AMD loss shocks Wall Street

Posted on July 18, 2014 by - News

AMD_lassDespite winning all sorts of console contracts, AMD managed to disappoint Wall Street by posting a loss this quarter and gave a revenue forecast for the current quarter that missed expectations.

AMD’s stock fell 15 percent in extended trade after the outfit said it had a net loss of $36 million in the June quarter, compared with a loss of $74 million, a year earlier.

Intel’s results had created expectations on Wall Street that the worst is over for the personal computer industry.  However this seems to suggest that AMD does not think so.

AMD has been expanding into new markets like game consoles and low-power servers and it aims to obtain half of its revenue from those additional businesses by the end of 2015.

Some of the dafter analysts think that the problem is because AMD is too dependent on the PC and does not make enough cash making mobile gear. That argument falls flat when you realise that Intel made a stonking profit but its mobile division bled cash.

Generally it was nothing to do with falling PC sales, or a drift to mobile. AMD’s biggest problem is debt. Each quarter it has to pay $49 million to service its huge debt pile.  If this were not, there the company would have reported a non-GAAP operating profit of $67 million.

In fact AMD’s revenue rose 24 percent to $1.44 billion in the second quarter. The company said its third-quarter revenue would rise 2 percent, plus or minus 3 percent, from the June quarter. That would be about $1.47 billion. Analysts on average had expected revenue of $1.44 billion in the second quarter and $1.57 billion in the third quarter.

Revenue in the Computing Solutions Group dropped 20 percent from a year ago, to $669 million, as microprocessor unit shipments declined. But notebook processor sales rose, while AMD sold fewer desktop processors and chipsets. GPU revenue declined as well, partially offset by a rise in chips sold into graphics workstations and add-on cards.

 

IBM disappoints with better than expected results

Posted on July 18, 2014 by - News

IBM logoIt seems that IBM cannot really win.  It released results which were much better than expected but it appears that shareholders were not impressed.

Net profit rose to $4.1 billion, or $4.12 per share, from $3.2 billion, or $2.91 per share, a year earlier. On an adjusted basis, the company earned $4.32 per share, beating analysts’ average estimate of $4.29.

However, analysts were quick to find fault. At the heart of the problem was the IBM’s software business which only grew one percent in the quarter to $6.5 billion, slower than forecasts of three percent.

Software revenue was IBM’s bread and butter and it had been growing quite well over recent years. The slowdown means that IBM is getting fewer contracts.

IBM Chief Financial Officer Martin Schroeter expected that software revenue would pick up to mid-single digits in second half of 2014.

There were a few one off problems too. In January, IBM sold its customer care business, which brought in approximately $1.2 billion in full year revenue in 2013, to hardware distributor Synnex, a sale the company expects to negatively affect revenue comparisons by $300 million per quarter.

Last quarter, the company saw a $870 million restructuring fee, which was largely completed and contributed to savings quarter over quarter.

One bright point was that it saw growth in its strategic sectors as business analytics was up 7 percent, cloud revenue grew 50 percent, and security revenue rose 20 percent.

Revenue fell 2 percent to $24.4 billion in the second quarter, above analysts’ average estimate of $24.1 billion. The wooden spoon was won by the Asia Pacific region which fell nine per cent. Revenue in the Americas fell 1 percent/

Net profit rose to $4.1 billion, or $4.12 per share, from $3.2 billion, or $2.91 per share, a year earlier.

 

 

 

Intel suffers

Posted on July 17, 2014 by - News

intel_log_reversedBuried in Intel’s glowing results was one anomaly – its tablet business was taking off while its mobile unit revenue fell like a free falling team of elephants.

It was possible to see a significant spike in tablets using its chips, up 10 million last quarter, but its mobile revenue was just $51 million. This was an 83 percent drop from a year earlier.

While it is possible to explain some of that drop by a fall in its phone modem chip business it turns out that this was the cost of “contra revenue”,

As president Ronald Reagan found out, giving money to contras is always going to get you into trouble and what you are seeing is the cost of Intel buying its way into the market.

For 2014 anyway, Intel is selling a chip into low-end tablets that costly and complex to design into devices than rivals.  Tablet makers are happy because they get a higher end Bay Trail chip  for their cheap tablets but Intel’s bottom line  suffers and it smacks of desperation.

