keeping simple

Author: yodaiken

  • Airbus computer and electrical problems

    Whoops! From Aviation Week According to a bulletin issued by the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), an electrical fault led to a series of display and control problems. These included the intermittent failure of both pilots’ electronic displays and the uncommanded application of left rudder trim.  [..] The crew also reported hearing “chattering” from…

  • Free and Open Source Licenses

    Interesting discussion here. But many FOSS-based transactions are not commercial in the foregoing sense. Instead, software subject to a FOSS license may come into a product without the producer knowing that this has happened or, in any realistic way, assenting to the terms. Also, the software often comes from a non-commercial party. An engineer downloads software from an…

  • Corporate Law and Programming State of the Art

    Big companies that want to use our software but don’t want to use our standard EULA keep sending proposed sales contracts that include a really peculiar provision. The provision asks us to guarantee, to represent, to warrant and all that stuff something which everyone knows is false: that our software has zero bugs or errors.…

  • Modern corporate america meets FSMLabs

    New Consultant: “Cort assured me there was a slide deck we could do a deep dive from. Then we can birdcage the low hanging fruit.” Deep dive from the slide deck, indeed.

  • why microkernels don’t work

    You can almost just see it from this diagram of connected boxes.  I want to think of the whole system as a series of connected state machines.  The arrows show how information is moved around the system with the green arrows identifying paths that carry data to and from the memory. When you fill in…

  • Shocking advances in Operating Systems

    And here I was complaining about the lack of progress in OS development “This will blow away any RTOS,” said Cauchy. “We speed up execution by doing things like vector interrupts, I/O memory mapping, and turning off timers.” By Gad!

  • Social Network and Lessig

    Two lawsuits provide the frame for The Social Network. One was brought by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twins at Harvard who thought they had hired Zuckerberg to build for them what Facebook would become. The other was brought by Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s “one friend” and partner, and Facebook’s initial CFO, who was eventually pushed out…

  • State of the art

    int cpu_features[4]; for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++) { cpu_features[get_cur_cpu_number()] = cpuid_get_features(); usleep(100); } for (int j = 0; j < 4; j++) printf(“CPU %d features: %xn”, j, cpu_features[j]); http://www.pagetable.com/?p=372

  • Mobile phone faking in China

    The other crazy thing about the mobile phone market is that it’s not the only one. Windell said he found another market just as big but with a greater focus on finished phones, and then just today I walked into what looked like the New York Stock Exchange of mobile phones. This last find was…

  • Security versus the dreaded “cleanup”

    The summary of this error. According to a report, the problem occurs because the 32-bit call emulation layer does not check whether the call is truly in the Syscall table. Ben Hawkes, who discovered the problem, says the vulnerability can be exploited to execute arbitrary code with kernel rights. An exploit (direct download of source code) is…