Came across an interesting book:

Silicon Dragon: How China Is Winning

the Tech Race (Hardcover)

I didn’t read the book. but from the comments, i can see the major examples listed in the book. Most of them happen to be stars of web2.0. Glad to see China’s tech edge is recognized by foreigners, but i have my own doubt on the subject:

1. Unlike U.S., I don’t think those star entrepreneurships are driving a major sector of economy. But, yeah, we may(or have to) be there after a while.

2. By and large the tech ventures in China are still mainly about localization. Well, “learning” from the west. I don’t think the community there is ready for leading things. At least it’s not cost effective.

3. Like most countries, China’s tech community started from a primitive and dirty phase. People want to get out of the mud and establish themselves as soon as possible, and they’re learning from whoever they can. But somehow we’re having problems with learning. For some reasons, rationality is still a rare thing in a lot of cases in China. In the 80s we learnt from japan, and now we learn from America. We have the traits of both, but it seems that we missed the most important part from both sides. A few days ago a Chinese major student talked with me about Chinese car’s big business plan in US, i regret to see the truth end up like this. Automobile industry is a good example. we have neither super technicians (like japanese), nor visionaries(like U.S.)

Chinese values education, and we have a immense amount of human resource. But somehow this growing force is still finding its way in the dark. I’m still waiting for the day it finds its way.

And, the author is looking for the Steve Jobs of China in the book. I think the real tech hero in China would be more like Bruce Lee, and I am yet to see one. And it nowadays it takes a whole community practicing tech-fu, rather than a few stars to push things forward. This is the case everywhere in the world.

I believe the two are honest and to the point when saying the single most important thing they should have learnt from each other. And here I’m going to talk about what Jobs wished he had learnt from Gates: work with others.

O. Maybe you want to stop me right here. Bill Gates working with others? Yeah. this is his working with others in action:

But, what I have to say is, in spite of brutal business strategy, when communicating with others, he’s always ready to give full recognition to other people’s good work, even for Jobs:)

Although known as “verbally combative”, he stated many times that he has the passion to work with smart people with different skill sets. And I did see proof of that in the way he communicates with people: he always put first priority to placing people at the right point for a bright future. And when it comes to give recognitions, he’s never too ready and sincere to do that.

When I compare this style to mine, I see a huge difference. Although not too “verbally combative”, the first thing I look at when listening to other people’s work is to find holes, draw backs. It’s good to point out those to people, but in order to work well with people, I find I have to have the passion to give proper recognition to others, either to those who at competing position. Maybe years of test based education put too much emphasis on being correct in my mind, that sometimes, in my subconscious, I forgot the ultimate goal is to find new solutions and get things done, and the shortest path to that is to motivate people around you and work together to that destination.

What a dangerous mistake!

Self-made helicopter by a self-educated chinese

A Chinese farmer-made airplane!!!

I can’t do that…..

Their makings might be shaky and primitive, but their mind and body is free and energetic out there in the sky, while a huge number of so called “researchers” imprison their mind and body in the lab.

Hats off to the farmers.

Hatebreed - I Will Be Heard

laziness and fear

fear dictates you over your own mind.
laziness seduces you to follow others.

and by finger pointing to each other, they work perfectly well together. to the extent that a lot of people forget the existence of the third option.

and to make the situation even worse, one may harm himself by trying to completely eliminate the two.

fear prevents one from danger.
laziness helps one to focus on important matters.

maybe the ultimate enemy for one is always the breaking of balance.

and it’s getting harder each day to restore it in this crazy world.

luckily, i found some nice remedies along the way, like this one:

“emotional content, not anger!“


i’m not a believer of any religion, but sometimes i want to say this is my salvation.

I’ve got high hope on android, and the open mobile platform it is going to open. I tried to participate the competition myself with some of my classmates but it didn’t work out. Mostly because of the lack of spare time, I think. But never mind. We might get loads of inspiration from the prize winners as well. let’s go:

AndroidScan
Developer: Jeffrey Sharkey
barcode. it’s originated from Japan and widely used there. A good way to link everything to the net:)

BioWallet
Developer: Jose Luis Huertas Fernandez
iris authentication. I guess bio authentication would become mandatory for mobile devices


One discovery: most of the prize winning software are developed by small teams, with one or two members.


CallACab
Developer: Konrad Huebner, Henning Boeger
similiar apps: call the cop. call a wrecker. custom one button emergency signaling. you don’t need to check your position and do the meanless talking.

Commandro
Developer: Alexey Pisarev, Andrey Tapekha
track your friends’s location and status

CookingCapsules
Developer: Mary Ann Cotter, Muthuselvam Ramadoss
I’ve no interest in cooking. but the idea would be appealling to me if it could download standard multivideo how-tos from the internet. Yeah. pervasive just in time learning.

