Sercan Külcü

Sercan Külcü

Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering, Giresun University

Blog Posts

Microsoft Opens More of Its Server Protocol Documentation

1 minute read

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On February 21, 2008, Microsoft announced that it would publish technical specifications for more than 30,000 pages of Windows client and server protocol documentation, committing to make these specifications freely available online. The announcement directly responded to the European Commission’s 2004 antitrust ruling, which had ordered Microsoft to provide “complete and accurate” interoperability documentation for its server protocols to allow competing server and workgroup software to interoperate with Windows clients. Microsoft had been slow to comply: the Commission fined Microsoft €280.5 million in July 2006 and €899 million in February 2008 for insufficient compliance — the €899 million fine was one of the largest EU antitrust penalties at the time, announced the same week as the documentation commitment. Read more

Netbooks And The Return Of The Small Computer

3 minute read

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Personal computers have spent most of their history growing more powerful. Faster processors, larger screens, more RAM, stronger graphics: these improvements have been easy to understand and easy to market. The ASUS Eee PC, which launched in October 2007 at $299, is suggesting that another direction can be valuable: a computer that becomes useful by becoming smaller, cheaper, and simpler. Read more

MacBook Air Redefines the Thin Laptop

4 minute read

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Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air at Macworld on January 15, 2008, sliding it out of a manila envelope to illustrate its thinness. The MacBook Air was 0.16 inches at its thinnest edge and 0.76 inches at its thickest, 3 lb (1.36 kg), with a 13.3-inch 1280×800 display. It launched at $1,799 with a 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (a custom LV — low voltage — version using a 45nm die in a smaller package than standard laptops), 2GB RAM soldered to the board, an 80GB 4200 RPM PATA hard drive, or optionally a 64GB SSD for $999 more. Ports: one USB-A, one Micro-DVI, one 3.5mm headphone jack. No Ethernet, no optical drive, no removable battery. Read more

Amazon Expands the Idea of Cloud Computing

4 minute read

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Amazon Web Services launched Amazon S3 on March 14, 2006 ($0.15 per GB stored, $0.20 per GB transferred out) and EC2 public beta on October 25, 2006, at $0.10/hour for the smallest (m1.small: 1 vCPU, 1.7 GB RAM) through $0.80/hour for m1.xlarge (4 vCPUs, 15 GB RAM). Both ran on Xen hypervisors in Amazon’s data centers, exposing infrastructure that Amazon had built for its own retail operations. In November 2007, Amazon added SimpleDB (a schemaless, eventually-consistent key-value store) as AWS’s first managed database service. By the end of 2007, S3 was storing tens of billions of objects, and notable startups including Dropbox (which launched in April 2007 with S3 as its storage backend), SmugMug, Reddit, and Animoto had built their core infrastructure on AWS. Read more

Google Announces Android

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Google announced Android in 2007 as part of the Open Handset Alliance, and the announcement immediately changed the shape of the mobile software conversation. The iPhone had already shown that the phone could become a general-purpose computing device. Android suggested that this new world would not belong to a single hardware maker or a single closed ecosystem. Read more

Ubuntu 7.10 Expands Desktop Linux

3 minute read

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Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” was released on October 18, 2007, shipping Compiz desktop compositing effects enabled by default for systems with supported graphics hardware — the first Ubuntu release to make GPU-accelerated desktop effects standard rather than optional. Compiz on Gutsy required a compatible NVIDIA or ATI driver; the Restricted Drivers Manager (introduced in Ubuntu 7.04) simplified installing these proprietary drivers through a GUI dialog, eliminating the manual xorg.conf editing that had previously required technical knowledge. With Compiz enabled, Ubuntu 7.10 offered the rotating desktop cube, wobbly window animations, and the Expo plugin showing all workspaces simultaneously — effects that had attracted significant attention when Novell demonstrated them via Xgl in early 2006. Read more

Wikipedia And The Changing Habit Of Looking Things Up

3 minute read

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When I was younger, looking something up usually meant finding the right book. A home encyclopedia — Britannica, Larousse, or whatever the household owned — had weight, order, and roughly 120,000 articles. If the information was not there, the search had to continue elsewhere. The library. A teacher. A more specialized reference. Read more

Apple Introduces the iPod Touch

3 minute read

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Apple announced the iPod touch at “The Beat Goes On” event on September 5, 2007, with the first units available September 14, 2007 at $299 (8 GB) and $399 (16 GB). The iPod touch used the same Samsung S5L8900 ARM1176JZF-S processor at 412 MHz, the same 3.5-inch 320×480 multi-touch display, and the same Safari mobile browser as the original iPhone (launched June 29, 2007), but omitted the cellular radio, microphone (added in the 2nd generation September 2008), earpiece speaker, camera (first appeared in 4th generation September 2010), and GPS. Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) was retained, enabling Safari, YouTube, Google Maps, and the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store — Apple’s feature allowing direct music purchase over Wi-Fi without connecting to a computer, first enabled on iPod touch at launch. The device was thinner than the iPhone at 8.0 mm versus 11.6 mm, because the cellular hardware occupied a significant portion of the iPhone’s internal volume. The iPod classic (announced the same day) continued as a hard drive-based music player, and a new thinner iPod nano was also announced, but the iPod touch represented Apple’s bet that the touchscreen interface would replace the click-wheel-and-physical-button paradigm for the premium iPod. Read more

VMware Fusion Brings Virtualization to Intel Macs

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VMware Fusion brought VMware’s virtualization experience to Intel-based Macs in 2007, arriving at a moment when the Mac platform was changing quickly. Apple’s move from PowerPC to Intel processors made it far easier to run x86 operating systems on Mac hardware, and virtualization turned that capability into a practical daily workflow. Read more

