Saturday, February 28, 2009
OLPC On Twitter Postings
Rwanda currently has 10,000 XO laptops. Some students have found that Kigali's airport has Free Wifi: http://tr.im/gJLx
New England QB, Tom Brady will be donating 1000 machines to 31 Boys and Girls clubs throughout New England http://tr.im/gCCw
Have you seen the OLPC+Sugar Manual by Floss Manuals? It's excellent http://tr.im/gAku
An XO user set up a public server that allows you to try out some of the XO's collaboration and sharing features. http://tinyurl.com
Look to the OLPC Activities Wiki to install additional software to your XO Laptop http://wiki.laptop.org/go/A...
Check out OLPC+Google+UNICEF has cooked up www.ourstories.org
OLPC orders surge as Peru requests 260,000 XOs http://tinyurl.com/237yeq
OLPC is the most subscribe non-profit channel on YouTube this month. Check out the new Negroponte video http://tinyurl.com
Now you can give an XO Laptop on Facebook http://apps.facebook.com/ca...
New England QB, Tom Brady will be donating 1000 machines to 31 Boys and Girls clubs throughout New England http://tr.im/gCCw
Have you seen the OLPC+Sugar Manual by Floss Manuals? It's excellent http://tr.im/gAku
An XO user set up a public server that allows you to try out some of the XO's collaboration and sharing features. http://tinyurl.com
Look to the OLPC Activities Wiki to install additional software to your XO Laptop http://wiki.laptop.org/go/A...
Check out OLPC+Google+UNICEF has cooked up www.ourstories.org
OLPC orders surge as Peru requests 260,000 XOs http://tinyurl.com/237yeq
OLPC is the most subscribe non-profit channel on YouTube this month. Check out the new Negroponte video http://tinyurl.com
Now you can give an XO Laptop on Facebook http://apps.facebook.com/ca...
Price Drop on NetBooks
9-inch netbooks seeing sharp price declines
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/41518/145/
By Wolfgang Gruener
Monday, February 23, 2009 13:43
Chicago (IL) – If you have thought about buying a netbook and are simply buying for a simple Internet access device, there may be some interesting deals out there.
According to a report published by Digitimes, notebook vendors are dropping the prices of their 8.9” netbooks in an effort to clear their inventory. SSD versions are apparently seeing the most significant declines , which is said to be due to more hard drive options in netbooks and the simple fact that SSDs are still way too expensive anyway and may make little sense for many buyers.
A quick check in the North American market reveals that Acer’s Aspire One, the best-selling netbook at this time, can be purchased for about $250 with an 8 GB SSD, while the Asus EeePC 900 with a 16 GB SSD is available for about $320 and HP’s Mini with an 8 GB SSD for about $330. Further price drops are expected.
If you are looking for a netbook with an SSD, you can generally expect a device that is lighter than the hard drive version and generates notably less heat. Battery time should also be positively impacted in most cases. However, buyers should be aware that 8 GB may be a bit tight as, for example, HP’s Mini with Windows XP provides only 2 GB of remaining storage space (HP provides an extra 2 GB USB stick that can be installed flush into the casing free of charge.) Buyers of 8 GB netbooks should consider buying an additional memory card to act as their main mass storage device.
It should also be noted that while these 8.9” and 9” netbooks are compact and light, their screen resolution is not high enough to comfortable view websites that are designed for screen resolutions of a 1024 pixel width or more. Netbook vendors have been saying for a while that the segment may be moving towards 10.1” netbooks as a result.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/41518/145/
By Wolfgang Gruener
Monday, February 23, 2009 13:43
Chicago (IL) – If you have thought about buying a netbook and are simply buying for a simple Internet access device, there may be some interesting deals out there.
According to a report published by Digitimes, notebook vendors are dropping the prices of their 8.9” netbooks in an effort to clear their inventory. SSD versions are apparently seeing the most significant declines , which is said to be due to more hard drive options in netbooks and the simple fact that SSDs are still way too expensive anyway and may make little sense for many buyers.
A quick check in the North American market reveals that Acer’s Aspire One, the best-selling netbook at this time, can be purchased for about $250 with an 8 GB SSD, while the Asus EeePC 900 with a 16 GB SSD is available for about $320 and HP’s Mini with an 8 GB SSD for about $330. Further price drops are expected.
If you are looking for a netbook with an SSD, you can generally expect a device that is lighter than the hard drive version and generates notably less heat. Battery time should also be positively impacted in most cases. However, buyers should be aware that 8 GB may be a bit tight as, for example, HP’s Mini with Windows XP provides only 2 GB of remaining storage space (HP provides an extra 2 GB USB stick that can be installed flush into the casing free of charge.) Buyers of 8 GB netbooks should consider buying an additional memory card to act as their main mass storage device.
It should also be noted that while these 8.9” and 9” netbooks are compact and light, their screen resolution is not high enough to comfortable view websites that are designed for screen resolutions of a 1024 pixel width or more. Netbook vendors have been saying for a while that the segment may be moving towards 10.1” netbooks as a result.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
E Text Books on Laptops
Morning Edition, February 23, 2009 ·
The college textbook is on track to becoming a relic of the paper-and-ink era. On campuses around the country, professors and students are selecting digital versions of books that can be read off of a computer screen.
Most college students are used to going online for music, videos and news — so why not textbooks?
One college in rural Missouri is the first trying to go entirely book-free.
At Northwest Missouri State, all students are issued a laptop when they arrive on campus. Just before his business finance class begins, junior Kevin Green takes out his laptop and clicks on his textbook.
"I've read it some. I find it easy to just go through it as [the instructor] discusses it in class and highlight things as he brings them up," Green says.
Green is one of 500 students testing out digital textbooks this semester. And they're wondering: How will the e-books change the way they study?
Freshman Lindsey Rheuport is just downloading her text for intercultural communications.
"I like having the book in front of me, so I can like flip back and forth really fast and, like, put Post-it notes up in the corners of important pages," she says.
Changing With Students
Some e-textbooks are just on-screen versions of the bound copies. But the newest books are interactive — you can search, mark pages, highlight, and cut and paste passages. You can share notes in a kind of social network with the rest of your class — or even click on a video.
The new generation of textbooks is trying to be in tune with the way students learn in the age of Wikipedia and YouTube. And textbook writers will have to keep up, says Frank Lyman of CourseSmart, a digital distributor that's working with nine major publishers.
"Now what you're looking for in an author is a Steven Spielberg. You're looking for somebody who can be the producer, have the vision for what the learning experience should be," he says.
Not everyone is ready to relinquish the heavy old tomes. Northwest Missouri State President Dean Hubbard says when he discussed the plan to move away from physical books on campus, some professors had tears in their eyes.
"And the philosophy professor talked about books that were so important to him that he took them and had them leather-bound," Hubbard says. "But then he ended up saying, 'This is the way things are going, and we're going to go with it.'"
Worries About College Costs
Professors across the country are assigning e-books. Eighteen percent of college students have purchased one, according to the National Association of College Stores. But Northwest Missouri State is in a unique position to go entirely digital: In addition to the laptops, students rent all their textbooks from the college. So when a comprehensive selection became available digitally, Hubbard decided to make the switch.
"The timing is just right. Everybody is anxious about the cost of higher education going up," he says.
College textbooks are part of that. One book can cost upward of $200. E-book versions cost about half that.
Some students still need convincing, though. About half at this school say they still prefer physical textbooks.
But human resources instructor Allison Strong says she's already noticing that students are more likely to bring their laptops than textbooks to class.
"I just remind them again, you know, review this chapter, probably more so than I did so before," she says, "because I think they're actually going to read it more this time."
As students trade their books for laptops, publishers and academics alike are watching the transition, which could mean profound changes for higher education.
Sylvia Maria Gross reports for member station KCUR in Kansas City, Mo.
The college textbook is on track to becoming a relic of the paper-and-ink era. On campuses around the country, professors and students are selecting digital versions of books that can be read off of a computer screen.
Most college students are used to going online for music, videos and news — so why not textbooks?
One college in rural Missouri is the first trying to go entirely book-free.
At Northwest Missouri State, all students are issued a laptop when they arrive on campus. Just before his business finance class begins, junior Kevin Green takes out his laptop and clicks on his textbook.
"I've read it some. I find it easy to just go through it as [the instructor] discusses it in class and highlight things as he brings them up," Green says.
Green is one of 500 students testing out digital textbooks this semester. And they're wondering: How will the e-books change the way they study?
Freshman Lindsey Rheuport is just downloading her text for intercultural communications.
"I like having the book in front of me, so I can like flip back and forth really fast and, like, put Post-it notes up in the corners of important pages," she says.
Changing With Students
Some e-textbooks are just on-screen versions of the bound copies. But the newest books are interactive — you can search, mark pages, highlight, and cut and paste passages. You can share notes in a kind of social network with the rest of your class — or even click on a video.
The new generation of textbooks is trying to be in tune with the way students learn in the age of Wikipedia and YouTube. And textbook writers will have to keep up, says Frank Lyman of CourseSmart, a digital distributor that's working with nine major publishers.
"Now what you're looking for in an author is a Steven Spielberg. You're looking for somebody who can be the producer, have the vision for what the learning experience should be," he says.
Not everyone is ready to relinquish the heavy old tomes. Northwest Missouri State President Dean Hubbard says when he discussed the plan to move away from physical books on campus, some professors had tears in their eyes.
"And the philosophy professor talked about books that were so important to him that he took them and had them leather-bound," Hubbard says. "But then he ended up saying, 'This is the way things are going, and we're going to go with it.'"
Worries About College Costs
Professors across the country are assigning e-books. Eighteen percent of college students have purchased one, according to the National Association of College Stores. But Northwest Missouri State is in a unique position to go entirely digital: In addition to the laptops, students rent all their textbooks from the college. So when a comprehensive selection became available digitally, Hubbard decided to make the switch.
"The timing is just right. Everybody is anxious about the cost of higher education going up," he says.
College textbooks are part of that. One book can cost upward of $200. E-book versions cost about half that.
Some students still need convincing, though. About half at this school say they still prefer physical textbooks.
But human resources instructor Allison Strong says she's already noticing that students are more likely to bring their laptops than textbooks to class.
"I just remind them again, you know, review this chapter, probably more so than I did so before," she says, "because I think they're actually going to read it more this time."
As students trade their books for laptops, publishers and academics alike are watching the transition, which could mean profound changes for higher education.
Sylvia Maria Gross reports for member station KCUR in Kansas City, Mo.
A Little Marvell Plugs Sub-Netbook Gap
25 February 2009
A Little Marvell Plugs Sub-Netbook Gap
As I've been telling anyone who would listen, one of the key recent trends has been the "race to the bottom" in terms of pricing for computer systems. The only real winner here (aside from the end-user) is open source - proprietary systems cannot cut prices enough, and are rarely flexible enough to allow the kind of experimentation that is necessary at this end of the market.
Here's another great example of the kind of thing I have in mind:
Can a computer get any smaller and cheaper than a netbook? Marvell Technology Group Ltd. thinks so.
The Silicon Valley chip maker is trying to create a new category of inexpensive, energy-efficient devices it calls "plug computers," for which it would supply the integrated processors.
Strongly resembling those vacation timers that turn on your lights at night to ward off potential robbers, a plug computer is more of a home networking gadget that transforms external hard drives or USB thumb drives into full network-attached storage (NAS) devices.
Aside from the form-factor, the other thing of note is the expected price for these GNU/Linux-based systems:
Marvell has already announced a handful of other resellers that plan to build plug computers. But it hopes to attract far more, so that it can eventually price its SheevaPlug chips low enough for vendors to profitably sell plug computers for as little as $49, Mukhopadhyay said.
At first sight, it's not clear why anyone would want one of these extremely small computers; but at prices around $50 you can bet all kinds of unexpected uses will start popping up. It's not hard to imagine a day when a house or office is full of dozens of tiny, low-cost and low-energy GNU/Linux-based devices, all talking to each other and other systems across the Net. Juding be the speed at which netbooks have caught on, it's probably closer than we think.
