All right, three, two, one. We're small business owners. We're small business owners. You're going too fast. I said he says one. Hi, I'm Shari. And my name's Brad. And our business is the Wooden Whale workshop. We've been in Freeport for seven years. My grandpa started this company here about 40 to 50 years ago. Actually, he had an oil and tire changing station out there in the shop, which eventually got changed over to a cabin to show up. And my brother eventually took it over and made it into the business that it is now. And we took it over here a few years back. And that's where we are now. Some of my favorite memories growing up were around my grandmother's dining room kitchen table, which we still have today. And here we make custom-made tables for our customers. They're heirloom pieces that they'll have forever. And we make them custom tables to enjoy many memories with their family around. So it's nice being in Freeport. It's a nice, close-knit town. Lots of people around. We have many neighbors just surrounding us here that have stopped by pretty much every day. We have local guys from Freeport that just wander into the shop pretty much every day of the week and just to see how we're doing to check things out and hang out. It's nice going down into town. I go to the same stores almost every day. They pretty much know me by name now. Go to the same little food stores and they know what I'm gonna get pretty much every day we go in there. Okay, so one day we're working in the shop and we had a guy randomly just show up. He walks in and he starts looking around and I asked him, I said, hey, are you interested in something? Is there anything I can help you with, sir? He says, no, I'm just here to watch. I said, okay, that's okay. And then for a while there, he stood around for about 15 minutes. I started to wonder, ask him some more questions. And he, I went over and started talking to him and he says, I used to be a woodshop teacher for Freeport and I just come in to watch you guys. And then it's been about three years and he's been here every day for three years and brings the guy's lunch off and on every day and he pretends he's our HR guy now. And he still shows up every day talking to our customers as he worked here. Thank you.


Coming up on DTNS we are all still at CES because CES is everywhere and we have all the big chip announcements from AMD Intel and Nvidia. There's a Sony car and Robert Herron and Patrick Dortner here to help us wrap our heads around all the home theater announcements and what it means for us. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday January 12th 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane and that's you Patrick. I'm sorry. If you look online nine of our rundown it says Patrick Norton goes next. Last time I was on I was told not to speak and now I'm anyhow from St. Louis, Missouri. I'm Patrick Norton and from beautiful California. Robert Herron sitting right here and I'm the show's producer Roger Chen. Hey you know when you're live from the CES show floor it's it's stuff like that's bound to happen. It's totally fine. We were just talking about apples literally apples the fruit on good day internet. If you want to hear that a lot of other nostalgic conversations about childhoods and other things become a member at patreon.com slash dtns. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. It's a no but guys sorry but true. This morning surrounded by friends and developers flash said goodbye to the world. It was born January 1st 1996 as macromedia flash with support for vectors motion even some bitmaps in 2005 it began a relationship with adobe rose to prominence as the power behind video and entertainment on the web a lack of mobile support led to flashes decline and an eventual fade into obscurity apple announced adobe rather announced it would pull support after a final update in december although i'm not sure apples bummed out about that adobe flash was 25 and will be missed just take a moment we'll miss you what's app issued a clarification of its privacy policy change set to take effect february 8th the change requires all users to agree to a policy that lets businesses store whatsapp chat logs on facebook servers that that's all it does whatsapp says that it doesn't keep its own logs of who people message that wasn't clear originally uh it doesn't share contacts with facebook and it doesn't see your location data and it has never been able to see your messages because it's end to end encrypted uh you may still not love it but if you don't love it don't love it for what it's actually doing atnt announced it will merge its atnt tv now streaming service into the atnt tv service that relies on an android set top box now after the merger of the two services customers won't be required to use the streaming box but it will still be offered the new combined service will also have no required contracts and packages will start at $70 per month the number of patents granted in the us in 2020 was about flat declining by less than 1 percent uh but patent applications rose 5 percent for shadowing a return to the normal yearly rise in patents that we see IBM led the way in 2020 with 9130 new patents received samsung took second place in patents received and continues to hold the largest patent number overall with 80,577 patents IBM is number two in holding patents with 38,541 the fastest growing technology on this year's list according to the ifi claims patent service was computer systems based on biological models so that kind of ai up 67 percent last year the number one was hybrid plant creation it wasn't even a tech thing uh so we had a little change this year netflix has been busy the company released a slate of movie releases for 2021 with 70 titles more than disney and warner brothers combined also an average of more than one new movie per week really for the whole year they include directorial debuts by lin manuel moranda and hallie barry and netflix may yet acquire films throughout the year which would increase the list even further tim burners lee's inrupt which uses the solid technology to let you control your personal data has signed britain's national health service the bbc and the government of flanders belgium as its pilot customers with in reps implementation of solid the nhs will let you keep all your medical records in one place under your control and then you decide which doctors and service providers get to access which parts of your record and when they add things to your record that goes in one place that is under your control all right that's the non ces news now the ces news tcl is showing off rollable prototypes keyword here prototypes one mobile design has an ammo led rollable although kind of more expandable than rollable screen which can extend a 6.7 inch display up to 7.8 inches it's less than 10 millimeters thick with a three millimeter bend radius another we briefly mentioned yesterday as an extendable display concept that unrolls on two sides like a scroll and is even thinner at point one eight millimeters very thin tcl says don't worry it's going to bring an actual real actual foldable flexible product to market this year but did not specify what it would be gm announced a new delivery oriented business unit called bright drop and its first two electric delivery vehicles the ev 600 is an all wheel drive electric van with 250 mile range 600 cubic feet of space for cargo and up to 2200 pounds that it can carry features an auto locking door interior motion detection location tracking battery management and incident reporting the second vehicle the ep1 is an electric pallet it has a 23 cubic foot of space that can carry up to 200 pounds it'll have remote locking and unlocking location tracking and battery status as well the container is lockable with a modular shelving system it's really meant to carry items from the van in delivery situations bright drop will also offer a cloud platform to monitor and delivery operations the ep1 pallet will be available early this year while the vans will arrive in early 2022 though fedex is receiving the first bright drop vans later this year after participating in tests which saw fedex deliveries rise 25 percent while using the vans and reducing physical strain on the drivers bright drop will compete with companies like canoe amazon and rivian are working together on an ev van and the uk's arrival has a contract with ups so it's a booming space right now dolby announced a tool called dolby voice for pc's designed to remove unwanted background noise and echoes on calls also auto adjust audio level so if a voice volume is low or mic is kind of weird it ends up being more consistent if a conference call app offers stereo audio dolby says it can separate multiple voices to make them clearer and more natural sounding dolby voice for pc's claims it can also improve speech recognition intelligent intelligibility for voice assistance lenovo's think pad x1 carbon and x1 yoga laptops are among the first pc's to use dolby voice oh did you mention lenovo uh lenovo announced a bunch of stuff the think pad x1 titanium yoga a 0.4 inch thick 2 in 1 laptop that the company says is its thinnest think pad ever running 11th gen intel processors weighing two and a half pounds available later in january at $1899 lenovo also announced the think pad x12 detachable a 12.3 inch tablet with a detachable backlit keyboard that's less than nine millimeters thick and two and a half pounds with the keyboard attached also uses intel 11th gen processors certified with mil spec a 10g for shocks and temp and spills arriving later in january for $1149 both those laptops include 5g but that's not all lenovo also introduced the think pad plus gen 2 with a 12 inch e ink panel on the lid uh they did this last year this new one increases the resolution to 2560 by 1600 adds multi touch that works with a stylus also comes with a wireless charging mat the laptop can go 15 hours on a charge or 24 hours if you just use the e ink screen that's coming q1 of $1549 and lenovo announced several laptops running the new rise in 5000 processors we're going to talk