In "Weird, Wacky, and Wonderful" (August Editorial), you question whether distributed computing can be made to work. The technology to do this already exists in the form of the Tao operating system, which has been reported on by your own U.K. correspondent, Dick Pountain, in "Parallel Course" (July 1994). The big advantage of the Tao OS's translated system is that the speed penalty is only about 1 percent; this leads inevitably to the fact that it reduces the processor to a commodity item, something that can only benefit the consumer. For more information about Tao's technology, go to
http://www.tao.co.uk/
.
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Why Not Tao?
