Tag Archives: IBM

April 13, 2023 · 04:17

The song remains the same

Yes, that is the setting we hear at times. We think that we are hearing something different, but when we listen closely, it is merely the same song we are hearing and this concert is all about ‘Oil in the family’ (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5vrWeHvErQ) yes, the song actually exists and it was created by Jan Akkerman (Dutch musician) a long time ago.

Yet the news comes from different sides. There is Arab News (at https://www.arabnews.com/node/2285261/saudi-arabia) who gives us ‘Saudi crown prince and US Senator Lindsey Graham discuss bilateral ties’, wasn’t he one of these people who would not discuss things whilst his Royal Highness Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud was in office? I remember something of that nature. So whilst we see “Graham, a member of the Republican party, has served as a senator since 2002. His visit was said to reflect a continuation of Saudi-US bilateral ties and reciprocal visits through the years” make no mistake, this was about restoring lost oil settings, it has the ability to set the stage I saw yesterday (previous article) I dreamt of. I reckon the Iranian setting would be raised as well. A setting that defines the coming end of the United States as the middle eastern power player is now in discussion and for the US it sucks, the ally they shorthanded for too long now has the US (as some younglings state) by the short and hairy and the US does not like that. They will do almost whatever they can to restore settings, but they are as I personally see it too late. There is every change they can restore 500K barrels a day, but they will pay for that, they will have to pay top dollar and the energy shortages head of them will make them pay. Oil rules the world at present as it has the last few decades. So whilst they mull over their options lets take a short sidestep The US and its people were all (including media) so set on letting Jack Dorsey pass by and hammer Elon Musk, his power-cell solution could have lessened the impact of oil in energy for a massive amount three years ago, now there isn’t enough times and they keep on hammering Elon Musk. Now, this is their western ‘right’ but it also largely enables oil and therefor Saudi Arabia (Aramco). 

ABC4 news (at https://abcnews4.com//senator-lindsay-graham-meets-with-crown-prince-of-saudi-arabia-mohammad-bin-salman-jeddah-international-relations-boeing-airline-money-wach) gives us ‘Sen. Lindsay Graham meets with Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia’ with the added “I just had a very productive, candid meeting with the Saudi Crown Prince and his senior leadership team. The opportunity to enhance the U.S.-Saudi relationship is real and the reforms going on in Saudi Arabia are equally real”, with the added “I also expressed deep appreciation to the Kingdom for purchasing $37 billion worth of Boeing 787s – which are made in South Carolina – for the new Saudi airline. Investments like this are game changers” all whilst the topic oil is never mentioned and mostly because that part was handled behind closed doors. Iran is avoided as the US needs the lollipop named Oil (most likely a liquorice lollipop). The more it is avoided, the stronger it pushes to the foreground. Just like the 1981 song that rocked disco’s all over Europe. A good song can never be held down, just ask Mozart, the man is dead and requiem (1791) still shines on. No matter whether it is for you of for someone you know, that song remains a hit in every funeral parlour. Last there is Politico (at https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/04/graham-senate-rebuke-saudi-arabia-1041379) that gives us ‘Graham on Senate rebuke of Saudi Arabia: ‘Someone’s got to do it’’ there we see “Sen. Lindsey Graham on Monday championed the Senate’s willingness to publicly rebuke the Saudi Arabian government despite the White House’s unwillingness to do the same, slamming the Gulf monarchy and calling out Secretary of State Mike Pompeo by name for accusing senators of grandstanding on the issue” there we see the larger problem and it is not that the White Houses unwillingness to do something, it is that they and others remain in denial. And guess what if the energy crises goes south and places like Google, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon see the impact of losing around 70% of the abilities during summer to do business because there isn’t enough energy to keep the equipment running, that is when the economic meltdown starts and panic hits several states. I think my early prediction of 90 days is right on the nose. At that point the US sees waves of panic it never faced before and China will be on the sidelines laughing. Their game worked perfectly. In my assessment (a purely personal one) action trumps inaction EVERY SINGLE TIME and that is what we see, and that is not nearly the end of it. Politico also hands us “the president, secretary of State and secretary of Defense have all said there is no definitive proof that the Saudi crown prince ordered Khashoggi killed. Multiple media outlets have reported that U.S. intelligence agencies have “high confidence” that the crown prince ordered the journalist’s murder.” The takeaway here is “there is no definitive proof”, something I mentioned several times, the gameplay via the United Nations (via someone called Eggy Calamari), its essay writer is falling flat and that goes back to February 2021  (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/02/27/that-was-easy/), more than two years ago, I already saw the failings of a United Nations being the useless tool of whomever. I even attached the document that shows their failings. It is so much easier to attach their folly, makes reading it easier. I don’t think the most powerful element that NO ONE investigated and forensically investigated the tape, there is mention of the tape, but when you read closely you see it surrounds things as ‘possible’ and ‘could’ the effect of forensic lacks. So this game was continued for over two years and that is what the US needs to claw back and they can not. 

