Accelerated Mobile Pages

Browsing the web from our phones is nowadays a common thing.  In fact it is now likelier to browse from your phone than from a desktop computer.  Personally, I find myself using a desktop browser only while I'm at work or while doing some desktopy thing (such as coding or messing with VMs and networks).  If I'm just browsing during the evening, for instance, its 99% from my phone.

My preferred way of browsing is via the forum kind of applications, such as reddit or hacker news, so at that point I'm not really using a browser.  However, the majority of the content is delivered from websites so you see and interesting title, tap on it, and the in-app browser or the main browser is opened.  This typically works fine, until the site you're accessing is a megalith and takes tens of seconds to load.  After at most 3 seconds, if barely any content has loaded, the link is forgotten and I move on the the next link.  That's it.

The problem is that these websites are offering too many features for them to be practical on a smartphone.  Sometimes websites take even longer because they need to load the comments section, then come the suggested posts, with ultra big resolution images, followed by the author's biography...  It's unnecessary, I just want to see content.

A team of internet companies, including Google, have come up with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).  It is primarily a technological development (not exactly unheard of, as we'll see), but  through its restrictions it tries to limit the amount of unnecessary crap on pages.  As I said, it's a development, however much of this development is in terms of standards and rules rather than faster networks, or something like that.

In fact ,the focus is on basically banning a whole bunch of heavy and also some outdated HTML elements.  Unsurprisingly, no more <applet>, no more <frame> and no more <embed>.  There are also strict limitations on JavaScript, however the most surprising (but great) banned elements are <input> and <form> (with the exception of <button>).  It may not directly impact immediate performance of HTML, but it will surely stop developers from adding useless "post a comment" forms.

The focus is primarily on immediate content.  If I get a link while chatting and I open it up, I don't have more than 3 seconds to read the title and move back to the chat.  Thankfully, on Android, this experience shall now improve with the new chrome tabs introduced in Marshmallow.  It's a technical thing, but basically it avoids having to use either an in-app browser (which is isolated from your standard chrome) or opening up chrome (which is slow).

Chrome tabs are much faster, at least in this demo (via Ars Technica)

But let's get back to AMP.  As I said, it is content that the majority wants, so in this age of platform webapps, single-page sites and all the rest, simplicity, again, trumps features.  Despite the lack of features, static areas of a website are hugely important.  If you're interested, here's a short how-to, however it is fair to note that static this time is mostly client side, so no JavaScript - which means you'll probably need server-side processing if you have "dynamic" content.

AMP avoids the common JavaScript the web is used to and realises the idea of Web Components.  These do have JavaScript under the hood, but since they are managed differently, it makes the page load faster without synchronous blocks by JavaScript.  AMP also restricts inline styling, conditional comments and some CSS attributes (although CSS is not so limited compared to JS).

As yet, (being days or hours since being announced) I personally do not consider this as a major breakthrough technologically - it's only a set of rules to reduce the bloat on webpages who primarily host content.  However, I am very glad with the way things are going and I do hope it gains traction.  

The benefits I see are greatly improved user experience with much faster load times and no nonsense web pages along with better development.  The more modular the pages, due to web components, the easier it is to develop.  There are no messy inline styles or randomly placed JavaScript.  Things are put in their place and the rules are strict - otherwise you'll not qualify for AMP and your page won't make it to the top of search results.  

Unfortunately, I don't have that much control on this blog, otherwise I would have AMP'd it right away!

For further details, there are quite some resources:

• Documentation
• Technical Description
• A post by Google

The Volatile Security of Volatile Memory

I forgot about yesterday...

It is the black box in every system, even our brain.  Volatile memory goes by many names, working memory, temporary memory, RAM, even just memory.  Whatever your preference, when you mention it you're most likely referring to the area of a system in which data is stored for a relatively short period of time until it is used and then discarded (or transferred to persistent storage).  One cannot possibly imagine a system without some form of memory; even if it is the same are where it is stored permanently, there is still some area used for temporary calculations.

Among the major differences between RAM and persistent storage is that RAM typically contains data about the processes that are currently in execution along with the data we are working on right now and will be discarded soon (yes I hear your screams, persistent storage does that too, but it also has data that we haven't looked at for months).  Along with this fact, hard disks enjoy the possibility of being totally encrypted.  They cannot be read unless the key is provided.  This is not possible in RAM, primarily because the CPU cannot work with encrypted commands.

