I’m surprised that John McCain’s proposal to make health insurance benefits taxable has not received more notice. For a startup, cash is expensive and hard to find and it is a tremendous handicap for US startups that we have toÂ
more security databases
“I was pulled aside in a room … and you have to wait your turn to finally be released,” Labbé said. “An hour, an hour and a half, two hours, whatever it is after. Once I was caught in Miami
why databases are more interesting than operating systems
A discovery Cort Dougan and I made 10 years ago when we first got a glimpse at the mighty Oracle building on the Bay and realized that, commercially, operating systems are an afterthought. This article shows that things are just
Meaning of concurrent programs and IP
Most of the new draft of the Concurrent Programs paper has to do with trying to specify problems and solutions in synchronization via an atomic “compare and swap” operation. Even these operations are surprisingly complicated once put under the microscope
Updated: meaning of concurrent programs
Updated rough draft available with thrilling descriptions of atomic compare and swap and some comments on “formal methods”. Bonus photo
More on common weakness
Dan Quist writes in to point at that writing software is hard and we should expect errors. No doubt. Perfect software is not on the near horizon and good programmers using good tools will make stupid mistakes. But the CWE
Common Weakness Enumeration
The common weakness enumeration is an amazing document. Imagine if there was such a document for architecture/construction. That document would contain admonitions like – “remember to put in structural supports for upper floors” and “don’t lay floors on dirt” or
New paper “H2” on operating system semantics
Please see a new version here. I am continuing to try to develop a practical engineering mathematics for operating system and other complex system code.
operating systems are harder than quantum physics
Went to hear Tilak Agerwala talk on the “Future of Data Centers” and was struck again by the way in which system developers and chip architects find solving problems like quantum power leakage and manufacturing devices with 100 angstrom feature
clouds versus pcs
George Gilder had an article in Wired on data centers as clouds. My instinct is to dismiss anything Gilder writes because of his track record of wacky ideas (e.g. feminism is destroying civilization and supply side economics makes sense). But,