* Posts by TM™

58 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2021

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Fine print in Intel's CHIPS Act deal includes requirement to keep control of its foundries

TM™

The US Government May Have Just Saved Intel

With one tiny rule the US government may have just saved Intel and it's CEO Gelsinger. I bet he's absolutely over the moon at the 'imposition' (not to mention the free money).

Intel went off the rails because of classic American MBA greedy accounting and mangement. Gelsinger was trying to turn it back into an innovator but the bean counters and investors forced him to double down on the old policies that was destroying Intel, not least off loading its manufacturing. With this rule Gelsinger now has an excuse to turn Intel back into an engineering company. Without it AMD and NVidia were going to eat Intel's lunch and pop the bag (yes I know they're fabless, but Intel needs to be innovative not follow).

Valve powers up Arch Linux – because who needs Windows when you have a Steam Deck?

TM™

I Just Wish Winning Felt Better

It's an interesting point. People do often paint Linux as a server success only, but if you include Chromebooks and Phones it's kicking ass. I just wish I had the level of control over my phone and Chromebook that I have over my Linux desktop computer. The former are merely consumer devices but the latter is a productivity device. I wish I could be productive on all of them.

NASA, IBM just open sourced an AI climate model so you can fine-tune your own

TM™
Big Brother

The Scientific Method

Climate science:

Start with 1,000 versions of a climate model with different parameters.

Check them against previous data and throw away the 750 versions that don't match.

Run for a year. Throw away the 200 versions that don't match the new year's data.

Run for another year and throw away the 40 versions that don't match that data.

Use the remaining 10 versions to make public policy, take money from those who work for a living (but not those that don't) and restrict people's rights and freedoms.

Paint anyone that disagrees with said policies or science as someone equivalent to those who would cover up the state sponsored murder of millions of people within living memory.

N.B. This science can also be applied to the horse racing and the stock market.

AI has colonized our world – so it's time to learn the language of our new overlords

TM™

Those That Fail To Learn From The Future are Destined To Repeat It

Warning from Andrew Glassner about this sort of thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kOBdxyj580

Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

TM™

Underinflated

Would the measure of inflation 'calculated' in each country by the largest employer and largest debtor in the country using a formula signed off by real asset holding politicians?

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

TM™

Magic TImes

I had a ZX81, Spectrum +, +2 and +3. Probably the cheapest professional education any parent could buy (I work in the IT industry despite my degree in Physics).

I use to argue that my specy was better than my friends' commodore 64s. I was so wrong. But, it was cheap.

I went over to the dark side for my Amiga which is still far and away the fastest, most amazing computer I've ever owned. Everything since then has been a bit meh.

Study backer: Catastrophic takes on Agile overemphasize new features

TM™

Re: Agile would be great if not for all the people

...which is the opposite of agile, but unfortunately what most people believe agile is. It gives agile a bad name and leads to articles like this.

TM™
Facepalm

You Keep Using That Word

Yes, feature factories are usually a disaster, but this reads like another straw man, anti agile argument by people who don't know what being agile is.

Agile is just inspect and adapt. It works because software development is primarily about gaining knowledge rather than defining everything up front (at the point of least understanding). It doesn't stop you from writing reliable, secure code - just the opposite.

And on the subject of 'comprehensive documentation'. That is in the manifesto because software code IS documentation. Unlike stuff written in confluence by people spread all over the world in their second or third language, code is an unambiguous description of what the computer should do. If you employ the right people it's also human readable.

Nvidia's subscription software empire is taking shape

TM™

CUDA, that four letter word that means I have to buy an NVidia graphics card for my development work and pretty much pay whatever they are asking. If I was the competition I would be pouring money into coming up with something free, open and good that sets customers free from this particular monopoly.

If it wasn't for CUDA I'd buy an AMD card, even though they're not as good they're prices don't take the micky.

Europe's largest council could face £12M manual audit bill after Oracle project disaster

TM™

The problem is that replacing these large legacy projects is only successful if you take the smallest possible bit, migrate it, test it, fix it and watch it, then take the next smallest possible bit and so on. This approach simply doesn't fit into the 'give us a fixed, massive upfront cost and fixed scope quote' bucket that manglement wants.

