Tuesday, April 30, 2013

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Microsoft gains share in smartphone wars

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 03:28 AM PDT

Microsoft missed out on the smartphone gravy train, but now it seems as if Windows Phone 8 might have a bright future after all. 

According to Kantar Worldpanel, Windows Phone 8 now has a 5.6 percent market share in the US, gaining 1.9 percent compared to the same period last year. Android remains the top selling platform with a 49.3 percent share, while iOS ranks second with a 43.7 percent share.

Windows Phone 8 is doing well in European markets and it seems to be attracting a lot of first time smartphone buyers.

For some reason the company that missed out on the smartphone revolution is appealing to consumers who did likewise. 

It turns out that 52 percent of consumers who picked up a Windows smartphone had previously owned a feature phone.

In contrast, 55 percent of iOS customers and 51 Android customers are coming from another smartphone. 

Older developers are better after all

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 03:25 AM PDT

The industry perception that you have to be a freshly scrubbed schoolboy to be any good as a developer is rubbish, according to new research.

While many companies have refused to hire older developers because they think that they cannot deal with many of the new technology changes, research from North Carolina State University indicates that firms are getting rid of the best.

The study indicates that the knowledge and skills of programmers actually improve over time and that older programmers know more than their younger peers when it comes to recent software platforms.

Emerson Murphy-Hill, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research wanted to see if the perceptions of veteran programmers as being out of step with emerging technologies were valid.

He found that, in some cases, veteran programmers even had a slight edge when it came to knowledge of new software trends.

Murphy-Hill's team looked at the profiles of more than 80,000 programmers on a site called StackOverflow, which is an online community that allows users to ask and answer programming questions.

Users who are rated as asking good questions and providing good answers receive points that are reflected in their "reputation score". The higher an individual's reputation score, the more likely it is that the user has a robust understanding of programming.

In the first part of the study, researchers compared the age of users with their reputation scores. It was clear that an individual's reputation increases with age, at least into a user's 40s.

But when they looked at the number of different subjects that users asked and answered questions about, which reflects the breadth of their programming interests. The researchers found that there is a sharp decline in the number of subjects younger users knew about.   But the range of subjects increased steadily through the programmers' 30s and into their early 50s.

Looking at the knowledge of older programmers compared to younger programmers for iOS and Windows Phone 7, the veteran programmers had a significant edge in knowledge over their younger counterparts.

The paper, with the catchy title "Is Programming Knowledge Related To Age?", noted that for every other technology there was no statistically significant difference between older and younger programmers. 

Fujitsu to dump microcontroller chips

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 03:07 AM PDT

Japan's Fujitsu is close to flogging its mirocontroller chip business to Spansion.

According to Reuters, the deal will broaden the US semiconductor company's product line-up so it can better cater to automotive clients.

The car industry is being seen as the saviour of many chip industry companies as cars become more intelligent and computers less so.

Reuters did not get details of the deal, which apparently will include Fujitsu's microcontroller design and development business as well as a Japanese plant.

It is also a coming of age for Spansion which was set up as a joint venture between Fujitsu and Advanced Micro Devices in 2003. The outfit specialises in flash memory and has been trying to diversify its product range.

Semiconductors were once a key business for Fujitsu, but the company could not keep up with rivals like Samsung. Fujitsu also plans to merge its LSI chip business with that of Panasonic this fiscal year, Reuters claims.

Microcontrollers are an important part of Fujitsu's device solutions business, which also includes LSI chips. The division made $6 billion in sales in the year ended March 2012, accounting for 12 percent of Fujitsu's total cash take.

Fujitsu insisted that nothing had been decided with regards to its microcontroller chip business, but the news was reported by Japanese media, including the Nikkei business daily. 

Beardie Branson breaks the sound barrier

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 02:59 AM PDT

Beardie billionaire Richard Branson saw his commercial space venture move a step closer to reality yesterday when the company's SpaceShipTwo crashed through the sound barrier and no one died.

Branson's Virgin Galactic ignited its rocket motor in mid-flight for the first time and sped to Mach 1.2, faster than sound and reached about 56,000 feet in altitude.

