Moore’s Law lives on with speedy 7-nm mobile chips coming in 2018

How do mobile devices keep get faster, thinner, and more power efficient? It's thanks to the quick advances in chip manufacturing, which help churn out smaller chips packed with new features.The next round of premium smartphones early next year could feature chips like Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835, made using the latest, 10-nanometer process.Continuing with the famous Moore's Law observation, it's likely that two years after that, smartphones will get even faster and smaller chips will be made using a 7-nanometer process.On Monday, ARM, with its chip designs in most smartphones, said it is working with prominent chip manufacturer TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) to make 7-nm chips. ARM shared intellectual property for its 7-nm designs, allowing chips to be designed for manufacturing in TSMC's factories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Need for Speed—Coming Changes in oVirt’s CI Standards

oVirt's CI standards have been in use for a while in most oVirt projects and have largely been a success.

These standards have put the control of what the CI system does in the hands of the developers without them having to learn about Jenkins and the tooling around it. The way the standards were implemented, with the mock_runner.sh script, also enabled developers to easily emulate the CI system on their own machines to debug and diagnose issues.

From the oVirt infra team's point of view, the CI standards have removed the need to constantly maintain build dependencies on the Jenkins slaves and also eliminated most of the situations where jobs running on the same slave influenced one another.

The CI standards implementation we have has one shortcoming, it is not particularity fast.

We started seriously looking at this after one of the VDSM maintainers reported that the check_patch jobs for his project are running for far too long a time. In the end it turned out that a major reason for the delay was in the way the tests themselves worked, but still, we looked at mock_runner.sh and managed to speed it up quite a Continue reading

48% off Travel Cord Organizer – Electronics Accessories Case & Cable Organizer – Deal Alert

Designed to protect and safeguard your electronic gadgets and save time on the go by easily storing and finding everything you need. This travel organizer offers a secure storage space for cord management, laptop and computer accessories putting everything you need in one place. This organizer also gives you special space inside for credit cards, passports, also for boarding passes, smartphone, tickets and has many pockets where you can put coins, keys, USB, SIM card, earphones, and other small accessories. Give yourself or someone else the gift of stress-free travel.  The travel cord organizer's typical list price of $30.99 has been reduced 48% to $15.99. See the discounted Travel Cord Organizer now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

U.S. and U.K. spy agencies have been intercepting in-flight phone calls for years

U.S. and U.K. spy agencies have been monitoring in-flight mobile phone users for years, according to new revelations from the trove of documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.As early as 2012 the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was intercepting voice and data communications from commercial aircraft using the OnAir service to carry 2G mobile services over the Inmarsat satellite communications network. At the time, GCHQ did not have access to a rival in-flight mobile service provider, Aeromobile, French newspaper Le Monde reported Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

U.S. and U.K. spy agencies have been intercepting in-flight phone calls for years

U.S. and U.K. spy agencies have been monitoring in-flight mobile phone users for years, according to new revelations from the trove of documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.As early as 2012 the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was intercepting voice and data communications from commercial aircraft using the OnAir service to carry 2G mobile services over the Inmarsat satellite communications network. At the time, GCHQ did not have access to a rival in-flight mobile service provider, Aeromobile, French newspaper Le Monde reported Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Buffers Sometimes Beat Bandwidth For Networks

Just like every kind of compute job cannot be handled by a single type of microprocessor, the diversity of networking tasks in the datacenters of the world require a variety of different switch and router ASICs to best manage those tasks.

As the volume leader in the switching arena, Broadcom comes under intense competitive pressure and has to keep on its toes to provide enough variety in its switch chips to keep its rivals at bay. One way that Broadcom does this is by having two distinct switch ASIC lines.

The StrataXGS line of chips have the famous and ubiquitous …

Buffers Sometimes Beat Bandwidth For Networks was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Apache Zeppelin open-source analytics startup reveals new name, fresh funding

The team behind the Apache Zeppelin open-source notebook for big data analytics visualization has renamed itself ZEPL and announced $4.1M in Series A funding.ZEPL, which swears a certain professional football organization had nothing to do with it ditching its former name (NFLabs), is one of numerous companies smelling blood in the water around Tableau, the $3.5 billion business intelligence and analytics software vendor that has stumbled financially in recent quarters and seen its stock price plummet accordingly.  The pitch from ZEPL entering my email inbox read: "Is Open Source project eating Tableau's lunch?"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung still struggling with the recovery of Note7 phones from users

Samsung’s recall of Galaxy Note7 smartphones because of exploding batteries is far from complete with some users, for example, in Canada still not turning in their devices for a refund or exchange.The South Korean company has now decided to cut these phones from the network, adopting similar measures to those taken last month in New Zealand and earlier this month in Australia.The company said Wednesday that from Dec. 12 functional limitations on Note7 phones, including curbs on the battery charge, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth disablement will be introduced in Canada.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft wants to enable cellular PCs, but will carriers bite?