A Little Marvell Plugs Sub-Netbook Gap
As I've been telling anyone who would listen, one of the key recent trends has been the "race to the bottom" in terms of pricing for computer systems. The only real winner here (aside from the end-user) is open source - proprietary systems cannot cut prices enough, and are rarely flexible enough to allow the kind of experimentation that is necessary at this end of the market.
Here's another great example of the kind of thing I have in mind:
Can a computer get any smaller and cheaper than a netbook? Marvell Technology Group Ltd. thinks so.
The Silicon Valley chip maker is trying to create a new category of inexpensive, energy-efficient devices it calls "plug computers," for which it would supply the integrated processors.
Strongly resembling those vacation timers that turn on your lights at night to ward off potential robbers, a plug computer is more of a home networking gadget that transforms external hard drives or USB thumb drives into full network-attached storage (NAS) devices.
Aside from the form-factor, the other thing of note is the expected price for these GNU/Linux-based systems:
Marvell has already announced a handful of other resellers that plan to build plug computers. But it hopes to attract far more, so that it can eventually price its SheevaPlug chips low enough for vendors to profitably sell plug computers for as little as $49, Mukhopadhyay said.
At first sight, it's not clear why anyone would want one of these extremely small computers; but at prices around $50 you can bet all kinds of unexpected uses will start popping up. It's not hard to imagine a day when a house or office is full of dozens of tiny, low-cost and low-energy GNU/Linux-based devices, all talking to each other and other systems across the Net. Juding be the speed at which netbooks have caught on, it's probably closer than we think.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Netbooks Become Ubiquitous and Linux Becomes Mainstream
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
http://ever-increasing-entropy.blogspot.com/2009/02/netbooks-become-ubiquitous-and-linux.html
Netbooks Become Ubiquitous and Linux Becomes Mainstream
Last Tuesday I took my ferret Chin Soon to her vet. While I was waiting I pulled my Sylvania g Netbook Meso out of its case to get some writing done. When the vet came in she commented on my "cute little netbook" and asked me if it was an Acer. Hers, it turns out, is an Acer and mine looks quite similar.
I read the reviews last year where people claimed that netbooks looked more like portable DVD players than computers. Well... nobody has mistaken mine for a DVD player. Lots of people recognize it as a netbook. I keep running into more and more people, both in the real world and online who have taken the plunge and bought themselves a little netbook. Many, like my ferrets' vet, are intelligent, professional people but are by no means technology professionals or even particularly technically inclined.
16 million netbooks have sold so far with growth estimated at 60% per year. I expect it could be higher that that. Netbooks are the least expensive new computers on the market in what is now a seriously troubled worldwide economy. Cool new technologies tend to snowball when they catch on. I've found I can do everything with my netbook that I could do with a conventional PC. Others will discover the same. Netbooks probably won't be as ubiquitous as cell phones but they will turn up in more and more places with more and more ordinary, non technical users.
Yes, the vet's Acer runs Windows. While the vast majority of new netbooks will be sold with either Windows XP or Windows 7, a substantial minority will continue to be preloaded with Linux. Millions of people have been introduced to Linux through netbooks and are satisfied with it. Educated consumers who learn that Linux, which requires fewer system resources, will run faster and comes with a wide variety of software preinstalled will choose Linux.
Despite the posts by various so-called tech journalists who always cheerlead for Microsoft claiming that Windows has "kicked Linux to the curb" or "crushed" Linux on netbooks, Microsoft's own estimate places Linux at 30% of current market share. Asustek's Samson Hu, quoted in the same Bloomberg article, places Linux on 30-40% of all EeePCs currently sold and expects Linux to maintain a 30% market share. Acer spokesman Henry Wang expects 20% of his Aspire One models to ship with Linux this year.
There were one million netbooks sold in 2007, all running Linux. There were 15 million sold last year. Assuming that Microsoft has no reason to deflate its own sales figures or inflate Linux numbers then the 30% figure becomes a good, conservative estimate of Linux netbook market share in 2008. That would make 4.2 million more Linux machines sold. Estimates for 2010 are as high as 29 million units. I've seen similar estimates for 2009. Let's assume the total market share for Linux across the industry will fall somewhere between the two leaders, around 25%. That would mean 14.5 million more new preloaded Linux boxes over the next two years, putting the total number since the summer of 2007 at 19.7 million.
I'm sure the Windows cheerleading section will be happy to point out that three times that number will run a Microsoft operating system and this will be touted as another great victory for Windows. Of course, these are the same folks who just a year ago were claiming Linux was insignificant in the consumer market with a less than one percent share of preloaded systems. Tell me again how going from less than 1% to 30% in the fastest growing segment of the consumer PC market is a crushing defeat for Linux and a great victory for Microsoft. Sorry, but I don't see it.
Consumers now are aware they have a choice and Linux has gone mainstream. Oh, and speaking of things snowballing, how many of those 19.7 million Linux netbook users will also choose Linux for a desktop or conventional notebook? How many will show Linux to their friends, family, or neighbors? How many of those friends, family, or neighbors may then make the same Linux choice? The results for an OS that's been "crushed" or "kicked to the curb" might be quite impressive indeed.
http://ever-increasing-entropy.blogspot.com/2009/02/netbooks-become-ubiquitous-and-linux.html
Netbooks Become Ubiquitous and Linux Becomes Mainstream
Last Tuesday I took my ferret Chin Soon to her vet. While I was waiting I pulled my Sylvania g Netbook Meso out of its case to get some writing done. When the vet came in she commented on my "cute little netbook" and asked me if it was an Acer. Hers, it turns out, is an Acer and mine looks quite similar.
I read the reviews last year where people claimed that netbooks looked more like portable DVD players than computers. Well... nobody has mistaken mine for a DVD player. Lots of people recognize it as a netbook. I keep running into more and more people, both in the real world and online who have taken the plunge and bought themselves a little netbook. Many, like my ferrets' vet, are intelligent, professional people but are by no means technology professionals or even particularly technically inclined.
16 million netbooks have sold so far with growth estimated at 60% per year. I expect it could be higher that that. Netbooks are the least expensive new computers on the market in what is now a seriously troubled worldwide economy. Cool new technologies tend to snowball when they catch on. I've found I can do everything with my netbook that I could do with a conventional PC. Others will discover the same. Netbooks probably won't be as ubiquitous as cell phones but they will turn up in more and more places with more and more ordinary, non technical users.
Yes, the vet's Acer runs Windows. While the vast majority of new netbooks will be sold with either Windows XP or Windows 7, a substantial minority will continue to be preloaded with Linux. Millions of people have been introduced to Linux through netbooks and are satisfied with it. Educated consumers who learn that Linux, which requires fewer system resources, will run faster and comes with a wide variety of software preinstalled will choose Linux.
Despite the posts by various so-called tech journalists who always cheerlead for Microsoft claiming that Windows has "kicked Linux to the curb" or "crushed" Linux on netbooks, Microsoft's own estimate places Linux at 30% of current market share. Asustek's Samson Hu, quoted in the same Bloomberg article, places Linux on 30-40% of all EeePCs currently sold and expects Linux to maintain a 30% market share. Acer spokesman Henry Wang expects 20% of his Aspire One models to ship with Linux this year.
There were one million netbooks sold in 2007, all running Linux. There were 15 million sold last year. Assuming that Microsoft has no reason to deflate its own sales figures or inflate Linux numbers then the 30% figure becomes a good, conservative estimate of Linux netbook market share in 2008. That would make 4.2 million more Linux machines sold. Estimates for 2010 are as high as 29 million units. I've seen similar estimates for 2009. Let's assume the total market share for Linux across the industry will fall somewhere between the two leaders, around 25%. That would mean 14.5 million more new preloaded Linux boxes over the next two years, putting the total number since the summer of 2007 at 19.7 million.
I'm sure the Windows cheerleading section will be happy to point out that three times that number will run a Microsoft operating system and this will be touted as another great victory for Windows. Of course, these are the same folks who just a year ago were claiming Linux was insignificant in the consumer market with a less than one percent share of preloaded systems. Tell me again how going from less than 1% to 30% in the fastest growing segment of the consumer PC market is a crushing defeat for Linux and a great victory for Microsoft. Sorry, but I don't see it.
Consumers now are aware they have a choice and Linux has gone mainstream. Oh, and speaking of things snowballing, how many of those 19.7 million Linux netbook users will also choose Linux for a desktop or conventional notebook? How many will show Linux to their friends, family, or neighbors? How many of those friends, family, or neighbors may then make the same Linux choice? The results for an OS that's been "crushed" or "kicked to the curb" might be quite impressive indeed.
OLPC Next Laptop on Open Source Hardware
http://harkopen.com/news/olpcs-next-laptop-will-be-open-source-hardware-driven
Olpc's next laptop will be open source hardware driven
Submitted by madaerodog on Sat, 02/21/2009 - 17:32
Nicholas Negroponte announced the next generation of One laptop per child and the awesome part is that it will be open source. So kids go to our tutorials area to know how to solder :P
The XO-2 how it's named will be a dual screen device from what he heard and will cost about 75$, and will be using one of the screens as keyboard when needed.
"The first generation is a laptop that can be a book; the next generation will a book that can be a laptop," he says. "That's the switch.
"One important thing about the XO-2 is that we're going to do it as an open source hardware programme. The XO-1 was really designed as if we were Apple. The XO-2 will be designed as if we were Google - we'll want people to copy it. We'll make the constituent parts available. We'll try and get it out there using the exact opposite approach that we did with the XO-1.
"We had to do the XO this way because everybody said it couldn't be done. We purposely designed a special-purpose, award-winning museum of modern art piece. The next one will be different: everything from the dual display to the touch-sensitive, force-feedback, haptic keyboard will be available." The XO-2 came as a result of feedback from the XO-1.
Negroponte says he'd thought ebooks were the weakest argument for the OLPC, "but I found that for many people, the strongest case was books. Suddenly a village can have 10,000 books, which is more than we had in school."
So I hope they will do the same as with XO-1 , buy 2 receive one because this will definitely be on manny geeks table, including mine :)
Olpc's next laptop will be open source hardware driven
Submitted by madaerodog on Sat, 02/21/2009 - 17:32
Nicholas Negroponte announced the next generation of One laptop per child and the awesome part is that it will be open source. So kids go to our tutorials area to know how to solder :P
The XO-2 how it's named will be a dual screen device from what he heard and will cost about 75$, and will be using one of the screens as keyboard when needed.
"The first generation is a laptop that can be a book; the next generation will a book that can be a laptop," he says. "That's the switch.
"One important thing about the XO-2 is that we're going to do it as an open source hardware programme. The XO-1 was really designed as if we were Apple. The XO-2 will be designed as if we were Google - we'll want people to copy it. We'll make the constituent parts available. We'll try and get it out there using the exact opposite approach that we did with the XO-1.
"We had to do the XO this way because everybody said it couldn't be done. We purposely designed a special-purpose, award-winning museum of modern art piece. The next one will be different: everything from the dual display to the touch-sensitive, force-feedback, haptic keyboard will be available." The XO-2 came as a result of feedback from the XO-1.
Negroponte says he'd thought ebooks were the weakest argument for the OLPC, "but I found that for many people, the strongest case was books. Suddenly a village can have 10,000 books, which is more than we had in school."
So I hope they will do the same as with XO-1 , buy 2 receive one because this will definitely be on manny geeks table, including mine :)
Open Source Hardware
http://harkopen.com/
Open source hardware
Open source hardware refers to the free release of information about the hardware design, such as logic designs (using hardware description language), schematics, bill of materials and printed circuit board (PCB) layout data, often with the use of free open source software to drive the hardware.
Now lets explain some terms I've used in this definition :
- hardware description language (HDL) is any language from a class of computer languages and/or programming languages for formal description of electronic circuits. It can describe the circuit's operation, its design and organization, and tests to verify its operation by means of simulation.
- printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect electronic components using conductive pathways, or traces, etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. It is also referred to as printed wiring board (PWB) or etched wiring board. A PCB populated with electronic components is a printed circuit assembly (PCA), also known as a printed circuit board assembly (PCBA).
Licensing.
