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“Mythical Man-Month” Author Frederick Brooks, at 91

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[Dec 20, 2022] – Noting here the passing at 91 last month of Frederick Brooks, director of some of IBM’s most important mainframe-era programming projects. He was a key figure in establishing the idea that software projects should be intelligently engineered and organized.

He helped as much as anyone to move the mysterious art of tinkering with computer code toward a profession capable of repeatable results. “The Mythical Man-Month,” his 1975 distillation of years of development management, became a common reference work in many a developer’s desk library.

La Brea Tar Pits – Huntington Library.

Working at IBM in the 1950s and 1960s, and spearheading development of the vaunted IBM/360, Brooks gave a lie to notions that were bedrock in hardware-software projects, and came up with a few notable inventions as well.

Especially, he is credited with IBM’s decision to settle on an eight-bit byte. This allowed the systems to handle both text and numerals. Strange to think there was a time when machines were dedicated either to text handling or numerical calculation, but it was so!

He oversaw the development of systems that could be offered with an expandable range of processor and memory equipment at different price points, thus entering the development era of “platform” over “product.”

Brooks studied and found some surprising truths about complex software and projects – the most telling: That projects slow down at a greater rate when leaders add people as a project gets closer to completion.

He also saw the dangerous lure technology offers in the form of “The Silver Bullet” that promises a sudden tech- or organizational-style breakthrough.

With these and other observations, Brooks help build a philosophical underpinning for structured analysis, a school of thinking that held sway for software during an era of big projects marked especially by NASA’s Apollo program.

Ed Yourdon, Ivar Jacobsen, Tom DeMarco and others would take Brooks’ work into the 1990s. Like him, they realized it’s not just about “the code” – that the culture of the organization can play a more dominant role.

Brooks paved the path forward with emphasis on requirements gathering. But he foresaw the tarpit that beckoned with any search for the greatest schema perfection ahead of actually getting the project going.

He conveyed this without embracing the extreme that says “Fail Fast,” and he did it as always with a measure of humor. It’s right there in the title for one of “The Mythical Man-Month” chapters: “Plan to Throw One Away.”

Some of Brooks’ musings do echo another era. I don’t think we have Man Months anymore – mythical or other. Unquestionably too, team programmers have gained much more responsibility over the years, so Brooks’ emphasis on the manager wears thin [Heck, a whole era of development sprang from gritty JavaScript developers who found a way around obstacles their managers took for granted as their ‘lot in life.’]

But managers, at the end of the day, bear the greatest responsibility for the software project. Technology acumen is just a table stake. Their communications and organization skills must be stellar, as Brooks indicates when he writes:

The Tower of Babel was perhaps the first engineering fiasco, but it was not the last. Communication and its consequent, organization, are critical for success. The techniques of communication and organization demand from the manager much thought and as much experienced confidence as the software technology itself. – From The Mythical Man-Month.

Is software engineering really a profession? The question will continue to be asked, and Brooks work will likely ever be part of that discussion.

Coda: My days as a software project manager were brief – about a year. [After which my colleagues welcomed me back to editorial and told me they thought I’d been crazy ever to leave.] What I learned building web sites was that, no matter what you think your problem is, it is probably a project management problem. I owe that to Brooks. As expressed in his thoughtful and very often bemused writings, Brooks’ thinking on the topic informed my and many others’ efforts to ‘ship the darn thing’. – Jack Vaughan, 2022

Bankman-Fried and Web Site Scrubbing: Brief Comment

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Briefly – On the Ballad of Sam Bankman-Fried – Worthwhile article considers, often sympathetically, some downsides in the trend toward ‘corporate journalism’. Specifically: A fawning PR piece on the young champion of Effective Altruism. One of several issues discussed: The important role the Web plays in creating “an immutable public record for other journalists and historians.” IMHO this is a point not to be forgotten!

All this said, I’d add that journalism generally did not shine altogether too brightly here -although LA Times and others were digging into what was going on as Bankman-Fried plied Washington’s Corridors of Power in the late Summer.

Everyone likes a good story, including writers. But the writers earn their credit by exercising some skepticism, especially of good stories that may turn out to be too good to be true.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-14/sequoia-ftx-profile-of-sam-bankman-fried-sbf-was-a-face-plant [Possible pay wall.]

Oracle gets the memo

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Conf
Ellison updates Oracle Cloud World crowd.

