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Is Samsung Preparing For A Price War?
Samsung Electronics changing its approach to its memory chip business and focus on market share over profit margins and the industry will suffer, according to one analyst.
Bernstein Research’s senior analyst Mark C. Newman said that the competitive dynamic in the memory chip industry is not as good as we thought due to Samsung’s aggressive and opportunistic behavior. This is analyst speak for Samsung is engaging in a supply and price war with the other big names in the memory chip marking business – SK hynix and Micron.
“Rather than sit back and enjoy elevated profit margins with a 40 percent market share in DRAMs, Samsung is intent on stretching their share to closer to 50 percent,” he said.
Newman said the company is gaining significant market share in the NAND sector.
“Although Samsung cares about profits, their actions have been opportunistic and more aggressive than we predicted at the expense of laggards particularly Micron Technology in DRAMs and SK hynix in NANDs,” he said.
SK hynix is expected to suffer. “In NAND, we see Samsung continuing to stretch their lead in 3D NAND, which will put continued pressure on the rest of the field. SK hynix is one of the two obvious losers.”
Newman said that Samsung’s antics have destroyed the “level of trust” among competitors, perhaps “permanently,” as demand has dropped drastically with PC sales growth down to high single digits in 2015 with this year shaping up to be the same.
“Sales of smartphones, the main savior to memory demand growth have also weakened considerably to single digit growth this year and servers with datacenters are not strong enough to absorb the excess, particularly in DRAM,” Newman said.
He is worried that Samsung could create an oversupply in the industry.
“The oversupply issue is if anything only getting worse, with higher than normal inventories now an even bigger worry. Although we were right about the shrink slowing, thus reducing supply growth, the flip side of this trend is that capital spending and R&D costs are soaring thus putting a dent in memory cost declines,” he said.
China’s potential entry into the market and new technologies will provide further worries “over the longer term.”
“Today’s oversupply situation would become infinitely worse if and when China’s XMC ramps up big amounts of capacity. New memory technologies such as 3D X-point, ReRAM and MRAM stand on the sidelines and threaten to cannibalize part of the mainstream memory market,” he said.
Courtesy-Fud
Is RedHat Being Open?
Red Hat has responded to claims that its implementation of Openstack isn’t as open as it should be.
A report at the Wall Street Journal this week suggested that Red Hat was blocking customers from using alternatives to the bespoke version of Openstack that it offers.
Red Hat provides Openstack with extended support by the company, however in spirit of open source, users should be entitled to use another vendor’s Openstack software, the generic Openstack, or create their own fork.
In reality though, the Wall Street Journal report suggests that Red Hat customers have been advised that Red Hat will not support mixed vendor software, that it has claimed it would cost the company too much to support multiple Openstack distributions and that Red Hat Linux and Red Hat Openstack are too closely intertwined to be separated.
Openstack’s open character is part of what makes it what it is, it’s embedded in the name, and Red Hat has been quick to distance itself from the report, though it does hedge a bit.
In a blog post, Paul Cormier, president of the company’s Products and Technologies division said, “Red Hat believes the entire cloud should be open with no lock-in to proprietary code. Period. No exceptions. Lock-in is the antithesis of open source, and it goes against everything Red Hat stands for.”
However, he went on to warn, “[Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform] requires tight feature and fix alignment between the kernel, the hypervisor, and Openstack services. We have run into this in actual customer support situations many times.”
In other words, its advice to customers is seemingly ‘of course you can do it, but you’d have to be a bit daft’.
He went on to explain, “Enterprise-class open source requires quality assurance. It requires standards. It requires security. Openstack is no different. To cavalierly ‘compile and ship’ untested Openstack offerings would be reckless. It would not deliver open source products that are ready for mission critical operations and we would never put our customers in that position or at risk.”
Which suggests that Red Hat will let you use your own version, unless it’s not happy with it, in which case it won’t.
In a swipe at HP, Cormier concluded by attacking its rival, saying, “We would celebrate and welcome competitors like HP showing commitment to true open source by open sourcing their entire software portfolio.”
HP, which recently launched its HP Helion brand for Openstack, would probably argue that it has already done this, so the war of words might just be beginning.
Red Hat Releases Fedora 19
Red Hat has released Fedora 19, codenamed Schrödinger’s Cat, which has support for 3D printing and is the first to use MariaDB as its default SQL database instead of Oracle’s MySQL.
