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More China Manufacturing
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 personal favorite shanzhai story is of the chap who owns a house that I’m extraordinarily…
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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 above is ganked from the PDF). These original phones integrate wacky features like 7.1 stereo…
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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 be copied and driven to the lowest possible cost. Thus, there is no longer a…
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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 when the machine does not deliver a result, it makes no sense to think more…
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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 recursion on integers where we define f(0,x) = g(x) and f(n+1,x) = h(f(n,x),x). In strings the…
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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 library, I was not entitled to papers in power engineering. Now I find that the…
