Category: News

LG denies it has a fire breathing Snapdragon

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - News

dragonWhile Samsung has pulled Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 from its new Galaxy S smartphone, because of overheating problems, another customer is denying there is anything wrong with it.

LG said it has encountered no overheating problems with Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and it will be powering a curved screen G Flex2 smartphone later this month.

Woo Ram-chan, LG vice president for mobile product planning, said that he was aware of the various concerns in the market about the (Snapdragon) 810, but the chip’s performance is quite satisfactory.

The comment came after Bloomberg reported a day earlier that Samsung Electronics, the world’s top smartphone maker, decided not to use the new Qualcomm processor for the next flagship Galaxy S smartphone after the chip overheated during testing. To be fair, Samsung and Qualcomm have declined to comment on the record about the reason for Samsung abandoning the chip.  Sources which cite overheating are so far unnamed.

Samsung is widely expected to unveil the new Galaxy S smartphone in early March, and Bloomberg reported that the Korean firm will use its own processors instead.

Woo said on Thursday that internal tests for the G Flex2, powered by the new Qualcomm processor, show that the new product emits less heat than other existing devices. The new phone is scheduled to start selling in South Korea on January 30.

He said he didn’t understand why there is a heat problem with the Galaxy S that his phone does not have.

 

Windows 10 will be free

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - News

ms-event-2015-01-21-win10-46-741x416Microsoft has released details of Windows 10 and said that it will be free for many current Windows users.

The company unveiled the Windows 10 consumer preview yesterday and showed off many new features which will be available.

What is surprising is that Windows 10 will be free for existing Windows users running versions of the OS, going back to Windows 7. That includes Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and Windows Phone.

Microsoft said that the upgrade would be free for the first year of release, but people would need to pay for it after that. However, Microsoft will support the upgrade for the “lifetime of the device”.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the event  he wanted Windows 10 to be the most loved release of Windows.  It will have services everywhere but no bolted on apps.

There will be a new web browser for Windows 10, codenamed Project Spartan. It’ll be the primary browser in Windows 10 and will be available on PCs, tablets and phonesallows users to “draw” directly on a web page for quick sharing of notes. It includes a fully integrated reading list that follows a user across devices, as well as a built-in PDF viewer.

Another unusual thing about the OS is the use of a sort of virtual reality, called Windows Holographic, powered by a new kind of device called the HoloLens.

Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of the Operating Systems Group, Joe Belfiore, announced it would bring back the much-missed Start Menu, but Belfiore revealed it would also have a full-screen mode that includes more of the Windows 8 Start screen. He also said Windows machines would go back and forth between two menus in a way that would not confuse people. Right.

Belfiore also showed a new notification centre for Windows, which puts a person’s notifications in an Action Center menu that can appear along the right side, similar to how notifications work in Apple OS X.

There is also a thing called Continuum to help so-called hybrid devices flip between themselves. Removing a keyboard from a tablet like the Surface Pro 3, say, will call up a dialogue box asking if  a human wants to switch to tablet mode.

Microsoft has also parked its Cortana into Windows 10. People will be able to access it using a search bar next to the Windows logo in the taskbar.

Describing Cortana showed how users could ask it to play music, answer queries launch apps and open specific files, like a PowerPoint deck you’ve been working on. Cortana is also built into Spartan.

Windows 10 can work on devices smaller than 8 inches, which would have a special version of the OS tuned to the precise touch capabilities needed.

As an example of Universal Windows Apps, which are apps that provide a multi-modal experience across devices, Belfiore showed off revamped mobile versions of Microsoft Office.

The “consumer preview” version of Windows 10 will be available for PCs starting next week, and for phones in February. Some of the Windows 10 features Microsoft showed at the event will not immediately be available in preview builds of the software, but will roll out in the next three to four months.

Microsoft hasn’t yet set a date for the general release of Windows 10, but it’s expected to launch in the Autumn. Or Fall. Pride comes before a fall.

 

Oracle unveils X5 with Intel Inside

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - News

Oracle-Announces-X5Oracle chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison unveiled X5, its fifth generation of Oracle’s engineered systems, to media and analysts at company headquarters on Wednesday afternoon.

Ellison introduced the company’s X5 as “the future of the datacentre” based on Intel Xeon® E5-2600 v3 processor family (Haswell-EP with up to 32 cores) and support for high bandwidth NVM Express (NVMe) flash drives.

