Monday, July 29, 2013

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MediaTek pins hopes on top-tier tablet targets

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 06:03 AM PDT

MediaTek is planning a massive push for selling its ARM big.LITTLE-based MT8135 tablet processor, setting its sights on Google, Amazon and Sony, as well as other branded notebook and tablet vendors.

Taipei-based Digitimes first heard the rumours, citing industry sources. The quad core CPU can already be found in some kit from Acer, Lenovo and Asustek.

MediaTek is hoping by getting its product into top names like Google and Amazon, which already ship plenty of their own devices, will increase its share in the global tablet market.

The sources say MediaTek expects five top PC brands will be rolling out more than 10 tablets with its own quad core chips under the bonnet by the year's end.

MediaTek previously announced it wanted to ship 15 million tablet units for 2013, but now expects it can raise the target to 20 million.

Apple shuffles Bob Mansfield sideways

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 04:25 AM PDT

The man who gave Apple some of its key devices, including the popular MacBook Air, has been shuffled sideways.

Apple breathlessly said that Bob Mansfield, senior vice president of technologies has been pushed out of its executive team to work on "special projects".

For those who came in late, "special projects" is usually a job given to those who you do not want to make decisions, but cannot actually remove because it will annoy staff and shareholders. Their "office" is often the lift.

To be fair Mansfield was on his way out of the building. Last year he announced his plan to retire as head of hardware engineering. Instead he stayed on to lead Apple's semiconductor and wireless teams.

Mansfield is the latest addition to chief executive Tim Cook's "special projects" team which appears to be made up of high profile names who are unlikely to produce real products.

One of the team members is the former chief executive of French luxury group Yves Saint Laurent, Paul Deneve. It is possible that the team's job is just to come up with ideas to save the company before it dawns on the world the iPhone and iPad are being endlessly recycled.

Last October, Cook overhauled his management team, pushing out the powerful head of the company's mobile software products group. 

Winner of NSA award disses NSA

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 03:31 AM PDT

The winner of this year's security award, sponsored by US spooks at the NSA, is a little embarrassed.

Joseph Bonneau, of the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge would normally have been over the moon at winning such a prestigious award. After all, his paper "The science of guessing" was chosen by top academics in the security world as the year's best scientific cybersecurity paper.

Writing in his blog, Bonneau said that he was honoured to have been recognised by the distinguished academic panel assembled by the NSA.

Yet Bonneau feels some conflict about the award, particularly after the news broke that the NSA, with the backing of sockpuppets on both sides of the political spectrum in the US, were spying on private communications on an unprecedented scale.

"Like many in the community of cryptographers and security engineers, I'm sad that we haven't better informed the public about the inherent dangers and questionable utility of mass surveillance, " he wrote.

He said that he was ashamed we've let politicians sneak the country down this path.

Bonneau wanted to make it clear that in accepting the award he did not condone the NSA's surveillance.

"I don't think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form," he said.

At the same time he was glad he got the opportunity to visit with the NSA and was grateful for his hosts' genuine hospitality.

A large group of engineers turned up to hear his presentation, asked sharp questions, understood and cared about the privacy implications of studying password data. We guess they also brought out the chocolate biscuits.

Bonneau feels that America's core problems are in Washington and not in Fort Meade. 

Researchers discover a flaw in weather prediction

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 03:26 AM PDT

While a huge amount of computer processing power is spent predicting the weather, a fair part of that could be going to waste because of software faults.

A study by Korean researchers has found that the flaws in software mean that you might as well predict the weather using tarot cards.

The researchers wanted to look at the simulation results from a global atmospheric numerical model on machines with different hardware and software systems.

Song-You Hong, of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, College of Sciences, Yonsei University, Seoul tested the commonly used global model program and the Global/Regional Integrated Model system on 10 different computer systems with different CPU's, architectures or compilers.

It was found that each bit of hardware, using the same software, gave a different prediction.

The paper deals with 10-day weather forecasts when weather forecasts are generally done in one hour steps. It assumes that the data from the first hour tended to be right, and was calculated correctly.

It speculates that the reason for the problem is because some parts of the software are rounding up or down incorrectly. Other suggestions are that there are approximations in built-in functions.