Then the article ends with “Responding to Pompeo’s insistence that Congress breaking with the administration over Yemen would undermine the possibility for peaceful resolution there, Graham retorted in his op-ed that Congress is “a coequal branch of government exercising leadership to safeguard the country’s long-term interests, values and reputation.”” This shows that the US is still all about the discord, the denial and that is why the US is about to fail massively. The media played along and now they are caught between two difficult situations, because when they lose the energy and they cannot produce they will cry like the little girls they were all along. And there we see the final part of what I stated in the beginning, the song remains the same.

Have a great days and consider whatever you can upgrade to systems that rely on chargers, because soon enough for many hours a day, you will not have any options. The wealthier people will embrace the Elon Musk energy solution, but it will cost them top dollar. The others (like me) we will not be that fortunate, it is the consequence of an inactive political engine on a near global level. 

Enjoy the day and the working lightbulbs (for now).

 

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April 5, 2023 · 06:33

Advanced Ignorance

Yes, this is about AI, the big issue is that it does not exist (not yet anyway), the sales bozo’s are giving you some talk about how it exists and yes the naysayers are right, but they are confusing one version of AI with another. Well part 1, Artificial Intelligence does not exist, it really does not and there is no alternative to this. What you see is machine learning and deeper machine learning and these two parts are AWESOME. They really are, but there is a hidden snag. These two elements rely on data and they are therefor dependent on Human Error and there is plenty. This is seen even today at Google. Now, things happen and errors are seen and at some point they will be corrected for, but until that happens, the machine learning part fails and it will fail a few times.

To illustrate this, lets take a look at a British Hollywood giant, namely the actor Tom Holland. Now, there is nothing wrong with this youthful young lad. As image 1 shows above. As you can see he was born June 1st 1996, on the same day as my mother, just a few decades later. He is from (read the pic) and so on, so far so good. I actually had to check something, as such I needed to see his movies. (See below).

Now we get to the good stuff, he did Psycho 2, 13 years before he was born. That makes him a temporal god, which is odd as far as I can tell I am the only one who travelled through time at present, but OK. If I can do it, so could he. And that is where we see the stage, it is seen in the picture below. 

As you can see, there was ANOTHER actor named Tom Holland and he did Psycho 2. But the learning machines never picked it up because the rule to check for errors and movies a person before that person was born did not occur to the software engineer at Google who did this part. Errors will creep in, they always do and there you see the failing of today’s AI when you get one and you might not see it, you will not notice it, because they are rare, but in AI no errors are allowed, they change the outcome of the algorithm and that breaks the AI sooner and sooner. 

This is why I do not trust any AI at present, the minimum stage for AI is nowhere near reaching. It is coming, but I reckon it is t least a decade away. Mainly because ONLY IBM has at present a quantum computer that is required for this and their computer is not ready yet, so at present it is all a version of machine learning which relies on data and it relies on people making the formulas and people are flawed, very very flawed. 

So when you see another AI BS story, feel free to steer clear, AI does not exist and the salesperson who relies on ‘his’ AI story cannot be trusted, he is selling you something that does not yet exist.

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February 19, 2023 · 11:55

The stage between two stages

Sounds weird and perhaps that is a little true. You see, I saw the article (at https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64178956) ‘Staff must be free to work for employer’s rivals – US regulator’, the article was from January 5th and I did see it, but I was unsure how I felt. You see, that setting allows for poaching and there Microsoft has been a little too active in the past. Now they are in the process of trimming the fat by well over 10,000 people and so are the others, so you would think that this is a moot process. But it is not. Microsoft is pretty much done for and their setting (a personal view) is to create shortages everywhere else so that they can get an extension on life. So we would see hundreds of essential workers at Amazon and Google now being offered a nice cushy position in Microsoft. IBM is also on that list, but IBM and Microsoft have too much alike, so there will be issues. They both preferred image above creativity and that is on them, it is also their right. As I personally see it IBM has a setting and poaching might happen, but it is often directly in league of what they are trying to design, so there is less of an issue and their stage of representation does not feel the same. I have less of an issue with IBM on that horse (which is seemingly rare), Microsoft however has a different setting. Just like their acquisition of Bethesda and Activision. It is not that they needed them (well they did in one way), it was to take away choice from Sony players and that is just not on with me. It would be nice if Amazon bought my IP, so I can really stick it to Microsoft, but that is another matter. The case is poaching. 

As such the article gives us “The FTC, which enforces competition law, said a ban would foster a more dynamic economy. The proposal was immediately challenged by the business community. It will now enter a long rule-making process. Non-compete clauses were developed to prevent leavers from joining rivals and sharing trade secrets”, it is not untrue, but to have people trained by Google, or Amazon (Web services) leave after a year (or two) of training and then use all that know how in the service of a player like Microsoft is a dangerous step. I understand and to some degree support non-compete clauses. The problem is that some of the players abused that non-compete setting in a much wider scale that should have been allowed for. So I am on the fence here and there is another stage that the US now opens up for. These people can due to this change now join a player like Tencent, who can open up European markets to a much larger degree. I wonder if they thought of that? Yes, we see the US limiting their workforce from joining Chinese players. Yet the EU has different stages and there these players are still shedding thousands of people and the UK is ripe for Tencent to come in and create a new workforce. If they weren’t becoming a hazard to my pension, I would not care, but they could be and as such I would care.

