Enjoyment: 6 May 2016

Friday 6 May 2016

Structure News: The long end of Moore's Law

Where We Consider Quantum Leap A Vastly Underrated Show

May 6, 2016 / by Tom Krazit

This week, we'll talk about some troubling security vulnerabilities, Detroit's sudden interest in cloud computing companies, and the search for the sequel to Moore's Law.

STRUCTURE NEWS

THE STRUCTURE SHOW: AWS EARNINGS, MEET DELL TECHNOLOGIES, AND OPENAI OPENS FOR BUSINESS

This week on The Structure Show, Barb Darrow of Fortune and I talk about the first-quarter performance of Amazon Web Services, the bellwether cloud company that might just be a standard by which to measure the health of the tech industry in general in coming years. We’ll also check in on the progress of the world’s biggest merger ever, should it actually happen (which EMC's Joe Tucci and Dell's Michael Dell, pictured, really, really hope will happen). And we'll look at the first release from OpenAI, the joint project from Elon Musk and Sam Altman that is trying to compete with the big AI corporate research groups as a mom-and-pop outfit, although those are two very rich parents.

INDUSTRY NEWS

OPENSTACK AND THE FRAGMENTING INFRASTRUCTURE MARKET

Reaction from last month's OpenStack Summit continues to trickle out now that everybody's home from Austin. This week Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk looks at how new projects like Mesos and Docker have created all kinds of new options for IT customers, and why that might present problems for OpenStack.

EXCLUSIVE: BIG DATA BREACHES FOUND AT MAJOR EMAIL SERVICES - EXPERT

You probably weren't the only person who sighed at a report from Reuters this week about a hack out of Russian that appeared to steal millions of email and password combinations from providers including Google and Yahoo. Don't freak out yet: Motherboard poured cold water on the report, suggesting that the hackers involved were making their heist look more damaging than it actually was, and noting that many of the email addresses were probably compromised long ago.

IMAGEMAGICK VULNERABILITIES PLACE COUNTLESS WEBSITES AT RISK, ACTIVE EXPLOITATION CONFIRMED

Ok, now you can freak out. Several security vulnerabilities were found this week in the widely used ImageMagick image manipulation tool, although fixes were quickly released according to CSO. And if that wasn't enough, Ars Technica notes that two important fixes were released for OpenSSL; security vulnerabilities in the "software supply chain" is something we'll definitely get into at Structure Security this September.

WHITE HOUSE WANTS TO DISCUSS THE PROS AND CONS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Unless the NSA has some amazing stuff under wraps, it seems like the most forward-looking research in artificial intelligence is taking place in the private sector. The White House Office of Science and Technology wants to make sure it stays on top of these developments with plans to host four public AI workshops, according to Fortune.

ORACLE BUYS CLOUD-BASED SAAS VENDOR OPOWER FOR $532 MILLION

Oracle continues to try and create a cloud story for itself through strategic acquisitions. ZDnet reports that it has picked up Opower, which provides utility management software as a cloud service, adding to the number of cloud services for vertical markets that have come under Oracle's umbrella in recent years.

MICROSOFT AND FORD BACK PIVOTAL IN $253 MILLION ROUND AT $2.8 BILLION VALUATION

If every major company is turning into a tech company, it makes sense to have tech expertise at an arm's length. Ford, which uses Pivotal Cloud Foundry to built a smartphone app that lets customers access their cars while mobile, invested $182 million into Pivotal this week as part of a $253 million funding round that values the cloud company at $2.8 billion, Venturebeat reported.

BIG PICTURE

Predicting the coming end of Moore's Law is a time-honored tradition, like calling peak oil or vowing that this is the year for the Chicago Cubs. Yet someday all these things will happen, and we got a brief look this week at the future once Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's famous axiom passes into history.

Moore's Law is, of course, not a "law," but rather an observation that became a challenge to double the number of features on a chip every 18 to 24 months. This trend changed the world over a 40-year period and has endured far longer than anybody, including Moore himself, might have thought, but The New York Times reported this week that the Semiconductor Industry Association is going to stop forecasting a chip roadmap based on Moore's Law.

Instead, a separate group, the IEEE plans to start looking at alternatives to Moore's Law for charting the pace of advancement in technology. For a variety of reasons, it has become too difficult to make chips smaller, faster, and cheaper, a process that has been the engine of the tech economy since Richard Nixon was president. And the rise of cloud services mean that our individual machines don't require nearly as much processing power, although those cloud services themselves are of course still hungry for advances in computing power.

So what comes next? IBM offered a glimpse this week of how quantum computing could be delivered via cloud services, as noted by Wired. Quantum computing is still a mythical creature and won't be a real option for computing for years, if not decades, but the idea that we could create more powerful computers by using building blocks that are capable of multiple states beyond "on" or "off" is getting serious traction inside the world's leading computing research facilities.

It's kind of amazing that despite all that's happened in technology over the years since Moore and Robert Noyce founded Intel, the transistor has remained the basic building block of computing. Pretty soon, something else will need to take its place, and whoever harnesses quantum computing (or something else) will take their place in computing history right alongside the 87-year-old Moore.