Slashdot Mirror
IBM to Unveil Major Tech Advances
mr wrote to us to point out an article on IBM in today's SF Chronicle. IBM, starting on Monday at the Internation Electron Device Meeting, will be disclosing eighteen new inventions coming out of their labs. IBM goes to so far to say that it will keep Moore's Law [?] around for at least another decade. The article also talks about some of IBM's recent advancements as well as describing some of the new stuff to be unveiled.
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perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
Well, one day we will have our nano assembled cubic meter crystals of super conducting solid FPGA like computational powerhouses churning out trillions or teraflops with ease and having more L1 type memory at clock speed (10-50 gigahertz) than all of the information on the internet as a whole at this point. When that day comes, well, I will be one happy geek. So, anyone care to calculate according to mores law when this point will be reached? Its sooner than you think.. try it.
I hate to whine, but this appears to happen quite frequently - I wish Rob would build something into the posting scripts for top level stories to automatically check the links.
I would say that usually about 10% of the links given in a top level story can be counted upon to be broken - pretty poor.
Sure, if you read the discussion someone usually figures out the correct link and posts it, but sometimes I would just like to read the link itself without having to sort through the comments to find the 'real' link.
-josh
here is a brief summary.
Yada, yada, yada, Silicon-On-Insulators, yada, yada, yada, Moore Law's, yada, yada, yada, still valid, yada, despite what the cynics say, yada, yada, copper instead of aluminum, yada, Moore's Law, yada, yada.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Motorola today said that they had found a way to make transistors 4 times smaller and be implementable in a short time-span. It reduces power consuption and allows for speed increases. This was on your favourite site.
The trench technology looks cool, burying the DRAM under the processor so it doesn't have to be next to it. That should increase yield whilst not compromising on capabilities of the processor. How much DRAM can you fit in 100mm^2? 400mm^2? That would be the amount of 2nd or 1st level cache your Athlon/Alpha processor could have built in, running at full speed!
- A new space age cereal that doesn't immediately become soggy in milk...
- Revolutionary new system that doesn't crash (guess which one).
- One-click power-on sequence for computers (amazon.com, eat your heart out!)
- An even *larger* harddrive to store pr0n and mp3s!
- Harddrives now come in designer colors like "tangerine" and "rasberry" (You'll note the lack of a "lemon" color, however!)
- Computers from Intel that actually boot.
- A new Office clone that has REAL useable features like "Extend Deadline", "Make pretty graphs", and "Create Bollocks" instead of a stupid animated paper clip.
Horrah for IBM - working for the common user. =)This is great that IBM will keep the speed increase for CPUs going for another decade. But will it really make the computers speed up that much? As the article points out, memory on the chip is faster than memory not on the chip. Part of the new technology involves putting more memory on the chip. But what is not mentioned is that the computer bus (used in moving data from memory to the chip) is not the biggest bottleneck today. Even slower is the network connection between computers. Sure, there is progress here, but the rate of increase is no where near as steep as the speed increase for CPU cycles. The problem is that the amount if information being transfered over the networks is increasing too.
Mike Eckardt meckardt@yahoo.spam.com
Looks like all the money IBM has historically put into general R&D is paying off once again. That's one thing Big Blue has usually gotten right....and something other large tech firms can learn from. Fund your scientists, and don't necessarily expect products immediately from them. Let them do basic research, and the products will follow.
-- JackCat
By fundamentally changing the architecture of the chip (though it could be argued whether these advances are truly fundamental), IBM is giving a new area for improvement. Just as it's hard to double the speed of the chip by improving transitor technology when transitors have not yet been invented, it's also hard to improve the SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology unless it has been invented. Moore's Law is only partially about new technologies; it also helps to refine old ones.
~=Keelor
Moderate me down if you wish, but it seems like a lot of folks (read: Slashdot readers who moderate) don't understand what the various moderation descriptors (especially "Flamebait" and "Troll") mean. The above post does not appear to be a troll -- constructive criticism of /. is just that.
:)
This is similar to calling the "first post" messages "Flamebait" (well, maybe hot grits and petrified are flamebait). They're not. Trolls at best.
