The surfaces of the glass disks are not actually flat, but faintly speckled to prevent striction
Wrong. They are smooth. Prevention of striction was necessary in very old designs that required the head to land on the disk. The new smooth disks alowed by non-head-landing designs allow higher data densities.
Why would anyone put glass in something that is supposed to be resistant to damage?
Because it's resistant to damage -- compared to aluminum, the alternative.
I will never buy something like this with the potential to store massive ammounts of my previous data when the next passing small earthquake,large truck, or thunder storm could destory it.
Check the shock rating: 6000g. Then put all of your most important data on the drive and destroy the original copies. Then mount this drive in a decently strong aluminum box -- without shock protection. Then smash the aluminum box for 60 seconds straight as hard as you can with a large sledgehammer. Remove the drive and check to see that your data is all right. It will be.
Yesterday, Cisco announced it will create "the the first end-to-end, all optical network to deliver Internet access service...." They talk about providing 100x T1 speed for each customer for the price of a T1. Yikes.
I have the Twiddler. I recommend it for anyone who wants a mobile keyboard. You should be able to get 60 wpm out of it and once you build up, you don't notice the strain on your fingers.
From the article: ...since [Transmeta] has a lot of cheap competition, most notably from National Semiconductor's soon to be released PC-On-A-Chip and Intel's StrongARM processors.
National Semiconductor's chip is called the MachZ. It's designed by David Feldman (father of the PC/104 embedded computer standard which he invented when he worked for Ampro in the '80s) and sold by Feldman's new company, ZF Microsystems (same link).
I'm slightly far-sighted (or long-sighted for those in other countries) - do these things cause eyestrain? - or do they somehow get your eyes to focus at infinity Wearable displays use optics to focus your eyes at somewhere between 3 feet and 25 feet. 4-6 feet typical. The Glasstrons are set at 6.5 feet. wearables.blu.org
Like most scientific folk wisdom ("You use only 10 percent of your brain power," "Right-brained people are more creative") the Mozart effect, as it is sometimes called, is extrapolated from research whose meaning is open to debate.
Actually, this is what ZDNet was talking about. Note that three authors are from IBM: Science Aug 6 1999: 864-867
Minimum Field Strength in Precessional Magnetization Reversal
C. H. Back, 1* R. Allenspach, 2 W. Weber, 1 S. S. P. Parkin, 3 D. Weller, 3 E. L. Garwin, 4 H. C. Siegmann 1
1 Laboratorium für Festkörperphysik, ETH Zürich, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland. 2 IBM Research Division, Zurich Research Laboratory, CH-8803 Rüschlikon, Switzerland. 3 IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120, USA. 4 Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Ultrafast magnetic field pulses as short as 2 picoseconds are able to reverse the magnetization in thin, in-plane, magnetized cobalt films. The field pulses are applied in the plane of the film, and their direction encompasses all angles with the magnetization. At a right angle to the magnetization, maximum torque is exerted on the spins. In this geometry, a precessional magnetization reversal can be triggered by fields as small as 184 kiloamperes per meter. Applications in future ultrafast magnetic recording schemes can be foreseen.
However, just about every time I've checked, buy.com has better prices on books than amazon or B&N.
buy.com charges $10 to ship. This makes their price for the about-to-be-released third edition of O'Reilly's Running Linux almost $2 higher than retail list. amazon.com has the best price on that book compared to any other retailer on the net except B&N, especially if you buy several books (only $1 more shipping for each additional book).
Inventor(s): Klaiber; Alex , Menlo Park, CA Bedichek; Robert , Palo Alto, CA Keppel; David , Palo Alto, CA
"The PPCArch simulators are based on a type of simulator originally developed for the Motorola M88K RISC microprocessor by Robert Bedichek for Tektronix [Bedichek, R. Some efficient architecture simulation techniques. In Proceedings of USENIX, Winter 1990.]. Bedichek developed a style of threaded code simulator that used a unique C language and assembly-code macro function to emulate each instruction in the 88100. He was able to decode an instruction once and use the decoded form many times, depending on locality of code reference and size of simulated nstruction cache. He was also able to simulate the 88K virtual machine sufficiently to boot Unix on the simulator. The performance of this simulator was also very impressive: an average of 130,000 instructions per second when hosted on a 2.5MIPS 68020 Tektronix workstation." --Communications of the ACM, June 1994 v37 n6 p64(6) An overview of Motorola's PowerPC simulator family. (The Making of the PowerPC) (Cover Story) William Anderson.
