Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 is so simple to user that it took 6 videos about 3 min each to prove it. Kind of irony ?!
Nevertheless, the videos are hilarious. Check them out.
and my favorite …
Nokia’s latest mobile operating system Maemo, launched beginning of October in N900 handset didn’t turn out as expected. At the same time, the processor giant Intel is still waiting for the best opportunity to enter the mobile world. The cooperation between Nokia and Intel has been rumored for a while in the industry and in blogs and finally it is announced today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Maemo + Moblin = MeeGo
This is the new formula that Nokia and Intel put in place to fight Google Android. Watch the video below to check the different point of views from both partners regarding this cooperation.
The “Intel Inside” tag has marked the desktop PCs (74% acc. Q4 2008) since the 1990s. In 2020, Intel expects to stample “Intel Inside” on our foreheads.
According to PhysOrg, Computer chip maker Intel wants to implant a brain-sensing chip directly into the brains of its customers to allow them to operate computers and other devices without moving a muscle.
Research projects to connect animal brains to robots have been carried out for many years. Rats and monkeys have already been able to control robots with brain signals. It was a matter of time before some large company announces a product that will allow human brain to communicate with electronic devices around them. Who’s better than the world leader in silicon innovation and world’s largest semiconductor chip maker to take that challenge? Read more…
Few days ago, I wrote about the 10/GUI: the new concept of user interface to PCs.
Today, Apple launched the world’s first multi-touch mouse called “Magic Mouse”. The top shell of Magic Mouse is one seamless multi-touch sensor and inside is a chip which according to Apple tells exactly what you want to do. Whether you want to click, scroll, swipe or simply rest your hand. Magic Mouse does not mix up these actions.
The magic mouse points and clicks like a regular mouse however without the buttons and the scrolling wheel. You can practically click anywhere along the Multi-Touch surface. Brush one finger along the top surface to pan a full 360 degrees. Swipe a finger along the surface to scroll, just like on an iPhone or iPod touch. You can adjust the sensitivity from the System Preferences. And just like an iPhone or a MacBook trackpad, Magic Mouse detects the number of fingers you are using at any given time. This fits perfectly to advance through internet pages in Safari or browse albums in iTunes. Although this is not quite the 10/GUI concept, but Apple have certainly realized that the Multi-Touch technology introduced a breakthrough in the way people interact with the device, through gestures.
Watch the video below to see the magic mouse in action Read more…
The touchscreen concept have proven to be a successful interface in mobile devices especially on mobile phones like the Iphone for example. The concept itself is however not new, many manufacturers have been looking into implementing the touchscreen in desktop computers. Microsoft came up with its Surface product which is a multi-touch computer, however it is not a solution that could replace the standard mouse+keyboard+screen interface that we are using today.
If you haven’t heard of Microsoft Surface before, you can check out this video to get an idea about what is does and how it works.
Although it seems like a cool product, and will certainly find suitable areas like in hotels, restaurants but I can’t see that product as the next generation of desktop computers.
The reasons are described in the next video but can be summarized by this title “not a practical solution”. The concept I believe might be the new generation of human-computer interaction is presented by R. Clayton Miller and shown in the same video below. It consists of splitting the touchscreen from the screen itself. The mouse+keyboard placement relatively to the screen is proven to be convenient for the user. Imagine that you can use 10 fingers multi-touch instead of a single pointer, and different actions result in different events (zoom-in and out using 2 fingers, moving objects using 3 fingers, …)
It might feel strange and many would consider it awkward in the beginning and wonder why would someone change something that is working, the same reaction that followed the invention of the mouse in early 80s by Xerox.
In 1984 a prominent PC columnist commented the release of this new computer with a mouse: “There is no evidence that people want to use these things.”
It’s not about changing a way of working rather that opens a new horizon. We were able to achieve what we have today because of that single pointer GUI. When applications will take advantage of the 10/GUI, it will be adapted by the majority and become a natural transition from the normal mouse+keyboard interface to the new multi-touch screen. Watch the video to learn more about the 10/GUI concept Read more…
Kraken are legendary sea monsters said to have lived in the Scandinavian waters between Norway and Iceland. This sea monster made its first appearance in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
The scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee launched the Kraken: a supercomputer monster, the first academic supercomputer to break the petaflops barrier. The flops or flop/s is a measure of computer’s performance and stands for FLoating point Operations Per Second.
The Kraken is based on the Cray XT5 model that was renovated and the system consists of 16,000 x 2.6 GHz processors with 16 cores and 129 Terabyte memory. When the system was started this week, it set a record of 1,03×1015 flops performing more than 1 thousand trillion operations per second, a huge achievement in the academic research environment.
Every time I buy a new electronic device, PC and accessories in particular, I can’t help thinking about the price development and the fact that despite the price pressure, the end customer always pays the same about of money for the same product class over the years. It seems a bit complicated to explain but I found that someone else have spent a lot of time on the subject.
Matt Komorowski made some history research and collected data for the price of a hard drive over the years (price per GB). The diagram below shows the hard drive cost per gigabyte from 1980 to 2009.
Not strange for a mathematician and software engineer like Matt to formulate the graph in a mathematic equation that gives the price of hard driver per gigabyte storage over the years between 1980 and 2009. Most likely, this expression can be extended to the future as long as the consumer electronics follow the same trend. So you can predict how much the price of a hard drive would be in 2020…
Price = 10-0.2502(year-1980)+6.304
Anyway, back to my idea, if you plot the “mass-production” available storage capacity by year on the right y-axis, I believe you will a linear line rising from 1980 to 2009 that will cross the blue line somewhere between $150 and $300 which corresponds to the average price of an average hard drive over the years.
I don’t share the enthusiasm as Matt to look up data and plot them to see if it matches my theory, but probably some other statistic freak out there might do it and share it or even prove that my theory is wrong..