Liudvikas Bukys

Threads Considered Harmful. A little known anecdote is that after Dijkstra’s famous paper in “Communications of the ACM” titled “Goto Considered Harmful”, and after the reactions, the ACM has adopted a policy of not allowing papers with “… Considered Harmful” in the title. It seems it decided such papers are inherently inciting. Thus, Goto has a position of sole infamy in the history of the ACM. Nonetheless, if ever a feature has been easy to compare to Goto in its destructiveness, threads would be that feature. Threads are, in a sense, “the goto that keeps on giving”: once you have spawned a thread, there is no way to know anymore which line is being executed in parallel with yours — at least not with a lot of careful locking that a moment’s neglectfulness proves useless. When deciding to spawn a thread, you are conciously giving up any and all protection your language gives you from making stupid mistakes. The rest of the paper will try to convince you that while there is a limited class of problems for which threads are a good solution, your problem is almost certainly not among them — no matter what your problem is. [kuro5hin.org]

See also: links to similarly-provocative

presentation by John Ousterhout
and

message by Tom Christiansen.

Scientists Plan to Shake Hands Via Internet:

Pushing on the pen sends data representing forces through the Internet that can be interpreted by a phantom and therefore felt on the other end,” said Mel Slater, Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL)…

UCL will conduct the experiment on Tuesday with colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Stanford gives ‘A’ to distributed computing
A group of chemists–including Stanford assistant professor Vijay Pande–said they successfully predicted the folding rate of a protein using calculations worked out on a so-called distributed computing network. Their research, conducted last year, was published this week in the science journal Nature.
ZDNet Oct 23 2002 8:12AM ET [Moreover – Tech latest]

The New York Times on Hypocrisy of US IP Policies [Slashdot]

MIT: Smart Tech Ideas Mean Biz. Wired News Oct 17 2002 5:53AM ET [Moreover – Tech latest]

Electronic News:

Germans Rethink Wireless:

‘
Next month at the gargantuan Electronica show in Munich, Germany—where everything from light rail cars to fiber optic modules is shown in miles of exhibition space every fall—the Berlin company Nanotron Technologies will unveil the first transceiver silicon based on its multidimensional multiple access (MDMA) technology.

‘
What’s garnering gasps in the halls of communications engineering are the range and data rates—over 60 meters and more than 2Mbit/sec.—coupled with power consumption on the order of a keychain RFID tag. But the smile that follows those gasps comes from the chirping.

‘
“The essence of Nanotron’s technology is that they use the chirp technology,” says Heinz Arnold, a company spokesman. “It’s based on the principle in nature. It’s the way dolphins and bats communicate. By chirping, signals or symbols are coded in a very, very effective way because the energy distribution is very constant over time. This is exactly what you want over time, that you are not allowed to go over a certain low level of energy,” Arnold says.
‘

SlashDot:
NSF Grants for Decentralized Infrastructure Research:
The NSF has given a grant to the IRIS Project to research something called Distributed Hash Tables as a tool for creating networks that don’t have “centralized points of vulnerability”. The chief purpose seems to be to stop DoS attacks,

Roll Call:
Answering Mass E-mails Made Easier:
“Flooded with tens of thousands of pieces of mail a year, Congressional offices want to know one thing as soon as each letter is opened: Is it from a constituent?”

Is This Moon Three? [Slashdot]

Vint Cerf’s page on the
Interplanetary Internet