Category: Uncategorized

The Underground Railway from Pakistan to Palestine ?

The Underground Railway from Pakistan to Palestine ? Where would you get off ? The American Conservative [via Jorn] interviews Norman Mailer as a “Left-Conservative”. [Quote] The notion that man is a rational creature who arrives at reasonable solutions to knotty problems is much in doubt as far as I?m concerned. [Unquote]

Motivation

Motivation. Not his main point, but an interesting (possibly apochryphal ?) story from Cringley. [Quote] If you are in the asynchronous logic field, you know who Rajit is. He had a knack for the stuff, that’s for sure. He understood it in a native way that nobody else did at the time, which made chip design, if not effortless for him, say a thousand times easier than it was for the otherwise equally smart guy down the hall. Rajit was a one-man asynch design lab, and both Intel and Sun wanted very much to hire him, though neither ever did. Both companies were unable or unwilling to provide the kind of motivation Rajit required — cats and chocolate. Most likely, they couldn’t even imagine an engineer unmotivated by stock or money, which are the normal currencies of recruitment. Cats and chocolate would have been cheaper, of course, but they didn’t bother to learn enough about the guy to know how to attract him. Today Rajit — smart as ever — teaches at Cornell, which must be chockablock with cats and chocolate. Or maybe it has just the normal levels of each and an absence of crazy product deadlines. [Unquote] [Main topic is chip speeds and the control of the PC marketplace.]