You see, I have in part opposition to “Lina Khan, who leads the agency and made her name criticising the might of big tech firms such as Amazon, on Thursday called the ability to switch jobs “core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy”. “Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand”, in this my opposition is that we see the clear mention of Amazon, and the weirdly avoidance of mentioning Microsoft (or Google) in this and that matters. Amazon has one of the most complete Web Services solutions including cloud solutions. Both Google and massively more Microsoft need people with these skills. I am not sure where Apple is with that but they all have some return to office setting and the noises we hear all over the place, they all have extensive needs soon enough, but Linda Khan is mentioned with her opposition of Amazon, who is leading that trump with most than a nose-length advantage. A player like Microsoft wants to get ahead and getting their hands on senior developers at Amazon is for them the way to go (Azure sucks too much according to some). 

As such with these elements in play, the need for a diminished non-competition clause is not entirely wrong, but the timing sucks and would luck have it, the timing would work for Microsoft and Tencent alike, a setting I am actually not happy about. Yet, I will admit that parts of this are personal views and personal settings I saw evolve over the last 30 years. And that is not all, in the last week we were given two parts. The first is “Microsoft last week laid off around 150 employees from a team tasked with convincing medium-size companies to adopt cloud services such as Azure server rentals and Microsoft 365 productivity apps, said a person with direct knowledge of the matter”, which in part makes sense, but when you add the next view that came 2 days later “Microsoft has officially joined the FinOps Foundation, a non-profit organisation that promotes financial management in cloud technology.” Consider that they need to promote that with 150 less staff, does that make sense? It makes a lot more sense when you poach the Amazon AWS staff pool and replace 150 narrow minded watchers by people with a much wider cloud view. It is pure speculation on my side, but they did a similar track in the Netscape days, as such I worry and you should too. A choice by a lack of options is not a choice and that is where Microsoft has been playing the field a little too long as I see it, which is why I am on the fence a lot more on the non-compete clause as I personally see it.

You should watch too because when your choices are lowered and Microsoft is clearly in the ‘surviving’ pool of choices. We see the power of stakeholders and they were never there for you, merely for their own wallets. But I might be seeing it too dark as some will respond.

My view is merely one view, make sure you learn all the elements in play when you go one direction. Its almost like the life of Harry the Hermit (Harry Styles), he makes an album of his house and the 13th track is about the love of his life (Remy “Thirteen” Hadley, M.D) which makes sense, but when you make 12 songs about your house and one about Olivia Wilde (mucho LOL), you do have your priorities wrong. It is all about the glasses you wear when you see the events unfold. This is nearly always true as is my view on Microsoft. They wanted to be the IBM clone, they played there games and they played it on Netscape and others alike and those who have been in IT long enough see the bitter taste that Microsoft leaves behind and that is before you add the Microsoft failures, they have become obsolete and in this I much rather support Amazon and what they could bring to the table of tomorrow than Microsoft who is merely copying the plate settings of yesterday. Yet that is a personal view, believe me or not but make sure you get a good view on where you stand, that is worth a lot more than merely following me. I want you all to be your own leader, not my follower. I am not some shepherd, I never was.

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February 9, 2023 · 22:09

Huh? Wha? Duh!

I was a little baffled today. The article that I saw in Al Jazeera (at https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/2/8/google-shares-tank-8-as-ai-chatbot-bard-flubs-answer-in-ad) had me. I saw the headline ‘Google shares tank 8% as AI chatbot Bard flubs answer in ad’. So I got to read and I saw “Shares of Google’s parent company lost more than $100bn after its Bard chatbot advertisement showed inaccurate information”, now there are a few issues here and one of them I mentioned before, but for the people of massively less intelligence, lets go over it again.

AI does not exist
Yes, it sounds funny but that is the short and sweet of it. AI does not exist. There is machine learning and there is deeper machine learning and these two are AWESOME, but they are merely an aspect of an actual AI. We have the theory of one element, which was discovered by a Dutch physicist, the Ypsilon particle. You see, we are still in the binary age and when the Ypsilon particle is applied to computer science it all changes. You see we are users of binary technology, zero and one. No and Yes, False and True and so on. The Ypsilon particle allows for a new technology. It will allow for No, Yes, Both and Neither. That is a very different kind of chocolate my friends. The second part we need and we are missing for now are shallow circuits. IBM has that technology and as far as I now they are the only ones with their quantum computer.  These two elements allow for an ACTUAL AI to become a reality. 

