Should the U.K. Government Form a Coalition to Buy ARM? (theguardian.com) 124
With SoftBank's Masayoshi Son trying to sell ARM, a columnist for the Observer newspaper has a suggestion for the U.K. government (and specifically Brexit Tories), calling the Cambridge-based company "a kind of public-interest commercial company: licensing state-of-the art instruction sets that can be implemented in silicon architecture by everyone. It was in nobody's pocket."
Its business, as its chief founder, Tudor Brown, acknowledges, relied on it never betraying its neutrality... A future owner could almost trash Arm in the pursuit of its own commercial ends. Nvidia, reported to be in advanced talks with Son, is just such a possible owner. Rooted in the games industry, it has found to its surprise that its processing units are much in demand as artificial intelligence applications mushroom. Son wanted to sell Arm to an industry coalition that might protect the company's independence and business model. None could be found, so, desperate for cash, given a string of failed and written-down investments (WeWork, Uber etc), he is now having to sup with a buyer that can only destroy Arm.
Nvidia's ambitions are scarcely hidden. Once it owns Arm it will withdraw its licensing agreements from its competitors, notably Intel and Huawei, and after July next year take the rump of Arm to Silicon Valley, just as Google has done with the British AI company DeepMind. Arm, and Britain's hopes to be a player in hi-tech, will be dead.
Ownership is fundamental and the lesson of the story is that unless Britain creates the legal, cultural and institutional framework allowing companies such as Arm (or DeepMind) to have anchor shareholders — or simply allowing founder shareholders to have powerful differential voting rights as in the U.S. and Canada — we are condemned to inferiority. But even now Britain could act. The government could offer a foundational investment of, say, £3bn-£5bn and invite other investors — some industrial, some sovereign wealth funds, some commercial asset managers — to join it in a coalition to buy Arm and run it as an independent quoted company, serving the worldwide tech industry... if Britain is to develop an industrial strategy, this is how it must act...
A successful capitalism is always about framing innovative private dynamism within a fit-for-purpose regulatory and ownership architecture designed by the state, a reality that neither major party has ever understood. The open question is whether Brexit Tories, forced by reality, might change. This kind of audacious deal could appeal to Johnson and Cummings, a statement of intent to match China in our commitment to a decisive presence in 21st-century hi-tech.
Brexit was meant to give Britain the freedom to make this kind of move.
Nvidia's ambitions are scarcely hidden. Once it owns Arm it will withdraw its licensing agreements from its competitors, notably Intel and Huawei, and after July next year take the rump of Arm to Silicon Valley, just as Google has done with the British AI company DeepMind. Arm, and Britain's hopes to be a player in hi-tech, will be dead.
Ownership is fundamental and the lesson of the story is that unless Britain creates the legal, cultural and institutional framework allowing companies such as Arm (or DeepMind) to have anchor shareholders — or simply allowing founder shareholders to have powerful differential voting rights as in the U.S. and Canada — we are condemned to inferiority. But even now Britain could act. The government could offer a foundational investment of, say, £3bn-£5bn and invite other investors — some industrial, some sovereign wealth funds, some commercial asset managers — to join it in a coalition to buy Arm and run it as an independent quoted company, serving the worldwide tech industry... if Britain is to develop an industrial strategy, this is how it must act...
A successful capitalism is always about framing innovative private dynamism within a fit-for-purpose regulatory and ownership architecture designed by the state, a reality that neither major party has ever understood. The open question is whether Brexit Tories, forced by reality, might change. This kind of audacious deal could appeal to Johnson and Cummings, a statement of intent to match China in our commitment to a decisive presence in 21st-century hi-tech.
Brexit was meant to give Britain the freedom to make this kind of move.
hmmm no. (Score:5, Insightful)
" A future owner could almost trash Arm in the pursuit of its own commercial ends"
In my mind I see a government like the UK/US etc as also a guaranteed way to trash it. wouldn't be long before sanctions or trade embargo's would be affecting who can and can't use it.
Re:hmmm no. (Score:5, Insightful)
For sure, UK government ownership would end its neutrality as effectivey as having it bought by the NSA.
Re: hmmm no. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, because it's the same thing. A business.
Which is what you get, when you "privatise" the government.
Fun fact: This is how Mussolini originally defined the term "fascism". As the merger of government and state. Not much is left of that definition, which is why it's only a fun fact.
