Author Archives: Bill Catchings

May 18 Today is a milestone. We are freezing the beta for HDXPRT 2012. It’s taken a lot of work–developing something with this many moving parts is a bit like herding cockroaches. However, the workloads are set and the benchmark … Continue reading →

May 11 We’re in the home stretch of testing the HDXPRT 2012 before releasing the beta to the community members. As is often the case, we’ve run into some issues that I want to share with you. We’ve encountered some … Continue reading →

May 4 For HDXPRT 2011, we did quite a bit of testing to characterize the benchmark. Those results appeared in an initial white paper and a follow up one. In the first, we ran tests on different processors, various amounts … Continue reading →

April 27 As we get close to the beta version of HDXPRT 2012, I wanted to let you know how it compares with the original design specification. As inevitably happens in any software project, there are differences between the original … Continue reading →

April 20 We’re currently starting testing on alpha versions of HDXPRT 2012. In order to do that, we’re putting together a testbed. We have two goals for the testbed that are somewhat contradictory. The first is to make the testbed … Continue reading →

April 13 One advantage of being in the industry for a long time is seeing the development pendulum go back and forth. One such pendulum is the way of interacting with touch interfaces. Touch interfaces existed long before the current … Continue reading →

April 6 Today I’m spending a good chunk of the day participating in a panel discussion on the Kermit file transfer protocol as part of an oral history project with the Computer History Museum. A little over 30 years ago, … Continue reading →

March 30 Since the beginning of the year and especially in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been discussing in the blog our thoughts on what should be in TouchXPRT. Based on those thoughts and on feedback we’ve gotten, we … Continue reading →

March 23 Last week I looked at the roles in TouchXPRT that would make sense on a touch-based device like a tablet. I suggested seven possible ones. The next step is to create usage models and scenarios based on those … Continue reading →

March 16 We have been busy the last couple of months with TouchXPRT. We have been investigating and trying out things on Windows 8 Metro. While we are excited by the possibilities for a benchmark in that space, the task … Continue reading →