I found an image once that might give a better view, the image below is a collection of elements that an AI needs to have, do you think that this is the case? Now consider that the Ypsilon particle is not a reality yet and Quantum computers are inly in its infancy at present.

Then we get to the next part. Here we see “The tech giant posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, describing the chatbot as a “launchpad for curiosity” that would help simplify complex topics, but it delivered an inaccurate answer that was spotted just hours before the launch event for Bard in Paris.” This is a different kind of candy. Before we get to any event we test and we test again and again and Google is no different, Google is not stupid, so what gives? Then we get the mother of all events “Google’s event came one day after Microsoft unveiled plans to integrate its rival AI chatbot ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and other products in a major challenge to Google, which for years has outpaced Microsoft in search and browser technology”, well apart from the small part that I intensely dislike Microsoft, these AI claims are set on massive amounts of data and Bing doesn’t have that, it lacks data and in some events it was merely copying other people’s data, which I dislike even further and to be honest, even if Bing comes with a blowjob by either Laura Vandervoort or Olivia Wilde. No way will I touch Bing, and beside that point, I do not trust Microsoft, no matter of ‘additions’ will rectify for that. It sounds a bit personal but Microsoft is done for and for them to chose ChatGPT is on them, but does not mean I will trust them, oh and the final part, there is no AI!

But it is about the error, what on earth was Google doing without thoroughly testing something? How did this get to some advertisement stage? At present Machine learning requires massive amounts of data and Google has it, Microsoft does not as far as I know, so the knee-jerk reaction is weird to say the least. So when we read “Bard is given the prompt, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my nine-year-old about?” Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. This is inaccurate, as the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA” this is a data error, this is the consequence of people handing over data to a machine that is flawed (the data, not the machine). That is the flaw and that should have been tested for for a stage that lasts months. I can only guess how it happened here, but I can give you a nice example.

1992
In 1992 I went for a job interview. During the interview I got a question on deviation, what I did not know that statistics had deviation. I came from a shipping world and in the Netherlands declination is called deviation. So I responded ‘deviation is the difference between true and magnetic north’, which for me was correct and the interviewer saw my answer as wrong, but the interviewer had the ability to extrapolate from my answer (as well as my resume) that I came from a shipping environment. I got that job in the end and I stayed there for well over 10 years. 

Anyway the article has me baffled to some degree. Google is better and more accurate all of the time, so this setting makes no sense to me. And as I read “A Google spokesperson told Reuters, “This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester programme.”” Yes, but it tends to be important to have rigorous testing processes in place BEFORE you have a public release. It tends to make matters better and in this case you do not lose $100,000,000,000 which is 2,000 times the amount I wanted for my solution to sell well over 50,000,000 stadia consoles for a solution no one had thought of, which is now solely the option for Amazon, go figure and Google cancelled the Stadia, go figure again.

The third bungle I expect to see in the near future is that they fired the wrong 12,000 people, but there is time for that news as well. Yes, Wednesday is a weird day this time around, but not to worry. I get to keep my sanity playing Hogwarts Legacy which is awesome in many ways. And that I did not have to test, it was seemingly properly tested before I got the game (I have not spotted any bugs after well over 20 hours of gameplay, optionally merely one glitch).

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February 7, 2023 · 04:33

Brain switch

Something happened to me around 02:00. My mind was redesigning a CBM Amiga game for streaming systems when a switch went off. I cannot really go to much into details for a few reasons, but my mind went into overdrive. I was redesigning part of a game almost every 10 seconds adding more and more. Then the mind took a sidestep and went into overdrive. The results are not to be placed here for a few reasons, yet I believe that the impact will be global if my mind is correct (which I am willing to doubt at present). The ideas for enhancing social media, the tomes of advertisement and several other parts flashed through my brain. 

As was the first part in Unreal Engine 5. I saw in a few ways that it is a game changer and could guarantee (with the right approach) a setting that goes so much further than the 50,000,000 subscriptions I expected. If this goes right than this system will go to almost double of what I expected and that is something. If my mind is not delusional, this setting could break all records in gaming and as I have been part of the gaming world since 1985 that would be some crown to remove from my head as I retire, my mind has always been about more than gaming, in the 90’s I tried to advocate that gaming could lower the threshold of IT for people, IBM refused to listen as did other players and I was proven correct less than 5 years later, I was correct a few times over in the decade that followed and now, now I see a new stage, a new setting and all that could enhance in several directions and as my subconscious brain is trying to tell my active brain side that there is more I see more applications and a lot more settings that could enhance in several ways. All that and at present the only player ready to see what could be a stage 2 setting that gets them close to $20,000,000,000 annual. The Kingdom Holding Company has an option to reverberate all over the Islamic world with additional handhelds that could get them a truckload more options, but I need to tread carefully here. I need to retest and reset every element here, a player like that you can only approach once and I need to make sure that the voice of delusional greed is handled and muzzled, but it is hard. As I see more opportunities (in part thanks to the Unreal engine 5) we see that whatever this system becomes and who owns it, it now stands in a place where it can overshadow all other systems, something I never aimed for but there it is. I have been and remain a loyal Sony fan and my PS5 is ready to get Hogwarts Legacy which will happen in 309 minutes (roughly). But as I see the next iteration of what I thought out, the station merely expands and enhances and it will be my pleasure to hand the wooden spoon to Microsoft (should I get that opportunity). 

