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Marco,
So is Alstom Power still using the BlackBox applications?
This reminds me a lot of what happened with the language MAINSAIL
developed at Stanford
by Clark Wilcox. It was modular (it actually swapped modules in an out
of memory) and
because of this it fit well with 'cell' libraries that Carver Mead was
developing for hardware
designs. I believe that Intel and another company (??? can't remember
name) used MAINSAIL
for at least 10 years as marketed by Xidak Corp (
http://www.xidak.com/ ).
MAINSAIL stands for Machine Independent SAIL where SAIL came for
Stanford AI Lab
(or Stanford AI Lab memo L).
I used MAINSAIL for 14 years before moving on to Oberon.
Oberon/Component Pascal is
simpler and cleaner.
I have used BlackBox at Stanford University for speech recognition (Greg
Edwards uses it for eye tracking),
at X-Ray Instrumentation Associates (Wojtek Skulsi and me) for x-ray
detector data analysis, QuikCat.com (Cleveland) for image and
speech compression, Cleveland Clinic for signal processing of brainwave
signals (epilepsy).
However, everyone of these cases has been 'behind the scenes' not as an
accepted software development
platform. I fault myself 80% for not having the guts to stand up and
say 'Hey guys this *really* is better'.
Next opportunity I am going to give it full throttle.
-Doug Danforth
Marco Ciot wrote:
> So far I produced software mostly for the manufacturing industry (Alstom
> Power (Switzerland) Ltd.).
> To be very precise, I had the pleasure to develop parts of the monitoring
> system for the largest water power plant world wide - together with Oberon
> Microsystems (cf.
> http://www.oberon.ch/pdf/Projektbericht_Alstom_Power_Monitoringsystem.pdf).
>
> I did smaller projects for individual customers, e.g. an application to
> maintain and calculate Life Cycle Inventories (prototype of ecoinvent:
> www.ecoinvent.ch).
>
> It seems obvious to me that convincing a customer about buying a solution
> based on BlackBox
> presumes the requirement for a very specialized application - maybe with
> performace critical GUIs. Otherwise a customer might rather prefer a web
> based solution that does not require the presence of any particular runtime
> system.
>
> Very suitable BlackBox can also be for large server side processing
> involving large databases or multi-tier architecture. I know for a fact that
> many many huge software systems running at full load on expensive multi node
> server systems could be replaced be lightweight implementations on cheap PC
> hardware - just doing all the work faster, without all the overhead of IPC
> and virtual distributed machines!
>
> (Note that my BB environment NEVER blocks background processing
> (Services.Actions) while tracking with the mouse here and there (nor does
> CPU usage raise to 100%.)
>
> Having an OCI adapter ready, allowing to implement any sort of Oracle DB
> access, I can say that a BlackBox based implementation can be interesting
> for practically every client, even for those who already have a partial
> solution but need to extend it. They simply need to be confronted with the
> reality that a state of the art implementation from scratch might be much
> cheapter than an extension of an old system.
>
> Marco Ciot
>
>
--- BlackBox
--- send subject HELP or UNSUBSCRIBE to blackbox{([at]})nowhere.xy
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Received on Fri May 12 2006 - 04:27:59 UTC