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Ah, Roland the Plogger again.

First, this isn't about a battery with a 100x higher energy density. That would be a major breakthrough. It's about one with a high peak power, for surge applications. That's a specialty item.

It's also been done. Flat batteries with high peak-power outputs were invented over 25 years ago at Polaroid, for the PolaPulse battery. One of those was in every Polaroid film pack for years. It could put out 15 amps for a brief period, providing plenty of power to run the camera mechanism. (Since, in that camera, the battery had to power the mechanism that squeezed the film between the development rollers, substantial power was required for about one second.) The battery chemistry wasn't rechargeable, although there's no reason a rechargeable chemistry couldn't have been put in that packaging.

PolaPulse batteries are still available, and turn up now and then when a flat battery with a high peak current is needed. One amusing use of PolaPulse batteries is StartMeUp, which is a pocket-sized unit with six PolaPulse batteries used to restart a car.

Several other manufacturers claim to make flat batteries, some of which are rechargeable. However, none of the manufacturers mentioned in that article actually seem to be shipping product.

This is good work, but what is so special about it?

Using image analysis, "computers" these days do:

- Automatisation of drug discovery screening tests
- Diagnosis of skin cancer
- Detection of early breast cancers
- All sorts of QA in assembly lines
- And much much more, these are just examples you can find googling a bit.

Why is this news? If you go to any computer vision, image analysis or pattern recognition conference, you'll find many similar applications.

From a recent article in DesignFax Magazine, you might be surprised at the kinds of things you can model using simple bouncing-ball-like objects. Everything from giant dump trucks to laser toner.

At Disk Mfg., CDs are produced in a clean room, where a laser beam recorder and nickel-electroplating processes create a metal-stamping tool with the data encoded as tiny projections coming from the flat face of the tool. The polycarbonate CD is formed with this stamping tool on one side of the mold cavity, creating pits in the plastic disc. A thin, reflective coat is applied under a vacuum in an aluminum-sputtering machine and sealed with a UV-curable coating to prevent oxidation and scratching. At the end of the process, labels are screen or offset printed onto the discs. It is the addition of the reflective layer and dye coating that makes inspection especially difficult.

That info might be a bit dated, it came from a page talking about a company who produced Sega CD's as well. I think it gives you an idea on how tough it is to get a machine that creates normal cds.

Even if the implementation takes 3-5 years, further reducing the size of cell phones may only be beneficial in a few markets. Most certainly, the US market will not need super small cell phones in the comming years. The Asian and EU markets already sell phones that on average are significantly smaller than those sold in most of the US market. Yes, those are GSM phones, but if the American consumers wanted smaller phones, the manufacturers would quickly swap out the GSM circuits in put CDMA in place. Unfortunatly (for some of us) the average American still tends to like their products to be larger (at least acording to many market research companies.)

Where this technology might be more appropriate is in the imbedded markets. For the Auto-makers, the size of On-Star style equipment could be greatly reduced and in-dash cell phones could have a much nicer and simpler integration.

Though its quite cool to see electornics reaching the miniature level, at some point (which we may have already reached) it will be impracticle to reduce the package size of many consumer electronics. Do you really want a 1 cubic inch sized cell phone that you loose once a week and spend $200 to replace?

As for MEMS, the medical applications are much more interesting.

Well, I'm not seeing many defending style, so I will. A disclaimer though - when I spend my computing dollars, I'll get a larger monitor, faster processor, and more memory before any stylistic considerations (and often, style doesn't make it onto the list).

The argument "Style over substance" is valid when marketing and design is used to make a sub-standard product look better simply by improving it's physical appearance. I cringe when relatives buy a poor performing PC, simply because it looked sexier than the alternatives.

But you don't have to sacrifice style for performance. The performance of a PC is not inversely proportional to how good it looks. Some of you have probably seen some pretty sexy looking heavy metal, and some of the highest performing notebooks also look pretty sharp.

We've all been duped by experience to trust that ugly=value. That's from the days when the big domestic guys were making pretty and expensive boxes, while the overseas guys were making ugly and cheap boxes. If you had tech skill, you passed on the pretty hand-holding models and went straight for the foreign boxes, with questionable configurations and lots of driver disks.

We no longer live in those times. You can buy an excellent PC over the Internet, that's fully functional. If you want to build one yourself, you can do that, but often the savings isn't worth the time (the people that know how to do it are worth quite a bit per hour).

So, why are PC's still ugly? Because we still buy them ugly, 'cause we think ugly=value=power. That's a larger factor than other considerations, especially since a little design may even help with cooling problems.

I much prefer my 1930's house with ivy and a little yard to a warehouse with a raised floor for easy cable access. I prefer my hardwood floors to 1/16 inch, easy to vacuum carpet. If prefer my home office, with a view of my yard and my dogs, to my cubicle at work (even though the cubicle is nice as cubicles go). I prefer my slashdot posts with nice formatting, well-thought out ideas, and most of the grammar and spelling checked to three-second post and links to naughty cx domains.

Why don't these ascetic tastes spill over into the PC domain? Mostly because the people that make them have bought into the style vs. substance war, and you can either buy an ugly but powerful system, or a pretty but brain-dead system. Well, you can have it both ways. To think otherwise is to still live in a world where people can be either intelligent but unattractive, or beautiful but dumb. Well, I have a little more hope for the world.

I'm slowly becoming a style convert, and my wife has helped a lot. It's not that expensive anymore, and it's becoming cheaper every day. You can still be a geek, too. Just run the wire through the walls rather than over the floors, and get some help when shopping for clothes.

Check out an organization that's trying to bring some design into our lives. They had a contest to design a better power meter, with some interesting results. (If anyone can find the slashdot article that first linked it, please tell me).