In an editorial in today's New York Times, Cory Doctorow enthuses about our grand new age of do-it-yourself digital electronics:
Plastic created the age of whimsical forms. Suddenly a radio could look like a moo cow. A chair could look like an egg. Toy ray guns could bulge and swoop. The exuberant designers of the golden age of plastic explored all the wacky, nonfunctional, decorative shapes that household objects could take.
Now that same plasticity is coming to microcontrollers, the computer chips that act as brains for the chirping, dancing, listening and seeing devices that line our knickknack shelves and dashboards and fill our pockets. The proliferation of cheap and cheerful programmable chips promises a new age of "whimsical logic," chips that power devices whose functions are as delightfully impractical as their forms, the sort of thing you find in a stocking but keep on your desk forever. [...]
Application-specific chips could do just one thing. New programmable chips, called field programmable gate arrays, can do anything you dream up. What's more, programmable arrays can be whipped up in tiny batches for just a few dollars.
Link: Flights of Fancy on Flexible Chips (NYT)
via Boing Boing: Cory's programmable logic editorial in today's NYT.
Um, Cory, FPGA's have been around for decades (or at least I remember using them when I was an undergrad 15 years go).
Okay, maybe there is some interesting work going on in this area (Neil Gershenfeld's work in particular), but shouldn't this kind of cheerleading/fluff piece be reserved for Wired?
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