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 …
Category Archives: Computers and technology
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 …
Apple and Palm
What a study in contrast. Yesterday, Palm announced that it is canceling its widely panned Foleo, a smartphone accessory that is essentially a stripped down laptop, before it was even released. While the idea is not necessarily bad, Palm needs to focus on its core products, the aging Treo smartphone line and the Palm OS, …
Today’s tech humor
From the excessive hype department: Apple’s New iPhone, as only The Onion can deliver A ‘Second Life’ parody you can’t miss, by Draftfcb, via CNET News.com
Spiritual computing
Today I attended a talk on “spiritual computing” by Dr. Craig Warren Smith, who works at the Human Interaction Development Laboratory at the University of Washington. Since spiritual computing isn’t well defined, much of his talk was devoted to examples, followed by a definition, which frankly I didn’t have enough time to absorb. What I did …
More iPhone reaction
I just watched Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote introducing the iPhone. Boy, he is a great speaker. His reality distortion field was in full force — an article in Palm Infocenter argues that iPhone’s phone features aren’t new (but they’re sure slick). In contrast, the CEO of Cingular was stiffly reading off of index cards for …
Two days, two big product announcements
It’s a geek’s dream week: CES and Macworld. There have been two announcements that have caught my attention. The first is Microsoft’s Windows Home Server, which will be sold by HP and other vendors. It makes it easy to share files and stream video, music, and photos to PCs and Xbox 360s at home, access …
Walking while working
Soon after I started working, I noticed I was even less physically active than as a computer science grad student (which is saying something), and I’ve dreamt of putting a treadmill in my office and walking while I worked. Not surprisingly, I’m not the only one with this brilliant idea: Dr. James Levine at the …
Ka-Ping Yee: “performance” considered harmful
Ping points out how computer people love to use the word "performance" when they really mean "speed," and that performance is about way more than just speed.