Posts by Wu Ming

Write-back to aging UK health systems lessens benefits of Palantir-based platform

Next at CERN

Guess what will happen next at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), itself a FOSS champion, under the purview of newly appointed CIO Enrica Porcari and Director-General designate, and chair of UKRI STFC, Mark Thomson?

CERN leaving Microsoft for FOSS in 2019: https://home.cern/news/news/computing/migrating-open-source-technologies

UN World Food Program partnership with Palantir under CIO Ms Porcari in 2019: https://www.wfp.org/news/palantir-and-wfp-partner-help-transform-global-humanitarian-delivery

CERN reverting to Microsoft under newly appointed Ms Porcari in 2021: https://home.cern/news/news/computing/three-year-malt-project-comes-close

Microsoft and Palantir partnership in 2024: https://news.microsoft.com/source/2024/08/08/palantir-and-microsoft-partner-to-deliver-enhanced-analytics-and-ai-services-to-classified-networks-for-critical-national-security-operations/

Ms Porcari appointed CIO at CERN beginning 2026: https://home.cern/news/opinion/cern/cern-management-structure-2026-2030-part-2

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

Munich, CERN

Could they learn from who tried before. There’s nothing difficult per se. Any technical requirement is met by FOSS already. Real problem is overcoming M$ public relations via politics. And the GM’s secretary.

EU gives staff 'burner phones, laptops' for US visits

Burner laptops and smartphones running on Microsoft and Google services?

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

Had it been called

Apple Model or Apple Learning expectations would have been tamed. Spinning it endlessly to mean regular / future / baby improvements would have been possible. Jumping on the AI bandwagon instead exposed them immediately to embarrassing convolutions trying to explain that Apple Intelligence can not be, in fact, intelligent. With more to come. Also let’s remember here the additional RAM, drawing power, just to run this thing.

Who had Pat Gelsinger retires from Intel on their bingo card?

Assuming unlimited funding by US govt

Was wondering if process node leadership can be bought back.

Latest ASML machine costs $450 Mil a piece. A18 faces astonishingly complicated innovations to work.

Troubles begun with 14nm well over a decade ago. Otellini’s purview.

Then they lost the smartphone market explosion.

Never a serious contender in the GPU market, they also lost the most recent NPU market explosion.

They are allegedly working with AMD to streamline AMD64. But with the proliferation of co-processors I am not sure it matters anymore.

Apple demonstrated ARM is viable for mass market general-purpose computing. Watch to desktop workstation. Designing it’s own SoCs, partnering with TSMC and many others in Asia for production demonstrated incredible efficiency. Both in products and financials.

Nvidia, Amazon followed suit.

I would say the fabless model has won. What can the US government do to extricate Intel, ailing vertically integrated silicon designer and producer, from Intel Foundry? The asset they want to retain control of and also to thrive.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Billions for hydrogen powered cars

And the UK Govt or some other European fund could not scrap few tens of mil for keeping afloat this groundbreaking technology research team? Which has already put ultra efficient heat exchangers into applications. Absurd.

Some US dept has decided already technology is strategic for military applications I am sure. And some US fund will gobble it up for cheap. But so should have had the consortium involved in the Tempest program.

Scientists demand FCC test environmental impacts of satellites

That the USA is one hideous and dangerous oligarchy should now be obvious even to the less informed. The real problem is the sheer amount of power needed to bing such gigantic level of carelessness to terms that we all share the same environment.

Capita wins £135M extension on much-delayed UK smart meter rollout

Re: Retrofit 4G?

Delay is because is no pressing matter then?

I briefly checked online and first result has pictures. Few cables, fixation on brackets, activation and registration perhaps are the steps required. Let’s assume half an hour each and eight in a day allowing for logistics. It would require 26 thousand installers to complete 51 million meters (if beginning from scratch) in one year. Or a little over 3 thousand for eight years at a rate of over six million meters a year. Seems doable. At 40 thousand pounds each we have 125 million for one year only. 135 seem indicating only few million meters are left untouched. Bill of materials should be few pounds each.

Retrofit 4G?

Assuming existing meters are still perfectly suited at measuring power, not exactly a novel application of technology, I wonder why retrofitting 4G is not possible. Possibly faster and, let me dare to write it, cheaper.

Also why not to considering the switch to powerline networking. Is not as ENEL and other utilities have not proven it viable across the world already.