There are a lot of licenses used for open source hardware most of them being borrowed from the software world , some of them especially for hardware like TAPR Open Hardware License, and some of them created solely for a single project like the Balloon Open Hardware License for the Balloon Project.
Harkopen.com respects the licenses that the passionate technological people choose for their projects and promotes open source hardware as permissive as can be, if a project is here we want you the user to be able to reproduce it as accurately as possible and to be able to use it as you wish, to improve it, extend it and share it back with the community.
Vision.
For the humanity to evolve one step is for every member to have free access to knowledge, another step is to provide methods for individuals to store what they accomplish and discover so that the we do not make the same mistakes or reinvent same things, yet another step is to provide them with tools and means to collaborate and help one another.
Given the society that we live in, with the earth's current problems and limitation the humanity needs to overcome the current obstacles thru technology, sustainable , generally available, green technology. And open source hardware provides that platform to help change the world and make it a better place.
Harkopen.com was created with these premises and will try to provide the tools to offer access to information, provide storage of progress and new information, and become a collaborative tool for the human race, thru the Internet to evolve technological.
Open source hardware
Open source hardware refers to the free release of information about the hardware design, such as logic designs (using hardware description language), schematics, bill of materials and printed circuit board (PCB) layout data, often with the use of free open source software to drive the hardware.
Now lets explain some terms I've used in this definition :
- hardware description language (HDL) is any language from a class of computer languages and/or programming languages for formal description of electronic circuits. It can describe the circuit's operation, its design and organization, and tests to verify its operation by means of simulation.
- printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect electronic components using conductive pathways, or traces, etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. It is also referred to as printed wiring board (PWB) or etched wiring board. A PCB populated with electronic components is a printed circuit assembly (PCA), also known as a printed circuit board assembly (PCBA).
Licensing.
There are a lot of licenses used for open source hardware most of them being borrowed from the software world , some of them especially for hardware like TAPR Open Hardware License, and some of them created solely for a single project like the Balloon Open Hardware License for the Balloon Project.
Harkopen.com respects the licenses that the passionate technological people choose for their projects and promotes open source hardware as permissive as can be, if a project is here we want you the user to be able to reproduce it as accurately as possible and to be able to use it as you wish, to improve it, extend it and share it back with the community.
Vision.
For the humanity to evolve one step is for every member to have free access to knowledge, another step is to provide methods for individuals to store what they accomplish and discover so that the we do not make the same mistakes or reinvent same things, yet another step is to provide them with tools and means to collaborate and help one another.
Given the society that we live in, with the earth's current problems and limitation the humanity needs to overcome the current obstacles thru technology, sustainable , generally available, green technology. And open source hardware provides that platform to help change the world and make it a better place.
Harkopen.com was created with these premises and will try to provide the tools to offer access to information, provide storage of progress and new information, and become a collaborative tool for the human race, thru the Internet to evolve technological.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Lost Laptops Artilcle
Adam Thierer
Lost Laptop Follies, Part 8: ATF Loses Laptops… and Guns!
http://techliberation.com/2008/09/18/lost-laptop-follies-part-8-atf-loses-laptops-and-guns/
And so the series continues. The Washington Post reports that the Department of Justice has just released “a scathing report” finding that over a 5-year period the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) “lost dozens of weapons and hundreds of laptops that contained sensitive information.” The DOJ’s Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found that 418 laptop computers and 76 weapons were lost. According to the report:
Yesterday’s report showed that ATF, a much smaller agency than the FBI, had lost proportionately many more firearms and laptops. “It is especially troubling that that ATF’s rate of loss for weapons was nearly double that of the FBI and [Drug Enforcement Administration], and that ATF did not even know whether most of its lost, stolen, or missing laptop computers contained sensitive or classified information,” Fine wrote. [...]
Many of the missing laptops contained sensitive or classified material, according to the report. ATF began installing encryption software only in May 2007. ATF did not know what information was on 398 of the 418 lost or stolen laptops. The report called the lack of such knowledge a “significant deficiency.” Of the 20 missing laptops for which information was available, ATF indicated that seven — 35 percent — held sensitive information. One missing laptop, for example, held “300-500 names with dates of birth and Social Security numbers of targets of criminal investigations, including their bank records with financial transactions.” Another held “employee evaluations, including Social Security numbers and other [personal information].” Neither laptop was encrypted.
The findings regarding lost weapons were equally troubling, if not a bit humorous:
Two weapons were subsequently used to commit crimes. In one incident, a gun stolen from the home of a special agent was fired through the window of another home. Ten firearms were “left in a public place.” One of them was left on an airplane, three in bathrooms, one in a shopping cart and two on the top of cars as ATF employees drove away. A laptop also fell off the top of a car as an agent drove off. Another weapon “fell into the water while an agent was fishing,” according to the report.
Now I know the private sector actors lose things too, but as I’ve pointed out before, if any of this happened in the private sector, trial lawyers would be salivating and lawsuits would be flying. By contrast, when the government loses personal information—information that his usually more sensitive than that which private actors collect—about the most that ever comes out of it is another report calling for “more accountability.” Few ever are actually held accountable (i.e., lose their jobs or get sued.)
The private sector's data can be just as sensitive as government data. NetworkWorld reported on June 5, 2008 Latest 'lost' laptop holds treasure-trove of unencrypted AT&T payroll data. According to the article an AT&T email stated: ""This is to alert you to the recent theft of an AT&T employee's laptop computer that contained AT&T management compensation information, including employee names, Social Security numbers, and, in most cases, salary and bonus information."
An AT&T manger is quoted as saying "It is pathetic that the largest telecom company in the world -- with more than 100 million customers -- doesn't encrypt basic personal information,"
The icing on the cake, the manager goes on to say ""I receive company internal e-mails reminding me to contact our legislators about relieving the company of the burdens of regulation," he says. "What happened here shows the company isn't ready to have those burdens lifted.
Lost Laptop Follies, Part 8: ATF Loses Laptops… and Guns!
http://techliberation.com/2008/09/18/lost-laptop-follies-part-8-atf-loses-laptops-and-guns/
And so the series continues. The Washington Post reports that the Department of Justice has just released “a scathing report” finding that over a 5-year period the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) “lost dozens of weapons and hundreds of laptops that contained sensitive information.” The DOJ’s Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found that 418 laptop computers and 76 weapons were lost. According to the report:
Yesterday’s report showed that ATF, a much smaller agency than the FBI, had lost proportionately many more firearms and laptops. “It is especially troubling that that ATF’s rate of loss for weapons was nearly double that of the FBI and [Drug Enforcement Administration], and that ATF did not even know whether most of its lost, stolen, or missing laptop computers contained sensitive or classified information,” Fine wrote. [...]
Many of the missing laptops contained sensitive or classified material, according to the report. ATF began installing encryption software only in May 2007. ATF did not know what information was on 398 of the 418 lost or stolen laptops. The report called the lack of such knowledge a “significant deficiency.” Of the 20 missing laptops for which information was available, ATF indicated that seven — 35 percent — held sensitive information. One missing laptop, for example, held “300-500 names with dates of birth and Social Security numbers of targets of criminal investigations, including their bank records with financial transactions.” Another held “employee evaluations, including Social Security numbers and other [personal information].” Neither laptop was encrypted.
The findings regarding lost weapons were equally troubling, if not a bit humorous:
Two weapons were subsequently used to commit crimes. In one incident, a gun stolen from the home of a special agent was fired through the window of another home. Ten firearms were “left in a public place.” One of them was left on an airplane, three in bathrooms, one in a shopping cart and two on the top of cars as ATF employees drove away. A laptop also fell off the top of a car as an agent drove off. Another weapon “fell into the water while an agent was fishing,” according to the report.
Now I know the private sector actors lose things too, but as I’ve pointed out before, if any of this happened in the private sector, trial lawyers would be salivating and lawsuits would be flying. By contrast, when the government loses personal information—information that his usually more sensitive than that which private actors collect—about the most that ever comes out of it is another report calling for “more accountability.” Few ever are actually held accountable (i.e., lose their jobs or get sued.)
The private sector's data can be just as sensitive as government data. NetworkWorld reported on June 5, 2008 Latest 'lost' laptop holds treasure-trove of unencrypted AT&T payroll data. According to the article an AT&T email stated: ""This is to alert you to the recent theft of an AT&T employee's laptop computer that contained AT&T management compensation information, including employee names, Social Security numbers, and, in most cases, salary and bonus information."
An AT&T manger is quoted as saying "It is pathetic that the largest telecom company in the world -- with more than 100 million customers -- doesn't encrypt basic personal information,"
The icing on the cake, the manager goes on to say ""I receive company internal e-mails reminding me to contact our legislators about relieving the company of the burdens of regulation," he says. "What happened here shows the company isn't ready to have those burdens lifted.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
http://manypossibilities.net/2009/02/a-modest-proposal-the-1-cent-sms/
http://manypossibilities.net/2009/02/a-modest-proposal-the-1-cent-sms/
ICASA - Stealing from AIDS Orphans »
A Modest Proposal - The 1 cent SMS
Published on 17 February 2009 in Telecom Policy.
I am filled today, as is often enough the case these days, with a sense of righteous indignation. In a meeting earlier today, Dominic Cull (firebrand lawyer for the forces of telecommunications good in South Africa) pointed out the obvious. He said that one of the single most important things mobile operators could do to make a difference for the poor would be to drop the price of SMS charges. The funny thing about the obvious is that we often don’t see what is staring us in the face.
90% profit on SMSes For those who may not be familiar with the technology of SMS, it doesn’t cost a mobile operator very much to send and receive SMSes. In fact, for GSM networks, SMSes are sent on a signalling channel which means that they don’t actually take up any traffic that would otherwise be used by voice calls. So, with voice infrastructure, mobile operators basically get SMS infrastructure for free. Now, that doesn’t mean that it is free for operators to provide. There are obviously billing and technical systems that need to be maintained to ensure that SMSes continue to function but it is about as close to free money as you can get.
About a year ago there was a blog post on the high cost SMS, subsequently picked up by Slashdot, which raised a small storm of indignation about the cost of SMS. In December last year, New York Times published an article highlighting the failure of the chair of the Senate anti-trust subcommittee to get anything like a reasonable explanation from operators on why SMS charges in the U.S. had doubled between 2005 and 2008 in the United States.
So what are the facts? The global average cost of an SMS is about 10 U.S. cents per message. Here in South Africa the cost of an SMS is R 0.75 or about 7 U.S. cents per message. Doesn’t sound like very much until you consider that, according to the ITU in 2006, the global SMS market is worth about 80 billion U.S. dollars annually. The New York Times article estimated that 2.5 trillion SMS messages were sent globally last year. A Huawei article estimates that 80-90% of SMS revenue is profit.
How is this possible? Why haven’t market forces brought the cost of an SMS down to something somewhat related to its cost + a reasonable profit? Why are consumers paying ten times the cost per SMS? Communication technology has gotten more sophisticated, less expensive, more automated and SMS volumes have sky-rocketed, yet on average cost per SMS has gone up. So what is up with that? A communications regulator doesn’t have to look much further for evidence of market failure.
So why do people put up with this? Partly, I think it is because behaviour in spending on mobiles is not entirely rational. Having anchored high prices for SMSes, it is comparatively easy for mobile operators to simply carry on charging high prices. Everyone, rich or poor, needs access to communication. For the poor, as expensive (comparative to cost) as SMSes are, they are still the cheapest form of pervasive electronic communication. Consider this in a context where poor Africans are spending over 50% of their disposable income on mobile communication (see the table below for more detailed information). What this amounts to is a level of price gouging on the part of mobile operators in developing countries that verges on the criminal. They make the highest profit margin on the service the poor need most.
So here is my proposal. The 1 cent SMS. Let’s challenge mobile operators to make a real difference to the poor by dropping pay-as-you-go SMS charges to 1 U.S. cent per message. Applied globally that would reduce SMS revenue to 8 billion dollars; arguably still a tidy sum. However, that is not taking into account the upside for operators. The reduced SMS costs would enable increased SMS traffic and new, as yet unthought of SMS-based enterprises such as Nathan Eagle’s innovative txteagle start-up.
