Microsoft’s future vision on technology
Jun0
Microsoft, as everybody knows it, the company who love to hate. A few months back, Microsoft showed a clip from a presentation given at the Wharton Business Technology Conference. In Microsoft’s belief, the technology advancement will be so rapid that this is a world we’ll live in in a decade.
Included in the video was their idea of Microsoft Surface. Though it’s still too expensive for the average consumer to buy, it’ll become a reality. Here is the video of what Surface is
Anyway, Project Natal is something the XBOX team has been working on recenly, and it’s basically a controller-free gaming system. Though I have my doubts in this (i.e. how well it works), the concept video is undoubtedly mind-blowing.
Sony toyed with this idea a few years back (remember EyeStation or Eye-something? The little webcam you hook up, and you calibrate it by standing inside the body outline shown on the screen) I guess Sony marked it as a failed attempt and never went forth with it in R&D.
Project Natal: good concept, pain in the ass to implement. Mainly because the input is a variable, and not a defined button. Everybody’s living room is going to look different, and dogs would be walking by (though that can be fixed with facial recognition). But hey, we have progressed through static HTML pages to PHP to websites built entirely upon user inputs (namely, facebook)
-edit-
Sorry, Project Natal is a reality. Microsoft explains:
Compatible with any Xbox 360 system, the “Project Natal” sensor is the world’s first to combine an RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone and custom processor running proprietary software all in one device. Unlike 2-D cameras and controllers, “Project Natal” tracks your full body movement in 3-D, while responding to commands, directions and even a shift of emotion in your voice.
In addition, unlike other devices, the “Project Natal” sensor is not light-dependent. It can recognize you just by looking at your face, and it doesn’t just react to key words but understands what you’re saying. Call a play in a football game, and players will actually respond.
More info on Gizmodo.
People need to separate real life from fiction
Apr0
Books, movies, TV shows create a new world where laws of physics do not exist, miracles happen, and characters don’t react how a normal person would. It’s alright to fantasize the fictional world the media creates, but by the end of the day, you must realize that is a fictional world. It does not exist.
Take the recent popular teenage-girl novel, for example. I’ve never read the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, but I’ve read/heard reviews about it. And this FML post proves my point:
Today, my girlfriend dumped me proclaiming she wanted someone more like her “Edward”. I asked her who Edward was. She held up a copy her “Twilight” book. She was talking about a fictional vampire. FML
If anything, this is probably what would’ve happened: CollegeHumor’s “Deleted ‘Twilight’ Sex Scene”
Anyway, back to the point. If you say, “Aww, come on. It’s just a teenage girl who doesn’t know any better.” Okay, let’s move on to my next example: 24 and torture. Anybody who have seen 24 knows it’s a very intense show, and Jack Bauer never gives up a chance to torture someone until the guy gives up the info he wants. In the show, those intel are always accurate – not necessarily true in real life.
It is Day 6, between 10.00 and 11.00 in the hectic schedule of the television series 24, and a normal day at work for Jack Bauer of the Counter Terrorism Unit. “People in this country are dying, and I need some information. Now are you are going to give it to me, or do I have to start hurting you?” Inevitably, he does. A few lurid torture scenes later and the terrorist confesses, the civilised world is saved for another hour or so, and Jack, played by Kiefer Sutherland, is hurtling towards his next violent confrontation with the forces of evil.
This is the central plot of 24, in many respects the only plot of 24, a brilliantly constructed, wildly popular, strikingly timely series based on a single premise that also happens to be untrue. 24 is fiction, and so is the notion that torture produces results.
…
Torture is morally repugnant and illegal, but also frequently useless. It certainly extracts confessions, but the resulting intelligence is usually flawed, and often dangerously inaccurate. Instead of undermining insurgency, routine abuse of captives has precisely the opposite effect.
…
A person confessing under torture is motivated solely by the need to end the pain, which means telling the person wielding the electrodes whatever he wants to hear. The truth is irrelevant. Indeed, the greater the agony, the more likely is the victim to say whatever is expected. Once one lie has been extracted, more lies follow to back it up.
…
Yet the idea that torture works has become deeply embedded in popular culture, thanks in large part to Jack Bauer, whose onscreen behaviour both reflected and reinforced the supposed correlation between inflicting pain and saving lives.
(Source: Times Online)
In this video, “Bill O’Reilly was desperately in search of a good argument for torture, but thanks to Cato Institute legal analyst David Rittgers — a former Army Captain — he came up empty.”
Third argument: special Hollywood effects. Enough said. If not, watch some Mythbusters (If Discovery Channel lies, then I don’t know what to believe anymore…)
How much is it to run my site?
Apr1
Call me a cheap Asian, but I’m starting to think my hosting, NearlyFreeSpeech.Net, is overpriced. On their pricing chart, storage cost is one cent per MB per month. MySQL database is one cent per day.
Say if you have a WordPress running, with 30 MB of stuff, and assuming you have really (really) low bandwidth, that’ll be $14.6 a year.
