I have recently to dig a bit in my “old” MBA Corporate Finance and Valuation classes because some of the fundamental skills were just…gone ;-)

I have also tried to find something “on-line” and I have found really a great website in this field: Damodaran Online.

Professor Aswath Damodaran is working at the New York University – Leonard Stern School of Business.

Mr. Damodaran is publishing an enormous, very useful and solid amount of teaching material, books and excel spreadsheets (MBA, Executive MBA, etc.) on his website for free. Really great!

His website received a “Best of the Web” award from Forbes.com.

Have a look at the sitemap, just to get a first impression of the huge quantity of published information!

I have more and more problems to find out what is the time difference with other countries and/or towns. Nick gave me a good site where it is very easy to bring your favorite (or most used) time zones:

timeanddate.com

I have to organize a telephone conference with Bangalore in India in the coming days and I have remarked that there is a time difference of …. 4.5 hours between Zurich and Bangalore!! I haven’t known that you can have half an hour of time difference :-) Quite crazy.

And no, it is *not* about offshoring, more the contrary :-)

[via BetaNews]

Interesting but tough move. Cisco doesn’t know this end-consumer market, the brand is not present in the head of these potential clients, and there is already a very tough competition in these markets. What is the expected differentiation?

In a move that will expand the company’s market reach, Cisco Systems has plans to start selling a line of consumer products including phones, radios and home theater devices, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. Cisco believes it can define itself by adding Internet connectivity to these devices, thus creating a new market.

[via BetaNews]

New version of Firefox available. Quite a lot of bugs corrected!

• Overlong page title causes hang on subsequent startups
• Selected images (from a selection of the document to print) are black
• Crash in browser when attempting to print a text selection
• fill/stroke shouldn’t destroy path
• Can’t copy and paste into the beginning of a line (Midas/designMode)
• XML object parsed from string from flash throws permission denied error when accessed
• Flashplayer 8 “Bad NPObject as private data!”
• Incorrect wrapping in RTL textarea with horizontal scrollbar
• Crash with moz-border-radius and small font-size
• Unable to create new XMLHttpRequests and DOMParsers from an XPCNativeWrapped window (e.g. in a Greasemonkey script)
• Security error with remote : can’t switch tabs if chrome has focus
• Clicking a partially off-screen link shouldn’t scroll the page
• If link target URL has non-ASCII char that is not encoded by UTF-8, the default file name is always escaped at “Save Link As…”
• Crash: array_unshift doesn’t handle holes properly [@ js_DeleteProperty – array_unshift]
• Crash involving autocomplete

[via Dragos and economist.com]

Yes, Google will “support” an existing (and well-known) project by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to produce a laptop for the poor, but so will many companies, and who wouldn’t? At one point, Mr Page mocked such inflated expectations by “announcing” Google Fastfood, a button in car dashboards that delivers instantaneous hamburgers.

Mr Page’s ambition started early. When he was 12, he read a biography of Nikola Tesla, a prolific inventor who never got credit for much, but is now a hero among geeks. Mr Page decided that he would be different: a great inventor and an acknowledged world-changer to boot. As the son of a computer-science professor, he channelled his energy into technology. By the time he was in college, Mr Page was building working inkjet printers out of Lego bricks—probably just to show that he could.

Playing God

If Google is a religion, what is its God? It would have to be The Algorithm. Faith in the possibility of an omniscient and omnipotent algorithm appears to be what Messrs Page and Brin have in common. It’s “in their DNA,” says Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist famous for investing early in both Yahoo! and Google. Whereas Yahoo! was started by two Stanford students who turned a hobby into a business, Google was started by two Stanford students who turned an intellectual obsession into a quest, says Mr Moritz. And what is that quest? Merely upstaging Microsoft would be almost banal. “We’re not trying to build a better operating system,” says Mr Schmidt (although that will not kill the rumour). Part of the plan is certainly “organising the world’s information”. But some people think they detect an even more grandiose design. Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, “they’re trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test”—in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.

[via wikipedia]

Sometimes, nature can be beautiful and … geometric.

Snow flakes highly magnified by a low-temperature scanning electron microscope (SEM).

[via BetaNews]

The first draft of the General Public License version 3 will be released on January 16 at a conference organized to help develop the standard. The First International Conference on GPLv3 will take place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Free Software Foundation said Wednesday.

The current version of the GPL is 15 years old, and does not address many of the issues that play a role in modern computing. Richard Stallman, founder of the FSF, first announced that it would be working towards a new version of the GPL in November. […]

Some issues to be undertaken by the new version of the license include protection from companies who attempt to sue GPL developers over patent issues, GPL software use on DRM-capable devices, and modifications to policies surrounding how GPL software can be used on the Internet.

[via OnlineInvestor]

Oups, on January 6, 2006, the capitalization of Google ($137 bn) was higher than the one of IBM ($134 bn), Cisco ($115 bn), PepsiCo ($100 bn). Google is now at the rank 15 from the biggest capitalization…. Still far away from MS ($286 bn) and GE ($375 bn), the biggest one. Just crazy, in such a short time.

The Apache Software Foundation released the version 1.0 of its J2EE certified server project called Geronimo on January 5, 2006. If you don’t this very central open source project, have a look at the Wikipedia’s description:

The Geronimo project is an open source application server developed by the Apache Software Foundation and distributed under the Apache license.

Geronimo is currently compatible with the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4 specification. When compared to other application servers such as JBoss, WebLogic and WebSphere, Geronimo’s most distinctive features are its:

• BSD-style license, which allows it to be modified for and embedded within commercial, closed source software (unlike the popular GPL and LGPL licenses)
• Modular GBean-based architecture, which allows users to remove unneeded services and build very lightweight configurations of the server
• Non-Profit ASF leadership, which provides legal protection, ensures stability across the loss of individual contributors and insulates the project from commercial conflicts of interest
• Diverse support community, in which companies compete freely and openly to provide services, with none enjoying any particular trademark advantage

Software consulting giant IBM has provided considerable support to the project through marketing, code contributions, and the funding of several project committers. In October 2005, IBM announced a free edition of its WebSphere application server suite based on Geronimo.

Other commercial supporters include AMD, Chariot Solutions, Simula Labs and Virtuas.

[via Matt Cutts]

Matt Cutts, if you don’t yet know him, is an employee of Google since January 2000 (Software Engineering). Matt is posting about a new data center Google is currently testing with some new algorithms. You can test it on http://66.249.93.104. This new data center is called Bigdaddy. This new stuff should be put in production in 1-2 months from now on. If you want to know if your Google position will change or not, have a look ;-)

Q: Do you expect this to become the default source of web results? How long will it take?
A: Yes, I do expect Bigdaddy to become the default source of web results. The length of the transition will depend on lots of different issues. Right now I’m guessing 1-2 months, but if I find out more specifics I’ll let you know.

Q: What’s new and different in Bigdaddy?
A: It has some new infrastructure, not just better algorithms or different data. Most of the changes are under the hood, enough so that an average user might not even notice any difference in this iteration.

Q: What else can you tell me about Bigdaddy?
A: In my opinion, this data center improves in several of the ways that you’d measure a search engine. But for now, the main feedback we’re looking for is just general quality and canonicalization.