...more recent posts
$150 cassette deck for your computer for ripping those old tapes to your hard drive, or dumping mp3 mixes back onto that old standby format.
Cool one wheel scooter design.
Looks like the free VoIP application Skype (from the kazza people - I mentioned it last September) will be coming to OS X. From the Skype forums:
May 18th: In response to all the requests: there WILL be a Skype version for Mac OS X. No info is publicly available about when exactly it will be out, but it's already in the work
May 24th: I will contact you when we have something to send to you, which is not in next week but quite close. Thanks for patient waiting. :-)
For David Stotts, computing needs a new face: yours. He'd like to hook you up to a partner miles or continents away, pipe live video of each of you onto the same computer desktop, and let you hash out your ideas, pointing to work on the screen, hearing each other's voices, and watching each other react....
...The key is transparency, which is wired into today's high-performance graphics hardware. By tapping that capacity and the human brain's ability to organize visual patterns, Stotts and his team found a way to let you peer through transparent images of yourself and your partner at the same time you're watching your work on the screen. (If you've ever looked through your reflection in a pond and noticed a fish swimming under the surface, you'll have the idea.)
Here is way more than you want to know about how web browsers and web servers negotiate their connections, and how the browser parses the resulting data stream into something that looks to you like a page. Written by the guy who leads development of Apple's Safari browser.
There is a lot going on under the hood to make this all happen. <understatement/>
To see what our mobile devices are going to look like in the near future, you just have to look at the mobile processors being previewed today: "Qualcomm pushes technology limits with new designs."
...Qualcomm announced the release of three new baseband processors that combine multimedia capabilities with support for GSM, GPRS, and wideband CDMA (W-CDMA) on chip....These chips will be available to cellphone manufactures in the 4th quarter of 2005 and into 2006.
All three of the processors are equipped with a multimedia processing block that can support up to 6-Mpixel cameras, 30-frame per second VGA support, and a gaming core from ATI Technologies that can handle 4 million triangles pr second. The chips also come equipped with interfaces for 802.11, Bluetooth, MDDI, TV, and USB.
I was sitting outside two days ago drinking a coffee and waiting for a friend. A young lady sat down next to me. And then a moment later a very confused looking family ("you're not from around here, are you?") dragging lots of luggage stopped in front of us asking if we knew where the 4 points Sheraton Hotel was located. I just shook my head, but the woman next to me offered to call and find out. Who says New Yorkers aren't helpful?
Anyway, she calls information, gets connected, but the number is busy. At this point I'm still doubtful, but I click to the browser on my Treo 600, point it at google, and go. About 10 seconds later I have the address (luckily I got the address right on the google results page without having to click through.) And I got it *before* she was able to get her voice call through!
After they left she looked at my phone and asked, "Is that the Treo? Mine is on order, but it's taking forever to get here."
:-)
I've never been very interested in video games, but there is no doubt they have been a major driver of computing technology. And now more than ever. Sony recently unveiling it's much rumored PlayStation Portable (PSP) at the E3 2004 conference. What a beautiful device! (Full sized picture here. In action - and multicolored - here.)
It's not going to be out for quite some time (after 1/1/2005 in the U.S.,) but it really looks worth the wait. Technical details are here, but the highlights include: 16:9 wide screen display, 32 megs of RAM, a 333 mhz processor (very similar to what is in the PS2 right now!), and a custom-created 1.8 GB UMD optical disc drive (it is Sony afterall, so of course there is proprietary storage.) In other words, games on this thing are going to be much closer to top of the line home console games than to anything we've seen in a portable.
But it gets more interesting from there. The PSP ships with 802.11b (WiFi) wireless networking built in. It can connect in client server mode (like with your broadband wireless basestation, so you could play games against people anywhere on the internet,) or in peer to peer mode, so you can strike up a game with everybody on your subway car.
And then there are the accessories, said to include a camera, a GPS unit, and a keyboard. These give you a sense that Sony has a lot in mind for this device. Sure it plays games, but it also plays music, and movies, and can be a wireless web cam. I'm sure voice over IP is in the cards too.
Hopefully they can price it right.
