I read with interest your opinion piece, "Not
Too Late to Celebrate" (Op/Ed by Shannon Cochran, Byte.com, 6/17/2002).
I have been trying for some time to find a browser and e-mail/client combination
that performs at least as snappily on my "legacy" computer system as Netscape
3.x and 4.x did (but without the sometimes eccentric behavior and frequent
crashes of those old products). To summarize my experience: I have found
nothing to celebrate about Mozilla 1.0, or any contemporary competitive
products I have encountered so far. This includes Netscape 6.2 and 7.0PR1
as browser/e-mail combos, Microsoft IE5 and Opera 5.0 as pure browsers,
and the most recent versions of Eudora and Outlook Express as pure e-mail
clients.
I purchased a Power Macintosh 5400/180 at the end of 1996. In the years
since then, I have attempted to keep it current with regular upgrades of
RAM (now at 136 MB), hard disk space (now 20 GB including 1.6 GB in the
CPU box and 18 GB in an external enclosure), Internet connection (now DSL),
and operating system (now Mac OS 9.1). It is interesting to note that,
back when my system was still fairly new, the preAOL Netscape was promising
a better Communicator version that would address performance and reliability
issues "real soon now." For that matter, many such promises were being
made on behalf of the imminent product of the (then) new and daring Mozilla
open-source initiative. Had the promised new developments materialized
in a timely fashion, I might now be thinking of replacing the PowerMac
as a faithful servant deserving of dignified retirement. Instead, solid
new Internet software took years to arrive, and when it did, it was designed
to deliver only bare-minimum performance on systems that were newer and
appreciably more powerful than mine.
In this volume of Best of BYTE, we explore the emergence of some heuristic algorithms. Although we have only scratched the surface of this intriguing subject, we hope we've suggested the potential of the synthesis of heuristics and algorithms.
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