The Invention Of Imaginary Numbers: Separating Math From Reality
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Mathematics began very close to the physical world. People counted objects, measured land, followed the movement of stars, and solved practical problems. Read more
Blog Posts
Imaginary Numbers
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The name “imaginary number” sounds almost like a joke — how can a number be imaginary? The name reflects a history of suspicion. These numbers were useful before anyone was comfortable saying they were real. Read more
HTML5 Becomes the Center of Modern Web Development
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By December 2011, “HTML5” had become both a technical specification and a marketing term that redefined expectations for what the web could do. The W3C had published the first public working draft of the HTML5 specification in January 2008, and the final W3C Recommendation would not arrive until October 28, 2014; but browser vendors were implementing features incrementally without waiting for the specification to freeze. The practical trigger for accelerated HTML5 adoption had been Steve Jobs’s April 2010 “Thoughts on Flash” open letter, which explained why the iPhone and iPad would never support Adobe Flash and positioned HTML5 as the appropriate open standard for web video and interactive content. Flash had dominated rich internet applications since the late 1990s: at its peak in 2010, approximately 97 percent of web browsers had Flash installed and most video sites (including YouTube and Vimeo) delivered video through Flash players. HTML5’s <video> and <audio> elements offered native browser-level media playback, but the codec debates complicated adoption: Apple supported H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (proprietary, royalty-bearing via MPEG-LA, but hardware-accelerated in Apple devices); Mozilla and Opera refused to ship H.264 support and backed Ogg Theora (royalty-free); Google’s acquisition of On2 Technologies produced VP8, which Google open-sourced as WebM in May 2010. YouTube began offering an HTML5 video experiment in January 2010, but codec inconsistency meant developers still needed fallback Flash players for most of the following two years. Read more
Raspberry Pi Hardware Design Nears Production
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By November 2011, the Raspberry Pi Foundation — founded by Eben Upton, Rob Mullins, Jack Lang, and Alan Mycroft at the University of Cambridge — had finalized the hardware design of the Raspberry Pi Model B and contracted manufacturing. The project had grown from a 2006 idea about a cheap programmable computer to teach Python to children. The final spec: Broadcom BCM2835 SoC (ARM11 core at 700 MHz plus VideoCore IV GPU capable of 1080p H.264 decode), 256MB of LPDDR2 RAM, HDMI output, composite video, 3.5mm audio, two USB 2.0 ports, 100Mbps Ethernet, SD card for storage, and a 26-pin GPIO header — all for a target retail price of $35 (Model B) or $25 (Model A, without Ethernet, one USB port). Read more
Remembering Atatürk on November 10, 2011
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Every November 10, Turkiye remembers Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Read more
Apple Introduces Siri on the iPhone 4S
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Apple introduced Siri as a headline feature of the iPhone 4S at an event on October 4, 2011 — the first Apple event presided over by Tim Cook as CEO, and the day before Steve Jobs died on October 5. Apple had acquired Siri Inc. on April 28, 2010 for approximately $200 million; the original Siri app had been released on the App Store on February 4, 2010 as a standalone application that used natural language to book restaurants, find movies, and access web services through third-party API integrations with OpenTable, Fandango, and others before Apple acquired the company and removed the app from the App Store four weeks later. The Siri built into the iPhone 4S was substantially redesigned for deeper iOS integration and marketed with the label “Beta” — the first time Apple had shipped a product feature explicitly marked as unfinished, acknowledging that the system would improve over time rather than being presented as complete at launch. Siri ran on the iPhone 4S’s Apple A5 SoC (the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor also used in iPad 2), with audio processing performed on-device but natural language understanding and response generation performed on Apple’s servers, requiring a data connection for most requests. Supported capabilities at launch included setting alarms and reminders, sending messages and emails, making calls, querying the weather, looking up restaurant information via Yelp, performing calculations, and answering factual questions through a Wolfram Alpha integration. Siri responded in synthesized speech and displayed text on screen simultaneously. Read more
When AltaVista Disappeared
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Some technologies disappear loudly: a company announces the end, people write long farewell articles, old users share screenshots, and someone makes a documentary. Then there are the technologies that simply stop answering. Read more
When Mounting a Disk Became a Linux Lesson
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There are technical problems that begin with a sentence so innocent that you already know the evening is lost. “I just need to write something to this disk.” That was more or less the situation. The disk was NTFS. The system was Linux. The tool involved was ntfs-3g. Nothing about this sounded dramatic — mount the disk, copy the files, continue with life. Instead, the computer gradually transformed into something that felt less like a workstation and more like a geological formation: slow, heavy, unresponsive. Every operation seemed to require negotiation. Read more
A Friday Night at IKEA Ankara
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Some places begin as stores and somehow become part of a city’s social life. That was the strange thing about IKEA Ankara. In September 2011, I wrote about it with the kind of confidence I often had then when observing other people’s habits. I had tried the famous meatballs, and my conclusion was that anyone going there only to eat them needed to reconsider their life choices. I had also heard — and partly observed — that Mamak’s nightlife seemed to be happening there; the place was crowded with people who did not fit any single category. And when people said it was the biggest IKEA in Turkey, I dismissed that too: of course it was big, I thought, half of it was pillows and duvets. That was the entry — short, mocking, very certain. Read more
Windows 8 Is Shown to Developers
