Rwyf i yn gineit i gael i fynd yw Pwyllgor �aneddwr, Llyfridogaeth nifer, pan gennyn nhw Rwth DAfford Dysiwyd yng ngheilfawr ein rhaglenu ym MhD Aberdd, a hynny llwyddiadau iawn yn cael ei gynwylliannol.  Rwy'n gwiriddoch yn Y Llywodraeth a Ddeudlasach, rydym ni'n gwnaeth gwahau rydym ni'n gwahau ddeudasach. Rwyf yn gwahau y rhai adres, yn gwahau bod yr Audit Sgrotlund yn gweithio. Rwyf yn gwahau, ond mae i'n gwahau i'n gwahau uchhell oedd yr Audit Sgrotlund ddiweddau I suspect that we won't hear from the opposition today. Firstly, NHS staff are maintaining and improving the quality of care. Secondly, there is a strong culture of continuous improvement in the NHS. There is a continued focus on safety and improvement. Levels of patient satisfaction are at an all-time high in the NHS. There are signs that reforms are having a positive impact. The report also points out that, since 2008, there has been an 8.2 per cent above inflation increase in spending in the national health service, and that health today accounts for a higher proportion of the Scottish Government budget than it did in 2008. As we know, in every health service across the developed world, changing population patterns means that there are rising demands on our health service. However, in meeting those challenges in Scotland—and they are big challenges, I think, against many measures—we are seeing the NHS in Scotland perform better than the NHS in any other part of the UK. That is because of the actions we are taking. Increased investment in the NHS, reform, integration of health and social care, for example, the focus on realistic medicine and the work that we have done on A&E, and we are now doing in elective care more generally. That is tough stuff—nobody denies that—but we will continue to focus on delivering the investment and reform that the NHS needs and that patients across the country deserve. Ruth Davidson. The answer, according to Audit Scotland, was one. In one of the eight key performance indicators, there has been any improvement at all in the last five years. The reason they say is because this Scottish Government is still struggling to do the basics, and one of the big ones is staffing. Audit Scotland warned two years ago that we needed a new national approach to worse work floors planning, and the Scottish Government promised to deliver one by early 2017. That one then grew to three, two of which we are still waiting on, and the only one that has been published, according to Audit Scotland, is not a plan at all. What is more, the Auditor makes clear that there is no likelihood of the Government being able to produce a proper plan, because it still does not have the data to do so. Audit Scotland has been warning about this for years, so why is there no proper plan in place and why is not there the data to allow one to be written? One of the things that the Audit Scotland report points to is the improving data that we now have not just in the acute service but across primary care that allows us not just to monitor trends in the NHS but also to drive improvements. It is specifically one of the things that the Audit Scotland report points to as a sign of positive improvement. I make this point seriously, because I accept the challenges in the health service and I absolutely accept the responsibility of this Government, the Government that I lead, to face up to and address these challenges in Scotland. Ruth Davidson seems to want to say that the challenges in Scotland's NHS are unique to Scotland and are somehow uniquely down to this Government. If that is the case, she has to explain why, under the Conservatives in England, no NHS targets are being met. It is a serious question for the Conservatives. On the specific issue of staffing, as Ruth Davidson is aware, there has been a plan published looking specifically at NHS staff. One of the pieces of legislation that we will take forward in the coming session of Parliament is, of course, a bill to enshrine safe staffing levels in law, something that no other part of the UK is doing. Increasingly, anybody who knows anything about how health services are delivered these days knows that you cannot look at the NHS in isolation. The second and third part of the NHS and health more generally workforce plan will look at social care and local authority staffing so that we bring together an integrated plan mapping out the staffing needs for the NHS, not just now but in the years to come. That is the right way to do this, and that is what we will continue to take forward. The final point that I would make on staffing is a point that I have made before, Presiding Officer, and I will continue to make it. One of the biggest risks that we face in Scotland generally, and in the NHS in particular, is a growing inability to recruit people into our public services. Why is that? Because the Conservatives want to stop or restrict our ability to recruit the best and brightest from other countries. That is one of the biggest risks that we face to recruitment, and Ruth Davidson should be ashamed of herself for supporting that. Ruth Davidson. Presiding Officer, if I can just quote a little bit at length of what the Auditor General says specifically on the issue that the First Minister has tried to sweep under the carpet, the quote is this, it is not a detailed plan to address immediate and future issues. The Scottish Government is likely to find it challenging to provide any more detail in the next two plans. This is due to a lack of national data on the primary care and social care workforces. The data isn't there and the plan isn't there. Let's talk about one area where that lack of work force planning is having a real and immediate effect. That is in primary care, or that Scotland makes clear that GPs are central to the changes that we all agree, all of us agree, are needed to improve healthcare, but that has been hindered by the continuing difficulties in recruiting and retaining family doctors. The Royal College of GPs make it clear today. They have written that the SNP Government has consistently cut the percentage share of health spending going directly to GPs over the last decade. They ask, how can hospital targets possibly be met when people feel that they have to attend A and E because they can't secure an appointment closer to home? Does the First Minister have an answer for the Royal College of GPs? In terms of staffing, it is precisely because we need to make sure that there is an integrated plan across not just the acute health service but primary care and social care as well that we are developing the workforce plan in the way that we are doing it in the way that I think Audit Scotland would advise us to do. That is why we will continue to take forward that work. In terms of GPs, Scotland is not the only country that is experienced in challenges in recruiting GPs. That is why we are taking forward a range of different actions from increasing the number of medical training places in our universities to establishing a new graduate entry programme that will focus specifically on general practice and rural and remote working. We have seen this year an increase in the fill rate of year 1 trainees compared to last year. At the same point last year it was 65 per cent, it is up to 74 per cent this year. We, of course, have a commitment to increase the proportion of the total health budget going to primary care by £500 million over this Parliament, taking it to 11 per cent of the total NHS budget. Again, that is a greater commitment that has been made by any Government anywhere else across the islands. Those are big challenges. Anybody can stand up here, as Ruth Davidson has done, and point to the challenges. I accept the challenges, but this Government is putting in place the actions to address those challenges, and that is what we will continue to do. Ruth Davidson I am standing up here calling on the First Minister to honour the promise that she made to GPs a year ago. I am standing up for GPs who are saying that she has gone back on her words and that it is not being delivered. Today, we have had a report from the nation's auditor saying that health in Scotland is not improving and that huge inequalities remain, that there has been a 99 per cent rise in the number of outpatients waiting more than 12 weeks in the last year alone. The SNP set its own targets to make things better, but they have improved in only one in the last five years. We know that there is no long-term plan, even though one was promised for the start of this year, that GPs are being underfunded and that we spent £171 million hiring in agency staff to plug the gaps. Yesterday, I met a group of fantastic trainees at the Edinburgh Medical School. What reassurances can the First Minister give to them that, after 10 years of Audit Scotland reporting the same failings over health by her Government, she will actually have taken some action to turn it around? The number of points to take on there—firstly, agency spending in the last year is down, something that is recognised in the Audit Scotland report. We are taking the range of actions to make sure that we have the right people coming into medical training and making sure that we can get them into the NHS, delivering the excellent care that the NHS delivers for patients across the country. Again, a reminder that the Audit Scotland report points to the fact that NHS staff are not just maintaining but improving the quality of care across our NHS. Ruth Davidson understands the detail of the commitment that we have made to primary care. She said that we have not kept the commitment that we made last year. Let me tell her what the commitment is. Over the life of this Parliament, we will increase spending on primary care by £500 million, £250 million of that will be specifically in general practice. The reason not all of it is in general practice is that, in order to take pressure off our GPs, we need to build wider primary care teams. That is the commitment. That will take the proportion of NHS spending in primary care to 11 per cent. That is the commitment that we will deliver over the life of this Parliament. I would say again that that is not a commitment that is repeated by any other Government across the islands. The central point that we so often come back to when we are discussing public services in this Parliament is that the Government that I lead since we came to office has increased the health service budget by £3 billion, again recognised in the Audit Scotland report. Ruth Davidson stands up week after week calling for action and health or education across the range of our public services. However, that is the same Ruth Davidson who would reduce the amount of money that we have available for public services by giving tax cuts to the richest people in our society. It does not add up. Ruth Davidson cannot offer tax cuts to the richest while calling for more investment in our public services. The Tory policies and the Tory approach have no credibility at all, so we will continue to deliver the investment. We will continue to deliver the reform. Actually, the most important finding in this Audit Scotland report today is the one that says that those reforms that this Government is introducing are starting to show the positive effects that they are designed to do, so we will continue with that focus, delivering for people across the country. It is worth remembering that there was a report published a few weeks ago by Professor Jim Gallacher that showed that spending per heady population in Scotland compared to England had fallen as a direct result of decisions made by this Government. However, I would say that anyone reading the report from the Auditor General this morning on our NHS in Scotland cannot beat anything but concerned. Concerned about the budgets and the financial management of the health and social care in Scotland. Concerned about the shortages of staff at every level and concerned for the impact of all of that on patients. The report clearly states that the patient experience will get poorer unless the pace and scale of necessary change is actioned and actioned now. When are we going to see that level of change being actioned? As any reading of the Audit Scotland report would tell you, we are seeing that change happen in the