What do decades-old Chinese computing inputs have to do with today’s biggest tech companies and generative AI? IT Brew recently caught up with Tom Mullaney, a sinologist, Stanford University professor of Chinese history, and author of The Chinese Computer, an upcoming book he spent 16 years working on. In the book, he outlines the many methods used to produce Chinese characters. The first and most basic component of Chinese computing—when it comes to these inputs and outputs—is that users “operate entirely in code all the time.”

To type out the phrase, “We like computers,” using the Sogou Pinyin method, for example, someone would use a standard QWERTY keyboard and use the input method editor to select the corresponding characters they wanted. So, “wm,” “xh,” and “dn” become the fully translated Simplified Chinese phrase: “我们喜欢电脑” after selection. In this way, people using inputs in Chinese think in code while typing out their sentences—as opposed to spelling something letter by letter with the Latin alphabet.

“From a practical standpoint, if it weren’t for all of the engineers and linguists I talked about in the book, basically modding and hacking and [creating] workarounds and bootstrapping, computing—there would be no Chinese computing market. Like, Microsoft and Apple would never have set a toe in the Chinese computing environment,” he told IT Brew.

Read more here.—AF

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The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has finished its review and is now taking concrete steps to migrate around 30,000 employees from Windows to Linux, Ars Technica reported. That means workers will use open-source software including LibreOffice, Nextcloud, Open X-Change, and Mozilla Thunderbird instead of Microsoft equivalents like Word and Exchange/Outlook.

Schleswig-Holstein will also develop an open-source alternative to Microsoft Active Directory, as well as its own telephone services, according to Ars Technica.

Justifications for the switch include older devices—a former minister told a German-language IT news portal in 2021 some of their computers couldn’t handle new Windows 11 hardware requirements—as well as cost, security, and freedom from international cloud services.

In an announcement in German, Schleswig-Holstein Digitalization Minister Dirk Schrödter touted investment in “real programming services from our domestic digital economy” rather than software licensing. He also wrote the move away from proprietary software would strengthen the state’s push for digital sovereignty and positions it to seek alternatives when building future administrative apps and services.

Read more here.—TM

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected]. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.

In the AI age, IT pros have a familiar question to consider: On-prem or not on-prem?

According to a recent panel discussion at Bloomberg Headquarters, IT practitioners must take inventory of a company’s AI efforts and weigh the benefits of hosting the services on location or off in the cloud.

“The thing you should be asking yourself on a technical level is at what point is the majority of the IT capacity of your enterprise in service of AI-driven technology versus traditional workloads? And if the answer is greater than 50%, you need to rethink your entire IT architecture and start building to optimize for AI first,” John Roese, global chief technology officer, Dell Technologies, told a crowd during Bloomberg Intelligence’s April 4 event, Generative AI: Next steps and evolution.

The evolution: Generative AI is poised to produce $1.3 trillion in revenue, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, and generative AI “is poised to expand its impact from less than 1% of total IT hardware, software services, ad spending, and gaming market spending to 10% by 2032.”

Early, controversial uses of the tech already include generating summaries, code, personalized recommendations, art, and language translation.

Keep reading here.—BH

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