The Organic brew; London, pakistan, photography, travel, poetry & a general acerbic sentiment.

Atic gets ready for chip challenge – SEMIS in the ME

// March 4th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech

An interesting article on the scale of ambitions in Abu Dhabi, of particular import given that a seemingly non-profit maxizing firm (in this case ATIC) intends to compete in an industry which almost tragio-comic boom/bust cycles and margin pressures (even for the likes of TSMC, regardless what FT says).

“For the next three years we’re going to invest whatever it takes to build this company up,” Mr Ajami. “I want to make sure that Globalfoundries grows faster than any other global foundry [chip manufacturing] company in the world.”

Mr Ajami’s financial targets are simply revenues – “top line in year one and top line in year two”, as he puts it.

“The core theme of the Chartered acquisition was really customers, and it is really the driving force behind that acquisition,” he says.

via FT.com / Companies / Industrial Goods – Atic gets ready for chip challenge.

Charlie Brooker | iPad therefore iWant? Probably. Why? -The Guardian

// February 6th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech

Absurdly, Apple keeps trying to pretend it'll make your life more efficient. Come off it. It's an oblong that lights up. I'm sick of being pitched to like I'm a one-man corporation undertaking a personal productivity audit anyway

via Charlie Brooker | iPad therefore iWant? Probably. Why? iDunno | Comment is free | The Guardian.

On software engineering…

// January 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. Much of the complexity that he must master is arbitrary complexity.

-F. Brooks

How to Write a Spelling Corrector (incidentally, how cool is python!)

// January 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech

import re, collections

def words(text): return re.findall('[a-z]+', text.lower())

def train(features):

model = collections.defaultdict(lambda: 1)

for f in features:

model[f] += 1

return model

NWORDS = train(words(file('big.txt').read()))

alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'

def edits1(word):

splits     = [(word[:i], word[i:]) for i in range(len(word) + 1)]

deletes    = [a + b[1:] for a, b in splits if b]

transposes = [a + b[1] + b[0] + b[2:] for a, b in splits if len(b)>1]

replaces   = [a + c + b[1:] for a, b in splits for c in alphabet if b]

inserts    = [a + c + b     for a, b in splits for c in alphabet]

return set(deletes + transposes + replaces + inserts)

def known_edits2(word):

return set(e2 for e1 in edits1(word) for e2 in edits1(e1) if e2 in NWORDS)

def known(words): return set(w for w in words if w in NWORDS)

def correct(word):

candidates = known([word]) or known(edits1(word)) or known_edits2(word) or [word]

return max(candidates, key=NWORDS.get)

Oh man, try implementing this is C++

via How to Write a Spelling Corrector.

Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man

// November 2nd, 2009 // 4 Comments » // Tech

I love great advertisers (and i mean the REALLY) great ones for being able to step back for a moment and re-think the ordinary, the obvious, just like brilliant photographers who make the mundane extra-ordinary. An interesting message, and one that should be for keeps.

enjoy

Nobody can live down a bluetooth headset. Not even Mr Pitt.

// July 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech

There is a guy at my local indoor-climbing center who wears a bluetooth headset whilst rock climbing. Of course, he looks like a perfect moron. How he expects to be able to speak on the telephone whilst he is hanging for dear life, also of course remains an abstraction.
You can see that blinking blue light in his ear from a mile though.

Now its a widely accepted fact that nobody can pull off a bluetooth headset and maintain their dignity, much less their humanity – if the future is blue blinking LEDs, I dont want it. Not even Brad Pitt as we are now shown..

but he’s less understanding of people who want to answer urgent cell phone calls during movies.

“It may be a brief interruption — just a few seconds — but what if someone sitting near you is trying to make a decent bootleg? Did you ever think of that? Now all those street-corner copies are permanently defiled by your so-called ‘emergency,’ ” he writes. “Don’t be so damn selfish.”

via CNN

Tech: Free the future of the internet

// July 2nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech

Over at the FT’s blogs (which have perhaps the most apathetic readership on the internet, a comment is a true event) is a soggy debate over Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. �Basic thesis (I havent read the book yet :): that the low marginal price of content delivery on the internet means that companies can, and must give away products. Either that, or �:

Many internet companies employ freemium, from Skype, which charges customers to make computer-to-phone calls, to companies that charge for more versatile versions of software. Many of them, however, are still experimenting to see what, if anything, works.�

I agree, and this is actually the core of the book. When I refer to a �new economic model�, I�m not referring to slapping advertising against stuff, which dates back centuries. Instead, I�m talking about the underlying economics that allow Freemium to work. Freemium is the inversion of the traditional free sample. Rather than giving out few percent of your product away for free as marketing, hoping to sell the rest, you give away most of your product for free as marketing, hoping to sell to a minority. This is only possible in the online realm, where the marginal costs of production and distribution are close enough to zero to �round down.�

I know we all want to sell books – thankfully for Chris, we arent giving those away free yet- but slightly skeptical this is an unprecedented business model (despite the new web 2.0 compliant name). And its not ‘free’ if you are couching it in an economic vocabulary. Take skype: free skype to skype calls? sure, but thats because the traffic is routed over the internet directly to the other client. Free? not particularly, since you pay for the bandwidth. The illusion is perpetuated because superficially you arent paying the company that provided you the client, and THAT is because of competition, not low marginal costs as is Chris’ argument. Skype knows that software over the internet has such low barriers to entry, that if they dont do it – competition will pretty much automaticlaly bid down prices to zero.

Sky (here in the UK) provides satellite cable TV, and they are by far the largest player. The marginal cost of providing an additional home with the service IS next to zero (we ignore hardware, as above), but has that hasnt translated into them giving it away free precicely because that isnt the driver here. Its competition. And they have next to none.