Author: Nick Farrell

Apple’s iPhone 6 chip is a lemon

Posted on September 15, 2014 by - News

CD153It looks like Apple’s new iPhone 6 will have the same performance of its older gizmos according to Hot Hardware benchmarking 

Normally one of the few things that is different about the new model iPhone is a that it comes with a better chip.  Last time it was the A7 System-on-Chip (SoC) which was the world’s first 64-bit smartphone processor.

Even Apple naysayers said that the A7 chip was rather good and dominated benchmark runs and consistently outperformed previous generation iPhone models.

However if Apple fanboys were hoping for a performance bump from the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, both of which sport a custom A8 SoC they are going to be disappointed.

Hot hardware noted only modest gains compared to the iPhone 5s. The dual-core 1.4GHz Cyclone CPU and A8 GPU, the iPhone 6 scored 21,204.26 and a earned a place at the top of the chart, though not by much. The iPhone 5s scored 20,253.80 in the same benchmark so the iPhone 6 is less than 5 percent faster than the iPhone 5s.

What is strange is that not only was everyone expecting a better performance gain the iPhone 6 launch live stream implied that the difference would be huge.

Apple said that the all-new A8 chip is our fastest yet. Its CPU and graphics performance are faster than on the A7 chip, even while powering a larger display and incredible new features. And because it’s designed to be so power efficient, the A8 chip can sustain higher performance.

Well it is sort of true – the chip is faster, but not by enough for anyone to notice.

According to Apple, it offers 84x faster graphics performance than the original iPhone and is up to 50x faster in CPU performance.

Hang on a minute, Apple is comparing its current chip with that of the first iPhone which was released in  June 29, 2007. Of course, the iPhone 6 is going to be faster. However, this means that Apple is aware that its new chip is disappointing and it is trying to pretend it is hot.

World moves to smartphones

Posted on September 15, 2014 by - News

shoe phoneFortune tellers at the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA) have been consulting their tarot cards and are predicting that either there will be a tall dark stranger who will ask them out to lunch, or by the end of the decade, there will be nine billion mobile connections across the globe.

If it is the latter meaning, GSMA predicts that while three billion of those connections will be data terminals, dongles, routers and feature phones, the other two thirds will be smartphone handsets.

The organisation claims that the smartphone market is poised for huge growth over the next six years.  There are currently two billion handsets in active use.  It predicts that the demand is being driven by people in emerging countries.

In a report with the catchy title,  Smartphone forecasts and assumptions, 2007-2020, the GSMA said that developing economies overtook mature markets such as the US and western Europe in 2011.

GSMA chief strategy officer Hyunmi Yang said that in the hands of consumers, these devices are improving living standards and changing lives, especially in developing markets, while contributing to growing economies by stimulating entrepreneurship.

“As the industry evolves, smartphones are becoming lifestyle hubs that are creating opportunities for mobile industry players in vertical markets such as financial services, healthcare, home automation and transport,” he said.

Asia Pacific already accounts for half of global smartphone connections yet smartphone penetration is still below 40 percent in the region, even when China’s 629 million smartphone connections are included.

By the end of the decade, emerging countries will account for four in five smartphone connections, as regions like North America and Europe hit the 70-80 percent mark and growth drops off.

The fastest growing region is expected to be sub-Saharan Africa. When figures are based on smartphone adoption as a percentage of all mobile connections, the region currently has the lowest adoption rate of 15 percent in the world.

However, the wider availability of affordable handsets and the roll-out of networks are expected to change everything.

The GSMA claims that the main factors driving smartphone adoption in emerging countries is falling prices. The price difference between feature phones and smartphones is getting smaller and smaller and $50 smartphones are now a reality.

Mature markets have seen operator subsidies and the roll-out of 4G networks helping to maintain growth in the premium end of the market, while more intelligent, individualised data plans are also helping to win consumers over from feature phones in all markets.

“Smartphones will be the driving force of mobile industry growth over the next six years, with one billion new smartphone connections expected over the next 18 months alone,” said Yang.

