Posts by systemBuilder22

Did IBM make a $6.4B blunder by buying HashiCorp?

Re: It's only $6 billion

Do not assume that IBM's motives are always evil. They probably are highly dependent on Hashicorp which is #1 in the USA; It's a key component of the Linux open source and cloud community, and remember that IBM runs a cloud that is trying to catch up "To the big 3". And they see that HashiCorp is being managed just terribly, horribly, the company is floundering, the CEO is a lunk who is pissing off all the customers, and HashCorp's cloud offerings are being abandoned in droves, and this company that IBM depends upon is endangered. If the price goes low enough they might buy it just to fix the shitstorm that HashiCorp created, all by themselves. They might buy it just so nobody else buys it to shut it down (Broadcom) or twist it to fit their own needs (Broadcom).

Re: It's only $6 billion

System/360 operating system has been a gold mine for IBM since the mistake was released in the mid 1960s. They recognize that whomever controls the operating system that runs the world, controls the world, and can ask for whatever tax they want, up to a point. So of course IBM could see that the world was going towards Linux, so it would be important to purchase the #1 Linux commercial operating system provider.

HashiCorp somehow proved that you can run a huge Open-Source project while never listening to your community, never integrating any of their contributions, and doing an absolutely terrible job of running a cloud runner service (Terraform Cloud) based on your beautifully functional but also very-twisted programming language, Terraform. Hashicorp managed to piss off absolutely everyone. At least 4 companies were launched to create a decent CI/CD cloud runner service (env0, spacelift, pulumi(sorta) , and so forth), and the rest of the people who were angry that their open-source contributions were never accepted, gladly forked the software saying, "Fine, you don't play by Open Source rules, you lose all control of your software, and that begins NOW." Their CEO who is apparently just a terrible manager then in an act of desperation tried to shut the barn door once the horse got out, by changing to a BSL ...

A tale of two missions: Starliner and Starship both achieve milestones

Re: Boeing's software woes.

Boeing has announced (6/11) that while in orbit they have detected a new - fifth - helium leak. Will the leaking never end?

"Boeing _Starleaker_"

SLS = Space Leak System ??

StarLiner - is this short for "White Star Line(er)"

What a Titanic achievement, Bowing!

Twilio cofounder buys The Onion

I remember that right after 9/11 the onion published an article saying, "The US vows to attack whoever it is that did this to the United States!" And the onion claimed the protesters were already marching in Washington with black guards reading, " us out of somewhere!"

It was a necessary dose of hilarious humor at the timeñ. But today, nobody is joking about the 500,000 people the United States and George Bush and Dick Cheney killed needlessly in Iraq ....

ByteDance 'would rather' torpedo TikTok than sell it off

Re: I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

Xi Jinping changed the term-limit laws in 2017 so he could be dictator for life!

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Re: A wasted trip

Thomas Knight, MIT, co-founder (I think) of LISP Machines, incorporated, killed by the over-capitalized Symbolics, Inc., and later an MIT professor, inventor of the Oculus VLSI chip (forgot what that was but it was pretty cool)

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Newbie tanks on interview ..

During a job interview in 1996, i asked the candidate to write a function in C that would take an array (int *p) and length (int len) and move all the zeroes to the end of the array, so nonzero values came first. When they got done i asked them about their fierce search for the first zero ...

Me: What if the array was entirely nonzero, would you like to make a change to your code (note: their code would loop out beyond the end of the array)

Candidate: No need!

Me: Why?

Candidate: it will eventually find a zero ... Somewhere in memory!

Needless to say they did not get the job!

Europe plots rules to protect tech supply chains from foreign influence

Hauwei = Grand Theft Auto

I can definitlely vouch for the truth that Huawei is out to steal anything that's not bolted down at every tech company on earth. I know several mid-level engineers hired by Huawei, from a world class fabless chipmaker, then these people were pumped for information for exactly 12 months, then fired. Period. Normally Huawei will just put spies into an organization via the china - grad school pipeline - which is their preferred method - but if that's not possible or if that would take too long, they just use money to turn former employees into industrial traitors ...

A moment of silence for all the drives that died in the making of this Backblaze report

Re: It's all relative.

Hitachi bought the IBM drive division, the inventor of winchester sealed disk drives. So it's no wonder they are head-and-shoulders more reliable than anybody else. They invented the tech and have been building it longer than anybody.

Re: 1% failure rate

I am pretty sure they screwed up their message and it's not a 10MB drive. Typical 1999 drives were 1GB. I started using the IBM PC XT in 1983 with a 10MB drive. Nobody would be using that 5" drive 17 years later, let alone 40 years later.

Years late and 36 cores short of AMD, who are Intel’s 4th-gen Xeons even for?