The above is NOT a ulterior plea to be moderated up by folks who want to prove how "fair" they are. I moderate every week or two, just like a lot of you, and I am NOT looking for extra karma points -- each of my posts stands on its own merits (good, bad, or otherwise
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
Heh. Thanks, from all the IBMers on /.
It's a pity that they are so big and therefore a bit less focused than other tech companies.
Actually, that is IBM's greatest strength. If you look at any of the markets that IBM plays in, you will note that we are rarely #1, but we are pretty consistently among the top players. If you look at most of those folks in the number one spot, you will note that IBM is usually providing them a fair sized chunk of the technology they use. Lou Gerstner set up the concept of "Coopetition", which is fun, because even if IBM is losing, it is winning. IBM has more patents than any other player in the industry, and the numbers keep growing. For instance, Dell uses IBM hard drives, IBM customer support, IBM... It doesn't hurt too much when Aptiva sales go down, because Dell (amongst others) picks up the slack and IBM gets a cut of the profits.
On the other hand, allocating resources is a royal pain. My manager was going home at 2 AM and coming in at 10 AM for two weeks while we were trying to set up the budget for 2000, and none of it is going to have any meaning by May... *sigh*
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
Now what I'm really wondering is this : at least one theory suggests that the government is in the process of doing to MS what it did to IBM back in the 80's. If that's true, and the DOJ keeps MS so tangled up over the next decade that competitors emerge, does anybody think that Microsoft will reinvent itself in a similar way? Sure, we can all hate MS as the big bad corporate enemy now, but we all did that 20 years ago, too, when it was IBM. Now we love them.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Probably wrong, but fun to speculate nonetheless.
These are all nice new technologies, but let' s hope IBM knows how to use them. Historically IBM has created quite a few technologies; unfortunately the management has, in the past, simply thrown the innovations away. Here are a couple examples:
On the other hand, many IBM innovations did make it, such as the magnetic hard drive. IBM still makes great hard drives.
The article didn't say it, but allowing RAM transistors to exist below other circuitry effectively doubles the data density of existing DRAM chips. How does tens of gigabytes of RAM sound? The problem: how do you cool double the amount of heat coming from those RAM chips?
I am looking forward to the faster and better computers and devices that will come from these innovations.
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Oh no! I've been sucked into
I am really sure that this could happen but what will happen to being able to actually buy this?
As I see this the more something costs in time and complexity the more it costs in terms of raw dollars. I really would rather not have to go back to the days of yore when computers had armed guards around them and required the use of a Phd in some obscure field to operate.
Having the 5 richest kings of Europe have access to all the technology makes me sick. I want to have a chance. The only reason that things like the open source movement actually succeeded was because of cheap but powerful/functional computers that everyone could and can now buy. I would hate to think of the world without affordable computing. Now people m,ay not like to think this way but think just how happy all these purists could be if they could have their Ivory TOwer back? They could do all their little research without having all the "rabble" to prevent them from their task.
If this can be done and actually have some useful stuff that can actually make the computer less of some kind of silly tool that still requires a great del of knowledge to get something working to it's full potential (for example to have say True AI, Instant linguistic translation, weather forcasting and the like). If people could write programs that did really interesting things then perhaps we would see an improvement in society. As it stands now most people would reason that *I* should spend the time/money/tallent/fatigue to write something that will do some socially enriching task. However most people don't have time time to go and get a Phd degree and then spend at least another 20 hours a day writing code and have just one area of a project take at least 120 years.
That's why we have crummy programs and systems of programs. People expect anyone who wants to make their life better to actually do it themselves. The whole perpetuated idea is that happiness exists outside computers in something that cannot and will not last be that marriage, family, career, wealth, health, or life. I maintain that existence could be viewed in relation to how well of a computer experience. If I could exist inside a computer even 5 minutes after my own physical death I would say that it would be a welcome thing.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
it seems like a lot of folks don't understand what the various moderation descriptors (especially "Flamebait" and "Troll") mean. The above post does not appear to be a troll -- constructive criticism of /. is just that.
:-)
I agree. I think that the "overrated" and "underrated" should be used to simply mark a post up or down. The others should be used only if they're descriptive. Also, I wish that the term "Troll" was not a negative score. I'm not saying it should be positive, but not all Trolls are bad.
