On Oracle's legal battle with Google on Java!

Oracle's legal battle with Google brings the debate on U.S patenting system itself. It is ridiculous to patent a programming language architecture. Imagine the situation if Tony Hoare wants a share for using quick sort which is almost ubiquitous in databases or any large computing systems or UT Austin wants share for Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm from Cisco or Google or any other company that is using shortest path for any application. Although, I got a few patents and I completely understand that it is just a corporate tool to protect them in face of competition and it has no other purpose. I would always vote for eradicating this ridiculous system. Oracle's motivation is in fetching some free money from Google. Oracle really did nothing with the patents they had purchased from Sun and now they wanted to use those patents.

G+ and Facebook comments

G+ with their circle and hangout features provides more natural and richer expressiveness for social than Facebook. It is a clean UI design and a neat piece of software and has been distributed so far quite cleverly. Facebook will need to innovate and make their product better. It's not hard for G+ to gain market share using their existing products. I believe G+ will stay and will be more competitive soon in future. G leadership is one of the best among Tech corps.

Google's voice based search Impressive

It is impressive that Google is able to obtain high accuracy for frequently used search terms in voice based search. This is an excellent engineering work. This is not an easy task since the speech recognizer needs to be stable under various accents. It must have required a lot of training data. I believe that they probably used a large scale finite state transducer to map to the correct word. It will be interesting to know what are the main tricks they employed in order to get this high accuracy.

More Binary search variants

# Search a sorted array of unknown length
# Degree of difficulty: Easy

Assume: Exception will be thrown for array out of bound.

Descriptive answer:
First find the length.
Then do a normal bin search.

How to find the length?
Assume, length 2^n.
Find out valid k for which no exception is thrown.

Again binsearch between 0 and 2^k+1. Consider exception in the
termination criteria.

# Search a sorted array of distinct integer for A[i]=i

# Degree of difficulty: Easy.



def binsearch_var3(list):

    l=0

    u=len(list)-1

    while l<=u:

        m=(l+u)/2

        print '%d %d' %(m,list[m])

        if list[m]==m:

            return m

        elif list[m]            l=m+1

        else:

            u=m-1



    return -1

On auction

Here's Amy Greenwald's essay on Game Theory and the Design of Electronic Markets.

A news article on IBM

On IBM

What does it mean by MSFT's purchase of Skype?

MSFT is going through stiff competition from GOOG and APPL. It has been barely keeping a presence in Internet search industry, even a purchase of sinking YHOO search did not put them in a better shape yet. The PC industry trend is going downward. MSFT is still stronger there but the growth of the PC market itself has already been penetrated by the "Tablets and other devices". Moreover, MSFT has almost lost its presence in the Mobile market which is one of the highest growth segment. The only good news for the software giant is perhaps its growing influence in the games market. Anyway, lets analyze what could be the reasons for MSFT paying a large sum of money for VoIP service like Skype. Skype has 663 million registered users and very significant gross profitability. Skype contributed more net new minutes of international voice than the rest of the industry put together in 2010, according to Telegeography. Skype has never struggled to achieve growth, but its profitability has often been criticized. MSFT can potentially develop a technology with Skype to disrupt the smart phone mobile industry. However, this is an absolutely daunting task to challenge APPL and GOOG in mobile market. But, only MSFT posses the strength for that. However, they need to find one or multiple people who can make that happen. They have many talented leaders. But they need someone different and it is a hard business+technology problem.