After years of rumors and speculation, a new report suggests that the era of foldable smartphones may soon be upon us.

Samsung is widely rumored to be working on its own foldable dual-display smartphone, which has long been nicknamed the Samsung Galaxy X (or Galaxy F) by the blogosphere. That device could see a release sometime next year, according to the latest rumors.

But the South Korea tech juggernaut is also already looking to sell its foldable display technology to its competitors. A recent report in ETNews claims that Samsung Display is currently in talks to supply foldable smartphone panels to Chinese-based Android makers Xiaomi and Oppo.

That move would be unusual for Samsung, which typically saves its newest technology for its own products for a period of time before rolling them out to the public.

On the other hand, by introducing a foldable smartphone and then immediately supplying those display panels to other handset makers, Samsung could create a new market segment that is largely dependent on its own display business, Android Authority points out.

It’s still a risky move, as other foldable smartphones could eat into the Galaxy X’s market share. But Samsung could readily become the sole supplier of foldable display panels for most, if not all, Android smartphones next year. That, of course, would significantly boost its Display subsidiary.

Korean research firm Stone Partners estimates that foldable display panel shipments could reach 14 million and be worth about $2.67 billion by 2021. The South Korean tech giant has a lot to gain by offering its own technology to the wider Android ecosystem.

Samsung does have a history of being a key supply chain giant, however. Just look at Apple, who relies on the South Korea company for its OLED display panels in newer iPhones.

Apple, for its part, is also rumored to be working on foldable display technology. The company has applied for a slew of patents that detail different mechanisms and applications related to flexible or foldable smartphone displays.

In any case, it’s starting to look like 2019 will be the year of the foldable smartphone — even if Samsung is the only firm to field such a device at the time.

The promise of continued innovation hangs on our ability to make data freely accessible to the people and teams who are driving towards the future. Companies everywhere are disrupting their own industries with mobile, agile, DevOps, and of course the cloud. But this is the Information Age and the Digital Economy and those same people, processes, and technologies are bumping into a new problem: access to data.

See also: How AI will transform devops and operations

Whether it be new advancements in machine learning or the ever increasing pressure for faster software innovation, the demand from data consumers (ex: developers, quality assurance teams, and B/I analysts) for fresh, production data has never been higher. At the same time data operators (the people tasked with the supply side of data, like DBAs and security professionals) are facing industry trends like mobile and IoT that are pushing exponentially more data into enterprises. On top of that, new industry and geographic regulations demand increased consumer protections, because though having data everywhere can be great, it can also result in enormous vulnerabilities.

These competing pressures result in a new, painful problem: data friction.

One on hand, it’s no secret that data is growing in size and complexity: IDC predicts that, by 2025, global data will grow to be ten times that of today. Enterprise data is expected to grow even faster, increasing nearly 25 fold in ten years to represent the lion’s share of all data created worldwide. Because of the physical limits of bandwidth, this kind of growth presents daily challenges. But even more sinister is the sneaking complexity of data that quietly crept into

But even more sinister is the sneaking complexity of data that quietly crept into enterprise architecture. The confluence of open source, cloud, and the disrupt-or-die market reality, has led enterprises to empower developers to use the best databases for each purpose. As a result, data is stored in a variety of formats across many data centers and clouds, making it exceedingly difficult to get a full picture of your customers and your business.

On the other hand, we are in a post-Snowden era. Consumers are aware of the need to secure their data: data breaches have become a way of life and we’re seeing an alarming uptick in the amount of personal customer data that is compromised every day. Industries and governments are responding by putting in place a range of protections and regulations, such as GDPR in the EU. Enterprises that fail to secure their data will see their customers lose confidence in them.

This challenge is left to Chief Information Security Officers and InfoSec professionals to solve, and too often the solution is to simply deny access to data. It’s no wonder there is great opposition to unchecked, free access to enterprise data.

This dynamic causes data friction, slowing innovation to a halt, when businesses have never needed to move faster. Data friction costs time, and therefore also can cost businesses their competitive edge, delaying innovations of the future from becoming reality.

The future? DataOps.

But fear not. Just as DevOps introduced people, processes, and technologies to rise to the challenge of increasing operational demands, I believe a new movement is emerging: DataOps. The first step is recognizing that the reactive, ticket-based IT model of the past simply won’t scale to meet the demands of data consumers. Instead, data operators must flip the model on its head and build a proactive enterprise data platform that gives data consumers self-service access to exactly the data they need and are approved for.

