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New Sharp 3D Notebook Available with Linux
Anonymous Writer writes "Earlier this month, Sharp released the Actius AL3DU, the second generation laptop in its line of autostereo display products. EmperorLinux, Inc. is distributing it with Linux pre-installed, dubbing it the Molecule."
Something that really concerns me is these laptop's autonomy, I think that it's of no use if it cannot at least play one DVD on batteries. What about this one ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I was going to say "Bah, what's the use", but this is actually really cool.
Put aside that it's running Linux for a minute. Who cares what software is running it? Not important.
What is important is that we are finally moving away, on a hardware level, from flat, 2 dimensional displays. While the "Help me Obi-one Kenobi" 3D displays are still a long way off (or disappeared a long, long time ago), this is an immense step forward.
Battery life : approx 1.8 hours.
I guess it's only when using the notepad with the light dimmed and no sound.
This "carryable" is a joke !!!
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Sorry, couldn't resist :)
I dont ever see the discounts that are supposed to accrue from not paying MS Tax... Another point, what about the peripherals?
How exactly does Emporer Linux justify chargin $500 more for a computer without a licencsed OS?
I'm not great fan of Windows, but why should I pay $500 so that some screw up can spend 15min installing a version of Linux I don't like (vs one I do like)?
I think I've just stoped wondering why linux as a desktop OS has never taken off.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Hehe.. Those should have been penguins.. ;)
EmperorLinux (based on Fedora 3), Slackware, Red Hat Professional, Mandrake, Suse, Debian....they offer quite a good choice. Especially as most of these come for $0. Perhaps cusotmers will be more attracted to this notebook, when they see they don't have to pay extra $$$ for an operating system.
can anyone detail software optmized to take advantage of the 3D display technology
I've never heard of any software (CAD/CAM included) that is optimized for 3D glasses -- what utility does the A3CLU add to the computing experience?
And what linux apps are optimized for this? It would seem a bit of a waste if the only 3D tools were, say, KDE Widgets...
Besides the cool factor that is...
shooting is not too good for my enemies
Yes, but does it run li... oh, sorry, my bad.
Just when I thought I'd never be able to buy a $4,000+ laptop again, they come out with this baby! Way to drive the high-end market, Sharp!
Seriously, though--I just finally bought an LCD desktop monitor last October, when a 19" got below $400 with shipping (thank you, NewEgg!). I bought an MP3 player for $50 in December that accepts CF card media, which is about $60/GB (thanks AGAIN, NewEgg!). Now THAT's some cool shit.
time getting excited about it until they're selling enough volume to bring the price down to commodity levels.
The software win-modems on the Kiwi, Raven, Toucan, SilverComet, and Rhino series systems are fully supported in Linux with win-modem drivers.
They just forgot to add that there is no free Linux driver for software win-modems with Conexant chipsets. The best I could find was at http://www.linuxant.com/drivers/, with a free version limited to 14.4 kbps. Add $14.95 to the price, if you want your modem to work.
Quite a hefty price for a laptop without a wireless card. Putting good wireless service into a Linux laptop would be a bigger step forward.
Right, I don't see what the problem is. I have a Centrino and the builtin wireless (ipw2200) works out of the box on these machines with Mepis/Ubuntu/Mandrake.
New concept in 3D sex TGP's. The next must be "Touch it" tecnology. ;P
It only does 1024x768 too. If I'm paying that much for a laptop, it had better go higher than that.
You know, I want to support Linux vendors, but the model with Linux costs *$500* more than the version with Windows direct from Sharp. That seems a little pricey for a free OS, eh?
