Author Archive: Peter S Magnusson
Gas prices will stay below $3 (redux)
On Friday, oil prices fell to below $30, the lowest in 12 years. Wall Street journal obviously had an immediate explanation: turmoil in the Chinese market and an expected increase in Iranian crude production: Decade after decade, business press invariably have just the right explanation for market movements – as long as they get to sleep …
Shakuntala Devi – the Human Computer
This was originally posted as an answer on Quora to the question “How did Shakuntala Devi mentally calculate the 23rd root of a 201-digit number correctly?“. Devi was a very talented mental calculator, but by no means the extreme prodigy that she has been made out to be in the media, and she certainly couldn’t …
Joined Snapchat as VP Eng
Yes indeed, as WSJ reported today (“Snapchat Poaches Google Veteran in Engineering Push”), I have recently joined Snapchat. This is a great place. Hope to get some bandwidth to share thoughts on new generation of communication. For now, I want to link to two items that might interest anybody interested in why I joined: Evan …
Happy Yule
A youngster corrected me the other day when I said “Merry Christmas”. He looked at me firmly and replied, “Happy Holidays”. (Actually, this happened a year ago, but some blog postings take a while to finish.) Most years here in the US there’s a public squirming about how to manage both the culturally inclusive nature …
Joined Google, working on the “cloud”
Just a quick status update. A few months ago I started talking to Google about their “cloud” strategies. Today I’m starting week five as a Googler, working on just that. Can’t say much just yet, but it’s pretty cool. Stay tuned.
The Internet Revolution – History and Significance
Today I needed access to some old files. I had an old tar file from around 1998 that held several gigabytes of files. It came from large Unix servers, and for many years I had no easy access to it’s contents – Windows would cringe at trying to access the large number of files (43502 …
Joined Conformiq as VP of Marketing
(Update: left in September.)
Wind River (Intel) acquires Virtutech
Well, it’s official now: Wind River acquires Virtutech, the company I founded in 1998 together with a brilliant team of four co-researchers from SICS – Bengt Werner, Andreas Moestedt, Magnus Christensson, and Fredrik Larsson. Simics will live on, but that wraps up Virtutech, and thus the end of an almost 19 year long project. So, …
Why are there 5280 feet in a mile?
The original Roman mile was 1000 paces (milia passuum), or 5000 feet. The modern mile was defined as 5280 feet under Queen Elizabeth at the end of the 16th century in order to reconcile multiple discordant measurement systems already in wide use. In particular, it was convenient to make it an even multiple of the …
The Fourth Wave
Some 4000 Google I/O attendees gave a standing ovation at the end of this morning’s keynote pre-launch of “Google Wave”. Google I/O attracts a reasonably savvy crowd, and this was not a Reality Distortion effect. What Google announced this morning is significant. It is the first candidate killer application for the Fourth Wave of Computing. …
Peter S Magnusson 