Information Overlow

When there is demand, there will be supply.

This rule applies for everything under the sun, including information.

Our ancestors realized the importance of information long long time ago.

Chinese even has a legend that when Cang Jie (仓颉） first invented the chinese characters, the whole world was shocked, gods and ghosts cried and the sky just changed color, because they knew humans would be able to access the sacred knowledge from then on. Of course this was a myth, if you are curious, here is the related Wikipedia link (In Chinese). And yes, the picture there really shows this guy has four eyes, I am not sure why, maybe they (the ancient Chinese) believed he was so special that he shouldn't look normal.

No matter in the East or West, literacy was used to be confined to the selected elite few and written articles were considered sacrosanct. But as education becomes more and more ubiquitous, the literacy rate goes up significantly every generation.

Now we are facing information overflow. The Internet is a giant hose connected to an unfathomable deep reservoir of information. No matter what kind of information, you can get them in tonnes. How to address the influx of seemingly overwhelming volume of data is a challenge for everybody.

In fact, information has the same characteristics as the normal tangible items like table, car, chair in the sense they are hard to get rid of from one's house. This observation is easily verified during a house-cleaning, how many times you paused at an item that you seldom or never used and thought "Maybe this will be useful later"?

Sounds familiar? Paul Graham has a good article on stuff here.

MV Time

[Updated Jan 20, 2008]
The original link to youtube was broken. Fixed for you...

Shakira's Underneath your clothes. Nice song.

Weed-Out Courses

Every school has a weed-out course. Weed-out course is the modern equivalent of rite of passage in universities around the world, and their sole function is to screw the newly incoming students, hard. Once you survive, you are in the clan.

For the department of ECE in Purdue, legend has it that deep down the dark alley of EE building where the study room is located, swamps of souls of students died of nerve breakdown for uncompleted assignments wander around, all of them would whisper these same words "ECE 201, ECE 202". Most probably in their next lives they turn to the dark side by majoring in liberal arts like accounting or economics, and from then on have a lot of time on their hands and later even become my bosses. Shit.

I heard this is the weed-out course for MIT EECS: 6.001

Money Lost is Money Lost

I am referring to the recent CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) fiasco that has sent the global stock markets to roller coaster rides. Even central governments have injected a lot of money to increase liquidity and Fed even went further one step by reducing the main interest rate.

Here is my take:

Imagine there is a hole in your pocket and you lose money as a result. How much will it help if I offer to lend you money with lower interest rate? Definitely it will help, but in the end of the day, there is still loss which affects the bottom line.

In other words, there will be definitely a bumpy ride ahead.

Old Pictures

When organizing my data folders, I found some pictures that I took back in my college days. Enjoy...

MSEE...

Hovde Hall

Hill Top Apartment

Cry

Got this from my friend's blog. Think about this. It's deep.

Price of Theoretical Feature

How much can you pay for undefined feature? Ask Nokia

I Need A New Phone...

My landlord yesterday told me he had a hard time to reach me in the afternoon. He locked himself out the apartment and needed to get the house key from me. He called me multiple times for the whole day but in vain. Finally he drove to his sister's place and got the spare keys.

My phone was on all the time then. This doesn't seem like StarHub's problem because if there really were no coverage, he would get the standard message "The number you called is current not active...", he said there was silence of like 10 seconds, then the line was disconnected. I suspect it is my phone's issue. Similar issue happened a few weeks ago when my parents tried to reach me. I can't let this happen again.

Weird enough when my landlord told me this, my first thought was on whether she called but the call couldn't get through... I start to miss her (again).

Ok, now I have a more than valid excuse to ditch my Moto. ByeByeMoto. Ta....

How To Talk Like A Politician (Part II)

Given the recent turmoils in the little tea cup of Boleh-Land, it's so inspiring to see how some people are talking crap like politicians. Without further ado, we will start with the familiar price hikes.

Scenario - How to increase the price innocently:

Step 1 - Divide:

"The lorry is not set to carry only a can of milk, there is no reason for its (the milk) price to go up" - a Boleh-Land minister commenting on the increase of canned milk prices after the petrol price was hiked by a whopping 30%

His Main Point:

1. The price of canned milk shouldn't go up because the lorry is carry 'literally hundred cans' of milk, thus the marginal increase in cost for each can is 'negligible'.

Point He Shunned:

1. The price of canned milk has one and only one factor: the cost of transportation, and the increase in petrol will only affect people in only one way: in terms of transportation cost.

