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Do you wave a pass card at the door at work? That's RFID. Do you drive through the quick lane at the toll booth? More RFID. I used to pay at the pump with my key chain. I cut it open after I cancelled the card and found a TI Tiris RFID tube inside. Similar to what they inject into a dog's neck so they can find it if lost. The one used in the Mobil SpeedPass that I had is the one on the right in this picture:
TI Tiris

Actual size is about 2cm and about 4mm in diameter.

I harddly see any enthusiasm in here. Though I think this Archos product is the greatest gadget ever made. Let me write obvious facts about the amayzing AV340:

It playsback 640x368 resolution DivX. It records 320x240 video at 25 frames per second. This means you can take your 100 favourite DivX movies with you in your pocket. And watch them in your video-glasses while you drive.

I do have a couple concerns about this player. Though following concerns probably won't stop me from selling my Archos JBMM20 on ebay (which I own since August 2002 and use very often) to buy the awesome AV340 instead:

1. Texas Instruments, who is making the processor which you find inside the Archos AV340, it's the DSC25. The DSC25 seems to be old. This might be sad, cause a 720MHZ DSP processor is available. (and a 1GHZ processor will be available in a few months) - Such 720MHZ or 1GHZ processors definately would perform better than 640x368 playback and 320x240 DivX record. Though Archos might get some help from DivXNetworks optimizing the DivX-support using the DSC25 inside the AV340 to the maximum and a firmware upgrade might be released to support better resolutions.

2. The Batteries. One can only get 3 houres of video-playback on the 3,8inch LCD. And Archos might again not provide an easy battery change possibillity. I wouldn't mind carrying around a couple extra batteries in my other pocket to swap into the player every 3 houres.

Archos here, developing portable DivX player designs since the beginning of 2002, definately has a knowledge in Portable DivX Player/Recorder manufacture. Which I think it is possible even Intel and Microsoft with their media2Go cannot equal. The Media2Go which might even not be available before christmas (picture of Media2Go).

A question I would like to ask all the other companies (Sony, Casio, Panasonic, HP, Philips..). Why don't you put a harddrive and a 720MHZ processor in your Cameras and PDAs! (up to 80GB 2,5" IBM pixie-dust harddrives are available that can fit in such portable design, IBM promizes 150GB). But somehow, I might be ignorant, it seems no one cares or knows how to put 720MHZ and a harddrive in the pocket. Only Archos can do it!

I harddly see any enthusiasm in here. Though I think this Archos product is the greatest gadget ever made. Let me write obvious facts about the amayzing AV340:

It playsback 640x368 resolution DivX. It records 320x240 video at 25 frames per second. This means you can take your 100 favourite DivX movies with you in your pocket. And watch them in your video-glasses while you drive.

I do have a couple concerns about this player. Though following concerns probably won't stop me from selling my Archos JBMM20 on ebay (which I own since August 2002 and use very often) to buy the awesome AV340 instead:

1. Texas Instruments, who is making the processor which you find inside the Archos AV340, it's the DSC25. The DSC25 seems to be old. This might be sad, cause a 720MHZ DSP processor is available. (and a 1GHZ processor will be available in a few months) - Such 720MHZ or 1GHZ processors definately would perform better than 640x368 playback and 320x240 DivX record. Though Archos might get some help from DivXNetworks optimizing the DivX-support using the DSC25 inside the AV340 to the maximum and a firmware upgrade might be released to support better resolutions.

2. The Batteries. One can only get 3 houres of video-playback on the 3,8inch LCD. And Archos might again not provide an easy battery change possibillity. I wouldn't mind carrying around a couple extra batteries in my other pocket to swap into the player every 3 houres.

Archos here, developing portable DivX player designs since the beginning of 2002, definately has a knowledge in Portable DivX Player/Recorder manufacture. Which I think it is possible even Intel and Microsoft with their media2Go cannot equal. The Media2Go which might even not be available before christmas (picture of Media2Go).