Re: hmmm no. (Score:5, Informative)
Fascism: Nominal private ownership of business, but with heavy government "partnership".
Fascism: Cheers on national pride well beyond normal levels, as rallying cry for the masses.
Fascism: Secret police
Communism: Takes over private ownership
Communism: Cheers on the masses as a rallying cry
Communism: Secret police
These survive more as anachronistic political attack labels than as meaningful differences qua plagues on humanity.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: hmmm no. (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)m GenX, but fail to see any reason why Iâ(TM)d positively moderate that message.
Re: hmmm no. (Score:2)
I thought they already did? Or did you forget the original reason why huawei started looking to replace arm chips and google infrastructure in the first place?
Re:hmmm no. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the Tories. They wouldn't run it, they would just appoint one of their friends to run it as a commercial business. Of course because the appointment would be made by nepotism there is a good chance the new CEO will be incompetent and there to asset strip it. So yeah, as likely as not to destroy it.
Thing is the Tories won't do that. They are putting the whole country up for sale to try to survive brexit. It's the world's first bargain basement country, in an economic death spiral where the only plan is to sell bits off cheaply (e.g. the NHS) to try to keep it going for a few more years, then walk away and let someone else deal with the mess. That's why they are sabotaging the trade deal with the EU - it would be too restrictive for their asset stripping plan.
Re:hmmm no. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Let it tube.
Let an open foundation snap it up, financing it on the meager proceeds. The ARM business model doesn't make money; it's a licensing venture.
DO NOT WASTE government funds, a huge depression is on its way. Look at the obituaries if you had any questions. Masayoshi Son deserves NOTHING. Let him rot.
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Should I list the Softbank Dead Pool for you? Read it for yourself.
Names you'd notice:
ZIff Davis/COMDEX/Key3Media - tossed off assets
Sprint -- a brand name no more, part of T-Mobile
Uber -- you're subsidizing their driver's benefits with your taxes.
This is a sample. The real history is tawdry. Truly, ARM isn't a money-making proposition and because of current contracts and licensing, cannot become one without great investment. Governments should avoid being in business because we need their resources as gove
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Private consortiums are a better idea. There is no government that is fair, all wanting to protect their own interests to the detriment of others.
One day, ARM will be worthless. Entropy will even kill the x86/x64.
The very long list of failed public policy initiatives in the Americas, UK, EU, and especially ASEAN countries make this a bad deal for any government, anywhere. An open consortium of interested parties is the best best for success through the lifecycle of ARM licensing, which will start to end in
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Private consortia have their own problems. The big one tends to be that they close the door to future members, especially startups with no clout. Government involvement could help to keep the group truly open.
It's true that something else will probably supplant ARM. But it could take a long time; as you say, entropy will eventually claim x86 but that architecture has been around a long time. x86-64 is 17 years old now, counting from availability of the first product, and the age of the base x86 architecture
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Your experience and my experience are much different. I can think of many consortiums, associations, and other entities of a similar nature that thrive with large and small organizational involvements.
Keep government out of business. Keep government doing government. Bribery and muddled direction ensues.
x86/x64 are totally flawed architectures. Intel and AMD opened a Pandora's box of problems with predictive execution models, hidden processors-within-processors, deterministic cache architectures, and worse,
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Re:hmmm no. (Score:4, Funny)
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What? There's still some silverware left after Mrs. T already sold out the country? Did the iron lady really forget to squander something?
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Palace of Westminster as a bed and breakfast.
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or brothel run by Prince Andrew
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That might even be a business success!
ARM run by a Boris crony would be unlikely to last a year (and they would blame its death on Covid).
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If it was still Prince Albert it would be a BDSM dungeon.
Re:hmmm no. (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh they're doing more than putting public assets up for sale - they're putting private ones up too.
In 2017 they created the employment state of "employed for tax" (somewhat ratified in the recent Finance Bill). This state means you pay all the same taxes as a permie, but get absolutely no working rights at all. Yep, that means you can be fired for smirking at the boss, getting fat, being late to work, getting pregnant - whatever else. Because these people pay all the same taxes as permies, the government won't complain if you displace permies with them (as they would do with traditional contractors).
This zero-rights employment also has a side benefit. If you hire people in this manner, you don't have to report them as "head count" in your official accounts filings. That means your £1bn revenue from 20,000 employees now turns into £1bn from 5000 employees - thus making your company *much* more attractive to "foreign investment" (aka. foreign buy-out).
