keeping simple

Author: yodaiken

  • FSMLabs move to New Zealand is postponed indefinitely

    Thanks to Ohioans. (and Virginians, Floridians, Iowans, … ). phew.

  • future of the data center

    This article from Ars Technica discusses a talk over the summer by Merrill Lynch’s chief technology architect, Jeffrey Birnbaum on “stateless cloud computing” – most concretely on distributed file systems. Birnbaum believes that one of the key foundational elements of a stateless computing environment is a networked storage system that enables ubiquitous availability of software.…

  • Operating system research – 16 years perspective

    (links and dates fixed March 15 2015 – thanks to Luu and pm90 at news.y.combinator for digging this up) October 2008: It’s somewhat funny and somewhat sad to read this thread on the old USENET. Starting out with Andy Tanenbaum’s proposed list of accepted truths (most of which I thought wrong at the time) GENERALLY ACCEPTED AS…

  • Avaya’s bizzare business model

    Years ago, we got some equipment from Avaya – not terrible, but not wonderful. A junior tech with no signature authority signed a contract with them that says in big letters on the top “until 2005”. In 2007 we got rid of the equipment and now have spent over a year attempting to cancel the…

  • Reliable broadcast algorithms: after 20 years

    New paper with short description of the Chang/Maxmchuk algorithm I have been championing for 20 years or more.

  • Investors and software patents

    Talking to possible investors, smart people with a lot of business experience, is a reminder of how critical patents are to innovative small business. Every new idea attracts imitators and worse, and small companies, by definition, do not have the market inertia that allows giants to sell bottled tap water at premium prices.

  • SCADA system security in the internet era

    This Washinton Post article on a SCADA failure at a US nuclear power plant was noted in Slashdot, but not much elsewhere. Specifically, experts worry that vulnerabilities were introduced into the systems that regulate the electrical grid as power companies transferred control of generation and distribution equipment from internal networks to supervisory control and data…

  • Cleantech and history of software

    I’m on my way to Linz, Austria to participate in a panel at  an event called Cleantech Venture Forum. We’ve spent a lot of the last two years looking at ways to save power in data centers and mini-data centers (which may be a term nobody else uses).  If we look at the history of…

  • Patent trolling and guilty knowledge

    Mr. Myhrvold: All of this fear is from people who have guilty knowledge of their own actions. There are lots of major tech companies that grew from zero to gigantically successful in a very short period of time without investing in their own inventions. They got there by using other people’s inventions. [cite] No kidding.

  • US Elections and startup/small-business economics

    I’m surprised that John McCain’s proposal to make health insurance benefits taxable has not received more notice. For a startup, cash is expensive and hard to find and it is a tremendous handicap for US startups that we have to  pay a huge amount for insurance for employees. But under current US tax law, the …