I've been trying to tighten the focus on this page. Lately I have been feeling that the technology I've been waiting for since the very early 90's is finally at hand. Ubiquitous, wireless, pocket sized computers with the power of traditional desktops but the ease of use of traditional consumer electronics. In other words the "next step" for computing. I'm working toward a larger write up, but I haven't been able to produce it yet. Still, my hope is that the links on this page all point to specific pieces of this one puzzle.
Boeing will introduce in flight wifi internet access on Monday on a non stop flight from Munich to L.A.. Cost will be $30 for the entire flight, or $10 for 30 minutes. Boeing hopes to have this service, called Connexion, on 300 planes by 2006. Singapore Airlines has plans to also deploy the system, but other major U.S. carriers are still dragging their feet.
Very informative article on the near future of camera phones:
Component and handset makers are gearing up to ship mass volumes of camera phones worldwide in hopes of sparking new markets in mobile imaging. They say they can resolve looming design hurdles for 2-megapixel and higher-resolution images as well as real-time video...Moving fast.
...Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., for one, wants "to push quickly toward the 5-megapixel camera phone and push digital still cameras to become something only for professionals. That's our ideal"...
...Next-generation lenses are also incorporating better autofocus, digital zoom and higher-resolution video capabilities. The enhancements already have doubled the bill of materials for a CMOS sensor module, from $5.50 at the VGA level to $10.10 for a megapixel unit, because of more expensive lenses and manufacturing costs. Samsung hopes to produce a 2-Mpixel CMOS module with MPEG-4 video for less than $20 by year's end....
"At Epson, we are working on 5-Mpixel graphics engines for 2005.... We believe that when the 2- to 5-Mpixel camera phones become mainstream, they will replace a huge percentage of digital still cameras," Lyons said. "In 2005 to 2006, we're looking at 2-Mpixel phones going mainstream"....
"We will support videoconferencing over circuit-switched and IP networks, but our long-term strategy is video-over-IP," he [Nokia senior VP Juha Putkiranta] said. "And carriers agree, because they see the efficiency benefits."
The article also expresses some worry about the networks being robust enough for lots of 2+ MP image file transfers. I still think the solution is to have the phone save two copies of every picture, one at full resolution and one at some fraction. The full resolution shots stay on the phone and then sync to a paired computer over bluetooth whenever in range. The reduced versions can be sent right from the phone over the network. This is better all around. 2 megs is too big. Even if I could I wouldn't want to fill someone's mail box up with 2 meg images. Just seems rude. (But, again, I want those full res shots in case I get one I want to keep.) My guess is this would be trivial to implement, since a DSP that can manipulate jpegs is already in the phone!
Interesting. Looks like redacted information can be (often) recovered by counting pixels:
The technology employed is, at first sight, nothing revolutionary. The two researchers measured the inclination of the text, deformed at the time of its digital reproduction - the inclination was an angle of 0.52°.
They then used a character recognition software to determine the width of the Arial-font text which provides the number of letters per unit of length. Simple recourse to an English dictionary then helped establish a list of possible words.
Incredibly long technical post on the history (and possible futures) of software development on the Mac. Short version: "The value is in the frameworks, not Obj-C."
Blogger undergoes a significant update. Notes on the very nice looking new designs are here.
From IBM's chief technology officer's speech at the International Electronics Forum:
"Somewhere between 130-nm and 90-nm the whole system fell apart. Things stopped working and nobody seemed to notice." He added, "Scaling is already dead but nobody noticed it had stopped breathing and its lips had turned blue."We are always seeing stories about "the end of Moore's law" and for years these stories have consistently turned out to be untrue. But this seems a little more specific and a lot more believable.
In a possibly related story, Intel has recently announced a complete change in their future processor roadmap, dropping their massive, and monolithic, P4 flagship in favor of a more energy efficient dual core design.
So perhaps CPUs have hit the wall in some sense. But does it really matter? My amateur understanding is that we will still continue to see total system performance increase, but more and more those increases will come from other links in the chain (from mass storage speed increases, from bus speed increases, etc...) as well as from redesigning toward parallelism.
