Sybreon Ones Nought

I have always had a special interest in Ayu’s songs. I bought her Best 2: Black album a while back but have been tirelessly hunting down the Best 2: White album. Today, I finally found it at a local store during our lunch break. So, I immediately put down the money to buy the album. The thing about this particular album is that it actually comes with two DVDs, one of which, contains an entire concert. Nice!

That’s the thing about these Japanese albums. They tend to be far pricier than the rest of the albums available in Malaysia, but they also come with more value for money. While most music albums would only contain a single music CD, these Japanese albums will usually contain at least a music CD and another video DVD. Now, I wish that there was a wider selection of Japanese and Korean artistes in Malaysia. Our choices here are severely limited to only the major artistes. It makes sense from a business stand-point as this is a rather niche market and the stores cannot be carrying an assortment of random artistes.

Watching the concert is kind of depressing because I am reminded of the fact that such shows would never be allowed in Malaysia. Our so-called ‘conservative’ factions of society would probably protest the entry of liberal acts – all in the name of protecting values and culture. There is nothing wrong with protecting ones values and culture as long as one does not deem to impose those same values and culture on others based on the misconception that those are universal values and cultures. It is this misconception that leads to a lot of misunderstanding between the different factions of our society.

Which brings me to the issue that our government and our people has always hidden behind – the facade that there is anything remotely resembling a universal value system. Instead of understanding, we settled for tolerance. As a result, everyone presumes that each others values are ‘similar’ to their own when in fact, each individual has their own value system. As an example, I can still remember when it was a buzz-phrase to claim that all religions taught one to do good. What everyone left out was that the meaning of ‘good’ is subjective and was different between one religion to another.

Good and evil are not black and white – neither is Ayu!

Long-time readers of my blog will already know my stand on various intellectual-property (IP) matters. However, what utterly confounds me is the practice of privately patenting inventions that are publicly funded. In most rational and civilised countries, publicly funded research would end up being put into the public-domain. However, in other places, researchers that are publicly funded end up owning the inventions and benefits from commercialisation. Personally, I don’t think that this is right for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, there is the ethical issue. It seems particularly unfair to me that the party who funded the research and made the invention possible in the first place is barred from enjoying the benefits. To me, this is quite a serious issue as patents are ultimately exclusionary – the only power that patents have is to block others from exploiting inventions. It seems rather silly that the public is unable to exploit the inventions that are publicly funded.

Secondly, there is the business issue of competition. Nobody will deny that the government has a lot of financial clout. It is part of the job of government, to throw its clout behind things that are seen as of national benefit. So, if the government decided to pump taxpayer money into bio-technology (for example), it would be able to pump in a lot of money, much more than the reach of many private enterprises. As a result, it should be able to achieve more, and if the technology is patented, it will inadvertently drive these private enterprises out of the market. To me, this is unfair competition.

That is why, in most rational and civilised countries, taxpayer funded research should end up in the public-domain, for fair consumption by everyone. If the researchers intend to benefit commercially from their research work, they should not have taken public money in the first place. There are other alternatives for funding, privately, that will cover the cost of doing research. Sometimes, I wonder what goes through the heads of these researchers when taking public money.

As an engineer by training, I have got reuse drummed into my head. In the world of engineering, one is always discouraged from re-inventing the wheel as it is something that has already matured. The main argument for it is both technical and business.

From a technical view, a wheel is already a well established technology or what we term as mature technology. Its characteristics are well understood by everyone and its use is common place. From a business sense, re-inventing something that is already there will incur unnecessary costs and will blow up any business budget. There are rare exceptions when a wheel needs to be re-invented but those are rare by definition.

So, it comes as something really odd to me when I see an entire organisation that seems to be devoted to re-inventing the wheel and calling it our wheel. I blame this on the kampung mentality that encourages us to strive for being kampung champions. In the end, it is still only a wheel. It may be coloured red, white, blue and yellow, but it is still only a wheel.

If we wish to compete on a global stage, we would need to move fast – more so in the technology arena. That is why people rarely re-invent the wheel. The capital outflow cannot be justified. Unless of course, you are not in the business of making a profit of course.

I got the chance to attend an introductory presentation on writing Windows device drivers today. Unfortunately, the person delivering the presentation was a bore. His speech was utterly monotonous and the slides were filled with nothing but boring text. Granted, I am a bit biased when it comes to Windows drivers, but it was still a boring presentation nonetheless.

Technical people should not be allowed to give technical presentations masked as non-technical ones.

A technical presentation should be filled with lots of diagrams, graphs, charts and very few words. Come to think of it, every presentation should be filled with non-words. The worst thing that a presenter can do is to actually read the words off the slides. Maybe we should send him for our presentation/communication skills training. It is at least a non-boring training.

PS: He finally showed a single diagram at the end of the presentation, which was basically worth the entire spoken presentation.

Linked from dilbert.com. I believe that it is allowed under the Terms but IANAL.

A truly personal entry.

I have a dream where nobody is denied an education and access to all the cumulative knowledge of the world. I have a dream where nobody is denied access to rational tools of thought, critical to our decision making. I have a dream where nobody is denied their personal opinions that matter and their private communications with anyone else. I have a dream where nobody is denied mobility and freedom to navigate their way through life.

I dream too much.

I was driving down the Federal Highway on my way to the Hyundai Service Centre when I chanced upon a massive bill-board showing the new PS3-Slim and PSP-Go devices along with a date – 31.10.2009. Looks like the PS3 will be coming my way sooner than I had expected. I had expected Sony to fully drag-their feet and continue selling the older models until their stock ran out in Malaysia. Turns out that I might have been slightly mistaken.

Anyway, this is a website dedicated to the countdown to their launch. As you can see, there are another 580 hours to go only!