[COSM-NEWS] Cosm News - 2000 June 7
Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Wed, 7 Jun 2000 10:47:54 -0500 (CDT)
Time for a quick update on Cosm and related things.
Status:
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CS-SDK is done, ready, and waiting... for the license. This is still a
bottleneck, as hunting for lawyers who understand licensing is not going
well. This is getting to be extremely frustrating to say the least, the
release of 10 hours of work (CS-SDK) have been delayed months by lack of
a license.
We have returned to work on the CPU/OS layer, getting it done and fully
polished. Several function families have been added to replace unsafe
functions in the ANSI C libraries and handle the expanded data types.
The self-tests and other areas that assure compatibility still need more
work, but noone seems to want to help do that last 5% that takes 95% of
the skill. That means that this is also a bottleneck preventing further
progress, but quality software takes many times longer then a hack.
We still need programmers for the MacOS and other unsupported platforms
including VMS and QNX. Most people seem to be in low gear for summer,
but a weekend porting project shouldn't stress your vacation
mentality too badly :)
Press:
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Discovery.com (May 2000)
http://www.discovery.com/news/features/supercomputer/supercomputer.html
[I'm not too happy with the article, it wasn't fact-checked at all]
We should have press coverage coming up in Wired, Computer, and CIO
magazines, so watch for it if you read those publications. The Wired
article has promise, as I worked with them during fact-checking to get
their usage of terms and concepts correct, so cross your fingers.
It's been interesting watching the last couple months as a new
"SETI-like" company is launched every few days, and the press is eating
it up. Too bad the press is 27 years behind the cutting edge publication
Business Week - http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber/ring1.gif
Miscellaneous:
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I will be speaking at RootFest 2000
(http://www.rootfest.org/index2.html) here in Minneapolis, MN. It is a
computer security conference running from June 14-16, 2000. I will be
speaking on security in distributed systems. I will be around all 3
days.
For academic types [it's an invite only event, but I believe submissions
are still open] I'll be speaking at TWIST 2000
(http://www.isr.uci.edu/events/twist/twist2000/) at the University of
California, Irvine, July 13-14, 2000. For this Cosm will definitely be a
central topic (pun intended) of my talk.
I should also be speaking at the Information Security Olymfair-Workshop
2000 (the site will be up at http://www.olymfair.org/) in Taejon, South
Korea, July 20-22, 2000. I'm not sure if we have any cosm-news readers
in South Korea, but if there are let me know.
- Adam L. Beberg
Mithral Communications & Design, Inc.
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/