I’m signed up to coach girls softball for my daughter’s team this spring. The season started three weeks ago, but we have been having record rainfall this month so nearly every practice has been rained out, along with all of the games.
Last Friday it mostly stopped raining for a while, but started up again and provided a spectacular double rainbow for most of our (damp) practice.
Google launched Google Finance today. Lots of people have written about it already, generally nonplussed. Here’s my quick reaction.
I like:
I wish for:
Technical charting and research reports are provided via Yahoo Finance, although the discussions are hosted at Google Groups.
Del.icio.us is testing out private bookmarks now.
I’ve been playing with a private instance of Scuttle ever since del.icio.us was purchased by Yahoo a few months back, but have continued using del.icio.us for posting public links anyway.
My del.icio.us links are automatically posted here (except when one end or the other is out of service for some reason), don’t know if that would include the private ones or not. Also don’t know exactly where the private bookmarks might be visible, aside from in one’s own account. I’ll have to give it a try.
An excellent guest lecture at Stanford’s EE380 sometime around February 2004 by Bob Colwell, chief architect of Intel’s IA32 microprocessors from 1992-2000. (90 minutes, Windows Media).
On the history of CPUs, chip processes, power and heat dissipation, Itanium IA64 versus IA32, target markets and economies of scale, FDIV, CPUID, lifetimes of architectures, organizational politics, learning to deal with branded consumer market rather than pure technology customers.
Architects must take the long view
Architect’s job is to make valuable products
- not clever microarchitectures or instruction sets
- not “blue crystals” - useless differentiating features
- look for intersection between what technology will be able to do and what buyers will want, then sell that vision to rest of company
This presentation was made a couple of years ago, in the middle of Pentium 4 and the early days of Centrino, Itanium was the path forward, Opteron was under the radar, and power dissipation and mobility were rising in perceived importance compared with higher clock speeds and CPU benchmarks alone.
It seems that a lot of the interesting content from last week’s analyst event at Google is in the speaker notes from the PowerPoint slide deck. Greg Linden and others have already pointed out the notes about Google’s storage plans (GDrive, Lighthouse on slide 19).
This afternoon there’s another blip on CNBC about accidental communications in the slides.
The previously undisclosed notes stated that Google’s core advertising business was expected to grow by nearly 60 percent to $9.5 billion in 2006 but that profit margins in its mainstay AdSense business could be squeezed this year and beyond.
I didn’t remember seeing a revenue forecast in there, so I went back and looked to see what it actually said (slide 14).
Our ads business for the moment is healthy and growing and we’re on a strong trajectory
projected to grow from $6bn this year to $9.5bn next year based purely on trends in traffic and monetization growth
I sometimes click on a random “deep” search result page to see if anything interesting turns up, because of the limitations of popularity and PageRank for some queries.
Paul Kedrosky points at a recent paper from CMU which suggests randomly mixing in some low ranking pages may improve search results over time.
Unfortunately, the correlation between popularity and quality
is very weak for newly-created pages that have few
visits and/or in-links. Worse, the process by which new,
high-quality pages accumulate popularity is actually inhibited
by search engines. Since search engines dole out
a limited number of clicks per unit time among a large
number of pages, always listing highly popular pages at
the top, and because users usually focus their attention on
the top few results, newly-created but high-quality
pages are “shut out.”
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