General technology

Speech synthesis technology

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Rereading an article from last year’s August New Yorker, a discussion of e-paper devices and especially the Kindle by Nicholson Baker [1]: Reading some of “Max,” a James Patterson novel, I experimented with the text-to-speech feature. The robo-reader had a polite, halting, Middle European intonation, like Tom Hanks in “The Terminal,” and it was sometimes … Read more




Another DOSE of distributed software development

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The software world is not flat; it is multipolar. Gone are the days of one-site, one-team developments. The increasingly dominant model today is a distributed team; the place where the job gets done is the place where the appropriate people reside, even if it means that different parts of the job get done in different … Read more




Analyzing a software failure

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More than once I have emphasized here [1] [2] the urgency of rules requiring systematic a posteriori analysis of software mishaps that have led to disasters. I have a feeling that many more posts will be necessary before the idea registers. Some researchers are showing the way. In a June 2009 article [4], Tetsuo Tamai … Read more




Programming on the cloud?

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I am blogging live from the “Cloud Futures” conference organized by Microsoft in Redmond [1]. We had two excellent keynotes today, by Ed Lazowska [1] and David Patterson. Lazowska emphasized the emergence of a new kind of science — eScience — based on analysis of enormous amounts of data. His key point was that this … Read more




Dwelling on the point

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Once again, and we are not learning! La Repubblica of last Thursday [1] and other Italian newspapers have reported on a “computer” error that temporarily brought thousands of accounts at the national postal service bank into the red. It is a software error, due to a misplacement of the decimal points in some transactions. As usual … Read more




Computer technology: making mozzies out of betties

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Are you a Beethoven or a Mozart? If you’ll pardon the familarity, are you more of a betty or more of a mozzy? I am a betty. I am not referring to my musical abilities but to my writing style; actually, not the style of my writings (I haven’t completed any choral fantasies yet) but … Read more