http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/band-releases-album-linux-kernel-module
There is a tendency, understandably, among people who look to IT as a means of earning money, of thinking that computers are meant to compute, compute, and only compute. Some of these earnest people may not have noticed that in the real world, most people use computers as glorified typewriters that happen to send the typed stuff ...somewhere... electronically. Along the way, the device computes how to do that, and does it. But here's a bunch of people (netcat, they call themselves) who refuse to consider the computer as a device locked into somebody else's definitions. They have released a music album as an OS, thus turning the computer into a self-defining musical instrument. Actually, teeny computers have been around for a long time, enabling kernels to be loaded on pen-drive sized hardware, but although these are terrific for hobbyists, there are limitations. With netcat, the limitation has been turned into a strength, celebrating the limited power of such devices by turning the whole gadget into a powerful musical instrument. It reminds me somewhat of the good old days, when the US based NASA used to send manned missions into space. Due to incredibly long lead times in engineering, the moon mission Apollo spacecraft had onboard computing power that could rival... the ability of a cheap throwaway calculator, of which some models had begun to be sold in India at the time. It was enough to rescue at least one mission that went astray, which shows, in a way, that getting seduced by the numbers game in hardware may not always serve a great purpose (I mean, other than giving some hardware company executives unbelievably high paid jobs). Let's hope that this example will be followed by others, exploiting the ability (it was always there, but then, so was silicon) of a 'computer' (the software) to be more than a computer (the hardware sitting on your lap as you read this). A paintbrush? A camera? A wallet? A health monitoring tool? All of the above, loading separately on demand? -- Vickram
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