Outsourcing is a fail

Posted on October 22, 2014 by - News

depressionWhile the services market grew in 2013, revenues failed to shine.

That’s according to a report from market research company IDC, which said the whole service market grew from 12.3 percent in 2012 to 13.4 percent last year.

But, as IBM and SAP results showed earlier this week, the gloss appears to have faded on the services industry.

Vendors, said IDC, attributed the small increase in income to cutting jobs, making people work harder for less money, and finind new places where labour is cheaper.

IT outsourcing appears to be on he wane, said IDC. It was the least profitable service line last year and in 2012.

But support and training services are still profitable, while the second and third most profitable lines were “business consulting” and IT project based services, said IDC.

Chad Huston, a senior analyst at IDC, said the lacklustre revenue growth hasn’t stopped what he described as “an upward trajectory”.

But, he added, that’s because vendors are cutting their costs.

The supply chain is the weakest IT link

Posted on October 22, 2014 by - News

Rusty chain - Wikimedia CommonsThe University of Maryland (UMD) said it has created counter measures to prevent the supply chain being targeted by hackers.

A research team at the university’s School of Business said that hackers are targeting vendors and suppliers that have access to enterprises’ IT systems, software and networks.

The researchers point to the Target breach last year, when a criminal cracked into a refrigeration system supplier that was connected to an enterprise IT system.

But UMD has a counter measure which it developed after looking at 200 different companies across various industries.

Sandor Boyson, a research professor at UMD, said the research showed that the cyber supply chain is fragmented and companies fail to respond to real time risks.  “Just half of our subjects used an executive advisory committee such as a risk board to govern their IT system risks,” said Boyson.

You can test UMD’s counter measure, at no charge, here.  Boyson said that will let companies map their IT supply chains and measure themselves against their peers and competitors.  The scalable portal has already been used by companies in aerospace, telecomms, real estate, medical, and professional services.

Boyson’s team funding comes from US quango the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Medical gear hacked

Posted on October 22, 2014 by - News

hacking-medical-devicesThe US Department of Homeland Security is investigating two dozen cases of suspected cybersecurity flaws in medical devices and hospital equipment.

Under investigation is an infusion pump from Hospira , implantable heart devices from Medtronic and St Jude Medica.

There is no indication that hackers have been attacking patients through these devices, but the agency is concerned that malicious people may try to gain control of the devices remotely and create problems, such as instructing an infusion pump to overdose a patient with drugs, or forcing a heart implant to deliver a deadly jolt of electricity.

The senior DHS official said the agency is working with manufacturers to identify and repair software coding bugs and other vulnerabilities that hackers can potentially use to expose confidential data or attack hospital equipment.

Hospira, Medtronic and St Jude Medical declined to comment on the DHS investigations. All three companies said they take cybersecurity seriously and have made changes to improve product safety, but declined to give details.

The agency started examining healthcare equipment about two years ago, when cybersecurity researchers were becoming more interested in medical devices that increasingly contained computer chips, software, wireless technology and Internet connectivity, making them more susceptible to hacking.

The US Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the sale of medical devices, recently issued  guidelines for manufacturers and healthcare providers telling them to better secure medical gear.

The DHS review does not imply the government thinks a company has done anything wrong – it means the agency is looking into a suspected vulnerability to fix it.

This is not the first time that medical gear has fallen under the security microscope. In 2007, then US Vice President Dick Cheney ordered some of the wireless features to be disabled on his defibrillator due to security concerns. Unfortunately, this was done and Cheney was not bumped off by hackers sabotaging his defibrillator.

Chromebooks start to shine brightly

Posted on October 22, 2014 by - News

google-ICNotebooks using the conventional Wintel model seem to be past history, but Chromebooks are selling like there’s no tomorrow.

That’s the conclusion of research by ABI Research, which said that shipments of Chromebooks soared by 67 percent in a quarter.

Acer is the top dog in the sector, followed by Samsung and HP – those three accounted for 74 percent of shipment share during the first half of this year.  That isn’t going to change in the second half of this year, said ABI.

So-called vertical markets like schools are a driving force, and Chromebooks also sell well in emerging markets. But ABI said that North America will account for 78 percent of the Chromebook market and other regions such as Asia Pacific and Western Europe are set to grow shipment market share over the next five years.

Stephanie Van Vactor, an analyst at ABI, said that while Chromebooks might be a temporary fad like the netbook, but the price and design mean that it’s attractive to the world+dog.

“People are hungry for a product that is cost effective but also provide the versatility and functionality of a laptop,” she said.

Xerox Alto source code made public

Posted on October 22, 2014 by - News

altoThe code that inspired generations of computer nerds has been made public by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

The Xerox Alto computer was important because it was the first attempt and a making a machine that was visual rather than text based. It used a mouse and a WYSIWYG word processor. It was this beastie which was ripped off by Steve Jobs

Conservationists behind making the code available to the public had to archive it to nine-inch tape, before being transferred to eight-millimetre cartridges and then put on CDs.  Then they had to get permission to release the code.