I do not mean that the CPU is not able to process encrypted data and convert it to plain text, what I am referring to is the inability of the CPU to understand encrypted commands (opcodes) or work on the encrypted data as data rather than a decryption payload.  Let's say we have the binary value of 13 = 1101 and we want to add that to 5=101.  Our simple XOR encrypter will give us the values 0111 and 000 for the keys 1010 and 101 respectively.  Adding 0111 and 000 does not give the actual result for 18=10010.  The values have to be in plain text before actual processing.  XOR is simple and integral to CPUs so it is the simplest operation for it to decrypt the values.  Once decrypted it is then possible to add the values.

But here is the problem - where is the key stored?  Of course, working memory.  What is the point of encrypting the data in RAM when the key is in the same RAM?  What is the point of encrypting RAM after all?

Boom!

We encrypt disks because they can be removed or because they are portable, yet still contain data, unlike RAM which hold it until we turn off the system (or a bit longer if you're into memory freezing and forensics).  So, we think, RAM is inaccessible to would-be hackers.  Or so we used to think.

Recent research by various people and organisations (Sophos, Brian Krebs, Volatility Labs, among others) have identified a simple and small malware that simply looks up processes, maps their memory regions, copy paste and onto the attackers server for them to enjoy.  And by the way, the kind of data was not you're ex's text messages, but the PIN to you credit card, so it's a bit more expensive I would say.

Use only for great dinners.

I did my own research (and eventually BSc. thesis) on this subject, and it is quite scary knowing that the very heart of your system may be so easily compromised.  What's worse is that when you enter your PIN into any other system on which you have no control...God knows what's running on them and where your data goes.  Anti viruses barely have an idea how to capture such an attack, and neither do firewalls, internet protection or whatever you have.  If they did, they would block your debugger too, because that's how it works - like a debugger.  It's like a kitchen knife used for a murder - you cannot ban knives.

Here's a short and sweet step-by-step on how you can scrape your memory.  It's not intended to attack anyone, and it wouldn't be easy any way.  It's successful only if your target cannot protect their networks and you manage to get in.  The sample was done on Linux;  Windows would be totally different but still very possible (the Target attacks were in fact on Windows).  So here it goes:

A dummy little program was written in C.  All it did was store a username and password (entered using getpass() for increased security) along with a series of credit card numbers that are "swiped" into the system.

Swiping cards

We then find the PID of this running process just by ps aux | grep scrape (the program is named scrape, but it may be something like POSSwiper for example)

Getting the PID

Now we can get all the memory regions and maps used by our processes.  The /proc directory gives us a hand there.

/proccing to analyse the memory

We are interested in the heap space of our program which shows up nicely in the fourth line;  ranging from address 009580000 to 00979000 (both hex).  Next thing we do is fire up the actual scraper (which is, in our case, a kitchen knife.  A legitimate gdb debugger).

Dumping memory in just one line!

GDB shows a bunch of text; we're only interested in how we started it (gdb -pid <PID>) and how we stole the memory (dump memory <to where> 0x958000 0x979000)  As you can see, using the exact heap space memory range we got from /proc.  The memory will be dumped to the file we choose.  Of course, this requires administrator rights, but as one might expect, tens and hundreds of POS devices will most likely share the same password, and will probably have the default one too (such a typical case of a security breach - I found the password to my ISP's router on a public forum...).

Now, onto the next step - the analysis, if you call it that.  Data dumped into the file is from RAM, so as expected it is binary.  Linux simplifies this analysis by providing another tools - strings.  All it does is see what's in a file and spit our all the strings it could find.  That's it, so we pass the dump to it and we get a nice list of string, including the password (you didn't see it in the first screenshot because of getpass()) and all the numbers and everything.

The gold mine

That is all.  Now go and whitelist the list of processes on your system, before someone gets to scrape the memory off it.

Some points on the Android UI

Android is a great OS - there's no doubt about that, even if you measure that statement using the number of active installations.  It has an interesting history, starting from plans to create an OS for digital cameras and ending up being Google's core mobile platform running on around a billion devices.  It is technically well designed, open source and very adaptable; from CPU architectures to screen sizes, Android can adapt.

