Tag: software

Putin the thumbscrews on Western tech companies

Posted on July 22, 2014 by - News

imperial_russiaTsar Vladimir Putin is taking his revenge on the US for bringing in sanctions against its Ukraine activity by cutting back on the use of American technology.

Apparently Putin is cross about the sanctions which froze the business assets of some of his closest business supporters. He thinks he should be allowed to supply missiles to pro-Russian supporters to use how they see fit without any world sanctions.

It looks like Putin is taking out his frustrations on US companies like Microsoft and IBM and ordering the country to be less reliant on Yankee tech.

Russia’s executive secretary of the commission for the State Duma, Andrey Chernogorov, was quoted as saying, “This all has to do with sanctions. Given the current international tensions, substituting imports with local software and hardware becomes the key to ensuring self sufficiency.”

The State Duma is currently in the process of drafting a bill which would seek to replace products from Microsoft and IBM in favour of software and hardware made by local companies.

It looks like the Russians will eventually only buy products that do not need to be imported or have licensed components.

It is not clear how that will play out yet. Probably some support or pressure to move to Open Source products. That might work well with the software, but hardware dependence on US, made in China, goods will be harder to shake.

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.

 

UserReplay, Star-Archats team up

Posted on May 22, 2013 by - News

cosyUserReplay has got all cosy with with Star-Achats.

The Session replay software startup has signed a deal with the French distributor in a bid to expand its reach into the pan-European eCommerce market.

According to Star-Achats the French eCommerce market now includes 120,000 e-commerce sites and will account for more than 53 billion Euros in transactions in 2013.

It added that major French financial institutions were also increasing their online banking offerings.

The company, which represents American and British software companies in the growing French-speaking markets of France, Belgium and Switzerland, said UserReply would fit in well in the markets as because of these factors.

UserReplay is claimed to allow users to record, re-run and analyse every visitors’ journey through a website. This aims to help customer service desks and support staff can use this information to quickly identify problems with the website.

Apparently this saves days for the web development team as they don’t have to try and replicate what happened based on vague details from the customer.

Other key uses of session replay are in resolving complaints and disputes with customers, recovering abandoned checkout pages and even protecting against online fraud.

On Monday, just a year before XP goes

Posted on April 5, 2013 by - News, Products

framedwindowsThis coming Monday will mark just one year until Microsoft ends extended support for Windows XP. Vista was a joke – but Windows 7 is quite good, and companies are being urged to upgrade their OS before exposing themselves to unnecessary risk.

Microsoft has itself advised companies to upgrade to 7 or 8, but according to a report from 1E, under a quarter of surveyed companies had migration in place. Just under half said they were in the process of upgrading – meaning headaches for IT departments if they do not get their upgrades guaranteed in time. 1E warns that with just a year left to complete that migration, it won’t be long before budgets are complicated by costly extended IT support.

In a statement, Sumir Karayi, CEO of 1E, said businesses will be under threat of security risk unless they upgrade their IT systems in time – and the migration should be done with as little disruption to the business as possible.

“Organisations that are not yet off the starting blocks or only a little way down the track are highly unlikely to complete before the Microsoft deadline,” Karayi said. “Whether the delay is because they misunderstood the sheer scale of the project, or that they are coming across technical hurdles, it means they cannot confidently predict when they will finish or how much it will cost them”. The prospects, Karayi warns, are a little grim – “few IT teams will have ever experienced such a complex migration,” he said.

Karayi said 1E leans toward fully automating the process on as many as machines as possible instead of partiallyautomating the process for every machine, because it can lead to 80 to 90 percent less desk visits. Using a totally automated approach “means organisations can deploy literally thousands of machines per day,” which is the “only way to get migrated within the available time”.

Camwood, a migration services company ‘s CEO Adrian Foxall said IT knows full well that the end of Windows XP is around the corner, but business isn’t paying as much attention.

“In these tough economic times, it is not surprising that business leaders do not want to invest a substantial amount of money in something that essentially isn’t broken, as is the case with Windows XP today,” Foxall said. “But with an estimated 40 percent of business desktops still running Windows XP and with the clock ticking, IT and the board need to join forces and work together to migrate to a new OS that will support their organisation now and into the future”.

If they don’t, companies will be putting themselves “in jeopardy”.

ARM turns to Avnet to push development tools

Posted on February 28, 2013 by - News

avnettsARM is turning to enormous distie Avnet in a bid to push its gear.