This is similar to calling the "first post" messages "Flamebait" (well, maybe hot grits and petrified are flamebait). They're not. Trolls at best.
Maybe there should be a "First Post Moron" descriptor.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
:) True. I'd probably be more worried about it if I wasn't surrounded by people who are very interested in that sort of thing. It's a fact of life that industry wants profiling information.
At least IBM is taking the right approach -- "We want profiling information so that we can help streamline the information we're providing to you." If I know you play tennis, there's two ways you can look at it. One is, "Oooo good, now I can sell him more tennis balls." Everybody hates this, of course, because nobody likes to feel like a target. But the second is, "Hey, you know what? Maybe I really am interested in knowing whose got a deal on tennis balls." Sometimes targeted messaging does actually work. It's really the same thing that the demographics have always been, only with better profiling they really know. They're not assuming "Oh, because you're in group X, there's a Y% likelihood that you play tennis."
There's a new movement in this area. That's to get away from the use of the word "targeting" and to start making use of expressions like "1:1" and "relationship". People are happier having a relationship with the businesses they use. The whole point of the IBM focusgroup commercial is a bunch of people being pissed off because the ad people don't know them.
And just in case anybody is prepared to argue that "1:1 relationship" is just new marketing hype for the same old spam, let me put it this way. When my grandfather walked into the local hardware store, the shopkeeper could say "Hello, Dan! Getting ready to send the kids off to college pretty soon, aren't ya? Got a good sale on bookcases down in aisle 3." And he would never, ever say "Have ya seen our sale on house paint?" if he knew that my dad had aluminum siding. And service like that was *appreciated*. People go on to the internet today and they ask where all the service went. The optimist in me says that all this 1:1 relationship stuff is actually a way to try and bring that *back*. If I really thought that I was just coming up with a better mousetrap (or in this case, spamtrap), I don't think I'd be working where I work.
d
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
You're right. Spam sucks in all flavors. But if you've voluntarily walked through the door of my hardwareshop.com, I'm hoping that you will appreciate me knowing that you have kids ready to go off to college so I can point you to the deal on bookcases.
And now I bet somebody's gonna moderate me down as being overrated. I hate it when that happens. :) It's not my fault I'm posting at a natural 2!
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
"I'm worried. We have those press announcements on Monday, and you -know- Slashdot'll cover them. Our servers will never cope!"
"It's ok. I've just put up some web pages, pre-announcing the announcements. If the servers melt down this week, we'll still have the weekend to replace them, and Slashdot readers don't care about repeat announcements."
"That's cunning! Do you think they'll fall for it?"
"I think so. The system load was showing 490% CPU usage, and rising fast, the last time I looked."
* In the distance, the sound of a hard disk spinning out of the drive bay and colliding with a UPS unit. An IL&M techie is on-hand to supply the effects *
* Outside the building, the T1 link is glowing red, then blue, before finally exploding as the energy from the packets causes the fibre to undergo nuclear fusion. *
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In fact reducing the number of off-die memory accesses may reduce the power (no need to source/sink to those external bus signal's caps)
The more complex anything gets - the lower the yield (basic rule of nature - I suspect it applies to life too :-)
The only complaints with releasing the latest /. source code, as Rob supposedly has been planning to do for a while now:
The code page claims it's not in a state ready for release - well then, tarball it up and that's good enough for me. It may not work right off the bat on another site, or there may be too many slashdot-isms hardcoded into the scripts, but we'll get things ironed out and smoothed out soon enough. Nobody wants to try and clone slashdot's style, just to use the cool forum design, customizability, and user moderation for sites covering other topics.
There is the security concern involved with open sourcing something suddenly - don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating "security through obscurity" - but while open source software may have fewer security flaws than closed source software, closed source software that suddenly is liberated is bound to have more bugs, more visible, for a while after the initial code release.
I don't think either of those things are a really convincing argument for keeping the code to the epitome of open source advocacy sites under wraps, though. I don't suppose Andover is against releasing the code, worried about competing web portals taking your ad revenue?