The test took place over the Mojave Desert and was the biggest milestone in Virgin Galactic's 8 1/2-year endeavor to be the world's first commercial space liner.

Branson wants to take scores of paying customers into space for a brief journey. However, it is taking a jolly long time. Branson wanted to see the first space tourists in 2007 but had to push that date back to 2014.

Branson told the assorted throngs that he never thought it would take this long, but it was worth the wait. Now the plane has accomplished supersonic flight, the company says it is just about ready to take the next step and there are an awful lot of exciting things to come.

Virgin Galactic still needs to clear regulatory hurdles, particularly satisfying safety concerns with the Federal Aviation Administration. We guess they want pilots to take their shoes off before they board the plane.

During the test, SpaceShipTwo was taken to about 47,000 feet by a carrier aircraft, and approximately 45 minutes into the flight, it was dropped.

Pilot Mark Stucky and co-pilot Mike Alsbury engaged the hybrid rocket motor for 16 seconds, at which point SpaceShipTwo's speed reached Mach 1.2.

The entire flight test lasted a little more than 10 minutes, ending in a smooth landing in the Mojave.

Virgin Galactic uses a WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft that will fly with the reusable SpaceShipTwo rocket plane under its wing to 50,000 feet, where the spaceship will separate and blast off.

When the rocket motor engages, it will power the spaceship to nearly 2,500 miles per hour and take the pilots and up to six passengers to the edge of space, more than 60 miles above the Earth's surface.

For $200,000 each passengers will reach a suborbital altitude, passengers experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth. Then they will reenter the atmosphere and glide back to the runway.

So far Virgin Galactic has accepted more than $70 million in deposits from about 580 reservations made by people who are interested in the ride. 

Campaigners fight against entirely autonomous war robots

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 02:53 AM PDT

Campaigners are calling for laws which are similar to Isaac Asimov's first law of robotics to prohibit the use of robots which can kill without a human control switch.

Researchers think that automatic killing machines should be ready for combat within the next 20 years if a doctor with a sonic screwdriver does not stop them.  Nobel Laureate Jody Williams, of the "Campaign To Stop Killer Robots", said that building real Doctor Who villains would breach a moral and ethical boundary that should never be crossed.

Williams, who won the 1997 peace prize for her work on banning landmines, said that if war is reduced to weapons attacking without human beings in control, it is going to be civilians who are going to bear the brunt of warfare.

Noel Sharkey, professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield said that robots already have a certain amount of autonomy and if someone asked him to build an autonomous killer robot today, he could knock one up in a few days.

However, he said that the technology is a long way off being able to distinguish between a soldier and a civilian and the idea of a robot being asked to exercise human judgment is silly, he added.

According to Yahoo, the British government has always said it has no intention of developing such technology. But then again Britain has not had the money for such a product since the Blue Streak was cancelled.

The Royal Navy has a defensive system called Phalanx, which can be used in an automatic mode to protect personnel and ships from enemy threats like missiles but a human operator oversees the entire engagement.

But the organisers of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots are worried that Britain's rejection of fully autonomous weapons is not yet watertight. Particularly as the United States, China, Russia, Israel and Germany are expected to move towards systems that will soon give full combat autonomy to machines. 

Spanish region saves a fortune by moving to open source

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 02:46 AM PDT

In a victory for the free software movement, the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura has started to switch more than 40,000 government PCs to open source.

All the computers will be migrated this year. Extremadura estimates that the move to open source will help save €30 million per year.

It is Europe's second largest governmental desktop migration, after the French Gendarmerie, which is migrating some 90,000 desktops. Europe's third largest project is the German city of Munich, which has to date switched 13,000 PCs.

Most of the software will be based around a Linux distribution, Sysgobex, which has been tinkered with to meet the majority of requirements of government tasks.

At a press conference, Extremadura's CIO Theodomir Cayetano announced that the government's Linux desktop includes an open source corporate email system and office productivity suite.

The system will link the government's medical record system and can be used in combination with the health card to manage prescriptions. The desktops will be centrally managed and won't need IT administrators to perform local updates and configurations.

The system has been tested in a roll out of 150 Linux-based computers in pilot programs in departments of the Ministry of Development, the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Rural Development, Environment and Energy, Cayetano said.

