keeping simple

Author: yodaiken

  • Transaction costs are good: software patent debate continues

    Don Marti is asking the wrong question when he writes: The question is where you draw the line of what is or isn’t patent infringement. If Victor invents something, and I describe it in prose, I’m not infringing. If he invents something and I build it as hardware, I am. But if I do something…

  • Enterprise operating systems

    Can anyone name a single feature of “enterprise” operating systems available today that was not already working in VMS or Solaris or SGI’s system 10 or more years ago? Multi-processor support – practically prehistoric. Here’s a wise observation: ”Since the speed of light, the physical sizes of computer components, and the speeds of memories are…

  • Software patents are so different from circuit patents (really!)

    Updated (and again, and even again – below) It should also be recognized that circuit arrangements are typically designed and fabricated at least in part using one or more computer data files, referred to herein as hardware definition programs, that define the layout of the circuit arrangements on integrated circuit devices. The programs are typically…

  • Low wage programming

    Greenspan did put forward a proposal on how to reduce the growing inequality of incomes in the United States — admit more skilled immigrants into the country. The former Fed chief said that increasing the number of immigrants with sought-after skills would increase the labor supply of these workers in the United States and hold…

  • Watering down computer science, Java, and feminism

    This old note by Spolsky explains why the shift to java-only in computer science classes is harmful and reminds me of two events in my old career as an academic. One was when a student came by my office to explain to me, in the most condescending manner, how the linked-list exercise I had given…

  • Difference between theory and practice in security and reliability.

    Theory of how F-22 Fighter software is going to be made bulletproof. Practice. Update: More practice (noted by Ben_k on Bruce Schneier’s weblog). Update2: See this paper and this one.

  • Operating system interfaces are what you bump into…

    Operating system interfaces are what you bump into when you are trying to do your work. There is no need for workaday users to see an operating system interface at all; the current OS interface is bureaucratic bloat, an unnecessary impediment and tollgate. Users are interested in direct links to documents, not in operating systems…

  • Moving on

    FSMLabs is about to make a major change in direction – with a focus on “enterprise” computing. Some of what we plan to do is brand new – for example, we have new ways of speeding up “black-box” trading in financial markets. Some is old – Cort Dougan worked on high speed MPI years ago…

  • Security notes

    David Elliot Bell has an interesting essay on the US government and software security – little “inside baseball”, but informative. He cites my critique of MILS. One of Bell’s points, which is briefly mentioned in my note, is that composition is harder than many imagine. Systems A and B may meet some security level individually,…

  • Jim Gray and the existence of working software

    Jim Gray disappeared and I hope he will reappear unharmed. I met him once at a Supercomputing show when Cort Dougan and had just been snubbed by the AIX developers at the PowerPC booth who explained that the Linux PowerPC port Cort had just written was beneath their contempt. Gray came up to us and…