Blog posts

2026

Google Introduces the Pixel 11 Generation

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Google unveiled the Pixel 11 family on August 12, 2026. The lineup includes the Pixel 11, 11 Pro, 11 Pro XL, and a new Pro Fold, all built around Google’s Tensor G6 processor. Read more

Why I Still Want A Web I Can Own

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The modern internet makes publishing incredibly easy. We can create an account, write something, upload a photograph, and reach people within minutes. The platform handles servers, design, discovery, and many technical details. Read more

AMD Advancing AI 2026 Shows a Broader Accelerator Ecosystem

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AMD used its Advancing AI 2026 event in July to expand its data-center AI strategy beyond individual Instinct accelerators. The company emphasized rack-scale systems, networking, CPUs, GPUs, and the ROCm software stack as one platform. Read more

Apple Unveils Siri AI at WWDC26

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Apple previewed a new generation of Siri at WWDC26 on June 8, 2026 as part of updates across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27. Read more

What AI Agents Still Get Wrong

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AI agents are one of the most discussed ideas in software right now. Instead of asking a model one question and receiving one answer, an agent can plan several steps, use tools, read files, call services, and continue working toward a larger goal. Read more

Google I-O 2026 Expands Agentic AI Across Products

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Google I/O 2026, held on May 19–20, pushed the company’s products further toward agentic AI. Google announced Gemini 3.5 Flash and Gemini Omni while expanding agents across Search, the Gemini app, and developer tools. Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Arrives

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Canonical released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon” on April 23, 2026. It is the eleventh long-term-support Ubuntu release and is intended for users and organizations that value years of maintenance over the faster six-month interim cycle. Read more

NVIDIA Unveils Vera Rubin at GTC

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At GTC 2026 in March, NVIDIA presented the Vera Rubin platform as the next major generation of its AI-computing stack. The announcement extended beyond a GPU to CPUs, accelerators, networking, storage architecture, and rack-scale reference systems. Read more

Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.6

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Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 on February 5, 2026. The model targeted coding, computer use, tool use, search, and long-running agent tasks, and introduced a one-million-token context window in beta for the Opus line. Read more

The Return Of Small Software

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Software has become incredibly capable, but capability often brings weight. A simple task can require an account, subscription, cloud service, large installation, and several layers of settings. I have started appreciating small software again. Read more

The Value of Quiet Progress

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We notice big changes easily. A graduation, a new job, a finished project, or a difficult goal finally completed. Read more

Microsoft Introduces the Maia 200 AI Accelerator

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Microsoft introduced Maia 200 in January 2026 as its second-generation in-house AI accelerator and designed it specifically around large-scale inference. The chip is manufactured on TSMC’s 3 nm process. Read more

2025

Looking Back at 2025

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The end of a year always creates a strange feeling for me. Nothing really changes at midnight. The same life continues. Still, a number on the calendar gives us a reason to stop and look behind. Read more

OpenAI Releases GPT-5.2

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OpenAI released GPT-5.2 on December 11, 2025 with a focus on professional work, long-running agents, coding, long-context tasks, and more reliable tool use. Read more

Google Releases Gemini 3

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Google released Gemini 3 on November 18, 2025 and made it available immediately in the Gemini app, developer platforms, and Google Search’s AI Mode. Read more

Ubuntu 25.10 Advances the Linux Desktop

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Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka” arrived in October 2025 as the interim release before Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Interim versions often carry newer kernels, desktop components, compilers, and system libraries earlier than the long-term-support branch. Read more

Welcome to Our Department

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Starting Computer Engineering in 2025 means entering a field where powerful AI tools are already part of everyday technical work. Read more

Apple Introduces Its 2025 iPhone Generation

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Apple introduced the iPhone 17 generation in September 2025, continuing the company’s shift toward processors and hardware designed around sustained on-device machine-learning workloads. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2025?

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In 2025, computers can already generate code, explain errors, summarize documents, create images, and assist with many tasks that once required substantial manual work. It is reasonable for a student to ask: if AI can do more of the work, why study Computer Engineering? Read more

OpenAI Releases GPT-5

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OpenAI released GPT-5 on August 7, 2025 as a unified ChatGPT system combining fast responses with deeper reasoning. Instead of requiring users to choose manually between a general model and a reasoning model for every request, the system used routing logic to decide when more computation was useful. Read more

Why We Return to Old Hobbies

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Sometimes an old hobby returns without warning. A song makes us pick up an instrument again. An old game appears on a screen. We find a forgotten book, a chess board, or a camera in a drawer. Read more

OpenAI Introduces ChatGPT Agent

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OpenAI introduced ChatGPT agent in July 2025, combining browser interaction, code execution, research, and other tools into a system designed to complete multi-step tasks rather than only answer questions. Read more

What Teaching Programming Taught Me About Patience

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Programming looks very logical from the outside. Teaching programming is much more emotional. A student can understand a difficult idea in five minutes and then spend half an hour looking for a missing symbol. Another student may struggle with the same topic for days and suddenly understand it after one small example. Read more

Google I-O Pushes Gemini Deeper Into Search and Android

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Google I/O 2025 showed the company moving Gemini from a standalone chatbot into Search, Android, developer tools, and creative applications. Gemini 2.5 models and agent-oriented features were central to the announcements. Read more

Why Data Structures Still Matter in the Age of AI

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AI can write code very quickly now. It can produce a function, explain an error, or suggest a solution in seconds. Because of this, I sometimes hear a simple question: if AI can write the code, do students still need to learn data structures? Read more

Meta Releases a New Llama Generation

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Meta released Llama 4 Scout and Maverick in April 2025, moving the Llama family to mixture-of-experts designs. In an MoE model, only a subset of specialized parameter groups is activated for each token. Read more

NVIDIA GTC Focuses on Blackwell Ultra and Rubin

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At GTC 2025, NVIDIA detailed Blackwell Ultra systems and its roadmap toward the next-generation Rubin architecture. The announcements emphasized rack-scale AI infrastructure rather than single accelerator cards. Read more

Small Projects and the Joy of Finishing

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I used to think a project had to be big to be meaningful. A large project looked serious and important. It felt like something worth talking about. Small projects looked temporary to me, almost like exercises. Over time, this changed. I started to enjoy the feeling of finishing something small much more than carrying a large unfinished idea for months. Read more

OpenAI Expands Agentic Research Tools

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OpenAI released Deep Research for ChatGPT in February 2025, pushing language models from answering one prompt toward carrying out longer research workflows across many sources. Read more

The Silent Path To Reinventing Yourself

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Modern life makes change very public. We announce goals. Share progress. Count reactions. Sometimes the announcement creates a feeling of movement before any real movement has happened. Read more

How AI Shape The Future Of Coding

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Programming languages let people describe instructions precisely enough for computers to execute them. For decades, developers had to translate ideas into syntax mostly by hand. AI is changing that interface. Tools such as GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT can generate code from natural-language descriptions, explain unfamiliar functions, suggest tests, translate between languages, and help debug errors. This does not make programming languages unnecessary. Read more

Clean Code Psychopath

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John Woods once used the provocative phrase “clean code psychopath” to describe a certain kind of developer attitude. The phrase makes me smile because I have seen smaller versions of the behavior. A developer becomes so committed to an idea of clean code that the code stops serving the project. Names must follow one perfect rule. Functions must have one ideal size. Read more

Why Joy Fades As We Age

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Children can become extremely happy about things adults barely notice. A new toy. A puddle. A small surprise. A trip that begins tomorrow. Read more

Time Passes Quickly

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The older I become, the faster years seem to move. I know the clock has not changed. A day still contains twenty-four hours. Still, childhood summers felt much longer than many adult years feel now. Routine may be part of the reason. Read more

Bullying Effects

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Children learn more from the environment around them than adults sometimes realize. They learn not only from instructions but from the way power is used. If a child often sees fear used as the main way to control behavior, the lesson may become larger than the original situation. They may begin to understand relationships through power. Who can punish whom? Read more

DeepSeek R1 Shakes the AI Model Market

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DeepSeek released R1 in January 2025 and drew global attention by pairing strong reasoning performance with openly available model weights and detailed technical discussion. Read more

Father Son Game Dev

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Many children enjoy playing games. Some eventually ask a more interesting question: How are games made? I think this can become a wonderful activity for a parent and child. The first project should be small. Read more

2024

Do Not Live In Ignorance

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Plato’s Allegory of the Cave remains powerful because the story is easy to imagine. People are chained inside a cave. They have spent their lives facing a wall. Behind them, objects move in front of a fire and create shadows on the wall. Because the prisoners have never seen anything else, they believe the shadows are reality. Read more

OpenAI Releases the o3 Reasoning Model Preview

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OpenAI previewed o3 in December 2024 as a successor to the o1 reasoning family. The announcement emphasized stronger performance on mathematics, coding, science, and difficult benchmark tasks. Read more

Exploring Identity, Change, And Continuity

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The Ship of Theseus asks a simple question with no simple answer. Imagine a wooden ship. Over many years, damaged boards are replaced one by one. Eventually, every original piece has been replaced. Is it still the same ship? Read more

NVIDIA Becomes Central to the AI Infrastructure Boom

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By late 2024, NVIDIA’s role in AI had expanded far beyond selling individual GPUs. Major cloud providers and AI laboratories were deploying large H100, H200, and early Blackwell-based clusters connected with NVIDIA networking and software. Read more

Intel Announces Core Ultra 200S

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Intel announced the Core Ultra 200S desktop processor family in October 2024, bringing the Arrow Lake architecture to desktop PCs. The chips used a tiled design with different functional blocks manufactured using different process technologies. Read more

The Inevitability Of Problems

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One morning, I woke up already irritated. Then I opened my inbox and found a few small problems. Because of my mood, each one looked larger than it really was. Later, I told a friend about the terrible morning. While speaking, I suddenly heard how ordinary the problems sounded. Read more

Welcome to Our Department

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If you are beginning Computer Engineering in 2024, you are entering the field at a moment when artificial intelligence, cloud systems, cybersecurity, robotics, and specialized hardware are developing rapidly. Read more

The Consequences Of Playing The Victim

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Bad things happen to people without their permission. Recognizing this is important. A person can genuinely be treated unfairly, betrayed, harmed, or trapped by circumstances. The problem begins when victimhood becomes the only way we understand ourselves. If every problem is caused by other people, then every solution also belongs to other people. Read more

OpenAI Releases the o1 Reasoning Model

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OpenAI introduced the o1 model family in September 2024 with a focus on spending more computation before producing an answer. The models were especially aimed at mathematics, coding, and scientific reasoning tasks. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2024?

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In 2024, artificial intelligence is becoming a normal part of software products rather than a separate research topic. At the same time, demand is growing for cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, efficient processors, data systems, and reliable software. Read more

Google Introduces the Pixel 9 Generation Early

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Google announced the Pixel 9 family in August 2024, moving its usual flagship-phone launch earlier in the year. The lineup used Google’s Tensor G4 processor and placed Gemini-based AI features at the center of the product. Read more

Your Greatest Enemy Is Within

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There is a saying: if you become arrogant, you no longer need another enemy. I think the sentence works because arrogance damages the person carrying it before anyone else needs to. Arrogance makes learning difficult. If I already believe I am better than the people around me, their criticism becomes easy to dismiss. Their success becomes threatening. Read more

CrowdStrike Update Causes a Global Windows Outage

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On July 19, 2024, a faulty CrowdStrike Falcon content update caused millions of Windows systems to crash with blue screens. Airlines, hospitals, banks, broadcasters, and other organizations were disrupted around the world. Read more

Those Who Cannot Occupy Themselves

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“Those who cannot occupy themselves will be occupied by others.” I like this sentence because it can be understood in several ways. A person without direction becomes very available to other people’s priorities. Someone else always has a task, an opinion, an invitation, a problem, or an expectation. If we do not decide what deserves our time, the empty space rarely stays empty. Read more

Distancing Yourself From The Truth

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Imagination can protect us for a while. When reality becomes uncomfortable, the mind creates alternatives. Maybe the problem will solve itself. Maybe the other person will suddenly change. Maybe the decision does not need to be made yet. Read more

Apple Announces Apple Intelligence

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Apple announced Apple Intelligence at WWDC in June 2024, integrating generative AI into iPhone, iPad, and Mac features such as writing assistance, image creation, notifications, and Siri. Read more

Microsoft Introduces Copilot Plus PCs

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Microsoft introduced the Copilot+ PC category in May 2024, defining a class of Windows laptops with neural processing units capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second for AI workloads. Read more

Accountability Is The Path To Growth

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Blaming other people is emotionally attractive. It protects the image we have of ourselves. If every failure belongs to someone else, we never have to look too closely at our own decisions. The cost is that we also lose the ability to change anything. Accountability begins with an uncomfortable question: Read more

The Paradox Of Loneliness - Alone But Not Lonely

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Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing. A person can spend an evening alone and feel peaceful. Another person can sit in a crowded room and feel completely unseen. Physical presence solves only one kind of distance. Loneliness is often about connection. Read more

