Fran Allen

Fran Allen has made outstanding contributions to the field of programming languages for almost forty years, and her work has significantly influenced the wider computer science community.

Here is her entry at WITI (Women In Technology International) and there is text about her at IBM Research.

A historic presentation by her on the "partnership" of processors and compilers can be found there.

Her entry at the Computer History Museum says, she has developed several programming languages that have advanced the fields of computer science and optimization compiling. She helped create one of the first automatic debugging systems and, as a member of the Stretch/HARVEST project, developed an advanced code-breaking language known as Alpha. Vow!

Worked with Lynn Conway in the IBM ACS project.

On Jan 15 06 NWY (not wikipediaed yet).

Update: Fran Allen now has wikipedia entries in Cesky Deutsch, Español, Français, Ivrit, Norsk (bokmål) and ???. Of course.

Krisztina Holly

M.I.T.'s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovations Executive Director

has turned an interest in engineering and an aptitude for marketing and entrepreneurship into an exceptionally diverse and rewarding career. Recently taking on the role of executive director of MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation [2002], Holly plans to share her knowledge of technology, product development, entrepreneurship and the corporate world with those preparing to enter these fields. [ web.mit.edu ]

If u got time for only 1 read, try this Protocol of an interactive session with KH at Stanford.

It seems in '98, when she was at RiverRun Media she used Frontpage to prepare a site and as a personal tool. Amazing, what people let lie around on the web. I like this todo list and this unfinished history page.

An active member of the New England mountain bike community.

As of Jan 15 06 not yet wikipediaed.

Ken and Dennis belong in here of course

And always have. I just thought they were wellknown stars anyway and I'd rather dig out the less wellknown "whodun important work" people.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were the main creators of the computing paradigm ushered in by Unix and C, are less famous nowadays but more important than Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.

Without Torvalds though, his kernel implementation and his open sourcing of it most of their ideas and work would be in a niche now, which would be really bad.

Anastassia Ailamaki: Staged Database Systems

GOOG being what it is and computing moving away from the 70ies, 80ies, 90ies "Client/Server" computing and "HFS/RDB" (Hierarchical File system/Relational Database) storage paradigm, I still think there are lots of applications for small computers and more conventional research. Quite a lot of people still do good work in those fields.

One of them seems to be: Anastassia Ailamaki.

And two of the fields she works in are:

Staged Database Systems: The main philosophy of the Staged DB design is to group concurrent tasks per software and hardware resource in the system. We do not propose a major overhaul in existing DBMS software. Rather, a small number of targeted changes can encapsulate existing functions into micro-servers (stages) ready to process a group of tasks. Papers are here.

Data Mining meets Traffic Modeling Traffic modeling of storage workloads is extremely helpful in evaluating system designs. They got a nice abstract (pdf) too there.

So, if these people are really good, relieve might come to us poor asses with lots of content in RDBMses.

My own ideas of "staged databasing" were a lot more primitive: basically I had the ideas to run fresh content from small mysql dbs and servers and automate backending in large Oracle stores or so. Probably hard to do & not very efficient. Sometimes one should listen to science a bit more and study a problem in earnest.

Apropos database features and cost: A Comparison of Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL DBMS from the Fermi National Accelerator Lab.

Jeremy Zawodny asks How Cheap is MySQL? SPEC gives a classical answer. mySQl set a TOPSC (TotalOperationsPerSecond Cost = System Cost divided by TOPS) record of $82 in 2004 but in the meantime the large ROI companies have came back to fight and the record stands at $47 as of first quarter 2005 The new record holder is SQLServer on Windows Server 2003 running HP (Proliant HW) running . The cheapest Oracle solution comes on Dell Itanium machines running 10g on Linux at $101.

On the other hand the Oracle solution came out at 1656 TOPS, mySQl on Sun renders 1363 TOPS and the priceworthy HP/MS DBMS at 1001. Of course these tests are highly abstract and do not consider TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) or anything daily real world. What we can see though, is, that overall competition is tight. Probably the most important factor is: where did you invest your team's learning energy?

Accidental discovery of today: What used to be Red China is called Mainland China now.

Gordon Bell, Nomograph

Here's an interesting collection of papers on Computer Structures : Principles and Examples by one of those important old men who ended up at MSFTs Bay Area Research Center the acronym of which makes up for a tired echo of Xerox's 70ies thing. Before that he was at Carnegie Mellon and at DEC where hed did development and architecture on PDPs and VAXen, the hardwarez so important for early Unix development and microprocessor architecture. It's a pity these poeple want or need MSFT funding to do whatever they still contribute these days.

You might want to look at this nomograph that Bell did for digibarn.com: One thing we here at the DigiBarn are struck with day in day out is what our visitors declare as their first "imprinted" computer. There is a pretty strong correlation between age and the computers most enthusiasts first identified with. Gordon Bell has encapsulated this in an ingenious manner. This indicates clearly that I for example am and will probably stay a microcomputer person. But since by accident I used a modem within 1 year of owning my first personal computer (C=64) I became a network person too.

Gordon Bell predicts home and body area networks by 2010. This prediction is based on his own law.