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The Disposable Computer
sp00 writes "A disposable paperboard computer has been developed and is already in use in Sweden. Developed by Cypak AB, the paperboard computer can collect, process, and exchange several pages of encrypted data, the company says." Pretty impressive, given that they say it has a mere 32K of memory.
March 4, 2004 (11:40 a.m. EST)
By W. David Gardner, TechWeb News
A disposable paperboard computer has been developed and is already in use in Sweden. Developed by Cypak AB, the paperboard computer can collect, process, and exchange several pages of encrypted data, the company says.
"Initially, it will be used in industrial-specific applications as an enhanced and secure RFID device," said Cypak marketing director Strina Ehrensvard in an email. "Today, in pharmaceutical and courier packaging as a data-collection device; tomorrow maybe for interactive books, lotteries, passports, and voting cards."
With just 32 Kbytes of memory, the paperboard computer's functionality is somewhat limited at present, but the firm believes its future will be broad. Cypak has entered into an agreement in the U.S. with MeadWestvaco Healthcare Packaging, which has marketing rights to the product and technology in the Americas.
Ehrensvard said the device is currently in use in a trial sponsored by a Swedish university involving compliance monitoring of pharmaceutical packaging. The trial tracks when a medicine tablet has been taken out of a package; it is then placed on a Cypak scanner connected to a PC on which the information can be viewed and stored. Ehrensvard said the paperboard computer is being considered in another healthcare application, as well: doctors would use it to help authenticate the administration of pharmaceuticals.
The Cypak product utilizes RFID technology that is based on printable sensors and electronic modules. The components are integrated on a variety of products, ranging from packaging and plastic cards to adhesives. In healthcare applications, Cypak says the paperboard computer time-stamps medicine dosages, which can be integrated with a patient's electronic diary. It can deliver sound reminders, too.
Cypak has also developed a companion device--a smart card with an integrated numerical keypad. The firm expects this to be used initially in applications demanding high security. By entering a unique PIN on a card, a user can connect to the Internet and exchange data. Cypak says the card's encryption can't be copied or broken, enabling it to deliver "military-class security."
"The paperboard computer concept and the PIN-on-Card are the same core technology--components integrated in different products," Ehrensvard said. "They exchange information to a PC with the same reader."
Cypak offers the components on an OEM basis for about $1 each. The firm added that OEM components for its readers are available for approximately the same price in large volumes.
The firm has developed a tamper-proof package technology with the Swedish Postal Service. Called SecurePak, the packaging technology stores sender and receiver relevant data and alerts receivers of any possible package tampering before the package is opened.
Cypak will demo the products at the CeBIT 2004 exposition, in Hannover, Germany, later this month.
It was computer design by temper tantrum.
That may well be, but it's still perhaps one of the smartest moves apple ever made. While the rest of the computing world focused on standardized components, interchangeable io cards and memory, replaceable drives etc... Apple made an all-in-one system whose only interesting upgrade path was a new machine from Apple.
And so, those who valued a complete, tested, supported system went with Apple, and that was the basis for (one of?) the most successful hardware companies ever.
You can't argue with success, even if Jobs is a bit of a whack.
Well... For most current computers, long takes as much space as int, 32 bits (or 64 bits for 64 bit CPUs). And for any individual variable, it'll take at least that amount of memory even if it's 1 bit bitfield (not sure if common x86 compilers by default pack variables to take less space if they can, though).
So using anything else doesn't really gain you anything in space, but it may well hurt you in peformance (and code re-use).
Bloat comes from copy-paste coding, and slowness comes from incorrectly chosen data structures and algorithms. This all arises from poor design, so for example the programmer is often faced with decision to change entire existing code to make some piece of it more generic, or copy-pasting that piece and modifying it a bit to fill the new need.
Speaking as a programmer whose first programming experience was Z80 assembly with 4K of RAM, I had to seriously revamp my thinking in recent years, but basically 32-bit processors work significantly better with 32-bit values. Also, except when memory is statically allocated and you've forced the compiler to pack memory allocated to your variables, that carefully considered allocation of a single byte is going to take up 32 bits of actual memory anyway, because once again, the CPU can access it that way significantly faster.
In a nutshell, if you use a byte, short, or int, you're slowing down the machine. The only good reason to optimize to that level is when you're expecting memory problems, and as your professor pointed out, that is rarely a consideration these days (especially when you add modern paging techniques to the vast amounts of available physical memory).
The more interesting question is the chicken-and-egg angle on runtime bloat -- did RAM increase because users needed it to run steadily ballooning applications, or did applications get bloated because cheap-as-dirt RAM meant end user machines had memory to spare? (I suppose both are probably true... which would be a bizarre conclusion if we were actually talking about chickens and eggs...)
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