Samsung's 110-inch Ultra HDTV is the world's largest

BY RICHARD LAWLER
Samsung promised at CES last January that it would deliver a 110-inch UHDTV this year, and with just a couple of days left to spare here it is. Apparently rolling out in China, the Middle East and a few European countries first, there's no word on price (the 85-inch version that launched earlier this year had a $40K pricetag attached when it launched), but can you really put a price on a TV that's bigger than a king-size bed? That's right, at 2.6-meters by 1.8-meters there's more than enough room for well-heeled VIPs or employees of large companies and government agencies (the target market for the S9110) to catch some z's on it -- and bring a few friends. It's available for custom orders just before we see the new generation of Ultra HD (including a 105-inch curved model) at CES 2014 next week, although most of us will be looking for TVs that actually fit inside our living room.
Update: Even though the set is custom order only, an Associated Press report puts the price at about $150,000

Tech's biggest misfires of 2013

BY BRIAN HEATER

THE NSA GETS CAUGHT READING EVERYONE'S EMAIL
Granted, it's not as if all this went down in the 2013 calendar year, but given the sorts of revelations that were uncovered, we'd be remiss if we didn't include it this time out. The question, then, is where precisely to start with the government agency's laundry list of civil liberties violations? After all, while it's likely that few were genuinely surprised that the government's been doing this manner of snooping, the information revealed by Edward Snowden was shocking in precisely how deep, thorough and extreme the NSA's collection methods were.

PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING BLACKBERRY
while we've been holding out hope that the Canadian smartphone manufacturer would have turned things around by now, each new piece of news out of Waterloo seemingly confirms that it hasn't quite found the bottom yet. By all accounts, it should have been a banner year for the company, wrapping up January by launching the long-awaited BlackBerry 10 with a bang. The release arrived with two new handsets -- the Q10 and Z10 -- and a complete rebranding for the company, finally shedding the stuffy Research in Motion moniker for the more familiar BlackBerry. Shortly after the announcement, the company's newly named creative director (and sometime singer-songwriter) Alicia Keys tweeted from her iPhone. It wasn't a make-or-break moment for the smartphone wars, but it was hard not to read the gaffe as symbolic of the company's larger struggles.

MICROSOFT GETS DRM-HAPPY WITH THE XBOX ONE
After nearly a decade between consoles, Microsoft's Xbox One got off to a bit of an inauspicious start. What should have been a celebratory time for the gaming powerhouse was preceded by something of a muddled mess, thanks to a jumble of confusion surrounding the admittedly obtuse digital strategy put forth by Redmond. One thing was for sure: Gamers were pissed about the console's DRM, most notably the 24-hour physical disc check-in for used games. The plan was even more problematic for those without access to a stable internet connection. Anyone who's ever spouted that tired cliche about there not being any such thing as bad press has clearly never been on the wrong side of a video game flame war, and with its chief competition, the PlayStation 4, launching at virtually the same time, Microsoft saw fit to make a change.

Smart devices get smarter, but still lack security

While many smart devices are coming with more cool features, improved security isn't one of them

by Taylor Armerding

As you shop for that new "smart" refrigerator that can do everything including figuring out when you're low on milk, perhaps you should also think about the risk of some mischievous hacker taking control of it and having 5,000 gallons of milk delivered to your door.

That scenario is real. It has been demonstrated. Security experts have been saying for more than a decade that, in the world of electronic devices, "smart" does not mean secure. They have warned that if security is not made a priority, the convenience provided by those devices will be undermined by cyber criminals.

And most of them say things have gotten even worse since those warnings began, in part due to the explosive growth of consumer devices with embedded computers.

In an interview with PaulDotCom Security Weekly TV this past February, Craig Heffner, a vulnerability researcher with Tactical Network Solutions, put it bluntly. "Go back 15 years in computer security, pick every problem we've had from then to now, and you'll find it in embedded systems," he said.

That would make it a problem growing by orders of magnitude. At a conference on the Internet of Things (IoT) last month, sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the agency's chairwoman, Edith Ramirez, said the 3.5 billion sensors now on the network are expected to grow to trillions within the next decade. Indeed, many of today's new cars already have more than 100 embedded, connected computers.

"Five years ago, more things than people connected to Internet," she said. "By 2020, 90% of all cars will have some kind of vehicle platform, up from 10% today. By 2015, there will be 25 billion things hooked to the Internet. By 2020, that will grow to 50 billion. In the consumer market, smart devices will track our health, help us remotely monitor an aging family member, reduce our utility bills and tell us we're out of milk."

But all that, she said, will come with "undeniable" privacy and security risks. In response, she said, the stance of the FTC is that, "companies need to build security into their products, no exceptions."

Top vendors like Google, Apple hope to take smartwatches mainstream in 2014

Smartwatch developers must focus on cutting prices, adding more apps, and improving the look to attract broad consumer interest

When International CES opens in Las Vegas in early January, a flood of wearable computing devices, including smartwatches, will be on display.