Red Hat’s Fedora Linux distribution is the testing ground for the firm’s hugely successful Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution, and for that reason it heralds what will appear in future releases of RHEL. The firm’s Fedora 19 release brings support for 3D printing through OpenSCAD, Skeinforge, SFACT, Printrun and Repetierhost, and it is the first release to make MariaDB the default SQL database server implementation in place of Oracle’s MySQL.
The Fedora Project was criticised for delaying its Fedora 18 release, however Fedora 19 appeared on time. Fedora’s latest release includes Gnome 3.8 and the capability to enable Gnome Classic, a Gnome 2 type user interface, along with KDE Plasma 4.10 and Mate 1.6, with other window managers such as Xfce and Lxde available in different spins.
As Red Hat sponsors the Fedora Project it is not surprising to see Fedora include Openshift, the firm’s platform as a service infrastructure. Fedora 19 also includes node.js and Ruby 2.0, but arguably its biggest move is away from Oracle’s MySQL to the community maintained MariaDB fork, which suggests that eventually RHEL will make MariaDB its default SQL database implementation.
The Fedora Project has said that work on Fedora 20 has been in active development for several months and it plans to release that in November.
Fedora 19 is available for download from regional mirrors and users can also use Fed Up to upgrade from previous versions of the distribution.
Anonymous Goes After North Korea
Anonymous has restarted its attack against North Korea and once again is using a North Korean Twitter account to announce website scalps.
The Twitter account @uriminzok was the scene of announcements about the hacked websites during the last stage of Op North Korea, and reports have tipped up there again.
The first wave of attacks saw a stream of websites defaced or altered with messages or images that were very much not in favour of the latest North Korean hereditary leader, Kim Jong-un.
They were supported by a Pastebin message signed by Anonymous that called for some calming of relations between North Korea and the US, and warned of cyber attacks in retaliation.
“Citizens of North Korea, South Korea, USA, and the world. Don’t allow your governments to separate you. We are all one. We are the people. Our enemies are the dictators and regimes, our goals are freedom and peace and democracy,” read the statement. “United as one, divided by zero, we can never be defeated!”
Before the attacks restarted, the last Twitter message promised that more was to come. It said, “OpNorthKorea is still to come. Another round of attack on N.Korea will begin soon.” Anonymous began delivering on that threat in the early hours this morning.
More of North Korean websites are in our hand. They will be brought down.
— uriminzokkiri (@uriminzok) April 15, 2013
We’ve counted nine websites downed, defacements and hacks, and judging by the stream of confirmations they happened over a two hour period. No new statement has been released other than the above.
jajusasang.com twitter.com/uriminzok/stat…
— uriminzokkiri (@uriminzok) April 15, 2013
Downed websites include the glorious uriminzokkiri.com, a North Korean news destination. However, when we tried it we had intermittent access.
Last time around the Anonymous hackers had taken control of North Korea’s Flickr account. This week we found the message, “This member is no longer active on Flickr.”
Anonymous Attacks MIT
January 23, 2013 by admin
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Anonymous goes after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) website after its president called for an internal investigation into what role it played in the prosecution of web activist Aaron Swartz.
MIT president Rafael Reif revealed the investigation in an email to staff that he sent out after hearing the news about Swartz’s death.
“I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy,” he wrote.
“I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it.”
Hacktivists from Anonymous defaced two MIT webpages in the wake of the announcement and turned them into memorials for Swartz.
Windows 7 Infection Rate Soaring
Windows 7′s malware infection rate soared by as much as 182% this year, Microsoft said on Tuesday.
But even with that dramatic increase, Windows 7 remained two to three times less likely to fall to hacker attack than the aged Windows XP.
Data from Microsoft’s newest twice-yearly security report showed that in the second quarter of 2012, Windows 7 was between 33% and 182% more likely to be infected by malware than in the second quarter of 2011.
The infection rate for Windows RTM, or “release to manufacturing,” the original version launched in Oct. 2009, was 33% higher this year for the 32-bit edition (x86), 59% higher for the 64-bit (x64) OS.
Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) — the upgrade that shipped in Feb. 2011 — saw even larger infection increases: 172% for x86, 182% for x64.
Microsoft blamed several factors for the boost in successful malware attacks, including less savvy users.
