Tag Archives: NVIDIA

To all these sales losers

Yes, it sounds a little vindictive and that is where I am. So to get to this, we need to assess a few things and as always I do assess where I am. To set that stage, we need to see the elements. As I early as February 8th 2021 I have stated “AI does not exist” I did so in ‘Setting sun of reality’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/02/08/setting-sun-of-reality/)

I have done so several times since and as always I got the ‘feedback’ that I was stupid and that I didn’t understand things. I let it slide over and over again and today the BBC handed me my early Christmas present. They did so in ‘Powerful quantum computers in years not decades, says Microsoft’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj3e3252gj8o) where we find “But experts have told the BBC more data is needed before the significance of the new research – and its effect on quantum computing – can be fully assessed. Jensen Huang – boss of the leading chip firm, Nvidia – said in January he believed “very useful” quantum computing would come in 20 years.” In 20 years? I can happily report I will be dead by then. Yet the underlying setting is also true. If actual AI is depending on a quantum chip and fully explored shallow circuit technology, we can therefor presume that true AI is at least 20 years away. I believe that another setting is needed, but that is not here nor there at this point. 

Don’t get me wrong. What we have now is great, even of a phenomenal nature, but it is not AI. Deeper Machine Learning is becoming more and more groundbreaking. And the setting together with LLM is amazing, it just isn’t AI. Together with the Microsoft setting of ‘in years’ comes nice. In an age that hype settings are required, the need for annual redefinition of something it isn’t will upset massive amount of sales cycles. They will suddenly need to rely on whatever PR is running with marketing setting the tome of what becomes next. A new setting for sales I reckon.

I have some questions on the quote “Microsoft says this timetable can now be sped up because of the “transformative” progress it has made in developing the new chip involving a “topological conductor”, based on a new material it has produced.” My question comes from the presumption that this is untested and unverified. I am not debating that this is possible, but if it was the quote would include (along the lines of) “the data we have now confirms the forward strides we are making” as such the statement is to some degree ‘wishful thinking’ it isn’t set in verifiable rule yet. It seems that Travis Humble agrees with me as we also get “Travis Humble, director of the Quantum Science Center of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, said he agreed Microsoft would now be able to deliver prototypes faster – but warned there remained work to do.” But the underground on this is set to a timeline that gives doubt to the set of Stargate and its $500 billion investment. Consider that the investment is coming over the next 4 years, all whilst ‘interesting’ quantum technology is 20 years away. So what will they do? Invest it again? Seems like a waste of 500 billion. In that case can I have 15 million of that pie? I need my pension investment in Toronto (apartment included). The larger setting of wasteful investment. Does Elon Musk know that there is 500 billion in funds being nearly wasted? 

And the simplest setting (for me) is also overlooked. It is seen in the quote “meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades”, that implies that there is no real AI at present. And my ego personally sees this as “Game, set and match for Lawrence”, as such all these sales dodo’s with their “You do not know what you are talking about” will suddenly avoid gazes and avoid me whilst they plan their next snappy come back. In the meantime I will leisurely relax whilst I contemplate this victory. It is the second step in my blog, the timeline shows what I wrote and when I wrote it. It could have gone the other way, but my degrees on the technology matter were clearly on my side.

And “Microsoft is approaching the problem differently to most of its rivals.”? Well, that is the benefit of taking another step, optionally innovative step in any technology. Microsoft cannot be wrong all the time and here they seemingly have a winner and that’s fair, they optionally get to win this time. 

In the setting of ego I start the day (at 04:30) decently happy. Time I had a good day too. As such there is nothing to do but to wait another 240 minutes to have breakfast. Better have a walk before then. Have a good or even better, a great day today.

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Alignments?

Less than 24 hours ago I wrote about Microsoft and the statement I gave there, namely “When you need to appease 400,000 partners things go wrong, they always do. How is anyones guess but whilst Microsoft is all focussed on the letter of the law and their revenue” led to a few questions. So, how is 400,000 partners an issue and the 12,000 partners of Salesforce are not? Well, I never said that 12,000 partners are not a problem, but as I see it the 400,000 are. 

To get where I am going, a few definition are needed. A partner (in IT) is set to “A partnership when it comes to IT is within the IT sphere and has mutual or at least some value for both companies.” But here the issue starts. You see, some have a somewhat more defined setting “In some mild cases, there are a few well-intentioned and hard-working partners who are just out of the loop. In more extreme cases, certain partners are not bought in, are not being held accountable, and are negatively impacting performance.” This is where the problem starts. Partners have an alignment to you, but they also have their own agenda. Microsoft can make all the claims they want, but this is reality. So lets get a useful presentation image. 

So see this boat, that is the Micro boat (a very soft presentation) the goal is the 100% mark, right on course. Now consider that in a polarising setting there are two directions, And the group of 400,000 is split up. In this we get that one group is larger and it has the breaching impact of the good ship Microsoft coursing to the right. Reality gives us that there will be be clusters in all directions. 

Some ahead to the left or the right, but those behind the ship will also slow it down with all kinds of budget overruns. No matter how good the Microsoft agreements are, there will always be interest groups for THEIR interest trying to ‘steer’ the ship more in their direction. As such 400,000 partners is (as I see it) folly. Revenue and greed will only help anyone so far, as I see it, Microsoft has had its problems. I reckon that not all the news is sincere and completely valid. Some were (as I personally see it) issues with alignment. Their might not have been drastic but there will have been issues. That is my point of view and in business intelligence I have seen my share of ‘issues’ not all of them drastic but plenty of them with some kind of impact. 

