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Big investor gets option to join Microsoft board

Written By Unknown on Sabtu, 31 Agustus 2013 | 16.00

A week after Steve Ballmer said he plans to step down as CEO of Microsoft, ValueAct Capital, one of its biggest investors, has secured the right to appoint its president to Microsoft's board.

Microsoft has signed a "cooperation agreement" with ValueAct that allows its president, Mason Morfit, to meet regularly with Microsoft board members to discuss "a range of significant business issues," Microsoft said in a statement Friday.

The agreement gives ValueAct the option of having Morfit join Microsoft's board, beginning at the first quarterly board meeting after Microsoft's next annual shareholder meeting. Those meetings usually take place in mid-November.

ValueAct Capital, in San Francisco, holds about 0.8 percent of Microsoft's outstanding stock and is one of its largest shareholders, Microsoft said. The firm manages about $12 billion in assets.

The development, announced Friday afternoon ahead of the Labor Day weekend in the U.S., comes a week after Ballmer's surprise announcement that he will step down as CEO of Microsoft at some point in the next year.

Longtime Microsoft analyst Rick Sherlund has said that Microsoft was under pressure from ValueAct to increase value for shareholders.

"It's not clear how big a role ValueAct played here, but I suspect they were a strong catalyst for change," Sherlund told the Seattle Times shortly after Ballmer announced his plan to retire.

Ballmer responded that his retirement had nothing to do with ValueAct. My retirement has everything to do with what I think is the right long-term timing for Microsoft," he told the Times.

A Microsoft spokesman on Friday declined to provide additional comment for this article.

In the statement Friday, Morfit said he looked forward to "actively working" with Microsoft at "this critical inflection point in the company's evolution." Ballmer was quoted as saying Microsoft "looks forward to ValueAct Capital's input."

For its part, ValueAct has agreed that it won't attempt a merger with Microsoft or acquire shares beyond a certain level, and that it won't take part in a proxy battle, according to a copy of the agreement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It has also agreed not to disparage Microsoft or its executives.


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Should your next PC be a Surface Pro?

Microsoft revealed that it's limited-time $100 discount on Surface Pro pricing isn't so limited after all. The discount is now permanent, and Microsoft cut the cost of the Touch keyboard cover as well. The reduced pricing makes the Surface Pro more attractive, but it's still not enough to significantly sway sales.

The Surface Pro is a solid, well-engineered device. On the surface (no pun intended) it's a tablet, but inside it's a full Windows 8 PC. It has an Intel Core i5 processor, and 4GB of RAM. Unlike many tablets—especially the very popular Apple iPad—the Surface Pro has a full-sized USB port, an SD memory card slot, and an HD AV port that can be used to connect via HDMI or DisplayPort to an external monitor with the right adapter.

The Surface Pro can compete as an ultrabook, but it's not a great value.

It has the size, weight, and portability to compete as a tablet, but it runs the full Windows 8 operating system—including all of your traditional Windows software. There are ways to do that in a limited way from an iPad or Android tablet using a remote streaming service like Onlive Desktop, or with an app like Parallels Accessfor the iPad, but those solutions are no match for just running your software directly on your tablet.

As a PC, the Surface Pro is even more unique. It can be used at your desk, connected to a monitor, keyboard, mouse or touchpad, and other peripherals, but it can also be easily taken with you on the go, or used to watch a movie in the living room, or for reading a Kindle book while you're riding on a bus or train. Try that with your desktop—or even your laptop to some extent.

When you add a Touch or Type cover, the Surface Pro is essentially an ultrabook, and it can compete as such. But, even at the discounted price, it's not a great deal. A 128GB Surface Pro with a Touch cover still costs $980. A 128GB 11-inch MacBook Air costs only $999.

The MacBook Air uses the latest Intel Core processors—the "Haswell" line—which have much better energy efficiency, and yield exceptional battery life. The MacBook Air can run Windows instead of Mac OS X if you choose, or you can use Mac OS X and still run Windows applications in a virtual Windows using something like Parallels.

I don't mean to sell the MacBook Air over the Surface Pro, per se. The MacBook Air is just a very poignant illustration—especially considering the false perception by so many that Apple products just cost more. There are also other Windows ultrabooks, tablets, and hybrids that are either cheaper, or have more power, more memory, or better battery life than a Surface Pro.

The discounted Surface Pro is nice, but I still maintain that Microsoft should cut another $100 off the price and throw the Touch cover in for free if it really wants to drive sales.


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Facebook tells employees, 'build something' -- with a table saw

Facebook's motto may be "move fast and break things," but the 3000 employees at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, now have the chance to do just the opposite.

To attract workers and keep them happy, the social network offers many well-known perks including free on-campus dining, a gym, and shuttle buses to and from San Francisco. But if those aren't cutting it, here's one that might do, literally: a woodshop.

The 3000-plus square-foot facility houses more than a dozen pieces of machinery including table saws, lathes, drill presses, sanders and a laser engraver. The idea is to give employees an opportunity to exercise another part of their brain, get their creative juices flowing, and build something beyond their usual output of webpages, mobile updates, and other products that don't exist outside of a computer screen.

And, Facebook hopes the shop will inspire employees to apply some new thinking to the jobs they were hired to do.

Hans Lintermans, a Facebook product manager in marketing, visits the woodshop at least once a week, sometimes during his lunch break, to work on any number of projects. On Thursday he was busy doing some polishing on a cutting board for cooking. Before that he made a two-by-six-foot table out of solid redwood he picked up from a local lumber yard.

Next on the list? Maybe a butcher block, the craftsman said.

Facebook is famous for its hackathons—usually anything-goes, all-night coding workshops that are meant to spawn new product concepts and prototypes.

But the woodshop, Lintermans said, is just as exciting, if not more so. "It helps me to unwind and think outside the box," he said.

Some other Facebook employees are still making up their minds.

"It's a perk," said Sean Nicolay, a software engineer who had stepped in for an introductory three-hour training session on how to safely use the machines.

Ted Kalaw, another software engineer, called it an extension—albeit a more hands-on one—of the culture the company tries to foster around creativity.

The woodshop is located just off the busy boulevard of cyclists and walkers that bisects the company's main quad. It sits adjacent to Facebook's Analog Research Lab, a screen printing studio and workshop.

There are all sorts of stylized posters adorning the walls of Facebook's buildings, bearing corporate mantras like "Stay Focused and Keep Shipping," or "The Foolish Wait." The Analog Research Lab is where those posters and other "offline" handiwork is produced.

Think of the woodshop, then, as the 3-D cousin to that lab, with sawdust.

In a sense, the shop also symbolizes the end to a period of transition for Facebook—it is housed in the last building to open its doors since the company moved its headquarters in 2011 from Palo Alto to nearby Menlo Park.

The woodshop also fits squarely into a movement popular in Silicon Valley known as "maker culture." It's a kind of do-it-yourself philosophy geared toward engineering-oriented pursuits like software development, robotics and 3-D printers, but there's no reason why good old-fashioned woodworking can't be included too.

The shop opened just under four months ago, and Facebook has some bigger plans for it. In addition to giving employees a new outlet to express themselves, the company wants to use the shop to quickly build things for events such as sales meetings, press mixers and internal gatherings, said spokesman Slater Tow.

"We hope that the woodshop will be helpful here when we need to create collateral for these [events] on the fly," he said.

To use the shop, employees must first complete some basic safety training. They can then sign up for classes to learn how to build things like household furniture items such as cabinets and drawers. The classes are usually small, with about six employees attending.

About 80 courses have been taught so far, and Facebook expects to expand the offerings as the end-of-year holiday season approaches.

Employees can use the machines for free, but they must purchase their own lumber, finishes, glues and other supplies—at wholesale prices, Facebook said—from the shop's in-house store.

For their first project, employees are encouraged to smart small, with a ballpoint pen. For these, the shop has boxes filled to the brim with small blocks of Brazilian rosewood, which were supplied by the local woodworking tools and supply store Woodcraft Supply.