Meta Releases Llama 3

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Meta released Llama 3 in April 2024 with 8-billion and 70-billion parameter models. The new generation used a tokenizer with a 128,000-token vocabulary and was trained on more than 15 trillion tokens, a large increase over Llama 2. Read more

AI Coding Assistants Are Becoming Part Of The Editor

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AI coding assistants have moved quickly from curiosity to normal development tools. GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and similar systems can suggest code, explain errors, generate tests, and help developers explore unfamiliar APIs. Read more

NVIDIA Announces the Blackwell GPU Architecture

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NVIDIA announced the Blackwell GPU architecture at GTC in March 2024. The flagship B200 combined 208 billion transistors across two tightly connected dies and targeted the rapidly growing cost of training and serving large AI models. Read more

Google Releases Gemini 1.5

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Google announced Gemini 1.5 in February 2024 with an experimental context window of up to one million tokens. That was far larger than the context sizes commonly offered by mainstream language models at the time. Read more

Apple Vision Pro Reviews Bring Spatial Computing Into Focus

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Apple opened Vision Pro preorders in January 2024, and detailed hands-on testing began before the February retail launch. Reviewers focused on both the remarkable display and tracking quality and the physical limits of wearing a heavy computer on the face. Read more

The Dawn Of Human Thought

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At some point in human history, survival was no longer the only thing happening inside the mind. People looked at the sky and asked what it was. They watched storms, stars, death, birth, and the changing seasons. They created names and stories for things they could not explain. Read more

2023

2023 A Year Of Challenges And Achievements

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2023 was one of those years that refuses to become a simple summary. There were achievements I had worked toward for a long time. I became an Assistant Professor, an academic step that meant a great deal to me. There were also difficult periods. Health problems and surgery interrupted normal routines and reminded me how quickly plans become unimportant when the body demands attention. Read more

Google Releases Gemini

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Google introduced Gemini in December 2023 as a new multimodal model family with Nano, Pro, and Ultra variants. Rather than treating images, text, and other modalities only as separate systems connected afterward, Google emphasized multimodal training and reasoning as a core design goal. Read more

Java Superstars

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Java has a large community, and some contributors become influential far beyond one company or project. The Java Champions program recognizes people who make sustained contributions to the Java ecosystem. They may write books, maintain open-source projects, teach, speak at conferences, organize communities, or help improve the platform itself. What I like about this idea is that technical communities are built by more than language designers. Read more

OpenAI’s Leadership Crisis Shakes the AI Industry

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OpenAI’s board removed CEO Sam Altman on November 17, 2023, triggering five days of extraordinary organizational turmoil. President Greg Brockman left, employees threatened to resign, Microsoft offered positions to Altman and others, and the board eventually reinstated Altman with a changed membership. Read more

Staying Engaged In Computer Science Classes

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Computer science classes can become difficult for a simple reason: the subject often moves from concrete to abstract very quickly. A student sees code on the screen, then suddenly hears about memory models, graph complexity, process scheduling, or mathematical proofs. It is easy to lose the thread. The first thing I recommend is active participation. Do not only copy what is on the board. Read more

Ubuntu 23.10 Shows the New Desktop Installer Direction

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Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” was released in October 2023 with a newer Flutter-based desktop installer and GNOME 45. The installer represented Canonical’s effort to share more installation technology across desktop variants while modernizing a component that had changed slowly for years. Read more

Embracing The Beauty Of The Journey

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There is a sentence attributed to Anatole France: “If the path is beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.” I like the idea, although I would not follow it literally in every part of life. Destinations matter. A road can be beautiful and still take us somewhere we do not want to go. But the sentence contains an important warning. Read more

Welcome to Our Department

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Starting Computer Engineering in 2023 feels especially interesting because artificial intelligence has suddenly become part of everyday conversation. Read more

Apple Introduces the A17 Pro

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Apple introduced the A17 Pro processor with the iPhone 15 Pro in September 2023. It was manufactured on TSMC’s first-generation 3 nm process and included a redesigned GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2023?

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In 2023, generative artificial intelligence has changed the public conversation about computing. Tools that can produce text, images, and code have made many people ask what software work will look like in the future. Read more

LK-99 Claims Trigger Intense Computational Analysis

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Claims about a material called LK-99 spread rapidly in July and August 2023 after researchers suggested it might be a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. Laboratories and computational researchers around the world rushed to test the claim. Read more

Meta Releases Llama 2

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Meta released Llama 2 in July 2023 with 7, 13, and 70 billion parameter versions and a license that permitted many commercial uses. That was a major change from the research-only distribution of the first LLaMA. Read more

The Road To Success

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Success looks much cleaner after it happens. We see the finished degree, the published book, the company, the promotion, or the project that finally works. The road before it is usually less attractive. It contains repetition. Doubt. Read more

Apple Introduces the Vision Pro

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Apple introduced Vision Pro at WWDC in June 2023 as a “spatial computer” rather than a conventional VR headset. The device combined high-resolution micro-OLED displays, multiple cameras, eye tracking, hand tracking, spatial audio, and Apple’s M2 processor with a new R1 chip dedicated to sensor processing. Read more

Google Announces the PaLM 2 Model

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Google announced PaLM 2 at I/O in May 2023 as the language-model family behind products such as Bard and new generative-AI features across Google Workspace. Read more

SpaceX Starship Completes Its First Integrated Flight Test

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SpaceX launched Starship and its Super Heavy booster together for the first integrated flight test in April 2023. The vehicle cleared the launch tower but several engines failed, control was lost, and the flight-termination system eventually destroyed the vehicle. Read more

Gordon Moore Has Passed Away At The Age Of 94

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Gordon Moore died on March 24, 2023, at the age of 94. His name will remain closely connected with one of the most famous observations in computing: Moore’s Law. In 1965, Moore observed that the number of components that could be placed economically on an integrated circuit was increasing rapidly. The exact formulation changed over time, and it was never a physical law. It was an observation and later an industry target. Read more

The Donkey And Its Golden Saddle

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There is an old saying in several cultures: a donkey does not become a horse because it wears a golden saddle. The language is harsh, but the idea is simple. Appearance cannot create substance. A title can make a person sound important. Money can make a person look successful. Read more

GPT-4 Is Released

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OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023. It improved substantially over earlier GPT models on complex instructions and many academic-style tests, and OpenAI demonstrated that it could accept images as well as text as input. Read more

Do Not Judge People Who Leave Without Saying Goodbye

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When someone leaves without saying goodbye, the silence can hurt more than the departure. We naturally want an explanation. Was I the problem? Were they angry? Did the relationship mean less to them than it meant to me? Read more

Meta Releases LLaMA

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Meta released LLaMA in February 2023 as a family of research language models with 7, 13, 33, and 65 billion parameters. The work challenged the idea that competitive language models always had to grow toward hundreds of billions of parameters. Read more

How Do Computers Make Decisions?

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Computers do not make decisions in the human sense. They follow logical rules. At the hardware level, these rules are built with logic gates. An AND gate produces a true output only when its required inputs are true. An OR gate produces true when at least one input is true. Read more

Why Do Computers Use 1s And 0s?

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Computers use 1s and 0s because electronic circuits need reliable ways to represent information. A transistor can behave like a tiny switch. At a simplified level, one voltage range can represent 0 and another can represent 1. Two clear states are easier to distinguish reliably than many very close states. This gives us binary. Read more

Microsoft Expands Its Partnership With OpenAI

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Microsoft announced a new multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI in January 2023. The partnership tied frontier AI models closely to Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure and product strategy. Read more

Understanding The Realities Of Growing Old

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Getting older is strange because it happens slowly until one day it feels sudden. A photograph, a birthday, a small physical change, or seeing someone younger can make time visible in a way the calendar cannot. When we are young, age often looks like something happening to other people. Later, we understand that there is no separate road. We are already on it. Read more

2022

2022 A Year Of Big Losses And Big Achievements

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When I look back at 2022, I cannot place the year into one simple category. It contained one of my largest academic achievements and one of the deepest losses close to my family. I completed my doctoral studies after a long period of work. A doctorate is easy to reduce to a title when it is finished. While living through it, it is made from many ordinary days: reading, writing, correcting, waiting, questioning, and trying again. Read more

To Be A Student Or To Graduate?

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Being a student and being a graduate require different habits. As a student, many problems arrive already prepared. The course has a syllabus. The assignment has a deadline. The exam tells you which questions matter. Read more

The Importance Of Active And Collaborative Education

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A student can sit quietly through an entire lesson and still learn very little. This is one weakness of passive education. Listening is useful, but understanding becomes stronger when students have to do something with the information. Ask a question. Explain an idea. Read more

OpenAI Releases ChatGPT

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OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022 as a research preview built from the GPT-3.5 family. The web interface made large language models accessible to people who had never used an AI API or read a machine-learning paper. Read more

Elon Musk Completes the Twitter Acquisition

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Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter on October 27, 2022, ending months of attempts to withdraw from the agreement. He immediately dismissed several senior executives and soon began large reductions in the workforce. Read more

The Power Of First Impressions And Energy

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Sometimes we meet a person and immediately feel comfortable. Other times, something feels wrong before we can explain why. People often describe this as “energy.” I think part of it is simply fast perception. Our minds notice tone of voice, facial expression, posture, distance, eye contact, timing, and many other small signals. Read more

Welcome to Our Department

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If you are joining Computer Engineering in 2022, you are starting at a time when both software and hardware are receiving renewed attention. Read more

NVIDIA Announces the RTX 40 Series

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NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 40 series in September 2022 using its Ada Lovelace architecture. The RTX 4090 and 4080 focused on much higher ray-tracing and AI performance while moving to TSMC’s 4N manufacturing process. Read more

What Are The Latest Trends In Software Development?

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Software development in 2022 is shaped by several trends that have been growing for years. Cloud computing is now a normal part of many systems. Organizations use services from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other providers instead of owning every server themselves. Containers and Kubernetes have also become important for deploying software consistently across different environments. Read more

You At The Center Of Your Universe

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Every person experiences life from the center of one private universe. We see through our own eyes. We hear thoughts nobody else can hear. Our memories, fears, plans, and small daily concerns naturally feel close and important. This can create a strange illusion. Read more

Building Mental Resilience Brick By Brick

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Resilience is often described as if some people are simply born strong. I think it is usually more ordinary than that. We build it from experience. A difficult conversation we survive. A project that fails and gets rebuilt. Read more

The Wisdom Of Seth Godin And Jerzy Gregorek

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Two pieces of advice sometimes appear to disagree. One says: do not give up something with long-term potential because of short-term stress. The other says that hard choices often create an easier life, while easy choices can create a harder one. I think both ideas point toward the same problem. We naturally give today’s discomfort more weight than tomorrow’s value. Read more

Navigating Pain

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Pain is difficult to compare. Two people can experience similar events and react very differently. This does not mean one person is weak and the other is strong. Experience has context. A loss enters a life that already contains memories, relationships, fears, responsibilities, and previous wounds. Read more

Apple Announces the M2 Processor

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Apple announced the M2 processor at WWDC in June 2022 as the second generation of its Mac-oriented Apple silicon. M2 kept the same broad architecture as M1 but increased CPU and GPU performance, memory bandwidth, and maximum unified memory capacity. Read more

Embracing Everyday Blessings

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A normal day rarely announces itself as something valuable. We wake up, drink something, answer messages, work, complain about small problems, and think about tomorrow. Then a difficult period arrives and many ordinary things suddenly look precious. A quiet breakfast. A healthy morning. Read more

Google Reveals Imagen

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Google Research revealed Imagen in May 2022, a text-to-image diffusion model that produced unusually detailed images from natural-language prompts. Imagen combined a large pretrained text encoder with a cascade of diffusion models that progressively generated and upscaled images. Read more

Generative Image Models Are Getting Hard To Ignore

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Image generation from text has improved remarkably quickly. Systems such as DALL-E 2, announced by OpenAI this year, can create images from written descriptions with a level of coherence that would have looked much less convincing only a short time ago. Read more

Elon Musk Reaches an Agreement to Buy Twitter

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Twitter accepted Elon Musk’s approximately $44 billion acquisition offer in April 2022. What followed was not a normal software product cycle but a prolonged legal and corporate struggle over whether the purchase would actually happen. Read more

Geworfen

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Heidegger used the German word Geworfenheit, usually translated as “thrownness,” to describe something simple and uncomfortable about human life. We arrive in a world we did not choose. We do not choose the century of our birth, our first language, our family, our early culture, or the body into which we are born. We begin from a situation already in progress. I find this idea useful because modern life often speaks as if every result is purely personal choice. Read more

NVIDIA Introduces the Hopper GPU Architecture

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NVIDIA introduced the Hopper data-center GPU architecture at GTC in March 2022. The flagship H100 was designed primarily for AI and high-performance computing rather than consumer graphics. Read more

Valve Releases the Steam Deck

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Valve began shipping the Steam Deck in February 2022. The handheld used a custom AMD “Aerith” APU with Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics, paired with a 1280×800 display and controls designed for both games and desktop-style input. Read more

Microsoft Announces Its Plan to Acquire Activision Blizzard

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Microsoft announced in January 2022 that it planned to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. The deal would place franchises such as Call of Duty, Warcraft, Diablo, and Candy Crush under the same company that operated Xbox and Game Pass. Read more

2021

FAQ Of Student Software Engineers

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Students who want to become software engineers often ask the same questions. Which language should I learn? Do grades matter? Do I need mathematics? How many projects should I build? Read more

Log4Shell Exposes the Risk of Ubiquitous Dependencies

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The Log4Shell vulnerability was disclosed in December 2021 in Log4j, a Java logging library embedded in an enormous number of applications. The flaw became critical because a specially crafted string could trigger JNDI lookups that, in vulnerable configurations, led to remote code execution. Read more

AWS Announces Graviton3

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Amazon Web Services announced Graviton3 at re:Invent in November 2021 as the third generation of its custom ARM-based server processor. The chip was designed for AWS rather than sold as a general retail CPU. Read more

Windows 11 Is Released

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Windows 11 was released on October 5, 2021. It introduced a redesigned desktop shell, centered taskbar, Snap layouts, a new Microsoft Store, and stricter hardware requirements than Windows 10. Read more

Welcome to Our Department

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Beginning Computer Engineering in 2021 means joining a field that has become central to almost every part of modern life. Read more

Apple Introduces the A15 Bionic

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Apple introduced the A15 Bionic with the iPhone 13 family in September 2021. The chip used six CPU cores, a redesigned GPU configuration, a 16-core Neural Engine, and dedicated image-processing hardware. Read more

Grady Booch, A Pioneer Of Computing Technology

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Grady Booch is one of the important names in the history of object-oriented software engineering. His influence is especially visible in software modeling. Before the Unified Modeling Language became a standard, different researchers and companies used different object-oriented methods and notations. Booch developed the Booch method, which provided a way to describe object-oriented systems using diagrams and a structured development process. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2021?