The X5-2, a 1U two socket server, is designed and optimised for running Oracle Database in a clustered configuration. Optional four NVMe drives can be used to accelerate Database performace via Smart Flash Cache. This server is targeted at high-density vitualization environments.

The X5-2L, a 2U platform, is targeted for single-node databases and enterprise storage applications. The supports up to 758GB of memory, and configured for a maximum of 50.4TB of direct attached storage.

Also announced was Oracle’s NVM Express (NVMe) design providing up to 6.4TB of hot-swappable flash providing 2.5X the data rate of older SAS3 SSD interface drives using PCIe Gen3 Small Form Factor NVM SSD drives (12Gb/s vs. 32Gb/s). NVM Express flash technology is optimized to accelerate Oracle Database using a feature called Database Smart Flash Cache. This feature keeps recently accessed data warm in flash storage, reducing the chance that the database needs to fetch the data from slower magnetic media that may be direct attached or resident on a NAS/SAN fabric. In addition to the high-bandwidth interface to the NVM Express SSDs, the flash technology itself has been engineered to be high-endurance and write-optimized for Oracle Database.

Ellison’s new “vision” entails connecting datacentres efficiently and at lowest cost to the cloud – “There has to be some degree of compatibility between the public cloud and your private datacentre”, Ellison said.

Ellison emphasised Oracle’s “new strategy” using Intel processors to compete for the two-socket core business. The new “Virtual Compute Appliance X5” converged infrastructure system, consists of compute servers and software defined networking.

That integration comes in the form of th Virtual Compute Appliance X5 converged infrastructure system, consisting of compute servers, software-defined networking and Oracle designed hardware. Ellison went on to highlight the company’s abilities in software defined configuration of server and storage networks on VCA, supporting infiniband internal networking with external connectivity provided by Ethernet and Fibre Channel to link with existing networks.

Included within the X5 product portfolio are Oracle’s Big Data Appliance for Hadoop and NoSQL big data jobs and Exalogic X5-2 for private clouds.

Ellison described Oracles Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance capable of full data recovery with real-time “redo” transport and fully automated recovery functions, log re-examination with extraction of malicious transactions followed by re-entry of those processes again allows the appliance to be restored to any point in time.

Further the appliance, which can handle thousands of databases with backup connections to on-site datacentre, remote datacenters and cloud. “The big deal is it’s fully automated, so it’s easy to operate, and you never lose data. It’s a no brainer appliance as we have, “Ellison stated.

Ellison reminded the audience that “Oracle manufactures tests and supports all of these products in-house”, naming rivals Cisco, EMC, VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat hinting at more expensive and fragmented support by rivals. Further “One appliance alone can handle thousands of databases with potential backup connections to on-site datacentres, remote datacentres, and the cloud.” he said.

“The big deal is it’s fully automated, so it’s easy to operate, and you never lose data. It’s as a no-brainer appliance as we have,” Ellison remarked.

He further stressed Oracle has manufactured, tested, and support all these pieces in-house, calling out rivals Cisco, EMC, VMware, Microsoft, and Red Hat and hinting at more fragmented (not to mention expensive) deployment options. All X5 machines are available now.

TechEye Take

The rumor of the Intel invasion of Oracle has been circulating since OracleWorld 2012. This is a major shift for Oracle. The company’s management, currently in the midst of a “reinvention period”, includes the fact that Larry Ellison is executing a gradual accession plan as he moves toward retirement.

The X5 release is seen as one aspect of the company’s new strategy – one in which the company protects their private datacentre market base while adjusting to a world increasingly enveloped by the evolution of open hardware, software and the cloud. Ellison is a sharp toothed shark and Oracle is having a problem finding a way to replace his natural instincts – how this evolves is another one of those “only in the valley” stories.

It is looking like a very good year for Intel’s E5000 series though…,

 

Government in school technology push

Posted on January 21, 2015 by - News

Nicky Morgan, department for educationThe coalition government has used a teachers’ conference in London to encourage primary schools to up their technology ante.
Speaking at the BETT conference in London, education secretary Nicky Morgan will tell people that Google and O2 will help the move by supporting a £3.6 million initiative.
She thinks that schools should be plugged into technology firms because a lot of jobs will end up being in the tech sector.
Her department, the Department for Education, is putting up £3.6 billion in funds to develop computing skills in primaries.
She wants children in primary schools to learn about coding. Meanwhile, Oxford Brookes University will develop an online course for teachers in primary schools.
Other tech firms at the BETT conference include Intel, which is launching an education content management portal aimed at teachers. Intel wants teachers to help develop the so-called “three Rs” of reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic.

