Carmack quits Meta

 https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/12/john-carmack-leaves-meta-after-a-decade-fighting-to-make-vr-a-reality/

Description of ZFS

Coming to a Linux near you?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/zfs-101-understanding-zfs-storage-and-performance/

Poker AI

Interesting Alpha zero like approach to playing poker:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/facebook-ai-pluribus-defeats-top-poker-professionals-in-6-player-texas-holdem/

Reporting on the original paper in Science:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/07/10/science.aay2400

The original Alpha zero article:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/move-over-alphago-alphazero-taught-itself-to-play-three-different-games/

Ransomware article

Interesting article about a hacker who works to disabe ransomware

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/hated_and_hunted_the_computer_virus_malware_ransomware_cracker

Android article

Great article on how Google are closing sourcing strategic parts of Android to keep the competitive moat high:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/

get_iplayer Script

A great script for downloading things off iplayer.

https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer

Great for grabbing the streams if you are going to be offline or on the move.  I think the iplayer apps do let you do this but to a limited extent.

This is the kind of thing BBC should not be too upset about, license fee payers accessing the content they've paid for in a convenient way...

Heartbleed Articles

I've been following the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL, for a developer it is quite an eye opener.  It is just a common buffer overrun that returns sensitive data to the client.  It is fascinating to think that so much ofthe security on the internet depends on this - and how fragile the whole ecosystem is.

There are some interesting implications.  Firstly over reliance on code review (it is hard to think like an attacker when reviewing - you are mainly concerned with "is this doing the right thing").   Secondly the lack of funding for this project that many corporates are using is pretty shameful.  Thirdly it shows the inevitble limitations of static analysis which OpenSSL has been exposed to.

Here is an XKCD which sums up the problem.

http://xkcd.com/1354/

Here is a technical article on how this type of flaw could be detected/avoided:

http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/heartbleed.html

Here is an article about someone trying to exploit the bug:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/04/how-i-used-heartbleed-to-steal-a-sites-private-crypto-key/

Ballmer Quits!

Well on the back of the reorganisation, Ballmer announces his retirement - causing a boost in the MSFT share price:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23815316

It's a bit of a surprise, and it's a little unfair to call him unsuccessful.  MSFT have maintained profitability on existing sectors - they've been patchy on new areas, although not for want trying on things like Windows Mobile, and the ill fated Windows 8/RT.  I must admit even I could see RT was a turkey - the need to recompile for it, it was just never going to be easy.

So it will be interesting to see who is next to give things a go.  They are a big company with a lot of power, they need to work out how to become a commercial brand to supplement the existing enterprise.  Also rather than throw their weight around, embrace some of the things like open source, interoperability to make them more appealing - rather than an empire whose products are needed out of necessity.

Software Patents

I'm pretty much against software patents, they have just become an increasingly gamed legal battleground for the big companies - and will hardly ever protect the lone inventor where there intentions originally lay.

Here is a good Joel on Software post describing the rejection of one such patent, and the game behind getting patent approvals:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/07/22.html

Microsoft Reorganisation

I do feel sorry for Microsoft - well a little bit.  For the first time in a long time they have some credible products, albeit playing catch up to other companies.  But no one cares for their platform or ecosystems they are building.  So what is a CEO to do, reorganise!

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jul13/07-11OneMicrosoft.aspx

Let's go guys!  I wonder how the minions felt at reading that e-mail.  Microsoft will not die quickly but there presence in expanding markets will decrease, so then will their revenues.  Seeing everything as an opportunity to have the Windows OS on it was a mistake.   You can call it something else, even if it is the windows kernel underneath.

CES No Microsoft

The past few years I would watch the Steve Ballmer keynote at CES. With Microsoft pretending to be a consumer device company. Last year was the last one, they were replaced by Qualcomm - really a hardware supplier into such consumer devices, but who probably think they can make their own impact as a device manufacturer.

But Ballmer put in an appearance!, to show off Windows 8 on touch devices. It has got off to a slow start - but maybe it will pick up. Also with Apple clearly at their peak of innovation and now reduced product line - maybe Microsoft will make some inroads into this market.

Raspberry Pi Manufacture

Raspberry Pi manufacturing was being done in China - the only realistic option for the volumes they were thinking of making.

The first change was getting professional distributors involved once the scale of the orders became clear, and now the device will be manfactured in the UK - presumably the volumes now make it economic to do.

That is really good news, the first British made computer for a couple of decades?

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1925

Apple v Samsung

I am sure this is only the start of the patent litigation in the tech industry. It looks like Apple have won their case against Samsung products copying Apple ideas that are patented.

Samsung shares have slid on the ruling that sees them paying $1bn dollars in compensation, and maybe having products withdrawn from the US market.

Overall I agree with those that say it will be bad for consumers in the market and limit competition. How long can ideas that are "out there" be something a company can protect, Apple sell a high margin product and locking out competition for many years is surely counter productive.

