Resumen
The author's new Global Positioning System (GPS), a Garmin nuvi 850, comes with a cool new feature: speech-activated controls. What has surprised her the most about this interface is that the voice-based control is so enjoyable and fast that she doesn't use the touch screen anymore. Speech recognition, which had been in the realm of artificial intelligence for decades, has finally matured to the point where it's now reliable enough for use in consumer devices. Kudos, Garmin, you've done a great job with the nuvi 850. Meanwhile, there is no definitive answer on whether people can build reliable exascale systems from extrapolations of current technology as almost any approach might be made to work at some level with enough heroic effort. The author believes it is time to move from their deus ex machina model of explicitly managed resources to a fully distributed, asynchronous model that embraces component failure as a standard occurrence.