“Lots of great inventions seem obvious in retrospect. About 30 years ago, one of our clients realized that if you attach a small pom-pom to the back of a short tennis sock, the sock won’t slip down into your tennis shoe. The idea sounds obvious, but designers had wrestled for years with the problem until…

Take that, doubters.

We’ve got time to develop some comprehensive benchmarks of other proposed “real-time Linux” solutions and I’ve started reading up on published benchmarks. We had the advantage of a large number of customers with real applications to assist us in figuring out what to benchmark and the standard tests with RTLinux and RTLightning (FSMLabs version of…

Good news as coffee distribution giant Starbucks comes to an agreement with Ethiopia about coffee ip. The case for Ethiopia owning trademarks to its own famous brands is simple: the value line in coffee production is drawn near the cup, not near the tree. Owning trademarks gives the growers some leverage on pricing. The relationship…

In the myth, back in the good old days of the MIT AI lab, programmers lived by the hacker ethos and were above such low things as trade and commerce. Scientifically, it’s clear that the AI Lab was the least interesting part of the old Project MAC – which produced Multics. The AI project itself…

Red Hat has apparently also understood the necessity of real-time in financial trading – FSMLabs main current focus. Unfortunately for them, they are using inappropriate technology as shown by the over 1.2 million lines of code that they boast has gone into soft-real-time Linux. The dual kernel virtualization approach we invented and pioneered has the…

This discussion on file systems and this one on virtual memory are good starts.  See also the extent-like UFS paper and this.

Greenspan did put forward a proposal on how to reduce the growing inequality of incomes in the United States — admit more skilled immigrants into the country. The former Fed chief said that increasing the number of immigrants with sought-after skills would increase the labor supply of these workers in the United States and hold…

FSMLabs is about to make a major change in direction – with a focus on “enterprise” computing. Some of what we plan to do is brand new – for example, we have new ways of speeding up “black-box” trading in financial markets. Some is old – Cort Dougan worked on high speed MPI years ago…

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 port Cort had just written was beneath their contempt. Gray came up to us and…