EmRadar
Developer: Jack Kwok
Always a good idea to put emergency alert on mobiles. Like earthquake alerts…


goCart
Developer: Rylan Barnes
Yeah. we always wish we could the average price on line when we came across something nice.
Barcode would be universal…

gWalk
Developer: Klaus ten Hagen, Christian Klinger, Marko Modsching,
Rene Scholze
personalized tours… I think we can also put this into the multimedia how-to directory. basicly my concept is a social networked ppt on the mobile devices.

IMEasy
Developer: Yan Shi
IM enabling collaboration on maps and paintings. Maybe we need to collaborate on more things.

Jigsaw
Developer: Mikhail Ksenzov
White board data capturing. Maybe folks can use it for books as well. But, actually we can just shoot a pic and do expensive photo processing on your server.

JOYity
Developer: Zelfi AG
Maybe we need to extend role play games to its literal meaning.


LifeAware
Developer: Gregory A. Moore, Aaron L. Obrien, Jawad Akhtar
I don’t like this kind of “tracking” apps, really. I think a major mistake in computer app design is to consume too much time, energy and privacy of the user. Who would like to be tracked all day like this? And who would be interested in knowing every little detail of the others?
Less is more. the computer age is maturing enough to get over the playing new gadagets as a toy period.

Locale
Developer: Clare Bayley, Carter Jernigan, Christina Wright, Jasper Lin
change setting automatically with location information.
Yeah. we need the mobile to be more intelligent.

LreadyEmergencyManager
Developer: Chris Hulls, Dilpreet Singh, Luis Carvalho, Phuong
Nguyen
emergency connection. yeah. emergency.

Phonebook2.0
Developer: Voxmobili
Although I don’t like status tracking, I would appreciate a phonebook that would display “don’t call me” status on it.

PicSay
Developer: Eric Wijngaard
maybe we need to add video support as well.



SafetyNet
Developer: Michael DeJadon
Oh… didn’t i just think of this one…

SocialMonster
Developer: Siu Lung, Ben Hui, Tommy Ng
….
We can actually do this on facebook. Why bother creating another here?

SynchroSpot
Developer: Shaun Terry
Location based alert: yes, this is much more flexible than time based alert.

Teradesk
Developer: José Augusto Athayde Ferrarini
File sharing between mobiles/mobiles and computers


WritingPad
Developer: ShapeWriter Inc.
not quite sure how powerful this is… But we do need more powerful input method on the mobile.


Ideas:
coordination schemes with location tracking, group im, or even video conferencing.
remember those strategy game? how about putting drag-select-communicate scheme to the im with map?
not much mobile/online server scheme. for me this is something that can tap the true power of the mobile system. do we have a ssh term on android???? hey it’s linux! But I still haven’t found it.
not many bluetooth apps. I really think opportunistic forwarding is a great way to know people around you.

windows:
add a desktop shortcut to C:\WINDOWS\system32\scrnsave
assign a key shortcut to it.
linux:
xset dpms force off
use some keyboard short cut to fire up this shell command.

You computer is a danger to you: it will eat your time, with so many fancy eye candies and the gateway to internet which is ever tempting your inner laziness.
It’s no news. People in the world are aware of that but most of them are still just one click away from being distracted, including me. And because I’m often unable to hold my basic instinct to try out all kinds of digital trash in my computer, I spend loads of time to reinstall it.

It’s probably a shame for a computer science major, since i have the knowledge to make things simple. Yeah. It’s a matter of principle for me. And in order to make this principle more established I decide to publish it here, spending 20 minutes more in distraction.

principle to stay as the master instead of the slave of my computers:
keep a *nix server whenever possible.(everyone should have their own server in a few years) and keep all the data that means something to you on it with a version control system.

if you have a working/secure system already, don’t change it until things break.

if you can do something online, don’t bother to install a software in your computer.

if you can use public computers with secure access to your server, don’t bother to carry laptop/pda with you.

on your computer, stick to the command line whenever possible. to hell, gui

linux for your server and windows/mac/any os the hardware you carry is intended for on your laptop/pda. it’s not that i like windows. the reason is to avoid dealing with hardware drivers yourself whenever possible. but 2 notions on windows: never use ie. have at least one malware detector.

keep a minimum set of software

install the software on your *nix instead of your laptop/pda/desktop whenever possible.

no themes, no eye candies. if you ever feel a need of change to the default desktop background, set it to grey. the user interface colors/themes are meant to be clear in logic and dump&humble in everything else.

avoid the radiation of the screen whenever possible.

if the work flow shaped by above principles are sub-optimum for quite a while(several days), spend sometime to think carefully how it can be improved the most while violating the above the least. and then stick to it.

above all, the aim is to spend the least amount of time dealing with the computer, or even looking at it.