Dan Siemon

Tag: Computers

  • The Future of Computing

    The Future of Computing: From mainframes to microblades, farewell to GHz CPUs provides a nice overview of trends in CPU and system design. I have a couple of comments to add. When in late 1950s computers became fast enough to relieve some of the coding burden from the shoulders of programmers high level languages were…

  • Operating system design

    The following article offers a nice introduction to some design techniques that may be used to create more reliable operating systems. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that microkernels long discarded as unacceptable because of their lower performance compared with monolithic kernels might be making a comeback due to their potentially higher reliability, which many…

  • Moore’s law is not dead

    In a post called Don’t Become Moore Confused, Greg Matter (a Sun employee) offers some insights into Moore’s law and system design. Very interesting ideas.

  • Vim tips for DOS text files

    DOS (Windows) uses CR-LF to mark the end of lines in text files. Unix just uses LF. Wikipedia has a long article on these differences if you are interested. Viewed in older versions of vim, DOS text files had a ^M at the end of every line. This made identification of text files that had…

  • Copyright in the digital world

    In Copyright vs. The Laws of Physics the author discusses copying in the digital world. In reality, every action on digital information involves copying. This is the fundamental reason why copy protection on computers is so hard. Lawrence Lessig touches on this in Free Culture too. Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than…

  • UPSs and testing

    Today, I decided it was time to test my UPSs out to make sure they were still functioning properly. Like any well designed product UPSs just work. They fade into the background which makes it easy to forget that they may need maintenance too. Computers can be very sensitive to power conditions. The hardware expects…

  • DRM

    Wow. Everyone interested in copyright and how it applies to new technologies should read this. Absolutely brilliant.

  • Lightening and DSL

    Reading Bob’s blog entry about lightening over here made me think about lightening and DSL modems. Bob’s quite right about computers most often getting lightening damage through the phone lines not the power lines. The fact that most DSL services use external modems actually provides a extra layer of protection for your computer. For lightening…

  • Non-open software

    I finally broke down and installed some non-open software on my desktop. This is something I try hard not to do. I don’t even have the Macromedia Flash plugin installed. I installed Real player so I could listen to CBC for the election coverage. Hopefully someday CBC will use Icecast so I don’t need this…

  • 2^x or 10^x?

    When working on my Linux QoS project I ran into the confusion over what k,M,G mean in computing again. Here is the problem. In normal usage k = 1000. Obvious example, kilometer == 1000 meters. However in computing the factor most used is 1024. This means a kilobyte in your computer RAM is 1024 bytes…