Word: processors
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...from time to time and trying to guess from observation how well the subordinate performs, a manager can now simply look into a worker's computer dossier and immediately see, for instance, an exact record of how many letters a week a secretary has been handling on her word processor. The manager can compare one worker objectively with all the others, then reward the speedy ones and warn the laggards. Not all employees find the surveillance oppressive. In fact many, particularly the hardest workers, prefer the new evaluative technique because they see it as a matter-of-fact measurement...
...stars, such as Michael York (Anna Karenina), Michael Learned (The Scarlet Letter) and Jason Robards (Anatomy of an Illness), or such authors as Ann Beattie, John Updike and Eudora Welty, reading from their own works. Even Lee Iacocca, Rosalynn Carter and Mike Wallace have recently gone from the word processor to the microphone. It is as ^ if, after decades of attention to the eye in TV, films and videocassettes, the ear has been rediscovered...
...Japanese, though, are the past masters at making such words pay their way. Sutoraiku, for example, is the kind of strike that a pitcher throws across the plate, while sutoraiki is the kind that workers go out on. It was inevitable that the Japanese would import "word processor" and just as inevitable that they would shorten it to wa-pro. Then the younger generation seized it and made it stand for "worst proportions," meaning an unattractive woman...
These reprogrammable connections give the machine its name. For any particular task, the processors are electronically rearranged to suit the natural structure of the data. To simulate a computer component made up of 20,000 transistorized switches, for example, the machine would assign one processor to each switch. Then, rather than updating the state of those 20,000 switches one at a time, as in a traditional Von Neumann-type computer, the Connection Machine's software simply tells the 20,000 processors to update themselves all at once...
...even computer scientists find difficult to perform. According + to a DARPA report, only one in three De fense Department programmers can make the leap. Says Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois: "We have 40 years' experience designing software for single-processor machines. But the software for these new machines is complicated and excruciatingly hard to write...