Visting LinuxWorld in San Francisco reminded me that one of the advantages Apple has in the cell-phone market is that it can set design goals to be “what people who buy cell phones want”. While you might think this would
Formal methods for doing what?
John Regehr’s question below gets to one of the basic problems I see in the field of “formal methods” – the general failure of researchers in the field to look at experimental data and the operation of actual systems. The
Chapter 2: liveness and scheduling
Draft is available https://www.yodaiken.com/papers/rec.html
Operating system design and specification: Part 1.
[Note: This is the first in a series of “chapters”. I’ll be revising as I see errors and in response to comments. As usual, this material is copyright Victor Yodaiken and rights are given to make, but not sell, verbatim
Security cannot be improved by waving flags
Via Schneier comes a story about the US Navy and a disgruntled contractor who just plead guilty: He confessed to programming malicious software codes into computers that track Navy submarines in May 2006 while in Naples. He told Navy investigators
Enterprise operating systems
Can anyone name a single feature of “enterprise†operating systems available today that was not already working in VMS or Solaris or SGI’s system 10 or more years ago? Multi-processor support – practically prehistoric. Here’s a wise observation: â€Since the
Difference between theory and practice in security and reliability.
Theory of how F-22 Fighter software is going to be made bulletproof. Practice. Update: More practice (noted by Ben_k on Bruce Schneier’s weblog). Update2: See this paper and this one.
Operating system interfaces are what you bump into…
Operating system interfaces are what you bump into when you are trying to do your work. There is no need for workaday users to see an operating system interface at all; the current OS interface is bureaucratic bloat, an unnecessary
Security notes
David Elliot Bell has an interesting essay on the US government and software security – little “inside baseball”, but informative. He cites my critique of MILS. One of Bell’s points, which is briefly mentioned in my note, is that composition
Talmudic codes
My knowledge of Talmud is, to be generous, zilch, but consider the format and style of Talmud. This is what you get when each commentator takes the arguments of colleagues and predecessors seriously. In the center a discussion between one