Miscellaneous and Useless Information
James Lin’s infrequently updated blog
Just one day after his keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Steve Jobs made an appearance last night at the Cupertino City Council to present the company’s plans for a new campus in Cupertino, on the old Hewlett-Packard site. It essentially consists of one giant building shaped like a doughnut that will hold 12,000 people. …
Continue reading “Steve Jobs presents plans for Apple’s new campus”
Thou Shalt Not Be Colloquial: why the King James Bible endures (New York Times) Sadat Shami: “Awesome overview of the New York Times’ R&D Lab’s Project Cascade – a tool to explore the life stories in social spaces” (Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard) @StartupJesus: “Googling ‘Torture + Friday’ used to return hits about Good Friday, …
Sadat Shami: “Giving up tenure… and getting happiness in return? Reflections from someone who did” (The Scientist via Nick Diakopoulos) I think I’ll get a standing desk (New York Times) Jeffrey Bigham: “How languages may have diffused from Africa, modeling phonemes” (New York Times) Boris Smus: “Allow me to explain sorting algorithms through interpretive dance” …
Almost three years ago, I blogged about Microsoft’s plans for a new West Campus. They finished last year, and I was impressed when I visited it a couple of weeks ago. The Commons has a nice urban contemporary vibe to it, and it feels energetic. Other companies should definitely take note. I noticed one amusing …
As I was cleaning out my papers, I came across some old receipts for various tech gadgets. While I’m used to high-tech stuff getting cheaper and cheaper, I still find it stunning how quickly prices have fallen for certain items: Item Purchase date Purchase price Current price Annual depreciation rate Annual overall inflation rate (CPI) …
Last month, Danyel blogged about Microsoft Research’s moving into a new building, Building 99, and linked to several newspaper articles about Microsoft’s expansion in general. I’m somewhat familiar with the Microsoft campus, having interned there in 1995 and visited a few times since, so I was curious to find out even more. On Microsoft’s web …
Continue reading “Microsoft’s Building 7: now you see it, now you don’t”
Remember this slogan? “If you paid full price, you didn’t buy it at Crown Books.” Another company bought the naming rights to Crown after it went bankrupt in 2001, and the chain has opened a store in Cupertino. This incarnation of Crown Books buys remainders and overstock at big discounts and passes the savings onto …
Continue reading “Cupertino gets a new bookstore… Crown Books?”
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 …
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 …
When Save Mart bought the Albertsons supermarkets in Northern California earlier this year, I fully expected them to rebrand them as Save Mart. Instead, it’s pulling an “AT&T” and rebranding them as Lucky, their old name before they were bought out by Albertsons. I couldn’t help but smile when I found out — strong brand names truly never …