Windows 8 reached RTM (release-to-manufacturing) on August 1, 2012, and Microsoft made the final build available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers on August 15. OEM PC manufacturers received the RTM build on the same date to begin factory installation, with the public sale date set for October 26, 2012 — nearly three years after Windows 7 launched in October 2009. The RTM announcement at a BUILD developer conference session marked the last point developers could verify their applications before retail availability. Read more
Apple released OS X Mountain Lion (version 10.8) on July 25, 2012 at $19.99 — the first time a Mac OS X release had been priced below $29, and the lowest price Apple had charged for a Mac OS release. Mountain Lion was distributed exclusively through the Mac App Store, requiring OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.8) or later and an Apple ID, continuing the App Store-only OS distribution model Apple had introduced with Lion (10.7) in 2011. The release brought more than 200 features from iOS to the Mac, completing a deliberate convergence of the two operating system families that Apple had been pursuing since Lion. Messages replaced iChat: the new app combined the older AIM/Yahoo/Jabber protocols (iChat’s capabilities) with iMessage — Apple’s end-to-end encrypted messaging system introduced in iOS 5 (October 2011) — allowing Mac users to send messages to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users over data rather than SMS, with message delivery and read receipts. Notification Center (pulled directly from iOS 5’s design) arrived in the top-right corner of the Mac desktop: applications registered notifications that appeared as banners or alerts, collected in a notification sidebar revealed by swiping from the right edge of the trackpad. Reminders and Notes (both iOS 5 additions) arrived as separate Mac applications, syncing via iCloud. Game Center, Airplay Mirroring (mirror the Mac screen wirelessly to an Apple TV 2nd generation or later), Twitter integration in system-wide share sheets, and Facebook integration followed. Read more
For years, I had been trained to respect Linux. At university, I had professors who loved it. Later, at work, I spent a great deal of time on embedded systems. So Linux was not some exotic operating system I occasionally installed out of curiosity — it was part of the technical world I knew. Windows development, on the other hand, was something I had done much less of. Then, in 2012, I had to use it, and because engineers are apparently incapable of simply using a new environment normally, I decided to experiment. Read more
In July 2012, I wrote about the newly formed Chamber of Computer Engineers. My first reaction was not philosophical — it was financial. I wrote, roughly: I will love this chamber as long as nobody comes to my door saying, “hands in your pockets.” In other words: please do not ask me for dues. That was the joke. But underneath it was a more serious question: what exactly should a professional chamber do for a computer engineer? Read more
If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2012, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more
Microsoft announced the first Surface tablets at a secret event in Los Angeles on June 18, 2012, with Steve Ballmer personally unveiling two models. Surface RT carried an NVIDIA Tegra 3 ARM processor and ran Windows RT — a version of Windows 8 that could not install legacy x86 desktop applications. Surface Pro was planned around an Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge processor and full Windows 8, capable of running any existing Windows software. Both featured a 10.6-inch ClearType display at 1366×768, a built-in kickstand, and a magnetic cover attachment. The Touch Cover — a 3mm fabric slab with a touch-sensitive keyboard — and the Type Cover — a 5mm physical keyboard — were announced alongside the tablets, priced at $119 and $129 respectively. Read more
Google introduced the Knowledge Graph on May 16, 2012 in a blog post by CEO Larry Page titled “Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings.” The system launched initially for US English searches, with international rollout following over subsequent months. At launch, the Knowledge Graph contained approximately 500 million objects and 3.5 billion facts connecting them — people, places, books, movies, music, companies, and scientific concepts sourced from Freebase (acquired by Google in 2010), Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook, and other structured databases. Read more
Google launched Drive on April 24, 2012, offering 5 GB of free storage with integration into Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. The service entered a cloud-storage market that Dropbox had pioneered in 2008 — Dropbox had approximately 50 million users by 2012 and offered 2 GB free — but Drive’s advantage was converting Google’s existing Docs user base and tying storage directly to a Google account that many people already owned for Gmail. Read more
