TechEye

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• Intel, Microsoft have terrible annuses
• Boffins lose back-up battle
• Chromebooks doing well
• Company spills the beans on salaries
• Facebook is losing its youth
• Hacker took over the BBC

Intel, Microsoft have terrible annuses Posted: 30 Dec 2013 01:55 AM PST "Your shadow at morning striding behind you     Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;     I will show you fear in a handful of dust." - TS Eliot, The Wasteland     Yeah, I am quite aware the plural of annum is not annuses but then the headline is more important than the body text. Both Microsoft and Intel have had a terrible year and Janus, which rhymes with anus, suspects that 2014 won’t be much better for either. Intel’s “customers” – for that, read compliant vendors – have, like Nero never did, fiddled while Rome burns. The X86 chip is not quite dead but considering the amount of money Intel spent on branding in the 1990s, it must be frustrating for the old lags at Chipzilla – those that are left of course – that the world+dog is not in the slightest bit interested in what component powers the smartphone and the tablet. Intel, it could successfully be argued, brought it all upon itself by allowing the famous Atom to cannibalise its ever so famous brand.  It thought the gravy train would run forever but it found itself at the end of the line, hitting the buffers of indifference and even this old buffer doesn’t care about Intel any more. The  notion that anyone in her or his right mind would pay over the odds because a machine had an Intel chip in it  is just plain busted. Microsoft is a different case.  It’s heart is in the right place, that is if any multinational corporation can be said to have a heart. Intel certainly has never been challenged by sentiment.  But Microsoft lost the plot too – why would you choose a Microsoft operating system for a phone and a tablet when it has such a big slice of a PC’s pie? This year has seen the brutal toppling of a quiet, charming man who has a large voice that can be heard 10 blocks away.  Steve Ballmer did not deserve the opprobium heaped upon him by, as Nick Farrell describes them, the Wall Street cocaine nose jobs.  Microsoft, like Intel, is now simply irrelevant.  The game has changed and both megamoths are tumbling into the dying flame of the X86 monopoly. Say you are a diplodicus with a huge body and a tiny brain.  Does death take longer because of your bulk?  I can think of only one IT company that managed to successfully re-engineer itself, and that is IBM under the stewardship of the Nabisco man.  Getting in a geezer from Ford to run Microsoft is just plain nuts in May. No one cares about the operating system, the motherboard, and the CPU any more.  Those days are gone.  A happy new year to all of our reader (sic) and lang may your lum reek.

Boffins lose back-up battle Posted: 30 Dec 2013 03:25 AM PST Boffins who fail to back up their data are causing a huge problem for modern science. According to a study published today in Current Biology, which we get for the centrefold of the sexually liberated protozoa.  crucial data is going missing making it impossible to check results. Authors of 516 biological studies published between 1991 and 2011 were emailed and asked for the raw data of their experiments so that it could be replicated. More than 90 percent of the oldest data, from papers written more than 20 years ago has died. Only 23 percent of papers published as recently as 2011 still had accessible data. Timothy Vines, a zoologist at the University of British Columbia, who led the effort said there had been no systematic estimates of how quickly the data held by authors actually disappears. More a quarter of studies active email addresses couldn't be found, with defunct addresses listed on the paper itself and web searches not turning up any current ones. For another 38 percent of studies, their queries led to no response. Another seven percent of the data sets were lost or inaccessible. In one case the data was saved on three-and-a-half inch floppy disks, so no one could access it, because they no longer had the proper drives, Vines said. Vines said that old data was extremely useful to his own research on a pair of toad species native to Eastern Europe that seem to be in the process of hybridising. So much of this research is paid for with public funding, much of it coming through grants that stipulate that resulting data be made freely available to the public. Additionally, field data is affected by the circumstances of the environment in which it's collected—thus, it's impossible to perfectly replicate later on, when conditions have changed, he said.