In other words, while we might not see 6 ghz processors, we will for sure see dual core 3 ghz processors (very soon,) and for most applications this will amount to the same thing. So expect more breathless "Moore's law is invalidated!" stories (even though it's not really a law and can't be invalidated,) but don't get too worked up. There is plenty of room still for innovation.
Puff piece, but sort of interesting nonetheless, on wearable displays:
Starner expects that the advent of mass-market floating displays will similarly expand what we do with mobile computers. He and his peers predict that someday we'll all be operating in "augmented reality" with the help of our wearable computers. All that really means is we'll eventually have the ability to bring the Web--or some form of it--with us wherever we go.Clearly the display is the biggest problem going forward (with data entry the second.) But will it go this way, or will flexible roll up displays be the answer? Imagine a cell phone / mobile computer in the form factor of a fat pen. Out of the side of the pen you can pull a flexible screen, like rolling down a window shade. This way you can get an arbitrarily big display in a pocket sized device. Both technologies are here, and close (2 years?) from the retail market.
"Why: Why not?"
Indeed.
Floppy disk drive RAID.
I'm not saying they are there yet, but Apple seems to have gotten something right with the latest iTunes (as well as breaking some stuff and going further down the DRM blackhole.) I think the iMix thing could be potentially huge. See this post for more:
Gyford writes, "It's kind of a social networking tool without really trying. With music as the social lubricant, you have something by which to gauge other people. Never mind those dumb lists of 'My Favourite Music' that Friendster et al suggest you populate. You can see which bands someone actually listens to. After browsing to, say, mechajesus's page, I'm almost interested in getting in touch simply because we share lots of tastes and he also listens to things I've never heard of. For anyone who's all High Fidelity-esque about judging people by their musical tastes (and, let's face it, you can't take anyone seriously who isn't), this is like the proverbial crack cocaine. Well, maybe if you could just download an MP3 with a click ... then I'd have problems leaving my computer to take care of essential bodily functions."
Interesting beta app for the Treo 600 (download link in first post) which gives you lots more control over the camera (can increase the factor set quality level from 65 to 99) plus it sort of deals with the low light blue dot problem. With a small amount of testing I can say that the pictures do look a little better.
Open-Source Mesh Group Releases Software:
The CUWiN project wants to allow self-forming, noncentralized, mesh-based Wi-Fi networks using standard, old PCs with no configuration. Slightly more advanced units could be ruggedized boxes using Compact Flash, but the basic unit would be a 486 or later PC with a bootable CD-ROM or bootable floppy that bootstraps a CD-ROM. Once booted, a unit finds other similar units without any other configuration or control and forms a mesh.
“We’ve been developing software now since about 2000, and our idea is to build software that is super user friendly, super easy for someone who doesn’t understand the nuances of the technology or community wireless networking to set up their own system,” said Meinrath. It’s an attempt to enable community networking to spread beyond the folks who are self-starters.
Here is a post with lots of links to very serious deep thinking on this subject. I should have some more to say, and some more specific pointers when I get done plowing through this fascinating stuff.
A completely killer 2 MP camera phone from Samsung that, if the past is any indication, will never ever be released in the U.S.
Okay, I know I have no pull. But can't someone hook me up with a gmail account?
Basic ran on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, a network of multiple simple terminals connected to a large computer, Kurtz explained. "The development of Basic was a natural step in a whole progression of computer activities that began when I arrived at Dartmouth in 1956," he said. "The whole thrust was to try to make computing easier for people, particularly nonscience and nonengineering people."My first experience with computer programming was using basic on a TRS-80 computer at my Junior High School.
Around 1960 or so, Kurtz said, he and Kemeny realized that the only way to do that was to develop a time-sharing system that would be especially geared toward small student jobs rather than the "big research stuff."
"The idea was that a time-sharing system made it easy for students or anybody else to get to the computer," Kurtz said. "The user interface to the time-sharing system was very simple. Instead of using things like 'log in' and 'log out,' we used [simple English-language functions] like 'hello' and 'goodbye.'
"We needed a simple language, and that's how Basic got developed," he said. "The languages that were around in those days were just not suitable, so we had to develop one from scratch -- [though] it derived from the existing languages, there's no question about that -- and we also wanted a computing environment where people could use it without having to take a course."