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I don't disagree, but I wasn't debating whether or not the external technology would look better on the balance sheet than the cash -- i.e., whether or not the deal would be done. I started with the assumption that the technology would be acquired, and then pointed out that when something is acquired most senior managers would like to have an asset on the balance sheet as a result, and so buying it from an external source, instead of generating it internally, is often the more attractive option.

It is of course true that the value of a purchased technology -- like that of most assets -- is subject to future writedowns in value. The active word being "future", as in, "some other guy's problem" -- or, at least, "a problem for another day", if it occurs at all. The expense of the internal R & D lab, though, is certain, and present today.

Viewed still another way, an internal R & D lab is a constant expense, from which one expects to get valuable technology assets which, at some time in the future, will have higher net present value than the money paid out -- but no guarantee you'll get them. ("Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. . . You can't simply say, 'Today I will be brilliant.'") External technology, however, requires no expense until it is needed/wanted, and someone else has taken the risk. (One can argue that, in a perfect market, the "someone else" would receive a return on the technology commensurate with the risk taken, but that's not always the way to bet.)

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

and off into the sunset...

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

—Immanuel Kant

"Your future will be ready in 20-50 years, same as last time, and before that, and before that."

True:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson
"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed."

"Maybe if you spent less time reading SF, and more reading TFS, you'd realize that this has no connection to any of your ideas about optical communication and/or computation. "

Maybe. But, sadly, I don't read much sci-fi these days (no time). About the only sci-fi thing I read in the past few months, and coincidentally related to Intel:
http://techresearch.intel.com/newsdetail.aspx?Id=30
"The Last day of Work" by Douglas Rushkoff"

While the comments are right that for whatever reason I was not paying attention that the solar cell was not on the chip, none-the-less, what about low-power operation is not related to the idea of chips that can run on incidental light? Such projects may take multiple innovations to make happen, as is common with fundamental research. The point is that with such chips, you can build a massive system cheaply because you just drop the chips on a surface without much infrastructure (putting them into a sphere might require glue though).

In any case, documenting previous discussions can potentially serve to invalidate later patents (and I'm past the limits of my confidentiality non-disclosure agreement on that time).

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu Wikiquote agrees; the handwriting interpretation is one I have heard before but is likely just a cynical satire upon the original context.

Because of their history of stealing other peoples work and calling it their own; where as Apple comes up with original designs

Fixed it for you.

FAIL "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." -Steve Jobs
FAIL "Good artists copy; great artists steal." -Steve Jobs

Because of their history of stealing other peoples work and calling it their own; where as Apple comes up with original designs

Fixed it for you.

FAIL "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." -Steve Jobs
FAIL "Good artists copy; great artists steal." -Steve Jobs

Hopefully it doesn't run Skype, since "I told you never to call me on this wall! This is an unlisted wall!"

"Now, we are entering a consolidation phase"?! No!

There are no indications that we are entering a consolidation phase.

640k... http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."

No, the tighter integration of fast memory with multicore CPU/GPU-like capacities will create the new killer apps we have not developed yet. IBM Watson in your pocket? Perhaps, but most likely the servies or device is not developed yet.

There are no indications that we are entering a consolidation phase!

I think I'm going to wait until the 5th edition American Heritage comes out in November. That dictionary is pretty much the standard for most professional writers and editors in the U.S

The American Heritage Dictionary has its origins in scenes like this:

Mr. Wolfe is in the middle of a fit. It's complicated. There's a fireplace in the front room, but it's never lit because he hates open fires. He says they stultify mental processes. But it's lit now because he's using it. He's seated in front of it, on a chair too small for him, tearing sheets out of a book and burning them. The book is the new edition, the third edition, of Webster's New International Dictionary, Unabridged, published by the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts. He considers it subversive because it threatens the integrity of the English language. In the past week he has given me a thousand examples of its crimes. He says it is a deliberate attempt to murder the --- I beg your pardon. I describe the situation at length because he told me to bring you in there, and it will be bad.

Nero Wolfe

The Usage Panel makes it explicitly a writer's dictionary:

For expert consultation on words or constructions whose usage is controversial or problematic, the American Heritage Dictionary relies on the advice of a usage panel. In its current form, the panel consists of 200 prominent members of professions whose work demands sensitivity to language. Present and former members of the usage panel include novelists (Isaac Asimov, Barbara Kingsolver, David Foster Wallace, and Eudora Welty), poets (Rita Dove, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver, and Robert Pinsky) playwrights (Terrence McNally and Marsha Norman), journalists (Liane Hansen and Susan Stamberg), literary critics (Harold Bloom), columnists and commentators (William F. Buckley, Jr., and Robert J. Samuelson), linguists and cognitive scientists (Steven Pinker and Calvert Watkins), and humorists (Garrison Keillor and David Sedaris).

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

The sun will go out one day too. Whatever will we do then?

