Maxwell's son knighted

Our students' former classmate and the son of Mary Maxwell - one of the famous women who gave their names to the Maxwell-Dworkin building at Harvard (is she related to James Clerk Maxwell?) was knighted by the British queen.

He can put KBE - Knight Commander of the British Empire - after his name. However, her majesty did not allow Bill to use "Sir" before his name because he's one of the rebel "Americans" who stole a colony from the British empire. Congratulations anyway! Also, Microsoft Windows may now be called Windows KBE, not to be confused with KDE. ;-)



Incidentally, Samsung Electronics Company's CEO Dr. Hwang is giving a talk in Maxwell-Dworkin today (or a nearby building) and all participants will receive a 256 MB USB flash memory or something like that. ;-) Oh no, it's not in Maxwell-Dworkin; Samsung just pays the shuttles between Maxwell-Dworkin and the Burden Auditorium (HBS).

... Hwang has made a good job. He showed ...

• how Samsung doubles the density of their memory every 20 months
• now they're working with tiny 16GB memory chips, and in 2007 he predicts a 200GB chip
  
• how their revenue equals the revenue of 3 next competitors combined
• their profit is however three times the profit of 3 competitors combined
• the annual revenue per an employee is almost 1 million dollars
• memory chips are more important than microprocessors, and therefore you should prefer Samsung over Intel
  
• the annual increase of the profit is roughly 60% while other companies sink
  
  
  
  
  
• investment and risky decisions were made even during the recession
• the competitors can't compete and most of them become Samsung's customers anyway
• one of the troubling statements by Hwang was that he believed that the size of the atom was 5 nanometers ;-) - this is what they use to calculate the limits of the semiconductor technologies (thanks to Quantoken for having corrected a typo)
  
• the memory chips will be a part of all gadgets, and all electronic devices will become a part of the universal "Smartphone"
  

Unfortunately, they heavily underestimated the number of people who would attend, and therefore they did not have enough flash drives for everyone. Their annual profit of order 20 billion dollars did not help, and therefore - despite the impressive high-tech video at the beginning - I recommend all the readers of my blog to sell their Samsung stock. ;-)

Incidentally, the audience (400 people) were mostly Asian people - a preview how the scientific and technological conferences and the developed world in general will look like in a few decades.