Author: Nick Farrell

Gamergate geeks shocked as their heroes snub them

amazonGamers who have been waging a war on women have been surprised and shocked to discover that their heroes think that they are  socially retarded.

For a while now “Gamergate” has been waged against those who think that games should be more inclusive and less sexist.  A hard core of male gamers has taken it upon themselves to threaten anyone, particularly women, with violence, threats and general abuse.

For a while they have genuinely believe that sort of misogynistic behaviour was “cool” and that somehow becoming a gamer Taliban made them something special.  However over the weekend a number of tweets has put them in their place.

The tweets have come from nerd heroes such as Patton Oswalt who said that the “The misogyny of “GamerGate” sickened me.” Seth Rogen called for people to stop supporting this “stupid cause.”   Joss Whedonm responding to an article about the GamerGate tactics, said that it was not terrorism blowing things up, but it is using a fear of violence to “cow us and control our actions.”

Felicia Day dubbed the gamers a “cliched bloodthirsty roaming gang from post-apocalyptic fiction” while Tim Schafer (LucasArts) called on everyone to watch the video on sexism in games that set everything off. Mariel Cartwright the illustrator of Skullgirls said she found the whole thing depressing.

The gamers were initially shocked that the people they idolised considered them the backward scum of the earth and the only famous person who backed them was Alec Baldwin.

One person, without a trace of irony, or intelligence actually wrote on 4Chan: “Even misinformed people can put out their opinion on whatever they want, and they’ve got a large platform to do it with via the internet.”

SAP loses money because of the cloud

cloudThe esoteric management software outfit, SAP, which makes expensive software which no one actually can say what it does, is starting to lose money on its cloud set-ups.

SAP, which was slower than many expected to set up cloud offerings,cut its outlook for full-year operating profit amid an accelerating shift by customers to buy its software over the internet rather than as packaged software.

The company said that this has delayed recognition of those sales and now expects its expects operating profit of $7.14-7.40 billion down from $7.65 billion.

Company executives said the accelerating switch from licence-software sales to internet-based, so-called cloud software is to cut into its 2014 profit, but that these sales would begin to bolster revenue and profit in coming quarters.

SAP Finance Chief Luka Mucic told reporters on a conference call that there were no plans to give up on the cloud based systems and it was “hitting the gas pedal as much as we can.” He is confident that “SAP will see the positive returns in the longer run”.

SAP’s customers, including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Vodafone, prefer cloud computing because there are no upfront costs for software licences, dedicated hardware or installation, giving  customers more flexibility to respond to shifting market demand.

But cloud sales are recognised gradually over three years. They require more upfront investments and will bolster sales and profit in future quarters.

 

Internet trolls face two years porridge in Blighty

trollUK justice secretary Chris Grayling has promised to drag internet trolls from under their bridges and lock them up for longer.

Grayling has announced a plan to change maximum prison sentence for online abuse from six months to two years

Grayling spoke of a “baying cybermob” and believed that the changes will allow magistrates to pass on the most serious cases to crown courts.

The case appeared to have been inspired by Chloe Madeley, the daughter of television presenters Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, who was trolled after she defended her mother’s remarks about the convicted rapist Ched Evans.

Madeley faced rape threats on social media after she defended her mother’s remarks that Evans, who was released from prison last week after serving half of a five-year sentence for raping a 19-year-old woman, should be allowed to resume his career as a footballer because his rape had not been violent and he had not caused “any bodily harm.”

Grayling told the Mail on Sunday: “These internet trolls are cowards who are poisoning our national life. No one would permit such venom in person, so there should be no place for it on social media. That is why we are determined to quadruple the six-month sentence.

“People are being abused online in the most crude and degrading fashion. This is a law to combat cruelty – and marks our determination to take a stand against a baying cyber-mob. We must send out a clear message: if you troll you risk being behind bars for two years,” he said.

Chloe Madeley told the Wail on Sunday that the law needs to be reviewed. It needs to be accepted that physical threats should not fall under the ‘freedom of speech’ umbrella. It should be seen as online terrorism and it should be illegal.

