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What's Worked in Computer Science

posted by cmn32480 on Monday November 30 2015, @08:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the thought-provoking dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of "computer systems research" [PDF]. Here are his opinions from 1999 on "what worked".

Yes

Virtual memory
Address spaces
Packet nets
Objects / subtypes
RDB and SQL
Transactions
Bitmaps and GUIs
Web
Algorithms

Maybe

Parallelism
RISC
Garbage collection
Reuse

No

Capabilities
Fancy type systems
Functional programming
Formal methods
Software engineering
RPC
Distributed computing
Security

Basically everything that was a Yes in 1999 is still important today.

The article is a current snapshot on those issues. Do you agree?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday December 01 2015, @12:11PM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Tuesday December 01 2015, @12:11PM (#270134)

    I don't know what's specifically going on, because in the morning my machine has frozen so there are no error messages. I know the exact same hardware ran older Fedora with KDE4 just fine, but since I upgraded to F22 and KDE5 it's been hard to keep these machines up for any length of time without lockups or crashes. I discovered how to restart KDE5's compositor without reloading my whole session, which helps, but I never had to do that with KDE4 and didn't even know how. I'm not sure why KDE5 is so unstable. After a few days, right-click menus, tooltips, and dialog boxes are solid black. My other machine freezes. Hopefully things will get more stable as time goes on, but KDE5 seems a strange leap backwards considering how great KDE4 was. Did they scrap the code and start over?

    Yes, I do use a UPS, but not for extended power outages because the batteries are so expensive I don't want to drain them.

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  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday December 01 2015, @05:18PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Tuesday December 01 2015, @05:18PM (#270258)

    sorry you have extended outages!!! I think I have only had 1 every few years. I will say though, having a UPS *just* for mobiles, greatly saves the anxiety of an outage. The battery on a mobile device is so much smaller than the draw of a desktop!

    If you want to debug KDE5 (on topic) there are symbol libraries you can install and an option in KDE to "report crashes". If you turn that on, you might at least get an objective measure of "hang" or crash.

    I should add that a hang on my system was caused by webmin (an admin tool) calling parted (a disk partition tool) every 20 minutes, to look for changed devices - I disabled it as this is a workstationb. It took me a year to find, but was definitely causing my machine to lock-up!