Thin TVs made with organic light-emitting diodes could become a big hit with consumers, but not any time soon, according to Toshihiro Sakamoto, president of the Panasonic AVC Networks company. "It will start to grow as a market in 2015," he said during an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show taking place here this week. "You won't be able to beat the cost and price performance of LCD and plasma for a long time."

I detailed Fitts' Law not too long ago in one of my usability terms articles (the series will pick up later on, by the way, I am currently too busy with my bachelor's thesis), and this article is a very detailed addition. It is a little old (October 2007), though. "Back in school, I remember that it wasn't until I started taking classes in physics that calculus made any kind of real sense to me. I just need diagrams to function. In that spirit, I thought it would be nice to go over Fitts's Law, a staple in the HCI diet, with a few visuals to explain both the concept and why it's ideas are a bit more complicated than most would have you believe."

After an extensive development period, the Syllable project has released Syllable Desktop 0.6.5 with improvements all over. As always there are bug fixes, most notably in USB and the network stack, leading to large reliability and performance improvements. LibUSB and SANE were ported, so there is now USB access from user space and support for scanners. There are new network and video drivers, including a unique S3 DeltaChrome driver that Arno Klenke wrote from scratch. Two new window decorators debut from John Aspras. CD burning ability is now integrated in the form of SimpleBurn and CDRTools. A new network preferences applet from Andrew Kennan was integrated, and also Arno Klenke's port of OpenBeFS. Many ports were upgraded and the system layout has been heavily reorganised. Files needed for compiling software have been split off in a separate package. This is also the release that harmonises a number of things between Syllable Desktop and Syllable Server. The full change log is here. Installation CDs, the upgrade, and images for emulators are here. Additional software can be found here.

Measure the total time of entry and verify the time between keystrokes to help authenticate a user regardless of the data being entered. Learn how to apply the open source tools xev and Perl in keystroke dynamics to measure the more-subtle characteristics of human-computer interaction. This article uses example code to demonstrate keystroke dynamics for enhancing the security of your applications in authentication and continuous data entry contexts.

"The Cray-1 is to supercomputers what Sigmund Freud is to psychiatrists. That is to say: it's likely the only one of the bunch that you've heard about, and you can feign cleverness just by dropping the name. So let's take a whack at this computer legend."

Haikuware carries a Q&A of Ingo Weinhold, one of the main contributing developers to the Haiku Project. In this mini-interview, Ingo talks about his beginnings in the community, his motivations for adopting BeOS, his involvement in Haiku development, and a bit about his professional work too. He also gives a bit of insight about his Haiku-related subprojects, and expresses his determination to port the development tool chain and optimize critical services as the first steps to make Haiku usable as a full time OS for early adopters. “Being a professional Java developer and enjoying Java hacking,” Ingo also seems to be thrilled by the recently announced Haiku Java Team and the prospect of finally getting Java on Haiku.