about in a bit including the thinkbook 14 p gen 2 and thinkbook 16 p and a whole lineup of legion gaming laptops the new uh five new legion laptops all come with rise in 5000 processors and rtx 30 series gpu's the flagship legion 7 laptop starts at 1669 99 with an estimated june 2021 release date and a 4.2 pound legion slim 7 a thinner version comes in may with three models in the legion 5 series shipping in march well not to be done by announcements at cece sir announced the predator triton 300 se gaming laptop which is at 17.9 millimeter thick running on intel's new 5 gigahertz i7 11 375 h processor and envidia's new rtx 30 60 gpu it has an all new metal design bit of a departure from what it looked like in the past with a 14 inch f hd panel and a 144 hertz refresh rate starting at $1399 and shipping in february acer's nitro 5 gaming laptops in either 15.6 or 17 inch versions will support intel 11 11th gen core h35 series processors or amd's rise in 5000 series cpu's with an option to upgrade up to envidia's rtx 30 80 the nitro 5 comes to the us for 749 99 it's a hundred dollars more if you want the 17 inch version and the company also announced two budget laptops the aspire 7 and the aspire 5 both with amd rise in 5000 series chips the aspire 7 starts at $749 the aspire 5 starts at 549 so pretty affordable there available in europe the middle east and africa starting in february and china gets the aspire 5 this month just a few more things to announce before we talk about the other big announcements uh razor announced a new blade 15 and pro 17 laptop with support for the new rtx 30 series gp is from envidia each model has 1080p 1440p uh and the 15 advanced and uh pro 17 offer 4k displays models all run the 10th gen intel h series chips razor blade 15 starts 1700 bucks blade pro 17 goes for 2300 bucks available for preorder january 12th the uk based startup lasso loop recycling announced that it's working on a prototype recycling container that looks like a dishwasher with a vertical slot of depositing items to recycle sensors can then scan those items as you drop them in non recyclable items will be ejected back to you hopefully not too hard while recyclable materials will be steam cleaned to remove leftover food or labels or other substances and then ground down for reuse when the appliances storage is full you use the app to order collection the materials are taken directly to manufacturers that cuts out recycling plants and lasso says that the prototype should be completed later in q1 but according to ceo aldous hicks a final product might not be ready until 2033 so it's going to take a while with a projected cost of around 3500 dollars all right we've got a chip announcement from samsung one of many at ces uh the latest mobile processor the accent was 2100 5g first chip with integrated 5g from samsung sub six gigahertz and millimeter wave samsung claims the eight core processor is 10 percent better and 20 percent lower at power usage compared to the xnose 990 it uses three arm cortex a 78 four arm cortex a five and a custom arm cortex x1 core it's paired with the molly g 78 mp14 gpu and new tricor neural processing unit no word on what devices would get the new chip but i'm guessing one that samsung will announce soon will probably have it the japanese health startup quantum operation demoed a prototype wearable that it claims can accurately measure blood sugar from the wrist without breaking the skin the device uses a small spectrometer to measure blood sugar it also packs in ecg and heart rate sensors and is able to display data within 20 seconds of being put on quantum expects to sell the devices to insurers and health care providers okay just four more of these quick ones before we get to like the intel in the amd stuff auto supplier active announced a new advanced driver assistance system available to manufacturers platform can scale from subcompacts to full-size sedans with only the need to scale the number of sensors as the vehicle changes size active claims that by using a pre validated platform automakers could save 20 to 30 percent in building level one through three autonomous vehicles compared to its previous solutions popsockets announced they'll be releasing magsafe compatible phone holders for the iphone 12 lineup starting with its popular pop grip a pop wallet plus is also planned that's a wallet case with a pop grip on the back there's also two mounts planned a multi surface mount and a mount specifically for a vehicle both of which will work with existing pop socket mounts the new pop grips will arrive in spring with the new mounts coming this summer razor announced its typical concepts got two of them to talk about project hazel is a n95 mask with rgb lights a transparent front cover so people can see your mouth and a built-in mic to amplify your voice that one has a shot of maybe becoming a real product but project brooklyn the gaming chair with a 60 inch curved OLED screen that folds into the seats back maybe not real uh it does have left and right pullout trays that can set at different heights that seems achievable but it's cool to look at not real yet tom yet asus announced a number of products as well it's ces after all you know everybody's got an announcement there's a 32 inch rog swift 4k 120 hertz gaming monitor with hdr 600 and hdmi 2.1 coming in q2 of this year the flow x 134 is a 13 inch ultra portable convertible with an amd rise in 9 at 59 80 hs chip an external nvidia g force rtx 30 80 gpu you can pre-order the bundle now on asus's site for 3200 us dollars and the rog zephyrus duo 15 se has a main 15.6 inch display a secondary 14.1 inch touchscreen that lifts up when you raise the lid on the laptop it can handle the latest amd and nvidia laptop chips starting at 2899 for pre-order now finally there's a there's the rog claim or two gaming keyboard with a detachable number pad and the rog gladius 3 wireless gaming mouse oh right names let's now talk about the big announcements at ces starting with intel boy it's been a tuesday or wednesday wherever you might be intel announced new processor families including 50 different processor variants coming this year 2021 intel expects 500 pcs to be introduced this year running on one of these new processors so let's meet them shall we the vpro platform has 27 variants aimed at thin and light business laptops among included security precautions as ai best based threat detection against ransomware and crypto mining plus intel control flow enforcement for attacks that usually evade software only solutions vpro promises at 23 faster productivity at processing over the competition like amd there's also the evo vpro which will combine security and manageability from the vpro with the evo mobility platform so look for this in a line of intel evo chromebooks patrick robert any thoughts on this before we keep going with intel stuff do not pay attention to what these strange people at apple of dawn get the magnificence we are bringing to you my people that's a good intel voice all right moving on there's the six new end series 10 nanometer intel silver and celeron processors targeted education systems they promise 35 percent better app performance and 78 percent better graphics performance then we've got the 11th gen intel core h series for what intel calls ultra portable gaming built on intel's tiger lake h 35 10 nanometer super fin architecture and process this allows gaming in 16 millimeter thick laptops with support for thunderbolt 4 z graphics and pc i e gen 4 with resizable bar the three models feature four core or eighth and a thread cpus with a 28 to 35 watt power draw the flagship is the intel core i7 special edition with up to five gigahertz turbo acer asus msi and vio all announced h 35 powered system so it's who intel is working with on this expect 42 gaming laptop designs to run on the h series with parts by march jsc 315 asked in the chat what's ultra portable ultra portable means it'll handle most games without giving you back pain well that's not that's not yeah that's actually accurate coming later in 2021 will be the 11th gen rocket lake s series desktop processors with 19 percent more instructions per cycle with the i9 11900k launching in q1 of this year finally until also demonstrated the 12th gen alder lake processors due in the second half of the year alder lake will be the first chip built on the enhanced version of the 10 nanometer super fin manufacturing technology combining new higher power cores with golden lake called golden lake with efficient grace month cores into a single product similar to arm's big little tech until intends to market alder lake for use in mobile devices laptops and desktops and if the sounds familiar now it's similar to apple's m1 chips until also announced it started production of the 10 nanometer xeon scalable processors for servers with volume ramp in q1 yeah man i there's a lot there the h series obviously the one that's going to show up in products that you're going to get but that 12th gen alder lake that they're teasing ahead that that is their attempt to say we can do what arm is doing for apple but with x86 and i will be very interested how that plays out yeah patrick what do you make of all this stuff i you know it's it's kind of echoes what we talked about this time last year which is oh my goodness intel cares about processors again computer processors like the ones you find on your desktop or in your laptop or in your server center and this is just even more of that it's it's been kind of interesting you know what i mean like didn't hear any mentions about ai for drones or peculiar you know this is this is this is super hardcore like wow amd is doing a lot of stuff apple is doing a lot of stuff we need to really hammer that we're going to do some amazing stuff that improves performance i wait with bated breath i want to see i want to see benchmarks and see what these things do in the real world and availability all right let's talk amd first laptops with the new rd na2 architecture and new desktop gpu's with rd na2 will arrive in the first half of the year ceo lisa su showed dirt five running at 60 