Hardware Archive

"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."

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."

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."

James Cameron is an engineer testing the mesh networking capabilities of the OLPC XO laptop. He lives in a tiny town in the remote Australian outback called Tooraweenah. There is little noise in the radio spectrum in such a remote place, creating a perfect mirror of the environment where the XO will be deployed (rural third world countries). Cameron reveals how the OLPC XO's mesh networking capabilities work by turning the kids into part of the network infrastructure, including the USD 35 solar powered mesh node designed to be deployed on top of a tree or any high area to widen the network's reach. Testing in the Australian outback, Cameron discovered that the range of the XO could go up to 1.6km 'quite easily' at 1.5m above ground.

Infoworld has an interesting article entitled "12 crackpot tech ideas that could transform the enterprise" that outlines some long-awaited technological innovations that are (perpetually?) just over the widespread commercial use horizon that could have a huge impact. For example: solid state drives, superconductivity, AI, and quantum computing.

"VIA's newly launched processor architecture, known for the last three years by its codename, "Isaiah," will keep the company's focus on cost and power intact while taking things in a substantially different direction. In short, this year will see something truly odd happen on the low end of the x86 market: VIA and Intel will, architecturally speaking, switch places. Intel will take a giant step down the power/performance ladder with the debut of Silverthorne/Diamondville, its first in-order x86 processor design since the original Pentium, while VIA will attempt to move up into Intel's territory with its first-ever out-of-order, fully buzzword-compliant processor, codenamed Isaiah. In this brief article, I'll give an overview of Isaiah and of what VIA hopes to accomplish with this new design. Most of the high-level details of Isaiah have been known since at least 2004, when VIA began publicizing the forthcoming processor's general feature list (i.e., 64-bit support, out-of-order execution, vector processing, memory disambiguation, and others). So I'll focus here on a recap of those features and on a broader look at the market that VIA is headed into."