Pretty soon, the private sector will start taking up the promise of ultra-flexible workers. Then the shareholders will sell out, emigrate to Monoco and leave the rest of us behind in shit-pot island which has no assets whatsoever.
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Basically they figured out how to asset strip an entire country.
The UK gov't owning it wouldn't effect sanctions (Score:3)
Frankly if I was the UK I'd do this. ARM is so huge that it's almost a national security issue for them.
Subsidizing the industries of the past (Score:5, Insightful)
Brexit was meant to give Britain the freedom to make this kind of move.
Subsidizing the industries of the past to keep them alive a little bit longer?
If Nvidia buys ARM denying licenses to competitors, it will only hasten the demise of ARM and the rise of RISC-V.
Re: rise of RISC-V (Score:2)
Only once the mega lawsuits filed against Nvidia are resolved. I fully expect teams of $500/hour lawyers are engaged in examining every line of the ARM licenses that the likes of Intel, Apple etc hold as I write this.
As for the UK government buying anything real then ...
wait, is that a squadron of Pigs I see flying overhead?
Never gonna happen. The Government under Cummings (Boris is a mere sock puppet) are in deep do-do over CV-19 and a trashed economy to do much more than cling to power until the next ele
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Re:Subsidizing the industries of the past (Score:5, Interesting)
Done right, Brexit doesn't prevent doing this. Other nations manage to. In the UK the issue has been ideological, not the EU. Although you can do it the wrong way and fall foul of EU state aid rules as well, but Chris Grayling isn't in the cabinet now so he wouldn't have been given the chance to screw it up even if the UK had remained in the EU.
EU nations are free to prevent industries they feel are strategically important from being acquired by foreign entities and if they feel Arm is important enough not to end up in the hands of Chinese investors they should do something because the Chinese sure as hell would if the situation was reversed and to hell the WTO. There is no reason to get Brexit messed up in this, the British have a long history of claiming Brexit was intended to liberate the UK from this, that or the other thing they were prevented from doing under EU law only for it to emerge after the tornado of UK tabloid bullshit dies down that they were free to do what ever it was they had gotten their panties in a twist over all along under EU laws. A good example is the 'iconic blue passport'. The burgundy colour is recommended for EU passports but Croatia already had blue passports at the time of the UK Brexit referendum and Ireland has passport in simple card form. The whole 'iconic blue British passports' thing was a giant bullshit hurricane about nothing.
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and Ireland has passport in simple card form
Nitpick, not they don't. These are travel cards which only permit travel within the EU+EEA. Many European countries issue these and in some cases they double as a national identity card or residence permit.
It's quite different from a passport.
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But Brexit hasn;t yet happened,
It happened on 31st January.
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sort-of, we left with a 1 year transistion period. So effectively we had a firm and final agreement that it would happen with no way to stop it now (ie no extension to the leaving transition period forever).
We actually leave for real, finally, totally, on the 31st December. 2020.
Also, other state sponsored companies (Score:2)
The EU would absolutely prevent the UK from buying ARM,
Also, there are: Galileo, ESA, Airbus, Arianespace, etc. lots of railwail companies, some national telecom, etc.
There are numerous example of large enterprises that are either state funded, state owned or even EU funded.
Given it's impact on the industry, ARM could largely be seen as the same strategic importance to allow state financial aid.
What EU doesn't want is one country "going Uber" and throw money at some local industry to artificially manipulate markets to weed out competitor through price dumping
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it will only hasten the demise of ARM
What demise? ARM still utterly dominates consumer device CPU architecture and I don't see any signs of it slowing down right now.
Re:Subsidizing the industries of the past (Score:5, Interesting)
What demise? ARM still utterly dominates consumer device CPU architecture and I don't see any signs of it slowing down right now.
First, there is ARM the processor family vs. ARM the company. Apple has paid in full for an irrevocable license, so no matter who many iPhones are sold, that doesn't benefit ARM the company. On the Android side I think there are companies with similar deals.
And ARM processors may dominate in consumer devices, but that's not a monopoly, that's because they are right now the best product with decent licensing terms. RISC-V is behind, but if someone tries to extract lots of money from ARM licenses, then they may be good enough. And they just need someone with significant financial interest to get behind it.