(And I have to assume the sort of person who'd spend $3500 on a laptop to run Linux on either knows how to install Linux themselves or has people paid to do it for them)
I think it's great to see laptops with linux being sold, but I ask one thing, who buy this kind of laptop? A linux user, or a person who doesn't know that it comes with linux? If it's the second option, does this person keeps linux, or install windows after he realize it's not the operating system of choice? :)
It'd be great to see some statistics about that
ajf
This kind of "solution looking for a problem" attitude isn't welcome round these parts.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In other news: Sharp has increased the resolution on their new 3D line of laptops to 1028x772 due to customer complaints and comments posted on a site called slash-dot-dot-org.Sharp spokesperson said that customers will be delighted with the increased viewing area."It's not just 3 or 4 pixels bigger, but even more than that" he added.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
...till someone writes a Firefox extension to exploit the z-index: CSS parameter for rendering HTML in 3D :)
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
WARNING: SHAMELESS PLUG
I lead the team developing stereoscopic software that has been distributed with every Sharp stereoscopic 3D laptop ever produced. Well... All the Windows ones... If your interested in trying our DDD TriDef software with one of many stereoscopic viewing methods (anaglyph glasses; other glasses free 3d displays;) please send me an email mailto:Brendan.Langoulant@gmail.com.
DDD TriDef software enables you to:
You might like to check out our FAQs http://www.tridef.com/support/
Regards,
Brendan Langoulant
Director of Software
DDD
The guys at Emperor Linux had one on display at LinuxWorld in Boston last month. It was creating a mob scene of people wanting to check it out. It's actally quite slick. The only thing is, it is very viewer-position dependent. Meaning, you have to be sitting right in the sweet spot to get the full effect. If you're a little off, you can still see it, but it's not as pronounced and you start to see some funkiness with the colors. The 3D mode can be switched on and off and in 2D mode, it looked usable (but 2D res looked pretty low to me, I'll stick with my SXGA+ thinkpad thanks).
The Emperor Linux version is speced with a 1.3 battery life. That will certainly be a down side at your local coffee shop since there never seems to be enough plugs.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Personally, as an amateur 3D animator I'd really like to have something like this, it would really help a LOT when doing 3D stuff if I could quickly tell which parts of the wireframe are closer than others... staring at wirefame of a high poly object can get very confusing and most of the times a bit of turning around is needed to make sense of it.
I saw this being demo'd at LWE. I have to say it was the coolest demo I saw at LWE, by a long shot. Hard to to it justice on the web..
IAAL,BIANLY
For the sake of cash, because I'm broke, I got a cheap Dell Inspiron 1000 (with barely enough $$ to shell out for extra memory, but it was worth it) running, of course, WinXP. What I need is an iBook, and then one of THOSE babies, with 512...That'd be the easiest way to test cross-platform performance, now wouldn't it? *sigh* I'm thinking I'm the only one who gets bouncy excited about these things.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
could someone please explain? Kindergarten Pixels?
Is this I time warp or what? Yes it's kewl, but scheesh. Holy luggable batman! Granted I'm biased as I used to use petite Sony VAIO laptop (haven't bothered to scrape up the cash to update the thing) so 3lb to 8lbs is a bit of a jump.
:)
Seriously though, the trend is lighter and longer battery. Bigger and power hungry applications are the domain of the desktop (but hey, if they want to start using laptop tech to reduce power consumption, more power to them.) My back/shoulder demands it and lets face it, yes there is that sweet spot in the local coffee shop with the outlet but it's usually known by everyone else and hard to get. (Tip for the urban hacker, carry a power strip/extention cord. If you're planning to camp down for a while you can either negotiate with someone else outlet camping or at least make some new friends. Saved me a couple of times. And a great way to meet mobile individuals of the opposite gender, might I add.
-nod- Right now, this technology (the 3D screen) is definitely targetted at a very specific professional market. We're
mainly seeing interest from people who want to use them for scientific visualization, medical imaging, and so on.
Gamers are not the market Sharp had in mind, I think. =)
I will say though, that with a Dothan processor and 2.5" Sata hard drive (and nVidia 6200 video driving only
a 1024x768 screen), this is one of the fastest computers I've used.
If it's not obvious, I work at Emperor Linux.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I've had a few sharp products over the years, and think they are very good at innovating new products, but the overall quality of thier products is very low. I bought a Sharp laptop a year ago and have had to return it 4 times already to get it fixed becaues of it breaking down on me. I doubt this new laptop will last much longer, and its probably just as easy to somehow mess up the 3D display.
That's only if you invoke strings or grep directly on /dev/ram (or /dev/ramN)... since it's a cat followed by a pipe through strings, it will work.
It just wouldn't do anything useful.
