Hoard It! (Squiddershins) Mac OS
Hoard It! (Squiddershins) Mac OS
Emery Berger is a Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus of the UMass system. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Professor Berger has been a Visiting Scientist at Microsoft Research and at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) / Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). Professor Berger’s research spans programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance. He and his collaborators have created a number of influential software systems including Hoard, a fast and scalable memory manager that accelerates multithreaded applications (used by companies including British Telecom, Cisco, Crédit Suisse, Reuters, Royal Bank of Canada, SAP, and Tata, and on which the Mac OS X memory manager is based); DieHard, an error-avoiding memory manager that directly influenced the design of the Windows 7 Fault-Tolerant Heap; and DieHarder, a secure memory manager that was an inspiration for hardening changes made to the Windows 8 heap. His honors include a Microsoft Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Lilly Teaching Fellowship, the Distinguished Artifact Award for PLDI 2014, the Most Influential Paper Award at OOPSLA 2012, the Most Influential Paper Award at PLDI 2016, three CACM Research Highlights, a Google Research Award, a Microsoft SEIF Award, and Best Paper Awards at FAST, OOPSLA, and SOSP; he was named an ACM Senior Member in 2010. Professor Berger is currently serving as an elected member of the SIGPLAN Executive Committee; he served for a decade (2007-2017) as Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, and was Program Chair for PLDI 2016. |
Professor Berger is a co-director of the PLASMA research lab, and a member of the UMass CS Security Group. |
The purpose of this essay is to familiarize readers with the facts and background of these issues in this important case, and to lay out the policy implications inherent in its resolution. This Article begins by providing some background and history regarding management of, and disputes over, water in the United States, with an emphasis on the value of interstate compacts in resolving. Hoard is a memory manager enhancing malloc function for multi-threaded softwares. It is designed to replace transparently the default system malloc.
Selected publications
PLDI 2018 | BLeak: Automatically Debugging Memory Leaks in Web Applications, with John Vilk. |
CHI 2017 | VoxPL: Programming with the Wisdom of the Crowd, with Dan Barowy, Dan Goldstein and Sid Suri. |
ASPLOS 2017 | Browsix: Bridging the Gap Between Unix and the Browser, with Bobby Powers and John Vilk.(browsix.org) |
OOPSLA 2016 | Prioritized Garbage Collection: Explicit GC Support for Software Caches, with Diogenes Nunez and Sam Guyer. |
ICSE 2016 | DoubleTake: Fast and Precise Error Detection via Evidence-Based Dynamic Analysis, with Tongping Liu and Charlie Curtsinger. |
SOSP 2015 | Coz: Finding Code that Counts with Causal Profiling, with Charlie Curtsinger. Best Paper Award. (coz-profiler.org) |
OOPSLA 2014 | CheckCell: Data Debugging for Spreadsheets, with Dan Barowy and Dimitar Gochev. Recipient of Microsoft Research SEIF Award.(checkcell.org) |
OOPSLA 2014 | SurveyMan: Programming and Automatically Debugging Surveys, with Emma Tosch. Best Paper Award. (surveyman.org) |
PLDI 2014 | Doppio: Breaking the Browser Language Barrier, with John Vilk. Distinguished Artifact Award. (doppiojvm.org), nominated by SIGPLAN as an ACM Research Highlight. |
ASPLOS 2013 | Stabilizer: Statistically Sound Performance Evaluation, with Charlie Curtsinger. (stabilizer-tool.org) |
OOPSLA 2012, CACM 2016 | AutoMan: A Platform for Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation, with Dan Barowy, Charlie Curtsinger, and Andrew McGregor. ACM Research Highlight. (automan-lang.org) |
CACM 2012 | Software Needs Seatbelts and Airbags. |
SOSP 2011 | Dthreads: Efficient and Deterministic Multithreading, with Tongping Liu and Charlie Curtsinger. (dthreads.org) |
CCS 2010 | DieHarder: Securing the Heap, with Gene Novark. Inspiration for security enhancements in Windows 8. |
OOPSLA 2009 | Grace: Safe Multithreaded Programming for C/C++, with Ting Yang, Tongping Liu, and Gene Novark. First fully deterministic runtime system. |
PLDI 2007, CACM 2008 | Exterminator: Automatically Correcting Memory Errors with High Probability, with Gene Novark and Ben Zorn. ACM Research Highlight. First automatic bug fixing system. |
SenSys 2007 | Eon: A Language and Runtime System for Perpetual Systems, with Jacob Sorber, Alex Kostadinov, Matt Brennan, Matt Garber, and Mark Corner. First energy-aware / approximate computing language. |
FAST 2007, ACM TOS 2007 | TFS: A Transparent File System for Contributory Storage, with James Cipar & Mark Corner. Best Paper Award. |
PLDI 2006 | DieHard: Probabilistic Memory Safety for Unsafe Languages, with Ben Zorn.Direct influence for the Windows 7 Fault Tolerant Heap. (diehard-software.org) |
OOPSLA 2005 | Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management, with Matthew Hertz. |
OOPSLA 2002 | Reconsidering Custom Memory Allocation with Ben Zorn & Kathryn McKinley.OOPSLA Most Influential Paper Award. |
PLDI 2001 | Composing High-Performance Memory Allocators, with Kathryn McKinley & Ben Zorn. Introduced Heap Layers infrastructure. |
ASPLOS 2000 | Hoard: A Scalable Memory Allocator for Multithreaded Applications, with Kathryn McKinley, Robert Blumofe, & Paul Wilson. First provably scalable memory allocator. Basis of the Mac OS X scalable memory allocator; widely used in industry. (hoard.org) |
more publications here.
