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Plagiarism watch

Thanks to google code watch I see that an open source real-time Linux project has reached new heights of originality – changing the magic number that they copied from RTLinux 10 years ago to a new number. The constant definition #define RT_TASK_MAGIC 0x754d2774 which was in very early versions of RTLinux and appeared every previous…

November 26, 2006
Formal methods and verification

One of my correspondents has said my comments on formal method (here and here) were too terse. There are a couple of things that annoy me about formal methods, but the lack of results is the foremost annoyance. After multiple decades of “research”, there should be at least one theorem that tells us something non-obvious…

November 18, 2006
The Embedded Enterprise, Pruit-Igoe, Ayn-Rand, the telecommunications stack and why software does not suck

Programmers will readily tell you that “Windows sucks” or “Linux sucks” or “POSIX sucks” why this or that software is badly designed, bloated, slow, buggy, un-needed, ugly, and generally disgusting. But, Windows is actually an immensely useful and sophisticated program with astounding capabilities – Linux is too. POSIX is a comprehensive solution to many difficult…

November 15, 2006
Back from India

We were going into a government facility in Mumbai, and the guard points at me and asks, as if finding it hard to believe “He is a foreigner?” This was my fourth visit to India and, like all the others so far, mostly a rushed series of meetings and trips to airports, but I got…

November 2, 2006
Another version of the slow moving recursive equations paper.

I’ll finish it someday, but here is a variant.

October 22, 2006
Soft real time continues to sag

Paul McKenney once wrote: Despite such complications, priority inheritance works reasonably well for exclusive locks, and is a major component of Ingo Molnar’s CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT patch. There are strongly held opinions both for and against priority inheritance, for example. http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7168794919.html in which Victor Yodaiken considers priority inheritance to be harmful, and, as near as I can…

October 21, 2006
On the way to India

I’m off to give a talk in Bangalore and then visit Chennai and Mumbai. In his delightful book called The Argumentative Indian Amrtya Sen writes A good example is the transformation of Âryabhat’s Sanskrit term jya … [which] was translated, through proximity of sound, into Arabic jiba (a meaningless word in Arabic) and later transformed…

October 21, 2006
Amar G. Bose on business

B: Research in this country is going down. Prior to World War II, the United States was rather poor in research; that’s why radar was invented in England and Germany. We learned the value of research in World War II. But today the quickest way to save your bottom line is to cut off research.…

September 11, 2006
Soft real-time and soft design strategies versus QOS

[ see revised version ] (edited August 18 2007 to add back link and formatting) “Soft real-time” is a perfect example of the “soft design” I was complaining about in the previous post. There are perfectly good ways of characterizing quality of service assurances. For example, you could say that the average = x and…

September 5, 2006
Programming design style

Someone needs to come up with a slick name for “designed to fail during test instead of production” or for the more common “soft” type of programming. When we write code, we assume we screwed up somewhere, an assumption based on years of bitter experience (well, we assume someone screwed up, maybe in the tools,…

August 31, 2006

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keeping simple

Groundbreaking treatise on state machines, paxos, specification
The RTLinux patent 5,995,745
Notes on Security and Common Criteria
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