 

Microsoft must recover from Windows 8 debacle

Posted on January 21, 2015 by - News

Windows-8As reported earlier this week, Microsoft will show off more features of Windows 10 today.
But it faces uphill challenges, according to Ovum.
Richard Edward, principal analyst of enterprise mobility and productivity said a number of challenges face the software giant.
He said that chief information officers (CIOs) and corporate IT managers will monitor the event closely.
“There could also be announcements that will materially affect business user computing strategies, as Microsoft and its Windows hardware partners  try to reboot the PC industry and gain a foothold in smartphone and tablet markets,” he said.
Further, he said Microsoft: “is no stranger to debacles where Windows is concerned – remember Microsoft Vista – but the effort, resources and time required to extricate the company from each predicament increases with every occurrence.”
Edward said that getting Windows 7 users to upgrade to Windows 10 will be hard because there are two distinct markets to engage – business users and home users.
Ovum thinks businesses will carry on deploying Windows 7 for now.  Extended support will continue until January 2020, he said, “so there is compelling reasons for organisations to make the upgrade”.

 

IBM revenues, profits fall

Posted on January 21, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-01-21 at 10.57.32Major services company IBM turned in its financial fourth quarter figures last night, and the news wasn’t all that good.
IBM made net profit in its fourth quarter of $5.5 billion, compared to $6.2 billion in the same quarter of 2013.  That’s a fall of 11 percent.
Revenues in the fourth quarter amounted to $24.1 billion, down 12 percent compared to the year before.
However, if this figure includes divestments including customer care outsourcing and System x businesses, as well as currency fluctuations, IBM calculus the decrease is two percent.
Gini Rometty, IBM chairman and CEO, claimed her company had made significant progress in changing its business to higher value services.
Global services fell by eight percent, while technology services also fell by eight percent.  Business services revenues also fell by eight percent.  Revenues from its software fell seven percent.

 

Samsung, Apple, take top semi spots

Posted on January 21, 2015 by - News

Samsung HQ Silicon Valley - MM picApple and Samsung were the biggest buyers of semiconductors in 2014.
Together, they bought $57.9 billion worth of chips last year, up by $3.9 billion in 2013, according to Gartner.
In terms of the total market for semiconductor, both companies’ accounted for 17 percent of the total market.
Gartner said the two firms have been top of the semiconductor consumption market for four years in a row.
That, said analyst Masatsune Yamajo, means decisions they make “have considerable technology and pricing implications for the whole semiconductor industry”.
Samsung was still top buyer but its decision to withdraw from some parts of the PC market as well as losing market share to other vendors meant its growth rate wasn’t as great as in the past.
Gartner estimates that the top 10 companies bought $125.6 billion of semiconductors, accounting for 36.4 percent of the whole market in 2014.
After Samsung and Apple, the remaining eight top ten buyers were HP, Lenovo, Dell, Sony, Huawei, Cisco, LG Electronics and Toshiba.
The entire semiconductor market worldwide amounted to $339.9 billions last year.

 

Smart bin market isn’t rubbish

Posted on January 21, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-01-21 at 10.38.45The growth of intelligent bins will grow at a 43 percent CAGR between now and 2020, with Western Europe and the USA leading the charge.
So says ABI Research, which estimates that efficient and operational smart bins will number hundreds of thousands over the next five years.
Right now, says ABI, BigBelly Solar has received the most attention but other firms like SmartBin and Enovo are making waves outside of the USA.
Analyst Eugenio Pasqua thinks that while 95 percent of smart bins connected to monitoring services by cellular links, there are other contenders.
Those include firms producing low power WWAN connection, such as SIFFOX and Weightless.

 

Turkish security expert kebabs VLC

Posted on January 21, 2015 by - News

3313108041_e74acb5429A Turkish security expert found two zero-day vulnerabilities in library code used by the popular VLC media player around Christmas and is amazed they still have not been fixed.

Veysel Hatas found the data execution prevention (CVE-2014-9597) and write access (CVE-2014-9598) violation vulnerabilities in VLC and warned the outfit it could lead to arbitrary code execution.

