Sercan Külcü

Sercan Külcü

Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering, Giresun University

Blog Posts

Google Open-Sources the VP8 Video Codec

2 minute read

Published:

Google open-sourced the VP8 video codec on May 19, 2010 at Google I/O (May 19–20, 2010), alongside the announcement of the WebM media format, approximately three months after completing its $124.6 million acquisition of On2 Technologies (February 19, 2010). On2’s VP8 was the eighth-generation codec from the company; VP7 had been the video codec used in Skype calls. Google published the VP8 specification and reference encoder/decoder (libvpx) under a BSD-style license with an irrevocable royalty-free patent grant, making both the standard and the implementation free to use and implement without licensing fees or formal negotiations. WebM combined VP8 video with Vorbis audio (the royalty-free audio codec from Xiph.org) in a container derived from the Matroska (.mkv) container format, all under open, royalty-free terms. Mozilla, Google, and Opera committed immediately; Apple declined to add WebM to Safari, citing hardware H.264 decoder support in iOS devices and existing H.264 infrastructure; Microsoft announced it would support WebM in Internet Explorer 9 only if users installed the codec separately. Read more

The iPad And The Question Of What A Computer Is

3 minute read

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Apple announced the iPad on January 27, 2010 and began selling Wi-Fi models on April 3. The device starts at $499 for 16GB. It runs a version of iPhone OS 3.2 on an Apple A4 chip. It has a 9.7-inch multi-touch display at 1024×768 pixels. It has no camera, no USB port, no SD card slot, no Flash support. Applications are installed only through the App Store. Read more

Apple Releases the First iPad

3 minute read

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPad at a press event on January 27, 2010, introducing it as a device that filled “a third category between a laptop and a smartphone” for use cases including web browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and e-books. The Wi-Fi-only models went on sale April 3, 2010; Wi-Fi + 3G models followed April 30, 2010. Pricing: $499 (16 GB Wi-Fi), $599 (32 GB), $629 (64 GB); Wi-Fi + AT&T 3G models added $130 to each tier. The 3G data plans were offered without contracts — $14.99/month for 250 MB or $29.99/month for unlimited, purchased directly from Apple — the first major smartphone-class device with month-to-month no-contract data. The iPad’s 9.7-inch IPS display at 1024×768 resolution (132 ppi) was the same aspect ratio as the original iPhone’s display but 7.8× larger in area. Apple’s A4 SoC (ARM Cortex-A8 at 1 GHz, PowerVR SGX535 GPU, 256 MB RAM) — designed by Apple’s chip team after its acquisition of PA Semi (April 2008, $278 million) — was the first chip Apple had designed in-house for a shipping product. The A4 was 9.56 mm thick, weighed 1.5 lb (Wi-Fi), achieved Apple’s claimed 10-hour battery life in typical use, and produced no audible fan noise (fanless thermal design inherited from iPhone). Read more

NVIDIA Announces Fermi GeForce GTX 480

4 minute read

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NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 480 on March 26, 2010 at $499, introducing the Fermi architecture (GF100 chip) as its first GPU designed explicitly to serve dual roles as a graphics processor and a general-purpose parallel computing platform. NVIDIA had first revealed Fermi at its GPU Technology Conference in September 2009 with a detailed architecture paper, generating anticipation for what appeared to be a significant compute-capability advance. The GF100 die was manufactured on TSMC’s 40nm process and contained 3.0 billion transistors across a 529 mm² die — more than double the GT200 chip (1.4 billion transistors, 470 mm²) used in the GTX 280 (2008). The GTX 480 shipped with 480 CUDA cores (15 Streaming Multiprocessors × 32 cores each) out of GF100’s full complement of 512 cores (16 SMs), with one SM disabled — a common yield management practice for complex dies. Each SM in Fermi was substantially redesigned from the GT200: it gained a configurable L1 cache (16 or 48 KB, shared with shared memory in a 48/16 or 16/48 KB split), connected to a 768 KB unified L2 cache shared across the entire chip — a conventional memory hierarchy absent from earlier CUDA architectures that had instead relied on purely programmer-managed shared memory and no L2. The GTX 480 offered 1.35 TFLOPS of single-precision and 168 GFLOPS of double-precision floating-point performance, with the 1:8 ratio between DP and SP reflecting a consumer-grade configuration (the professional Tesla C2050/C2070 cards, launched in 2010, offered 1:2 DP:SP ratio for scientific computing). Read more

