David Elliot Bell has an interesting essay on the US government and software security – little “inside baseball”, but informative. He cites my critique of MILS. One of Bell’s points, which is briefly mentioned in my note, is that composition
Jim Gray and the existence of working software
Jim Gray disappeared and I hope he will reappear unharmed. I met him once at a Supercomputing show when Cort Dougan and had just been snubbed by the AIX developers at the PowerPC booth who explained that the Linux PowerPC
Books on operating system design and paleontology
There is the classic by Vahalia on UNIX implementation (new edition supposedly coming out ) which, is in my always humble opinion the only worthwhile modern OS textbook although the original edition of Shaw’s book is good too. It’s depressing
When mathematicians get mad
From Outlaws of the Marsh, translated by Sidney Shapiro The second [bandit] was Jiang Jing, from Tanzhou in Hunan. Originally he had studied for the imperial examinations. But when he failed to pass, he abandoned the pen and took up
Digital rights management catastrophe continues to approach
A correspondent back from a war somewhere writes: More to the point, we had a large amount of Civvy laptops, and military systems together. There were major problems with dust, heat etc. From what I read of the Tilt bits
Talmudic codes
My knowledge of Talmud is, to be generous, zilch, but consider the format and style of Talmud. This is what you get when each commentator takes the arguments of colleagues and predecessors seriously. In the center a discussion between one
Elegance shmelagance, the Le Corbusier fallacy again (rev3).
Spolsky recently writes Alain de Botton, writing in The Architecture of Happiness (Pantheon Books, 2006) has a section on elegance that any software designer will find familiar. And I do find it drearily familiar: it is ignorantly dismissive and embraces
Free software economics
Here are four quotes. Quotes 1, 3, and 4 all make sense together, if you are sufficiently cynical, but quote #2 is remarkably odd when taken with the others. 1For ten years now, free software developers have tried various methods
Bitkeeper and tossing crates of money out the windows (vistas)
wish I was like Mr. Gates, all my money in big crates – Bruce Springstein One of the many peculiar features of the software industry is the stubborn manner in which important innovations are ignored. If you read this account
Adding value to Windows
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