Tuesday, June 4, 2013

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Acer boss bashes Windows RT, again

Posted: 04 Jun 2013 04:33 AM PDT

In recent weeks Acer chairman J.T. Wang has transformed into an outspoken critic of Microsoft’s OS strategy and now he’s at it again. This time he has Windows RT in his crosshairs, and it wouldn’t be the first time we've heard PC execs criticising Redmond’s fledgling tablet OS.

Commenting on Acer’s launch of the first 8-inch Windows 8 tablet, Wang told the Wall Street Journal that he’s not sure Windows RT will remain relevant. He said the OS is unlikely to stay “influential” and that the company has not decided whether it plans to launch a new Windows RT tablet. 

Wang doesn’t like to beat around the bush. They come on the back of a Bloomberg report, which claims Microsoft might be about to cut the price of RT for small tablets. Microsoft is also reportedly working on an 8-inch Windows RT Surface with a much lower price tag, but it might be too late. 

Surface RT sales were never good and it did not take long for partners such as Samsung to jump ship. HTC reportedly ditched plans for a 12-inch RT tablet last week, and it is very likely that Acer is out as well. Dell and Asus can’t be thrilled, either.

In retrospect, it was Microsoft’s fault. For some reason the company thought it could charge an arm and a leg for RT, while at the same time crippling it by refusing to bundle Outlook. The high price, coupled with RT’s relatively big footprint, meant that the first generation of RT tablets was overpriced and underspecced – it didn’t stand a fighting chance in the insanely competitive tablet market. 

DoJ starts Apple antitrust ebook trial

Posted: 04 Jun 2013 03:53 AM PDT

Apple is experiencing the nightmare of a PR own goal based on its own arrogance and stupidity. The company has been dragged into court by the US Department of Justice - charged with illegally running a pricing cartel with some of the big publishers.

It is hard to see how the company can escape. Not only have the publishers admitted running a pricing cartel, Apple's messiah Steve Jobs boasted about it in his biography. The evidence against Apple is so overwhelming that the DoJ has not had to call in the biographer as a witness. It reportedly has piles of emails penned by Apple's senior executives where they say something similar.

Yet, for some reason, Apple insists it has done nothing wrong and will fight to the last bullet to defend its actions. The only reason for this is that it arrogantly believes its own line.

Jobs' logic was that by running a pricing cartel and pushing the price up on ebooks the publishers were sticking one to Amazon. The relationship between Amazon and the book publishes is tricky at best, and they all wanted to take some of the control away from the retailer. Jobs' alliance of the major book publishers based around his iToys was seen as a way forward. At the time, ebooks were just starting to take off.

Apple conspired with publishers to raise the price of e-books in a scheme costing consumers "hundreds of millions of dollars," a US government lawyer, Lawrence Buterman, said.

As the case opens, the DoJ is seriously damaging the view held by many Apple fans: that the company cares about its users. It is forcing open a closet which contains more skeletons than the Capuchin Church of the Immaculate Conception.

The trial has three weeks and quotes like "Apple told publishers that Apple - and only Apple - could get prices up in their industry" could tarnish Cupertino's image.

What is even stranger is that Apple could have settled. All the DoJ wants is for Apple to sign an agreement saying that it will not fix the price in the future. It seems that Apple believes that it, not government, makes those sorts of decisions.

Orin Snyder, an attorney for Apple, insists that the case is "bizarre". He said that Apple acted in its own business interests in negotiating deals with publishers in the run up to the debut of its iPad in January 2010. He claims that the government wants to reverse engineer a conspiracy from a market effect.

Well, that is sort of what a price cartel is, and what it does.  Apple insists the DoJ has its tinfoil hat on, seeing conspiracies where there are none. However, in this case, it is as if the conspiracy theorists have got the signed confessions of the CIA, FBI, Cuban government, the Mafia and Lee Harvey Oswald all admitting they were acting under orders of alien lizards to form a world government with the Queen at its head.

