Computers

Coputer topics

Happy 20th birthday Debian!

Today is Debian‘s 20 anniversary. Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. Debian started as Linux distribution, but Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel (work is in progress to provide Debian for other kernels). Debian was begun in August 1993 by Ian Murdock, as a new distribution

USB and ground loops

USB was originally designed for desktop use, but it is increasingly used for industrial applications. For USB to survive in those environments, it needs to be made more rugged. It means that ruggedizing USB for ground loops and using better (more protection and better locking) connectors are often needed. Ruggedize USB connections for tough environments

Do LEDs cause blindness?

Do LEDs cause blindness? article tells that According to a study led by Dr. Celia Sánchez-Ramos, of Complutense University in Madrid, prolonged and continuous exposure to LED light might be sufficient to damage the retina. Her study, published in the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology in 2012 found that LED radiation caused significant damage to human

Are You Sure This Is the Source Code?

Software freedom is an interesting concept, but being able to study the source code is useless unless you are certain that the binary you are running corresponds to the alleged source code. It should be possible to recreate the exact binary from the source code, but a simple analysis shows that this is very hard

The History of CTRL + ALT + DELETE

The History of CTRL + ALT + DELETE article tells that in spring 1981 David Bradley created a keyboard shortcut that triggered a system reset without the memory tests. In the fall of 1981, the IBM PC hit shelves. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, when Microsoft’s Windows took off, that the shortcut came to

Node.js

When I was researching for my BeagleBone Black I saw in material two things I had read about earlier: Cloud9 IDE on node.js. I wanted to test node.js. Node.js is a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model. The idea of using

Cloud9 IDE

When I was researching for my BeagleBone Black I saw in material two things I had read about earlier: Cloud9 IDE and node.js. Cloud9 IDE is an online development environment for Javascript and Node.js applications as well as HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, Ruby and 23 other languages. It promises that you can write, run, and

Software-Defined Data Centers

Software defined seems to be the hype buzzword nowadays for many technology areas: We have Software-defined radio, Software-defined networking, Software defined storage and software-defined data center. Some days ago AllThingsD ran a piece endorsing the idea of the software-defined data center titled What Is the Software Defined Data Center and Why Is It Important? Slashdot

USB and Ethernet audio

Over the last decade the way we find, store, and listen to music has undergone a huge change. Online media has changed many aspects of the audio industry, but some things just don’t change. The debate over audio quality still goes on. Ethernet AVB, USB Audio Class 2.0 aid audio quality article discusses on some

CrashPlan backup software and service

Availability of reasonably priced fast broadband connections has made making off-site backups of computers over Internet feasible. This kind of off site backup business started with expensive small off-site storage services (few gigabytes of storage many dollars/euros per month). That business is then competed with small free off-site storage services (for example Dropbox, Google Drive,