NHS. It is one of the key findings of the Audit Scotland report, one of the key points that is made in the Audit Scotland report that we are now starting to see the reforms that have been introduced. It looks specifically at integration authorities and says that those reforms are now starting to deliver the change that we need to see. Of course, spending per head of population on the health service in Scotland is 6.5 per cent higher than it is in the UK as a whole—143 pounds higher for every person in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK. Again, this is a point that I make frequently, but my party is Government, but all parties have to be accountable for what they put forward. Labour went into the last Scottish election promising less money for the health service than any other party, even the Tories for goodness sake, represented in this Parliament. The fact of the matter is that there is record funding going into our health service. There are record numbers of people working in our health service, but, as Audit Scotland expressly says in this report, it is no longer enough just to put extra money into the health service because of the rising demand, we need to deliver reforms. Those are the reforms that we are delivering, the reforms that, according to Audit Scotland, are now starting to show real benefits to patients across the country. Alex Rowley But if we stick to the facts, the facts are that we have health boards across Scotland not able to make the cuts to balance their budgets. Those same boards are then borrowing money from the Government to balance the books, storing up debt for the future. Prescribing costs are increasing at a level that is not sustainable. Indeed, we now have council tax funding being used to be able to pay for prescriptions through the integrated joint boards. The lack of workforce planning is driving up costs, and we are having to use more and more agency staff in locums. The whole thing is spiralling out of control. The Royal College of Nursing is calling for clarity on how more care will be delivered in the community and they want to know how staff and the public will be engaged in the development of services, community services, moving forward. Can the First Minister answer that question? The First Minister I am not quite sure which one of those questions Alex Rowley wants me to answer. Alex Rowley says that prescribing costs are rising in every health service across the developed world, probably across the entire world. It is a feature of the ageing population. It is exactly the challenge that health services here and elsewhere are dealing with. That is why we have to reform how care is delivered. He asks about how we deliver more care in the community, as I am sure Alex Rowley knows, for the last two budgets. Again, it is narrated in the Audit Scotland report for the last two budgets. We have taken the very difficult step of transferring money from the NHS into integration authorities so that we bring together health and social care, not just in theory but in practice, because we know—again, the Audit Scotland talks about the reduction in delayed discharges that the integrated approach is now delivering, because if we do that to build up social care, we take the pressure off the acute services. All the parties in Pyrton are not easy stuff. It is not easy in Scotland, in England, Wales, Northern Ireland or any part of the world. In Scotland, we are doing some of the necessary stuff that is still being dodged in most other parts of the UK. We are doing the reforms, we are integrating health and social care, we are transferring the budgets, we are taking the steps around workforce that will ensure that our NHS can deliver in the face of the rising demand that it faces. That is why, while everything that the Audit Scotland report says is important and has to be addressed, the key finding of the Audit Scotland report, in my view, is First Minister with responsibility for those reforms. The key finding is that the reage reforms are starting to show positive signs. That says to me that we stick with what we are doing because we are on the right track, and that is why we keep that focus. Presiding Officer, I accept totally that this is not easy. I think that what the Audit Scotland report says today is that we are not doing enough and we are not moving fast enough. It is, however, important for us to remember that behind all those statistics, behind all those statistics, are real people. Today, we should remember that it is about people who are trapped in hospital because they cannot get the care packages that they need in the community. It is also about those people in communities up and down Scotland who cannot get the support from health and social care that they need. It is for all those people who are on the waiting list. It is the dedicated staff in our hospitals, health centres and community care centres that are run off their feet. That is why we need action. Labour will use our debate in this Parliament next week to discuss the report further. I believe that we need a more detailed discussion on the findings of the report. After 10 years in government, the First Minister has a choice. She can continue to do more of the same, or will she publish a response to the report that will tell the people of Scotland how her Government intends to tackle those big issues facing our health and social care services in Scotland? First, I welcome the fact that we will debate the report. I warmly welcome that, maybe in that debate. If Labour's position is that the Government is not doing enough, maybe Labour will bring forward some ideas as well rather than simply talk about the problems. The second point is this. The whole point here, which again any reading of the Audit Scotland report will tell you, is that we are not just doing more of the same. We are doing things differently, and it is those reforms that are starting to have the positive impact that the Audit Scotland report talks about. Alex Rowley says that we should do it faster. I am absolutely open to doing this faster, but often when we bring forward proposals for change, what we find are the impediments to those changes that sit on the Opposition benches, because they never want to do it. They just want to get up here, and it is the easiest thing in the world to get and diagnose the problems, our job and what we are doing is coming up with the solutions. I tell you what, we will not do. We will not do daft and wrong-headed things that we are seeing south of the border. Because of the action that we are taking in Scotland, delayed discharges are coming down because of sensible change. In England, we see proposals to use air B and B to rent accommodation from local residents to get all people out of hospitals. We will continue to do the sensible evidence-based things that deliver the improvements in our NHS that we are determined to continue to deliver. We have a couple of constituency questions, the first one is from Brian Whittle. The A77 was closed for 24 hours over the weekend due to severe flooding. Paul Grant, Stenolines Trade Director says, and I quote that it is quite clear from this and other incidents that the current A77 and A75 do not reflect the requirements fitting of a major UK island and freight hub. I am afraid that major disruptions and loss of trade could be a feature of life in this region until those responsible commit the necessary resources to alleviate those recurring problems. I can simply ask the First Minister, will the Scottish Government make this long overdue commitment to the people of the south-west of Scotland, and to the A75 and A77? We have a range of improvement plans for our roads in the south of Scotland, as in all parts of Scotland. I am sure that all members will appreciate that there will be times when issues such as flooding will result in a road being closed. That is deeply regrettable, but sometimes unavoidable. I will ask the transport minister to write to the member about the specific issue that he has raised in more detail. I think that anybody looking at the record of this Government—in fact, the Greens often criticise for it—would say that the investment that we have made in our roads, improving our roads over the past 10 years, is a good one, and we will continue to do more, including in the south-west and the area in particular that the member talks about. Liam McArthur The First Minister may be aware that the conclusions of the Government's review of freight ferry fares due out by the end of the summer have still not been published. Pending the outcome of that review, hauliers in the Northern Isles were told last month that freight fares would be frozen. A week later, they received notice that fares would indeed rise by 2.9 per cent next year. How does she justify that decision? How does it square with Government objectives of bearing down on the cost of living for islanders or, indeed, support for Scotland's food and drink sector? Does she believe that it is right, as Audit Scotland has highlighted, that freight fares paid by hauliers on west coast routes remain largely unchanged since 2010 but have increased significantly for hauliers serving businesses and residents in Orkney and Shetland? Of course, we have invested over £1 billion in our ferry services since 2007. In fact, we have been talking about a particular Audit Scotland report this morning. There was an Audit Scotland report out last week that said that investment in ferry services had doubled over the last decade. We have introduced new routes as part of that investment. We have also already cut fares for CalMac customers and we will shortly be doing the same for Orkney and Shetland, which I know the member will welcome. We have tackled under investment that had been the case for a long time and we will continue to do so. In terms of the ferry fares review, that will be published as soon as possible. The First Minister will be aware of the gas explosion at a derelict building in Lanarkshire recently that resulted in the tragic death of worker Pavel Erbansky, who was from Coatbridge. Can the First Minister outline how she will be supporting the investigation and what steps she is taking to enhance health and safety at work regulations in Scotland? First Minister, I want to take this opportunity to express my deepest sympathies to those affected by what was a very tragic incident, particularly for the family of Pavel Erbansky. The investigation into the death under the direction of the health and safety division of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service is on-going and, of course, the family will be kept updated in relation to any development. It would be inappropriate to comment further while those investigations are under way. The regulation of workplace health and safety is, of course, an issue reserved to the United Kingdom Government. The health and safety executives are responsible for drawing conclusions from health and safety incidents as to whether relevant regulations remain fit for purpose. I am sure that the HSE will do so once they have completed their investigation into that particular incident. I am sure that the thoughts in the meantime of everybody in the chamber are with the family and friends of the individual who lost their life in that incident. Looking at today's report into the challenges that the NHS faces, I do not think that anyone should pretend that there is a simple, quick fix that would solve every problem at a stroke, but is it not clear that challenges such as recruitment, retention and staff morale will be made worse not better if we fail to provide a fair pay settlement for the dedicated professionals providing those essential services, who have seen a real pay cut of some 14 per cent over the last five years? Yes, that is why this Government is committed to ensuring that we do see fair pay settlements for public sector workers not just in the NHS but right across our public sector. Again, I think that we are still the only Government anywhere in the UK that has given the unequivocal commitment to lift the 1 per cent public sector pay cap. The commitment has been given to lift the 1 per cent pay cap, but no commitment has yet been given to an inflation-based increase, a real-terms increase restoring