You don’t own that car

A modern car only runs because of the software. GM has copyright on the software. They contend that the owner of the car only has a license to make use of the software. If they or some they hire (like an independent mechanic) tinkers with the software it is breaking the law. This doesn’t look good. The courts agree with GM, it will raise the cost of cars and reduce choice. Read more here.

CLOUD 2015

Congratulations to Kamal. He had two papers accepted to CLOUD 2015. “Dynamically controlling node-level parallelism in Hadoop” describes an online mechanism that adapts the node-level parallelism to improve performance up to 28% over best practices. The second paper “Evaluation of MapReduce in a large cluster” discussion our experiences with Pivot’s Analytic Workbench, a 500+ node Hadoop cluster.

The acceptance rate at CLOUD 2015 was 14%, which is 2% for two papers (OK-that isn’t quite how it works).