There are a lot of smart people at Microsoft, and they do a lot of things well. My personal opinion is that a lot of the problems with their software comes from making a deliberate effort to lock competitors out. If MS took half the time, energy, and money it appears to devote to keeping its competitors down, and focused on simplifying their software and supporting open standards, they'd be producing a lot better products.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
AT&T: Perhaps, but I am not aware of what basic science things they have invented aside from some applied computer science stuff (C, Unix, etc).
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How about the transistor? Or the laser? Or Information Theory? The solar cell, and perhaps the communications satellite? Cellular phones? How about the first photonic computer? How about Radio Astronomy including the Big Bang remnant radiation? The application of statistics to the social sciences? Or waveguide optical fibre (making transoceaninc optical cables possible).
AT&T had the best industrial labs in the world before they spun them off as Lucent. No other lab in the world has come close to contributing as much. Eleven workers at Bell Labs have been awarded Nobel Prizes.
Schawlow and Townes Invent the Laser
The invention of the laser, which stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, can be dated to 1958 with the publication of the scientific paper, Infrared and Optical Masers, by Arthur L. Schawlow, then a Bell Labs researcher, and Charles H. Townes, a consultant to Bell Labs. That paper, published in Physical Review, the journal of the American Physical Society, launched a new scientific field and opened the door to a multibillion-dollar industry.
The work of Schawlow and Townes, however, can be traced back to the 1940s and early 50s and their interest in the field of microwave spectroscopy, which had emerged as a powerful tool for puzzling out the characteristics of a wide variety of molecules. Neither man was planning on inventing a device that would revolutionize a number of industries, from communications to medicine. They had something more straightforward in mind, developing a device to help them study molecular structures.
The beginnings at Bell Labs Townes, armed with a Ph.D. degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology, joined Bell Labs in 1939, where he worked on a variety of problems, including microwave generation, vacuum tubes, and magnetics. He then moved on to solid-state physics, studying electron emissions from surfaces. One day, about a year after Townes arrived at Bell Labs, Mervin Kelley, then director of Townes' laboratory, informed the group, "On Monday, I want you to start a radar bombing system." Townes wasn't enthusiastic about the assignment, but realized that World War II had invaded the quiet hallways of Bell Labs. "We worked at it pretty hard, and after about a year we had a system which we put in an airplane, and actually used. It worked.
For those who are interested in the history of the first transistor, here is
an excerpt from "The TRANSISTOR - A Crystal Triode" by Fink and Rockett in
ELECTRONICS 21, 68-71 (Sep 1948), describing the work at the Bell Telephone
Laboratories:
"Although investigation of semiconductors at BTL dates back a number of years,
with the end of the war a concentrated basic research progrm was undertaken."
"The group on semiconductors, led by William Shockley, one of this country's
leading solid-state physicists, was seeking answers to three basic questions:
(1) physically, what is a semiconductor, (2) how doers its physical nature
produce its observed properties, and (3) how does the fabrication and
processing of the material affect its physical nature? Among the
semiconductors studied were silicon, copper oxide, and germanium."
"A great deal of empirical information had been amassed on these substances
during their use, particularly as detectors in microwave equipment ("Crystal
Rectifiers", H.C. Torrey and C.A. Whitmer, Mcgraw-Hill, 1948). In particular
it was known that their resistivities were determined chiefly by impurities,
and furthermore that their resistivities could be varied over wide ranges by
applying various external influences (light in the case of photocells,
electric potential in the case of rectifiers and detectors, or temperature
in the case of Thermistors)."
"Likewise, a high potential applied externally (without making contact) to
a semiconductor should change its resistivity. Using a sheet of germanium
as one plate of a capacitor, Shockley and his colleagues measured the change
in resistance produced by changing the voltage across the capacitor. The
change in resistance was much smaller than anticipated in the light of
prevailing theory. Conclusion: something wrong with theory. So John Bardeen,
a theoretical physicist in the group, devised a theory of surface states that
would account for the measured change as well for older known effects
unexplained by previous theories."
"The new theory suggested new experiments, which, when performed, called for
refinements in the theory. While W.H. Brattain and John Bardeen were following
up the consequences of the refined theory of surface states they invented the
Transistor."
The discovery was made in December 1947, but not announced to the world at
large until July, 1948, after additional devices has been fabricated and
tested.
