Merging – Human Intelligence and Computer Intelligence

This has been the stuff of science fiction for years, but now the techies are getting into it. Intel has just passed its 40^th anniversary, and Justin Rattner, CTO and a senior fellow at Intel, told Computerworld that perhaps as early as 2012 we’ll see the lines between human and machine intelligence begin to blur. Nanoscale chips or machines will move through our bodies, fixing deteriorating organs or unclogging arteries. Sensors will float around our internal systems monitoring our blood sugar levels and heart rates, and alerting doctors to potential health problems. Virtual worlds will become increasingly realistic, while robots will develop enough intelligence and human-like characteristics that they’ll become companions, not merely vacuum cleaners and toys. Read the full article at http://urlpass.com/3p4b

Brian Nadel of Computerworld did some testing to determine what the optimum RAM and disk storage should be – looking at speeds and battery life.  He found that adding RAM helped on both – to a point. After that, more memory increased performance only slightly and actually decreased battery life. The optimum?  1.5GB (Gigabyte – billions of bytes) for XP systems, and 2GB for Vista.

The flash, or solid state, drives are absolute winners over disk storage in both measures – they increase performance and extend battery life. The drawback?  They’re small and expensive! The 32GB unit used in the comparison  cost $520, compared with about $75 for a traditional hard drive. And, 32GB isn’t a lot if you’re editing video or running simulations.

Microsoft Server 2008 – Looks Okay

Overall, 59% of a Computerworld’s survey said they plan to adopt Windows Server 2008. It appears that the unpopularity of Windows Vista has not hurt WS 2008, as more than half (55%) expect to get started expect to complete the transition within two years. The highest level of interest came from respondents at midsize organizations with 100 to 1,000 employees; 69% of them said they expect to get started within the next 12 months.

Mac OS X – Growing Usage

Net Applications monitors 40,000 Web sites and produces analytics on various usage – including operating system usage.   Mac OS X usage has increased by 32% and accounted for 7.94% of the operating systems on the systems that accessed these Web sites. A year ago, Mac OS X’s usage share stood at 6.03%. Also showing gains in June were Windows Vista (8% gain accounting for 16.14% usage) and Linux (18% gain accounting for .88% usage). These gains came from decreases in the use of Windows XP and Windows 2000 – both systems are at the end of their run.

VISTA   Intel has decided it’s not going to upgrade its 80,000 computers to run Vista. Needless to say, Microsoft is not happy about this – but it’s another indication of Vista’s problems. 

BEST PLACES TO WORK   From Computerworld, the top ten in order: The Capital Group Cos.; Quicken Loans Inc.;  General Mills Inc.; The Mitre Corp.; SAS Institute Inc.; University of Pennsylvania; JM Family Enterprises Inc.;  Rackspace US Inc.; Mount Carmel Health System; University of Miami. For details, check out the article here: http://www.computerworld.com/spring/bp/2008/1 

MACS IN BUSINESS   According to a survey by Yankee Group Research, nearly 8 out of 10 businesses have Macs in place today – twice what was being used two years ago. Might not mean anything, but… 

CLOUD COMPUTING    Think this is big?  Look at these investment costs  – Salesforce.com wants to become a major player in the cloud computing arena and compete with Amazon, eBay and Google. They firmly believe this is the future of IT, and offer force.com which they define as PaaS (Platform as a Service). They have spent $300 million to build their current cloud computing infrastructure. But they’ve got a ways to go to be competitive.  Google spends more than $4 billion annually in capital expenditures to build and support its computing infrastructure.

English researchers have developed a robot that builds 3-D replicas of objects like shoes and door handles. It’s an open-source machine that acts like a three-dimensional printer. Instead of printing out documents or pictures on paper, this printer uses blueprints to produce 3-D plastic objects. The name of the machine is RepRap - replicating rapid-prototyper.

RepRap works by heating plastic and then squeezing it out into a line. The lines are built up into usable forms as they solidify. So far, the robot has made everyday plastic objects, like sandals  and coat hooks. The machine can also replicate itself! It has successfully copied all of its own structural pieces, the beginning of a machine creating a computer. While that could be 20 years away, it’s completely possible.

Are any of you sci-fi fans?  If so, you’ve read this story more than once. When computers build computers, what’s next?