Progress of Android over the years (Ars Technica)

As Android progressed to meet the expected standards of the day, the general UI got more minimalist while more colours were introduced (older versions looked darker).  Despite the move towards a more modern UI in general, it is still possible for application developers to apply their own style.  A typical result of this support was that developers of older applications did not bother updating their styles to the latest version (this is basically an XML file).

What we ended up with is a FIAT 127 in 2015's motorshow.

Not quite in the same league

The problem with this situation is that not only we have to sometimes use outdated applications, but Google is also pushing a new 'UI language'.  There is nothing wrong in having a new UI language...except when few developers are following it, and you're not one of them.  If Android is to have a uniform, clean and modern UI, there should be a mechanism which automates the transition of styles to the latest standard in cases where the default file was left lying around.  Automation is not uncommon on the Android ecosystem - Code is checked for potential errors, style files must be up to standard, even copyright issues are flagged by a bot - so why not a simple style file?

What's the deal with this UI (SIM Tool Kit)?

As I mentioned earlier, there is also another problem which Google does not seem to want to fix - Material Design.  Consistency is key in product branding and Google is/was known for their efforts in this regard.  The ubiquitous bar in all their web products and their logo in the exact same location made it clear that this is a Google product.

Nowadays, their Android apps are cacophony of UI element styles and whatnot.  Despite their efforts to make Material Design the next standard, it's already been 2 years and I have no idea when this next will be now.  It can be seen in some apps, such as the settings, and the major Google apps.  However, applications such as the Google Analytics still sport the Android 4.3 UI.  Even worse is the app for Blogger - with UI probably designed by the Romans.

Yet again, even though the apps follow the general material design, all of them seem to have a language of their own.  One aspect which was recently highlighted was the lack of consistent scrollbars.  Now we got a new scrollbar in the application launcher too, for diversity.

Google Calender app has to be one of my favourites.  It's fast, visually appealing and above all, useful.  I use it regularly to set appointments, reminders, etc. just like all other users.  The problem with the whole Calendar ecosystem is the web version.  Why has Google introduced the Material Design, implemented it correctly in Calender on Android yet left the web version in the dark while at the same time it developed the Inbox service with correct material guidelines on both Android and the web (I'm not discussing whether Inbox is practical or not)?  I understand the drive towards mobile and I truly appreciate the improved UI on mobile, but I'm not in favour of sheer inconsistency (and then again, there are web versions better than their apps).

Yes this was quite a rant - not really helpful for many.  But it gets frustrating when you're working on your services and try to follow as many guidelines as possible to make your users happy.  Thankfully apps are not accepted or rejected based on their looks and interaction, although sometimes I do favour such a system as it does improve the users' mobile experience.

Hosting static websites on AWS S3

Hosting websites nowadays has become quite simple, easy and affordable.  Years ago you would try to find free hosts which would allow you to upload a few files and you're done.  GeoCities and freewebs were some of the most popular of these services.  As time went by, the data centre landscape has changed dramatically and the current situation is big companies offering extremely cheap hosting services.  The market is so huge that the classic "brochure site" has become almost free to host while still enjoying world class availability and scalability.

Static websites are the simplest form of site.  These are just a set of HTML pages linked together via links.  No complicated code, no weird configurations - just plain old files.  Depending on what you want, such a site may be ideal (maybe you do all your business transactions over a facebook page and use the site just as a brochure).

This of course has the advantage of being simple, easy, cheap and can be up and running very quickly, including development time.  It lacks, however, some of the major features you may want, such as a member's area, blogs and news, user-generated content etc.  But then again, you might not want these extra features.  In that case, here is a simple, short and sweet guide on how to host your site on Amazon Web Services.  There is no doubt that it is currently the leader in cloud services and it would be wise to use their services.

1. Get A Domain

The first thing you need is the dot-com.  You may use or favourite registrar or just randomly choose one from these that come to mind: noip.com, namecheap.com, godaddy.com.  If this is your first time you may want to read up on registration etc. but all you need is to find a domain that is available, buy it, and configure it as explained later.  Make sure you do not buy hosting with it, as some providers will try to bundle them together.  Well you can do whatever you want, but it's not necessary in this case.

2. Sign Up with AWS

Log on to aws.amazon.com and sign up for an account.  Choose your region, etc and keep going until you get to the main control panel.

3. Hold your horses!

The control panel may be overly complicated.  It isn't, though.  The number of services may be overwhelming, including the names, but we'll get through.  Only two services are required in our case.

