Shared Queue, Speculation, Digital Circuits

Shared Queue:
I suppose this is a sign that I haven't really been thinking things through, because we've had several patterns discussed already that talked about using a queue to create multiple tasks or threads with the option to use task stealing. And the idea of concurrency problems happening at the dequeue and enqueue operations scares me to death. Multiple counts of the same tasks being created, multiples getting added to the queue, and the list goes on. That we have waited until now to discuss this issue is worrisome, but what's scarier is that those papers we read before seemed to be willing to sweep these possibilities under the rug. And the deep problems at the task generation and retrieval stage can cause such extreme problems with data and process integrity.

Speculation:
It's a strange but interesting idea. I'm much more used to stages of programs flowing into each other in a way of tight dependency. I can see the possible uses for this showing up as a part of setup of methods and difficulty during other stages of execution. Additionally, decomposing the various tasks of interest into the FSMs for easy charting is going to be complex. The parsing example is a very good one, one where multiple stages can be broken cleanly into non-dependent parts, but getting another example showing where it could be useful would help easy my mind. Also, and this is probably just my lack of understanding, but I'm still not clear on the recovery process when a decomposed thing doesn't execute correctly. It's nice that this has been considered and covered I'm still confused as to how it's actually going to do its job.

Circuits:
Strange that this paper is almost 90% examples with very little definition. While I understand that there are only so many bitwise operations, seeing the examples of each with a clear explanation would be nice because I've only got a vague understanding of this stuff because it has been a while since I've last looked at it. Other than that, it seems sensible, though I personally haven't really worked with bitmasks there are very few tools to do so easily, and so doing CRCs on large disc images cannot be an easy task.