TM™

Re: Hmm.

Yes and don't call my Shirley.

Sam Altman's basic income experiment finds that money can indeed buy happiness

TM™

I 'invented' UBI back in the 90s and use to talk to people about it. They politely listened but I think it was generally seen as extremely 'left field'. I let it slide, thinking it would never catch on. I've been amazed to see it now become a mainstream consideration. At the time I thought it was a great idea, but now I have some doubts:

1. If those in charge didn't deliberately create and hide (through deliberately massaging the figures) massive inflation while clamping down on real wage growth we would need UBI far less. I reckon real inflation has generally been roughly 10%pa since the 70s and more like 20%pa recently - that has destroyed real wages while the assets of the rich have just adjusted for the currency devaluation. If Sam Altman wants to do an experiment I challenge him to pay all his employees in the equivalent value of gold (a la pre dropping of the gold standard and the introduction of deliberate wage devaluation). That wouldn't be charity it would just be acting fairly.

2. There is a massive risk that governments will use UBI as leverage over the populace - it would have to be impossible to loose it. I can't imagine any government being that self controlled.

Porting the Windows 95 Start Menu to NT

TM™
FAIL

Productivity to Consumerism

Computers have change from being productivity devices to consumer devices.

My Psion 5 was much better at being productive than my new Samsung Mobile.

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

TM™
Facepalm

You Keep Using That Word

Most of the places I've worked at over the last three decades claimed to be agile - only one of them came close. The one where I was CTO and introduced agile. We increased user count by two orders of magnitude, going from tens of thousands of regular users to millions.

Agile is almost certainly the antithesis of what you have experienced at an 'agile' company. I encourage people to read the manifesto and listen to people who actually know what it is like Alen Holub, MArtin Fowler and Ron Jeffries.

Agile is a mindset, it is not a process, tool or framework you do.

TLDR: Would you rather work at a company that 'does' kindness or is kind?

US mayors urge Congress to ditch red-tape-slaying broadband expansion bill

TM™

IIRC a law was passed (locally somewhere in the US?) to prevent local community run cooperatives from installing their own internet infrastructure or getting government funding to do so. Those damn socialist commy bastards.

While nowhere near free, installing fibre is not crazy expensive once you have the initial investment (fuser, micro trencher etc) - which is small once divided by 100+ homes. Multi cable single mode can be laid for approx $1k per km. The problem is bureaucracy, port barrels, and getting people like bridge companies, telegraph pole owners, not to take the piss when charging 'rental'. Ask me how I know.

Like most problems us riff raff have to put up with (e.g. expensive houses) the first step is to just stop those with the power from deliberately make things worse - the whole 'if only we could fix this' narrative is total BS.

Fragile Agile development model is a symptom, not a source, of project failure

TM™

Re: A view from an

What if he was wrong? Here's some differences I can think of:

Software is elastic - through the wonder of digital copies it costs nearly the same to build (as in compile etc) a billion as one.

Software can be delivered immediately, anywhere in the world (with internet) at any time.

Software is easy(ish) to revise (even completely) after it has been delivered - compare that to a bridge or skyscraper.

In software the challenge is designing the first one, in traditional engineering much of the challenge is building the design.

In traditional engineering designs are typically very conservative and the costs of mistakes is high. In software you can experiment for little cost.

And so on.

TM™

Straw Man Argument

I've worked at lots of places that claim to be agile, all but one of them (where I was CTO) had nothing to do with agile.

I've skim read the objections in the comments and they don't represent the values and principles in the agile manifesto.

I really do wish people would read it.

https://agilemanifesto.org/

In my experience agile is far and away the best way to create software.

Here is a good talk from Allen Holub on the sort of 'agile' described by the complaints in the comments above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZyRQ8Uhhmk

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

TM™

Re: There's no fun in scrum

That might be scrum, but it certainly isn't real agile (flexible, responsive, nimble, quick).

TM™

Re: You Keep Using That Word

I've worked (not if worked).

See agile ;->

TM™

You Keep Using That Word

If worked on many Agile projects and none of them were agile - bar one. The one where I was CTO and we were agile. We increased user count by two orders of magnitude and transformed the company into a massive success.

