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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.
Jeez, no one would ever want to buy that underpowered machine! Give me 640k, and we will talk. ;-)
Who needs more than 32k of memory anyway?
Jay | http://oldos.org
I remember when a 32K Commodore PET was a cool thing. ... Just imagine a cluster .... in a three ring binder.
If they print double sided could they emulate a Commodore 64.
In a few more years
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
If I get Windows running on this thing (with 32k!) and I get a BSOD, do I just throw it away and get a new one instead of a reboot? Or even better, could I mail it to MS and ask for a new one?
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
A computer you use for a few days and then throw away? Hell, Dell's like twenty years ahead in that market.
..a computer I can actually wipe my ass with when I get pissed at it.
So what's the payout for collecting pounds of these and returning them to my local recycling center?
The difference between disposable and classic is age. My three year old PC is disposable. My 15 year old PC is a classic and goes for $9,000 on Ebay.
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
Imagine....a Beowulf cluster of these!
*sigh*
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 $1 each. The firm added that OEM components for its readers are available for approximately the same price in large volumes.
The firm has developed a tamper-proof package technology with the Swedish Postal Service. Called SecurePak, the packaging technology stores sender and receiver relevant data and alerts receivers of any possible package tampering before the package is opened.
Cypak will demo the products at the CeBIT 2004 exposition, in Hannover, Germany, later this month.
Well, with this configuration the power receptacles would take up more room than the cluster nodes. So imagine 1,000,000 of these in a box the size of a filing cabinet? And along these lines, can you unplug it and store it with your other files?
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
Their mod specialist Yoshi DeHerrera will show off a cardboard case PC. (Web story is already posted here.)
This was actually a delayed segment from last week. Yoshi cut his hand working on setting up his demo on how he did it last time he tried to do this segment. He needed to leave the studio to get stitches and missed most of the show as a result.
Forget about clustering, I want to see someone overclock one of these without the thing smoking and going up in flames!
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
In Soviet Russia...
the computer disposes of YOU!
*ducks*
Now I can use my disposable cell phone to dial up and post my photos from my disposable digital camera and ask disney why I cant find anymore disposable dvds.
Oops. Better get back to work. Else no disposable income.
Well, it seems we will finally be able to refer to something as truly a "Notebook computer"
68.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Look at pr0n then shred the evidence...
Somebody help me: I keep my todo/dates, todo/tasks, books/want, books/have, tidbits in a plain Unix text file and I maintain it with a text editor and print it using a2ps -2. My life fits in two columns landscape mode.
Whenever I need it, I print it, at a cost of 17 cents on my inkjet. When I need to update it, I simply use a pen and "sync" at home later.
I can fold it, put it in my pocket, access the data randomly instantly, and easily add graphics or test with a 0% error rate. However it gets expensive at 17 cents per sync.
All I need is a little bit of memory (32k) and a read-only display screen, super-tiny, and cheap as hell. If America wasn't ass-backwards, I'd just SMS the stuff to my cell phone.
As an employee at Microsoft I had TWO of the top of the line PocketPCs : I played quake on them, wrote some C programs, and put them away as toys. I need to do WORK, as a technical person, not a salesman. All I need is digital paper.
What can I use?
I know - because that's how much RAM my Radio Shack Model 1 had after I'd purchased the add-on module and populated it with the extra 16K of RAM (the main module could only handle 16K) and before I pushed the limits by moving to 48K.
Note that the module plus 32K extra RAM (to bring the system to 48K) was about $2,000 Canadian at the time.
This is not insignificant - at least not if you've ever used something other than Windoze ;)
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
"My dog ate my computer sir"
Cypak says the card's encryption can't be copied or broken...
...
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
*whew*! I needed that.
There are devices marketed as calculators that have more than 32k of memory these days...
:)
High-end wristwatches are starting to behave like low-powered computers with a small black and white pixel-based display, the beeping speaker, and ability to accept wireless input. We're not calling those computers, just "smart watches".
So, this really is more about "smart paper"... paper with a few chips in it and therefore the ability to beep. Only a small upgrade over the musical greeting card.
I'm still waiting on the disposable cell-phone .....
wouldn't a beowulf cluster of these.. be a book?
Cypak says the card's encryption can't be copied or broken, enabling it to deliver "military-class security."
sigh.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
They're probably great at running Folding@Home.
that that is is that that is not is not
Why climb everest?
I think you'll find the answer to both questions is "why not?"
Not so. The true answer to all questions is: "to improve my chances of getting laid".
-kgj
-kgj
"Who would ever want more than 16K?" He said it to Woz when Woz was designing the Apple II. Woz wanted to put socketing for 16, 32 or 48K on the motherboard, as opposed to the 16K limit of the Apple I. Jobs was also against the color capabilities. Woz built them in anyway.
