Systems software technology and business
Andy Bechtolscheim says:
It’s really hard to add value to Windows. Whatever you add, Microsoft is going to take away from you.
Linux has opportunities. There are many ways to add value. There are lots of things Sun customers expect that are missing from Linux
The first two sentences are relatively common wisdom. The last sentence, maybe. But [...]
Thanks to google code watch I see that an open source real-time Linux project has reached new heights of originality – changing the magic number that they copied from RTLinux 10 years ago to a new number. The constant definition
#define RT_TASK_MAGIC 0×754d2774
which was in very early versions of RTLinux and appeared every previous [...]
One of my correspondents has said my comments on formal method (here and here) were too terse. There are a couple of things that annoy me about formal methods, but the lack of results is the foremost annoyance. After multiple decades of “research”, there should be at least one theorem that tells us something non-obvious [...]
Programmers will readily tell you that “Windows sucks” or “Linux sucks” or “POSIX sucks” why this or that software is badly designed, bloated, slow, buggy, un-needed, ugly, and generally disgusting. But, Windows is actually an immensely useful and sophisticated program with astounding capabilities – Linux is too. POSIX is a comprehensive solution to many difficult [...]
We were going into a government facility in Mumbai, and the guard points at me and asks, as if finding it hard to believe “He is a foreigner?” This was my fourth visit to India and, like all the others so far, mostly a rushed series of meetings and trips to airports, but I got [...]