I received the latest Communications of the ACM in the mail last week. It has a number of what looked to be really interesting articles on a topic that interests me: self-managing systems. As you can probably tell from the title of the post, I ended up being disappointed.
While there was the potential for a lot of good meat in there, the details just sort of ground down into nothingness. I was confused for a few days why I was so disappointed actually. I mean, the articles are excellent scientific research articles. And then it really dawned on – that isn’t at all what I wanted. I wanted something with meat on it – pointing me to a sourceforge (or such) project and saying “Hey, check it out – this is what we did”.
Ironically, comparing that with the research paper behind Jeff Han’s multitouch interface. For a hardware project, that’s amazingly detailed. Looking through it, the whole kit looks like you might be able to reproduce it for something like $1700 – most of which are off-the-shelf commercial parts. Shoot – I’ve got to admit, I’m darned tempted…
Rhonabwy 