And still my mind is pointing out some of the past versions and what could be possible in this setting and the stage of doing that to a streaming system, I need to find my off switch, I need sleep.

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January 15, 2023 · 20:34

The theory of new

Before I connect to the story of today which BBC gives us is something from my past. In the 80’s I learned that there are 4 basic stances. Attack, defend, avoid and evade. The last two are not the same. In one we deflect here the attacker goes in the other we avoid where the opponent is expecting to be. It helped me in many of the stages I ever faced. It is the basic of being, that is how I saw it anyway. So these matters were in my mind when an article hit my eyes. It was ‘US-China chip war: America is winning’ (at. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-64143602), are they? Really?

You see the article gives us “These tiny fragments of silicon are at the heart of a $500bn industry that is expected to double by 2030. And whoever controls the supply chains – a tangled network of companies and countries that make the chips – holds the key to being an unrivalled superpower.” I cannot disagree, but the setting is folly. You see for the most in the last 30 years that industry tried to be everywhere and there is a stage where we see them in many places. But is that a good thing, or can that truly be pushed everywhere? Think of it, think of the stage from let’s say 1996 and now 2023. Electronics got to drown everything else. 

Now lets look at the simple image below

It is an abacus, and it comes from Persia about 600BC, there is enough speculation that they got it from somewhere else and that story goes back to the age of Mesopotamia. What is important is that a person truly versatile in this device can get to a result faster than anyone with a calculator and there is the solution, or perhaps the direction of the solution. The second strap is not what is out today, but what was out yesterday. In the older days we had Microsoft laptops, they outgrew their usefulness, or so that was what Microsoft wanted us to believe. The laptops were too slow, but guess what, those laptops became decently powerful Unix/Linux servers and that was a mere 10 years ago. The old PS3 could be broken into a Linux system, which was surprisingly powerful. They got a new lease on life and that is what we need to do, we need to consider other directions. Yes we see all the bla bla bla on AI and on what a powerful system can do, but guess what? AI does not exist. Machine learning does and deeper machine learning exists too and they are awesome. AI needs a lot more and these parts do not yet exist. In the first a real quantum computer is required and IBM is the closest to getting one. Once they get a handle on shallow circuits and the power is upped, that is when the system exists where a real AI could be, the second part is still a decade (at least) away. A Dutch physicist did find the Ypsilon particle and that is essential to get the shallow circuit truly going, but it is a decade away. You see chips are binary. It is either yer or no and an AI needs the Ypsilon particle. It is Yes, No, Neither or Both and these last two will evolve systems into closer to true AI and we are not there yet. So how does it all fill together? 

That is the core and we see part of that with “The manufacture of semiconductors is complex, specialist and deeply integrated. An iPhone has chips that are designed in the US, manufactured in Taiwan, Japan or South Korea, then assembled in China. India, which is investing more in the industry, could play a bigger role in the future.” This is true, or at least it sounds true, but the real issue is what can be replaced with a chip? You think it is ludicrous, but is it? Do we need them? It is a serious question. You see any new technology is derived from the limits of others and as power is more and more an issue in many places, the idea of exploring the field of mechanical computer is not the craziest. What did we overlook? What did we reject because an American told us that their chip was better? They did it before with VHS, Betamax was highly superior, but VHS had the numbers, it is the only reason they won. So what else did we reject? If an abacus can equal a person with a calculator. A system with a time advantage of 3000 years, what else is possible? We forget to look behind us (which is where I found billions in IP) what else is there and what else could be done? And this is not done overnight, this will take years, decades perhaps but it would result in a new technology stream, one not founded on electronics and guess what, when the power falls away, so do your chips. So is my idea weird? Yes. Is it preposterous? Perhaps. Is it invalid? No! There is enough evidence all over the field and seeking replacement systems is not the weirdest idea, not in this day and age. 

Consider one other system, in the old days (a little past WW2) someone invented the Knijpkap (squeeze cat) the torch had a small dynamo inside which sounded like a purring cat when operated. 

The interesting part is that it needed no battery. So how many torches do you know that have no battery? What happens when batteries are not available? We can add a recharging battery to hold that power, or not. But one device completely without battery. So what happens when we adjust this to other means? These are two simple applications, now consider one where whomever invents it reuses a mechanical computer to take the load away (and revenue) for electronic ones? That will be the exercise and it is not an easy one. It takes one with serious brains and a decade at their disposal. But I reckon the spoils will be so worth it in the end. 