Looks like Intel is going whole-hog for CISC

Looks like Intel has embraced CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computers). While I'm sure it keeps the VLSI engineers employed to design all these custom ASICs, I'd like to remind Intel that the last company to embrace CISC was Digital Equipment Company of Maynard Massachusetts. It did not end well for them! Beware, Intel! Your new server chips might be renamed "Itanium" or better yet, "Itanic".

Apple aims to replace Broadcom, Qualcomm wireless chips with its own

It's hopeless.

I am sure that Apple has absolutely NO IDEA what its doing here. It takes 1000 hours of drive-around testing in the worst RF environment(s) in the world to optimize the cell phone performance of a Qualcomm phone, and that is done in San Diego, the #2 worst environment in the world after Hong Kong, and it is done when the cellular system is designed. Qualcomm never discloses the control parameters of their phone algorithms which govern handoff. And that, folks, is why nobody makes phones that work as well as Qualcomm, not even Apple ...

Intel: Please buy these new 13th-Gen CPUs, now with 24 cores

"Honest Product Naming" - Intel Edition

Y-series cores - "ThrottleMaster" (i don't know what but these things throttled immediately)

N-series cores - "RapidGerbils" (100% atom cores)

U-series cores - "UPaidFor1CoreThatsAll" (used to be celeron 2-cores x 1 thread)

P-series cores - "PowerPig" (used to be Pentium)

I really think Intel's low-power chips are terrible. Most of them run quickly just long enough to complete today's benchmarks, then throttle their speed in half. Every time a longer benchmark is released, Intel has to scramble to get new designs out the door that don't throttle as quickly, to respond.

As Arm plays chicken with Qualcomm, both have a lot to lose

Quite frankly, ARM has been slacking for over 10 years. Their slacking makes Intel look positively HYPERACTIVE !! They have slacked off so badly, it forced both Apple & Qualcomm to take out architecture licenses & design their chips in-house, skipping the ARM designs. The one design that Qualcomm took - the A72 - almost destroyed qualcomm, that 64-bit chip was so horribly inefficient that Q's Snapdragon 810 was a total failure in 2015 in the marketplace. Most of the ARM chips being made today use 6-year old technology. Look at anything from Raspberry Pi. Those micro circuit boards take gobs of power and run very very sloooowwwwwwllllly. Compare the benchmarks of Raspberry Pi #4 devices against any phone. It's competitive with a phone that's 6-years old, that is all.

Now after relaxing - "resting and vesting" as we call it in the tech industry - ARM has decided to make its next round of money with Lawyers. Well guess what? Qualcomm has the BEST lawyers in the industry, they sent their wireless systems engineers to law school to gain their degrees! I was there at Qualcomm when they put out the call to grow a new class of mutant engineer-lawyer!!

Arm is doomed.

Qualcomm: Arm lawsuit motivated by greed, 'payback' for opposing Nvidia takeover

Re: Must be a mistake

Not exactly. Who wouldn't pay a 5% tax on their computer to make it run 3x faster? Qualcomm charges a 5% tax on every phone so the base station cells can carry 3x the calls ...

Haha Q the joke's on you ...

I worked for Qualcomm. Qualcomm itself has a clause in its own licenses that if a company gets bought all the 3G, 4G, or 5G licenses are void and must be renegotiated with Qualcomm.

Qualcomm seems to have forgotten that this own contract language which they developed could be used against them by a company like arm which provides all the CPU intellectual property in a Qualcomm phone.

'Nobody can control TSMC by force': Exec dismisses fears China could seize fabs

Why Pelosi matters ...

She held an illegal protest in Tiananmen square in 1992, Google it . .

This is laughably stupid because China has already stolen the 7 nanometer fabrication process from TSMC. If TSMC wants to continue to get business from us fabulous semiconductor companies then they better tighten up their operation and stop bleeding trade secrets to China!

Why bother to invade Taiwan if China can steal anything that TSMC develops? Much cheaper to just steal what they need!

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Who's surprised?

What do these clowns expect (NVidia, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, Apple)? They exported all the factories to Asia which is where a lot of the visual sizzle occurs and now they bemoan that they can only find EEs in Asia? Hey stupid? If you're looking for a scapegoat, try the mirror?

I used to train electrical engineers as a professor of EE at a top 20 School. I thought I was opening the doors to do opportunities for these kids! That was until I saw one of our elite EE graduates working in a Quickie Mart 2 years after he got his degree! So I quit that job and I quit putting my sweat into a field that throws away it's best and brightest!

The industry in the USA does a great job of firing its EEs but a terrible job of keeping them employed!

IBM ordered to pay $1.6b to BMC

One of 1,000+ Rometty mistakes ...

This was during Ginny Rometty's tenure and she is the worst leader that IBM has ever had almost as bad as GE's Jack Welch who ruined the company Thomas Edison built ..