Hardware Archive

Back in November of 2006, I wrote a piece about the One Laptop Per Child Project. I was afraid that the project's focus on creating a whole new paradigm (the Sugar UI) would ultimately intervene with the actual goal of the project: teaching stuff to kids. Ivan Krstic, former director of security architecture at OLPC, wrote an essay in which he heavily criticises the OLPC project.

Today's NPR Talk of the Nation Science Friday radio program discussed the recent Memristor advances for the non-Electrical Engineer: "The possibility of such a circuit element, known as the "memristor," was first described in 1971, but no one was able to find a device with the properties of that missing element. Now, a group of scientists at HP Labs has found that in nanoscale materials, the "memristance" property becomes easier to see. The finding could lead to lower power, instant-on computers, as well as novel types of circuitry. HP Senior Fellow Stanley Williams, one of the discoverers of the modern memristor, talks about the find and its potential applications." The 13 minute program is available online

First theorized in the 1970's as the fourth basic circuit element, a practical memristor implementation has finally been discovered at HP Labs. If practical manufacturing can be scaled up, memristor technology could become the new standard for computer memory -- memory that combines the speed of DRAM, the persistence of Flash memory, and the bit density of hard drives. In addition, memristors can work as analog as well as digital devices, and hold promise as the basis for building neural networks

When Asus released its Eee PC, praise was almost universal. People loved the device's size, low price, and the fact it came with Linux appealed to many geeks. Consequently, the device sold rather well, and was a hit for Asus. However, the device had two major shortcomings: its small screen (7" 800x480), and its relatively short battery life. Asus took the critcism to heart, and came up with the Asus Eee PC 900, which has a 9" 1024x600 screen. So, what's the verdict?

A Geeks.com article examines the latest in virtualization technology, and the hypervisor, a hardware execution layer contained in modern processors from AMD and Intel.

About a year ago, Dell made an important move. Pushed by thousands of comments in its IdeaStorm website, the company started offering Ubuntu preloaded on a small selection of its machines. Initially only a US-based program, but later on, some European countries followed. However, criticism was not absent; buyers complained the machines were hard to find on Dell's website and that Dell did not do enough to promote sales of the Ubuntu machines. Today, Dell has commented on the whole Dell-Ubuntu marriage.

Every now and then, a computer comes along that makes a mark, that sets a trend, or that simply stuns you - but not because of its internals, its processor or its software, but because of its appearance. Through the history of computing, there have been a number of computers that were actually designed to appeal not just because of raw technology alone, but also because of stunning looks. Read on for a countdown of my ten most beautiful computers.

SEMI, the semiconductor manufacturing equipment trade group, interviewed Gordon Moore, the retired chairman and CEO of Intel Corporation, which he co-founded in 1968. Moore is widely known for 'Moore’s Law', a 1965 prediction that the number of components on a computer chip would double every year. The interview details the early days of semiconductor manufacturing.

"It's easy to view the computer interface as nearly static. Since the advent of mouse-driven, windowed interfaces over 20 years ago, much of human-computer interface (HCI) has gone the same route. But a proliferation of mobile devices is beginning to change that and, even if that weren't the case, important differences are developing in what information is available to computers, and how we access it. In March 2007, Microsoft Research invited 45 leading researchers to discuss where HCI would be in 2020; a report summarizing their conclusions has now been made available."

"The U series from Asus has been one sort of an X factor in ultraportable notebooks for the past generation or two. Not being from a company like Dell, HP, or Lenovo, it tends to not get as much attention, but emerged as interesting alternatives. These models are most popular with PC builders and people already familiar with the Asus brand. The U6S is a 12.1" notebook with a Core 2 Duo T7500 processor and a weight of 3.5lbs."

Ivan Krstic, the director of security architecture for the One Laptop Per Child Project, has resigned in response to recent changes in management within the organization. His resignation comes at a difficult time for OLPC, which has suffered from numerous setbacks in recent months. The price has increased from USD 100 to USD 188 during development and demand for bulk sales has been slow. OLPC faces other problems as well, including numerous delays, a dubious USD 20 million patent infringement lawsuit from Nigerian keyboard maker LANCOR, and a rocky relationship with Intel."

NEC AND the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed the technology for a ten-Petaflop supercomputer. The foundation of this beast is a network of optical interconnections between nests of chips. The Japanese government says it could be ready by 2010.

The Guardian has a piece examining the impact of cheap sub-notebooks on Microsoft's OS business. "The price differential has been slight. The Asus Eee PC changes all that. The price differential between the basic Eee PC running GNU/Linux and one running Windows XP is now significant as a proportion of the total cost."

"Recently, quantum computing has been heralded as the new cool kid on the block. The point of quantum computing is that, during a calculation, the bits (called qubits) that are being manipulated are never in a definite one or zero state. Instead, they can be thought of as being both a one and a zero simultaneously, which allows a quantum computer to explore many solutions at the same time. The upshot is that, for a limited set of problems, quantum computers may offer a substantial speed up over normal computers. In recent, unpublished research, scientists have made use of the similarities between a certain type of quantum computation and neural networks to construct a very simple quantum neural network. The result may offer a faster and more robust form of pattern recognition."