It all means that Intel can say it is “on track” to reach its goal of selling 40 million tablet processors this year but this means that more “successful” Intel is at getting device makers to use its chips, the more money it will lose.

Intel does not seem to care either.  It has said that it is tablet program is expected to take the company’s entire profit margin down by as much as 1.5 percentage points this year.  Intel can afford it, but it is questionable if his makes sense and it if would be better to invest in the 3.30 at Ascot.

Intel thought Bay Trail chip it is selling to tablet makers would wind up in high-end devices which cost a fortune. Instead, Intel’s opportunities have been in lower-end devices such as the Asus Memo Pad, a device that costs around $150.

Intel does not expect the mobile unit to turn profitable next year, but the losses should narrow, CFO Stacy Smith told the world+dog.

CEO Brian Krzanich believes that over time we can make this a profitable business.

Microsoft knows you are rubbish

Posted on July 17, 2014 by - News

Microsoft campusResearchers at Microsoft think they have found the secret of when someone is accidently introducing a bug into the software they are developing.

Microsoft researcher Andrew Begel said that instead of trying to go through a developers rubbish code looking for bugs it is possible to tell by looking into the developers eyes.

He hit on the idea of measuring the attributes of the developers themselves to see what cognitive or emotional issues lead to buggy code or lowered productivity.

This would enable employers to intervene and stop them from causing developers to make mistakes in the first place.

Begel has carried out tests using psycho-physiological sensors to measure developers’ reactions to tasks. He used eye-tracking technology, electrodermal-activity sensors (which measure changes in the skin’s ability to conduct electricity), and electroencephalogram sensors (which evaluate electrical activity in the brain).

Using this data, Begel was able to predict the difficulty of a task for a new developer with a precision of nearly 65 per cent. For new tasks the precision was even greater – almost 85 per cent.

Begel suggests that reducing the contrast on the display and making the fonts harder to read would force the developer to apply more brainpower to read and understand the code.

He added that Begel’s system makes no distinction between critical mistakes and minor mistakes, inevitably leading to unnecessary delays.

“I’m pretty sure that the industry could take pieces of the research that would help us understand better why mistakes are happening and when, and therefore how to try and avoid that,” said Shulman.

 

AMD eyes Nintendo for chips

Posted on July 17, 2014 by - News

AMD, SunnyvaleAMD thinks it can get back into the portable console business, and is hinting at a new deal with Nintendo involving its 3DS.

The vice president of AMD’s custom semiconductor business Saeid Moshkelani noted that AMD was doing rather well in consoles. It was providing the graphics processors for the Wii U, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.

However, portable consoles, such as the 3DS and PS Vita use other processors and AMD wants a piece of that action.

Of course, he admits, that market appears to be drying up but he said that “believe it or not” the 3DS is still selling.’

He said that before AMD could invest any time on a project it would have to be worth at least $100 million annual revenue for us to go for it.

He said that no Android console has made anything like that amount of money and it is extremely hard to imagine Sony producing another handheld console after the PS Vita, which leaves Nintendo – who have confirmed they definitely are making another portable.

Nintendo has said that whatever their next handheld is it will share the same operating system as their next home console and therefore the same games and apps.

Though there are various models, Android does not face software shortages because there is one common way of programming on the Android platform that works with various models.

It is not clear if AMD actually has Nintendo in the bag as a customer, but the fact Moshkelani is talking about it makes it a good bet.

 

Bing says “thanks for the memories” EU

Posted on July 17, 2014 by - News

Bill GatesSoftware giant Microsoft has followed Google and set up a system which will allow Europeans to be forgotten.

Microsoft started taking requests from individuals in Europe who want to be removed from its Bing search engine results following a court judgment in May guaranteeing the “right to be forgotten.”

Google complied with the ruling in May, and started removing some search results last month.

The European Court of Justice of the European Union ordered Google to remove a link to a 15-year-old newspaper article about a Spanish man’s bankruptcy, effectively upholding people’s “right to be forgotten” on the Internet.

The ruling, which affects the EU’s 500 million citizens, requires that Internet search services remove information deemed “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.”

If it does not remove the link, then there could be fines. The rule only applies to EU countries, meaning links that have been removed in Europe will still appear in search results elsewhere, including the United States.