Microsoft about to do a Windows 8 on Windows 9

Posted on September 12, 2014 by - News, Opinions

windows9.1 leak Microsoft normally follows a pattern with its operating systems – one successful version is followed by a total stuff up. 

Theoretically that should means that Windows 9 should be great, but leaked screen shots of the coming attraction shows that Microsoft could be headed for yet another disaster.

The update, codenamed Threshold and possibly called Windows 9 or just plain Windows, takes some features from Windows 8 and grafts them onto the classic Windows 7 desktop. This is a sop to most Windows users, like me, who hated having to dumb down their computers by running tablet software as the interface.

When running in windowed mode, Windows Store apps will get a button in the top-left corner. Clicking the button brings up a list of functions that previously appeared in the Charms bar, including Search, Share, Play, Project and Settings. This menu will let users switch the app to full screen mode as well.

There will be some new buttons to the desktop taskbar — a search button sits immediately to the right of the Start button, followed by a button for switching between multiple desktops. The latter feature, possibly called “virtual desktops,” will let users switch between several sets of desktop apps and layouts.

On the right side of the taskbar, users will find a new notifications button, with a pop-up menu that will presumably show messages from Windows Store apps.

The screenshots show that Microsoft is keeping the Charms bar, which many expected would be culled.

While all of this is subject to change as Microsoft has not even released a public beta yet, but it is clear that Windows 9 is not really going to be much different from Windows 8.

This is a major problem, particularly as Windows 7 will be starting to look a little elderly by the time Windows 9 hits the shops. Part of the problem is that Microsoft refuses to understand that people do not want their PCs running like a tablet. When you are sitting at a PC you are there for serious work and serious programs, you do not want to have to jump between screens looking for software you do not want.

How often PC users will want to visit the app store is anyone’s guess, yet Microsoft appears to be trying its hardest to make this easier.

What is annoying is that the software behind the interface is much better and more reliable than Windows 7, but the software is crippled by its interface.

This will create huge problems for Microsoft. When it put out Windows Vista people just stayed using Windows XP. Now, rather than use Windows 8, users are sticking to Windows 7.  If Windows 9 is just Windows 8 in drag then people are going to want to stay with Windows 7 even longer.  That is going to make it even more venerable and established that XP was.

Microsoft needs to get back to design basics and work out why people use a desktop.  Hint: it is not because they want a more powerful tablet.

 

Microsoft founder joins in Ebola fight

Posted on September 12, 2014 by - News

gates_and_allen_450pxSir William Gates III is not the only former Microsofty who wants to save Africa from killer illnesses – Paul Allen wants to get in on the act too.

Allen’s charitable foundation has said that it will donate $9 million to support USe efforts to fight the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

The money will go to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) comes at a time when international groups, including Doctors Without Borders and the World Health Organization, have said resources to contain the epidemic and treat those affected are falling tragically short.

Allen said the donation from the Paul Allen Family Foundation will help CDC establish emergency operations centres in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. In these regions, Ebola has killed about 2,300 people and shows no sign of slowing six months after it began.

Writing in his bog, Allen said that the tragedy of Ebola is that we know how to tackle the disease, but the governments in West Africa are in dire need of more resources and solutions. He said that the developed world needs to step up now with resources and solutions.

This is not the first time Allen has stepped up to the plate to fight Ebola. Last month, Allen’s foundation donated $2.8 million to the American Red Cross for its work on the outbreak.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have donated $50 million to United Nations agencies and other international groups to purchase supplies, such as protective gear for healthcare workers treating Ebola patients, and to expand the emergency response.

This needs to be compared with the efforts of the US government. US President Barack Obama asked Congress for $88 million in new Ebola funding, including $25 million for CDC, but this week congress said they would provide no more than $40 million. We presume this is because Africans do not pay them for campaign donations and there is not enough oil in the region to justify a US task force.

Allen said his foundation’s gift would help CDC establish and equip emergency operations centres in the three most-affected countries, focusing on public health, not patient care.

He said that the centres will use “data management and communication systems for disease and patient contact tracing, to detect and stop the disease from spreading,” Allen wrote. They will also expand lab testing to identify new outbreaks, and disseminate information about the epidemic to the public.

