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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 agreement protocol between all participating machines at commit time to ensure atomicity and durability. To ensure isolation,…
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Patents considered harmful, by some.
@vyodaiken This makes no sense. You don’t foster competition by handing out monopolies. — Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) September 16, 2014 That’s not how it looks from here but I think part of the muddiness in the software patent argument is the result of arguments that really attack the entire idea of patents but are…
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Cassandra
Cassandra is quite interesting – and time sync seems increasingly critical to correct operation. Here are some resources: A paper on the storage model from developers at Facebook. A reasonably clear introduction from IBM Developer Works. A big difficulty for people who are, like me, more familiar with the relational databases is that Cassandra and…
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A hard theorem becomes easy over time.
The basic result of the incompleteness proofs is pretty simple. The proofs are complicated because the idea was literally unthinkable until programming was invented. The heroic efforts of Gödel, Skolem, Post, and Church to create a mathematics in which doing mathematics could be represented as some sort of calculation were an incredible feat of imagination. But…
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From Jersey to Wall Street – or the equivalent
A common configuration for FSMLabs TimeKeeper customers is to cross-couple time sources in New Jersey and New York City or London and Slough or Chicago and Aurora or Singapore and Sidney- any two trading locations that are connected with high quality network. Sometimes the network connection does not even have to be that great. TimeKeeper will…
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The Horrors of Software Patents
US Patent Number 4701722 A is a perfect example of everything software patent opponents hate about software patents: It implements mathematical functions that are pretty well known. It covers a process of changing information not changing any physical object one could touch. It is owned by a company with a business model depending on licensing…
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The technology disconnect
What it did was reinforce a point about the sociology of management: From cars to space shuttles, from offshore oil wells to nuclear reactors, the people who make the decisions are often out of step with the mechanical details.” – Mathew Wald, New York Times. 2014/06/09. We sell pretty complex software that synchronizes clocks of computers, down…
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The story we were told at a bank that I cannot name is that all their time synchronization was the domain of an engineer tucked away for 30 years in the home office, a fellow known as Professor Time. The system he had built was remarkable in its complexity and fragility. Nobody seemed to understand…