Eric McCrystal is co-owner of that store and leads many of the classes at Facebook's woodshop. Employees have so far made 30 to 40 pens with the wood, he said.

Facebook's Tow also sees the shop as a recruiting tool to woo prospective job candidates.

It has good reason to open a woodshop for that purpose. Google, one of its biggest rivals, is located just down the road in Mountain View, and they have a workshop too. It's unclear what their pen output is.

Follow TechHive on Tumblr today.

Updated at 10:40 p.m. PT with a video report from IDG News Service.


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Australian Sex Party gets no love from Google's AdWords

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 30 Agustus 2013 | 16.00

The Australian Sex Party, a political organization, has a hard time getting some love from Google.

The search engine has rejected several AdWords advertisements related to the party's position on marijuana legalization and voluntary euthanasia. AdWords is Google's pay-per-click product that shows advertisements related to keyword searches and content.

The Australian Sex Party, founded in 2009, is fielding 54 candidates in Australia's upcoming federal election, which will take place on Sept. 7. The party also supports same sex marriage, the decriminalization of personal drug use and better public transport.

The Sex Party has requested a manual review of its AdWords advertisements, which were placed through Google's automated systems, said Fiona Patten, the group's president.

"We are not saying 'Buy marijuana here'," said Patten who is a senate candidate for the state of Victoria. "We are not promoting anything illegal. We are a political party."

One of the ads that was rejected read: "Sex Party. Regulate and Tax Marijuana. Your Life, Your Choice," followed by the party's website address. Patten said her group has budgeted AU$30,000 (US$26,800) to $50,000 for digital election-related advertising, the majority of which will be spent with Google.

A Google spokesman in Sydney said the company does not comment on individual advertisers, but that it was looking into the matter.

Patten said even if the advertisements are approved, the Sex Party has lost out on several days of advertising prior to the election. Even if Google spends 24 hours reviewing an advertisement, "you're losing a considerable amount of time," she said.

"If we are not able to share our policies via online methods, that really limits how we can get our message out there in this election," Patten said. "As a small party, you do have to rely on getting your message out in online forums. We can't afford the television advertising, the radio and print advertising that the major parties can budget for."

Last year, Facebook rejected advertisements bought by the group, but after a manual review, allowed them to be shown, Patten said.

It's not the first time the Australian Sex Party has encountered difficulties in buying ads with Google.

In the run up to a 2010 election campaign, Google rejected some of the party's advertisements due to the use of the word "sex." In July 2012, Google rejected the group's advertisements because the ads showed a donation button, which is not allowed if the advertiser does not have a tax-exempt status.

Australian political parties are not eligible for tax-exempt status. The misunderstanding was resolved only one day prior to a by-election.

As a result, the Australian Sex Party filed letters of complaint in September 2012 with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The ACCC rejected the complaint, while the DOJ never responded, Patten said.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk


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Samsung starts mass production of DDR4 memories

Samsung Electronics has started mass producing DDR4 memories that it expects will go into enterprise servers in next-generation data centers.

A successor to the DDR3 (Double Data Rate 3), DDR4 memories are expected to offer higher performance, reliability and lower power consumption than its predecessor.

However, there have been some doubts as to whether the market is ready to transition in volumes from DDR3 memories which are still being designed into servers and other products. Some analysts have forecast that the component will get designed into servers and later PCs only by 2015.

Samsung said on Thursday that early market availability of the 4-gigabit (Gb) DDR4 devices, which use 20-nanometer process technology, will create demand for 16GB and 32GB memory modules.

The 4Gb-based DDR4 has a data transmission rate of 2,667 megabits-per-second, a 1.25-fold increase over 20nm-class DDR3, while lowering power consumption by more than 30 percent, Samsung said.

Samsung did not immediately provide information on the schedule for shipment of the new memories. The pricing information is not available, a spokesman said.

Microelectronics standards body JEDEC Solid State Technology Association published in September 2012 the initial DDR4 standard.


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Can China's Xiaomi make it globally?

Like some other Chinese brands, Xiaomi doesn't exactly have the easiest name for westerners to pronounce. But on Thursday, the name was spoken worldwide after the company hired a former Google executive to lead its global expansion.

The hiring is the latest in a string of successes for a company that only began selling Android phones in China two years ago. Xiaomi product launches are so anticipated in the country that its phones routinely sell out, forcing millions of customers to wait for more stock. Expectations for the company are also high, with some saying Xiaomi is China's answer to Apple.

But to expand outside its home market, Xiaomi faces a difficult road that other Chinese handset makers are still trying to navigate, according to analysts. They point to challenges with raising brand awareness, potential patent disputes, and whether Xiaomi can go head-to-head against foreign tech giants with a history of innovation.

"There's still some debate as to how much is Xiaomi an innovative company, and how much of their innovation is just really good public relations," said David Wolf, a technology consultant at public relations firm Allison+Partners. "I think we are coming to the point where we are going to find out."

Xiaomi, pronounced She-ow Me, means "Little Rice" in English and was created partly because of its CEO's dissatisfaction with the handsets he owned.

"If I don't feel the phones are good enough, I want to change it. But I myself don't have the power to change the phones," Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun said in an interview in May. "For example, if I gave my advice to Nokia's R&D vice president, will he change it? No, he won't change it."

"I wanted to force Nokia to do this, but they just wouldn't," he said. "Their model doesn't support this business."

As a result, Xiaomi founded itself on the idea of building phones by harnessing the power of user feedback. The company's handsets are installed with a customized version of Android called MIUI that Xiaomi engineers will update on a weekly basis with new tweaks and features culled from customer opinion.

The crowdsourcing model has been a major driver for Xiaomi's success, helping to generate word-of-mouth marketing and create loyal customers, according to Lei. But it is also an approach that he believes will be welcomed worldwide.

"If you are an American, and we go to the U.S. market, our product might not initially be good enough, but every week we will make changes, and so after a while I think Americans will think this product is very good," he said.

Xiaomi is joining the ranks of other Chinese smartphone vendors wanting to make it big in the international market. Telecommunication equipment vendors Huawei and ZTE have been selling handsets in the U.S., and PC maker Lenovo is also eyeing mature markets for its smartphone sales.

But so far Chinese branded phones have yet to gain the worldwide recognition their rivals Apple and Samsung Electronics enjoy. Instead, Chinese handset vendors have excelled more at selling affordable phones than at generating brand awareness.

The same can be said for Xiaomi. Adding to its appeal is that the company sells phones with high-end specs, but at low prices. Its newest handset features a quad-core processor, a 4.7-inch screen, and an 8-megapixel camera, for US$129 without carrier subsidies.

After announcing the phone, the company received over 7.4 million pre-orders for the device, Xiaomi said earlier this month. Demand for the company's products is so high that in this year's second quarter, Xiaomi surpassed Apple to become the sixth-largest smartphone vendor in the country, according to research firm Canalys.

But while Xiaomi phones are still only available in China and Taiwan, the company on Thursday signaled it was preparing to expand to foreign markets with the hiring of former Google vice president for Android product management Hugo Barra.

Barra is an important hire for Xiaomi because he can help the company cooperate with Google to deal with patent disputes that have hampered other Android smartphone makers, said Sandy Shen, an analyst with research firm Gartner.

"These legal issues have been a big problem. It can affect a phone's design and software," she added.

Barra could also aid the Chinese company in improving its customized Android interface for its phones, said David Wolf. But its unclear if Xiaomi's crowdsourcing model will be a boon or a burden for the company when it comes to foreign markets, he added.

"Can you trust the people who want you to add this feature on the phone? Or will it turn you from a market leader into a market follower?" he asked.

Xiaomi generated revenue of 13.3 billion yuan (US$2.2 billion) for the first half of this year, but it's unclear how profitable the company is. Nevertheless, investors are flocking to the smartphone maker, and the company's valuation has reached $10 billion, Lei said in a post on Chinese Twitter-like site Sina Weibo earlier this month.   

A growing company like Xiaomi naturally wants to expand, earn more profits, and build up the manufacturing capacity for its products, Wolf said. But Xiaomi will face stiff competition, and perhaps needs to pick a new name for the company that's easier for international customers to pronounce, he added.

