Tag: techeye

ARM and Intel are as bad as each other

Posted on August 29, 2014 by - News

tweddle dee and tweedle dumFor years, ARM and Intel have been snarling at each other that each other’s chips are more power efficient. ARM has claimed that the reason it was more power efficient thanks to fundamental differences in the ISA (instruction set architecture).

As we reported earlier this week, however, Intel is one of ARM’s biggest fans.

ARM uses RISC and Intel’s x86 uses CISC.  ARM says that makes a big difference. However a team from the University of Wisconsin has been looking at the two architectures RISC and CISC and thinks that ARM might be wrong and that ISA is less important.

Their new research paper, which was reviewed in detail by Extreme Tech examines these claims using a variety of ARM cores as well as a Loongson MIPS microprocessor, Intel’s Atom and Sandy Bridge microarchitectures, and AMD’s Bobcat.

The report suggests that ISA can matter in certain, extremely specific cases where die sizes must be 1-2mm2 or power consumption is specced to sub-milliwatt levels.  At those rare times, RISC microcontrollers can still have an advantage over their CISC brethren.

But the report suggests that those who claim RISC still has enormous benefits over x86 at higher performance levels are ignoring the fact that RISC and CISC describe design strategies and which fixed technological limitations of years ago and are not important today.

The report said that in the good old days RISC chips could run at significantly higher clocks than their CISC counterparts thanks to reduced complexity, but that’s no longer true.

Now it is process technology controls clock speed, not one’s choice of RISC vs. CISC. Today a Core i7 and Cortex-A57 have far more in common due to decades of experience have led designers to adopt strategies and structures that work, even if the underlying ISA is different.

They concluded that the RISC vs. CISC argument should be cast into the dustbin of history even if it still has some relevance in the microcontroller realm. Basically an x86 chip can be more power efficient than an ARM processor, or vice versa but it has nothing to do with the instruction set.

Ohio wants to limit science teaching

Posted on August 28, 2014 by - News

BiM65CpIYAAdb-PThe US state of Ohio is considering restricting the teaching of science, in a move which might bring in a  Christian fundamentalist education system.

The bill, currently under consideration by the Ohio Assembly, is intended to revoke a previous approval of the Common Core educational standards, includes sections devoted to science and social studies.

The Common Core standards are based in core existing disciplines of biology, chemistry, and physics; incorporate grade-level mathematics and be referenced to the mathematics standards; focus on academic and scientific knowledge rather than scientific processes; and prohibit political or religious interpretation of scientific facts.

This sounds reasonable but actually, the new law means that teachers will be forbidden to teach the scientific process. They might learn scientific facts, but will not be taught how scientists reached those facts.

The law prohibiting “political or religious interpretation of scientific facts” actually prevents educators from pointing out any evidence that says that the earth is more than 10,000 years old.

Republican Andy Thompson told The Columbus Dispatch that the bill would open the door to instruction on intelligent design. For those who came in late, Intelligent Design is a quasi-scientific way of saying that the world was created 10,000 years ago by a specific god in seven days.

Thompson however is not consistent in his statement of intent. He told the Cincinnati Enquirer that the bill does nothing to put creationism into the classroom what it prevents is politicised science.

That naturally includes the issue of climate change in which he quotes some fake science to say it is untrue and therefore “political.”

Where this will leave IBM which has a big plant in Ohio is anyone’s guess.  It will only be able to find workers who believe you can create data centre class servers by praying to God for them.

 

Amazon Fire Phone fails to rage

Posted on August 28, 2014 by - News

quo_vadis_poster-nero-plays-while-rome-burns-w450Amazon’s Fire Phone was launched in July to a great fanfare over its 3D-effect maps and multiple front-facing cameras.

But apparently it has been greeted with a collective yawn by actual users and there are signs that Amazon priced itself out of the market.

The Fire Phone cost $200 for a 32GB version on an AT&T contract – the same price range as the iPhone 5S or Samsung GS5.

According to a release from Chitika, looking at activity on its ad network in the 20 days after the Fire Phone’s release, the Fire Phone accounted for 0.015 per cent of activity.

This sounds a low number, but it is possible to work out how many phones that might represent. Using data from ComScore for the three months to the end of June 2014 there were 173m smartphones in use in the US.

That figure is rising by between a million or two a month so two months later, by mid-August, when the Chitika data was collected, there would be about 177 million smartphones in use in the US. .015% of 177 million means 26,550 Fire phones in use.