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In 2021, it is difficult to find an important technology that does not involve computing. Cloud platforms run global services, artificial intelligence is entering more products, and the semiconductor shortage has reminded everyone that software still depends on physical hardware. Read more

The Metaverse Is Still More Question Than Answer

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The word “metaverse” is appearing more often in technology discussions. Companies talk about persistent virtual spaces where people may work, play, meet, create, and buy digital objects. The idea sounds futuristic, but many pieces already exist in separate forms. Read more

Apple Announces CSAM Detection Plans

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Apple announced a set of child-safety features in August 2021 that included a controversial plan to detect known child sexual abuse material in iCloud Photos before images were uploaded. Read more

Some Of Popular Java Developers

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Java has existed since the mid-1990s, and its development has been shaped by many people. James Gosling is the obvious place to begin. He led the original Java language project at Sun Microsystems and is often called the father of Java. Read more

Steam Deck Is Announced

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Valve announced the Steam Deck in July 2021 as a handheld PC designed to run a user’s existing Steam library. The device used a custom AMD APU combining four Zen 2 CPU cores with RDNA 2 graphics. Read more

Windows 11 Is Announced

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Microsoft announced Windows 11 on June 24, 2021. The visible changes included a centered Start menu, redesigned windows, new Snap layouts, and a more consistent visual language. Read more

Exploring The Connection Between Evidence And Belief

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Beliefs do not arrive only after careful investigation. We inherit some. We absorb others from friends, family, culture, and repeated experience. Then we naturally look for evidence that fits what we already think. This is why the relationship between evidence and belief interests me. Strong evidence should be able to change a belief. Read more

Revolutionizing The Artificial Intelligence Landscape

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Artificial intelligence is surrounded by excitement. In 2021, that excitement often appears beside other fashionable technology discussions such as cryptocurrencies, NFTs, the metaverse, and Web3. I think AI deserves attention for a different reason. It is already solving real problems. Read more

Google Announces LaMDA

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Google introduced LaMDA at I/O in May 2021 as a language model designed specifically for open-ended conversation. LaMDA stood for “Language Model for Dialogue Applications.” Read more

The Art Of Self-Talk

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We all speak to ourselves. Most of the conversation is silent. A mistake happens and a sentence appears immediately. “That was stupid.” “You always do this.” Read more

Apple Introduces the M1 iMac and New iPad Pro

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Apple introduced a redesigned iMac and an iPad Pro using the M1 processor in April 2021. Putting the same chip into a desktop and a tablet made Apple’s silicon strategy unusually visible. Read more

Do Not Believe Your Thinking Easily

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Thoughts feel convincing because they happen inside our own mind. That does not make them true. A fear can feel like a prediction. An assumption can feel like evidence. A memory can feel exact even when details have changed over time. Read more

Microsoft Introduces Mesh for Mixed Reality

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Microsoft introduced Mesh in March 2021 as a cloud platform for shared mixed-reality experiences. The idea was to let people represented by avatars or holographic forms occupy the same virtual space even when they were physically separated. Read more

NVIDIA Launches the GeForce RTX 3060

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NVIDIA released the GeForce RTX 3060 in February 2021 as a more affordable Ampere-generation graphics card. It used the GA106 GPU and included 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, an unusually large amount for its market segment at the time. Read more

Apple Silicon And The Return Of Processor Diversity

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Apple’s first Macs with the M1 processor have made processor architecture visible to ordinary users again. For many years, most personal computers followed the x86 world closely enough that software developers could often ignore the architecture underneath the operating system. Read more

2020

SolarWinds Reveals a Major Software Supply Chain Attack

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A major supply-chain compromise involving SolarWinds Orion software was disclosed in December 2020. Attackers had inserted malicious code into legitimate, digitally signed software updates distributed to thousands of organizations. Read more

What Is Quantum Computing?

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Quantum computing is often described as a technology that will make computers unbelievably fast. That description is too simple. Read more

Remote Work Is Changing How Software Teams Communicate

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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many software teams to work remotely for much longer than they expected. Software development was already more remote-friendly than many professions, but working from home occasionally is very different from building an entire working culture around distance. Read more

Apple Releases the First M1 Macs

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Apple released the first Macs with its M1 system-on-chip in November 2020: the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. The performance and battery-life results immediately showed why Apple had left Intel. Read more

AMD Announces the Zen 3 Architecture

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AMD announced Zen 3 processors in October 2020 with the Ryzen 5000 desktop family. The most important change was a redesigned core complex that allowed up to eight CPU cores to share one 32 MB L3 cache. Read more

Understanding Different Levels Of Understanding

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One of the easiest mistakes in communication is assuming that another person begins where we begin. When I know a topic well, some steps become invisible to me. I stop noticing the background knowledge I am using. Then I explain something to another person and feel surprised when they do not understand. The problem may not be intelligence. It may be distance. Read more

Smart Antennas

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A traditional antenna has a radiation pattern mainly determined by its physical design. A smart antenna adds signal processing to the system. Instead of treating every direction in the same way, an antenna array can combine signals from multiple elements and shape the effective radiation pattern. This makes beamforming possible. By adjusting phase and amplitude across antenna elements, the system can strengthen transmission or reception in a desired direction and reduce energy in others. Read more

Welcome to Our Department

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Starting university in 2020 is different from what many students expected. Education, work, communication, and daily life have all become more dependent on digital systems in a very short time. Read more

Celebrating Small Wins

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We are usually very good at seeing what is still missing. The unfinished work. The next goal. The skill we do not have yet. Because of this, progress can become invisible. Read more

NVIDIA Announces the RTX 30 Series

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NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 30 series in September 2020, introducing the Ampere architecture to consumer graphics cards. The RTX 3080 and 3090 offered major increases in shader throughput and second-generation ray-tracing hardware compared with Turing. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2020?

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The year 2020 has made the importance of digital infrastructure unusually visible. Work, education, communication, shopping, entertainment, and many public services have moved online at a scale few people expected. Read more

Why Are We Spending Time Without Much Thought

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Time is the resource we discuss as if it were unlimited and remember as if it disappeared too quickly. I often notice this at the end of a busy day. I did many things. But did I spend the day on things that mattered to me? Busyness can hide that question. Read more

Epic Games Challenges Mobile App Store Policies

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Epic Games deliberately bypassed Apple’s in-app payment system in Fortnite in August 2020, prompting Apple and Google to remove the game from their stores. Epic immediately filed lawsuits challenging platform rules and commission structures. Read more

The Importance Of Having A Friend

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Friendship is one of those parts of life that can look ordinary until we suddenly need it. A good friend does not remove every problem. They do something simpler. They make the problem less lonely. Read more

GPT-3 Demonstrates the Scale of Large Language Models

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OpenAI introduced GPT-3 in 2020 with 175 billion parameters, more than two orders of magnitude larger than GPT-2. The model used the same basic transformer principle—predicting the next token—but scaled data, model size, and computation dramatically. Read more

Apple Announces the Move From Intel to Apple Silicon

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Apple announced at WWDC 2020 that Macs would transition from Intel x86 processors to Apple-designed ARM-based silicon. It was the Mac’s third major CPU-architecture transition after Motorola 68k to PowerPC and PowerPC to Intel. Read more

Software Bug Of Therac-25

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The Therac-25 is one of the most disturbing cases in software-engineering history because the consequences of failure were not lost files or a crashed program. People were injured and killed. Read more

Software Bug Of Pathfinder

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Mars Pathfinder landed successfully on Mars on July 4, 1997. Soon after, however, the spacecraft began experiencing unexpected system resets. Read more

Blogging For Your Career And Life

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I started to see blogging as more than publishing articles. A personal blog can become a record of what we learn, what we care about, and how our thinking changes over time. Read more

Remote Work Tools Become Critical Infrastructure

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In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced offices, schools, and universities around the world to move online almost simultaneously. Video conferencing, VPNs, cloud collaboration, and identity systems suddenly became critical infrastructure. Read more

Agnosticism

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Agnosticism is often misunderstood as a weak form of belief or disbelief. Read more

Samsung Unveils the Galaxy Z Flip

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Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Z Flip in February 2020, bringing a vertically folding OLED smartphone into the mainstream market. Unlike the larger Galaxy Fold, the Z Flip folded a normal phone-sized screen into a compact square. Read more

The Story Of Computing

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The story of computing is also a story about human limits. For thousands of years, people have created tools to count, measure, record, and communicate. An abacus, a mechanical calculator, a punched card, and a modern processor may look completely different, but they all come from a similar desire: to move some mental work outside the human mind. Read more

Microsoft Ends Support for Windows 7

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Microsoft ended normal support for Windows 7 on January 14, 2020, more than a decade after the operating system’s release. Millions of PCs were still using it, so the event created a large migration and security problem. Read more

2019

The Power Of Small Actions

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Large changes often begin with actions that look too small to matter. A short email. One page of a book. Ten minutes of exercise. A simple hello. A small amount of money saved. Read more

Wi-Fi 6 Hardware Becomes Widely Available

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Wi-Fi 6 hardware became widely available in 2019 as routers, laptops, and phones adopted the 802.11ax standard. The new generation focused not only on increasing peak speed but on making crowded wireless networks more efficient. Read more

True Freedom

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Freedom is one of those words that becomes less simple the longer we think about it. Money can create freedom. So can time. But neither one guarantees it. For me, freedom is connected with four questions. Read more

Google Claims Quantum Supremacy With Sycamore

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Google published a Nature paper in October 2019 claiming “quantum supremacy” with its 53-qubit Sycamore processor. The machine performed a specially designed random-circuit sampling task that Google estimated would take a classical supercomputer vastly longer. Read more

Embracing Lifelong Friendship The Japanese Way

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There is a Japanese idea often discussed in connection with Okinawa called moai. Historically, a moai is a social support group whose members help one another over long periods of life. The idea interests me because modern friendship can become very casual. We know many people. We follow many people. Read more

Welcome to Our Department

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If you are starting Computer Engineering in 2019, you are entering a discipline that now touches almost every industry. Software is inside phones, cars, financial systems, factories, hospitals, communication networks, and entertainment platforms. Read more

Apple Introduces the A13 Bionic

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Apple introduced the A13 Bionic processor with the iPhone 11 generation in September 2019. The chip used a 7 nm-class process and contained billions of transistors across CPU, GPU, image-processing, and machine-learning blocks. Read more

We All Have Our Own Unique Value

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Truffles are expensive partly because they are difficult to find and difficult to produce. Most people do not see them in normal daily life. Their value comes from rarity, demand, and context. People are not products, of course. Still, the example makes me think about value. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2019?