Cloud providers typically offer more than just simple hosting.  Keep in mind that big enterprises are running their businesses here too, so this complexity is to be expected.  One of the core offerings of a cloud provider is storage.  Storage keeps everything in place - services need to save their logs, applications exist in storage, databases are persisted to storage...you get the pattern.  Again, due to the enterprisiness of this offering, the storage services have their own terminology.

Your usual "hard-disk" or "USB drive" (or floppy disk) is known as a bucket.  You have a bucket in the cloud in which you put your files.  Amazon offers storage in a service known as S3 - Simple Storage Service.  These bucket also tend to be dirt cheap.  A site a less than 10 pages and low to moderate traffic may cost you no more than €1 a month.

4. Creating the site

Now that you know about the basic concept, it is time to create the storage for your site.  In this example (and pretty much any other tutorial out there), we shall use the example.com domain.  Whenever you see this written down, replace it with the domain name you bought.  Do not prepend it with "www."; that is a subdomain, not the proper domain that you bought.

4.a. Sign in to https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/;
4.b. Create a bucket named example.com;
4.c. Create another bucket www.example.com (with the www);
4.d. Upload your content to the first (example.com) bucket;

What we'll do is host the site on the example.com bucket and redirect any traffic coming in to www.example.com to it.

5. Prepare the site

Now you'll need to allow the public to access your buckets, otherwise they'll be forbidden from seeing your content (which, presumably, you want to be publicly accessible).  All you need is to attach the following bucket policy to your example.com bucket.  Again, make sure you replace example.com with your domain.

5.a. Set the policy
{
  "Version":"2012-10-17",
  "Statement":[{
"Sid":"AddPerm",
        "Effect":"Allow",
 "Principal": "*",
      "Action":["s3:GetObject"],
      "Resource":["arn:aws:s3:::example.com/*"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

5.b. Set up as static website by clicking on the bucket and select the Static Website Hosting section.  Choose the 'Enable' option;
5.c. Name the index page.  This is the "homepage" of your site.  Typically this is named "index.html" or similar;
5.d. Test the page by entering the Endpoint URL shown to you in your browser, just to make sure it is accessible;
5.e. Select the second bucket (www.example.com) and in the same section choose to redirect requests.  In the input field, enter your domain (without www.);

6. Wire it up

Another service that is required to properly route traffic to our site is Route 53.  As you've seen, you endpoint is appended with a much longer address belonging to amazon.  You wouldn't want to distribute that URL to your clients, after all you bought your own domain.

Route 53 is basically a DNS service - an internet directory for converting example.com to a number that the internet understands.  You do not need to do any of this works, except how to inform the registrar about your shining new website on AWS.  Here's how:

6.a. Open up https://console.aws.amazon.com/route53 and create a hosted zone for your domain (no www.) - Click Get Started Now under DNS Management, or just go to Hosted Zones and then Create Hosted Zone;
6.b. In the details section you'll see a Delegation Set - a list of addresses.  Write these down somewhere, we'll use them later on;
6.c. Click Create Record Set and enter you domain name.  Mark it as Alias and from the Alias target select your bucket.  Do this also for the www.example.com (point it to its own bucket).

7. Finishing

Now that everything is set up on AWS, all you need to do is inform the domain registrar (the site from where you bought your domain).  Remember the 4 addresses in the Delegation Set?  These will now be used to configure the DNS addresses for your domain.  What you need to do is log in to your domain registrar control panel and configure your domain.  Somewhere you should be able to change the DNS settings for it.  Not all providers have four fields - there may be more, there may be less.  Enter all four addresses in the delegation set in the domain configuration.  If there are less than four fields, that's it.  If there are more than four, leave the rest empty.

8.  Live!

Now that you're done, you may need to wait a few minutes until the DNS settings are updated.  This is not related to your site on AWS but on the nature of DNS - i.e. people's ability to enter example.com and be properly taken to your site.  These may take up to 48 hours, but in my case it was only a matter of minutes.

Hope you found this helpful!

HDMI over WiFi

No not really, no such thing exists.  Well you can stream HD media over WiFi but not in a plug and play way as a common HDMI cable.  There are various ways this can be accomplished but the idea is simple;  run a server from a device and play it on another, as long as there is a protocol, typically DLNA.

