keeping simple

Author: yodaiken

  • Operating system design and specification: Part 1.

    [Note: This is the first in a series of “chapters”. I’ll be revising as I see errors and in response to comments. As usual, this material is copyright Victor Yodaiken and rights are given to make, but not sell, verbatim copies only (in addition to fair use rights) ] Update 1: Evening June 6. Update…

  • Lots of great inventions seem obvious in retrospect….

    “Lots of great inventions seem obvious in retrospect. About 30 years ago, one of our clients realized that if you attach a small pom-pom to the back of a short tennis sock, the sock won’t slip down into your tennis shoe. The idea sounds obvious, but designers had wrestled for years with the problem until…

  • Certified good

    Take that, doubters.

  • Benchmarking real-time

    We’ve got time to develop some comprehensive benchmarks of other proposed “real-time Linux” solutions and I’ve started reading up on published benchmarks. We had the advantage of a large number of customers with real applications to assist us in figuring out what to benchmark and the standard tests with RTLinux and RTLightning (FSMLabs version of…

  • Free as in double espresso

    Good news as coffee distribution giant Starbucks comes to an agreement with Ethiopia about coffee ip. The case for Ethiopia owning trademarks to its own famous brands is simple: the value line in coffee production is drawn near the cup, not near the tree. Owning trademarks gives the growers some leverage on pricing. The relationship…

  • Prelapsarian software

    In the myth, back in the good old days of the MIT AI lab, programmers lived by the hacker ethos and were above such low things as trade and commerce. Scientifically, it’s clear that the AI Lab was the least interesting part of the old Project MAC – which produced Multics. The AI project itself…

  • Still trying after all these years

    Red Hat has apparently also understood the necessity of real-time in financial trading – FSMLabs main current focus. Unfortunately for them, they are using inappropriate technology as shown by the over 1.2 million lines of code that they boast has gone into soft-real-time Linux. The dual kernel virtualization approach we invented and pioneered has the…

  • Net neutrality and real-time

    British Telecom breaks with the party line. This is the intersection of a business/political dispute about what business telecos should be in and a technical issue of QOS. Traffic shaping is a blunt instrument for QOS and part of the problem is that nobody bothers to try to characterize scheduling requirements more precisely than “needs…

  • Security cannot be improved by waving flags

    Via Schneier comes a story about the US Navy and a disgruntled contractor who just plead guilty: He confessed to programming malicious software codes into computers that track Navy submarines in May 2006 while in Naples. He told Navy investigators that he was upset that his company’s bid on a project was passed over. Sylvestre…

  • Enterprise file systems

    This discussion on file systems and this one on virtual memory are good starts.  See also the extent-like UFS paper and this.