A Historical Perspective on Semiconductors and Moore's Law - Craig Barrett

Craig Barrett on Moore's Law
See it here - A Historical Perspective on Semiconductors and Moore's Law

Craig's lessons from 40 years of working in the semiconductor industry -

1. Problem Solving Methodology and getting a definition of where you want to go. There is no replacement for sophisticated problem solving. That's why engineers will always be needed and that's why many CEOs of the fortune 500 companies have engineering background. Ask "why" about 5 times.

2. Changing the rules of the game. What did Apple do to make the ipod so successful? they made it easier to download music legally. Changed the rules on how MP3 players are sold. Motorola used to be the premier supplier of cell phones but had analog phones. Nokia moved to the digital side and changed the rules of the game. Kodak recognized that the rules were changing around them but they were wed to their old business model and couldn't change. Intel Inside marketting campaign changed the rules.

3. No matter how big your company is or how smart your engineers are, you do not own all the smart engineers of the world. How to use the engineering talent outside your work? Fund those ideas, become a VC. Intel is one of the largest VC firm in the firm funding everything around our microprocessor area. Also recognized the importance of industries, fund 100 million a year in university projects. Life threatening challanges to big companies with multi-billion dollar research budgets come not from big companies but from one or two researchers at some university who have a bright idea.

4. If you want to be an executive, grw thick skin as press and analyst will write whatever they want about even though they know nothing about your industry.

5. what makes companies, economies and countries competitive are - smart people, smart ideas and the right environment to put smart people together with smart ideas

From IT to ET (Energy Technology) - Tom Seibel

Tom Siebel spoke at Stanford sometime ago.
See it here - Emerging Opportunities in a Post IT

Key takeaways -
1. First few minutes of talk shed light on how IT grew at 17% compound rate in the last 20 years of 20th century. Since 2000, the growth rate in IT has slowed down to about 3% that matches the growth rate in GDP. Basically IT has become a matured industry.

2. Regulation will be the dominant focus for governments in developed countries for several years to come.

3. World population will reach 9 billion people. A very significant number of those in developed countries will be more than 65 years old. The per capita use of energy has gone up significantly and is now at unsustainable levels. Supply of oil will run out in the next 50 years.

4. This creates major issues and thus major opportunities in food, water, healthcare and energy. This is the Moore's law of our times

5. Shanghai, China is the new center of gravity for innovation in the world. The leading University in Shanghai admits about 3,000 students from a pool of 8 million applicants. This is a mind-boggling number. They have high work ethic, are very smart and work very very hard.

6. Siebel launched two parallel efforts -

(a) $20 million prize for an energy free home that costs the same amount of money to build that a conventional home would and satisfies all the building codes. The house has to be on 2000 sq ft., 3 bd room and 2 bath. Teams from all over the world participating in the prize.

(b) C3 - a company to respond to the market needs. C3 will build software to manage, monitor, mitigate and monitize carbon footprint. Just like public companies today have to report their financial statements to the SEC, they will be required to report their carbon usage to the government. This is a major opportunity that is going to form in the coming years in the US and European Union. C3 is already up and running and has a stellar group of people involved in it.

Why Android vs. iPhone war is not quite the PS vs. Apple of the 80s

Content is the king, this is the key to understanding why Apple will continue to succeed with iphone, ipod and now ipad.

Here's what I think would happen -

1. Pretty soon Apple's profits from selling the apps and music would far exceed its profits from selling the devices.

2. This should be (if not already) a wake up call for the device makers (Google, Nokia, Motorola and the like) and more so for the telecom companies (Verizon, ATT and the like). They would want to be in on the content and apps goldmine.

3. Telecom companies especially Verizon would want to have its own marketplace for apps and music. That would create tension between them and Android marketplace.

4. Google will most likely come up with a revenue sharing model with the mobile careers for the apps and music that they sell through the cell phone networks. That, just like the google ads, can be their killer app.

Fragile Javascript - Dancing Grid with Dojo

I have had some instances of an AdvancedDataGrid with complex renderers in Flex going into a dancing mode where it would continue to shrink and expand indefinitely. It was funny to find the same behavior while testing dojo's DataGrid. In this case, however, it didn't take much to do that, it happened with simple content. Simply nesting a grid component inside a BorderContainer did it for me.