“VLC Media Player contains a flaw that is triggered as user-supplied input is not properly sanitised when handling a specially crafted FLV” or M2V file”, Hatas wrote in his blog 

“This may allow a context-dependent attacker to corrupt memory and potentially execute arbitrary code.”

Despite the fact that the flaw was discovered on Boxing day and VLC was about to release a new stable version on January 9, the flaw was never fixed.

The flaws lie within libavcodec, a core component of the video player and VLC is not the only one to use the library. MPlayer and other open-source software also use it.

It has been estimated that there are more than 1.5 billion downloads of the open saucy VLC thanks mostly to the fact it will play anything – including viruses apparently.

Ubuntu gets snappy with the internet of things

Posted on January 21, 2015 by - News

frog-mouth-crocodile-blair_42596_990x742The Linux OS maker Canonical wants to extend its Ubuntu Snappy Linux technology to power the Internet of Things.

Ubuntu is best known as a popular Linux operating system for servers, cloud and desktops. Now Canonical is tweaking Ubuntu to power embedded devices and IoT.

The key to this is apparently the Snappy Ubuntu Core technology. Snappy Ubuntu Core was first announced on December 10, 2014, as a cut down version of Ubuntu.

Snappy was supposed to be a cloud technology but has been seen as a wizard thing to run embedded devices.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, said that the use of Snappy could improve the security, reliability, and efficiency of update mechanisms and help to isolate apps from one another.

This fixes a problem with IoT that its operating systems are harder to upgrade – which makes them insecure.

Shuttleworth said that Snappy updates can be delivered as smaller, more efficient transactional updates. It also has an update rollback feature, which can enable an application to be reverted if the update is unsuccessful for some reason.

He said that Snappy has very efficient bandwidth usage, making it ideal for IoT embedded devices. With

Shuttleworth told eWeek that Canonical could deliver an update for something like a Heartbleed or Shellshock vulnerability, completely independently of the lawnmower control app that would come from the lawnmower company.

With IoT, anything and everything can be connected to the Internet, even potentially a lawnmower, and it is usually up to the vendor to provide patches for any security issues.

To help capitalize on the IoT opportunity, Canonical now has an entire Internet of things division within the company.

While it sounds grandiose that we have a whole Internet of things division, this is an extremely efficient repurposing of the technology we already have,” Shuttleworth said.

 

Samsung snubs Qualcomm

Posted on January 21, 2015 by - News

qualcomm-snapdragonSamsung has ruled out using Qualcomm processors for the next version of the South Korean technology giant’s flagship Galaxy S smartphone.

Apparently the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chip had a nasty habit of overheating when Samsung came to test it. Samsung will use its own processors instead.

This would be a huge blow to Qualcomm which is the world’s largest maker of semiconductors used in phones, and has been supplying Samsung with chips that run the company’s best-selling handsets for ages.

Samsung is Qualcomm’s second-largest customer, providing about 12 percent of its sales, according to Bloomberg supply chain analysis.

It also gives Samsung a reason to boost its own processor-making division as it spends $15 billion on a new factory outside Seoul.

Samsung is expected to release the next Galaxy S as early as March, and it can’t dare to take the risk to use any of the chips in question for its most important model.

The company has been taking a kicking lately as smartphone sales slow.  Releasing a phone into the market with a hot chip could sink it.

Qualcomm has not commented on the news shares fell on the news.  In Europe they fell to 1.2 percent. Samsung shares rose 1.7 percent  as news got out.

Qualcomm said in April its latest 808 and 810 processors will start appearing in phones at the beginning of this year and will feature more advanced computing, graphics and radio capabilities. Xiaomi and LG are among the manufacturers preparing to release models with the Snapdragon 810.

 

Dropbox buys CloudOn

Posted on January 21, 2015 by - News

dropboxOnline document-sharing outfit Dropbox has acquired US-Israeli firm CloudOn.

CloudOn is a developer of tools to simplify creating and editing documents on mobile devices.

Financial details were not disclosed but money is believed to have changed hands.

CloudOn will become Dropbox’s first Israeli office and will focus on R&D. Dropbox plans to hire more engineers in Israel following the purchase.

Dropbox is waxing lyrical about what CloudOn brings to the company. It says that the CloudOn team will help build collaboration capabilities into Dropbox.

