CS 553 Spring 2003

Position paper topics

Possible Positions for the 1st position paper for CS 553 You can take the opposing positions for these as well.

The exceptions, garbage collection and automatic type checking features of languages like Java and Python easily outweigh any performance penalties these languages have. While C and C++ might live on as compilation targets (like assembly), but their days as languages people actually program in are numbered.

People's own desktops are running at 3 nines. Most people wouldn't notice the difference if their service was at 5 nines. So, obviously, 5 nines is not required.

For 2 systems, A and B, if A has higher throughput and lower latency than B, and they both cost about the same, then system A is always preferable, regardless of power requirements. After all, power in datacenters is "free".

The concepts for all the underlying technologies for Internet services have been around since the 1970's: Hypertext (Xanadu Project) packet switching(DARPAnet) , remote access (telnet) remote file transfer (FTP), windowing/GUI's (Xerox Dorado).

Software is a discrete-state system. Same program, same input, same output. For Heisenbugs to exist, the evaluators must not be taking into account some input to the program.