I always sympathise with the James Dyson views on patents, he won a case when he was trying to bring his vacuum cleaners to market - so I do feel they have a place. Here is his comments on the case:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/9500480/Its-obvious-that-British-courts-should-defend-firms-patents.html

Microsoft Decline

Interesting article describing Microsoft slow decline and internal strife:

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer

Focusing too much on competing with themselves, rather than turning out good products. Rushing things to market to make a deadline. Microsoft had some significant firsts, ereaders, tablets but they just could not make them a success. This is astonishing despite their huge budget for such work.

If the anti-trust investigation had broken them up, would that have really being doing them a favour?

Itanium HP v Oracle

The very sad yet predictable end of Itanium. With products just left with HP, they try to convince Oracle that the need to keep producing their database on the platform...



You can hardly blame Oracle on this one, there must be no profitability in releasing this product on their platform.

At the time of creation you could not have forseen the multi core and 64 bit potential of the x86 line, and this has largely caused Itanium to be a flop. Had that not being the case then there may have been more customers willing to take the pain of an architecture changeover. AMD of course came up with x86-64 - had they not I would not be so sure the Intel would have been keen to extend the life of the processor in the server space given their second product.

Optical Media

The death of optical media cannot be that far away, maybe 5 years before it is gone completely?

I am old enough to remember the introduction of the CD, and you could not think of a time where the CD would feel like an LP record did then.

Within a couple of years I think we'll see USB boot only to install computers. The last bastion will be the retail DVD markets and 5 years maybe does seem a little short for that. If film downloads take off though I think that will see their fate sealed.

In some ways it is sad, another piece of mechanical perfection disappearing and making computers that little less diverse and solid state only. In a similar way hard drives, which probably have a slightly longer life span will one day be replaced with solid state devices.

Personalised Search

A lot of coverage of Google changing their privacy policy and sharing information about users across their services.

Personalised search, although seemingly an obvious thing to offer I think misses the point. Ideally when you search for something, typically you want the same results any other person would get (if only so you can easily say "search on this"). Personalising kind of robs you of that. What I think is missing is some sort of context input to your search, allowing results to be filtered by that. That has the benefit of being interchangeable between people as well as allowing fine tuning on what is being searched for.

Microsoft CEO

I always try and read the Cringely predictions for the year, and a new Microsoft CEO is one of them:

http://www.cringely.com/2012/01/prediction-7-a-new-microsoft-ceo/

I kind of agree, Microsoft have being treading water in too many areas - except maybe gaming. Of course they are still immensely profitable, but relying on stalwarts such as Windows and Office cannot go on forever - and currently they look like failing to make the Cloud transition very convincingly.

High ranking executives have been leaving the last few years, Bach, Allchin, Ozzie - those are the ones I can remember. This maybe a strategy by Ballmer to keep the replacement options limied, of course a company can appoint outside of the current management structure. It will be interesting to see if this prediction comes true, and who replaces him.

Wikipedia donation

Over Christmas I made my first ever donation to Wikipedia. I had been meaning to when they first started running the campaign a couple of years ago. I suppose what stopped me was the additional problem of setting up a PayPal account - I just about justified it to myself by thinking that account might come in handy in future (in general I like to limit the number of services I use, and only commit to signing up to something if I think I am going to make good use of it and check on it regularly - PayPal was borderline for that criteria)

So I made my small donation, when you read about the number of servers they have compared to the big corporations it is incredibly small. Of course they are serving mostly static content, but it seems a small number even for that.

The thing that made me donate was the fact that it is the first place I turn to for initial facts on something, and the articles are usually very high quality. If Wikipedia was pay for then I probably would - but I hope it never goes down that route. Of course this raises the question of how can any web enterprise ever be viable if it was not for a benevolent owner with deep pockets - but that is another question.

CES Keynote

I watched the annual keynote by Microsoft at CES. This year it was announced that this would be the last time Microsoft would do this event, after appearing at the conference to keynote since the late 1990s.

Sadly it felt like a sign off end of an era rather than Microsoft showing new technology, it was done in a "conversational style" with Ballmer being asked questions by a main presenter, and then other people doing some demos.

The first segment was all about Windows Phone, and how they are taking a "social" integration view of the whole thing. I'm sure the handsets and platform is good, but you could not help feeling there was an elephant in the room (getting out sold and having to rely on patent litigation to get revenue from other vendors who have more successful products).

Then we went onto Windows 8, for me this is what Windows 7 should have been to anticipate a fashion for tablet computing (something Microsoft failed to start in the mid 2000s). But as we know Windows 7 put Vista right, and Microsoft fell behind. Stil Windows 8 may get this right, although you can see it being niche for these devices, I do not think they will get across the platforms right or popular.

Finally to end on a high, there was an Xbox and Kinect demo. Every year we get told that this will become the content center piece of the living room. Maybe it is true this time, and they did announce content provider deals this time. The voice control demo also looked good, although I think I would find it frustrating to use even though it looks fairly slick.