Cassandra is quite interesting – and time sync seems increasingly critical to correct operation. Here are some resources: A paper on the storage model from developers at Facebook. A reasonably clear introduction from IBM Developer Works. A big difficulty for
A hard theorem becomes easy over time.
The basic result of the incompleteness proofs is pretty simple. The proofs are complicated because the idea was literally unthinkable until programming was invented. The heroic efforts of Gödel, Skolem, Post, and Church to create a mathematics in which doing mathematics
From Jersey to Wall Street – or the equivalent
A common configuration for FSMLabs TimeKeeper customers is to cross-couple time sources in New Jersey and New York City or London and Slough or Chicago and Aurora or Singapore and Sidney- any two trading locations that are connected with high quality
Real-time Linux
My opinion has always been that the Linux-RT project was based on an unfixable engineering error. A few words on the status and the future of RT: ———————————————– The situation since last years RTLWS (https://lwn.net/Articles/572740/) has not improved at
The Horrors of Software Patents
US Patent Number 4701722 A is a perfect example of everything software patent opponents hate about software patents: It implements mathematical functions that are pretty well known. It covers a process of changing information not changing any physical object one
The technology disconnect
What it did was reinforce a point about the sociology of management: From cars to space shuttles, from offshore oil wells to nuclear reactors, the people who make the decisions are often out of step with the mechanical details.” – Mathew Wald,
The story we were told at a bank that I cannot name is that all their time synchronization was the domain of an engineer tucked away for 30 years in the home office, a fellow known as Professor Time. The
Back in the day
This is an embarrassing confession when I think back on how little I knew and how much I thought I knew. At the height of the dot-com/Linux boom, maybe 1999, picture a restaurant in Palo Alto, one of the favored
Heartbleed and open source
The Heartbleed bug was caused by a business model error. When we were in the real-time software business, our best customer was an old line manufacturing business that wanted to make sure before they qualified us as a vendor that
Measuring NTPd in the Cloud II
The problem with ntpd is the sudden performance degradations which can occur when conditions deviate from ‘ideal’. We have detailed these robustness issues of ntpd in prior work, including [17, 18]. Simply put, when path delay variability exceeds some threshold, which is a complex function