Since resigning from Microsoft in 1983, Allen has become a prominent philanthropist, supporting scientific research through the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

 

Yahoo accused of Mexican stand-off

Posted on September 12, 2014 by - News

zapataTwo Mexican companies have sued Yahoo and law firm Baker & McKenzie in New York federal court, accusing them of engineering a conspiracy to avoid a $2.7 billion judgment.

Worldwide Directories S.A. de C.V. and Ideas Interactivas S.A. de C.V claim that Yahoo and Baker & McKenzie enlisted the help of a senior Mexican judge and other court personnel to “corrupt the appeals process and overturn the judgment.”

It all started with a contractual dispute over deals between Yahoo and the companies over an online search project in Mexico. All sides fell out and the companies filed a lawsuit in 2011 in Mexico, claiming Yahoo had breached its duties by terminating the agreements prematurely.

In December 2012, a Mexican judge issued a $2.7 billion preliminary judgment against Yahoo.

According to Thursday’s lawsuit, Yahoo and its lawyers at Baker & McKenzie successfully reduced the award to $172,500 by instructing a corrupt Mexican federal judge to meet in secret with the appellate chief judge and “intimidate” her into slashing the damages.

The appeals court also granted Yahoo a $3 million judgment on its counterclaims against the companies because of the coercion, the lawsuit said.

The company has evidence of the conspiracy in the form of sworn statements from witnesses who directly observed the misconduct, including the original trial judge who issued the judgment.

David Stone, a lawyer for the companies based in New Jersey, said the lawsuit was intended to prevent two major US corporations from “interfering with the Mexican judicial process.”

 

Harvard creates indestructible robot

Posted on September 12, 2014 by - News

t1000Boffins, who clearly have never seen any Terminator movie, have come up with an indestructible robot which is also super soft.

Also indicating that they never saw any 1980s slasher flims they have made it soft, like a child’s soft-toy thus creating Terminator chucky.

Of course, that is not what Harvard’s School for Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering are calling it. They are proud that “the world’s first untethered soft robot” can stand up and walk away from its designers, can walk through snow, fire and even be run over by a car.

They think that such robots might one day serve as a search and rescue tool following disasters, not create disasters by trying to take over the world.

A team of researchers that included Kevin Galloway, Michael Karpelson, Bobak Mosadegh, Robert Shepherd, Michael Tolley, and Michael Wehner scaled up earlier soft-robot designs, enabling a single robot to carry on its back all the equipment it needs to operate — micro-compressors, control systems, and batteries.

Tolley , a research associate in materials science and mechanical engineering at the Wyss Institute and the study’s first author, said that the earlier versions of soft robots were all tethered, which works fine in some applications.

One of the hardest things for the researchers was challenging people’s concept of what a robot has to look like.

“We think the reason people have settled on using metal and rigid materials for robots is because they’re easier to model and control. This work is very inspired by nature, and we wanted to demonstrate that soft materials can also be the basis for robots.”

The robot is a half-meter in length and capable of carrying as much as 7½ pounds on its back. Giving the untethered robot the strength needed to carry mechanical components meant air pressures as high as 16 pounds per square inch. To deal with the increased pressure, the robot had to be made of tougher stuff.

They used a “composite” silicone rubber made from stiff rubber impregnated with hollow glass microspheres to reduce the robot’s weight. The robot’s bottom was made from Kevlar fabric to ensure it was tough and lightweight. It is very important to have a touch and lightweight bottom.

Researchers tested the robot in snow, submerged it in water, walked it through flames, and even ran it over with a car. It could not be killed.

The researchers think that because the robot is soft and cuddly, humans are more likely to interact with it and it opens up many more opportunities.

 

 

Microsoft to change suicide server settings

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News

msSoftware giant Microsoft has had enough of a suicide server setting in ASP.NET which too few sysadmins can be bothered disabling.

Microsoft said that all future versions of ASP.NET will enforce the deprecation of EnableViewStateMac=“false”. This was in a security advisory in December 2013, when Redmond has warned the setting had a privilege escalation vulnerability. Microsoft warned that disabling Message Authentication Code (MAC) validation would allow an attacker to use crafted HTTP code to inject code into the ASP.NET server.

