This from the IEEE is really fascinating. It is the blog of a robot operator in the Fukushima nuclear plants. Some interesting things about controls, robot handling, and durability are discussed. And, big surprise, the competence of the organization that
Why computers are more and more devices for generating heat from electricity
Why is it that the hardware interfaces of disk drives 30 years ago were simple and clear and they currently require enormously elaborate drivers? Imagine if one could provide a command consisting of (read/write, diskaddress, buffer_address, count, notification_address) so that
Dutch masters
Seen on Linux Weekly News. Ext4 maintainer Ted Ts’o has responded with a rare (for the kernel community) admission that technical concerns are not the sole driver of feature-merging decisions: It’s something I do worry about; and I do share your
Industrial robots state of the art
During the BP Macondo leak I was struck by the enormous level of skill needed by the robot submarine operators and wondered at the apparently low level of automation available to them. But the absence of robotic equipment in the
Security news
The lesson of this story is that even (particularly?) computer security companies cannot put up with the inconvenience of standard security precautions. Greg Hoglund’s nightmare began on Super Bowl Sunday. On Feb. 6 the high-tech entrepreneur was sitting in his
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
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
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!
Processor architecture
I wish that processor architecture was not so committed to a obsolete model of software. For example, it has become clear over the last few years that the sloppy shared memory thread model of programming has multiple drawbacks. Sharing of
memories
For some reason, all copies of an early variant of RTLinux called “myrtlinux” by its Italian “author” have disappeared from the web, but thanks to some archives we can find some fragments from old days. For example, within a year