As you say, Casey is experienced and his code is valuable. MS should pay him if they want to look at his code! He said as much in his tweets… I mean, why should he be doing charity for MS by fixing their products for them?
> Casey is experienced and his code is valuable. MS should pay him if they want to look at his code! He said as much in his tweets… I mean, why should he be doing charity for MS by fixing their products for them?
so difficult that he wrote it so he could demonstrate how easy it is.
he gladly showed the rest of us how to do it, and he intentionally took action which prevented anything he did from being used within Microsoft. Microsoft is so shitty because they don’t know [thing] so i’m going to show everyone but them how to do [thing].
he could have chosen to help. he chose to not help. he chose to complain and ridicule while intentionally avoiding doing anything to change the situation he was unhappy with.
Casey did choose to help - explaining the issue and potential solution on github. It was only after his solution was dismissed, then catching the microsoft engineers using his solution and making a blog post about it that he complained.
they didn't use his solution. they began to adopt his approach. began to. they are still not even close to done with it all, and the changes they would need to make to fully line up with Casey's approach can't happen because of other things the code does.
they were not caught using his solution. they published a blog entry describing that they were made aware of performance problems and they didn't mention him. it was rabid fans of Casey that started foaming at the mouth then, even though Casey publicly stated he didn't want or need credit, because the idea wasn't his to begin with.
Personally I think that he owes them nothing, especially after the way he was treated in https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 so I can't comprehend statements which claim that he was an asshole for using GPL.
He owes them nothing, you're right. I made no claim that he does.
I'm saying he could have helped the situation, and he deliberately chose to not only avoid helping, but to hinder anyone at Microsoft who wanted to look at that code and contribute to Windows Terminal. That was a choice he made intentionally.
He could have taken the high road, there. He chose not to. It's his choice, don't get me wrong, he was well within his rights. I just disagree with that choice. that's why I call that a "dick move". And if you disagree with me, that's fine. "Dick move" means different things to different people at different times.
Microsoft hires consultants sometimes to better understand Windows. They hire people to come lecture to them about their own software. (I'm not making fun of them, it's a good idea.) If they can't pony up for a few consulting hours to help their developers learn how to write the software they should have written, that's really on them.
The way Casey handled this issue was... not good. He's been a jerk about it and generally dragged this whole dumb argument on way longer than needed (I can't believe we're still talking about it).
He was right, but he does not seem remotely pleasant to work with and has been remarkably adversarial. Hasn't exactly fostered a "let's hire him as a consultant" relationship.
I learned to program in 1982 when my mom bought me a Timex Sinclair 1000 (2K RAM!) and had to type in all the games from source listings in books and magazines. At some point later, I bought a 16K memory expansion pack which was awesome until you jiggled the computer a little bit and it would reset all memory.
The very first bug I had to figure out was when I was typing in an expression like "A <> B", and not realizing that "<>" was a single character on the keyboard, and not "<" followed by ">".
I hope she reads the article about Beeple fraud. Buyer and owner of that art are basically investors in the same nft comp, there is no transaction either. It's just a PR.
I feel like everyone was going through massive amounts mental gymnastics to justify how NFTs are not just a scam like they look on the surface but how they are actually legitimate. News companies chipped in with the "well um actually value is just made up anyway"
But no, in the end it was just another crypto scam.
Intel's modem division was not exactly Intel, it was the modem business unit they bought from Infineon Semiconductors of Germany in 2011.
Having worked in the semiconductor business in Germany and having friends who worked at Infineon there, the cause would be the corporate culture that rewards incompetent management riding the gravy train(old boys club) instead of engineering effort and playing the politics game is the only way to move up, even though lots of engineers there are very talented people.
This, coupled with Intel's own innovation culture that fails at anything that doesn't involve milking the X86 resulted in a dumpster fire.
Under Apple, these same engineers could probably ship something competitive if Apple plays their cards right.
It's too bad anything Apple manufactures is effectively taken completely off the market unless you are interested in buying the thing packaged inside of extremely expensive form factor.
Personally I suggest people do read the actual 233 page report, It is actually an easy read. I come to a vastly different conclusion to mainstream media including Ars, at least someone shares the same opinion [1] as I do.
One needs to support all existing standards since 5G availability is limited in the world. This low power mixed circuit masterpiece requires really specific knowledge and must find balance between low power and good connectivity. It’s not trivial. Otherwise we would have couple startups every year trying to compete against Qualcomm. Last but not least: this matter involves thousands patents making it game for companies with very deep pockets only.
The hardest part is to get power management right. Anyone can build a modem that "works", but nobody other than Qualcomm, (and I really mean that), has gotten power management right.
What I mean is that even today, if you buy a 4G enabled phone not powered by Qualcomm, your battery will drain in a few hours and you'll be left with a dead brick for the rest of the day.
Source: I spent years building 3G and 4G PHY chips at various QC competitors that have all since folded up or have been bought and merged into other teams.