The fledgling smartwatch market is tiny compared to that for smartphones, or even wearable devices like Google Glass or smart

Still, the smartwatch phenomenon promises to blossom in 2014 as experts expect Google to launch a model by summer followed by Apple sometime in the fall. Even Microsoft is reportedly working on one.

To achieve any degree of greatness, though, these major tech innovators and their smaller competitors must overcome some significant hurdles.

For instance, most of the smartwatches unveiled to date are too expensive, at $200 to $300 each, for widespread adoption. Most of the devices also require a connection to a smartphone via Bluetooth, which implies that users face the added cost of the smartphone and a wireless service contract.

The early smartwatches also lack functionality and mostly run fewer than 20 smartwatch apps.

Southampton University supercomputer goes live

A £3.2m supercomputer, one of the most powerful in the UK, has been installed at the University of Southampton.

The Iridis4 has 12,200 processors, each of which can perform a trillion calculations per second - a measurement referred to as a "teraflop".

The IBM machine also has a million gigabytes of disk space and 50 terabytes of memory.

Home computers generally have between 500GB and 2TB of disc space and about 4GB to 6GB of memory.

There are 1,024 gigabytes in a terabyte.

The university said the new machine would allow academics to work on more projects at faster speeds.

The world's most powerful computer is China's Tianhe-2, which can perform 33,860 trillion calculations per second.

Moto X : supposed iphone killer

The Moto X, the first real Google phone, is the coolest thing Motorola has done since being acquired by Google. It offers 5 features that has not been seen in any other smartphones before, not even the iPhone!
Feature 1: You can design your own color scheme.
You get your customized phone within four days, courtesy of Feature 2.
Feature 3 is the most useful: touchless mode.
Feature 4: Motorola observed that many people wake their phones many times a day just to check the time or missed messages. The Moto X displays this information briefly every time you move it.
Feature 5: You can fire up the Camera app by twitching your wrist a couple of times, as though trying to dislodge a mosquito; it works whether the phone is on or off.

Full Specs

Microsoft’s one million servers: what it means

By Nancy Gohring
Digging through the transcript of Microsoft’s recent Worldwide Partner Conference, a number of people paused at CEO Steve Ballmer’s comment that the company now has one million servers. As interesting is that he said that Google has more and Amazon fewer, while other big names like Facebook and Yahoo are in the 100,000 ballpark.

--Does Ballmer know how Microsoft compares to his competitors? Probably not. As well-known Amazon Web Services
engineer James Hamilton notes, Amazon has never released a server count. Neither has Google, although two years
ago a Stanford professor deduced, based on official data about Google’s data center energy output, that Google had around 900,000 servers
--What does the number mean about Microsoft data center efficiency? That’s a tough one to answer. Microsoft’s IaaS and PaaS services are dwarfed by AWS. Bing is dwarfed by Google. More than 300 million people use Outlook.com, but 100 million more use Gmail.

Then there are Microsoft services, like Office 365 and other hosted enterprise software, that neither AWS or Google offer.

Do all of Microsoft’s flagging competitive services, like Azure and Bing, plus its enterprise services, add up to more workloads than AWS has? Or is Microsoft just really inefficient at running its data centers?

These are questions posed by Roger, in the comments after Hamilton’s blog post. He suggests we can’t compare efficiency based on server numbers: “The numbers they should brag about are ratios – servers per system ops/admin person, annual power consumption per user, servers per user, etc.” he wrote.

--Regardless of the comparison, what more does the one million figure tell us about Microsoft’s data center? Hamilton does the math for us. He figures that one million servers equals 15 – 30 data centers, a $4.25 billion capital expense, and power consumption of 2.6TWh annually, or the amount of power that would be used by 230,000 homes in the U.S.

Those numbers are all huge, but plausible given Microsoft’s size.

--Should we care? Hamilton argues the number isn’t useful “mostly because a single data point is open to a lot of misinterpretation by even skilled industry observers.”

That said, apparently there’s significant interest throughout the industry. Data Center Knowledge said that its page that lists the best information about who has the most servers is one of its most popular.

Take a look, it’s very interesting to see the enormous differences in scale. Rackspace, for instance, has just 94,000 servers. In 2011, SoftLayer said it had 100,000. EBay has 54,000 servers, compared to Facebook’s “hundreds of thousands.”

Ultimately, it’s intriguing to find out how many servers Microsoft has, particularly because the giants in the industry are secretive about such data center metrics. But unless we have additional metrics, it’s just too hard to draw any meaningful conclusions from the number.

Read more of Nancy Gohring's "To the Cloud" blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @ngohring and on Google+. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.

The end of Symbian: Nokia ships last handset with the mobile OS

Two years ago, Symbian was still the #1 mobile operating system. What happened?
by Christopher Null (PC World)

Will the last one to leave please turn out the valot?

This week, Finnish smartphone creator Nokia announced that it had shipped its final handset running the Symbian operating system. As the last company in the world building phones using the Symbian OS, Nokia's withdrawal from the platform means Symbian is now completely defunct.

