Monthly Archives: August 2009

Jay Singh’s view

I met last week with Jay Singh of Plato Networks. His official title is “Manager CAE” which makes it sound like he’s in charge of schematic capture. Isn’t CAE what we used to call what Daisy, Mentor, Valid did in … Continue reading

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Friday puzzle: Monty Hall

Last week’s puzzle was the camel and the bananas. Firstly, a moment’s thought shows that the camel can’t get any bananas to market in one go. It is 1000 km away and so the camel will eat all of its … Continue reading

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Learning French

I wrote earlier about learning Chinese, but the first foreign language I learned was French. I did it at school and I first went to France on a school trip in 1964. I even have a French O-level (the exams … Continue reading

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Mobile payments

I have been doing some work recently with a biometric mobile payment startup. So I went to a VCtaskforce meeting last week about mobile payments. I learned some new stuff to go along with what I already knew. The first … Continue reading

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What’s Dan Dobberpuhl doing?

As I’ve pointed out before, most of the differentiation in the iPhone is in the software and the industrial design. Almost none is in the hardware which, especially in the first version, was all off-the-shelf not particularly special standard parts. … Continue reading

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Analog mobile TV

I talked today to a company called Telegent Systems who make chips for adding TV to cell-phones. The bulk of their business is adding ordinary over-the-air analog TV to cell-phones. You’ve probably never seen this since the US is not … Continue reading

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Big company guys don’t do small

Big company guys think that they can run startups because they’ve run small divisions of big companies. So that must be the same, right? Actually the two things are very different and not many people seem to be good at … Continue reading

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Friday puzzle: bananas

Last week’s puzzle was to estimate when the 20th record year of rainfall will occur in New York. The answer is in 272 million years time. In 1835 that year was a record year by definition. In 1836 there were … Continue reading

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Public affluence, private squalor

Somebody in a comment earlier this week said that I was especially turned off by unions in a post talking about California. Unions actually behave just the way that you would expect them to, to maximize their own power. The … Continue reading

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DAC in review

So now that there are a couple of weeks to allow a bit of introspection (also known as reading everyone else’s blogs) what were the big themes? On the technical side I think it is the fifth, or whatever, year … Continue reading

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