THE SKEPTICAL ENQUIRER – Pride bordering on arrogation is a typical trait of successful enterprise tech companies – it’s definitely been the case with Oracle Corp. Many times it’s met the challenge of a changing computing paradigm with brio, taking its lead from irascible founder Larry Ellison, but the sum substance of its claims would be argued.

I may be a tea leaf reader here, but I see a subtle shift in Ellison’s irascibility in the minutes of last week’s Oracle Cloud World 2022 event.

Ellison’s lively quotes have long been a reporter’s friend. But it’s hard to relay his cloud computing pitches without adding footnotes. The consensus big cloud players are AWS, Google and Microsoft – while enterprise incumbents like Oracle, Teradata, and IBM are cited as tertiary at best.

Overall, Oracle’s financial growth has been modest in the last decade, while its cloud claims have been bold. It is by no means alone in the creative work it has done to define cloud, which is a promise of future growth, on its accounting ledger.

But, in terms of pitching everyday database automation advances of Oracle Autonomous Database [It’s enterprise blocking and tackling, right?] as the one-true self-driving database for the cloud of the future – well, Oracle has no equal there.

Its latest tactic is to boost its acquisition of health system giant Cerner as a great opportunity to rapidly modernize Cerner’s systems, move them to the Oracle Cloud, and count them as such on the financial report.

As I said, the company still experiences gradual overall gains, so I may be talking style rather than substance when I say they missed some big new tech boats, although they revisit these product line gaps from time to time. I’m talking about databases, development tools and persistence stratagems that all called for less spend and new thinking:

 

  • Oracle missed opportunities to expand its MySQL brand at a time when competitive PostgreSQL database versions were becoming go-to players in AWS and Microsoft stables for open-source distributed SQL. In September, the company came out with a bigger/better MySQL known as MySQL the Heatwave Database Service.
  • In fact, Oracle played down, ignored or glossed over inexpensive clustered open-source databases – both SQL and NoSQL — despite having the original Berkeley NoSQL stalwart in its hand.
  • JSON-oriented document database development led by MongoDB is a particular thorn. Oracle, like others, found ways to bring JSON to its RDBMS, but Mongo is still on the up stroke. Oracle last week addressed what it called a mismatch between JSON and the Oracle SQL database in the form of “JSON Relational Duality” – a new developer view supported in Oracle Database 23c.
  • Also, Oracle was slow to support cloud-friendly S3-style object storage. Not surprising in that the great goal is to place data into an Oracle database. But maybe it doesn’t have to be Oracle Autonomous Database. Last week, Oracle described MySQL Heatwave Lakehouse which may be a step in a broader direction of support.

This latter trait, object storage, seems to be getting a bit more of Oracle’s attention, as Snowflake Inc. rises on the back of its 3-in-1 distributed cloud data warehouse, data lake and data lake house. At Oracle’s yearly confab, Snowflake seemed to have garnered leader Ellison’s grudging admiration.

No small feat, that!

It’s a little hard to directly discern Ellison-speak-on-the-page. But his presentation moves salesfolks – and customers too. This recalls Curt Monash once calling him “one of the great public speakers and showmen of the era.”

What did Ellison tell the conference crowd? Well, besides a lot about how Oracle technology helped deliver Covid-19 vaccines, he spoke about the cloud market. People are moving from single-cloud to multi-cloud architectures, Ellison told the crowd at Oracle Cloud World 2022.

“The fact that this is happening is changing the behavior of technology providers…So the first thing that happened as people use multiple clouds is that service providers started deploying new services in multiple clouds, maybe most famously its Snowflake,” he said. Then, in a nod to the new highflier, he added, “And Oracle got the memo.”

“You know, we noticed, and we actually thought that was a good idea,” he said.

Of course, evolution to multi-cloud is a chance for Oracle to take another at bat in the cloud game. The bad news, as in the past, is that so much of the company’s effort is toward moving everything into the Oracle database. That is why any shifts to emphasize MySQL Heatwave would be notable.

Jack Vaughan is a writer and high-tech industry observer.

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My Back Pages
Data Lake Houses Join Data Lake in Big Data Analytics Race – IoT World Today – 2021
Purveyors of data lake houses and cloud data warehouses are many, and opinions on qualifications vary.

Oracle Cloud IaaS security gets superhero status from Ellison – TechTarget – 2018 [mp3 – Podcast]
It’s incremental!