frames per second on ultra high settings at 1440p however the big announcement was the ryzen 5000 processor family for mobile meaning laptops mostly based on the 7 nanometers zen 3 architecture that is also found in the ryzen 5000 desktop chips so get in 5000 for laptops the h series from amd is meant for gaming and content creation and the u series from amd is for ultra portables all but one of the h series amd cpu's for high powered laptops have eight cores and 16 threads the flagship ryzen 9 5980 hs boosts up to 4.8 gigahertz and has 35 watt tdp there's also the hx chips a new h line for gaming the ryzen 9 5900 hx for example has 45 plus watts tdp and unlocked overclocking amd says it beat the core i9 10980 hk from intel by 37 percent overall 14 for single threaded performance as well as 21 on the 3d mark fire strikes physics benchmark the flagship of the ultra portable u series is an eight core 16 thread ryzen 7 5800 u that can boost up to 4.4 gigahertz using just 15 watts of power so it's the power of the 5000 without using up your battery that's because it's in an ultra portable amd says it out performs intel's core i7 1165 g7 1.23 times it also claims 17 and a half hours of general battery use in 21 hours for movie playback we'll see how that works out in practice amd also introduced a non x line of desktop chips the ryzen 7 5800 and ryzen 9 5900 with 65 watts tdp but still at that lower power amount for desktop anyway running eight and 12 cores these chips will be made available in pre-built systems though it doesn't look like they're going to sell them to you directly ceo lisa su also showed off amd's third gen epic server chip codename melon a test showed dual processors with 32 cores each with a 68 percent performance advantage over an intel zion gold 6258 r and pcs with ryzen 5000 mobile chips are expected to start arriving in february uh yeah the majority of this is about those h series and then a little bit about the u series but about those ryzen 5000 series chips i i i've just double checking now in stock i think i i i want to see availability i want to see parts that we can buy i want to see desktop ship i'm curious how many are we going to be available like i feel like the ultimate broken record for the last six months but i think that says something that your reaction to the intel chips was oh it's nice to see intel focusing again whereas your reaction to amd is i want these how hard is it going to be to get them yeah well i you know a friend of mine and i have both been trying to buy one of the 5000 series desktop processors since they launched and it was like they launched and they sold out and then there were you know some available for like a day in november and then there were some available for literally like a day in december i think you know if you know different do me a favor you know tweet at patrick norton and tell me where they're all going but you can you know you can buy pre-built it's like buying a 3000 series gpu if you have the coin you can spend the staggering amount on ebay um you can buy a pre-built system if you can actually find one but availability and all this stuff you know the we you know again we wait with fated breath if we can buy it i'll be excited robert you have any more thoughts on either amd or intel i'm just thrilled for ultra portable performance really because that's when i buy notebooks nowadays if i can get it under three pounds that's what i want it is fantastic be able to have something that does all of that i do not expect graphics at that size point but in terms of just having the power to do all the work i need to do in some cases well i have a brand new workstation now but prior to that my notebook was often outperforming my workstation using solid state storage technology along with a great intel processor in addition to their wi-fi and bluetooth connectivity which they they seem to keep updated pretty well so i'm thrilled there i am not a gaming notebook person per se but it's nice to have at least a chip that can do something with some oomph where i'm not totally just wrecking the the detail levels and everything like that when i want to do a little gaming on the road or or so to speak yeah it looks it looks to me like intel is it's still very focused on business which makes sense that's where they're going to sell a lot and amd is more widely focused on the consumer but you mentioned graphics robert and you can get some good graphics in your laptops now thanks to our next announcement nvidia announced the rtx 30 60 30 70 and 30 80 gpus for laptops nvidia says the 30 60 can do around 90 frames per second at 1080p with ultra settings uh they used fortnight as an example uh they think laptops with the 30 60 should start around 999 the 30 70 can do 90 frames per second and 1440p and they think those laptops should start around $1299 and the 30 80 can do more than 100 frames per second at 1440p and if you have to ask i guess you can't afford it because they didn't put a price on that one first laptops 30 70 and 30 80 should start arriving january 26th with rtx 30 60 laptops coming later and vidya expects more than 70 rtx 30 series laptops coming from oems and vidya also announced rtx 30 60 for desktops for $329 so pretty cheap designed to replace the gtx 10 60 pascale cards 30 60 has 12 gigabytes of gddr 6 ram and the usual rtx apps and dlss support as well as resizable bar it's only behind the 30 60 ti and teraflops 13 shader versus 16.2 25 ray tracing versus 39.7 rtx 30 60 arrives late february worldwide now if you noticed resizable bar nvidia's uh optimization only on the 30 60 for now nvidia is launching support for it resizable bar if you don't know gives compatible cpu some direct access to video memory for performance games and vidya is working with amd and intel to bring it to a wide range of motherboards later this year so it's launching on the rtx 30 60 desktop we just mentioned but it's also coming in march to earlier rtx 30 series gpus through a v bios update intel's 11th gen h and s series processors and select 10th generation systems will support it as well uh which are you more excited about patrick the uh you know higher gpu nvidia in your laptop or the resizable bar a little bit of both the the seeing these seeing these chips come out in the laptops i think it's going to be amazing for gaming performance especially at those prices um you know i'm more excited about seeing the 30 60 ship because i want to be able to use a bunch of the rtx broadcast app which you can't use without an rtx card but rtx cards have been unobtainium not to hammer on that thing again so one of the things is like you know can they deliver them in volume in february you know some people are saying it's not going to be available in volume in may i'm just i'm i'm excited for the laptops i think that's going to be how a lot of people get next generation gaming performance at this point uh robert i'm excited by the resizable bar functionality that was recently added to my asus motherboard in my new workstation as a bios update and i applied that and if i can get my hands on a new graphics card with say up to 20 gigs of ram where i'm not always using that for gaming it would be nice to take advantage of that high speed ram with a compatible motherboard to see what that can really do for me with the variety of apps out there be it content creation and gaming of course but but if you're not using all that vram it seems like an awful waste where it just sits there idle most of the time and that's where yeah that's where the bar technology is really just uh something i'm i'm glad i have a motherboard that supports and i look forward to actually trying it out all right sarah tell us what sony's up to they didn't announce a chip there's got to be other stuff there is turns out tom's sony announced a virtual concert technology among other things but we'll start with that in a demonstration artist madison beer performed as a virtual avatar in virtual sony hall in new york in front of virtual fans you know we can't really have concerts anymore so this is a thing beer was in a studio wearing a vr suit to do the performance and a full madison beer concert will be accessible on playstation vr and oculus vr later this quarter i'm sure if it's a success we will see other artists following suit sony also showed off its air peak quad copter with sony's alpha mirrorless camera and ai image stabilization for filmmakers and includes two landing arms that lift up on takeoff the air peak will be available this spring if you're feeling creative might want to look at that and then remember sony's vision s car prototype from last year's ce s do was a prototype it is back still a prototype in a video shot by air peak on a private track and public roads in austria the vision s now has 40 sensors for 360 degree awareness and the video also shows a voice assistant gesture controls video game compatibility 5g connectivity and wireless software updates there's also an in cabin camera to identify who's in the car it can also use that to learn a driver's preferred temperature music driving routes among others the dashboard dashboard length display screen also has five plain card size titles in the center camera settings navigation music and video uh assumably also customizable and partners include bosh continental all-motive electro bit belay-o vodafone zf group here nvidia qualcomm and blackberry q and x so we got car parts we got software makers we got connectivity we've got autonomous systems it appears sony is making a car some kinds real yeah in fact magna stirs president announced that contract automobile manufacturers that it that it has will continue partnership with sony on the car and we've talked about that company and recent history on this show as well if you want to move on from cars to tv sets sony's got you covered there the company announced new bravia x r tv sets will let users stream movies in high quality through the bravia core platform sony's pure stream will stream sony pictures movies at eight 80 megabits per second that means u hd blu ray quality lossless streaming and users get a different