Moore's Law at work: We wouldn't know for sure that there had once been water on Mars without microchips. Telescopic observation couldn't prove it, and the early Mars probes were too big, too heavy, too clumsy, and too out of control to provide definitive answers. But the two little robots, Spirit and Opportunity, seem to have found enough to make it pretty certain. One more consequence of the computer revolution.
And about the time you read this, the DARPA Grand Challenge of a million dollars for an autonomous vehicle run from Los Angeles to Las Vegas will begin. No one is expected to finish this time, but the very fact that it can be attempted is significant. Finally, the military has developed small electric-powered semi-autonomous aircraft to patrol battlefields and watch for target opportunities. Miniaturization and computer smarts follow Moore's Law…
How Fallen are the Mighty
Standard and Poor's has downgraded the Sun Microsystems bond rating to "junk." You may recall the glory days when Sun was a high flyer, the premier pioneer in using the UNIX operating system for commercial servers and workstations. Sun Solaris was Sun's proprietary UNIX, and it had a lot of enthusiasts. Sun workstations were high prestige items, and few places that did CAD were without at least one. Sun has also been a major user of AMD Opteron processors. So what happened to Sun?
I don't know, but I have some guesses, and a story goes with that.
I recall some years ago there was an "Operating System Shootout" at COMDEX. The panelists consisted of the Microsoft Windows Product Manager (and Bill Gates himself put in a short appearance); a top Sun programmer; an IBM OS/2 executive; an Apple lead programmer; and maybe someone else, but those are the ones I remember. John Dvorak and I were the commentators. This was back when there was some doubt as to where the computer industry would go after DOS.
2008 International Mathematica Conference Dr. Dobb's interviews Wolfram Research's Theo Gray, co-founder and Director of User Interfaces, and Roger Germundsson, Director of Research and Development, about the upcoming 2008 International
Mathematica Conference.
How Do You Do Nightly Builds and Tests when there is No Overnight? Software Production in a Geographically Distributed Environment
Attend this Webcast and find out how to overcome common build-test-deploy challenges that affect all members of a distributed team, including:
<ul>
<li> Communication difficulties, because of time-zone and cultural differences</li>
<li> Workflow challenges, like lack of documented procedures and build and test handoff problems</li>
<li> Slow build and test cycles, broken builds, and other factors that hamper distributed team productivity</li>
</ul>
Thursday, September 25, 2005 " 11am PT / 2pm ET
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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.