The Browser Is Becoming A Platform

4 minute read

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For most of the web’s history, a browser was a program for reading documents. HTML was a document format. JavaScript was a scripting language for small interactive touches — form validation, a dropdown menu, an image that changes when you hover over it. Serious applications ran on the desktop. Read more

Microsoft Azure Becomes Commercially Available

1 minute read

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Microsoft Azure became commercially available in 2010, marking Microsoft’s serious entry into cloud computing as a public platform. At the time, the cloud conversation was often associated with Amazon Web Services and fast-moving startups. Azure showed that the shift was also becoming unavoidable for established enterprise software companies. Read more

Google Introduces the Nexus One

3 minute read

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Google unveiled the Nexus One at a press event on January 5, 2010, with the phone going on sale the same day at $179 with a T-Mobile contract or $529 unlocked — a price significantly higher than competitors expected from a carrier-free unlocked Android phone at the time. HTC manufactured the hardware; Google designed the software experience and sold the phone directly from google.com/phone without requiring a carrier store or contract. The phone ran Android 2.1 (Eclair) on a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 processor with 512MB RAM, a 3.7-inch 480×800 AMOLED display, and a 5MP camera. Read more

Google Public DNS Launches

4 minute read

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Google launched the public DNS resolvers at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 on December 3, 2009, offering a globally operated alternative to the DNS recursive resolvers that most users received automatically from their Internet Service Providers. DNS (Domain Name System) is the distributed hierarchical database that translates human-readable domain names like example.com into IP addresses that computers use for routing, resolving the mapping by querying a chain of authoritative name servers from the DNS root through top-level domain servers to the specific domain’s authoritative server, and caching responses to avoid repeated queries. Before Google Public DNS, the primary alternative to ISP DNS was OpenDNS (founded 2006, primary address 208.67.222.222), which offered faster resolution and optional content filtering but monetized NXDOMAIN responses (redirecting mistyped domain names to search/ad pages). ISP DNS resolvers varied dramatically in quality: some performed NXDOMAIN hijacking (redirecting failed domain lookups to ISP-branded search pages rather than returning NXDOMAIN responses), some had poor cache TTL compliance (serving stale records beyond their intended expiry), some lacked DNSSEC validation support, and many had higher latency than a globally anycast resolver could achieve. Google’s anycast deployment announced the same 8.8.8.8 IP address from data centers in multiple locations worldwide, routing each user’s query to the geographically or topologically nearest Google data center — reducing average query latency from typical ISP values of 30-60 ms to Google’s claimed 11-12 ms median. Read more

When Solid State Drives Start To Feel Real

4 minute read

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Hard drives have always made computers feel mechanical. You can hear them spin up at startup, click during seeks, and spin down when idle. A significant part of the computer is electronic, but for decades storage has depended on a physical disk rotating at 5,400 or 7,200 RPM and a read/write head moving across its surface. The average seek time for a 7,200 RPM hard drive — the time required to physically position the head over the right track — is around 8–10 milliseconds. Read more

Google Announces the Go Programming Language

1 minute read

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Google announced Go as an open-source project on November 10, 2009, releasing the initial source code at golang.org. The language was created by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson — Pike and Thompson were the principal designers of Unix at Bell Labs in 1969 and Plan 9, and had strong opinions about language design informed by decades of systems programming. The project began September 21, 2007 as an internal Google effort motivated by frustration with C++ compilation times: a large Google service could take 30–45 minutes to compile in C++, making development iteration slow and build farms expensive. Go targeted C++-scale systems programming with compilation speeds measured in seconds. Read more

Windows 7 Is Released

3 minute read

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Microsoft released Windows 7 on October 22, 2009, at retail prices of $119.99 (Home Premium), $199.99 (Professional), and $219.99 (Ultimate) — with launch edition upgrade pricing of $49.99 for Home Premium available through the summer pre-sale. Windows 7 RTM (Release to Manufacturing) had been signed off on July 22, 2009 as build 7600.16385, available to OEM partners in August and to MSDN/TechNet subscribers before the retail launch. The release came 34 months after Windows Vista’s consumer release (January 30, 2007), which had been criticized heavily: Vista’s User Account Control dialog appeared 4–6 times during a typical session (Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads dramatized this repeatedly), hardware requirements were high (1 GB RAM minimum, 2 GB practical), driver compatibility was poor at launch (printer and scanner drivers in particular broke badly), and early versions had performance regressions on the hardware typical at the time of release. Windows 7 kept Vista’s underlying architecture — NT 6.1 kernel (Vista was NT 6.0), WDDM 1.1 graphics driver model, BitLocker, Windows Defender — but fixed the UAC behavior to prompt far less frequently (background configuration changes by administrators no longer triggered prompts), reduced minimum memory requirements, and benefited from three years of Vista driver maturation in the hardware ecosystem. Read more