number of credits based on the model of their tv that can be used for those movies kind of an interesting trend we're seeing i am excited the fact that they can do an 80 megabit stream if they can do that to anybody who can receive it that that is coming very very close to what you can do with the 4k u hd blu ray movie in terms of the actual bit rate sony has had a long history of doing 4k streaming products including a product i still have but i don't know if it's even supported anymore but they were the one of the first to provide not only a streaming service with recent run movies but in the highest quality you could get matching what was available on disk at the time and it included a hard drive built in so you could actually buffer things out if your connection wasn't so hot here they're kind of implying that it's going to be a decent internet connection required before it will perform at its best so i'm curious to see if or what kind of buffering they may offer within that system be it just ram a bunch of ram or even a small hard drive or an ssd or something like that it's an interesting way to demo their technology to just build it into the tv's and say here yeah make good use of this tv we gave you here's some credits get some sony movies they were the they were one of the first to apply a game console directly to their tv's in terms of the old playstation gaming service that they used to offer on some of their premium models and as we've seen it see yes this week it's it is changing and new services are popping up to be integrated into the most popular tv's out there folks we know you got opinions a lot of you are like sony's not making a car tom come on talk about it go into our uh subreddit submit some stories and vote on of a daily tech news show dot reddit dot com uh and we are going to talk a little bit about home theater trends in just a second ces is always filled with home theater products but each year has a different blend there's always televisions though even virtually it's filled with televisions patrick what are we seeing oh my goodness uh one thing to think about is ces is way smaller this year than it was last year i believe there are 4500 exhibitors at ces uh 2020 ces 2021 it's more like 1900 exhibitors so many companies just aren't there a lot of companies that are are there aren't really showing anything new uh except for televisions and robert will tell you about all of the televisions i mean there were a lot of televisions yeah so without without just listing model numbers robert what what are what are some of the trends we're seeing in the technology amongst all these tv's well for the lcd televisions we're all familiar with they're switching to better and better backlighting systems in this case using mini led and in terms of just covering the back of the panel with tens of thousands of leds to create better zone control for local dimming as well as just improving the brightness many of the premium tv's are also offering now quantum dot technology for better color as well one of the cool things i'm seeing is that ai this year seems to be even more mature than it was last year last year it was mostly very targeted systems being used to improve video quality this year there's a big switch toward multi neural networks being used to process not only the video for everything from ak upscaling to excuse that light going out uh ak upscaling all the way to things like audio performance in terms of either 3d audio processing or just creating a situation where the tv can analyze the room it's in and correct the audio accordingly and make it sound even better uh for me it was also about the we've we've heard about rgb laser projectors quite a bit uh in the last couple of years but there's been no actual physical product in our hands that is even in the realm of affordability this year we're going to see a product from samsung and hisense both incorporating full rgb red blue and green lasers as the light source providing in excess of bt 2020 color the color standard for hdr video it actually exceeds the spec brightness has never been uh any better than it's getting right now and these products while still expensive are a fraction of what they would have been even a year or two ago that to me is the cool thing in terms of micro led where they're creating actual tile based technologies and we're all familiar with this with outdoor signage and other products like that large format displays those are becoming approaching consumer levels in terms of like what sony did with their crystal led modules in samsung with their starting with the wall last year now with integrated tv is that basically put all the panels together for you at specific sizes these are still very expensive but this is the first year where i've seen anybody and in this case sony actually declared that it's diy friendly in the sense of being able to integrate connect and set up these panels for if you are in the mood to create a 110 inch or or 24 foot screen for that matter it's all going to be good now everyone's interested in the OLED panels that is probably where all of the focus has been this year lg is the major manufacturer for most of the OLED TVs we see i am not seeing that change at least here in North America for 2021 what i am seeing though is a push toward increasing the brightness and i would say panasonic professional OLED panels based on lg panels were the first to really get this going last year through the use of a heat sink technology basically covering the back of the panel with aluminum that in essence helps it not only become brighter but they're also claiming that it improves longevity of the panel itself they're talking upwards of a thousand nits or greater and that's about a 25 increase over what we were seeing in 2021 for lg their premium panel for this year is going to be the g1 series that is where they're putting all of the new technology including a new OLED material that supposedly improves the color performance of red blue and green so the sub pixels being generated from a consistent color are going to be able to be brighter in addition to just delivering something that exceeds what was going on last year historically lg panels have had problems with the green in particular they weren't green enough and they explicitly mentioned this as being one of the performance improvements however lg this year is also drawn a line in the sand saying that the g1 is going to represent what's new and now they've added an a1 series for an entry level model that will bring pricing down as well as a new screen size they've announced a 42 inch panel at least lg displayed it lg electronics and others will have the option to integrate these into their into their designs but it should bring us back from say a 48 inch panel which was super popular last year to a 42 inch panel which may work better for more people on the upper end of it a lot of kitchen tv upgrades coming this year for people because in that smaller screen size there's just never been anything even remotely premium there's been some good televisions but there's been a good lcd flat panel and even an average OLED flat panel at this point is huge in terms of the image quality indeed and lg is also announced an 83 inch panel size which you will see at the premium for a variety of different manufacturers out there so there is a new super size the biggest OLED panel i've seen is still the z1 which is their 8k panel that goes all the way up to 88 inches pricing you know to be determined on all of that and when it comes to all of these tvs one thing i can tell you that's different for sure is the implementation of hdmi 2.1 in particular this year it seems to be that all the hiccups we saw with the introduction of this technology in 2020 have been resolved things like 4k 120 variable refresh rate auto low latency mode enhanced e arc or e arc itself all of those now are checkbox features on every premium tv if they're offering hdmi 2.1 and the panel is capable of 120 hertz they're going to offer all of the features they can for specifically gaming in particular and that's a good thing this should be the year where we have far fewer headaches particularly with like the graphics card driver updates of recent uh applying directly to the features of these tvs in addition to the new game consoles out there everybody's flagship tv is supporting it and i'm really really glad to see that we're also seeing a lot of oh no go ahead i would also say too that uh companies like tcl we talk about 8k panels in general and uh while that has been kind of a premium target for a long time tcl specifically announced that they're bringing their 8k series all the way down to their six series they have a brand new eight series which will feature an impressive mini led backlight with ten tens of thousands of leds illuminating that panel they have a new performance slash value series in the seven series but the six series is kind of that balance we've all become accustomed to where you get really good bang for the buck and they're claiming that they're going to have an 8k version of that six series sometime this year in addition to some 4k series panels also size wise there are plenty of 80 plus inch options this year at good pricing we will see uh from all of the manufacturers being able to produce an 80 plus inch panel doesn't seem to be the problem it's been for a long time uh at least at prices people are willing to pay and you combine that once you get above 80 inches i think that's where 8k really kind of comes into its own in terms of it it's kind of nice then because you get a more seamless looking picture even if you're really close to it man there's so much good stuff and it's good news about tv's at a ces this year folks if you want to know more about that and you want to know more about receivers and soundbars and headphones uh patrick and robert are always talking about it over on avxl uh let's wrap things up sarah who we're going to shout out today we are shouting out patrons at our master and grand master levels including ken haze tony glass and jeffrey zilx thank you all to our patrons and