The file includes the Bravo word processor, Markup, Draw and Sil drawing programs, and the Laurel e-mail program. There’s also the BCPL, Mesa, Smalltalk, and Lisp programming environments along with various utilities and the Alto’s Ethernet implementation.

Ethernet was developed for the Alto system using networking software, called Pup (for PARC Universal Packet).  This anticipated the Internet by allowing multiple Ethernet local area networks to be interconnected by leased phone lines, radio links, and the ARPANET (which at this time connected a handful of computers at ARPA research centres).

You can look at the software here 

 

Eat your heart out Dan Brown! Vatican puts archive online

Posted on October 22, 2014 by - News

vatican_library3The Vatican Apostolic Library has announced that more than 4,000 ancient manuscripts will now be available online as part of a digital archive.

Global IT service provider NTT DATA has developed the service, which displays high definition digital reproductions of the texts at the library’s website.

A special viewer built by the firm’s digital archive solution technology, AMLAD, enables manuscripts to be examined across a variety of devices, including tablets.

The release is part of a four-year project launched in March. NTT DATA had to establish the infrastructure for the long-term storage, safekeeping and viewing of digital specimens. The company also hopes to provide an efficient search function for the library’s digital artefacts by the end of the year.

Toshio Iwamoto, president and CEO of NTT, said that the firm was extremely excited to bring the collection to a wider audience.

Prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library, Monsignor Cesare Pasini added that the Vatican gladly adopts the use of innovative technologies in order to make “these treasures of humankind more widely known, in a profound spirit of universality”.

The digital archives can also be accessed via a portal site managed by Digita Vaticana, a foundation raising funds for the library’s preservation projects.

The Vatican Library is one of the oldest in the world and currently contains 75,000 codices, 1.1 million printed books and an estimated 8,500 incunabula. It was formally established in 1475,

In the 17th century, the Vatican Secret Archives were separated from the library at the start of the 17th century and are believed to contain an additional 150,000 items and it was these that Dan Brown made a big thing about in his books. Unfortunately, for conspiracy theorists, the “secret archives” is a mistranslation – it is actually a private library for private papers and it is allowed to be viewed by more than 1000 scholars.  No word as to when these will be made public.

Women were pushed out of coding in the 1980s

Posted on October 22, 2014 by - News

MSDWARG EC001While software development is seen as a “male only” industry, apparently it was not always like that.

Historically, a lot of computing pioneers, including those who programmed the first digital computers were women and for decades, the number of women studying computer science was growing faster than the number of men.

But something strange happened in 1984 which changed all that and the percentage of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged.

According to NPR,this is exactly the same time when personal computers started showing up in US homes in significant numbers. And the problem was that they were only marketed to men and boys.

Movies like Weird Science, Revenge of the Nerds, and War Games all came out in the ’80s and they were all about awkward geek boy geniuses.

By the 1990s families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when girls were really interested in computers.  This meant that girls grew up not playing with computers at home, which was how the next generation of programmers developed.

The paper cites Patricia Ordóñez who didn’t have a computer at home, but was a math wiz.  When she got to Johns Hopkins in the ’80s, she found that most of her male classmates were way ahead of her because they had grown up playing with computers.

In the ’70s, that never would have happened because Professors in intro classes assumed their students came in with no experience. But by the ’80s, that had changed.

 

Apple seems to hold little hope for its iWatch

Posted on October 22, 2014 by - News

fobwatchIt seems that the fruity cargo cult, Apple does not have the same hope for its iWatch as many commentators in the Tame Apple Press.

Yesterday Apple made changes to its reporting process which aims to obscure sales results. For example the fading iPod will not be identified on the balance sheet, nor will sales from retail. Instead, store results will be distributed among the various regions (such as Americas and Greater China), and iPod will be lumped in with “other products” along with along with Beats headphones, Apple TV, and accessories.

However, this “other products” category will also include Apple’s much touted, rarely seen iWatch. Which means that Apple does not want to tell anyone how sales of the product are doing. Hacks would have to look at this year’s figures, and guess how much of the category related to the watch.

This is telling – it means that Apple, quite rightly, does not really believe that the iWatch will sell significant amounts.

Analysts tried to corner Apple CEO Tim Cook on the matter during an earnings call who tried to reassure them that the move “says nothing about our expectations” for the Apple Watch.”

Cook added he also does not want to detail Apple Watch numbers to give competitors any data.

As an excuse that does not work very well. Apple has largely depended on creating an image where its shiny toys were popular. To do that it needs to tell the world how many millions of a product type it has sold. This creates the impression of a company doing well, rather than peddling anything that failed to work.

