Liudvikas Bukys

Boston Globe:

Got paper? Beth Israel Deaconess copes with a massive computer crash

Network World: Hospital sounds alarm after 3-day struggle

Slashdot: Hospital Brought Down by Networking Glitch

See also an earlier Boston Globe article:
Hospital computer crash a lesson to the industry

OS News: An Overview of the Boa Web Server:
Boa is a single-tasking HTTP server. Boa does not fork a copy of itself or spawn a thread to handle each incoming connection, but rather internally multiplexes the connections. Boa only forks for CGI programs, automatic directory generation, and automatic file gunzipping, each of which must be a separate process.

gridMathematica Announced [Slashdot]

SpamArchive.org Launched [Slashdot]

IBM to build fastest supercomputers. CNET Nov 19 2002 7:28AM ET [Moreover – Tech latest]

A Vote for Less Tech at the Polls. Wired News Nov 19 2002 7:32AM ET [Moreover – Tech latest]

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.

XDCC – An .EDU Admin’s Nightmare

Summary:
In a recent advisory written by Microsoft, and by trends being noticed by many university administrators over the past recent years, people have wanted to know what all these slave computers are on IRC. These machines are serving to newest warez (games, movies, apps, mp3, ect.) to anyone that knows how to use a keyboard. Also, massive amounts of bandwidth is being wasted (easily up to 2MB/s each machine). In this, I will describe from an insiders view, what is happening, how this is being done, how to see if you are a victim, and what you can do to prevent this from happening to your network.

Four Simultaneous Access Points OK for 802.11b [Slashdot]

IBM uncloaks heavyweight supercomputer. CNET Nov 15 2002 2:13PM ET [Moreover – Tech latest]