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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 be the obvious choice, many players in the market are trying to build what the…
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Formal methods for doing what?
John Regehr’s question below gets to one of the basic problems I see in the field of “formal methods” – the general failure of researchers in the field to look at experimental data and the operation of actual systems. The normal operation of science in, say physics or biology or even analysis of algorithms, involves…
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Chapter 2: liveness and scheduling
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Operating system design and specification: Part 1.
[Note: This is the first in a series of “chapters”. I’ll be revising as I see errors and in response to comments. As usual, this material is copyright Victor Yodaiken and rights are given to make, but not sell, verbatim copies only (in addition to fair use rights) ] Update 1: Evening June 6. Update…
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Security cannot be improved by waving flags
Via Schneier comes a story about the US Navy and a disgruntled contractor who just plead guilty: He confessed to programming malicious software codes into computers that track Navy submarines in May 2006 while in Naples. He told Navy investigators that he was upset that his company’s bid on a project was passed over. Sylvestre…
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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: â€Since the speed of light, the physical sizes of computer components, and the speeds of memories are…
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Difference between theory and practice in security and reliability.
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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…
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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,…
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Talmudic codes
My knowledge of Talmud is, to be generous, zilch, but consider the format and style of Talmud. This is what you get when each commentator takes the arguments of colleagues and predecessors seriously. In the center a discussion between one group of experts, commented on and amplified by a second group. On the side a…