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November 19, 2022 · 23:28

Identifying a new stage

That I something we all have to do at times. I (for the longest time) have been contemplating whether Keno Diastima required a fourth season. There was something close to immaculate to the open ending and there were questions within me. Why certain things existed, why certain steps were made and then I got to thinking part of what would have been a goal? There is something towards triggers, we all do, but what happens when the trigger is happening towards an automated process? You see, the automated process takes (for the most) time out of an equation. There can be two reasons behind this.  Th first is the fire and forget process where the instigators look at what comes after, the second is a little harder to explain. Consider a small room, in that room an African bee is released, to be safe you must kill the bee. That process can be monitored, but the stage is difficult and to get the killer bees in place requires an engine. My mind started to ask ‘But why?’ And then I remembered. It is perseverance, resisting temptation. This got my mind to an optional fictive stage that was once said to happen in Las Vegas, they played with artificial pheromones to keep people in a stage of continuous gambling and happiness. Now, I do not know whether this was ever true. The stage came to me from some Lawyer series, I forgot which one. But the stage had an interesting side question. How to infect the right people whilst keeping the others untouched. This led me to the brainwashing stage. Brainwashing can be achieved in psychological ways with additions of chemicals, isolation, debilitation and exhaustion. It is the balance that sets a stage and that can be used in many ways. Yet then we get to Sun Tsu. What if the need is Living spies, reverse spies and/or inside spies? How to create them and better how to keep control? That solution is in part seen by the stage where they are unaware that they are in the first place. And now we have the beginning of a stage. I am also cautious not to give anything away regarding the control lines of the first three seasons. And at that point I had unintentionally created the opening to continue the series (no spoilers). 

It is that stage that creates a new cast of leads and a very new cast of antagonists. You see we assume one side, but what happens when the roles are inverted? How can we see good from evil and more important, does it matter? The soldier tells us, we do not murder, the enemy murders, we merely kill them and protect ourselves. Adrian Furnham (in The Psychology of Spies and Spying: Trust, Treason, Treachery) teaches us the concepts regarding the rigorous psychological analysis of the personality and motivation of individuals involved in spying. Yet if they are unaware motivation is taken out of the equation, the personality of a person can be adjusted to facilitate processes and as such identity is take out of the equation. And with both out of the way you get more than who is good and who is not, we get the making of a faceless scout and that was when the idea struck a much larger stage, a much longer game, optionally something leading to a timeless one. Yet, who would prosper? It was at that stage when my mind went back to WW2 and the idea that at that point corporate espionage, espionage conducted for commercial or financial purposes could have had another option. Alfred Hitchcock touched on it with the movie the 39 steps, but the people never realised what an amazing and dangerous piece of work it was. You see industrial espionage seems limited (like Microsoft on IBM), but what if the stage is not that, but what happens when the stage defines where we invest, where we look and where the diamonds are? What if that party is to identify players that make a difference? It would be a much larger game, a game that has no borders. A setting we never faced before. 

And with that I had the beginning of season 4, but how to connect certain parts and make is ‘realistic’ enough to make the generals in Kremlin, Pentagon and Zhongnanhai cry like little chihuahua’s? Well perhaps not the Kremlin, they have bigger problems (like getting the bulk of their systems to actually work in wartime without losing over 80,000 troops). But the setting gives me two parts, the engine itself and trying to identify the parties involved and I do like a twist or two, like Pakistani intelligence in Homeland season 4. And the longer we do not know who or what we are facing, the term suspense at the tip of your chair becomes very acceptable. Like any writer who perks up when they hear the radio announcer scream ‘Did you see the plot twist last night? Holy F%#&!’ Any writer lives for such a moment, and I is no different. 

But the revelations my mind gave me during  short nap is making my brain hurt, I need to try and work out the story whilst I know I have to edit from word one with every iteration of facts. This is going to take a while, and that is merely season 4, with a related season 5. 

Just my way to pass the time when sex is not an option, the universe is massively unfair at times. 

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November 12, 2022 · 17:56

The other foot

A thought occurred, it happened earlier today, but my mind was not with the program that runs within me. You see we have a foot we prefer, almost like left handed and right handed, but the foot is less obvious, it is merely in the back of our minds, perhaps it is linked to instinct, perhaps it is less than that, but the setting exists. Yet what happens after? You see we are so of the mind that we walk we do that, and sometimes we run. Then we meet with people who tells us not to run, but to walk. Some have an actual concern. It can be safety, or merely the chance of danger. The other group gives us that setting do that we can be caught up to, we do not run faster than they do, it worries them. 

Yet there is another place. Where we rely on asymmetric gait, it is skipping. The interesting part is that skipping, even for 1-2 minutes a day strengthens you and increases your accuracy. Yet be honest. When was the last time you did that exercise? When do you no longer need to rely on increased strength and accuracy? You thought of that as a child’s game, did you not? 

