Systems software technology and business
It’s sad that after all this time, one can look at any random article on parallel programming and find some variation of:
for i = 1 … n
create thread i
do something
end for
as if that was the only [...]
Real-time operating systems are either a solved problem or a backwater of engineering design. Threads, semaphores, mutexes, some basic I/O, priority scheduling all of this has been more or less standardized in the POSIX 1003.13 smaller profiles (51,52) for many years. The basic programming model has not changed in years. Even FSM’s original RTOS and [...]
I agree with this but really, basic ideas of calc are simple and could be taught easily early on too. Found here. But this paper is also good and even though I don’t agree with it 100%, I think it is a brilliant diagnosis
A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he [...]
The first part of a critique of process algebra is below. This relates to the Recursion and State paper and explicatory blog entry where I show how to compose classical automata and define them “abstractly” and to a complaint about the weak critique of automata theory in standard process algebra literature and also to a [...]
The idea that Germany is playing catch-up with Europe’s most promising strategy for renewable energy is jarring. This is Germany, after all, the country that 11 years ago put the Green Party in government, decided to phase out nuclear power, and pushed wind energy and photovoltaics to grid scale. Today Germany’s installed wind-turbine capacity of [...]
SAN FRANCISCO — In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google announced late Tuesday that it is developing an operating system for PCs based on its Chrome Web browser.
The move sharpens the already intense competition between Google and Microsoft, whose Windows operating system controls the basic functions of the vast majority of personal computers. [...]
Here’s Edsger Dijkstra discussing the birth of the use of axiomatics in computer science – the start of “formal methods” research. What’s striking is the assumed choice between “axiomatic” and “mechanistic” as if there was no other way. In a later note he writes:
And now we are back at our old dilemma. Either we take [...]
Working on a “process algebra” post, I had to look up previous posts on microkernels where I wrote this:
Information hiding is only good design when the hidden information is not needed by the software it is hidden from! If you hide information that you need to share you’re just wasting time. A great example of [...]
I always had the impression that the entire group of “process algebra” people didn’t know much about automata, but this is surprising.
But meanwhile I got somehow interested, and I don’t know how, in concurrency. I remember that, without linking it to verification particularly, I wondered about interacting automata. I had an idea that automata theory [...]
Despite some deep results, algebraic automata theory has fallen out of favor in theoretical computer science. Reasons include the disciplines failings such as a love of over-generality, weak mathematical background of people working on “formal methods”, and gap between theoreticians and engineers. But perhaps the key reason is that traditional state machine presentations in [...]