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In 2019, software is becoming an invisible layer inside almost everything we use. Phones, vehicles, payment systems, factories, streaming services, medical devices, and public infrastructure all depend on computing. Studying Computer Engineering means learning how this layer is designed. Read more

OpenAI Releases GPT-2 in Stages

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OpenAI released progressively larger versions of GPT-2 during 2019, culminating in the full 1.5-billion-parameter model in November. The organization initially withheld the largest weights because of concerns about misuse. Read more

Daily Life Of A Software Engineer

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The daily life of a software engineer is usually less dramatic than movies make programming look. Most days are a mixture of coding, reading, testing, meetings, debugging, and communication. A developer may begin by checking messages, issue trackers, or build results. Then comes the difficult part: understanding what actually needs to be done. Writing code is often not the first step. Read more

Movie Suggestions For Software Engineers

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Software engineers spend enough time in front of a screen for work. Still, sometimes another screen can be a good way to rest. I especially enjoy films and documentaries connected with technology, mathematics, invention, and the people behind systems. The Imitation Game tells a dramatized story around Alan Turing and codebreaking during the Second World War. Hidden Figures focuses on African-American women mathematicians who worked at NASA and reminds us how much important technical work can remain invisible in popular history. Read more

Book Suggestions For Software Engineers

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Software engineers spend a lot of time learning from screens. Documentation, source code, issue trackers, tutorials, and online discussions are part of daily work. Books offer a different pace. They allow one author to develop an idea without competing with notifications and search results. For programming practice, The Pragmatic Programmer is a book I often recommend because it talks about habits and judgment, not only syntax. Read more

Jean De La Bruyère

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Jean de La Bruyère was a French writer and moralist best known for observing human character with uncomfortable precision. He was born in Paris in 1645 and studied law. His most famous work, Les Caractères, was published in 1688 and expanded through several editions. The book combines portraits, short observations, and moral reflections. La Bruyère wrote about vanity, ambition, wealth, conversation, social status, hypocrisy, and many other parts of human behavior. Read more

Why Smart People Get Stuck

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Thinking is useful until thinking becomes a place to hide. People who are good at analysis can sometimes create too many possibilities. What if this fails? What if the other choice is better? What if there is another option I have not found yet? Read more

Raspberry Pi 4 Is Released

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The Raspberry Pi 4 launched in June 2019 with the largest redesign of the board in years. It moved to a quad-core Cortex-A72 CPU, offered up to 4 GB of RAM initially, added true Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, and support for two displays through micro-HDMI ports. Read more

6TiSCH Protocol

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Low-power wireless devices have a difficult problem. They need reliable communication, but they cannot keep their radios active all the time because energy is limited. 6TiSCH is an approach designed for this kind of network. The name combines IPv6 with Time-Slotted Channel Hopping, or TSCH. Read more

Microsoft Releases Chromium-Based Edge Preview Builds

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Microsoft released preview builds of its new Chromium-based Edge browser in April 2019. The decision meant abandoning EdgeHTML, the rendering engine Microsoft had created for the original Windows 10 version of Edge. Read more

The Challenge Of Changing Perspectives

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People like familiar patterns. We take the same road. Choose the same seat. Talk to the same people. Repeat the same explanations for why something is good or bad. Read more

Embracing Lottery Of Life

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A large part of life begins before we make our first decision. We do not choose our country. We do not choose our family. We do not choose our genes, childhood language, economic conditions, or many of the events that shape our early years. In that sense, life contains a lottery. Read more

Google Introduces Stadia

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Google announced Stadia at the Game Developers Conference in March 2019 as a cloud gaming platform that would render games in data centers and stream the resulting video to players. Read more

The Joy Of Unexpected Happy Moments

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Some of my favorite moments are the ones I did not plan. A small cafe discovered while walking somewhere else. Meeting an old friend by accident. Finding a book I had forgotten. Hearing a song at exactly the right time. Read more

Google Announces the End of Google Plus for Consumers

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Google shut down the consumer version of Google+ in 2019 after years of weak adoption and the discovery of privacy bugs in its APIs. One software flaw had exposed profile information that users might have expected to remain private. Read more

How Emotions Can Transfer Between People

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Emotions do not always stay inside one person. A friend’s laughter can make us smile before we understand why. A tense room can make us uncomfortable even if nobody says anything. Someone’s calm voice can reduce our own anxiety. This kind of emotional transfer is sometimes described as emotional contagion. Read more

2018

Kubernetes 1.13 Strengthens Cloud-Native Infrastructure

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Kubernetes 1.13 was released in December 2018 with kubeadm declared generally available. Kubeadm provided a supported way to bootstrap a Kubernetes control plane and join worker nodes without hiding the cluster behind a vendor-specific installer. Read more

Ignorance Lead To Sinking

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Deadlines become heavier when we refuse to look at them. I know this feeling. A task is uncomfortable, so we delay it for one day. Then another day. For a short time, ignoring the task feels like relief. Read more

The Knowledge Illusion

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We often think we understand more than we actually do. This is not because we are dishonest. It is partly because knowledge is social. Read more

Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ Is Released

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The Raspberry Pi Foundation released the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ in November 2018. It combined the faster processor and wireless capabilities of the Pi 3 generation with the smaller, cheaper Model A form factor. Read more

Machine Learning Is Becoming A Normal Software Tool

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Machine learning is no longer something I hear about only in research papers. Libraries such as TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, and scikit-learn are making experimentation easier, while cloud platforms offer prebuilt services for vision, speech, and language tasks. Read more

IBM Announces Its Acquisition of Red Hat

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IBM announced in October 2018 that it would acquire Red Hat for about $34 billion, one of the largest software acquisitions ever at the time. Red Hat’s most important asset was not merely its Linux distribution but its position in enterprise open-source infrastructure. Read more

Welcome to Our Department

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Beginning Computer Engineering in 2018 means entering a world increasingly shaped by data, cloud computing, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and connected systems. Read more

Apple Introduces the A12 Bionic

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Apple introduced the A12 Bionic processor with the iPhone XS generation in September 2018. It was among the first mass-market chips manufactured using a 7 nm process and combined CPU, GPU, image processing, and machine-learning hardware in one SoC. Read more

How Computer Computes?

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A computer can look complicated from the outside, but its basic operation can be described with a simple cycle. Input arrives. Instructions are executed. Data is processed. Output is produced. At the center of this process is the CPU. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2018?

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Technology in 2018 is increasingly built around data. Companies collect it, applications process it, machine-learning systems learn from it, and users are becoming more aware of how it is stored and protected. That makes Computer Engineering a particularly relevant field to study. Read more

The Strange Power Of Podcasts

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Podcasts have become one of my favorite ways to use time that would otherwise feel empty. A walk, a drive, or a repetitive task can become an opportunity to listen to a conversation, technical discussion, history program, or interview. Read more

NVIDIA Announces the Turing GPU Architecture

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NVIDIA announced the Turing GPU architecture in August 2018, introducing dedicated hardware for real-time ray tracing and expanding Tensor Cores beyond the data-center-focused Volta generation. Read more

Popular Questions About Software

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Software is the part of a computer system that tells the hardware what to do. The hardware is physical. We can touch the processor, memory modules, storage devices, keyboard, and screen. Read more

Google Chrome Begins Stronger HTTPS Warnings

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Chrome 68 began marking ordinary HTTP pages as “Not secure” in July 2018. This reversed an older browser convention in which secure HTTPS sites received a special positive indicator while unencrypted sites looked normal. Read more

GitHub Is Acquired by Microsoft

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Microsoft announced in June 2018 that it would acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. The deal was striking because Microsoft’s relationship with open source had changed dramatically since the era when company leaders treated Linux as a threat. Read more

JavaScript Modules Are Finally Becoming Normal

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For years, organizing JavaScript across several files has required conventions and tools that were not part of the language itself. Developers used patterns such as immediately invoked functions, CommonJS, AMD, and later bundlers to create some form of modular structure. Read more

GDPR Changes How Software Handles Personal Data

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The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation became enforceable on May 25, 2018. GDPR was a legal framework, but it forced software teams to change how they collected, stored, processed, and deleted personal information. Read more

Cloudflare Launches 1.1.1.1 Public DNS

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Cloudflare launched the public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1 on April 1, 2018 in partnership with APNIC. The memorable address gave users an alternative to ISP resolvers and Google’s 8.8.8.8 service. Read more

GDPR And The Question Of Who Owns Personal Data

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The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, usually called GDPR, will begin applying in May 2018. Even companies outside Europe are paying attention because websites and services often have users in many countries. Read more

Google Announces Kubernetes Is Graduating at the CNCF

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Kubernetes became the first project to graduate from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in March 2018. Graduation signaled that the project had strong governance, a large contributor base, production adoption, and mature security and release processes. Read more

SpaceX Launches Falcon Heavy With Advanced Computing Onboard

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SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy for the first time in February 2018. Although the spectacle centered on rockets, the mission also illustrated how deeply modern launch systems depend on redundant computers, software, sensors, and real-time control. Read more

Meltdown Spectre And The Cost Of Going Fast

1 minute read

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The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities have made a very technical processor feature suddenly important to ordinary computer users. The problem is connected with speculative execution, a technique processors use to improve performance by doing work before they know for certain that the work will be needed. Read more

Meltdown and Spectre Expose CPU Speculation Risks

less than 1 minute read

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Meltdown and Spectre were publicly disclosed in January 2018, revealing that speculative execution in modern processors could leak information across security boundaries through side channels. Read more

2017

Apple Confirms It Slows Some Older iPhones to Protect Batteries

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Apple confirmed in December 2017 that iOS could reduce peak CPU performance on some older iPhones with degraded batteries. Users had noticed benchmark scores dropping after updates, which created suspicion that Apple was deliberately slowing old phones to encourage upgrades. Read more

The Rise Of Smart Speakers

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Voice assistants are moving out of phones and into rooms. Amazon Echo and Google Home are making the smart speaker a new kind of household device. Instead of opening an application, the user says a command into the room. Read more

Mozilla Releases Firefox Quantum

less than 1 minute read

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Mozilla released Firefox 57, branded Firefox Quantum, in November 2017 after a major performance effort. The browser incorporated technology from Mozilla’s experimental Servo project and increased parallelism in parts of the rendering engine. Read more

Google Releases the Pixel 2

less than 1 minute read

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Google released the Pixel 2 in October 2017 with a strong emphasis on computational photography. The phone used only one rear camera while several competitors were adding dual-camera systems. Read more

The Power Of Self-Faith

1 minute read

Published:

There are moments when the future becomes difficult to read. A plan fails. A relationship changes. Work becomes uncertain. We make a mistake and suddenly doubt decisions that once felt obvious. Read more

Not Every Pain Teaches You Anything

1 minute read

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There is a comforting idea that every painful experience teaches us something. I understand why we want to believe it. If pain contains a lesson, then at least it was not meaningless. But I do not think life always works that way. Sometimes pain is only pain. Read more

Welcome to Our Department

1 minute read

Published:

If you are beginning Computer Engineering in 2017, you are joining the field at an interesting time. Mobile applications, cloud platforms, artificial intelligence, connected devices, and open-source software are becoming increasingly important. Read more

Apple Introduces Face ID with the iPhone X

less than 1 minute read

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Apple introduced Face ID with the iPhone X in September 2017, replacing Touch ID on its new edge-to-edge-screen design. The system used a “TrueDepth” camera array rather than ordinary 2D face recognition. Read more

AMD Launches the Threadripper Platform

less than 1 minute read

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AMD released the first Ryzen Threadripper processors in August 2017, bringing up to sixteen Zen cores and thirty-two threads to high-end desktop systems. Read more

How To Study To Be A Good Software Developer

1 minute read

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Learning software development can easily become overwhelming because there is always another topic to study. A programming language leads to a framework. The framework leads to databases, networking, testing, operating systems, design, security, and many other areas. Read more

Intel Launches the Skylake-X Platform

less than 1 minute read

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Intel launched Skylake-X processors in 2017 for its high-end desktop platform, offering far more cores than mainstream consumer chips. The Core i9-7900X started the line with ten cores, and Intel later announced models reaching eighteen cores. Read more

Apple Introduces the Core ML Framework

less than 1 minute read

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Apple introduced Core ML at WWDC 2017 to make trained machine-learning models easier to run inside iPhone, iPad, and Mac applications. Developers could convert models from common frameworks into Apple’s format and execute inference through a high-level API. Read more

Google Announces Kotlin Support for Android

less than 1 minute read

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Google announced first-class support for Kotlin on Android at I/O in May 2017. Kotlin, created by JetBrains, ran on the Java Virtual Machine and could interoperate directly with existing Java classes and Android APIs. Read more

Kotlin Arrives On Android

1 minute read

Published:

Java has been the main language of Android development for years, but Kotlin is becoming difficult to ignore. JetBrains designed Kotlin to work well with Java while removing some of the language features that developers often find repetitive or unsafe. Read more

Docker Introduces the Moby Project

less than 1 minute read

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Docker announced the Moby Project in April 2017 to separate the open-source building blocks of its container platform from the commercially packaged Docker product. Read more

AMD Launches Ryzen

less than 1 minute read

Published:

AMD launched the first Ryzen desktop processors in March 2017, introducing the Zen microarchitecture and ending years in which Intel had faced relatively weak competition in high-performance x86 CPUs. Read more

Cloudflare Discloses the Cloudbleed Bug

less than 1 minute read

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Cloudflare disclosed a serious memory-leak bug in February 2017 that became known as Cloudbleed. Under unusual combinations of HTML parsing features, parts of Cloudflare’s edge software could read past the end of a buffer and include unrelated memory in HTTP responses. Read more

