The Emergence of Net-Centric Computing: Network Computers, Internet Appliances, and Connected PCs

Colossal investments are being made in a wide variety of new computer technologies that share a revolutionary new paradigm: they are net-centric. In this book, award-winning editor Bernard Cole provides a desperately needed "birds-eye" view of this new phenomenon. Cole, who covers net-centric computing for Electrical Engineering Times, the industry's leading trade paper, reviews and compares each competing approach: connected PCs, NetPCs, NCs, Web-enabled set-top boxes, and net-centric "computing appliances." He reviews each key element of the infrastructure needed to support net-centric computing, including the Internet, Java, Windows and alternative operating systems, distributed objects, and the RISC and CISC processor alternatives available to system designers. He focuses on the key challenges facing suppliers, including improving reliability and I/O, delivering real-time networked multimedia across the Internet, and building Web-centric user interfaces that transcend today's 2D GUIs. From 64-bit CPUs to MPEG4, CORBA to XML, For engineers and developers who want to build the next-generation of Web-centric computing devices - and the users who await them - Cole has done the "impossible": he has made sense of the net-centric computing revolution.