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- Qualcomm plunges money into restaurants
- IBM is Sherlock Holmes, not Watson
- Apple crumbles after Swift attacks
- World faces Zombie data centre crisis
- Kim Jong-Un cures Cancer, Ebola and Aids
- AMD plans sell off
- Texas Instruments might be up to something big
- Enterprises plump for tablets
- Samsung SSD TRIMs data
| Qualcomm plunges money into restaurants Posted: 22 Jun 2015 03:20 AM PDT
Qualcomm, like many other tech multinationals is seeking to diversify. And as part of this strategy, the firm has apparently put over $6 million into a Korean firm called MangoPlate. MangoPlate is a service that helps you find restaurants. According to the Korea Times, Qualcomm wants to help grow the Korean market and it believes that "food technology" has great potential for growth. A director at Qualcomm VC told the newspaper that it believed MangoPlate "will become a new icon" in Korea. MangoPlate slices and dices data from reviews and social networks to provide potential diners with a place they'd like to go. The Qualcomm Ventures web site shows dozens of firms it's put money into. More well known companies it's invested in in the past include Paypal. |
| IBM is Sherlock Holmes, not Watson Posted: 22 Jun 2015 02:41 AM PDT
The company said it has put IBM i2 Coplink on the cloud, and that will liberate over a billion law enforcement shareable documents to the cloud. It said the move will let "law enforcement agencies" access a huge network of shareable documents. Putting Coplink on the cloud means that analytics can be applied to huge quantities of data to help cops use fuzzy logic to correlate information. IBM said that for the last 20 years it's helped over 6,000 policing agencies in North America to feel the collar of criminals. The data being on the cloud means that the cops can use desktops, computers in cars, or tablets and smartphones to access the data. Police in the USA are being hit by "shrinking budgets", said IBM. |
| Apple crumbles after Swift attacks Posted: 22 Jun 2015 02:26 AM PDT
Taylor Swift, a US crooner, penned a note to Apple saying there was no way she'd let Apple stream her music in a three month free trial the computing company is offering with Apple Pay. That led to a frenzied situation at Apple Central in Cupertino with its top music executive saying it respected her and independent artists and grinding the gears as it performed a massive u-turn. Swift said in an open letter to Apple that three months is a long time to go without being paid. It was "unfair" for people to work for nothing. She said: "We don't ask you for free iPhones. Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation." Apple crumbled at the idea it would be considered as unhip by people playing in popular beat combos and gave in without a fight. |
| World faces Zombie data centre crisis Posted: 22 Jun 2015 02:16 AM PDT
A new study says that 30 percent of all physical servers in data centres are comatose, or are using energy but aren't doing anything useful. According to Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University, the problem has been around for a while, as the percentage hasn’t changed since 2008. He used data collected by TSO Logic, an energy efficiency software vendor, from nearly 4,000 physical servers in customer data centres. They decided that a server is considered comatose if it hasn’t done anything for at least six months, which would be an interesting definition if applied to a human. Koomey said it was not a technical matter as much as a management problem but more work is needed to confirm or refute those numbers. IDC estimated the number of physical servers worldwide last year at 41.4 million; that figure is expected to grow to 42.8 million by the end of this year. A study last year by the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), with the help of major vendors, estimated that in the U.S. alone data centres used 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electrical energy in 2013. That use is expected to increase 53 percent by 2020. It estimated that electrical usage could be reduced by 40 percent by getting rid of zombie servers and improving energy efficiency. That figure represents only half of the technically possible reduction in energy use. It is the smaller data centres which were the problem rather than the big clouds. |
| Kim Jong-Un cures Cancer, Ebola and Aids Posted: 22 Jun 2015 02:14 AM PDT
The Northern Korean dictator announced that his miracle cure consists of ginseng grown from fertiliser and a mix of other ingredients. The secret sauce to the cure is just that,secret, but it means that no one in North Korea has to worry about these illnesses ever again. It means that only capitalists have to worry about getting sick. The medicine will apparently be injectable and will be known by the name of Kumdang-2. In a statement published by Korean Central News Agency of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to herald the news, Dr Jon Sung Hun said: "The researchers insert rare earth elements (REE) into insam (gingseng) by applying the mico-elementary fertilizers of REE to the fields of insam." "The injection is made of extracts from those complex compounds. As a strong-immuno-activator, the injection has been recognized to prevent different malignant epidemics." The drug's website cites a medical study in Africa where the drug was tested on HIV positive patients. It records that every single participant in the trial noted an improvement, with 56 per cent being completely cured and 44 per cent noting a considering improvement in their condition. To be fair, the State has made some interesting claims before. Who would have thunk it that Kim Jong Il invented the hamburger and had magical powers which meant he did not need to use the loo. The state also claims that Kim Jong Il was born atop a North Korean mountain prompting a double rainbow and new star to spontaneously appear. State records show he was born in Siberia. Now if only Kim Jong Il could fix that pesky drought which is threatening to wipe out most of his country. We expect he will sort that out by tea time. |