The company has teamed up with old school dealer Avnet Electronics Marketing to make available its embedded development tools on the Embedded Software Store (ESS).

Launched in 2011 by Avnet Electronics Marketing and ARM, the online ESS is said to offer services in the embedded software community, providing software that supports ARM architecture.

The portfolio includes ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5) tool chain, DSTREAM debug and trace unit, MDK-ARM microcontroller development kit and ULINK family of debug adapters.

In addition, Avnet has also signed on the dotted line to become its new pals authorised distributor for ARM developer tool products meaning it’s reps can now flog ARM products to their clients.

Mutual customers will also be able to access ARM’s embedded tools from ARM online, which the company said would help “accelerate engineers to develop robust and highly optimised embedded software for ARM devices.”

UK government’s building software plans stuffed up

Posted on February 13, 2013 by - News

urinalsResellers of Building Information Management (BIM) software packages say that the UK government is stuffing up the introduction of such software in the industry, by failing to make sure that the software is compatible.

When the government announced in May last year that BIM software would be made mandatory on all public sector building projects, resellers of the software started to rub their paws eagerly.

However, it turned out that the issue of compatibility in BIM software packages is delaying its wider use in the building services sector.

H&V news  quoted BIM reseller Mintronics’ John Minto, saying that the government’s BIM plans were “largely failing”.

NG Bailey Engineering principal mechanical engineering manager Will Pitt and Interserve Engineering Services head of business development Edward Halford have agreed that while  BIM was set to transform the design and delivery of buildings, the software was being scuppered by inter-operability problems.

Halford said that BIM software was sufficiently developed to allow multi-disciplinary co-ordination at early stages but the transfer of BIM information into a format suitable for manufacture and beyond is still tricky.

Some design and detailing required by the government cannot currently be handled by many of the BIM systems being used by architects and consultants.

Halford’s company recognised how some SMEs can struggle with BIM integration, due to cost, time and resource considerations, but some of it was to do with the lack of compatibility across various software packages, as well as the non-availability of supply chain components appear to be holding a number of small and medium-sized enterprises back.

He wanted more standardisation of software packages, improved compatibility, and better integrated technical libraries from manufacturers and suppliers.

To make matters worse, the use of level 2 BIM will become mandatory within public sector projects by 2016, before many have got the hang of level 1.

How Microsoft and Intel lost the plot

Posted on January 15, 2013 by - Opinions

The TitanicWhile no-one could say that the writing is on the wall for giant tech companies Intel and Microsoft, there is a warning there but so far it’s just written in invisible ink.

As I write this, Intel’s share price (NASDAQ:INTC) stands at $21.93 and Microsoft’s (NYSE:MSFT) at $26.90.  They’ve ticked along in this way for many a long year now and the only way seems to be down.

Signs of bombers approaching have been on the radar for many a year now, and both companies seem to be like supertankers, which take an awfully long time to run round.  The Vole and the Zilla have got complacent and failed to take steps years ago to re-engineer their businesses.

You still have time to have a wee and wash your hands before a PC boots up and despite the undoubted process advances Intel has made over the years, people are fleeing the Win platform in their droves.

Both companies have failed to make inroads into the smartphone and tablet market, even though they whined on and on about convergence for many a year.  Handset manufacturers, by and large, do not want to be in the tender embrace of the two companies which essentially dictated what went in the PC industry.

And besides, their basic technology deeply sucks, for different reasons. Intel is forced, because of its huge capital investment commitments, to put a premium on its notebook microprocessors while it is safe to say that its much vaunted Atom range is just a total flop.

Microsoft’s software has always basically sucked anyway and it’s only by cunning marketing that it achieved its pre-eminence in this side of the business. I don’t think anyone, apart from Intel executives, have got smartphones powered by Intel Inside. Oddly enough, at an Intel Developer Forum years and years ago, when it still had its StrongARM stuff, me and a few other journos did ask why Intel just didn’t go and develop really low power devices based on the ARM chip and give people what they really wanted.

While Intel and Microsoft have been shilly-shallying and, essentially, living in the past, competition has crept up and overtaken them.

And so at some point this year, current CEO Paul Otellini is to depart from his captain’s cabin at Intel, to be replaced by who-knows-who to guide the ship into 2013 and beyond.

Right now, and as an Intel and Microsoft watcher for nigh on 30 years, I just can’t see how these particular conjurers are going to pull any rabbits out of their magic hats. Maybe they’ll specialise in producing cabbages from up their sleeves, instead.