Commodity computer hardware is faster and cheaper than it has ever been, as always, but software has got slower and less reliable to match. I'd like to change that uwith RMoX: we should figure out the theoretical performance limits for the applications that we build, and then attempt to get as close as possible to them.
One example: software routing. There are existing systems that let you use a PC as a router, but they're generally considered to be too slow for production use. I'd be interested to find out how fast a software router should be able to go, and then see how close we can get to that using a future version of occamnet.