the lost value in people's pay that they suffered over recent years. We have heard the SNP's Kate Forbes, the PLO to the finance secretary, someone who works with the finance secretary very closely, saying on television this week that the pay settlement for the public sector should be at least inflation if not above inflation. We have also heard a wider range of voices from multiple political parties accepting the basic green proposition that fairer rates and bands of taxation can raise adequate revenue to fund our public services without resulting in cuts elsewhere and without cutting the pay of public service workers. I do not expect the First Minister to publish our budget today, but does she agree with that basic point of principle that we can provide an inflation-based increase above inflation increase without hitting low earners through fairer taxation? First, we have given the commitment to lift the public sector pay cap. We have not made that dependent on actions that the UK Government has taken in the budget, unlike the Welsh Government, which has done exactly that. I have said personally that we must seek to pay settlements that are fair. Of course they must be affordable, but they must also reflect the real life circumstances that public sector workers are facing. Of course that includes the rising cost of living. We will, of course—this is in the normal course of events—confirm the detail of our public sector pay policy when we publish the budget because we require to know the overall budget that we have available to us before we do that. That is in the normal way that we do things and we will continue to set out policy in that way. On the part of Patrick Harvie's question that is focused on tax, I have again said openly that notwithstanding the party's different manifesto commitments, we require as a Parliament to come to a consensus position on tax in order to pass a budget. Given the continuation of austerity, given the implications of Brexit that are becoming clearer by the day, we need to ask ourselves as a Parliament how we use our still limited tax powers in order to protect our public services and provide the infrastructure that businesses need to thrive. Next week we will publish a discussion paper setting out some of the options, some of the principles that should guide that decision, and that discussion paper will then form the basis of the discussions that we have across this Parliament in the lead-up to the budget. That is a long way of saying that I agree with much of the sentiment behind Patrick Harvie's question, but we have to take proper decisions in line with the proper process of budgeting because, unlike the Opposition parties, the governing party in any Parliament has the responsibility of making sure that we can pay for the commitments that we make. The Government's policy of prioritising full-time college courses has resulted in a cut of 150,000 part-time places. It has deprived thousands of people of the education that they want and need, particularly women and older people. Last week, the education minister sent a guidance letter to colleges with an apparent change in policy that had never been announced publicly before. Can the First Minister tell me, has the policy changed and, if so, when exactly did it change? The most recent figures show that the majority of college courses were still part-time courses, but this was a commitment that we set out in a manifesto. Given the rate of youth unemployment that we faced at the time, we made a deliberate decision—and it was the right decision—to try to increase full-time places at colleges in order to increase the likelihood of people going through our colleges and getting into work at the end of that. Do you know what? The proof of the pudding is in the eating, because youth unemployment today in Scotland is half the rate that it was 10 years ago when we took office. In fact, we have one of the lowest rates of youth unemployment, not just in the UK but anywhere across the European Union. The policy that we will ask our colleges to pursue will depend on the needs of the economy at any given time, and that is the basis for the guidance that the minister put forward that Willie Rennie has referred to. However, we have taken the right decisions in our colleges, and I think that we see the evidence of that in some of the economic data that I have talked about. Willie Rennie. Nothing has changed but everything has changed. Is a bizarre answer. Has the policy changed or hasn't it changed? If this was such a success story, why did her minister sneak it out in a paragraph 7 of a letter on a wet Wednesday afternoon? Surely, if it was a success, she would be parading it in this Parliament. Everyone knows that the birth rate at the turn of the century is more responsible for the drop in youth unemployment than any policy of this Government. The truth is that it has taken six years for this Government to realise the economic value of part-time learners over the age of 24. This is a crashing U-turn, and the First Minister should be big enough to admit it. Six years of narrowing the focus has left us short. That is six years of missed economic opportunity. Six years of abusing those in this chamber who dare to question the policy. Will the First Minister now apologise to the generation of women and older people who have lost out because of this Government? First Minister, Members, I would appreciate if Members would listen to the question and then listen to the answer. Probably the fact that his pals on the Opposition benches felt that they needed to give them so much help suggests that they know how fundamentally wrong Willie Rennie is. I will not apologise for the fact that we have youth unemployment at half the rate today than it was when this Government took office. Nor will I apologise for the fact that we fought an election on a manifesto commitment to maintain full-time equivalent numbers in our colleges, and we did not just meet that manifesto commitment, but we exceeded that manifesto commitment. Those are solid achievements, but the real flaw in Willie Rennie's question is that, in spite of delivering that commitment to increase full-time students at colleges in order to get more young people into work, the majority of courses at our colleges continue to be part-time courses, open to the very people that Willie Rennie is talking about. We will continue in colleges and in every other aspect of Government policy to take forward the policies that are right for the needs of this country. That is what we have done, and that is what we will continue to do. We have got to have a couple of supplementaries. Marie Todd. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Today's daily record has figures showing that a quarter of Scottish councils are already spending almost £9 million mitigating the impact of universal credit. Does the First Minister agree with me that the impact on people left in dire financial straits, because of universal credit, is morally unacceptable and the idea that local authorities or the Scottish Government should have to pay the price for failed Westminster austerity is a disgrace? The fact that the UK Government is refusing to pause the implementation of universal credit knowing that it is pushing already vulnerable people into debt, into rent arrears, making it difficult for parents to put food on the table to feed their children, is not just morally unacceptable, it is morally repugnant, and I think that every Conservative should be deeply ashamed of this. The fact of the matter is that universal credit is not working, and that is being demonstrated in the pilot areas that I have spoken before about a visit that I made to Inverness, talking directly to people who have found themselves in these unacceptable situations. We need to see a pause to universal credit, and we need to see that happen now before any other person has to suffer the indignities and the anxieties that so many have already suffered. Again, we come back to this issue about mitigation. As people across the chamber know, we should mitigate where we can, but we should not have to spend money that should be getting spent on education or health or colleges mitigating welfare cuts that are implemented and imposed by a Conservative Government at Westminster. The sooner we get all of welfare powers into the hands of this Parliament, the better. Do you believe that cutting yet more firefighter posts and closing fire stations will, A, make our communities safer, or B, put more lives at risk? If you do not know the answer, have a guess. Sometimes you only have to listen to Neil Findlay's tone to understand why Labour is in the dire straits that they are in. It is shockingly bad. First, let me take the opportunity to thank our firemen and women right across the country for the essential and vital work that they do. It is the important presence of that work that has meant that the Scottish Government this year has increased the operational budget of the fire service. There has been since reform, no compulsory redundancies, no fire station closures. In fact, over the last year, we have seen the recruitment of 100 new firefighters. The fire service, just like any other public sector, cannot stand still when circumstances are changing. There are changing risks, changing patterns of demand, changing technology. It is right that the fire service looks closely at how they deal with that, but as they do, the priority of them and of this Government is not just in protecting the front line, but in enabling our firefighters to do an even better service for the people of Scotland in the future. Can I ask the First Minister what progress has been made with the reaching 100 programme to connect premises that have not received support from the previous programmes for access to superfast broadband? The Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband programme has been a huge success so far. It has already enabled fibre broadband to be delivered to over 800,000 premises in Scotland, and we are on track to meet our target of 95 per cent of premises with broadband access by the end of this year. However, we recognise that many areas still do not have access. That is why the reaching 100 programme will focus on extending superfast access to those premises that will not be reached in the current programme. We have completed an open market review and public consultation to formally agree an intervention area and undertake an extensive supplier engagement to maximise competition. We will set out our delivery approach in greater detail shortly ahead of the launch of a procurement exercise later in the year. I congratulate the Scottish Government on its success in rolling out superfast broadband and accelerating the policy given the slowness of previous UK Governments. Tens of thousands of my constituents have certainly benefited from the programme. However, I wonder if the First Minister has recognised that the one side effect of the success is the gap between the haves and the haves not. I have just got bigger, and many rural communities have not benefited or received any form of public support. Although we will await the next programme and the roll-out of R100, can ministers consider any other further short-term measures, perhaps working with the private sector, to connect such communities who, in this day and age, see connection as a utility and not a luxury? Can Scottish ministers also press UK ministers to introduce appropriate regulation, such as introducing universal obligations and dealing with the likes of BT, who are charging customers similar amounts every month for widening, varying levels of service? I am very acutely aware that some premises, particularly in the rural parts of the country, do not yet have fibre broadband access. That is why the reaching 100 programme will seek to prioritise those communities through the initial procurement exercise. In the meantime, the better broadband scheme already offers residents of premises with broadband speeds of less than 2 megabits per second, a voucher code that subsidises the cost associated with alternative broadband solutions. I am sure that all members will want to make their constituents aware of that. As Richard Lochhead knows, telecoms is a wholly reserved