if you ever have feedback on anything we talk about on the show we'd love to hear it feedback at daily tech news show dot com thanks to patrick norton and robert harron i know you guys work together but patrick work if people find your work uh avxcel dot com just uh if you have a question for us email ask at avxl or tweet at patrick norton excellent robert harron thanks to you as well i really love it when you're on the show because i learned so much about tv's that i'm not going to buy but i still love them uh where people find your work as well uh hit me up on twitter at robert harron or visit my website harron fidelity dot com that's right post a lot of cool stuff folks we love our patrons uh and so if you stick with us uh we're going to give you some patreon loyalty rewards you can get a unique sticker mug t-shirt or hoodie every three months as long as you stay a patron at a certain level or above each one has unique art from len perelta featuring the dts seven-year anniversary logo there's mugs there's hoodies this mug that i'm holding in my hand right now has a illustration of roger you get that uh in the second quarter uh that you're a patron so go get the details patreon dot com slash dts everybody we are live monday through friday ces week rolls along and we'll be back tomorrow 4 30 p.m eastern 21 30 utc if you can join us live please do find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live we'll be back tomorrow with scott johnson and richard gunther this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com i hope you have enjoyed this bro


Thank you very much It's a bit hard for all of you. I know this is the last presentation You've seen lots of numbers concept about technology. I would like to start by What does it mean for us because at the end of the day? We are here to create together a better world and make sure the governance fits with that I'm going to give you few dates 2006 and 2009 my two boys turned 18 and The nicest day of their life was to have their driving license. They had it the very day of their birthday 2015 I bought a Tesla and I bought a Tesla which is a high-end luxury car on the net with my credit card without any interaction with a sales guy I couldn't negotiate by the way because the machine didn't want me to negotiate So this was for me a great experience In 2016 I organized a Congress like that on connected car and I went to see One of my dear friend who is a CEO of a very large car manufacturer and we start to talk about connected car and I really wanted to talk about connected car at the end of the day what we did we talked about smart mobility why because He told me you know Francois five years from now. Not sure we're going to produce cars or we're going to transport people 2017 2016 my daughter turned 18. So I say what about your driver license say I don't really care 2017 she turned 19. I say what about your driver driving license say but then I have Hubert Well, she has my account of Hubert. Let's put it that way And you know what I mean?  So 2007 remember 2008 remember nine years ago was The appearance of iPhone so in nine years so many things happen I see five things who have transformed my life. The first one is usage The main things that internet has brought to people is the community of knowledge knowledge has been in books in university The boss when you were the boss you didn't share your knowledge, but now with internet Knowledge is a commodity share by everybody So you you are not smart because you know rather, you know better than another you smart because you share and the young people and internet has put us in the sharing economy you share pictures on Facebook you share your experience and Everybody share so owning something is good, but sharing something is much better, especially with a young generation second is the development of technology With the explosion of the fiber the 3G and 4G The power of iPhones With the power of the cloud you have access to everything anywhere the geolocalization allows to buy something where you are or order a car and The technology has dramatically changed The picture of where we are right now So the sense and symbol when I talk to our kids or young people a student when I teach Sense makes a lot to them. They don't want to be or work In an environment that do not care about the planet They do not I remember all my life when my three kids went out for my Range Rover I was very proud to have a trophy car and say dad too much oil. We don't want to traveling into this car And the other point also is car is not anymore Something to celebrate to success in life is the commodity I remember when I got my driving license my first car. It it was something very very important to me for emergence of new trends we always We spend a lot of time of course in the traffic jam, but also there is emergence of smart cities And smart cars and whatever you call that I was in Riyadh last week And there was this big announcement about Neon the 500 billion US dollars investment Into the next generation city is around smart cities. It's around Eco carbon and now everybody talks about smart cities and it is it's at the plan at the state level and last It's ubiquity in to in terms of choice of what you want to do as an example If you want to go from A to B on Google map You can walk take a train take a bike or whatever when you order Uber You can take a small one a big one if you go to London you have six different Categories so in nine years there has been a huge revolution driven by technology driven by sense driven also by the abundant of some sign symbols just a quick Slide I don't like slide, but this isn't quite interesting to see If you can launch that not the previous one. I just want to Give you a short update on where we are on connected guard. There are three type of connected cars The most advanced by far is Tesla Tesla has not only a 3g card in it. It has intelligence It can drive by itself last week. I drove between Brussels and Paris 240 kilometers without touching the steering wheels and I came in in Paris as Relax as my wife and I could do SMS. I know it's forbidden, but really I was cool the second type of connect cut car is car with some technology inside, but your iPhone or Smartphone is the kind of modern and the last is your smartphone because the smart the smartphone on back so many technology with you What would looks like the next generation? Autonomous car it will be like a saloon. You will be comfortably sitting in it you have seven types of Autonomous car and again here Tesla is something is Is the is the brand which is the most advanced by? 2021 will start to have a lot of cars autonomous and it's a me-to strategy driven by most of the car manufacturer. I like this slides because It it it looks like what the future Will be there will be different type of connected car There will be connect cut car where they connected together or connected car smart cars connected with environment Each of us has been I've been to some emerging countries Where in the center of city you have three thousand different objects. So you have Donkeys you have bicycle you have cars you have trucks and there is zero accident Why because they all are connected to to each other the donkey is connected to the bicycle Be connected to the truck the motorbikes if you take three thousand connected car is the same They will have a software between themselves with a Yankee with rules. There will be never an accident if you have 2,999 cars one donkey there will be an accident So you need to connect things With some algorithm some logic so that they can be they can live together You will see in the near future a big acceleration. You all know what is the Moore's law The chairman of soft bank last week announced the million The speed of connectivity will be increased by one million the speed Of treatment of information by one million and the capacity in the cloud to treat info information will be Also increased by one million that means that all the cars Will have a huge software hardware infrastructure will have real-time access To the cloud and in the cloud there will be trillion lines of codes that will make us safe when you travel Identify the danger identify the quality of the road or any obstacles. So we're not there yet, but it will be very soon. Thank you


This is my favorite low-tech onboard. Let me present to you the black solder fly. The larvae of this fly can eat any organic waste with a very high efficiency and turn it into very useful resources. We have been in Malaysia to meet Emily with the world experts. At Low-Tech Lab, we travel the world to find the best low-tech inventions that are useful, sustainable and accessible to all. For us, the use of the black solder is amazing because it's an insect that can really convert almost any type of organic waste into an insect meal that will be used in animal feeding, so chicken, pig, fish, etc. and in a compost that will also be reused in agriculture. Here, if we receive about one ton of organic waste, we will turn it into 200 kilos of larvae and 200 kilos of insects. Thanks to these flies, we will collect eggs with about one kilo of eggs. In 15 days, we get about five tons of larvae, which is the equivalent of an elephant. We are contributing to sustainable farming like that. We are using waste to produce insect biomass and compost to produce value and I find that very exciting. I'll show you how to raise the black solder fly on a small scale. You put your organic waste in this box. They can eat any waste that is not too dry. We even give them our dry toilets. When they have eaten enough, they want to turn into poopas. They climb this slope, then fall in the tray. Once a week, you harvest 90% of the larvae to feed the animals. It's full of lipids and proteins. Put the rest into the ivory. They will become flies, reproduce themselves and lay eggs into this cardboard. Babies will hatch and jump into the food. One third of our garbage is organic waste. We use a lot of energy to make it disappear. This little quail fly is a ready-made technology, free of cost and highly efficient. Everybody should use it.