Microsoft fixed that problem in ASP.NET 4.5.2 and in an optional patch for customers. Now, in a notice published on September 9, Microsoft says the previously optional patch will henceforth be enforced for all versions of ASP.NET.

“If you are running the ASP.NET framework on your machine, this behaviour will be picked up automatically the next time you check for updates.”

However it is likely to break installations still using EnableViewStateMac=“false”, but Microsoft said it was necessary to address this issue head-on due to the prevalence of misinformation regarding this switch and the number of customers who are running with it set to an insecure setting.

Most developers using the insecure setting did so to support cross-page posts on their sites. The scenario most likely to break when EnableViewStateMac=“false” is disabled is where designers were avoiding synchronising the <machineKey> setting in a Web farm.

You can read the advisory here 

 

 

Chinese give Qualcomm a novel suggestion

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News

Tchinaflaghe Chinese government, which is currently about to release its antitrust watch-dogs onto US chipmaker, Qualcomm has come up with a novel way for the outfit to avoid trouble.

Qualcomm has been told that if it helps Chinese companies become so competitive that they can give the company a good kicking, then the watchdogs will be sent back to their cages.

Lu Wei, the head of China’s State Internet Information Office, was speaking at a panel http://www.weforum.org/ during a World Economic Forum event in Tianjin, China, where Qualcomm’s executive chairman Paul Jacobs was also among the speakers.

Lu told Jacobs that Qualcomm made $24 billion in revenue during the company’s last fiscal year, with nearly half of it from China.

“This means China is a good place to make money… we should make money together. You should work alongside Chinese companies to make money.”

China’s National Reform and Development Commission has been investigating Qualcomm since last November, on industry complaints that the company has been overcharging Chinese clients to use its patents.

Qualcomm said the company had 70 Chinese vendors using its 4G LTE patents, and another 120 vendors for its 3G CDMA patents.

Jacobs replied that his company had been helping Chinese companies to deliver new products to the market. This includes working with over 90 Chinese companies to build devices.

“I feel like it has been a win-win between Qualcomm and Chinese companies, Chinese customers and I hope that continues far into the future,” Jacobs said.

US begins McCarthyite purge of scientists

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News

mccarthyism-3The US’s obsession with imaginary terrorists has resulted in what appears to be a McCarthy style purge of academics.

According to Science the latest to be purged is Valerie Barr who, in 1979, when she was 22, handed out leaflets, stood behind tables at rallies, and baked cookies to support two left-wing groups, the Women’s Committee Against Genocide and the New Movement in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence.

In a few years, she had become a top software academic and found herself too business for such causes and a quarter-century later, she’s a tenured professor of computer science at Union College in Schenectady, New York, with a national reputation for her work improving computing education and attracting more women and minorities into the field.

In August 2013 she took a leave from Union College to join the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a program director in its Division of Undergraduate Education and that is when she found herself in trouble with the terror police.

The FBI insists that Barr lied during a routine background check about her affiliations with “a domestic terrorist group” that had ties to the two organisations to which she had belonged in the early 1980s.

On 27 August, NSF said that her “dishonest conduct” compelled them to cancel her temporary assignment immediately, at the end of the first of what was expected to be a two-year stint.

Behind all this craziness is an obscure agency within the White House called the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) it has huge control over hiring workers because it is supposed to arrange background checks.

Ironically labelling her a terrorist and booting her off the progamme is a security own goal. Barrs job was to help the US combat cyberterrorism.

So how much of a security threat was she?  Well the two groups she was involved with were affiliated with a third, the May 19 Communist Organization (M19CO), that carried out a string of violent acts, including the killing of two police officers and a security guard during a failed 1981 robbery of a Brink’s truck near Nyack, New York.

When she was asked if she had ever been a member of an organization “dedicated to the use of violence” to overthrow the U.S. government or to prevent others from exercising their constitutional rights she had said no.

But since in the mind of the FBI the three groups were all linked she must have known that she was a member of the M19CO/

“I found out about the Brink’s robbery by hearing it on the news, and just like everybody else I was shocked,” she recalls.

