This week we’re doing a headlines only version of the Gestalt IT Rundown. Cisco announced it is postponing Cisco Live, ThousandEyes and Edgewise Networks are acquires, OpenAI details a new learning model, and Zoom will provide end-to-end encryption to only paid users.
This week on the Rundown:
Cisco Live Postponed
Cisco Buys ThousandEyes
ZScalar Buys Edgewise Networks
Zoom Encryption Coming to Paid Users
As part of Zoom’s Q1 earnings report, CEO Eric Yuan said that the company up coming end-to-end encryption feature will only be for paid users, saying it did not want to provide it for free users to compy with law enforcement requests. Zoom’s Alex Stamos said the company does not monitor free Zoom calls or silently record them, but that not having end-to-end encryption on free calls will help the company identify repeat offenders. On the call, Zoom reported revenue of $328 million, beating analyst expectations of $202 million, and said it had 265,400 customers with 10 or more employees, a 4 times increase on the year.
Google and Microsoft Eye Indian Telecom Investments
Google and Microsoft are reportedly considering buying stakes in Indian telecom companies. The Financial Times reports that, according to sources, Google is considering buying a 5% stake in Vodaphone Idea, the second largest telecom in the country. Meanwhile the Indian newspaper Mint reported that sources say Microsoft is in talks to invest up to $2 billion dollars in Reliance Jio Platforms. In April, Facebook invested $5.7 billion for a 9.99% stake in Reliance Jio Platforms
Raspberry Pi with 8GB of RAM
The Raspberry Pi Foundation released a new version of the Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM, priced at $75. To better take advantage of the additional memory, the foundation also released a 64-bit beta of its Raspbian Linux operating system, which has been renamed to Raspberry Pi OS.
Google Re-releases SameSite Cookie Policy
Google initially rolled out its SameSite Cookie labeling policy with the release of Chrome 80 in February, which blocked third-party cookies on websites. This was subsequently rolled back in April in order to not break any access to essential websites during the escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Google now says it will bring back the SameSite Cookie update back on July 14th with the release of Chrome 84, which will be gradually rolled out back to the Chrome 80 release.
OpenAI Details GPT-3 Model
OpenAI released a paper details its new GPT-3 language model, which is able to run with 175 billion parameters. This compares to their current GPT-2 model with 1.5 billion parameters, and Microsoft’s Transformer-based language model released last month with 17 billion parameters. As opposed to Transformer-based learning, which needs task specific data sets, GPT-3 is a autoregressive model trained with unsupervised machine learning and focuses on few-shot learning, which supplies a demonstration of a task at inference runtime. No release details of the model were announced, and the paper shows that while it performs extremely well in reading comprehension, the model currently struggles completing comparing writing samples for context at a middle-school level.
Stack Overflow Developer Survey
Stack Overflow published its annual developer survey, giving some insight into what tools devs are using and how that’s changed in the last year. JavaScript remained the most used programming language for the 8th straight year, followed by the usual suspects of HTML, SQL, and Python. Typescript overtook C and C++ as the 8th most used language, and the second most loved among respondants. Rust remained the most loved, while Python fell to number 3 in that regard. The top three most dreaded languages were VBA, Objective-C, and Perl. Database usage remained similar to 2019, with over half of respondants using MySQL, with most developers loving Redis and dreading IBM DB2. Looking at DevOps, 81% of developers said DevOps was Somewhat or Very Important to scaling software development, while only 43% reported having dedicated devops personnel in their organization.
The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on YouTube every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for the show each week.