The other foot is there too. What happens when you start concentrating on moving the other foot first? It is a simple question, did you ask yourself that? What happens when people state that there is no need, you are good as you walk and for a while you suddenly get compliments. Did you consider that someone does NOT want you to increase your mobility? In the 90’s my bosses did something similar. Convince me to NOT learn Oracle. It did not sit well with their exploitation of me, yet I did not learn that lesson until much later, too late actually. Yet in my twilight I have merely a few goals. Sell my IP and get a really nice stake in my retirement. And in good faith those who wronged me will never be allowed near my IP (Microsoft is not invited either). 

Yet the stage is not my IP, this stage is about you. When were you given a real option in the last two years? You see bosses are now no longer in charge (sort of). It is an employee setting and for the most they cannot get a good employee at present. EVERYONE is short of staff. As such this is the time to slam your fist on the table and set precise goals that they have to adhere to, although if you do that, you better deliver on their needs too. 

The AFR (at https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/why-we-don-t-have-enough-workers-to-fill-jobs-in-4-graphs-20220621-p5avcc) gives us in a first graph that the shortage increased by 30% in the last 2 years alone and it is not merely the ageing group. Bosses have short sold their staff for over a decade and now the invoice is due. In the blue collar stage it fluctuates between 20% and a whopping 74%. As such businesses on a global scale have a problem. Fortunately for them they have some options in other fields. Instead of relying on ‘Fake it until you make it’ they need to rely on ‘learn it until you lead it’ and there could be options all over the Commonwealth, Europe and even the US. Places like Oracle can start hiring trainees and after their first courses are passed they can be placed at their customers. Rotating every 6 month until someone ‘Shanghai’ them to become permanent employees. And this is not merely Oracle. There is Oracle, IBM, Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, end a few others.

The HR departments on a global scale need to alter their Modus Operandi it no longer works the way they think it does. The old days are over and you either adjust or you restrict your business. Of course players like Oracle need an alternative workforce, but there Universities and experienced oldies might be two streams of getting the workforce enabled. In addition they have the ability to enhance cyber knowledge all over the field making their people more enticing than the other ones. There the AFR had another view (at https://www.afr.com/technology/skills-shortage-a-handbrake-for-technology-companies-20220503-p5ai8r) and here we see ‘Skills shortage a ‘handbrake’ for technology companies’ which is merely the top-line. It is “The Australian Information Industry Association’s annual member survey found 75 per cent of technology companies are expecting their revenue to grow by at least 5 per cent this year but are concerned skills shortages will be a barrier to expanding their business.” And that is merely Australia. The commonwealth (especially UK and Canada) have growing issues and the US is in deep trouble and with their approach to everything it is now becoming the least interesting place to work. Plenty of California places (as well as the large players) have an option to syphon services via Canada, which is not a great solution, but better than nothing. In addition we see “AIIA chief executive Ron Gauci says his members are looking offshore to find specialist tech talent” and there we see the first problem, they rely on HR systems that did not evolve, that did not adjust and I see the same BS emails in my inbox to prove it, all half baked ‘invitations’ to come to Malta, they even pay the first month rent. Moving to a place where ‘others’ call the shots? You have got to be joking. When you are young and in the workplace we had 7 years ago, some people might give that a try. In todays setting it does not hold water and that is also a problem in Australia, the people who fell for that approach the last 6-10 years ago now have different stories and their friends are giving it a miss. But some places have options. They merely have to wake up and look at the equation from the other side to see that opportunities and options are there, merely for those willing to throw the gears in another speed setting and start with the other foot, it is seemingly that simple.