Barr says she was casually acquainted with two of the convicted murderers, Judith Clark and Kuwasi Balagoon (née Donald Weems) but had no prior knowledge of their criminal activities.

Barr also has some ammunition in the form of the fact that the FBI investigator into her case was, according to his own blog, somewhat of a conservative who likes to tell stories about thumping atheist academics. Barr is a feminist and a lesbian.

All this calls into question whether the US government is hiring scientists on the basis of their ability to do a job or shooting itself in the foot following the same McCarthest mindset which paralysed the US for years.

Basically it means that it does not matter how good a scientist or computer security expert you are, if you are a woman, a lesbian or belonged to groups when you were a kid which we think might have been left wing extremists, we don’t want you working for our government.

 

Next year’s server wars may be cancelled

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News, Opinions

soldiers-2The major battle in the server space planned for next year may be only a minor skirmish with the usual suspects winning.

Intel needs to see off the expected competition from ARM and is going to chuck a lot more cash in the area to keep its position as market leader. What we are seeing from the Intel Developer Forum is that its answer will be a a new Xeon D family of chips.

Xeon D chips will be the first server chips based on the Broadwell architecture, and will go into dense servers starting next year. But these are not your normal server chips, they are effectively systems on a chip which means that they will be deliberately targeting anything “low level and power efficient” that ARM is expected to come up with.

It means that Intel does not think that its Xeon E3 and Atom chips code-named Avoton will be up to the task of taking on ARM. The Xeon D chip will be faster, but more power hungry than Avoton, which is based on an architecture called Silvermont used in mobile chips.

But Intel thinks that the Xeon D will provide more performance-per-watt, which punters will find attractive.

Intel does have some other advantages in any coming server war. Intel’s chips already go into more than 90 percent of servers, and server makers like Dell have said that the chances for success of ARM servers are diminishing due to product delays. Intel also has a head-start on software development over ARM.

ARM’s server chips are based on the ARMv8 architecture, and have integrated networking, storage and I/O controllers. Its key weapon against Intel is still lower power consumption, something Chipzilla is fast catching up on.

A variety of companies had indicated interest in making server processors based on blueprints from ARM,  but so far ARM 64-bit server processors have not been made available commercially.

Chip makers like Applied Micro and Advanced Micro Devices have delayed shipment of ARM-based chips.

Dell is offering prototype ARM servers for benchmarking and application development. Hewlett-Packard announced plans to use ARM processors in its Moonshot “dense” server, which uses x86 chips, but hasn’t announced a definitive release date for the ARM edition.

The other player in any coming war AMD is also expanding its low-power server processor lines,  which could also will hurt adoption of ARM servers.

The other big hurdle for ARM is the fact that most firms already have software and hardware based around x86. To adopt ARM-based servers, companies will not only have to invest in new servers and components, but also port applications to the architecture.

This could make a switch to ARM very expensive in terms of capital and final cost of ownership. Then there are some licensing issues surrounding the adoption of ARM servers, as companies will have to pay more for software per core used in them, Norrod said.

ARM is also finding its allies thin on the ground. ARM server pioneer Calxeda folded operations and earlier this year Nvidia scrapped server chip plans. Samsung has also abandoned ARM server chip development.

Qualcomm releases Snapdragon 210

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News

qualcomm-snapdragonQualcomm has released its new Snapdragon 210  chip which should mean more LTE smartphones running high-quality video.

Sticking two fingers up at its rival MediaTek, Qualcomm has built a 28-nm chip for the entry-level market. It has based around a 1.1 GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU, Adreno 300-series GPU, supports up to 8 megapixel cameras, and has a resolution of up to 720p.  Not huge but you are trying to watch a movie on a screen the size of a beer mat.

It supports HD Video with high efficiency video coding support and supports the usual USB, Bluetooth, single-stream 802.11n WiFi, and NFC standards.

Qualcomm claims this is the first LTE-Advanced chipset to target the sub-US$100 phone category.

It is clear that Qualcomm wants to be the first of the starting blocks with this sort of technology.  The world is slowly moving to LTE but most of it is happy with its 3G phones.