IBM’s supercomputer, Roadrunner, was built for the federal Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Lab. It  smashed the high-tech equivalent of the four-minute mile last month by breaking the petaflop barrier.  This computer is so impressive that a research director at Los Alamos said it is as big a leap forward as when scientists got their hands on their first computer ever. This machine operates in petaflops (a petaflop is 1,000 trillion calculations per second). According to IBM, the new machine would take a single week to run a calculation that the fastest supercomputer 10 years ago would have needed 20 years to complete.

Kind of fun – the “machine” is still housed at an IBM facility in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where three Los Alamos research teams, totaling 50 people, traveled from New Mexico to get an early start on using the supercomputer for three different research projects - mapping the visual cortex in the human brain, and studying ocean currents and climate change. In July technicians will pack up the system on 21 tractor-trailer trucks and move it to Los Alamos, where they will reassemble it and test it all over again. It’s slated to be up and running there by the end of the summer.

IBM broke the petaflop barrier first – but other companies, including Cray Inc., Hewlett-Packard, Sun, and SGI – aren’t far behind. 

Have you heard about this one? I just started seeing a lot of mentions, mostly because Microsoft has become a sponsor of the Open Source Census. So, I went looking for it.

It’s a global initiative to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open-source software in the enterprise. It provides open-source tools to scan enterprise computers for all installed open-source software. The results of these scans can then be contributed anonymously to the Open Source Census which will aggregate the data. This allows enterprises to see what open-source software is already installed on their computers and to compare themselves to similar companies.

It was founded by OpenLogic with help from IDC and other sponsors (now including Microsoft).  

Just another indication of the popularity of open-source. Microsoft, as you probably know, was not an early supporter, but they’re in it now! They are in partnership with the Eclipse Foundation, where Microsoft pledged to support Eclipse open-source projects at the EclipseCon conference in March. 

Continuous change in our IT…..

Not a survey – but a study conducted by Evans Data Corp. – concluded that IBM’s Rational Application Developer (RAD) had the highest user-satisfaction rates among several IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). Over 1200 developers ranked products in 15 different categories, and the overall ranking of the top eight products:
• RAD
• JDeveloper
• Visual Studio
• Sun Studio
• Adobe Creative Suite
• Delphi
• NetBeans
• MyEclipse
RAD scored 170 points, but note that Visual studio (third on the list) was only five point behind. Eclipse IDE was not included in the study because it’s not an out-of-the-box product and must be assembled, but it’s notable that it is the basis for both MyEclipse and RAD.

Winners in other categories:
• Visual Studio, for its debugger, editor and size and quality of its user community
• Delphi, for ease of use, compiler performance, ability to integrate third-party tools and availability of third-party tools
• Adobe Creative Suite, for Web design tools
• Sun Studio, for performance of resulting applications
• JDeveloper, for documentation

It’s always fun to get a picture of the popularity of competitive products.

I love to find to find surveys that talk about hot IT jobs and skills. This comes, not from a survey, but from a study done by CompTIA. CompTIA provides certification programs – you can always tell their products by the plus sign. Their most popular certification is A+ certification (says the holder can take apart a PC and put it back together, working). Over 700,000 people have obtained this certificate. Anyway, their study stressed IT people need business skills. We’ve heard that before, and will hear it again. From there, some specifics – IT management is is short supply. Shortages in technical skills include Java EE, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), .Net, and Web 2.0. On the other side of the scale, they say COBOL and C++ programmers can’t find jobs.  And, looking forward, they think wireless will be the next skill shortage.

Something to think about…

A marketing survey of Mac users found several things. First, it found that Mac owners do indeed look down their noses at Windows  users. At the same time, it found that they’re more likely than PC owners to whiten their teeth. The survey was done by Mindset Media, an Internet ad network, back in January, but has been given new life by a recent piece that National Public Radio’s Marketplace aired about it. Mindset Media surveyed 7,500 computer users in 20 different personality traits, such as self-esteem, pragmatism and modesty. They found that Mac owners pretty much personify the Mac guy from the commercials. The survey found that Mac users describe themselves as perfectionists, and will shout their accomplishments from the mountaintops. They are also more likely than PC users to whiten their teeth, drive hybrids, drink Starbucks coffee and eat organic food. And, Mac users at times consider PC users gauche, uninformed, and clueless. I love finding this stuff. Thanks to Preston Gralla, I found this in his blog.