It's good to have some foresight, but if you refuse to touch anything that might prove temporary, you refuse to touch anything at all.

In the long run, we're all dead. - John Maynard Keynes

I hate Illinois Nazis
    -Joliet Jake

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Blues_Brothers#.27Joliet.27_Jake_Blues

They used to run around naked all day. They still do, but they used to, too.

Schindler: There's no way I could have known this before, but there was always something missing. In every business I tried, I can see now it wasn't me that had failed. Something was missing. Even if I'd known what it was, there's nothing I could have done about it, because you can't create this thing. And it makes all the difference in the world between success and failure.
Emilie: Luck?
Schindler: War.

source

Never memorize what you can look up in books. --Albert_Einstein http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

I disliked history until I had a class in high school where a teacher went off curriculum and taught the class like a college class. No memorizing dates and such, they can be looked up in a reference, what we focused our time on was *why* that historic person made that particular decision at that time and place. What influenced or led to that decision? This is when history became interesting to me.

FWIW this was all pre-internet.

Never memorize what you can look up in books. --Albert_Einstein
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

Wrong.

"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again. "

- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

Computers are everywhere now, not every computer has to be a multi-purpose device. You want multi-purpose ? Buy a Mac. You want a handy, well designed device for playing games, browsing, etc. ? Buy an iOS device. This isn't rocket science.

iOS devices are made in the spirit of Raskin at Apple :

"Users do not care about what is inside the box, as long as the box does what they need done."
"As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product."

Humane interfaces for users, not technocrats.

As the saying goes, the two things you don't want to see being made are law and video games

An interesting and apt variation, but the old saying is

"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."

Though often attributed to Otto von Bismark, this is actually a quote from John Godfrey Saxe.

As the saying goes, the two things you don't want to see being made are law and video games

An interesting and apt variation, but the old saying is

"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."

Though often attributed to Otto von Bismark, this is actually a quote from John Godfrey Saxe.

as Hegel observed, those who know no history are doomed to repeat it

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". I believe that was Santayana.

What is it with press releases being passed off as news?

"News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity. ..." - Bill Moyers

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Moyers

Yes. China is unusual, historically, in that peasant protests have caused upheavals. More typically (and in particular in Europe, North America and India) the protests have originated and have been lead by the middle classes, who have the most to both lose and gain from a change in order.

As China becomes less of an agrarian society, the same pressures come to bear. Perhaps Zhou Enlai's famous and witty comment about the French Revolution will come to end sooner than expected.

I do criticize WikiMedia publications, but Wikiquote taught me an interesting thing. The oft-quoted statement is:

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

However, its authenticity is disputed. A similar statement was made in a 1914 address at the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America biennial convention.

Throw in $5 for Pizza Overhead for the kid.

'Pizza Overhead' is now on the list of Engineering costing extras. Much like Scotty's Rule of 4.

You know sometimes they call that insanity.

No, "they" don't. Albert Einstein never did. Only AA (and maybe Rita Mae Brown, though I think she used it after AA did) makes that claim, and AA is idiotic and full of shit. (http://www.hulu.com/watch/207926/family-guy-friends-of-peter-g :) http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2006/07/alcoholics-anonymous-doesnt-work.html ) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

"I would like -- and this would be the last and most ardent of my wishes -- I would like the last of the kings to be strangled by the guts of the last priest".

I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: "The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go."

A bit more important addition is more tracking : http://slashdot.org/submission/1581820/Flash-Player-103-adds-tracking

Its not at all clear that this is tracking. That term was introduced by the link you posted.

From the source quoted in the link you posted:

Media Measurement for Flash allows companies to get real-time, aggregated reporting of how their video content is distributed, what the audience reach is, and how much video is played.

How distributed, Audience numbers, and how much of the video is actually viewed seem pretty innocuous on their face.
The devil, of course. is in the details. It could be all server side, with no tracking per say, everything you could currently get from from a web server log (user agent ID, hit counts) plus additional info (such as percent/bytes transmitted) from the streaming engine.

But this is Adobe. So we are left with assuming evil intent or simple incompetence. My Hanlon Meter pegs both pins when Adobe is involved.

That's just it. The reasonable assumption is that there is no sense in implementing a new "feature" that doesn't tell companies anything they couldn't already know from their HTTP logs. There is already a plethora of tools for parsing HTTP logs and gleaning usage information. As a business decision it wouldn't make much sense for Adobe to create a "me too!" reinvention of that wheel; the resources would be better spent elsewhere. It's well-founded to assume until proven otherwise that this is a more intrusive method of tracking users.

A bit more important addition is more tracking : http://slashdot.org/submission/1581820/Flash-Player-103-adds-tracking

Its not at all clear that this is tracking. That term was introduced by the link you posted.

From the source quoted in the link you posted:

Media Measurement for Flash allows companies to get real-time, aggregated reporting of how their video content is distributed, what the audience reach is, and how much video is played.