 

Microsoft about to buy Minecraft outfit

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

showposter_1354981054Software giant Microsoft is close to inking a deal to buy Mojang the Swedish company behind the  “Minecraft” video game.

It is believed that Microsoft will have to write a $2 billion cheque for the company and everything could be announced as early as this week.

“Minecraft” is a game where players build structures with blocks to protect against nocturnal monsters which is a little like what Microsoft has been doing, without much success, in the mobile market.

The deal will add to Microsoft’s Xbox video game business, at a time when the competition in the video game console market is heating up.

Acquiring Minecraft gives Vole control of an online world that has become a blockbuster despite breaking a lot of the rules. Minecraft’s blocky graphics are crude it also is sold the old-fashioned way — by charging people to buy a copy.

The price varies depending on what kind of device people use to play the game, ranging from $7 on mobile phones to $27 for computer versions. A version of Minecraft for Microsoft’s Xbox, which has been a top seller for the console, costs $20.

The business is already lucrative. Mojang’s revenue was about $360 million last year, up 38 percent from the year before.

Mojang was co-founded by Markus Persson, who has said in the past that he did not want to sell the company or take money from outside investors.

Redmond has shipped five million Xbox One units to retailers worldwide since the launch. In the same month Sony   sold more than 7 million PlayStation 4 units and was struggling to keep up with consumer demand, so it must be hoping that Minecraft will drive more traffic to its console.

 

iWatch will not save Apple or kill the Swiss

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

POPE-SWISSGUARD/WOMENThe Tame Apple Press was somewhat muted this morning as to whether the iWatch will provide the sort of technology which proves that Jobs’ Mob “still has it”.

Sure there were the usual free press releases in which the Tame Apple Press outdid itself.  Our favourite was Bloomberg which actually claimed that the Swiss economy would collapse now that Apple had put out its watch . Given that the Swiss economy is a little more dependent on Nazi and Mafia gold and its watchmaking industry was gutted by the advent of the digital watch, we doubt it will lose much sleep over Apple’s efforts in the industry.

However saner heads rushed to point out that the whole Apple spin on its new toy was completely off base.

As Tech Crunch eloquently put it “if Switzerland is fucked than the iWatch is too.”    It makes the point that the Swiss watch industry is not Apple’s target market. The real niche here is the  wearables space which is so limited that no one will admit how many wearables have sold so far.  It has been estimated that it could be as high as 90 million, but the Federation Of The Swiss Watch Industry said that it sold 28.1 million timepieces last year for a total of $23 billion. That’s an average of $836 a watch.

But it has known for ages that the wristwatch is a dying object. More than 60 percent of 18-34 year olds get the time from their phones and watches are rare in the wild and when you see them they are worn for a reason. The most expensive watches go to collectors, whose rationality is suspect, and the very rich. The mid-range watches go to folks who appreciate the artistry of a fine mechanical timepiece and the riff-raff will get the cheap gear. In this situation, the iWatch would count as cheap gear.

What Apple has forgotten with its iWatch is that people do not buy watches to tell the time.  They are either a fashion statement or a tradition. At the low end you buy a Swatch because you like the styling and the slightly wicked, slightly retro feeling of insolence that comes with wearing a watch with hands.  These are not mind-sets that want their watch to do anything and this is exactly why so far the wearables have only managed any interest in the sports diagnostic industry.

Normally this would not be a problem for Apple. After all Jobs convinced the world, that everyone needed a tablet when Microsoft and HP could not do so for years. To our mind, the tablet is still a product without an actual killer app, but Apple convinced the world they all needed one.

However, in this instance they are wrong. A tablet at least was technology which could work but hadn’t. A watch is retro-technology which has bolted-on new functionality which it is not really designed to do. As my wife pointed out the watch screen is too small to see or use and is counter to the same desire of consumers for phablets or things which are bigger and can be easily integrated with.

Given this, even the Wall Street Journal has its doubts as to whether Apple will be saved by its iWatch. Media outfits which are not members of the Tame Apple Press are still reluctant to declare the idea a lemon because Apple has managed to market its way out of trouble before and they look like idiots. But the Journal points out that the potential of the Apple Watch is “tough to gauge”. The device won’t hit the market until early next year, and a $349 starting price is at a bit of a premium to rival offerings.