Carl Von Clausewitz On War

1 minute read

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Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian officer and military thinker whose book On War became one of the most influential works on strategy. He experienced the Napoleonic Wars directly, and this shaped his view of conflict as something far more complicated than a clean plan on paper. One of his best-known ideas is that war is connected to politics. Read more

Baltasar Gracián The Art Of Worldly Wisdom

1 minute read

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Baltasar Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom is a collection of short observations about judgment, reputation, timing, and human behavior. Gracián was a seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit writer. His book contains hundreds of compact maxims, and many of them still feel surprisingly modern. Read more

Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws Of Power

1 minute read

Published:

Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power is a book about influence, status, control, and the less attractive side of human behavior. It uses stories from history to present forty-eight rules about gaining and protecting power. Some of the laws are clever. Some are uncomfortable. Some are openly manipulative. That is exactly why the book is interesting. Read more

Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War

1 minute read

Published:

The Art of War is an old book, but many of its ideas still feel modern. Traditionally attributed to Sun Tzu, the text comes from ancient China and focuses on strategy, preparation, information, timing, and leadership. The most famous lesson is probably the importance of knowing both yourself and your opponent. This sounds obvious. In practice, people often do the opposite. Read more

Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince

1 minute read

Published:

Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is a short book with a very long reputation. Machiavelli wrote it in 1513 after losing his political position in Florence. He had worked as a diplomat and had seen rulers, wars, alliances, betrayals, and political changes closely. Read more

About Semantic Web Technologies

1 minute read

Published:

The traditional web is very good at presenting information to people. The Semantic Web asks another question: can web data also be described in a way that machines can understand more clearly? Read more

2016

Amazon Opens Its First Checkout-Free Store Concept

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Amazon publicly revealed Amazon Go in December 2016, presenting a small grocery store where shoppers could pick up items and leave without a traditional checkout line. The first store initially opened to Amazon employees before a broader public launch later. Read more

Why Two Factor Authentication Is Worth The Extra Step

1 minute read

Published:

Passwords are a weak part of modern security because people have too many of them. We reuse passwords, choose memorable patterns, and sometimes keep the same password for years. Large data breaches make this more dangerous because one stolen password can be tested on many unrelated services. Read more

Google Home and Modern Voice Assistants Expand

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google Home reached consumers in November 2016, placing Google Assistant into an always-available smart speaker. The product competed directly with Amazon Echo and helped turn voice interfaces into a new platform category. Read more

About Social Network Analysis

1 minute read

Published:

Social network analysis studies relationships rather than only individuals. That small change in perspective can reveal a lot. Read more

Google Announces the First Pixel Phones

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google introduced the first Pixel and Pixel XL phones in October 2016, replacing the Nexus line as its flagship Android hardware. HTC manufactured the devices, but Google controlled the branding, software experience, and much more of the product design. Read more

The Liberating Power Of Vulnerability Among Trusted Friends

1 minute read

Published:

There are very few places in life where we can stop performing. At work, we try to look capable. In public, we often hide confusion. Even with people we know, we sometimes choose the safe version of ourselves. A trusted friendship can be different. Read more

Welcome to Our Department

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Starting university is exciting, but it can also feel unfamiliar. New courses, new people, new expectations, and a new environment all arrive at once. If you are joining Computer Engineering in 2016, you are entering a field that is changing quickly and creating opportunities in almost every part of modern life. Read more

Chatbots Before The Hype

1 minute read

Published:

Chatbots are receiving renewed attention in 2016. Messaging platforms are opening APIs, companies are experimenting with automated assistants, and services such as Facebook Messenger are becoming places where software can talk to users directly. Read more

Apple Removes the Headphone Jack from the iPhone

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple removed the 3.5 mm headphone jack from the iPhone 7 in September 2016. The decision was controversial because the analog connector had been a universal audio standard for decades. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2016?

1 minute read

Published:

Choosing a university department means thinking about both the present and the future. In 2016, Computer Engineering is one of the fields where those two perspectives meet especially well. Read more

Intel Announces More Details of Kaby Lake

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Intel detailed its seventh-generation Core processors, codenamed Kaby Lake, in 2016. The architecture was notable because it broke Intel’s long-running “tick-tock” rhythm of alternating process shrinks and new microarchitectures. Read more

How To Be A Good Software Developer

1 minute read

Published:

Becoming a good software developer is not only about learning more programming languages. Languages matter. Tools matter. Frameworks matter. But after spending enough time around software, I think the deeper skills are more stable. Read more

Pokemon Go And When Augmented Reality Left The Lab

1 minute read

Published:

For years, augmented reality has been easy to demonstrate and difficult to make ordinary. Researchers can place digital objects over a camera image, companies can build impressive prototypes, and technology presentations can show what may be possible. Most people still do not wake up thinking they need augmented reality. Read more

Pokemon Go Brings Augmented Reality to the Mainstream

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Pokémon Go launched in July 2016 and turned location-based augmented-reality gaming into a global phenomenon. The game used GPS and map data to place virtual creatures and locations into the player’s physical surroundings. Read more

Docker Announces Built-In Swarm Mode

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Docker announced a redesigned Swarm mode at DockerCon in June 2016, integrating cluster orchestration directly into the Docker Engine rather than requiring a separate orchestration product. Read more

Containers Are Changing The Way Software Is Delivered

1 minute read

Published:

Docker has made the word “container” common in software development. The basic idea is attractive because deployment problems often come from differences between environments. A program works on one machine, then behaves differently on a server because a library, configuration, or dependency is not the same. Read more

Google Introduces the Tensor Processing Unit

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google revealed the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, in 2016 as a custom accelerator designed specifically for machine-learning inference. Instead of trying to be a general-purpose CPU or graphics processor, the first TPU focused heavily on the matrix operations common in neural networks. Read more

Vim A Powerful Text Editor

1 minute read

Published:

Vim is one of those tools that looks unfriendly before it starts to make sense. The first time someone opens Vim, even leaving the program can become a small problem. That has become a joke among programmers, but it also explains something important about the editor. Vim does not try to behave like a normal graphical text editor. It has its own language. Read more

Microsoft Releases Ubuntu on Windows Preview

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft surprised many developers in 2016 by introducing the Windows Subsystem for Linux and making an Ubuntu user space available on Windows 10. This was not a traditional virtual machine and did not initially run a Linux kernel. Read more

Raspberry Pi 3 And The Small Computer That Keeps Growing

1 minute read

Published:

The first Raspberry Pi was exciting because it made a computer feel inexpensive enough to experiment with. The new Raspberry Pi 3 continues that idea, but the small board is becoming much more capable. A faster processor, built-in Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth make it easier to use without adding several external devices. Read more

AlphaGo Defeats Lee Sedol

less than 1 minute read

Published:

AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol 4–1 in Seoul in March 2016. The result was surprising because many Go experts had expected computers to remain below the strongest human players for years. Read more

Google Announces Accelerated Mobile Pages

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google began rolling out Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, in early 2016 as an attempt to make news and publishing pages load much faster on phones. AMP restricted what page authors could do and encouraged content to be served from caches close to users. Read more

Why Progressive Web Apps Are Interesting

1 minute read

Published:

The web and mobile applications have been moving toward each other for years. A website can now do much more than display documents, while native mobile applications have taught users to expect speed, offline access, notifications, and an icon on the home screen. Progressive Web Apps are an attempt to bring some of those expectations to the browser. Read more

AlphaGo Prepares for Its Match Against Lee Sedol

less than 1 minute read

Published:

In January 2016, DeepMind published the Nature paper describing AlphaGo and announced that the system would face Lee Sedol, one of the world’s strongest Go players. The paper was significant because Go had long resisted the brute-force search methods that worked well in games such as chess. Read more

2015

Let’s Encrypt Enters Public Beta

less than 1 minute read

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Let’s Encrypt entered public beta in December 2015 with a goal that sounded simple but had major consequences: make HTTPS certificates free and automate their installation. Read more

HTTPS Is Becoming Everyones Problem

1 minute read

Published:

For years, HTTPS has been associated mainly with banks, shopping sites, and login pages. A simple personal website or blog often stayed on ordinary HTTP because encryption seemed unnecessary and certificates were inconvenient. Read more

Google Open-Sources TensorFlow

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google open-sourced TensorFlow in November 2015 under the Apache 2.0 license. The project gave researchers and developers access to a production-oriented machine-learning framework that could run on CPUs and GPUs. Read more

Microsoft Introduces the Surface Book

less than 1 minute read

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Microsoft introduced the original Surface Book in October 2015 as its first laptop. The unusual hinge and detachable display let the machine operate as a conventional notebook, a clipboard-like tablet, or a drawing surface. Read more

Rome Was Not Built In A Day

2 minute read

Published:

“Rome was not built in a day” is one of those sayings we understand immediately and forget almost as quickly. Of course large things take time. We know this. Then we begin a new project, learn a new skill, try to improve our health, or work toward a career goal, and suddenly we want visible results next week. Patience becomes much harder when the unfinished thing belongs to us. Read more

John Left His Beloved Work, So Why Did He Do That?

2 minute read

Published:

John always imagined himself working with technology in the defence industry. It was not a temporary interest. From a young age, he liked the idea of engineering work that had a clear mission and real consequences. Read more

Apple Introduces the A9 and 3D Touch

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple introduced the A9 processor and 3D Touch with the iPhone 6s in September 2015. The A9 used Apple’s 64-bit ARM-compatible CPU design and delivered a large performance increase over the A8 while remaining within smartphone power limits. Read more

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

2 minute read

Published:

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was one of the people who helped turn programming from a practical craft into a serious intellectual discipline. He was born in Rotterdam in 1930. His parents were both highly educated, and Dijkstra initially studied theoretical physics at Leiden University. Read more

Google Becomes Part of Alphabet

less than 1 minute read

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Google announced a corporate restructuring in August 2015 that created Alphabet as a new holding company. Google remained the largest subsidiary, while projects such as life sciences, investment arms, and experimental “moonshots” could operate more independently. Read more

Windows 10 Is Released

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft released Windows 10 on July 29, 2015 and offered it as a free upgrade to many Windows 7 and 8 users. The Start menu returned, combining a familiar application list with optional Live Tiles. Read more

Microsoft Releases Visual Studio Code

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft made Visual Studio Code broadly available in 2015 as a lightweight, cross-platform editor built with web technologies. Unlike the full Visual Studio IDE, VS Code was designed to start quickly and support many languages through extensions. Read more

Google Photos Launches

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google launched Google Photos as a separate service in May 2015, offering cloud photo storage combined with automatic organization and search. The product used computer vision to recognize categories such as people, objects, and places even when users had never manually added tags. Read more

Apple Watch Reaches Consumers

less than 1 minute read

Published:

The first Apple Watch went on sale in April 2015. It used Apple’s S1 system-in-package, a small OLED display, heart-rate sensing, accelerometers, haptic feedback, and a Digital Crown for scrolling. Read more

USB Type-C Reaches New Consumer Devices

less than 1 minute read

Published:

USB Type-C began appearing on major consumer devices in 2015, including Apple’s 12-inch MacBook and Google’s Chromebook Pixel. The small reversible connector was designed to replace several older USB plug shapes. Read more

Docker And The Idea Of Portable Software

1 minute read

Published:

One sentence has caused programmers pain for a very long time: “It works on my machine.” A program depends on more than its source code. It may need a certain library version, a service, a configuration file, or a particular operating system setting. Moving software from one computer to another can turn a working project into a collection of mysterious errors. This is why I find Docker interesting. Read more

Raspberry Pi 2 Is Released

less than 1 minute read

Published:

The Raspberry Pi 2 arrived in February 2015 with a much larger CPU upgrade than earlier revisions. It moved from a single-core ARM11 processor to a 900 MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 while keeping the familiar board layout and low price. Read more

Microsoft Reveals More Details About Windows 10

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft used a January 2015 event to show how Windows 10 would move away from the most controversial parts of Windows 8. The Start menu returned as a desktop element, while Live Tiles remained available inside it. Read more

2014

Docker Containers Move Deeper Into Production

less than 1 minute read

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By the end of 2014, Docker had moved beyond developer experimentation and was increasingly being tested for production deployments. The attraction was consistency: the same container image could move from a developer’s laptop into testing and then into a server environment. Read more

Amazon Introduces the Echo

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Amazon introduced the first Echo smart speaker in late 2014 as an invitation-only product. Its defining feature was Alexa, a voice assistant designed to be available from across a room rather than only after pressing a button on a phone. Read more

HTML5 Becomes a W3C Recommendation

less than 1 minute read

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HTML5 became an official W3C Recommendation in October 2014. Developers had already been using many of its features for years, so the milestone was less a launch than a sign that the modern web platform had stabilized. Read more

From Babyhood To Growing Up

1 minute read

Published:

A baby enters the world with a very direct way of communicating. Something is wrong, so the baby cries. Hungry. Tired. Cold. Uncomfortable. Read more