Microsoft  has released a four-part questionnaire. Microsoft advises those interested in completing the questionnaire that it will “help us to consider the balance between your individual privacy interest and the public interest in protecting free expression and the free availability of information, consistent with European law.”

If you want to be forgotten by Bing you should go here https://www.bing.com/webmaster/tools/eu-privacy-request .

TSMC shares fall on rumours of chip cancellations

Posted on July 17, 2014 by - News

A not so mobile X86 PCTSMC shares fell as much as six percent after an analyst and Taiwanese media reported that Apple and Qualcomm were going to buy their next generation chips from elsewhere.

This is bad news as TSMC reported its highest quarterly profit since the end of 2006, and said it expected revenue to grow at least a record 20 percent this year. But its outlook was based on increased demand from Apple which recently chose TSMC over Samsung to make the majority of chips for the successor to its iPhone 5 series of smartphones.

But it looks like Apple and Qualcomm will likely buy a larger proportion of 14 nanometer smartphone chips from Samsung rather than TSMC beginning in the second half of 2015.

KGI Securities analyst Michael Liu said in a note to clients that he found that tasty bit of gossip following an investor conference held after TSMC reported second-quarter earnings.

The Commercial Times on Thursday, citing market speculation, said Qualcomm has already started working with Samsung to develop the chips. The Economic Daily News said without citing sources that Qualcomm had placed orders with Samsung.

However the rumours are not believed by everyone. Quanta Securities Analyst George Chang, who also attended the conference, said this was just a lot of speculation as no one has even seen the iPhone 6 yet, so it’s too early to say anything about future products.

During the conference, TSMC Chairman Morris Chang admitted that the company’s market share in 16 nanometer chips – which perform similarly to 14 nanometer chips – will be smaller than “a major competitor” next year, and that TSMC will claw it all back the year after.

Laptop users should disable Chrome

Posted on July 16, 2014 by - News

windersLaptop using Windows users might be better off uninstalling Google’s Chrome, according to Forbes magazine.

Apparently Chrome can drastically affect battery life, and even slow down your computer.

The problem is the “system clock tick rate.” Chrome sets the rate to 1.000ms. The idle, under Windows, should be 15.625ms. This means that the chip is waking far more often than at 15.625ms.

Vole warns that tick rates of 1.000ms might increase power consumption by “as much as 25 per cent.”

Macs and Linux machines don’t have the problem because they have “tickless timers.” IE and Firefox don’t exhibit this issue at all, instead they up the refresh when needed.

Noone seems to be keen to do much about it. It was apparently first seen in 2010, but the last confirmed bug addition was made yesterday.

If you must use Chrome it is probably a good idea to turn your browser off whenever possible. You could use Firefox which hogs memory or IE which is still IE unless Google does pull finger.

 

Apple forms new alliance with IBM

Posted on July 16, 2014 by - News

ibm-officeApple and IBM do not appear to have given up on their on-again off-again relationship.

The pair have a troubled relationship.  Big Blue, and Microsoft, were one of the targets of Apple’s famous 1984 marketing campaign. IBM was supposed to be the outfit protecting the locked in status quo while Apple’s Macintosh provided a pathway to freedom with locked in products.

A  decade later, IBM and Apple entered into an alliance to produce a computer operating system to rival Microsoft Windows.

Dubbed Taligent, it was axed and Apple to bought Next, bringing back Steve Jobs into the company.

Jobs made two other partnerships with IBM back in the 1990s. Kaleida, spent several years failing to develop interactive CD-ROMs. Then there was the AIM alliance, hoped to build a rival platform to Intel’s personal computer. That created the PowerPC chip it produced would run Apple’s Macs for several years but the platform really went nowhere either.

This new glorious partnership to help companies deploy wireless devices and business-specific applications to run on them.

Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty were doing their best to be best buddies when they announced the tie-up.

Cook said: “If  you were ‘building a puzzle’ the two companies would fit nicely together with no overlap. We do not compete on anything. And when you do that you end up with something better than either of you could produce yourself.”

Rometty said the team-up will allow the two giants to sort out serious problems that had been inhibiting deployment of wireless in the enterprise.