The market for smartwatches is nascent and none of Apple’s rivals has yet cracked the code for delivering a product with the right mix of style and functionality, the Journal pointed out.

Unlike previous Apple products that forged new product categories, the watch is essentially an upsell of the company’s existing customers and only customers with an iPhone 5 or newer will be able to use it.  Although it is unthinkable that any true Apple fanboy would not have the latest iPhone, there are still a fair few of the devices out there.

The Journal also points out that it would take more than 55 million units of the Apple Watch selling at $349 to equal just 10 per cent  of the $197.4 billion Wall Street expects for Apple’s fiscal 2015 revenue.  In short, even if it does well, it will not be a game changer for Apple.

As cooler heads start to look at the announcement, it seems that Apple is leaning on the launch of its iPhone 6 and the iWatch is just a somewhat silly distraction. But that does mean that truly Apple has run out of game changing ideas that will continue its growth.

In time it will be the launch of the iWatch which will mark the slow slid of Apple into mediocrity. It is also worthwhile pointing out that the Swiss have not been defeated in battle since the Middle Ages and that is despite being armed with small but useful folding knives and pikes.

Western Digital fills drives with helium

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News, Products

helium-ballong-flygWestern Digital’s HGST subsidiary has added 8TB and 10TB hard drives to its HelioSeal product line.

These drives are hermetically seals in helium in order to reduce internal drive friction and power use and make your drives sound like Mickey Mouse.

HGST announced its first helium-filled hard drive, the 6TB He6 model in December.  It did rather well and broke all previous records for hard drive areal density.

HGST said that by 2017, it plans to end production of air-filled hard drives for use in corporate data centres and just use helium-filled products.

Along with the thinner gas’s ability to reduce power use, the helium-drives run at four to five degrees cooler than today’s 7200rpm drives, HGST stated.  Sealing air out of the drive also keeps humidity and other contaminates from getting in.

The announcement follows Seagate’s two weeks ago which announced its highest capacity enterprise hard drive would be an 8TB model that bypassed helium for air.

Seagate uses a technology called shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to increase the capacity of its drives beyond 4TB. Seagate has said SMR holds the promise of creating 20TB drives by 2020.

HGST’s new 3.5-in 8TB drive uses PMR technology. Both drives use a 12Gbps SAS interface, but by using helium instead of air, HGST said it was able to stack seven platters and reduce power usage at idle by 23 per cent and watts per terabyte of capacity by 44 per cent over its 6TB drive.

NHS doctors try to extract Ellison’s backbone

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

skeletonsThe NHS has purged the Oracle backbone from a national patient database system and recommended a course of Open Sauc NoSQL running on an open-source stack instead.

Dubbed Spine2, the new Ellison free backbone has gone live on x86 hardware.  Spine is the NHS’s main secure patient database and messaging platform.  It is a bit of serious technology logging the non-clinical information on 80 million Brits.

It also runs a messaging hub between 20,000 applications that include the Electronic Prescription Service and Summary Care Records.

The first version of Spine had run on Oracle under an out-sourced contract managed by telecoms giant BT, but the Health and Social Care Information Center (HSCIC) – the NHS organisation running the system thought that open source and NoSQL will be easier to live with.

Oracle’s relational database has been replaced with a NoSQL distributed system called Riak, from Basho.

Other open-source elements are Redis, Nginx, Tornado and RabitMQ while Splunk has been used for logging and reporting.

The Spine2 contract was awarded under the Cabinet Office’s G-Cloud framework, which encourages government types to buy from small providers like Basho.

It seems to have been much cheaper too some of that is not having to pay an Oracle license, or a maintenance fee, but some of it was also managed by consolidating the hardware.

Riak is up to two times cheaper than Oracle while the infrastructure will cost five per cent that of the old setup.

What is also odd is that HSCIC has saved money by bringing Spine2 back in house with on-going development. This is bad news for BT, but could be the start of a backlash against open sourcing.