Lucasian Litotes

Well, it wasn't a woman (Gee! I'm shocked), although it could have been but the committee wimped out. And it won't be long. At 63, Mike Green is the oldest appointment yet, and if the retirement rules are applied consistently (which they haven't always been), he only gets four years in the prestigious Chair once held by such luminaries as Newton (at 26) and Dirac (at 30). Conventional wisdom has it that theoreticians are past their "sell-by" date in their late twenties, but Newton didn't write The Principia until his mid forties and Hawking is still publishing in his sixties.

Parallelism in PDQ

All so-called "analytic solvers" for queueing models, including PDQ, assume that the queueing system being modeled is in steady state. Steady state means that in the long run, the number of arrivals into a service facility, e.g., customers arriving at a grocery checkout, will be identical to the number of customers departing. Why is this important?

Googling Google + Linux

Honorary Guerrilla alumnus, GB, sent me a link to "How Google uses Linux" which, although it provides an interesting view inside The Goog's datacenter management, looks like it's supposed to be available only to LWN subscribers:

"The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber." Eh? 

Not wishing to let any cats out of their subscription bag, I checked with the editor and he said it's ok to blog the link.

It's a BRisk Wind That Blows No Good

OK, I admit it. I can't resist this "I told you so" moment:

1. BRisk Management
   
2. When BRisk Goes Bust

But that doesn't mean I'm happy about it. In fact, I'd much prefer it had not happened. In case you missed what I'm talking about, a 5000 lb chunk of the San Francisco Bay Bridge (not the Golden Gate) fell onto the upper deck last night. Several drivers narrowly avoided potentially fatal injuries as pieces fell onto their vehicles. That's 2 tons or 2268 kg of falling steel, folks!


Click for video at KTVU Channel 2
Apparently, it was from the same cracked steel "I-bar" (a hinged strut shaped like the link in a bicycle chain) that delayed traffic flow while it was repaired less than 2 months ago. This failure was supposedly due to vibration from the high winds that prevailed yesterday, not an earthquake. No comment on the quality of the steel.

This Apple Does Fall Far From The B-Tree

That old adage: the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, doesn't apply to Apple the corporation. According to ArsTechnica today, Apple abruptly abandoned its open-source project to port Sun's ZFS as the filesystem for Mac OS X, on October 23rd.

The speculation is that Sun licensing fees may have been viewed as a roadblock to adoption or possibly there are growing concerns that Oracle's acquisition of Sun could cause other problems. In the meantime, Apple is hiring engineers to build its own advanced filesystem, instead of adopting either ZFS or its Linux derivative BtrFS.

Is SCO Waiting for Godot?

Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross remarked in his recent ruling that ongoing SCO Group litigation attempts were like a bad version of Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. The almost decade-long legal saga gained publicity in the FOSS community for targeting Linux as illegally containing licensed AT&T UNIX System V source code.

Hadoop, MAA, ML, MR and Performance Data

Over the past few months, I've been attending a series of talks on machine learning (ML), sponsored by ACM.org at the NASA Ames Research Center, with an eye to applying such things to gobs of computer performance data. Two pieces of technology that kept cropping up were Google MapReduce and Apache Hadoop.