To get a more complete sense of what people are paying for mobile communications in Africa, here is an excerpt from Alison Gillwald and Christoph Stork’s 2008 publication “Towards Evidence-Based Policy: ICT Access and Usage in Africa“, published by Research ICT Africa,
Monthly expenditure for mobile telephony as share of income and disposable income
ICASA - Stealing from AIDS Orphans »
A Modest Proposal - The 1 cent SMS
Published on 17 February 2009 in Telecom Policy.
I am filled today, as is often enough the case these days, with a sense of righteous indignation. In a meeting earlier today, Dominic Cull (firebrand lawyer for the forces of telecommunications good in South Africa) pointed out the obvious. He said that one of the single most important things mobile operators could do to make a difference for the poor would be to drop the price of SMS charges. The funny thing about the obvious is that we often don’t see what is staring us in the face.
90% profit on SMSes For those who may not be familiar with the technology of SMS, it doesn’t cost a mobile operator very much to send and receive SMSes. In fact, for GSM networks, SMSes are sent on a signalling channel which means that they don’t actually take up any traffic that would otherwise be used by voice calls. So, with voice infrastructure, mobile operators basically get SMS infrastructure for free. Now, that doesn’t mean that it is free for operators to provide. There are obviously billing and technical systems that need to be maintained to ensure that SMSes continue to function but it is about as close to free money as you can get.
About a year ago there was a blog post on the high cost SMS, subsequently picked up by Slashdot, which raised a small storm of indignation about the cost of SMS. In December last year, New York Times published an article highlighting the failure of the chair of the Senate anti-trust subcommittee to get anything like a reasonable explanation from operators on why SMS charges in the U.S. had doubled between 2005 and 2008 in the United States.
So what are the facts? The global average cost of an SMS is about 10 U.S. cents per message. Here in South Africa the cost of an SMS is R 0.75 or about 7 U.S. cents per message. Doesn’t sound like very much until you consider that, according to the ITU in 2006, the global SMS market is worth about 80 billion U.S. dollars annually. The New York Times article estimated that 2.5 trillion SMS messages were sent globally last year. A Huawei article estimates that 80-90% of SMS revenue is profit.
How is this possible? Why haven’t market forces brought the cost of an SMS down to something somewhat related to its cost + a reasonable profit? Why are consumers paying ten times the cost per SMS? Communication technology has gotten more sophisticated, less expensive, more automated and SMS volumes have sky-rocketed, yet on average cost per SMS has gone up. So what is up with that? A communications regulator doesn’t have to look much further for evidence of market failure.
So why do people put up with this? Partly, I think it is because behaviour in spending on mobiles is not entirely rational. Having anchored high prices for SMSes, it is comparatively easy for mobile operators to simply carry on charging high prices. Everyone, rich or poor, needs access to communication. For the poor, as expensive (comparative to cost) as SMSes are, they are still the cheapest form of pervasive electronic communication. Consider this in a context where poor Africans are spending over 50% of their disposable income on mobile communication (see the table below for more detailed information). What this amounts to is a level of price gouging on the part of mobile operators in developing countries that verges on the criminal. They make the highest profit margin on the service the poor need most.
So here is my proposal. The 1 cent SMS. Let’s challenge mobile operators to make a real difference to the poor by dropping pay-as-you-go SMS charges to 1 U.S. cent per message. Applied globally that would reduce SMS revenue to 8 billion dollars; arguably still a tidy sum. However, that is not taking into account the upside for operators. The reduced SMS costs would enable increased SMS traffic and new, as yet unthought of SMS-based enterprises such as Nathan Eagle’s innovative txteagle start-up.
To get a more complete sense of what people are paying for mobile communications in Africa, here is an excerpt from Alison Gillwald and Christoph Stork’s 2008 publication “Towards Evidence-Based Policy: ICT Access and Usage in Africa“, published by Research ICT Africa,
Monthly expenditure for mobile telephony as share of income and disposable income
Canonical Discusses Ubuntu Mobile Internet Devices
Barcelona: Canonical Discusses Ubuntu Mobile Internet Devices by Joe Panettieri
Ubuntu Mobile Internet DeviceDuring the GSMA Mobile World Conference in Barcelona this week, Canonical is working behind the scenes — evangelizing Ubuntu-based Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) to new and existing customers. The big question: Will Canonical line up more Ubuntu MID partners, or will MIDs (highly mobile WiFi devices) remain overshadowed by the netbook craze?
For its part, Intel is promoting a new MID technology — called Moorestown — at the mobile conference, notes The Wall Street Journal.
Canonical isn’t exhibiting at the conference, but the company is holding meetings behind the scenes and taking a close look at Moorestown.
“We are definitely keen to do a Moorestown-based MID device,” notes Canonical Marketing Manager Gerry Carr. “Of course we need a customer to ask us to do it first but we work very closely with Intel on these initiatives and have been working towards Moorestown for some time.”
Touchy Subject
Still, Canonical’s MID initiative seems to be overshadowed by the ongoing netbook craze. When Canonical and Intel announced joint work on MIDs in mid-2007, the effort was expected to focus on touch-driven WiFi devices (and other form factors) that weren’t quite smart phones. But since that time, two key mobile market disruptions have occured:
1. Netbooks came out of nowhere, and demand for the low-cost devices (running Windows XP or Linux) has prompted some skeptics to question whether MIDs will ever gain critical mass.
2. Google Android, to some extent, has captured the attention of software developers and mobile device makers. It’s widely seen as the “open” alternative to the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Still, 36 percent of WorksWithU readers continue to express a strong interest in MIDs, according to WorksWithU reader poll concluded January 23, 2009. Concludes Canonical’s Carr: MIDs are “a category we are committed to and believe will succeed.”
Frankly, I agree with Carr. The reason: Apple’s iTouch (iPod Touch) proves there’s demand for WiFi-enabled mobile devices that aren’t traditional notebooks or smart phones.
Ubuntu Mobile Internet DeviceDuring the GSMA Mobile World Conference in Barcelona this week, Canonical is working behind the scenes — evangelizing Ubuntu-based Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) to new and existing customers. The big question: Will Canonical line up more Ubuntu MID partners, or will MIDs (highly mobile WiFi devices) remain overshadowed by the netbook craze?
For its part, Intel is promoting a new MID technology — called Moorestown — at the mobile conference, notes The Wall Street Journal.
Canonical isn’t exhibiting at the conference, but the company is holding meetings behind the scenes and taking a close look at Moorestown.
“We are definitely keen to do a Moorestown-based MID device,” notes Canonical Marketing Manager Gerry Carr. “Of course we need a customer to ask us to do it first but we work very closely with Intel on these initiatives and have been working towards Moorestown for some time.”
Touchy Subject
Still, Canonical’s MID initiative seems to be overshadowed by the ongoing netbook craze. When Canonical and Intel announced joint work on MIDs in mid-2007, the effort was expected to focus on touch-driven WiFi devices (and other form factors) that weren’t quite smart phones. But since that time, two key mobile market disruptions have occured:
1. Netbooks came out of nowhere, and demand for the low-cost devices (running Windows XP or Linux) has prompted some skeptics to question whether MIDs will ever gain critical mass.
2. Google Android, to some extent, has captured the attention of software developers and mobile device makers. It’s widely seen as the “open” alternative to the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Still, 36 percent of WorksWithU readers continue to express a strong interest in MIDs, according to WorksWithU reader poll concluded January 23, 2009. Concludes Canonical’s Carr: MIDs are “a category we are committed to and believe will succeed.”
Frankly, I agree with Carr. The reason: Apple’s iTouch (iPod Touch) proves there’s demand for WiFi-enabled mobile devices that aren’t traditional notebooks or smart phones.
Asus to phase out 9 inch netbooks, focus on 10 inch models
Asus to phase out 9 inch netbooks, focus on 10 inch models
901-no-goAs expected, it looks like Asus will be phasing out all of its Eee PC netbooks with 8.9 inch displays soon. The goal is to focus on laptops with 10 inch screens, which appear to be the industry standard today. The machines with larger displays also tend to have larger keyboards which are easier to type on, although the screen resolution on 8.9 inch and 10.1 or 10.2 inch netbooks is typically the same (1024 x 600 pixels, give or take a few pixels).
Asus expects 95% of its netbook shipments in 2010 to be 10 inch Eee PC models. The other 5% will be netbooks with 7 inch screens, probably sold through telephone companies.
901-no-goAs expected, it looks like Asus will be phasing out all of its Eee PC netbooks with 8.9 inch displays soon. The goal is to focus on laptops with 10 inch screens, which appear to be the industry standard today. The machines with larger displays also tend to have larger keyboards which are easier to type on, although the screen resolution on 8.9 inch and 10.1 or 10.2 inch netbooks is typically the same (1024 x 600 pixels, give or take a few pixels).
Asus expects 95% of its netbook shipments in 2010 to be 10 inch Eee PC models. The other 5% will be netbooks with 7 inch screens, probably sold through telephone companies.
Asus Eee PC 1000H
Sure, the Asus Eee PC 1000H has been out for a little while now and you may have already seen an unboxing video or two. But you haven’t seen my unboxing video yet, have you? So check it out:
I’ve been playing with the laptop for about a half hour, and so far I’m very impressed. It addresses almost every issue I’ve had with the Eee CP 701 and the HP Mini-Note:
* The onboard graphics and CPU are powerful enough to handle multitasking and multimedia. It plays Hulu videos flawlessly.
* The 1024 x 600 pixel display doesn’t manage to fit as much on the screen as the 1280 x 768 pixel display, but it handles most web sites (including this one) just fine, and no squinting is necessary when looking at this computer.
* The keyboard is much larger and easier to type on than the Eee PC 701 keyboard. It’s not quite as easy to touch type on as the HP Mini-Note.
* The touchpad is nice and wide, and has two trackpad buttons. But I still prefer to plug in a travel mouse.
* Asus ships a padded slip case for the computer
* The power brick and AC adapter are relatively small, and feature a two-prong plug that goes many places the HP Mini-Note three-prong plug will not.
On the down sde, the built in speakers are pretty quiet. And the webcam is a bit choppy, at least with the included software. I’ll try another application soon.
I was mildly surprised to note that Asus ships the Eee PC 1000H with Microsoft Works and StarOffice rather than OpenOffice.org. Of course, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are basically the same office suite. But it seemed like an odd choice.
Posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008, 1:39 pm by Brad Linder
Tags: asus eee pc, asus eee pc 1000h, eee pc, unboxing, video
Asus Eee PC 1000H-X will come with MS Office preloaded
http://www.liliputing.com/2009/02/asus-eee-pc-1000h-x-will-come-with-ms-office-preloaded.html
Asus Eee PC 1000H-X will come with MS Office preloaded
Asus is reportedly launching a version of its Eee PC 1000H netbook with Microsoft Office Personal 2007 preloaded in Japan. The Eee PC 1000H-X will have a 10.2 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, a 160GB hard drive, and it will be priced at 57,800 yen or about $617 US. If that price seems high, keep in mind the fact that most computers cost more in Japan than in the US.
This will be the first Eee PC model to ship with Microsoft Office. Most netbooks in the Eee PC lineup come with Sun’s StarOffice suite preloaded. Staroffice provides much of the same functionality as Microsoft Office, (or OpenOffice.org, which started out as the open source stepchild of SunOffice), and can even open and edit most Office documents. But if you’ve ever tried using SunOffice to edit complex Excel or Word documents, you know that sometimes things can get lost in translation.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen mention of an Eee PC 1000H-X. The model number first reared its head back in October. So I’m guessing that the model number has nothing to do with the software stack. Rather, Asus is preloading some new software on an existing netbook.
Asus Eee PC 1000H-X will come with MS Office preloaded
Asus is reportedly launching a version of its Eee PC 1000H netbook with Microsoft Office Personal 2007 preloaded in Japan. The Eee PC 1000H-X will have a 10.2 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, a 160GB hard drive, and it will be priced at 57,800 yen or about $617 US. If that price seems high, keep in mind the fact that most computers cost more in Japan than in the US.
