I don't do this much but it was sooo refreshing to see your thoughts [see Innovative PC Architecture Design
by Frank Levinson, BYTE.com, 1/06/2002]. Thank you for delivering good ideas and, perhaps
more importantly, adding to a discussion which should (and MUST) displace the current focus
on clock speeds and proprietary rights to OSes and interfaces and the other short term,
marketing-driven issues.
I am a bit of a cynic and fear that as the industry becomes more "mature" it will
inevitably end up trying to protect its existing "assets" rather than reaching for the sky.
My (admittedly not very well informed) view is that there are no driving motivations for the
initiatives you suggest coming from the market or the supplier side. The option that looks
best to me is to plant seeds which will create the demand for evolution in these directions:
Generate a buzz for this stuff at the academic level, which will then translate into a
cadre of "power users" and professionals who lust after the functionality.
Kluge the functionality as add-ons and peripherals to existing systems. That way at least
the functionality will be present in the marketplace (even if it is inefficiently executed
and premium-priced) and this will surely pull the industry along. The Flash memory idea seems
a good example here and an artfully done piece of freeware which did "magic" using emulated
CAM principles (even if slow) and was usable as a plug-in by some major database or
data-mining apps (Filemaker maybe?) would be interesting. What could fast CAM do in the power
gamer domain?—since these are the people who are really the Formula-1 race car
developers of this hardware. How about the A to D interfaces and the Tactile I/O. These all
sound like eminently do-able projects for the academic community and would be great for
evangelizing.
My last comment is that this has Apple written all over it.
What Zope Did Wrong (and How It's Being Fixed) Dr. Dobb's talks with Lennart Regebro about the many things that
Zope 2 did right and did wrong. Lennart has also been one of the driving
forces behind Five, the integration of Zope 3 technologies into Zope 2.
Ubuntu and the Software Around It Dr. Dobb's interviews Ubuntu's Gerry Carr about the Linux-based Ubuntu
operating sytem and the application lifecycle tools -- such as the
recently released Launchpad -- that surround it.
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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