Of course, you have to assume that Amazon’s Fire Phone will show up on Chitika’s network as often as any other phone, but even allowing for errors, does seem that the Fire sold only 35,000 Fire Phones during those 20 days.

Amazon said that it was in the phone game for the long play and it intends to be patient. That might work in the long term, but we would have thought Amazon would go for a cheaper more popular product, as it did successfully with its tablets.

Michael J Fox teams up with Intel

Posted on August 28, 2014 by - News

back-to-the-futureStar of Back to the Future Michael J. Fox is teaming up with Intel to use the Internet of Thongs to find a cure for Parkinson’s Disease.

Fox’s plan involves using gear like the Pebble Watch to help in the fight.

Patients in phase one of the Parkinson’s study are being given Pebble watches which are paired with a smartphone. “The setup monitored daily movements and securely uploaded data to the cloud, letting researchers seamlessly keep tabs on multiple patients without disrupting their schedules.”

The smartwatch maker is excited to see its technology being used in medical research and perhaps ultimately helping to bring a change.

Chipzilla’s involvement using a new big data analytics platform that detects patterns in participant data collected from wearable technologies used to monitor symptoms.

Todd Sherer, PhD, CEO of The Michael J. Fox Foundation said that data science and wearable computing hold the potential to transform the ability to capture and objectively measure patients’ actual experience of disease, with unprecedented implications for Parkinson’s drug development, diagnosis and treatment.

The potential to collect and analyse data from thousands of individuals on measurable features of Parkinson’s, such as slowness of movement, tremor and sleep quality, could enable researchers to assemble a better picture of the clinical progression of Parkinson’s and track its relationship to molecular changes.

Wearables can unobtrusively gather and transmit objective, experiential data in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With this approach, researchers could go from looking at a very small number of data points and burdensome pencil-and-paper patient diaries collected sporadically to analyzing hundreds of readings per second from thousands of patients and attaining a critical mass of data to detect patterns and make new discoveries.

The idea was trailed earlier this year to evaluate the usability and accuracy of wearable devices for tracking agreed physiological features from participants and using a big data analytics platform to collect and analyze the data. The participants (16 Parkinson’s patients and nine control volunteers) wore the devices during two clinic visits and at home continuously over four days.

Intel data scientists are now correlating the data collected to clinical observations and patient diaries to gauge the devices’ accuracy, and are developing algorithms to measure symptoms and disease progression.

Later this year, Intel and MJFF plan to launch a new mobile software that enables patients to report their medication intake as well as how they are feeling. The effort is part of the next phase of the study to enable medical researchers to study the effects of medication on motor symptoms via changes detected in sensor data from wearable devices.

 

Red Hat is missing the developer train

Posted on August 28, 2014 by - News

red-hatWhile CIOs tend to think “Red Hat” when they contemplate their open source navels, their developers are not big fans and more likely to love Ubuntu, according to research.

According to AngelList data compiled by Leo Polovets, these developers also like MySQL, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL for their database; Chef or Puppet for configuration; and ElasticSearch or Solr for search.

None of this technology is developed by Red Hat which means that if the Open Source giant does not pull finger, it may find itself without applications.

The same thing is happening on the cloud. Ubuntu claims more than 50 percent of all guest OSes. Across Red Hat’s complete product range (RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora), the company gets less than 20 percent of all guest OSes.

Where Red Hat has been doing some Stirling work with the open source developer community, on OpenStack Red Hat has a better 34 percent adoption rate.

Red Hat is doing well in its middleware business, JBoss and storage business based around Gluster, Ceph.

But it has missed out on nearly all of the biggest projects, from Hadoop to ElasticSearch to Cassandra and Red Hat also lacks meaningful partnerships with most of them.

The reports suggests that Red Hat needs developers and it could be in big trouble unless it does.

 

Nadella kowtows to China

Posted on August 28, 2014 by - News

kowtowMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella appears to be packing his suitcase to visit China in late September in a move which might be an attempt to sort out the government’s rejection of his company’s software.

Although China runs on pirated versions of Windows XP, the government has forbidden its civil servants from using anything more modern than Windows 7.  The idea being that it will be releasing a homegrown version of Linux which it will expect everyone to use.

At the same time, the Chinese are investigating Redmond for playing monopoly behind the bamboo curtain.

