There are exceptions to the "Our systems are Good Enough" rule. One is professional video editing, but if you're doing that you don't need me to tell you about it. David Em and Alex Pournelle have the latest words on that subject: Just as I deal mostly in words and crunch a few numbers, David and Alex work mostly with video images and objects. Read their reports and you'll know as much as you need to about the state of that art.
Dan Spisak, David Em, and Alex Pournelle fiddle with a new HP
xw9300 AMD Dual Processor video editing workstation. The machine is making a
rare visit to Chaos Manor: it usually resides in the Video Lab in Sierra
Madre. Read about it in David and Alex's reports.
Another exception is games. Indeed, development of affordable systems with more image processing speed is driven almost entirely by the needs of gamers, there not being enough professional video editors to support affordable development. Of course this has had a big effect on the former kings of video processing. The result is that you can today buy video editing gear capable of producing professional results for less money than I spent on my first PC. It runs on machines sold as high end games systems—and the competition is stiff enough that prices continue to fall. Voodoo, Alienware, CyberPower are not names we traditionally associate with high end video editing machines, but they're delivering performance that Silicon Graphics would have killed to get not very long ago—and doing it at prices at the high end of consumer computing systems. Games drive the industry, and gamer demands help us all: Last year's extreme gaming system is this year's recommended mid-range SOHO system.
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.