This problem becomes more marked over time so that on the tenth day the result is so realistic that it is predicting that Daenerys Targaryen will be invading the North-west of England with an army of dragons on Tuesday with thundery squalls of badgers off the Orkney and Shetland Islands by Wednesday. 

Windows NT turns 20

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 03:22 AM PDT

Windows NT is celebrating its 20th birthday and is still operating under the bonnet of Microsoft's current and future operating systems.

According to Mark Morowczynski of Microsoft's Ask Premier Field Engineering blog over the weekend, 20 years ago the Vole launched Windows NT.

The operating system was so successful it is still part of Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Phone 8, Windows Azure and the Xbox One.

In 1993, Microsoft launched Windows NT 3.1, followed up by NT 3.5, 3.51 and 4.0.

Vole’s Windows releases still rely on NT numbering conventions. Windows 7's build numbers commenced with 6.1; Windows 8's with 6.2; and Windows 8.1 with 6.3.

NT stood for New Technology and the Vole promoted it as a cutting edge OS that included all the features users expected in an OS for workstations and small to midsized servers.

For those of us who were around then, it was difficult to see that it was going to make much of an impact. The networking market was pretty crowded and mostly focused on UNIX flavours.

David Cutler was the brains behind NT. He had come to Microsoft from Digital where he was involved in the RSX-11M project and VAX.

In the 1980s he was leading an elite group within Digital with the historically unfortunate name of Prism, which was a hardware project based around an OS called Mica.

In a short-sighted move, in 1988, Digital cancelled Prism and laid off many of its group members. Vole headhunted Cutler and more than 20 Digital employees.

Microsoft's internal project name for the new OS was OS/2 NT, because the Vole wanted it to succeed OS/2 and retain the OS/2 API as its primary interface.

However, after Windows 3.0 did so well, the relationship with IBM started to turn sour. Six weeks after Microsoft released Windows 3.0, Microsoft renamed OS/2 NT as Windows NT,  It then designated the Win32 API as NT's official API.

Gates wanted compatibility with the 16-bit Windows API and the ability to run Windows 3.x applications unmodified, along with support for DOS, OS/2, and POSIX APIs. Cutler's team managed this thanks to a lot of well invested support from Gates.

The team was more than 200 engineers and testers by the time it was good to go.

The speed at which this was done made many think that Cutler and his team must have used VMS technology and there were some similarities.  While Digital developers wrote the VMS kernel almost entirely in VAX assembly language, Vole used C with some clean ups and tweaking.

In 1995 Digital did a deal with Microsoft to avoid an expensive court case. Digital announced Affinity for OpenVMS, a program that required Microsoft to help train Digital NT technicians, help promote NT and Open-VMS as two pieces of a three-tiered client/server networking and promise to maintain NT support for the Alpha processor.

Gates wrote a cheque for Digital for between $65 - $100 million.

Digital should have been thinking a little clearer about this.  It had just seen what was happening as Vole had just launched NT4.0 a few months earlier.

NT 4 incorporated the Windows 95 shell and Microsoft moved the graphics and printing from win32 into the kernel. This made graphics and printing significantly faster. It was also a honey to install compared to its rivals.  

Microsoft was competing with Novell’s Netware and Unix was fast becoming a thing of the past. Pretty soon Microsoft had control of the networking market.

Texting and email is hurting handwriting

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 03:13 AM PDT

Handwriting skills have progressively dropped down the loo as technology has increased communication speeds.

Wendy Carlson, a handwriting expert and forensic document examiner said that she has noticed a dramatic downturn in the legibility of handwritten court documents.

And she says that the loss of handwriting skills is coming at the price of a rotting of the mind.

She said that texting was part of the problem because people lost the knack of writing long sentences. People aren't using their minds and they are relying on technology to make the decisions for them.

Carlson says cursive writing uses mental and physical processes which involve both sides of the brain. But cursive writing decreases as technology becomes the most dominant means of communication.

Typing or texting is just a matter of punching and finger-moving.  You don’t have to do much thinking because you are not allowing your brain to form neural processes, she said.

CNN cited a 2012 study that found 33 percent of people had difficulty reading their own handwriting. Docmail, a UK-based printing and mailing company, found that that one in three participants had not been required to produce something in handwriting for more than half a year.

Updating calendars, phone books and reminder notes was more likely to be completed without using a pen. Finally, more than half of participants said their handwriting was poor.
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