bsk's comments

bsk | 15 years ago | on: Goldman Sachs invests in Facebook at $50 Billion valuation

If you look at the market prices of newspapers, radios, TV stations, you'll see that they depend little on their earnings. The buyer pays for influence on the public opinion.

How much do you think will FB support be worth to GS during the next bailout? In understanding what are the common fears, arguments for and against. Even now GS manages many deals, parts of the society don't like - outsourcing, green house options trade, arab and chinese investors, etc.

bsk | 15 years ago | on: Goldman Sachs invests in Facebook at $50 Billion valuation

I'm suggesting GS would buy FB stock even if FB was loosing billions every year and there was no hope for future profits. In the same way GS and company are spending who knows how much on political campaigns and lobbing.

bsk | 15 years ago | on: Goldman Sachs invests in Facebook at $50 Billion valuation

If these were $50M and not $50B your analysis would've been correct. But with such enormous amounts, it's not about money anymore, it's about power. And Facebook has the power to understand and influence what ppl think.

bsk | 15 years ago | on: How the neo-medieval 21st century will be more like the 12th century

>> Your post, on the other hand, is reductive and boring.

So mean and bad mannered ;)

This guy, Parag Khanna, have been shown in school and Hollywood movies an extremely simplified model of the 19th and 20th centuries world. A model where all events are explained through the state politics and big business is ignored. Based on that stupid assumption he is saying that now the world is different, because there are powers outside the states.

bsk | 15 years ago | on: The Man Who Invented the Computer

Hmmmm, IMHO every statement here is incorrect.

Do you have a mathematical prove that ABC is not Turing Complete? I suspect that if one is sufficiently smart, he can implement a Turing machine on top of any 1930s, 1940s computer.

BTW I don't think 'General purpose computer' is used widely as equivalent of a 'Turing complete computer'.

From https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/John_Vincent_... : "In June 1941 Mauchly visited Atanasoff in Ames, Iowa for four days, staying as his houseguest. Atanasoff and Mauchly discussed the prototype ABC, examined it, and reviewed Atanasoff's design manuscript. Up to this time Mauchly had not proposed a digital computer. In September 1942 Atanasoff left Iowa State for a wartime assignment as Chief of the Acoustic Division with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory (NOL) in Washington, D.C. ... Mauchly visited Atanasoff multiple times in Washington during 1943 and discussed computing theories, but did not mention that he was working on a computer project himself until early 1944.

By 1945 the U.S. Navy had decided to build a large scale computer, on the advice of John von Neumann. Atanasoff was put in charge of the project"

Sounds to me like Mauchly just tried to steal Atananasoff ideas (with some success).

bsk | 15 years ago | on: The Man Who Invented the Computer

>> So useful, in fact, every digital computer you see in front of you is a direct descendant of Mauchly's labor, not Atanasoff.

This doesn't make any sense. Atanasoff had some pretty genius ideas and together with Berry built the first electronic digital computer. Mauchly visited their lab, got a ton of information on ABC and later built another electronic digital computer - ENIAC, which was generally ABC 2.0.

bsk | 15 years ago | on: North Korea Fires Rockets at South Korean Island

>>Russia in particular, a backwards agrarian empire, was about the last place he thought would be ready for it. And turned out he was right.

Hmmmm, communist regime turned the agrarian empire into world's 2nd industrial power, that won the biggest battles in human history and was the 1st to send robots and humans to space.

bsk | 15 years ago | on: Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

It was the first cheap computer. Cheap enough for the unwashed masses in US. And tablets like this one are the first computers cheap enough for billions of ppl in Asia, Africa and Latin America. And for many, many, many other purposes.

90% of the time innovation in IT is kick-started by cheap knockoffs ;-)

bsk | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Seriously, what's wrong with HTML tables?

Here are a couple reasons:

- At one point the design becomes a nightmare to maintain. I've worked on some web apps, where we had pages with 15 levels deep tables in tables in tables ...

- Separating the semantic information in .html from the design in .css. Can help with SEO, screen readers, cashing.

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