keeping simple

Author: yodaiken

  • China manufacturing

    A couple of fascinating posts on Shenzen small manufacturing. Significantly, they do not just produce copycat phones. They make original design phones as well, as documented in this PDF (it is in Chinese, but the pictures are cool; the collage above is ganked from the PDF). These original phones integrate wacky features like 7.1 stereo…

  • Future of innovation

    The company I work for now really does not care about IP. I design low-cost consumer products that get shipped offshore to be produced. The big deal is time-to-market and being first. After something is successful and commoditized, it will be copied and driven to the lowest possible cost. Thus, there is no longer a…

  • Gödel’s Lost Letter

    Gödel’s perspective in this letter is a refutation of the simplistic take on Turing’s proof seen so often in the computer science literature. In particular: After all, one would simply have to choose the natural number n so large that when the machine does not deliver a result, it makes no sense to think more…

  • Primitive recursion and transducers

    11/23/2009 please see the updated version: here. Yet another version of the recursion/transducer paper . The main result is that simultaneous primitive recursion on strings corresponds to general products of state machines. Primitive recursion on strings is analogous to primitive recursion on integers where we define f(0,x) = g(x) and f(n+1,x) = h(f(n,x),x). In strings the…

  • Deterministic multithreading

    An interesting paper appearing in ASPLOS proceedings provides a “deterministic” locking method Kendo enforces a deterministic interleaving of lock acquisitions and specially declared non-protected reads through a novel dynamically load-balanced deterministic scheduling algorithm. The algorithm tracks the progress of each thread using performance counters to construct a deterministic logical time that is used to compute…

  • IEEE’s war on science

    I dropped my subscription to the IEEE “Digital Library” because I found that if I strayed from a very narrow range of  areas, the IEEE wanted ridiculous fees for access to papers. For example, despite a subscription to the digital library, I was not entitled to papers in power engineering. Now I find that the…

  • parallel processing and bash reduce

    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 way to express parallel computation. This is such an awkward way of looking at…

  • RTOS design and embedded system development

    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…

  • Mathematics education needs probability and art

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhMKmovNjvc&w=427&h=352] 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…

  • Process algebra (updated)

    See Process algebra and automata theory