-----------------------------------------------
Further details are given by J. Bardeen and W.H. Brattain themselves in
their introduction to "Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action",
published simultaneously in BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL 28, 239-277
(Apr 1949) and PHYSICAL REVIEW 75, 1208-1225 (1949) as follows:
"The properties of germanium as a semi-conductor and as a rectifier have
been investigated by a group working under the direction of K. Lark-Horovitz
at Purdue University. Work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories
was initiated by R.S. Ohl before the war in connection with the development
of silicon rectifiers for use as detectors at microwave frequencies. Research
and development on both germanium and silicon rectifiers during and since the
war has been done in large part by a group under J.H. Scaff. The background
of information obtained in these various investigations hs been invaluable."
[A summary of the wartime weapons research can be found in "Development of
Silicon Crystal Rectifiers for Microwavve Radar Receivers" by Scaff and Ohl,
BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL 26, 1-30 (Jan 1947)]
"The general research program leading to the transistor was initiated and
directed by W. Shockley. Work on germanium and silicon was emphasized because
they are simpler to understand than most other semi-conductors. One of the
investigations undertaken was the study of the modulation of conductance of a
thin film of semi-conductor by an electric field applied by an electrode
insulated from the film. [described in "Modulation of Conductance by Surface
Charges" by Shockley and Pearson, PHYSICAL REVIEW 74, 232 (July 15, 1948)]
If, for example, the film is made one plate of a parallel plate condenser,
a charge is induced on the surface. If the individual charges which make up
the induced charge are mobile, the conductance of the film will depend on
the voltage applied to the condenser. The first experiments performed to
measure this effect indicated that most of the induced charge was not mobile.
This result, taken along with other unexplained phenomena such as the small
contact potential difference between n- and p- type silicon and the
independence of the rectifying properties of the point contact rectifier on
the work function of the metal point, led one of the authors [Bardeen,
"Surface States and rectification at metal semiconductor contact", PHYSICAL
REVIEW 71, 717-727 (1947)] to an explanation in terms of surface states.
This work led to the concept that space charge barrier layers may be present
at the free surfaces of semi-conductors such as germanium and silicon,
independent of a metal contact. Two experiments immediately suggested were
to measure the dependence of contact potential on impurity concentration
and to measure the change of contact potential on illuminating the surface
with light. Both of these experiments were successful and confirmed the
theory. [Brattain & Shockley, PHYSICAL REVIEW 72, 345L (1947)] It was while
studying the latter effect with a silicon surface immersed in a liquid that
it was found that the density of surface charges and the field in the space
charge region could be varied by applying a potential across an electrolyte
in contact with the silicon surface. While studying the effect of field
applied applied by an electrolyte on the current voltage characeristic of
a high-back-voltage germanium rectifier, the authors were led to the concept
that a portion of the current was being carried by holes flowing near the
surface. Upon replacing the electrolyte with a metal contact transistor
action was discovered."
"The germanium used in the transistor is an n-type or excess semi-conductor
with a resistivity of the order of 10 ohm-cm, and is the same as the material
used in high-back-voltage germanium rectifiers." ["Preparation of High Back
Voltage Germanium Rectifiers" by J.H. Scaff and H.C. Theuerer, NATIONAL
DEFENSE RESEARCH COMMITTEE 14-555 (Oct 24, 1945)]
"Our discussion has been confined to the transistor in which two point
contacts are placed in close proximity on one face of a germanium block.
It is apparent that the principles can be applied to other geometrical
designs and to other semi-conductors. Some preliminary work has shown
that transistor action can be obtained with silicon and undoubtedly other
semi-conductors can be used."
-----------------------------------------------
Later that year, William Shockley extended the theory from simple metal-
semiconductor junctions to full semiconductor-semiconductor junctions,
and suggested that the behavior of a transistor made from such junctions
would be easier to predict than that of the point-contact transistors
made so far. From the introduction to "The Theory of p-n Junctions in
Semiconductors and p-n Junction Transistors", BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL
28, 435-489 (July 1949):
"As is well known, silicon and germanium may be either n-type or p-type
semiconductors, dependig on which of the concentrations Nd of donors or
Na of acceptors, is the larger. If, in a single sample, there is a
transition from one type to the other, a rectifying photosensitive p-n
junction is formed. The theory of such junctions is in contrast to those
of ordinary rectifying junctions because, on both sides of the junction,
both electron flow and hole flow must be considered. In fact, a major
portion of the hole current may persist into the n-type region and vice-
versa. In later sections we show how this feature has a number of
interesting consequences"
"A p-n junction may act as an emitter in the transistor sense, since it
can inject hole current into n-type material."
