keeping simple

Author: yodaiken

  • State machines and circuits

    The cross coupled latch is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century State machine models of timing and circuit design

  • Public spirit of programmers

    It’s sad to note that while Doctors/engineers/journalists/even-lawyers without borders are all organizations of people who help less developed nations, “programmers/software/etc” without borders refers to outsourcing.

  • Bias in academic reviewing

    EURYI applications were first submitted to the relevant national research councils, who could nominate a specific number of candidates. This selection cut the proportion of women from one-quarter to one-fifth. Each national research council oversaw a drop in the number of selected women. In Spain, where nearly a third of the applicants were women, not…

  • Computer Science as a failed discipline

    I write an email to a CS Prof. asking if they have any followup work on some nice OS measurement research they published a couple of years back. The response is that there is no followup and then: Me: Too bad. Is it just me or has everyone given up on measurement in OS research?…

  • Amory Lovins on smart engineering

    Data centers show up around minute 24. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28RmpedUYLk&w=425&h=344]

  • Security for dummies – a lesson for smart grid

    WASHINGTON — Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations. Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some…

  • Fake Steve Jobs: “Then I hung up”

    I stopped, then. There was nothing on the line. Silence. I said, Randall? He goes, Yeah, I’m here. I said, Does any of that make sense? He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it. See, when you run the numbers what you find is that we’re actually better off running a shitty…

  • Green energy and smart devices

    We’re starting to see a confluence between IT and energy that will change both industries. A windmill power data center is an interesting data point. At some time, we’re going to want to control the energy generation from the data center – for example, to run big batch jobs when the wind is blowing or…

  • the elusive open source business model

    In some cases, dominant technology companies have used open-source projects as pawns. Google, for example, has needled Microsoft by providing financial support to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees of the development of Firefox. I.B.M. has been a major backer of Linux, helping to raise it as a competitor to Microsoft’s Windows and other proprietary…

  • multicore and multiprocessor performance

    Here’s two  interesting tables Percentage of lock acquisitions for global TCP/IP locks that do not succeed immediately. OS Type 6 conns 192 conns 16384 conns MsgP 89 100 100 ConnP-L(4) 60 56 52 ConnP-L(8) 51 30 26 ConnP-L(16) 49 18 14 ConnP-L(32) 41 10 7 ConnP-L(64) 37 6 4 ConnP-L(128) 33 5 2 L2 Data…