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Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 at the BUILD developer conference September 13–16, 2011 in Anaheim, California, and gave all 5,000 attendees a Samsung Series 7 Slate tablet preloaded with a Windows 8 Developer Preview build. The conference was led by Steven Sinofsky (president of Windows division) and introduced the Metro interface publicly for the first time: a full-screen, tile-based Start screen designed for touch, replacing the Start menu that had been in Windows since Windows 95 in 1995. The tiles were live — updating dynamically with news, weather, email counts, and photos without opening the full application. Read more
Google Agrees to Acquire Motorola Mobility
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Google announced an agreement to acquire Motorola Mobility on August 15, 2011 for $12.5 billion in cash — $40 per share, a 63% premium to Motorola Mobility’s closing price the previous Friday. Motorola Mobility had been spun off from Motorola Solutions (the enterprise and government radio business) only seven months earlier, in January 2011. The deal’s stated rationale from Google CEO Larry Page was protecting Android from patent litigation: Motorola Mobility held approximately 17,000 granted patents and 7,500 pending applications covering cellular communications, wireless protocols, and mobile device design, accumulated over Motorola’s 83-year history as a pioneer in wireless technology. Read more
The Bar Hidden Inside an Office Building
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Some places feel strange before you even enter them — not because they are dangerous, not because they are beautiful, but because they are in the wrong building. In August 2011, I wrote a short entry about SSK İşhanı in Ankara. Years earlier, it had contained the second bar I had ever gone to, called Baraka. What I remembered most was not the music, not the drinks, not even the people — it was the fact that the bar was inside an office building. Read more
GitHub And The Social Side Of Code
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Source-code hosting used to feel like infrastructure — a necessary utility, not a social space. Sourceforge (launched 1999) and Google Code (launched 2006) provided repositories, bug trackers, and download pages. They were functional. You submitted a project, it hosted the files, other developers found it through search. Read more
OS X Lion Moves Software Distribution Toward App Stores
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Apple released OS X 10.7 Lion on July 20, 2011 through the Mac App Store for $29.99 — the first Mac operating system sold as a digital download only, with no DVD option at retail. Snow Leopard (2009) had been available as a $29 disc, itself a reduction from Leopard’s $129; Lion went further by eliminating physical media entirely for consumer upgrades. (A USB flash drive option was made available for machines without Mac App Store access, priced at $69, via Apple.com.) The Mac App Store had launched only seven months earlier, in January 2011. Read more
The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2011
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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2011, 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
Apple Announces iCloud
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Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced iCloud at WWDC on June 6, 2011, describing it as a replacement for MobileMe — Apple’s $99/year subscription sync service that had launched in 2008 to widespread criticism for reliability failures and data loss. Jobs called MobileMe’s execution “not our finest hour” and announced that iCloud’s core services would be free with 5 GB of storage. iCloud launched alongside iOS 5 (October 12, 2011) and OS X Lion (July 20, 2011), which were prerequisites. The service replaced the Mac-as-hub model that had defined Apple’s digital hub strategy since 2001 (the original iTunes philosophy where the Mac was the master copy of music, photos, and calendars, with devices syncing via USB cable). In iCloud’s model, the cloud was the hub: contacts, calendars, email, and purchased content would propagate to every device automatically, with no cable required. MobileMe transitioned to iCloud and was shut down on June 30, 2012. Read more
Google Introduces Chromebooks
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Google announced the first commercial Chromebooks at Google I/O on May 11, 2011, with two models going on sale June 15: the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook ($499 Wi-Fi / $549 3G) and the Acer Chromebook AC700 ($349). Both ran Chrome OS, a Linux-kernel operating system built around the Chrome browser as the exclusive application runtime, with no support for installing native Windows or Mac software. User accounts, bookmarks, apps, and settings synchronized to Google’s servers, meaning any Chromebook could be logged into and return the same environment within seconds. Read more
Ubuntu Introduces the Unity Desktop by Default
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Ubuntu introduced the Unity desktop by default in 2011, making one of the boldest user-interface changes in the distribution’s history. For years, Ubuntu had been associated with a relatively familiar GNOME 2 desktop. Unity moved the experience toward a custom shell with a launcher, global menu ideas, search-centered navigation, and a layout influenced by smaller screens as well as traditional PCs. Read more
Firefox Moves to a Faster Release Model
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Firefox’s move to a faster release model in 2011 was a major cultural change for one of the web’s most important browsers. Earlier browser releases often felt like large events separated by long waits. The web, however, was moving too quickly for that rhythm. New standards, security fixes, performance improvements, and developer needs demanded a shorter feedback loop. Read more
IBM Watson Defeats Jeopardy Champions
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IBM’s Watson competed against Ken Jennings (winner of a 74-game consecutive win streak in 2004) and Brad Rutter (highest all-time Jeopardy prize earnings) in a three-game match taped in January 2011 and broadcast February 14–16, 2011. Watson won with $77,147 in combined scores versus Rutter’s $21,600 and Jennings’ $24,000. The $1 million first prize was donated to charity; IBM had spent approximately four years and $900 million on the project. Watson’s hardware comprised 90 IBM POWER7 servers with 2,880 processor cores and 16 TB of RAM, occupying 10 racks. The system had no internet access during the match; all 200 million pages of content (Wikipedia, Britannica, literary works, newspapers, and databases) were stored locally. Watson could analyze 200 million pages per second. Read more