Tis the season for conferences, or so you would think from the spate of seminars, forums, and symposiums that have been running nonstop since the first of the year. From the word go, conferences have been stacked up like 747s during the Christmas rush, starting with January's Go Corp. developer's conference and continuing to April's Borland Languages forum. But for my money, the pick of the litter is the venerable Compcon.
Sponsored by the IEEE and staffed by volunteers (mainly from the Lawerence Livermore Lab), Compcon is perhaps the only regularly scheduled, broad-based computer conference around. The presentations are pure technology -- no high-powered marketing hype, no products being pushed.
Over the years, Compcon has consistently covered topics important to programmers and engineers. Among this year's threads were video and general data compression, neural net architectures for character recognition, object-oriented programming, software design versus software engineering, and much more. Jim Warren, DDJ's founding editor, even chaired a panel called "Protection For/Against the Information Age." (Then in March, Jim ramroded yet another conference, "The First Conference on Computers, Freedom, & Privacy.")
If you have the chance next year, set aside the last week in February and attend Compcon.
The interest in data compression at Compcon was big (or little, depends on how you look at it). Folks from C-Cube, IBM, AT&T, and Storm Technology analyzed the MPEG and JPEG++ video compression standards while, from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Daniel Helman talked about data compression ICs, and Glen Langdon discussed arithmetic coding.
Also interesting was a recent visit to DDJ world headquarters by Texas Instrument's Kun-Shan Lin and Trey Howse, two Texans in town to talk about TI's digital signal processing strategy. One prop Dr. Lin pulled from his briefcase was slicker than a four-dollar dog: a low-cost, fully digital telephone with a built-in, solid-state answering machine. (Although manufactured by a third-party, the phone uses TI's DSP chips.) The machine has no moving parts because magnetic recording tapes aren't required -- voice data is stored in static RAM and voice compression/extraction is handled on-the-fly by routines from TI's data compression library. Users can specify the degree of data compression, trading off audio quality for a greater number of messages (or vice versa), skip from one message to another, and so on. You get most of the benefits of voice mail (if there are any) without the hassle -- and without the cost.
Incidentally, your response to our data compression contest (see DDJ, February 1991) has been exciting. We've had a mountain of requests for the sample files and the entries continue to come in, but the more the merrier. Get your entry in as soon as possible.
At an upcoming diplomatic conference in The Hague (June 3 through 28, 1991), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) will propose an international treaty stipulating in part that "patent protection shall be available for inventions, whether they concern products or processes, in all fields of technology." (Article 10 of the treaty.) If the treaty is ratified and subsequently approved by the U.S. Senate, our patent laws will be amended to comply with the treaty, thereby torpedoing any further discussion of software patents.
Alternatively, a few countries are pushing for a clause that would permit individual countries to exclude particular (software?) fields from the patent system for various reasons, including the public interest. The decision about which flavor of Article 10 to adopt -- or to adopt it at all -- will be made at the conference in June. In any event, patent laws are in for another round of upheaval.
Advanced Micro Devices recently received some good news and some bad news. On one hand, the courts finally said AMD could use the moniker "386." (Intel, if you remember, was trying to prevent AMD and others from using the 386 handle on i386-compatible CPUs.) Consequently, Am386 CPUs will likely be appearing soon on PC motherboards near you, although the company hasn't publicly set a delivery date for the processors.
Unfortunately, that delivery date might have had some cold water thrown on it with the news that an early shipment of Am386s was hijacked at gunpoint on a road near AMD's Malaysian fabrication plant. The highwayman knew exactly wanted he wanted -- he demanded only 386 chips -- before running off with nearly 900 of the CPUs valued at over $170,000. He probably needed the money to attend another computer conference somewhere.
Copyright © 1991, Dr. Dobb's JournalLet's Get Small
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