Good morning. I'm Glenn Vanderberg. Thanks for coming. I'm here to talk about real software engineering. I'm told that for video purposes I have to stay behind the podium, which is not my usual mode of speaking. So if I wander off and you can't hear me anymore, somebody wave me back over here. This is a room full of software practitioners. So nobody here will be surprised to hear me say that software engineering doesn't work. This is widely known in our field. Most of us who started out and were educated as software developers, at least, went through a period where we were taught a set of practices called software engineering. Some of us may have learned that on the job if we started work at someplace that cares about those sorts of things. And it's widely acknowledged that those practices simply don't work in our field. The practices that we call software engineering, although they have changed over time, they don't reliably control the costs of projects. They don't reliably produce software of high quality. And sometimes, even when they're practiced rigorously by people who have good training in how to do it, they don't succeed in producing software at all. But we should find it very surprising that this is the case. Because in every other field that aspires to the title of engineering, the term engineering is reserved for practices that work. In fact, that's as good a capsule definition of engineering, independent of any particular subspecialty as you're likely to find, those sets of practices and techniques that have been shown through experience to work reliably in that field. And yet in software development, we have this untenable situation where we have a set of practices that are known by the name software engineering. And everybody who practices software development knows that those practices don't work. This state of affairs is so strange and alarming that it has caused many people to question whether engineering is an appropriate metaphor for software development at all. Maybe software development just isn't engineering. Maybe it's incompatible with engineering. Maybe it's craft or art or movie making or theory building or something like that. And we need to just give up on the idea that software development is engineering. And I think that's silly. But it's easy to see how we would get to that point because those kinds of reactions spring from the same misunderstandings that led to the development of a flawed vision of software development in the first place. The people who created the field that we now call software engineering misunderstood two very important things. Software development and engineering. And the result is that software engineering is really a caricature of an engineering discipline. And so in this talk, I want to take a brief look at where we went wrong, sort of how it's possible that a whole field stepped down the wrong path and pursued a vision of engineering that was really flawed from the outset. And then I want to compare the caricature of engineering that we see in our field with what a real engineering discipline looks like. And finally at the end, talk about what software engineering would look like if we were to reinvent it based on a proper understanding of what engineering is. The term software engineering first started to be thrown about in 1968 in Garmisch, Germany. Sorry, you can't see that very well, but it was a conference on software engineering sponsored by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization of all people to try to address what was perceived as the software crisis or inability to manage software projects appropriately and produce reliable things. And being curious about software engineering and what the problem was, I decided a few years ago, a couple years ago, to go read the proceedings of that conference. And given my attitude toward the field of software engineering, I fully expected to learn, you know, this is where the madness started, right? And I was surprised and kind of gratified to find that that wasn't the case at all. Really if you read the proceedings, there's a lot of smart stuff in there. The participants in the conference came from academia and from industry and from various organizations like Bell Labs that kind of straddle those two worlds. And a lot of them were practitioners. And there were a few things said at that conference that I think don't make much sense to our ears today, but there was a lot of sense there as well. There were a lot of smart things said. By far, the prevalent tone of the conference was that there's a whole lot we just don't know about software and how it's developed and what software engineering might look like. There's a great deal of uncertainty about what it might mean to engineer software. And I think that's perfectly reasonable. In 1968, software development was a baby of an industry and the tools and techniques and platforms we were building on were an enormous flux, and it made perfect sense to have a lot of uncertainty. At the end of the conference, Alan Perlis spoke and tried to summarize the few things that they had been able to agree on. And in that very short statement, he talks about iterative design. The vocabulary is very different and he didn't call it that, but clearly he was talking about iterative design, starting with a system that was very small and did almost nothing but worked, and gradually building on that and expanding it into the system you eventually wanted to have, and he spoke of driving that process through tests. It's no surprise that everybody who participated in that conference was excited about the prospects and wanted to carry on the work. And so in 1969, in Rome, there was a second software engineering conference, also sponsored by NATO, and if you go read the proceedings, it'll be clear that this, in fact, is where the madness started. The tone is very different. What happened in that year? Well, some of you may have seen me give this talk elsewhere, an earlier version of this talk, and it was at this point that I said, well, I don't know, and presented a humorous explanation of what might have happened by looking at how waterfall sort of inadvertently became the standard way of developing software. Since that time, somebody who heard my talk, a guy named Zane Bitter, a New Zealander, sent me a link to a very interesting resource. In 1996, there was a conference on the history of software engineering, and a gentleman named Brian Randall, who co-edited both of these reports, wrote a reminiscence in 1996 about these two conferences and the process of being involved in them and co-editing the two reports about the conferences. And like Dave Hoover yesterday in his keynote, I'm a quotations geek, so I'm going to offer an extended quotation from Brian Randall's reminiscence about the second NATO Software Engineering Conference, unlike the first conference at which it was fully accepted that the term software engineering expressed a need rather than a reality. In Rome, there was already a slight tendency to talk as if the subject already existed. And it became clear during the conference that the organizers had a hidden agenda, namely that of persuading NATO to fund the setting up of an international software engineering institute. I suspected this much, but it was amazing to see it confirmed so starkly. However, things did not go according to their plan. The discussion sessions which were meant to provide evidence of strong and extensive support for this proposal were instead marked by considerable skepticism and led one of the participants, Tom Simpson of IBM, to write a splendid short satire on masterpiece engineering, which is worth seeking out, by the way. It's easy to find if you Google for it. It was a little surprised to any of the participants in the Rome conference that no attempt was made to continue the NATO conference series. But the software engineering bandwagon began to roll as many people started to use the term to describe their work, to my mind, often with very little justification. It's pretty damning. Randell, for the next 25 years or so, declined to have anything to do with the software engineering movement and refused to participate in any event or body of work that used that name. What we see is a little bit academic empire building, you know? If you've ever heard the quote, how many of you have been involved in academia post-graduate work at all?  But it's not quite that simple, right? What we're really seeing there is what I call premature maturity, the desire to appear more grown up than you actually are. Anybody who's ever known or been an adolescent is familiar with this. You can't bear to be seen as immature. And so you put on the errors of maturity. And in doing so, you imitate what you see as what mature people do without really understanding them or understanding why and probably without noticing some of the less obvious things that mature people do. And that certainly characterized a lot of the early history of software engineering and that resulted in the caricature that I've talked about. Here I'm going to show some quotations that express the caricature of engineering. And I think most of you will find them, if you're not familiar with the exact quotations, you'll at least have heard things like them. And they'll be very familiar with you in terms of the picture of engineering that they present. And I will contrast each one with descriptions from real engineers or researchers into the history of engineering about what real engineering is like. I apologize for coughing in the microphones. I've been sick most of the week. Just two years ago, Bruce Echel, who's a very smart software developer, and I think he actually knows better than this, but was just a little careless with his words. But nevertheless, he said this in a blog post, and so I get to pick on him about it. And I do think it reflects the attitude that a lot of developers have. He wrote, programming is not some kind of engineering. The sneer is almost palpable there. Where all we have to do is put something in one end and turn the crank. How many of you actually have a formal engineering background in another engineering field? Anybody? A few. Is there any kind of engineering where you just put something in one end and turn the crank? Another example of this same kind of misconception is the rational design process that was described in a 1986 paper by David Parnas. In fairness, Parnas doesn't deserve the blame for all of this because he was basing it on something called the rational model of decision making, which comes from a Herbert Simon book in 1969 called The Sciences of the Artificial. But the rational design process that Parnas describes is that you first establish and document requirements. And then you design and document the module structure. And then you design and document the module interfaces. And then you design and document the uses hierarchy. And then you design and document the module internal structures. And finally, you write programs and maintain. Now that seems ridiculous when applied to software, but most of us, if we're honest, would say that at some point, at least, we had the view in mind that that's kind of what an engineering process looked like. Design, design, design, design, design. And then finally, go build the thing. Eugene Ferguson, in his wonderful book Engineering and the Mind's Eye, paints a more realistic picture of the engineer. The conversion of an idea to an artifact, which engages both the designer and the maker, is a complex and subtle process that will always be far closer to art than to science. I'm going to pick on David Parnas a little bit more. A few years ago, in a talk I heard him give, he said, in engineering, people design through documentation. And certainly, in engineering, documents are important as a record of the design. But the implication here is that that is an essential part of the process of design. Going back to Ferguson again, although the drawings appear to be exact and unequivocal, their precision conceals many informal choices in articulate