 

 

 

2014 the best year since 2001

2001The tech industry is in its best state since 2001, according to figures from TechAmerica Foundation analysts.

Before the bubble burst, and payrolls shrank dramatically, the tech industry employed 6.5 million people.  In 2014 we are just 200,000 jobs shy of equalling that figure.

Tech industry employment reached 6.3 million in the first half of this year, a gain of 118,800 jobs, up 1.9 percent compared to the first half of 2013.

Oddly that is below the 3.7 percent growth rate overall for private-sector employers and the weaker rate of growth is an anomaly for the industry.

Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of technology industry trade group CompTIA, which bought  TechAmerica, said that the tech industry often experiences a better employment situation than the private sector.

In 2011 and 2012, the tech industry outgrew the overall private sector. In 2009, while the private sector saw employment fall by 5.5 percent. The employment decline in the tech industry was slightly lower at 4.5 percent.

Some of the slowing down of growth might be due to the fact that some big names like HP and  Microsoft have been cutting back, and in the first half of this year there were nearly 50,000 tech industry layoffs.

Safer areas to work have been R&D, testing and engineering services, which saw 54,100 new jobs. IT services was next, with a gain of 36,000 jobs.

Computer and peripheral equipment manufacturing saw employment rose from 156,000 jobs in January 2013 to 166,000 in June 2014.

Apparently, the tech industry is one of the best-paying sectors of the economy. The average annual salary for a tech industry employee is $93,000, compared to $47,400 for the private sector.

AMD flounders

flounderThe surprise exit of Rory Read as CEO of AMD appears to have been explained as the company reported a lower-than-expected revenue forecast for the current quarter and announced job cuts.

Read cleaned out his desk,  handed over the keys to the executive drinks cabinet and his special poisoned chalice, to Chief Operating Officer Lisa Su this week. This sparked speculation that this quarter’s numbers were going to be bad.

AMD has seen its market value nearly halved since when Read took over in 2011 as the company lost market share to Intel.

Sure enough, in a statement, AMD reported third-quarter revenue and gave a forecast for current-quarter revenue, both of which missed expectations and its shares were down 5 percent in extended trade.

AMD said its revenue fell two percent to $1.43 billion in the third quarter, missing Wall Street expectations.

The company said its fourth quarter revenues would fall 13 percent, plus or minus three percent, from the September quarter. That would be about $1.244 billion.

Analysts on average had expected revenue of $1.47 billion in the third quarter and $1.48 billion in the fourth quarter

In response, AMD said that it was cutting seven percent of its workforce. This would be the outfit’s third major round of job cuts since 2011.

AMD said the cuts would be made by December and save about $9 million in the fourth quarter and $85 million next year.

AMD had 10,149 employees at the end of the September quarter.

AMD reported a net profit of $17 millionin the third quarter, compared with a net gain of $48 million a year earlier.

In the third quarter, AMD’s Computing and Graphics group, which includes processors for PCs, saw its revenue fall 16 percent year over year.

Apple’s new iPad disappoints

new-ipadNot even the Tame Apple Press was able to come up with much to say about Apple’s new iPad, which is surprisingly similar to the old model.

True they are a bit slimmer and had a fingerprint sensor, but everyone said that the gear was a bit of a yawn and offered nothing to wow consumers ahead of a holiday shopping season.

At a launch event on Thursday, Chief Executive Tim Cook called Apple’s new line-up, which includes a new iMac computer with a “5K retina” or high-end display, the company’s best ever. But analysts believe that propping up Apple’s reality distortion field will probably not save this tablet.

Of course, Apple fanboys will start queuing for the device immediately, but it is starting to look like saner heads will question why they should bother.

Gartner analyst Van Baker said that the only impressive thing was the 5K retina display on the iMac. The only other things we saw were just iterative improvements on the iPad.

Pre-orders start Friday for the larger iPad Air 2, priced at $499 and up, with shipping beginning next week. The smaller iPad mini 3 will be about $100 cheaper.

The new iMac, which sports the new “Yosemite” operating system, will go for $2,499.

Tablet sales are set to rise only 11 percent this year, according to tech research firm Gartner, compared to 55 percent last year.

