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Incredible Shrinking PC
Lawrence_Bird writes "Reuters is reporting that IBM is set to announce next week a
prototype
PC called a 'metapad' 5"x3"x0.75". 128Mb Ram, 10GB, and an 800 Mhz cpu.
Understand this is a module that can be plugged into other devices,
such as a LCD screen or docking station. "
...putting one in your pocket on a crowded subway?
...trying to *type* on this thing?
...the cost of these things?
...how this will impact the PDA market?
...the cost of these things?
...having a Beowulf cluster in a card catalog?
Nice, now I can have a pc where ever I go! Oh wait, then what would I do with my laptop? Maybe I can attach it to my laptop, and use Merlin with it :)
.. the better/smaller the device, the easier it is for pickpockets ;)
The article actually claims that the unit has a 10-gigaBIT hard drive. I wonder if that was a mistake, or an intentional marketing ploy to make it sound more impressive than it actually is.
In other words this is a laptop without a screen?
MetaSearch=Search a set of search engines
MetaModerate=Moderate a set of Moderations
MetaPad=Pad a set of Pads???!!
Can 'Meta' prefix a Noun, rather than a Verb?
...In other words, no keyboard, no mouse, no screen, no input or output of any kind. It's a PC you're meant to take home and plug into a docking station which has all your input and output devices ready for you.
Why this is any better than an ultraslim laptop, which has pretty much all the same features plus the ability to use it without a docking station when needed, is not immediately clear to me.
This sounds like something that would be a great application for a Transmeta CPU. These will definitely need low power and cool-running chips. It's too bad the article didn't have many details.
~.Evanrude
With a little device like this, I could move my "Computer" from home to work, have the laptop be a "dock" for the computer.
Taking it one step further, an industry standard device could allow one to buy laptops as a chassis with engine. I could buy the Thinkpad X's chassis and plop in a transmeta computing module to get 2x the battery life.
Alex
Add a battery, DVD drive, keyboard. Is it still a lot smaller than a notebook? It seems to me like someone just took an old notebook apart... Not all that revolutionary when you look at it form this perspective, is it?
Finally, a mainstream computer both small and fast enough to fit in a car.
I am looking forward to watching movies and listening to the music I want to in the car, and it is removable and can have (Maybe) a cdrom so I can watch even more movies!
I'm not sure about the name...
...I think there could be a lawsuit coming from whatever Japanese company owns "Poke'mon." Isn't there a pokemon out there by that name?
This thing sure has the potential to be an iPod killer. Not only do you get to have all your music, you get to have all your workspace and all your files with you, wherever you go. I just plug it into another computer and that computer instantly acts as a dumb terminal into my own computer. That sounds like a really great idea!
What does this do, you may ask, other than act as a penis-size indicator without a screen? Well, if I want, I can run it as a personal server that's small. If I want the portability of a laptop without the size, I can have one docking station for it at home and one at the office, and play mp3's on it in the car during my drive between. (If it's a pc, then somebody can make a panel you put on it that will give you an lcd to select files and an audio output). If it's reasonbly priced if/when it comes out, I'll definitely get one if only for the fun use factor!
so apparently we all read arstechnica too. this was on there long before it showed up on slashdot. i don't blame the /. editors for
this, but i'd hope that the people posting
news would take a bit more ethical responsibility and report the source. see
the original arstechnica article for more details.
...because pagers and cell phones haven't completely succeeded in making our jobs be 24/7.
The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
...get AMD to put a proc in the thing, then market it as "MetaHeatingPad".
That's like the people at k5 complaining "This was on The Other Site". All of us don't read arstechnica.
Best Slashdot Co
Hook this up to one of those shoes that generate power as you walk from MIT. Attach it to a glasses HUD with voice recognition and you have a wearable computer.
This is gonna be cool...
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
is this a Good Thing(tm)?
Assuming it has a touch screen and an OS that takes advantage of that touch screen, then what you have here is much better than an ordinary laptop.
Frankly, laptops are uncomfortable to use in your lap. A tablet's form factor would work much better for doing things like browsing the web while you're watching TV.
As an artist, I use a sketch pad with an array of pencils and markers. With a sufficiently designed tablet, I could run Photoshop on it and use that as my sketchpad. Since all the work I do is digital, being able to save the step of scanning my sketches is a big time saver. Not to mention that with Photoshop, I could start with a real photo (PCMCIA camera?) and draw on top of that. Plus, I would need a lot fewer art supplies, and those aren't cheap. Heck, if I really wanted to get fancy (and I do...) I could get an 802.11 card and have it automatically upload my sketches to my website. Since I post my artwork on forums alot, this would be a time saver too.
The execs where I work have expressed interest in replacing their laptops with tablets. One of them actually said "I wish my PDA was about 8.5 by 11 inches." On a plane and in meetings, its far more convenient to use in that form factor.
If you oversimplify anything, it can sound dull. The revolution comes from how it's used, not how it's designed. If one teeny weeny little change to a system makes people use it in a whole new way, then that's all it needs to be interesting. You know that little wheel on your mouse? Those didn't always used to be there. Now that it's there, I can't stand mice that don't have that wheel.
"Derp de derp."
MetaPad sounds WAY too much like a super-absorbent feminine hygiene product.
I realize this was for Yahoo Finance, and not exactly aimed at the SlashDot crowd, but seriously:
Sheeesh. Like explaining that 800 megahertz is 800 million cycles per second is going to clue folks in with such valuable information. "Gawrsh, that's a lot of cycles per second."
