If you haven't already, watching the The CES Keynote by Jeff Hawkins. (unfortunately it's in WMP format). He talks in depth on PDA useability and functionality, hilighting the evolution of the Treo, along with it's many failed brethren from the past. He addresses the small screen and lower resolution issue, explaining that much of the UI for PalmOS seems to have undergone some tweaking to create what they've made here. Also, bandwidth isn't quite so much an issue if they handle the web proxying well (pretty big "if")
One of my physics profs, Yumi Ijiri, moved to my school after doing a few years of research for NIST and IBM regarding GMR technology. Basically, noone could figure out why GMR worked, or how to systematically improve upon the concept. IBM found a neat combination of thin films created these extremely sensitive magnetic sectors, and instead of finding out why/how it works, they empirically tried some 22000 or so combinations until they progressively found better and better arrangements. After the fact, they hired Yumi to figure all the physics out, but her research was also inconclusive. It kinda scares me that there's stuff in my harddrive that IBM and NIST couldn't figure out after 4 years of research.
I know this isn't that fast by todays standards, but for building that tiny LAN box, the A-Trend ATC-6254M BX motherboard has integrated Voodoo3/2000 w/ 16 MB vram on a 2x onboard AGP, and onboard Yamaha 740 sound controller. That'd eliminate at least the perpendicular AGP card jutting out. Coupled with the fastest PIII it'll take and some other desktop components, and you've got a modest gaming rig without the cost of going laptop.
The human brain stores information in analog form over a vast network of neurons. To compare it with a binary form of data storage (like computer harddrives) would seem a little backwards. For instance: how many 1's and 0's can we store in a brain? Well, even if we found that figure, we wouldn't have a grasp on how much information that brain was storing JUST to rehash all those 1's and 0's dependably. Ok, then how much harddrive space does it take to store all the information in the brain? That's also kinda hard to define, but if we were to break down all the brains functions, and find all the wave patterns and synaptic activities and neurochemical interractions, all the neuronal functions and placement, we would have this really large lump of data. However, that data would not react and synthesize information like a brain, and would not be able to differentiate between actual "stored information," and functional activities of the brain, which, whereas describeable in binary fashion, are not actually indicative of stored information in the brain, rather it is of the brain itself.
It is popular, but misleading to relate the neuron to a bit. Since neurons either fire, or they don't, it seems that they would have an "on/off" significance in the brain. This is unfortunately not true. The rate of fire of a neuron, along with the intensity of the potential also carry information, unlike a string of 1/0's. That, and neuron's communicate w/ 10000's of other neurons, unlike a pile of data sectors. Any comparison between the human brain and a digital computer is lacking in validity because the brain acts nothing like a digital system.
Slashdot Mirror
If you haven't already, watching the The CES Keynote by Jeff Hawkins. (unfortunately it's in WMP format). He talks in depth on PDA useability and functionality, hilighting the evolution of the Treo, along with it's many failed brethren from the past. He addresses the small screen and lower resolution issue, explaining that much of the UI for PalmOS seems to have undergone some tweaking to create what they've made here. Also, bandwidth isn't quite so much an issue if they handle the web proxying well (pretty big "if")
One of my physics profs, Yumi Ijiri, moved to my school after doing a few years of research for NIST and IBM regarding GMR technology. Basically, noone could figure out why GMR worked, or how to systematically improve upon the concept. IBM found a neat combination of thin films created these extremely sensitive magnetic sectors, and instead of finding out why/how it works, they empirically tried some 22000 or so combinations until they progressively found better and better arrangements. After the fact, they hired Yumi to figure all the physics out, but her research was also inconclusive. It kinda scares me that there's stuff in my harddrive that IBM and NIST couldn't figure out after 4 years of research.
I know this isn't that fast by todays standards, but for building that tiny LAN box, the A-Trend ATC-6254M BX motherboard has integrated Voodoo3/2000 w/ 16 MB vram on a 2x onboard AGP, and onboard Yamaha 740 sound controller. That'd eliminate at least the perpendicular AGP card jutting out. Coupled with the fastest PIII it'll take and some other desktop components, and you've got a modest gaming rig without the cost of going laptop.
The human brain stores information in analog form over a vast network of neurons. To compare it with a binary form of data storage (like computer harddrives) would seem a little backwards. For instance: how many 1's and 0's can we store in a brain? Well, even if we found that figure, we wouldn't have a grasp on how much information that brain was storing JUST to rehash all those 1's and 0's dependably. Ok, then how much harddrive space does it take to store all the information in the brain? That's also kinda hard to define, but if we were to break down all the brains functions, and find all the wave patterns and synaptic activities and neurochemical interractions, all the neuronal functions and placement, we would have this really large lump of data. However, that data would not react and synthesize information like a brain, and would not be able to differentiate between actual "stored information," and functional activities of the brain, which, whereas describeable in binary fashion, are not actually indicative of stored information in the brain, rather it is of the brain itself.
It is popular, but misleading to relate the neuron to a bit. Since neurons either fire, or they don't, it seems that they would have an "on/off" significance in the brain. This is unfortunately not true. The rate of fire of a neuron, along with the intensity of the potential also carry information, unlike a string of 1/0's. That, and neuron's communicate w/ 10000's of other neurons, unlike a pile of data sectors. Any comparison between the human brain and a digital computer is lacking in validity because the brain acts nothing like a digital system.