keeping simple

Category: software business

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Adding value to Windows

    Andy Bechtolscheim says: It’s really hard to add value to Windows. Whatever you add, Microsoft is going to take away from you. Linux has opportunities. There are many ways to add value. There are lots of things Sun customers expect that are missing from Linux The first two sentences are relatively common wisdom. The last…

  • Plagiarism watch

    Thanks to google code watch I see that an open source real-time Linux project has reached new heights of originality – changing the magic number that they copied from RTLinux 10 years ago to a new number. The constant definition #define RT_TASK_MAGIC 0x754d2774 which was in very early versions of RTLinux and appeared every previous…

  • The Embedded Enterprise, Pruit-Igoe, Ayn-Rand, the telecommunications stack and why software does not suck

    Programmers will readily tell you that “Windows sucks” or “Linux sucks” or “POSIX sucks” why this or that software is badly designed, bloated, slow, buggy, un-needed, ugly, and generally disgusting. But, Windows is actually an immensely useful and sophisticated program with astounding capabilities – Linux is too. POSIX is a comprehensive solution to many difficult…

  • Back from India

    We were going into a government facility in Mumbai, and the guard points at me and asks, as if finding it hard to believe “He is a foreigner?” This was my fourth visit to India and, like all the others so far, mostly a rushed series of meetings and trips to airports, but I got…

  • Soft real time continues to sag

    Paul McKenney once wrote: Despite such complications, priority inheritance works reasonably well for exclusive locks, and is a major component of Ingo Molnar’s CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT patch. There are strongly held opinions both for and against priority inheritance, for example. http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7168794919.html in which Victor Yodaiken considers priority inheritance to be harmful, and, as near as I can…