Tag Archives: Intel

Roy Taylor and John Byrne – memories are made of this…

IT WAS in Monaco – I flew in, I think for a channel gig.  I certainly took a helicopter from Nice to Monaco, Sukh Rayat and me were in the helicopter.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been to Monaco, but certainly was the last.

I found myself in a channel conference with old muckers Roy Taylor and Scot John Byrne.

They had fallen out – I’m not quite sure why – because they were one partnership when I’d first met them as a channel journalist.

Now, of course, they are very important people. I think John Byrne works now  for Dell-EMC and Roy works for Nvidia – sorry, AMD.

They were hammer and tongs in Monaco. I, being the perfect diplomat, brought them together in the cheapest bar in the place – a Guinness bar – where I persuaded them to love each other again.

I hadn’t expected Byrne and Taylor to jump on a table and kiss each other – in obviously  a fraternal rather than a gay way.

The rest is history. Or maybe mystery. 

Intel and Microsoft in the deepest of doo doo

OR SO it seems according to Jock McFrock, the bekilted engineer, here.

The perfect combo of mugs

FROM RIGHT to left: Talisker hip flask, Microsoft OS/2, Itanium mug, Pentium 4 mug, Merced (Itanium) mug.♥

Here are four great books I’ve read in the last 10 days

There can be no doubt that up in the Marriott, in 4th Street, Tom Foremski perhaps made the best joke ever. The best jokes are mantras. Tom relayed a story of a guy who had thrown himself off the Empire State Building and was overheard to say, half way down, “so far, so good”.  We all hit the pavement or sidewalk eventually.

His book – In my Humble Experience, is a collation of articles that show a different side of Silicon Valley.  As yours truly has been holed up near La Honda for the last four days and night, sometimes dipping into Woodside, we can affirm there is a different, higher side to the Valley (surely Valet, Ed?). We love chapter 19 – Die, press release, die! Die! Die! – Foremski had been hinting strongly that the PR machine had a few cogs loose – because press releases are nearly useless.  They’re created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then vast amounts of moolah are spent to get this stuff into the spam filters of countless journalists. “This madness has to end,” points out Foremski. Aptly. But it hasn’t yet ended.

In my hide hole in the mountains near La Honda, where many an eagle quails, where the coyotes shriek, and where you can always at least descend to Woodside to stalk Larry the Man and Jobs the Steve,   we pondered long and hard on Divining a Digital Future, penned by the Professor, nay Good Doctor, Genevieve “I got water from frogs” Bell from La Intella and by Paul Dourish too. Bell indicates, says this dense tome, that the UK exists within “a set of competing hubs of social activity”, including pubs, gardens, community centres and sporting facilities. “People move between these local hubs, frequently without first going home,” the book avers.  Going down the pub, however, is harder and harder these days in good old Blighty because so many of them are closing down, or are geschloten already. It’s cigarettes, see. Cigarettes, or rather the lack of cigarettes, are the cancer sticks that are shutting down pubs down and giving strength to the Tesco elbow. Or is it that the major pub chains seek to capitalise on their extensive property portfolios and delude the shareholders with tales of Starbucks anew? This is a dense read, but well worth reading.

And so from science fact to science function, sorry fiction.  In his Science Fiction Prototyping, by Intel chap Brian David Johnson, he argues rather persuasively that it would be really good if there could be more sci-fi around. I kind of agree; it is a bit of an outdated genre though, as witness this passage from the clearly charming Roger Zelazny in Lord of Light: “Yama snorted: ‘The rod of Trimurti still falls upon the back of men. Nirriti stirs within his dark lair; he harasses the seaways of the south.” And: “To beauty, down with ugliness.” This is clearly based on Hinduism of a certain kind and surely cannot contribute to the shape of things to come.

Lastly, but not leastly, we turn to another of the books we’ve read while in our lair not too far from the Pacific but far enough away from Bucks in Woodside.  The Science of Light: An introduction to Vedic Astrology by Freedom Tobias Cole, who says, crucially, that developing initiation is the key to greater things. “Hard work,” says Freedom, nourishes discipline and control of the senses. “We are all busy, but we must make the time for this great study and still perform all tasks required of us in this world.” This book is thoroughly recommended too.

As Foremski’s mantra has it: “So far, so good.” (This article first appeared in TechEye.net

AMD reprises its not quite so finest hour

THE BEST THING to come out of the launch of the K5 was this pair of binoculars from AMD – I use them to watch the lovely lovely birds that populate my lovely garden here in Oxford.

The binoculars quickly focus on any old thing that’s flying around out there – truly AMD did a good job with this rev of the binocs. There’s not much horse racing going on out there, but then they are not 3D binoculars.