How distributed, Audience numbers, and how much of the video is actually viewed seem pretty innocuous on their face.
The devil, of course. is in the details. It could be all server side, with no tracking per say, everything you could currently get from from a web server log (user agent ID, hit counts) plus additional info (such as percent/bytes transmitted) from the streaming engine.

But this is Adobe. So we are left with assuming evil intent or simple incompetence. My Hanlon Meter pegs both pins when Adobe is involved.

Mod parent up. The exact quote, and source:

"The tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available whenever you want it, which is why I'm already using a tablet as my everyday computer," Gates said. "It's a PC that is virtually without limits -- and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America."

- Bill Gates, November 12, 2001 when Microsoft was introducing Windows XP for Tablet PCs.

Alan Kay said The best way to predict the future is to invent it. I think it's clear that the current Apple under Steve Jobs is better than MS under Gates and Ballmer at delivering in this particular area.

Stephen Hawking

This is one of those cases where Google is your friend.

It's all explained here

I wish I hadn't commented earlier because I have mod points and you would definitely get one from me.

A large portion of purchasing is the trust aspect. Most of my job is Continuous Improvement and Quality Assurance. I work with new and existing vendors constantly trying to improve our products profitability and believe me the last thing you want is a flaky vendor who will not stand behind their product. A good example I have is a label vendor we had formerly used. Two years ago we decided to revamp the look of one of our lines of hand tools and chose to use a vendor we had been using for over a decade with no real problems due to their price and the performance of their sample labels in our application during testing. Almost immediately after receiving the first batch the labels began to fall off our products. Their first excuse was that during testing the tools we tested on had a different diameter handle then what production had. That was true, but subsequent testing showed the labels coming off irregardless or diameter. Next they blamed the finish, stating that it must have changed - it hadn't. And so on and so forth. Finally this past winter they said they would no longer accept any complaints about their labels nor would reimburse us for failing to adhere. In the meantime this is going on the salesperson for the vendor would directly contact the marketing department over these and other projects after being told expressly numerous times not to do so. they would also constantly be late with deliveries and any promises they gave could not be taken seriously. In the end we decided to pull all of the labels they produced for us from them. Even if they provided the labels for free the amount of time spent dealing with them and their performance did not make it worth while.

In the end, it's about total cost. Not just the actual price of the product but customer service and time spent dealing with issues as they arise is a huge factor. It reminds me of an old saying which has been attributed to John Ruskin: "It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do."

In which case, religious doubt is ALWAYS unfounded, else the religion falls. Faith in a miracle where scientific evidence is totally against you seems to be a central point of many religions.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e." --Kenneth Thompson

"creet"? That's even worse!

Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e."

--Kenneth Thompson

Most I hear from academics is that they got annoyed with Wikipedia once somebody removes their well explained text, around a subject they know a lot about, once too often.

This. I'm no researcher or academic, but I can't see putting the effort it takes to create a well researched, well written article about something I am an expert in, only to have some know-nothing come along and delete it for "not being notable", or worse, altering it so it doesn't conflict with their political views. For instance, if you were Richard Dawkins and you posted an article to wikipedia, only to have some creationist (aka, intelligent design proponent), piss all over it, what would you do?

As Bakunin said in "God and the State", rejecting all authority is foolish. Egalitarianism has its place, but applying it everywhere is madness.

Yes, well, what do you do when you hit your planned retirement age in 2009?

You put off retirement for a year to wait for the market to bounce back. Better yet, you sold in 2008 because you saw the bubble and were fearful when others were greedy.

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
-- Jack Valenti

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison

(just kidding. That's a joke, a reference to the oath scene in Kingdom of Heaven). I actually respect and like your licensing agreement a lot!.

Be without fear in the face of your enemies. Be brave and upright, that God may love thee. Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong; that is your oath. [Slaps Balian] And that is so you remember it. Rise a knight, and Baron of Ibelin.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." (actually that is a popular misquote, properly attributed to Evelyn Beatrice Hall). Our society in general, and academe in particular, could benefit from living up to that ideal.

Of course I have mixed feelings about the Texas legislature introducing this bill, because I strongly suspect their motives in doing so are rather the opposite of Hall's quotation. If they do the right thing for the wrong reason, should I approve?

We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!

Except he never actually even said that.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed

Daniel Solove makes a good case that imbalance between the power of the individual vs society (government and/or corporations) invariably precedes upheaval.

"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars - the rest I just squandered."
- George Best

It's usually misattributed to Benjamin Franklin, although the earliest verifiable use seems to be in Usenet. See here.

If they are over 9000 (*sigh*) years old

Really not sure why you are sighing.

I learned it by watching Vegeta!

I prefer this definition of the internet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

Text search "elders" and "internet" and you'll find the funny parts:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd

It's hilarious. Must see.