A question I would like to ask all the other companies (Sony, Casio, Panasonic, HP, Philips..). Why don't you put a harddrive and a 720MHZ processor in your Cameras and PDAs! (up to 80GB 2,5" IBM pixie-dust harddrives are available that can fit in such portable design, IBM promizes 150GB). But somehow, I might be ignorant, it seems no one cares or knows how to put 720MHZ and a harddrive in the pocket. Only Archos can do it!

as a link (Never underestimate the laziness of a /.er)

Pictures of TI's

The rate on the box != the actual throughput you get.

Due to protocol overhead, backwards compatability overhead, physical environment, yada yada yada, you'll see varying throughput.

With current implementations of the draft solution mixed mode performance is *terrible*. 10 Mb/s mixed mode is an improvement. Right now your draft .11g solution is probably barely reaching 8 Mb/s in a mixed mode network and confusing the hell out of any .11b stations listening. You'd be silly not to upgrade the firmware as soon as they provide it.

The standards body hasn't throttled down .11g 's PHY level data rate; theoreticly 54Mb/s worth of info is still being spit out into the air. What they've done is added a little bit more overhead so that the .11g stations don't completely butt out the .11b stations.

Still, by the end of the summer you'll see throughput at 30 Mb/s in pure .11g, with 15 Mb/s mixed mode (without adversly affecting .11b stations). The leader of the pack should be Texas Instrument's chipset, hopefully to appear in DLink's newest 11g offering.

In a pure .11g network you won't get 54Mb/s but if you use TI's chipset you'll get throughput approaching 30 Mb/s.

The compatability

It's the Compiler Language With No Pronouncable Acronym, and therefore, for obvious reasons, named INTERCAL.

And here's a little known fact: The Texas Instruments C64x DSP has special hardware support for INTERCAL in the form of its SHFL instruction.

here is a link to TI's PDF datasheet only $1.25 in qtys of 1000 for the device side, much cheaper than a wall wart

Kind of like Texas? Even New York wants to copy us.

Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and New Mexico - well they're all just a bunch of back-woods hicks who don't know nuthin 'bout them 'puters. :)

This would be a much more useful announcment if they had written the software for Palm's Tungsten T and the on-board C55x DSP half of its OMAP 1510 processor.

This way:

a) It wouldn't hog 100% of your CPU... you'd actually be able to, you know, DO STUFF while listening to the radio

b) You wouldn't hose your whole battery in virtually no time. The C55x has a WAY better power/mips ratio than XScale, not to mention you're going to use way less mips in the first place by virtue of it being a DSP that's actually designed to do Digital Signal Processing.


Mechanik

It's not on their website, but via emailed, I was informed the OGG code was being worked on and would be available for the II and the ia.

Having my NEX II conveniently disassembled right now, it looks like it's using a TI TMS320VC5416 (C54xx series) 16-Bit 144-pin Fixed-Point DSP with Boundary Scan.

A quick Ogg search shows that someone was working on porting the Tremor code to the TI C54s last year. Interesting stuff.

BTW, I'm been using Mozilla v1.3+ (currently running a 1.4b build) and the site hasn't been giving me any problems.

Have a look @ TI's WANDA platform for a cool reference design similar to this. I played with the platform at the CTIA show last month, and the company that put it together for TI, Accellent, had working prototypes in cases ready to go.

The best part about WANDA: it's $130 for the integrated board. Add a battery, display and a few controls, and you could have whatever kind of PDA you wanted.

Additionally, Metrowerks has been working to get their OpenPDA Linux distribution (formerly Lineo's) working on WANDA.

Symbol has a less than stellar track record of opening up their devices to alternative technologies, and their licensing relationship with Microsoft all but guarantees that you'll never see them shipping a Linux or Symbian device from them.

TI info site here: TI LINK

This one does have it...

Wanda spec sheet

The only thing that'll keep me from getting it would be the underpowered ness of the processor to operating system. Make it efficent and u got a customer here!!

