Democracy in Hong Kong?

There are major protests in the streets of Hong Kong for their democracy, for universal suffrage. 

Early Success of Sun and NeXT

I was reading Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing by Randall E. Stross, and was surprised about Sun Microsystem's early success:

• 1982 - Sun grows to $8 million in sales ($19.7 million in 2014 dollars)
• 1983 - Sun grows to $115 million in sales ($274 million in 2014 dollars)
• 1988 - Sun grows to $1 billion in sales ($2.01 billion in 2014 dollars)

Around this time, NeXT Computer Systems releases their first product to the market,  NeXT Cube for around $7000 (or $14000 in 2014 dollars).  The Cube used Motorola 68030 processor, which was too slow at the time in comparison to Sun Microsystem's workstations and other competitors that used more powerful RISC processors.

The original target market was a niche market for universities that needed affordable workstations, and the target price range was $3000 (or $6000 in 2014 dollars).  However, Steve Jobs uncontrollably added more features and made other decisions that delayed the product and dramatically drove up the costs.  With the product delays, Sun was able to sell their workstations into the vacant markets that NeXT wanted.

The end results were that NeXT did not become the immediate success that Steve Jobs would have liked at the time, and the NeXT Cube, in a sense, was an underpowered and overpriced flop.

Schedule For CityU Hong Kong

One of the first steps to getting organized for classes, is to create a schedule, and I like create a schedule with some style.  Here's my schedule at CityU:

Note: The hours and days of week is in Japanese Kanji or Korean Hanja, which are the same in this case.  This was made with Excel 2008 on Mac OS X 10.6, exported to PDF, converted to JPG with Preview, and later cropped in iPhoto.

San Jose is 50th out of 75 in Literacy

I came across this survey that ranked San Jose (California) 50th, lower than Oakland, out of 75 cities in USA for literacy: http://www.ccsu.edu/page.cfm?p=8142 

For those that don't know, San Jose is one of the major cities in Silicon Valley, home to many of the technological innovations in the 1980s and 1990s.  

There's some differing views on the quality of life there.  Some say great because of low crime and great schools.  Though others beg to differ.  San Jose is the largest city in the world without a major urban symphony.  Public transportation is expensive, $6 USD for a day pass, and small commutes that would take 15 minutes by car, take over 2 hours by public transit.  For me personally, beyond Santana Row, I don't find places that I enjoy hanging-out, chatting, or studying.

Incremental vs. Innovative Improvements

I am attending this Business Process Analysis course at CityU in Hong Kong [香港].  I came across a concept that I never encountered at my home university SFSU.  There are two ways to improve processes, an innovative way, or an incremental way.  

The incremental style is called TQM (Total Quality Management) and the professor clustered these methods into the following items:

• CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration),  
• Six Sigma DMIAC, 
• Six Sigma DMADV, and 
• PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) 

At SFSU, we touch on Six Sigma in various courses, and may have mentioned CMMI in IT Project Management course.

The innovative styles is called BPR (Business Process Re-engineering) and includes key authors like:

• Michael Hammer and James Champy,  
• Thomas H. DavenPort, and 
• Omar A. El Sawy. 

Reasoning: Association vs. Causation

I came across this concept in my Macro-Economics course about errors in reasoning in confusing association (or correlation) and causation.  The book concluded the following:

The fact that one event follows another does not necessarily mean that the first event caused the second event.

Association is where these two events occur, like voodoo dancing and stock market increases, and concluding that they are related.  Many people do this in their reasoning, especially in religious context, and it is flawed.  I know some people that do this with computers, and they struggle in building technical knowledge, because they build a lot of assumptions based on these associative reasoning.

Causation is when the cause-and-effect relationship is stable over time.  From a technical perspective, it would mean one can empirically prove the relationship, such as through a controlled environment.  It that is difficult to set up, at least document the consistent behavior.

So which side are you: Association or Causation?  Or are some things association and causation?

The SmartPhone Ecosystem: Why iPhones Will Succeed...

I spoke with an Adobe employee that's been around since 286 computers from long ago.  His case about Apple's iPhone and the Android was that the whole market is a completely different ecosystem compared to computers that competed for the cheapest price, where most consumers didn't care if the quality was good or not.   

Now in the current setting, the price point has crossed the threshold to make these devices affordable and in this setting consumers don't care so much about price, but rather quality.  My added 2¢ was that also the industrial design combined with good intuitive interaction design of the interface, makes Apple's iPhone not only market leader, but generates customer loyalty.

He added that for the Android, out of the 700,000 applications, the most popular application or the killer application is the "Advanced Task Killer Free", to essentially kill other applications running on the Android.  I have to agree with that.