| Posted: 22 Jun 2015 02:13 AM PDT
The review, which is at its early stages is part of Chief Executive Lisa Su’s cunning plan to consider every possible option to turn the company around. A consulting firm has been bought in to help it review its options and draw up scenarios on how a break-up or spin-off would work. One plan is to spin off AMD’s graphics and licensing business from its server business. This is not the first time that AMD has thought of doing this, but each time the plan was abandoned. Su thought that there was “merit” for the company to at least consider such a possibility again. Officially AMD is denying everything and said that it is sticking to the company’s commitment to the long-term strategy it laid out in May at its analyst meeting. Part of the problem for any split is that AMD has an extensive cross-licensing agreement with Intel, a problem AMD would have to study carefully in the case of a break-up. AMD faces declining cash flows and its net loss widened to $180 million in the quarter that ended March 28, from $20 million, or three cents per share, a year earlier. It also missed on revenue expectations. It is forecasting a return to profitability in the second half of the year. If it manages this then all thoughts of spinning off anything will disappear. |
| Texas Instruments might be up to something big Posted: 22 Jun 2015 02:12 AM PDT
The outfit has a market capitalisation of $56 billion, and watched as Intel, Avago and NXP Semiconductors consolidated and made acquisitions. TI was talks to acquire Maxim last year which fell through because the outfit did not want to sell. It also kicked the wheels of Freescale before it was bought by NXP in March for $11.8 billion. The feeling is that if Texas Instruments chief executive Rich Templeton doesn’t move fast, there will not be any companies worth buying left. TI is expected to want to buy up analogue chip makers and the right deal could boost TI’s operating margins and profits by increasing the utilisation rates in TI’s 21 fabrication plants in nine countries. On the shopping list are Maxim, Analog Devices, Linear Technology, Microchip Technology, Intersil and Atmel. TI’s chief financial officer Kevin March said on a conference call with analysts last autumn that TI would prefer to buy an analogue company that sells into the industrial and automotive markets, or one that provides catalogue parts which are non-custom silicon parts. |
| Posted: 22 Jun 2015 01:22 AM PDT
IDC said that usage of enterprise tablets in the UK, France and Germany is on the rise and by 2018, 15 percent of the total device base will be 15 percent. IDC said it anticipates 40 million tablets and 2-in-1s will be sold over the next five years meaning one in four business computing devices will be that form factor by 2019. What are the reasons for increased uptake of tablets in businesses? According to Marta Fioerenti, a senior analyst at IDC, the reasons for change are efficiency, productivity gains, and the increasing mobility of employees. Right now, the leading sector in business is transport, while distribution is also adopting tablets. IDC said 70 percent of the businesses it surveyed will probably buy tablets in the next two years. Touch is considered a "very important" method to input data. Tablets are no longer used only by executives – 60 percent of people using them are involved in chiselling away at the business coalface. All these changes, said IDC, herald sea changes in hardware and software requirements. |
| Posted: 21 Jun 2015 08:09 PM PDT
The TRIM command allows the Operating System to inform a Solid State Drive which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be erased. The Trim command was introduced soon after SSDs started to become an affordable alternative to traditional hard disks. Because low-level operation of SSDs differs significantly from hard drives, the typical way in which operating systems handle operations like deletes and formats resulted in unanticipated progressive performance degradation of write operations on SSDs. According to StorageServers, an engineer with Algolia claimed to have discovered the bug in the way in which the drive reallocates blocks of data. Instead of zeroing areas which contain previously deleted data as they are supposed to, the drives appear to be deleting 512 byte blocks in "random locations on the drive" resulting in corruption of large file systems and near total erasure of small files. Hope of recovering the data was reported as “a tedious task" at best. Samsung SSD models confirmed with the problem are:
Samsung recently issued a firmware update to fix problems with the 840 EVO SSD which exhibited slow read speeds. A new team has been assigned to look into the TRIM data erasure/corruption problem and will be issuing an update shortly. TechEye Take Samsung does not like stains like this and will break out the reserves to not only fix the problem but also ensure that it does not re-occur. We are trying to find out whether any of the affected drives contain any of Samsung's 3D NAND-Flash devices. They are not indicated as having any part in the reported problem. It will be interesting to see whether this will have a positive effect on their competitors ‘share price on Monday’s market open…, |
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