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Dijkstra versus Perlis (updated)
Dijkstra wrote: He [Perlis] published a very obnoxious paper arguing against a mathematical approach to programming cite The paper by De Millo, Lipton and Perlis starts as follows: Many people have argued that computer programming should strive to become more like mathematics. Maybe so, but not in the way they seem to think. The aim of program…
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Investors and software patents
Talking to possible investors, smart people with a lot of business experience, is a reminder of how critical patents are to innovative small business. Every new idea attracts imitators and worse, and small companies, by definition, do not have the market inertia that allows giants to sell bottled tap water at premium prices.
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SCADA system security in the internet era
This Washinton Post article on a SCADA failure at a US nuclear power plant was noted in Slashdot, but not much elsewhere. Specifically, experts worry that vulnerabilities were introduced into the systems that regulate the electrical grid as power companies transferred control of generation and distribution equipment from internal networks to supervisory control and data…
