The Saddest Moment: Byzantine fault tolerance [pdf]

https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thesaddestmoment.pdf

by AndrewDucker • 13 years ago

214 41 13 years ago

research.microsoft.com

mordae• 13 years ago

tl;dr Rant about complexity of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance and it's practical uselessness.

I didn't know there was an area of CS called "Byzantine fault tolerance". Now, I'm completely astonished by both the intelectual honesty of people that call their field something that reads "known impossible problem that can only be dealed with by increasing complexity" and that the same people try hard to deal with the problem without bringing extra complexity.

ColinWright• 13 years ago

Your tl;dr does this paper a serious disservice. It is at once more enlightening and more entertaining than most other papers.

It's also accurate.

nullc• 13 years ago

Yes, but its a fitting one that does pretty much characterize the field.

It also highlights how remarkable the Bitcoin whitepaper is…

clarkm• 13 years ago

You realize that this is a humor column for USENIX's online magazine, right?

eliwjones• 13 years ago

Its a sexy read.

James Mickens is AKA "Galactic Viceroy of Research Excellence"

http://microsoftjobsblog.com/viceroy-james-mickens/

seliopou• 13 years ago

The LeBron James of Computer Science

http://www.livescience.com/40023-james-mickens-microsoft-s-l...

brown9-22• 13 years ago

A different topic, but http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/theslowwi... is a good read too.

keithpeter• 13 years ago

Quote from The Slow Winter

> Unfortunately for John, the branches made a pact with Satan and quantum mechanics during a midnight screening of "Weekend at Bernie’s II." In exchange for their last remaining bits of entropy, the branches cast evil spells on future generations of processors. Those evil spells had names like "scaling induced voltage leaks" and "increasing levels of waste heat" and "Pauly Shore, who is only loosely connected to computer architecture, but who will continue to produce a new movie every three years until he sublimates into an empty bag of Cheetos and a pair of those running shoes that have individual toes and that make you look like you received a foot transplant from a Hobbit, Sasquatch, or an infertile Hobbit/Sasquatch hybrid." Once again, I digress. The point is that the branches, those vanquished foes from long ago, would have the last laugh.<<

This guy is going for the HST approach. Funny but opaque as well.

ColinCochrane• 13 years ago

Another good one, titled "Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of Deception and Chicanery" is at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/nestofhor....

philsnow• 13 years ago

Wow, _somebody_ doesn't like windows phones

but seriously, that article had nothing to do with research. it seemed to be a rant at third-rate smart phones from 3 years ago.

metermaid• 13 years ago

My favourite Mickens is The Night Watch: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thenightw...

"HCI people discover bugs by receiving a concerned email from their therapist. Systems people discover bugs by waking up and discovering that their first-born children are missing and “ETIMEDOUT ” has been written in blood on the wall."

and also

"I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I’VE DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS."

jimktrains23• 13 years ago

Just wondering: what does the [scribd] mean in the title? I thought this was a warning for the poor usability and difficulty to download from site http://www.scribd.com. This links directly to a pdf, so wouldn't a [pdf] tag be better? I've noticed this on a bunch of posts recently.

judk• 13 years ago

It's a HN auto-tag, to promote a Scribd, a YC company.

cfqycwz• 13 years ago

More specifically, it's actually a link to a copy of the same pdf hosted on scribd, the intention being to offer a means of viewing the pdf that's less cumbersome than Adobe Reader.

SilasX• 13 years ago

I always took it as a warning that "this will be a hassle to access".

graycat• 13 years ago

The OP brings up a very old story in fault tolerance, reliable systems, and systems management: In practice a very significant fraction of all outages are due fairly directly to those famous words of the HAL 9000 "human error" or people in the server farm 'bridge' or the network operations center (NOC) doing the wrong things.

terminus• 13 years ago

Funny, but in light of recent events (see http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/uk-spies-continue... for example) things like Byzantine General's problems do not seem quite so far fetched.

army• 13 years ago

That was far funnier than it had any right to be.

hendzen2• 13 years ago

CS background for people who haven't heard of Byzantine Fault Tolerance:

Original Lamport Paper - http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82....

'Practical' Byzantine Fault Tolerance -http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82....

somethingnew• 13 years ago

You posted a duplicate, what's the other link?

neilc• 13 years ago

Probably http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf

jordan0day• 13 years ago

This is the second article I have read written by this author and I've found both of them to be mildly informative and wildly entertaining. Sort of like a Dave Berry of computer science writing.

Strilanc• 13 years ago

There's two more near the bottom of the author (James Mickens)'s Microsoft Research page[1]. The page itself is also funny.

1: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/

hristov• 13 years ago

I agree, he is like Dave Berry. Absolutely horrible.

sedev• 13 years ago

I was also getting a strong Dave Barry vibe. It's not bad - but it's easy to let the schtick get old, and Dave Barry is still alive. Maybe the guy is testing the theory that if you understand it well, computers are as crazy as Florida and thus capable of generating as many bizarre anecdotes suitable for column grist as Florida. Plausible.

ycskyspeak• 13 years ago

I had absolutely no idea what a Byzantine fault was and to be honest I probably still have a very peripheral grasp of what the author is trying to make fun of. What I love about this is that you can sense the buildup of frustration that the author felt which then got released in the form of this paper, hilariously entertaining.

ivanhoe• 13 years ago

Very little real info and too much of what author probably believes to be a humor, but it's just pretentious BS...

sanderjd• 13 years ago

Nah, the author thinks right, it's humor.

muyuu• 13 years ago

I chuckled. But, like it or not, lesser trust requirements are CRUCIAL in the immediate future of computing and therefore so is research on Byzantine Fault Tolerance.

The Saddest Moment: Byzantine fault tolerance [pdf]

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