Differences between your phones and desktop computers Last week, I read some technical papers related to my question and got some interesting points from academy --- From researchers' point of view, the two fundamentally different aspects (and hence challenges) of mobile devices compared with traditional stationary computers are *wireless* and *mobility*. The term wireless infers that wireless devices such as your phones and laptops use different protocols and methods to transmit and receive data to and from routers or access points. For example, your phones may use GSM protocol to make calls and Wifi to access Internet. These protocols and different from those used previously in stationary computers which are connected though physical cables. The term mobility infers that the wireless devices need to keep the connections to other devices alive while the users (and the devices) are moving. For example, wireless devices must prevent your phone calls and web surfing experiences from any disturbing, no matter are walking, driving, or taking the train which is moving in an speed of 250kmps.

Challenges and opportunities with mobile devices Challenges and opportunities with mobile devices This is the first response to my post "Difference between smart phones and traditional laptops". I would like to thank Michelle's valuable comments to my old post. For me (an end-user of mobile devices), there is no much differences between a smart phone and a tablet, though a tablet is definitely more powerful in computation and more durable in power supply. In other words, as Michelle has pointed out, they mainly differ in size. Inspired by this (maybe not true) observation, I searched on the web a bit today and am going to change the title of this topic to "Difference between mobile devices and traditional stationary devices", where mobile devices refer to devices that equip with battery (instead of AC power) and have access to Internet anywhere and anytime, and traditional stationary devices refer to laptops and desktop computers which use AC power supply and locate mostly in a pre-defined geographic location. Mobile devices include smart phones and tablets from Apple and Samsung, and stationary devices include PC computers and laptops from DELL and ACER. In summarize, all of the personal computing devices fall into two categories according to their mobility. I will try to argue my idea in the following paragraphs. Mobility enables a device to become part of necessities in your routine life (other necessities include glasses and even shoes), compared with a desktop without mobility merely being tools in work. Except for going to sleep, you do anything and go anywhere with your mobile devices in your pocket(phone, tablet, or whatever). That means your mobile devices can know everything about you (that is the reason why personal privacy issues arise with the ubiquitous of mobile devices.) Secondly, remember that they have access to the Internet, which means you are connected to the Internet anytime and anywhere, whether or not you are aware or would like to be. Mobility arises a lot of challenges already such as privacy. On the other hand, it brings tons of opportunities given that the world including billions of people are connected anywhere and anytime. I think that the reason why some companies providing mobile devices are so valuable. Overall, interesting topic. I will continue and turn in more entries about this topic. Welcome to discussing and correcting.

Difference between smart phones and traditional laptops This Monday, I bought a brand new smart phone which composes of a quad-core CPU, 1G memory, a high-definition camera and a bunch of sensors such as GPS and gyroscope. With this device, I can call my family, browse the Internet, open pdf files and edit documents generated by Microsoft Office. It is amazing that nowadays your smart phone seems comparable to your laptop in hardware, and much more powerful in software capacities. Questions that naturally arise include: 1) Can mobile devices (e.g. smart phone, pad) someday in the near future replace personal computers? 2) What is the fundamental difficulty that hampers the development and deployment of mobile devices? 3) What is the impact on Internet infrastructure and society with the exploring of the number of mobile devices globally? Since I am a student studying computer science, I would like to spend some time on these interesting questions and post my ideas and conclusions in subsequent notebooks. Welcome to discussing with me and corrections.

Learning of vocabularies (corrections needed) Hi, I'm learning English and following are some vocabularies I learned today when browsing English articles. I try to use them by constructing sentences with them. Please help correct them. -- audacious: The image of soldiers in my mind is audacious because they, in most cases, time, and positions, will face difficulties, dangerous and even death. -- debut: It is said that the Apple will debut Iphone 6 on Sept. 9. -- haywire: Everything in this street became haywire after the tornado hit the city. -- stakeholder: For a football team, both the coach and the players are stakeholders.

A short paper review This morning, I read a tutorial article, Reading a Computer Science Research Paper, which focuses on helping graduate students improve their reading skills when reading technique papers that are typically 8-12 pages long. The article emphasises that writing a paper review is one of key components of critical reading. Inspired by this suggestion, I decided to spend one hour writing down a short essay (or at least whatever in my mind) for each paper I read and post it in italki for critics and suggestions :-). The following is the first post, a paper review for Reading a Computer Science Research Paper written by Philip W. L. Fong from University of Calgary. (Background in computer science papers) Research papers in most research domains (e.g. Mathematic, Psychology, and Computer Science) can fall into two categories, journal paper and conference paper, which are different in organizers, the process of paper review, time to publish, and hence quality. Generally speaking, conference papers are more flexibly in organization, peer-review of papers, and most importantly, can be published in months. I suspect those are the top reasons most researchers in computer science are willing to publish their results as conference papers. Hence, most research papers in computer science are regularly 8-12 pages long, relatively lack peer-review, and possibly contain bugs. (Summary) This paper helps us look down into the process of reading a computer science paper that is around 10 pages long and possibly contain bugs (most bugs though, are ambitious claims that cannot be substantiated and experiments that are hardly to repeat by other researchers.) The author suggests to break the reading process into three sub-tasks -- comprehension, evaluation and synthesis. Every sub-tasks, with different goals, target the key components of a paper, the problem the paper tries to address, the claims made by the authors, the way the claims are substantiated, and the conclusions and impacts of the research result. To help students facilitate with this process, the author lists dozens of questions that a student can ask while reading a paper. Such as What is the motivation of the research work. (Critique) To be continued... (Synthesis) To be continued...