judgments, acts of intuition, and assumptions about the way the world works. It's clear from looking at the early history of software engineering that much of it was modeled on looking at particular engineering disciplines, and in particular, the oldest, most well known, and arguably the most different from software development, structural engineering. And structural engineering does have a strong bias towards what's known as the defined process model. The defined process control model requires that every piece of work be completely understood. A defined process can be started and allowed to run until completion with the same results every time. That certainly fits our view of how, for example, bridges are built. And it fits quite well the software processes that came out of the software engineering field. But the notion of process control models was originated by some chemical engineering researchers, who, when they learned that software development was heavily biased towards this kind of process control model, were amused, to say the least. Because chemical engineering, a well-understood, mature branch of engineering, is in fact heavily biased toward the opposite end of the continuum, which is the empirical process control model, which provides and exercises control through frequent inspection and adaptation for processes that are imperfectly defined and generate unpredictable and unrepeatable outputs. That certainly seems much more appropriate for software development. I mentioned earlier the 1996 conference on the history of software engineering. And in the proceedings of that conference, I came across this diagram, which I think describes the view that many people have in the early days of some field. We start with people producing things and others people trying to produce at a slightly higher level that bring notions of craft into the mix. And eventually, this becomes commercial and profitable. Money gets into the picture. And at that point, it becomes necessary to bring in science. And once we take all of that stuff that we learned and base it on science, then we end up with something mature and respectable called professional engineering. Just a few weeks ago, Nick Morgan tweeted the following. I've invented a new term, parasitic credibility, where certain fields attempt to link themselves to science in order to sound more real. That is going on today, actually. If you're familiar, if you're interested in this at all, you may be familiar with CEMAT, a group called Software Engineering Method and Theory, originated by Ivor Jacobson and dedicated to the proposition that software engineering must be based on sound scientific theory or else, obviously, it's no good. But that has never really been the view of engineering. And even outside of such a young discipline as software development, that notion is very contentious in the engineering field at large. Fred Brooks, when he was an engineering student in the 50s at Harvard, in his book, The Design of Design, Brooks recommends reminiscence about his days at Harvard as an engineering student. At the time, the dean of engineering at Harvard was John Van Vleck, who was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. And Brooks says, Van Vleck was very concerned that the practice of engineering be put on a firmer scientific basis. Note that Van Vleck was a physicist, not an engineer. He led a vigorous shift of American engineering education away from design toward applied science. The pendulum swung too far, reaction set in, and the teaching of design has been contentious ever since. This struggle goes back even farther. In 1923, aeronautical engineer J.D. North, in an address to the Royal Aeronautical Society, got a bit angry and said, airplanes are not designed by science, but by art, in spite of some pretense and humbug to the contrary. There is a big gap between scientific research and the engineering product, which has to be bridged by the art of the engineer. And finally, another aeronautical engineer, Walter Vincente, in his great book, What Engineers Know and How They Know It, points out that engineers, not just software developers, frequently have to make decisions of great practical importance in the face of incomplete and uncertain knowledge. And here's something I've heard many times about software engineering and the immature way we go about things in our field. You don't know it's right if you don't have the math to prove it. I haven't been able to find a good reference in software engineering literature that puts it quite succinctly. If anybody comes across one, I'd appreciate hearing about it. But I know I've read this and I know I've been told this in various discussions many times that real engineers use math to prove their assertions. But in engineering, although math is used quite heavily, it doesn't have the role that non-engineers often think it does. Going back to Eugene Ferguson's book again, structural analyses, indeed, any engineering calculations must be employed with caution and judgment because mathematical models are always less complex than actual structures, processes, or machines. The 19th century railroad bridge engineer, Arthur Mellon Wellington had a nice way of saying this and I've edited his quote a little bit because he wrote in a sort of flowery Victorian English that's a bit hard to see through in these days. So I sort of tightened it up and made it more modern but this is the gist of what he said. Engineering is not the art of constructing. It is rather the art of not constructing or it is the art of doing well with $1, what any bungler can do with two. So I mentioned that mathematics and formalism, formal analysis in engineering, doesn't really have the role that we thought that we often think it does. So let's explore what role it does have. I know it wasn't big at the time and the UK doesn't have the newspaper comics culture that the US had but I think most of you are probably familiar with the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. As a father, I've modeled myself on Calvin's father. In that, when my kids ask me some question about how the world works, I like to invent comical and highly improbable answers and deliver them with a straight face and see what they say. And one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes comic strips has Calvin asking, how do they know the load limit on bridge's dad? That's 10 tons. And dad cheerfully says, well they drive bigger and bigger trucks over the bridge until it breaks. And then they weigh the last truck and rebuild the bridge. Calvin thinks this is perfectly reasonable. Why is that funny? Like Joe in the last talk, this is not a... It's so unreasonable, it's ridiculous. Nobody would ever do that. How many of you have seen the video where the Boeing engineers test the wings of a 777 to the breaking point? Anybody seen that? If you haven't seen it, it's worth seeking out. A, because it'll make you feel very safe riding in a 777. B, because it's just a remarkable picture, glimpse into how engineering is done. They put this thing in a giant hanger, attach winches to the ceiling and attach the ropes to brackets on the end of the wings. And they start ratcheting the winches up until both wings break. And when they break, all the engineers get huge grins on their face and start slapping themselves on the back and rejoice. My question for you is why? Anybody have any ideas? What was that? Because they predicted that, yes. Because it happened at the exact moment they predicted. If math proves everything, why is that reason for rejoicing? Because they weren't sure. Models are always approximations of reality. They're not reality. So then, why are the models used? Mathematical modeling was introduced to engineering as a cost saving measure. Because in order to build a bridge, just to take the usual example, and be sure that it's safe, in the absence of good mathematical models, you have two choices. One, the Calvin and Hobbes approach of actually build a full scale prototype and test. Maybe multiple times if your first one didn't work as well as you hoped. Or, really over engineer the thing. And even in the face of models, you have to over engineer things because you have to over engineer to account for the margins of error in your models. The reason mathematical modeling was introduced is that when you're working with physical materials, especially at a large scale, building prototypes and testing them is very expensive. And so we can use math to allow us to instead test models in the mathematical sense and save ourselves the effort and cost and time of having to go build the real thing. And even in the face of models, both failure and over engineering happen. A good example is right around the corner from us here in Edinburgh. In 1879, the Tay Bridge, not far away from here, collapsed in a famous engineering disaster that the high girder portion there in the middle in a storm collapsed while a train was going across it and cost 75 lives. At the time of that disaster, another bridge was already in the planning stages over the 4th of 4th. And as a reaction to the Tay Bridge disaster, the 4th bridge design was changed to be much safer and more importantly to look much safer. The 4th bridge was the first major cantilever steel bridge of its size ever built. And the design is simple, radically different from the Tay Bridge and really over engineered for both engineering purposes and also for public relations purposes. I don't mean that as a criticism. I think that was exactly the appropriate thing to do and I love this bridge and I think it's beautiful. But this began a roughly 30 year process of trying to better understand the statics and the physical theory behind cantilever steel bridges like this and build more accurate mathematical models of them, why it was accuracy important because it reduced the need to over engineer and therefore it reduced the materials that would be involved and the cost of the bridges and so forth. And this is the 4th bridge still, just another view of it. This 30 year process resulted in thinner and lighter and less heavily over engineered bridges being built around the world over that period until the very light and airy Quebec Bridge collapsed also with great loss of life. After the Quebec Bridge collapsed in 1907, those were sort of viewed as unsafe so people started building big suspension bridges instead and the cycle repeated itself. Big heavy looking over engineered suspension bridges gradually getting lighter and airier until of course the Tacoma Narrows Bridge ended the era of great suspension bridges. And in the case of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the failure can be directly traced to a flawed mathematical model which was widely perceived as the best mathematical model of suspension bridges at the time. I went looking for definitions of engineering that predate software engineering and my favorite one in one sense is this one from the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1828. Engineering is the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man which I like but that's a bit colonialist I think. So a more recent one from the Structural Engineers Association is structural engineering is the science and art of designing and making with economy and elegance structures so that they can safely resist the forces to which they may be subjected. I want you to notice the tensions in this definition. Engineering is a science and an art. It involves creativity, blind alleys, exploration, discovery as much as it involves merely applying the findings of science. It involves designing and making. Engineers don't just build documents and hand them off to people to build the artifacts. They're involved in the making of the things they design and the fabrication facilities. Good structural engineers have hard hats in their offices because they go to visit the construction site and talk with the workers and learn about new problems that were encountered during the construction of building or whatever. With economy and elegance. Cost is always