I got the smallest of the small Sharp Actius laptops and they pre-loaded it with Debian Linux at my request. They don't just slap a Linux distro on and push it out the door, they make sure everything works as advertised, customizing whatever they need to to make sure it does. The modem works! Software suspend works!
The model I got comes with a really small battery, and I bought an optional larger battery that has more life, but has a big buldge in it. The unit itself has no removeable disk drives -- everything is attached via USB. It comes with a docking station which allows the laptop to be used as a USB hard drive while it's powered off. Way cool.
EmperorLinux provides a detailed manual on making the most of your laptop through the Linux environment. But enough about the geek stuff.
The most important thing of all: when I pull this baby out at Starbucks, the chicks all turn their heads. A Dell doesn't do that. A Titanium Powerbook doesn't do that (anymore).
Score!
I saw one at EmperorLinux's booth at LinuxWorld not too long ago. While the pseudo-3D display tech is interesting, it unfortunately comes with a quit-ugly interlaced look - like a TV.
I'll wait, I guess.
When I first saw this story I was thinking ye-haa, but on closer inspection it looks like a pretty weak machine for the money in terms of RAM, weight, and hard drive size. My natural inclination is to switch from OSX back to Linux at the first opportunity for an "easy" transition, but this is somewhat tempered now. In a professional setting where price is less of a concern, you just can't beat OSX's combination of a "no worries" simplicity, unix capability, and the availability of open source products. I'm thinking I may never be able to switch back at this point.
Believe it or not, there are people who don't read every single subthread in a conversation. =)
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
From what I can tell, the good news about this laptop is that you don't need glasses to get the 3D effect.
The bad news is that you have to put your left eye where the left "viewing diamond" is and your right eye where the right "viewing diamond" is. Of course, this might just be my pessimistic side talking.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Just curious... What did it cost to have the linux shop install linux for you? Did it cover everything like power management, sleep type features, wireless card? Was the shop local or mail order? Sounds intriguing.
The $500 is just spending money to save time. If your time is valuable, you'd do it.
They ot only install the OS but also add a whole bunch of other software.
Media players, full office suite, graphics programs, games, scientific programs, network utilities (more than you can count). Probably several hundred pieces of software.
Of course, its all free software. You could just do it yourself and save the money.
For the money you get to not have to spend your time installing and configuring the OS and software. You get an OS that crashes less, doesn't freeze up during IO operations, and allows you to work faster. These things give you more time to do other things. So, if your time has a high value, you'd pay the price. If your time doesn't you won't.
Like getting the oil changed in your car. Yes, its cheaper to do it yourself. Its also not a dificult task. Me, I'll pay the $30 and spend my time doing something else.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
This must be one of the most expensive if not the most expensive notebook that I have ever seen. I retails for $3,500 from Sharp and the screen can't even do xvga+ in 2d. Shure it has 3d and stuff but I am not going to use a browser or do text editing in 3d and even if I was still I would like to have a higher resolution if I am spending that much money. Most notebooks with 17" screens cost less that this. As far as battery life goes this is a centrino computer (pentium 4 m) and the battery life would be decent enough even with 3d turned on. If you disable the 3d and use the screen as a regular notebook screen you will probably get well over 2 hours of battery life. Yeah this is a very high quality product and yes it does have technology that noone else other that sharp currently has but still 3,500 will buy you not one but 2 comprable notebooks. Sorry Sharp but it seems like you have another zaurus-like product on your hands ... Oh yeah and most Centrino notebooks are fully supported under linux. Plus the sharp linux distros donot apeal at all to linux users.
At 8lbs and $4000, it should be called the Boulder.
How do you like it so far?
I've been thinking about getting the MM series' successor, the MP30.
+++ATH0
One of the research labs in my university have purchased a couple of these laptop along with a Phantom Omni pen and stands.
The laptop can display photographs and 3D applications in stereo, with the actual depth field being +/-4 inches in front of and behind the laptop screen. The haptic pen provides force feedback to give you an idea where the surface is (resistance will increase if you try and move the pen into somewhere "solid", but will be flexible otherwise).
The two can be combined together with special stand which allows you to turn the laptop upside down, and see a reflection of the screen from a mirror, with the goal being to allow you to use the pen as naturally as possible.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads