On March 30, 2020, the ACM announced that its digital library would be open access for three months. During that time, every conference paper, journal article and book chapter published by the ACM was free to the general public. They didn’t even require a login. The reason to open the digital library was a good […]
A decade ago, I was a new graduate student at William and Mary taking a course called “Linux Kernel Internals.” For this course, we all presented a walk-through of a particular part of the kernel. I had the boot process, and I created the slides Booting: From Power Up to Login Prompt. The slides can […]
A fundamental tenet of modern biology is that life happened once. In principle, we can trace the lineage of everything alive today back to that occurrence. And, as a consequence, everything alive is related. We can infer how related everything is by comparing the genomes of different species. Because the genomes for humans and chimps […]
A surprisingly common sentiment among some programmers is that “computer science is math.” Certainly, computer science as a rigorous discipline emerged from mathematics. Now, we consider such foundational work to be theoretical computer science. For example, Alonzo Church’s lambda calculus and Alan Turing’s Turing machine provided a theoretical foundation for computation. At the time, the […]