Tablet sales for Apple, which defined the category with the iPad just four years ago, have fallen for two straight quarters. Investors remain focused on the iPhone, Apple’s main revenue generator, but a prolonged downturn in iPad sales would threaten about 15 percent of the company’s revenue.

Missing from yesterday’s event was a larger, more interesting, 12-inch-plus iPad, which actually would have been useful to enterprise buyers. Clearly it was bending too much.

Ulrika ? Those were the Crays

crayCray has just built a machine with 1,500 cores, 6TB of DRAM, 38TB of SSD flash and 120TB of disk storage and named it after a Swedish weather girl from the 1990s.

Actually we are not sure if there is any link between Gladiators’ star Ulrika Jonsson and Crays’ latest supercomputer but she has not been in the news lately so we thought we would help her out.

Rather than a B list celebrity, the Ulrika XA is what is known as a single-platform entity, which mixes a range of analytic workloads that needed separate systems.

Cray said that its design has been optimised for compute and memory-intensive and latency-sensitive workloads.

Urika-XA as a turnkey, scale-out, analytics appliance and is designed for “extreme analytics” (hence XA) and described as a “pre-integrated, open platform for high-performance big data analytics”.

A single Urika-XA rack features 48 Intel Xeon compute nodes with an 800gig SSD per node, 200TB of SDD and disk storage using Sonexion 900 array, InfiniBand, Lustre parallel file system, HDFS-compatibility and POSIX compliance.

It is based around a SW stack with Cloudera Enterprise, Apache Spark, Cray Adaptive Runtime for Hadoop and Urika-XA management system.

The first buyer is the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab where ironically it will be looking at the impact of the weather.

The Cray says it’s coming from supercomputing land with “battle-hardened” technology which we would have thought should be “Gladiator hardened” and jolly useful when you are trying to have an affair with an English football coach without the tabloids finding out.

 

There’s fowl play in the gaming industry

rooster-71685_640There’s surprise news in the gaming industry after Digital Extremes, the outfit which made Warframe, has been taken over by a Chinese chicken company.

Sumpo Food Holdings, a Chinese agricultural company that describes itself as “one of the well-known chicken meat products suppliers in Fujian” has taken an eggceptional steak in Digital Extremes [ surely eggstremes. Ed].

Sumpo scratched out 58 per cent of the company shares leaving a poultry 3 per cent to Perfect World.

It cost Sumpo the breast part of $73.2m to buy the outfit which is a sign that the games industry has legs and is not clucked as many had suspected.

Analysts have henpecked the company saying that Sumpo is a chick when it comes to the gaming industry. But the company thinks the extra cash will help it rule the roost.

Digital Extremes CEO James Schmalz  said that this partnership will further empower to continue making Warframe bigger and better with full control over its destiny.

Others think that he is just playing chicken with the rest of the industry and could end up stuffed.

 

 

Will.i.am releases new watch phone

watch will i amPopular beat combo artist, and Intel advisor, Will.i.am has released a new watch gadget which he says can do everything a phone can.

Dubbed the Puls the “smartwatch-type device” is designed to be worn throughout the day and be charged at night. It will run at least a dozen apps, handling everything from Twitter to phone calls to fitness and maps.

Will.i.am unveiled the device onstage at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.  It has been backed by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

The device will be sold this holiday season through a variety of channels, including physical AT&T stores, fashion stores and online sites. Although there was no word on price it will cost less than a smartphone by a big margin, Will.i.am said.

Unlike the gizmos on the market so far, Will.i.am’s Puls will make phone calls without requiring smartphone tethering. In the U.S., users will need a data plan from AT&T; O2 is required for the U.K. Pricing details for those plans were not disclosed.

The device will also have 1GB of memory, 16GB of storage, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, a pedometer, and accelerometer. The Puls runs a proprietary OS, has a curved screen, and wraps around the wrist like a cuff.

Will.i.am insisted that it was not really a watch but “a new type of communication on your wrist”.

 

EU programmers are rubbish

euTop technology companies including Microsoft, Facebook and SAP have written a stiffly worded missive to the EU to complain that the blocs’ programmers are rubbish.