Doing so will require commitment by everyone involved to fundamentally rethink their existing processes and workflows. It will also require some amount of technologies as well: How will data be continuously pulled down from production? How will sensitive data get reliably secured before distribution? What happens to the underlying infrastructure if dozens or hundreds of people want their own personal copies of the data to develop against or run experiments on? Those that can tackle the people, process, and technology problems will be the ones that break through today’s innovation barriers.

Data is the most valuable asset for an organization today. I joined Delphix because as a product manager I’ve felt the pain of data friction and I’ve see the what can happen when data flows freely, letting me make data-driven decisions. Delphix is a founding member of this new DataOps movement and works with some of the most important brands in the world to help them define the future.

From autonomous cars and smart cities to AI breakthroughs in cancer research, new technologies will require access to massive amounts of data. Data that needs to be securely and continuously delivered. These visions of the future are incredibly exciting, but without the enterprises behind them making smart, data-driven decisions, the future won’t come fast enough.

SAN DIEGO — 

The Trump administration is under increasing pressure to speed up the reunification of immigrant families it separated at the Mexican border, following allegations three youngsters were sexually abused while in U.S. custody.

The government of El Salvador said the three, ages 12 to 17, were victimized at shelters in Arizona, and it asked the U.S. to make their return a priority.

“May they leave the shelters as soon as possible, because it is there that they are the most vulnerable,” Deputy Foreign Relations Minister Liduvina Magarin said in San Salvador on Thursday.

Deadline a month ago

The U.S. government already is facing heavy criticism over its slow pace in reuniting more than 2,600 children who were separated from their parents last spring before the Trump administration agreed to stop the practice. Most have since been reunited, but hundreds remain apart more than a month after the deadline set by a judge.

Before the Trump administration reversed course, many of the parents had been deported to their home countries while their children remained in shelters in the U.S.

Attorneys for the U.S. government and the immigrant families discussed how to accelerate the process at a hearing Friday in San Diego in front of U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, who set the deadline.

Magarin gave few details on the three cases other than to say they involved “sexual violations, sexual abuses.” She said her government is ready with lawyers and psychologists to help the families, adding: “The psychological and emotional impact is forever.”

“It’s unbelievable that children who were fleeing violence here were met in the United States with the worst violence a child could encounter,” said Cesar Rios, director of the Salvadoran Migrant Institute.

More information is needed to investigate, the U.S. Department Health and Human Services said in a statement Friday, that adding that “without additional details, we are unable to confirm or deny these allegations took place” at a facility overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. It contracts with nonprofits and other third parties to run shelters for unaccompanied minors arriving at the border.

Administration asks ACLU to find the families

In trying to reunite families, the Trump administration has put the onus on the American Civil Liberties Union, asking that the organization use its “considerable resources” to find parents in their home countries, mostly Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

The governments of those countries and nonprofit organizations have been trying to locate the families. Those efforts have included posting public notices and putting hotline numbers on billboards in the hope a parent missing a child might see the signs and call.

“Every day that these children are separated and left in government facilities does more damage,” said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney representing separated families. “Even if the facilities were palaces, the separation of young children from their parents causes potentially permanent trauma.”

The government and ACLU indicated in the hearing Friday that the process should start to speed up.

200 cases could be resolved soon

Gelernt told the judge as many as 200 cases could be resolved in the next week or two. Those include families who want to be reunited in their home countries and those who want to waive their right to reunification and keep their child in the United States to pursue asylum.

The judge also said the administration can expedite cases where families have expressed the desire for the child to be sent back and not worry about it violating a temporary halt on deportations of families seeking asylum.

Justice Department attorney Scott Stewart said the government wants to remove any roadblocks.

“There are a lot of folks that want to move forward with reunification,” he told the judge.

Parents increasingly anxious

More than 300 parents who have been deported are waiting for their sons and daughters to be returned to them in their homelands. Many are growing increasingly anxious.

Among them is Evelin Roxana Meyer, whose 11-year-old son, Eduardo Almendarez Meyer, was told this week that he won’t be leaving the U.S. until Nov. 27. He has been held at a government-contracted shelter in Brownsville, Texas, since he was separated from his father in early June.

The boy’s mother said her husband was told when he signed his deportation papers that his son would be waiting for him in Honduras.

“Now it’ll be six months before we see him? Oh my God,” Meyer said Friday, crying during a telephone interview from her hometown of La Union. “I don’t know why it’s taking so long. My son is worried. He tells me, ‘More time here, Mommy? Oh, no. Why?’ I don’t know what to tell him.”

Child psychologist Barbara Van Dahlen, founder of Give an Hour, a network of mental health professions that is offering to counsel the separated families, said the reports of abuse are likely to worsen the immigrant parents’ anxieties.