What's worse, Apple is going into this trial with Judge Denise Cote offering a "tentative view" at the last hearing that the government will prove Apple knowingly participated in and facilitated a conspiracy to raise prices of e-books. 

Sex is the key to changing the vole

Posted: 04 Jun 2013 03:27 AM PDT

Over the years there has been a sea change in the hearts and minds of people about the vole.

Some put this down to the fact that really there are much worse things out there - things with a fruity flavour and those organisations which claim to do no evil but pay no taxes.

Now scientists have worked out why people are feeling a lot more positive about the vole and it is all down to brain chemistry and sex.

Researchers have confirmed that sex induces permanent chemical modifications in the chromosomes, affecting the expression of genes that regulate sexual and monogamous behaviour.

According to a study published in Nature Neuroscience, prairie voles mate for life. The voles' pair bonding, sharing of parental roles and egalitarian nest building in couples makes them a good model for understanding the biology of monogamy and mating in humans.

Neuroscientist Mohamed Kabbaj and his team at Florida State University in Tallahassee took voles which had been housed together for six hours but had not mated. The researchers injected drugs into the voles' brains near a region called the nucleus accumbens, which is closely associated with the reinforcement of reward and pleasure.

Animals that had been permitted to mate also had high levels of vasopressin and oxytocin receptors, confirming that sex activates this brain area which leads to partner preference.

It is not just the drug though. It takes a drug plus about six hours of living together for the Voles to think they have found their dream partner. This might explain why Steve Ballmer has stayed as Microsoft's CEO for so long. 

Beer fridge collapses Aussie mobile network

Posted: 04 Jun 2013 03:22 AM PDT

One of Australia's largest mobile networks was caught by the billabongs in a freak rogue beer fridge accident.

The fridge in north-east Victoria was hunted down by a software "robot" employed by Telstra to identify things that interfere with its mobile network.

According to the Herald Sun, the "rogue beer fridge" had been traced to a Wangaratta man's garage.

It had been interrupting mobile signals in "several neighbourhoods" of the town of 17,000, which lies about 230km from Melbourne.

It is not clear why a beer fridge would have it in for the internet. It might have been working for the resistance or trying to link other beer fridges across Australia in a great electronic beer revolt. Or it could just have been broken.

Telstra's area team manager for mobile coverage delivery in the Victorian metropolitan, Richard Henderson, told iTnews it is "one example of hundreds and hundreds of investigative interference jobs that are done each year across the country".

He did not say how many of them were beer fridges. In fact he went as far to say that there was no particular focus now on beer fridges, but they always say that.

Over the past 18 months, Telstra has been fine-tuning a "software robot" developed out of its Operations division to help track down sources of network interference.

It is basically an algorithm that crawls a database of performance stats collected from equipment across the NextG mobile network. We guess its job is a lot easier if it is programmed to look for beer. 

China lifts the lid on new supercomputer

Posted: 04 Jun 2013 03:19 AM PDT

Details are emerging about a Chinese supercomputer that is headed to becoming the world's fastest.

The Chinese Tianhe-2 is being developed in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou as the successor to the Tianhe-1A.

According to HPCwire, the Tianhe-1A was pretty fast. In its day it was number one and could drive its 14,336 Intel Xeon X5670 processors and 7,168 nVidia Tesla GPUs to a peak performance of 4.7 petaflops. Now it is the eighth fastest supercomputer, well behind the Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratories with a peak performance of 20 petaflops, or 20,000 trillion calculations per second.

But the Tianhe-2 is supposed to deliver peak performance between 53 petaflops and 55 petaflops, with a LINPACK score for sustained performance of between 27 petaflops and 29 petaflops. It is supposed to eventually have a peak performance capability of more than 100 petaflops.

Most of the detail about Tianhe-2 came from a draft of a report on the system by Jack Dongarra, a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratories and founding member of the Top500 list organization.

Dongarra said that the Tianhe-2 runs a total of 3,120,000 processor cores divided among 16,000 nodes. Each node contains sockets for two Intel Ivy Bridge processors that serve as the CPU and three boards for co-processors, which use Intel's Xeon Phi processor.

