serialisation

I just left a meeting that essentially described changing the development process at work to become more serial rather than parallel. The underlying idea is that completing 1 task at a time is better than all tasks at the same time, for a number of reasons. It was a little more in depth than that, but the general trend of moves from parallel to serial interests me.

Other moves from parallel to serial include:

• SATA vs PATA in hard disks
  
• Java's UI Libraries: Swing (Single threaded) vs. AWT (Multi threaded)
  
• Hyper threading: Multiple effective CPUs but the actual tasks are executed serially
  
• USB - Universal Serial Bus
  
• Firewire is serial
  

I had thought of more but I've since forgotten them; at 4pm my time is better spent working than blogging so I'll leave it at that ;)

Lets hope they don't extend the serial concept to christmas lights.