Alan Jeffrey

December 5, 2024

September 22, 2024 September 22, 2024 While getting ready to teach my While getting ready to teach my grad distributed systems course this fallgrad distributed systems course this fall, I found myself once again flipping through Cheriton and Skeen’s , I found myself once again flipping through Cheriton and Skeen’s rather scathing 1993 article “Understanding the limitations of causally and totally ordered communication”rather scathing 1993 article “Understanding the limitations of causally and totally ordered communication”..

The short version of this post: The last-ever !!Con is coming up in a month from today! Please spread the word about !!Con and get your tickets here!

You may or may not already know about !!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”), the radically eclectic, radically affordable conference of ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing!

There’s a classic tradeoff between safety and liveness in the context of replicated data systems, originally proposed by Eric Brewer and later made precise by Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch. The idea is that, in a networked system of servers that is vulnerable to partitions (that is, where messages betweeen servers can be arbitrarily delayed,...