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Category — IT Featured Content


IT Featured Articles on cool technologies, focused on System Administration and Programming Languages


Evolving concurrency, like memory management did

As processors become faster and multiprocessor systems become cheaper, the need to take advantage of multithreading in order to achieve full hardware resource utilization only increases the importance of being able to incorporate concurrency in a wide variety of application categories.

In this article we are evaluting a new approach to the concurrency.
In the last five years computers are becoming even more parallel.
Intel is pushing multi-core achiteture also on commodity personal computers.
Neverless the computing power is ofter not well used: one again, hardware is a step head of our day-by-day software development.
Remember when the 80286 came into light.
The 286 was able to provide a multi-programming architecture but without memory management protection.
We had to wait 386 hardware to see software working on preemptive multi-tasking, because software cannot cope with unprotected memory. In one word, it costs too much to develop a operating system without the new features the 80386 bring to us.
What about concurrent programming? Can we look similarities in the  concurrency field?

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June 11, 2009   No Comments

Interactive map of Linux kernel

Slashdot reported an interactive map of the Linux  kernel:

Interactive map of Linux kernel.

Slashdot comments here

Happy Friday Hacking!

March 20, 2009   No Comments

A very good hosting provider

After my past experience with bad hosting provider, I am happy to say I have find a very good hosting service.
If you need VPS hosting, Rimuhosting is a very good choice.

After about two years with Rimuhosting, I can summarize their feature here:

  • They have a very good  entry-price for a virtual hosting
  • System aministrator has a very prompt response: on every issue I get support in 24 hours, also on Sunday
  • Rimuhosting uses a Xen virtualization mechanism which is very effective. I have tried other virtualized solution, which are worst.
  • Java hosting works well, without problems.
  • The default Bandwith is very huge (30GB). There is also  an automatic backup and a remote web-based shell out-of-the-box.
  • You can choose between high-end Linux distribution  (like Red Hat enterprise) and free one.

March 3, 2009   No Comments

Che cosa ci ha insegnato l’iPod – Parte Prima

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series IT Economy

Grazie al periodo natalizio, pieno di Regali, la redazione di Gioorgi.com è riuscita a guardare da vicino l’Apple iPhone 3G, chiamato anche “Melafonino”.

Così abbiamo iniziato a fare una serie di considerazioni sull’iPhone e abbiamo tratto delle conclusioni interessanti.
In questo primo articolo inizieremo a parlare di iPod, per poi introdurre l’argomento iPhone in un secondo intervento.

Negli ultimi due anni e mezzo la Apple ha iniziato a trasformarsi da società venditrice di Personal Computer di fascia alta con una forte riconoscibilità, ad un a società che aspira a vendere apparecchiature avanzate di diverso tipo. Questo percorso è iniziato con l’iPod, ed è poi proseguito con l’iPhone. Si noti che questa strategia si è affinata nel tempo. Inizialmente l’iPod sembrava più un gadget per veicolare e rafforzare l’iTunes Music Store. L’avventura del negozio on line di musica era molto rischiosa: innanzitutto perché esistevano (ed esistono) già innumerevoli servizi similari, e poi perché il loro successo era risibile. Microsoft ha faticato non poco a entrare in questo mercato, e lo ha rafforzato con Zune solo dopo che l’esperienza della Apple era parsa convincente in quel di Redmond.

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January 5, 2009   3 Comments

Open Source for the Infrastructure

At Gioorgi.com, after working with a lot with software for over twenty years,  we have envisioned a clear idea about open source. This is the first article of a series tagged “opensource”: let’s start!

Richard Stallman Vision, based on GNU open source idea, is too radical from our point of view.

Stallman GNU License is based on a “copyleft” idea, which gives everyone the freedom to look at others’work, without taking credits for it. The license vision is very strict, so consulting is the natural option for an IT business based on GNU software, which is drived by Univestities, because of its basic freedom statement.
Closed and paid software is still widely used, but open source is the key for the next revolution; let’see why.

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November 10, 2008   2 Comments

Designing Interfaces with Balsamiq

In the last seven months I have the need of sketching a bunch of interfaces, but I cannot find a valid tool. I was a Software Architect of a big huge project, busy also on other smaller projects as project manager.

I need a rapid way to sketch use cases, to pass them to a very young team.

Web interfaces are not easy to design, and we was in a very weird situation: the team was forced to use DAOs, with no O/R mapping tool. So I need also to map some interfaces to a database model, to help them building the model and the view classes

After some search, I ended up with MS Visio.

MS Visio is great, but too difficult to use, doing training is hard and so I must discourage its use.
Worst, Visio costs a lot, and it is not included with the standard MS-Office Tools.

Visio offers only WinXP look&Feel, which is not the best for designing agnostic web interfaces.

Thank you to a friend of mine, I have the discovered the BalsamIQ Mockup project.
Let’s see why it is a so good solution.

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August 2, 2008   2 Comments