Re: Plans for 1.8+ (2.0?)

[Bill Hacker <wbh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Robert Luciani wrote:

*snip* (clustering discussion..)

> 
> Jokingly: I think the notion of functional individual computers
> helping each other out sounds a bit like neourons in a brain. The
> technological singularity is coming, nothing can stop it!

Oddly, they *are* - but not in the way theoreticians around the time 
'Metropolis' or even 'Brave New World' were written might have enviaged, i.e. 
neither centrally controlled nor even 'close coupled'.

The 'net, e-mail, file & media exchange, IRC... one could go on.. seem to JFDI 
w/r all manner of pragmatic 'sharing' with one of the essential characteristics 
of their human users:

- For the most part, a little 'latency' is not unwelcome.

IOW 'Mañana' - response / gratification in minutes, if not hours, is usually as 
good as we could absorb anyway w/o becomeing totally 'time-slaved' to the 
machinery that was intended to be servant - not master.

Specialized scientific applications are just that - specialized, and often 
warranting from-the-ground-up bespoke software - OS included.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but most of these need a very different core 
than (any of the) Unix anyway. Real-Time Exec's, self-onitoring, 
soft-fault-tolerance, etc.

Bill