This will be the first Eee PC model to ship with Microsoft Office. Most netbooks in the Eee PC lineup come with Sun’s StarOffice suite preloaded. Staroffice provides much of the same functionality as Microsoft Office, (or OpenOffice.org, which started out as the open source stepchild of SunOffice), and can even open and edit most Office documents. But if you’ve ever tried using SunOffice to edit complex Excel or Word documents, you know that sometimes things can get lost in translation.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen mention of an Eee PC 1000H-X. The model number first reared its head back in October. So I’m guessing that the model number has nothing to do with the software stack. Rather, Asus is preloading some new software on an existing netbook.
Sakar’s Kid-Friendly Netbook: Hands On and Video
Sakar’s Kid-Friendly Netbook: Hands On and Video
February 17th, 2009 by Dana Wollman
http://blog.laptopmag.com/sakars-kid-friendly-netbook-hands-on-and-video netbooks-lead-imageIf you’ve never heard of Sakar, it’s because it’s primarily a licensing company, which buys rights to big names like Crayola and Hello Kitty, and then slaps them on digital cameras and camcorders, and MP3 players for kids.
So, Sakar’s booth was the last place I expected to find a netbook at Toy Fair 2009 (not that I expected to find any netbooks, honestly). Moreover, it was the last place I expected to find what looks suspiciously like another 3K Razorbook 400, one our least favorite netbooks of all time. Perhaps, like the RazorBook, it is also a rebranded Exon PC701-XL from China.
This is the company’s first foray into computers– let alone pint-size ones– so right now, everything is tentative: there’s no word on specs, battery life, street date, or even an official name. However, Sakar said $299 was the highest price at which it would sell a netbook, which is music to our ears.
That doesn’t mean I can’t give Sakar some feedback on the design, though. The chassis is about the size of a 10-inch netbook, although the screen itself is 8 or 9 inches, thanks to a thick bezel. The chassis comes in four attractive colors: hot pink, purple, red, and silver. From the look and feel of it, it appears to have a three-cell battery. And, unlike the RazerBook, it has built-in Wi-Fi, as opposed to a dongle.
keyboardOn the one hand, the keyboard extends almost from edge to edge. However, some of the keys are undersized and oddly placed (the right shift key is to the right of the up arrow key, a story we’ve heard many times). And yet, this doesn’t seem as egregious in a notebook meant for kids, who probably aren’t touch typists anyway.
Although the trackpad had a nice, textured feel to it, its touch buttons flank the touch pad, just like the HP Mini 1000’s. They provided good tactile feedback, though, and weren’t so hard to use in practice.
The Linux OS also reminded me of the HP Mini 1000 Mi series. It has a tabbed interface that separates Internet (a browser, chat client, and e-mail program), multimedia (painting, photos, and music, among others), and productivity (word processing and the like). The UI is easy enough for a small child to use, but the software stack covers older kids’ needs, too.
Again, no word yet on when this will hit the market, but in the meantime check out our hands-on video.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Dell Online Store
http://www.delldownloadstore.co.uk/
Interesting that Dell is getting into the ONLINE music story business.
Interesting that Dell is getting into the ONLINE music story business.
Monday, February 16, 2009
HP and Orange team up on mobile broadband
Monday 16th February 2009
HP and Orange team up on mobile broadband
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/247626/hp-and-orange-team-up-on-mobile-broadband.html
Just days after the GSMA announced that the world had reached its four billionth mobile connection, Orange and HP have partnered to push the numbers even higher.
The three-year, pan-European collaboration will add weight to the 100 million mobile broadband connections already counted as part of the four billion figure.
As part of the deal announced at Mobile World Congress, both companies will co-distribute laptops and HP Minis with either mobile or fixed broadband connectivity.
The partnership continues the trend of laptop manufacturers striking exclusive deals with mobile networks. Dell and Vodafone also have a pan-European deal that sees Mini Inspiron netbooks given away or heavily subsidised with mobile data contracts.
"The demand for mobile broadband is a global phenomenon," said Olaf Swantee, senior enterprise vice president of Orange's communications services. "Adding a select range of HP Notebooks and Minis to our successful portfolio of connected offers is just the kick-off phase."
"Together, we will define new ways to bring services to customers, from co-marketing activities through to distribution, supply chain and care, reinforcing our commitment to make it easy for everyone to access the internet and their content, whenever and wherever they want."
The Compaq Mini 700 is one of the new options available in the UK, costing £30 a month on a mobile-broadband bundle deal.
Maggie Holland in Barcelona
HP and Orange team up on mobile broadband
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/247626/hp-and-orange-team-up-on-mobile-broadband.html
Just days after the GSMA announced that the world had reached its four billionth mobile connection, Orange and HP have partnered to push the numbers even higher.
The three-year, pan-European collaboration will add weight to the 100 million mobile broadband connections already counted as part of the four billion figure.
As part of the deal announced at Mobile World Congress, both companies will co-distribute laptops and HP Minis with either mobile or fixed broadband connectivity.
The partnership continues the trend of laptop manufacturers striking exclusive deals with mobile networks. Dell and Vodafone also have a pan-European deal that sees Mini Inspiron netbooks given away or heavily subsidised with mobile data contracts.
"The demand for mobile broadband is a global phenomenon," said Olaf Swantee, senior enterprise vice president of Orange's communications services. "Adding a select range of HP Notebooks and Minis to our successful portfolio of connected offers is just the kick-off phase."
"Together, we will define new ways to bring services to customers, from co-marketing activities through to distribution, supply chain and care, reinforcing our commitment to make it easy for everyone to access the internet and their content, whenever and wherever they want."
The Compaq Mini 700 is one of the new options available in the UK, costing £30 a month on a mobile-broadband bundle deal.
Maggie Holland in Barcelona
Netbook inventor not very impressed after waiting 40 years for first model Print
By Julian Prokaza on Wednesday, 05 November 2008
Dynabook concept mock-up. (c) Alan KayIf you thought the netbook was a fresh and exciting idea only now made possible by innovative technological developments – think again. Alan Kay came up with the idea way back in 1968 and despite waiting 40 years for manufacturers to catch on to his clever idea, he’s less than impressed by what they’ve all come up with so far.
Alan Kay concocted the netbook while at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, only he termed it the “DynaBook” (no relation to Toshiba’s DynaBook). In a paper he published in 1972, he described a cheap, portable PC aimed primarily at children, the DynaBook had both touch-screen and keyboard, and could be used as an e-book reader, word processor and games console – complete with graphical user interface (something else that Kay had invented earlier at Xerox).
Dynabook
Kay even foresaw the advent of the modern internet with the devices connection to the “Liblink” – an electronic connection to “the thought and knowledge of ages past”. Oh, and it could copy and paste, too. 40 years ago, no less...
Kay reckoned that the DynaBook was “within reach of current technology”, but it’s impossible to see how something so small and sophisticated could be manufactured at that time (although a 1in flat-panel display was apparently demonstrated at the University of Illinois in 1968).
Texas Instruments’ Speak & Spell was one of the first devices to offer anything like its form, but had nowhere near the DynaBook’s function. In fact the Sinclair Z88 was perhaps the earliest computer to approach Kay’s vision – and that didn’t turn up until 20 years later.
TI Speak & SpellSinclair Z88 (c) www.retrothing.com
And then came the netbook. Small, light and (usually) inexpensive, it does almost everything that Kay envisioned for the DynaBook – and it’s cheaper, too. Kay proposed that his DynaBook should cost no more that $500 (for 8Kb of RAM), which is rather a lot of money by today’s reckoning.
Asus Eee PC 701
So, it may have taken 38 years, but Alan Kay must be pretty pleased that his DynaBook has finally been made real, right? Not really. In a recently published interview in Wired, Kay says:
Wired.com: Are there any particular manufacturers that you think are heading in the right direction in terms of mobile devices?
Kay: All the ones I've seen have been spotty one way or another. The only one that has paid real attention to the screen is the OLPC XO, done by Mary Lou Jepson. It is otherwise a little too big, thick, etc. The service idea on it could be better, but it at least represents an attempt to rethink service, and has a few improvements on the standards.
Oh well. Maybe we’ll have cracked it by 2048.
[Alan Kay's " A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages" paper (PDF)]
Netbooks: Small, Cheap -- and Fast?
Netbooks: Small, Cheap -- and Fast?
Monday, December 01, 2008 12:40 PM PST
Peter Sayer, IDG News Service
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/154725/netbooks_small_cheap_and_fast.html
Linux distributor Good OS and BIOS vendor Phoenix Technologies each have plans to make netbooks speedier devices, the vendors said at the Netbook World Summit in Paris on Monday.
For Good OS, the browser is the operating system -- or at least, all you're going to see of it.
While other companies have developed quick-start software that allows you to check mail or play music seconds after turning on your computer, Good OS has created "a wrapper that enables you to perform all your major rich client applications from within the browser," said Good OS founder and CEO David Liu.
The company's forthcoming "Cloud" combines a compressed Linux kernel with a browser modified to play media files, make phone calls and set up the computer's network connection.
The different functions are accessed through a line of icons at the bottom of the browser window, reminiscent of the Dock in Apple's Mac OS X. They can include a media player, a Skype client, a Gmail session, access to online productivity suites such as Google Docs, or a tool for configuring Wi-Fi access. The browser's tabbed interface allows navigation between different tasks, Liu said.
Netbook manufacturers can also choose to add a button to launch a full operating system, either Windows or Linux, for users who just have to run a "real" application for some tasks.
That's what Good OS's first customer plans to do, said Liu. Taiwanese vendor Giga-byte Technology will show a Tablet PC-style touch-screen netbook at CES in Las Vegas in January, running Cloud and Windows XP, he said.
Liu wasn't sure how much Giga-byte will charge for the netbook, venturing that it would perhaps be "under US$500," and that in any case he expected it to be "very competitive." He wouldn't say exactly how much Good OS is charging Giga-byte for the software, either. "We are talking more high-end, but very cost-competitive," he said.
Phoenix Technologies is readying something similar to Cloud -- but with a twist: Its quick-start Linux system puts the application icons down the side of the screen, instead of along the bottom.
There's more to it than that, though: Using its HyperSpace virtualization software, Phoenix allows you to read your e-mail or check out a YouTube video within 10 to 15 seconds of turning on your computer, while Windows continues to boot in the background. The Windows icon at the side of the screen changes to let you know when the operating system is ready for work.
This system also allows Phoenix to apply some aggressive power-management techniques, reducing system load and shutting down unused components to give users up to an hour of extra battery life as they surf the Web, said Surendra Arora, the company's vice president of business development.
"Vista has a lot of processes running, on average about 70, whereas we run about 15," he said.
That power management can be applied to Windows too, he said, just as a night-time crescent moon appeared on the Windows icon to indicate that the operating system had gone into "sleep" mode behind the scene.
Phoenix too plans to show its new software at CES in January. Arora wouldn't say who the company's partners will be, but he did have the software running on a Lenovo IdeaPad S10. The current version of that netbook, the IdeaPad S10e, ships with the competing Splashtop quick-start software from DeviceVM. With Splashtop, though, you have to choose between booting Windows or continuing to read your e-mail.
The company first demonstrated the HyperSpace software in November 2007, hoping to persuade application vendors to develop special versions of messaging or maintenance tools to run on it. At the time, the license for some versions of Windows Vista prevented its use in such virtual machines, and Phoenix had to wait until early this year for Microsoft to relax the rules, opening the way for makers of small, cheap computers to combine Windows Vista with its quick-start technology.
Monday, December 01, 2008 12:40 PM PST
Peter Sayer, IDG News Service
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/154725/netbooks_small_cheap_and_fast.html
Linux distributor Good OS and BIOS vendor Phoenix Technologies each have plans to make netbooks speedier devices, the vendors said at the Netbook World Summit in Paris on Monday.
For Good OS, the browser is the operating system -- or at least, all you're going to see of it.
While other companies have developed quick-start software that allows you to check mail or play music seconds after turning on your computer, Good OS has created "a wrapper that enables you to perform all your major rich client applications from within the browser," said Good OS founder and CEO David Liu.
The company's forthcoming "Cloud" combines a compressed Linux kernel with a browser modified to play media files, make phone calls and set up the computer's network connection.
