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Timestamp based reconciliation
Timestamp based reconciliation: This case differs from the previous one only in the reconciliation mechanism. In case of divergent versions, Dynamo performs simple timestamp based reconciliation logic of “last write wins”; i.e., the object with the largest physical timestamp value is chosen as the correct version. The service that maintains customer’s session information is a good example of a service that…
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Murdoch strikes against copyrights
The witnesses allege a software company NDS, owned by News Corp, cracked the smart card codes of rival company ONdigital. ONdigital, owned by the ITV companies Granada and Carlton, eventually went under amid a welter of counterfeiting by pirates, leaving the immensely lucrative pay-TV field clear for Sky. The allegations, if proved, cast further doubt…
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Loose cables at CERN and Time synchronization is hard
According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos’ flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it…
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Julia programming language and hadoop
While we’re being demanding, we want something that provides the distributed power of Hadoop — without the kilobytes of boilerplate Java and XML; without being forced to sift through gigabytes of log files on hundreds of machines to find our bugs. We want the power without the layers of impenetrable complexity. We want to write…
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The UNIX file system as a recursive function
Ignoring “write” operations, for the moment, a file system is just an implementation, a concrete manifestation, of a map from file names to file contents. A UNIX style file system complicates the story because file names are “paths” through a somewhat compromised tree structure. You could try to express the relationships between nodes in this…
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Apple’s A5 chip made in Austin
Although I think it might have been designed here too. The A5 processor – the brain in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 – is now made in a sprawling 1.6 million square feet factory in Austin owned by Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics, according to people familiar with the operation. One of the few…
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Droning on about computer security
Good grief. The US military’s unmanned Predator and Reaper drones are continuing to fly remote missions overseas despite a computer virus that has infected their US-based cockpits. Government officials are still investigating whether the virus is benign, and how it managed to infect the heavily protected computer systems at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada,…