“This may be caused in part by increasing acceptance and usage of the newest consumer version of Windows,” said Microsoft in its latest Security Intelligence Report. “Early adopters are often technology enthusiasts who have a higher level of technical expertise than the mainstream computing population. As the Windows 7 install base has grown, new users are likely to possess a lower degree of security awareness than the early adopters and be less aware of safe online practices.”
Red Hat Outs Fedora 17
Red Hat has released its Fedora 17 ‘Beefy Miracle’ distribution just over a month after Canonical released its Ubuntu 12.04 distribution.
The Red Hat sponsored Fedora project serves as the proving ground for new features that eventually end up in the firm’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system. Now Red Hat has announced that it has released Fedora 17 including updates to Gnome, Eclipse, GIMP and Openstack along with numerous patches.
Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution might have shunned Gnome 3 in favour of its Unity desktop interface but Red Hat continues to stick with Gnome in Fedora, shipping Gnome 3.4 as its default window manager. Fedora 17 also includes GIMP 2.8 and Openstack Essex, while developers who like to live on the edge can run Eclipse Juno, the full release of which is expected later this year.
Fedora project leader Robyn Bergeron said, “I am extremely proud of the Fedora 17 release. The addition of projects such as Ovirt [virtual machine management] and JBoss Application Server 7, enhancements in Openstack, and continued support for fresh releases of desktop environments demonstrate the Fedora Project’s commitment to deliver rich features and capabilities. This, combined with our leading-edge innovations at the operating-system level, truly makes Fedora 17 a comprehensive and robust operating system for all types of users.”
Will Linux See Growth Next Year?
Canonical has said it expects Ubuntu to ship on 18 million PCs next year.
Having just launched Ubuntu 12.04, Canonical is bullish about its future, with Chris Kenyon, its VP of sales and business development forecasting that the firm’s operating system will ship on 18 million machines in 2013. According to Phoronix, Kenyon claimed that will amount to five per cent of worldwide PC shipments.
Kenyon’s prediction represents more than double the number of PCs shipped currently with Ubuntu and while that might seem optimistic the firm has been on a roll when it comes to OEM support. Prior to Canonical’s launch of Ubuntu 12.04 it announced certification for HP Proliant servers, and yesterday it revealed that it has been working with Dell on an Ubuntu image for Dell’s headline XPS 13 ultrabook.
Although Kenyon mentioned PC unit sales, it is unlikely to forecast a similar growth in servers pre-installed with Ubuntu despite the firm’s certification for some Proliant servers.
Kenyon believes that most firms buy bare metal servers and load their own tweaked images. He said, “As a point of fact the vast majority of this [Ubuntu on servers] is not sold pre-installed. […] Pre-install in the server market is just irrelevant, it is not how the market works. Even when something gets pre-installed an enterprise will wipe it because they will have their own image. [OS pre-installation] is a distraction [for servers, but] it’s a very applicable question in the client world.”
Are Medical Implants Vulnerable To Hackers?
April 16, 2012 by admin
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Security experts have warned that many medical implants are vulnerable to cyber attacks that could endanger their users’ lives. While an increasing number of patients are being fitted with devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps to manage chronic conditions apparently the inventors did not think anyone would be evil enough to try and hack them.
For some reason they installed unprotected wireless links so that they could be updated easily. Therefore this means that hackers could gain remote control of such implants because they rely on unprotected wireless links to update them. After gaining access to the device, a cyber criminal could then switch it off or tell it to deliver a dangerous dose of medicine to the patient.
Hackers Plan To Go After Fox
Anonymous plans to take out the Fox news network because of its coverage of the Wall Street Protests.
Dubbed “Operation Fox Hunt”, Anonymous announced the plans on YouTube to attack the Fox News website on the anniversary of Guy Fawkes Day. Anonymous is also planning to target former Fox News personality Glenn Beck as well as current Fox News representative Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly during “Operation Fox Hunt”.
Anonymous said that it has had a gutsful of “right wing conservative propaganda” and “belittling the occupiers” of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Anonymous recently a distributed denial-of-service attack against the Oakland police department’s website after a 24-year-old wounded Marine home from serving two tours in Iraq was critically injured in the Occupy Oakland protest. Police allegedly threw an object that fractured the marine’s skull landing him in the hospital.