Slashdot Mirror
Promised Microsoft Tablet 'No Thicker Than Sheet of Glass'
Barence writes Microsoft will deliver a touchscreen PC that is 'no thicker than a sheet of glass' within the next three years, according to the company's principal researcher. The device will be the next generation of Microsoft's Surface project, which currently houses a touchscreen PC in a deep cabinet that uses cameras to detect hand gestures and objects placed on the screen. According to Microsoft's Bill Buxton, 'Surface will become no thicker than a sheet of glass. It's not going to have any cameras or projectors because the cameras will be embedded in the device itself.' Microsoft is developing a new screen technology to make this possible. 'The best way to think about it is like a big LCD where there's a fourth pixel in every triad. So there's red, green, and blue pixels giving you light, and a fourth pixel which is a sensor that will capture stuff,' Buxton claims in an interview with The Globe and Mail."
how thick can glass be?
"No thicker than a sheet of glass"
I've never seen a sheet of glass a Microsoft researcher couldn't outwit.
A sheet of glass like in a picture frame (2mm) or like in an Aquarium (Several cm's). Maybe, being Microsoft, it starts out as thick as the picture frame glass, but it rapidly expands to be as thick as Aquarium glass. Then it breaks.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
what ever happened to the Origami Project?
It folded.
Nobody buy an iPad!
Let's all wait for this promised invention from Microsoft, which will be much better than anything we can get today, and is coming Real Soon Now!
a fourth pixel which is a sensor that will capture stuff
Didn't someone here on Slashdot have a patent titled, "A Method and Process of Doing Things with Stuff" . . . ?
It looks like Microsoft might have an intellectual property problem here . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Does that mean we can have windows running on a window?
That begs the question,* why isn't this tagged 'telescreen'?
*I'm in ur language, trollin' ur pedants.
This is great. I can't wait to get one. I will carry it in my backpack while I fly around in my jet pack which will be powered by cold fusion.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
"It's the thickness. Once we figure this out it's game over!"
It's the software, stupid.
My favorite is from the show How It's Made.
They said, "when complete it weighs 10 pounds, about the weight of a full-grown cat."
For the next 2 years, my roomates and I refered to weights in terms of full-grown cats.
I am become
Apparently, since you can get glass over 60cm thick, at least as thick as the person who used that description. I suppose they'll be telling us that the screen is as long as a piece of string next.
I know of other MS products that resemble a (fragile) sheet of glass. Windows, anyone?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I am a pedantic type with an axe to grind, and even I knew that they obviously meant the first thing that would occur to most people’s minds when they thought of a pane of glass.
The part that I considered an atrocious abuse of language was the part where he claimed that there will be four pixels per triad. He could have just said that instead of using triads of pixels (3 pixels per group... red, green, and blue) they will have tetrads: 4 pixels per group; red, green, blue, and an extra 4th pixel that is a simple light sensor.
But no... his triads go to FOUR.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
It looked good on paper.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There you go. Reading the article, and making sense, and spoiling everybodys fun. There's one in every crowd.
I want to shoot the messenger!
It's a marketing problem.
Apple users don't expect iPads and iPhones to run Macintosh software, even if these devices run a flavour of OSX - Apple doesn't call it that - they call it iOS, so no one expects OS X programs to run on it. If Microsoft were to not call their mobile OS 'Windows', then the confusion would go away. Instead of calling it 'Windows Mobile' which kind of gives the expectation that it's just Windows and you can run desktop software on it, they could call it something else. Perhaps 'Doors'.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows