Ravi Pandya
ravi@iecommerce.com
www.iecommerce.com
+1 425 417 4180
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2007 11 10

2004 10 09 08 07 06

2003 04 02 01

2002 12 11 10 09 08

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ABOUT ME

Ravi Pandya
Architect
Technical Strategy Incubation
Microsoft
ravip at microsoft.com

03-	Microsoft
00-02	Covalent
97-00	EverythingOffice
96-97	Jango
93-96	NetManage
89-93	Xanadu
88-89	Hypercube
84,85	Xerox PARC
83-89	University of Toronto, Math
86-87	George Brown College, Dance
95-	Foresight Institute
97-	Institute for Molecular Manufacturing

DISCLAIMER

The opinions expressed here are purely my own, and do not reflect the policy of my employer.

Quick Links

A Logic of Filesystems
An interesting general logical framework for modeling the memory & disk consistency of filesystems - not just to ensure they are correct, but also to avoid unnecessary operations that don't add to logical consistency guarantees. Of course, as my officemate Keith Kaplan responds, "Would I sound like a bitter FS guy if I pointed out that the vast majority of disk hardware is provably incorrect, and then asked why does everybody place such high standards on the filesystem? Yes, I think I do sound like a bitter FS guy. " I suppose it still might be a way to analyze how you handle all the provably incorrect errors disks throw at you...

Computation Spreading: Employing Hardware Migration to Specialize CMP Cores On-the-fly
Separating OS and application threads to different cores yields significant performance increase by reducing contention for cache, branch prediction, etc. They do this using VM instructions, but a microkernel could do this more explicitly.

A Predictive Model for Transcriptional Control of Physiology in a Free Living Cell
They were able to get significant predictive power for transciption behavior in new experiments from a relatively small number of microarray samples and other data. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't (yet :-) have a subscription to Cell so I can't read the original paper...

Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright
A very nice application of straightforward economic analysis of the variables affecting the social welfare from copyright (discount rate, "cultural decay" rate of value of work, production cost, value of new work produced vs. additional value gained from releasing copyright on older works, etc.) Even though the empirical data only give rather wide ranges of estimates for these, they show that the current copyright terms are much too long under a robust set of assumptions; the best estimate is that the optimal term is around 15 years.

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