Like many famous papers, Fred Brooks No Silver Bullet is more referenced than read but it deserves better. Here is Brooks explaining why verification hype, for example the recent vast investment in marketing supposed security levels of Common Criteria Software
OSIM Madrid and Value Manifolds
Spent a couple of very interesting days at the OSIM conference in Madrid as part of my consulting for WindRiver which has a very powerful market position in cellular handsets now – partly due to their acquisition of RTLinux for
Exciting moments in fiber
… the first truly game changing advance in bend-insensitive fiber came at the FTTH Council Europe meeting in Amsterdam early 2005, when an NTT engineer demonstrated a tough fiber that could be tied into knots. As we reported in oour
Thinking like a subcontractor
Many industries are organized so that a small group of companies controls the “product” and sit on top of a pyramid of subcontractors who provide parts and labor. It’s natural for companies at the top of the chain to prefer
Apple’s strategic brilliance
I may be reading too much into it, but Apple looks to have come up with a strategy to pass Microsoft in the next ten years. They are linking their phone, music, and PC business together to form an unavoidable
Carbon neutral processors and ecocidal operating systems
Data centers are reckless consumers of power. Since modern processors leak somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of their peak power consumption even when idle and since most measurements show that most computers are nearly always idle, that’s a lot
universal machinery
If even 20% of what Peter Gutman says is so, then I’ve been optimistic in my assessement of DRM.
GPL Interface arguments and proprietary kernel modules
(rewritten for clarity Aug 21, 22, 2007) Changing interfaces of GPL software is permitted under the GPL. The license specifically permits anyone to make any changes in the code. There is no limitation concerning the intentions of the coder or
Easy patent solution: Exponential method
Suppose that we said each year, each person named as an inventor or each company or person named as an assignee on a patent qualified for a rolling fee. Say $200 for the first patent, $1000 for the next, $5000
Building what customers want
Visting LinuxWorld in San Francisco reminded me that one of the advantages Apple has in the cell-phone market is that it can set design goals to be “what people who buy cell phones want”. While you might think this would