Software Runs the World: How Scared Should We Be That So Much of It Is So Bad?

From The Atlantic: The underlying problem here is that most software is not very good. Writing good software is hard. There are thousands of opportunities to make mistakes. More importantly, it’s difficult if not impossible to anticipate all the situations that a software program will be faced with, especially when–as was the case for both… Continue reading Software Runs the World: How Scared Should We Be That So Much of It Is So Bad?

Berserk Algo: $440M

Knight Capital: Final Berserk Algo Bill To Knight – $440 Million; Stock Implodes Ten million dollars a minute. And it’s almost certainly the case that the software passed all its tests in the lab.

cppreference.com

A cool new (for me) site, cppreference.com. A super-navigable, super-clean C++ reference, including C++11. The only thing missing is a search box, but the search engines give you that.

Fantasecond response time

Here’s a fascinating in-depth study of one second of market data for a single stock: HFT [High Frequency Trading] Breaks Speed-of-Light Barrier, Sets Trading Speed World Record. Adds a new unit of time measurement to the lexicon: fantasecond. On September 15, 2011, beginning at 12:48:54.600, there was a time warp in the trading of Yahoo!… Continue reading Fantasecond response time

Super Cool, Super Divergent

Smart-phone platforms: iPhone, Android, WebOS, Maemo, etc. All are super-cool. But all are also astonishingly divergent in their approach to many of the details. So much so that one has to learn each one separately. My wife (an Android user) picks up my (webOS) phone and gets frustrated with it. I find this particularly surprising… Continue reading Super Cool, Super Divergent

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Insidious Ad Award

Here’s a screen-shot of ClamWin.com’s main page, as of today. Notice the giant Download button on the right. That’s really an ad for who-knows-what. To download ClamWin, you want the much-smaller download menu item on the left. Caveat emptor.

The Cloud: Availability vs Complexity

Via LinkedIn: Amazon Explains Its Cloud Disaster. As complexity grows, paths (through the software) and combinations of paths not often taken now fire. We spend a lot of time and energy controlling and predicting what will happen, but our best efforts aren’t always up to it. Hats off to Amazon for publishing their detailed finding.

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Categorized as Technical