Re:Subsidizing the industries of the past (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple is unique in that they still produce their own custom ARM designs. Almost all the custom ARM designs from other companies have been shelved. Samsung ended their Exynos development:
https://www.techradar.com/news... [techradar.com]
Now all the big players in ARM SoC production rely on reference ARM designs, which is where things get dicey. Yes, Apple may have a license in perpetuity to ARM designs, but nobody has a license in perpetuity to every reference ARM design that has yet to be produced. Shops like Qualcomm likely have licenses for everything up to A78. If nVidia buys up ARM, they could opt to stop releasing reference designs (which would eventually kill off ARM) or change the terms of future license agreements in a way that would be favorable to nVidia.
However, none of what the linked article says really makes any sense. nVidia is a dGPU company first-and-foremost. Their own CPU/SoC design efforts have largely failed, and nobody in their right mind believes that nVidia is going to try to harass those currently licensing reference designs from ARM (much less Apple or Intel. Intel, really? Honestly). nVidia's goal is to assure future markets for their compute accelerators which make them a very large amount of money. Industry efforts at open interconnects (CCIX, CXL, OpenCAPI, etc.) threaten to undermine nVidia's proprietary NVLink. If nVidia can push the Neoverse platform (or future versions of it) into the hands of as many anti-Intel/anti-x86 buyers as it can, it can bake NVLink into their reference platforms, making it difficult to produce compute clusters using anything but nVidia hardware from top to bottom. Unless, of course, you're going x86 or . . . POWER I guess. Never mind that at least up through POWER9, POWER platforms also supported NVLink despite the existance of OpenCAPI.
Maybe nVidia has long-term plans of trying the same thing on desktops where they still sell a fair amount of gaming dGPUs, but let's face it, that market is undergoing slow attrition, and as long as nobody tries to close the PCIe standards off to nVidia, they'll be able to sell cards in that market as long as they like.
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ARM is used almost exclusively in places where it's pretty easy to just swap in something else. If the new owner gets grabby with licenses, just use a different instruction set. You'll have to recompile Android, and the developers who have apps in your app store will have to recompile those. It's not like switching architectures on a desktop where there might be decades of legacy software still in use.
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Ehhhh don't be so sure. It would be a major headache for Android and iOS to move away from ARM to . . . something else. And what else would they choose? Please don't say RISC-V, since RISC-V was designed to be a nightmare of unsupported ISA extensions (among other things). Nobody's seriously producing x86 CPUs that can replace ARM SoCs either. Or MIPS or POWER or anything else.
Also Apple is just now moving onto ARM. You expect them to dump everything and move to yet another ISA?
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I said it would be relatively easy to swap something else in, not that there was a ready and waiting "something else." Apple and Android devices have essentially done this many times already because the capabilities of newer devices (and never versions of the processor) are different enough that apps the OS and apps are frequently binary incompatible between devices, sometimes even between OS versions.
Switching Windows or MacOS to something else is a much bigger deal. Yes, Apple switching MacOS to ARM then
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Ehhhh don't be so sure. It would be a major headache for Android and iOS to move away from ARM to . . . something else.
Android already runs on other ISAs, in real, production devices used by real users. Most apps are compiled to platform-independent bytecode and for the minority (mostly games) that use architecture-specific code, Android and the Play store fully support fat binaries.
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Android on x86 is horrible, have you ever used it?!? Most Android applications that require any kind of performance use inline assembler code and either won't run or require insanely slow binary translation. Fat binaries my ass, it's slowwwww
Also Intel hasn't provided SoCs for Android since Cherry Trail. Unless someone is seriously using Apollo Lake (or some variant thereof) which I seriously hope they aren't.
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AMD suddenly hasn't disappeared from the compute market. Just not as big. Maybe they'll do for compute what Ryzen did to Intel and take the sting out of a monopoly that thinks they own an entire segment.
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We've been waiting for Radeon Technology Group to catch up. MI60 was pretty good and CDNA is showing its face soon (I think), but at the moment, it's still nVidia or bust for serious compute power (and machine learning).
Besides, CUDA works really well. People like it. Try using CUDA vs ROCm or OpenCL 2.0 and you'll see why the industry still bows to nVidia. AMD has a long way to go on the software side.
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RISC-V can't be taken seriously as a successor to ARM.
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RISC-V can't be taken seriously as a successor to ARM.
Sure it can. RISC-V and ARM are 2 architectures that essentially do the same thing. And thus are interchangeable. No fundamental reason one couldn't take an ARM based SoC, replace the ARM part with a RISC-V part, and use the resulting SoC for same application(s) as before.
