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Domain: acmqueue.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to acmqueue.org.
Stories · 14
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Peter Tippett on Biomedicine and Security
gManZboy writes "IT security borrows some of its most basic terminology (e.g., virus) from biomedicine. It's therefore no surprise then that some of the top minds in the field have backgrounds in biomedicine. Two such figure are Peter Tippett, CTO of Cybertrust, who earned a medical degree and went on to develop what later became Norton Antivirus; and Steve Hofmeyr, who studied the marriage of biology and computation at MIT and later founded Sana Security. In this roundtable discussion, the two discuss how biomedicine informs their thinking about security and when and when not to apply the metaphor. Of particular note is their discussion of the pros and cons of using both signature and non signature-based methods of intrusion detection." -
The Future of Databases
gManZboy writes "Ever wonder where database technology is going? This is something that Turing award winner Jim Gray from Microsoft has given a lot of thought to. He recently published an article in which he looks at the many forces pushing database technologies forward, and what those new technologies will look like. Gray writes, 'the greatest of these [research challenges] will have to do with the unification of approximate and exact reasoning. Most of us come from the exact-reasoning world -- but most of our clients are now asking questions that require approximate or probabilistic answers.'" -
On Plug-ins and Extensible Architectures
gManZboy writes "Developers who want a flexible, configurable, IDE have long preferred plug-in architectures such as Eclipse over what they might view as the bloated, monolithic alternatives. Ever wondered how it all works? Well, ACM Queue just posted an article by someone who has worked on Eclipse since its inception, Dorian Birsan. He gives a great explanation of the Eclipse architecture as well as a thorough analysis of things to watch out for when developing or working with pure plug-in architectures." -
How Hard Is It To Write Your Own Search Engine?
kha0z writes "Anna Patterson, from Stanford University, overviews the difficulties that have to be overcome when attempting to develop and/or implement a search engine solution in this article in the ACM Queue Magazine. The article covers many issues dealing from data sources, to indexing, to ranking. How does Google make it look so easy?" -
How Hard Is It To Write Your Own Search Engine?
kha0z writes "Anna Patterson, from Stanford University, overviews the difficulties that have to be overcome when attempting to develop and/or implement a search engine solution in this article in the ACM Queue Magazine. The article covers many issues dealing from data sources, to indexing, to ranking. How does Google make it look so easy?" -
Turing Award Winner On The Future of Storage
weileong writes "Ars Technica highlights an interview at ACM Queue with Jim Gray, a winner of the ACM Turing award *(among other things) by one of the pioneers of RAID (among other things). Many issues touched upon, including: "programmers have to start thinking of the disk as a sequential device rather than a random access device." "So disks are not random access any more?" "That's one of the things that more or less everybody is gravitating toward. The idea of a log-structured file system is much more attractive. There are many other architectural changes that we'll have to consider in disks with huge capacity and limited bandwidth." Actual interview has MUCH detail, definitely worth reading." -
Commercializing Open Source Software
CowboyRobot writes "Michael Karels, system architect for BSD 4.3 and 4.4, has an article on ACM Queue about the challenges in trying to make money from open source software. From the article: 'As users of the software, open source contributors have certain common interests in making the software stable and usable.' but 'When additions require modifications to the base system, there may be resistance to incorporating the changes.'" -
Open Source at TiVo
CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an article by TiVo co-founder Jim Barton, in which he explains how the company relies on open source technologies to create a closed-source product. A good lesson in how other companies can do the same. From the article: Careful management of our sources to abide by the terms of the GNU General Public License while protecting our proprietary developments is a small price to pay for this benefit." -
Open Source at TiVo
CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an article by TiVo co-founder Jim Barton, in which he explains how the company relies on open source technologies to create a closed-source product. A good lesson in how other companies can do the same. From the article: Careful management of our sources to abide by the terms of the GNU General Public License while protecting our proprietary developments is a small price to pay for this benefit." -
Disk Drives Explained
CowboyRobot writes "Magnetic disk drives are one of those things I usually take for granted without thinking about, but I recently realized how little I understood about how they really work. ACM Queue has an article from their 'Storage' issue titled, 'You Don't Know Jack About Disks', which does a very good job of explaining exactly how magnetic disks have evolved since the 70s and how they work today." -
Mailing Disks is Faster than Uploading Data
CowboyRobot writes "Who would ever, in this time of the greatest interconnectivity in human history, go back to shipping bytes around via snail mail as a preferred means of data transfer? Jim Gray would do it, that's who. And we're not just talking about Zip disks, no sir. We're talking about shipping entire hard drives, or even complete computer systems, packed full of disks. David Patterson (one of the developers of both RISC and RAID) interviews ACM Turing Award winner Jim Gray." Back in school we always had a saying, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes." Seems like that still holds true. -
Open Spectrum: Toward Ubiquitous Connectivity
obiwan2u writes "ACM's Queue magazine has a moderately dense article describing how new intelligent radios may free up under-utilized spectrum bandwidth, possibly providing solutions to the last mile bottleneck." -
Open Spectrum: Toward Ubiquitous Connectivity
obiwan2u writes "ACM's Queue magazine has a moderately dense article describing how new intelligent radios may free up under-utilized spectrum bandwidth, possibly providing solutions to the last mile bottleneck." -
Linux's Future As The Next Embedded OS
CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an interview with Jim Ready about how embedded systems differ from desktops and servers, and how they will help shape the future of Linux. From the article: Your car, for instance, now has telematics -- mapping, navigation, and entertainment systems -- that clearly present a very sophisticated user interface... The neat part for me now is that embedded systems can consist of Linux applications with beautiful graphical interfaces."