Take this as well as the news we saw through Wired and we get a much larger issue and now as I personally see it, partners could become debilitating. Mess with a partners revenue stream and things go pear shaped really fast. We see this 1 hours ago when we are told “Nvidia Loses $470 Billion in Value in a Week. Should Investors Be Worried? · The market as a whole is shaky · Nvidia remains in an extremely solid position.” Really? At what point does a firm remain in a solid position when they lose $470,000,000,000 in a week? Now take this setting (which might be a temporary thing) and take it to the next level. A major side to the so called AI stage. That firm loses four-hundred and seventy BILLION dollars. That’s about 20%, so this was a simple dip which recovered in mere minutes. So at what point and why did it drop to that degree? And as I see it, any partner that does not react is on a fools errand. Now consider that 400,000 partners call Microsoft at that point to learn what THEIR impact might be. So a software vendor needs to appease 400,000 partners. And I couldn’t get support (in the past) for hours. So how does this compute? Well look at the first image. These partners will not be in one direction, but in dozens of directions. So are you catching on now? So take that and News by TechTarget giving us ‘Understand Microsoft Copilot security concerns’ and the underlying text “Microsoft Copilot can improve end-user productivity, but it also has the potential to create security and data privacy issues.”and that with the news at Wired (see previous article) gives a lot more weight to “the potential to create security and data privacy issues” and now, what will the partners do? How many will optionally panic? Now watch the good ship Microsoft slow down and drop their anchors for the storm (optionally in a teacup) recede. What is the bill belonging to such a knee-jerk reaction? 

You tell me, but there will be a reaction. As I see it, they either have 400,000 customers (optionally non paying) and they will not make a sound, but it makes Microsoft seem more important, or they have 400,000 real partners and you see what I described above. I am merely throwing the terms they publish (via media). You can’t have it both ways and it all ends with the setting of Alignment. I do not know a real good read on the alignment of customers versus partners. But one gets you revenue and the other gives you a smoking hand grenade. You tell me what you prefer to deal with. 

OK, not the most positive writing, but it came from a question that gave ma additional pause to think. 

Have a great Sunday (Vancouver) and I am moving towards Monday a present (in 40 minutes).

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How to measure success?

That is the question is was facing today. It wasn’t about my success (or lack thereof). It was about the olympics. One member (a fellow Australian) was happy because we had two additional gold members over the United Kingdom. But there was something wrong with that train of thought. It was too American. Don’t get me wrong, as I see it it is great to have more golden medals, but in my old fashioned way of life (and thinking) it is weird that the runners up get to live. I must be going soft in my old age.

You see with Australia grasping a 14-12-9 achievement and the United Kingdom holding onto 12-15-19 at present this list could go into any direction. However, this got me thinking. How do you measure success? Don’t get me wrong the gold number are nice, yet it is not a true list of achievement, is it? I have been pondering this and my mind took me to the old 1,2,3 squared allocation. So Bronze counts as 1, Silver as 4 and gold as 9. Now we get to 183 for Australia and 187 for the United Kingdom. UK won by a nose-hair as jockeys tend to say. So is this actually fair? How can medals be universally set? I don’t think that a boxer will accept equal points to an equestrian, in support, the horse will not go along with that either. Still there is a need to give some level of equality especially as the best of the best of the best in any of these disciplines are competing, yet the simple set to look at the golden medals seems wrong (possibly Canadian Summer McIntosh might agree but she just got 3 golden and one silver medal), at 17 she got (as far as I know) a tied second place with a few others all with three golden medals in the French Olympics. 

However I still ponder, is my formula the right one? It seems to be, but it might be my own shortsightedness to think so. 

Still, the question remains, how do you measure success, and not just in sports. In the 90’s I was subject KRA’s (Key Result Areas) and I accepted them as I had no knowledge on how to measure success. Even in customer care and Technical Support these numbers (when applied to the field I was in) made perfect sense. At some point you need to consider what to measure and how to measure it. Medals are a finite point of achievement, customer care is a little bit more fluidic. So how to go about it? The Olympic medallist might have kicked this off, but my brain takes into all directions. So with one movie script under my belt (for assessment with Dubai Media) am I more successful in scripting then all my friends (both of them)? They are not in that field, so how to generalise some metrics? You see we can grab Z-scores but as far as I can see that is a near obsolete approach to matters (perhaps what the people call AI use this) and now we get to the next bit and why I used Summer McIntosh as an example. These were her first Olympics, so how could there be a Z-score of her and how would it be reliable (or relatable)? Previous competitions? These were her first olympics and even in global events the pressures are different. 

And the field becomes even more complex, you see whatever they call these systems based on LLM’s and Deeper Machine Learning, it is either set by a programmer, or set by data and there the problem becomes a lot larger as both are used. Without proper verification and a number of constraints the equation becomes a GIGO rule (Garbage In Garbage Out).

I wonder how much some players consider success. Most will measure success by their ability to bring home the bonus funds. To some extent I accept that, but when you consider how they went about getting that success becomes a larger issue. In this I take the conceptual setting of Awareness versus Engagement in market research. Awareness could be shown how many impressions (or clicks) something gets, whilst engagement requires interaction with the solution. As I have always stated Engagement wins every time, but the large companies often herald views per thousand (or clicks as a secondary). So who get the price turkey at the end? Large Language Models with (Deeper) Machine Learning what some call a version of AI has issues and the world is waking up to Nvidia (not meant in a bad way). You see there is currently no AI, not yet anyway. What there is (the LLM and DML reference) is awesome and it can do great stuff, but it has issues like the legal sector recently saw. There is a lack of verification and that will be an issue in plenty of fields. 

Have a successful day.

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The alignment of views

That is what I am setting this conversation up for. Well conversation? As the blogger this is my monologue, a monologue plain and simple. I had another idea regarding the approach to gaming IP, but that ill be for another day. 

Today I am talking about the ABC article (at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-25/iran-saudi-china-middle-east-war-actress-nazanin-boniadi-profile/102996008). I am using this example for the simple reason that ABC is a good media outlet, they try to give us the real settings. As such taking the article apart in a different way might bring the points better across to the readers. 

