Technological development has been running counter to control, especially in countries where control, not just of of user identity, is considered crucial. Economic and technological developments come hand in hand, there is simply no way to have only one. However, as development brings new ways of communication, new ways of life, new ways of doing [...]
In a previous post, I was talking of the so-called decadence card, which is part of the problems in the e-payment industry in China. Companies that are providing e-payment services are not registered as financial institutions, therefore, they are not subject to the same People’s Bank of China (PBOC) regulations on financial institutions. However, their [...]
The charge card industry in China is worth hundreds of billions of RMB a year, operating on the margin of the jurisdiction of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC). The card issuing companies are not registered as financial institutions, therefore, are not subject to the same regulations as financial institutions. The cards come in different [...]
As the buzzing of the vuvuzula fills every stadium in South Africa, and after watching the match featuring France against South Africa, this reminds me of a very funny story told by a friend a few years earlier. This friend of mine went to Chongqing for vacation. He was looking at the menu in a [...]
This book was written in the 1940s through the 1950s, and after more than half a century, it is still one the best science fictions you could find around, and has spawned a whole new genre of literature on highly capable robots. The book consisted of a series of short stories, told through the reminiscences of [...]
In a previous post, I wrote about the feature to export and import appliance in VirtualBox, but VirtualBox changed the MAC address of the network adapter when you move the virtual machine from one host to another. In that case, if the guest OS is Ubuntu (or other Debian-based distribution), the network interface is also [...]
Most modern computers have multiple cores, and even new multi-core processors are available for portable devices now. Yet, software are not taking advantage of them. Processors are sitting idle, doing nothing, most of the time. A lot of frameworks, libraries, language extensions, and even new programming languages, have been proposed to take advantage of the [...]
Ubuntu 10.04′s repository only has OpenCV 2.0, but if you want to use the 2.1 version, which was released in April, you would have to build it from source. Here’s a simple how-to. First, you need to install the following required packages to build OpenCV: libgtk2.0-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg62-dev libtiff4-dev zlib1g-dev libjasper-dev libavcodec-dev libdc1394-22-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev [...]
We were having lively discussion in a park, sitting around a few bottles of beer. The discussion was surrounding the topic of whether we could, eventually, model human reasoning in a computer program. The discussion seemed to flow directly from the conversation in The Cambridge Quintet by John L. Casti. One of the participants suddenly [...]
The GCC Steering Committee has approved the use of C++ in GCC, according to this message. Although the reasons behind the decision were not clear, but it’s probably a decision to make GCC framework more modular, by leveraging the C++ features. As GCC has become the mother of compilers, this decision could have great benefits [...]