function. There are a range of issues that I think need to address, and we are working closely with OFCOM to ensure that Scotland's particular challenges are considered and indeed calling for a more regional approach. I think that issues such as universal service obligation are important ones, although with the current discussion around a USO being taken forward by the UK Government, the problem with that, of course, is that it is not delivering broadband at super-fast speeds. However, we will continue to deliver on our own programme and continue to press the UK Government to take action that it needs to take in order to deliver the same. Thank you, Presiding Officer. To ask the First Minister what action the Scottish Government is taking to hold to account NHS boards that do not meet their waiting times targets. First Minister. We work with and support NHS boards to improve delivery of waiting times targets. In May, we, for example, announced that £50 million had been made available to improve waiting times between now and the end of March next year. In August, we also announced the setting up of an expert group to improve the way elective care services are managed across all boards. Derek Bell of the Academy of Royal Colleges, who will lead that work, was the same person who did similar work that led to the improvement of A and E waiting times. Of course, we are investing £200 million in a network of five new elective and diagnostic centres over the period of this Parliament. Edward Mountain. I thank the First Minister for that answer, and I would like to put out a few things here to help the First Minister so that she does not have to address them in her answer. We accept hard-pressed staff in NHS Scotland who are committed, dedicated and hard-working, and we do appreciate what they do. Saying that failing to reach seven out of 10 targets is okay because other places in the UK are worse, it does not help people who are waiting for treatment. Making targets easier is not acceptable, and just increasing spending on the NHS won't be solved the problem. Therefore, I turn to the Audit Scotland report. It says that previous approaches such as providing more funding to increase activity or focusing on specific parts of the system is no longer sufficient. There is no doubt that the situation is getting worse, and the Health Secretary was unable to say this morning on Radio Scotland when it would get better. We need transformational and inspirational leadership. What is the First Minister going to do to ensure that our NHS has the leadership that it desperately needs, but clearly lacks? We certainly will not do what other Governments are doing, and that is to privatise the NHS, something that the member will know a lot about. There was so much in that—I was going to say question, but it was not really a question, but there was so much in there that it is just wrong. Making targets easier. One of the things that we have done over the past 10 years is to make many of the NHS targets tougher. That is part of the challenge that we face, and many of them, while, yes—and I have never said that it is okay that we are not meeting them—we are performing better against tougher targets than used to be the case against targets that were weaker. We are toughening up many of those targets, in other words, stretching our expectations of what the NHS delivers, at the same time as demand on the NHS is increasing. We will continue to take the action that I have already set out here several times today, investing record sums in our NHS, making sure that there are record numbers of people working in our NHS, but also taking forward the difficult but necessary reforms that will equip our NHS to deal with rising demand now and in the years to come. To ask the First Minister what the Scottish Government's position is and whether public sector workers should be given a real-terms pay increase in 2018-19. As I have already made clear today, the 1 per cent public sector pay cap will end in 2018-19. I fully understand the impact that increasing living costs and social security cuts are having on working households and we will set out our plans fully in the draft budget on 14 December. We will develop a pay policy that is affordable but also one that recognises real-life circumstances such as the cost of living while continuing to support those on the lowest incomes. Public sector workers, both in Scotland and across the UK, deserve a fair deal and the UK Government should follow our lead in lifting the pay cap, of course, ensuring that there is then proper investment in our vital public services. James Kelly Thank the First Minister for that answer. In recent years, the policy of a public sector pay cap followed by the Scottish Government has resulted in 156,000 health service and police staff being worse off in real terms. That is unacceptable and the budget is the opportunity to address that. When the issue was raised previously by Patrick Harvie in this session, we get two minutes of waffle from the First Minister on it. Let me give the First Minister another chance to answer the question. Does the First Minister accept the position that was set out by Kate Forbes in Scotland tonight that the pay rise should be set at least inflation? Will the Government bring forward the consequential tax changes that are required to give public sector workers the pay rise that they deserve? The First Minister We will bring forward the detail of our spending plans and our tax plans in the budget that will be published in 14 December. However, the hypocrisy of Labour on this issue is quite frankly staggering, because we have said that the pay cap will be lifted. We have not made that dependent on actions taken elsewhere, and that is completely different to the position taken by Labour in the Welsh—I have a letter here. No, they will not want to hear this. I have a letter here, written by the Labour Health Secretary in Wales to Jeremy Hunt, the UK Health Secretary. It says this, and I am quoting, without a commitment from the UK Government to give the Welsh Government more money, the public sector pay cap will remain. That is what Labour in Wales saved. Here is what we have got. Labour calls for the cap to be lifted in Scotland. It calls for the cap to be lifted in Westminster. In Wales, the only part of the UK where it has the power not just to call for things to be done, but to do things, Labour refuses to give a commitment to raising the public sector pay cap. What does that tell us about Labour? This is what it tells us about Labour. Labour are all mouth and no action. The First Minister's question time is over. We now move to members' business and the name of Jeremy Balfour. We will just take a few moments for members to change seats.


In this demo with IBM, we're gonna watch how Arman's intrusion detection and prevention solutions ECU shield and TCU shield can protect vehicles against cyber attacks such as these that can occur from a mobile app. The hacker can lock and unlock the doors he can now spoof the RPM he can spoof the speed of the vehicle. At IBM, we are helping OEMs and fleet managers protect their cars by providing them fleet's security visibility. Our system collects data from different devices, security devices and monitors in the car and forward the data to the back end, the curator. On the back end, we apply different type of analytics including cross-split analytics and single vehicle analytics. In addition, our technology will enable OEM to carry out forensics to answer questions such as how the attacker managed to get access to the car or what tools he was using for the attack and also to understand how he's exposed to such an attack, how many vehicles are exposed to this specific vulnerability that was used or how many vehicles were communicating with the malware distributed server and so on.


Good afternoon, Madam Secretary, and thank you once again for being here. My name is John Martinez, and I'm a second year MPP student, a Bonnet fellow at the Ford School Public Policy. And we were wondering, there is a school of thought that the last recession contributed to the rise of populism and emboldened races in Europe and the United States. Should we be worried that if it will intensify if there is another global economic downturn? And how should we address this worry? It's a very important question. I do think that the global recession unleashed a lot of emotions, and some of them were justified because it wasn't, you know, it should not have happened. And when it did, I think many millions of people here in the United States and around the world lost a lot of faith in institutions, both in the free market system of our country as well as in our government. And even though President Obama tackled it seriously and let us out of that, saved the auto industry in Michigan, did a lot of other really good things, it took a while. And so people had, you know, a lot of serious problems economically and the damage lingered. The other big push for populism, for nativism, whatever you want to call it, tribalism, nationalism, was immigration. And that goes back to the Syrian question because the real igniting event in Europe was the tens of thousands of Syrians pouring out, trying to escape Assad and Russian bombers. So they were flooding into Europe and Europe was not prepared. It was kind of hard to be prepared. And there were millions of people who were showing up in Italy and then moving on to, you know, Germany or France. And, you know, Angela Merkel, who is a great stateswoman, took a huge political risk and basically said, look, we're going to take the Syrians and there were others mixed in with them, but it was predominantly from, you know, the Syrian region. We're going to take them and we're going to try to assimilate them. We're going to try to give them jobs, training, education. And they took about a million Syrians. And that caused a huge political backlash. I mean, the fact is Germany had a better system than most countries would to actually do what she said they were going to do and to absorb those people. And a lot of them, they may not have spoken German, but they were engineers, they were pharmacists, they were educated. So they have slowly been able to assimilate them, but there still is a big backlash. And so these problems, the economic problems, the migration problems, we need people, again, doing that slow patient diplomacy that looks boring, but can actually make a difference, trying to figure out what do we do about this? Because I will predict that with climate change, you will have even more migrants, and particularly from North Africa, which is suffering from desertification. You're going to have more and more people pouring out of parts of Asia. You've got temperatures in Europe now, 110 degrees, and temperatures in parts of Asia, 120, 130 degrees. People are going to leave, and what are we going to do? And I want to say just another quick word about development. I think it would be really smart for us to focus some development aid, to build institutions in Central America to stop the migrant flow, to try to provide honest policing, to try to provide support for those governments, even if they are not particularly effective or even honest. We ought to figure out what we can do. A lot of the migrants are coming because they're scared to death with the gangs. Well, no government should tolerate armed gangs, and we should help those governments crack down and eliminate that gang threat. So people don't have to rush to our border because they've seen their father killed or their daughter raped, and they don't know what else to do. The coffee farmers are leaving because there's some kind of pestilence that is affecting the coffee crop. We have the best agricultural experts in the world. We should be down there trying to figure out how to help those people stay on their little farms if that's possible. We could be doing a lot instead of making this huge political dilemma, putting children in cages, abdicating our own values, our own laws. We should say, look, we have to have an orderly migration process. Every country has to have secure borders. Why don't we try to help our neighbors so that they don't have to leave their homes and do more to prevent that flow in the first place?