Apple Introduces the First Apple Watch

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple unveiled the first Apple Watch in September 2014, although the device did not go on sale until 2015. The watch combined a small touch display with the Digital Crown, a rotating control intended to avoid covering the screen with a finger. Read more

IBM Announces a Major Investment in Cloud Computing

less than 1 minute read

Published:

IBM spent heavily on cloud infrastructure in 2014, building on its acquisition of SoftLayer and expanding data centers around the world. The strategy was aimed particularly at enterprise customers that wanted cloud flexibility without abandoning existing corporate systems. Read more

Google Announces Kubernetes

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google announced Kubernetes as an open-source project in 2014, drawing on its internal experience running large clusters with systems such as Borg. Kubernetes was designed to manage containers across many machines rather than treat each container as an isolated unit. Read more

We Can All Become Better Individuals

1 minute read

Published:

We often admire people for what they can do. They are intelligent, talented, successful, famous, or very knowledgeable. These qualities are easy to notice. Character is quieter. Read more

Apple Announces Swift

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple announced the Swift programming language at WWDC in June 2014 as a modern alternative to Objective-C for iOS and Mac development. Swift kept interoperability with existing Objective-C frameworks so developers did not have to rewrite entire applications. Read more

Microsoft Introduces the Surface Pro 3

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft introduced the Surface Pro 3 in May 2014 with a larger 12-inch display and a redesigned kickstand. Earlier Surface devices had struggled to convince users that one machine could replace both a laptop and a tablet. Read more

Heartbleed Reveals a Serious OpenSSL Weakness

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Heartbleed was disclosed in April 2014 as a critical bug in OpenSSL, the cryptographic library used by a huge number of HTTPS servers. The flaw was in the TLS heartbeat extension, not in the underlying encryption algorithms. Read more

Java 8 Is Released

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Java 8 was released in March 2014 and introduced the largest language-level change Java had seen in years: lambda expressions. Lambdas made it possible to pass behavior as values more naturally, reducing the need for verbose anonymous classes. Read more

Facebook Acquires WhatsApp

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Facebook announced the acquisition of WhatsApp in February 2014 for approximately $19 billion in cash and stock, an extraordinary valuation for a messaging company with a small engineering team. Read more

Google Acquires DeepMind

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google acquired the London-based AI company DeepMind in January 2014 for a reported price of roughly $400–500 million. At the time, DeepMind was known mainly inside research circles for combining deep neural networks with reinforcement learning. Read more

2013

Docker Reaches Its First Major Wave of Adoption

less than 1 minute read

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Docker gained major developer attention in 2013 by making Linux containers far easier to build, distribute, and run. Containers were not a new kernel technology; Linux already had namespaces and control groups. Docker packaged those primitives into a practical workflow. Read more

JavaScript Frameworks And The Search For Order

1 minute read

Published:

JavaScript applications are becoming large enough that writing everything as a collection of event handlers is no longer comfortable. The browser now hosts email clients, dashboards, editors, social applications, and many interfaces that behave more like desktop software than traditional pages. Read more

The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One Launch

less than 1 minute read

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Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One launched in November 2013. Both consoles moved much closer to PC-style hardware than their predecessors, using AMD x86-64 processors and Radeon-derived graphics. Read more

Windows 8.1 Is Released

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Windows 8.1 became publicly available in October 2013 as a free update for Windows 8 users. The release tried to soften the conflict between Microsoft’s touch-first ambitions and the expectations of traditional PC users. Read more

The Weight Of What Ifs

1 minute read

Published:

“What if?” Two small words can create an entire future inside the mind. What if I fail? What if they do not like me? What if I send the message and receive no answer? What if I make the wrong decision? Read more

Online Courses And The Changing Classroom

1 minute read

Published:

Online courses are becoming difficult to ignore. Universities and new platforms are putting lectures, exercises, and complete courses on the internet. A student can sit at home and listen to a professor from another country. A person with a job can study at night. Someone can explore a subject without formally joining a university. I find this very exciting. Read more

Apple Introduces the 64-Bit A7 Processor

less than 1 minute read

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Apple introduced the A7 system-on-chip with the iPhone 5s in September 2013, calling it the first 64-bit processor in a consumer smartphone. The chip used Apple’s ARMv8-based Cyclone CPU cores rather than simply extending the older 32-bit design. Read more

Microsoft Finalizes Windows 8.1

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft finalized Windows 8.1 in 2013 less than a year after Windows 8, an unusually fast response to criticism of the new interface. The update preserved the touch-oriented Start screen but restored a visible Start button on the desktop and offered more configuration choices. Read more

Google Chromecast Is Released

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google released the first Chromecast in July 2013 for $35. The small HDMI dongle did not behave like a traditional streaming box with its own large interface and remote control. Instead, phones and computers acted as controllers. Read more

Apple Reveals iOS 7 and the New Mac Pro

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple used WWDC 2013 to reveal two very different redesigns: iOS 7 replaced the heavily textured visual style of earlier iPhones, while the new Mac Pro abandoned the traditional rectangular workstation tower for a compact cylindrical design. Read more

A Genius And Visionary Nicola Tesla

1 minute read

Published:

Nikola Tesla is one of those historical figures whose real achievements are impressive enough without adding legends. He was born in 1856 in Smiljan, in what is now Croatia, and moved to the United States in 1884. His work in electrical engineering became especially important during the development of alternating-current power systems. Read more

Google Introduces Android Studio

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google introduced Android Studio at I/O in May 2013 as a new official development environment for Android. It was based on JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA rather than the Eclipse tooling Google had previously promoted. Read more

Google Releases Blink as a New Browser Engine

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google announced Blink in April 2013 as a fork of WebKit’s WebCore rendering engine for Chrome and Chromium. Chrome had originally adopted WebKit because it was mature and standards-oriented, but Google’s browser architecture was diverging from Apple’s priorities. Read more

Raspberry Pi And The Joy Of Small Computers

1 minute read

Published:

The Raspberry Pi is a very small computer, but I think its real size is larger than the board in your hand. What I like most is not its speed. There are much faster computers everywhere. What makes it interesting is that it invites experimentation. Read more

Samsung Launches the Galaxy S4

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Samsung introduced the Galaxy S4 in March 2013, continuing Android’s shift toward large, high-resolution smartphones. The device used a 5-inch 1080p AMOLED display and shipped in different regions with either Qualcomm Snapdragon or Samsung Exynos processors. Read more

Ubuntu Announces Its Phone Interface

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Canonical demonstrated Ubuntu for Phones in early 2013 as an attempt to extend Ubuntu from PCs and servers into smartphones. The interface emphasized edge gestures: swiping from different sides of the screen opened applications, controls, or navigation. Read more

3D Printing And The Idea Of Downloading An Object

1 minute read

Published:

For most of my life, a digital file and a physical object have belonged to different worlds. A photograph can become a print, but a chair, gear, case, or toy still needs a factory, workshop, or skilled person to make it. Read more

Facebook Introduces Graph Search

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Facebook introduced Graph Search in January 2013 as a way to query the social network’s structured data using phrases such as “friends who live in San Francisco” or “photos of my friends before 2010.” Read more

2012

Google Compute Engine Expands Cloud Competition

less than 1 minute read

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Google expanded access to Compute Engine in 2012, offering virtual machines on the same broad infrastructure family that supported Google’s own services. The product put Google in more direct competition with Amazon EC2. Read more

The First ARM-Based Windows RT Devices Arrive

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Windows RT devices reached consumers in late 2012, including Microsoft’s Surface RT. They ran on ARM processors rather than the x86 CPUs that had defined Windows PCs for decades. Read more

Windows 8 Is Released

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft released Windows 8 on October 26, 2012. The operating system combined a touch-oriented Start screen with the traditional Windows desktop, making it one of the most radical interface changes in Windows history. Read more

Embracing The Significance Of Every Moment

1 minute read

Published:

Sometimes I think about how quickly a person disappears from memory. I know the names of my parents and grandparents, of course. But when I move further back, the details become weaker. Great-grandparents turn into a few stories, a photograph, or only a name. Read more

The iPhone 5 Brings LTE to Apple Phones

less than 1 minute read

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Apple introduced the iPhone 5 in September 2012 with LTE cellular support, a taller 4-inch display, and the new Lightning connector. LTE was the most important networking change because it brought much higher mobile data speeds than the 3G technology used by earlier iPhones. Read more

Windows 8 Reaches RTM

less than 1 minute read

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Windows 8 reached release-to-manufacturing status in August 2012, giving PC manufacturers a final build before the public launch. The operating system was built around Microsoft’s belief that touchscreens would become central to personal computers. Read more

OS X Mountain Lion Is Released

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple released OS X Mountain Lion in July 2012, continuing the transfer of ideas from iOS back to the Mac. Notification Center, Messages, Reminders, Notes, and deeper iCloud integration made the desktop operating system more closely connected to Apple’s mobile devices. Read more

Microsoft Announces the Surface Tablet

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft announced the first Surface tablets in June 2012, marking an unusual move for a company that traditionally licensed Windows to PC manufacturers rather than building flagship computers itself. Read more

Google Introduces the Knowledge Graph

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google introduced the Knowledge Graph in May 2012 to supplement ordinary web search with structured information about real-world entities. Instead of treating every query as a collection of words, Google increasingly tried to determine whether a user meant a person, place, book, company, or other specific thing. Read more

Google Drive Launches

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google launched Drive in April 2012 with 5 GB of free storage and tight integration with Google Docs. The service entered a market already shaped by Dropbox but connected file storage directly to Google’s browser-based productivity tools. Read more

NVIDIA Launches the Kepler GPU Architecture

less than 1 minute read

Published:

NVIDIA launched its Kepler GPU architecture in 2012 with products including the GeForce GTX 680. Kepler was designed to improve performance per watt compared with the preceding Fermi generation. Read more

The Unexpected Hanging Paradox

1 minute read

Published:

The Unexpected Hanging Paradox is a puzzle about prediction, knowledge, and surprise. A common version begins with a judge telling a prisoner that he will be executed on one weekday during the following week, but the execution will be a surprise. The prisoner will not know the day in advance. Read more

The Zenos Paradox

1 minute read

Published:

Zeno of Elea created several paradoxes about motion more than two thousand years ago. The most famous versions all play with the same uncomfortable idea. Before you reach a destination, you must travel half the distance. Then you must travel half of what remains. Then half again. Read more

The Berrys Paradox

1 minute read

Published:

Berry’s Paradox lives in the uncomfortable space between language and mathematics. A common form of the paradox asks us to consider: “The smallest positive integer that cannot be described in fewer than twenty words.” At first, this sounds like a valid description. Read more

Raspberry Pi Goes on Sale

less than 1 minute read

Published:

The Raspberry Pi went on sale on February 29, 2012, and demand immediately overwhelmed the distributors’ websites. The $35 Model B was a complete ARM-based Linux computer on a board roughly the size of a credit card. Read more

The Hilberts Paradox

1 minute read

Published:

Hilbert’s Hotel is one of my favorite ways to think about infinity. Imagine a hotel with infinitely many rooms. Room 1, room 2, room 3, and so on forever. Now imagine that every room is occupied. In an ordinary hotel, the answer is obvious: there is no space for another guest. Read more

The Birthday Paradox

1 minute read

Published:

The Birthday Paradox is not a real contradiction. It is a contradiction between probability and intuition. Imagine a room with 23 people. What is the probability that at least two of them share the same birthday? Most people expect the probability to be small because there are 365 possible birthdays. Read more

The Banach-tarski Paradox

1 minute read

Published:

The Banach-Tarski Paradox sounds impossible the first time we hear it. In very informal language, it says that a solid mathematical ball can be divided into a small number of special pieces and then rearranged using only rotations and translations to create two balls, each the same size as the original. One ball becomes two. No stretching. No ordinary copying. Read more

The Liar Paradox

1 minute read

Published:

Consider the sentence: “This statement is false.” It is only four words, but it creates a problem that has troubled philosophers and logicians for centuries. Suppose the sentence is true. Read more

The Barber Paradox

1 minute read

Published:

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 Begins

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Raspberry Pi production began in early 2012 after the foundation finalized a board that could be sold at an unusually low price. Manufacturing a computer this cheaply required controlling not just component cost but board complexity, testing, packaging, and distributor margins. Read more

Russells Paradox

1 minute read

Published:

Russell’s Paradox is one of those problems that looks harmless until one sentence turns mathematics against itself. Bertrand Russell discovered the paradox around 1901 while thinking about the foundations of set theory. The problem begins with a simple question. Can a set contain itself? Read more

Imaginary Numbers

1 minute read

Published:

The name “imaginary number” sounds almost like a joke. How can a number be imaginary? The idea appears when we try to solve equations that have no answer among the real numbers. A simple example is Read more

2011

HTML5 Becomes the Center of Modern Web Development

less than 1 minute read

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By 2011, HTML5 had become the direction of mainstream web development even though the specification was not yet a final W3C recommendation. Browser vendors were implementing new capabilities that reduced dependence on plug-ins such as Flash. Read more

