Whitenoise

It has been some time that I blogged about news that was interesting to me. Here is a pick from the many links that I read over the past month.

Machine learning in GCC : IBM recently released an extension for GCC that enabled ‘machine learning’ capabilities into GCC. The compiler could intelligently optimize application to provide better performance. The researchers say that this learning capability helps developers speed up things by as much as 50%.

India’s own chip : In an effort to ward of thread in using commercial  processors on its military establishments, the Indian government is going to make its own chipset and use it for critical systems with sensitive information. The government has setup a new company called the Zerone Corp  for this effort. While there is some skepticism if the effort will be successful I have good hopes on this . We recently launched our own mission to Moon and have a Nuclear Sub now!  BTW Zerone Corp seems quite unheard of. Does anyone know ??

The 140 limit: After the success of twitter, I used to wonder how the creators   came up with the 140 character limit for the service. Jack Dorsey ,the co founder of Twitter gave some insights into this.   “The maximum in an SMS message is 160 characters before breaking the message, so we took 15 characters for the username, 5 characters for formatting or whatever, and ended up at 140 characters… we wanted to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the cheap $20 Nokia prepay cell phone… “