The open letter said that kids of today are not being given the skills to flourish in tomorrow’s digital economy and society and are not learning to code.

“It is undeniable that Europe needs more computer scientists and engineers if it is to prosper and compete – the number of unfilled ICT vacancies in Europe is expected to reach 900,000 by 2020,” the letters said.

Coding was not just for “geeks” or those destined for a career in ICT. A plethora of interesting, creative jobs all depend on a degree of coding ability. Whether analysing healthcare data, designing security software or creating special effects for movies, coding is the red thread that runs through Europe’s future professions, the letter said.

“The spread and sophistication of coding teaching in Europe remains too limited. Code is easy to learn but not widely taught in schools. Only 20 per cent of Europe’s school children are in schools which have adopted over-arching formal policies covering the use of ICT across all subjects.”

Part of the problem is that ICT and computer science skills are seen as niche, with little relevance to other fundamental academic pursuits. In Europe, fewer than 15 per cent of students have the opportunity to use the kind of higher level ICT in school that would help them develop ’21st century skills’ such as collaboration, self-regulation and problem-solving.

Teachers have the power to awaken passions and inspire ideas. And they are enthusiastic adopters of technology, keen to implement digital skills in their classroom. However, they receive little to no structured ICT training, it said.

PC Partner partner gets into 3D printing

manli-simplyprint-3d-printer-2PC Partner partner Manli has launched two 3D printers which look the spit of something already on the market.

According to Fudzilla the move mimics one carried out by Inno3D. Both outfits are PC Partner brands and the printers are practically twins.

The Manli SimplyPrint 3D is a rebadged Inno3D Printer M1, while the Manli MXPrint 3D is the Inno3D Printer D1.

The specs are the same. All of them have a build volume of 140mm (L) x 140mm(W) x 150mm (H), layer resolution of 0.13-0.30mm, 0.4mm nozzle and all use standard 1.75mm filament. The MXPrint 3D features an open design with a metal frame, while the SimplyPrint 3D is enclosed in a plastic shroud.

Inno3D is pricing the printers at €1,150 in Europe and Manli’s printers should cost about the same. Manli is PC Partner’s brand for Asia, so its products are usually not available in western markets.

Still it is an odd step sideways for Manli which is better known as an Nvidia partner and maker of motherboards and cards.

Apple’s reality distortion shield fights the law


courtroom_1_lgApple’s famous reality distortion field
and obsessive demands for secrecy have suddenly hit the reality of US law courts.

The judge overseeing the mysterious bankruptcy of an Apple sapphire supplier dared to actually question why it should be demanding secrecy in the case.

Jobs’ Mob has managed to keep the entire case locked up with its NDAs and hardly any information has emerged since GT Advanced Technologies filed for bankruptcy.

Key court filings reveal that GT Advanced is terrified of the confidentiality requirements in its Apple contracts which carry fines of $50 million.

However at a hearing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Springfield, Massachusetts, Judge Henry Boroff told a lawyer for Apple that the documents do not seem to contain much proprietary information. Boroff instructed Apple to provide him a list by Monday of exactly which elements of the filings are sensitive.

He said that he had a foot high stack of documents, and it could not be all kept secret. This of course runs counter to the Apple view that everything should be very secret and might be a move by the company to prevent information getting out which might make it look bad.

Apple and GT Advanced appeared to have made a complex series of agreements. The two made a deal in November for GT to set up a factory in Mesa, Arizona, to make scratch-resistant sapphire glass exclusively for Apple.

Boroff said that what he was looking at appeared like a construction suit, where a homeowner says to the contractor, ‘It didn’t come out the way I wanted to,’ and the contractor says: ‘Well, it would have come out that way if you didn’t continue to change the specifications.'”

Boroff’s comments came during a hearing that was meant to consider a motion by GT Advanced to keep certain documents sealed and begin the process of winding down its operations. But those issues were postponed until next Tuesday, in light of the recent appointment of GT Advanced’s official creditors’ committee.

However, other than Apple the other creditors involved in the case want to know what happened. The US Department of Justice’s bankruptcy watchdog in court papers said sealing information about GT Advanced’s downfall would “thwart” the objectives of bankruptcy laws and “unjustifiably undermine” the system’s fairness.

