Four short links: 8 May 2019
Old Timers, Web Flashback, Software Collapse, Revisions to Paxos
- Brian Kernighan interviews Ken Thompson (YouTube) — wonderful footage from Vintage Computer Festival East 2019.
- Hypertext and our Collective Destiny (Tim Berners-Lee) — a 1995 talk honouring Vannevar Bush. I had (and still have) a dream that the web could be less of a television channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge. (via Daniel G. Siegel)
- Dealing with Software Collapse — The main issue with the rot metaphor is that it puts the blame on the wrong piece of the puzzle. If software becomes unusable over time, it’s not because of any alteration to that software that needs to be reversed. Rather, it’s the foundation on which the software has been built, ranging from the actual hardware via the operating system to programming languages and libraries, that has changed so much that the software is no longer compatible with it.
- Distributed Consensus Revised (Part II) (The Morning Paper) — In today’s post, we’re going to be looking at Chapter 3 of Dr. Howard’s thesis, which is a tour (“systematization of knowledge,” SoK) of some of the major known revisions to the classic Paxos algorithm.
