Dell woman wins woman of year award

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

Sarah ShieldsA senior executive at Dell has been voted Woman of the Year by 1,000 IT voters.

Sarah Shields, executive director and general manager at Dell UK, picked up the award at an event organised by PCR in London today.

Shields said: “It’s an absolute honour, especially to be in a room full of such amazing women.  I really am at a loss for words right now, but I think the best thing that I can do is to inspire all women to join IT.”

It’s rarely Sarah Shields, nee Scott, is at a loss for words.  In the 20 odd years we’ve known her, she has often had something to say. And, sure enough….

She continued: “IT isn’t just about programming or hardcore selling – it’s actually one of the most rewarding an enjoyable careers a woman can get into it and make a real difference.”

Nancy Hammervik, ComTIA’s senior VP for industry relations said: “With women representing just over half of the population, and the slight majority of university graduates, it is critical we leverage this powerful demographic to contribute and grow our industry.”

BBC to remember web pages forgotten

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

beebGoogle removal of BBC web pages under the so-called “right to be forgotten” is being challenged by the broadcasting giant.

The BBC feels that some of its own pages shuld not have been taken down.  David Jordan, who heads up the BBC’s editorial policy said it would publish a regularly updated list of pages that Google has removed.

The European Court of Justice told Google that people should have the right to have content they objected to removed.  Google, said Jordan, doesn’t let people or organisations that run pages know links have been taken down.

Jordan said that the BBC wouldn’t publish any identifying information or republish pages.  He said there isn’t an effective appeal process and said one page about members of the Real IRA was removed from the BBC website even after two people were convicted.

Jordan made the remarks at a meeting organised by Google. The search engine is currently engaged in a PR campaign around Europe in a bid to help people understand Google really isn’t evil.

AMD flounders

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

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

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

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

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

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

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - Fun Stuff, News

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

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

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”.

 

Notebook shipments creep up

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

notebooksSales of notebooks in the third quarter of this year are only up by 2.6 percent compared to the same quarter last year, despite bullish talk by vendors like Microsoft and Intel.

Digitimes Research said shipments for the calendar third quarter amounted to 45.198 million units, with HP being the top dog worldwide.

HP had a market share of 21 percent, Lenovo 20.9 percent, Dell 12.5 percent, Acer 9.7 percent, Apple 8.5 percent, Asustek 8.3 percent and Toshiba 6.2 percent, the Taiwanese research unit estimated.

These of course are the brand names, but many of the notebooks are made by original design manufacturers (ODMs) based in Taiwan.  These ODMs accounted for a significant 36,958 notebooks in the quarter.

The ODM battle is fought between Compal (34.5%), Wistron (15.7%), Inventec (6.7%) and Pegatron (5.7%).

Digitimes Research also breaks out the shipments in terms of screen sizes with 8.2 percent being sub 12 inch models, 13 percent 12 inch notebooks, 13 percent 13 inch units, 22.7 percent 14 inch units, 47.2 percent 15 inch notebooks and 6.1 percent 16 inches and above.

The market research unit does not, however, appear to have provided figures for touch and non touch screen machines.

There’s hope for better batteries

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

David Prendergast, Berkeley LabScientists at Berkeley Lab think there’s light at the end of the tunnel as people quest to develop better alternatives to lithium ion batteries.

The problem with Li-ion batteries is that they sometimes burst into flames but we need rechargeable batteries with better energy density and cost reductions.

After running a series of simulations on supercomputers, David Prendergast and Liwen Wan (pictured) think a battery based on a multivalent ion, like magnesium (Mg), may well be the answer.

They think that an Mg-ion battery can provide twice the electrical current of Li-ions with the same density.  There have been problems with Mg-ion batteries but the scientists think that the problems aren’t insuperable.

“The catch for multivalent ions is that their increased charge draws more attention to them – they become surrounded in the battery’s electrolyte by other oppositely charged ions and solvent molecules – which can slow down their motion and create energetic penalties to exiting the electrolye for the electrodes. However, we found the problem may be less dire than is widely believed,” said Prendergast.

He said the simulations show that performance bottlenecks in Mg-ion batteries are related to what happens at the interface between the electrolyte and electrodes.

Essentially, Mg-ion based batteries are not as tricky as manufacturers might think as a result of the Berkeley Lab findings.

AMD Cuts Workforce – Sea Change 101 for Sailors?…,

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

AMD LayoffsJust one week and a day after assuming her new roll as AMD’s CEO Dr. Lisa Su announced a reduction in force amounting to seven percent of the AMD’s current workforce of 10,149 employees.

The fallowing of ~700 people follows two rounds of layoffs under Rory Read’s three year tenure.

AMD did not provide any information about where the cuts would be made – the company recently split into two divisions “Computing and Graphics”, and “Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom”. Contacts indicate that “Computing and Graphics” will receive a majority of the “hits”.

Last Thursday’s warning by Microchip Chief Executive Steve Sanghi that a correction will spread more broadly across the industry in the near future sent shares of chipmakers lower last Friday.

Microchip is a broad spectrum supplier into the Chinese and Asian marketplace, booking revenue only after it is shipped by distributors – a closely coupled supply chain that quickly indicates impending sea changes. AMD shares a similar situation in China, the company’s biggest market, substantiating Microchip’s warning. Whether this is the beginning of a prolonged downturn or is merely another “noise blip” on the radar is entwined in controversy.