Recently I came across a new video format which looks quite interesting and powerful.  HEVC was released a few months ago (only drawn up sometime in 2013) and is now gaining traction.  I was surprised to find that an hour long HD video can be compressed down to 200 megabytes or so.  Being so new not many players can really decode it, as expected.  If you're on Linux, great news! It's not so hard to get it to play.  As always, VLC is your best friend so the solution I have/found is for VLC.  All that's needed is a new library from a PPA and you're good to go.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:strukturag/libde265
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlc-plugin-libde265

That takes no more than a few seconds; minutes if you're on a slow connection (which makes the HEVC format ideal in your case).

I wrote this little post about this format because I am quite interested in how the far we can compress HD videos, but also because it was a bit inconvenient for me to not be able to play it pretty much anywhere (BubbleUPnP and chromecast appear to handle it though).  It may spare you some time hunting for a way to watch that latest episode next time :)  Yet still, my original thought (and title) of this post were actually meant for something totally different, but hey, two birds one stone!

I need to learn to HDMI

Having organised cables is quite important if you intend to keep your sanity.  Not long ago I did rewire my homelab and after a few hours everything look perfectly in place.  Except for one thing; WiFi.  It was constantly disconnecting and apparently going offline and back again for no apparent reason.  Restarting, re-configuring and switching ports fixed nothing.

A few hours or days go by and I started noting red pixels showing up on my screen at particular points where the image was darker.  Then it hit me.  There must have been some interference between my WiFi router and the HDMI cable in its vicinity (hence the title ;)).  Looking around on the internet seemed to prove my theory, even though similar cases appeared to be quite uncommon.  I have not completely fixed it yet however messing around with the cable is a good workaround.  That's until the shielded HDMI cable arrives in my mailbox, which should hopefully fix the issue.

Intelligent Input Processing

Hello again after quite a long time!  Quite a lot has happened over the past few years, from starting and graduating from University, finding a job in another company and travelling around the world.  I have also been involved in some small side projects, some of which have actually gained some traction.

One such project which I did some basic parts of is a a system for maintaining a list of classified vehicle listings for used (2nd hand) and new cars...or any other kind vehicle.  The interesting part is the way a new listing can be added with minimal effort.  Typically people *hate* filling long forms, and entering the details of a car is no exception.  Even if the form is actively trying to help the user by showing suggestions, it still is not as streamlined as just typing text or actually filling out a hand-written form.

So here I found the thing I hated about forms - having to switch between inputs and having to think about the value I should enter next.  I don't want to think about it, I just want my form to fill up, by itself if possible.  A little experiment lead to the development of a small but quite helpful feature which tries to offload this (minor) effort from the user.

As the data was a simple table, we could predict what the user is going to enter; some details on a car.  There aren't too many attributes when you think about it - a make and model, year, colour, engine and transmission.  You could also do away with some of them, even though it might hurt search rankings.  The result was that a form may be populated by simply parsing the semi-natural text taken from one big text box.  The user no longer had to enter different and specific values in each entry - just one descriptive sentence where order does not matter and mistakes may be easily fixed.  All we needed is some initial data to "teach" the system what to expect.

We now have a very clean solution for entering listing details where a short description relieves us from having to think about each individual attribute of a car (what an epic case of 1st world problemism).

By some luck, this little experiment has made it through to a website and is now available for many users to enjoy.  Let's hope these kinds of little experiments from professionals and enthusiasts keep getting better and more popular so one day we may have a more user-oriented internet, rather than a machine-oriented one.  Oh by the way, the website making use of this little tech is http://www.pickacarmalta.com!

Caching : The unsung hero of performance

It's not just abstract numbers after all :)

Many people tend to forget, or worse, ignore the fact that caching plays a vital role in many applications.  Why would they place a cache in the CPU for example?

This idea might come from the fact that in an age dominated by the web and fast internet access, some might think that cached pages are unnecessary.  True, at times you end up with a lot of space taken up by pages you visited only once.

But caching is more than just a copy of a page on your hard drive (or SD Card).  In this post I shall demonstrate how a terribly simple implementation of a cache in a Fibonacci algorithm will have a massive impact on performance.  Obviously one might not find many uses for Fibonacci numbers, but the idea can be used in many areas, such as crawlers, searching and environments where some value which is unknown but is somewhat constant is required frequently.

