keeping simple

Author: yodaiken

  • Happy Birthday to Emmy Noether

    March 23.  So much for you, Larry Summers, mere economist.

  • Software comes from the sky and labor is overpaid: NOT!

    John Dvorak concludes an otherwise sensible  article on the effect of Linux/Office-clone packages combined with netbooks with the following: If Intel can provide users with powerful little systems for $99 and has been pushing prices lower and lower over the years, why can’t Microsoft? Intel makes elaborate hardware in billion-dollar factories. Microsoft stamps out a…

  • Program structure and threads

    Threads were initially used for telephony systems where each request to connect could be given to a new thread to manage. The simplification was, in theory, dramatic. The programmer could just write the code for handling a single line, and the OS and network code would multiplex operation over 100,000 calls. The programmer does not…

  • Marine One Blueprints via Pirates Bay

    Goodness. The US blueprints for Marine1 show up in Iran. “What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,” Boback said. Tiversa also found sensitive financial information about the cost of the helicopter on that same…

  • AIG and me

    The New York Times has an article explaining the business model of the  failed insurer AIG that is giving me a new perspective on why I walked out of a bank in New Mexico wondering whether it was worth it to put my kids college funds at risk to get a loan.  As I understand…

  • Are threads evil? (updated)

    This paper by Prof. Edward Lee explains something of why “threads” are such a painful abstraction.  As Prof. Lee notes, threads intrinsically create unspecified program operation (which he calls non-determinism) and resource conflicts which we then attempt to “prune” via synchronization and complex tools. In an earlier note, I argued that we should design real-time…

  • Venture Capital falls off the cliff

    Through all the bumps and strains in the broader economy, venture outlays kept up an almost eerily steady pace over the previous 21 months, ranging between $7.3 billion and $8 billion each quarter, from the start of 2007 to the third quarter of last year, according to the MoneyTree survey, which tracks venture-capital investments. But…

  • Mobile device security and President Obama

    Obama’s fighting hard to keep his Blackberry President Barack Obama will have a beloved BlackBerry — and maybe a second, more secure smartphone-like device — with him in the White House. The president has been adamant about continuing to use a BlackBerry, a smartphone with Internet and e-mail access, despite concerns that are likely making…

  • Satyam explodes

    WSJ: Satyam Computer Services Ltd. Chairman B. Ramalinga Raju Wednesday resigned admitting to falsifying company accounts and inflating revenue and profit figures over several years, sending the company’s shares plunging 78%. In a letter to the company’s board, which was released to the Bombay Stock Exchange, Raju said that Satyam had inflated its operating profit…

  • Fault tolerant patent application for virtual machine

    [0018]For incoming network packets, the following is done during the logging mode. When a packet is received, an event-request is posted for the VMM, at Block 210. When the VMM processes the event, it stops the VM, synchronizes the guest VCPU state, and then calls into the device emulator (i.e., device emulation software event handler),…