The different functions are accessed through a line of icons at the bottom of the browser window, reminiscent of the Dock in Apple's Mac OS X. They can include a media player, a Skype client, a Gmail session, access to online productivity suites such as Google Docs, or a tool for configuring Wi-Fi access. The browser's tabbed interface allows navigation between different tasks, Liu said.
Netbook manufacturers can also choose to add a button to launch a full operating system, either Windows or Linux, for users who just have to run a "real" application for some tasks.
That's what Good OS's first customer plans to do, said Liu. Taiwanese vendor Giga-byte Technology will show a Tablet PC-style touch-screen netbook at CES in Las Vegas in January, running Cloud and Windows XP, he said.
Liu wasn't sure how much Giga-byte will charge for the netbook, venturing that it would perhaps be "under US$500," and that in any case he expected it to be "very competitive." He wouldn't say exactly how much Good OS is charging Giga-byte for the software, either. "We are talking more high-end, but very cost-competitive," he said.
Phoenix Technologies is readying something similar to Cloud -- but with a twist: Its quick-start Linux system puts the application icons down the side of the screen, instead of along the bottom.
There's more to it than that, though: Using its HyperSpace virtualization software, Phoenix allows you to read your e-mail or check out a YouTube video within 10 to 15 seconds of turning on your computer, while Windows continues to boot in the background. The Windows icon at the side of the screen changes to let you know when the operating system is ready for work.
This system also allows Phoenix to apply some aggressive power-management techniques, reducing system load and shutting down unused components to give users up to an hour of extra battery life as they surf the Web, said Surendra Arora, the company's vice president of business development.
"Vista has a lot of processes running, on average about 70, whereas we run about 15," he said.
That power management can be applied to Windows too, he said, just as a night-time crescent moon appeared on the Windows icon to indicate that the operating system had gone into "sleep" mode behind the scene.
Phoenix too plans to show its new software at CES in January. Arora wouldn't say who the company's partners will be, but he did have the software running on a Lenovo IdeaPad S10. The current version of that netbook, the IdeaPad S10e, ships with the competing Splashtop quick-start software from DeviceVM. With Splashtop, though, you have to choose between booting Windows or continuing to read your e-mail.
The company first demonstrated the HyperSpace software in November 2007, hoping to persuade application vendors to develop special versions of messaging or maintenance tools to run on it. At the time, the license for some versions of Windows Vista prevented its use in such virtual machines, and Phoenix had to wait until early this year for Microsoft to relax the rules, opening the way for makers of small, cheap computers to combine Windows Vista with its quick-start technology.
Netbook sales drive PC growth
Netbook sales drive PC growth
By Iain Thomson
16 October 2008 02:57PM
Netbook sales drive PC growth
The latest figures from analyst house Gartner report that sales of PCs and x86 servers grew by 15 per cent from this time last year.
The bulk of the growth has been driven by strong interest in the netbook market segment according to the analyst house. It singled out Acer and Asus, whose EeePC launched the market for such devices, as particular winners.
“The mini-notebook segment experienced strong growth in the global PC, led by robust growth in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region,” said Mika Kitagawa, principal analyst for Gartner's Client Computing Markets group.
“In the North America market, the economic crunch created more interest in the sub US$500 segment. Because the mini-notebook is still a new segment, it is too early to determine if the emerging segment created new market opportunities, or if it cannibalized lower priced systems.”
Overall HP remains the world’s biggest supplier of x86 systems, with 18.4 per cent of the market compared to Dell’s 13.6 per cent. However Acer showed the strongest growth of any manufacturer, with sales rising nearly 50 per cent to give it 12.5 per cent of the market.
However, Kitagawa sounded a warning note of tougher times ahead. He warned that a global slowdown in sales was coming about due to the overall financial situation.
“The global PC market finally felt the impact from global economic downturn. The U.S. professional market experienced the biggest hit from the economic crunch. The U.S. home market saw definite softness in PC sales after a few quarters of strong growth,” Ms. Kitagawa said.
“The Asia/Pacific PC market was impacted by a slowdown in China. PC growth in Latin America was slow relative to historical levels, but it was still in line with the forecast.”
Copyright © 2009 vnunet.com
By Iain Thomson
16 October 2008 02:57PM
Netbook sales drive PC growth
The latest figures from analyst house Gartner report that sales of PCs and x86 servers grew by 15 per cent from this time last year.
The bulk of the growth has been driven by strong interest in the netbook market segment according to the analyst house. It singled out Acer and Asus, whose EeePC launched the market for such devices, as particular winners.
“The mini-notebook segment experienced strong growth in the global PC, led by robust growth in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region,” said Mika Kitagawa, principal analyst for Gartner's Client Computing Markets group.
“In the North America market, the economic crunch created more interest in the sub US$500 segment. Because the mini-notebook is still a new segment, it is too early to determine if the emerging segment created new market opportunities, or if it cannibalized lower priced systems.”
Overall HP remains the world’s biggest supplier of x86 systems, with 18.4 per cent of the market compared to Dell’s 13.6 per cent. However Acer showed the strongest growth of any manufacturer, with sales rising nearly 50 per cent to give it 12.5 per cent of the market.
However, Kitagawa sounded a warning note of tougher times ahead. He warned that a global slowdown in sales was coming about due to the overall financial situation.
“The global PC market finally felt the impact from global economic downturn. The U.S. professional market experienced the biggest hit from the economic crunch. The U.S. home market saw definite softness in PC sales after a few quarters of strong growth,” Ms. Kitagawa said.
“The Asia/Pacific PC market was impacted by a slowdown in China. PC growth in Latin America was slow relative to historical levels, but it was still in line with the forecast.”
Copyright © 2009 vnunet.com
IDC puts some numbers to Europe's growing netbook sales
IDC puts some numbers to Europe's growing netbook sales
Netbooks took 20% of total portable PC sales in the Christmas quarter, according to IDC, with Acer and Asus leading the way
Comments (…)
Mini-Notebooks Make Explosive Entry into EMEA PC Market in 2008, and Momentum Will Continue in 2009, Says IDC.
Basically, in the final quarter of last year, netbook (mini-notebook) shipments reached 3.6 million units. This represented 20% of total portable sales and 30% of consumer portables in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. IDC says in its press release:
"Driven by strong vendor and channel push, consumers benefited from the plethora of new models appearing on the shelves from October onwards, and the explosion in the product offering stimulated fierce competition for shelf space. Following in the footsteps of Asus, there are currently more than 50 vendors, from international players to local assemblers, with a mini-notebook offering across EMEA, which is clearly contributing to the ongoing buoyancy."
Acer was the leading vendor, with sales of 1.1m units for a 30.5% market share. Asus placed second with 1.0m (28.0%), with HP's 253,000 units earning it third (7.0%). Samsung and Dell completed the top five.
IDC expects models with 10-inch screens to dominate next year, with a growth market partly stimulated by telecoms companies such as Phones 4u, T-Mobile and Vodafone. It says:
Market dynamics will remain driven by consumer demand, but improving specifications, larger screens, and integrated 3G will make mini-notebooks more appealing to businesses as well. The education sector will be another growth opportunity in the long term. There are already several projects running in the UK and Russia, for example, and demand is expected to rise in an effort to promote one-to-one computing across the region.
J
Netbooks took 20% of total portable PC sales in the Christmas quarter, according to IDC, with Acer and Asus leading the way
Comments (…)
Mini-Notebooks Make Explosive Entry into EMEA PC Market in 2008, and Momentum Will Continue in 2009, Says IDC.
Basically, in the final quarter of last year, netbook (mini-notebook) shipments reached 3.6 million units. This represented 20% of total portable sales and 30% of consumer portables in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. IDC says in its press release:
"Driven by strong vendor and channel push, consumers benefited from the plethora of new models appearing on the shelves from October onwards, and the explosion in the product offering stimulated fierce competition for shelf space. Following in the footsteps of Asus, there are currently more than 50 vendors, from international players to local assemblers, with a mini-notebook offering across EMEA, which is clearly contributing to the ongoing buoyancy."
Acer was the leading vendor, with sales of 1.1m units for a 30.5% market share. Asus placed second with 1.0m (28.0%), with HP's 253,000 units earning it third (7.0%). Samsung and Dell completed the top five.
IDC expects models with 10-inch screens to dominate next year, with a growth market partly stimulated by telecoms companies such as Phones 4u, T-Mobile and Vodafone. It says:
Market dynamics will remain driven by consumer demand, but improving specifications, larger screens, and integrated 3G will make mini-notebooks more appealing to businesses as well. The education sector will be another growth opportunity in the long term. There are already several projects running in the UK and Russia, for example, and demand is expected to rise in an effort to promote one-to-one computing across the region.
J
Book as a Computer
Manolis is the creator of a piece of technology which turns an ordinary paper book into an interactive experience. I've written about this before but just in case you haven't seen this, I've included a video of me playing with the technology
Xandros Linux for netbooks with ARM Cortex-based CPUs
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/Xandros-Linux-for-netbooks-with-ARM-Cortex-based-CPUs--/112654
Xandros Linux for netbooks with ARM Cortex-based CPUs
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Xandros has introduced a port of its Linux operating system for the i.MX525 SoC processor from Freescale's i.MX51 family. The processor is intended for netbooks that will compete with Intel's Atom platform in the netbook and nettop market.
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Xandros is promoting the system's short start-up time and low power consumption. They are also reporting that its 3G wireless support is particularly stable – which isn't only interesting for mobile internet access, but also for the potential future use of the Linux system on smartphones. Another pointer in this direction is that the entire system can reportedly be operated with a keyboard, as well as via a touch screen.
A browser, e-mail client, a Microsoft-compatible office suite and games will reportedly be available for download at an on line applications store. Various branding features are planned for network providers and networking suppliers.
Xandros Linux for netbooks with ARM Cortex-based CPUs
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Xandros has introduced a port of its Linux operating system for the i.MX525 SoC processor from Freescale's i.MX51 family. The processor is intended for netbooks that will compete with Intel's Atom platform in the netbook and nettop market.
Advertisement
Xandros is promoting the system's short start-up time and low power consumption. They are also reporting that its 3G wireless support is particularly stable – which isn't only interesting for mobile internet access, but also for the potential future use of the Linux system on smartphones. Another pointer in this direction is that the entire system can reportedly be operated with a keyboard, as well as via a touch screen.
A browser, e-mail client, a Microsoft-compatible office suite and games will reportedly be available for download at an on line applications store. Various branding features are planned for network providers and networking suppliers.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Aleutia E2: low power to the people
Aleutia E2: low power to the people
February 4, 2009
This article was contributed by Nathan Willis
Green computing frequently makes the news either for its cost-saving potential to businesses, or as a way for eco-conscious consumers to reduce their environmental footprint. But UK-based Aleutia, Ltd takes a different approach, using green to produce ultra-low-power-consumption Linux PCs for classrooms and businesses in developing countries. The company's flagship product is the E2, a compact desktop system that consumes just 8 watts.
The E2 measures 115x115x35 millimeters, is fanless, and runs from Compact Flash storage. It sports a 500 MHz VIA processor, 1GB of RAM, and comes with VGA, Ethernet, PS/2, audio-in, audio-out, and three USB ports packed onto a ruggedized aluminum enclosure. The case has screw mounts designed to match the 10x10 centimeter VESA plate on the backs of most LCD monitors, allowing for an even smaller desktop footprint.
The company sent two Compact Flash cards with its review unit, one containing a standard Debian Etch installation, and the other Aleutia's customized version of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Other operating system choices are available, including Windows XP, although founder Michael Rosenberg says Ubuntu accounts for the overwhelming majority of customer selections.
The base model that I tested retails for £199; options adding a Mini PCIe WiFi module or hard disks are available at additional cost. If you opt for the WiFi model, be prepared to either load a binary blob or to work with NDISwrapper; the card included is a VIA VT6655, which is supported by VIA-built closed drivers only. Alternatively, the Mini PCIe slot is unused in the base E2 configuration, so any other card of your choice is an option. The graphics situation is better; the onboard video for all E2s is a 32MB VIA CX700, running the openChrome driver.
