Monday, May 12, 2014

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Qualcomm to write $US300 million cheque for Wilocity

Posted: 12 May 2014 02:35 AM PDT

The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth rumour that Qualcomm is going to buy the 60 GHz WiGig chipmaker Wilocity.

According to an Israeli financial site TheMarker  Qualcomm is prepared to pay $US300 million for the deal.

Qualcomm has been behind the outfit from the start, raising $US105 million for it. Established in 2007, Wilocity shipped its first commercial chip in December 2012. It has flogged more than a million chipsets to PC manufacturers, with clients including Dell.

Wilocity chipsets are based around the IEEE 802.11ad standard published last year. The WiGig standard deals with short-range wireless communications in the 60 GHz spectrum and maxes out at 7 Gbps.

Recently the company announced its first smartphone chips built on a 28nm process. The Wil6300 chipset can manage 4.6 Gbps connections.

The company was developing the next generation of chips so that they would be smaller and more efficient and work with mobile devices and computers of other terminal equipment manufacturers. The plan was to develop WiGig, broadcasts on a frequency of 60 GHz to allow better high-speed data transfer indoors.

TheMarker claims its data came from deep throats in Wilocity, so far neither outfit has confirmed the rumours. It said that the staff will just transfer over to Qualcomm once the deal is done.

The company was founded in 2007 by Tal Tamir, who is CEO Danny Rettig, and Jorg wave Meissen. The three were leading developers at Intel and experts on the Centrino mobile processors and were behind the first generations of WiFi. 

U2 drained US air traffic control of its memory

Posted: 12 May 2014 02:33 AM PDT

Last week’s terrifying incident where the Los Angeles Air Traffic control shut down when an U2 spy plane flew overhead was the result of a memory problem and it could have happened anywhere in the US.

In fact those looking into the incident claim that the same vulnerability could have been used by an attacker in a deliberate shut-down.

The error blanked out a broad swath of the southwestern United States, from the West Coast to western Arizona and from southern Nevada to the Mexico border.

It cost the US more than $2.4 billion to build the Air Traffic Control system, which was  made by Lockheed Martin. Apparently the system had a lack of altitude information in the U-2's flight plan and caused a memory overload. The FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said the computer had to examine a large number of air routes to "de-conflict the aircraft with lower-altitude flights and the system just did not have the RAM for it.

The FAA later set the system to require altitudes for every flight plan and added memory to the system, which should prevent such problems in the future, Brown said.

When the system went out, air traffic controllers working in the regional centre switched to a back-up system so they could see the planes on their screens and reverted to pen and paper for communications to other control centres.

Apparently the ERAM system failed because it limits how much data each plane can send it, according to the sources. Most planes have simple flight plans, so they do not exceed that limit. But the U2 had a complex flight plan that put it close to the system's limit, the sources said.

For example the flight plan showed the plane going in and out of the Los Angeles control area multiple times, not a simple point-to-point route like most flights, they said. The conflict generated error messages and caused the system to begin cycling through restarts.

What is worrying is that the same gear is used in other airports so it could happen there at any time. The problem could also, with some difficultly, be created by a hacker.

Security experts said that from the description by insiders, the failure appeared to have been made possible by the sort of routine programming mistake that should have been identified in testing before it was deployed. The FAA said that a fix was being rolled out.

Oracle wins new method of trolling

Posted: 12 May 2014 02:31 AM PDT

Oracle's obsession with suing first and thinking about the implications later might have opened a can of worms for the company.

On Friday Oracle had a big win, when a federal appeals overturned a ruling in their epic battle over the Java programming language.

The dispute comes down to code used in Google's Android operating system which if it does go forward could create a new breed of software trollage on a scale never seen before. The issue is one of cloning. Most software developers will tell you that cloning software is OK provided you do not cut and paste the source code.

Oracle thinks it can claim copyright not just over the source code itself, but over the standard names and structures used to organise Java. Therefore, it owns the designs of Java's application programming interfaces, or APIs.

The techy judge Judge William Alsup ruled that was silly, but the Appeals Court disagreed and overturned his ruling.

This means that many important pieces of open source software which are clones of something else will suddenly become open to be trolled into oblivion. This could kill the Linux operating system and various cloud services and no doubt other proprietary software too.

In a post to the online discussion site Hacker News, Bryan Cantrill, the CTO at cloud provider Joyent, called the idea that APIs could be copyrighted a "perverted and depraved principle".

"An API is a description of what the software is going to do," Cantrill tells us. "You can think of the API as the plot as opposed to the novel. If you're saying that that abstract notion of the plot is copyrightable, then everything is derivative."