Christmas cancelled at eBay

santa-naughty-listIt seems that eBay has been naughty and is worried that Santa will not visit it this Christmas.

The online auctioneer trimmed its full year revenue forecast because it expects a weaker than expected holiday shopping season.

EBay cut its full-year revenue outlook to between $17.85 billion and $17.95 billion from its previous range of $18 billion to $18.3 billion.

The company also forecast fourth quarter revenues of less than $5 billion, falling short of the $5.2 billion expected by Wall Street.

Weak economic data from the United States and China is fanning fears of another global slowdown, forcing investors to re-examine the world economy that is only just emerging from one of the worst recessions in history.

The fact is that analysts are not certain what will happen this Christmas, but signs from the luxury retailers indicate that things might be tight.

US retail sales, which account for about one-third of consumer spending, recorded their first fall since January last month.

eBay’s marketplaces division, which grew less than some forecast and the fear is that the company’s dependence on Europe might have also played a role in depressing its outlook.

Marketing firms scan online snaps

19th-century-photographerMarketing firms are scanning the 1.8 billion photos posted every day to social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook looking for clues about what to peddle you.

US company Ditto Labs has created a program which ‘reads’ digital photos Software scans photos for brands and analyses the facial expression with it.

This data then builds profiles of people to help targeted advertising. Apparently, this is being used by Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Procter & Gamble and Adidas.

The software, created by Ditto Labs in Massachusetts, also ‘reads’ the background, the person’s clothing and even the location of the photo in a bid to glean as much information as possible as the customer and how they view the product or brand.

The wealth of information is then used to set up a profile which spells out exactly how that customer should be targeted by advertisers.

Liberty rights campaigners have warned the process goes ‘far beyond’ what most users should expect and that companies should seek permission before passing on the information to third parties.

Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, a campaign group set up to challenge policies which it believes threatens privacy, said  scanning our photos for logos and certain backdrops will go far beyond what many would expect companies to do with the photos we post.

“If companies want to use our data in this way, explicit permission should be sought. It is also only right that users ask for complete transparency about what data will be collected, analysed and who it will be sold on to,” she said.

Computer scientists began creating the program more than a decade ago. Other brands include Adidas, which, through the program, discovered that 13 percent of its ‘Adidas population’ are also interested in Justin Bieber. Of course, 87 percent want him killed on sight. Budweiser has found that beer drinking generally peaks at 11PM, presumably because its customers are returning their rented product.

 

No more pot of gold at end of Irish rainbow

irelandThe days of Apple and Google screwing over European and American tax authorities by having an Irish base is likely to become a thing of the past.

Ireland’s Ministry of Finance announced that Ireland will phase out its controversial tax scheme known as the “Double Irish,” which lets companies, especially tech companies, drastically reduce their overseas tax burden.

Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan said in a statement accompanying the government’s new 2015 budget that he was abolishing the ability of companies to use the ‘Double Irish’ by changing our residency rules to require all companies registered in Ireland to also be tax resident.

This change will take effect from the 1st of January 2015 for new companies. For existing companies, there will be provision for a transition period until the end of 2020.

So, in other words, Apple and Google will be able to save money for at least six years.

Firms that take advantage of this arrangement include Apple, Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, and Google. It is unlikely that they will move their EU operations away from Ireland as the corporation tax rate in that country is extremely low.

Google declared $60 billion worth of revenue in the United States in 2013. Google’s effective tax rate in the United States has fallen dramatically from 21 percent to 15.7 percent in recent years as the company has broadened its use of overseas tax benefits.

It is starting to look like the Irish government was getting a little jittery about an EU investigation into the scheme. Over the last year, various European countries, including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France, have been reviewing their laws that enable this type of corporate behaviour.

Noonan is going against  U2’s Bono, the Irish icon, who claimed that the fact that Apple’s cheating of the tax payer in the US and EU somehow assisted Irish poor. To be fair Bono owes Apple a favour – Jobs’ Mob forced Apple fans to listen to U2’s latest album by hard wiring it into the latest iPhone 6, until it had enough complaints to issue a fix for the problem.