“I can’t imagine the stress, the anxiety, the terror, if I was separated from my child, and then the thought that possibly some of these kids are being abused,” Van Dahlen said. “It would be so debilitating and destructive that it would be hard for some parents to function.”

Ask any 25-year old engineer what Labor Day means to him or her, and you might get an answer like: it’s the surprise three-day weekend after a summer of vacationing. Or it’s the day everyone barbecues at Dolores Park. Or it’s the annual Tahoe trip where everyone gets to relive college.

Or simply, it’s the day we get off because we all work so hard.

And while founders and employees in startup land certainly work hard, wearing their 80-hour workweeks as a badge of honor, closing deals on conference calls in an air-conditioned WeWork is a far cry from the backbreaking working conditions of the 1880s, the era when Labor Day was born.

For everyone here in Silicon Valley, we should not be celebrating this holiday triumphantly over beers and hot dogs, complacent in the belief that our gravest labor issues are behind us, but instead use this holiday as a moment to reflect on how much further we have to go in making our workplaces and companies more equitable, diverse, inclusive and ethically responsible.

Bloody Beginnings

On September 5th, 1882, 10,000 workers gathered at a “monster labor festival” to protest the 12-hours per day, seven days a week harsh working conditions they faced in order to cobble together a survivable wage. Even children as “young as 5 or 6 toiled in mills, factories and mines across the country.”

This all erupted in a climax in 1894 when the American Railway Union went on a nationwide strike, crippling the nation’s transportation infrastructure, which included trains that delivered postal mail. President Grover Cleveland declared this a federal crime and sent in federal troops to break up the strike, which resulted in one of the bloodiest encounters in labor history, leaving 30 dead and countless injured.

Labor Day was declared a national holiday a few month later in an effort to mend wounds and make peace with a reeling and restless workforce (it also conveniently coincided with President Cleveland’s reelection bid).

The Battle is Not Yet Won

Today in Silicon Valley, this battle for fair working conditions and a living wage seems distant from our reality of nap rooms and lucrative stock grants.  By all accounts, we have made tremendous strides on a number of critical labor issues. While working long hours is still a cause for concern, most of us can admit that we often voluntarily choose to work more than we have to. Our workplace environments are not perfect (i.e. our standing desks may not be perfectly ergonomic), but they are far from life-threatening or hazardous to our health. And while equal wages are still a concern, earning a living wage is not, particularly if the worst case scenario after “failing” at a startup means joining a tech titan and clocking in as a middle manager with a six-figure salary.

Even though the workplace challenges of today are not as grave as life or death, the fight is not yet over. Our workplaces are far from perfect, and the power dynamic between companies and employees is far from equal.

In tech, we face a myriad of issues that need grassroots, employee-driven movements to effect change. Each of the following issues has complexities and nuances that deserve an article of its own, but I’ve tried to summarize them briefly: 

1. Equal pay for equal work – while gender wage gaps are better in tech than other industries (4% average in tech vs. 20% average across other industries), the discrepancy in wages for women in technical roles is twice the average for other roles in tech.
2. Diversity – research shows that diverse teams perform better, yet 76% of technical jobs are still held by men, and only 5% of tech workers are Black or Latino. The more alarming statistic in a recent Atlassian survey is that more than 40% of respondents felt that their company’s diversity programs needed no further improvement.
3. Inclusion – an inclusive workplace should be a basic fundamental right, but harassment and discrimination still exist. A survey by Women Who Tech found that 53 percent of women working in tech companies reported experiencing harassment (most frequently in the form of sexism, offensive slurs, and sexual harassment) compared to 16 percent of men.
4. Outsourced / 1099 employees – while corporate employees at companies like Amazon are enjoying the benefits of a ballooning stock, the reality is much bleaker for warehouse workers who are on the fringes of the corporate empire. A new book by undercover journalist James Bloodworth found that Amazon workers in a UK warehouse “use bottles instead of the actual toilet, which is located too far away.” A separate survey conducted found that 55% of these workers suffer from depression, and 80% said they would not work at Amazon again.Similarly, Foxconn is under fire once again for unfair pay practices, adding to the growing list of concerns including suicide, underage workers, and onsite accidents. The company is the largest electronics manufacturer in the world, and builds products for Amazon, Apple, and a host of other tech companies.
5. Corporate Citizenship & Ethics – while Silicon Valley may be a bubble, the products created here are not. As we’ve seen with Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica breach, these products impact millions of lives. The general uncertainty and uneasiness around the implications of automation and AI also spark difficult conversations about job displacement for entire swaths of the global population (22.7M by 2025 in the US alone, according to Forrester).