Burying iWatch sales can only mean that Jobs’ Mob does not want the fact that it will only sell a million of them to the sort of people who would buy anything with an Apple logo to get out to the rest of the world.

Notebooks to become cheap as chips

Posted on October 22, 2014 by - News, Products

notebooksThere is a long held adage about buying notebooks and that is don’t buy them in the fourth calendar quarter.

Intel always release new chips  in the New Year and it’s always wise to wait for that to happen rather than get all excited before Yule.  But just because chip prices will come down in early 2015, don’t rush to buy a new notebook because there is, of course, trouble on the Windows 8.1 scene.

Personally, I need a new notebook and would have bought one by now but for the fact that it’s very hard to buy one with the reasonable operating system Windows 7 any more.  This is because Microsoft, as usual, is behaving like a headless chicken.

Microsoft has a sound track record of getting operating systems and operating environments wrong every other time it releases one.  Just as Vista was a dog, so Windows 7 was pretty good and therefore Windows 8.1 was certain to be a dog.

It has decided not to bother with Windows 9 and its next operating system will be called Windows 10 – a bit of a cause for concern because Windows 9, compared to Windows 8, was probably going to be pretty good but now it’s calling Windows 9, Windows 10, that is a bit of a worry.

There’s other good news on the scene if you’re up for a new notebook, because Taiwanese based market research company Digitimes Research reckons that first tier vendors’ 8GB tablets are going to drop to $99 or less. It claims major Chinese vendor  Lenovo is starting this particular price war.

Driverless car hits 149MPH

Posted on October 21, 2014 by - News

Audi's Hackenberg with the RS7 driverless carGerman car firm Audi said it has demonstrated a car without a driver clocking nearly 150MPH at the Hockhenheim racing circuit.

A number of automotive manufacturers are experimenting with the concept of cars that don’t need drivers.  And Google is at the forefront of such attempts.

It may be quite a while before we see such vehicles on the roads, however, with a number of obstacles on the way including the question of liability in case of accidents.

The RS7 Audi used a heap of sensors including GPS to navigate around the race track, with the data generated being analysed and processed by software. The car took two minutes to complete one lap of the circuit.

Software is notoriously bug ridden and some governments would be a little nervous about licensing potential death traps to scoot around increasingly congested cities.

Audi board member Dr Ulrich Hackenberg said the test allowed Audi to test several concepts which could be applied to cars with drivers.

GloFo gets a Big Blue boost

Posted on October 21, 2014 by - News

IBM logoAs we reported yesterday, IBM has sold off its semiconductor business giving Global Foundries (GloFo) a considerable leg up in the foundry business.

IBM spelled out the details saying that GloFo will get its intellectual property, technology and technologists formerly part of Big Blue’s IBM Microelectronics business.

GloFo also gets some business from the deal because it will act as its exclusive server processor provider for 22 nanometre, 14 nanometre and 10 nanometre processes in a 10 year deal.

IBM was eager to say that despite it disposing of its Microelectronics division, it will still work on semiconductor research. And as part of this commitment, IBM will continue to invest $3 billion over the next five years in semiconductor technology research.

GloFo will get primary access to the research through the investment, will get thousands of patents and other benefits including technology related to advanced geometries at 10 nanometres and below.

Dr Sanjay Jha, CEO of GloFo, this gives his company leadership in the semiconductor business.  “This acquisition further strengthens advanced manufacturing in the US and builts on established relationships in New York and Vermont,” he said.

IBM will take a charge of $4.7 billion in its third quarter financial results because of the acquisition. Most former employees of IBM Microelectronics will keep their jobs.

Nadella gets loads of bad karma

Posted on October 21, 2014 by - News

Scrooge-PorpoiseThe CEO who told women that they could gain good karma by not asking for pay rises, Microsoft new Chief Executive Satya Nadella, apparently is planning to come back as a slug in a future life.

Nadella has become one the technology industry’s biggest earners, with a total compensation package worth $84.3 million this year.

According to a document filed with securities regulators, Nadella has no chance of being released from the wheel of birth and death any time soon – unlike many Microsoft female employees.

The huge number is mostly made up of the estimated value of certain one-time stock awards given to Nadella, who became the company’s third CEO in February. He cannot actually receive the shares until 2019.

The massive stock awards, valued at $79.8 million overall, were designed to keep Nadella at Microsoft while the company was hunting for a new CEO, and to give him long-term incentives as CEO.

Large stock awards have not been necessary for Microsoft’s previous two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, as both had multi-billion dollar holdings in the company.

Nadella’s compensation is set to be more modest, with “total target compensation” for fiscal 2015 set at $18 million, according to the company’s proxy filing.

