Despite pedants, pointers are useful and interesting and if you don’t understand them, you don’t really get what’s going on in a computer. Think of memory as a function $latex M: N\to N$ where $latex N$ is the set of
How business works in the real world: Apple and GT and Beelzebub
GT Advanced declared bankruptcy and blamed Apple for its problems. Apple called GT Advanced’s story “defamatory”. I have no idea about the specifics in this case but I do know about big companies pushing insanely onerous and self-defeating terms on
Telecom is 10 years behind wall street on time synchronization
This is an interesting paper, but Telecom has not yet come to grips with the problems and advantages of fast shared commodity ethernet interconnect. North American service providers are in the process of upgrading their radio access networks with next
Project Roseline
Accurate and reliable knowledge of time is fundamental to cyber-physical systems for sensing, control, performance, and energy efficient integration of computing and communications. This simple statement underlies the RoseLine project. Emerging CPS [Cyber Physical Systems – vy] applications depend on
Why is computer science education so horrible
This is a post about CS education. It is prompted by a seriesofposts by Mark Guzdial in which he criticizes the pervasive belief among CS educators that when it comes to programming, there’s not much an instructor can do: some
JP Morgan Security Breach
“Faced with the rising threat of online crime, JPMorgan has said it plans to spend $250 million on digital security annually, but had been losing many of its security staff to other banks over the last year, with others expected
Paths versus Recursion
/* * Iterative DepthFirst file list (c) Victor Yodaiken 2013 * * “Not the way we do it in Brooklyn” – Dave “Kinch” Arnow. * * * Data structure is P – the current path, with some aux data *
What happens when you do not use enterprise quality technology.
News from last year. Aug. 26, 2013 11:52 a.m. ET A glitch in time synchronization caused German exchange operator Deutsche BoerseAG DB1.XE -0.16% ‘s Eurex Exchange arm to halt trading for slightly more than an hour early Monday, the latest
Fischer Lynch Patterson and timeouts
There is a widely cited (over 1400 cites in CiteseerX ) result called the Fischer-Lynch-Patterson theorem about consensus – a key issue in distributed databases or any system where data is either distributed or replicated or both. In this paper, we
Why is clock synchronization so important in big data
Distributed transactions have historically been implemented by the database community in the manner pioneered by the architects of System R* [22] in the 1980s. The primary mechanism by which System R*-style distributed transactions impede throughput and extend latency is the requirement of an