I am always recruiting stellar PL/systems students to join my research group. If you are applying to UMass, especially from overseas, please read this first.
Apple made the vast majority of its ever-growing multibillion-dollar hoard selling us hardware: iPads, Macs, Macbooks, Apple TVs, Apple Watches, speakers, headphones, docks, cables, and above all else that ultimate cash cow, the iPhone.
So it may seem a little strange that the company's keynote at its WorldWide Developer Conference in San Jose Monday featured not one single hardware upgrade. No new entry-level iPhone, no iMac or Mac Pro, no iPad Pro with Face ID, not the long-rumored replacement for the Macbook Air. Just a string of incremental software improvements: Mac OSX Mojave, iOS 12, TV OS, Watch OS 5.
SEE ALSO: Everything you need to know about Apple's iOS 12
And yet, counterintuitively, this was still a hardware keynote. Why? Because Tim Cook and his troupe of excited executives basically gave us a two-hour ad for how great life is when you're entirely inside the Apple ecosystem. Every software upgrade seemed designed to prove that the sum of all Apple products is greater than their whole.
The pitch: If you only own an iPhone and you're not using our Mac/TV/Watch, you're missing out! Buy all our stuff and you'll be living your best digital life. Play in our walled garden and we'll keep you safe from the appeared on the screen behind him to answer that question.
Well, of course the two won't ever merge — just as when two people get married, they retain their individual identities. They operate different devices, after all. MacOS is from Mars, iOS is from Venus.
But they do appear to be dating rather seriously. Apple News, Stocks, Voice Memos, and Books (formerly iBooks) apps will all run on an iOS shell inside the new MacOS. If that doesn't count as moving in together, I don't know what does.
SEE ALSO: Apple launches macOS Mojave with Dark Mode, support for some iOS apps
And they're just the first tentative examples; it's not ridiculous to think you might be able to switch any app from your iPad to your Mac inside a year or two. If you own both devices, that is.
If you think Apple's goal with the News app is to dominate the media landscape, then this move is tepid in the extreme: If they're aiming for sheer number of readers, shouldn't they produce an Android version of the app?
But if you see Apple News as an ad for the Apple software ecosystem as a whole — a place where you can open the same app and have it remember what you've read no matter what device you're on — then it is functioning exactly as intended.
Similarly, Apple made Photos a lot smarter — so that you could, say, take a screenshot on your iPhone and drop it straight into your presentation on your Mac. If you own an iPhone and you're thinking about a new laptop, consider yourself the target audience here.
The hard upsell
This strategy makes total financial sense when you're a company as large as Apple and you want to keep growing your profits (as the company is required by law to do for its shareholders). The company is facing the maturing of its smartphone market. Some 700 million people already use iPhones.
Make a new iPhone, and the buyers will likely be drawn from a percentage of the 700 million looking to upgrade. Sure, you'll get a nice chunk of change, and it's not like Apple is going to stop giving us new iPhones. But that is not the only way to milk your market of true believers.
What if you could sell each of those 700 million iPhone owners — people who are already inside the ecosystem, and love it — on an Apple TV 4K, or the latest generation Apple Watch? Now we're talking easy profit margins.
Everyone who's ever walked into an Apple Store intending to buy a small accessory and walked out with a shiny new device, their wallet hundreds of dollars lighter, knows this feeling. It's called upselling, and no one does it better than Apple — in store or in keynote.
Indeed, even Federighi's insistence that iOS 12 will work better than iOS 11 on old iPhones could be seen as part of this strategy. If Apple treats you with respect through its core product, you're more likely to look at its offerings in other areas of your electronic existence.
Well, I guess I'm buying an Apple Watch now
For years I've ridiculed the company for devoting so much time in each keynote to a product with a relatively small user base, the Apple Watch. It's the one thing made by the company that I don't currently own (my inventory: iPhone, iPad Pro, iMac, Macbook). I was quite happy with my Fitbit and didn't really need the Watch's bells and whistles.
But my wife does own one — and on Monday, Apple showed me two killer features in Watch OS 5 that might work for us. I could see us having fun with the new exercise competition, and saving a ton of time on phoning each other by just using the Walkie Talkie app, and well, I guess I'm buying an Apple Watch now.
The company is also pretty good at getting other corporate giants on board with this sales effort. For example, a little noted feature of the Apple TV 4K presentation was 'single sign-on': that device will now log on automatically to all TV content apps if you get your internet and cable service bundled from the same company. 'It just works,' enthused an Apple executive. Yeah, that should just work for AT&T and Comcast, who may use this feature to sell more bundles.
Hoard It (squiddershins) Mac Os Catalina
The one piece of the Apple pie not on display? The HomePod, an overpriced and exceedingly dumb 'smart' speaker that adds nothing to the ecosystem as a whole, and may even have devalued it by being mentioned. Every family needs its red-headed stepchild, I guess.
Hoard It (squiddershins) Mac Os X
Bottom line: Apple doesn't need fresh products to help its bottom line. That doesn't mean they're not coming; we're likely to see new iPhones and iPads, if not laptops and desktops, this fall, closer to holiday buying season. But if you don't think Apple is selling its hardware harder than ever, try walking into a store and seeing what happens.
Hoard It! (Squiddershins) Mac OS