When Jobs hoisted the pirate flag and built the Mac, he specifically left out expandability and color on purpose. It wasn't because of technical considerations, as the Apple IIgs was in design at the same time as the Mac. It was computer design by temper tantrum.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Perhaps they can get it to run Windows, sell them on rolls and I'll be able to wipe my butt with Microsoft on a daily basis.
John.
...the paperboard computer can collect, process, and exchange several pages of encrypted data, the company says.
What do they mean by process? It sounds more like data storage. This is quite different than a computer. What kind of calculations (or computations) can it do?
All of the examples could easily be implemented on this paper computer with nothing more than a clever encoding scheme and be decoded by a real electronic computer (PDA) with a scanner.
In short this sound like a new type of ticker tape. The PDA and scanner would be the "Turing machine" (or processor).
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
I wonder if /. can set things up so that any story related to a piece of hardware would get an automatic "imagine a beowulf cluster blah, blah blah" post from anonymous coward. Seems as if it would save a lot of valuable time for /.'ers.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
with Slashdot when 95% of Score:5 comments to such an interesting article are "Funny." That having been said, I believe that our community as a whole (id est Slashdot at large) seems to completely lack any professionalism regarding cryptography by writing on the front page that "the paperboard computer can collect, process, and exchange several pages of encrypted data, the company says." which is supposedly 'Pretty impressive, given that they say it has a mere 32K of memory.' Surprise: To "collect, process, and exchange several pages of encrypted data" you don't need million times more memory than said data! Film at 11! What will be "impressive" next? The fact that strong crypto can use only few cycles per byte on general purpose processor? Wow! How impressive! Really? I don't need 4GHz Pentium 5 with 4GB of RAM to "collect, process, and exchange several pages of encrypted data"?
Give me a break! This article is great news and really worth reading, but for much more important reasons than those that kids today think that you need ten hundred megabytes of ram to encrypt and store ten kilobytes of plain text. I, for one, feel insulted by such article summaries, because everyone who knows that I am a Slashdot user might think that I must be completely incompetent looking at the front page.
I might only suggest for everyone who wishes to post stories about cryptography to read at least Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier first. This is the absolute minimum if you don't want to make an idiot out of yourself. Why cannot we talk about the serious implications of using RFID technology to build this machine instead of posting completely unintelligent jokes in the lines of "Imagine a beowulf cluster of those! It might have 640kB of RAM! Who needs more?" This is stupid at best and insulting at worst. I urge you to start posting insightful, informative or at least interesting posts before it is too late and this discussion is already archived.
What I am personally most concerned about is how disposable are the active and passive (semi-)conductor elements which are printed on this boards. Does anyone have any experience in disposing them? It is not very clear in the article.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Very handy for when the SCO cops show up. Quick, everybody, flush the computers down the toilet!
Proper respect...or propers...or prop. Don't look at me, I didn't make it up. Just reporting it.
bah "32k should be enough for anybody!"
:)
"Cypak says the card's encryption can't be copied or broken, enabling it to deliver "military-class security.""
^ well fate is tempted. I'd say slashdotters will take about 3 months to crack it after being distributed commonly...
A blog I run for the wealth
Yes, it certainly was. The Mac was not Apple's first computer with a mouse and a graphical interface. That was the Lisa, which nobody bought, because it was too expensive. A colour Mac would have required a huge frame buffer in order to provide adequate resolution. The memory costs of this would have pushed the price too high. Also, the 7MHz CPU was not fast enough to draw text and windows on a colour graphics display (again, unless the resolution was too small to be useful).
And keep in mind that the Lisa, despite its immense cost, was also black and white. So was the Xerox Star (another failed GUI computer that cost too much).
The Mac was not the first personal computer with a GUI. It was the first GUI computer that was cheap enough for ordinary people to buy. The hardware limitations you mention were necessary to keep the cost down.
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
A year or so ago, we read about annonucement of a printable comptuer..
Was going to be uses by the US census.. And was never heard from again...
What ever happened to them?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Come on guys. This is just a smart card chip with some sensors put on it. It has a non-ISO 14443 type A or type B interface, which means you can only use the readers provided by Cypak.
On top of that it only uses AES encryption. Great. Most smartcard processors can do any symetric cryptography and DSA and RSA as well. 156 / 1024 bit 3DES/RSA is common nowadays and higher asymetric encryption is on the horizon, if not there. 16 bit processors are quite common as well, with 32 bit processors just around the corner. You can host web servers on smart cards for some time now.
Obviously there are some interesting things to this story. What kind of wireless protocol will they use? How do they connect the sensors? What kind of sensors are available? What kind of operating system can be used? How easy is it to integrate it into some piece of clothing (eg)?
And 1 dollar per CPU is very good value I suppose.