Tactical Environment Software

4 minute read

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Tactical environment software is an interesting example of software that must work with a large amount of changing information. In a military or operational environment, a user may need maps, weather data, positions, communication information, surveillance reports, and mission plans at the same time. The important problem is not only collecting this information. It is presenting the right part of it clearly enough to support a decision. Read more

Intel and the Industry Push Multi-Core Computing

2 minute read

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Intel’s Core 2 Duo launched July 27, 2006, marking the mainstream shift to dual-core x86 desktop processors. By mid-2007, Intel expanded to quad-core with the Core 2 Quad Q6600 (January 2007, $851 initially, reduced to $266 by July 2007) and the Core 2 Extreme QX6850 at 3.0 GHz ($999 at launch, July 2007). AMD had been first to mainstream dual-core with the Athlon 64 X2 in May 2005, but Intel’s Core 2 microarchitecture (Conroe, 65nm) reclaimed performance leadership, and the move to quad-core in 2007 extended Intel’s lead as AMD’s Phenom quad-core didn’t ship until November 2007. The clock-frequency race that had defined the PC industry since the 1980s had effectively ended: Intel’s Pentium 4 Prescott (90nm, 2004) reached 3.8 GHz but generated over 100 watts of heat in high-performance configurations, making 4+ GHz architecturally untenable. Adding cores was the only remaining path to increased throughput within thermal limits — Steve Ballmer summarized this publicly: “core counts will double every two years” in place of clock frequency. Read more

The Phone Is Becoming a Computer

4 minute read

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Two days ago, Apple began selling the iPhone in the United States. I have been reading everything written about it and trying to understand whether this is a genuinely different kind of device or only a well-designed version of things that already existed. Read more

The First iPhone Goes on Sale

4 minute read

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The first iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007 at 6 PM local time in each timezone. Steve Jobs had introduced it at Macworld on January 9, 2007, describing it as “an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator” — three products in one. The original iPhone had a 3.5-inch 320×480 capacitive multi-touch screen (163 PPI), a 2MP camera, Samsung-manufactured ARM 11 processor running at 412 MHz, 128MB RAM, and either 4GB or 8GB of storage, priced at $499 and $599 respectively on a two-year AT&T exclusive contract. AT&T was the only US carrier; GSM-only, operating on EDGE (2.5G) data rather than 3G. Read more

Google Street View Appears

4 minute read

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Google launched Street View on May 25, 2007 with panoramic street-level imagery from five US cities: San Francisco, New York City, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver. The feature integrated into Google Maps as an alternative to the top-down satellite/map view, allowing users to navigate a 360-degree photograph taken from street level at specific addresses. The initial imagery was captured using cars equipped with camera systems from Immersive Media — their Dodeca 2360 spherical camera array captured images in 11 directions simultaneously — combined with GPS, inertial measurement units, and laser rangefinders to record the precise position and orientation of each photograph. Processing the raw camera output into Street View panoramas required multiple pipeline stages: synchronizing images from multiple cameras taken at slightly different times, lens distortion correction, color calibration across cameras, photographic stitching into equirectangular panoramas (2D projections of the full sphere), GPS/IMU fusion to place each panorama at an accurate geographic coordinate, and compression for web delivery. The initial Street View cars were Chevrolet Cobalt sedans with the camera assembly mounted on the roof; Google subsequently developed its own Street View camera generations, reaching 15 cameras plus additional sensors by later versions. Read more

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Is Released

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Ubuntu 7.04, known as Feisty Fawn, was released in April 2007 during a period when desktop Linux was becoming more approachable for curious PC users. Ubuntu had already built a reputation for taking Debian’s strengths and presenting them through a friendlier installation and update experience. Feisty continued that work. Read more

Adobe Announces Creative Suite 3

1 minute read

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Adobe announced Creative Suite 3 in 2007, and the release represented more than another bundle of design applications. It arrived at a moment when print design, web design, photography, video, and interactive media were converging inside the same professional workflows. Designers increasingly needed to move between formats rather than live inside one tool. Read more

History of Early Personal Computers and Gaming Consoles

5 minute read

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When I look at today’s computers, it is easy to forget how young personal computing really is. Many of the machines that helped shape home computing and video games appeared only a few decades ago. They had tiny amounts of memory and very limited processors compared with modern systems, but they created a new relationship between people and computers. Read more

Virtualization Becomes a Mainstream PC Topic

2 minute read

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Intel shipped VT-x (Vanderpool Technology) in mainstream processors beginning with the Pentium 4 600 series in June 2005, and AMD shipped AMD-V (Pacifica) with Athlon 64 X2 processors beginning in May 2006. By February 2007, both Intel Core 2 and AMD Athlon 64 processors sold in standard retail configurations included hardware virtualization support, making the technology available to any developer or power user who bought a modern PC. Before hardware virtualization, VMware had used binary translation — rewriting x86 privileged instructions in real time to safe equivalents — and achieved surprisingly good performance, but at significant engineering complexity. Intel VT-x and AMD-V added a new CPU execution mode (VMX/SVM mode) in which the hypervisor ran at a higher privilege level than ring 0, so guest OS code could execute native privileged instructions that would trap to the hypervisor for emulation rather than causing system failures. Read more

Learning Linux From A Live CD

3 minute read

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Trying another operating system used to feel like a significant commitment. Installing it meant repartitioning a drive, potentially overwriting the existing system, configuring a bootloader, and accepting some risk that something would go wrong. For a curious user, the barrier was technical and emotional at once. Read more