This means that Dropbox might be moving into end user content creation tools. So far it has Mailbox, a mobile email client, and Carousel, a mobile image viewing application. But nothing like compare to Google Docs or Microsoft’s mobile Office.

CloudOn customers have been told that the service will shut down in the next two months and that no new users will be accepted after today.

What is not clear is where this leaves Dropbox’s developing relationship with Microsoft.
In November, Dropbox teamed up with Microsoft to allow Office software users to manage and share files through Dropbox’s website and mobile app.

Microsoft has its own file sharing solution, OneDrive and did not really need Dropbox. However if Dropbox is heading into application land, one wonders why either side would find a relationship attractive.

 

Facebook cracking down on fake news

Posted on January 21, 2015 by - News

UhCNNFacebook announced that it will update its news feed software to flag stories that might be false and limit their spread.

The social notworking site has been a key spreader of fake news, including celebrity deaths, fake science reports mostly because some seem to think that “satire” is the same as “made up news”.

Instead of looking at the comments on a given post, it has added an option for Facebook users to flag it as “a false news story” when they run across it in their feeds.

Facebook will also look at how often it has been deleted by the people who posted it. The theory is that a widely deleted post may be one that many users regretted posting because they realized it was bogus.

The site will not remove such stories from its feed. Instead, the company said it will reduce their distribution and add an annotation warning news feed readers that they may contain false information. A post that has been either widely deleted or flagged as false news by a large number of users will now come with a note like this when it appears in your feed:

“Many people on Facebook have reported that this story contains false information.”

It is not a big technology deal. Facebook’s software will not be analysing the actual content or substance of stories to suss out the fake ones. Instead, it thinks that relying on explicit feedback from human users—is far simpler and makes more sense. Humans are collectively better than bots at recognising bogus stories when we see them, although given the number of people who think that climate warming is untrue, vaccination gives kids autism, UFOs buzzed the International Space Station and President Obama is a Muslim we would not think that humans are doing that good a job.

To make matters worse so called “satirical” articles from sites like The Onion will not be flagged . The company found in its testing that these sorts of posts are not often flagged as false by users.  Goodness knows what this will do to Fox News’ presence on Facebook.

This is not the first time that something like a hoax-flagging algorithm has been tried on Facebook.  It had a “war on clickbait” which was based on the same ideas and it did not exactly end  Upworthy’s reign of terror even when it still runs stories with intros like “you will never believe what happened next”.

UK open to security abuse

Posted on January 20, 2015 by - News

ciscologoA report from networking giant Cisco revealed that only 41 percent of UK companies have good security processes in place.
That places it well below India at 54 percent, and below the US at 44 percent and Germany at 43 percent.
But the situation is worse in Asia.  Only 36 percent of Chinese enterprises have adequate security while Japan has only 24 percent.
Cisco’s annual security review reveals that hackers are moving from compromising servers and operating systems to target individual users’ browsers and emails.
Some of the favoured techniques are Snowshoe spam, which generates many spam emails from a large range of IP addresses to avoid detection.
Attackers are also taking advantage of the relatively weak security of JavaScript and Flash by attacking both at the same time.
According to the survey, less than 50 percent of firms patch and configure systems to ensure security.
The survey canvassed executives at 1,700 companies and it appears there is a gap in perception with 75 percent thinking their security tools are very effective, while the reality is quite different.

 

Microsoft to open Windows 10 kimono

Posted on January 20, 2015 by - News

windows-10-technical-preview-turquoiseAlthough Windows 10 won’t launch until the second half of this year, Microsoft is attempting to keep us interested by revealing more features of the operating system.
It will reveal those details later this week.
When Microsoft opened the kimono on Windows 10 last Autumn, it was trying to get the attention of corporate users of PCs, many of which voted with their feet by not buying Windows 8.x
But this week, Microsoft wants to tempt regular punters by showing off services and devices that will support the operating system.
Part of the disgruntlement was because Windows 8.x looked like the interface of a tablet, and lacked the traditional “start” button.
Microsoft is promising that a feature called Cortana will be able to detect what sort of device is running Windows 10 and will react accordingly.
Microsoft is also waving goodbye to the long despised Explorer browser, by replacing it with a browser called Spartan which is rumoured to be niftier than the browsers of yesteryear.
No one is sure exactly when Windows 10 will ship, how much it will cost or how many flavours it will come in.  Most pundits are predicting a launch probably in September.