Jim Gray disappeared and I hope he will reappear unharmed. I met him once at a Supercomputing show when Cort Dougan and had just been snubbed by the AIX developers at the PowerPC booth who explained that the Linux PowerPC port Cort had just written was beneath their contempt. Gray came up to us and…

There is the classic by Vahalia on UNIX implementation (new edition supposedly coming out ) which, is in my always humble opinion the only worthwhile modern OS textbook although the original edition of Shaw’s book is good too. It’s depressing to see that my list has not changed in 10 years – either I’m fossilized…

From Outlaws of the Marsh, translated by Sidney Shapiro The second [bandit] was Jiang Jing, from Tanzhou in Hunan. Originally he had studied for the imperial examinations. But when he failed to pass, he abandoned the pen and took up the sword. A clever fellow, he was a skilled mathematician. In ten thousand calculations, he…

A correspondent back from a war somewhere writes: More to the point, we had a large amount of Civvy laptops, and military systems together. There were major problems with dust, heat etc. From what I read of the Tilt bits on the DRM in Vista, one malfunctioning peripheral could shut down the whole network. In…

Spolsky recently writes Alain de Botton, writing in The Architecture of Happiness (Pantheon Books, 2006) has a section on elegance that any software designer will find familiar. And I do find it drearily familiar: it is ignorantly dismissive and embraces the Le Corbusier fallacy and, (oddly) directly contradicts Spolsky’s argument. Le Corbusier was an architect…

Here are four quotes. Quotes 1, 3, and 4 all make sense together, if you are sufficiently cynical, but quote #2 is remarkably odd when taken with the others. 1For ten years now, free software developers have tried various methods of finding funds, with some success. There’s no need to make anyone rich; the median…

wish I was like Mr. Gates, all my money in big crates – Bruce Springstein One of the many peculiar features of the software industry is the stubborn manner in which important innovations are ignored. If you read this account of Microsoft’s source code managment methods and this more believable response, and you know about…