Raspberry Pi Hardware Design Nears Production

less than 1 minute read

Published:

By late 2011, the Raspberry Pi team was moving from prototype boards toward mass production of a low-cost computer intended for programming education. Keeping the price around $25–$35 forced unusually strict hardware choices. Read more

Apple Introduces Siri on the iPhone 4S

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple introduced Siri as a built-in feature of the iPhone 4S in October 2011 after acquiring the original Siri company the previous year. Instead of requiring users to navigate menus, Siri accepted spoken requests such as setting reminders, sending messages, or checking the weather. Read more

Making Your Family Proud

2 minute read

Published:

Wanting to make our family proud can be a beautiful motivation. For many of us, family is connected with sacrifice. Parents work, worry, give time, and sometimes give up things we never fully see. Because of this, success can feel larger than a personal achievement. We want to show them that their effort mattered. Read more

Windows 8 Is Shown to Developers

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft gave developers a detailed preview of Windows 8 at the BUILD conference in September 2011. The most dramatic change was a new touch-first interface built around large tiles, while the traditional Windows desktop remained underneath. Read more

Google Agrees to Acquire Motorola Mobility

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google announced an agreement to acquire Motorola Mobility for about $12.5 billion in August 2011. Motorola was an Android handset maker, but one of the most important assets in the deal was its large portfolio of mobile patents. Read more

GitHub And The Social Side Of Code

1 minute read

Published:

Source-code hosting used to feel mainly like infrastructure. A project needed a repository, developers needed access, and version-control history needed a safe place to live. GitHub is turning that practical service into something much more social. Read more

OS X Lion Moves Software Distribution Toward App Stores

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple released OS X Lion in July 2011 primarily through the Mac App Store rather than as a boxed DVD. That delivery method was itself a major change: a full desktop operating-system upgrade could now be purchased, downloaded, and installed like ordinary software. Read more

Apple Announces iCloud

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple announced iCloud at WWDC in June 2011 as a replacement for MobileMe and as a broader synchronization layer for its devices. The goal was to make data such as contacts, calendars, photos, documents, and purchases follow the user automatically. Read more

Google Introduces Chromebooks

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google introduced the first commercial Chromebooks in May 2011, with hardware from Samsung and Acer. The machines ran Chrome OS and were designed around a browser-first model rather than the traditional idea of installing desktop applications locally. Read more

Ubuntu Introduces the Unity Desktop by Default

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Ubuntu 11.04 made the Unity desktop interface the default in April 2011. Unity replaced the traditional GNOME 2 desktop layout with a vertical launcher, a global menu, and the Dash interface for finding applications and files. Read more

The Paradox Of Forgetting

1 minute read

Published:

Forgetting is usually described as a failure. We forget a name, a date, a promise, or something we studied. We become annoyed with ourselves. But forgetting is not always an enemy. Read more

Haste Makes Waste

1 minute read

Published:

We all know the saying, “Haste makes waste.” It sounds simple, but I think we only understand it properly after we have rushed something important. Read more

It Is Not The Mountain We Conquer, But Ourselves

1 minute read

Published:

When I watch a bird fly, I sometimes think about how strange that movement really is. Two wings work together, but each wing also needs its own space. They move as a pair without becoming the same thing. I like this as a small metaphor for life. Read more

Firefox Moves to a Faster Release Model

less than 1 minute read

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Mozilla changed Firefox to a rapid release schedule in 2011, moving away from long gaps between major browser versions. Instead of waiting a year or more for a large release, Mozilla planned new versions roughly every six weeks. Read more

IBM Watson Defeats Jeopardy Champions

less than 1 minute read

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IBM’s Watson defeated former Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in February 2011. The system had to solve a problem very different from ordinary database lookup: clues often depended on wordplay, ambiguity, culture, and indirect references. Read more

Intel Introduces the Sandy Bridge Architecture

less than 1 minute read

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Intel launched the Sandy Bridge processor family in early 2011, integrating CPU cores, graphics, memory control, and other functions more tightly onto one die. Compared with earlier designs, the integrated graphics engine was no longer a separate chip sitting elsewhere in the package. Read more

2010

The Quiet Value Of Making Backups

1 minute read

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Backups are one of the least exciting parts of using a computer. Nothing new appears when a backup works. There is no faster program, new feature, or beautiful interface. We only create another copy of something we already have. Read more

Google Announces the Chrome Web Store

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google opened the Chrome Web Store in December 2010 as a distribution system for browser applications, extensions, and themes. It reflected Google’s belief that web applications could become a primary form of software, especially on the emerging Chrome OS platform. Read more

The Kinect Sensor Reaches Consumers

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft released Kinect for the Xbox 360 in November 2010. The accessory let players control games using body movement rather than a handheld controller and quickly became one of the most widely distributed depth-sensing devices of its era. Read more

Why I Keep Notes While Programming

1 minute read

Published:

When I am deep inside a programming problem, I often believe I will remember everything. I tell myself that the reason for this strange function is obvious. I am sure I will remember why I changed that setting. I think the error message will stay in my mind because I spent three hours fighting it. Read more

Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7

less than 1 minute read

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Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 in late 2010 as a complete break from the aging Windows Mobile interface. Instead of trying to shrink the desktop Windows experience onto a phone, Microsoft built a touch-first design around large typography and Live Tiles. Read more

Unpacking Emotional Baggage

2 minute read

Published:

We all carry things that cannot be seen. Some come from our own experiences. Others come from family, friends, school, culture, and the environment in which we grew up. Over time, these influences become part of the way we understand ourselves and other people. I like the metaphor of emotional baggage because baggage can be useful and heavy at the same time. Read more

Google Introduces Instant Search

less than 1 minute read

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Google introduced Instant Search in September 2010, updating search results while users were still typing their queries. The feature looked simple, but it changed the performance requirements of an already enormous search system. Read more

Oracle Completes Major Changes Around Java and Sun

less than 1 minute read

Published:

After Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, developers began seeing what new ownership meant for Java, Solaris, MySQL, and Sun’s open-source projects. Oracle inherited both commercial products and communities that had grown around Sun’s comparatively open development culture. Read more

JavaScript Is Growing Up

1 minute read

Published:

JavaScript once felt like the language used for small tricks inside a web page. Validate a form, open a window, change an image, or make a menu move. The important programming seemed to happen on the server. Read more

Node.js Gains Attention as Server-Side JavaScript

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Node.js was still young in 2010, but developers were rapidly noticing its unusual approach to server programming: JavaScript running outside the browser on Google’s V8 engine with asynchronous, event-driven I/O. Read more

Apple Introduces the iPhone 4

less than 1 minute read

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Apple introduced the iPhone 4 in June 2010 with a new industrial design, a high-density “Retina” display, front-facing camera, and Apple’s A4 processor. The 960×640 screen packed about 326 pixels per inch, making individual pixels difficult to distinguish at normal viewing distance. Read more

Google Open-Sources the VP8 Video Codec

less than 1 minute read

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Google open-sourced the VP8 video codec in May 2010 after acquiring On2 Technologies. The codec became the core of the new WebM media format, paired initially with Vorbis audio and a Matroska-derived container. Read more

The iPad And The Question Of What A Computer Is

1 minute read

Published:

Apple released the iPad this month, and the most interesting question for me is not whether it is a large phone or a small laptop. The device makes me wonder what we actually require before we call something a computer. Read more

Apple Releases the First iPad

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple released the first iPad in April 2010. The tablet used Apple’s A4 system-on-chip, a 9.7-inch multi-touch display, and the same basic operating-system family as the iPhone, but it was positioned for web browsing, reading, video, games, and lightweight productivity. Read more

NVIDIA Announces Fermi GeForce GTX 480

less than 1 minute read

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NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTX 480 in March 2010 as the first flagship consumer card based on its Fermi architecture. Fermi was designed not only for graphics but also for increasingly important general-purpose GPU computing. Read more

Microsoft Azure Becomes Commercially Available

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft Azure became commercially available in February 2010. The service represented a major strategic shift for a company whose business had been built around software installed on customer-owned PCs and servers. Read more

Google Introduces the Nexus One

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google introduced the Nexus One in January 2010, built by HTC. Unlike most Android phones of the period, it was sold as a Google-branded reference device and initially offered directly through Google’s own online store. Read more

2009

Google Public DNS Launches

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Google launched the public DNS resolvers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 in December 2009. DNS is the Internet’s distributed naming system: it translates human-readable domain names into addresses and other records computers use. Read more

When Solid State Drives Start To Feel Real

1 minute read

Published:

Hard drives have always made computers feel mechanical. We can hear them spin, click, and search. A large part of the computer may be electronic, but storage still depends on a moving disk and a tiny head travelling across its surface. Read more

Google Announces the Go Programming Language

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google introduced the Go programming language publicly in November 2009. Its designers, including Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson, wanted a compiled language that kept systems programming relatively simple while handling modern multi-core and networked software. Read more

Windows 7 Is Released

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft released Windows 7 on October 22, 2009. The system was widely seen as a recovery from Vista because it felt faster, worked with more existing hardware, and restored confidence in upgrading Windows. Read more

Making Happiness A Choice

2 minute read

Published:

Have you ever tried very hard to improve someone’s mood and discovered that nothing you did was enough? I have thought about this more than once. We can be kind, make a joke, send a message, offer help, or simply stay near someone. Sometimes a small gesture changes the whole day. At other times, the same effort seems to touch nothing. It reminds me that happiness is deeply personal. Read more

Windows 7 Reaches RTM

less than 1 minute read

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Windows 7 reached release-to-manufacturing status in July 2009, meaning Microsoft’s code was stable enough for PC makers to prepare systems for the October launch. The milestone mattered because hardware vendors needed a final build to validate drivers and factory images. Read more

Snow Leopard Reaches Gold Master Development

less than 1 minute read

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Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was completed in 2009 with an unusual goal for a major operating-system release: Apple emphasized internal engineering improvements more than visible features. Read more

The Comfort Of Long Forum Conversations

1 minute read

Published:

Forums can be messy. A topic begins with one question and ends five pages later in a completely different place. People disagree. Someone writes too much. Someone disappears for months and returns as if nothing happened. I still like them. Read more

Google Chrome OS Is Publicly Announced

less than 1 minute read

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Google publicly announced Chrome OS in July 2009. The operating system was built around the idea that a lightweight browser-focused computer could be simpler, safer, and faster to maintain than a traditional desktop. Read more

Microsoft Launches the Bing Search Engine

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft launched Bing in June 2009 as the successor to Live Search. Competing with Google required far more than building a web crawler: a modern search engine had to index billions of pages, rank them quickly, fight spam, and learn from user behavior. Read more

Thinking Mechanically

2 minute read

Published:

Sometimes I wonder how much of our behavior is really chosen and how much simply follows patterns we learned long ago. The idea of thinking mechanically comes from a view of the world in which events can be explained through rules, causes, and predictable processes. During the Scientific Revolution, this mechanical view became very powerful. Nature could be studied as a system. If we understood the parts and the laws acting on them, perhaps we could understand the whole. It is tempting to apply the same idea to people. Read more

Google Wave Is Revealed

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google revealed Wave at its I/O conference in May 2009 as an attempt to rethink email and collaborative communication. A “wave” was a shared document and conversation that multiple users could edit in real time. Read more

Oracle Announces Its Plan to Acquire Sun Microsystems

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Oracle announced in April 2009 that it would acquire Sun Microsystems for about $7.4 billion. Sun owned technologies that sat at the center of enterprise computing, including Java, Solaris, SPARC processors, MySQL, and a large collection of open-source projects. Read more

The Web Is Moving Into Our Pockets

1 minute read

Published:

A few years ago, browsing the web on a phone felt like a reduced version of the real internet. Pages were difficult to read, connections were slow, and many sites seemed designed for a large screen and a mouse. That experience is changing quickly. Read more

Intel Launches Xeon 5500 Nehalem-EP

less than 1 minute read

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Intel launched the Xeon 5500 series, codenamed Nehalem-EP, in March 2009. The server processors replaced the front-side-bus architecture that had connected CPUs to a shared chipset interface for years. Read more

WhatsApp Is Founded

less than 1 minute read

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WhatsApp was incorporated in February 2009 by Jan Koum and Brian Acton. The service did not begin as the global messaging platform it later became; its earliest idea was closer to showing short status messages beside contacts. Read more

Learning From Stack Overflow

1 minute read

Published:

A new programming question-and-answer site called Stack Overflow has become one of the places I enjoy visiting. The idea is simple. A programmer asks a clear question. Other programmers answer it. Useful answers move upward through voting, and the discussion stays focused on solving the problem. This sounds small, but it feels different from searching through long forum threads. Read more

Windows 7 Beta Shows a New Direction for Microsoft

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft released the public beta of Windows 7 in January 2009. Although the new system looked like a major correction after Vista, much of its kernel, security model, and driver architecture actually came from Vista. Read more