The Compact Flash card is ready to boot; no installation required. It uses the GNOME desktop environment and a customized suite of applications, including several not common to vanilla Ubuntu, such as the Mozilla-based Songbird audio player, Mozilla Seamonkey, and MPlayer, which Rosenberg says provided the best playback performance of the available free software video players. There are also applications from the proprietary world, such as Skype, Picasa, and Google Desktop. A local mirror of Wikipedia is included as a reference, containing 4,625 articles.
Apart from these supplementary applications, however, the system is a full-fledged Ubuntu installation, capable of downloading updates through the project's official APT repositories. Rosenberg explains that the company went with the 8.04 LTS release for stability's sake on behalf of the units in the field, and that his team continues to track Ubuntu development as well as other Linux variants.
[E2 screenshot]
Considering the E2's low power profile, I was surprised by some of the application selections, such the inclusion of OpenOffice over the much leaner Abiword, and Seamonkey over Firefox. Songbird is an interesting project in its own right and I find it impressive in a number of ways, but it consumes far more memory than many simpler music players. Google Desktop is a CPU drain that I have never found to be worth the trouble.
At 500MHz, the E2 will strain to perform some processor- or graphics-intensive tasks. I found video playback choppy, although audio playback and Skype were flawless. Saving files to flash storage is predictably slower than writing to a hard disk, but the difference is only discernible on multi-megabyte data like downloaded audio or video. The E2 is easily capable of handling Internet and office tasks like you would expect in the classroom or in an Internet cafe. The 8 watts of electricity it consumes is roughly five percent of the power drawn by a typical desktop computer; if you did not know it was specially-engineered to be green, you might well mistake its performance for a traditional PC one generation or so behind the curve.
Video performance and write speed are two particulars that the company is taking specific steps to improve as it continues to tweak the E2's system configuration. Many of the tweaks Aleutia incorporates to improve E2 performance originate with the ever-increasing pool of Linux netbook hackers. The platforms face similar issues: flash storage of limited capacity, low-speed (by desktop standards) CPUs and graphics processors, and limited RAM.
Rosenberg chronicles the effort on the corporate blog, noting changes such as the adoption of the lightweight Fluxbox window manager to replace GNOME's default Metacity, filesystem tuning, and accelerating Firefox by storing the browser cache in RAM instead of writing it to flash storage. The team has recently been experimenting with supplanting GNOME itself with LXDE, although Rosenberg confides that the system is not yet stable enough to ship to customers. It is a promising alternative, though, as Aleutia has demonstrated that an E2 running LXDE is capable of playing video smoothly at full-screen.
Speaking of netbooks....
Despite the E2's obvious benefits from a power consumption and space perspective, once you add on the cost of a display and I/O hardware, the E2 is also similar in price to a midrange netbook -- without the portability. Thus one might well ask how Aleutia sells the E2 as a better value. Rosenberg's answer is that the E2 is designed to outperform and outlast the expensive Dell and HP Windows boxes that dominate education channel sales in developing countries, particularly in Africa. In that context, of course, a netbook's small screen and keyboard are a disadvantage. Furthermore, the E2 is designed to be easily serviced by local resellers -- a problematic board can be pulled out and replaced in a matter of minutes, unlike the more complex beige boxes.
Still, considering Aleutia's stated goal of catering to underprivileged schools, comparisons to one other high-profile effort are inevitable: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Like OLPC, Aleutia is targeting its machines at schoolhouses in underdeveloped parts of the world -- but, unlike OLPC, Aleutia is attempting to stay profitable.
[E2 back]
The company highlights two differences between itself and the OLPC project. First, it operates as an open-to-all manufacturer. OLPC's XO laptops are available only to national governments, through specially-negotiated contracts. Aleutia can and does sell E2s in any quantity to any buyer. Second, Aleutia warranties its devices for three years and offers support and repair services. When OLPC has offered XOs to the general public through "Give One Get One" programs in the past, the laptops came with a 30 day warranty and no support.
The company appears to be making its case to business and schools. It currently has resellers in six countries outside the UK, and has made sales to 37 others. Rosenberg says he just shipped a classroom set of E2s and LCD monitors to a school in Musoma, Tanzania, where they await clearing customs before they can be installed. At this point, he adds, the main hurdle Aleutia faces is marketing against the billions of dollars spent each year by the larger manufacturers.
"Typically, our customers find us through blogs or just searching on Google. Internet access is much more expensive in Africa so often it's a question of [expatriates] or volunteers finding us in the UK and then putting us in touch with prospective customers back in Africa." The Musoma sale was just such a case. "The headmistress had seen the pair of E2s at the school we have case study for, contacted our local reseller, and spent the bulk of her annual budget to set up this ICT lab."
The state of the art changes fast, and development continues on successors to the E2 hardware -- including the possibility of mesh networking and optical drives. Whatever the next model looks like, though, it will build on the E2's tradition of desktop performance at remarkably low power consumption, a feat that would not be possible on a closed system.
Right now, the E2 would not replace a typical Linux hacker's primary workstation, but for a less demanding usage scenario it is worth considering. The low profile, minimal power draw, and rugged construction make it viable in conditions beyond those suitable for a traditional PC. And as Linux continues to evolve on low-power platforms, you can be sure its advantages will only increase.
Aleutia E2: low power to the people
Posted Feb 4, 2009 18:06 UTC (Wed) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]
There's a few boxes like this around these days; for people in the UK Viglen's Geode based MPC-L is also worth a look. The Ubuntu UK podcast folks reviewed one a while back and organised a deal with Viglen to make them available for £79.00 all-in.
Aleutia E2: low power to the people
Posted Feb 4, 2009 18:29 UTC (Wed) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Interesting - the datasheet doesn't say much about CPU, RAM, etc... good to know what it has.
Aleutia E2: low power to the people
Posted Feb 4, 2009 18:45 UTC (Wed) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]
Mine has 512Mb of RAM, cpuinfo reports the processor as a "Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by National Semi" at ~400Mhz and ~800 bogomips, and it has an 80Gb hard disk (yes, an actual rotating one). It came with a rather old Xubuntu, the speed of which was OK, but noticably on the slow side. I've since nuked it in favour of a text only Fedora 10 install, which it runs quite happily, albeit with the i586 kernel rather than the i686 one.
Aleutia E2: low power to the people
Aleutia E2: low power to the people
Posted Feb 4, 2009 18:39 UTC (Wed) by dany (subscriber, #18902) [Link]
Also take a look at alix boards, they are even cheaper (100 EUR) and only little less powerful.
http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm
Aleutia E2: low power to the people
Posted Feb 4, 2009 20:08 UTC (Wed) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]
Hrmm, I don't know if the comparisons to netbooks is even fair. At UKP199 I think you have to start comparing to full-on notebooks. A regular laptop gets you the keyboard, pointing device, and display, which are all extra with this system. Any base-model Core 2-equipped laptop will be 2-50 times more powerful than a Geode depending on the task. And my powerful ThinkPad consumes at most 24W, including the display, which is comparable to this underpowered matchbox with display. Considering how much more quickly a Core 2 will rip through difficult jobs, the task energy is likely to be superior on a real laptop.
I think their device is cute and has some advantages but I don't think power saving is really among them. If you think about it on an energy instead of power basis I think it's a step backwards.
Pedants' corner
Posted Feb 4, 2009 22:07 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
The currency code is GBP.
Pedants' corner
Posted Feb 4, 2009 22:13 UTC (Wed) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]
Great, but what's the X11 compose sequence? I used to think it was Compose+Shift+L, $, but that doesn't seem to be working.
Pedants' corner
Posted Feb 5, 2009 14:09 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
I dunno, I never type that pesky character, it's always GBP or £ or even just L.
Pedants' corner
Posted Feb 9, 2009 7:53 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]
For me it's compose-L-hyphen, which is logical if you think about it (I just guessed it).
Aleutia E2: low power to the people
Posted Feb 4, 2009 21:52 UTC (Wed) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link]
Yikes, $300?
I mean, I know it's small and VESA mountable, but... yeesh.
An Intel D945GCLF2 'Little Falls 2' board is only $96 at LogicSupply:
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/boxd945gclf2
Review: http://www.logicsupply.com/blog/2008/10/16/intels-little-...
Atom 330 dual core, Drop in a 2GB DDR2 stick for $30, and pick a case:
http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/cases/mini_itx
They even have a few NAS-style cases ;)
I dig this one myself:
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/es34069
I could only see purchasing an E2 if I was REALLY dead set on a 100x100mm VESA mount...
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Online sale of Gizmos
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3887946599.html?kc=rss
An open source hacker community has launched an online store to sell home-made gizmos, including a GPS-equipped baseboard (pictured) for the Linux-ready Gumstix Verdex processor module. GizmoForYou builds custom gadgets according to members suggestions, and sells the open-spec devices online, says the group.
(Click for larger view of 1.0 version of GizmoForYou's Gumstix DaughterBoard, with enclosure)
GizmoForYou acts like an open source version of Santa's workshop, building devices to order, based on wish list requests from registered members. The requests can be as simple as "I wish there was a device for switching power ON/OFF by sending an SMS message," says the group. It then sells the devices to the member, as well as to the other interested buyers online. Volume is based on members voting for devices they think they might buy, so the idea is that the more people who vote for a product, the cheaper the cost.
The Gizmo developers post notes on their progress, and respond to member suggestions for new ideas and improvements. All software source files and hardware documentation are posted as open source, including schematics, mechanical designs, and PCB designs, says the project. GizmoForYou also sells all the parts, PCBs, and tools required to build the gizmo, so members can build their own devices or spin off new versions.
GPS -- GSM Tracker Gizmo
So far, all the gizmos for sale are based on GPS. These include an "ISeeYou" GPS tracker and RF transmitter (which was built initially to track runaway surfboards), and a "GPS -- GSM Tracker Gizmo" (pictured above) which incorporates a Linux-ready Telit GE863 wireless module to transfer GPS tracking information over cellular networks.
0.8 version of Daughter Board Gizmo for Gumstix Verdex Pro
The most challenging project involved two subsequent 0.8 and 1.0 designs of a simple PND gizmo called the Daughter Board Gizmo for Gumstix Verdex Pro. The device combines the Telit GE863 GMS-GPS module with a touchscreen LCD screen, all controlled by the gumstick-shaped Gumstix processor module. The Daughter Board designs include power and backlight buttons, as well as enclosures. They are claimed to offer all the peripherals provided by Gumstix's various daughterboards, all on a single baseboard, according to the group.
1.0 version of Daughter Board Gizmo for Gumstix Verdex Pro
The Gumstix Verdex platform has been used by a variety of open source projects, including an award-winning robotic clarinet. The 3.2 x 0.8 x 3.2-inch (80 x 20 x 8mm) SBCs are based on the Marvell (formerly Intel) PXA270 (aka "Bulverde") processor, clocked at up to 600MHz.
Enclosure for version 1.0
Gumstix Daughterboard
(Click to enlarge)
The Verdex boards integrate up to 128MB of RAM and 32MB of flash memory soldered onboard, and offer support for USB host interfaces, inputs for CCD (charge-coupled device) cameras, and other peripheral interfaces. Gumstix itself sells a wide variety of custom boards based on the Verdex design, ranging from robotics devices to WiFi modules.
Gumstix recently introduced a next-generation Linux-based SBC design called Overo Earth that measures 0.7 x 2.3 x 0.2 inches -- 40 percent smaller than the earlier Verdex. The Overo Earth incorporates the ARM Cortex-A8-based Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP3503 system-on-chip (SoC).
GizmoForYou is now working on a new project based around the Freescale i.MX platform, says the group.
Availability
The various GPS-related devices mentioned above are now available in various forms (with and without enclosures, etc.) at prices ranging from $31 for an unassembled Gumstix Daughter Board PCB to $175 for a completely assembled version (minus enclosure). More details can be found at the GizmoForYou online store, here.
An open source hacker community has launched an online store to sell home-made gizmos, including a GPS-equipped baseboard (pictured) for the Linux-ready Gumstix Verdex processor module. GizmoForYou builds custom gadgets according to members suggestions, and sells the open-spec devices online, says the group.