Spending time traveling can be a frustrating exercise in trying to find Wi-Fi. So much modern work often requires an internet connection, and while it’s possible to tether smartphones to PCs to help bridge the connectivity gap, that’s a clunky solution.Microsoft is aiming to help with that by supporting the installation of non-removable programmable SIM cards and data radios in PCs and Windows tablets. In the company's vision, users will then be able to purchase cellular data for those cards through the Windows Store. The announcement was made Thursday at the company’s WinHEC conference for device manufacturers in Shenzhen, China.By enabling the new form of internet access, Microsoft could give users an easy way to get online right from their computer, and encourage manufacturers to build cellular-capable devices. Users would also get settings to help them better manage the use of data plans, so it’s easier for them to control how much data apps can suck up.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bluetooth 5 is out: Now will home IoT take off?

Bluetooth is aiming straight for the internet of things as the fifth version of the wireless protocol arrives with twice as much speed for low-power applications. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which gains the most from the new Bluetooth 5 specification, can now go as fast as 2Mbps (bits per second) and typically can cover a whole house or a floor of a building, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) said Wednesday. Those features could help to make it the go-to network for smart homes and some enterprise sites. The home IoT field is pretty open right now because most people haven’t started buying things like connected thermostats and door locks, ABI Research analyst Avi Greengart said. Bluetooth starts out with an advantage over its competition because it’s built into most smartphones and tablets, he said. Alternatives like ZigBee and Z-Wave often aren’t.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bluetooth 5 is out: Now will home IoT take off?

Bluetooth is aiming straight for the internet of things as the fifth version of the wireless protocol arrives with twice as much speed for low-power applications. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which gains the most from the new Bluetooth 5 specification, can now go as fast as 2Mbps (bits per second) and typically can cover a whole house or a floor of a building, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) said Wednesday. Those features could help to make it the go-to network for smart homes and some enterprise sites. The home IoT field is pretty open right now because most people haven’t started buying things like connected thermostats and door locks, ABI Research analyst Avi Greengart said. Bluetooth starts out with an advantage over its competition because it’s built into most smartphones and tablets, he said. Alternatives like ZigBee and Z-Wave often aren’t.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Turkish hacker is giving out prizes for DDoS attacks

A hacker in Turkey has been trying to encourage distributed denial-of-attacks by making it into a game, featuring points and prizes for attempting to shut down political websites. The DDoS platform, translated as Surface Defense in English, has been prompting other hackers in Turkey to sign up and score points, according to security firm Forcepoint which uncovered it. Users that participate will be given a tool known as Balyoz, the Turkish word for Sledgehammer, that can be used to launch DDoS attacks against a select number of websites. For every ten minutes they attack a website, the users will be awarded a point, which can then be used to obtain rewards. These prizes include a more powerful DDoS attacking tool, access to bots designed to generate revenue from click fraud,  and a prank program that can infect a computer and scare the victim with sounds and images.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Turkish hacker is giving out prizes for DDoS attacks

A hacker in Turkey has been trying to encourage distributed denial-of-attacks by making it into a game, featuring points and prizes for attempting to shut down political websites. The DDoS platform, translated as Surface Defense in English, has been prompting other hackers in Turkey to sign up and score points, according to security firm Forcepoint which uncovered it. Users that participate will be given a tool known as Balyoz, the Turkish word for Sledgehammer, that can be used to launch DDoS attacks against a select number of websites. For every ten minutes they attack a website, the users will be awarded a point, which can then be used to obtain rewards. These prizes include a more powerful DDoS attacking tool, access to bots designed to generate revenue from click fraud,  and a prank program that can infect a computer and scare the victim with sounds and images.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Scoring the DNS Root Server System, Pt2 – A Sixth Star?

In November I wrote about some simple tests that I had undertaken on the DNS Root nameservers. The tests looked at the way the various servers responded when they presented a UDP DNS response that was larger than 1,280 octets. I awarded each of the name servers up to five stars depending on how that managed to serve such large responses in IPv4 and IPv6. I'd like to return to this topic by looking at one further aspect of DNS server behaviour, namely the way in which servers handle large UDP responses over IPv6.

Configuring the Future for FPGAs in Genomics

With the announcement of FPGA instances hitting the Amazon cloud and similar such news expected from FPGA experts Microsoft via Azure, among others, the lens was centered back on reconfigurable hardware and the path ahead. This has certainly been a year-plus of refocusing for the two main makers of such hardware, Altera and Xilinx, with the former being acquired by Intel and the latter picking up a range of new users, including AWS.

In addition to exploring what having a high-end Xilinx FPGA available in the cloud means for adoption, we talked to a couple of companies that have carved …

Configuring the Future for FPGAs in Genomics was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Qualcomm’s new chip may be too late as ARM server market fades

After more than half a decade in the making, ARM server chips should have struck gold by now, but they haven't. ARM servers were projected to be approaching a double-digit server market share, but they still are virtually non-existent.Keeping market realities in mind, Qualcomm earlier this year said it would take a wait-and-watch approach before making a splash with its ARM server chips. While ARM servers adoption has been poor, Qualcomm decided to go ahead and launch the chips.In the making for two years, Qualcomm's Centriq 2400 server chips have 48 cores and are now being sent as samples to companies. Volume shipments of the chips will start in the second half next year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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