Re:I'm so glad they got rid of that 'Woodstock' Bi
on
Debian Chooses Logo
·
· Score: 1
snip --- What I really want is a machine that unifies my communications at a high level. That pushes us back to something that's more like a small portable or wearable PC. These appliances tend to grow functions and grow extensions over time, and eventually they end up being full-fledged computers even if they don't look like them on the outside. The appliances in the future are going to be like very small, very lightweight, and very carryable PCs that just happen to have a simple interface wrapped around them. And yes, I think that Linux will dominate them. --- snip
If you are interested in wearable computing...
on
Thumb-only Keyboard?
·
· Score: 1
Extreme Computing has now partnered with Ricoh to provide the Magio as a base for a wearable kit. Total cost under $2000 including M1 and Twiddler.
I'm not affiliated w/ the company BTW. Saw it on the wear-hard list today.
Wearable researchers, myself included, argue that being able to type with one hand 14 hours a day, wearever you are, and simultaneously with whatever else you do during the day, makes 30 wpm text input blisteringly faster than any desktop input -- even, say, desktop input with speeds well in excess of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 wpm. And Twiddlers can cruise at 60 wpm.
Speech recognition on Linux is going to be a difficult problem to solve, alone. There are tools out there to do it, but it is going to require massive coordination.
Slashdot Mirror
Sega, the company that brought us ToeJam and Earl -- forever the best game ever made, though only in two-player mode.
The surfaces of the glass disks are not actually flat, but faintly speckled to prevent striction
Wrong. They are smooth. Prevention of striction was necessary in very old designs that required the head to land on the disk. The new smooth disks alowed by non-head-landing designs allow higher data densities.
Why would anyone put glass in something that is supposed to be resistant to damage?
Because it's resistant to damage -- compared to aluminum, the alternative.
I will never buy something like this with the potential to store massive ammounts of my previous data when the next passing small earthquake,large truck, or thunder storm could destory it.
Check the shock rating: 6000g. Then put all of your most important data on the drive and destroy the original copies. Then mount this drive in a decently strong aluminum box -- without shock protection. Then smash the aluminum box for 60 seconds straight as hard as you can with a large sledgehammer. Remove the drive and check to see that your data is all right. It will be.
Also announced today by IBM are the two newest world's highest capacity hard drives. These also sport IBM's first glass disk platters.
Should be a good match for these new CPUs.
Yesterday, Cisco announced
it will create "the the first end-to-end, all optical network to deliver Internet access service...." They talk about providing 100x T1 speed for each customer for the price of a T1. Yikes.
No, it is the real Hemos. Note the spelling error. (than/then)
I have the Twiddler. I recommend it for anyone who wants a mobile keyboard. You should be able to get 60 wpm out of it and once you build up, you don't notice the strain on your fingers.
Also just announced at IDF was the world's smallest PIII motherboard. Yes, it's the same size as the world's smallest PII motherboard (3 X 5 X .7") and it's from the same company, Cell Computing.
400 MHz in your pocket.
From the article:
...since [Transmeta] has a lot of cheap competition, most notably from National Semiconductor's soon to be released PC-On-A-Chip and Intel's StrongARM processors.
National Semiconductor's chip is called the MachZ. It's designed by David Feldman (father of the PC/104 embedded computer standard which he invented when he worked for Ampro in the '80s) and sold by Feldman's new company, ZF Microsystems (same link).
I'm slightly far-sighted (or long-sighted for those in other countries) - do these things cause eyestrain? - or do they somehow get your eyes to focus at infinity Wearable displays use optics to focus your eyes at somewhere between 3 feet and 25 feet. 4-6 feet typical. The Glasstrons are set at 6.5 feet. wearables.blu.org
So where are these things? IBM says they're shipping... but they don't even appear to be in THEIR online store, let alone anyone else's...
d-store: $459
Like most scientific folk wisdom ("You use only 10 percent of your brain power," "Right-brained people are more creative") the Mozart effect, as it is sometimes called, is extrapolated from research whose meaning is open to debate.