You see, the media has squandered respectability, they squandered credibility and they squandered reliability. Not all media mind you, but a lot of them all decided to courtesan the digital dollar (whoring seems so harsh). In that setting we have a much larger station, but lets loo at the article. 

Actress Nazanin Boniadi on why China shouldn’t be mediator in the Middle East’ is the title.

Point 1
Boniadi, who has dedicated much of her working life to advocating for human rights, including in Iran.” So who is Nazanin Boniadi? Is she an influencer? I never heard of her. Perhaps she is for real, but I cannot tell.

This is a setting that is partially on me. I never heard of her, but the larger media is using ‘influencers’ to taint the stories we see. It is a populist agenda that we are too often given (not accusing ABC of this) and as such we can no longer tell the difference between real, fake and deep fake. Populist sources are all about the flames, all about emotions and the larger corporations (as well as some governments) will give added ‘benefits’ to any anti-China story, that much is a given. That does not mean that there isn’t any valid anti-China materials out there. But the waves of deception have grown to a degree where we can no longer tell the difference. 

Point 2
“I think we will have to worry about autocracies taking that top spot in the world, and what that would look like for the rest of us,” Boniadi says.

This could be seen as a valid question. Yet the sentiment is on ‘autocracies’ and the issues is that America and the EU have become such a mess that they cannot even stop in-fighting. They cannot decide on whether to counter Russia or hand over their governments to Putin, a sore setting indeed and the media is always there to push any flame that they can. You see China is regarded (to many) as a system of people’s congress with a unified state power. A communist nation. We can think what we want, but the setting of “a system of government by one person with absolute power” remains a debatable one. You see that is OUR point of view but others (especially in China) seem to believe that country’s recent economic achievements have actually come about because of, not despite, China’s authoritarian form of government. It is up in the air, but as we see that the EU and America are collapsing under their own weight of indecision, they might not be in such a setting. In addition Dutch political party New Social Contract with its leader Pieter Omtzigt was giving the press 7 minutes to time to prepare for the election papers. 7 minutes, that is a populist approach to getting votes and responses. How is that any way to treat voters? That is the setting we see and that is what we are given. 

The media has been shirking their responsibilities for close to a decade and it is getting worse. So whilst I would be willing to accept the story by the ABC, the larger setting is that the media has been flawed for some time and newspapers aren’t what they used to be. 

Point 3
The third point is a good one “We, the democratic countries, really have to unite in the same way that these autocracies are uniting to prevent that from happening.” I do have an issue with “in the same way”, you see getting them to ACTUALLY unite is one thing. America is in shambles and they are all there to address their own needs, then the needs of their ‘benefactors’ and then the rest is in play. The EU is no different, but with 19 nations all up in arms of each other, the larger station is lost to most of them. An example was seen last week when we were given “Boehringer Ingelheim and five other drugmakers have agreed to pay the European Commission €13.4 million in a hybrid settlement decision after admitting to participating in a global cartel to fix the price of an essential stomach medicine.” So, they make billions and they get a slap of €13.4 million? Things are getting worse and worse in the EU and I wonder if they even have an option to get back on track. Another example is seen with “U.S. measures to limit the export of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China may create an opening for Huawei to expand in its $7 billion home market as the curbs force Nvidia to retreat, analysts say”, it is funny as I gave the readers in ‘The definition of insanity’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2023/10/19/the-definition-of-insanity/) a day before that papers was published that very same setting. I did not give any numbers as I didn’t have any, but the larger station is now clear. The EU and USA broke their own systems a few times over and this isn’t helping any. This setting is important in light of the way that I am monologuing ‘unite’, but the lack of unity all over the western world is a clear sign that BRICS might end up being the next real power and as we are all up in arms on what  there is going on between China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Yet Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud, Saudi’s foreign minister is correct, something needs to happen and the wester nations are missing or fumbling the ball again and again. We get too much ego, too much presentations and no results and the media isn’t helping any.

So even a the article that is staging what we see now was all on the up and up, the questions are real. They are real because of all the Murdoch wannabe’s, glossy flames and influencer enablers we forgot what ACTUAL news is. A lot of people can no longer tell the difference and the press isn’t policing itself, so the people are on a short pier with nowhere to go. 

That is my point of view and in all this ABC is one of the more respectable sources. Too many are a lot less and the enabling of terrorist agenda’s by the media to get clicks is starting to be noticed by a lot of people. The populist agenda has never been a democratic view or a realistic democratic approach. Consider the autocracy that they will deliver when they are elected will cause a rapid decline in many nations and I might just live long enough to see that impact on a global scale. 

Enjoy the day as we move towards the middle of the week.

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The definition of insanity

We have all heard this one. The setting that people doing exactly the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different outcome. A patent clerk named Alfred came up with it according to a fair amount of people, but here you would be wrong. It originated somewhere around 1980 apparently by Narcotics Anonymous. The US government has taken this setting of insanity to heart as we can see. 

Not the first but we get at some point that the US government was stopping Android towards China, Huawei especially. The consequence was that Huawei created HarmonyOS. They are now at 4.0.0.121 which is available in 77 languages, so not just in China. It might not have the following that makes it a threat to Google and it likely won’t be for years to come. But the stage has been created. To give some kind of relativity “Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group claimed that HarmonyOS had reached 300 million smartphones and other smart devices, including 200 million devices in the ecosystem and 100 million third-party consumer products from industry partners.” The setting that it is now in 300,000,000 smartphones and smart devices implies that those machines are NOT using Google’s Android. Nice example of stupidity US government.

