Server market slumps after seven quarters of growth

The worldwide server market saw a year-on-year revenue slump of 3.6 percent in the first quarter to US$12.4 billion, after a winning streak of seven quarters of growth, IDC said Wednesday.The slowdown in the market, which also witnessed shipments of servers drop by 3 percent year-on-year to 2.2 million units, is largely put down to an end in the enterprise refresh cycle and what is described as a “pause” in investments in hyperscale server deployments.Those investments are expected to be back in the second half of this year with a pick up in expenditure on servers for existing data centers and the roll out of new ones.The slowdown in the server market in the first quarter has not affected key players uniformly. Hewlett Packard Enterprise retained its top position, with revenue of $3.3 billion and a 26.7 percent share of market revenue, after a year on-year growth of 3.5 percent. Dell and IBM retained their number two and three spots respectively, but with year-on-year decline in revenue.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Check out these crazy modded gaming rigs Corsair brought to Computex

Check out the crazy modded gaming rigs Corsair brought to ComputexImage by James NiccolaiWe stopped by Corsair’s suite at the Computex trade show this week to check out the gaming PCs built to show off its latest components. Pick a CPU, graphics card and motherboard, and Corsair has everything else you need to build out a custom, high performance rig. This system uses the Mirror's Edge Catalyst chassis, modelled after the game of the same name. Someone bolted an LED panel to the side just for the hell of it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle employee says she was sacked for refusing to fiddle cloud accounts

A senior finance manager in Oracle’s cloud business has complained to a federal court that she was terminated from her job because she refused to go along with, and threatened to blow the whistle on accounting principles that she considered to be unlawful.In a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Svetlana Blackburn has stated that her superiors instructed her “to add millions of dollars in accruals to financial reports, with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers, an act that Plaintiff warned was improper and suspect accounting.” The former employee is said to have warned her supervisor that she would blow the whistle if ordered to proceed further in the same manner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle employee says she was sacked for refusing to fiddle cloud accounts

A senior finance manager in Oracle’s cloud business has complained to a federal court that she was terminated from her job because she refused to go along with accounting principles she considered unlawful.In a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Svetlana Blackburn says her superiors instructed her “to add millions of dollars in accruals to financial reports, with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers, an act that Plaintiff warned was improper and suspect accounting.” The former employee is said to have warned her supervisor she would blow the whistle if ordered to continue in the same manner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS Brings Supercomputing Set Further into Fold

Back in 2009, when yours truly was assigned the primary beat of covering supercomputing on remote hardware (then dubbed the mysterious “cloud”), the possibility that cloud-based high performance computing was little more than a pipe dream.

At that time, most scientific and technical computing communities had already developed extensive grids to extend their research beyond physical borders, and the idea of introducing new levels of latency, software, and management interfaces did not appear to be anything most HPC centers were looking forward to—even with the promise of cost-savings (as easy “bursting” was still some time off).

Just as Amazon Web …

AWS Brings Supercomputing Set Further into Fold was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

25% off Logitech Wireless Keyboard with Touchpad for Internet-Connected TVs – Deal Alert

Logitech's K400 Wireless Keyboard for internet-enabled TVs is designed to be compact, comfortable, quiet, and easy to use from the comfort of your couch. It features a familiar key layout and a large 3.5-inch touchpad. A 33-foot range makes for a trouble free connection even in large rooms, and its battery is strong, lasting up to a year and a half without needing a charge, even with 2 hours of typing per day. The keyboard averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 860 customers (read reviews). It's regular list price of $39.99 has been reduced by 25% to just $29.99. See the discounted K400 wireless keyboard now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The PC upgrade cycle slows to every five to six years, Intel’s CEO says

The upgrade cycle for PCs has slowed down drastically, now extending to nearly six years, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said on Wednesday."[The] replacement cycle for the PC has extended," Krzanich said. "Four years was the average, now it has moved to about five to six years."Intel needs to ramp up its efforts and release the right innovations so people are motivated to upgrade PCs quickly and easily, Krzanich said at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York."Right now, it's easier to move your phone to a new phone than your PC to a new PC," he said. "We've got to go fix some of those things."PC upgrades have slowed because current operating systems can run well on older Intel-based PCs. Five years ago, Intel shipped Core processors code-named Sandy Bridge, and they can capably run Microsoft's Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Understanding Deep Text, Facebook’s text understanding engine