In the deal IBM will use its investments in big data and analytics plus cloud computing services and mobility. Last year developed mobile software for the enterprise with an initiative it called MobileFirst. In working with Apple, it has created an extension, dubbed MobileFirst, for iOS.

The deal means IBM and Apple will develop more than 100 industry-specific applications that will run on the iPhone and iPad, including applications for security, analysing corporate data and managing the devices themselves. Jobs’ Mob will add a new class of service to its AppleCare program and support aimed at enterprise customers.

IBM will sell iPhones and iPads to its corporate customers and will devote more than 100,000 people, including consultants and software developers, to the effort.

The enterprise software will run on IBM’s cloud infrastructure or on private clouds. Data for those applications will co-exist with personal data like photos and personal email that will run on Apple’s iCloud.

The move will get Apple into the business sector, a sector which has never liked it much, by using IBM software to replace the holes in its own efforts. Big Blue, on the other hand, gets popular hardware it can provide to its business customers after flogging off its own to Lenovo.

All this depends on history not repeating itself.

Internet recycles news

Posted on July 16, 2014 by - News

typewritIt appears that the world wide wibble is recycling news as a way of saving time.

This time last year our reporters wrote a yarn about how the Russia’s Federal Guard Service (FSO), was  upgrading to old style typewriters to avoid a US style internet leak.

Apparently the FSO is so worried about a Snowden style leak that it has bought 20 new electric typewriters for $15,000.

The story went the way of all flesh, but this morning the world wide wibble was all a flush with the news that the Russians were replacing their computers with typewriters.

It appears that the Izvestiya newspaper ran the story this week and it was picked up by serious news sources. Only it did not. Izvestiya mentions the G20 summit in London, which was also last year.

What appears to have happened is that the story suddenly did a round on Facebook and hacks looking for a new story to tell their news editor pitched it as something new.

It is not like there is a new angle on it either; the story was the same as it was when Techeye and Izvestiya first mentioned it.  The story appears in the Washington Post which even linked to a USA Today story from a year earlier  The Guardian which ran the story last year at least added that the Germans were doing the same thing.  We have also seen news blogs which are repeating the same headline from 2013.  Of course the story is all over Facebook.

 

Dell puts Hammer on the table

Posted on July 15, 2014 by - News

Hammer logoMajor channel player Dell said it has appointed distie Hammer as an international OEM covering its complete portfolio.

The partnership means Hammer will sell into 40 verticals including military, defence, media, entertainments and telecommunications.

Gerard Marlow, general manaer at Hammer said that his company’s experience in bespoke server design helps it to be a Dell OEM.  The company has over 50 sales and technical professionals in house.

Dermot O’Connell, executive director of OEM business at Dell says that the partnership means Hammer will be part of his company’s overall channel strategy.

Windows Start menu leaked

Posted on July 15, 2014 by - News

Microsoft campusA leak has tipped up on the nternet suggesting what Microsoft’s new start menu will look like in Windows 9 

It had been known for some time that Microsoft had been reverting back to its start menu for desktop users after its move to a more tablet interface went down like rent boy at a Tory conference.

To be honest the start menu is not that exciting, unless you have tried to live without one for longer than a month.  It is all stuff which will be familiar to Windows 7 users with a couple of minor tweaks.

It is clear that this is an early build of next generation of Windows and might be tweaked still further before Windows 9 comes out. Still there is only so much that you can do to a start bar to make it new.

The image says that the start bar is for Win 8.1 Pro however, the world on the street is that it is actually a legitimate Windows 9 version. Builds inside of Microsoft still use this branding.

This build 9788 is said to be floating around the web but has so far not been a full leak. We expect that there will be a more complete leak in the near future.

In the meantime here is the thread where the leaks appear be being posted 

 

Man denies right to be forgotten

Posted on July 15, 2014 by - News

OgleA man is backing up the parts of Google and the worldwide web that people are asking to be forgotten.

Hidden From Google, the idea of a web programmer in New Jersey, archives each website that Google is required to take down from European Union search listings thanks to the recent court decision that allows people to request that certain pages be scrubbed from Google’s search results if they’re outdated or irrelevant.

There is a concern that the people who are making the takedown requests are mostly convicted sex offenders and huge banking companies who are abusing the system to hide their crimes.