The submitter didn't even RTFA. WANDA (there's the link that the submitter was too lazy to give you) is at least 7 chips.

If you ask me, it's not worth the effort, I used it in high school to format equations for math and physics, which is otherwise a bitch in Word. But I have since discovered LaTeX and AMSMath :)

Actual throughput isn't near the advertised rate. The 11Mb/s or 22 Mb/s shown on the box is the theoretical throughput at the PHY level. Due to the overhead of the 802.11 standard and vagries of TCP/IP you'll see much less throughput.

In real world FTP throughput tests done at my office DLink cards averaged 6.2 Mb/s within 115 ft of the AP, while comparable cards ranged from 3.75 Mb/s (SMC) to 4.6 Mb/s (Cisco)

RFID technology has been around for years. Have you purchased a CD or DVD in the last few years? Remember the check-out guy "beeping" it before you left? That's an RFID tag at work. In this instance, it's just a proximity tag that will alert the store if you (ahem) neglect to purchase the product. (The official term for this is "inventory shrinkage.")

Checkpoint Systems makes RF Electronic Article Surveilance (RF-EAS) tags (the US site is not responding, but the Japanese one is, showing the bulk tags.) And here's a company that sells machines to auto-insert the RF-EAS tag into DVD carriers.

An amazing amount of effort has gone into reducing the cost of the RFID anti-theft tags. They're typically screen printed, and usually are destroyed when you purchase the product. It's not cost effective to make it re-programmable, as the retailers are playing a statistical game - they're weighing the probability of someone stealing a returned (or defective) unit against the reprogrammable cost that burdens EVERY unit going out the door.

One step up from this application is the ubiquitous personnel badge that most of us drones are required to wear at the orifice. Here's one from TI (PDF datasheet.) This costs a little more, and is definitley capable of identifying who you are.

Apple has been dragging its ass in the sand in the processor race due to Motorola's lack of money/research/carbonated beverages

Too true. This is what Motorola got after the big layoffs, mobile business misinvestment and shutting down of research labs.

Not only Apple, Palm also learnt their hard lesson and gradually move to non-Motorola processor like ARM as you find in Tungsten.

Or, if you want to attach the nodes to Ethernet, the Ubicom IP2022. It's still reasonably inexpensive, but has 64K of Flash, 20K of RAM, and built-in 10baseT Ethernet support. That way you don't have to invent any new protocols to wire the things up.

The only drawback of the IP2022 is that the SDK is somewhat expensive. If you just want basic tools (a compiler, assembler, linker, and debugger), you can use the GNU tools. But the SDK includes the Ethernet driver, TCP/IP stack, small HTTP server, etc., which would be useful for an application like this.

Disclaimer: I've worked for Ubicom for a little over four months. Before that, I was a satisfied customer, having designed their SX part into the first generation ReplayTV box to handle IR remote functions.

Argh...sorry I checked Tungsten/T uses Texas Instruments OMAP1510 processor (an enhanced ARM-based processor), not StrongArm sorry.

Not so sure about the clock speed, but you can check here.

What surprises me is that in this day and age we still have battery powered calculators at all. Wouldn't a decently sized solar panel [e.g. make it 2cm x 1cm and that should be enough].

That'd work fine for a 4-function calculator (or an entry-level scientific calculator), but I'd think the solar panel you would need to power (for instance) a TI-92+ or an HP 48GX would be a bit on the bulky side.

We're talking TENS OF THOUSANDS if not HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of cycles for a single FP divide.

No, we're talking LESS THAN A THOUSAND cycles for a single FP divide.

Here, on page 99. Yes, I know it's for a different architecture, but come on, don't make wild exaggerations like that.

Small update.

Alien is using 915mhz/2.45ghz. I assumed they were using the tech described here:

13.56 MHz Frequently Asked Questions

There's no shortage of equipment that can capture and transmit on these frequencies; cordless phones do analog work in this domain all the time. But, again -- Alien is not trying to do badging, they're trying to do inventory control.