"I think the challenge is how much bandwidth can they devote to becoming an international company," Wolf said. "And its also about how can they be innovative when there are much more better funded and experienced companies out there."


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Hacker points Syrian telecom website to AT&T, T-Mobile

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 29 Agustus 2013 | 16.00

The website of a Syrian telecommunications provider redirected to AT&T's website and then T-Mobile's on Wednesday, an apparent prank by a hacker who has been probing the country's Internet infrastructure for several days.

The hacker apparently found a way to modify the authoritative DNS (Domain Name System) record for the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (STE), said Doug Madory, senior analyst with Renesys, a company that monitors global Internet activity.

The style of hack is similar to one that affected The New York Times, Twitter, Sharethis and others on Tuesday when certain domain names they controlled were pointed to an IP address controlled by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group of pro-Syrian government cyberattackers.

DNS is a distributed database that translates domain names, such as twitter.com, into an IP address that can be called up in a browser.

The DNS server used by STE also runs several other Web services "which is quite unusual for high-profile DNS servers," said Andree Toonk, founder of the network monitoring company, BGPmon.net.

"It's not unlikely the attacker gained access to this machine exploiting one of these services," Toonk said.

The attack on STE also modified the organization's mail exchange (MX) records, which are used to route email messages.

At one point, STE's MX record pointed to a domain in Israel. The record was then changed to point to a mail server run by Iran's presidential office, Madory said. Then the hacker changed it once more to "oliver.tucket.boom."

On Wednesday, The Washington Post published an interview with a person going by the pseudonym "Oliver Tucket," who took credit for a series of attacks on the Syrian's government's infrastructure.

The Post identified him as an American white-collar worker who has sought to embarrass President Bashar al-Assad's regime. A Twitter account, @olivertuckedout, showed several tweets on Sunday claiming attacks against Syria. The person running that Twitter account could not immediately be reached.

It's unlikely that the MX record tampering actually allowed the hacker to intercept emails, although that in theory is possible. Emails directed to another server that is not configured correctly to receive mail would be rejected, Madory said.

The MX record tampering is likely designed "more just to embarrass," Madory said.

Syria's government has waged a long-running, bloody campaign against rebels seeking to topple al-Assad's government. In protest of coverage of the conflict, the SEA has conducted a range of cyberattacks against the websites and Twitter accounts of media outlets such as the Financial Times, the Associated Press, The Guardian, BBC and Al Jazeera.

The SEA's attack on Tuesday compromised a reseller of domain name services affiliated with Australia-based Melbourne IT.

Through a spear phishing email, the group gained account credentials that allowed it to modify authoritative DNS records for many websites, redirecting people to a website in Russia that it controlled.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk


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Former Google executive to help Xiaomi to expand outside China

Up-and-coming Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has hired Hugo Barra, former Google vice president for Android product management, to lead its expansion worldwide.

The hiring of Barra is a high-profile move for Xiaomi, a company that only began selling smartphones two years ago, but has since become one of the biggest names in China's tech industry.

Barra announced his departure from the U.S. search giant in a posting on his Google+ page.

"In a few weeks, I'll be joining the Xiaomi team in China to help them expand their incredible product portfolio and business globally -- as Vice President, Xiaomi Global," he wrote.

Xiaomi's CEO Lei Jun and President Lin Bin both confirmed that Barra would be joining the company in posts on Chinese Twitter-like site Sina Weibo on Thursday.

Xiaomi, which means "Little Rice" in English, has gained its popularity partly by selling high-end Android phones, but at low prices. For example, the company last month announced a phone built with a quad-core processor, 4.7-inch screen, and an 8-megapixel camera, for the low price of US$129 when bought without carrier subsidies.

At the same time, the company also uses a crowdsourcing model to encourage its customers to offer input on improving the user interface to its Android phones. This has helped the company generate word-of-mouth marketing and create loyalty among its customers, according to Xiaomi's CEO.

In this year's second quarter, shipments of Xiaomi phones surpassed Apple in China, making the company the sixth largest handset vendor in the nation, according to research firm Canalys.

Xiaomi's top management is already made up of Chinese employees who formerly worked at Google, Microsoft and Motorola, but the company's expertise has been geared toward the domestic market so far, said Teck Zhung Wong, an analyst with research firm IDC.

"Xiaomi knows the Chinese market, but when it comes to tackling the global market, I think this is where this person [Barra] will become useful," he said.

"It goes to show that Xiaomi's ambition is definitely not restricted to the Greater China market," Wong added. "It's definitely looking at ways to get into the overseas market, very likely mature markets, such as the U.S. and Europe."

The company's phones have started to sell outside of mainland China, in Hong Kong and Taiwan. But next year, Xiaomi could start expanding into five other foreign markets, its CEO said back in May.

Next week, Xiaomi is holding a major event in Beijing, where the company is expected to unveil its next flagship phone. Xiaomi has also been rumored to be developing a tablet.


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US court finds file-hosting service Hotfile infringed copyright, says MPAA

A U.S. federal court has found file-hosting website Hotfile liable for copyright infringement, according to movie industry body Motion Picture Association of America.

The US District Court for the Southern District of Florida also held that Hotfile's principal, Anton Titov, was personally liable for Hotfile's infringement, MPAA said in an emailed statement Wednesday.

"This case marked the first time that a US court has ruled on whether so-called cyberlockers like Hotfile can be held liable for their infringing business practices," it added.

The order was marked on online court records as "restricted/sealed until further notice." The opinion will be made public by the court in about two weeks, after confidential and proprietary information has been redacted, MPAA said.

Five U.S. movie studios filed a copyright infringement suit against Hotfile in 2011, alleging that the company paid incentives to those who uploaded popular files to the system, that were widely shared. Its affiliate program still offers payment "calculated based on a percentage of the total value of premium accounts purchased by users who download the affiliate's uploaded files."

The scheme gave incentives to users to upload popular copyright infringing content to lure users who would pay for premium accounts to access and download the files, according to the complaint by the studios. Hotfile offers downloads on a high-speed connection to holders of paid premium accounts, in contrast to slower download speeds and fewer downloads offered to free users.

"The more frequently the content is downloaded illegally, the more defendants pay the uploading user," the complaint said. Hotfile was also charged with paying websites that hosted and promoted links to infringing content on its servers.

The file-sharing site did not provide a searchable index of the files available for download from its website, and instead relied on "third-party pirate link sites" to host, organize and promote URL links to Hotfile-hosted infringing content, according to the complaint.

In a filing to the court in the civil suit, Hotfile said it is in full compliance with the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. "Hotfile and Mr. Titov run a legitimate business that fully complies with (and, indeed, embraces) the United States' copyright laws and the DMCA," it said. The terms of service and an intellectual property and rights policy published on its website explicitly prohibited copyright infringement, it added.

The website said it removes access when notified about files that allegedly infringe copyright, and has provided copyright holders, including the five studios, the "unfettered ability to remove access to files by directly commanding Hotfile's servers through special rightsholder accounts."

Hotfile in Panama could not be immediately reached for comment.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com


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Server revenue continued slide in Q2 on weak demand, says IDC

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 28 Agustus 2013 | 16.01

The server business continued to slide in the second quarter with worldwide revenue and unit sales down, IDC said Tuesday.

Revenue was down 6.2 per cent to US$11.9 billion in the second consecutive quarter of year-over-year decline, as demand for servers continued to soften in most geographic regions, the research firm said. Unit shipments were also down 1.2 percent to 2 million, after also falling in the previous two quarters.

The highest fall in revenue was in midrange systems, which dipped by about 22 percent year-over-year, while volume systems had a 2.4 percent revenue decline and revenue from high-end systems dipped 9.5 percent in the quarter ended June.

The slowing demand is a combination of factors including consolidation, virtualization, and migration initiatives by mainstream small and medium businesses and enterprise customers, and dampening demand for new IT projects in difficult economic conditions. Top server vendors tried to offset weak demand for higher-margin Unix and blade servers with lower-margin rack and density optimized servers, IDC said.

