Random comments

[Benedikt Stefansson]

Y'all,

For the record, I'd like to congratulate Chris and Glen on what looks
like a sound strategy to take Swarm "into the 21st century" (don't you
just hate that phrase?). The Windows NT port could increase the user
base by a few orders of magnitude from what it is now (the question that
everyone is asking though is if Glen will now have to re-introduce the
Alpha bug in the NT version to appease Intel?).

I'm also sure that ungluing Swarm from Tk/Tcl and integrating it with a
Java GUI is a crucial step in keeping the platform viable. It is great
to be able to tell people that by this time next year Swarm could be
running on practically any PC (under NT,Unix or the MacOS). The next
logical step should not be to hard, i.e. to turn Swarm into a true
client/server environment.

In other words, great job. I hope that the satellite sites for Swarm
development will grow in number and be able to support more of the
research in the future.

Finally, on Swarmers in the news: Ken Cline already mentioned the
Business Week article about Swarm. Here is the full story:

http://www.businessweek.com/1997/25/b35328.htm

I thought I'd mention that the June 7th issue of the New Scientist also
carried a nice story about Barry McMullin's research at SFI.

-Benedikt

----------------
Benedikt Stefansson                            address@hidden
Center for Computable Economics      Tel. (310) 825-1777
Department of Economics, UCLA       Fax. (310) 825-9528
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477            http://cce.sscnet.ucla.edu


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