Hey, everybody. This is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat. I'm talking today with Josh. Hello. Hello. Good afternoon. Well, for folks that don't know you, who are you? Where are you? And what do you do? OK, so I am Josh Garbrek. I am in Buffalo, New York, sunny Buffalo, New York. It's warm this time of year. I hear it is. It's actually almost 70 out right now, which is OK. Yeah, people. I was joking. You're 25, 30 degrees warmer than I am here in Utah. Yeah, so it's it's good times. It's actually it's been a nice ease into what will probably be an interesting back half of the winter. So I'll take it, you know, I'm a cloud solution architect for Codison under the Microsoft Business Group. And it's a recently formed business group that is the result of a couple of different companies coming together, primarily Tenth Magnitude, which is where I was originally seated and New Signature as well. So those two companies along with I think a couple of others that came into the mix later on. But we focus on all things Microsoft. So my particular area is at modernization and DevOps. So I do a lot of work with not only the solution aspects of things, but I get very heavily involved in the delivery aspect as well. I'm always interested to talk to folks in the DevOps space in the Microsoft ecosystem because like so I spent a few years, you know, years ago and folks that have watched this sorry, broken record on this. But so I had a startup that I sold the rational software a long time ago, pre IBM acquisition. And so I wrote my first three books were on clear case, clear quest and IBM related now IBM related technology. But in the software configuration management space, which is like the DevOps space, so it's managing code. And yeah, yeah, so it's an interesting space. And it's what's interesting is that when after they rational sold, there's a bunch of big name people at at rational that left and some of them went to Microsoft. And back in like, what was it? 2001, 2002, 2003 time frame somewhere around there. So yeah, it was I think they've all left since then, but it was just interesting to see that shift of mindshare go over to Microsoft and kind of the early days of. And that's before, of course, we were we were referred to it as, you know, SCM, not DevOps, but so it's really kind of expanded with the tool set around that. Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting to also see some of the trends now where folks are kind of migrating away from Microsoft and going to Google, for example. Like if you see like Jeffrey Snowver made that move, I know a few other folks have as well. And it's just good. I'm glad to see that folks are still staying in the in the overall ecosystem, the technology ecosystem, you know, brand loyalties aside. I think it's still important to be able to have good folks in those positions. So well, that's it. That is important because we've seen the same with there's a bunch of share performer, SharePoint people that are over at Google. And Google made it easy by buying a bunch of built like a whole campus right by the East Campus there in Redmond. So it just it's literally down was at 154th down towards the movie theaters and stuff before the Wells Fargo.  But now that makes it an easy transition for folks. But you're right. In this day and age, there are very few customers that are solely down one technology stack. There are multiple technologies and players and competing solutions that are in place. And it also speaks to the need for interoperability and movement in between these different assets. And the DevOps space, I mean, there is there any clear like winners, owners of the space in DevOps, or is it really just spread out? I see so a lot of the stuff that I've come across, especially over the past several years being involved in it from not only the MVP aspect, but also just from a general work perspective.  There's GitHub is obviously huge, huge presence and even more so since the acquisition, right? I mean, that's that's definitely picked up steam and, you know, a lot of the enterprise offerings as well. Folks are starting to gravitate towards that. And I've been involved in a couple of migrations off of old on-prem systems into GitHub as well. So it's definitely interesting there. Still seeing a lot of clamor around GitLab.  You know, it's less about what's pretty and more about what's functional for your team, right? I mean, I have my own opinions, but folks also have theirs. And, you know, if it fits your need and it's it's doing what you need it to do and it's providing value and helping to, to, you know, demonstrate efficiencies. You know, it's it's a toss up at that point. I think whatever you pick, as long as it works for you. Yeah, that's because for years, I was in more in the project management side of things. And so I would work with engineering organizations and build PMO's and, you know, like that side of things. That's how it kind of got into SCM space. But it's much the same.  And if through acquisitions, there is a larger number of your, you know, users that are on a system and opposing system, then it might be a time to reflect and go look at what makes sense for the broader organization and and move things around. I know a lot of there is a lot of. It's it's I'm going to say it's a commoditized space. But it kind of is. There's just mainstream capabilities.  Yeah, which is which is good for practitioners where it's like you can take if you've got depth of knowledge and understanding of one platform, join a new company that's using a competing platform. You're going to get 80, 90 percent of that right away and just get back up to speed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, all the mechanics and the overall UI and usability is fairly transferable between them all. When you get into the the guts, the underlying stuff, like if you're doing a conversion, a platform conversion, there are nuances that will show up that are just like, oh, why do they do that? Or this this is actually pretty cool. I like the way that this is put together versus where we're going. So it's interesting to get behind the scenes. It's there's always things.  I'm just like, like, where are the buttons? Whether it's everything's on the reverse side. They intentionally have things swapped out. So those little nuances and things. Yeah, yeah, I am a Mac user, but a Mac user for quite some time. But I still have like if I wasn't embarrassed of how cluttered my desk was, I'd show you. But I've got like the Windows Dev Kit, the new one that just came out. I just bought that. I've got that running. I've got a Nukebox running. I've got a Raspberry Pi three node cluster. It's running Kubernetes. I have another client laptop to the one side of me. That's just a regular old, you know, Lenovo banger and my Mac, but that's my primary from from work. So I'm kind of surrounded on all sides by different processors and electromagnetic fields. So well, I always like to say that while I'm, you know, like my father in the 80s was like bought one of the first, the like the first, you know, Macintosh and, you know, so like used it for years and years and it was in graphic design in the late 80s, early 90s and so heavily used that. But and then I've been a PC user ever since. But I have to say that my primary home system for a couple of years was a Mac when Vista was released because Vista worked perfectly on the Mac. Nice. So it's like, I don't know what the some somehow, you know, Apple did the hardware right that whatever I remember every other problem other people had, I never experienced it just ran beautifully on that Mac hardware. And we used that third party tool to be able to load it and run it, but it just was fantastic and performant and just it was a great solution. But anywho, well, so, Josh, so you've been an MVP for eight, nine years now. What what was your path to becoming an MVP? So this I love telling the story, mainly because just the randomness of how it all started is something that I find funny. Long time I think it was like the beginning of 2014 or maybe the end of 2013, somewhere in that timeframe, I'd started that's when I started to really get into a lot of the CICD systems and was trying to actively promote that type of thing at my place of employment at the time. I started to really get excited about it. And it was kind of like when I first taught myself how to actually program like using VB, you know, I was a VB4 kid. That's when I came in was was around that time. And then once we started to get into things like, you know, C Sharp, I made that cut over and haven't looked back. But I started to get into the CACD platforms and TFS was obviously a big thing around that time. So I started to go through the it was the Microsoft Virtual Academy at the time, I believe was what was out there.  And my goal was to go for a certification. Well, the two gentlemen who were doing the courses were, of course, Steve Borg, Anthony Borg. Right. So I'm watching these courses. I really enjoyed the content. I really enjoyed their candor back and forth and their delivery style and all that stuff. So I'm doing a little bit of side research and I see that there's this group. It's called the Visual Studio ALM Rangers. And it's a group that's partially Microsoft FTE, partially external folks. I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. That would be really fun to be a part of. So as I'm looking through, I look at the membership roster, like who's in there. And I see that Steve is in there. So I'm like on a whim, I email him and I said, hey, first of all, I just want to say thank you so much for the content that you guys have out there for the TFS administration stuff. It's been really helpful for me. It's really gotten me excited about, you know, the CICD in general and just the whole DevOps frame of mind. And, you know, I see that you're also a member of the ALM Rangers. You know, do you have any further information about what's entailed with that? How you can, you know, express interest or whatever?  And here's a Willie Peter Schaub, who is the program manager for the ALM Rangers. And through a bunch of back and forth, Steve basically chipped in for me and was just like, yeah, he'd be great for the program. And at the time, he didn't know me from just about anybody. But my enthusiasm apparently is what kind of initiated that whole thing where he's just like, yeah, you know, he should be able to join up, no problem. So that's how I started off was on that track with the ALM Rangers. And the big thing that got me into the MVP program was working on the very first iteration, the alpha of what's now the Azure Pipeline system. So if you remember back when everything was XAML, right? And they were just starting to make that cut over into task-based pipelines.  And that's how it started. Like from there, Willie nominated me and the rest is history at least on the internet. So that's kind of where I started off too and just kept going. I love asking that question just because I mean, obviously there are similar patterns when I, like almost 200 MVPs have interviewed and asked the same question about that and there are certainly patterns within that. But one of the things that I'd love to point out is that you reached out to people like within the ecosystem. Like you get involved, participate, comment, that kind of stuff.  