IBM held the number one position in the server market with a 27.9 percent share of revenue, but its share was down from over 29 percent last year. The company's server revenue fell in the quarter by 10 percent year-over-year because of low demand for System x and Power Systems. IBM's System z mainframe running z/OS, however, had a third consecutive quarter of growth, with revenue up by 9.9 percent year-over-year to $1.2 billion. The mainframe accounted for 9.8 percent of server revenue in the quarter.

Hewlett-Packard held the number two position with a smaller market share of close to 26 percent, after a year-on-year decline in revenue of 17.5 percent as a result of poor demand for x86-based ProLiant servers and continued decline in demand for HP Integrity servers.

Dell fared better, growing its server market share to 18.8 percent, its highest ever in any quarter, from 16 percent last year, to retain the third spot. Dell's server revenue grew 10.3 percent in the quarter. Rival Oracle held the fourth position with 6 percent market share followed by Cisco Systems at number five with 4.5 percent share after a close to 43 percent growth in revenue. Cisco had a statistical tie with Fujitsu in the last quarter.

Revenue from density optimized servers, used in large hyperscale datacenters, surged 26.6 percent year-on-year in the quarter to $735 million, while units shipped increased 13.8 percent to close to 200,000 servers. Dell continues to lead in this market with a whopping 60.5 percent share.

In contrast, revenue from blade servers was down 6.2 percent year-on-year to $2.0 billion. Blades accounted for close to 17 percent of total server revenue in the quarter. HP held the top position in this market with 44.8 percent share of revenue.

Demand for x86 servers was weak in the quarter, with revenue down by 1.3 percent year-over-year to $8.7 billion as shipments were relatively flat at 1.9 million servers, according to IDC.

Linux servers benefited from cloud infrastructure deployments and now account for about 23 percent of all server revenue, up by 1.8 percentage points from the same quarter a year ago. Windows server sales were, however, down 5.1 percent, with quarterly server hardware revenue at $5.8 billion, representing 49.3 percent of overall quarterly server revenue, IDC said. Unix server revenue declined 21 percent to its lowest quarterly revenue of $1.8 billion, accounting for about 15 percent of server revenue for the quarter.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com


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Oracle software will run faster with new SPARC M6 chip

Oracle's database and high-performance workloads will run faster with the company's latest SPARC M6 chip, which has been tuned specially for the company's applications.

The latest SPARC processor has 12 processor cores, effectively doubling the number of cores than its predecessor, M5, which shipped earlier this year. Each M6 core will be able to run 8 threads simultaneously, giving the chip the ability to run 96 threads simultaneously, said Ali Vahidsafa , senior hardware engineer at Oracle, during a presentation about M6 at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford, California.

SPARC has been around for more than two decades, and the goal with M6 is to push the processor deeper into high-performance and highly parallel systems, Vahidsafa said, adding that the new chip will help expand Oracle's portfolio of high-end servers.

"What runs on these servers is consolidation of virtual workloads, and single-image databases, in particular in-memory databases and application. Both of those can benefit from higher thread count and higher memory footprint," Vahidsafa said.

It is also imperative that the benefits of the new chip be accessible to current workloads and software, Vahidsafa said.

Multithreaded applications will benefit most from the new chip, but single-threaded applications will have access to the specific "Critical Thread" queue thanks to a feature in OS scheduling, which could speed up workloads.

Some other chip features have not changed from the M5, which was the first high-end enterprise SPARC chip variant with a higher cache-to-core ratio. The M6 chip will have 48MB of L3 cache, and support 1TB of memory per socket. Oracle did not reveal the clock speed of the chip.

The chip has been tuned for in-memory databases and applications with four DDR3 schedulers to better organize traffic and visibility of tasks, Vahidsafa said. The memory subsystem has been organized for system designers to balance performance, power and serviceability.

The processors also can be linked to create two-way, four-way or eight-way servers. Using special boxes called Bixby, the chip will also allow for creation of 32-way, 48-way or even 96-way servers, with memory and other resources being shared. The M6 has features to balance out performance in servers to reduce latency and to ensure transactions are quickly processed. The coherency features have been built from the ground up for larger systems, and can be applied to smaller server pools, Vahidsafa said.

The chip also has new RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) to track down errors in the system, which ensures high server uptime. In conjunction with the Solaris OS, a three-step process identifies errant threads, cores or cache, which are isolated, reported and then cleaned up. It also has ECC memory.

Vahidsafa declined to comment on when the chip would become available in servers.

Another SPARC chip got attention at Hot Chips, with Fujitsu sharing details about its latest mainframe chip called SPARC X+. The 16-core chip runs at 3.5GHz and higher, and can be used in mainframes with up to 64 sockets. Each core will support two simultaneous threads, with the ability for a mainframe to run 2,048 threads simultaneously. On-chip software helps accelerate database applications, said Toshio Yoshida , director in the processor development division at Fujitsu.

Fujitsu and Oracle collaborate on chip development. Oracle also resells Fujitsu servers.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com


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Bitcoin offers privacy -- as long as you don't cash out or spend it

On the surface, Bitcoin seems to be a great way to hide cash. Actually, it's a terrible way to launder money.

That's the conclusion of a new academic study that analyzed Bitcoin's blockchain, or the public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. The ledger shows how bitcoins move from one person to another, represented by 34-character alphanumeric addresses.

It's a sea of numbers without names. But researchers from the University of California at San Diego and George Mason University found it is a lot harder to convert bitcoins to cash -- or spend the bitcoins with a service -- and stay anonymous due to the ledger.

Most bitcoin users interact with a service to buy or sell the virtual currency. These days, most of those services want to know exactly who they're dealing with, especially as regulators around the world take an increasing interest in bitcoin.

Using special algorithms, the researchers were able to associate large numbers of seemingly anonymous bitcoins addresses with certain major services such as exchanges and payment processors, said Sarah Meiklejohn, a doctoral candidate in computer science at UC San Diego, who assisted in the research.

By analyzing those transactions, they found it is possible to somewhat deanonymize bitcoin users, opening up avenues through which investigators could reveal the people behind them.

For example, they linked more than 500,000 Bitcoin addresses with Mt. Gox, a popular exchange in Japan where users buy and sell bitcoins. Mt. Gox requires identification from its users, often including a scan of their passport. It wouldn't make sense for a hacker to cash out a large number of bitcoins there.

"We haven't uncovered the identity of the thief, but we've paved the way for law enforcement or an agency with subpoena power to do exactly that," Meiklejohn said.

The researchers analyzed details from bitcoin thefts. While there are sophisticated methods that can be used to cloud whether a bitcoin is indeed still held by a thief, many thieves became lazy after initially moving stolen funds around, Meiklejohn said.

"Maybe thieves and other criminals in the future are going to become a lot more sophisticated, but I think so far, people have not been particularly careful," she said.

Many bitcoin thefts have remained frozen: The victim saw what address their funds went to, but the funds have never moved, perhaps because the hacker is still mulling how to convert the virtual currency to cash or goods without being noticed.

Average bitcoin users appear to be unaware at how quickly their bitcoin spending could be linked back to them. The Silk Road, an online marketplace of mostly illicit goods, only accepts bitcoin.

"We saw a lot of people deposit into Silk Road directly from their Mt. Gox address," Meiklejohn said. In those cases, law enforcement would have minimal work to obtain the name of a user if they presented a legal order to Mt. Gox.

Money laundering is not impossible, but it is not particularly attractive with bitcoin. "It seems like an offshore account at this point would be a lot easier," she said.

Still, as long as bitcoin users are willing to take certain cumbersome steps, such as generating new bitcoin addresses for every transaction, staying off the exchanges and using other evasion techniques such as repeatedly forwarding funds, Bitcoin retains its privacy strengths.

"I do think inherently Bitcoin can provide you with a huge amount of anonymity, but the argument here is you have to work for it," Meiklejohn said. But most patterns of bitcoin use "indicate most users are falling short."