Nadella has a lot to talk about with the government, although it is not clear if he will meet with any Chinese government representatives as part of his visit, or try to resolve problems with the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), one of China’s antitrust regulators.

Foreign CEOs often pay calls on the world’s second-largest economy to strengthen business and political ties and Nadella is following Qualcomm’s President Derek Aberle who also looked to end his company’s woes in China.

The shy and retiring Steve Ballmer, did occasionally go to China in his 14 years as CEO, but that was mostly to speak loudly and carry a soft stick about piracy. Ballmer sulked in 2011 that Microsoft got more revenue in the Netherlands than China.

Ministry of Justice fined for privacy leak

Posted on August 27, 2014 by - News

Not a good idea: prisoners in uniform from the 1920 film From Now On.The Ministry of Justice has been fined £180,000 by the data watchdog for failing to safeguard sensitive and confidential information about prisoners.

According to the data watchdog, the information commissioner’s office the Ministry of Justice allowed data to go missing twice and failed to encrypt personal data.

It all started when an unencrypted hard drive containing data on 2,935 prisoners went missing at HMP Erlestoke in Wiltshire last May. The information included details of links to organised crime, health information, history of drug misuse and material about victims and visitors.

This followed a similar case in October 2011, when the information commissioner’s office (ICO) was alerted to the loss of another unencrypted hard drive containing the details of 16,000 prisoners at HMP High Down in Surrey.

After the first mistake, the prison service was given new hard drives in May 2012 for all of the 75 prisons across England and Wales. The devices could encrypt the information stored on them, but for some reason the prison service did not realise the encryption option needed to be turned on.

Sensitive information was insecurely handled by prisons across England and Wales for over a year, leading to the latest data loss at HMP Erlestoke. If the hard drives in both of these cases had been encrypted, the information would have remained secure despite their loss, the ICO noted.

Stephen Eckersley, ICO head of enforcement said that a government department with security oversight for prisons can supply equipment to 75 prisons throughout England and Wales without properly understanding, let alone telling them, how to use it beggars belief.

“The result was that highly sensitive information about prisoners and vulnerable members of the public, including victims, was insecurely handled for over a year. This failure to provide clear oversight was only addressed when a further serious breach occurred and the devices were finally set up correctly.

“This is simply not good enough and we expect government departments to be an example of best practice when it comes to looking after people’s information. We hope this penalty sends a clear message that organisations must not only have the right equipment available to keep people’s information secure, but must understand how to use it,” he said.

 

Seagate releases 8TB hard drive

Posted on August 27, 2014 by - News

Seagate  has decided that the world needs hard drives which can store 8TB.

The 8TB HDD comes five months after Western Digital had released the first ever 6TB HDD, so the company clearly thinks we are running out of space.

Apparently the 8TB HDD comes in the 3.5-inch form factor and  features a SATA 6Gbps interface and multi-drive RV tolerance which makes it suitable for data centres.

At this point it is not clear if the drive uses PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.

Seagate vice president of marketing Scott Horn said that as the world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data.

“This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centres,” he said.

He thinks the new drive will support the demand for high capacity storage in a world bursting with digital creation, consumption and long-term storage.

Unfortunately, Seagate did not announce the retail price for its 8TB HDD though the company claims that the new hard drive has “the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry.” In otherwords while the drive is expensive it will be cheaper than owning two 4 TB machines.

Microsoft to release a Chromecast rival

Posted on August 27, 2014 by - News

tvMicrosoft thinks that there is room for another TV casting dongle and is apparently thinking about releasing a rival to Chromecast.

Redmond has not mentioned the dongle so far but it did pop up in an FCC filing.

The filing  lacks much info to identify the device, but it carries the model number HD-10.

The FCC filing says that this device has an HDMI port, Wi-Fi and a USB charging unit.

But if you look at the Wi-Fi Alliance product database you can spot that Microsoft’s HD-10 is described as a Miracast dongle.

Miracast is a wireless standard that lets devices connect to one another and share media.  It is not as sexy as the Chromecast or Apple AirPlay. Miracast doesn’t let users queue up multiple files from different sources or play multiplayer games, and it requires media to be played on other devices and sent to the TV, rather than directly from online and cloud sources.

However, this does mean that Microsoft will get its Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 devices casting to the TV which, at the moment, it cannot do.