So here is the prequel, now we get to the main event dished to us by the BBC. Here (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67141987) we are given ‘Beijing unhappy at latest wave of US restrictions’. The setting sounds one way, but when you get to “The measures target chipmaking tools as well as advanced chips, including two from market leader Nvidia. The move is being seen as an attempt to close loopholes that became apparent after an initial wave of chip controls last October. America said the measures were designed to prevent China from receiving cutting-edge technologies that it could use to strengthen its military, especially in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).” So stupidity continues in a few ways. You see AI does not yet exist and the one player most likely to push that into completion is IBM. And for the statement “prevent China from receiving cutting-edge technologies” is pretty much a joke. China already has cutting-edge technologies. Huawei is more advanced then anything the west has and we see that in action all over the Middle East. The second part is that Nvidia is a market leader, but it became one through business based cutting corners. This is not negativity, what they did was sound, clear and business based. But there is a downside for the US (yet again), like HarmonyOS, China can create its own chips. Granted that it will not be as powerful as Nvidia but it will work. And there is a second tier to all this now. 

For example the PNY NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation Graphics Card is next level shit, we can all agree that this is the case and for $15,790 it is all yours. Yet, who could afford that? Now China gets to be in the place to create a competitor that can only do 90% of what this card could do, but for $3,500. The bulk of people who cannot afford the Nvidia card will jump at the Chinese option and then what? This is not some speculation, it is a given certainty. The US is throttling whatever they can and alternatives become a reality. First HarmonyOS, then we see that Saudi Arabia has the fastest 5G by leaps (over 700% faster than 5G in the USA) and that list merely becomes bigger, all whilst they set the stage for others to take over marketshare. Have they forgotten the harsh lesson they saw in 1985-1995? They blocked Russia from getting PC’s and other hardware and as a result Toshiba became a world player with an annual revenue surpassing ¥158.94 billion (2021). Marketshare lost to Compaq, HP, Dell, and so on. So, what will the US do when China stops exports to the USA? Cry? 

America thinks it is a global player, but that is no longer the case and their 325 million people includes well over 50% who cannot afford any of it. That gives China the option to expand into Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The two richest nations (Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) are now in a stage where they give more and more expansion options to China. I like the comparison that the West Wing gave us “America designed a pen that works in outer space, it costed them millions. Russia? They used a pencil” That stage is returning to us again and again. China will create new processors and through that new cloud systems and notebooks. In the meantime as people need to get cheaper stuff will end up with Chinese hardware. Europe has roughly 750,000,000 people, twice the population of America. Africa has a population of 1,215,000,000 people and the Middle East has around 370,000,000 people. All now getting a small nudge towards China. So, what will America do when it defaults at the same time that the people of the world moves towards Huawei, Harmony and whatever comes next? 

So whilst we are given “The Biden administration has denied it was trying to hurt China economically, but Beijing’s foreign ministry branded the move “forced de-coupling for political purposes”.” We need to consider that this is a final act of desperation and the news that Chinese stock is down 1.2%, consider what happens to the stock of Microsoft, Google and Samsung when HarmonyOS is releasing 5.0 which is likely a year away. When the CEO of Huawei tells the world that their HarmonyOS is now in well over 500 million devices, that is the point that big-tech starts getting nervous and when Tencent technologies is told to end its partnership with Microsoft we will see the first sparks of a race that had only one outcome, all due to ego driven political posturing. I know that this will be an event as I have several pieces of IP that none of the other players have and I should not have this advantage. I got it by looking at what was possible, not what greed demanded I would do and that would result in some losing 3%-5% marketshare and that was why I initially went to the Saudi government. They can afford to buy it, the American firms will hide behind “Trust us, we’ll do right by you” but they will not deliver, they merely want freebees and now at the end of the margins that sloppy setting will cost them their house. 

Could I be wrong?
That is the first question I ask myself and I ask it all the time. To critically look at your own settings is how you can find flaws and I did find a few but consider that HarmonyOS did not exist before 2019. Consider that there was only Google and Apple and now one in 20 houses have Huawei and optionally HarmonyOS to some degree. It might be slow now, but in 2-3 years that amount will have doubled. Apple and Google are still safe and still firm, but this third player was never a blip before and now they are more than a blip. I personally believe that their grow markets are the Middle East and Asia. I reckon that India is the first setting. We were given “We are open to doing business with any company anywhere as long as they are investing and conducting their business lawfully and are in compliance with the Indian laws,” A statement by Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, as such India is now open for business. Huawei is re-entering Pakistan with smartphone solutions no later than early 2024. That opens up the corridor  between China and Egypt and when Egypt comes across, which it already did in January as we saw “Telecom Egypt, the country’s first integrated telecom operator, in cooperation with Huawei Technologies” sets the stage that Huawei is now at the front door of Europe. The moment that Ericsson fails to remain on par, which it isn’t at present the flood gates into Europe open up and all this could have been prevented by focussing on innovation, which the telecom providers failed at all over Europe and in the USA. So that is the consequence that a lack of innovation brings and still the same old greed driven play is being pushed by America and as they financially buckle more and more, the game will get a different continuation. 

This is not the first mention of this, I made several publications going back 2-3 years into this field and now that the stage is at the edge of readiness we see some mention of “it could use to strengthen its military” I merely laugh. The bulk of American politicians want to stop supporting Ukraine against Russia. If they are not ready for that setting they will not like what military encounters with China will look like. China doesn’t need to fight, it can just wait until America collapses and as things go that moment is coming closer and closer. The nanny state looks good on paper, but when you have too many children and only one nanny chaos is an absolute certainty, ask any mother. They can tell you just how bad things can get. 

As I personally see it the US-China chip war is a paper tiger. It might sound nice now but it is staged on a setting that nothing changes and that is never a reality. Change is the number one part in evolution and innovation. In 2022, the total number of invention patents filed in China reached 4.21 million, of which 3.28 million were held by inventors from mainland China, do you really think that all innovation comes from America? Lets not forget that Nvidia only had an additional $60 million in revenue over the last year and that is one number that greed driven Wall Street does not like. There is no telling what happens when China get its own systems running and that is a certainty, no government will rely on foreign technology. Not in the west and not in the east. Yet that marker seems a lot more clear in the east, but feel free to refuse my view on that matter. That would be fair enough. 

