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By now, most everyone is aware of the energy problem at its highest level: our primary sources of energy are running out, while the demand for energy in both commercial and domestic environments is increasing, and the side effects of energy use have ...

The rate at which power-management features have evolved is nothing short of amazing. Today almost every size and class of computer system, from the smallest sensors and handheld devices to the "big iron" servers in data centers, offers a myriad of ...

How much longer will current RAID techniques persevere? The RAID levels were codified in the late 1980s; double-parity RAID, known as RAID-6, is the current standard for high-availability, space-efficient storage. The incredible growth of hard-drive ...

The JavaScript language has a curious history. What began as a simple tool to let Web developers add dynamic elements to otherwise static Web pages has since evolved into the core of a complex platform for delivering Web-based applications. In the early ...

In my college computer science lab, two eternal debates flourished during breaks from long nights of coding and debugging: "emacs versus vi?"; and "what is the best programming language?" Later, as I began my career in industry, I noticed that the ...

I used to be a systems programmer, working on infrastructure used by banks, telecom companies, and other engineers. I worked on operating systems. I worked on distributed middleware. I worked on programming languages. I wrote tools. I did all of the ...

Software practitioners today could be forgiven if recent microprocessor developments have given them some trepidation about the future of software. While Moore’s law continues to hold (that is, transistor density continues to double roughly every 18 ...

In the May/June issue of Queue, Eric Allman wrote a tribute to Jim Gray, mentioning that Queue would be running some of Jim’s best works in the months to come. I’m embarrassed to confess that when this idea was first discussed, I assumed these papers ...

Modern applications are built using two very different technologies: object-oriented programming for business logic; and relational databases for data storage. Object-oriented programming is a key technology for implementing complex systems, providing ...

A number of important challenges are associated with the deployment and configuration of contemporary computing infrastructure. Given the variety of operating systems and their many versions—including the often-specific configurations required to ...

Performance pathologies can be found in almost any software, from user to kernel, applications, drivers, etc. At Sun we’ve spent the last several years applying state-of-the-art tools to a Unix kernel, system libraries, and user applications, and have ...

In December 1997, Sun Microsystems had just announced its new flagship machine: a 64-processor symmetric multiprocessor supporting up to 64 gigabytes of memory and thousands of I/O devices. As with any new machine launch, Sun was working feverishly on ...

The advent of SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) added a new degree of scalability to computer systems. Rather than deriving additional performance from an incrementally faster microprocessor, an SMP system leverages multiple processors to obtain large ...

I have to admit a great measure of sympathy for the IT populace at large, when it is confronted by the barrage of hype around grid technology, particularly within the enterprise. Individual vendors have attempted to plant their flags in the notionally ...

When I raised the idea at the Queue editorial advisory board meeting several months ago, it was because I think the way that software is now being delivered to us is quite interesting. Things have changed. Nowadays you much less often expect to “install”...

Driving the stretch of Route 101 that connects San Francisco to Menlo Park each day, billboard faces smilingly reassure me that all is well in computerdom in 2004. Networks and servers, they tell me, can self-defend, self-diagnose, self-heal, and even ...

Simulators are a form of “virtual machine” intended to address a simple problem: the absence of real hardware. Simulators for past systems address the loss of real hardware and preserve the usability of software after real hardware has vanished. ...

Finding information and organizing it so that it can be found are two key aspects of any company’s knowledge management strategy. Nearly everyone is familiar with the experience of searching with a Web search engine and using a search interface to ...

Google is one of the biggest success stories of the recent Internet age, evolving in five years from just another search engine with a funny name into a household name that is synonymous with searching the Internet. It processes about 200 million search ...

The name of the game is web services-sophisticated network software designed to bring us what we need, when we need it, through any device we choose. We are getting closer to this ideal, as in recent years the client/server model has evolved into web-...