This is probably the first commercial use of Chipzilla's Many Integrated Core Architecture, which can deliver as much as a teraflop per chipset.

Dongarra believes that the system is configured with a total of 1.404 petabytes of memory and a parallel storage system with 12.4 petabytes of space.

It managed to overcome scalability and performance problems by using a Chinese-developed network tool called the TH-Express 2, and a frontend system using 4,096 Galaxy FT-1500 CPUs–16-core processors developed by NUDT based on the Sparc-V9 chip, Dongarra said.

Each FT-1500 can manage 144 gigaflops a second, compared to 211 gigaflops from the Ivy Bridge processors.

As you might expects it takes a lot of electricity to power. At peak power consumption, the Tianhe-2 needs 17.6 megawatts plus another 6.4 megawatts for a closed-coupled water-cooling system, for a total of 24 megawatts.

As far as the software is concerned, it uses a NUDT-designed Linux distribution called Kylin Linux, which also runs on the Tianhe-1A. 

Intel: Now your PC is a zombie

Posted: 04 Jun 2013 03:17 AM PDT

Tom Kilroy, an executive VP of Intel said that netbooks ushered in tablets, which is an interesting re-invention of history. Kilroy, speaking in a vast auditorium here at Computex Taipei, was pushing hard the concept of two-in-one machines.

If you didn’t know, these are notebooks with detachable screens which can act as independent tablets and obviously they use the fourth generation of Intel core, codenamed Haswell.

Intel’s new tag phrase is “Look Inside”, so Kilroy kicked off by quoting a Buddhist philosopher. He – Kilroy that is not the philosopher – said that the iPad held two thirds of the market but in Q1 this year Android captured the market for tablets.  The industry is on the verge of ushering in a new game changer – that is to say a PC with a detachable screen – Kilroy describes it as a Game Changer.

Every day on the internet, he says, those who are connected spend 133,000 years on the net. Five hundred million photos are uploaded every day. Intel thinks it has a 1.5 billion unit opportunity this year, and two billion next year.

He claimed Intel is getting traction in phones. Intel is learning a lot from the market, Kilroy said and “honing its approach”. Intel is gaining ground in tablets. Silvermont  performs well, he said, despite what ARM said yesterday.

Kilroy demonstrated a Bay Trail tablet. The “mumbo jumbo” gives you incredible experiences, he said. 

Intel’s LTE is here with Haswell, but no-one mentioned the word that still makes the Taiwanese government livid: WiMAX, once supported by Intel.

People talked about the demise of the X86 platform, but with this new two in one concept, the PC is both dead and alive, according to Kilroy.

Kilroy also boasted that Intel Iris, the graphics engine launched today, is the bee’s bollocks. Well, he didn’t use that exact phrase, but you get the drift.

Haswell is the biggest performance and graphics boost Intel has ever produced. You can keep your Haswell on standby for 13 days. Kilroy “ripped up the roadmap”. Intel shifted its benchmarks and created a “seismic change”.

“Consumers shouldn’t have to choose between a laptop and a tablet,” Kilroy said. Two in ones are what you need, you’ll be surprised to learn.



Kilroy dragged in a local celeb who sings and dances to argue that two in one is a great idea.

Intel has introduced “depth vision” today. “Computers need two eyes,” so there will be depth platforms integrated into form factors as the year drags on.

At a Q&A after the speech, Kilroy said that while there are tablets costing between $35 and $50 dollars, Intel wouldn’t play in that field. But, he said, Intel will play with tablets costing between $149-$199. “We’ll use Atoms to participate in that market,” he said.

He disputed that Intel was lagging behind ARM-based chips on performance.  “Our intention is to get leading edge for Atoms,” he said. “We’re running fast.”

Windows 8.1 and Haswell can't save the PC

Posted: 04 Jun 2013 03:11 AM PDT

Analysts are looking hopefully at Windows 8.1 and the release of the Intel's Haswell chip in the belief that this can stimulate the flagging PC market.

