Author: victordion

Civilization, a long journey just started

Currently, there is a heated debate going on across China’s Internet forums. It started with the following video clip, shown below. A male driver pulls a female driver out from her car and beats her up bitterly. The male driver was extensively condemned by public at first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptHO45amo3Q

The following video shows what happened right before the beat up. A series of dangerous driving behaviors caused by road rage. The very first cause is that the female driver recklessly changed lanes, and then, crazy back-and-forth retaliation from both parties. The result is the furious male driver beating up the female driver, as shown in the above video. Major public opinion changed tone instantly, not only because of the new video, but also because netizens further revealed (through an inappropriate intrusion of privacy) the female driver was a frequent traffic violator and received a staggering number of tickets in the past few years. The male driver was acclaimed as a “justice enforcer” by many people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxPCHSOBZ4w

As a Chinese citizen, I feel deeply ashamed about the incident. Though I’ve for long known it is just one embodiment of many uncivilized behaviors on China’s roads, this incident reminds me blatantly how slow a leveling up in a country’s civilization index can be. Especially when I’ve lived in the US for two years and can read the difference from out of the box.

Driving on US roads is more pleasant than on China’s roads. This is current fact. No wonder. Americans have been driving for 100 years while Chinese started to embrace private cars only several decades ago. But current China’s road law enforcement does not do a very job at regulating people’s driving behaviors. Technically, traffic penalty is too light. Fines are like jokes to the rich. Violations are seldom prosecuted, and not connected with insurance. The cost of breaking the law is too low. Culturally, people don’t believe in law enforcement (the police). Corruption is believed to exist extensively (true in many cases). When there is dispute, people trust fist more than legal means (real sad thing and the point I don’t like about China). The logic behind some people’s compassion on the male driver is: you are road killer, so people have the right to beat you, till you know you are wrong. Should we blame people for their lacking sense of rule of law?

Thinking about Russia seems to be worse than China (according to many youtube videos) in this realm, should I feel relieved a little bit?

Reading papers to learn? Lucky you!

Writing an outstanding paper on hardware and software co-design is definitely not easy these days. Most of the time, if a paper can define a problem well (no need to be very theoretical or challenging), propose a seemingly logical solution (does not have to be mathematically fancy), provides relevant experimental data (no need for big improvements), make claims judiciously (avoid excessive groundless claims), then it has 95% chance to win the BEST PAPER AWARD at the probability of 0.9.

Reading papers to learn? Lucky you!

Software design V.S. hardware design

Having been away from digital circuit design for two years, I recently started writing Verilog code again because of a research project. This reminded me once again how different writing hardware is from writing software, though hardware engineers and software engineers are loosely attributed as “coders” in layman’s eyes.

1. Hardware design CAD tools are hard to obtain. If you are not affiliated with an academia institute or relevant business entity, you almost have nothing to start with. However, for software developers, almost everything in need (OS, compilers, runtime, IDE) is free and can be downloaded easily.

2. Hardware design community is much more closed than the software community. IP cores, even those simple ones, are mostly not free. Even if you find an IP core free of charge, you would not risk pulling it into your own design because of potential bugs. Linux OS to software industry is like Intel CPU to hardware industry, however the former is open sourced and the latter is heavily guarded (you cannot even obtain a datasheet without being a close partner of Intel).

3. When you encounter a software problem, 99% of time your solution is a Google search away. However for hardware design issues, it is always better to consult an experienced guru. But if you are a self-taught engineer, where to look for this guru?

4. It is easier to gain a sense of achievement doing software than doing hardware. Writing some software code and hit the run button, you see feedback instantly; however in hardware design, the only thing you can do is simulation (and you have been reminded 1000 times that simulation lies). Even if your design turns into silicon (after months?), it is always clumsy to demo, but your software engineer peer have been demo-ing her fancy website to people for a long time.