News Precis#7 - 21 August 2020

Here’s a list of some of the things I found interesting this week, or perhaps over the previous few weeks. Things are such a blur at the moment…

Vendors & Companies

Datrium is all but dead. We expected it, but now we know for definite. A sad end to a great product.
SoftBank mulling Arm sale. I may be a bit behind the curve on this one, however this does reflect the bind SoftBank appears to find itself in. Perhaps the best option is simply to float the company again and let the market decide.
Qumulo raises a further $125m. The company is now allegedly valued at over $1 billion. I find this quite amazing. I don’t doubt the hard work of the good folks at Qumulo, but I alway see the value of a company as being based on what people will pay for it. EMC bought Isilion for $2.25bn, perhaps HPE could fill their file storage gap with a cheeky purchase?

People

Programming pioneer Fran Allen dies aged 88. Another sad loss. I think it’s incumbent on all of us to know who was responsible for the leaps in computing that we all come to rely on today. Although it may not always be obvious, compiler optimisation is incredibly important and affects every application and operating system.

Blogs

Max isn’t happy with his MacBook Pro. I’m not surprised at this situation. Apple seems to have misfired on the desktop and laptop hardware in recent years. The butterfly keyboard was a previous challenge. I do wonder if this is almost a deliberate prelude to the move to ARM – put fewer resources into engineering the current generation of devices in favour of ARM machines. I hope they resolve this, Max!

Technology

Lithium from seawater. Who knew there was such an abundant supply of Lithium just waiting to be tapped? Well, scientists apparently, who could be on the verge of industrialising the process of extraction. This kind of technology is where future fortunes will be made.
Skyrmions offer the chance of better memory devices. There’s a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes to develop new storage and memory technologies. How long is it going to be before we actually get superman memory crystals?

….and finally…

I was one of the lucky few who suffered from the Twitter hack that saw blue ticked validated accounts being temporarily suspended from posting. It was strange to know I couldn’t vent my anger at something of no consequence. Perhaps it’s time to get a backup account.