outlook for this year remains stagnant — the company projects 2015 revenue will be flat to slightly lower.

In other words, Motorola probably should not have listened to Icahn. Lenovo is doing well with the bits of the company it bought and saw its bottom line grow because of its investment.

 

TSMC flees Chinese unions

Posted on February 9, 2015 by - News

tsmcTSMC is set to invest US$15.8 billion in the Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP).

The outfit is set to start building its 18-inch wafer foundry in March which will apply the 10 nanometre manufacturing process with a target for mass production in 2017.

However the location of the plant, away from mainland China has raised an eyebrow or two.

Last year the BBC ran a yarn about how China’s labour unions were getting antsy at Apple’s broken promises on work conditions.

Apple’s response to the BBC’s report at the time was that it strongly disagreed: “We are aware of no other company doing as much as Apple to ensure fair and safe working conditions. We work with suppliers to address shortfalls, and we see continuous and significant improvement, but we know our work is never done.”

However, another news site in China is reporting that “in response to the growing criticism of Foxconn’s treatment of its employees, the company has invited its critics to visit its production bases to get a better understanding of its operations”. During the visit, the critics could also talk to the employees to hear their views,” Foxconn said.

But it is starting to look like another row is flaring up between Foxconn via the labour unions – this time  it is about overtime. It seems that there has been a rash of suicides at its plant, and the unions are blaming them on the overtime.

So it does seem that Foxconn is avoiding any conflict with the Chinese unions getting in the way of its relationship with Apple by shifting its new plant to Taiwan.

 

ARM buys OffSpark

Posted on February 9, 2015 by - News

lightningBritish chip designer ARM has bought Dutch firm Offspark, which is an open source security software outfit.

It is all part of ARM’s cunning plan to make chips for the internet of things.  It seems that the move by Intel to buy McAfee is starting to make some sense and ARM is seeing the wisdom of having inhouse security software.

Offspark’s PolarSSL technology is designed for sensor modules, communication modules and smartphones.

ARM said buying the group would add its security and software cryptography to its IoT platform, designed to link billions of devices online.

It is not clear how much ARM paid for the security outfit. ARM has promised that the  technology will remain open source and will be made available to developers for commercial use.

It complements ARM’s Cryptobox technology of mbed OS that enables secure execution and storage.

Apparently ARM is to  release mbed OS under an Apache 2.0 licence which will include mbed TLS, Thread, and other key technologies toward the end of 2015.

The release of mbed TLS 1.3.10 is now available under GPL and to existing PolarSSL customers on polarssl.org.

 

SEC investigates Blackberry deals

Posted on February 6, 2015 by - News

watchdogWatchdogs  for the US Securities and Exchange Commission are snuffling around the rump of a January 14 spike in trading in BlackBerry options that took place hours before Reuters reported that Samsung Electronics was in talks to buy the Canadian smartphone maker.

One trade took place at 12:06 p.m. on that day, when there was a purchase of options with the rights to buy 200,000 shares of BlackBerry stock at a strike price of $10 a share.

In the afternoon, Reuters reported that Samsung had offered to buy BlackBerry for as much as $7.5 billion, valuing its stock at between $13.35 to $15.49 per share.

BlackBerry’s stock shot up 30 percent on the news meaning that someone was laughing all the way to the bank. If the buyer had been able to sell the options at that high they would have been able to make a profit of $490,000 on a $20,000 investment.

Both companies later denied they were in talks and BlackBerry’s shares tumbled. Reuters subsequently corrected its story to make clear that the discussions were between advisors.

Radio Shack goes bankrupt

Posted on February 6, 2015 by - News

1980-radio-shack-catalogAs we predicted, a century after it opened its first store and sent out its first catalogue, RadioShack (RSHC) has declared bankruptcy.

In its final hours it struck a deal to sell up to 2,400 of its approximately 4,000 stores and wireless company Sprint (S) will create a “store within a store” in up to 1,750 of those.

What is left will be shut.

RadioShack’s franchise locations, as well as stores in Mexico and Asia, are not included in any deals and it is not clear what their future will be.

RadioShack products, services and accessories will still be available at the approximately 1,750 stores where Sprint will open shop. In fact, Sprint will occupy just one third of those locations, where it will sell devices and plans.

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)  suspended trading of Radio Shack shares on Monday. And RadioShack (RSHC)workers have told CNNMoney that some locations have already been converted to clearance stores.

Closing stores is expensive, due to the cost of redundancy, liquidating merchandise and paying penalties to get out of leases and the outfit has been too broke to close them.

Last March, the company wanted to close about 1,100 stores, but it was only able to close 175 stores through the end of October.

RadioShack has come a long way since the days it could brag about its vast retail network, saying that 90 per cent of Americans lived or worked within a few minutes of a RadioShack location.

Ironically, the Internet and Online shopping helped kill the outfit off – making all those stores an albatross.