Very, very different problems. Worst case scenario is that a competitor drives by your facility and gets the same realtime updates of your inventory that you do.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Have any of you priced serial radio modems recently?

We're talking far, far more expensive than even the more expensive wireless Ethernet cards. Check this out: Arrick's wireless links.. $650.

Perhaps there are some modules that, in a manufacturing situation, are pretty cheap. But you're going to have to spend a lot, unless you're interested in developing with TI's transceiver modules. Break out a very tiny soldering iron and a magnifying glass, those flatpacks can get pretty small (this I say right before actually soldering a similar sized chip).

• Pens & Pencils (with a pocket protector, of course)
• Overhead markers
• White-board markers
• Chalk-board, uh, chalk
• Minutes from the latest Yearbook meeting
• 1 hole punch (I couldn't figure out how to fit the 3 hole in there)
• Wallet (with about $20 worth of coins in a stretched change compartment)
• Key to the yearbook room
• Keys to my house

• Graphing Calculator (not just any graphing calculator, mind you, but the biggest available -- a TI-92)

In typical usage, there is a lot of time that the CPU is doing nothing. Design one that can take snoozes for as little as a millisecond at a time with insignificant latency and you can save a lot of power.

I came acorss this mod one time and thought it would be incredibly cool with a blue LED instead, but I thought about it and the plexi used for the mouse wheel probably wouldn't be as grippy/nice feeling as the slightly rubbery surface of the wheel I had. I looked around and finally I found a mouse that came with a clear scroll wheel. it was the new m$ Blue Intellimouse. I bought it ($20 after a $10 rebate) and ordered some superbright blue LEDs. Once they came I hijacked voltage from the USB cable and put one directly behind the clear scroll wheel. It lights up quite nicely and looks awesome, Then I replaced the red LED in the back and the one for the sensor with blue ones. It worked fine and it was bright enough that the responsiveness didn't drop, but... all microsoft optical mice have the clear red plastic for the bottom. It glowed quite brightly when there were red LEDs in it, but i unfortunately discovered that the red plastic completely filters out the blue light. So the only light coming from it is out of the wheel, and of course the bottom if you pick it up. I attached some longer leads to the one in the back and and siliconed it directly too the little red oval in the butt of the mouse and managed to get a faint purple glow out of it. It still looks pretty cool, but it dissapointingly glows less. My TI-83+ Silver on the other hand glows very nicely with the 2 blue LEDs i put in it.

My favorite chemical to imagine working with (when I worked at Texas Instruments and wandered around the 3rd floor pipe space looking at labels) was Silane. With a chemical formula just like Methane, with Silicon in the place of the Carbon, you'd imagine it would be explosive but not otherwise interesting. Wrong! Silane can spontaneously explode when exposed to air. It has to be specially ducted and burned off or blown out quickly enough to prevent creation of a flammable concentration. A friend of mine where I work now, though, had more direct experience with Silane while working at another semiconductor manufacturer. He claims that he once liberated a small volume of silane in the air, and found that it formed a bubble... the silane reacted with the air on the edge to form a protective shield around the remaining gas. Of course, when the bubble burst... the explosion was deafening. Strangely enough, I don't think my friend ever found the opportunity to experiment further. But should you care to try it yourself on a smaller scale, go for it!

Stack machines are efficient in terms of economy of opcodes and economy of specification. They're inherently serial beasts, though, unless you want to work extra hard and "registerize" the stack.

Registerizing the stack is basically register renaming that has to take into account that every instruction might rename the entire register set.

For a non-performance critical embedded system with tight power constraints, it might be a good match. For top-speed computational performance, you just don't get the parallelism out of a stack machine. At least, I can't see how without jumping through a lot of hoops.

