Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the hardware category.
Quote of the day
Rosenberg’s Law: “Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new.”
Read more:
http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html
Skebby.it: cheap texting (for us as well)
Believe it or not, the price of a single SMS text message here in Italy is 0.15 EUR (0.20 USD, more or less). Let’s get it a bit more impressive: a single character is a byte, a single text message is 160 characters long, so I get charged 0.20 USD to send you 160 bytes, which means transferring a megabyte of text would cost to the final Italian user 1325 USD. It looks like a lot of money, right?
Fortunately a lot of smart people live on this planet, and Davide Marrone – a 24-years-old computer science student @ University of Milan – developed Skebby, a java app to enable people texting via their mobile phones (through Skebby’s servers) at a much lower rates.
The free membership allows users to send a limited number of text message (exploiting free services) at a cost of 0.01 EUR.
The premium membership allows no-limit texting at rates depending on how many text messages you buy in advance, but you might get till a 50% 70% off the current price.
[UPDATE: You should also add the cost of connecting from your mobile to Skebby's servers. ]
I don’t remember but if I’m not wrong Skebby.it is still only in Italian (actually it was on the national TVs yesterday, so servers went down immediately, they’re moving on right now 
). If so, I hope they’re going to get an English version as soon as possible.
Embedded systems @ SWeng Radio
<twitter-style-post> I’m currently listening to software engineering radio’s latest podcast, about embedded systems. Very interesting. Yeah, it’s 44 minutes long, but you can always try to improve your audio learning skills. 
</twitter-style-post>
Eclipse and iPhone development
Eclipse now supports iPhone development by an Aptana plugin, LeNettoyeur reports. I’ve been dealing with aptana months ago, in this post.
You might want to have a look, it’s got some quite interesting features IMHO.
Looking forward for the iPhone to ship in Italy as well .
Apple unveils iPhone (for real!)
This time is for real. This is not a fake as the tons (altough some were really sleek!) which invaded the blogosphere some weeks ago. This is how the real iPhone looks like!
Steve Jobs unveiled the new iPhone, starting actually a new era and making Apple a player in the mobile market chessboard.
To commemorate the move, Jobs announced that the company was dropping “Computer” from its corporate moniker. “From this day forward we’re going to be known as Apple Inc.“, Jobs said in front of a roaring crowd.
Weighing in at 135 grams with a 3.5-inch touch screen, the iPhone looks like an iPod without its well-known scroll wheel. It has no conventional buttons, instead using a finger for navigation. It will be available - in the US 
– in June through an exclusive, multi-year partnership AT&T’s Cingular Wireless (read here if you eventually want to switch) and cost between $499-4GB and $599-8GB each.
Ok price is high, but not that much if you compare declared features with those of state-of-the-art phones out now in the shops.
It seems this is going to tear down the barrier between mobile phone and personal computing, providing real wireless access, together with a really innovative interface. I’m really curious about that.
Apple shares already gained a 7% since the launch, and wireless device makers lost millions (-6% both for Blackberry and Palm, TechCrunch reports), this meaning analysts were not wrong at all when the buzz went public, back in September, 2006.
I’m afraid I’ll postpone my mobile phone switching 
. This is going to be big!
Software development: where do we go now?
This Vinnie Mirchandani’s post lets me know of a recent two-part interview by Jason Pontin @ MIT Technology Review, with C++ inventor Bjarne Stroustrup. It’s very interesting as he discusses what’s wrong with most software code nowadays.
He makes some excellent points, going straight into the old time-to-market problem (here it is a post I wrote few months ago about it):
“[...] looking at “average” pieces of code can make me cry. [...] People reward developers who deliver software that is cheap, buggy, and first. That’s because people want fancy new gadgets now. [...] Significant improvements are needed, and they can only come gradually. They must come on a broad front; no single change is sufficient. [...]“.
It’s no mistery though that outsourcing is changing the way software is designed and coded, putting the software process in a new, geographically-distributed dimension: this might lead to a rise of interest in formal methods in software engineering, to reduce cultural mismatches and leave no room for ambiguities. An awesome - pdf – article by ETH’s Bertrand Mayer @ IEEE Computer (January 2006, pp. 121-124) deals with the new reality of offshore outsourcing and the revolution in the industry.
A better education of software professionals is needed too, Stroustrup says. To this end, Michael Stal’s latest post about teaching architects is very interesting too.
Stroustrup talked about performance and hardware-software relationship too:
“Software developers have neutralized the astounding performance of modern computer hardware by adding layer upon layer of overelaborate [software] abstractions. We seem to have hit the limits of linear speedup for hardware, but in many cases, we could win a couple of orders of magnitude back from the software.“
The problem is not so easy to address, though: abstraction is an essential strategy to address complex problems, no doubt about it, and challenges to tackle in software development are getting harder and harder (Manfred Broy, “The ‘Grand Challenge’ in Informatics: engineering software-intensive systems” IEEE Computer, October 2006, pp. 72-80).
Thus, a lots of dimensions of variation improvement are out there, and the optimal trade off is still to be found; or maybe we shouldn’t be looking for a trade off at all, which is Stroustrup’s own point of view: a bit strong perhaps but…does it mean he’s wrong?
Apple announces the new iTunes7 to ship today
Apple on the edge as usual announces new gear and the new iTunes 7, now playing TV and Movies, TechCrunch reports.
A new Nano is on the way too, Scoble writes.
Google to boost mobile technology market in Japan
Mobile devices (no surprise at all, though) are attracting lots of big firms’ investments: among other things indeed just a couple of days ago analysts’ blogs were buzzing around the future Apple iPhone launch.
Now Google announces to be going to hire more engineers in Japan to develop next generation of mobile technologies in one of the most advanced and active country for the industry segment, Yahoo! News reports. Google is offering more services to the Japanese market too, as mobile search and advertising.
Apple smartphone?
The handset industry is going to be revolutioned by Apple which is launching the new iPhone, analysts predict. I just got through some interesting news about it on Techmeme.
Analysts are getting confident about the product, and are suggesting massive investments in Apple Computers shares before the iPhone is ready to go to market.
An accurate analysis of when and how Apple is likely to launch the product, and its implications on the cell phone segment – by Shaw Wu – can be found here @ MacObserver.
I’m not an analyst, though after the huge consensus the iPod got worldwide (despite of initial skepticism), it does not seem so difficult to predict the iPhone launch to be a success.
I find Apple’s stepping horizontally in another industry segment exploiting iPod’s past success an absolutely smart move: if I had money to invest, now I would do it .
Read more:
Time-to-market and software defects
A scary scenario has been exposed at BlackHat security conference by hackers Jon Ellch and David Maynor, who however omitted details of the security flaws. Looks like bugs in wireless device drivers are responsible for important vulnerabilities affecting many wireless cards on the market today.
Ellch and Maynor showed (in a video, to avoid traffic sniffing) how access to a MacBook can be obtained in less than a minute, and discovered similar flaws in Windows device drivers too. The victim does not even need to be connected to a wireless network.
Authors said this is to attribute to the fact that drivers are often “developed and written by an odd mix of hardware and software developers in an environment where time-to-market often trumps any thorough code review for potential security flaws“.
Ok, nothing new, but still impressive, don’t you think?
[UPDATE]
Looks like the MacBook hacking clip they showed at blackhats is spreading, and Mac fans are reacting to Maynor’s statements about Mac invincibility. 
“Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.” (E. W. Dijkstra)