So you can't just come out of nowhere not having participated and reach out to people that having participated, then you'll reach out, connect with people, MVPs, Microsoft people, community leaders that are out there. That's how you start the process. That's how you get the ball rolling. It's like, I was just telling somebody this week as we're getting ready to organize our what used to be our SharePoint Saturday event happening in February, which we're now collab days, Utah. And we had a couple of new faces show up to a planning call and just say that, hey, just get anybody wanna get involved. And so people are like, hey, I'd like to help out. It's like there's no shortage of things to help out with as an organizer, we're gonna find something for you to go and do and get involved. And so we wanna see. So if I've got somebody that shows up, they start helping out, they're helping out the user group, they're helping out with training materials maybe being a guest showing what they're doing with their work around certain solutions that kind of easy to get involved doing what you're just doing in your normal job. That's how you get that recognition so that if you are interested in going down that path you can have that conversation. That's right. It's absolutely right. And that's critical is just showing up, right? Yeah. Making people aware that you're interested in and you wanna help and pitching in where you can. It's less about like stacking experience as it is just being there for the experience and helping out any way you can. How do you balance?  Because that's a real problem for so many people. I had managers for a couple of different companies that I worked for for years that were like, you're doing great stuff, nobody sees it. They're like, well, I'm just doing my job. And I'm trying to do it well. I'm not trying to go promote the fact that I'm doing my job. So how do you balance that? How do you kind of get the word out? So a lot of what I do is I attack it from two different angles. One is for a lot of the like news updates and things like that, I use buffer to help with managing the release of that type of stuff. We don't just dress alike. We also, well, where is it? There we go. Yeah.  I've been a subscriber for a few years now and just makes it so much easier to take feeds and parse them up and say, hey, I wanna make sure that I target this time, this day, you know, if it's over the weekend, maybe I'll get a little bit more aggressive with sending out small updates. The tooting your own horn and self-promotion stuff, I tend to do that, excuse me, a little less liberally for a couple of reasons. One, I have a really hard time going, hey, Attaboy, you know, just giving myself the- Most people do though. Yeah, yeah. Most normal people, I should say, normal people have a hard time. Precisely. Yeah. Yeah, so I'll pick and choose my battles there. Like for example, when I got it, when I was accepted to do a couple of asks, the expert sessions at Dyke this year, I put that out there because to me, you know, that's a big deal for me. And I like to share that with other folks as well, who if they're in the neighborhood and they happen to go to the conference and they wanna stop by, say hi, you know, chat about something, that makes that in-person connection a little bit more meaningful. Same with books and I'm sure, you know, you're in the same boat where you have things that are getting ready for publication, whether it's books or whether it's, you know, online courses or anything like that, you wanna get the word out for, you know, obviously sales purposes, but also to kind of let folks know, hey, you know, I've spent a considerable amount of time on this particular subject, go check it out. Maybe, you know, hopefully find some use of it. Yeah, agreed. It's a, I mean, look, there's a lot of strategies. I have provided a lot of advice on, there's things that I do that have just become habits now, where I, like one of the things that, if you visit my blog, there's actually monthly updates. And it looks like a, hey, he's tuning his own horn kind of thing. It's like, no, it was, I started doing it internally, just to capture, to make sure that I didn't lose, like what did I work on? Where did I speak? Where are my slides? Where are the recordings? You know, all of those things in one place. Then it became a newsletter that I would push out internally to say, hey, here's everything that I've been doing. And I was the chief evangelist for an ISV. And so like, here's everything that's going on. Then I started tagging everything in CRM, anything that was relevant. So that if, which I think is a great internal strategy. So if somebody else in your company and on the sale side is working with a customer, they goes like, what content do we have around this? Oh, hey, our chief evangelist or our head of engineering or whoever it is, it's the MVP, you know, wrote this blog post on that topic. So that there, it helps surface that information. And then over the years, probably six, seven years ago, I turned it into these monthly, just a blog post outlining everything. And so I'll often forget, it's almost like a time capsule. I'll go back and what was I talking about two years ago? I see the outline of exactly what I was talking about. That's awesome. Yeah. It's just an extension of the brain, you know? Yeah, yeah. Like that, that's an aspirational place for me. I'm much less, I won't say much less organized, but I won't say I haven't compartmentalized to that level as of yet. So, but that's an absolutely great technique. It's a process to get there. It doesn't happen just overnight, but like anything, now it's just, it's a habit. I just think that way and, you know, what one note has all the notes around that and collect it all up and then it's just in, you know, to organize it though. Nice. Very cool. Well, what else, anything else that's going on in the community and what's your involvement there? So I've done a few talks virtually for the Microsoft reactor out in New York. So I did a couple of talks on cost management and on dev containers. I want to say a couple of months ago and then I also did one for an Azure group out of Toronto that was covering introduction to service mesh. So I went, you know, kind of ran through the basics of what it is, why you might want it, why you might not need it, what some of the major players are and key benefits and stuff like that. The sessions that ignite were actually around cloud for healthcare and cloud for retail. So it was more of like an onsite, I don't know if you were there in person as well. No, it wasn't. It was in another event that had already been scheduled so that got overlap, which is fantastic. Yeah, yeah, right. Thanks, Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It was an interesting experience. Basically the way that they had the expo lead out, there were different colored zones and each zone had this huge U-shaped desk. So I kind of felt like I was working at a Best Buy in that respect. You know, it's just like I chill in back there and people come up and ask me questions and stuff, but it was fun. It's a good way to kind of get more randomized feedback from folks, right? As opposed to, you know, typically when you're doing a talk or anything like, even if you're doing like a moderated Q&A or table topic, there's still a lot of structure to it. Whereas, you know, these, you could get any kind of question from things that are, you know, very, very technically deep to just absolutely off the wall stuff. Like why would you ask me that question? I love the AMAs for that purpose too. And, you know, if I were more organized, I would kind of start, I would catalog all the questions, whether they're answered or not. And again, look for the kind of the patterns and say where, and that would, for me, as a content creator, if I keep seeing questions around there, that means that, hey, they're not getting the answers out of the, you know, the documentation. Cause one of the problems is for folks that, you know, are not content creators around the tech spaces, you know, Microsoft does, is they've really improved their content creation, but so much of it is like, here's how I walk through the steps of to get through, navigate through the platform to do something, but then they missed all of the nuances of your industry of your business. They don't have necessarily the case studies, the scenarios, the real world, you know, examples of that thing, which is really what, you know, people need to, it's like doing a demo against your own data versus the generic data that's out there. I know we all appreciate the Contoso examples that are out there, but, you know, when you have something that is shared against your industry and with the nuances, the language of the real world and not just the product team trying to translate and walk you through the steps, it makes a big difference. That's why community content is so invaluable. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you know, two things that come to mind immediately are both in kind of that regulated industry area, you know, healthcare and finance, right? So a lot of these examples are really good at getting the core concepts down, but then, you know, a lot of folks that I talked to were like, well, how do I make this PCI compliant? Or how am I, you know, using something that's gonna be able to encrypt everything and to end at rest in motion and in process, right? I mean, yeah, now there are things for that, but that was always a huge nut to crack is to figure out how to do stuff like that. So having even those nuanced references into how you could potentially leverage other products to do things like that with that industry flare is something that's really important. Right, well, and we were, as we were talking about earlier, the competitive solutions that are out there. So there's a lot of questions about how do I move from this other here or how do I get the two to work together to interoperate? How do I, you know, all those kinds of questions? Again, that's why I love the AMAs. It's always great when there's a panel of you versus just you there. So there's a lot of, I don't know answers, but great thing about MVP is that we might not know the answer, but we probably know somebody who does know the answer. Exactly. But I prefer having the panel. So a group of us answering those questions, but... Well, Josh, well, really appreciate your time today for folks that want to follow you or reach out and connect with you. What are the best ways to reach you? I would say Twitter and LinkedIn. So my Twitter handle is at JayGarverik and my LinkedIn profile is out there in the wild. It's just linkedin.com in Josh-Garverik. Easy. And we'll have the links, of course, in the blog post out on buckleyplanet.com and for those that are listening to the podcast and also out on YouTube. So, Josh, really appreciate your time today. Yeah, thanks. Been a pleasure. Appreciate it. Enjoy the coming winter. I don't know what was the Game of Thrones. It was like the winter is coming. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's funny because my chair is actually a Game of Thrones custom from Secret Lab that has winters coming on the side of it. So it's nice. It's interesting you bring that up. Yeah. Well, you're in Buffalo. It's coming. It's going to hit hard. So. Yes. Stay safe. Yeah. Indeed.