Agile is not a methodology or a process or a practice. It is something you are (based on the dictionary definition of agile). It is based on understanding that software creation is not a repeatable manufacturing process but a R&D process where you are gaining knowledge. The manifesto and its principles merely highlights some of the things that flow out of pragmatically accepting these facts.

Agile is far and away the best approach I've seen to creating software. Please don't confuse your experience of the Agile Industrial Complex, with real agile. Scrum, SAFe etc is not agile.

See https://martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html for a primer (ignore the stuff at the end on the implementations nobody uses any more, it's a very old document).

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

TM™

Here's hoping it comes to light that Cook personally signed off on the campaign himself and they get someone better in instead.

US semiconductor building boom means staff shortages and talent slipping away

TM™

I'm afraid McKinsey lost what little credibility they had in their infamous measuring developer output report. Them complaining about a situation that they and their ilk are directly responsible for doesn't help either.

We've been in race to the bottom for the last fifty years. We've even avoided the effort of walking down the stairs by jumping out of the window. Here comes the ground.

Open Source world's Bruce Perens emits draft Post-Open Zero Cost License

TM™

Seems Overly Complex to Me

Seems overly complex to me, but like most of the other posters I agree something needs to happen. I am loathed to do anything to OSS licenses that make them less attractive. The musician analogy/comparison doesn't bode well - musicians really don't so well out of similarish systems. Good to see someone try though. I wish you all the luck. Some thoughts:

1. Someone needs to take IBM to court or close the loophole. To me their restriction is just that and thus illegal, but let's fix it one way or another.

2. Using the code as SaaS just needs to be counted as distribution and customers given the same rights to have the source code as that used on the server. A tweak to the GPL?

3. My guess is hyperscalers et al. would be happyish to throw key OSS developers some crumbs (upto N x $100k pa) for better code if there was a single central organisation that made it really, really easy to do so - i.e. removed any hint of employment liability, and dealt with (self)employed tax and sales tax around the world. The organisation would have to do some due diligence to make sure the right people (and not just the noisy ones) got rewarded. Perhaps throw in some sort of enterprisey like support thing to make the C level suite happy. This would be voluntary, but maybe my opinion of the hyperscalers et al isn't low enough!? They might just do nothing. Perhaps have a public record of who the good and bad guys are?

City council audit trail is an audit fail after disastrous Oracle ERP rollout

TM™
FAIL

The Bureaucrat's Paradox

Ironically, these expensive, late delivered, 'm'uck ups are usually caused by a culture of extreme risk avoidance, time estimate fixation and penny pinching.

AI PCs are here but a killer application for biz users? Nope

TM™

AI PC? I assume that means it has a very powerful and well priced GPU for doing exciting ML work and running 3D games at very high quality?

What's that you say? You don't make one of those?

Pass.

Fancy building a replacement for Post Office's disastrous Horizon system?

TM™

Face Palm

"Whilst Post Office is responsible for overall programme management, strategy and architecture it has a requirement to engage with third parties to help create the necessary solution," the notice said.

Which is why it will fail, because software creation is in large part: programme management, strategy and architecture. Only someone who mistakes a knowledge gaining exercise like software creation for manufacturing would think of using nineteenth century Taylorism to manage it, i.e. "We've come up with the plan, we just need someone to bolt it all together".

New flash: No software plan survives contact with the enemy. Software programming is not the twenty first century equivalent of brick laying.

Obviously no lessons have been learnt.

AI will reduce workforce, say 41% of surveyed executives

TM™

Human society has been dumbed down to the point where a mathematical algorithm can now take over. Principally, this has been done by making everything about a single short term number, i.e. cost. For example:

- If I sack my most experienced (AKA expensive) engineers will the share price go up?

- If we keep printing money will our exports get cheaper, our welfare liabilities go down, our civil service costs go down?

- If we focus on delivering on time and on budget (regardless of quality or value) will I get a raise?

- If we internationalise trade will labour costs be driven down?

For the last fifty years we've been in a race to the bottom. Now we've automated it.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

TM™

Nobody understands software creation - it's always managed with the wrong paradigm - Taylorism - a more than hundred year old discipline for running manufacturing projects.

