Economics of Free Software
Fate has made me the “money guy” for OpenSSL so I’m going to talk about that for a bit. As has been well reported in the news of late, the OpenSSL Software Foundation (OSF) is a legal entity created to...
View ArticleMeasuring 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]....
View ArticleHeartbleed 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...
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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...
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Article 2
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....
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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...
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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...
View ArticleReal-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...
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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...
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A hard theorem becomes easy over time.
Can it really be this simple? Suppose we have simple programming language where variables represent non-negative integers and where the range of integers represented is limited only by available...
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Cassandra
Cassandra’s unfortunate end. 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...
View ArticleA claimed validated operating system.
The claim: we have demonstrated the comprehensive formal verification of the seL4 microkernel, with a complete proof chain from precise, formal statements of high-level security and safety properties...
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Patents considered harmful, by some.
@vyodaiken This makes no sense. You don’t foster competition by handing out monopolies. — Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) September 16, 2014 That’s not how it looks from here but I think part of the...
View ArticleWhy is clock synchronization so important in big data
Distributed transactions have historically been implemented by the database community in the manner pioneered by the architects of System R* [22] in the 1980s. The primary mechanism by which System...
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Fischer Lynch Patterson and timeouts
There is a widely cited (over 1400 cites in CiteseerX ) result called the Fischer-Lynch-Patterson theorem about consensus – a key issue in distributed databases or any system where data is either...
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What happens when you do not use enterprise quality technology.
News from last year. Aug. 26, 2013 11:52 a.m. ET A glitch in time synchronization caused German exchange operator Deutsche BoerseAG DB1.XE -0.16% ‘s Eurex Exchange arm to halt trading for slightly...
View ArticlePaths versus Recursion
/* * Iterative DepthFirst file list (c) Victor Yodaiken 2013 * * "Not the way we do it in Brooklyn" - Dave "Kinch" Arnow. * * * Data structure is P - the current path, with some aux data * * Two basic...
View ArticleJP Morgan Security Breach
“Faced with the rising threat of online crime, JPMorgan has said it plans to spend $250 million on digital security annually, but had been losing many of its security staff to other banks over the last...
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Why is computer science education so horrible
This is a post about CS education. It is prompted by a seriesofposts by Mark Guzdial in which he criticizes the pervasive belief among CS educators that when it comes to programming, there’s not much...
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High Frequency trading and the batching remedy
These findings suggest that while there is an arms race in speed, the arms race does not actually eliminate the arbitrage opportunities; rather, it just continually raises the bar for capturing them. A...
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