Tomorrow I’ll be going to Taipei, only a day of traveling and 12 hours ahead, I’ll be in the Computex talking with our hardware suppliers and possible new suppliers. We have big plans for the next years and there is definitely the best place for buying well.
maio, 2008
25
mai 08
Offline searchable information
You have no internet and you need to find out what is the closest hotspot. What do you do? Imagine an offline hotspot locator, a simple application that will provide fields for searching and a grid to display the results. No matter where you are, if you need to know where is the closest hotspot, just open the application, filter a little bit and voila!
If you think deeper about this, you’ll see that it can be used in many situations, so making it a rock would be a waste of time, latest couple hours I’ve been writing the initial spec of this project, which must be flexible enough to be useful for anyone interested in providing up to date offline content to the user.
Resources:
- Multi-platform (Windows XP/Vista, Mac, Linux, Phones, PDAs, …)
- Display/Search fields customizable
- Everything is remotely updatable, information never gets old
- Easy to whitelabel and release for your business
- Free Software
If you have comments, please email me.
24
mai 08
Update from London
Opening in great style, like usual, the day before the event was the fourth Quiconnect’s dinner, where everyone from the market has chance to meet, I had the pleasure to meet and chat with great people.
Day after, the event, divided in two parts, speeches in the Mobile Broadband Congress and the exposition in The Wireless Event, both being used for only one reason, meeting people, nobody really cares about the speeches much, they just want to sit somewhere, make meetings and close deals.
It was very common to see people sitting all day long doing meetings and not even getting to see the speeches or the exposition, for me, that’s what really worked, where I could meet people/companies to explore new opportunities.
I would think about changing it completely, the level of interest for the speeches are decreasing, mainly because it’s not chosen with focus in interest, it’s all about money, if you pay, you talk, which is a terrible model, normally events are either about scale or quality, and if you want to make money from the speakers you are dead, good speakers charge, not the opposite.
21
mai 08
Fon’s revenues
Martin said… “Revenues at Fon last month were slightly over 100K euros. Gross margins are over 70%. Cash burn which was over a million euros during December was down to 480K euros in April and is going down to 350K euros in June. This puts us on target to be profitable in the last quarter of 2009. Number of registered Foneros is at 830,000. Number of registered hotspots is 332,000 and of active hotspots at anytime has gone up to 212,000 around the world up from 145,000 in December. Last week we added 6000 hotspots and we are on target to have 300K hotspots by year end. Headcount is 61 employees around the world which is remarkable for a company that is managing the largest and fastest growing WiFi network in the world. Our top countries are UK, France, Japan, Germany, USA, Taiwan, Spain and Italy.”
I doubt it, not even with a miracle Fon will be profitable in last quarter of 2009, I won’t even bother to show you the math, it’s so obvious, the fact is that by that date, the money will be almost gone… hurry up Fon!
Read my last article about this subject: FON Raises $9.5 Million – To buy their grave?
16
mai 08
Removing the Big Kernel Lock
“As some of the latency junkies on lkml already know, commit 8e3e076 in v2.6.26-rc2 removed the preemptible BKL feature and made the Big Kernel Lock a spinlock and thus turned it into non-preemptible code again. This commit returned the BKL code to the 2.6.7 state of affairs in essence,” began Ingo Molnar. He noted that this had a very negative effect on the real time kernel efforts, adding that Linux creator Linus Torvalds indicated the only acceptable way forward was to completely remove the BKL. Ingo explained:
“This task is not easy at all. 12 years after Linux has been converted to an SMP OS we still have 1300+ legacy BKL using sites. There are 400+ lock_kernel() critical sections and 800+ ioctls. They are spread out across rather difficult areas of often legacy code that few people understand and few people dare to touch. It takes top people like Alan Cox to map the semantics and to remove BKL code, and even for Alan (who is doing this for the TTY code) it is a long and difficult task.”
Ingo went on to describe how the BKL works, how it differs from other locking mechanisms, and why this complicates removing it permanently from the kernel. He noted that the various dependencies of the lock are lost in the haze of 15 years of code changes, “all this has built up to a kind of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the BKL: nobody really knows it, nobody really dares to touch it and code can break silently and subtly if BKL locking is wrong.” He then suggested “changing the rules of the game”, creating a “kill-the-BKL” branch which “turns the BKL into an ordinary albeit somewhat big mutex, with a quirky lock/unlock interface called ‘lock_kernel()’ and ‘unlock_kernel()’.”
