http://jpatterson.floe.tv pOld->Next = pNew->Next = pOld->Next Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:25:24 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en   I love it when a plan comes together. --- Hannibal, The A-Team Disclaimer: I'm a contributor on the openPDC and I work for TVA/NERC. These are my personal views and in no way espouse the opinion or position of my employer or the Federal government. These are simply my thoughts from an ... http://jpatterson.floe.tv/index.php/2009/10/29/the-smartgrid-goes-open-source/ Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion and in no way reflects the opinion of my employer. Today parallel programming at the commodity level is a booming sector both from big tech standpoint and from a small grassroots "web 2.0" standpoint; Most everyone who is connected to the internet has more data ... http://jpatterson.floe.tv/index.php/2009/07/20/a-high-level-comparison-of-hadoop-and-dryad/ saw them hurrying from either side and each shade kissed another, without pausing, Each by the briefest society satisfied. (Ants, in their dark ranks, meet exactly so, rubbing each other's noses, to ask perhaps What luck they've had, or which way they should go.) --- Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXVI Before I went back to grad school, I ... http://jpatterson.floe.tv/index.php/2009/07/19/tinyos-and-tinytermite/ Where there is an ecosystem, there are local experts. An outsider can muddle through an unfamiliar wilderness at some level, but to thrive or to survive a crisis, he'll require local expertise. Gardeners regularly surprise academic experts by growing things they aren't supposed to be able to grow because, as ... http://jpatterson.floe.tv/index.php/2009/04/19/the-data-ecology/ Without its software, a computer is basically a useless lump of metal. - first line of the book "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" So, in my last article, we took a look at the last 50 or so years of operating system evolution. In this article, I want to take a short ... http://jpatterson.floe.tv/index.php/2009/01/14/what-is-an-operating-system/ Long ago it became clear that in order to create more complex programs, we needed to shield programmers from the complexity of the hardware. [1] In any discipline, it's interesting to see where we've been to get an idea of where we might be heading. These days we hear a lot ... http://jpatterson.floe.tv/index.php/2008/12/12/a-quick-glance-at-the-history-of-the-operating-system/ Once the young lava fields of Iceland cool down, life begins anew little by little. Ice, wind and water flatten and carve out shapes to begin with, then, during the summer, bacteria, lichen and fungi prepare the soil for plants, in particular mosses which adapt to an environment which remains ... http://jpatterson.floe.tv/index.php/2008/11/30/a-road-sign-in-a-digital-world/ "Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to ... http://jpatterson.floe.tv/index.php/2008/11/23/ad-hoc-discovery-in-mesh-networks/ (This is a thread of an ongoing series on Self Organization; The first article was Emergence, and the preceding article was Self Organization and Social Insects.) In this article I want to explore discovery in social insects as it is a critical mechanic given that individuals in a colony have little ... http://jpatterson.floe.tv/index.php/2008/09/25/discovery-and-social-insects/ (This article is an entry on my continuing series on Self Organization. The first article was Emergence, and the article that preceeded this one was based on stigmergy. ) What is it that governs here? What is it that issues orders, forsees the future, elaborates plans, and preserves equilibrium? - Maeterlinck [1] Social ... http://jpatterson.floe.tv/index.php/2008/09/12/self-organization-and-social-insects/