I linked to this already, but it’s too good not to copy this para In a sense, I feel like the shanzhai are brethren of the classic western notion of hacker-entrepreneurs, but with a distinctly Chinese twist to them. My
China manufacturing
A couple of fascinating posts on Shenzen small manufacturing. Significantly, they do not just produce copycat phones. They make original design phones as well, as documented in this PDF (it is in Chinese, but the pictures are cool; the collage
Future of innovation
The company I work for now really does not care about IP. I design low-cost consumer products that get shipped offshore to be produced. The big deal is time-to-market and being first. After something is successful and commoditized, it will
Gödel’s Lost Letter
Gödel’s perspective in this letter is a refutation of the simplistic take on Turing’s proof seen so often in the computer science literature. In particular: After all, one would simply have to choose the natural number n so large that
Primitive recursion and transducers
11/23/2009 please see the updated version: here. Yet another version of the recursion/transducer paper . The main result is that simultaneous primitive recursion on strings corresponds to general products of state machines. Primitive recursion on strings is analogous to primitive
Deterministic multithreading
An interesting paper appearing in ASPLOS proceedings provides a “deterministic” locking method Kendo enforces a deterministic interleaving of lock acquisitions and specially declared non-protected reads through a novel dynamically load-balanced deterministic scheduling algorithm. The algorithm tracks the progress of each
IEEE’s war on science
I dropped my subscription to the IEEE “Digital Library” because I found that if I strayed from a very narrow range of areas, the IEEE wanted ridiculous fees for access to papers. For example, despite a subscription to the digital
parallel processing and bash reduce
It’s sad that after all this time, one can look at any random article on parallel programming and find some variation of: for i = 1 … n create thread i do something end for as if that was the
RTOS design and embedded system development
Real-time operating systems are either a solved problem or a backwater of engineering design. Threads, semaphores, mutexes, some basic I/O, priority scheduling all of this has been more or less standardized in the POSIX 1003.13 smaller profiles (51,52) for many
Mathematics education needs probability and art
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhMKmovNjvc&w=427&h=352] I agree with this but really, basic ideas of calc are simple and could be taught easily early on too. Found here. But this paper is also good and even though I don’t agree with it 100%, I think