Meiklejohn co-authored the paper with Marjori Pomarole, Grant Jordan, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker and Stefan Savage.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk


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ARM acquires Sensinode, a vendor of software for 'Internet of Things'

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 27 Agustus 2013 | 16.00

ARM has acquired Sensinode in Finland in its bid to provide technology and processors for the "Internet of things," consisting of a variety of low-power and inexpensive devices including sensors communicating with the Internet and one another.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Privately-held Sensinode has led to the creation of the 6LoWPAN and CoAP standards for low-cost, low-power devices to connect to the Internet, ARM said Tuesday.

CoAP, for Constrained Application Protocol, enables web services for constrained devices and networks, while integrating with the Web architecture and HTTP. 6LoWPAN is a standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force first published in 2007, which optimizes IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) for use with low-power, low-bandwidth communication technologies. The technologies reduce the complexity and overhead of key Internet and Web protocols to make them easy to handle by small footprint devices.

ARM is adding Sensinode technologies to its mbed project, an industry collaboration to deliver open source hardware and software building blocks for rapid development of intelligent connected devices. IMS Research said in October that the Internet of Things will have 28 billion Internet-connected devices by the end of 2020.

ARM in Cambridge, U.K., has said it is committed to enabling a standards-based Internet of Things where devices of all types and capabilities are connected through interoperable Internet protocols and Web services.

The company, which licenses the designs for the chips that go into a majority of smartphones, is now targeting the embedded market, providing free software libraries, hardware designs and online tools for professional rapid prototyping of products built around ARM microcontrollers.

ARM will continue to offer Sensinode's NanoStack and NanoService products, built around 6LoWPAN and CoAP, commercially to existing and new customers, it said.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com


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Australian startup's software tracks how companies execute strategy

In new jobs after graduating from university, Eric Perriard and Tom Wright found their employers could articulate grandiose strategies for their businesses. But there was little connection to how the average employee could help out.

Perriard, who worked in human resources for a manufacturing company, and Wright, in banking, found that HR systems were fine for performing technical tasks related to employees. But HR software couldn't track if a company's broad strategy was on the mark throughout the year and how employees felt they fit into the big picture and performed.

"There is nothing to cascade the strategy down to people -- to really translate the CEO's or organization's missions to every person down from middle management to the people in the field," Perriard said.

Perriard and Wright's company, Sydney-based Responsis, has built a cloud-based web service called Cascade. For employees, Cascade keeps them in tune with how they can help the goals of the organization, and for management, ensure everyone's work remains aligned with the company's strategy.

There are other products, such as SAP's Successfactors, that try to tackle this problem. Perriard said Sucessfactors focuses on appraisal and people management, but doesn't help to solve issues around executing company strategies.

Cascade is Web-based dashboard. An employee, for example, can see the company's broad goals and then more specific ones in their business unit. They can define their own goals, which fit into a neat, visual hierarchy in Cascade.

A company's chief strategy officer -- an increasingly fashionable title in organizations -- can see diagrams of employees and which ones are working on tasks that fit into the overall vision. Cascade creates a percentage that shows how strategically aligned an organization is, or the "overall cascade" in which strategic themes are filtering throughout a company.

Perriard said Cascade isn't an HR system, but it certainly can be used by HR. Wright said interest has typically come from managing directors, strategy officers and CFOs because they're the people that come up with the strategies.

"They want it so they have can visibility -- so that they can say, 'I took the time to create this particular strategy, now I want to know how is that being implemented right down to the front line'," Wright said.

Cascade is intended to help companies catch when things start to go astray. A company may kick off the year with a new set of strategies but actually only figure out in August or September that they're not going to meet, say, a revenue goal until it is too late to change.

Cascade isn't designed for bosses to micro-manage people. It's also not a project management tool. Employees would likely update their work and goals once a month or so in Cascade, while management would keep a closer eye on how groups of people are working towards the strategy.

"You can immediately see in a very visual way how aligned your organization is," Wright said. "Within the first month or so, you will have a very good indicator of whether or not you are going to succeed."

In true startup fashion, Perriard and Wright coded the first iteration of Cascade, which was released in February. Now they have a lead developer and are both moving toward the business side.

Cascade is hosted on Amazon's cloud infrastructure in Australia. Since Cascade handles very sensitive data, the data is encrypted using 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). To assuage concerns with using cloud storage, Cascade consulted Israeli cryptography experts to implement partial homomorphic encryption.

Encrypted data is descrambled with a key, and management of those keys poses a great security responsibility. Cascade's implementation allows the data to be decrypted with a still-encrypted key, Wright said.

It requires a lot of CPU power, but it means a third party does not have to be trusted with the key. If Cascade was compromised, attackers would only get encrypted data and an encrypted key, which would be useless, Wright said.

The system "allows what everyone thought was impossible," Perriard said. "It allows you to have the most encrypted data at rest without a third party. So it's brilliant. You save costs, and you have the most secure data at rest."

In what may be a rarity in the startup world, Cascade actually turned down a venture capital offer of investment. They didn't even know what their company was worth, Wright said.

"I think from our perspective, we agree it was the right thing to turn it down," Wright said.

"We took the radical, opposite approach, which was literally: everything we don't know how to do, we have to learn it. Tom had to learn some graphic skills, I had to do some video editing," Perriard said. Everything that was too much of an investment to learn, we outsourced it."

That outsourcing included the drawing of meerkats, which grace their Responsis logo, and the homomorphic encryption technology, Wright said.

Aside from themselves, they just have two full-time employees. A 60-person contract team helps with support. They've also landed customers, including from UNICEF Australia and a major player in the credit card business. To allow them to continue without VC funding, Cascade charges $120 per user per year, paid one year in advance.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk


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Google, Apple remove some restrictions on technology to Iran

Google has told Android developers that they can start offering free apps in Iran, while Apple has removed Iran from among the countries to which sales of its products are prohibited.

"Developers, starting today you can make your free apps available in Iran," Google said in a Google+ post on Monday.

The move appears to be linked to the U.S decision in May to lift sanctions on the export of a variety of consumer communications devices and software and services including mobile phones to Iran.

Exports of the devices to Iran had been blocked since the 1990s, but ahead of presidential elections in the June in the country, the U.S. decided that its new license would empower the Iranian people as the Iranian government intensifies its efforts to stifle their access to information.

The export of equipment to the Iranian government or to any individual or entity on a Specially Designated Nationals list, however, continued to be prohibited.( Technology covered under the new license were fee-based services, software and hardware required for personal communications over the Internet, including instant messaging, email, chat, social networking, sharing of photos and movies, web browsing and blogging.

The products, software and services now authorized for export to Iran also include mobile phones, personal digital assistants, satellite phones, computers, consumer network equipment, anti-tracking software, anti-censorship tools, virtual private networks, proxy tools and voice-over-IP and video chat tools.

Google said Monday that the new distribution option for developers is currently available only for free apps and not for priced apps or apps that use in-app billing. The new general license authorizes financial transactions related to the products it covers, said the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. The move by Google will give Iranians access to a number of important tools which activists use to protect themselves from surveillance, but developers have to still opt to make their apps available in Iran, it said.

Google's competitor Apple has also apparently removed Iran from its list of prohibited destinations for its products like the iPhone, iPad and Mac and associated software, citing the new general license in May. The list now includes Cuba, Syria, North Korea and Sudan. On an Apple support community, a user wanted to know how to contact Apple to set up a store in the country.

Both companies did not immediately comment.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com


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HyTrust enforces two-person approval for VMware security

Written By Unknown on Senin, 26 Agustus 2013 | 16.00

Following up on customer feedback from U.S. intelligence agencies, VMware security systems provider HyTrust has updated its virtual security appliance so actions taken by administrators can be delayed until external approval for that action is granted.

Such precautions are increasingly necessary because today's virtual environments pose "a concentration of risk," said Eric Chiu, president and cofounder of HyTrust.

"Servers, networking, storage used to be separate physical systems and they all had their separate configurations and experts to manage them. That has all been collapsed to a single software layer, with a single management console where any administrator can access any resource," Chiu said. "Ultimately, that creates security and compliance issues."