What will happen next? That is anyones guess, I stated clearly what is out in the open and what I expect to happen next. Make up your own mind and always check what you are given, no matter what or who the source is.

Enjoy the day.

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Evolution is not merely the person

The setting started a few days ago, yet the new stage we are shown is merely hours old. Even as it seemingly started on August 12th with ‘Tapping an economy’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2023/08/12/tapping-an-economy/) the stage is getting redefined, almost as we speak. This is seen with ‘Saudi Arabia and UAE race to buy Nvidia chips to power AI ambitions’ (at https://www.afr.com/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-and-uae-race-to-buy-nvidia-chips-to-power-ai-ambitions-20230815-p5dws6). I believe personally it is merely one of two sides. You see, we are given “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are buying up thousands of the high-performance Nvidia chips crucial for building artificial intelligence software, joining a global AI arms race that is squeezing the supply of Silicon Valley’s hottest commodity.” But it is merely one side and this side is putting pressure on the US, it’s companies are running out of funs and their credit cards are reaching limits. These two players have the cash to run circles around dozens of nations and that is not the only place they are in an advantage. I will not go back to my IP (no mater how valid it is). The larger station is that these two players will need data centres and that is where EVROC (as discussed in the earlier article 4 days ago) has the ability to set up national data centres, a stage that takes American companies out of the loop. I am not anti-American, I am anti-stupid and the catering that data centres have given the US companies all whilst places like Cambridge Analytics opened up to is now starting to show. There is the added setting that nationally speaking these two players prefer to be set in, the stage is not merely based on national needs. I personally believe that they have a ‘non-American’ involvement mindset. And I reckon that evidence will be proven when EVROC is allowed these two new data centres as well. It puts the USA in a massively decreasing setting. Another (non-related) stage is added to this. Only a few hours ago Yahoo Finance (merely one source) is giving us (at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dollar-being-dethroned-india-just-201500390.html) ‘India just bought 1M barrels of oil from the UAE using rupees instead of USD for the first time’, we can chalk this up to a whole set of reasons and if someone states that this will be the pro-forma setting of BRICS, I will not be able to support or oppose it. There is not enough data accessible to me. The larger stage is set that the US is being ignored for too man settings and that is merely in the last week. I do not care how many Pizza al Fungi’s Janet Yellen has consumed, or how magical that dinner was. The stage is that the US has become trivialised and a lot of it is by their own doing. So whilst some are staging to trivialise that India is not using the US dollar. The reality is that only 3 years ago that option would be ludicrous and here we see it play out. So is BRICS becoming more powerful, it the US becoming weaker and just how much gains will Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates make in this year alone? EVROC is still a Swedish conundrum, but there are too many voices out there that are too anti-American voiced (which is not anti-stupid, my personal setting). I know I am seeing my own prophecies come to reality, but not in a way I envisioned. It could be that I never had the proper glasses to see it all, or it is because new elements are coming to bear and that second part is the larger stage I am now worried about. Not because of what the KSA and UAE are doing, but because of the US and its Trump and Karen setting, it is highly likely that it will drag the EU and Japan down with them. These latter two made the wrong calls a few times and now that the endgame (of the US) is starting to show, the back paddle actions of the EU (optionally towards China) might not be enough. I have no idea how this will play out for the Commonwealth. The stage of Canada with wildfires and 90% of the NWT being a goner looks more like a scene from ‘How it ends’ (2018) than reality, no matter how surreal both are. As such this stage will impact the rest of the Commonwealth. The UK is close to broke, and with Canada in the state it is in, the Commonwealth needs to find a safe place and footing and the US is less likely to be that place at present. It needs to find a solitary road to link to nations and that is the hard part. I have no idea what the safe route is, but I do feel certain that the US is no longer that part. I feel that finding a way to connect to the Middle East is presently safer than a link to China, but in reality I am speculating on what the safer route is. 

The setting we see now (the Nvidia AI chip) where we were given (at https://www.crn.com.au/news/ai-chips-could-save-future-data-centres-money-nvidia-599254)“Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has a mantra that he has uttered enough times that it almost became a joke during his SIGGRAPH 2023 keynote last week: “the more you buy, the more you save.”” Yet the setting is not merely ‘the more you save’ it is about to become who owns them and those who cannot afford them and now the KSA and UAE will have additional power positions. So consider “AI chips can save companies significant money on costs compared to traditional CPUs for what he views as the future: data centres, fuelled by demand for generative AI capabilities, relying on large language models (LLMs) to answer user queries and generate content for a wide range of applications” and a place like EVROC could set up two data centres all whilst these two nations provide the AI chips required, now we get an entirely new play and it will give these two nations the power to set a stage that excludes the US or their tech-firms. A stage none of them ever had before, as such do you still think I am boasting or creating non-sense? Too many sources had the elements available and the larger media ignored the puzzle pieces. So, is my puzzle correct? Not necessarily, but the pieces fit the image we have all seen before. This does not make the image correct, but it makes it decently likely and the more BS the American media spouts the less reliable it should be seen. This does not make China or the Middle East more reliable, but in the setting I currently see it makes the Middle East (KSA and UAE) a lot safer than the US has been the last few years and that counts, because that reinforces the image that Nvidia and EVROC are giving us, with optional speculations from yours truly (aka moi).

Your guess is as good as mine as to what comes next, but the larger fighting ring (a square setting) is about to show us who the contenders are and the amount of underdogs they face. Because no matter how much BS an underdogs brings to the table, in the ring it is what you can achieve and as I personally see it, the US, EU and Japan are starting to become the largest underdogs this century, which could be a stage pushed in by evolution.

Have fun today.