While the grid is dancing, open your windows explorer to see process memory and CPU usage. The IE process would continue to creep up - for me it reached 200MB of memory and 50% of CPU very quickly before I closed the tab.

To see the dancing with dojox grid, download dancinggrid.doc, change the extension to .html and open it in IE7/8. This assumes that you have all the dojo libraries under dojo/ directory.

The Beautiful Nanga Parbat

View from the plane
Originally I posted this on my old blog

Honor killing of the 17 year old girl Dua (Du'a) Khalil Aswad in Iraq

Moving this post from my blog

I met Dr. Sureya Sayadi a couple of days ago at a restaurant in Fremont. We had quite a heated debate,I disagree with a lot of what she believes in, she did have some valid points though. Here is the video from her website. CNN couldn't show more than two minutes of it, here you can see the whole 10 minutes.

Video of honor killing of Du'a Khalil in Iraq

Warning: This video contains extremely disturbing images.

If you thought there was a limit to the barbarism man is capable of, think again. A 17 year old Kurdish girl by the name of Du'a is stoned to death for allegedly having an affair with a sunni boy. She is dragged to the middle of a bazaar by her own cousin and then brutally stoned to death while a large crowd of men not only watch but actively participate in the act. It is important to note that despite the chants of Allah-O-Akbar in the movie, this murder has nothing to do with Islam. Also this was not done in the name of Islam. The Yezidi tribe that this poor girl belonged to is held captive by its savage traditions. Yezidis have been persecuted for centuries by many different civilizations. Even after many migrations and forced Islamization by the Ottomans, they have kept their traditions.

What drives an otherwise sane human being to ruthlessly kill another person and that too one of his own family? Is it honor? But what is honor anyway and why is it restored by taking a human life. Generally we like to shrug away such incidents as acts of savagery by the illiterate, the unenlightened among us. Depending on the flavor of stereotyping you subscribe to, you might be inclined to think that this was just another barbaric act by the savage Arabs. Such simple explanations, however, are constantly being challenged in the world we live in. We can't explain it that easily, there probably isn't one size that fits all. What drives a student in a prestigious institution such as Virginia Tech to systematically murder so many of his class mates is probably a very different emotion than the one that motivates a suicide bomber in Baghdad to take his life. or is it? Would a terrorist be able to do it if he didn't have the comfort of a gun or a bomb to shield himself with, if instead all his victims were tied down and he had to stone and maim each one to death. Would he be able to bear the screams of innocent children. The men who participated in stoning this innocent girl or those that slaughtered Daniel Pearl are at some level more savage than the suicide bombers or the carpet bombers. They don't have to visualize the consequence of their action, they can see it. They have to live it and live with it. And yet they do it.

This should remind us once again how fundamentalist beliefs in any ideology be it religious, tradition, nationalism or caste can drive men to commit unspeakable acts of horror. We witnessed that in Holocaust against the Jews, US plundering in Viet Nam, Pakistanis slaughtering Bengalis, genocide of Muslims in Bosnia and of Tutsis in Rawanda and last but not least the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Actors change yet the plot remains the same.

Is it really ideology though, I am not so sure. Would a suicide bomber still be impelled solely by his beliefs to take so many lives if he was *not* to become a hero in his own community. Is it his way of standing out, if not in life then in death. Is he thus at the core driven by the same emotion that drives a painter to paint a master piece? I don't think it's only the seventy virgins, they are the consequence not the cause. At the end of the day, it's very selfish, very worldly. Religion, God, Tradition, etc. are all slogans, excuses used to pacify one's own conscience. It's not even revenge, revenge is futile unless it's accompanied by glory. "Honor" needs an audience, it's not won and lost in isolation.

Tansfering my content from Wordpress

I have a blog at http://khurramm.wordpress.com and have been trying to transfer my content from there to this blogger blog I just started. Needless to say, it is turning out to be quite a chore. I exported all the wordpress content as XML but there is no way in blogger to import that. The exported xml is in RSS format, that ought to be easy to import. Still investigating....