NVIDIA launched the Kepler architecture on March 22, 2012 with the GeForce GTX 680 at $499. The GK104 die at the heart of the GTX 680 contained 3.54 billion transistors on a 28nm TSMC process, delivering 3.09 TFLOPS of single-precision compute. The GTX 680 matched or outperformed AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 (launched January 2012 at $549) in most games while drawing significantly less power — 195W vs. 250W under load. NVIDIA followed with the GTX 670 in May 2012 at $399, using a cut-down GK104 that offered most of the GTX 680’s performance at lower cost. Read more
The Unexpected Hanging Paradox appears to prove that a judge’s announcement cannot be fulfilled — and then the announcement is immediately fulfilled. The contradiction is not in the judge’s statement. It is in the prisoner’s reasoning about knowledge. Read more
Zeno of Elea, a Greek philosopher from the fifth century BCE, created several paradoxes about motion that troubled thinkers for two thousand years and ultimately demanded new mathematics to resolve. Read more
Berry’s Paradox lives in the uncomfortable space between language and mathematics — the space where ordinary words meet formal definitions and produce results neither can handle alone. Read more
The Raspberry Pi went on sale on February 29, 2012 (deliberately chosen as a leap-day launch) through two licensed distributors, RS Components and Farnell/Element14 — both UK-based electronics distributors that had agreed to handle manufacturing orders. Within minutes of the 6 AM UK launch, traffic overwhelmed both distributor websites, knocking them offline as tens of thousands of people tried to place orders simultaneously. Pre-registration lists ahead of the launch had exceeded 700,000 names, massively outstripping the initial production run of 10,000 boards. The Model B priced at $35 (£22) included a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC (700 MHz ARM1176JZF-S ARM11 core with 256 MB RAM co-packaged on the same SoC die — later upgraded to 512 MB in October 2012), VideoCore IV GPU (capable of 1080p30 H.264 hardware decode and OpenGL ES 2.0), HDMI output, composite video jack, 3.5mm audio, two USB 2.0 ports, 100 Mbps Ethernet, an SD card slot for the boot OS, and a 26-pin GPIO header. The cheaper Model A ($25) had one USB port and no Ethernet. The board was assembled at the Sony UK Technology Centre in Pencoed, Wales — a deliberate choice to keep manufacturing in the UK despite lower-cost options in China. Read more
Hilbert’s Hotel is one of my favourite ways to think about infinity. David Hilbert described the idea in a 1924 lecture in Göttingen; it was not published formally but was later popularised by the physicist George Gamow in his 1947 book One Two Three… Infinity. It remains the clearest illustration I know of why infinity does not behave like a very large finite number. Read more
The Birthday Paradox is not a real contradiction. It is a collision between probability and intuition — and the gap between them is large enough that the result consistently surprises people even after they have heard the explanation before. Read more
The Banach-Tarski Paradox is a theorem in mathematics stating that a solid ball in three-dimensional space can be decomposed into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can then be reassembled — using only rigid motions: rotations and translations — into two solid balls each identical in size to the original. One ball becomes two. No stretching, no scaling, no adding material. Read more
Consider the sentence: “This statement is false.” It is only four words, but it creates a problem that has troubled philosophers and logicians for more than two thousand years. Read more
The Barber Paradox is a simple story that carries the same logical problem as Russell’s Paradox. Imagine a village with one barber. The rule is this: The barber shaves all men in the village who do not shave themselves, and only those men. At first, the rule seems clear. Read more
Raspberry Pi production began in January 2012 at the Sony UK Technology Centre in Pencoed, Wales, with the first batch of Model B boards going through SMT (surface-mount technology) assembly and automated optical inspection before shipment to distributors RS Components and Farnell/Element14. The Raspberry Pi Foundation had spent 2011 refining the design to hit the $35 price point: an early prototype used an Atmel ATmega644 microcontroller, but the decision shifted to the Broadcom BCM2835 SoC (a multimedia processor Broadcom designed for IPTV set-top boxes and mobile phones) after Eben Upton, working at Broadcom, arranged access to the chip at educational pricing. The BCM2835 integrated a 700 MHz ARM1176JZF-S core (ARM11 architecture, ARMv6 ISA), a VideoCore IV GPU (supporting 1080p30 H.264 hardware decode, OpenGL ES 2.0, and OpenVG), and 256 MB of LPDDR2 RAM in a package-on-package stack above the SoC — a single component rather than separate CPU, GPU, and memory chips. The GPU’s hardware H.264 decoder was critical for education use cases like media centers (XBMC ran acceptably on the Pi using GPU-accelerated video) and for making a $35 device feel useful. Read more
Russell’s Paradox is one of those problems that looks harmless until one sentence turns mathematics against itself. Bertrand Russell discovered it around 1901 while reading Gottlob Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik — an attempt to derive all of arithmetic from pure logic. Russell noticed that Frege’s axiom allowing unrestricted set formation contained a contradiction, and he wrote a letter to Frege in June 1902 explaining it. Read more
