[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
*snip*
PS: I keep thinking that this is not 9fans, but rather
alt.folklore.computers. Does anyone out there have a copy of
Hollingdale and Toothill (Digital Computers, was it?) that they would
be willing to part with for a moderate amount of money?
Well...
'C' *has* had an inordinately long run, and that has not always pleased even its
creators. No tool remains 'good enough' forever, let alone 'best and only'.
Similarly, Plan9 itself seems to have gone from bleeding edge to minor sideshow
without much time on stage in between.
Speaking of respect, admiration, use as a source of inspiration, partial
emulation - not of 'popularity', per se. A Loonix 'distro' it is not.
UTF-8 - for which I am very grateful, seems to be the most visible and enduring
contribution, and few who depedn on it are even aware that it was Plan9 related.
Maybe it is again time to do something new and shed another round of baggage -
even if it is not HP Maxim's '.. whole nine yards'.
Available CPU power is astonishing nowadays. More than we can actually put to
work on personal task if not 'servicing' (as in animal husbandry) MS Orifice and
their parasites.
How about a voice-driven, speaker-independent human-machine interface?
Demonstrated, and quite well, even with Mandarin, by IBM on a mainframe no more
powerful THEN than commodity CPU and aoofrdable RAM are NOW.
A natural for remote 'plumbing' over a 'net. Speech bandwidth need is really
small compared to VNC or large file transfer for local manipulation when all ou
want is the *answer* the human PA we can no longer afford to emply coudl have
gotten for you.
Hands free, and surely beats hell out of those itty-bitty keypads... could even
make acme/rio paging model finally make sense...
Computer voice: <selectable size chunk of speach output>.
user's voice: ['more' | 'repeat' | 'end' | 'next' | 'new'| 'snarf']
;-)
.. hmm .. or was Plan9 involved in AT&T automated attendant / directory service
interfaces in the first place?
... seems a natural fit to the networking model.
Bill