Chromebooks doing well Posted: 30 Dec 2013 03:23 AM PST The much-battered, assaulted and sprinkled with vinegar  Wintel Alliance seems unable to defeat the rise of Chrome. According to retailer Amazon.com and industry analysts, Google's Chromebooks did rather well last year. The cut -down laptops powered by Google's browser-based Chrome OS have been doing better than expected and Amazon.com has named a pair of Chromebooks, one from Samsung, the other from Acer, as two of the three best-selling notebooks during the US holiday season. The Asus' Transformer Book, a Windows 8.1 "2-in-1" device that transforms from a 10.1-in. tablet to a keyboard-equipped laptop came in third. According to Computer World, Chromebooks' holiday success at Amazon was duplicated elsewhere. Beancounters at NPD's worked out that Chromebooks accounted for 21 percent of all US commercial notebook sales in 2013 through November, and 10 percent of all computers and tablets. Both shares were up from 2012 when Chromebooks were two tenths of one percent of all computer and tablet sales. Chromebooks have taken advantage of the fact that Microsoft stuffed up the launch of Windows 8 which allowed brands with a focus on alternative form factors or operating systems, like Apple and Samsung, to capture significant share of a market dominated by Windows gear. The 11.6-in. Acer C720 Chromebook, first on Amazon's top-10 list Thursday, costs $199, while the Samsung Chromebook, at Number 2, runs $243. Amazon prices Acer's 720P Chromebook, No. 7 on the chart, at $300. It appears that Chromebooks have arrived as the successors to "netbooks" which fell by the wayside in 2010 and 2011 as tablets assumed their roles and full-fledged notebooks closed in on netbook prices.

Company spills the beans on salaries Posted: 30 Dec 2013 03:22 AM PST While most companies spend a lot of their time hiding how much everyone earns, a US start-up thinks there is mileage in keeping everything open. In a post on Buffer's Open blog, CEO Joel Gascoigne told the world+dog his salary along with the salary of every single employee in the company, He also published the formula the company uses to get to each one. In the bog, he said that one of the highest values the company had was transparency which apparently breeds trust, and that is one of the key reasons for the company to place such a high importance on it. Gascoigne has a salary of $158,800 based on a formula of Salary = job type X seniority X experience + location + $10K if salary choice. So his $75,000 starting base salary is  for an executive officer level job which gets a boost for seniority, experience, and location . That works out to the following: $158,800 (75k Executive Officer base + 20%, + 12k/$m revenue, 1.2X, +22,000). The bog  also lists other openness which would give some companies pause to think. One of our favourites is a rule that email must be sent to the whole team. It is not clear what your colleagues would make of messages such as "I am picking the kids up from school" but we are sure it would mean that emails that are salacious would never be sent.

Facebook is losing its youth Posted: 30 Dec 2013 03:21 AM PST Social notworking site Facebook is losing the hearts and minds of the young, according to new figures. Professor Daniel Miller of University College London, an anthropologist who worked on the research, wrote in an article for academic news website The Conversation that his study of how teenagers use social media has found that Facebook is "not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried". He said that Facebook is morphing into a tool for keeping in touch with older family members and younger people see Facebook as 'uncool'. Kinds of today prefer simpler social networks such as Twitter and Snapchat. The only time you will see a teen on there is to stay in touch with older relatives, Miller said. Miller said that most teens feel embarrassed even to be associated with it. This year marked the start of what looks likely to be a sustained decline of what had been the most pervasive of all social networking sites. Once parents were worried about their children joining Facebook, and now it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives. This years Global Social Media Impact Study, which was funded by the European Union, observed 16 to 18 year olds in eight countries for 15 months and found that Facebook use was in freefall. Instead, young people are turning to simpler services like Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp which Professor Miller conceded were "no match" for Facebook in terms of functionality. "Most of the school children in our survey recognised that in many ways, Facebook is technically better than Twitter or Instagram. It is more integrated, better for photo albums, organising parties and more effective for observing people's relationships," said Professor Miller, adding that "slick isn't always best" in attracting young users. WhatsApp has overtaken Facebook as the number one way to send messages and Snapchat has gained in popularity in recent months by allowing users to send images which "self-destruct" after a short period on the recipients phone in order to maintain privacy.

Hacker took over the BBC Posted: 30 Dec 2013 03:19 AM PST Red-faced security experts at the BBC are having to explain how a hacker broke into their systems over the Christmas break. According to Reuters,  the hacker was only revealed after he launched a Christmas Day campaign to convince other cyber criminals to pay him for access to the system. It is not clear if the hacker found any buyers, but the BBC's security team responded to the issue on Saturday and believes it has secured the site. Reuters could not find out if the hacker stole data or caused any damage in the attack. However, they did manage to compromise a server that manages an obscure password-protected website called ftp.bbc.co.uk. The Beeb was warned about the attack by Hold Security, a cybersecurity firm in Milwaukee that monitors underground cyber-crime forums in search of stolen information. Hold spotted a Russian hacker known by the monikers "HASH" and "Rev0lver," attempting to sell access to the BBC server on December 25. HASH showed files that could only be accessed by somebody who really controlled the server. The BBC has been targeted by the Syrian Electronic Army, which supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and other hacker activist groups that deface websites and take over Twitter accounts.

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