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Patent trolling and guilty knowledge
Mr. Myhrvold: All of this fear is from people who have guilty knowledge of their own actions. There are lots of major tech companies that grew from zero to gigantically successful in a very short period of time without investing in their own inventions. They got there by using other people’s inventions. [cite] No kidding.
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US Elections and startup/small-business economics
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 to pay a huge amount for insurance for employees. But under current US tax law, the …
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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 getting better in a $500 million project!! When tested, the new system failed to find…
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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 – or not so surprisingly complicated if you think about the details of using or…
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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 compendium points to systemic problems in the field. Look at the problem of allowing unfiltered…
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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 “make sure there are no free unterminated wires left hanging out of walls.” Here is…
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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 sizes to be easier than improving operating system performance or design. Seymour Cray used to…
