Prulink Protection Account

I have encountered too many insurance agents who deliver financial plans without knowing what they are selling. Most of the time, I have to find my own answer about how the insurance company charges their clients from everywhere except the agents. And I know that insurance policy is never worth your money unless you get lucky to be hit by capital illnesses, or hospitalized, etc.

The latest policy that I'm scrutinising is PruLink Protection Account. My wife bought it with the intention of financing it using her PruCash cashback and additional monthly payment.

The policy promises investment return in the long run while giving us the policy holder protection right now. To justify the cost of protection, 85% of our premiums for the first year will be used to offset distribution cost, and the remaining 15% will be put in our funds account to invest in a chosen fund, which is Singapore Managed Fund for my wife's case.

For second and third year, the proportion for investment will grow to 50% of premiums paid, and from fourth year to ninth year, it will be 100% of premiums paid. Then the policy states that for 10th year onward, the insurance company will even top up our investment to 105% of premiums paid.

What is not stated clearly is that the "assurance charges" for death, TPD, TI, and crisis cover, payable every month, will be taken from the funds account. The assurance charge per $1,000 sum assured starts from $0.74 at age 26, to $86.25 at age 85, to $254.68 at age 99.

That means, if you're still covered at age 99, expect to pay $1699 of assurance charges per month for $80k sum assured! Of course, most people will not live to that age or will have cashed out by then. Anyway, currently the assurance charges including administrative cost for my wife's Prulink Protection policy is $14.86.

So for this first year, my wife will pay monthly premium of $100, in which only $15 will make it to the funds account. Then I discover that the units are immediately redeemed with 5% of its value shed because of the bid-offer spread, to pay for the assurance charges. But the redeemed units are only worth $14.25, which is not sufficient to pay the assurance charges! So we have to top up cash for the difference of 61 cents.

If you have not realized by now, did you see how the $15 just made a futile trip to the funds account and losing 5% of its value in the process? In so doing, our $15 became insufficient to pay for the $14.86 assurance charges.

Now here's the twist - if we could first pay the assurance charges with our $15 premium, then investing the balance, our funds account would have 14 cents in the black instead of 61 cents in the red at the end of the day. Simply reversing the process will earn us 75 cents per transaction :)

To give some sense to the process, I strongly urge Prudential to take the assurance charges from the premium paid, instead of trying to recover it from the units, as long as premiums are being paid. That'll mean more work to Prudential, but consumers will like you for doing it for them. And isn't that what Prudential wants us to believe? O... Prudential has no tagline for consumers?

making sense of new generation of Linux

There are several ways to run Linux:
1) Install Linux from installation CD the traditional way
- need CD ROM drive
- need new partition in harddisk
- can only run one system at a time

2) Run Linux from Live DC.
- need CD ROM drive,
- don't need new harddisk partition though
- only can run one system at a time

3) Load Linux Live CD from virtual machine
- don't need CD ROM
- don't need new harddisk partition
- can easily switch between host OS and guest OS!
- file sharing locally could be issue, but can be overcome through IP applications!

the flavors of Linux

Linux has come a long way since Linux Torvalds days. I was hunting for small footprint linux sometime back and bravo, there are so many of them available. There are versions that can boot directly from CD too - like damnsmalllinux and knoppix. The names they chose were funny too.
Well, I was looking for ways to install linux from ntfs though, and this feat has not been accomplished by many yet. There's this tool "instlux" that I thought I may use, but it turns out I couldn't load the aironet network module for my laptop, so I was stopped from installing the OpenSuse from network.
Then I was thinking maybe I could build a kernel and control the boot process so that it boot directly to open up a browser. In that way I won't have to wait long long for system initialization when all I need is a browser...

bash starteam

I must bash starteam. it's so slow. I don't like to use it at all. more than half my time is spent on trying to start and restart and start again the starteam client when it hangs.. it's a pain in my ass.

Transceiver module

I have a new assignment - make RIU hardcopy work on PDH-IFU... let's see what needs to be done.
1) how transceiver module interact with RIU and ODU
2) what changes introduced in RIU HC - I heard it requires new libHwModule

Founders at work

Hey, I'm reading this book called "founders at work". So far, the founders are all techie.. like google's founders larry & sergey. The most techie guy must be steve wozniak.. he designed the Apple II, add colors to it, and even designed a floppy disk drive for it personally... a tremendous feat at that time... it's amazing! I even read about the guy who started blogger :) he's cool.
It makes me think what's the most doable thing for a startup in this day and age. Cuong is talking about Web 2.0, and I'm like a system guy... well, we're gonna do something anyhow :)

it's hard to keep blogging

It's hard..
Just think about the hurdles you have to pass before a single character can be put online:
1) it takes the PC at least a minute to boot up (you have to do that once in a while when windows filesystem become cranky)...
2) it takes the IE some time to load...
3) the blogger server may be slow...

Will there be a dedicated blogger device in future? just like what I heard google is trying to do - coming up with a google handphone...

JTAG

JTAG is a jargon of the testing industry, and I have not understood it the first time I read about it. But it's not too difficult to understand if you follow the explanation in this tutorial. More advance concept like JTAG clock frequency, bypass mode, daisy chain operation needs explanation. But I guess I won't be needing the understanding any time soon.

GHS debug probe

The GHS probe has its own CPU (don't know what model though). The probe configuration can be accessed in several ways:
1) using serial comm via COM (RS-232) port (need null modem cable)
2) using telnet or web browser via Ethernet (RJ-45) port (need Ethernet cable)
3) using GHS graphical probe administrator via Ethernet (RJ-45) port (need utility gpadmin.exe)
4) using serial comm via USB port (need usb driver)

we can use Tera Term Pro as the serial comm application.

stack frame

was trying to understand how stack tracing work... so went to look it up in wikipedia.

GHS-INTEGRITY

This RTOS is so baffling... I was trying to compile a simple application that prints "hello world" but the elxr linker blurted out this line:

(error) cannot find file C:\NG-PDH\int508\ixdp425\crt0.o

Let me explain a bit. C:\NG-PDH\int508\ is where I place the RTOS system files, which is INTEGRITY version 5.08. ixdp425 is where the bsp files are. I looked into the bsp directory, sure enough there isn't any crt0.o. The problem is, how can this file be generated? or is this file necessary? or did I screw up the build process because of wrong options in default.gpj.

o.. the ccintarm also complain:

Warning: Cannot open library libres.a
Warning: Cannot open library libbsp.a