Windows 7 Reaches RTM

4 minute read

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Windows 7 reached RTM (Release to Manufacturing) on July 22, 2009, with build 7600.16385 signed as the final code. TechNet and MSDN subscribers could download the RTM build on August 6; OEM distribution — Dell, HP, Lenovo, Toshiba, and others receiving the build to preinstall on new PCs — began August 24. The public retail launch was October 22, 2009, with Home Premium priced at $119.99 upgrade / $199.99 full, Professional at $199.99 upgrade / $299.99 full. Microsoft also introduced a temporary three-license “Family Pack” at $149.99 for Home Premium to address household multi-PC licensing. Read more

Snow Leopard Reaches Gold Master Development

1 minute read

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Mac OS X Snow Leopard reached its gold master stage in 2009, signaling that Apple’s next Mac operating system was ready for final release. Unlike many operating-system launches, Snow Leopard was not remembered mainly for dramatic visual changes. Its reputation came from refinement. Read more

The Comfort Of Long Forum Conversations

4 minute read

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Stack Overflow launched last September and has grown quickly. It does something that older technical forums often failed at: it surfaces the best answer efficiently, rewards clarity, and is designed for people who want a fast, correct response. I use it. It is genuinely useful. Read more

Google Chrome OS Is Publicly Announced

4 minute read

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Google publicly announced Chrome OS in a blog post on July 7, 2009, authored by Sundar Pichai (VP of Product Management) and Linus Upson (Engineering Director). The announcement came ten months after Google Chrome browser launched on September 2, 2008 — the OS would be the browser made into a full operating system. The post framed the project around the 2009 netbook market: millions of consumers were buying $299–$399 Windows XP or Windows 7 Starter laptops (Acer Aspire One, ASUS Eee PC) that were slow, prone to malware, and required constant maintenance. Chrome OS targeted that segment directly with a Linux-kernel OS in which the Chrome browser was the only execution environment — no native app installation, no file system users needed to manage. Read more

Microsoft Launches the Bing Search Engine

3 minute read

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Microsoft launched Bing on June 3, 2009 — replacing Live Search, which had itself replaced MSN Search in 2006. CEO Steve Ballmer had positioned it as a “decision engine” rather than a search engine, emphasizing structured results for specific high-value query categories: flight prices and schedules (Farecast acquisition, 2008), restaurant and business reviews, health conditions and drug information, and shopping comparison. The homepage featured a rotating scenic background photograph with mouse-over hotspots linking to related searches — a deliberate visual departure from Google’s sparse interface. Read more

Google Wave Is Revealed

2 minute read

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Google revealed Wave at Google I/O on May 27–28, 2009, in an 80-minute live demo by Lars Rasmussen — the same engineer who had previously co-created Google Maps with his brother Jens at Where 2 Technologies before Google acquired it in 2004. A “wave” was a hybrid object combining a shared document, a conversation thread, and a live collaboration session. Every participant saw other users’ keystrokes appear character by character in real time as they typed, rather than waiting for messages to be sent. Waves were nestled: sub-conversations (wavelets) could branch inside a parent wave, and any participant could edit any message in the conversation’s history, unlike email’s immutable sent-message model. Read more

Oracle Announces Its Plan to Acquire Sun Microsystems

1 minute read

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Oracle announced its plan to acquire Sun Microsystems in 2009, and the news immediately felt larger than a normal enterprise acquisition. Sun had shaped major parts of computing culture: Java, Solaris, SPARC, NFS, workstations, servers, and important open-source projects all carried Sun’s influence. Read more

The Web Is Moving Into Our Pockets

3 minute read

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Browsing the web on a phone used to mean visiting a stripped-down WAP page — minimal text, no images, a navigation designed around a numeric keypad. That was the mobile web until recently: a simplified shadow of the real internet, tolerated rather than enjoyed. Read more