keeping simple

Author: vy

  • Space-X patents

    Anderson: So what have all your creative people come up with, then? What’s different in your basic technology versus 50 years ago? Musk: I can’t tell you much. We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use…

  • Einstein and Peer Review

    From Time. Although when I posted this on twitter, I got a good response. https://twitter.com/lsidir/status/573416554265763840 In computer science, well …

  • Pointers draft

    Despite pedants, pointers are useful and interesting and if you don’t understand them, you don’t really get what’s going on in a computer. Think of memory as a function $latex M: N\to N$ where $latex N$ is the set of non-negative integers. When we build physical memories, there are limits on both domain and range,…

  • How business works in the real world: Apple and GT and Beelzebub

    How business works in the real world: Apple and GT and Beelzebub

    GT Advanced declared bankruptcy and blamed Apple for its problems. Apple called GT Advanced’s story “defamatory”.  I have no idea about the specifics in this case but I do know about  big companies pushing insanely onerous and self-defeating terms on small ones.  Here’s the original claim by GT Advanced: At the start of negotiations, Apple…

  • Telecom is 10 years behind wall street on time synchronization

    This is an interesting paper, but Telecom has not yet come to grips with the problems and advantages of fast shared commodity ethernet interconnect. North American service providers are in the process of upgrading their radio access networks with next generation LTE equipment. They arefinalizing a 4G rollout that involves highly stringent timing requirements, but…

  • Project Roseline

    Accurate and reliable knowledge of time is fundamental to cyber-physical systems for sensing, control, performance, and energy efficient integration of computing and communications. This simple statement underlies the RoseLine project.  Emerging CPS [Cyber Physical Systems – vy]  applications depend on precise knowledge of time to infer location and control communication.  There is a diversity of…

  • Why is computer science education so horrible

    This is a post about CS education. It is prompted by a seriesofposts by Mark Guzdial in which he criticizes the pervasive belief among CS educators that when it comes to programming, there’s not much an instructor can do: some students get it, others don’t; it’s all in genetics or other external factors that CS…

  • JP Morgan Security Breach

    “Faced with the rising threat of online crime, JPMorgan has said it plans to spend $250 million on digital security annually, but had been losing many of its security staff to other banks over the last year, with others expected to leave soon.” – New York Times.  Why is it that NY banks can spend…

  • Paths versus Recursion

    /* * Iterative DepthFirst file list (c) Victor Yodaiken 2013 * * “Not the way we do it in Brooklyn” – Dave “Kinch” Arnow. * * * Data structure is P – the current path, with some aux data * * Two basic operations: * 1) Lp(P) – starts at path P and extends it…

  • What happens when you do not use enterprise quality technology.

    News from last year. Aug. 26, 2013 11:52 a.m. ET A glitch in time synchronization caused German exchange operator Deutsche BoerseAG DB1.XE -0.16% ‘s Eurex Exchange arm to halt trading for slightly more than an hour early Monday, the latest in a thread of technical issues at global exchanges. The Eurex derivatives trading market was…