RadioShack goes back to 1921, when it opened a store and mail-order operation in Boston to serve the needs of radio officers aboard ships. It was bought in 1963 by Tandy Corporation, a retailer that started as a supplier of leather parts to shoe repair shops.

RadioShack introduced one of the first mass-market personal computers, the TRS-80, in 1977, and one of the first laptops, the Model 100, in 1983. It also was an early seller of both mobile phones and satellite TV.

Coca-Cola quotes Hitler

Posted on February 6, 2015 by - News

coca-cola_olympic_games_in_berlin_1936Coca-Cola has been forced to withdraw a Twitter advertising campaign after a counter campaign tricked it into tweeting large chunks of the introduction to Hitler’s getting to know you book Mein Kampf.

Marketeers thought that the campaign dubbed “Make it Happy” during the Super Bowl, Coke invited people to reply to negative tweets with the hashtag “#MakeItHappy”.

The idea was that an automatic algorithm would then convert the tweets, using an encoding system called ASCII, into pictures of happy things – such as an fluffy mouse, a palm tree wearing sunglasses or a chicken drumstick wearing a cowboy hat.

Apparently, this was going to make people want to drink some sweet brown liquid with bubbles in it which can also be used to clean toilets.

In a press release, Coca-Cola said its aim was to “tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media feeds and comment threads across the internet”.

Gawker editorial labs director, Adam Pash, created a Twitter bot, @MeinCoke, and set it up to tweet lines from Mein Kampf and then link to them with the #MakeItHappy tag – triggering Coca-Cola’s own Twitter bot to turn them into cutesy pictures.

For two hours on Coca-Cola’s Twitter feed was broadcasting big chunks of Adolf Hitler’s text, albeit built in the form of a smiling banana or a cat playing a drum kit.

Gawker managed to quote the words “My father was a civil servant who fulfilled his duty very conscientiously” in the shape of a pirate ship with a face on its sails – wearing an eyepatch – before Coca-Cola’s account shut down.

In a statement to AdWeek, a spokesperson for Coca-Cola said: “The #MakeItHappy message is simple: the internet is what we make it, and we hoped to inspire people to make it a more positive place. It’s unfortunate that Gawker is trying to turn this campaign into something that it isn’t.”

The statement concluded: “Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign.”

 

 

Cisco promises partners a sticky end

Posted on February 6, 2015 by - News

 honey1Cisco Systems executives have been promising their channel partners that its Cisco ONE Software Suite will be stickier than a hive of bees who stuck super glue on their feet and went skating on the honey combs.

Cisco ONE (Open Networking Environment) is a software licensing program that provides flexibility for customers to acquire the latest software for infrastructure. Yes, apparently, you can be sticky and flexible at the same time; we looked it up.

The networking supremo appears to be removing the la carte method with separately priced products it has also removed the concept of a software license being tied to hardware.

Under the new system, Cisco ONE covers data centre, WAN and network access software as a subscription. Later this year Cisco ONE will offer perpetual licenses and hearing aids for those who were damaged by Cisco shouting ONE at them all the time.

John Brigden, senior vice president of software strategy and operations for Cisco, said all this means that Cisco is now in the business of flogging “business outcomes” instead of products.

Cisco ONE provides flexibility and drive greater deal sizes as well as more margin incentives through the Value Incentive Program (VIP), OIP, and TIP, he said.

For the channel it prevents multiple sales cycles because it is software tied to maintenance and support with SmartNet brings in a more predictable revenue stream.

“This is very sticky for partners.”

Top encryption software project nearly went under

Posted on February 6, 2015 by - News

Glens_EnigmaA free email encryption software project which was used by whistleblower Edward Snowden nearly went under this week when the bloke behind it ran out of cash.

Koch’s code is behind most of the popular email encryption programs GPGTools, Enigmail, and GPG4Win.  If he packed it in, he would create a nightmare scenario for the security industry.

Werner Koch appealed for cash to keep his Gnu Privacy Guard project going.  He wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.

He has been running the project more or less for free because he believed there was a need to have some sort of open saucy encrypted software.  In 2013 he was all set to pack it in and then the Snowden news broke, and he realised that this was not the time to cancel.

It is not as if the industry has been particularly helpful, despite its dependence on him, the security industry has not been that helpful.

Koch could not raise enough money to pay himself and to fulfill his dream of hiring a full-time programmer. He has been living off $25,000 per year since 2001 — a fraction of what he could earn in private industry. In December, he launched a fundraising campaign that has garnered about $43,000 to date but he needed $137,000 to pay himself a decent salary and hire a full-time developer.

A lifeline was thrown to him this week. He was awarded a one-time grant of $60,000 from Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative. Donations flooded Werner’s website donation page and he reached his funding goal of $137,000. In addition, Facebook and the online payment processor Stripe each pledged to donate $50,000 a year to Koch’s project.