Symbian's fall from dominance is a tale about which books can (and should) be written. Its origins date to the '80s, but as of 1998, Symbian's existence was formalized when an old PDA company, Psion, changed its name to Symbian and took funding from the major phone manufacturers at the time, including Ericsson and Motorola, to become the official caretaker of the rising mobile OS.

But Nokia has always been Symbian's biggest supporter. The company produced millions of phones running the OS, and the two have always had close ties. Together they dominated the cell phone market throughout the early 2000s; in fact, Symbian remained the top-selling smartphone OS worldwide until late 2010.

That abrupt reversal of fortune was due to a couple of factors: First, the rise of Android and iOS as the dominant phone OSes, sought-after by consumers dropping simplistic handsets in favor of smartphones. Second, Nokia's fall from grace (for much the same reason), along with its fateful 2011 decision to jump into bed with Microsoft and the Windows Phone OS. At that point, the only remaining Symbian backer (and the main contributor to the Symbian code base) said goodbye to the OS, and the writing was on the wall for what would happen next.

Today, Symbian is actually maintained by Accenture, a management consulting company, to which Nokia outsourced development (and shipped off thousands of employees) in 2011. Accenture is supposed to maintain the OS through 2016.

So, what killed Symbian? Complexity, according to Nokia. In reports, the company blamed Symbian's difficult and unfriendly code structure for the extended time it takes for a phone using that OS to be developed. BGR quotes a Nokia spokesperson complaining that a typical Symbian handset required 22 months of development time, compared to less than a year with Windows Phone. In today's environment, when markets are made and lost in a matter of weeks, that just won't fly.

For businesses with large deployments of Symbian smartphones, well, there's probably little need to fret. First, there's no question you've seen this day coming for at least a few years, and chances are you've long since figured out a successor to standardize on. For those stragglers, that deal with Accenture means you'll likely get security updates and other fixes for the next three years--that's plenty of time to decide whether you want to jump to Android, iOS, Windows Phone, or--dare we suggest it--BlackBerry. (The smart money seems to be on moving to Android.)

Catchyit : The Symbian OS has had a good run, take a bow ... goodbye

BlackBerry stems bleeding, but sells 1 million Z10s

Company to launch a midrange model later this year to boost sales
Matt Hamblen
Research In Motion Limited, now doing business as BlackBerry, shipped about 1 million BlackBerry Z10 smartphones during its fiscal fourth quarter.

Anything more than a million in Z10 sales in the quarter can be considered a success for BlackBerry, anything less would have been disappointing, according to Ovum. The Z10 is the first BlackBerry 10 OS device.

BlackBerry shipped a total of 6 million smartphones in the quarter, the company said Thursday as it released its quarterly earnings.

Revenue in its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended on March 2, was approximately $2.7 billion, down 36% from the same quarter of fiscal 2012. Net income from continuing operations for the quarter was $94 million, compared to a net loss of $118 million during 2012.

It had about 76 million subscribers, compared to 79 million during the previous quarter.

The company also announced that co-founder Mike Lazaridis, has decided to retire as vice chairman and a director of the company. Lazaridis co-founded BlackBerry nearly 30 years ago and served as a co-CEO of the company until last year.

"[Lazaridis] revolutionized the mobile communications industry when he invented the BlackBerry and he is widely recognized as one of Canada's greatest innovators," CEO Thorsten Heins said during a conference call presenting the results.

While Lazaridis deserves a lot of credit, he and former co-CEO colleague Jim Balsillie, who retired last year, were unable to reply swiftly to the onslaught from Apple's iPhones and Android-based smartphones.

The announcement of the first shipment figures for the Z10 is a momentous occasion for the company, as BlackBerry tries to claw its way back in the smartphone market, it is too early to draw any major conclusions from the figures, according to analysts. That's in part because the BlackBerry Z10 just went on sale in the U.S. last Friday.

"The Z10 hasn't been on the market for the full quarter, first of all. Second of all, and more significantly, the U.S. launch isn't reflected in the results. Also, the Z10 is just one in what will be a long line of products in 2013," said Geoff Blaber, who leads mobile device software research at CCS Insight.

There also have been supply constraints in markets where the phone has been launched, meaning that even if people wanted to buy them they haven't necessarily been able to, according to market research company Ovum. The second BlackBerry 10 smartphone, the Q10 -- which has the classic BlackBerry physical keyboard -- won't go on sale for some time, so many of the prime candidates for buying a BlackBerry 10 device will be waiting for that, it said via email.

The first true referendum on BlackBerry 10's success or lack thereof will come after the current quarter, Ovum said.

During BlackBerry's conference call, Heins underlined that what the company has done so far is only the beginning. The Q10 will start shipping in April, and the company is working on less expensive BlackBerry 10-based smartphones, as well.

"The midrange BB10, expect that kind of around fiscal midyear in various markets ... We are looking forward to that because we know there is a big demand," Heins said.

The company also continues to investigate potential licensing opportunities and the use of its new platform in areas other than smartphones, including the automotive sector, according to Heins.

Analyst Blaber had another suggestion for a priority: "The first thing it needs to do is to ensure that the existing subscribers base that have been on older BB 7 products start to upgrade, and see the value with BlackBerry 10."