You’d say, come on, $15 a year isn’t that much, but keep in mind that’s only 30 MB worth of stuff. Let me put it this way – I can store 8.11 GB (276% increase in storage) of stuff on Amazon S3 with the same amount of money; $10 more, I can have Flickr pro, with unlimited storage and bandwidth (∞ increase in storage).
Something to rant about…
On the other hand, Google’s CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity) is looking promising. This AI-thing is happening sooner than I thought. Also, judging by her blog she created, she’s really into pandas (haha)
Google is implementing CADIE on all its services: Docs (Docs on Demand) , Gmail (Google Autopilot)
Slumping economy
Mar0
It seems to me that every other day, I’d hear some company is slashing 200 or more employees. It’s rare to see green up ticks across the stock market board these days. The large sums of debt and government fundings of 100 billion are becoming numb to me. Nevertheless, there’s always another side you can look at this
Hard as it may be to believe, the crash will also help a lot of young families. The stocks that they buy in coming years are likely to appreciate far more than they would have if the Dow were still above 14,000. The same is true of future house purchases for the one in three families still renting a home.
The second reason is government policy. The Obama administration plans to raise taxes on the affluent, cut them for everyone else (so long as the government can afford it, that is) and take other steps to reduce inequality. Franklin D. Roosevelt did something similar and it had a huge effect.
Of course, these two factors both boil down to redistribution. One group is benefiting at the expense of another. Yes, many of the people on the losing end of that shift have done quite well in recent years, far better than most Americans. Still, the shift isn’t making the economic pie any bigger. It is simply being divided differently.
Which is why the third factor — education — is the most important of all. It can make the pie larger and divide it more evenly.
Source: NYT
Haha, I should probably start saving up money for investments. I also got to thinking, what careers won’t be affected in a global economy meltdown, such as this one? Doctors, professors, and debt collectors
The banks need another bailout and countless homeowners cannot handle their mortgage payments, but one group is paying its bills: the dead.
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The people on the other end of the line often have no legal obligation to assume the debt of a spouse, sibling or parent. But they take responsibility for it anyway.
…Dead people are the newest frontier in debt collecting, and one of the healthiest parts of the industry. Those who dun the living say that people are so scared and so broke it is difficult to get them to cough up even token payments.
Collecting from the dead, however, is expanding. Improved database technology is making it easier to discover when estates are opened in the country’s 3,000 probate courts, giving collectors an opportunity to file timely claims. But if there is no formal estate and thus nothing to file against, the human touch comes into play.
New hires at DCM train for three weeks in what the company calls “empathic active listening,” which mixes the comforting air of a funeral director with the nonjudgmental tones of a friend. The new employees learn to use such anger-deflecting phrases as “If I hear you correctly, you’d like…”
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Not everyone has the temperament to make such calls. About half of DCM’s hires do not make it past the first 90 days. For those who survive, many tools help them deal with stress: yoga classes and foosball tables, a rotating assortment of free snacks as well as full-scale lunches twice a month. A masseuse comes in regularly to work on their heads and necks.
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If a relative is more focused on denial or anger instead of, say, bargaining, the collector offers to transfer him to the human resources company Ceridian LifeWorks, where “master’s level grief counselors” are standing by. After a week, the relative is contacted again.DCM executives say some of the survivors not only gladly pay but write appreciative notes. They offered up a stack, with the names deleted, as proof.
Source: NYT
Back to “Slumdog” life
Mar0
Truthfully, I’ve never heard of the movie “Slumdog Millionaire” until Oscars, and I wouldn’t have watched it if it weren’t for the eight or so awards Oscars that were given to this movie. I decided to have a looksie, and it turned out not to be half bad. (Some things were left unexplained, so I didn’t feel completely satisfied by the end of the movie.. more on this later). The movie itself wasn’t extraordinarily touching, but what really changed my heart was the article published by Huffington Post:
Meanwhile, both Rubina and Azharuddin continue to wear their Oscar clothes and pine for life in America:
For Rubina, the highlight was her new pale blue dress, which she is still wearing. She says: “When we got to America, Uncle Danny (Boyle)) arranged for some clothes for us. I had never been given so many clothes. I picked out seven dresses and four pairs of shoes. I felt so special in my party dress that I never want to take it off. I felt like a princess walking down the red carpet.”
Rubina also said:
“I don’t want to sleep on the floor anymore. I want a proper bed and live where the air does not smell of poo. I have seen what it is like in America. Here, there is garbage everywhere, people get angry, swear and shout. I have realised how bad life is here. I just want to get out.”
Sounds like spoiled children, but can you blame them? They were taken from the lowest class to a rich and glamorous life, living the American dream, and after tasting a week of that life, they get dumped back to their slumdog lives. You can tell everything looked so fresh and exciting to them: they wouldn’t stop to take a breath during the Oscars red carpet interview, trying to score a teddy bear at Disneyland even though they just won the Oscars. The producers and the director, Danny Boyle, already sent the kids to school, set up a trust fund, and are also in the process of getting them a new home.