Intel frees its Foundry biz – and that's just one of many major shake-ups today

From a consumer point of view

I feel to massively underestimate the capabilities of a corporation with revenues in the tens of billions. Even allowing for inefficiencies inherent in any org, I read comments assuming they did not do their job by skipping strategic analysis of costs and market trends. They did not.

In my layman’s mind Intel troubles can be traced back to the 14nm process. Continuous delays were never recovered in follow up nodes. What caused those delays is anyone’s guess. Astonishingly complicated process steep of trade secrets.

AMD piggyback on Apple’s economies of scale achieved with TSMC fab of leading edge mobile SoCs, and the intro of a competitive design, came along with Apple’s decision to abandon ship, and at the same time find a competitive position independent of nVidia accelerators, and AWS long term plan of promoting it’s own design, coming back now as a fab only customer, were in the nature of things.

Something I would like to read more about is the environmental cost of newer nodes to power smartphones. And then the rest.

My two cents.

Hailo's latest AI chip shows up integrated NPUs and sips power like fine wine

A

> there aren't many CPUs with integrated neural processing units (NPUs), unless you're looking at the latest laptop CPUs from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, or for desktop, the Ryzen 8000 series.

Are you not forgetting here the elephant in the room for integrated ML capabilities? Delivering hundreds of millions of integrated NEs. In 2017. In a smartphone. And never stopped since then with more smartphones, laptops, desktops and workstations in well over a billion units. You know, just to not skew readers view.

Greener, cheaper, what's not to love about a secondhand smartphone?

With iPhone 7 here

Received it second hand from my wife four years ago in pristine conditions. Many early adopters are simply corporate employees who will never see a phone bill.

Replaced the battery twice at Apple. Replaced the display at Apple. It works very well so, even if I was tempted to buy a newer model, gave it few more years of useful life.

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

Tried LLM yesterday for the first time

It was ridiculous. Public website found somewhere. Three questions. First two fairly open ended and without depth. Answers were entertaining. Not much space for failure there. Last one was a technical question. Answer was completely meaningless. Took first part of my prompt as a title of sort and generated some unrelated procedure about the rest.

ML has not being instructed to tell: “I don’t know this subject.”. I doubt it will ever learn to do so. It takes intelligence.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: Powerline?

In markets around the world Enel installed tens of millions of smart meters based on the power-line comm technology. With wireless backup on dedicated low frequency channel. Smart meters don’t need and don’t want a broadband connection.

Powerline?

I don’t understand. I thought smart meters were all using powerline technology to transmit the little data they need to. Concentrators then transmit the bulk onwards on the backbone network. Why they use 2G and 3G instead?

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

But then the chatter will move to the “best” cable. Cat 5 is marketed for the poor now, cat 6 being the “smart” choice and cat 7 “future proof”. I came to realize salespeople recognized long ago how to play ego and ignorance effectively. Unfortunately we can not afford gross negligence in recognizing the environmental disaster we are in anymore.

WiFi 4 for all

Deferrable data transfer? It is being deferred. Non deferrable, near real time transfer? It is optimized for WiFi g.

Promoting network equipment for speed only few need is promoting waste and pollution. We can not afford them anymore.

One data point: we have two of almost everything. iPhone s, iPad s, laptops. Plus environmental monitor. WiFi 4, 1x1 with 60 Mbps Tx serving everything, including work from home, is perfectly sufficient. Because everything was optimized long ago.

Why Chromebooks are the new immortals of tech

Opinionated article

It is fitting The Reg decided for labeling the article as the author’s opinion. The old trick of stirring up interest and responses by opposing truth never dies. I am no publishing expert so wondering who’s ultimately responsible for an Opinion article. Is the editor completely off the hook?

Anyway, Windows support is almost forever but don’t count on optimizations. macOS is not completely for the masses so don’t expect any love from mainstream marketing. And Chrome, well G is not really in the business of selling hardware is it?

Not call: Open source gurus urge you to dump Zoom

Re: Use Jitsi

8x8 the new owner has HQ in California and is registered in Delaware. It may be financially very efficient but a lawless, privacy wise, country as the United States doesn’t give me any confidence about being better. In that regard.

Europe sets out to squeeze every last drop of power from supercomputers

5mil

Covers the amount of paper bureaucrats use for printing emails. On the other hand ECMWF uses a DSL already for decoupling logic from HPC implementation. The article doesn’t add much to that.

