Wednesday, December 07, 2011

The world's first open source 32-bit RISC processor on ASIC

The world's first open source 32-bit RISC processor on ASIC supporting Linux (OpenRISC) | No royalties
http://orsoc.se/openrisc1200-platform-2/
http://opencores.org/donation

Sunday, November 20, 2011

TED Talk: David S. Rose on Pitching to VCs

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_s_rose_on_pitching_to_vcs.html

What is the single most important thing VC looking for when you are pitching: You
What is VC looking in You:

  • Integrity
  • Passion
  • Experience
  • Knowledge
  • Skills
  • Leadership
  • Commitment 
  • Vision
  • Realism
  • Coachability
The Pitch
First 10 seconds grab their attention. The rest of the presentation has to go up from there.
Go through these:
  • Logical progression
  • Things I know or understand
  • Validators
  • Things I know are not true
  • Things I don't understand
  • Things that make me think (take me through it as a sixth grader without patronizing)
  • Internal inconsistencies (clarify if any)
Presentation Slides (Steve Jobs example)
  • Good: short bullet points
  • Better: just the headline
  • Best: only images
Presentation suggestions:
  • Use presenter mode in PowerPoint or another tool (to see a slide before/after and notes)
  • Use clicker
  • The handouts you give are not your presentation. The handout has to stay without presentation.
  • Don't read your speech
  • Never, ever look at the screen (keep the connection with the audience)

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Futurist Ray Kurzweil that made a number of accurate predictions about future says "We are only 8 doublings away from it [solar enegery] meeting our energy needs". In this TED talk he explains that 8 doublings is not too far considering the exponential growth of many technologies. Below is a screenshot of logarithmic Megawatts of photovoltaic production over 1975-2007.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJsHRltEVBc

Fixing dashed line bug when pasting Visio objects into Word

To avoid dashed lines converting to solid when pasting Visio 2003/2007 objects into Word for example, follow this registry workaround: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837294