History is littered with CPU architectures that come & go. Nothing makes ARM special in this regard. Yes there's a very big industry behind it, yes there's a large software ecosystem built around it, yes it absolutely dominates the
Re:Subsidizing the industries of the past (Score:5, Interesting)
RISC-V can't be taken seriously as a successor to ARM.
Sure it can. RISC-V and ARM are 2 architectures that essentially do the same thing. And thus are interchangeable. No fundamental reason one couldn't take an ARM based SoC, replace the ARM part with a RISC-V part, and use the resulting SoC for same application(s) as before.
Well, no. The ARM architecture (and IP) defines a ton of aspects of the architecture, in particular how the cores interact with the Caches, the interconnect, and the peripherals. Whereas several components can be adapted to work with different architectures, and some are connected through industry standard interconnects (such as PCIe), many other components need to talk to each other using a specific set of protocols. The ARM Architecture is not just a ISA, it is a complete Architecture. So, by taking out ARM cores from an ARM-based SoC and replacing it with something different would result in IP infringement. There is a ton of work going into architecting several aspects of the complete architecture - in fact more work than "just" the ISA. RISC-V is at the moment not much more than a set of ISAs.
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If you actually look at the limitations of RISC-V, you'll see that it's kinda bad actually.
Re: Subsidizing the industries of the past (Score:2)
Any statement without supporting arguments that are built on assumptions, pre-accepted by the reader too, or can be checked, is invalid. Not right, not even wrong, but invalid. By which I mean useless. Aka a waste of time.
(Supporting arguments: Assuming everyone accepts basic logic, because it is the natural result of pattern detection, which is what our brain's neurons do, as can be checked by everyone. Then pre-accepted assumptions are the building ground upon which the argument can be built with basic lo
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So you're commentary is invalid? Got it.
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AMD isn't a successor to x86. AMD copied (and then extended) x86. At an ISA level, AMD has never been deficient.
Have you even look at RISC-V seriously? I mean, really looked at it?
Re: Subsidizing the industries of the past (Score:3)
Yes, exactly. This is why I think it would ultimately be a good thing. RISC-V could become the Linux of the hardware world.
Subsidizing the bodies of the past (Score:2)
So Apple will move once again to another architecture while the ARM body is still warm.
"state of the art instruction sets" (Score:1)
Intel says yes! (Score:1)
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Quite right, lets let Softbank sell it and all its IP to the chinese instead. Brilliant idea!
So, is Nvidia or the UK government the fluffer? (Score:4, Insightful)
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RISC-V really needs someone like ARM to champion it. The reason ARM is still dominant is that even though there is a small licencing cost you get it back many times over in the value of the support they offer.
Everything from help integrating ARM cores into your SoCs to active compiler development to vast software libraries. Need an RTOS? ARM maintains both their own CMSIS and FreeRTOS. Want code portability? Use the ARM HAL and switching vendor is easy, and you have a nice template for doing your own silico
Re:So, is Nvidia or the UK government the fluffer? (Score:4, Interesting)
If someone like Microchip or ST took up RISC-V there might be a chance of this happening but so far it's a bit lacking.
Microchip are running with RISC-V via their Microsemi brand, as a direct replacement for the ARM cores used in previous generation chips.
They are founding members of RISC-V and have a staff member on the board.
I think it is safe to expect more RISC-V cores to emerge in time, it is particularly compelling for the low cost end of the market that many of their products target.
On the tooling and support side. SiFive, who are big players in the RISC-V ecosystem and designed the cores that Microchip are using, recently hired Chris Lattner of Clang/LLVM fame.
I expect we will see improvements in the tooling and library side coming from them.
It is complicated somewhat by the openness however. ARM can openly release libraries and tools because they will get paid for the chip or licence in the end, a RISC-V core company can't make that assertion.
Re: So, is Nvidia or the UK government the fluffer (Score:2)
RedHat doesn't seem to have a problem with Linux being open when supporting it.
So what we need is basically RISC-V distributions. With a chip, tooling, and everything to get you going.
From there, meta-distributions (for easier custom chips) (analogous to Gentoo), "RISC-V from scratch", and alliances and standards (e.g. in tooling) can grow.
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RISC-V ain't shit.
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Nothing good did come from K5. They dumped that design and bought K6 from NeXT
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Yeah that. Oh the FPU block? The one that wasn't pipelined? Well okay, it was better than what Cyrix had at the time so, good on him for that.
