Posts by Frank Long

The final death of phone design in the Thames Valley

I think this is the final nail in the coffin for what used to be a thriving industry in the UK.

Moved to the UK 20 years ago, there were well over a dozen companies within 20 miles of Reading designing mobile handsets. NEC (Reading), Nokia, Vertu (Fleet/Camberley), Motorola, Sony, Ericsson (Basingstoke), RIM/Blackberry (Slough), Panasonic (Bracknell & Thatcham), Sharp (Bracknell). There's almost certainly more than that, e.g. I believe Hitachi in Bourne End were designing some from the UK at the time.

Vodafone, Three and O2 were all designing phones too, e.g. the XDA, or custom versions of phones from the other suppliers.

There was an entire ecosystem of equipment suppliers, manufacturing, test, chipset vendors, etc...

Bullitt were essentially one of the last vestiges of that industry in the Thames Valley area.

And now they're gone too.

"We're never going to spend $10 billion on building a state-of-the-art 2nm fab for making chips to go into iPhones"

That sounds a bit defeatist. Intel have just started high volume production on their Intel 4 process node (which they say is equivalent to 4nm) fab in Ireland, having spent €17bn on developing it.

Ireland has spent an enormous amount of time cultivating its relationship with Intel, building strategic partnerships with multiple universities over decades (e.g. Intel funded kit for the electronic engineering department for UCC when I attended a long time ago).

People believe that Ireland's success is purely down to tax breaks, but fail to see what the IDA (Industrial Development Agency) has been helping deliver for decades, in areas like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals (7 of the world's top 10 pharma companies have manufacturing and development facilities in Cork) and now datacentres.

Saying it'll never happen is a bit silly, it takes time, patience and planning to achieve it, but it absolutely can be done.

Obligatory XKCD reference, latitude/longitude coordinates can scale from "It's on the Eurasian Continent" to "That atom, there":

https://xkcd.com/2170/

Pretty much every device that can do W3W can provide lat/lon coordinates, without license fees.

12 digits provides more than 3 times more precise measurement than W3W, 10 only slightly less accurate.

To be fair, you can pick up a second hand Apple Watch SE for a smidge over £100 which a lot cheaper than the $400 cited in the article and has a wireless connection, supporting this functionality without a phone.

One great thing about this study is that it should really help with finding the cause of the cancer, because there's clearly signs of it before it's obvious to humans.

If those markers can be identified, and there's no reason why they can't be, then there should be better cues as to the root cause(s)

The Naka plant was wrecked by the 2011 earthquake, was working for Renesas at the time, it was an amazing recovery that did huge fundamental damage to the company (as it revealed that Renesas were single-source, single factory for a lot of the automotive supply chain).

https://www.eetimes.com/image-gallery-recovering-renesas-naka-fab/#

I'm sure they'll get it back up and running pretty quickly.

That article seemed to change the subject a couple of times.

But anyway, here's my view on bimodal IT:

Sometimes you can iterate, fail fast and work in an agile way. A large percentage of customer facing IT systems fit this mode. DevOps is the way to go for this.

Sometimes you have to get it right first time, get your requirements right, your design signed off, your Dev and test separated and pretty regimented and deploy once.

For that, Waterfall is the right tool.

Good luck updating a financial reconciliation system using DevOps, for example.

Common sense, innit? Different tools for different jobs.

Maemo/Meego was ready for the big time and while Nokia were incredibly slow getting phones to market, they were getting them there.

The ‘Burning Platforms’ speech sent everything off the cliff, any chance of a rampdown disappeared with it. They had a few options, they could have made Symbian fit for purpose (not an attractive option, but certainly an option), they could have ramped up Meego or they could have cobbled together Android devices to cover the gap between a competitive Windows Phone platform and where it was in 2011.

They chose none of the above. Elop was certainly good for bringing focus to the organisation, but the decisions he took led to the destruction of Nokia as an operator in the smartphone market.

This was despite significant advantages, from an efficient supply chain, to leading cameras, to battery life and a strong brand. In 2011, Interbrand ranked Nokia as the world’s 14th strongest brand (down from 8th in 2010).

Today, they’re ranked 98th.

Next year, they won’t even be a mobile phone brand. That is, unless they launch some Android phone or acquire Jolla, as some suspect they will do.

That's why the top speed is limited to 86MPH

Think the point that this is a beta version is important here.

While this is distinctly undercooked, it sounds like they mightn't be too far away from something that could be worth spending money on, especially if you're in charge of IT spend in an organisation that likes to tightly lock down PCs.