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That first step

We have all heard it, the first step is admitting you have a problem. There is of course debate on WHAT the problem is. I am not any different. I hate stupidity, hypocorism and bot to mention short sighted issues. One of these issues is ‘Tax the rich’, we see all these stupid people screaming ‘tax the rich’ whilst the system is set, there is a tax system, there are tax laws and instead of all screaming to adjust the tax system we see the empty gesture to tax the rich, the rich do not care, they adhere to tax laws, so these laws will PROTECT them. Another issue was seen in ‘Greed and Law helping each other’, I wrote it on July 9th 2021 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/07/09/greed-and-law-helping-each-other/). There I set out the short sighted setting of the Oxycontin setting. I wrote “Yes, there are culprits in this story. You see some sources give us that in 1996 316,000 prescriptions were dispensed, it grew to an impressive amount topping over 14 million prescriptions with an estimated value of $3,000,000,000. The issue we see everyone painting over is ‘prescriptions dispensed’, this is not something that a person can get, it needs a doctor and it needs a pharmacist.” You see there are laws and rules, and they were massively broken by doctors and pharmacists. So when do they go to court? 

It is Reuters who give us today (at https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/sacklers-near-deal-contribute-more-opioid-settlement-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy-2022-01-31/) the story of ‘Sacklers near deal to increase opioid settlement in Purdue bankruptcy’, I personally do not believe that members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma LP were completely innocent, yet that is not the setting is it? SOMEONE handed a paper to dispense Oxycontin, a pharmacist handed over the drugs. Yet nearly all of them banked the money and did not ring the alarm bell (some really did that) and those who cashed in on 14,000,000 prescriptions? Why are they not in court? Members of the Sackler family cannot hand over prescriptions, they cannot dispense drugs to people, they can merely distribute to pharmacies. So I do not believe that they are completely innocent, but to go after them and not after the doctors and pharmacies is (as I personally see) immoral. 

Yes, I know that in Torts you go after the money.

So in that setting: “Jeff Bezos, I do believe you owe me $50,000,000 post taxation, pay up please!

But is any of that fair? You might say that fair has nothing to do with it and it is not incorrect but it is wrong. So when Reuters gives us “An agreement involving members of the Sackler family and several state attorneys general could potentially end a legal challenge that has prevented Purdue from exiting bankruptcy, and clear the way for a plan aimed at helping to abate the opioid crisis” my personal thoughts are wondering how many of these state attorney generals went after the doctors and the pharmacies? Justice handed in August 2021 a verdict, ‘Doctor Sentenced To More Than 15 Years In Prison For Conspiring To Distribute Thousands Of Oxycodone Pills Illegally’, there is no way in hell that only ONE doctor did that, so how many are serving 15 years? 

It is U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss who gives us “Dr. Emmanuel Lambrakis wrote medically unnecessary prescriptions for thousands of oxycodone pills – an addictive and potentially fatal opiate.  Instead of abiding by his oath to ‘do no harm,’ Lambrakis pumped deadly drugs into the community.  Lambrakis put his own greed before his duties as a medical professional, and for that he will now spend a lengthy term in federal prison.” And as stated before, there is no way that there was merely one doctor guilty of that, in addition, there are truckloads of pharmacies that require the same amount of attention and that too is not being done to the degree it had to be done, it is my personal opinion that some state attorneys general’s were lazy and decided to go after the money, go for the easy conviction. Yes, the Sackler family benefitted, but who prescribed? Who handed them over? I see close to nothing on that. It is a simple tax the rich approach to a failing in law and a failing to observe the law and there are clearly a vast amount of doctors and pharmacies more guilty than any of the Sackler family. But we do not get to see that, do we?

As I see it, it started with that first step and the law has a problem, it cannot properly dispense justice to the wrongdoers. It merely went to the richest person and found them guilty. So what happens when it becomes about something more problematic? What happens when someone figures out that any Ponzi scheme can be done online handing the mess to Apple or perhaps Epic systems? So what happens when the hackers find the weakness in something like Nvidia’s GeForce Now service? What happens when 300,000,000 people lose $10-$35 and Epic goes ‘Not my Problem’, and Nvidia goes ‘We know nothing’? Who will end up with that bill of $3,000,000,000-$9,000,000,000 because the people will demand payment and as I see it the Justice departments will be globally clueless on how to proceed. The nice part here is that the court setting makes Apple automatically innocent, they had to open up the system and the people will merely lose their money. 

How a spindled world wide web we weave.

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The delusional stage of me

Yup, that was always going to be a phase. Even if it is merely academical, the best setting towards a stage of balance is to reflect on the matter that I might be bonkers. To others this mean gaga, mad, insane optionally freaking bug nuts. Some people might be afraid of setting their mental capacity to minus 365, but I do not share that. There is the chance I have been correct on every count (I usually am), but to set that stage I must reflect on the chances that I somewhere to the right of insane and to the left of being bonkers to the umpteenth degree.

You see, it is easy to blame Reuters, but the merely propagate the news, do they not? So when I see “U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday said he is confident there will be effective 5G competitors to Huawei from Western vendors at comparable costs, adding that he believes Western technologies will come to dominate telecommunications” some could consider that I am not alone in the fashion house with the long sleeved shirts, but that is just them. When I see ‘Western technologies will come to dominate’ I see a clear admission that China is ahead in 5G and they are. This s further fuelled by “I am confident that there will be a cost effective deliverables from Western trusted vendors that can deliver the same services or better services at comparative cost”, there we do not see ‘trusted vendors that will deliver’, but ‘trusted vendors that can deliver’, it sets the stage to a presumption. The former CIA director is precise with his language, he is no fool, not by a long shot. This sets a different scope for me, to counter it, I will be pushed to offer my IP to either Saudi Arabia or the UAE, an alternative is Qatar, but that has its own issues and it might cost me in the long run. If the ‘person of patent calculations’ os to be believed, I would have a lot to lose, but there is no way that I can trust most of the governments, yet Google and Huawei is a polarised field, in this setting Saudi Arabia or the UAE could be the in-between to whomever bids next, and that might be Huawei, they have the advantage on software and they are a smudge ahead of Google in that matter. The Reuters article is limited and one of the smaller articles, it is like Reuters is merely setting out one paragraph of a memo. I see no questions, no rhetoric of even speculative settings towards what is and what could be, Reuters is playing this cautiously, which in light of the ‘revelation’ is interesting, but the stage is one that I cannot ignore. Dealing with Huawei is the safe bet on the value of the IP, yet the bully tactics of the US are starting to pay off, and now that the UK government has handed ARM to Nvidia, the stage will turn for yet another turn. In all this the media remains oblivious on delivery times by Apple that in some cases are set to 20 weeks, a 2 trillion dollar company with a delay of 20 weeks on their iPad air? That means that there is a shortage of unbridled proportions and this is not merely the COVID stage, there is more, there has to be. 