Many know what Fibonacci numbers are, so I won't be going into a lot of details about their algorithm, but don't worry though, it's very easy to implement it Java.  This time we'll be writing a single class, having only 3 methods.

import java.math.BigInteger;
import java.util.HashMap;


public class Fibonacci 
{
private static HashMap<Integer, BigInteger> cache = new HashMap<Integer, BigInteger>();

public static void main(String[] args) 
{
int v = 35;
if(args.length>0)
v = Integer.valueOf(args[0]).intValue();

System.out.println("Fibonacci efficiency tester for Fib("+v+").\n\n");

long n = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Cached: "+fib(v, true));
long mst = (System.currentTimeMillis() - n);
System.out.println(getTimeFromMs(mst/1000));

n = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Non-Cached: "+fib(v, false));
mst = (System.currentTimeMillis() - n);
System.out.println(getTimeFromMs(mst/1000));
}

Not much here.  Just declaring some variables and a main class.  The main class starts off by declaring the number of iterations we plan on doing.  In this case variable v takes care of that.  Don't set it too high, otherwise you might end up waiting 5 minutes until you get a result!  Next we check if we have any arguments;  if so, we assume that it is the number of iterations to perform, so we set v as that value.

Then we just start displaying the result messages.  As you can see we are measuring the time it takes for cached and non cached calculations.  I know I have created a benchmarking tool, but it's OK to use the normal system time here.

Now it's time to code the real Fibonacci method.

private static BigInteger fib(int f, boolean cached)
{
if(f<2) return new BigInteger(""+f);


if(cached)
{
if(!cache.containsKey(new Integer(f)))
{
BigInteger v  = (fib(f-2, cached)).add(fib(f-1, cached));


cache.put(new Integer(f), v);
}
else
{
return cache.get(new Integer(f));
}
}

BigInteger n1 = fib(f - 2, cached);
BigInteger n2 = fib(f - 1, cached);
return n1.add(n2);
}

What we are doing here is recursively calling the same method.  It is much cleaner than a loop, and anyway, a loop does not always suffice, such as in cases of crawling.  Before performing anything complicated, we check if the number is high enough to be calculated.  So if we have a 1 or 0, there's nothing much to do, so just return it.  Otherwise, we will perform the normal calculation.

We check if the caching is enabled, as this is all about caching after all, an then the calculation is performed.  So if we have caching enabled, we will first check if the cache contains the Fibonacci of the number we are currently analysing, and if it does, we are done, and return it.  Otherwise we will calculate it and cache it.  If caching is not enabled, the value is calculated every time.

We then write the usual method which cleanly shows the value in a more humane way :)

public static String getTimeFromMs(long ms)
{
if (ms < 1000)
return ms + "ms";
else if (ms >= 1000 && ms < 60000)
return (ms/1000) + "s " + getTimeFromMs(ms - ((ms/1000)*1000));
else if (ms >=60000 && ms < 3600000)
return (ms/60000) + "m " + getTimeFromMs(ms - ((ms/60000)*60000));
else return (ms/3600000) + "h " + getTimeFromMs(ms - ((ms/3600000)*3600000));
}

That is all basically.  You can now run this program and see for yourself the improvement which is gained through caching.  I have provided my results below;  naturally yours will have some variations, but there definitely will be a huge difference between the cached and non-cached runs.

Fibonacci efficiency tester for Fib(35).


Cached: 9227465
in 2ms
Non-Cached: 9227465
in 3s

Make no mistake. There is an 'm' in the cached, while there is not in the non-cached. That means we had a whole 3 second difference. Now, hopefully, you shall be writing more sensible code and freeing the CPU from eccessive and unnecessary work :)

The full code is available here.

186Gbps : Breakneck network speed

I have just read an article about a new network speed record and honestly I could not believe at first.  This really means that I can transfer my whole hard disk content, over the network, in less than 10 seconds!

So many recent tech and science news recently hehe; hybrid drives are getting popular thanks to extremely faster seek times, this network record, quad-core CPU's in phones...Honestly, I simply can't seem to think that there is a limit.  Just as you lay your hands on something which feels like the bleeding edge of technology, you end up reading an article the following day totally eclipsing your new device.

Let's hope that we'll be seeing at least 1% of this technology's power get to our homes.  1% if you think of it, is enough, for now.  That's almost 500Mbps, definitely much more than your 20 or 50Mbps. [Press Release]