A supply of tea with milk and sugar would be nice.  If it is tea I
really like, I like it without milk and sugar.  With milk and sugar,
any kind of tea is fine.  I always bring tea bags with me, so if we
use my tea bags, I will certainly like that tea without milk or sugar.

If I am quite sleepy, I would like two cans or small bottles of
non-diet Pepsi.  (I dislike the taste of coke, and of all diet soda;
also, there is an international boycott of the Coca Cola company for
killing union organizers in Colombia and Guatemala; see
killercoke.org.)  However, if I am not very sleepy, I won't want
Pepsi, because it is better if I don't drink so much sugar.

There’s more. A lot more.

Facebook engineers and analysts tap the company’s Hadoop clusters via a SQL-like query language known as Hive. [..]

Separate from its Hadoop work, Facebook built Cassandra, a distributed database also based on a piece of Google’s backend. Google uses a proprietary distributed database known as BigTable that runs atop the Google File System (GFS) system, and it published a paper on the technology in 2006. In echo of the Hadoop project, Facebook leaned on the paper in building Cassandra.

But Cassandra isn’t a pure BigTable mimic. Facebook applied BigTable’s data model to the Dynamo distributed storage system developed by Amazon for its S3 storage service, part of the retailer’s increasingly popular Web Services cloud. Cassandra’s authors included Avinash Lakshman, who helped build Dynamo at Amazon. Register

The Tile-Gx chips have 64-bit processing on their cores, and include floating point math instructions that allow a floating point operating to be done in five cycles instead of hundreds of cycles when done in software.

This is, believe it or not, important for PHP support, Ihab Bishara, director of cloud computing applications at Tilera, tells El Reg.

The Tile-Gx chips might support 64-bit processing, but physical memory addressing on the chips is either 39-bit or 40-bit, which works out to either 512GB or 1TB of maximum main memory. Each core burns less than a half watt of power. From the Register

All that work – to make PHP run faster and use less power.

We’ve heard three stories in which lead investors bailed on rounds after term sheets were signed.

 

The first upset came last week from a WeWork Labs company. The startup’s lead investor pulled out of a $500,000 round.

Another entrepreneur raised between $3 and $4 million and thought he was in the clear. The money was invested, but there was a draw-back clause on the term sheet.  The investor retracted all of the money 30 days later.

Today, we heard from Rand Fishkin, cofounder of SEOMoz, who had $24 million taken back after term sheets were signed.

Fishkin says “everything was signed” with his investor in August

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/vcs-money-drying-up-2011-8?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=10+Things+In+Tech+You+Need+To+Know&utm_campaign=Post+Blast+%28sai%29:+10+Things+You+Need+To+Know+This+Morning#ixzz1X1sq9ZeI

People tend not to note the non-binding nature of term sheets – non-binding on one side.

ASUSTeK started out making the simple circuit boards within a Dell computer. Then ASUSTeK came to Dell with an interesting value proposition: ‘We’ve been doing a good job making these little boards. Why don’t you let us make the motherboard for you? Circuit manufacturing isn’t your core competence anyway and we could do it for 20% less.’ 

Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. On successive occasions, ASUSTeK came back and took over the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. However the next time, ASUSTeK came back, it wasn’t to talk to Dell. It was to talk to Best Buy and other retailers to tell them that they could offer them their own brand or any brand PC for 20% lower cost.

From Forbes:

Apple’s initial legal victory over rival HTC in a patent infringement suit could pave the way for Apple to collect high royalties from devices running Google Android, according to one analysis.

Mike Abramsky with RBC Capital Markets believes that Apple has the upper hand over HTC, which is a smaller handset maker with a limited portfolio of intellectual property. As such, Apple could potentially push for an injunction and ask the U.S. International Trade Commission to bar the import of HTC handsets.

Instead, Abramsky believes it’s more likely that Apple will try to establish a high royalty precedent on Android devices. He said the iPhone maker could garner a deal that’s similar to or even higher than the $5 per unit that Microsoft collects on HTC Android devices.

