2x24: They Weren't That Shiny Anyway

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we look down the barrel of 2018, 2018 gazes back into us spectrally and meltdownily, nobody shines Jono’s shoes for him, and:

  • [00:02:30] The news: the Spectre and Meltdown security vulnerabilities are here to eat the world -- you know that a security issue is serious when it gets its own Wikipedia article... one of the lead engineers (perhaps) behind the VW emissions scandal was sent to prison, and we're not sure (and discuss in some depth) just how responsible he was and how culpability applies to engineering staff as well as decision-makers... the US state of Oregon allows you to fill your own car with petrol, Oregonians freak out about it, the internet are beside themselves with laughter... Amazon patent "watch a video ad for a product and the more of the ad you watch, the more the price of the product drops", everyone agrees that nobody watches the ad... eHarmony claim that their dating algorithm is scientifically proven, get slapped by the Advertising Standards Authority who take a very dim view of this sort of thing... Amazon release Linux 2 on premises... Linux Journal saved from the jaws of destruction by Private Internet Access, leading to discussion about getting magazines on paper...
  • [00:29:10] Predictions for 2018! What do we think will happen? Jono looks into Facebook VR, Red Hat's finances, Google's Flutter, and the PlayStation; Stuart has things about augmented reality, healthcare and tech, Microsoft and Linux, and Twitter and Trump; and Jeremy's seeing stuff in 2018 for Tesla, harmful IoT devices, Bitcoin, and AI!

Download from http://badvoltage.org/2x24 !

Jason Perlow at ZDnet argues that x86 must die and be replaced with an open architecture processor.

… and it’s own logos too!

Hahaha, TBH any advert that says “scientifically proven” is always a bit fishy - Science doesn’t “prove” anything - it shows evidence.

Interesting predictions guys, can’t wait to see if any of them come out as true.

My predictions are that: -

  • Google will try and re-position their Voice Speakers for small/medium sized businesses.
    As in “Hey Google, book a meeting with myself and Joe Bloggs in the Pub tomorrow at 2:30”
    And will market that type of use case.
  • I predict that ChromeBooks will be able to be used for writing Flutter apps
  • I predict that some high profile companies will get into difficulty when with regards to the loss of net neutrality

Bonus prediction - all my predictions will be incorrect :wink:

I’d like to see that, however demonstrating how that will make a good return-on-investment for investors will be hard…
The costs of designing Silicon are super high. Maybe ARM chips might make more inroads into the desktop/server space - I’d like that but I won’t hold my breath.

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Ya, we discussed OpenPOWER and SuperH in 2x09: Visible Private Network for similar reasons. My scepticism about whether it can happen is unchanged :slight_smile:

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But doesn’t ARM suffer from the same issues with Spectre?

Just some more news Microsoft’s update can brick AMD computers.

Are shows going to be released earlier in the week now?

Not normally. This is a special early one, because we recorded earlier than normal (at the end of last week) and it seemed silly to keep it away from you all :slight_smile:

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Being pedantic here, I have a philosophy degree, and masters in both engineering and physics, so it’s hard for me to be anything else - sorry.

Science can not prove anything only disprove: If I say this is true and you can show me a single example where it does not apply I am wrong and I need to research further. True scientists look forward to this as you have challenged their thinking . As an engineer most of my mechanical modelling is based on Newtonian mathematics though we know he was wrong, Einstein showed that, in most cases the errors are small enough that we can ignore them. The discovery of quantum effects shows us that we still don’t understand it properly because Quantum physics can’t explain events on a big scale and relativity does not work on the particle scale.

We study on hoping to learn more as we go.

Just caught up with the latest show on my way home from work today.
Big thanks to our esteemed presenters for the shout out (photography competition) and of course thanks to @warrenhill for organising it.

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For @sil’s health prediction, I got confused with what the end prediction ended up being, but the US data for major health problems exists and is open. I work with IHME in Seattle for this Bill Gate Foundation funded site (it runs MariaDB ColumnStore underneath): http://www.healthdata.org/

Caught up on the show last week as well. In regards to the Kotlin prediction and the new android OS, The reason I was given (from a training course provider) for Kotlin’s existence was that Google are locked out of the new features in the latest Java editions for fear of being sued by Oracle. As phone software will only get faster by using the multiprocessor functionality of the latest phones they need to use Kotlin to do this rather than say Java.

It is possible he was trying to flog a Kotlin course but that maybe why Kotlin is the future of android

Intel has announced an in silicone fix for Meltdown and Spectre later this year.

08

[refrains from making fake boob joke]

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Stuart has things about augmented reality, healthcare and tech,

sounds like you might not be too wrong with healthcare @sil:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/amazon-berkshire-jpmorgan-to-set-up-a-health-company-for-staff