Well the tale is from Jeffey Snover's twitter feed, so from the horses mouth....

He says that he developed Powershell, but his VP at the time was a bit of an ass, and MS refused to have anything to do with anything "linuxy". He was therefore told to drop it. When he didn't he got demoted (which according to him had quite a large financial penalty)

Much later in his career the benefits of a shell based tool was seen he was promoted again.

Now obviously we only have his word for this, although ex-colleagues on the same twitter feed, seem to back him up that in MS, and especially in that division, there was a toxic management culture , where any innovation would be stomped on and the perpetrators deminished

If you studied the history of Erlang you will see it was not created by academics but real engineers trying to solve complex problems a.k. how do design a fault tolerant large scale parallel system. Erlang and the associated OTP libraries provide the design methods to solve these and have been honed and proved on multiple real projects

Don't let your prejudices hit you on the way out

i think you misspelled Python

Erlang's very existence was due to real world large scale products. It was not designed as some academic exercise, but as a solution to a real problem (large concurrency on a telephone exchange). Because of that Erlang is actually one of the most practical real-world languages i know, because real world applications is part of its DNA

This blog by Francesco Cessarini is a lovely tribute and provides a wonderful slice of history about the early days of Erlang development

https://www.erlang-solutions.c...

I would also recommend anyone with a interest in concurrency programming to listen to this talk

https://www.erlang-solutions.c...

If I had any up votes you could have them all. Thanks for that

...are grossly overestimated he said

The problem with the Drake equation is it tends to look at the problem from a physicist/astrophysics point of view. if you look from a biological perspective, things become even murkier.

1. We still have no understanding how life appeared on earth. yes we can propose a mechanism for the creation of amino acids, but that is a long way to creating even basic life
2. We have no way of calculating the likelihood of creating complex life. On earth this appears to go go back to one event during symbiogenesis. How likely is this to happen? How often has it happened since then, but the organisms did not survive
3. What we term intelligent life (insert joke here) has only appeared as far as we can tell once in 4.5 billion years. Why is this? What are the conditions needed and why has it not happened in multiple times

Personally I think the possibility of single cell life arising quite likely given the right conditions, but multi-cell intelligent life highly unlikely. Fortunately the universe is quite large so even very low probability events come about if your allowed to roll the dice enough, but the likelihood of it happening twice in the same neighborhood is so low, to be virtually non-existent

I've seen a lot of bad research and bad job skills coming out of the US too. Not all of them mind you, but a fair number of them.

30% of US college funding (about 9 billion) comes from international students. They make up about 12% of the student population.

Now imagine a world where all international students were banned from US universities. Yes there would be 12% fewer students, but also 30% less funding. So either fees would have to go up, or courses would be dropped due to lack of funding.

If you want more US students to go to university you need to look closer to home. The things that stop US students getting a university education is the cost and the lack of government support to pay those costs. No bright American student has ever been denied university access just because of universities taking international students, in fact just the opposite

It used to be that industry was driven by their ability to access natural resources such as steel and coal. Today the resources in the information economy is knowledge and brains.

If you cut off the supply of either, your industrial advantages will die and other countries will outstrip you. The difference is the best people are mobile, sought after and a limited resource. If you don't attract them, other countries will and use their talents to build their universities and industries

America was built on attracting the brightest and best. It is the reason its industries are envied and copied, but they were built by offering opportunities to any who were willing to work hard whatever their nationality. The revisionist history is that America was built by Americans, but they forget that most of those were originally from other countries looking for a better life.

This is why Intel is becoming irrelevant in the embedded space.

While I am sure that this is not meant as a raspberry pi killer, the lack of a low cost Intel platform means that all cool interesting stuff is being done on ARM.

Not only that but the next generation of embedded engineers will grow up knowing about the ARM architecture, and Intel will become increasingly marginalized.

If I was Intel I would produce a $30 board, put on a version of vxworks linux (also Intel owned) and give them out to schools at the same time encourage the hacking community to extend the boards. But it won't happen, because Intel cannot see beyond PC's which are increasingly becoming irrelevant in the modern world

They want their post back.

Seriously Linux motherboard compatibility nowadays is a good if not better(more legacy support) than the latest Microsoft OS.

The Grand Ayatollah announced that High Speed Internet is immoral via youtube yesterday, followed quickly by the Internets 1st selfie beheading..

He may well be right...However John McAfee has a well earned reputation of drugged out paranoia, so I think I will reserve judgement for now

As someone who has to support legacy systems, there is nothing more I would like to see old embedded systems die (and in some cases, incinerated and the embers crushed into the ground).

But we have to be realistic.

The main effort in systems like SCADA is the commissioning time required. You cannot just rip out a system, plug in a new box and expect everything to work as before.

Secondly who pays for this? The customer will not be happy if we say every 5 years we say you have to close your factory down for 2 weeks while we rip out all your old boxes and replace with new ones.

Finally what is the guarantee that the new box has not introduced a new security hole?

The real solution is the segmentation of the security and application code. Use Trusted boot technologies to verify the running code and ring fence the code with your security management application. Then if a new threat is introduced you only need to update the security app, leaving the hardware and application untouched.

Unfortunately at present industrial application either have no security or are very closely coupled meaning that updates are difficult and costly.

The chip is specifically for security. It runs a embedded secure environment that the main processor can use to verify executables before they are run. It has nothing to do with android apart from the fact the same technology can be used to secure mobile devices(stop your phone being rooted etc)

Being part of the main processor means it should be harder to break into unlike the intel TPM solution which requires a separate off-chip device