>What I mean is that even today, if you buy a 4G enabled phone not powered by Qualcomm, your battery will drain in a few hours and you'll be left with a dead brick for the rest of the day.
I had an iPhone 7 with an intel modem (AT&T iPhone) for 3 years. The battery did not die in 4 hours.
Miniaturized, high frequency, low-power, high bandwidth, radio modems to be exact - supporting multiple complex protocols. In real-time. Meaning it is all done in hardware, although firmware does some management stuff. It's about as hard as silicon engineering gets.
Only PHY is in hardware, indeed with firmware control.
Then, the protocol stacks on top of that are enormous and complex. The software is very large.
Broadcom also tried and failed because they underestimated the task, IMO.
Those who can/could make it happen are those who are willing to invest massively over many years and, ideally who have a sure customer. E.g. Huawei who is willing to take the long view and who ships hundreds of millions of phones.
Apple’s quarterly revenue is larger than Qualcomm’s market cap. This is clearly about more than the money for them. I wouldn’t be shocked if they spent 10bn and poached away half of Qualcomm’s best engineers. They’ve already been on a hiring spree and opened a pretty nice office down in San Diego.
yup. Office is literally 5 minutes away from from Qualcomm, so no problems with the commute, and I'm sure they would be willing to pay much more than Qualcomm. Only thing is the patents. Qualcomms real value is in the crazy amount of R&D they do, and the patents they have to show for it.
every now and then i see somebody claiming to know more and hinting at deeper things going on with mobile modems, basebands, gsm.
then they can‘t say anything because of nda. or the gsm standard manual costs hundreds of dollars.
my tin foil hat is glowing, i‘m telling you. we already know that gsm encryption is a joke. i don‘t want to imagine what‘s going on inside all those closed-source baseband firmwares. it creeps me out.
Part of the reason is that Intel tried to aquire their way into this market. So they bought Infineon - which let's face it, Infineon wouldn't have sold if it was going well. So they bought the distant second place in the modem market in 2011 and started work on 4G, with the intention of catching up.
The only real product success they had was getting Apple for 4G and we can quite clearly see that as more of a strategic move by Apple against Qualcomm. Over that period there were numerous issues about Intel chips not being as high performance or low power as Qualcomm - which we'd hardly find surprising.
So there's that element to it, but the second element is that Intel has a fantastic reputation for destroying the businesses they acquire. Essentially what happens is that once they acquire a business they do a number of things:
1. They take a long time to perform these acquisitions. The timeline from first hints of acquisition to close can be years. So the engineering organisation of the company being acquired starts to hide problems because they fear it will endanger the acquisition. So you have a steady build up of issues that will overflow on day 1 after the deal closes.
2. They massively invest. This means massively increasing the cost structure of the acquired company, they do this whilst setting much higher targets to justify the investment. But there's two problems: The new employees take a long time to bring up to speed, and because Intel is constantly re-prioritizing you have existing engineers in Intel who are trying to move across into any role available. Suddenly you have a team of engineers in Folsom who basically have no work to do and so they're dumped into the new growth area (because as we all know, engineers are fungible commodities). The acquired company needs to figure how the hell these engineers are going to contribute.
3. They massively increase expectations. That investment has to pay off, so they set way higher new goals - and not "In 5 years time you need X revenue" more "This year you need 30% revenue increase". This immediately puts the new business in panic mode - EOLing products and doing sales tricks to invent revenue to hit the target. Year 2, all the sales guys know they pumped year 1's numbers to hit their targets so the good sales guys jump ship -either into different parts of Intel or entirely out of the company.
4. They find SYNERGY. What that means is every other branch of Intel will turn up and start either insisting you use their technology (guess what: You're using the Intel Fab now despite the fact we can't deliver on 10nm). Because Intel is so much larger than the companies they acquire your little business group suddenly has thousands of people coming to you saying "How about you work on this" or "Our client needs this let's bundle these products". That creates massive attrition on your core business.
5. They scale up: Intel is such a big company they literally can't chase small revenue - it would eat them up in COGS to sell $1m at a time. So very quickly the acquired business starts to lose its small customers that make up the revenue that made the business attractive in the first place.
So in the end: You've alienated all your customers, you've thrown your engineering organisation into dis-array, you've set ridiculous targets, and you're now owned by a company that's perfectly willing 5-10 years down the road to pull the plug on the entire sector you're working in. Hey presto: They 10 year cycle from Acquisition to Spin-off. Say hello to the boys at McAfee!
The "synergy" stuff is so true! I talked with a colleague who interned at Intel doing HDL development for networking. Guess what - when Intel acquired Altera they asked each division to evaluate using FPGAs in their products.
also, are they even really "modems"? I know that "cable modems" are really routers… surely cellular modems aren't all bzzzt-brrzzt-bing-bong-bing-bong like my 90's Hayes 1200baud.
Yes they are. Modem is an abbreviation for MOdulator-DEModulator which is what they do, they modulate and demodulate radio signals to digital and vice versa.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLai5B987bZ9CoVR-QEIN9foz4...