TechEye |  |
- PC makers despondent about Windows 10
- Microsoft to cut more jobs
- Semi sales rose in May
- Symantec wants to sell Veritas
- Nvidia plans more AI
- Apple Watch sales fall by 90 percent
- ISPs will be US spooks’ eyes and ears
- Full invisibility is within reach
- Intel sees Windows as its blue eyed boy
- World will see 2.5 billion devices ship this year
| PC makers despondent about Windows 10 Posted: 08 Jul 2015 02:16 AM PDT
The companies that make PCs, largely in Asia, don't seem to think that the introduction of Windows 10 at the end of this month is going to boost their sales figures. According to a report in Taiwanese wire Digitimes, the original development manufacturers (ODMs) don't think Windows 10 will cut the mustard and won't go down a storm with either individual buyers or commercial enterprises. The wire said that "many" ODMs aren't happy about the level of orders they've received for the second half of this year and think that many people just won't bother to upgrade. Enterprises generally don't immediately upgrade to new versions of Windows until they're sure that the release will be stable. Many decided to stick with Windows 7 and skip Windows 8.x. Digitimes said that the channel is currently stuck with large amounts of inventory and the ODMs are not going to contribute to that by speculatively manufacturing notebooks in the hope that Windows 10 will take off. |
| Posted: 08 Jul 2015 01:55 AM PDT
Microsoft said last year that that it would lay off 18,000 people but, according to the New York Times, more cuts will come in both the hardware division and the smartphone business it bought from Nokia last year. Newly fledged CEO Satya Nadella has said in the last few months to Microsoft employees that "tough choices" had to made in several divisions. Rather like Intel, Microsoft has for years struggled to make a dent in the smartphone business and last year's buy of Nokia's smartphone unit for over $7 billion doesn't seem to have made much of a difference to its tiny market share. But Microsoft cannot lose face by exiting the smartphone business completely. That's a component of its strategy to launch Windows 10 on devices including PCs, tablets and telephones. The New York Times added that Microsoft may well seek to write off a large proportion of its Nokia buy in the buildup to its next financial earnings report. |
| Posted: 08 Jul 2015 01:45 AM PDT
But while those revenues were similar to those in April 2015, EISA said there were "some remarkable areas of strength" in May with increased demand for several product categories. Sales of discrete semiconductor devices rose by 3.7 percent, diodes by five percent, and optoelectronics by 6.7 percent. And, said EISA, if measured in Euro, the market showed "very strong growth" compared to May 2014, an illustration of the effect exchange rate fluctuations have on sales in Europe. In May 2015, worldwide, sales of semiconductors for the automotive, consumer, wireless and wired comms applications went well. Worldwide, sales were up 5.1 percent compared to May 2014. EISA released a graph showing monthly European semiconductor sales development between January 2011 until now.
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| Symantec wants to sell Veritas Posted: 08 Jul 2015 01:19 AM PDT
The word on the street is that Symantec was nearing a deal to sell Veritas to Carlyle for between $7 billion and $8 billion, but few other details are known. Symantec shares rose 2.64 percent in after-hours trading, after closing up 0.5 percent, at $22.79, in regular trade on the Nasdaq. Symantec has been seeking buyers for Veritas for several months but interest from potential buyers had been limited because of a tax burden associated with splitting the company. Symantec had been planning to separate its business focused on corporate and consumer security software, which had $4.2 billion in revenue last year, from Veritas, which has about $2.5 billion in revenue. It announced the tax-free spinoff last October. Investors have wanted Symantec to become more agile and capitalise on faster growing businesses, whether it’s through corporate breakups or divestitures. Looks like this deal is exactly what they wanted. |
| Posted: 08 Jul 2015 01:18 AM PDT
Digits version 2 comes with a graphical user interface, potentially making it accessible to programmers beyond the typical user base of academics and developers which specialise in AI. Nvidia vice president of accelerated computing Ian Buck said that a the previous version could be controlled only through the command line, which required knowledge of specific text commands and forced the user to jump to another window to view the results. Digits will now enable up to four processors to work together simultaneously to build a learning model. Because the models can run on multiple processors, Digits can build models up to four times as quickly compared to the first version. Nvidia wants AI to take off because it requires heavy computational power where its GPUs can do rather well. Nvidia first released Digits as a way to cut out a lot of the menial work it takes to set up a deep learning system. It does have users Yahoo, which found this new approach cut the time required to build a neural network for automatically tagging photos on its Flickr service from 16 days to 5 days. Nvidia updated some of its other software to make it more AI friendly including its CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) parallel programming platform and application programming interface, which also now supports 16-bit floating point arithmetic.This helps developers cram more data into the system for modelling. The company updated its CUDA Deep Neural Network library of common routines to support 16 bit floating point operations too. |
| Apple Watch sales fall by 90 percent Posted: 08 Jul 2015 01:17 AM PDT