Updated Oracle Gen 2 Cloud aims to challenge cloud leaders – TechTarget – 2018
The central product for Oracle is the database, and all the related tools that support the continued dependence of customers on the database.

On top of the RDB mountain – ADTmag 2001
Never lose the database sale: It’s tattooed on their foreheads.

Progressive Gauge Recently Noted – Edge, Quantum Computing, More

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Here’s a brief video look at some of the advanced technology trends we’ve been watching in top web journals and our own humble Progressive Gauge Blog – analyzing current activity based on experience over 20 years in the computer trade press, now called media. We start of*f with discussion of Quantum computing that is moving subatomic waves/particles​.

How well can Nvidia tread the Agglomerverse?

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Nvidia has worked hard to emerge from the worlds of graphic cards, gaming, and bitcoin mining to become a potent presence in enterprise AI considerations. It also is poised to play as a key vendor in the Metaverse, an AR-imbued but ill-defined repository for the next version of the Web.

More work is in store now as the GPU company – like most companies of any sort – navigates a more difficult economic environment – one where macro winds auger a possible enterprise spending slowdown. Already, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has led his crew into spaces others could not imagine.

Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) support ultrahigh memory bandwidth applications. They can churn through neural networks and sundry matrix multiplications like banshees. Huang and company pursue all their possible uses, and created a large portfolio of use cases, even as would-be competitors nip at their heels with more specialized offerings.

Visionary Huang, who we heard last week in keynotes and press conferences related to Nvidia’s GTC 2022 event, calls Nvidia an “Accelerated Computing Company.” And, he has set out to exploit “the Full Accelerated Computing Stack.”

These ambitions take form in a true slew of new offerings – ranging from the Nvidia DLSS3 deep learning sampler to GeForce RTX Series GPUs for neural rendering to Omniverse Cloud Services for Building and Operating Industrial Metaverse Applications, the Omniverse Replicator for synthetic data production and the 2,000-TFLOPS Thor SOC. The latter is probably well-described as “a super chip of epic proportions.”

Nvidia was early to see the possibility that AR/VR technology could drive a more interactive world-wide computing environment. The company coined it “the Omniverse” but now it’s joined others in the “metaverse” quest. For now, the metaverse is a loose agglomeration (the ‘Agglomerverse’?) of such elements as physics simulation, digital twins, and, of course, AI modeling. This puts Nvidia in competition or what Sam Alpert called coopetition with a host of other vendors. Hype vastly surpasses reality in today’s metaverse and the pay-off is both unclear and distant.

Meanwhile, Enterprise AI has found a place in data centers, and Nvidia has established a genuine foothold there. Obscured in the rush of GTC 2022 product announcements were less-than-flashy Apache Spark accelerator technology and AI inference announcements that may show up in revenue reports sooner than metaverse cases. Huang, for his part, sees the two technical domains playing off one another.

Be that as it may, in the metaverse and enterprise AI alike, Huang needs boots on the ground. These undertakings need great advances in skilling around big data.

It remains to be proved that corporations are anymore ready now to take on enterprise AI and the metaverse with imagination and execution. Can they imagine and execute on par or better than they did with Big Data Hadoop beginning ten years ago?

It’s worth noting that GTC 2022 software tools announcement were as proliferate as hardware news, showing the company is seeking ways to simplify the way to such advancements. Nvidia will likely need to take on greater headcount, and forge more mega-partnerships like one announced with Deloitte last week, if it going to successfully seed enterprise AI and metaverse apps.

Like most, Nvidia’s stock has been in free fall. But some of its challenges are unique. When US Government policy looked to slow down or block the transfer of advanced AI to China, Nvidia felt the brunt of it.

Meanwhile, the general rout of crypto currency impedes chip sales to crypto miners – and, as some news reports have it, a recent 2.0 update to the Ethereum blockchain takes a new proof-of-stake approach to processing and reduces the general call for GPUs for mining.

At the same time, the gaming card market has gone from famine to glut in the 24-month-plus period following the start of the global COVID pandemic. Moreover, the cost of these ever-bigger and more functional chips goes up-up-up, emptying gamer’s’ coffers.

Successes in these areas gave Nvidia wiggle room as it pursued enterprise AI. The wiggle room gets smaller just as the metaverse and enterprise AI to-do list gets taller. Among this week’s slew of portfolio additions there are some parts that will find users more quickly than others, and its up to Nvidia to suss those out and ensure they prosper. – Jack Vaughan