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RISC-V is looking like Betamax in a VHS world.
Are we sure they are able to withdraw the licences (Score:3)
Is it certain that Nvidia will "withdraw" licences to competitors? I'd imagine all of these people would have negotiated and bought "perpetual" licences (i.e. ARM cannot withdraw it). ARM might be able to cut them off from future developments by ARM, but that's not the end of the world (for example, I'd be very surprised if Apple doesn't have a perpetual licence that allows Apple complete freedom to develop its own extensions etc. - Apple has basically forked ARM into its own lineage already).
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I don't think anyone - including the author of the link article - has all the terms of Apple's license with ARM in front of them. And even if they did, they might not understand it.
In all likelyhood, the only thing Apple has is the right to develop Aarch64 designs as long as they like. Which means that if, someday, ARM moves on from Aarch64, the license won't be good for whatever new ISA ARM decides to push. Not sure if Apple's license covers things like SVE and SVE2 but it probably does.
Anyway, for ever
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Outside of nVidia's Tegra, what reason do they have to wipe out all of ARM's existing revenue streams? The whole point of acquiring ARM would be to prop up their existing business.
I think the point of acquiring ARM is to compete with AMD in the integrated CPU/graphics market. nVidia lost out big time when both PS4 and XBox One designs moved to integrated AMD GPU designs. That is a lot of guaranteed sales. nVidia already has an integrated chipset with ARM, so it's a natural fit.
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I think the point is to build compute nodes without x86 in them, so as to make the nvidia GPU platform more appealing for people building clusters, people trying to use nvidia GPU for self-driving cars, etc etc. A game console still needs quite a bit of raw CPU next to the GPU, because it's handling interactive input. That's still far and away best handled with amd64 because of the price:performance ratio, and because of the minimum performance which is much better than ARM.
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That was my expectation. nVidia takes control of Neoverse and integrates NVLink into it. That helps them fight CCIX/CXL/etc.
NV has sold Tegra as an automotive solution, but as I responded to the poster above, if all they want is a specific product or series of products for end-users, they can just license ARM cores like everyone else to showcase integrated GPU performance. NV's major threat is being deplatformed.
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Maybe, but nV could just license A78 and replace Mali with their own iGPU and it would cost them a lot less. There's no need for them to buy out the entire company.
No (Score:1)
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You aren't ever going to have your own quantum computer, much less in your phone. If anybody ever makes a practical one, it's still going to require a lot of cryogenics. Liquid helium costs about as much by volume as good scotch.
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Fortunately, I am working on a new computing technology powered entirely by good Scotch - or so I tell my SO.
"Brexit was meant to... make this kind of move" (Score:3)
I think this columnist is stupid and has second motivations. A person with the true best interest of Britain in mind wouldn't demand an investment that "invites" private investors - it would demand nationalisation or a golden share-kind of move, which will be allowed given the EU was the one blocking such types of shares. But what this person is demanding is "capitalist" measures such as management boards having more power than owners (why? Isn't that against the concept of private property?) and that the UK dips it's feet in investing hard on the company but not manage it - the kind of light touch, meaningless oversight that puts governments in financial risks without recourse to seize malpracticing management. He wants the UK to pay the current investors a premium so that they keep all the reins of the company, and not sell it to the UK.
I doubt this is even remotely close to why of the people who voted "leave" wanted. Even the minuscule portion of those, who thought about leaving the EU for more than 10 seconds, did not consider the ramifications of their vote on a company being sold to the USA.
... and the freedom not to (Score:1)
> Brexit was meant to give Britain the freedom to make this kind of move.
Not really. It gives Britain the freedom to decide for itself, irrespective of which way the decision goes.
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Really? My comment that 'freedom' gives the UK the option of deciding between all options gets down voted, while some idiot comment about Cummings gets upvoted?
Slashdot is full of fools now, it seems.
This goes against their free market ideology (Score:2)
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This particular crop of tories are more about "our friends know best" - thus, if the market in question is stocked with their friends, then it will indeed decide. If the market doesn't have their friends in it, then either those friends need to be installed in it, or else they don't give two shits about it.
If only the UK could club together (Score:5, Insightful)
No. (Score:2)
They'll F it up. Where's the incentive to improve on anything? Government is good at excuses, especially when the media is in their pocket. We don't want a technology company to be controlled by politicians. Think about it, what are elections but selection of the fastest talking con artists in a popularity contest. It's not like you being a doctor or even a plumber where you need to have actual useful skills in an art.
