Stories by: Gary Anthes

"As the mind learns to understand more complicated combinations of ideas, simpler formulae soon reduce their complexity." -Antoine-Nicholas de Condorcet, 1794

In the 19th century, British mathematician Charles Babbage invented the "difference engine," a mechanical computer that had an enormously complex arrangement of levers, ratchets and gears. Had this prototypical chunk of steampunk machinery ever been completely built, it would have weighed several tons.

For much of his 34 years at Intel, Justin R. Rattner has been a pioneer in parallel and distributed processing. His early ideas didn't catch on in the market, but the time has come for them now, he recently told Computerworld's Gary Anthes.

Someday robots will do more than vacuum your floors. They will train you, advise you and help you remember things as they strive to improve your quality of life.

At a time when news of advanced technologies seems dominated by the likes of robots, nanogadgets and supercomputers on a chip, the subject of radio might seem a tad boring. But software-defined radios and cognitive radios hold promise for making our wireless networks far more powerful and useful.

"But let your communication be, Yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." Matthew 5:37

For years, the name of the game in supercomputing has been raw speed, with hardware and software designers striving to boost the number of instructions per second -- FLOPS -- that could be crunched. Gigaflops computers gave way to teraflops machines, which are now yielding to petaflops models -- those able to execute 1 quadrillion computations per second.

Advances in IT over the decades have come mostly in small increments -- Release 2.3 yields to 2.4, transistors shrink a few more nanometers, Ethernet gets another speed boost, bugs are fixed, and algorithms get tweaked. That kind of evolutionary approach has served users well, boosting speeds, capacities and application capabilities by many orders of magnitude.

Technopundits have predicted the arrival of "smart spaces" for years. Your car sends a message to a robot in your kitchen, so it can have your martini ready when you arrive home in the evening. A software agent on your LAN knows not to interrupt you with a phone call -- unless it's from your boss -- because you're working on a presentation for a meeting later that day.