Archive for November, 2007

What every programmer should know about memory

Posted on November 30th, 2007 in Computer Science, Software | Comments Off

Ulrich Drepper works for Red Hat, is the lead contributor and maintainer of glibc, telling you this I don’t need to comment how talented he is. Last year he gave a talk in Red Hat Summit in Nashville about CPU Caches, in his opinion the time for the talk was not enough to transfer all his thoughts about the subject, after this he worked around six months on a document titled What every programmer should know about memory, 100 pages of pure high quality knowledge, Drepper released it in PDF for free.

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Amazon Kindle

Posted on November 24th, 2007 in Business | Comments Off

Three years ago Amazon set out to design and build an eletronic paper display, a convenient, portable reading device with the ability to wirelessly download books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. The result is Amazon Kindle, just launched.

There is no doubt that this is the future, specially when it is pushed by such a strong company like Amazon. They had the content, but not the device, why not doing exactly like iPod/iTunes.

At first sight, the gadget doesn’t have an interesting design, it’s white, ready to get dirty, has a 15.2cm display, a keyboard that steals screen’s space and the reason and motivation for my post, it has a free wireless connection.

It uses Linux 2.6.10 with squashfs, among other programs it uses busybox, depending on they use, not a smart decision, but looks like they have done a great work in the power-saving field.

It uses EVDO to access the internet with limited access to their website, blogs and wikipedia. It’s a very interesting feature, a must I would say, but very risky.

I have no idea how it works technically, but opens space for hackers trying to have full access to the internet for free.

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