The way any government will look out for ARMs interest is in three main ways:
1. Stifling c
Corporate psychobabble (Score:2)
Re: Corporate psychobabble (Score:3)
Strangely, this time I got its meaning. ... Let me translate:
(Now I think it might be just us not knowing words that in other circles are indeed well-defined and useful due to their compactness for describing many fine nuances in one. Same way we use so many acronyms and the like in IT, but with using normal wo
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"A successful capitalism is always about framing innovative private dynamism within a fit-for-purpose regulatory and ownership architecture designed by the state, a reality that neither major party has ever understood." Over half of that sentence means absolutely nothing.
Which half? The part following the comma is a bit specious, but the rest is perfectly cromulent. That half? Read "self-perpetuating" for successful, "activity" for dynamism, and "profitable" for fit-for-purpose.
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Come on, it all means something, it's just unnecessarily flowery.
"successful capitalism": a phone in every pocket but also no child coal miners.
"innovative private dynamism": this guy can get creative with following the relevant laws, but if he gets caught it doesn't take the rest of us down.
"fit-for-purpose regulatory and ownership architecture": the relevant laws, from above. Fit-for-purpose means "it works." I.e. it keeps the kids out of the coal mines, but it allows enough moral flexibility for that inn
And this is why open hardware is important. (Score:2)
Or rather why monopolies are a crime. No matter if they are excused with being too lazy and stupid to come up with a legitimate business model that isn't relying on a concept of property, incompatible with physical reality.
This, contrary to popular belief, isn't mutually exclusive with compensating the inventors and designers and enginneers and workers well. Quite the opposite actually, given how those who actually come up with the stuff are treated by "i.p." companies.
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Lazy and stupid? They make the most money and the most powerful chips.
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First you blather about software drivers which are irrelevant to discussion of hardware. Then you bring up xbox and ps5 which game boxes, again irrelevant, we're not talking toy market nor shit low end tablet market. The world isn't using ps5 and xbox for their computers
The worlds businesses move on closed proprietary hardware, that's where the money is and that crushes open hardware.
Neo-liberal order built into the instruction set (Score:2)
This is a great idea. The ARM chips become incompatible with the ideologies of countries opposed to the neo-liberal order, such as China, Russia, or Iran. The chips stop working as soon as the computer is being used to meddle in the democratic elections. Brilliant.
Hell no. (Score:2)
If ARM goes by the wayside then we'll switch to RISC-V. This is why we write portable code.
XMOS (Score:2)
Spot the usual anti Tory BS from the lefties (Score:2)
Yeah, lets not have any nasty UK government owning a majority stake in it - lets let Softbank sell it to the chinese, it'll me much safer then!
Fucking idiots. I'm so sick of all the rabid left wing agitators that can't see any further than the spittle flecks on the end of their noses.
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Wait, the rabid left wing agitators are opposed to state ownership now?
The UK, loser of industries (Score:2)
Look at the history of the UK after WWII.
Everything that was important after WWII, they lost to other countries: jet engines, car industry, computer industry. They lost their empire. They had to cede the development of the atomic bomb to the US, because they could not make the investments necessary.
The big fantasy of certain people in the UK is that they still live somewhere between the wars, and that the UK still has what they used to have.
Yes, maybe they should make an effort to keep ARM British.
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No. The Americans reneged on a whole bunch of agreements, so the UK did develop there own, in the traditional British way - using old cigar tins, chewing gum and string instead of billions of dollars. (Plus we had working electronic computers, not relay based ones, to do the calculations).
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Look at the history of the UK after WWII.
Everything that was important after WWII, they lost to other countries: jet engines, car industry, computer industry. They lost their empire. They had to cede the development of the atomic bomb to the US, because they could not make the investments necessary.
Some of those loses like their empire were inevitable because of the scale of investment required but their computer industry was lost because of the political decision to keep wartime developments in computers secret while the US declassified a lot.
But even now Britain could act (Score:2)
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The last government here in BC balanced the budget by demanding billions in dividends from Hydro which they had to borrow as well as forcing them to build new unneeded transmission lines and a huge dam. Pretty sure their next step was to sell it off as it was losing so much money.
It's the problem with public companies, it just takes one government that has a religious believe in private always better to sabotage the public company rather then keep their hands off.