Hidden From Google doesn’t automatically archive each website that disappears from searches—instead, it relies on news reports about specific websites that are removed.

The idea is that a person can submit a link that has been removed from Google, and the site will archive it. That means that the site is far from comprehensive. It only has a couple dozen stories listed thus far.  Google is wrestling with a backlog of some 50,000 requests.

Talking to Motherboard, Afaq Tariq, the site’s programmer said that Hidden From Google seemed to be something that was missing from the internet.

“Whether I agree with the concept or not, it is a perfectly legitimate way to archive the actions of this societal decision so an open discussion can take place on its impact. I built it with the notion of it empowering a fairly equipped debate.”

Tariq is not clear in his own head if the right to be forgotten should exist or not, but says that determining whether or not a website should turn up in Google searches should be a decision undertaken by the internet as a whole, not just one person.

Websites such as Chilling Effects catalogue takedown requests from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but have not yet begun listing sites removed from searches because of right to be forgotten requests.

Emily Hong, of Chilling Effects, wrote in a blog post that given the inherent subjectivity of the content, right to be forgotten requests promise to be even more ambiguous than copyright claims.

“Formulaic notice services are thus even more likely to upset the balance between privacy and freedom of expression by making fraudulent requests both easier to send and harder to detect. “In a pool of 50,000+ incoming notices, a false positive rate of just 0.1 percent would amount to 50 individual cases that result in the harmful loss of speech,” she wrote.

Chilling Effects is still wondering if it is possible, to catalogue all sites removed from Google searches as a result of the law.

 

The internet belong US

Posted on July 15, 2014 by - News

pressieThe US government has ruled that if data is on the internet, anywhere in the world, it has to be turned over to one of its spying organisations for processing.

President Barack Obama’s administration is insisting that that any company with operations in the United States must comply with valid warrants for data, even if the content is stored overseas.

This means that anyone who uses an iPhone anywhere in the world will see their data inside a US government database.

Microsoft and Apple insist that enforcement of US law stops at the border, but the government seems to think that it rules the world.

A magistrate judge has already sided with the government’s position, ruling in April that “the basic principle that an entity lawfully obligated to produce information must do so regardless of the location of that information.”

Microsoft appealed   and the case is set to be heard in two weeks.

The US government said that content stored online is not protected by Fourth Amendment protections as data stored in the physical world. It quoted a law put out by President Ronald Reagan called the  Stored Communications Act (SCA).  This said that overseas records must be handed over domestically when a valid subpoena, order, or warrant forces them. No one thought that the SCA stuffed up the Fourth Amendment so there is no need to change the laws.

However Microsoft said Congress has not authorised the issuance of warrants that reach outside US territory. It points out that the government cannot issue a warrant allowing federal agents to break down the doors of Microsoft’s Dublin facility.

Microsoft said that consumer trust in US companies is low in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations and the government will make overseas operations impossible.

It has the backing of Apple, AT&T, Cisco, and Verizon agree. Verizon said if the government wins, it would produce “dramatic conflict with foreign data protection laws.” Apple and Cisco said (PDF) that the tech sector would be blacklisted by foreign governments.

Recently the senior counsel for the Irish Supreme Court wrote in a recent filing that a US-Ireland “Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty” was a way for the US government to obtain the e-mail held on Microsoft’s external servers.

 

GCHQ uses internet as a toy

Posted on July 15, 2014 by - News

chamberThe British spy agency GCHQ has developed tools to seed the internet with false information.

According to security writer Glenn Greenwald  the British spooks have the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplify” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.”

GCHQ’s capabilities were found amongst documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.  The British even use a trick to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call.

The software tools were built by backroom boffins working for GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG). It appears to be a clear indication that the British are using  propaganda and internet deception. We have seen already the use of “fake victim blog posts,” “false flag operations,” “honey traps” and psychological manipulation to target online activists, monitor visitors to WikiLeaks, and spy on YouTube and Facebook users.

However the GCHQ document called “JTRIG Tools and Techniques” https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/07/14/jtrig-tools-techniques/ shows just what sort of skulduggery the British are up to online.

According to Greenwald, the document us designed to notify other GCHQ units of JTRIG’s “weaponised capability” when it comes to the dark internet arts, and “serves as a sort of hacker’s buffet for wreaking online havoc”.