According to this Amazon.com S3 Team write up on the loss of their S3 service’s availability, “very few requests were completing successfully” during an availability event. The service’s problems seem to have started at 08:40, and the service’s error rates did not fall back to normal, acceptable levels in the United States until 16:02pm. The […]
Many people place a notice of copyright on artifacts such as web pages and include the text, “All Rights Reserved,” without actually knowing what those rights are. The text of United States Code Title 17 (“Copyrights”), Chapter 1 (“Subject Matter and Scope of Copyright”), Section 106 (“Exclusive rights in copyrighted works”) is presented below: Subject […]
More interesting software systems are complex, and the implementation of complex software typically requires multiple developers. The introduction of additional developers increases software complexity, which requires the software design to provide for software components that are resilient against change. Functional behaviors or component dependencies, such as the need for one component to recognize that another […]
Another case of lost backups has recently been featured on the pages of Slashdot. Let’s just hope that the “proprietary compression and encoding tools” place the strength of their cipher on a key, rather than a proprietor’s secret cipher algorithm. The article seems to suggest that third-party security consultants were unable to decipher the data […]
If the definition of “computer specialist” can be stretched to include software engineers, then software engineering qualifies for Heather Boerner’s list of America’s Surprisingly Unhealthy Jobs. Though Boerner states that computer specialist jobs are associated with issues of ergonomics and her article appears to equate unhealthiness merely with injury, it is worth considering a sedentary […]