HyTrust announced the update to its flagship HyTrust Appliance at VMware's VMworld conference, being held this week in San Francisco. At this conference, VMware will detail its roadmap for the software defined data center (SDDC) architecture, in which servers, networking and storage can be virtualized and run in a coordinated fashion.

The HyTrust Appliance monitors and controls the employee use of virtual machines (VMs) that run on VMware's ESX and ESXi hypervisors, as well as oversees administrative use of the VMware vSphere management console. It monitors every administrative action taken on a VM, based on the roles that are assigned to each user. The appliance can block inappropriate actions, and log all user actions.

The software can be valuable in preventing the theft of a VM that contains confidential information, the willful destruction of an entire virtual data center, or the misconfiguring of a VM tenant.

The new version of the virtual appliance includes the ability to block any administrative action until approval from an outside party is granted.

One customer, a U.S. intelligence agency, had requested this feature, Chiu said. It mimics the procedures the U.S. Air Force called the two person concept, in which two managers would be required to complete an action (in the Air Force's case, to launch a nuclear strike).

With the HyTrust software, certain actions, such as deleting a VM, can be put on hold until it is approved by a second party, such as a manager or higher-ranking administrator.

HyTrust offered a limited version of this capability in prior versions, but this release offers a full range of capabilities around the process, Chiu said. It now meets the U.S. National Security Agency's requirements for implementing secondary approval. New features include a timer that could be put in place on any action, so a person can only execute an approved action within a certain period of time, such as a nightly maintenance window, Chiu said.

HyTrust Appliance 3.5 also includes a new monitoring mode, which allows an administrator to log how VMs are used before applying policies to their use. The appliance logs all activity, without enforcing any rules. The monitor-only mode can be useful for allowing an administrator to observe routine behavior, which would provide a baseline for building a set of rules to enforce proper use.

The new software can also send out e-mail alerts whenever some unwanted activity takes place."You can specify any kind of alert you care about," Chiu said. For instance, an administrator can set up an alert for whenever anyone deletes more than 10 VMs.

Typically, administrators rely on SIEM (Security Information Event Management) systems for getting such system alerts, but that software tends not to work well for virtualized environments, Chiu said.

"Trying to configure a SIEM to report on what is happening in a virtual environment is difficult. Our customers told us 'We want that to come from you'," Chiu said.

Drawing from a new security hardening guide for vSphere released by VMware, HyTrust Appliance now has three times as many server configuration security checks and remediation operations than it had before. It can also now work with Intel's Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT), so "you can determine whether your hardware platform is trusted, before you move your workload into that environment," Chiu said.

HyTrust Appliance 3.5 is now available. The HyTrust Appliance Enterprise Edition costs US$1,050 per CPU socket for each ESX or EXSi host, as well per $30,000 per appliance. The company also offers a downloadable community edition for no cost, which manages up to three hosts.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com


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Intel bringing vision, 3D to laptop and tablet cameras

From mundane 2D devices, integrated cameras in laptops and tablets in the future will change into powerful 3D tools that can sense movement, track emotion, and even monitor reading habits of children, according to Intel.

Intel is developing a "depth sensing" camera, which is an enhanced version of a 3D camera that can go deeper inside images to "bridge the gap between the real and virtual world," said Anil Nanduri , director of perceptual products & solutions at Intel.

The webcam enhancements will help the computer understand a human better, bring new levels of interactivity to 3D games, and make webconferencing fun by blanking out the background and adding a green screen, Nanduri said.

"You'll add the ability to sense your excitement, emotion -- whether you are happy or smiling. The algorithms and technologies are there, but they are getting more refined, and as they get more robust, you'll see them," Nanduri said.

Such depth cameras will be integrated into laptops and ultrabooks in the second half of 2014. The technology will initially appear in external webcams such as Senz3D external webcam, which was jointly developed by Logitech and Intel, and will become available in the coming quarters. The camera technology will ultimately trickle down to tablets and smartphones, Nanduri said.

The camera will also be able to identify characteristics, contours and shapes of items in view. For example, the camera's ability to sense distance, size, depth, color, contours and other parameters of structures could also help in the growing area of 3D printing. A depth sensing picture of a model can be extracted to reveal exact specifications and other details of a design, which can then be printed.

"You are not going to look for a case [for a device] anymore, you'll just point that device, and the cameras will recognize what you have. It'll know the model number...and it'll print [the case] for you, or you go to the store, they will print it for you," Nanduri said.

With the help of eye tracking, it could also track how well somebody is reading and use that information as an evaluation tool. For example, it could track reading, and tell if kids are stuck on words, how much they read, or whether they need help with specific words.

"Having the capabilities to say -- they read about 80 percent of the lines, they had difficulty with these words -- that kind of intelligence for educational tools is phenomenal," Nanduri said.

Other small enhancements also include using a motion-sensing game where hands can be followed to pick up objects in the wider dimension of 3D games. The data collected by the camera could be combined with other modalities like voice recognition to improve human-computer interaction.

There are already 3D cameras out there, but Intel is trying to tack on the algorithm and hardware features that make images more meaningful.

"Kinect was a good initial version of a depth camera more from a long range perspective. When Intel started looking at it, we were primarily looking at it primarily as more personal interaction, short range, which is probably a meter or meter-and-a-half range of interaction," Nanduri said.

Integration in the thin ultrabook display panels may be a challenge. Intel is addressing the challenges with a high resolution short-range camera that focuses on a small area, and what Nanduri called "finger-level articulation."

"You need to have a lot more resolution for that zone. To really scale it to volumes, you need to get to the right form factor from the optics perspective, you need to get to the right power levels and you need to have the right cost structure to help scale it into integration," Nanduri said.

When the technology reaches devices, users may progressively forget the keyboard and mouse when interacting with computers.

"When you have depth information, what you can do with it is pretty phenomenal," Nanduri said.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com


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SSDs still maturing, new memory tech still 10 years away

Solid-state drive adoption will continue to grow and it will be more than 10 years before it is ultimately replaced by a new memory technology, experts said.

SSDs are getting more attractive as NAND flash gets faster and cheaper, as it provides flexibility in usage as a RAM or hard-drive alternative, said speakers and attendees at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford, California on Sunday.

Emerging memory types under development like phase-change memory (PCM), RRAM (resistive random-access memory) and MRAM (magnetoresistive RAM) may show promise with faster speed and durability, but it will be many years until they are made in volume and are priced competitively to replace NAND flash storage.

SSDs built on flash memory are now considered an alternative to spinning hard-disk drives, which have reached their speed limit. Mobile devices have moved over to flash drives, and a large number of thin and light ultrabooks are switching to SSDs, which are smaller, faster and more power efficient. However, the enterprise market still relies largely on spinning disks, and SSDs are poised to replace hard disks in server infrastructure, experts said. One of the reasons: SSDs are still more expensive than hard drives, though flash price is coming down fast.

"It's going to be a long time until NAND flash runs out of steam," said Jim Handy, an analyst at Objective Analysis, during a presentation.

Handy predicted that NAND flash will likely be replaced by 2023 or beyond. The capacity of SSDs is growing as NAND flash geometries get smaller, so scaling down flash will become difficult, which will increase the need for a new form of non-volatile memory that doesn't rely on transistors.

Many alternative forms of memory are under development. Crossbar has developed RRAM (resistive random-access memory) that the company claims can replace DRAM and flash. Startup Everspin is offering its MRAM (magnetoresistive RAM) products as an alternative to flash memory. Hewlett-Packard is developing memristor, while PCM (phase-change memory) is being pursued by Micron and Samsung.

But SSDs are poised for widespread enterprise adoption as the technology consumes less energy and is more reliable. The smaller size of SSDs can also provide more storage in fewer servers, which could cut licensing costs, Handy said.

"If you were running Oracle or some other database software, you would be paying license fee based on the number of servers," Handy said.

In 2006, famed Microsoft researcher Jim Gray said in a presentation "tape is dead, disk is tape, flash is disk, RAM locality is king." And people were predicting the end of flash 10 years ago when Amber Huffman, senior principal engineer at Intel's storage technologies group, started working on flash memory.

