Diomidis Spinellis - Slashdot User

Submission + - How do Big US Firms Use Open Source Software? (spinellis.gr)

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Diomidis Spinellis

on Thursday March 22, 2012 @02:06PM

Diomidis Spinellis writes: "We hear a lot about the adoption of open source software, but when I was asked to provide hard evidence there was little I could find. In a recently article we tried to fill this gap by examining the type of software the US Fortune 1000 companies use in their web-facing operations. Our study shows that the adoption of OSS in large US companies is significant and is increasing over time through a low-churn transition, advancing from applications to platforms, and influenced by network effects. The adoption is likelier in larger organizations and is associated with IT and knowledge-intensive work, operating efficiencies, and less productive employees. Yet, the results were not what I was expecting."

Submission + - Content poisoning in p2p networks (usc.edu)

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Diomidis Spinellis

on Thursday July 23, 2009 @05:35PM

Diomidis Spinellis writes: "Two UCLA researchers published a paper in the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Computers that describes a technique for p2p content poisoning targeted exclusively on detected copyright violators. Using identity-based signatures and time-stamped tokens they report a 99.9 percent prevention rate in Gnutella, KaZaA, and Freenet and a 85-98 percent prevention rate on eMule, eDonkey, and Morpheus. Poison-resilient networks based on the BitTorrent protocol are not affected. Also the system can't protect small files, like a single song MP3. Although the authors don't say so explicitly, my understanding is that the scheme is only useful on commercial p2p distribution systems that adopt the proposed protocol."

Submission + - Microsoft tries a new ad agency (economist.com)

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Diomidis Spinellis

on Friday August 08, 2008 @08:51AM

Diomidis Spinellis writes: "An article in this week's Economist outlines Microsoft's marketing response to Vista's travails and Apple's hip Get a Mac campaign. Describing the recent Mojave Experiment as "Microsoft at its worst", the article''s writer wonders whether hiring a new hot ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, to put together a $300m campaign can make Microsoft look cool. Can money buy you love?"

Submission + - Open and closed source kernels go head to head (spinellis.gr)

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Diomidis Spinellis

on Thursday May 15, 2008 @06:40PM

Diomidis Spinellis writes: "Earlier today I presented at the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering a research paper comparing the code quality of Linux, Windows (its research kernel distribution), OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD. For the comparison I parsed multiple configurations of these systems (more than ten million lines), and stored the results in four databases, where I could run SQL queries on them. This amounted to 8GB of data, 160 million records. (I've made the databases and the SQL queries available online.) The areas I examined were file organization, code structure, code style, preprocessing, and data organization. To my surprise there was no clear winner or looser, but there were interesting differences in specific areas."

Submission + - IBM the next great software company?

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Diomidis Spinellis

on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @02:39PM

Diomidis Spinellis writes: "A report in this week's Economist discusses IBM's globalization strategy and the company's presence in India. Refreshingly, the article admits that there's more to outsourcing that cheap labor, contrasting IBM's calculated investments with Apple's rapid pull-out from Bangalore. Although the jury is still out on how sluggish multinationals can compete with vigorous tigers, it seems that IBM has a credible strategy for becoming the next great software company, and that outsourcing is only a part of the puzzle."

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