So, welcome to the DSD classroom again. Right. Oh, I started it, right. Hello, welcome everyone. When I switched from Windows to Linux, then Linux to FreeBSD for a studio, I tried to gather as much info about, well, whatever is needed for a FreeBSD studio, a music production studio in one block post called SingBeast to Sing. It was, I was using FreeBSD for a year and at that time, I didn't know there's a beast is actually a BSD logo, not a mascot, not a FreeBSD. So, it doesn't work. This doesn't work on all BSDs. I tested it only on FreeBSD and I thought no one is interested in a studio based on BSD. But if you look at Twitter statistics, that's probably the most important thing I ever done in my life. Then it kicked off and it's a pretty amazing studio. But let's start with who I am as I'm pretty new in a FreeBSD community. My name is Gordon Mankic. By now, I think everyone calls me Manka. I come from a hackerspace in Nami Sad Serbia called Tilda Center. I was lucky enough to have a support from my beloved wife to actually do it. So, we are co-founders. I come from my education is electronic engineer high school. I think that's the proper translation of our education system. I studied something vaguely called business IT at a university which actually translates to 80 percent math and the rest. I'm a band member which means I play a guitar, which is the hardest instrument to record in a rock and roll band. I used to sing but I hope I won't do it anymore because we have a guy who is actually trained in singing and does that way better than I do. If you ask any person, they are listening to all kinds of music, but if we narrow it down for me, it's metal on a guitar. Guitar music is usually metal if you ask me, and there is this electronic music type called gore trends. So, I'm not going to go into, they say there are like 70 types of metal, but if you actually want to simplify stuff like I do, there are three types of metal. First one, synths and gingers. I'm playing the gingers style and in electronic music, there is Uts Uts and Piu Piu. I'm interested in chickens, of course, the Piu Piu style. So, more elaborately, I like complex melodies and arrangements. So, I needed something that is robust and works. So, let me show you a typical layout or my layout in a studio. This is it. This is everything FreeBSD or any operating system sees. It's ideally, it's a USB digital mixer, so everything is in one place, the routing, the mixing, the effects and whatnot, which you can control via computer. I'm not going to say FreeBSD because we still lack a bit of support for devices, not audio-wise but control-wise, and you probably need to hear what you're doing. So, there are some speakers. There are some instruments that are recorded ascent through the USB so they can be recorded clean without any effects or whatever. There's effects unit, well, this is my favorite. So, what does the mixer, as a hardware does? It splits, one sound goes to the effects and one goes to the USB for recording. Then when the sound comes back, it's split again. So, one goes to USB and one goes to the speakers. So, it's a monitoring system. If you're playing or singing something, you can hear yourself. For the POP part, there is a synth and it goes straight to the effects processor. So, it's from a mixer perspective. This is all one device. And there's a floor pedalboard so you can switch different presets on an effects rack. And what I usually do is use three sounds. It's clean, it's a djunjun, and it's pew-pew. So, in reality, this is how it looks. These together with the keyboard is a synth. The glowing yellow stuff is a processor, effects processor. On top, there is a mixer, although it doesn't look like that. It's the mixer that is on top of a pile there below the tripod. Luckily, we didn't need it this year for these dev rooms. So, after the talk, you can ping me and I can show you how it works and we can fiddle with it. And I don't know if you can see this, but this is a pedalboard and something glowing here is a desktop. This is actually a 10-year-old computer. So, I have i5 where it's 8 gigs of RAM and it used to run with a hard drive now, it's SSD. So, it's a really, really low-end computer these days. And it's possible to use a low-end thanks to FreeBSD being optimal in this way. So, software that I use or am I used? I started with FreeBSD and it started all working after a lot of fiddling because there are not many people you can actually ask how to run a music production studio. Later on, I decided, OK, how about we go in totally untoward territory. Nobody is using HardenBSD for a music studio. Let's give it a try. And that's what's installed on my desktop right now. It works perfectly. And for the sake of this talk, when I say HardenBSD, you can take FreeBSD and Weisforz. There is this little audio driver on FreeBSD it's called OSS. And there is this little thingy called virtual OSS that does complicated things like resampling, routing, and whatnot. It's a user space program because if you have a big number of channels, user space is more efficient in doing that kind of operations. Part of 5 is currently the only digital audio workstation available on FreeBSD that gives you the power to actually have a production studio. On Linux world, I don't even know how many alternatives. But right now, I tried ported some of them and they all have these Linuxisms and it's really hard. So maybe in the future, we will get alternatives for the drumming because I live in a building and having a drum in a building is almost impossible, although I had it for years and I don't know why I'm living yet still. It was actually e-drums, so it's not a full analog drum. Probably that's why they kind of let me do it for a while. There is this thing called LV2, which is short for Let's Power version 2. And that's a framework and libraries for implementing your own effects and sound generators or porting someone else's work. And there is Jack, unfortunately. I personally don't like it, but currently, Ardor 5 explicitly works only with Jack and FreeBSD, so we have to use it. And if you're talking about music, you're actually talking about real time from a FreeBSD perspective. What does it actually mean? One is if you pluck a string on a guitar, you don't want to hear it in five seconds. You want to hear it right now, so you have a proper feedback and you know what you're actually doing. And the second part is jitters. So if sample is not put it shortly, if it's not on the sound card at the right time, you're not going to get your signal right. It's going to have these little distortions called jitters. And jitters are actually from a real time perspective or harder to get than plucking a string, everything below, I don't know, six milliseconds, no matter how your ear is trained, you cannot hear that. But five milliseconds, if your sample is late for five milliseconds, that's a disaster. So what does it mean? A lot of CCTL. First one is I joined a drum gizmo team and we have tests. And tests shown that the FreeBSD is so slow that tests are failing. It's not possible. I mean, if you read the FreeBSD, I think it's in a handbook. The kernel actually has a concept of real-time priority queue for the tracks. So if your application is asking for real-time permissions, kernel is going to give it to them only to the root but there are ways to get exceptions. And what this does, I asked on a mailing list, the default is equal five. When there's an IR queue, now I'm not a kernel developer, so I might be off. But from a musical point of view, when there's an IR queue happening, the FreeBSD will not react right away. And because FreeBSD tries to save your battery, for example, on a laptop, and not reacting right away gives it ability to, OK, so I have these five IR queues, a kernel lamb, in one sweep. Not entirely true technically, but that's what's going on. Lower this to zero and every IR queue is handled right away. And the tests in drum gizmos magically start passing instead of failing. If you have a USB audio, a USB device, you can tune how many milliseconds of buffer is going to use, but only for USB. And it goes from 2 to, I think, 64. But nobody's interested in an upper limit, only lower one. When applications open sound-wise, they can choose the buffer size of the internal buffer size. And it's also a buffer on the application because of the copying of the data. And if application doesn't know about that in FreeBSD, you can force it to be as real-time as possible. And that's what latency equals zero does. Give me the smallest possible buffer. So if, for example, Jack doesn't know how to handle buffers in FreeBSD OSS, OK, give it the lowest one. And the last one is a bit perfect. It's not strictly real-time. It's more has to do with jitters. And if you know that you're not going to resample or in any way transform your audio in the kernel or virtual OSS, you can set it to bit perfect equals one. And everything actually produced or written to the driver is just going to be sent to the device without taking any care of, well, resampling for start. There are devices that actually can do hardware resampling, so they can use this too. And it's important currently if you have more than, I think, eight channels on your audio. The reason I don't know is because I have 18. You have to use bit perfect and virtual OSS to do your audio stuff. So bit perfect is actually needed for a virtual OSS. And this is one quarter of a command, actually. What it does. So minus says, OK, if I'm working on 44.1 kHz and there's something like 48k coming in, do the resampling, and then send it to the driver. Minus i8 is a real-time priority. B32 means use 32-bit samples, please. Minus s708 is an experimental value for buffer. It depends on many variables, but mostly on your frequency of audio and what your hardware can push. In reality, this translates to a few milliseconds on a very, very old computer, decade old computer. You can say, OK, my card has multiple inputs and outputs, but please use only two. This is what C minus 2 does. And you can tell it with minus m. Don't use first and second input, but use eight and nine. Why do that is