SGI acquired & more news

SGI acquired

Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquires SGI for $275 million | VentureBeat – death of a legend. SGI stands for Silicon Graphics International. SGI workstations and servers were legendary. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were rendered on SGI hardware. Much of the early web was run off SGI servers and SGI were involved in early efforts to make the internet a ‘metaverse’ with a 3D VRML browser. Their IRIX UNIX operating system was like macOS today, but well over 20 years ago.

China

Why Millennials Are Excited About the 90th Birthday of China’s Ex-President – China Real Time Report – WSJ – “It’s very simple,” says Zhang Ming, a political scientist at Beijing’s Renmin University. “People right now aren’t satisfied…When he was in office, everyone said bad things about him. Now people miss him more and more.” – which by implication is pretty damning for the Xi administration. Hu wasn’t dynamic and hamstrung by Jiang Zemin interfering in the shadows. Jiang when in power was ruthless and pragmatic

Beijing spells out strict residency rules for migrants to the capital | South China Morning Post – which will adversely affect social mobility

Economics

How the China Shock, Deep and Swift, Spurred the Rise of Trump – WSJ – globalisation gave rise to Trump and others

Ideas

NASA systems engineering manual – (PDF)

More is different by PW Anderson – fascinating read

Innovation

Panasonic eyes trial sales of tomato-harvesting robot | The Japan Times – interesting challenge in produce handling (tomatoes bruise easily)

Revolutionary steel treatment paves the way for radically lighter, stronger, cheaper cars | New Atlas – it still doesn’t have the corrosion resistance or awesomeness of titanium though. And titanium doesn’t need paint

Intel Licenses ARM Technology to Boost Foundry Business – Bloomberg – this plugs a gap, whether it is a permanent approach a la what IBM did with manufacturing for Xbox etc or a stopgap until they come up with a new mobile offering who knows? The ARM | SoftBank deal looks strangely prescient and ARM looks like an even bigger monopoly – existing ARM Holdings shareholders who wanted to hold on to their shares will be sick as dogs

Korea’s LG plans to make its own mobile chips — in Intel’s factories – Recode – that’s a win for Intel

Media

Real Time Engagement Platform for Consumers, Fans & Audiences | Mobile Polling & Voting, Social API’s & Interactive TV Solutions at Telescope – useful for using Facebook Live – also has measurement / analytics apparently

What’s behind P&G’s cutback on targeted Facebook ads? – To reach 5,000 targeted viewers on Facebook, the spending needed can reach the equivalent of that required to reach a million TV viewers, according to Peter Daboll, chief executive of Ace Metrix, which tests ads for effectiveness – more on marketing here

Sony Acquires Ministry Of Sound, One Of World’s Largest Indie Labels – hypebot – getting in at the tail end of EDM. More media related content here.

ComScore replaces CEO and CFO, and delays quarterly filing – MarketWatch

Online

Instagram rolls out business profiles complete with ‘contact’ buttons as it offers advertisers greater insights | Social Media | The Drum – finally available in Europe

Security

Internet or Splinternet? by Joseph S. Nye – Project Syndicate – interesting that this focuses on cybercrime. I think a bigger issue is the walled garden businesses like Facebook

Software

Google’s New OS Will Run on Your Raspberry Pi | Hackaday – interesting that Google could be moving away from Linux on everything to RTOS underpinnings – presumably to reduce the footprint and further improve stability. At the end of the day, do you want your phone to control a lift, a defibrillator or anti-lock breaks? Also benefits for IoT in terms of smaller footprint??? Though not so sure as the language says ‘not so minimalistic’

Bloated HTML, the best and the worse — Monday Note – it has implications for page load times

Technology

Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market: Home or Everywhere Else – The New York Times – “The barrier to entering the U.S. or China market is becoming higher and higher,” said Kai-fu Lee, a venture investor from Taiwan and former head of Google China.

Telecoms

The bandwidth bottleneck that is throttling the Internet : Nature News – interesting article on the need for the last mile to be fibre rather than copper. It is interesting that buffer bloat isn’t mentioned once in this piece on bandwidth bottleneck

Tighter EU rules on messaging services | RTE – so much in this but overall could be good for telecoms carriers and bad for privacy as well as freewheeling Silicon Valley companies

Cisco Systems to lay off about 14,000 employees: CRN | Reuters – Cisco moving away from hardware. Interesting, implies that there is no differentiation in networking hardware anymore. Not sure software will be defensible for them as other players like Microsoft et al could get involved. Also means networking hardware to become more commoditised.  On a related note Cisco et al missed a trick on not using work like that done on Bayes Theory and network management in the late 1990s to help prevent buffer bloat. Academics have continued on this theme

Web of no web

New Startup Aims to Commercialize a Brain Prosthetic to Improve Memory – IEEE Spectrum – Johnny Mnemonic comes closer to reality?