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
Bitkeeper and tossing crates of money out the windows (vistas)
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
Adding value to Windows
Andy Bechtolscheim says: It’s really hard to add value to Windows. Whatever you add, Microsoft is going to take away from you. Linux has opportunities. There are many ways to add value. There are lots of things Sun customers expect
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
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
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
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
Another version of the slow moving recursive equations paper.
I’ll finish it someday, but here is a variant.
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
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,