Stick a beefier processor in there (say a Snapdragon 600, which would only knock up the price by a few bucks), sort out some of the more obvious bugs and they might actually sell some. Partnering up with MS, making an equivalent to Chromecast based on Media Centre and they might well be onto something.

Credit to Dell for experimenting though.

The death of telecoms HW design in the Thames Valley area?

Very sad to see Southwood is to close, it was a great place to work, some great phones from there.

Another nail in the coffin for hardware development in the area, Motorola, NEC. Nokia. Panasonic and many others used to employ large numbers of hardware designers.

Now there are only a handful of small-ish sites left, Vertu, Qualcomm, Renesas.

Can't think of many more, really. A real pity.

One country this article neglects

Saudi Arabia.

Not nuclear armed (although with all that money, no doubt they'd be able to get one), but with a very sophisticated airforce, an autocratic system atop a vastly unequal society and a penchant for violence.

The fact that it floats on oil keeps it safe, but should that supply be disrupted by domestic insurgency, then all bets are off.

Championship Manager?

Not a single mention of this time destroyer. Started playing it in 93/94, insanely addictive, if painfully slow. The record of how long you'd been playing a particular game for was always a bad thing. I didn't need to know that I had wasted weeks of my life getting Doncaster Rovers to the Champions League.

Connected Home

The only other division of note is the Connected Home division, which has been growing (admittedly from a very low base) at a rapid pace within Motorola. This could be what they're pinning their future hopes upon.

Mystic mobile

@ColonelClaw

I've been working on LTE chipsets since June 2007. They won't be mass market until next year. Without people having an idea of what's possible five years from now in the mobile sector, this sort of technology can't be developed.

To my mind, it's best to look at what's driving the lowest power chips. For all of them, bar intel, they're running on ARM cores. Samsung (the silicon provider on the A4), Qualcom, Texas Instruments, Renesas, Infineon all use ARM. This is not Microsoft's natural environment, it's the home of *nix.

On the other hand, the x86 world of Intel is now tied to Meego with Nokia. The next generation of low powered Atom processors will be pushed by Intel with Meego on board.

The laptop makers have yet to demonstrate that they can compete in the mobile sphere, tablets will be where the laptop and mobile makers will meet. For those tablets that more resemble scaled up mobile phones, such as the Apple iPad, then Microsoft haven't a hope.

On the other hand, for those scaled down laptops, that HP have been pumping out for years, Microsoft are already the dominant player. It will be very interesting to see whether or not they can maintain that lead. If Chrome and Meego make a decent fist of it on netbooks, then they're in serious trouble in this sector.

A bit of history goes a long way

Do they not remember the Nokia Internet Tablets?

The N800 was, in my opinion, on of the greatest "I couldn't possibly tell you what exactly it's for" pieces of electronics of the past 10 years.

All linux-tastic with touchy goodness.

I *heart* my N800.

If they could port the Maemo code, then surely that would get them where they want to be quickly.

Alternatively, one could just strip down Meego/Maemo.

If that effectively breaks up the CTA...

...then does that mean the Republic of Ireland can finally join the Schengen Area? Huzzah! No more stupid travel rules imposed by Westminister, pandering to people who would otherwise vote for the BNP and finally have a sensible visa system for people who are not lucky enough to be born in the EU.

Will save Ireland a fortune on border checks and immigration control, now they'll only have to check flights from the UK and non-EU countries.

Sweet.

When they act morally, I'll act morally

I'm a contractor, have been for years. Used an umbrella company for my first contract in Germany. Paid almost £40k in taxes. I have little problem with that. I think returned to university, paid entirely out of my earnings as a contractor, following that, I attempted to set up a company, although I never officially registered it, more pitched the idea and put the structure in place before officially registering it.

As the idea wasn't getting off the ground, I went job hunting, contract or permie. 3 months into the job search, I swallowed my pride and went down the Job Centre to sign on.

"sorry mate, you're not entitled to anything".

As I had invested in a small apartment in Eastern Europe, that remained unlet and was costing me a fortune and was unaware of the fact that only my previous two years national insurance counts towards the dole (nobody tells you these things, it's up to you to find out), I neither qualified for contributions, nor means tested benefits.

I didn't qualify for housing benefit or coucil tax relief as my girlfriend, heavily indebted thanks to massive university fees, earned an income that was a good few grand under the national average.

Obviously, they wanted me to sell my sole long term investment.

I still had to pay full council tax in that time.

So in my hour of greatest need, the government told me I was entitled to nothing.

Now that I'm earning once again as a contractor, I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure that HMRC don't get a penny of my money. I'm going to give the government as much support as they offered me, i.e. none.