Balloon-borne telescope returns first photos in search for dark matter

Re: resolutions as high as the Hubble Space Telescope

For who is curious as I was: https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/79949

Re: Stabiliser?

At 28 km (70 hPa) winds are not absent as I thought. But they do appear more predictable:

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/70hPa/orthographic=-51.73,22.76,169

How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores

My interpretation instead is Apple don't wanted a superior performing port available in everyone's hardware. Also because catering everyone means slicing it into so many sub-sets of cheaper specs down to ridiculousness. Aka "USB-C ports that are USB4 Version 2.0, USB4 Version 1.0, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, USB 3.2 Gen 2, USB 3.2 Gen 1, or USB 2.0, plus some will opt for Intel Thunderbolt certification". Lightning is Lightning. Fireware was Fireware.

Most Londoners would quit before they give up working from home

Wife at home

My wife began WFH with Covid and never went back. Three hours a day for commuting removed. Plus make-up, dress-up, high heels and sharing a cramped office. Yesterday she was complaining had to make-up and customer did not switch the camera on. Reminded her the relative cost of stepping in to the next room, prepping for a minute and back. I guess habits are easy to acquire and then you are looking forward to the next improvement.

Myself could not do it. I deeply dislike working from home. If had to commute for more than an hour would consider options though.

US Air Force signs $344m deal for hypersonic Mayhem aircraft

Re: SABRE?

Their super fast air cooling technology is being commercially explored already. So the company is alive and iterating on the core concept. I haven’t found much news about the engine test campaign though. Given the history founders had with the UK military I was surprised they accepted any further involvement with that potential line of application. But also for such an applied technology breakthrough public funding appears inexplicably scarce. More as example goes for countless EU Horizon projects, not exactly famous for obtaining useable results, and this well before UK left the union. So there may be more progress than publicly available.

SABRE?

Wondering if the air breathing engine has anything related with Reaction Engines and the SABRE concept. And how their test campaign in the US is progressing.

Europe's USB-C deadline: Lightning must be struck from iPhone by December, 2024

Re: Lowest common denominator

Netiquette (still a know term?) advises not to use capital letters. I will stick to it.

Agreed. The problem is, as you put it, people. People buying bottles of air from Canada. People buying drugs from online forums. People buying SUVs. I am wandering off.

The point is regulation exists because tax money allow politicians to confront industry representatives and allocate resources for enforcement. It would be much more effective for the protection of the environment to enforce longer lasting smartphones with non bundled, modular chargers. Instead of forcing a connector choice. Good quality cables are a non issue.

Effective for the environment doesn’t mean also for the people mentioned above. I give for granted they won’t understand.

Lowest common denominator

Smartphones themselves are by far the largest source of waste and pollution. Highly complex components as SoC, battery, screen, baseband processor, cameras, a multitude of sensors and the rest are being manufactured, assembled together, used for few years and then discarded. It’s reasonable to expect useful life extension to be the highest priority for reduction of waste. Mandate at least five years of OS updates and spare parts for at least seven years. Reverse the endless Android fragmentation. At the very least push Android makers to align with Apple.

Far second in line chargers. Modular design with replaceable cable and socket connector extend useful life. It’s reasonable again to expect a push for Android vendors to at least align with Apple.

Last tiny cables. With modular chargers is the part you may need to replace anyway every five to seven years. No matter which connector is used.

Did EU officials pursue what is sensible? Longer lasting smartphones firmly first. Modular chargers second. No. The narrative instead being Google won. Who knows why.

BOFH: Come back to the office. Your hotdesk is nice and warm

Re: True story...

What a laugh. Thanks.

TSMC triples spending on Arizona advanced chip site with extra 3nm fab

Mature nodes cover 75% of demand

24 mn wafers per year output from TW include about 18 mn made of mature nodes. 600k becomes a well rounded 10% of wafers output made of advanced nodes.

Boeing swipes at Starlink as it finishes two internet slinging satellites

Re: Latency

This is interesting. To add some data points Ookla estimates in the US Starlink’s “Median latency rose from 40 ms to 67 ms” in one year. In Canada “latency was 77 ms” in the previous quarter. It appears about 95% of latency is not attributable to rf propagation in to vacuum.