Made of Bugs

After my previous post got posted to reddit, there was a bunch of interesting discussion there about some details I’d handwaved over. This is a quick followup on some the investigation that various people carried out, and the conclusions they reached. In the reddit thread, lacos/lbzip2 objected that in his experiments, he didn’t see tar [...]

6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for complex reasons”. As a class about designing and building complex systems, it’s a reminder that failure modes are subtle and often involve strange interactions between multiple parts of a system. In my own experience, I’ve concluded that they’re often [...]