Agronesia

In Slashdot, one of the biggest software/computer news site, one popular kind of joke in the comments is the Soviet Russian joke. The premise is simple: The majority of readers on sites like Slashdot are American. Russia is of course a country with a supposedly very different culture, so everything there must be different! Therefore, to make this kind of joke comment the news or reply the last comment with “In Soviet Russia …” and insert something very absurd there.

Let me teach you. I’m a Slashdot lurker so I feel I’ve got some expertise in this area…

A: In Thailand, one Indonesian student threw a trash on the road and got fined!
B: Well, in Indonesia, even the police throws trash anywhere.
C: In Soviet Russia, the trash throws you!!!

The key is just to make some absurd statement

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Pictured above are speakers you get for free when you buy a non-branded computer at computer shops. It has “QC. PASS” stickers on the back side and the writing “DS-693 MULTI-MEDIA SPEAKER SYSTEM” on the front side.

The quality? Well, it sounds WORSE that my laptop’s built in speakers. The quality check pass stickers apparently mean “at least it made a sound”. I would very much prefer my headphone.

Go is a board game with very simple and elegant rules, but with a mathematical complexity far far above chess. It is a game with lots of pattern recognition involved, so a skilled human player is particularly good at intuitively making judgments just by glancing a position.

We all know how Gary Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue some time ago, so in essence computers now can play better chess than human. Go, with its enormous computational complexity, is regarded by many as the last bastion to defend human intelligence in strategy games.

Around 5 years ago, the best computer program can still be defeated by a professional even with a 25 stone handicap (e.g., getting free 25 moves at the start of the game). Now it plays much much better, and at the recent U.S. Go Congress (7 August 2008) a supercomputer beat a professional player at 9 stone handicap. Here’s the details of the match:

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We did it :).

In total 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 on the designated download day and it has now hold the world record for the most software downloaded in a day :).

But frankly I kinda hate FF3, it hangs when it loads Java… \(O.o)/

Anyway, you can see the download statistics presented in a Flash map here.

It’s interesting, the tiny country Singapore got 129,957 downloads, almost rivaling this giant country of nothing Indonesia which only gets 143,283. Japan did more than 1.3 million downloads.

The Indonesian ISP business have lots of room to grow assuming all areas will reach the internet usage density of Singapore, Japan, and the likes… Let’s not just become a nation of farmers, but a nation of Linux-using internet-savvy farmers!

My parents bought an IDE to USB adapter some time ago to connect an orphaned hard disk. The product name is “R-Driver III USB 2.0 to SATA IDE CABLE”. It consists of a power cord and a data cord. A 1-page manual and cables for SATA are also in the package.

The manual instructs you to set the drive’s jumper settings to Master. After that you just use the power cord to connect the drive to an electrical outlet, and the data cord to link the device to the USB port of your computer. Windows XP can load it without problems. Plug and Play!

I can now access my 80-GB hard disk easily :). It also worked on my parent’s HD.