Systems software technology and business
“When we started releasing data publicly, we measured it in petabytes of traffic,” said Doug Webster, a Cisco Systems market executive who is responsible for an annual report by the firm that charts changes in the Internet. “Then a couple of years ago we had to start measuring them in zettabytes, and now we’re measuring [...]
Coverity has a program that reads other programs looking for errors. The company started as a research project from Stanford (how unusual!) and the Communications article is really about what they found in commercial world. One thing they found was a lot of crappy programmers.
Upon seeing an error report saying the following loop body was [...]
Jamie Kitman’s look at the twisted path Toyota followed to it’s current difficulties inspired me to think about software and money – two topics I spend way too much time thinking about. As a purely disinterested observer (ahem) it has come to my attention, repeatedly, that manufacturing companies undervalue, underinvest in, and undertest software. On [...]
I write an email to a CS Prof. asking if they have any followup work on some nice OS measurement research they published a couple of years back. The response is that there is no followup and then:
Me: Too bad. Is it just me or has everyone given up on measurement in OS research?
Prof: It [...]
Data centers show up around minute 24.
We’re starting to see a confluence between IT and energy that will change both industries. A windmill power data center is an interesting data point. At some time, we’re going to want to control the energy generation from the data center – for example, to run big batch jobs when the wind is blowing or [...]
In some cases, dominant technology companies have used open-source projects as pawns. Google, for example, has needled Microsoft by providing financial support to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees of the development of Firefox. I.B.M. has been a major backer of Linux, helping to raise it as a competitor to Microsoft’s Windows and other proprietary [...]
Imagine that you release software under a license that is primarily concerned with making sure that modifiable source code is available to all and that no restrictions should ever be placed on derived works. Now imagine that someone takes a huge body of code like this and starts marking interfaces as limited to specific uses [...]
The ALMA team has released ACS 8.0 on Red Hat 4.4, downgrading the Linux version from the foreseen 5.2 version. This choice, with the consequent back-porting of the code to the older OS version, had to be taken because of major problems encountered by the Control and Correlator teams in porting RTAI real time code [...]
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwire – 11/10/09) – Cavium Networks (NASDAQ:CAVM – News), a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, wireless, storage and video applications, today announced that it is has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MontaVista Software for $50 million, comprised of approximately $16 million in cash [...]