When you cannot deliver for that amount of time, yet you open more and more stages of shop displays (in other chains), the shortage is fundamental and as I see it, when chip shortages hits 5G hardware, it will be fun to see some people panic. This is not a given, and not speculatively, Sony already has issues with its SoC chip. They are expected to ship 4 million less PS5 consoles in the coming year. 5G also has a SoC chip (a different one) but if one has issues, the setting that others have it too is not too far fetched. Gizmodo gave us a little over a month ago ‘MediaTek supply for 4G chips run dry, fresh stock to arrive by 2021’, it does not matter how Mediatek voices it, if it cannot supply the world with 4G chips, it will not be able to keep up on 5G either, and that is what matters. Because the moment China has a decent alternative to offer, 100% of that stock goes straight to Huawei increasing the advantage they have and at that point, how many of them will go to the US? My speculative guess is 0%, and that is where the Middle East comes into play. Huawei needs to make nice and the EU is not ready, but the Middle East is, Egypt too, although not sure if they have a lot fo needs at that point. But the stage that I predicted months ago is still coming to pass, although chip shortage was not on my radar, merely the shortsighted actions by the American govern mental administration.

And me? My delusional stage? Well that is out in the open, either Saudi Arabia or the UAE can get hold of my IP for $25,000,000 upfront with shared patent ownership, as the investor they get 60%, I keep 40%, which would be an awesome payout, especially when the US has no options but to buy in. It was a choice and a risk to play it like this, but there was no trust with some corporations, as such there was only Google and Huawei and Huawei is becoming an international discriminated party, it will hurt me, so I am taking an alternative road and these people want to play on the 5G table, I had to make a choice and I have everything to gain and nothing to lose, in the worst case I make my IP public domain, if that happens it means that governments and corporations are so greed driven that engineers on a global scale will walk out and start for themselves, I wonder if I see that happen.

Well, have a great (delusional) day.

 

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Getting back on the horse

Finally a blog article from me that is for the most all about my view of gaming  (because there is nothing interesting about reading stories regarding Varoufakis being a sore loser in the Guardian).

We all have these moments where we go shopping, whilst there are no funds available. A situation I have been very familiar with, yet we still go browsing in many places to see whether there is something to work towards. This certainly describes my case and as I found out soon thereafter, I got myself into a mingled world of facts and none facts a lot more than I bargained for. So what started this?

I’ll be honest, ever since the release of Elite: Dangerous I have been living on the edge of my previous addiction. It is one of the most loved games I had ever played. I still think back with utter fondness playing this game on the CBM-64. Wireframe and low resolution were at the core of a game that offered such fun, its challenge and entertainment that left its mark on me ever since. I played the remake on the Amiga somewhere in the 90’s, but the original was still the soul breaker for me. With David Braben making the ‘now’ version for today’s PC environment and by adding not just a galactic map, but by almost mapping the ENTIRE galaxy, this game is now an entirely new revelation and because Sean Murray keeps on not giving a release date for his upcoming masterpiece No Man’s sky, my desire to play Elite: Dangerous increases. It is however not that simple, my PC (which still works excellently) is now 9 years old, so it cannot deal with today’s gaming. As I stated, there is no way to afford a new PC at present, which is why I kept on browsing.

Now we get to the issue: The amount of gaming systems out there appear to be a joke! I lost two days getting back into the field I had high expertise in, but as I moved to consoles (as keeping up with gaming PC’s became way too expensive, even when I had my good income), the market moved on (as it would) and I learned that changes had been many. Now, for the most I understand it all, but the diversity to learn what is needed to know is one that a non-hardware savvy person, gamer or not, is one that could boggle the mind.

It took me two days to get back onto the level of knowledge I once had. Even now, there are still diminishing gaps.

So, why is all this an issue?

Well, even though the graphics card was always an issue, in my days I moved from a Diamond Viper (which was top of the market in 1998) to a NVIDIA GeForce 6800 card (in 2005), which was again pretty high up (and not cheap), at this point I could game pretty much anything, I had the top of the range SoundBlaster and a good screen and I could game and compute my life away behind my desktop.

Now gaming has changed. For one, it is no longer really about sound cards, the system board has all it needs for gamers, so we are left with the proper processor, the right amount of memory and the graphics card. This is where the issue starts. The diversity of graphic cards is now a jungle, how can any parent choose the right system for their kid, or for that matter, how can any newbie gamer select the best card for their needs?

I can tell you right now that many shops are truly lacking in knowledge there. When you go to online places (which is an initial MUST), you get a boatload of options too. System prices range from 999 to 4299, so where is the best choice? In the middle or at the far end? Questions that many do not have and others state: ‘the more expensive the better’ (which is a truth to some degree). You see, at some point I decided to stay one hardware iteration behind, so that I could game at a very high level, yet needing a decently less amount of money. That truth in gaming remains to be an almost absolute truth. There is a new property in play, one that was never a real issue even 5 years is now a massive part, it is about the noise level of the graphics card as some of those bad boys make noise when they are working, which is not that dissimilar an issue from the Xbox 360 DVD drive and fan noise. So getting a quiet system is worth it. A lesser item is the power consumption of such a card, which at maximum uses as much energy as two PS4 systems in full gaming mode and at the price of $999 (just for a graphics card), that bad boy costs the same as two PlayStation 4 systems. So is gaming on the PC worth it?