The cash gave Koch, who has an 8-year-old daughter and a wife who isn’t working, some breathing room. But when Propublica  http://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryption-software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke asked him what he will do when the current batch of money runs out, he shrugged and said he prefers not to think about it. “I’m very glad that there is money for the next three months,” Koch said. “Really I am better at programming than this business stuff.”

VMware expands channel programme

Posted on February 5, 2015 by - News

vmware-partner-link-bg-w-logoVMware has announced new programs and other initiatives for its partner network.

The announcement, made at this week’s VMware Partner Exchange 2015, is tied to the outfit’s cunning plan to push “business transformation in the mobile cloud era”.

The VMware Partner Professional Services Programme will let  consulting partners to sell and deliver their own services. Partners will have free access to experienced software-defined data centre architects and experts.   They will also get access to customer-focused labs along with training discounts, the company said.

The scheme is only available to a limited number of pilot partners in the first half of fiscal 2015, the program is expected to expand in the second half of the year.

VMware has been expanding its VMware vCloud Air Network Programme to include managed services opportunities for vCloud Air Network service providers.  This will enable partners to use VMware vCloud Air as their core infrastructure while providing differentiation through their managed services. This gives partners more flexibility in how to build and offer cloud solutions. The new managed services model will be available in the second quarter to qualified service providers.

Javascript grows in popularity

Posted on February 5, 2015 by - News

JavascriptAccording to numbers from RedMonk, a tech-industry analyst firm, while Apple’s development language Swift is growing it has a mountain to climb before it will rival the ever popular Javascript.

The tame Apple Press is doing its best to talk up the rise of Swift, but the real news from RedMonk’s list of the most-used languages survey is that Javascript is continuing to grow like topsy. Swift has risen from obscuring to one of the top 22 languages but given that is two spots below an OS called “groovy” we don’t think it is making that much of a splash.

The top ten are

  1. JavaScript
  2. Java
  3. PHP
  4. Python
  5. C#
  6. C++
  7. Ruby
  8. CSS
  9. C
  10. Objective-C

JavaScript edged Java for the top spot in the rankings, but as always, the difference between the two is so marginal as to be insignificant.

The Top 10 was effectively static. C++ and Ruby jumped each one spot to split fifth place with C#, but that minimal distinction reflects the lack of movement of the rest of the “Tier 1,” or top grouping of languages.

PHP has not shown the ability to unseat either Java or JavaScript, but it has remained unassailable for its part in the third position. After a brief drop in Q1 of 2014, Python has been stable in the fourth spot, and the rest of the Top 10 looks much as it has for several quarters.

In fact rather than Swift, Red Monk predicts that Go is doing the best.  Six months ago it was predicted that it would become a Top 20 language within six to twelve months. Six months following that, Go can consider that mission accomplished. Go jumped over Visual Basic, Clojure and Groovyand displaces Coffeescript entirely – to take number 17 on the list.

Red Monk said that Julia and Rust are the two notable languages to watch, Julia and Rust’s growth has typically been in lockstep, though not for any particular functional reason. This time Rust outpaced Julia, jumping eight spots to 50 against Julia’s more steady progression from 57 to 56.

 

Obama has support for “big data” bill

Posted on February 5, 2015 by - News

Obama BarackIt is looking like President Barack Obama’s “Big Data” privacy plans might get through the Republican controlled Congress.

He has proposed action on a series of laws to address “Big Data” concerns, but most have not gone anywhere when many corporations want to collect data to sell products, and are telling their paid politicians to vote them down.

This was the reason that a proposal to update the outdated Electronic Privacy Communications Act to protect email and other data stored in the cloud died.

However that is starting to change after public concerns over privacy and cybersecurity that have been amplified by high-profile hacking of credit card data at companies such as Target and Home Depot.

First up is a law being put through by Indiana Congressman Luke Messer, the chairman of the House of Representatives Republican Policy Committee, and Democrat Jared Polis of Colorado, an Internet entrepreneur who founded a network of charter schools.

He is pushing a student privacy bill which will stop big corporates collecting data on kids. The lawmakers have worked on the issue with privacy advocates and more than 100 companies including Microsoft, Google and News Corp subsidiary Amplify to develop a privacy pledge to prevent misuse of data collected in classrooms.

The law will make sure that data collected from students is used only for educational and legitimate research purposes.

Obama wants to go further and has proposed a new national standard to require companies to tell consumers within 30 days from the discovery of a data breach that their personal information had been compromised.

However, there are a patchwork of differing state regulations, which might put a spanner in the works.

Obama is also worried about how Big Data could be used to discriminate against people based on race or where they live for housing or jobs.

On Thursday, the White House will release a report on how companies use Big Data to offer different prices to different consumers saying that Big Data techniques have “turbocharged” price discrimination.  Those sorts of laws will hack off the US corporate sponsors of the US political system, and might also die.  But US reports are optimistic that Obama might win that one.