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.”That Groucho Marx quote illustrates why it’s difficult for computers to understand humans. When programming for computers to understand humans, one must account for vagueness, ambiguity and uncertainty to distil the meaning of human language.Facebook announced today that it can now do that with Deep Text, a deep learning-based text-understanding engine running a neural network that can understand with near-human accuracy the textual content of several thousands of posts per second—and in more than 20 languages.Consumers interacting with computers Consumers regularly interact with computers trained with machine-learning techniques that understand human language. Ask Siri for the best Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, and Siri will give you a list of restaurants. Or ask Google how many people live in Lisle, Illinois, and Google will reply with the answer from the U.S. census. These intelligent systems parse the question like school children, using syntax to diagram a sentence and then answer the question with structured data sets: the list of restaurants labeled San Francisco and Japanese or the quantity of people labeled Lisle, IL, in the census database.To Continue reading

Microsoft rolls out SQL Server 2016 with a special deal to woo Oracle customers

The next version of Microsoft's SQL Server relational database management system is now available, and along with it comes a special offer designed specifically to woo Oracle customers. Until the end of this month, Oracle users can migrate their databases to SQL Server 2016 and receive the necessary licenses for free with a subscription to Microsoft's Software Assurance maintenance program. Microsoft announced the June 1 release date for SQL Server 2016 early last month. Among the more notable enhancements it brings are updateable, in-memory column stores and advanced analytics. As a result, applications can now deploy sophisticated analytics and machine learning models within the database at performance levels as much as 100 times faster than what they'd be outside it, Microsoft said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

All-female team to lead Association for Computing Machinery

Rochester Institute of Technology Vicki Hanson, a distinguished professor of Computing at RIT, now adds President of ACM to her resume Against a backdrop of an IT industry pushing hard to more fairly represent women in leadership positions, the Association for Computing Machinery has announced that an all-female board has been elected to head up the society.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft ships a major update to its HoloLens platform

Just as the month was about to end, Microsoft announced the release of the May 2016 Update for HoloLens, the first major software update to the virtual reality (VR) headset it's developing since it offered the developer edition.Considering it's been just two months since the Developer Kit and first wave of devices went out at the Build 2016 conference, Microsoft sure has added quite a bit to this update. The company also announced it was shipping headsets to a second wave of developer applicants.The full list of additions and changes to the May 2016 Update for HoloLens is rather lengthy, so we've boiled it down for you:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi real-time network analytics

The Raspberry Pi model 3b is not much bigger than a credit card, costs $35, runs Linux, has a 1G RAM, and powerful 4 core 64 bit ARM processor. This article will demonstrate how to turn the Raspberry Pi into a Terribit/second real-time network analytics engine capable of monitoring hundreds of switches and thousands of switch ports.
The diagram shows how the sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine receives a continuous telemetry stream from industry standard sFlow instrumentation build into network, server and application infrastructure and delivers analytics through APIs and can easily be integrated with a wide variety of on-site and cloud, orchestration, DevOps and Software Defined Networking (SDN) tools.
A future article will examine how the Host sFlow agent can be used to efficiently stream measurements from large numbers of inexpensive Rasberry Pi devices ($5 for model Zero) to the sFlow-RT collector to monitor and control the "Internet of Things" (IoT).
The following instructions show how to install sFlow-RT on Raspbian Jesse (the Debian Linux based Raspberry Pi operating system).
wget http://www.inmon.com/products/sFlow-RT/sflow-rt_2.0-1092.deb
sudo dpkg -i --ignore-depends=openjdk-7-jre-headless sflow-rt_2.0-1092.deb
We are ignoring the dependency on openjdk and will use the default Raspbian Java 1.8 version Continue reading

IBM buys EZSource to help transform your mainframe apps for the digital world

The digital transformation train may have already left the station, but for companies with legacy mainframe applications, it's not always clear how to get on board. On Wednesday, IBM announced an acquisition that could help.The PC giant will acquire Israel-based EZSource, it said, in the hopes of helping developers "quickly and easily understand and change mainframe code."EZSource offers a visual dashboard that's designed to ease the process of modernizing applications. Essentially, it exposes application programming interfaces (APIs) so that developers can focus their efforts accordingly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Strong Scaling Key to Redrawing Neuroscience Borders

Computing for neuroscience, which has aided in our understanding of the structure and function of the brain, has been around for decades already. More recently, however, there has been neuroscience for computing, or the use of computational principles of the brain for generic data processing. For each of these neuroscience-driven areas there is a key limitation—scalability.

This is not just scalability in terms of software or hardware systems, but on the application side, limits in terms of efficiently deploying computational tools at sufficient size and time scales to yield far greater insight. While adding more compute to the problem …

Strong Scaling Key to Redrawing Neuroscience Borders was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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