Software creation is a knowledge gaining exercise - if you manage it like a factory, it's doomed to fail.

Uncle Sam wants to make it clear that America's elections are very, very safe

TM™

TLDR: Government with long and documented history of interfering in the internal politics of other countries and lying to own citizens assures own citizens that election will be fair and fraud free.

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

TM™

I took the vaccine because I trusted the virus 0% and the powers that be 1%

From what I've learnt in the intervening two years, that 1% may have been misplaced.

P.s. I am a scientist.

NASA celebrates 40 years of Discovery, the longest-serving Space Shuttle

TM™

It stopped the spread of democracy and self determination throughout central Asia. I guess those in charge considered the escalation a price worth paying.

As it prepares to abandon its on-prem server products, Atlassian is content. Users? Not so much

TM™

Oh no! How will we micro manage our developers and use measurement dysfunction now?

I guess we could always try some of that agile stuff we keep hearing about.

LinkedIn lays off nearly 700 staff, engineers to suffer the most

TM™
Devil

Big tech is a monopsony and appear to be working in concert.

The west's race to the bottom on education has produced a massive shortage of skilled people - especially in IT.

With this massive upward pressure on wages how else is big tech going to reduce the cost of employing minions?

Treat em mean keep em keen.

Meta can call Llama 2 open source as much as it likes, but that doesn't mean it is

TM™

Closed is the new Open. Expensive is the new Free.

Maybe they are using RedHat's definition.

Rocket Lab wants to dry off and reuse Electron booster recovered from the ocean

TM™

I wonder what the maths of a single orbit ballistic trajectory looks like. One where you almost make it into orbit but (mostly) glide back down to the takeoff point.

P.S. See Dawn Aerospace for a space glider project (also New Zealand).

Oracle pours fuel all over Red Hat source code drama

TM™

I must say I feel confused.

My understanding is the GPL gives recipients the right to redistribute the source code WITHOUT RESTRICTION. Red Hat threatening to take away a customers' licenses and support is an extremely large restriction. The fact that Red Hat claims they have a right to do that is irrelevant - it doesn't prevent it from being a restriction.

No open door for India's tech workers in any UK trade deal

TM™

There is no way the UK government doesn't want lots of cheap IT labour flooding the market and driving down wages. Especially a Tory government. This is an announcement designed to mollify the electorate, nothing more.

China chokes exports of semiconductor secret sauces gallium and germanium

TM™

Re: Middle Kingdom

I believe they call that the U S of A.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

TM™

Free as in fear

You're free to complain about the mold, leaky roof and rats in the kitchen, but if you do we won't renew your contract.

I for one will not be recommending any company I work with gets into bed with RedHat or IBM - quite the opposite.

The question is: Who can be trusted? I know we're all running to Ubuntu, but I'm left wondering if they're not able to pull the same stunt. Debian? Arch Linux? RedHat's approach had undermined the whole trust model open software is built on. I think someone needs to tweak the GPL to rebuild that trust.

Community to RedHat: "We've revoked your right to use our software on the grounds that we believe (rightly or wrongly) that you add no value to our businesses"

TM™

You Keep Using That Word But I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means

You're free to vote for any person you like, but if you vote for someone else we'll burn your house to the ground.

Meta cranks Zuckerberg's personal security budget to $14m while cutting everything else

TM™

All the layoffs are an attempt to push back on rising wage costs produced by a lack of skilled people. A lack created by the slashing of western education budgets at the behest of the rich and powerful, because money wasted on educating people should be spent on making rich people richer.

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

TM™

All apple devices will move to wireless charging. The wireless charging pads will be propriety (i.e. expensive) Apple technology and powered via a propriety Apple cable and PSU.

Biden wants SpaceX to beam internet to Iran amid uprising

TM™
Big Brother

Freeeeeedorm

With American help, Iranians will soon be as free as the rest of us.

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

TM™

Perfect example of making important what you can measure (cost of N programmers) vs measuring what is important (quality of output).

Anyone who actually understands programming knows that objectively measuring programming 'output' is pretty much impossible (https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html). That's what a manager who is technically competent is for - they will get an understanding over time of how their team (subjectively) performs.