That is the question you must ask yourself, especially considering that gaming will take another bang in hardware in 3-4 years, even as you might only need to replace the graphics card, you see a devaluation of 25% a year. That is the part many people are not always considering, which fair is enough. Now, the truth is that if you see some games like Skyrim, where some mods were made to truly blast the hell out of the word pretty, as an RPG fan, I would fold like a bad poker player at the mere sight of the created graphics, yet, I never felt that Skyrim was anything less than amazing on a console, and I knew that the PC was a lot better.

Fortunately for me Elite: Dangerous does not require the most massive card, so that system is a lot less unaffordable than any new system, but unaffordable it remains, so what is this about? First of all, people need to really take a look at what they are willing to afford online before walking into a computer shop. Places like http://www.pccasegear.com and http://www.mwave.com.au/ (for Australian consumers) are good places to take a first look. When you see the prices you are in for (that is before you add the keyboard, mouse and display), you need to see what the graphical needs will be, and moreover, how some games perform. In this I relied on http://www.tomshardware.com/  in the past and it is still around. It is here where we would read “In the graph, MSI’s card is listed at 34 decibels. This is done to represent just how quiet the Twin Frozr V solution really is. The meter wouldn’t register a reading two inches from the rear panel, even when the fans started up“, that is indeed one part that matters, another part is frame-rate, so how smooth is the game, this site gives us that too, although one setback is that Tom does not seem to test all resolutions whilst the new gamers all want 1440p and a few now demand 4K resolution performance graphs, but the new upcoming cards will likely show that too.

There are other sites that give good independent review of cards, just be willing to spend an hour looking at the different places before you go shopping, I have tried a few conversations out there and I can tell you now that these places (read: shops) are often devoid of true inside knowledge on cards, finding one gamer amongst that lot is a treasure, but also a hindrance, as you might find yourself overspending a bit sooner and a little more than you expected.

In all this, PC gaming will remain and there is no reason why it should not, but in this day and age that part is too often forgotten, and electricity, especially in the UK does not come cheap. The amount of gamers not considering their electricity bill is growing on a daily basis.

For example, 9.429p per 1kWh, 600W PSU means 0.094 x 0.6 x 24 = £1.35 per day, meaning that your gaming PC (if you keep it on all day) will cost you £495 a year alone. The Australian example is harder as energy suppliers seem to REFUSE to give out clear pricing, only when they know all your facts will they give you any information, making them slightly less reputable than the ice dealers in Kings Cross. So if we go by the same system and a 20c per KwH, we get: 0.2 x 0.6 x 24 = $2.88, which amounts to $1042 a year on power to the gaming system alone.

You might think that this is trivial, but in this day and age, in these moments, you better consider shutting down your PC. A friend of mine got scared as he got his quarterly bill, he now shuts down the computer properly. It is one of the running costs of gaming that people forget as they think it does not matter, and when you are renting in a university dorm it might not, but when you work, you are not working to be the bitch of Energy Australia, or EDF Energy for that matter, are you? At least UK power (www.ukpower.co.uk) gave me some decent prices to work with.

How does this relate?

Getting back on the horse is a term we see ourselves confronted with, because the term ‘is the juice worth the squeeze’ is becoming a predominant question in gaming, not just in PC gaming, the fact that several high profile cases have changed the industry is linked to all this. When we see Assassins Creed: Unity, with needing gigabytes in patches, where a game almost a year old is still receiving patches (number 5 was released 3 days ago). The gamer’s view of quality demand and the industry of lacking the ability to meet even the minimal requirement here is also affecting the choice of gaming system. Why spend $4200 on a system that will require patching for a year? And that game is not alone. Arkham knight is now treading that same line, an industry inherently unable to even meet basic expectations. And even though Witcher 3 exceeded expectations wildly, the new patch is massive at 7Gb and as Forbes is informing us (at http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2015/07/18/theres-a-problem-with-the-witcher-3s-new-patch/), where we see “the new patch means that The Witcher 3 doesn’t perform as well on either the Xbox One or the PS4, dipping down to 20 FPS fairly consistently in some of the game’s busier locales” gives clear indication that PC gaming is however much desired a path that is riddled with issues at a price so much higher than the console world.

So even if it were possible for me to get back on that horse, I have serious doubts whether the juice will be worth the squeeze, because at $4200 ($1999 is a more realistic choice in decent gaming PC’s) I would demand a decent level of perfection in gaming and even though the hardware meets it, it seems more and more clear that the industry is no longer able to meet these expectations, so even though I will require a PC at some point, my old one still (thankfully) suffices for non-gaming purposes and gaming on a PC is no longer truly surpassing the joy of a console.

Many will not agree with me on the latter and that is just fine, some will get great gaming on their PC when it comes down to World of Warcraft and League of Legends, yet when we consider the following headlines ‘Battlefield 4 – what can we expect from the summer patch?‘ (July 10th 2015), ‘Batman: Arkham Knight PC Version Fixes Not Coming Until Fall‘ (July 16th 2015), ‘The Huge Witcher 3 Patch Is Rolling Out Over The Next 24 Hours‘ (July 17th 2015) and the least said about ‘F1 2015 Errors, Crashes, Bugs, Performance, Low FPS, and Fixes‘ the better, with 2 patches within a week (including a day 1 patch) and as stated “PC community still seemed to struggle to get a decent gameplay experience” the question is not just about the massive cost of hardware, the issue becomes, if this industry does not up its game by a lot real fast, will there still be a long term future for these less affordable gaming PC’s?

 

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