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Jim Gray disappeared and I hope he will reappear unharmed. I met him once at a Supercomputing show when Cort Dougan and had just been snubbed by the AIX developers at the PowerPC booth who explained that the Linux PowerPC

There is the classic by Vahalia on UNIX implementation (new edition supposedly coming out ) which, is in my always humble opinion the only worthwhile modern OS textbook although the original edition of Shaw’s book is good too. It’s depressing

From Outlaws of the Marsh, translated by Sidney Shapiro The second [bandit] was Jiang Jing, from Tanzhou in Hunan. Originally he had studied for the imperial examinations. But when he failed to pass, he abandoned the pen and took up

A correspondent back from a war somewhere writes: More to the point, we had a large amount of Civvy laptops, and military systems together. There were major problems with dust, heat etc. From what I read of the Tilt bits

Spolsky recently writes Alain de Botton, writing in The Architecture of Happiness (Pantheon Books, 2006) has a section on elegance that any software designer will find familiar. And I do find it drearily familiar: it is ignorantly dismissive and embraces

Here are four quotes. Quotes 1, 3, and 4 all make sense together, if you are sufficiently cynical, but quote #2 is remarkably odd when taken with the others. 1For ten years now, free software developers have tried various methods

wish I was like Mr. Gates, all my money in big crates – Bruce Springstein One of the many peculiar features of the software industry is the stubborn manner in which important innovations are ignored. If you read this account

One of my correspondents has said my comments on formal method (here and here) were too terse. There are a couple of things that annoy me about formal methods, but the lack of results is the foremost annoyance. After multiple

I’ll finish it someday, but here is a variant.

I’m off to give a talk in Bangalore and then visit Chennai and Mumbai. In his delightful book called The Argumentative Indian Amrtya Sen writes A good example is the transformation of Âryabhat’s Sanskrit term jya … [which] was translated,