Of course, I might be biased. The CPU I program lets you issue 8 instructions per cycle and has 64 32-bit registers. It can read about 30 registers and write 18 registers every cycle. I just can't imagine trying to write the highly parallel code I write on a stack machine!

OK, well 2pF may not seem like alot and in most cases its not. However, what you are forgetting is the scale we are working at here. I tried to lookup the exact memory module for a GeForce card, but I couldn't so I just went to Micron's site and looked up their spec on their 256Mb DDR333 SDRAM. If you will look on page six you will see the capacitance ratings for each signal line are as low as 0.5pF for three of the signal lines and max out at 4.0pF for the I/O (data) lines on the memory module. So lets look at the 2pF number again. By adding a connector you increase your input capacitance by 400% in some cases and 50% in the best case scenario. This is very bad and will directly impact how much memory can be put on one bus and how fast the memory can be timed. The more input capacitance you have on a line the harder the output buffers of the graphics chip (or memory controller) have to work. More input capacitance directly affects how fast you can get that nice little square wave signal to look nice enough to be registered on the other side. The more input capacitance the longer it takes, and this is all very relevant at the speeds we are talking about here. Also, FYI other factors for not using a connector include trace length. By adding modules you are increasing trace length by a large amount (relatively speaking of course). This also adds input capacitance.

So now you are probably asking. How much capacitance can a typical graphics chip or processor drive? Well I tried to find the datasheet on nVidia's website for their GeForce chips, but didn't turn up a thing. So I went to Intel's site and looked up the datasheet for their 845G chipset with integrated graphics. If you look on page 525 you will see that the output drive for the Intel chip is 12pF. So now you can probably see the problem. Assuming all we drove were memory modules directly from the 845G (which we wouldn't in real life) we could put just two to three 256Mb (32MB) modules on board without connectors. If we put the Molex connector you specified in between that number changes from 1 - 2 chips. In real life we would put a nice buffer in between that has a stronger output drive in between the 845G and the memory. Like TI's 24-Bit to 48-Bit Registered Buffer. That sucker has a 30pF drive and each buffer could easily drive 6 - 7 modules for a total of 256MB of RAM without the connector. Add a connector and this number deindles to 4 - 5. Anyway, I'm sure you get the point. At this scale even a 2pF connector makes a big difference.

However, after saying all that I should mention that I do not believe that these electrical considerations are the main or only reason the cards are not expandable. I think alot of it has to do with demand. Very few people are gonna upgrade their video card with more memory. I don't know any Matrox Millenium owners, including me, that upgraded their memory on their video cards. Because the economies of scale for a specialized memory make them much more expensive to produce than consumers like myself are willing to pay. In adition, by the time I am gonna upgrade a cards memory I can probably buy a brand new one with that amount of memory for the price of the piddly module ;)

JOhn

TI-34 ... discontinued

I swear by my TI-36x calculator. When in hexadecimal mode, it changes the trig keys into A-F keys.

While this doesn't quite fit the bill for what you want, it's not a bad calculator. The TI-34 is solar powered, small, light, and doesn't try to do anything fancy. It was the "recommended" calculator at my high school, and it worked great all the way through college.

Mine actually just died recently, and so I'm looking for a replacement. Unfortunately, TI discontinued this little gem and replaced it with a 2-line dot-matrix display thing. Ugh!! So now, like you, I'm looking for a nice simple calculator. If the TI-34 looks good to you, I'm sure you could find a used one (or maybe even a new one -- they haven't been discontinued for too long).

Funny you should mention VLIWs, since the DSPs I program (the TMS320C6000 family) are VLIW. They're actually much closer to traditional VLIW than Intel's IA-64.

Compilers can produce much more "pretty good" code than any human could (without going insane, at least), in a much, much shorter period of time. But I've never yet had the compiler beat me on size and speed simultaneously on any individual calculation-intensive function I've coded by hand. (It'll beat me very occasionally by a couple cycles at a large cost in size.) This is not because the compiler's bad at what it does. TI actually has one of the better optimizing C compilers out there, at least in the embedded space. (Disclaimer: I work for TI.)

