I was recently helping out Ron with his Ph.D. defense talk, and sent him slides from my talk as a reference. He said, “By the way, your last slide is amazing. best defense slide ever.” My last slide was titled, “What has happened since I entered grad school.” So are some of the notable products …
Monthly Archives: October 2007
Another story from Morris Chang
One more amusing anecdote from Morris Chang. The initial funding for TSMC came mostly from the Taiwanese government (48%) and Philips. There were also a few key individual investors who put their own money into the company. But TSMC was proposing to be a silicon foundry, a brand new business model. How did the company …
A conversation with Morris Chang
I just got back from a Computer History Museum event: a conversation with Morris Chang (張忠謀), founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC, and Jen-Hsun Huang (黃仁勳), co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, the last independent graphics chip company. Morris Chang is a pioneer in the computer industry: TSMC was the first dedicated …
Apple opens up the iPhone
Looks like my prayers (and those of many others) have been answered: Apple will release a software development kit for the iPhone and iPod touch in February, enabling developers to write their own native apps for those devices. I’ll be curious to see how the third-party iPhone/iPod app market will develop; I bet it will …
Closing the door to reform in China?
I found this New York Times headline puzzling: China’s Leader Closes Door to Reform This assumes the door was open to begin with.
News flash: Cupertino housing is expensive
From the Cupertino Courier: Higher prices make it harder to buy a home in Cupertino A concern frequently expressed by some city council members and planning commissioners is that Cupertino homes are become so expensive many families cannot afford to move here…. “In the first six months of the year, it was a seller’s market. …
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Stanford beat USC???
24-23! Holy moly, I didn’t give Stanford a chance. As a Cal fan, I think the competition for this year’s Big Game just got a lot more interesting. And Cal’s prospects for the Rose Bowl also opened up even more.
Adobe Thermo
At its Max developer conference, Adobe gave a sneak preview of a new tool code-named Thermo that allows designers to create the front end to Flash-based rich Internet applications without writing code. For example, you can import a layered Photoshop image and convert parts of the image to real UI controls. You can also create …
The resurrection of Lotus Symphony
IBM made a big splash a couple of weeks ago when it released a new productivity suite based on the Productivity Tools in Lotus Notes 8. I joked with my colleagues that it should be called “SmartSuite for Notes.” But I never dreamed Lotus would reach back even farther and dub the them Lotus Symphony. …
Could you pass the U.S. citizenship test?
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services introduced a new citizenship test, which takes effect in a year. To pass, you are asked ten questions randomly picked from a list of 100, and you must answer 6 correctly. USCIS has posted the questions (PDF). Some organization should do a survey to see what percentage of Americans would pass the test. …
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