When I made the short study about finance and petroleum industries, my main point was to insist on the fact that regulation is much needed for this world. But it appeared that this study was bringing much evidence that money is energy. So I am going to make a shorter post on this particular subject out of the previous post.
Behind the answer ”money is energy”, the question is naturally ”what is money?”

Let’s have a look at the 2007 revenues per employee and profits per employee of a few top firms. Notice 2007 is the year before the global crisis. The aim is to see whether this tells us something about the current state of the world and namely whether this tells us something about energy and finance troubles. The companies are all chosen in the Fortune 50, except Google (150th) that I wanted to include because it is a very interesting case and because it is self-proclamed world white knight (cf ‘Do not be evil’ motto). Here are the companies with their industry:

• Exxon Mobil (Petroleum refining)
• McKesson (Wholesalers: Health Care)
• Goldman Sachs Group (Finance (1) )
• Lehman Brothers Holdings (Finance (1) )
• Google (Internet Services and Retailing)
• General Motors (automotive)
• Microsoft (Computer Software)
• Boeing (Aerospace and Defense)
• Verizon Communications (Telecommunications)
• IBM (Information Technology Services)
• Wal-Mart (General Merchandisers)

Gosh, I thought that, nowadays, writing flight code was constraining. Here is what you had to do to write code in the days. I would not say “It was better before”.
Btw, If you wonder what the navigation software really is for an aircraft (or spacecraft). I send you back to the guidance, navigation and control series I wrote some months ago.

Really amazing.

My home, end and delete keys were not working in my unix terminal (xterm) or in my Matlab console. For instance in the Matlab console (Matlab run in –nodesktop mode), all I was getting after pressing the home or end key was 4~ or 5~, same was going on for the terminal (xterm and csh). As most shells recognize the ctrl+a, ctrl+e, ctr+d shortcuts for home (beginning of line), end (end of line) and delete and as Matlab too recognizes these shortcuts, the simplest solution is to have your keys sending these shortcuts when in a terminal. You probably do not want to completely reconfigure your keys as they might be working fine in text editors.

Chrome for Linux has recently been released in an unstable version. As I have been looking forward to it for a year now, I cannot wait more. So I am going to have a look at that beta version (3.0.196.0).

In case you wonder, I am OK with Firefox but not completely satisfied. Mainly for the reason that sometimes when an applet on a website crashes it just crashes all Firefox. I am not counting the number of times I have had to reboot FF. Yes it might be also due to flash on 64 bits. But even though, the whole internet experience on Linux 64 bits is just not amazing. So from the beginning I was curious to see what Google could bring in.

Get chrome (unstable) for Linux.