an object, a big object in engineering. Our job is not just to build something but to build something in the most affordable way possible balancing economy and elegance and robustness. Another thing we learned from looking at real engineering disciplines is that different engineering disciplines are very different. When you look at structural engineering or electrical or mechanical or industrial engineering or chemical engineering, you learn that they use different materials, employ different physical effects and deal with different forces. They work with different degrees of complexity in terms of the requirements, the designs themselves, the processes that they use and the artifacts that are the eventual goal. The different engineering disciplines have a varied degree of reliance on formal modeling as opposed to experimentation and prototyping and testing. Structural engineers don't build a lot of physical model bridges but electrical engineers sure build a lot of breadboards and prototypes and things like that. Ask your friendly neighborhood aeronautical engineer how much math he would do if building and testing a prototype of his design were instantaneous and free. The answer is probably not none. But it's a lot less than they do now. And finally, they have a varied reliance and use of defined versus empirical processes. So if we understand what real engineering is like and we try to apply that to what we as software practitioners know of the software development field, what would we end up with? Well, first of all, I'm gonna take that structural engineers association definition of engineering and modify it a little bit to be kind of my view of the definition of software engineering, which is the science and art of designing and making with economy and elegance systems so that they readily adapt to the situations to which they may be subjected. And this incorporates the idea that one of the great benefits of software is that it's soft. The goal isn't to resist forces. The goal is to adapt to change. Other than that though, I think the structural engineers definition is a very good one. We know that software engineering can be expected to be very different from other engineering disciplines. So we should not, when we're done, end up with a look-alike of structural engineering or a caricature of some other engineering discipline that we understand or think we understand. Software engineering was based on an analogy. I'm drawing an analogy with large scale physical engineering disciplines. And that analogy goes something like this. You have engineers and they sit in their white shirts and ties and they produce designs. And those designs are then handed to laborers who use the designs to go and build the finished product. By analogy then, if we want to view software development in the same way and try to learn from engineering disciplines about how we should build software, let's look at what the analogy looks like. So we have software engineers, the same guy, just retrained, and they produce a design which is then given to some laborers in their cubicles which produce the finished product. And it's hard to look, well, once you've sort of seen it laid out this way, it's hard to look at any of the discussions of software engineering between 1969 and the mid-90s without seeing this analogy just blaring loud and clear through every assumption that is being made. But in 1992, I believe, a gentleman named Jack Reeves realized that this analogy is totally wrong. And he wrote a paper called What Is Software Design and published it in the C++ report, which is why not as many of you as should have have ever heard of it. Where he said, this analogy is totally wrong because it misses some fundamental things about software development. This is what the analogy would draw if you didn't know anything about software development, but if you're a programmer, you know how things go, you know this is wrong. And the first problem is we've never been able to figure out a way of expressing a software design that in any kind of an economical way that then programmers can take and reliably turn into working software. And so maybe that's part of the problem. Maybe we should just try to change our view of what a software design is. In fact, Reeves said, the programmers are the engineers of software. And this thing over here, the source code, that's not the finished artifact. That's not what our customers are paying us for. Our customers are paying us to produce working software that's installed on machines, not files of ASCII text sitting on disks somewhere. In fact, that source code is the design of our software. Maybe not all of it. It still helps to have diagrams sometimes that are the high level view of the design, but the detailed design, how it's actually supposed to work is the source code. So what does that make the laborers? What corresponds to the laborers in this world? Compilers and programming language implementations. And the finished artifact is working solutions, running on machines that customers can use. Once you see the analogy this way, everything changes. What's the most expensive part of the top row? Construction. What's the cheapest part of the bottom row? Construction. And that upside down economics changes everything about what we should do. And any field that earns the title of software engineering, any way of doing things that earns the title of software engineering needs to take that fundamental fact into account. That for us, building a prototype of our design is effectively instantaneous and free. Furthermore, when Reeves wrote his paper, testing that prototype was still quite an expensive proposition, although nowhere near as expensive as testing a bridge. But in the years since 1992, we've learned an awful lot about reducing the cost of repetitive testing of our designs, haven't we? And so by far, the most expensive part of our field is the designing itself. Just such a great degree that it dwarfs everything else and makes it look insignificant. Another point I will point out is that, although we are often criticized for not having mathematical rigor in our field, that source code is math. Even if our programming languages aren't rigorously specified using denotational semantics or some other formal mechanism, and that's Ruby, so it certainly is not, that is a formal language with rigid semantics. We use math every day. Our math does real work for us. Our math is executable. And this was understood even as far back as the 1968 NATO software conference, a software engineering conference. In that conference, Friedrich Bauer said, what is needed is not classical mathematics, but mathematics nevertheless.  One more thing, in that picture back here, where's the model? Oops, that's the wrong version. Where's the model? Where's our model? It's partly in our heads, but that's the same as true of engineering, right? The expression of the model is also in the source code. And the ease of seeing the model of the system in the source code is one measure of the quality of the design itself. Where's our document? Engineers use models, they use math, they use documents. Where's our document in the source code? I mentioned earlier that Parnas says that engineers design through documents. And he has proposed a documentation notation called tabular mathematical expressions for expressing requirements and designs. And it'd be unfair for me to show you this next example without saying that this is a grossly oversimplified example of a tabular mathematical expression. But nevertheless, this gets the idea across. This is a very simplified example of one of Parnas's tabular mathematical expressions because he thinks we need to have documents. I'll show you some other documents that actually express the same requirement in a different way. Here's one. Oops, push the wrong button. Not used to working without my remote. Here's one. Here's another. Here's another. And there's another. Which actually starts to look quite a bit like Parnas's original. We have a test unit test case and an RSpec example and a cucumber scenario and a fitness fixture. What's different about these documents as opposed to Parnas's document? They're executable. They can execute and verify themselves. They're documents, but they're not merely documents. If you ran each of these, you would find that there was an error. That error is there intentionally to point out the fact that it would be much harder to figure out that that one has an error. Finally, empirical versus defined processes. This is a diagram of the 12 or 13 as I defined them. Original practices of extreme programming and the dependencies between them that Kent Beck documents in his book, Extreme Programming Explained. And those dependencies take the form, there's a whole chapter in his book that says, unit testing couldn't possibly work because X, Y, and Z, it has these flaws. And that would be true except that these other practices continuous integration and collective ownership and 40 hour week in pair programming and refactoring and so forth backfill for that and help make up for its flaws. There's redundancy in this process. And spurred on by a comment from Dave Thomas, I started wondering, he said, if you built a software design that was that tightly coupled, you'd be fired. And I said, he has a point, but that doesn't seem right to me. So I started looking for deeper structure there. And it turns out that most of those dependencies can be understood this way. You can lay those practices out, most of them. Some of the practices are really just standards. The ones that are actual practices, you can lay it out along a line and you can lay them out according to the scale of artifact, the scale of decision that they are dealing with when you practice them. When you're pair programming, you're dealing mostly at the level of statements and methods and unit tests work mostly at the level of methods and classes and interfaces. And all the way up to short releases are there to help you validate that you're producing the right solution for the customer's problem. And interestingly enough, you can remap that line to the scale of time on which those practices work. Pair programming works at the level of seconds and sometimes minutes. Unit testing works at the level of minutes Onsite customer works at the level of hours where you go back and forth with them discussing details of requirements and so forth, all the way up to short releases taking several weeks or months, in many cases, to go from release to release. This is practically the definition of an empirical process for software. It gains feedback about every decision that's made at every stage at the most rapid scale, at the smallest time scale that's economically practical to gain feedback about that kind of decision. It's costly to gain feedback about big decisions so we don't do that quite as often. But we still do it as fast as possible but it's very cheap to gain feedback about small decisions so we do that every few seconds. Constantly gaining feedback and adjusting just like an empirical process should. Agile software development has been accused of being ad hoc and sloppy and messy but in fact, I think it's a great depiction of what an engineering process for software ought to be. So I'm a little over time, I'm gonna finish very quickly. I talked about software engineering suffering from premature maturity. What will it look like when we really grow up? We won't rely on math. We won't rely on models. We won't rely on documents. And we certainly won't rely on copying other disciplines without understanding them. Instead we'll learn from practitioners in our field about what works and what doesn't work. We'll bias towards empirical processes because that's more appropriate for such a complex field where so much is unknown. We'll encourage continued innovation in those processes. I don't think XP or Agile is the be all end all. I still think we have a lot to learn and we will make sure that we call what works engineering and stop using that term for things that don't work. Thank you.