Hardware Archive

And finally, finally, finally, Vizio has fully unveiled its brand new line up of laptops and all-in-ones. The successful American TV maker announced its new kit at CES in January, catching my eyes with a set of beautiful, distinctive laptops and all-in-ones, and, as they promised back then, they have now unveiled all. This has want written all over it. Update: Rejoice: non-glossy, matte screens on the laptop.

Two weeks ago, my grandmother passed away - the last grandparent I had left. As those of you with experience in dealing with deceased family members know, the funeral is only the start; the next part is taking care of the deceased's affairs, which includes going through all their belongings to determine what to do with them. I took care of my grandmother's extensive book collection, and while doing so, I hit something that fascinated me to no end: a six-volume Christian Encyclopaedia from 1956. In it, I found something I just had to share with OSNews.

"Touchscreens, zoomable maps, page swiping, and more, all integrated into one Eames-chair-equipped media room." MIT, late '70s, and noted by Andy Hertzfeld as a direct influence for the original Macintosh. Fantastic story by The Verge. Favourite part: even back then, there was concern among the scientists that the touch screen page flipping animation was frivolous.

Hewlett Packard announced the company would lay off nearly nine percent of its 300,000 person workforce over the next two years, or about 27,000 people. The move is expected to save HP $3 billion to $3.5 billion annually. HP stock went up 5% in response to the news Thursday morning. Research firm Ovum asks "...the key missing piece is long-term company vision and strategy, which hopefully will be revealed to an anxious customer base soon... the question still remains: Just what kind of company does HP want to be next year, three years, five years from now?"

"When Tudor Brown stepped down as president of ARM Holdings earlier this month, he left behind one of Britain's and indeed the world's, most successful technology companies." Thanks for a fantastic architecture. The technology world would be poorer for it without ARM.

"Disassembling Apple's diminutive inch-cube iPhone charger reveals a technologically advanced flyback switching power supply that goes beyond the typical charger. It simply takes AC input (anything between 100 and 240 volts) and produce 5 watts of smooth 5 volt power, but the circuit to do this is surprisingly complex and innovative." Quite fascinating, although I'm not sure just how much the mentioned advantages really matter beyond bragging rights.

Speaking of HP, the company replied to a question if they copied Apple for their latest ultrabook, the Envy Spectre XT. "There are similarities in a way, not due to Apple but due to the way technologies developed. Apple may like to think that they own silver, but they don't. In no way did HP try to mimic Apple. In life there are a lot of similarities." It's an ultrabook, a category of laptops defined by Intel. Coincidentally, Intel also developed the internals of the MacBook Air. These products are looking relatively similar because their internals have been designed by the same damn company. Get over it.

"Leo Apotheker's disastrous tenure as HP's CEO revealed a dysfunctional company struggling for direction after a decade of missteps and scandals. Can his replacement, Meg Whitman, fix the tech giant?" As a consumer, I wish they simplified their product line-up. They have the engineering skills - I just have no idea what I'm supposed to buy when I visit their site. The choice for the ZenBook late last year instead of anything HP had to offer was elementary.

"The ZX Spectrum is 30 years old. The successor to Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX81 - at the time the world's best selling consumer computer - it introduced colour 'high resolution' graphics and sound. It also offered an extended version of Sinclair Basic, a computer language with which hundreds of thousands of users were already familiar."

"IKEA introduces UPPLEVA, a completely new range that integrates smart TV and sound system with furniture. UPPLEVA brings beauty and functionality to the living room, solving the problem of cable clutter and miss-match between TV and furniture." I'm throwing money at my screen but nothing is happening.

Not being content with the state of open source graphics drivers for Linux, a developer working for Texas Instruments has reverse-engineered his competitor's (Qualcomm) driver and written an open-source Snapdragon driver. With being tainted by legal documents at Texas Instruments, the developer who is also involved with Linaro, had no other choice but to work on an open source graphics driver for his competitor in his free time. The open source Qualcomm Snapdragon/Adreno driver is called Freedreno.

"These drawings date from 1982 (thirty years ago). Alan Kay had just become the Chief Scientist at Atari and he asked me to work with him to continue the work I started at Encyclopedia Britannica on the idea of an Intelligent Encyclopedia. We came up with these scenarios of how the (future) encyclopedia might be used and commissioned Glenn Keane, a well-known Disney animator to render them. The captions also date from 1982." Pretty cool.

"This article CPU DB (cpudb.stanford.edu), an open and extensible database collected by Stanford's VLSI (very large-scale integration) Research Group over several generations of processors (and students). We gathered information on commercial processors from 17 manufacturers and placed it in CPU DB, which now contains data on 790 processors spanning the past 40 years. In addition, we provide a methodology to separate the effect of technology scaling from improvements on other frontiers (e.g., architecture and software), allowing the comparison of machines built in different technologies."

"Little benownst to the world all this time, GoldenEye (N64) has a fully-functional ZX Spectrum 48x emulator built into it. By feeding it a proper Spectrum monitor program and calling menu 25 to load a snapshot, any Spectrum 48x program can be run. The emulator started life as a side project to see if Spectrum emulation was possible on N64 and was hooked into GE, the current game in development. It was supposed to be removed before release but was only made inaccessible and inoperable. All the registers, dependancies, and script required to run the emulator still reside in retail GoldenEye carts."