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🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Computing/Computer science

The replay system is a little-known subsystem within the Intel Pentium 4 processor. Its primary function is to catch operations that have been mistakenly sent for execution by the processor's scheduler. Operations caught by the replay system are then re-executed in a loop until the conditions necessary for their proper execution have been fulfilled.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

Cargo cult programming is a style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. Cargo cult programming is symptomatic of a programmer not understanding either a bug they were attempting to solve or the apparent solution (compare shotgun debugging, deep magic). The term cargo cult programmer may apply when an unskilled or novice computer programmer (or one inexperienced with the problem at hand) copies some program code from one place to another with little understanding of how it works or whether it is required.

Cargo cult programming can also refer to the practice of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly without understanding the reasons behind that design principle. Examples being adding unnecessary comments to self-explanatory code, overzealous adherence to the conventions of a programming paradigm, or adding deletion code for objects that garbage collection automatically collect.

Obsessive and redundant checks for null values or testing whether a collection is empty before iterating its values may be a sign of cargo cult programming. Such obsessive checks make the code less readable, and often prevent the output of proper error messages, obscuring the real cause of a misbehaving program.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

The fundamental theorem of software engineering (FTSE) is a term originated by Andrew Koenig to describe a remark by Butler Lampson attributed to the late David J. Wheeler:

"We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection."

The theorem does not describe an actual theorem that can be proven; rather, it is a general principle for managing complexity through abstraction.

The theorem is often expanded by the humorous clause "…except for the problem of too many levels of indirection," referring to the fact that too many abstractions may create intrinsic complexity issues of their own. For example, the use of protocol layering in computer networks, which today is ubiquitous, has been criticized in ways that are typical of more general disadvantages of abstraction. Here, the adding of extra levels of indirection may cause higher layers to duplicate the functionality of lower layers, leading to inefficiency, and functionality at one layer may need data present only at another layer, which fundamentally violates the goal of separation into different layers.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Computing/Computer science 🔗 Computing/Early computers 🔗 Computing/Networking

Jonathan Bruce Postel (; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. In his lifetime he was known as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence on the medium.

The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. His obituary was written by Vint Cerf and published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work. In 2012, Postel was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. The Channel Islands' Domain Registry building was named after him in early 2016.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

In computer science, the Rabin–Karp algorithm or Karp–Rabin algorithm is a string-searching algorithm created by Richard M. Karp and Michael O. Rabin (1987) that uses hashing to find an exact match of a pattern string in a text. It uses a rolling hash to quickly filter out positions of the text that cannot match the pattern, and then checks for a match at the remaining positions. Generalizations of the same idea can be used to find more than one match of a single pattern, or to find matches for more than one pattern.

To find a single match of a single pattern, the expected time of the algorithm is linear in the combined length of the pattern and text, although its worst-case time complexity is the product of the two lengths. To find multiple matches, the expected time is linear in the input lengths, plus the combined length of all the matches, which could be greater than linear. In contrast, the Aho–Corasick algorithm can find all matches of multiple patterns in worst-case time and space linear in the input length and the number of matches (instead of the total length of the matches).

A practical application of the algorithm is detecting plagiarism. Given source material, the algorithm can rapidly search through a paper for instances of sentences from the source material, ignoring details such as case and punctuation. Because of the abundance of the sought strings, single-string searching algorithms are impractical.