Supercore
In stories circulating widely around the Web, Apple's new all-animation, all the time user interface is just the hottest thing. How hot? Well, it introduces a brand new UI element: smoke. In the item I link to above, launching a window to burn a CD or DVD also launches a plume of smoke curling away from the top of the window. Wait, there's more: If you blow into your headset mic, the smoke billows away off the edges of the screen.
Spare us. I object to this for a couple of reasons. First of all, it perpetuates the myth that smoke is interesting and glamorous, or, God help us, an art medium. I remember watching one of my friends back in college smoking in his parents' basement and then sculpting the stream of smoke he exhaled with quick motions of his fingers. He did other dumb things too; I hope he's still alive. Maybe I'm being priggish, but I also watched my father die horribly of a smoking habit. Smoke is our enemy, like malaria and Marxism, and should be buried with those and a lot of other fiendish and deadly things.
Don't get the wrong idea. I have a lot of sympathy for Apple Computer, even if they have an obsession with pointless buttsquirt like animated smoke. (I'm expecting that the trash can icon will soon begin crossing animated legs when it needs to be emptied.) Clearly, we're getting to the point where we have more cycles than we know what to do with, especially with those imminent eight-core CPUs. So let me make a suggestion here: We need to take one of those increasingly wasted cores and turn it into something useful: a master core with special powers and its own entirely independent memory system. It should be able to inspect and change memory belonging to other cores, and among its other tasks it should load OS files into the memory belonging to the other cores from a storage device inaccessible to subsidiary cores and main memory any other way. The idea is to create a boss process in a privileged core that simply can't be subverted by programs running in the main portion of the machine.
Yes, it's a two-edged sword: Such a supercore would doubtless be seized for their purposes by a media industry desperate to have absolute control over what what files are loaded or run on a computer. On the other hand, Apple stared down Big Music over DRM, and because it controls its own hardware, could work with Intel to create such a system and tell Big Media to just back off. Dare we hope that they have the courage to try something like that? Or are they going to make their rep and stay in the game by creating visual emulations of catastrophic hardware failure? Will the Blue Screen of Death be replaced by a billowing blue mushroom cloud? I can just see a debugger window dripping liquid when it spots a memory leak...
Substance first, style later. And optional. (I've seen enough real smoke come out of computer hardware for one lifetime, thanks.) UI gimmicks at some point become distractions from the things that the underlying machine is trying to do, like get my work done and protect itself against the bad guys. Apple has a marvelous opportunity here. Let's hope (as with smoke) that they don't end up blowing it.