There is an interesting Skeptical Inquirer article debunking the 10-percent myth.
...instead of $4,125.
Actually, this is what ZDNet was talking about. Note that three authors are from IBM: Science Aug 6 1999: 864-867
Minimum Field Strength in Precessional Magnetization Reversal
C. H. Back, 1* R. Allenspach, 2 W. Weber, 1 S. S. P. Parkin, 3 D. Weller, 3 E. L. Garwin, 4 H. C. Siegmann 1
1 Laboratorium für Festkörperphysik, ETH Zürich, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland.
2 IBM Research Division, Zurich Research Laboratory, CH-8803 Rüschlikon, Switzerland.
3 IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120, USA.
4 Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Ultrafast magnetic field pulses as short as 2 picoseconds are able to reverse the magnetization in thin, in-plane, magnetized cobalt films. The field pulses are applied in the plane of the film, and their direction encompasses all angles with the magnetization. At a right angle to the magnetization, maximum torque is exerted on the spins. In this geometry, a precessional magnetization reversal can be triggered by fields as small as 184 kiloamperes per meter. Applications in future ultrafast magnetic recording schemes can be foreseen.
yeraveragelinuxarticle
However, just about every time I've checked, buy.com has better prices on books than amazon or B&N.
buy.com charges $10 to ship. This makes their price for the about-to-be-released third edition of O'Reilly's Running Linux almost $2 higher than retail list. amazon.com has the best price on that book compared to any other retailer on the net except B&N, especially if you buy several books (only $1 more shipping for each additional book).
The long-awaited NetWinder RM (the rackmount version of the NetWinder) is now shipping!
"Rob is on leave from Transmeta Corp." it says on his homepage.
Inventor(s):
Klaiber; Alex , Menlo Park, CA
Bedichek; Robert , Palo Alto, CA
Keppel; David , Palo Alto, CA
"The PPCArch simulators are based on a type of simulator originally developed for the Motorola M88K RISC microprocessor by Robert Bedichek for Tektronix [Bedichek, R. Some efficient architecture simulation techniques. In Proceedings of USENIX, Winter 1990.]. Bedichek developed a style of threaded code simulator that used a unique C language and assembly-code macro function to emulate each instruction in the 88100. He was able to decode an instruction once and use the decoded form many times, depending on locality of code reference and size of simulated nstruction cache. He was also able to simulate the 88K virtual machine sufficiently to boot Unix on the simulator. The performance of this simulator was also very impressive: an average of 130,000 instructions per second when hosted on a 2.5MIPS 68020 Tektronix workstation."
--Communications of the ACM, June 1994 v37 n6 p64(6)
An overview of Motorola's PowerPC simulator family. (The Making of the PowerPC) (Cover Story) William Anderson.
Woodstock? I thought it was the Partridge Family bird.
>could they make gloves that would read sign language...?
Yes. They have. In fact this hat does it without gloves.
Did anyone notice this?:
snip
---
What I really want is a machine that unifies my communications at a high level. That pushes us back to something that's more like a small portable or wearable PC. These appliances tend to grow functions and grow extensions over time, and eventually they end up being full-fledged computers even if they don't look like them on the outside. The appliances in the future are going to be like very small, very lightweight, and very carryable PCs that just happen to have a simple interface wrapped around them. And yes, I think that Linux will dominate them.
---
snip
Extreme Computing has now partnered with Ricoh to provide the Magio as a base for a wearable kit. Total cost under $2000 including M1 and Twiddler.
I'm not affiliated w/ the company BTW. Saw it on the wear-hard list today.
Wearable researchers, myself included, argue that being able to type with one hand 14 hours a day, wearever you are, and simultaneously with whatever else you do during the day, makes 30 wpm text input blisteringly faster than any desktop input -- even, say, desktop input with speeds well in excess of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 wpm. And Twiddlers can cruise at 60 wpm.
Speech recognition on Linux is going to be a difficult problem to solve, alone. There are tools out there to do it, but it is going to require massive coordination.