patents should require you to release a full reference implementation with full documentation under a free (BSD, MIT) license as soon as the patent runs out
What you say about the second person is true, but all the forms are understandable by all Spanish speakers and all of them are «correct». It is mostly a matter of style.
Thanks for posting Dijkstra answer. I had read it a lot of time ago and was going to post it myself.
Even keeping in mind that it was written with tongue in cheek, Mr Dijkstra does sound like a bit of a jerk in this paper. Also, I think that this response actually validates Rubin's thesis: Dijkstra points to a number of bugs in the second and third versions of the program (i.e., those without GOTO), proving that the GOTO-less version is not only shorter, but easier to get right.
I am not from the UK and in fact I am not even a native English speaker and yet I had always assumed that the tone of El Reg was a parody. I think it is quite obvious.
The printing routine. Internally, none of them can store 0.3 in a floating point variable because it is impossible to do so in exponential notation with base 2 (which is what IEE 754 uses).
Some languages may optionally use an exact representation (e.g., Scheme or Python), but that's not the general case.
As scott_s says, you could start looking at the papers presented in PACT in the last years (not all are about coherence, but there are a few almost every year). You should also look at ISCA and HPCA.
In fact, you could start by looking at the Related Work section of this paper itself. The version at https://people.csail.mit.edu/devadas/pubs/tardis.pdf is better. It is quite telling that the paper does not make the outrageous claim of the title of MIT's press release.
O(log N) of memory overhead per block is nothing new. There were commercial systems in the 1990s that achieved that (search for SCI coherence). Note that there are other overheads to consider (notably latency and traffic).
This paper is very interesting and looks sound, but MIT's press release makes it look silly.
Excuse me for not even trying to make a summary of the last 30 years of research in this field.
I wonder how can he be violating any law with respect to distribution of copyrighted content when he is not distributing anything. He is just pointing to other sources doing the actual distribution (which may be legal). He is just providing links, although with a nice interface.
The version of the tools that I have installed (5.1.2alpha in Fedora) do support a -T option for parallel compression which I use regularly.
However, it is true that that same option does not seem to work everywhere. At least, it didn't seem to work a few weeks ago in a different system (Ubuntu). The option is accepted, but does not seem to have any effect.