Initially there had been hope that the tide against the IT industry would change when Windows 8 arrived. When this didn't happen, analysts were about as cheerful as a Stark wedding in Game of Thrones.

Now, Bloomberg is getting enthusiastic that Windows 8.1 and Haswell can bring new life into the industry.

Bloomberg points out that the Haswell processors are a major improvement, especially for portable PCs like ultrabooks, tablets, and hybrids. There are two main benefits to Haswell that are uniquely suited to deliver a better portable computing experience: power efficiency and graphics performance.

Windows 8.1 removes a lot of the controversial default features of Windows 8 and returns it to being a good and sensible operating system.

But what Bloomberg and its ilk fail to understand is that the slump in the PC market is nothing to do with technology any more than it is to do with the rise of mobile devices.

The reason that the PC market is frozen is because the world economy is still the pits and the previous generation of Windows 7 machines were good enough to ride any long term slump.

Firms and consumers are saving money by sitting on existing machines and not upgrading. Why should anyone get themselves into hock when they can run all the existing games and software on machines that are doing just fine?

The only reason that mobiles and tablets have taken off is because they are tools which people did not have before the recession hit. Some people think they are "must have" and so that industry has survived the economic storm.

The proof of all this is that the downturn in PCs mirrors those places in the deepest economic doo doo. Europe in particular is a black hole for PCs.

This makes it unlikely that the IT industry will pick up until the economics in those regions improves. It might be that it takes a year or two before those Windows 7 computers start to die, but at the moment there is no compelling technology reason to upgrade. It is not as if Windows 8 can run software which Windows 7 can't. Haswell will improve things like ultrabooks and laptops, but people are more likely to say wait for their laptops to die before splashing out on a new one.

Obama to target patent trolls

Posted: 04 Jun 2013 03:06 AM PDT

US President Barack Obama might not be the strapping young Muslim socialist he used to be, but he still seems to have a few tricks up his sleeve.

According to the Wall Street Journal, he is planning to take executive action against patent trolls. 

Since the US Congress is a wholly owned subsidiary of big business, it can’t be counted upon to reign in money men and their shady practices, so Obama will reportedly instruct the USPTO to start coming up with new rules that should curb abuses. 

The WSJ says Obama will announce five executive actions and seven legislative proposals tomorrow. It is not a surprising move, as Obama has already made it clear that he believes the US patent system is badly broken and in need of an urgent fix. 

One of his ideas is apparently aimed at stripping the International Trade Commission of some of its powers. The ITC has been embroiled in a series of patent disputes, with high profile names seeking import bans on competing products based on relatively vague claims that rarely stand up in court. 

French electronic voting allegedly easy to rig

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 08:58 AM PDT

France's first electronic election has turned into a farce with reports coming in of the sort of election rigging that you would expect from third world countries like Afghanistan, Zimbabwe or the USA.

An "online-primary" claimed as "fraud-proof" and as "ultra secure" as the Maginot Line, has turned out to be vulnerable to a Blizkrieg of multiple and fake voting.

The election was supposed to anoint a rising star of the moderate right, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, 39, as the party's candidate in the election for mayor of Paris next spring.

Some of her problems was that she abstained in the final parliamentary vote on same-sex marriage in late April and hard-right figures within the party urged militant opponents of gay marriage to swamp the open primary with votes for a young Paris city councillor, Pierre-Yves Bournazel.

So it was going to be a tight election, and then journalists from Metronews proved that it was easy to breach the allegedly strict security of the election. They voted several times using different names to prove their point.

To vote, Parisians were supposed to make a credit-card payment of €3 and give the name and address of someone on the city's electoral roll.

A Metronews journalist managed to vote five times, paying with the same credit card, using names which included that of Nicolas Sarkozy.

The situation is particularly tricky for the UMP party which has been accused of election fraud before. Last year the UMP almost split amid allegations of ballot-stuffing and other dirty tricks in an election to replace Nicolas Sarkozy as the national party president.

Former Prime Minister, François Fillon, accused his rival, the party secretary general, Jean-Francois Copé, of "fraud on an industrial scale". 
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