Almost ten years on, flash is still maturing and could last even longer than 10 years, Huffman said. Its adoption will grow in enterprises and client devices, and it will ultimately overtake hard drives, which have peaked on speed, she said.

Like Huffman, observers agreed that flash is faster and more durable, but also more expensive than hard drives. But in enterprises, SSDs are inherently parallel, and better suited for server infrastructures that need better throughput. Multiple SSDs can exchange large loads of data easily much like memory, Huffman said. SSDs can be plugged into PCI-Express 3.0 slots in servers for processing of applications like analytics, which is faster than hard drives on the slower SATA interface.

The US$30 billion enterprise storage market is still built on spinning disks, and there is a tremendous opportunity for SSDs, said Neil Vachharajani , software architect at Pure Storage, in a speech.

Typically, dedicated pools of spinning disks are needed for applications, which could block performance improvements, Vachharajani said.

"Why not take SSDs and put them into storage arrays," Vachharajani said. "You can treat your storage as a single pool."

Beyond being an alternative primary storage, NAND could be plugged into memory slots as a slower form of RAM. Facebook replaced DRAM with flash memory in a server called McDipper, and is also using SSDs for long-term cold storage. Ultrabooks use SSDs as operating system cache, and servers use SSDs for temporary caching in servers before data is moved to hard drives for long-term storage.

Manufacturing enhancements are being made to make SSDs faster and smaller. Samsung this month announced faster V-NAND flash storage chips that are up to 10 times more durable than the current flash storage used in mobile devices. The flash memory employs a 3D chip structure in which storage modules are stacked vertically.

Intel is taking a different approach to scaling down NAND flash by implementing high-k metal gate to reduce leakage, according to Krishna Parat, a fellow at the chip maker's nonvolatile memory group. As flash scales down in size, Intel will move to 3D transistor structuring, much like it does in microprocessors today on the 22-nanometer process.

But there are disadvantages. With every process shrink, the endurance of flash may drop, so steps need to be taken to preserve durability. Options would be to minimize writes by changing algorithms and controllers, and also to use compression, de-duplication and hardware encryption, attendees said.

Smarter controllers are also needed to maintain capacity efficiency and data integrity, said David Flynn, CEO of PrimaryData. Flynn was previously CEO of Fusion-io, which pioneered SSD storage in enterprises.

"Whatever Flash's successor is, it won't be as fast as RAM," Flynn said. "It takes longer to change persistent states than volatile states."

But Flynn is already looking beyond SSD into future memory types.

"The faster it gets the better," Flynn said. "I'm excited about new, higher memories."

But SSDs will ultimately match hard drives on price, and the newer memory and storage forms will have to wait, said Huffman, who is also the chairperson for the NVM-Express organization, which is the protocol for current and future non-volatile memory plugging into the PCI-Express slot.

"Hard drives will become the next tape," Huffman said.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com


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Browsers block ads, threaten free sites, researchers say

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 25 Agustus 2013 | 16.01

Nearly one in four browsers are armed with an ad-blocking tool, reducing revenue at free-content websites, an Irish company said last week.

The popularity of ad blocking—driven by users' frustrations with intrusive, distracting or just-plain-ugly-and-noisy ads—threatens the free-for-all model of the Internet, said PageFair, a company that's helping content publishers audit the problem and try to stem some of the bloodletting.

"It's a vicious cycle," said Neil O'Connor, CEO of Dublin-based PageFair. "Ads are becoming more aggressive to capture eyeballs, but that forces more people to install ad-blocking software. It's a lose-lose situation."

But without ads and the revenue they generate, most content publishers cannot sustain operations. Sans ad revenue, the only options are to charge for access—the path taken by publishers like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times—or fold the tent. [Note: Computerworld and most IDG news sites rely on advertising for revenue.]

Blocking becomes the default

PageFair mined its data from the past 11 months and found some surprising nuggets about ad blocking.

"We started this because we were a publisher ourselves, in the game space," said O'Connor. "We wanted to know how many of our users were dropping out by installing ad blockers, and thought it was maybe as high as 10 percent. But we found that 30 percent were blocking our ads. That was shocking to us."

On average, 22.7 percent of the users who browsed to the several hundred sites monitored by PageFair since September 2012 used an ad blocker, but the range was very wide, from just 1.5 percent to 65 percent.

The more technically savvy a site's audience, the more likely they will block ads, said O'Connor. Game-related websites, for instance, deal with an average ad-blocking rate of 30 percent, the highest of any category. More mainstream websites, however, have a lower percentage of ad-blockers: The average for travel sites is around 5 percent

browsers

"The severity of ad blocking on a given site is positively correlated to the technical ability of its audience," said O'Connor in a report PageFair published recently ( download PDF).

That's because browser ad blocking relies on add-ons, which not all users are comfortable installing, or even know exist. AdBlock Plus, which offers add-ons for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and most recently, Internet Explorer, is the best known.

Firefox users block ads more than those running any other browser, said O'Connor, perhaps because the Mozilla browser has long trumpeted its add-on ecosystem. Also, AdBlock Plus has supported Firefox the longest of any browser.

According to PageFair's data, 37 percent of Firefox users block ads. Google's Chrome took second place with a 30 percent blocking rate. IE's rate was miniscule, under 1 percent.

Comparison studies

Corroborating PageFair's numbers is difficult. A May 2012 analysis ( download PDF) by ClarityRay, which like PageFair works with companies to counter ad blocking, pegged the percentage of browsers running blockers at 9.3 percent. But the two companies agreed on many points, including Firefox users' greater interest in ad blockers and technical sites' increased likelihood of being blocked.

Ad blocking is becoming more popular, O'Connor contended. Of the 38 sites for which PageFair has the most data, the annual growth rate was 43 percent, meaning a site that saw 10 percent of its visitors using blocking tools one year could expect that number to climb to 14.3 percent the next.

And appealing to users to not block a site they patronize has proved futile. PageFair offers site owners tools that make such appeals, reminding customers that the site depends on advertising to survive. The efforts have been disappointing.

"It's as if people don't care," said O'Connor. "Even for those who visited a site every day, only 3 percent to 4 percent would turn off ad blocking for that site. And those were smaller sites. For bigger publishers, it's even more difficult."

So what's the answer for sites struggling to deal with ad blocking?

Striking a balance

"They have to rethink how they advertise," O'Connor said. "Rather than just chasing the click, they need to really engage customers in the advertising."

One way to prevent even more users from adopting ad blockers, said O'Connor, is to ditch the most intrusive and annoying ads—especially ones that use distracting animations and sounds—and rely on more discrete text-based ads.

The fact is, however, that display ads, which do not restrict themselves to text, are most sites' most effective advertising.

Some companies have taken to working with ad blocker makers—AdBlock Plus in particular—rather than fight the tide. Earlier this year, reports claimed Google had paid AdBlock Plus to get on the latter's "white list" as an acceptable advertiser. AdBlock Plus kicked off an acceptable ads program late in 2011, and does require large advertisers to pay to be on the list.

AdBlock Plus dismissed the claims, saying in a blog-based response that "you cannot 'buy' your way into the stack."

O'Connor said in lieu of a Google-like effort to get on AdBlock Plus' whitelist, he recommended that sites "put in place much more acceptable forms of advertising," those that won't prompt users to turn to ad blockers in the first place.

PageFair is working on a platform that will help site publishers do just that, perhaps with a two-tier system of ads, one acceptable to ad blockers like AdBlock Plus, another more aggressive, then ask users to opt in to one or the other.

"But short term, for some sites, it's already too big a problem," said O'Connor, again citing gaming sites as an example. "For them, they don't have time to wait for online advertising to adapt."


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Windows 8 users prefer third-party antivirus to bundled tool

Microsoft's Security Essentials (MSE) remains a hugely popular consumer antivirus product but new figures suggest that its Windows 8 successor, Defender, is losing out to third-party alternatives.

Security tools firm OPSWAT has carried out market share analysis of antivirus clients using numbers from its AppRemover tool in the past, but the latest stats are derived from its new security assessment application, Security Score, released in June.

