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Family Affair: Through the Elon Darkly

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There’s not a lot of wailing in grief this week for Elon Musk, who loses $100-billion-plus in stock value as Stop Wall Streeters spray paint his show room windows; and as some investors call for his removal at the company Tesla’s helm. What’s a prototype man of the future to do? Who cares?

I’d venture that most Americans have seen enough of him, and even President Donald Trump seems tired of Musk’s presence. Mike Meyers hilarious parody of this Nerd for All Seasons has knocked him from his very high horse.

But let’s flash back. It was just a few years ago that Musk was a paradigm of modern engineering, conqueror of the realms of electric cars and rocket propulsion. He was set to implant helpful silicon chips in needy craniums, and to bore a vacuum sealed tunnel all the way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

[Read more…] about Family Affair: Through the Elon Darkly

Observations: Need real-time analytics? There’s a StarTree Cloud for that

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Led by former LinkedIn and Uber hands, Mountain View, California-based Star Tree looks to drive wider use of real-time analytical applications based around the Apache Pinot OLAP engine. This kind of technology has many uses in a world where great volumes of data arrive at ultrahigh velocity.

TECHNOLOGY EMPLOYED
If “OLAP” had marketing magic, that was a long time ago. OLAP was an early attempt to go beyond relational database and data warehouse limitations, but Apache Pinot today is probably better described in today’s parlance as a column-oriented data store, and its competition can come from any of the many databases to arise in recent years. Apache Pinot is designed to handle fast ingestion of data, and fast joins on users’ SQL queries. Since the StarTree focus is on cloud computing — its found in the three big cloud providers’ marketplaces – it can and also has been called a Database As A Service (DBaaS). [Read more…] about Observations: Need real-time analytics? There’s a StarTree Cloud for that

VP Vance runs AI scrimmage – takes on EU bureaucrats

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JD Vance last month dressed down the Euros at Grand Palis AI Summit. Here, an old tech hand reckons with memories of AI policy efforts. Sees surprising devolution.

By Jack Vaughan

Booted footsteps in the hall at night. Coming closer as in an old radio drama — but real. The steps still resound in corners of Europe.  Where some memories of oppression are hard-wired.

The bootsteps might be KGB, Gestapo or Stasi. These were secret police, compiling dossiers and worse.  The US has had its secret agencies tracking its citizens. [Read more…] about VP Vance runs AI scrimmage – takes on EU bureaucrats

At Dynatrace Perform 2025: Non-breaking break points make their point

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Live Debugger captures key performance data as working code does its work — Giving developers a real-time view into issues.

By Jack Vaughan

[February 4 ] – At Dynatrace’s Perform 2025 user conference in Las Vegas, the observability software company announced Live Debugger, said to enable developers to non-invasively access runtime operations. Founder and CTO Bernd Greifeneder described this more succinctly, as “non-breaking break points.”

That’s succinct – but it borders on the paradoxical, oxymoronic or contradictory. What goes on?

The basic premise of the portfolio update is to allow developers to set a marker without interfering with the runtime. They can capture stack traces, variable values, and process information without the onerous labor of reproduction and redeployment. The new capabilities are supported directly from the Dynatrace platform or by using the company’s native Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDE plugins. And Dynatrace advises on ways to set breakpoints on interfaced programs where source code is unavailable. [Read more…] about At Dynatrace Perform 2025: Non-breaking break points make their point

China Moon Racing

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This first ran in January on my Medium Blog.

It’s been something of an afterthought since the US Apollo program ended in December of 1972, but the Moon is moving into the public spotlight again.

What’s becoming clear is that a new Moon race is well underway, one with plenty of participants but one most pointedly pitting China against the US.

The competition has a different character than it had in the now distant past — it’s become more a long-running endurance race and less the clearly defined sprint it was in the 1960s, when fear of Sputnik tended to unite sentiment in the US. [Read more…] about China Moon Racing