Thus, the reversal in sentiment against Silicon Valley this past year is sending a message that should resonate loud and clear — the products we build and the industries we disrupt here in the Valley have real consequences for workers that need to be taken seriously.

Laboring toward a better future

To solve these problems, employees in Silicon Valley needs to find a way to organize. However, there are many reasons why traditional union structures may not be the answer.

The first is simply that traditional unions and tech don’t get along. Specifically, the AFL-CIO, one of the largest unions in America, has taken a hard stance against the libertarian ethos of the Valley, drawing a bright line dividing the tech elite from the working class. In a recent speech about how technology is changing work, the President of the AFL-CIO did not mince words when he said that the “events of the last few years should have made clear that the alternative to a just society is not the libertarian paradise of Silicon Valley billionaires. It is a racist and authoritarian nightmare.”

But perhaps the biggest difference between what an organized labor movement would look like in Silicon Valley and that of traditional organized labor is that it would be a fight not to advance the interest of the majority, but to protect the minority. In the 1880s, poor working conditions and substandard pay affected nearly everyone — men, women, and children. Unions were the vehicles of change for the majority.

But today, for the average male 25-year old engineer, promoting diversity and inclusion or speaking out about improper treatment of offshore employees is unlikely to affect his pay, desirability in the job market, or working conditions. He will still enjoy the privileges of being fawned over as a scarce resource in a competitive job market. But the person delivering the on-demand service he’s building won’t. His female coworker with an oppressive boss won’t. This is why it is ever more important that we wake up and not only become allies or partners, but champions of the causes that affect our less-privileged fellow coworkers, and the people that our companies and products touch.

So this Labor Day, enjoy your beer and hot dog, but take a moment to remember the individuals who fought and bled on this day to bring about a better workplace for all. And on Tuesday, be ready to challenge your coworkers on how we can continue that fight to build more diverse, inclusive, and ethically responsible companies for the future. 

We haven’t seen reports of widespread problems with the iPhone 8, but Apple revealed late Friday that it’s opening a Logic Board Replacement Program. According to the company “a very small percentage” of phones sold between September 2017 and March 2018 — the first six months they were on sale — have a manufacturing defect that can lead to restarts, freezes or a failure to start. Of course, when you sell as many phones as Apple does, even a small percentage can add up very quickly, as we’ve seen with previous iPhone flaws like the “no service” iPhone 7 bug or iPhone 6 Plus “touch disease.”

This does not apply to the iPhone 8 Plus or any other model, and owners of devices purchased during that period can hit Apple’s website to check if their device is impacted — if it is, then Apple will replace the phone for free (FYI: physical damage like a cracked screen will need to be fixed first, and that could cost you). If you’d rather wait, then the replacement program will be in force for three years from the first retail sale of a device, and does not extend its warranty.

In India, at 3:30 PM, all the eyes in the country currently watch the thrilling fourth test match between India and England at Rose Bowl, Southampton.

During England’s first innings, Captain Kohli grabbed the catch of opener Elster Cook on the ball of Hardik Pandya, and then caught England’s wicket-keeper Jos Buttler with a double century (200 catches) in international cricket after catching Mohammad Shami’s ball.

Image Source

The 29-year-old Kohli has taken 101 catches in 211 one-day internationals, 32 catches in 62 T20 Internationals and 67 catches in 69 Tests.

Yesterday, Pujara’s footwork against spin, always a feature of his game in home conditions, came to the fore in the first innings of an overseas Test, and it helped India. As he settled down, the batsman looked comfortable against the pacers and ensured there was no hiccup from at least one end.

In what turned out to be another eventful day of Test cricket, India slumped from 161 for four to 195 for eight in the final session of play, with veteran off-spinner Moeen Ali doing the bulk of the damage.

Image Source

Kohli and Pujara added 92 runs for the third wicket after Shikhar Dhawan (23) and Lokesh Rahul (19) were dismissed cheaply by Stuart Broad (2/50).

Kohli’s 71-ball knock had six boundaries. India currently lead with 27 runs.

In the five test series between India and England, India is trailing 1-2 to England and so Kohli’s team is determined to win the current test match. England won the first two test and India won the recent test 3 with a good margin. England was completely stunned in the first innings of test 4 and India has now scored 273 runs yesterday.

Image Source

The next test details are as follows:

5th Test: September 7
Venue: The Oval, London

Stay tuned to Laughing Colours for the latest sports news and updates.

Published by Bhaumik Raja on 01 Sep 2018