But what is even more ironic is that Oracle itself could be a victim of its own court case. Apparently it is sitting on shedloads of software in which its programmers copied APIs.

Cantrill works on an open source version of the Solaris operating system, and he claims that Oracle copied some of his APIs into its Oracle Solaris product without permission.

He said that he will not become a software copyright troll because that is wrong in principle, however the patent trolls have shown that there is no level to which they will not stoop if they can threaten anyone and make a quick buck.

Our guess is that there will be many patent trolls looking to becomes software trolls who are frantically scanning the APIs of Windows, iOS and Oracle software now trying to find vague similarities between code they wrote a decade or two ago which has been copied into other software. 

Apple iPad sales plummet

Posted: 12 May 2014 02:29 AM PDT

The fruity cargo cult Apple is watching its iPad sales slump as millions start to wonder why they are wasting their cash on the keyboardless netbooks.

Canalys beancounter Tim Coulling said that it was the sharpest decline ever and was on account of Apple trying "to run down" its iPad inventory.

He said that this was a smart move as tablet stock in the channel rose due to strong seasonal shipments in the previous quarter. In other words, Apple made too many over the Christmas break which sat on the shelves.

Coulling however does not believe that Apple's tablet days are over. He thought that Apple's Q1 performance did not indicate a decline in the tablet category, despite growing pressure from larger-screen smart phones.

He thinks that consumers, and increasingly businesses, are continuing to adapt, with tablets acting as disruptors and finding their place as desktop and notebook replacements.

Couling added that Apple's ecosystem and the recent launch of Office for iPad should ensure it is well placed to remain a leader for some time.

According to the rest of the Canalys report into sales, Global PC shipments rose five percent year on year to reach 123.7 million units in the first quarter of 2014.

Roughly 41 percent of those shipments belonged to the tablet category and about 38 percent to the species notebook, with desktops making up the rest.

In the non-tablet PC category, the end of Windows XP helped arrest the decline in notebook shipments somewhat, limiting it to seven percent. This factor also helped desktop shipments remain flat year on year, Canalys said.

The quarter was particularly good for Lenovo as it managed to raise its PC market share from 10 percent to 12 percent, shipping around 15 million units worldwide. "It achieved solid annual growth in all PC categories and is now placed first, second and third in the notebook, desktop and tablet markets respectively," the report added.

Most of the growth came from Europe, the Middle East and Africa and Canalys analyst James Wang pointed out that Lenovo managed an impressive 61 percent year-on-year growth in shipments there.

"'Lenovo was quick to move with new form factors and its Yoga line now dominates the global convertible notebook market," Wang said.

"In addition, it has diversified its tablet portfolio and has product SKUs in all key market segments. Unlike Apple, with its 'one size fits all' tablet strategy, Lenovo and others are free to tailor tablets to specific market segments. The tablet form factor is well liked by both young and old consumers; product customization can be beneficial in both cases," Wang said. 

FCC changes its mind on net neutrality again

Posted: 12 May 2014 02:27 AM PDT

The US FCC appears to have had an epiphany on net neutrality and worked out that it is probably not a good idea to back the telcos as they kill off the internet.

The watchdog has previously said that there is nothing wrong with the telcos creating a two-tiered internet and that it would not create any rules which would force them to do otherwise.

Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, it seems that the FCC was a little shocked to discover that the great unwashed wanted their watchdog to protect them and not the telcos.

The head of the Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler, is revising a proposal to regulate broadband internet. The WSJ says the changed report will offer "assurances that the agency won't allow companies to segregate Web traffic into fast and slow lanes," but may not appease the huge number of people who feel the FCC's plans will allow internet service providers to dictate consumer web usage.

The revised proposal would stop large internet providers such as Comcast from brokering deals with content companies on special terms, and would seek comment on whether "paid prioritisation” which is PR speak for when broadband providers slow access to nonpaying companies' sites and services  should be banned.

Also added to the draft proposal is new language designed to protect companies that require internet access, and a new ombudsman position who will advocate on behalf of start-ups in disputes, with "significant enforcement authority."

Wheeler’s initial plans to surrender the Internet to the telcos and offer an internet "fast lane" for bloated internet providers, was blasted by some of the United States' biggest investors, technology companies, senators, and even Wheeler's own mates at the FCC.  The great unwashed claimed that he was a tool for cable companies that he used to lobby for.

One FCC official reportedly described the situation as "a debacle," saying "we may not agree on the course, but we agree the road we are on is to disaster." Certainly, if the proposal isn't altered sufficiently ahead of its official review later this week the open Internet will be destroyed in the Land of the Fee.
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