[fixed a couple of typos, Dec. 20 2007] John Regehr writes: On the other hand, there is plenty of useful work to be done on supporting time sensitive applications (I’ll just avoid saying “soft real-time”) even when no guarantees are
Are programmers smarter than Hollywood writers after all?
Don Marti in comments below notes Reruns of “I Love Lucy†and “Knight Rider†don’t stop working when the studio fails to bring in writers to maintain them. Maybe the programmers are smarter after all.
Soft real-time and QOS (revised)
[ revised version of an older post] “Soft real-time” is a perfect example of the “soft design” noted in an earlier post. There are perfectly good ways of characterizing quality of service (QOS) assurances precisely. Doug Jenson proposes one possible
Free digital content and the daily show
Video about “free digital content”. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzRHlpEmr0w&rel=0&color1=0xd6d6d6&color2=0xf0f0f0&border=1]
Hollywood writers are smarter than programmers
The strike in Hollywood is about royalties. The writers, who are used to getting a share of the royalties on their work, want to keep getting royalties on work shown on the internet. The producers are making the claim that
Sparc T2 (niagra 2)
UT architecture seminar today was by Greg Grohoski from Sun – an updated version of his Hot Chips talk. I’m not a big fan of this approach to chip architecture: 8 processors, each with 8 threads, but they are working
OpenBSD developer notes king’s clothing is “virtual”
Theo de Raadt explains why virtualization does not improve security. How about this: to improve security, you have to have a secure design, a marketing buzzword won’t do the trick. Anyone who has seriously looked that the current generation x86
The Linux community
According to Greg’s email, organizations that contributed more than 100 changesets to the recently released 2.6.23 kernel included: Red Hat with 827 changesets (11.7%), IBM with 557 changesets (7.9%), the Linux Foundation with 528 changesets (7.5%), Novell with 449 changesets
Distributed shared memory from first principles
[Update 10/16] What is the fundamental performance limiting factor that has dominated that last 30 years of computer architecture? The obvious answer is the disparity between processor and memory/storage speed. We connect processors to cache, to more cache, to even
Smart engineering design
Amy Smith and her work and her student