 

 

Microsoft wins PR blitz over cloud

Posted on August 27, 2014 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeMicrosoft’s several-hour outage of the cloud-based Visual Studio Online services might have been a PR disaster, but Redmond appears to have won the hearts and minds of its customers by actually doing the right thing.

Computer World spend the day ringing around hoping to find a “moaning customers” story but was surprised to find hat Microsoft’s customers were happy at the way that the outage was handled.

Apparently Redmond did something radical – it did not spin, it did not pretend that nothing happened, and it provided customers with the information they really needed.

The genius behind this strategy was, Brian Harry, a Microsoft Technical Fellow, corporate vice president, and product unit manager for Team Foundation Server.

Writing in his bog, Harry said detailed the August 14 outage of Visual Studio Online, the cloud service designed to help development teams manage complex projects.

Visual Studio Online was offline in some regions late Wednesday and early Thursdaybut troubles mounted Thursday morning until they became a total outage that lasted five-and-a-half hours.

“This duration and severity makes this one of the worst incidents we’ve ever had on VS Online,” Harry admitted.

Harry apologised for the outage dove into a technical explanation of what triggered the blackout, and laid out some steps the team planned to take to stymie a repeat.

“We’ve gotten sloppy. Sloppy is probably too harsh. As with any team, we are pulled in the tension between eating our Wheaties and adding capabilities that customers are asking for,” said Harry. “In the drive toward rapid cadence, value every sprint, etc., we’ve allowed some of the engineering rigor that we had put in place back then to atrophy — or more precisely, not carried it forward to new code that we’ve been writing. This, I believe, is the root cause.”

Customers loved this approach and in the comments they praised his candour. “Let me simply say: nice analysis write-up, that was refreshingly direct,” said Benjamin Treynor in a comment appended to Harry’s piece.

“A perfect template for no BS straight talking. Well done, very impressed,” added someone identified only as “Craig” in a latter comment. “Lots of good lessons in there, too, that we can all benefit and learn from.”

Harry’s admission that Microsoft’s push for a faster pace was behind the outage might have won him the support of customers, but it does not bode well for his internal political future. Microsoft is on a mission to accelerate development and its release “mobile-first, cloud-first” strategy.

Still there cannot be many in Microsoft who can see their product fail and still get their customers to support them. At this rate, Harry should be made PR manager.

 

EU watchdog bites Qualcomm’s rump

Posted on August 27, 2014 by - News

AnubiIt looks as if the EU is going to back Nvidia’s complaint against Qualcomm and investigate the chipmaker for alleged anti-trust shenanigans.

Nvidia has been moaning about Qualcomm for nearly four years and the investigation coincides with a similar case in China into the chipmaker’s monopoly practices.

If found guilty of breaching EU rules, the company could face a fine of up to $2.5 billion.

Reuters said that the Commission may open a case after the summer.

The case centred on the British mobile phone chipmaker Icera which was bought by Nvidia in 2011.

While no one said what happened to Icera, it appears that the company accused Qualcomm of using patent-related incentives and exclusionary pricing of chipsets to discourage customers from doing business with it.

No one seemed to care that much and the issue appeared to have faded from the Commission’s agenda. However, a recent case where Europe’s second-highest court in June upheld a record 1.1 billion euro EU fine against Intel for abuse of its dominant market position made the regulators realise that they were sitting on a nice little earner.

Companies can be fined as much as 10 percent of their global revenues for breaching EU antitrust rules.

But the case is a long way off being resolved and anything could happen. In 2010, the EU competition authority scrapped a four-year probe into Qualcomm after Ericsson and Texas Instruments withdrew their objections against the company.

Microsoft faces China crisis

Posted on August 26, 2014 by - News

china-syndrome-one-sheet1Things are not shaping up well between Microsoft and the Chinese government.

A Chinese antitrust watchdog growled that Redmond had not been fully transparent with its sales data on the software it distributes in China.  It is particularly interested in the information regarding the sales of its media player and Internet explorer.

Zhang Mao, the head of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), told reporters at a briefing in Beijing that after multiple meetings including at high levels, Redmond had “expressed a willingness” to respect Chinese law and collaborate with investigating officials.

Western companies operating in China must be finding the whole thing fishy. The Microsoft investigation comes amid a spate of anti-trust probes against foreign firms in China, including Qualcomm and Mercedes-Benz.  Word on the street is that the Chinese are looking to damage foreign companies.

Earlier this month the Chinese claimed that Microsoft was suspected of violating China’s anti-monopoly law since June last year in relation to problems with compatibility, bundling and document authentication for its Windows and Microsoft Office.