The Extremadura region has been a poster child for the open source movement. Under the previous government, 70,000 desktop computers were in use in the secondary schools and 15,000 PCs used in health care, and were fitted with a local GNU/Linux distribution, Linex.

Cayetano noted that since the implementation of incident management using CAUGobex software, the system was able to handle more than 18,000 requests for service or incidents related to the operation and maintenance of computer equipment for public employees. 

China becomes biggest PC market

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 02:41 AM PDT

China was the world’s biggest PC market in 2012 according to analyst house IHS.

The Chinese market gobbled up an estimated 69 million PCs, three million more than the US. 

Furthermore, China’s PC market is expected to show moderate growth this year, which can’t be said of western markets.

Chinese consumers are showing some interesting trends  - they still like desktop PCs, which accounted for about 50 percent of all PC shipments in China last year, while notebooks accounted for the other half. In the rest of the world desktop shipments lag behind notebook shipments by a wide margin. 

“The equal share of shipments for desktops and notebooks in China is unusual, since consumers in most regions today tend to prefer more agile mobile PCs, rather than the bulky, stationary desktops,” said Peter Lin, senior analyst for compute platforms at IHS.

Lin attributed the trend to strong desktop demand in rural China. Rural consumers simple tend to prefer desktops for one reason or another. However, as the Chinese market matures, IHS is expecting notebooks to overtake desktops next year, reports EEtimes.

Chat apps whisper SMS' swan song

Posted: 29 Apr 2013 08:07 AM PDT

Web messaging services like WhatsApp have surpassed SMS text traffic for the first time ever, according to a report from Informa.

Services like WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, and Facebook Chat raced past SMS in 2012, with Informa recording 19 billion messages sent per day on chat apps - trumping 17.6 billion sent by SMS.

Telcos will be scratching their heads over how to further monetise SMS messages, or if a new approach is needed entirely. The numerous operators in Britain try to seduce customers onto contracts with promises of thousands of free texts per month, but these are threatened by the rapid rise in free chat using the web. With 4G on the horizon for the UK's many mobile users, it may be more reliable, and cheaper, to fire up WhatsApp than hammer off a text message.

Services like WhatsApp do not suffer from character limitations and users are able to attach pictures without extra charge, unlike sending an MMS for many. This will depend, of course, on data limitations.

Informa's Pamela Clark-Dickson told the BBC that there is still life in the SMS, particularly in emerging and lesser developed economies who may not have quite as much data access as they'd need for web messaging. However, with aggressive infrastructure building and a swaming of telcos across developing regions, this too should change eventually.

There are still plenty of people on feature phones who will rely on SMS for communicating, it's clear that smart devices are cleaving a different path towards something else. Here in Europe, the changes are already impacting the traditional operators - with real-world revenue losses in the hundreds of millions as traffic declined from 2007 to 2011.

India's IT workers increasingly depressed

Posted: 29 Apr 2013 07:29 AM PDT

Psychiatrists in India are noting a serious spike in depressed workers among the country's considerable IT workforce.

A director at NIMHANS, the largest counselling and psychiatric centre in India, told the Economic Times of India that when the IT industry began its boom in the country, signs of work-life stress were showing but they are increasingly moving towards signs of depression.

Increasingly, symptoms such as anxiety, acute depression, low confidence and those with little to no interest in a social life are making themselves known to India's mental health professionals.

Right now, the India Times reports, a NIMHANS centre specifically tailored for urban patients to balance work life problems is seeing more and more patients from the IT industry - and expects that soon, over half will be IT workers. Just two years ago, under a third worked in IT.

A depression counsellor who worked with IT staff who suffer from depression said pressures from social media aren't helping - although their major points of interaction are online, many workers also feel under pressure to pretend they "have a slice of happy life", while burying their head in the sand about work-life problems.

Hiring is slowing down in India's IT sector, and the wider economic environment is seeing companies trying to save money by cutting employee costs first.

Earlier this April, industry body Nasscom said in 2013 there will be 50,000 fewer jobs available in the once booming IT sector. It claimed the enormous contracting deals Indian firms used to be able to score are starting to wane, and future outsourcing project deals will be much smaller.
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