because eight and nine for me is a fax processor. So if you're, I don't know, for example, talking on Viber, Skype, or choose your failure of Wipe, you can sound like Dark Wader or something, because you're going through the effects. And as a matter of fact, a friend once asked me who is not living in the same country as I am, OK, did you create something new on a guitar? Yeah, can I hear it? Of course. And that's the way to tell your FreeBSD default inputs are the ones from a fax processor. Minus the DSP tells it, create a device DSP, slash that, slash DSP. And that's the default device in FreeBSD for audio. So if you've got multiple devices or only one, doesn't matter, it's going to create a default one for the device you're actually using. And this capital M, Tingi, the line, is copying my first input to the 8 and 9 outputs. What it actually does is when I play a guitar, I want to record it and send it straight away to the effects. And that's what it does. It's options for virtual voices go to infinity, and it really does a lot of work in a studio. But if you choose FreeBSD for your studio driver, you're going to learn, whether you like it or not, you're going to learn some non-musical stuff. There's going to be a lot of GDB, unfortunately, or LLDB, choose your preference. There are all kinds of glitches and failures that can happen because the community running FreeBSD in the studio is really, really small. I think I can count six people that I met on internet since two years ago, I think. You're going to be part of that community. It's small, but a very, very fast answering community. And because it's really technical stuff, they are really technical. I don't know if I should count myself in. You're going to learn system administration, meaning you're going to discover a lot of ways to improve your real time by either managing, it's always managing buffers, but it's either managing CCTL or you're going to turn off some things or you're going to maybe compile your custom kernel. I don't use custom kernel, so it works great. I don't think anyone should admit it, but who knows? And when I said that USB driver has a CCTL tunable for a buffer, it actually didn't have it when I started. So I started poking around the kernel and trying to find which buffer is too big. I didn't know what I was doing. I was just lowering the numbers. And when I got the result, all right, I can play now. So it's that buffer. So you're going to learn kernel development at least a little bit where you like it or not, and you like it, right? Actually, I didn't do the CCTL for this USB driver buffer. I asked actual developer, can we please make it a tunable? So it's an option. Maybe you don't know how to do development. You're just a musician. And you can ask people, can we do it like this or like that? You might have some idea how it's done. I promised you a lot of GDB, but I'm not going to go into details of GDB. This is like 80% of GDB that I use. Why?  You get, ah! And you need to search, why is that sample not right? And this is used like 80% of the time. You probably can use other techniques, but as it's audio, I didn't want to go into debugging too much. And probably, D-trace would be easier to use, but I didn't use D-trace before. I used GDB, so I picked my known enemy instead of unknown friend. And it was really nice, and I hope that in the following month we will, we as a band, will publish something on the internet. So it's not going to be totally empty talk. We actually do the recording these days, and it works. It works beautifully. So there are a few things that, at least, I would like to be implemented or done next. There is this thing called Malan. I started this as a library. It's in C++, and I wanted to explore buffer management in the audio application. I didn't know how to name it. And my wife suggested, how about you go to Google Translate, enter all the keywords for your software, and choose different languages. See what you like. For some reason, Irish language is beautiful for naming, because if you put, I've put a buffer, and chose all the languages. And almost in all languages, buffer is buffer. Audio is audio. Oh my god. So I put buffer, Irish, and it's Malan. I don't even know if that's a proper Irish pronunciation, but that's how the software is called. It's currently running only on FreeBSD. Actually, it doesn't run anywhere, to be honest, because it's only the library. And if you know how the inner workings of the library are doing their stuff, you can program your own digital audio workstation. And that's where I'm, that's the direction I would like to take, as I didn't know any other effort, and I asked to create specifically FreeBSD audio workstation. But it's implemented in such a way that if you implement your, for example, also for Linux as a class, you have your also input and output. And yeah, it's an experiment of using standard library, standard C++ library structures to do audio. You can be much more optimal than that, but I chose to go this way because if it works, it's less work for me. So it works wonderfully. So wonderfully that if I have two channels with one sample of buffer on the input and output, it takes around 30% of CPU on my computer, probably around 10%, 15% on a modern computer. What I'm not satisfied with is a hardware mixers, digital hardware mixers. So in Tilda Center, we are exploring real-time operating systems and audio and ADDA chips. We want to implement our own digital mixer or audio interface because it's going to be equipped with a USB. And what I want to deal with that is currently, I use audio card to route my signals, which means virtual OSS does it. And if you look at the pathway, the signals goes to the driver than virtual OSS, then you route it, and it goes back. It would be much more optimal if the routing could be done in a hardware, and that's what I want to do. Tilda Center is conceived as an educational center, and we are really, really loud about FreeBSD tuning and the education of FreeBSD for the sake of audio is what we do. And there are at least three persons listening to my gibberish talks about, hey, what if they do this or that in audio-wise. And there's Ravenna, I think that's the pronunciation. It's AES standard, and there's no open source implementation of that protocol. What that protocol allows or brings is ability to use your network for routing audio. So you can, for example, have multiple machines without audio cord, but they all route their audio through Ethernet, and one machine does the reproduction of the sound. That would be really wonderful if we could have FreeBSD, and there are some FreeBSD developers that are tackling the problem slowly. And we hope, I mean, they hope that it's going to be implemented soonish. I mean, with the drivers, it's never fast, so soonish. There are a few people and teams I would like to thank. First one is Hans-Peter Sileski. He implemented USB stack for FreeBSD, USB, audio drivers, virtual OSS, and I don't know what other plethora of software that is needed for FreeBSD to be a viable music production alternative. And he has a more crazy studio setup than me, so he needed more real-time than me, so great. Yuri Viktorovich is a guy who ported almost all LV2 plugins. If you go to Freshports and type LV2, it's Yuri all the way. Tony Pernella helped me with presentation, proofreading, and some of the crazy setups for audio. Drum Gizmo team actually taught me how to do DSP real-time and whatever is needed for audio, which 80% of the time is GDB. Order team really done great stuff. It has wonderful audio mixing and routing and not so wonderful MIDI, but it's usable. It's still used in at least my studio, but it can be better. And a Tilla Center crew for supporting me, giving back ideas, implementing a few beats and pieces, and generally not being annoyed by me when I talk about these stuff. That would be all. And if you have any questions, yes? Do you use this setup only for recording music, or are you also using it to mix in the box, basically, with plugins like virtual instruments or compression EQ? So the question was, if I use it only for a mixing order, some effects in the box. The effects are good, but sound generators are not so good. For example, there's, I would say, a crossover called guitarics, which doesn't generate the sound. But if you need, a metal sound is going to generate a totally different sound on the output because of the distortion. And it's still not really good for rock and maybe clean sounds. Yeah, but sound generators are not perfect. The effects are wonderful. And sometimes I use software. Sometimes I use Dirac. Yes? Yes, actually, the reason why I switched from Linux to FreeBSD is that I didn't switch, actually. I had a dual boot. And FreeBSD was in a worse situation because it was on a hard drive. Linux was on SSD. There is no such thing as a real-time queue for threads in a Linux kernel or preemptive threads. There are patches, but when I used it, virtual box broke. So it's better for real time, but you probably have much better support in Linux for other audio workstations like Muse, which I would really like to have on FreeBSD. I try to avoid it by all means. I don't know. Even in Linux, it's a problem, so I never tried it. There is one song on SoundCloud. So if you ping me on anything, I will send you a link. I wanted to put a link, but it's a huge. Anyone else? Be loud. Now is the audio time. I was a little bit lost with your way of using the FX processor. You're basically sending the clean guitar signal to the box, to the input, and then you have the FX processor as a send and return. Actually, almost yes. What I do is, let's say it's a guitar. When I play, it gets into the virtual assess, which splits it into two. So one goes to the computer for recording, because you want to record the clean sound and then re-amplify it and whatnot. And the other half of the split goes to effects because you want to hear it in real time while you're playing. But when samples return from the FX processor, go to recording to the computer and to the PA. We have a minute and a half to be allowed. OK, that would be all then. Thank you for coming.