Memory Hierarchy

"[E]ntrepreneurs with competing financing offers, at least one of which is from a "high reputation" VC, will generally choose the marquee VC. No surprise so far, but here is the interesting bit: they'll generally give that winning VC firm a 10-14% better price (i.e., the venture firm gets more equity for the same price, or the same equity for a lower price) than they were offering less notable venture firms."

Follow-up study should answer: Do startups that pay this premium have 10-14% better chance of success?

Beware of them.

Earthquake kills 5,000 - 20,000 in Bam, Iran.
In China 200 people die from toxic gas leaked from natural gas mine.
About 120 people die in a plane crash in Benin.
In California an earthquake kills 2 and a mud slide a dozen people.
Hundreds perish in Philippines in another mud slide.
US now has a confirmed case of mad cow disease.
And the wars in Afghanistan, Chechenia, Congo, Iraq, Israel, etc go on.

"And I was like, 'Darla, do you have any idea how easily the CTO of this company could be replaced by an infant? And no one would know.' *pause* ...I think she was just mad she hadn't thought of it first."
--A man talking on a cell phone at SFO

Only a few weeks ago I read a three-part series on Wal-Mart's negative impact on local economies on LA Times, that said Wal-Mart bullies its suppliers, decimates its competitors and pays peanuts to its employees. Just now I read a Fast Company article on Faustian bargain that suppliers make with Wal-Mart to their ultimate demise. Also tonight NOW charged Wal-Mart for abusing local governments by making its employees take government health care and shortcharging city halls promised sales tax revenues. Wasn't it only a short time ago when everybody was praising brisk efficiency of Wal-Mart? I wonder if all these attacks on the company is a coincidence? Or does our current recession have anything to do with it?

One interesting bit of history from the Fast Company article: A&P supermarket chains used to own 80% of the market at one point in the last century. Now there is no A&P. Wal-Mart may be a godzilla now but who knows how it will deal with changes in the world that cannot be handled by its only trick of driving prices down, down, down?

Please sign the petition to keep BART running to 3:00 AM if you live in SF Bay Area.

"The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned." -- T. S. Eliot

Thanks to the free tickets of ROTK thanks to my employer, now I have throbing headache from sensory overload. Other than that I will keep mum.

http://www.computerhistory.org/ is a place to visit if you're around Sillicon Valley. You get to see piles of junk, that had been once very expensive technological marvels, carefully polished, restored and displayed for the future generations. Put all of these beached whales together and your PC would beat them without breaking a sweat (if you allow slight exaggeration). Interestingly many early computers have names ending with AC.

In retrospect, PDAs were doomed from the start thanks to its lack of networking capability. Sure later on some limited network was added but by then it was too late -- cell phones with their ever present connections became more like PDAs. One can easily argue that the cell phone are the new computing paradigm (or the next phase of the PC revolution) because they are the first computers that emphasizes network over mere computation. Old Sun's slogan "The network is the computer" is now finally happening.

Okay the above paragraph is terribly unoriginal and past its sell-by-date. But I need to remind myself what I missed some years ago when I ditched Palm. I should've moved on to thinking about the cell phones as the authentic, legimate (inter-) personal computers instead of treating them as mere convinience and toys.

[Note to self: keep track of oovm and Michael Franz's work on mobile code that stems from slim binary AST]

http://openaugment.org/index.html [via Patrick Logan]

As a beneficiary of Kerr's vision of public higher education (and a former resident of a dormitory named after him), I should link to two obituaries from SF Chronicle and LA Times.

If somebody asks me "What is great about California?" my first answer is our superb public university system. This system is not just University of California -- it includes California State University (mostly) dedicated to undergraduate teaching and community colleges that admit all high school graduates and local residents and turn many to scholars worthy of UC. Millions of people with either low income or poor academic preparation receive affordable university education and job training at more than 100 community colleges throughout the state. And we owe much of this wonderful system to the late Clark Kerr.