Big Blue slows down

Posted on October 21, 2014 by - News

sn_blu_mysIBM shocked the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street by giving up its 2015 operating earnings target and moaning that it was suffering from a bad dose of weak client spending and a slumping software sector.

IBM shares fell nearly seven percent to a three year low, which must really hack off Warren Buffett whose Berkshire Hathaway owns seven percent of IBM shares. The decline shaved more than $13 billion off Big Blue’s market cap, which stood at $182 billion at the stock market close on Friday.

Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer said that the result was disappointing and that the company saw a marked slowdown in September in client buying behavior, and our results also point to the unprecedented pace of change in our industry.

In a move to rid itself of one underperforming business, IBM also said on Monday it will hive off its loss-making semiconductor unit to contract chipmaker Globalfoundries.

“Some of these fundamental shifts in the industry are happening faster than we planned,” Rometty said on a call with analysts. “We are continuing to remix to higher value.”

To be fair, IBM is hardly the only technology company having a hard time keeping up. German software maker SAP cut its 2014 operating profit forecast on Monday, citing a faster-than-expected move to cloud-based software. Oracle has similar problems.

Revenue from the company’s cloud service unit, which allows businesses to access software and data remotely, grew more than 50 percent in the quarter, while mobile revenue doubled.

Still, they were not enough to offset weakness in servers and other hardware, as well as some software business lines.

IBM is spending $600 million for “workforce restructuring,” but did not specify how many employees would be cleaning out their desks.

IBM, which said it would announce a new operating earning per share target for 2015 in January, reported a 4 percent drop in third-quarter revenues as clients held back on spending in September.

Revenue fell to $22.4 billion in the quarter from $23.34 billion a year earlier. Wall Street expected $23.37 billion.

Net profit from continuing operations dropped to $3.46 billion, or $3.46 per share, from $4.14 billion, or $3.77 per share in the same quarter last year.

 

iPads sinking to oblivion

Posted on October 21, 2014 by - News

quicksand1It looks like the world has given up on the novelty of the tablet and is more interested in bigger phones and PCs.

After years of posting stories about how Steve Jobs killed the PC by bringing in the tablet, the Tame Apple press has to face the fact that it was not quite, but completely, untrue.

Apple reported that it had its strongest growth in Mac computer shipments in years but tablet sales were slinking fast.

This seems to suggest that what we have been saying all along the so called shift to mobile was all marketing spin and that slow PC sales were due to economic rather than a shift in technology demands.

Jobs Mob saw a 16 percent jump in iPhone sales, with a stronger-than-expected revenue of $63.5 billion to $66.5 billion in the December quarter.

But sales of the iPad slid for the third straight quarter falling 7 percent from the previous quarter to 12.3 million units, and were down 13 percent from the year-ago period.

The Tame Apple Press is banking on Apple’s alliance with IBM to drive tablet and phone sales to corporate customers, however saner heads do not think that likely.

Biggish Blue Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri said that the scheme had more than 50 clients, and Apple and IBM intend to introduce their first jointly designed software apps next month.

The lack of interest in the Tablets place Apple in a dodgy position. It means that the company still depends on the iPhone, and it is a market which is fast drying up.

Orders for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus began in September, helping Apple chalk up a 12.2 percent jump in revenue last quarter to $42.12 billion. That exceeded the roughly $39.9 billion that Wall Street analysts had predicted, on average.

The return of the Mac was a surprise. There was talk once of Apple leaving its Mac business behind as it moved into the gadget business. But it appears that there are people who are prepared to pay over the odds for a PC with an Apple logo on it.

 

Great Firewall of China attacks Apple

Posted on October 21, 2014 by - News

great wallChinese authorities are staging a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on Apple’s iCloud after previous attacks on Github, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

The man-in-the-middle attack is a form of spying in which the attacker makes independent connections with the victims and relays messages between them, making them believe that they are talking to each other.

According to Great Fire  the Chinese are using their Great Firewall security system to gain access to usernames and passwords and consequently all data stored on iCloud such as iMessages, photos, contacts, etc.

Unlike the recent attack on Google, this attack is nationwide and appears to be after personal data. This may also related to images and videos of the Hong Kong protests being shared on the mainland.

 

 

Internet users in China should first use a trusted browser on their desktops and mobile devices.  Firefox and Chrome will both prevent users from accessing iCloud.com when they are trying to access a site that is suffering from a MITM attack. Qihoo’s popular Chinese 360 secure browser loads the page without question.

Apple does provide security warnings, but users often ignore these – after all, they believe they are connecting to the Jobs’ Mob site itself and have been told that their software and system is totally secure.

In fact the Tame Apple Press claims that Apple is being targeted because it now offers encryption on the phone, which would keep the spooks out.  It is better for the Chinese to steal users’ passwords so they do not have to worry about having to decode the hard-drive.