In a previous note I objected to venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki’s requests (demands) for shallow and glib sales pitches in PowerPoint, but Professor Edward Tufte
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Digital Rights Management and Logic
The Sony DRM fiasco is due to a common failure of requirements management logic. If an engineered system relies on certain properties, whenever you add
Read morePower Point, Rocket Science and dangers of compelling stories
In American English, you can say that something is not too difficult by saying “it’s not rocket science.” We don’t have a good idiom for
Read moreFormal methods and academic computer science
Holloway [22] points out that the typical argument in favor of formal methods (that software is bad, unique, and discontinuous; that testing is inadequate; and
Read moreWhy programs fail and get hacked
“People’s distrust of the high-pressure engines was confirmed when the boiler of a stationary engine exploded at Greenwich on 8 September 1803. It was the
Read morePriority Inheritance: Hack or Error
The subject of priority inheritance has come up again on the Linux kernel mailing list and Torvalds correctly notes “Friends don’t let friends use priority
Read moreComparing VXworks to RTLinux
A couple of years ago, one of our salesmen asked us to comment on a comparison between VxWorks and RTLinux performance that had a prospective
Read moreHandbook of Networked and Embedded Control Systems
You can find an article on writing real-time control loops in RTLinux inside the giant Hristu-Varsakelis, Levine Handbook of Networked and Embedded Control. The article
Read moreProving Operating Systems Correct:#8
One of the longstanding problems with operating systems is that there is no way to validate their correctness in the same way that engineers can
Read moreThe romance of trade and fuzzy slippers
Commerce used to be more fashionable. The French historian Fernand Braudel writes that in the 1630s “ten ships a year from the Indian ocean, from
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