Step 2 - Compare:

1. To drive home the point everybody in Boleh-Land is so damn lucky and blessed, we should remind everybody the 'hefty prices' people in other countries in UK, Japan, US are 'suffering'.

"Look, our government is sacrificing for the sake the people and we have subsidized enormously on the oil price. You don't believe? In Japan the oil price is X, in UK it is Y, and in Spain it is Z, where X, Y, and Z are all numbers greater than the oil price in Boleh-Land (after conversion of currency, of course). I wonder why those Japanese, Britons and Americans aren't flocking to Boleh-Land in droves, hey, Boleh-Land is soooo good and cheap, right?

Step 3 - Give an Innocent Look :

This step is entirely optional and the politician won't give you this look actually. Only the poor people who are screwed will have this look.




How To Apply:
This will be left as homework for the reader. ;)

Open Source CPU

In a desperate move to boost sales and compete with Intel and AMD, Sun announced it will put its latest UltraSPARC T2, code-named Niagara 2 into the open source domain. Its official website is here.

Sun realizes if this architecture were kept private and customers had to sign NDAs, they (Sun and this product) will get more middle fingers than money. By letting people to use for free putting this IP (intellectual property) under GPL, it is a shrewd strategy that can net in people who won't consider SPARC CPUs in the first place.

If this move really gains momentum, Sun still can earn money in alot of different ways.

For example (not all examples are from mine, I read some off the net):

1. Keep evolving the architecture such that for latest version n, all version m < n will be released into public domain. Version n which has more features/power/perks will have a (usually hefty) price tag on it. This pricing tactic is used by M$ on Vista, but the problem is customers just don't want Vista at all, despite the branding names like premium, basic, home, business, super-duper, etc.
   
2. Sell related value added products like OS (Solaris, anyone?), customized interconnects, memory controllers, or co-processors. These are really money spinners nowadays
3. Hoping to sell more unrelated products due to its increased popularity. This may not always work for companies that are in the quest to diversify their profiles. A famous fiasco is from Colgate venturing into the business of microwave meals. During part of the post-mortem of its failure, most customers conjured images of tooth-paste when seeing the word 'Colgate', and the problem was most people aren't too keen to have tooth-paste as part of the meal. Tata, Colgate fell on its face flat.

Tomorrow is a public holiday. Sigh... I am not really happy these days...

Exit Strategy

Last weekend I didn't go out for long. Instead I spent the whole Sunday to clean my room, did some laundry, and relaxed at home.

There are things to ponder upon, and on that Sunday I was thinking on how I am going to plan for my professional life.

The first important question is: Do I still want to be an engineer?

If I do, then some other questions to consider:

1. For how long?
2. Where?
3. Do I still want to dive deeper in my current scope, or I need to increase the breadth?

If I don't, what else I want to do to eke out my incomes? Financial analyst? economist? businessman? or even as a modern farmer?

Unfortunately in the real-world there is always a gray area. A problem that has a lot of solutions, but each of those solution has trade-offs. I recognize this is called 'life'.

With regard whether I want to continue as an engineer, at this stage I am more keen to establish an exit strategy. An exit strategy I define as a plan that decouples the money part from the work itself. In other words, upon the fruition of my exit strategy, I can work on things that fancy me with minimal consideration on how to sustain my family and myself. Before that, I still think working on my specialization will give me more ROI (Return On Investments). All in all, I still like to be a geek. :)

Moving to Singapore is a good start: I don't need to worry too much about things like crimes, idiotic politicians, and growth opportunities. How long will I stay here? I don't know....

A Robot With Big Gun(s)

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/08/httpwwwnational.html

Don't always assume robots are dumb :P

Random Thoughts

1. I have a friend working as unit trust agent back in Malaysia and we are kind of good friends. He peddled those funds to me a few times, and I was really at the edge of buying, until an incident that changed my mind: He has a younger brother who was still studying, however it seems his younger brother needed to foot his own bills and pay everything by himself (no sponsorship from the family). I know my friend has a very decent income both from his day-time job and the part time job as fund agent. When he mentioned his younger brother would need to fend for himself for school fees and he would spend money to travel with his girl friend, it left a really bad taste in my mouth. Honestly my friend had not done anything wrong, and I do think there are a lot of people acting the same way. I decide not to buy anything just because of that particular remark he made. Conclusion: Be more humane to your siblings or/and parents, you could earn my business
2. What do you do when there is a stalemate in a relationship? My take is to try my best to resolve it, when everything fails, just watch it to fade. What can I do anyway?
   
3. What do you do when you are dog-tired? Go home.