"The p-n-p transistor has the interesting feature of being calculable
to a high degree. One can consider such questions as the relative ratios
of width to length of the n-region and the effect of altering impurity
contents and scaling the structure to operate in different frequency
ranges."
-----------------------------------------------
With the assistance of several others (Morgan, Sparks, & Teal), Shockley
went on to produce a working p-n junction transistor in 1951, and in 1952
he went on to develop the theory behind the field-effect transistor, which
is the type most commonly used today in computer chips. ["A Unipolar
Field-Effect Transistor", PROCEEDINGS OF THE I.R.E. 40, 1365+ (Nov 1952)]
-George Fergus
Why is this? Because it was Pixels: the little company that makes Pixels3d, a modeller/renderer etc for the Mac. I already knew them- in fact I keep a copy of Pixels3D 2.1.4 around because they are one of the many Mac vendors who have taken to releasing their last-year's model at no cost, and I grabbed it. Being allowed to fully use something like that left me with a good feeling about them, and they are the antithesis of a big vague corporation- it's a bunch of computer geeks running a company, and their product kicks butt (except that I hate the Lightwave-like interface :) )
I wasn't able to take 'em up on their promo, won't be buying anything today- but, you know, I am _very_ used to shutting off telemarketers. I don't give them three seconds. I interrupt, I firmly say I'm not interested and then hang right up. Yet in this case these people were able to keep my attention and get my sympathies- why?
Partly because they were ready to put some serious effort towards getting me what I wanted. I learned that the scripting language was like Renderman shaders. I learned people write plugins in REALbasic- hey, I have that! I even ended up talking to the main programmer for about ten minutes on how many semitransparent layers you could stack to simulate volumetric clouds (a POV trick I've been playing with), and he had all the techie details. It was so deeply about what _I_ wanted to know, rather than about what they wanted to sell.
I hear people saying IBM is also taking this approach. Well, good for them! The predatory thing only works when you have a lock on people. Pixels doesn't- they do Mac software, and compete with everything from Metacreations (Poser, Bryce, Infini-D) to Lightwave itself and who knows what else? Seeing this glimpse of how they work with their customers gave me a bit of insight into why they're still around at all. Did you know that you can go to their community page and they will put up _pictures_ of their users? (one wonders if it's pictures of _most_ of their users! ;) ) Looking down the row of faces, next to banner links to the respective websites, was a lesson in PR.
It doesn't always stay- that language I use, REALbasic, is very neat but the marketing people have taken to trying to get people to link to the RB site by offering space on the CD in exchange for posting 'Made With Realbasic' logos on things. That's a 'what can we get' approach, not a 'what do you want?' approach. I don't mind it but I'm not doing it. Pixels is smarter- or wiser. As, apparently, is IBM...
*hits backlight* (bip!)
*turns it back off, closes cover* (bip! clik)
This was $30. I once wanted an old Powerbook- just something that could take text notes and be carried around. B/W screen, some tiny amount of ram- never could get one, too expensive.
Now I have a toy with 256k of ram (that's an awful lot of little memos!). It has a backlight, which is more than the old Powerbooks had. It's got chiclet keys that go (bip!). There's a fourway arrow key thing that is occasionally relevant. The text editing is rather like vi or something- hell, the whole thing is extremely modal, and yet it's such a little thing that it doesn't matter- I don't need a trackball or color for this. So where a few years ago I could only wish for an old Powerbook (which wouldn't fit in my pocket without _serious_, er, percussive redesign ;) ), now I can actually have a little toy 'laptop' that goes (bip!) and takes notes and shows what time it is in Hong Kong or Berlin.
And this is totally cool- and I can't wait until I get to have one for $50 that's the same size, the same lcd screen with blue backlighting- but has 4M, bash, and vi ;)
That would just feel so good tucked into your pocket. Imagine. Hip-nix ;) (poc-nix?)