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October 31, 2022 · 10:28

The path not trodden

That is something that has been with me a lifetime. Even when I was little, being a passenger in a car, I always wondered where the exits led that we passed. Over time, as my knowledge of geography grew I knew where they led, but it was not that simple, although I never realised that at the time. So when I got accepted into Uni something started to stir and I got myself degrees in internet-working and legal studies with a master of Intellectual Property. That did not open the doors I hoped would open, yet it opened up doors inside of me. A much more rewarding part. I started to question almost everything and it led to over a dozen pieces of IP. UTS opened a doorway into how other people were thinking and that was utterly rewarding, because the exits I saw pass by were now in the open for me to explore and a dozen of IP pieces are now mine. Google never looked there, Amazon did not look there and wherever Microsoft is looking and not looking is not something anyone needs to be bothered about. Especially as some give us only 15 hours ago ‘Microsoft warns that October 2022 security updates can cause problems joining domains in Windows 11 and older’, I wonder if Microsoft can actually properly test security updates, they have become too big and the cracks are showing. In all this I found billions in revenue and to be honest, I do not trust a whole lot of wannabe tech firms. You see them on LinkedIn with fortune cookie wisdoms, getting their friends to like their post and liking the posts of friends hoping they gain traction. It is one of the reasons I handed the first part of my IP to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and if part 1 comes through they get a shot at the rest as well. As the large firms contract into the billions, I found additional billions as well as a few more options, because I explored the paths not trodden. Not only that, I found a few new sides that were ignored for longer than anyone would be happy about. When I started to meditate on these parts, my speculation (perhaps presumption) was that they either did not understood what they were looking at, or they didn’t fit it with their ‘marketing’ revenue. And that is the larger station. They are all trying to cash in on advertisements, and as they do that, they left billions on the floor. The certain telling of a limited field of view, like Microsoft. It is still a mystery why dopey googly Google would miss out and for that same reason Amazon, but there you have it, by looking where other race by, you tend to find the gemstones. The problems is which party could want and would pay for these gemstones. I am banking on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the UAE is an option but too far from Sydney at present and there are too many unknowns there too. The fact that the tech firms in the US, UK and EU have the same failing implies that they are all connected and optionally a discriminating source to some, as such I went the other way and now that there is a real chance to take a slice of the marketshare that should have been Google and Amazon (or wannabe Microsoft too) is a larger concern. I did not forget about Apple or IBM, they have focussed areas and they focus on these places as any tech firm will. So they never faltered (not to that degree), and in all this when you start digging and you see how they are all in the same mindset you will see that they miss the same opportunities again and again, which is now amounting to billions. So when you see ‘Google reportedly spends $100 million on avatars to take on TikTok’, or ‘Google making disinformation profitable via ad business: Report’ you get a first view that they are all looking at each other, optionally coveting the piece of pie the other one has and I found a new pie that I would not need to share (well whomever buys my IP). And now we have a new ballgame. The IT representing hundreds of billions of value is ignoring the few percentages that I found and no one else is aware (for now), I actually wonder when they will wake up from their dog eats dog momentum to realise that the dogs fighting over the same bone left half a dozen bones still covered in meat alone. Me as the little chihuahua got those bones as they were seemingly too small, but at 2%-5%, these billions are a lot to a little Chihuahua like me and I am happy with the spoils that they bring, I reckon that Saudi Arabia will be equally pleased. They get to sit at the big tech table and the other players will wonder how that happened. It happened because they followed each other and they all ignored the few exits that made me wonder, they all thought it went nowhere, which tells you more about them than me. And after my first win, the other IP pieces will become interestingly easy to sell, but I am also loyal, as such Saudi Arabia gets to pick first. The others never wanted to show interest, now they do not have to. That is only fair, is it not?

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September 14, 2022 · 18:54

The weird dream

We all have them, the seem to make sense at the time, but then we wake up and the dream has absolutely stopped making sense at that point. I had one last night. In the dream I was somewhere in the Ukraine. The commander was upset because he had three Howitzers. Their undercarriage was damaged, so they could not be transported and they were too heavy to carry and the Russians were coming, a group of 9 tanks, they were less than an hour away. One of the men had an idea, he told the commander. The commander thought for a moment and they started to move the Howitzers to the other side of the field. And they were placed in a ditch so that the barrel was parallel with the ground, about a meter above the ground. Seven men moved to the other side of the field, about 150 meters down the road and the remaining man worked on camouflaging the artillery. One man went towards a tower, but not a church, carrying an SVD Dragunov. As the tanks were approaching everyone hunkered down, then as the first three tanks came into the firing line of the Howitzers a few things happened at the same time. First the sniper shot what I presumed was a tank commander peering through binoculars in the head and at that very same time three Howitzers were fired, it did more than damage the tanks, the under carriage and tracks were ripped from the tank, a 155 mm shell hitting that close to the mark, at less then 50 meters is a sight to behold, and at that same moment, the men wielding Dragon anti tank systems were slamming the tanks from the last tank onward. Panic was complete! The tanks in the middle could not move either way and they had no commander to shout them where to go. In less than a minute the Russians lost three tank platoons and given that these are $500K, that is a tidy sum that will not make it back to Russia ay day soon. To be honest, I have no idea what brought the dream to me. I have little to no interest in tanks and I have no idea where this played, so I have no idea what brought the dream towards me. Yet there was link to IBM that I could not see, not comprehend, and that is why I brought the ‘this page intentionally left blank’, I cannot tell you why these pages were there, or why the MSDOS manual had so many of them. Even in 1986 it never made sense and I never comprehended the wisdom of that move. Because they through of everything? Because they thought that there was something they did not count on? Or something that they could not see? Your guess is as good as mine. So why do we now see ‘IBM targets energy-saving mainframes at Linux users’? They could have done that 20 years ago, so why now? Hoping to get the ‘energy aware tag’ from people that have no clue or merely market environmental awareness? Like the Guardian reporter that writes about jet-setters and their planes, whilst the 147 facilities that cause 50% of all the pollution damage (as given by an EEA report) are left in the dark, even the report is ignored by a lot of environmental reporters. So why was that? 

I will leave you to consider that, but I gave it to the readers and I even included the report itself, something the Guardian seemingly never did. Why was that? Who do these Environmentalists serve and who is IBM serving now? How many  Linux mainframes does IBM have out there, and how many other servers are out there? No matter how weird the dream was, reality can be a lot stranger.

 

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