FWIW my experience of outsourcing is that it is always a disaster. Funny how we never outsource senior management jobs...

'IBM is now a very different company' says CEO as Q1 2022 beats expectations

TM™

I'm not sure that without a cash cow monopoly (Office - MS, DB - Oracle, Ink - HP, Advertising - Google) these companies can make money. The need to quickly produce returns to shareholders severely limits big company's abilities to do things well, let alone innovate, or, worse still, turn things around. These companies are forced to make 'making money' the goal, but the paradox is the pursuit of money (as opposed to excellence, customer satisfaction, employee retention, etc) is not profitable. All that is left is stupid things like cutting expenses - e.g. sacking all your skilled staff, to make things look profitable while making one's executive bonus.

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

TM™

Eutelsat appears to be geo-stationary which means that a round trip takes almost a second, i.e. 750ms latency. That is more than an order of magnitude worse than the latency in Starlink and means the Eutelsat is useless for online meetings, gaming, or telecommuting VDI work. Apart from that it's totally 21st century. It's lucky people who live in rural areas never need or want any of these things.

It constantly amazes me that those in government that are responsible for regulating this stuff need this stuff explaining to them.

US, UK, Western Europe fail to hit top 50 cheapest broadband list

TM™

Something to bear in mind when we here another one of those bullshit arguments for the efficiency of capitalism and the free market economy*. If you can't provide your service cheaper (or even come close) to that in a war torn country than me thinks there are a lot of fingers in the pie.

The cost of living argument is fairly moot when you consider that all the equipment will be coming from overseas (bought with that massively devalued currency these countries have) along with most of the expertise required to install and run it.

* If only, most western broadband infrastructure is run by private monopolies that spend lots of money lobbying to keep things that way.

But hey maybe I'm wrong, those photons and electrons don't pay for themselves. I also hear they are incredible heavy and difficult to move around.

Intel debuts Arc discrete GPUs for laptops

TM™

Seems weird that when AMD and games games consoles have demonstrated that APUs are able to produce (consumer) state of that art 3D graphics that Intel would go in the opposite direction. If anything needs the space, power and heat saving features of an APU it's a laptop. The only reason I look for a laptop with discrete graphics is because I need to program in NVidia's propriety CUDA platform. Then I look for the lowest power dGPU variant. I'd much rather be carrying around a Thinkpad X1 carbon than a Thinkpad X1 Extreme (not that I can afford either).

Yes, I know everyone is different, just talking about the average laptop usecase - a computer you carry around everywhere with you and use away from a power source. Not talking about lug-able workstations.

Mozilla creates paid-for subscriptions for web doc library

TM™

I feel for Mozilla. Their contribution to IT is massive, but they're in a really tough position to monetise it. The big players with the money naturally prefer people to use their own browsers that best protect their income streams and give their browsers away for free (at the point of use) so there is no incentive for people to pay Mozilla for the same thing.

The fact is Mozilla, amongst others, is saving us from a bleak future where browsing is controlled by big corporations, but that future would take years to materialize if Mozilla were to disappear today. By then it would probably be too late to resurrect a free browser because said corporations would have tweaked the standards to require something akin to secure boot that requires a large, 'trusted', corporate entity to work (for our own safety you understand).

It's a long stretch but I guess the guaranteed privacy route is the only way to go, but then you have to restrict functionality in a browser that was once totally open source. Tough one.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

TM™

Sinclair ZX Spectrum (Plus): First PC that really did stuff (I had a ZX81 but that was all about getting the keyboard to register key presses).

Commodore Amiga: Biggest wow moment I've ever experienced in a computer (and I've worked in VFX). Never to be surpassed experience of leap in computing power. I guess the matrix might do it, but I'm probably already in that (things are crazy enough).

PlayStation 3: Another quantum leap in performance per price. Massive respect for CELL.

Everything else has been more of the same.

The Apple studio is impressive, but the price! Can't help but wonder if there is a missed opportunity for a top notch living room entertainment / games console at competition beating price here. I'm guessing they can church out a 32GB, 1TB Ultra pretty cheaply. If they came in at 60% of a PS5 / XBOX it would be really disruptive.

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