The SAIC is one of China’s three anti-monopoly regulators and raided Microsoft offices in several major cities. It had a quiet world with Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Mary Snapp.

 

 

HP and shareholders deal in doubt

Posted on August 26, 2014 by - News

Meg Whitman, photo by Mike MageeA US judge is not happy about a proposed agreement struck between HP and plaintiff shareholders to settle a lawsuit over the computing giant’s acquisition of Autonomy.

US District Judge Charles Breyer rejected several million dollars in fees that shareholder attorneys would have recouped under the settlement.

But he added that he would have to make further inquiries into whether dismissing claims against HP officers, including current Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman, was fair for shareholders.

Under the terms of the settlement, shareholders agreed to drop all claims against HP’s current and former executives, including Whitman, board members and advisers to the company. Instead the two sides would team up to bash former Autonomy executives, including Chief Executive Michael Lynch.

Laughing all the way to the bank were the shareholder attorneys who would have collected $18 million in fees.

The court heard how HP is also gunning for British unit of Deloitte & Touche over its role in auditing Autonomy.

HP’s allegations of accounting improprieties, misrepresentation and disclosure failures at Autonomy have prompted an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as the UK’s Serious Fraud Office. However so far there have been no actual charges levelled against Lynch and co.

Former Autonomy Chief Financial Officer Sushovan Hussain objected to the settlement too saying that it was a “whitewash” and asked that he be allowed to review internal HP documents that absolved Whitman and others of wrongdoing.

HP has vigorously contested Hussain’s ability to review documents that gets Whitman off the hook.

Breyer said he would need to weigh the evidence against HP officers as part of his analysis on whether the deal absolving them of liability is fair for shareholders.

Bryer said that something went terribly wrong with the Autonomy acquisition.

 

Cloud teaches teaches robots

Posted on August 26, 2014 by - News

robby the robotResearchers at Cornell, Stanford and Brown universities and the University of California have come up with a method of teaching robots using the cloud.

Dubbed Robo Brain , the system is a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available Internet resources. The data is translated and stored in a robot-friendly format that robots can draw on when they need it.
Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University said that since  laptops and mobile phones don’t have access to all the information we want, the robot can query Robo Brain in the cloud.

Robo Brain will process images to pick out the objects in them, and by connecting images and video with text, it will learn to recognize objects and how they are used, along with human language and behaviour.

It speeds up the development time that a robot needs to work out what to do. If a robot sees a teacup, it can learn from Robo Brain not only that it is a teacup and not a coffee mug. It also can learn that liquids can be poured into or out of it, that it can be grasped by the handle, and that it must be carried upright when it is full.

The system employs what computer scientists call “structured deep learning,” where information is stored in many levels of abstraction. An easy chair is a member of the class of chairs, and going up another level, chairs are furniture. Robo Brain knows that chairs are something you can sit on, but that a human can also sit on a stool, a bench or the lawn.

The robot stores the information in a mathematical model, which can be represented graphically as a set of points connected by lines. The nodes could represent objects, actions or parts of an image, and each one is assigned a probability – how much you can vary it and still be correct.

This means that the robot’s brain makes its own chain and looks for one in the knowledge base that matches within those limits.

 

Facebook kills off click-bait news you will not believe what happens next

Posted on August 26, 2014 by - News

no fishingThe days of social notworking sites supporting news sites which have introductions like “you will not believe what happened next” or “you will find this astounding” could be a thing of the past.

Facebook announced further plans to clean up the News Feed by reducing stories with click-bait headlines as well as stories that have links shared in the captions of photos or within status updates.

“Click-baiting” is the art of posting links with a headline without actually telling you much information. In other words, you click to see more, and you are not told enough about what to expect.

Posts get many clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed. However, they are as popular as the Boston stranger and 80 per cent of the time people want headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article.

Facebook’s News Feed algorithm now considers how long people spend reading the given content and the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing it with their friends.

If users click on an article, reading it, and maybe even came back to interact with it on Facebook, they clicked through to something valuable, while if they came straight back to Facebook and didn’t engage with the story it was probably click bait.

Facebook will be making ongoing adjustments so it is not penalising stories unnecessarily. However the change is expected to cane a publishers who do this and few will mourn their passing.

Of course they could provide news stories with a decent headline, like the old days but that is too much like hard work.