Apple is selling fewer than 20,000 watches a day in the US since the initial surge in April, and on some days fewer than 10,000. Data collected by Slice Intelligence slow that either the iWatch is a dead end or that anyone who wanted one now has one. Two-thirds of the watches sold so far have been the lower-profit "Sport" version, whose price starts at $349, according to Slice, rather than the costlier and more advanced models that start at $549. The figures are based on the electronic receipts sent to millions of email addresses following purchases. The company conducts market research on behalf of consumer goods companies, among others, many of them in the Fortune 500. Apple has refused to comment about the sales. It does not comment on good sales or bad ones so that is not surprising. However the iWatch was super-hyped and the first that the company has created and launched since the death of Steve Jobs, in 2011. Some claim that how well the watch fares may be one measure of how well Apple may be able to maintain the standards of excellence in innovation, marketing and production it achieved under Jobs. Of course if you don't think that Apple ever showed any innovation then you would say that the watch indicates whether Apple can continue to sell a turd provided it has an Apple logo on it. |
| ISPs will be US spooks’ eyes and ears Posted: 08 Jul 2015 01:15 AM PDT
The legislation was approved in a closed-door hearing, and is “classified” but will be made public when the law heads to the Senate. The FBI is apparently worried about American teens being susceptible to the Islamic State’s online recruitment tactics. Twitter has removed tens of thousands of these terror propaganda accounts, which violate its terms of service. Ironically the legislation is modelled after a 2008 law, the Protect Our Children Act. That measure requires Internet companies to report images of child porn, and information identifying who trades it, to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. That quasi-government agency then alerts either the FBI or local law enforcement about the identities of online child pornographers. This confirms the fear that laws that start out "protecting children" end up being used for something nastier. What it means is that ISPs and social networks will have to scan ordinary people's mail and messages looking for evidence of IS or similar activities. It will be similar to what the US government was doing before, but was ruled illegal. The bill does not demand that online companies remove content, requires Internet firms that obtain actual knowledge of any terrorist activity to provide to the appropriate authorities the facts or circumstances of the alleged terrorist activity. The terrorist activity could be a tweet, a YouTube video, an account, or a communication. Twitter, Google, and Facebook haven’t publicly taken a position on the new legislation, probably because they have not read it yet and only heard about it through the Washington Post. |
| Full invisibility is within reach Posted: 07 Jul 2015 06:45 AM PDT
The researchers said the design is thin and doesn't alter the brightness of light around a hidden object. And, even better, the cloak doesn't just make you or things invisible, it can increase signal speed in optical communications. These invisibility cloaks change the scattering of electromagnetic waves to make them less detectable. But the scientists said previous attempts needed many layers of material to hide objects while they say their device only needs a thin single layer sheet. The scientists don't use metal particles in the cloak, which cause "lossiness", but instead use non conducive dielectrics – a ceramic material and Teflon which alter the way light waves reflect. The scientists believe their technology to have applications in optics, interior design and art as well as the obvious military benefits. |
| Intel sees Windows as its blue eyed boy Posted: 07 Jul 2015 06:33 AM PDT
Intel has spent hundreds of millions of pounds aiming to be a player in the tablet and smartphone markets but so far has seen little for the money it's spent. Digitimes Research believes that Intel will more or less dump Android and drop its subsidy for tablets using the OS and incorporating its own microprocessors. But that is a gamble that could well be based on over-inflated estimates for the success of Windows 10, which starts to ship at the end of this month. In a separate report, the Digitimes wire said that Microsoft is unlikely to make headway in the smartphone market or the tablet market. Instead, Windows 10 is likely to be the choice for people using traditional notebook designs. However, as we reported elsewhere today, shipments of notebook PCs are in decline and it's by no means certain that Windows 10 will boost sales by a significant amount. Commercial organisations, in any case, prefer not to go for a new iteration of a Windows operating system until all the bugs have been ironed out. |
| World will see 2.5 billion devices ship this year Posted: 07 Jul 2015 06:25 AM PDT
That's 1.5 percent more than shipments in 2014. Gartner categorises these devices as including PCs, notebooks, mobile phones, tablets and others. But the numbers are less than Gartner expected and the market research company said the global PC market will account for only 300 million units in 2015 – a fall of 4.5 percent compared to last year. It's not just desktops that are seeing a decline – notebook PCs will also decline this year. Windows 10 will give PC sales something of a boost this year but Gartner doesn't expect the global PC market to recover until next year. Gartner said that people aren't buying new tablets because they're finding their existing device does the trick. A tablet's life for individuals will probably be about three years, the organisation thinks. It also believes smartwatches for the average person is "still not compelling enough". People will rely on smartphones more. |
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