The real difference, I think, comes from the assumptions the compiler can't make but that the programmer can. The semantics of the C language get in the way of performance sometimes. Pointer rules cause dependences where you don't expect them, alignment issues frustrate SIMD optimization, etc. When you code in assembly language, What You See Is What You Get, exactly.

We are giving a seminar to a number of engineering students with the same goal and have put a lot of material online.

More information should become online on DSPInfoExchange, but as with most companies, promises, promises, promises... If you are interested, you can always contact me for the rest.

If you have a look at the Texas Instruments website and look for DSP Fest or Developer's Conference, you'll find a lot of relevant material. They promised to release linux tools a couple of weeks ago on the tidevcon 2002 (not the full blown gfx interface, but rather gdb like) for the 'C6000 line. Let's hope they deliver :)

We are giving a seminar to a number of engineering students with the same goal and have put a lot of material online.

More information should become online on DSPInfoExchange, but as with most companies, promises, promises, promises... If you are interested, you can always contact me for the rest.

If you have a look at the Texas Instruments website and look for DSP Fest or Developer's Conference, you'll find a lot of relevant material. They promised to release linux tools a couple of weeks ago on the tidevcon 2002 (not the full blown gfx interface, but rather gdb like) for the 'C6000 line. Let's hope they deliver :)

You don't want a PDA, you want a calculator. TI has had the TI-92 for a long time. It will solve all of your on the go math needs. I think they also have some new calculator that is better than the 92. Check Texas Instruments' website to see what their latest offering is. While it doesn't run Linux itself there is a great deal of linux software that allows you to interface with the calculator. Other than that I believe this device will suit all your needs. It is also very reasonably priced compared to palm devices.

http://www.ti.com/sc/docs/news/2000/00004.htm

I haven't found the part number for the finished product yet, but pretty cool stuff, no?

It's humerous that one of the biggest Japanese companies is so concerned with intellectual property. The Japanese reputation with regards to Patent enforcement is a model for the anti-Amazon burn-the-patents crowd. This is illustrated by, for example, Texas Instruments getting bent over by Fujitsu in 97.

I wonder how many are willing to admit that they drool at night at the thought of owning a TI Powerbook

I probably would have gotten one years ago if TI really was the manufacturer (they used to make some of the best laptops on the market, and have experience in making things rugged from their decades as a defense contractor).

As it is, I still want to get a Mac after I get another job, but I'm unsure whether to get a desktop or laptop right now. I could use a new laptop, but, I'm sorry, naming a laptop after the material it's made from is pretty funny, and smacks of conspicuous consumption. It's almost like an SUV with Greenpeace stickers, or a vegan leather dyke. Besides, if you stick to that convention, wouldn't you have a "recycled plastic emac" line, too? =)

The corperate benifit of some of this stuff is fairly easy to see. For instance, say we make a chip called the Wizbang 3900. Now, this chip is going to be released in the 3901, 3903 and 3909 flavors each with different features. Since a run through the fab can cost upwards of $500k, it is much easier to just make one version, then just label them differently. The same thing is true with the development boards. A lot of times the board is only populated with the parts to allow that feature set. By populating more/different parts of the board, different features can be achived with out requiring a different board spin. All of this saves money and development costs, but does lead to some documentation holes.

So in short, blame it not marketing not the engineers. We're the good guys.

IEEE 1394b supports bandwidth up to 3.2Gbps. TI has introduced a 1394b controller chipset.

Furtherless IEEE 1394b can run at 800Mbytes/sec over Cat 5 for up to 100m. Seems like you'll be able to just swap out your RJ-45 connectors for firewire ones and get to business.

As far as being saturated by a single fast disk...well do you have a single disk that can sustain 50Mbytes per second ? IEEE1394a can really transfer data very close to its theoretical limits in my experience. I've seen it shovel around 40+MBytes/sec so, I wouldn't write it off so fast. You need an IDE RAID 0 array to manage that.