Who would’ve knew a small budget movie would change someone’s life forever?
Anyway, onto the unexplained things in the movie that made me go, “wait, how? who? when, what, where why?” (and apparently, I’m not the only one. As I turned to Google for the answers, Dear Cinema shared my confusion)
- How exactly did Jamal get on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
- Why did the show host want Jamal to lose so badly? What’s in for him if Jamal didn’t get the million dollars? If any, he should hope Jamal wins – the number of viewers will spike up –> TV company can charge more for the commercials –> bonus pay
- So that night when Salim was drunk and kicked Jamal out, what did Salim do to Latika? And why didn’t Jamal just wait outside the door – saves the trouble of losing and finding Latika years later.
Girls like that… apparently
Jan0
So, uhhh, I was on Amazon searching for something yesterday, and in the front page it was promoting V-day gift ideas. All I can say is, I never knew girls are like that.
It’s not that I found interesting, but also a recent study by the Onion
Tomorrow’s a big day…
Jan0
Two things are happening in less than 12 hours. One is our President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Speech, and the other is the first day of Sping ‘09. Both are life-changing events.
Anywho, this is how my schedule looks like for this semester:
A little math goes a long way…
Jan0
By the end of last semester, I had about 50 meal plans left in my account. A&M’s stupid policy wouldn’t allow roll-overs for meal plans, so that means I had to use them up or lose half of the value to dining dollars ($3). I wasn’t prepared to do that, so before I left for Christmas, I bought a crapload of Chick-fil-a to take home. A stunt I don’t want to pull again this semester.
So, with my calculator and a little spare time, I calculated which meal plan I should get for spring
| Name | Description | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 210 Meals/$125 Plan | 210 Meals/semester – $125 Dining Dollars/semester (averages 14 meals/week) |
$1,442.00 |
| 150 Meals/$150 Plan | 150 Meals/semester – $150 Dining Dollars/semester (averages 10 meals/week) |
$1,133.00 |
| 105 Meals/$200 Plan | 105 Meals/semester – $200 Dining Dollars/semester (averages 7 meals/week) |
$906.00 |
| 10 Meals /$1250 Plan | $1250 Dining Dollars/semester – 10 Meals/semester | $1,442.00 |
| 20 Meal / $900 Plan | $900 Dining Dollars/semester – 20 Meals/semester | $1,133.00 |
| 30 Meals / $600 Plan | $600 Dining Dollars/semester – 30 Meals/semester | $906.00 |
| 20 Meals / $350 Plan | $350 Dining Dollars/semester – 20 Meals/semester | $541.00 |
| 45 Plan | 45 Meals/semester (averages 3 meals/week) | $335.00 |
The dining dollars have an 110% purchasing power (10% discount), and assuming each meal is worth $8, I would save $375.5 for the first plan, $232 for second, -$154, -$13, -$17, -$6, -$4, -$25. But we all know a “Maroon Plate Special” isn’t worth $8, unless you go to Sbisa for all-you-can-eat.
Anyway, I was just surprised that I’m not actually saving money when I purchase a meal plan – I’m actually better off paying my meals with my credit card. I don’t have to worry about having a zero balance at the end of semester, and I have better flexibility with what I want can get.
Interesting, innit?
New Years Resolution
Jan0
It’s time to blog again. After hammering my head for four weeks for three essays, I finally realized I cannot slack on writing anymore. We’re already 13 days into 2009, but I’m going to make my New Years Resolution now (heh).
- Blog more.
- Polish my site. Dig through my archives and organize my old layouts into a portfolio
- Stop slacking off and do what I love to do.
Updates…
Jun0
Haven’t written in a while, and I guess all the random stuff that has accumulated in the last week or two warrants an update. Let’s see.
- Got my diploma from Plano West. A really small piece of certificate. Smaller than a letter paper. Oh well.
- Went to Houston for a few days to fetch my pregnant sister.
- Worked at Masergy from Monday to Friday.
- Went to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay by myself. Hmmm, Kristen Bell. Hot.
- Took random pictures. Fed up with Amazon AWS S3. Whenever I edit the ACL of a folder, it keeps telling me that the “specified key does not exist”. Ugh. I may get Flickr pro after all.
- Watched and read Oprah Winfrey’s Stanford Commencement Address. Not as great as Steve Job’s or J.K. Rowling’s, in my opinion. Spent a third of the time giving thanks and props to her goddaughter, then gave conflicting/weak/debatable lessons of life. But she said something that had in common with Job’s and Rowling’s speech: “I consider the world, this Earth, to be like a school and our life the classrooms. And sometimes here in this Planet Earth school the lessons often come dressed up as detours or roadblocks. And sometimes as full-blown crises.”
Hmm, I think that’s all that has happened since the last update. And oh, iPhone 3G seems pretty impossible to obtain without getting a contract. I don’t think this new version will help boost iPhone sales that much. Stocks will probably go the opposite way, I think. Dunno. We’ll see in a few weeks.