This time the firm divided its results into three categories; the most popular vendors overall, the most encountered individual products and the most encountered individual products that had real-time protection enabled (or not), coming up with some interesting numbers.

Not surprisingly, the frequency of Microsoft's Security Essentials (the standard Windows antivirus client) and Windows Defender (which was upgraded to succeed it on Windows 8) topped the list at a combined 25.8 percent, just ahead of Avast Software's 23.6 percent. A clutch of other familair vendors scored under 10 percent, including AVG, Symantec, Eset, Avira, and Kaspersky.

The top individual product was in fact Avast's Free Antivirus with 19.5 percent, followed by MSE on 18.3 percent, with the Windows 8-only Windows Defender on 7.7 percent.

There were some limitations to this element of the study, starting with the small installed base of Security Score due its recent release. However, the numbers it generated chime with past OPSWAT products share results that used larger data sets.

More interestingly, when the company logged the number of occurrences of each vendor where real-time protection was not enabled (i.e. where the software was present but inactive or disabled), they found that two thirds of Windows 8 users were using a second program for real-time protection.

Windows Defender comes enabled on every install so users who choose to supplement it are making a positive choice to do so. By contrast, MSE on Windows 7, Vista, and XP was far more likely to be enabled, 98 percent of the time to be precise.

"RTP status can be seen as a metric for product usability and/or effectiveness; if a user views an antivirus product as effective and easy to operate, the user is more likely to have that product actively running on his or her machine," concludes OPSWAT's researchers.

It could also be the case that Windows 8 users are confused about the level of protection offered by Defender or even whether, given its self-effacing design, it is present at all. A study by OPSWAT from 2012 found that antivirus programs were often poorly configured.

On cloud backup use, OPSWAT found Google's Drive on 22.5 of systems, Dropbox on 19.5 percent, and Microsoft's SkyDrive (soon to have its name changed) on 15.4 percent. The top ten vendors accounted for more than 83 percent of the market, which suggests that this particular market is now too mature for outsiders to make headway.


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Wall power outlets are so 2012

In the future, your phones, tablets and wearable computing gadgets won't come with chargers—they'll use inductive chargers built into desks, kitchen counters, bedside tables, cars, and other surfaces. Just placing a device on any convenient surface will charge it.

This future will be great for us lazy people, and there are environmental benefits as well.

More than one-third of the "stuff" that comes with your smartphone—plastic, wiring, and electronics—is in the charger.

Each phone has its own personal charger destined inevitably for the landfill or an environmentally unfriendly recycling center.

How dumb is that? Billions of needless devices are manufactured and discarded every year.

Also, when a mobile phone is fully charged, or when the phone is removed from the charger, the charger continues to consume energy if you leave it plugged into the wall.

The promise of wireless charging is that it could solve both of those problems. With ubiquitous wireless charging, devices would no longer need chargers and power could be managed intelligently based on the device—or on the absence of one—much more efficiently.

We have the technology. So what's the holdup?

What's it going to take for wireless charging systems to be so ubiquitous that they're built into our tables, countertops, cars and desks?

What's it going to take for smartphones, tablets, and wearable computing devices to not need dedicated internal chargers?

It's going to take a miracle. Here's why.

Why wireless charging has no juice

Yes, a few wireless charging gadgets are emerging here and there. But mostly, the product category is stuck in the dark ages.

The problem is that the wireless charging industry has three competing standards organizations and thus three different sets of standards and protocols. As a result, multiple technologies are competing to become the one true standard.

One of the standards bodies is the Power Matters Alliance (PMA), whose members include AT&T, Duracell Powermat, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, LG, NEC, Power Kiss, Samsung, Sharp, Starbucks, ZTE and dozens of other companies. The PMA's standards and protocols are known collectively as "Power 2.0."

Then there's the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), which includes Belkin, Energizer, HTC, Huawei, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, Verizon and many others. You may have heard about the WPC's devices, which are marketed under the qualcomm brand Qi (pronounced "chee").

The third wireless charging standards organization is the Alliance for Wireless Power (AWP), whose members include Deutsche Telekom, HTC, Intel, LG, Qualcomm, Samsung, SanDisk and others.

battery-charging

The PMA and WPC are the main players. The AWP was largely irrelevant in the United States until recently when, for some reason, Intel joined.

(You'll notice that some companies are in all three organizations.)

As a result of the industry's disunity, you might have to be careful when buying devices and chargers to make sure they match. And even if you do make sure your devices and chargers all adhere to the same standard, you might still find that you can't charge your gear in some public wireless charging venues.

Still, there's been a lot of progress in wireless charging.

Starbucks, Coffee Bean and McDonald's are all testing wireless charging stations in their restaurants. Starbucks has tests underway in 27 locations in Boston and Silicon Valley. Coffee Bean is testing in Los Angeles. And McDonald's has test locations in New York and Europe.

Delta Air Lines has wireless charging stations in its Sky Club lounge in New York's La Guardia Airport and at La Guardia's Marine Air Terminal.

Automakers are starting to build wireless charging stations into some car models. For example, GM plans to put wireless chargers in the Chevy Volt, starting with 2014 models and expanding to other models later. Toyota and Chrysler have previously announced support for wireless charging.

Interesting developments are happening in unexpected places.

One of the boldest is from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), which is testing an electric bus that recharges from buried power cables under the asphalt. Sounds cool, but the idea probably doesn't have wheels in the real world.

The European Poker Tour has announced a publicity stunt in which players will get free wireless charging via custom-made poker tables that have built-in charging mats.

The truly interesting developments in wireless charging for you and me, however, are happening in the smartphone and tablet worlds.

Wireless charging comes to a gadget near you!

Google's new Nexus 7 represents something close to the future of wireless charging. It comes with wireless charging capability without an additional kit or add-on. Although it comes with a conventional wired charger, it doesn't come with its own wireless charger. You have to buy that separately.

If all handset and tablet makers adopted wireless charging for their devices and didn't include chargers with their products—wireless or otherwise—every gadget buyer would be forced to buy an all-purpose charger, and the industry would be on its way toward wireless nirvana.

The U.S. version of the Verizon LG G2 gets it right, too, with wireless charging out of the box. The phone should become available through Verizon on September 12.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 has an optional wireless charging kit. The upgrade requires the replacement of the phone's back cover, which makes the device thicker. The phone's S Charger kit uses the Qi standard, so it should charge with any Qi charger.

An unconfirmed rumor says the still-unannounced BlackBerry Z30 will have Qi-based wireless charging. The rumor was started when the WPC included the device on its list of supporting gadgets.

Apple's various iPhones don't support wireless charging, unless you buy a separate case. Doing so adds a lot of bulk and heft to the iPhone. But it might be worth it.

Buqu Tech's Magnetyze wireless charging case for the iPhone 5 is one new option. (The company also makes similar cases for the iPhone 4 line and the Samsung Galaxy S3).

The ZENS wireless charging flip case is another option for the iPhone 5. (ZENS makes similar cases and pads for a wide variety of handset models.)

Sadly, most smartphones don't have wireless charging capability built in, or wireless charging aftermarket options.

Universal charging plates

Because of the standards wars, you have to choose between Power 2.0 and Qi universal chargers, if you want to go the wireless route. In general, however, Qi is the way to go for phones and tablets.

Energizer (you know, the bunny people) has a range of universal Qi chargers and smartphone cases.

You can also buy Qi charging plates from LG, Monster Watts, AGPtek, Esorun, and others.

Some phones, such as the Nexus 4, the Nokia DT-900 and the LG WCP-300, have wireless Qi chargers that work pretty well with other Qi devices. The only problem is that they tend to be too small for charging tablets.

As you can see from my brief survey here, wireless charging is slouching toward some kind of ubiquity.

What we really need is one standard, and a handset and tablet industry that stops shipping chargers of any kind, but makes sure every device has wireless charging capability built in.

If that happened, we would be forced to embrace a new model where universal charging pads are found throughout our homes and in our offices and cars, and we would save time, money and energy because every device wouldn't come with its own dumb charger.


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