Further, Apple is apparently considering rolling out 1394b as standard in the next round of desktops, and possibly the laptops too. (No link for the latter...)

If you're trying to get maximum bang for the chip buck, and willing to custom-build boards (which people often are for multi-million-dollar highly-custom machines), digital signal processor chips often have rocking performance for dumb fast applications. For instance, the TI TMS320C6713 can do up to 1800 MFLOPS at 225MHz (probably only 1350 double-precision), while most general-purpose CPUs do less than one MFLOPS per megahertz, and have a reasonable amount of memory and I/O bandwidth. You won't be running off-the-shelf Beowulf on them, but it's not hard to build them into PCI boards or multi-processor PCI boards that you can feed data from a conventional CPU, and they come with compilers and usually other programming environments.

Unfortunately, TI hasn't officially provided much information, but having been involved in the TI dev scene quite a while, I've had the opportunity to play with beta versions of these apps quite a bit. They're slightly limited when compared to Palm because they don't have touchscreen input, although the 92+/Voyage 200 calculators have a full qwerty keyboard. The software is quite nice, and I've been using it full time since my Clie broke a few weeks ago. I'll have the Clie repaired under warrantee, but for the target demographics of TI's calculators (mostly students), the Organizer software is more than powerful enough to make somebody who purchases one of these calcs reconsider whether they need to carry around a PDA as well. And trust me, consolidating the two devices and freeing up a pocket is definitely something to look forward to.

Recall that TI is releasing a calculator (Personal Learning Tool) with a desktop-like navigation system. That calc, if anything, shows how closely they're starting to come together.

At least it's built on TI-89/92+ architecture. I can play all of my games on three calculators now.

>Keep taking notes on notepads for a few years, then try to find a crucial bit of info that you don't know where you scribbled. This is why PDAs exist.

Keep using a PDA for a few years and you'll find it doesn't work anymore, that they don't sell replacements, and that the synchronization programs reuiqre you to use antiquated software that won't let you transfer your data onto a newer model.

Case in point: The TI Avigo. Notice the Lotus Organizer CD in the background...

Nope, thats not for me!

Nope.

Transmeta, maker of the Crusoe processor for mobile applications (</marketroid>) contracts the actual manufacturing process out to Texas Instruments.

Moreover, they already have a working model using development boards, for from the front page of the link I quote:
It is written entirely in VHDL. Originally designed and tested using Altera's APEX20K200E FPGA and Nios development board, the design is now ready for the public.

My guess? USR is just the first to bring a product to market using TI's 802.11b chipset. See this product note for details...

I was at a Mathematics Educators conference about a month ago and got to see some of the new TI calculator models that can be used in the classroom.

Take a look at the TI-10 calculator. I got a first-hand view of this thing at the conference. This thing is targeted for 10 year olds. Personally, the calculator was congested with buttons, too many in my opinion for a third or fourth grader. There are buttons for graphing, charting, powers of ten, and even a random number problem generator. Plus, the display was awful on the eyes (each number was displayed in a 5x7 pixel grid). I tried to ask the representative from TI if she really thought that kids would have no problems working with this calculator. Her response: "I know of kids who are surfing the web. Of course they'll be able to learn how to use that calculator."

I then talked with a calculator distributor, and she said that the teachers hated the calculator, because there were always a certain number of kids that needed help finding their way around. The teachers hated having to give complex instructions such as "Now click on the button that has the square-ish spiral located in the top-center of your calculator." Most teachers were instead just buying the simple 10-key, simple operation calculator from TI that was $5 cheaper (the TI-10 runs at $15, while simpler calculators are about $9-$10). So now, TI is raising the prices of their other calculators to match the price of the TI-15.

Anyway, the point of the story is still the same as in the article:

KISS
Keep it Simple, Stupid!