Posts Tagged ‘Silicon Valley’
Sunday, December 31st, 2017
Here are some random predictions for 2018 and beyond. No rhyme or reason to the list, but just a zany way to usher in the New Year.
1) Autonomous vehicles will rule the roads, after the requisite number of high-profile crashes.
2) Electric vehicles will shut down the power grid, precipitating wholesale revolt from those who cleave to their combustion engines.
3) Problems with returning online purchases will move legions of shoppers back to brick and mortar retail.
4) The piles of stuff due to #3 will continue to grow, further increasing the National Crisis of Clutter.
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Tags: Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, LED, Penmanship, Silicon Valley
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Thursday, March 10th, 2016
You would probably have learned more about Ajoy Bose by reading his biography than by attending Jim Hogan’s gentle exercise in collegiality on Tuesday night, March 1st, in Silicon Valley. The conversation between these two giants of EDA, hosted by EDAC as part of DVCon week, was consistently unstructured, whimsical and seemingly without outline.
The next day, I sat in a coffee shop and struggled to find a handle with which to write a coherent summary of the previous night’s random access memory album. But that handle would not reveal itself.
Then I happened to glance over to a nearby table where another caffeine addict was buried in a book: The Man Behind the Microchip. I asked the addict who exactly was the subject of the book and the answer came back: Robert Noyce.
So Robert Noyce is the man behind the microchip, I pondered. The only man behind the microchip? Like Steve Jobs invented the iPod/iPad/iPhone? Or Thomas Edison invented the electric light?
No wonder, I realized, it was hard to get a handle on the previous night’s Hogan/Bose interview. They didn’t do anything. Robert Noyce did it all. And without help. Hogan and Bose did nothing, and ergo had nothing to offer their audience.
These two were not part of a vast conspiracy of contributors, all adding their particular drips and drops of innovation into the trickle of technology, that rolled into a small creek of creativity, that ran into a moderate-sized stream of science-turned-engineering, which poured into a roaring river of real change, which crashed into a seething sea of twenty-first century digital life.
Of course, that’s nonsense. Robert Noyce did not do everything, and Hogan and Bose did not do nothing.
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Tags: Ajoy Bose, Atrenta, Bell Labs, Cadence, Dallas Cowboys, DVCon, EDAC, Gateway Design Automation, Graham Bell, Hermann Gummel, IIT, India, Interra, Jim Hogan, John Bardeen, Jon Gertner, Larry Nagler, Leslie Berlin, Levy Stadium, Mike Hackworth, Robert Noyce, Roger Staubach, Silicon Valley, Spyglass, Steve Jobs, Steve Szygenda, Synopsys, Thomas Edison, UT Austin, William Shockley
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Wednesday, April 22nd, 2015
If there’s something missing in your personal or professional knowledge of Moore’s Law, you should have spent 5 hours at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on April 17, 2015, although even then you might not have learned anything new. For people in technology, seriously, what more is there to know?
The ‘law’, penned by Gordon Moore and published in an Electronics article on April 19, 1965, was based on his many years’ experience in the nascent-to-ferocious semiconductor industry, and has since been interpreted, re-interpreted, mis-interpreted, and zealously lionized – both the law and the man – over the last 50 years. Which brings us back to April 17th and the 3-part program at the CHM.
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Tags: Arnold Thackray, Cal Tech, Carver Mead, Computer History Museum, David Brock, Fairchild, Gordon Moore, Intel, John Hollar, Linus Pauling, Moore's Law, San Jose State University, Silicon Valley, The Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, U.C. Berkeley, William Davidow, William Shockley
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Thursday, January 29th, 2015
Despite the international hype over the rich and famous of Silicon Valley, the truth is far less glamorous. In fact, I would estimate that for every gazillionaire that’s celebrated for having “won” in the tech sector in Northern California, there are a good half million people behind him or her that have not. That have not “won” big, but have simply showed up for work each and every day in the Valley, labored away intelligently year after year, and lived out lives of quiet contribution — not quiet desperation — implementing ideas, engineering better bits of this system or that, and helping to direct business decisions and market strategies deep within the organizations that reside here.