From Apple Insider

$5 a unit. Wow.  But Apple has some remarkable technology covered by the patents at issue. For example

When the handler 44 requests a facsimile transmission, for example, the real-time function block issues commands to start the real-time engine and install the various modules that are needed for it to function as a virtual telephone. Binary facsimile image data is transferred to the real-time engine via the FIFO buffers, where it is encoded as PCM data which is further encoded according to the transport medium over which it is to be transmitted. If the adapter is connected to a telephone line, for example, these signals can be encoded as 16-bit pulse-code modulated (PCM) samples, and forwarded directly to the adapter 36 via the serial driver 42 . Alternatively, if the transport medium is an ISDN line, the modem signals are encoded as mulaw-companded 8-bit PCM signals. The different types of encoding are stored in different tables, and the appropriate one to be used by the real-time engine is installed by the real-time function block during the initial configuration of the engine and/or designated by the API 48 at the time the command to transform the data is issued.

Too stunning. There should be a Nobel prize in there – at least. Take a look.

So representatives of Athenahealth approached the major health insurance companies and proposed a new payment model: Instead of paying for professional services, the insurers would pay a global fee for all care — hospital care, physician care, lab care — so that if Athenahealth could keep the mother healthy, lower the rate of complications and therefore lower costs, it would be able to more than cover the cost of the additional upfront preventive care, benefit financially and in the process drive down the total amount of money the insurers had to pay out. A win-win for all. “The insurers said, ‘Look, we completely agree with your math,’” Park said. “‘We agree with the five-year study that shows this model will work, but we can’t rewire our systems to pay you differently from everyone else. We have to keep paying you on a per-service basis, even though we completely believe that this lowers cost for higher value.’

Think about how much the insurance companies have invested in information technology and about how rigid and fragile the result.

This is one of my big beefs with the way we think about capitalism in this country: We fundamentally support what I call incumbency capitalism. We don’t support innovation capitalism. What’s the difference? Every rule around tax credits in the oil industry is set up by, and influenced by, the lobbyist from the oil industry. The royalty rates aren’t free auctions for offshore drilling; they are influenced by the oil industry. Depreciation policy is incumbency policy meant to benefit large capital expenditures instead of R&D investments. So, we can easily change a few of the rules, encourage more R&D and maybe less capital investment or other things. And almost all policy, because it is influenced by incumbents—and not just in oil and gas, but in nuclear, in solar, in wind—is influenced and shaped by incumbents. And I call that incumbency capitalism.”

—Vinod Khosla, Managing Partner, Khosla Ventures

Comcast demanded a “recurring fee” from Level 3 “to transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast’scustomers who request such content,” Thomas Stortz, the chief legal officer for Level 3, said in a statement Monday afternoon, seemingly alluding to the Netflix service. The action “threatens the open Internet,” Mr. Stortz added.

Comcast did not immediately respond to the company’s claims. A spokesman for Netflix declined to comment.

The clash appeared to expose a new battleground in the delivery of Internet video. Companies like Netflix, which streams films and TV episodes to millions of paying customers, are encroaching on the terrain of incumbents like Comcast, which is eager to protect both its subscription television business and its emerging video-on-demand business

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/netflix-partner-says-comcast-toll-threatens-online-video-delivery/

So I’d suggest that WIPO start examining how the copyright system might enable and support the development of robust, efficient copyright information systems that everyone – owners, users, governments, and the public – can use to facilitate frictionless transactions related to copyrighted works. There are many possible ways to accomplish this. It should be open to all kinds of legal mechanisms – such as voluntary agreements, public-private partnerships, regulations and even statutory amendments – whatever might help create systems that serve the public interest in making copyright more accessible, more sensible and more effective in the Networked World.

That ends my brief presentation to the technocrats in the room. Coming from Microsoft and being here at Stanford in the heart of Silicon Valley, let me now distill it for those of you who are not only technocrats but also techies. Looked at in terms of copyright, the Digital World was perceived as a bug. The ease of copying led to rampant infringement that harmed creators. In contrast, again looked at in terms of copyright, I submit that the Networked World should be embraced as a feature. The ability to create new works and share them with a vast audience across a multitude of platforms via a network creates great opportunity for creators.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6560 http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/tom-rubin

via Lessig

And two quotes from Mark Twain.

Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.