Strangely enough, AMD’s arch nemesis Intel, reported rather glowing results on Tuesday indicating that AMD might be suffering from Intel’s competitive resurgence in Asia. The fact that Intel is devoting resources to system level integration at the SoC level may now be having an effect on both competitors.

AMD’s experienced a 65% drop in quarterly profits and is expecting the current quarter to be 13% lower than the period ended in September. The company’s share price fell 6% to $2.49 in after-hours trading. The share price has dropped 43% in three months as of close Thursday.

Su went on to assure analysts that the company was moving toward customized chips for applications beyond videogames hinting at two customers that had the potential of bringing in $3 Billion in additional revenue over the next three years.

TechEye Take

The first time I saw Rory Read perform in front of analysts was somewhat of an embarrassment. He became so animated on stage that an additional two flaps of his arms per minute would have gotten him airborne (I heard that he fired his stage coach soon thereafter). His resignation came as no surprise, only late by three years. Lisa Su was the only stand-up with credibility and has remained so since.

Can we expect Dr. Su to right the AMD ship? She’s very smart and well experienced in the land of semiconductors and if anyone can accomplish the miracle required to make AMD a player she’d be my pick…,

New mirror invented

Posted on October 16, 2014 by - News

mirrorzScientists claim to have invented a mirror that uses nanoscale technology to create new effects.

According to the Optical Society’s journal Optica, the boffins demonstrated a mirror that abandons a shiny surface but reflects infrared light by using a magnetic property of a non metallic “metamaterial”.

The scientis place nanoscale antennae at the surface of the magnetic mirrors and that allows the capture of electromagnetic radiation that will open up new types of chemical sensors, solar cells, lasers and other devices.

Michael Sinclair, a scientist at Sandia National Labs said: “Our breakthrough comes from using a specially engineered, non metallic surface studded with nanoscale resonators.”

The scientists are developing metamaterials whic are substances engineered with certain properties.

The magnetic mirror uses a two dimensonal array of dioelectric resonators using tellurium.  That means the design is more reflective at infrared wavelengths.

Google wants us to lick its lollipop

Posted on October 16, 2014 by - News, Products

lollipopGoogle has released a major update of Android, dubbed “Lollipop”.

According to Google, this is its thirteenth and most ambitious release of Android.

It has over 5,000 new application program interfaces (APIs) and to work on all devices.

Lollipop, it says, has a consistent design across different devices.  It also has features that lets you filter notifications so that if you’re doing something and you don’t want to be disturbed, you’ll see only the people you decide to let through.

It also includes a new battery saver feature which it claims will extend the life of a gadget by up to 90 minutes.  Android 5.0 Lollipop  also now includes multiple user accounts, guest user mode, and PIN passwords.

Use Facebook to talk to your heating

Posted on October 16, 2014 by - News

washingmachineA report suggests that pretty soon now we’ll be friending our washing machines, heating, lights and cars and telling them what we’ve had for breakfast. If we didn’t already know.

Scientists from the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil suggest that interfaces of social networking sites are likely to change to allow us to interact with things connected to the internet.

The internet of things, say the authors, could hook up with weather feeds so that your heating turns on when snow is expected.

And as things get ever more connected, you might even find that your gadgets defriend you because you’re not really needed at all.

The scientists at Bahia say that we will soon find ourselves waking up to what they dub a “social web of things”.  Think, for example, that in the future you can send a text message to your house to fiddle about with the heating. You will not be necessary in the future, and, says the team: “The archicture could be extended to remove the intermediate, us, from the equation and so give us domestic bliss with minimal intervention.”

Fitness spurs sensor market

Posted on October 16, 2014 by - News

fitnessWith a flood of gadgets aimed at people who like to be fit as well as machines used by medicos, shipment of the sensors used in the devices is set to increase sevenfold from 2013 to 2019.

The types of sensors used in these devices can be broken down into motion sensors, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and sensor for health, environment and user interfaces, according to IHS.

But out of these categories, motion sensors will be the dominant technology and under this umbrella are accelerometers, gyroscopes, proximity sensors and MEMS displays.

The top dog in the sensor market is ST Microelectronics – it sells sensors as bundles along with microprocessors and wirless chips.

IHS said that the worldwide market for sensors in wearables will reach 466 million units in 2019, up from 67 million in 2013.

Semi spending set to soar

Posted on October 16, 2014 by - News

Samsung rules the roostSemiconductor capital spending will be worth $64.5 billion this year, up 11.4 percent from 2013.  And capital equipment spending will increase 17.1 percent in 2014.

So says market research firm Gartner in a report that indicates that the increases are driven by strong memory average selling prices (ASPs) as well as higher consumer demand for gizmos and gadgets.

The report said that there’s undersupply on  DRAM and that will continue next year, but then we’ll see one of the characteristics of semiconductor swings and roundabouts.  Companies build extra capacity in times of drought only to find they’ve built too much.  Gartner said we’ll see oversupply in 2016.

Samsung, and SK Hynix are both ready to ramp up DRAM manufacturing in order to meet the pent up demand.

Memory capital spending will increase by 4.5 percent this year, but in the long time demand will be flat, said Gartner.