These are not the people who are in the headlines of the lay press, the business press, or the lead story in tech pubs. And even though it seems these lesser heroes are supposed to read the stories in the press and pubs about their more successful colleagues, they probably don’t. They don’t believe the hype. They don’t believe Steve Jobs invented the iPhone. They don’t believe the streets of Silicon Valley are paved in gold.
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Tags: Apple, EDA, Silicon Valley
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Thursday, December 18th, 2014
This time of the year is awash in magic. If you want to be part of that, unlocking more of your own internal magic, you have three choices.
Numbers 1 and 2 reside in San Mateo on the outskirts of Silicon Valley, while Choice Number 3 requires you be a wizard, that you find Platform 9-3/4 at Kings Cross Station in London, take the Express Train from there to the shores of a mysterious loch in Scotland, and study for years under the tutelage of Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. An interesting experience from start to finish, no doubt, as Dumbledore is “the epitome of goodness and knows just about everything.”
At first glance, Choices 1 and 2 may not seem quite as thrilling, but they’re certainly more accessible to both muggles and wizards alike. Choice Number 1 can be found at 1700 South El Camino Real in San Mateo, Suite 100, and boasts the legendary (and late) Dale Carnegie as Honorary Headmaster. If you don’t recognize the name, here’s some help from Wikipedia: “Dale Harbison Carnegie (1888 to 1955) was an American writer and lecturer and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills.”
His legacy to the American business community included numerous self-help books and a series of schools where you can still learn the skills Dale Carnegie codified: How to believe in yourself, channel your inner magic, and emerge a self-actualized leader full of confidence and vim.
If Dale Carnegie seems a bit too mid-century modern here in the 21st, or you weren’t born a wizard, then Choice Number 2 pushes far forward as the best of the three. Choice Number 2 also includes a school and a headmaster, but only requires a 6-week commitment and a few thousand dollars to produce an outcome that’s positively exhilarating compared to the calm, clean-cut cache of the Carnegie course.
Housed in an 8-story building, with classrooms at street level and dorm rooms in the floors above, Choice Number 2 is Draper University at 44 East Third Avenue in San Mateo. The Headmaster is the founder of the Academy, Timothy Cook Draper, and believe me when I say he is neither as enigmatic as Professor Dumbledore nor as dispassionate as Dale Carnegie.
Instead, Tim Draper is straightforward, passionate about his mission, and clearly willing to risk his reputation on the idea that he can turn anyone into a hero. That his school can release the inner magic of self-confidence that produces self-actualized, aggressive, out-reaching, success-seeking, push-the-envelope heroes capable of outpacing any Hot Wizard from Hogwarts or Cool Cat from Carnegie.
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Tags: Albus Dumbledore, Dale Carnegie, Draper University, Hogwarts, Magic, Silicon Valley, Tim Draper
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Monday, February 3rd, 2014
Yesterday was awash in poignancy. If you’re online a lot, you learned around noon California time that actor Philip Seymour Hoffman had died suddenly in NYC of an apparent overdose. The news really gave pause, particularly because it turns out he was so much younger than he looked, because the young people in my life really thought him a great actor and were stunned by his death, and because it gave evidence, yet again, that people of fame and legendary talent are also often so completely human and frail.
And, I was a big fan of Amy Winehouse. My friends and family knew that about me. When she died 3 years ago, I actually received condolence notes because they knew how I felt about her voice and her talent, and they were sad about it for me. Oddly, we somehow feel very personally connected to famous people. We feel we really know them, how strange. People wept for John Kennedy, for Abraham Lincoln, for Paul Walker, for Heath Ledger, for Marilyn Monroe, yet I’m pretty sure that most of those grieving never actually met the person they mourned.
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Tags: Aart de Geus, Amy Winehouse, Cadence, Jacques Benkoski, Mike Fister, Monterey Design, Peyton Manning, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Silicon Valley, Super Bowl, Synopsys, Tom Quan, Wally Rhines
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