2008

Cloud Computing Becomes a Serious Industry Strategy

less than 1 minute read

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By the end of 2008, cloud computing had become more than an experimental hosting model. Amazon was expanding AWS, Google had launched App Engine, and Microsoft had announced what would become Azure. Major software companies were now designing products around infrastructure delivered over the Internet. Read more

Cloud Computing Still Feels Like A Strange Name

1 minute read

Published:

The phrase “cloud computing” is appearing more often, and I am still not sure I like the name. The cloud usually means somebody else’s computers, located somewhere I cannot see, providing storage or processing through a network. Read more

Google Releases Android Source Code

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google published the Android source code through the Android Open Source Project in 2008, shortly after the first commercial Android phone reached consumers. This gave manufacturers and developers access to most of the operating system’s underlying code. Read more

Android 1.0 Arrives

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Android 1.0 reached consumers in October 2008 with the T-Mobile G1, manufactured by HTC. The software already contained many ideas that would remain central to Android: a notification system, home-screen widgets, deep Google-service integration, and an application marketplace. Read more

A Personal Website Feels Like A Notebook

1 minute read

Published:

A personal website is not a very practical object. It needs time. Pages break. Links change. Designs become old. Sometimes you spend an hour changing something that almost nobody will notice. Read more

Google Launches the Chrome Browser

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google released the first public beta of Chrome for Windows in September 2008. The browser arrived with a minimalist interface, but its architecture was more radical than the appearance suggested. Read more

Intel Introduces the First Mainstream SSDs

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Intel entered the consumer solid-state drive market in 2008 with products such as the X25-M, which quickly became known for strong random-access performance. SSDs had no mechanical heads or spinning platters, so they behaved very differently from hard disks. Read more

Apple Opens the App Store

less than 1 minute read

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Apple opened the iPhone App Store in July 2008 alongside iPhone OS 2.0. The store launched with roughly 500 applications and gave third-party developers an official way to distribute native software to iPhone and iPod touch users. Read more

Git And The Strange Idea Of Distributed Version Control

1 minute read

Published:

Version control becomes important the first time a project grows large enough that “final”, “final2”, and “really-final” stop being funny file names. A proper system keeps the history of changes and allows us to return to an older version when something goes wrong. Read more

Mozilla Releases Firefox 3

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Mozilla released Firefox 3 in June 2008 after a public campaign that attempted to set a world record for software downloads in a single day. The release included a new bookmarking and history interface known as the “Awesome Bar,” improved standards support, and major performance work. Read more

Multi-Function Display

2 minute read

Published:

A Multi-Function Display, usually called an MFD, is one of the cockpit systems that interests me because it brings many different kinds of information onto a single screen. Instead of giving every function its own instrument, the display can change according to what the pilot needs at that moment. Read more

Google App Engine Opens to Developers

less than 1 minute read

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Google launched App Engine in April 2008 as a platform for building web applications without managing servers directly. The first version focused on Python applications and provided managed services for storage, authentication, caching, and request handling. Read more

Open Source Changed How I Learn

1 minute read

Published:

One of the nicest things about programming is that sometimes we can look inside the thing we use. Open-source software makes this possible in a very direct way. We do not only receive a program. We can also see how it was built. For a student, this is powerful. Read more

Apple Releases the iPhone SDK

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple released the first iPhone software development kit in March 2008, finally giving developers an official way to build native applications for the iPhone. Until then, Apple had encouraged third-party developers to create web applications that ran in Safari. Read more

Microsoft Opens More of Its Server Protocol Documentation

less than 1 minute read

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Microsoft announced broader publication of technical documentation for important Windows client and server protocols in February 2008. The move followed years of antitrust pressure and complaints that competitors could not interoperate easily with Microsoft’s dominant enterprise software. Read more

Netbooks And The Return Of The Small Computer

1 minute read

Published:

Computers have spent many years becoming more powerful. Faster processors, larger screens, stronger graphics cards, and more storage are easy improvements to understand. The recent interest in netbooks suggests that another direction can also be attractive: maybe a computer can become useful by becoming smaller and simpler. Read more

MacBook Air Redefines the Thin Laptop

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple introduced the first MacBook Air in January 2008 as an unusually thin notebook, just 0.76 inches at its thickest point. Reaching that size required removing or shrinking components that laptop users still considered normal. Read more

2007

Amazon Expands the Idea of Cloud Computing

less than 1 minute read

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By the end of 2007, Amazon Web Services had turned “cloud computing” from a vague phrase into a practical development model. S3 offered object storage, while EC2 let developers rent virtual machines by the hour instead of buying physical servers. Read more

Why I Like Learning from Manuals

1 minute read

Published:

When I start using a new program or programming language, I often want to understand everything quickly. I search the web, read a few examples, copy something that looks useful, and try to make it work. Read more

Google Announces Android

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Google and a group of hardware and mobile companies announced Android in November 2007 through the Open Handset Alliance. Unlike Apple’s tightly integrated iPhone, Android was presented as a software platform that many manufacturers and carriers could adapt to their own devices. Read more

Ubuntu 7.10 Expands Desktop Linux

less than 1 minute read

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Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” was released in October 2007 with a stronger focus on desktop polish. Compiz desktop effects were enabled by default on supported hardware, and the distribution improved monitor configuration, printing, and automatic handling of graphics drivers. Read more

Wikipedia And The Changing Habit Of Looking Things Up

1 minute read

Published:

When I was younger, looking something up usually meant finding the right book. An encyclopedia had weight, order, and a limited number of pages. If the information was not there, the search had to continue somewhere else. Read more

Apple Introduces the iPod Touch

less than 1 minute read

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Apple introduced the iPod touch in September 2007, only a few months after the first iPhone. It removed the phone radio but kept the multi-touch interface, Safari browser, Wi-Fi networking, and much of the same software foundation. Read more

VMware Fusion Brings Virtualization to Intel Macs

less than 1 minute read

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VMware released Fusion 1.0 for Intel-based Macs in August 2007. Boot Camp already allowed Mac owners to restart into Windows, but Fusion let Windows run inside a virtual machine while Mac OS X remained active. Read more

Tactical Environment Software

3 minute read

Published:

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

less than 1 minute read

Published:

By 2007, dual-core processors were becoming standard in mainstream PCs, and the industry was clearly moving away from the old strategy of increasing clock speed every generation. Power density and heat had made that path increasingly difficult. Read more

The Phone Is Becoming a Computer

1 minute read

Published:

For many years, a mobile phone was mainly a phone. It made calls, sent messages, stored a few contacts, and maybe had a simple game. That idea is starting to look old. Read more

The First iPhone Goes on Sale

less than 1 minute read

Published:

The first iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007. It combined a capacitive multi-touch screen, a mobile version of OS X, a real web browser, phone functions, and an iPod-style media player in one device. Read more

Google Street View Appears

less than 1 minute read

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Google launched Street View in May 2007 with imagery from a small number of US cities. The feature turned Google Maps from a top-down map into something closer to a navigable photographic model of real streets. Read more

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Is Released

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” was released in April 2007. It arrived when desktop Linux distributions were working hard to make installation, drivers, multimedia, and wireless networking less intimidating for ordinary PC users. Read more

Adobe Announces Creative Suite 3

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Adobe announced Creative Suite 3 in March 2007, bringing major applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, and Dreamweaver into one generation of tools. For Mac users, CS3 was especially important because it was the first Creative Suite version designed to run natively on Apple’s Intel-based Macs. Read more

History of Early Personal Computers and Gaming Consoles

3 minute read

Published:

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

less than 1 minute read

Published:

By 2007, hardware-assisted virtualization was becoming a normal feature of x86 computers rather than something restricted to expensive servers. Intel VT-x and AMD-V added processor support that made it easier for a hypervisor to run guest operating systems safely and efficiently. Read more

Learning Linux From A Live CD

1 minute read

Published:

Trying another operating system used to feel like a serious decision. Installing it could mean repartitioning a disk, changing the boot configuration, and accepting the possibility that something might go wrong. For a curious user, the risk could be larger than the curiosity. Read more

Windows Vista Reaches Consumers

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Windows Vista reached retail consumers on January 30, 2007. Microsoft promoted a redesigned Aero interface, improved search, stronger security, and new multimedia features, but the public launch quickly became dominated by questions about hardware requirements and compatibility. Read more

2006

AMD Moves Desktop Processors to 65 Nanometers

less than 1 minute read

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AMD began shipping desktop processors manufactured on a 65 nm process in late 2006, moving beyond the 90 nm technology used in earlier Athlon 64 chips. Semiconductor “process nodes” are not a direct measurement of one transistor dimension, but the move represented a new generation of manufacturing technology. Read more

The Last Days Of The Floppy Disk

2 minute read

Published:

For years, the floppy disk was one of the most normal objects around a computer. We carried documents, homework, small programs, and configuration files on a square piece of plastic that could disappear into a pocket. The 1.44 MB capacity felt useful because many of the things we moved were small enough to fit. Read more

Windows Vista Launches for Business Customers

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft made Windows Vista available to volume-license business customers in November 2006, before the consumer launch in January 2007. The operating system represented one of the largest architectural changes to Windows since Windows NT became the foundation of the consumer line. Read more

Firefox 2 Arrives

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Mozilla released Firefox 2 in October 2006. The browser added features that now feel ordinary, including session restore after a crash, built-in spell checking for web forms, improved tab handling, and stronger protection against phishing sites. Read more

Facebook Opens Registration Beyond Colleges

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Facebook opened registration to anyone aged 13 or older with a valid email address in September 2006. Until then, the service had expanded from Harvard to other universities, then to high schools and selected organizations. Removing the school requirement changed Facebook from a campus network into a general social platform. Read more

SPEC CPU2006 Redefines Processor Benchmarking

less than 1 minute read

Published:

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation introduced SPEC CPU2006 in 2006 as a new benchmark suite for comparing processor and system performance. It replaced SPEC CPU2000, whose workloads had become less representative as hardware and compilers improved. Read more

RSS And The Quiet Pleasure Of Following The Web

2 minute read

Published:

The web is becoming larger faster than I can follow it. There are more blogs, technology sites, news pages, and personal websites every month. Visiting all of them one by one is possible, but after a while it starts to feel like checking twenty mailboxes every morning. Read more

Intel Launches the Core 2 Duo

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Intel released the first Core 2 Duo desktop processors in July 2006. The launch was important because it marked a clear break from the Pentium 4 era, when Intel had pushed clock frequency aggressively but struggled with heat and power consumption. Read more

Blu-ray Enters the Consumer Market

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Blu-ray reached consumers in 2006 as one of two competing formats for high-definition optical video. Its name came from the blue-violet laser used to read the disc. That laser operated at about 405 nanometers, compared with the longer-wavelength red laser used by DVD, allowing data to be packed more densely. Read more

The Web Is Becoming More Social

1 minute read

Published:

The web feels different lately. A few years ago, many websites felt like digital brochures. We visited them, read something, and left. Now more websites are asking us to stay, write, comment, share, and create something of our own. Read more

Windows Vista Beta 2 Reaches the Public

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Microsoft released Windows Vista Beta 2 to a broad public audience in May 2006. Vista had been in development for years under the codename Longhorn, and the beta finally let ordinary users test features that would define the final operating system. Read more

Apple Introduces Boot Camp for Intel Macs

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple released the first public beta of Boot Camp in April 2006, only months after moving the Mac to Intel processors. Boot Camp allowed owners of Intel-based Macs to install Windows XP and choose between Windows and Mac OS X when the computer started. Read more

Amazon S3 Launches and Changes Web Infrastructure

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Amazon launched Simple Storage Service, better known as S3, in March 2006. Instead of renting a server and managing disks, developers could store arbitrary objects through a web API and pay for the storage and bandwidth they actually used. Read more

XGL Brings 3D Effects to the Linux Desktop

less than 1 minute read

Published:

In early 2006, Novell demonstrated Xgl, an experimental X server that used OpenGL to render the Linux desktop. Together with the Compiz window manager, it produced effects that looked unusual for desktop Linux at the time: transparent windows, smooth animations, live thumbnails, and the famous rotating desktop cube. Read more

Age of Empires II

3 minute read

Published:

Age of Empires II is one of those games that can easily steal an evening from me. I start with the idea of playing for a short time, but there is always one more building to finish, one more technology to research, or one more attack to prepare. It was released in 1999 and is set mainly in the Middle Ages. The basic idea sounds simple: collect resources, build a civilization, train an army, and defeat your opponents. In practice, every match becomes a small story. Read more

AJAX And The Web Without Reloading

2 minute read

Published:

For a long time, using a website has followed a familiar rhythm. I click a link or submit a form, the browser waits, and then the whole page appears again. It works, but it often reminds me that I am moving from one document to another. Recently, some websites have started to feel different. Read more

Apple Begins the Intel Mac Era

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Apple introduced its first Intel-based Macs in January 2006: an iMac and the new MacBook Pro. The switch ended more than a decade of PowerPC-based Macintosh hardware and moved the Mac onto the same x86 processor family used by most Windows PCs. Read more