And IBM's statements seem weird:Ready for the market in a few years??? In a few years, this thing should be *way* obsolete, with tiny pocket computers more powerful than our desktops of today. This thing would be useful and interesting today, not a year from now.I thought IBM had top notch people in usability, market research, laptop design, and so on. It seems strange to hear them say "we have this cool technology, but we're not sure how people would use it." I can think of a dozen ways it could be turned into a useful product. I guess it's good that they're asking the industry, but it sounds like these guys are a bit directionless, and will end up deliverying too little, way too late.
Too bad, I'd likely buy one of these if it were available today.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I was crossing the street one day and a few steps in front of me was a young lady talking animatedly on a cellphone. So animatedly was she talking, in fact, that she failed to notice the height of the curb and consequently stumbled when she reached the other side. The cellphone flew out of her hand and crashed down in the gutter, whereupon the battery fell off the back of the phone.
Leaving two very small black rectangular objects.
Both of which were easily small enough to fit in the gaps between the bars of the sewer grating on which they landed.
...unfortunately, as much fun as it may be to leave it there, I have to report they didn't fall down the drain, but instead both bounced off the bars and onto the road. Pure dumb luck she didn't lose them both.
...and when I opened up the box, there had been significant shrinkage.
I Heart Sorting Networks
Isn't this just a re-hashing of the Ergo Brick? It was a 486/Pentium that was just a brick with ports. Sold with the idea that you could afford a second monitor, kbd and mouse at home, and you would just lug this thing back and forth. Was used in some secure environments because you could pop the whole machine in a safe at the end of the day.
Point is, this really isn't a new idea. Not that it's a bad one, but it's definately not original.
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
I thought that IBM was going to be supporting Linux.
This article on CNN has the same basic content, a few more details, but infinitely less painful to read than the cornball "humor" in the Yahoo article.
-- Rob "Xemu" Fermier
picture: http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/ne/en/2002/02/0205met apad.jpg
article: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-830173.html
Why the hell would you want to plug it into a base station? Haven't they heard of Bluetooth? Simply walk up to a screen/mouse/keyboard station, pair the device and of you go. This is the medium term future of computing, one small device that holds all that you currently have on your local machine with the ability to pick it up and walk away with it, just like todays PDA's. Of course it will be full featured when linked with the right I/O devices unlike todays PDA's.
Longer term it should all be networked but since the networks don't cover everywhere we need to be and are not fast enough yet this isn't fessible.
[Please type your sig here.]
Trademark does not apply -- the link you point to is for software, while IBM's handy-dandy miracle machine is hardware.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
oooooooh, I'm supposed to be impressed? What microprocessor? My cordless phone runs at 2 GHz. :-/
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
Understand this is a module that can be plugged into other devices, such as a LCD screen
A computer that can be attached to a monitor? I'll believe it when I see it!
...I never metapad I didn't like.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Photoshop over Telnet always seems to give me some sort of error...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
A computer this small means you can take it to work and finish that game of NetHack you were doing so well on at home.
Bah, that's a load of BS. Where are your priorties? If you want to spend more time with your kids, then do so, don't sit there and complain about being too busy.
I get paid way less than I should because I turn my pager off on weekends. I don't put in any overtime unless it's critical. Yeah, I'm not living the high life, and not going to have much when it comes to retirement funds, but the important thing to me is that I enjoy my time with my son, NOW. Once he's grown, I'll probably have to work much harder and longer to make up for lost time, but that's just money. You can't make up lost time with your kids.
I don't have a GHz computer at home, I don't drive a Benz, I don't own a big house, I can't buy the latest gadets. But I do take my son out hiking and camping on weekends. That's where my priorites are. Think about yours...
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
This sounds rather dubious if it's sold to consumers. Remember the "brick" computers of a few years ago? These were compact and reasonably high performance boxes, more than pocket size but still not hard to take home with you. But you had to have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and CD & floppy drives at every place you were going to use it. They were far sturdier than laptops, and I think had considerably higher performance than a laptop in the same price range. But they were duds on the market. I doubt that shrinking it to pocket size will be sufficient to overcome the basic problem that to the average user it's just a laptop with critical parts missing...
But I can see an embedded system designer salivating over this, IF the price is right and there is a good way to attach the required I/O. Give it USB, Firewire, and RS-232 ports so we can hook in I/O modules and bury this thing somewhere inside of a machine. For program development, we might have to reach inside and hook up the docking port, but once the software is released we just load up the internal HD and stick it in the machine.
Tera Pax.
Giga Tex.
Spot the madness!
5PM time for dinner, chow!
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I hope its running a lite version of XP. 1.25GB isn't too much space.
this would make a sweet little MP3/DVD player though if you could attach IDE/USB devices.
i just hope i don't have to take my work home with me every night.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
http://www.personal.psu.edu/reh18/micro/retirem
It's in an older excel format, if memory serves (as old as I could save with whateverI was using that day).
ANyway, it assumes a 7% real return (the historical average forthe stock market), though this can be set in a cell to other values.
It shows the effects of putting $2000/year (the old IRA amount; it's now $3000, but you can change that in the sheet) every year from 21 to 65, including the value of that year's contribution on its own at 65. It also shows starting at 31, and stopping at 30--come retirement time, your contributions from 21-30 are worth more than those from 31-65!
hawk