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Actually, the Internet IS a series of tubes...

Alaska's Senior Senator Ted Stevens was widely disparaged for a speech he gave back in June of 2006 when he compared the Internet as a " series of tubes "[1]. The backlash against the comment was quite remarkable, IMHO. People seemed to believe that this Read More...
Posted Monday, July 30, 2007 9:36 AM by LarryOsterman | 26 Comments

The C abstract machine

I mentioned yesterday that the C/C++ language was defined to operate on an abstract machine. At the time I didn't know of an online reference to the C or C++ language standard, but a little birdie pointed me to this , which is a draft of the C language Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 16, 2007 3:50 PM by LarryOsterman | 21 Comments

Making stuff go fast on a network, part 1

So yesterday , I commented on how I was glossing over lots of details about how to make a client/server protocol operate efficiently on a network. After I wrote it, I realized that while it's out of scope for a single post, how to make a client/server Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 09, 2006 1:22 PM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments

Firewalls, a history lesson

Recently, a rather high profile software company has been taken to task about its patching strategy. One of the comments that was made by the customers of this company was basically: "We don't have to worry, all our servers are behind a firewall". I've Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 02, 2006 8:46 AM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments

The dreaded "beeping death"

Anyone who's been at Microsoft for long enough (long enough to use DOS on a day-to-day basis) remembers the deadly "beeping death". The "beeping death" was an artifact of the MS-NET product that we deployed for networking here at Microsoft, and I was Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 09, 2005 8:57 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

Does Visual Studio make you stupid?

I know everyone's talking about this, but it IS a good question... Charles Petzold recently gave this speech to the NYC .NET users group. I've got to say, having seen Daniel's experiences with Visual Basic, I can certainly see where Charles is coming Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 26, 2005 4:18 PM by LarryOsterman | 40 Comments

Re-applying the decal

Some of you might know this, others might not even care, but one of my private passions is a MMORPG game called " Asheron's Call " that Microsoft originally published with Turbine games. Valorie started playing it first (she was an early playtester for Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 11, 2005 9:15 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

Michael's finally writing the nitty gritty details of DllLoad

I don't normally post on weekends, but I just noticed that Michael Grier 's finally started posting his " How does the NT loader work " series. His second post, on the basic operation of the loader is also up. Michael sent out a doc internally on Thursday Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 18, 2005 1:04 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Book Review: Find the Bug by Adam Barr

Several months ago, I mentioned Adam Barr 's book " Find the Bug ". I pre-ordered it from Amazon, but have only now finally finished reading it, so it took me somewhat longer to get this book review out :) This is the first book review I've done since Read More...
Posted Monday, February 07, 2005 1:28 PM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

What's the big deal with the Moore's law post?

In yesterday's article , Jeff made the following comment : I don't quite get the argument. If my applications can't run on current hardware, I'm dead in the water. I can't wait for the next CPU. The thing is that that's the way people have worked for Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:45 PM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments

And the fourth video's now up on Channel9.

Robert just posted the fourth of the videos he shot last month. This one's short, about the hardest problem I've solved. Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 04, 2004 2:13 PM by LarryOsterman | 10 Comments

The consequences of ignoring nagling and delayed acks

Over most of this week, I’ve discussed how ignoring the underlying network architecture can radically hurt an application . Now it’s time for a war story about how things can go awry if you don’t notice these things. One of the basic Read More...
Posted Friday, August 06, 2004 5:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 6 Comments

Sometime soon, this internet thing is going to be really big, ya know.

But sometimes I wonder if it’s getting TOO big. I don’t normally try to do two rants quick succession, but there was a recent email discussion on an internal mailing list that sparked this rant. There’s a trend I’ve been seeing Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 15, 2004 10:10 PM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments
 
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