The second best thing is out of Old Taipei and is a health warning on the fags out there, that cost $NT75 – that’s less than £2 quid to you and me.  I am looking forward to using the K5 binocs to view the eclipse of the Moon, due any hour now…


Space: It’s the final frontier

WENT to an Intel gig last night at the Bloomsbury Ballroom – covered it in TechEye yesterday.

The biggest problem any journalist have was not solved by Albert Einstein. If there’s an infinite amount of space to fill, do you have the time? The Tantrarajatantra is quite illuminating about this, if you’ve the time to read it.

After ducking out of the Intel conference because we were feeling a bit peckish, we proceeded in an easterly direction to Lamb’s Conduit Passage, there to the Dolphin to quaff a few ales with our old mate Tony Dennis.

Opposite the Dolphin is The Enterprise, on Red Lion Street. On Red Lion Street is Conway Hall, an emblem of the ethical society, free thinking and humanism. The last time I was in the Dolphin it was with David Tibet and Dadaji. David Hall might have been there too… The former had a skeletal hand on his belt and a Tibetan thighbone trumpet, and many a piercing around his ears. Dadaji  was dressed in full ceremonial Nath regalia. Dave Tibet said to me quietly: “It’s a bit embarrassing being in a pub with a man dressed like a sadhu.”

How we laughed. ♥

The Enterprise

The Intel Quiz: Now where was I?

I WAS IN JERUSALEM. It’s all coming back to me now. Not Jerusalem as in William Blake Jerusalem. Not Jerusalem as in Israel/Palestine. No.

Jerusalem in Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia. I arrived in a timely fashion only to find that because I was the only person from TG Daily there, I had to be formed into a team.

Luckily, Hill & Knowlton saw that I seemed to know the managing director of Intel UK – one Graham Palmer – and they shuffled me off to a table with five – or was it six – people that worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Last time this happened at an Intel Yule Quiz, there was me, Paul Hales and Martin Veitch and we came a very close second to the people from the Daily Mail – seemed to be dozens of them – a very competitive lot.

The good thing is all the BBC journalists are members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). We didn’t win. I don’t think. They were a fun lot though. Where’s Jill Franklin when you need her.

Hill and Knowlton screw up@Hackenflacks awards

THE FLACKENHACK awards are some sort of PR gig where the booze runs out early.

I’ve been to one. Lest you have any doubts about this, PRs, generally speaking, despise journalists. Mike Hardwidge didn’t, and Bill Moores doesn’t, but they are totally exceptional.

At an Intel Developer Forum a few years back, my son was standing near the front of the piano bar when one Dan Snyder walked in. My son was then a hack but Dear Dan didn’t know that.

The minute he walked in and saw me, he said “f***** Mike Magee, f***** Mike Magee.”

Tazz is a bit of a rebel. Heck he’s doing PR these days. So when he went to the Flackenhack Awards the other day, he bumped into a spinner from Hill & Knowlton,  a spinner for the Intel Corporation, and asked him what he thought of Mike Magee.

“He’s a f***** t***”, said the spinner. Why’s that, asked my son, faux innocently. “He totally screwed us at the Intel Developer Forum,” said the H&K guy. “He’s my dad,” said Tazz.

Funny how things come around in the end, eh?  Heck. ♥

Would my bum look big in this?

I BOUGHT – yeah bought an Intel t-shirt while I was at the Intel Developer Forum last week.

Because bum doesn’t have the same meaning in the USA as it does in the UK. Bum here means arse here and ass there. Bum also means street bums.  So I was with Rupert Goodwins and he suggested we buy loads of the t-shirts and give them out to the various bums on the street to wear.

Still, at this price tag, maybe we’d be better off organising a shelter or something. Of course with this particular “bum”, Intel is signifying its rather famous jingle, which you can hear here, if you want to.

Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum bum, bum

Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum bum, bum

Silkworms could end up busting druggies

NIKKEI NET has an interesting article today on how Japanese boffins are studying insects to create cyborgs (cybugs?) that integrate electronics with bits of their bodies.

Junpei Kanazaki, of the University of Tokyo, thinks that he can use the ability of the silkworm moth to detect pheromes from a female moth over one kilometre away to detect narcotics instead.

His Frankenstein creation integrates the head of a moth with a 30 centimetre robot to detect the pheromones and point to where the source is.

Nissan is studying the bee’s ability to avoid obstacles in a hundredth of a second and hopes those principles can be applied to future motor car designs.

Mammals, according to Kanakazi, have brains that have 100 million neurons, while insect brains are hundreds of thousands of times simpler.

Kanakazi, however, should take note of Intel’s take on the humble bumble bee. According to an Intel executive in 1998, its CPUs would have enough transistors to equal the number of logical circuits of a bee family member by 2010.  The nikkei.net article is here – you will need a subscription.

If all of this comes to pass, it will be most interesting.