(Click for larger view of 1.0 version of GizmoForYou's Gumstix DaughterBoard, with enclosure)
GizmoForYou acts like an open source version of Santa's workshop, building devices to order, based on wish list requests from registered members. The requests can be as simple as "I wish there was a device for switching power ON/OFF by sending an SMS message," says the group. It then sells the devices to the member, as well as to the other interested buyers online. Volume is based on members voting for devices they think they might buy, so the idea is that the more people who vote for a product, the cheaper the cost.
The Gizmo developers post notes on their progress, and respond to member suggestions for new ideas and improvements. All software source files and hardware documentation are posted as open source, including schematics, mechanical designs, and PCB designs, says the project. GizmoForYou also sells all the parts, PCBs, and tools required to build the gizmo, so members can build their own devices or spin off new versions.
GPS -- GSM Tracker Gizmo
So far, all the gizmos for sale are based on GPS. These include an "ISeeYou" GPS tracker and RF transmitter (which was built initially to track runaway surfboards), and a "GPS -- GSM Tracker Gizmo" (pictured above) which incorporates a Linux-ready Telit GE863 wireless module to transfer GPS tracking information over cellular networks.
0.8 version of Daughter Board Gizmo for Gumstix Verdex Pro
The most challenging project involved two subsequent 0.8 and 1.0 designs of a simple PND gizmo called the Daughter Board Gizmo for Gumstix Verdex Pro. The device combines the Telit GE863 GMS-GPS module with a touchscreen LCD screen, all controlled by the gumstick-shaped Gumstix processor module. The Daughter Board designs include power and backlight buttons, as well as enclosures. They are claimed to offer all the peripherals provided by Gumstix's various daughterboards, all on a single baseboard, according to the group.
1.0 version of Daughter Board Gizmo for Gumstix Verdex Pro
The Gumstix Verdex platform has been used by a variety of open source projects, including an award-winning robotic clarinet. The 3.2 x 0.8 x 3.2-inch (80 x 20 x 8mm) SBCs are based on the Marvell (formerly Intel) PXA270 (aka "Bulverde") processor, clocked at up to 600MHz.
Enclosure for version 1.0
Gumstix Daughterboard
(Click to enlarge)
The Verdex boards integrate up to 128MB of RAM and 32MB of flash memory soldered onboard, and offer support for USB host interfaces, inputs for CCD (charge-coupled device) cameras, and other peripheral interfaces. Gumstix itself sells a wide variety of custom boards based on the Verdex design, ranging from robotics devices to WiFi modules.
Gumstix recently introduced a next-generation Linux-based SBC design called Overo Earth that measures 0.7 x 2.3 x 0.2 inches -- 40 percent smaller than the earlier Verdex. The Overo Earth incorporates the ARM Cortex-A8-based Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP3503 system-on-chip (SoC).
GizmoForYou is now working on a new project based around the Freescale i.MX platform, says the group.
Availability
The various GPS-related devices mentioned above are now available in various forms (with and without enclosures, etc.) at prices ranging from $31 for an unassembled Gumstix Daughter Board PCB to $175 for a completely assembled version (minus enclosure). More details can be found at the GizmoForYou online store, here.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Dell in the Race
Dell Joins Netbook Race to Bottom
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/02/dell-joins-netbook-race-to-bottom.html
There are two schools of thought about netbooks. The first is that they are simply another kind of notebook - smaller, a bit cheaper, but otherwise nothing really new. The second is that they are a completely new market sector - a view that I have been propounding for almost as long as they've existed
One indication that they are distinct is that the prices of netbooks are still falling rapidly - and will continue to fall. That's in contradistinction to notebooks, where prices tend to be much more stable, but features are added over time. The netbook is about *minimum* acceptable functionality, while notebooks are about achieving near-desktop capabilities (themselves constantly improving) in a package that's portable.
Here's another proof-point:
Dell fires back at the Taiwanese market leaders with the Mini 9n. Starting at just $250, this Ubuntu netbook is easily one of the cheapest on the market from a brand-name manufacturer.
The catch? The netbook only comes with 512 MB of RAM and a 4 GB hard drive. But remember it uses Ubuntu, which runs significantly more efficiently than Windows. This means of course that it can only run Linux programs but give me Firefox and Open Office and I can conquer the world.
This is just what notebook manufacturers fear: a "race to the bottom", as Sony so memorably put it. Dell's participation in that race will send shivers down the spine of manufacturers who thought they could ride the netbook wave with their low-end notebooks.
Do I hear $200?
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/02/dell-joins-netbook-race-to-bottom.html
There are two schools of thought about netbooks. The first is that they are simply another kind of notebook - smaller, a bit cheaper, but otherwise nothing really new. The second is that they are a completely new market sector - a view that I have been propounding for almost as long as they've existed
One indication that they are distinct is that the prices of netbooks are still falling rapidly - and will continue to fall. That's in contradistinction to notebooks, where prices tend to be much more stable, but features are added over time. The netbook is about *minimum* acceptable functionality, while notebooks are about achieving near-desktop capabilities (themselves constantly improving) in a package that's portable.
Here's another proof-point:
Dell fires back at the Taiwanese market leaders with the Mini 9n. Starting at just $250, this Ubuntu netbook is easily one of the cheapest on the market from a brand-name manufacturer.
The catch? The netbook only comes with 512 MB of RAM and a 4 GB hard drive. But remember it uses Ubuntu, which runs significantly more efficiently than Windows. This means of course that it can only run Linux programs but give me Firefox and Open Office and I can conquer the world.
This is just what notebook manufacturers fear: a "race to the bottom", as Sony so memorably put it. Dell's participation in that race will send shivers down the spine of manufacturers who thought they could ride the netbook wave with their low-end notebooks.
Do I hear $200?
Mobile Growth
http://seekingalpha.com/article/119742-mobile-traffic-to-increase-66-fold-by-2013
Mobile computing is here - and it’s only going to get bigger, according to projection studies released this week.
Cisco Systems (CSCO) Tuesday released the results of its Visual Networking Index (VNI) Mobile Forecast for 2008-2013. The big projection in that study is that global mobile traffic will increase 66-fold between 2008 and 2013, a forecast that reflects the pending arrival of 4G mobile Internet connections, the key to increased use of mobile video and greater access to other mobile broadband services. In the report, Kelly Ahuja, senior vice president of Cisco’s service provider routing technology group, said:
More personalized services and applications are becoming available on a wide range of devices. The key to success will be delivering video-rich any-play services to users, enabling them to move freely throughout the world while maintaining connectivity to others. As a result, service providers will have to take into account the need not only for more bandwidth when planning their network architecture but for greater network intelligence as well.
Among the highlights from that study:
* Global mobile traffic will exceed two exabytes (1 billion gigabytes) per month by 2013.
* Mobile broadband handsets with higher than 3G speeds and laptop air or data cards will constitute more than 80 percent of global mobile traffic by 2013.
* Nearly 64 percent of the world’s mobile traffic will be video by 2013.
* Mobile video will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 150 percent between 2008 and 2013.
Speaking of mobile video, Global IP Solutions released the findings of a separate survey this week on the topic. In a nutshell, the survey found that mobile operators and equipment vendors also see mobile video heading into the mainstream, over the next few years. Some of the highlights from that study:
* More than half of U.S. wireless carriers plan to launch - or increase access to - real-time video services in the next two years.
* As a way of competing with the big guys, smaller carriers are upping their mobile Internet offerings and are going after third-party apps to enhance communications on the device.
* Nearly half of the carriers surveyed are “enthusiastic” about delivering open platforms for third-party software developers.
An excerpt from the report:
Significant additional service rollouts are generally expected to occur within the next two years. Respondents cited various drivers behind the emergence of real-time video on the network. Sprint views real-time video as a “communication mechanism,” including video chat, for rollout in the “near term,” suggesting timelines of up to a year. Verizon seems bullish regarding video and real-time video.
Mobile computing is here - and it’s only going to get bigger, according to projection studies released this week.
Cisco Systems (CSCO) Tuesday released the results of its Visual Networking Index (VNI) Mobile Forecast for 2008-2013. The big projection in that study is that global mobile traffic will increase 66-fold between 2008 and 2013, a forecast that reflects the pending arrival of 4G mobile Internet connections, the key to increased use of mobile video and greater access to other mobile broadband services. In the report, Kelly Ahuja, senior vice president of Cisco’s service provider routing technology group, said:
More personalized services and applications are becoming available on a wide range of devices. The key to success will be delivering video-rich any-play services to users, enabling them to move freely throughout the world while maintaining connectivity to others. As a result, service providers will have to take into account the need not only for more bandwidth when planning their network architecture but for greater network intelligence as well.
Among the highlights from that study:
* Global mobile traffic will exceed two exabytes (1 billion gigabytes) per month by 2013.
* Mobile broadband handsets with higher than 3G speeds and laptop air or data cards will constitute more than 80 percent of global mobile traffic by 2013.
* Nearly 64 percent of the world’s mobile traffic will be video by 2013.
* Mobile video will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 150 percent between 2008 and 2013.
Speaking of mobile video, Global IP Solutions released the findings of a separate survey this week on the topic. In a nutshell, the survey found that mobile operators and equipment vendors also see mobile video heading into the mainstream, over the next few years. Some of the highlights from that study:
* More than half of U.S. wireless carriers plan to launch - or increase access to - real-time video services in the next two years.
* As a way of competing with the big guys, smaller carriers are upping their mobile Internet offerings and are going after third-party apps to enhance communications on the device.
* Nearly half of the carriers surveyed are “enthusiastic” about delivering open platforms for third-party software developers.
An excerpt from the report:
Significant additional service rollouts are generally expected to occur within the next two years. Respondents cited various drivers behind the emergence of real-time video on the network. Sprint views real-time video as a “communication mechanism,” including video chat, for rollout in the “near term,” suggesting timelines of up to a year. Verizon seems bullish regarding video and real-time video.
Android and Tablets
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2008/12/android-announces-cupcake-development-branch.ars
Android announces "cupcake" development branch
Android's new cupcake branch introduces SquirrelFish and x86 support in addition to many bug fixes.
Over at the Android bat cave, there's some interesting news going down. Today, Android announced the public release of its "cupcake" branch. This new branch offers a number of application enhancements, including bug fixes, a video recorder, the ability to save MMS attachments and more. System enhancements include better bluetooth support, better HTTP handling and, most importantly, a new JavaScript engine built on SquirrelFish.
Unlike the main Android trunk release, which is built on Linux 2.6.25, cupcake has been built on the updated Linux 2.6.27. Notably, the new system software offers basic x86 support and will allow third party manufacturers to develop and deploy their own handset-specific APIs.
Erica Sadun
* 240GB iPod modification now available for 5G owners
* Review: Duck Shoot tickles for short-term fun
* Apple righting iTunes Plus upgrade snafus
* iPhone devs, access Emoji for free with Freemoji
Cupcake is a development branch rather than a release branch. According to the cupcake roadmap page, it remains distinctly a work in progress. This first release represents a big commit of changes since Android's 1.0 release; future plans are for smaller updates as the cupcake changes stabilize. The announcement page emphasizes that cupcake is an outgrowth of Android's roadmap; the roadmap allows for project forking with development continuing on in private branches, which is what cupcake is.
The cupcake branch updates will eventually be merged back into the main Android trunk. This will probably not happen until early to mid January due to the American holiday season. Given the number of bug fixes covered by the cupcake release, this will likely be a welcome update for most Android users.
Android announces "cupcake" development branch
Android's new cupcake branch introduces SquirrelFish and x86 support in addition to many bug fixes.
Over at the Android bat cave, there's some interesting news going down. Today, Android announced the public release of its "cupcake" branch. This new branch offers a number of application enhancements, including bug fixes, a video recorder, the ability to save MMS attachments and more. System enhancements include better bluetooth support, better HTTP handling and, most importantly, a new JavaScript engine built on SquirrelFish.
Unlike the main Android trunk release, which is built on Linux 2.6.25, cupcake has been built on the updated Linux 2.6.27. Notably, the new system software offers basic x86 support and will allow third party manufacturers to develop and deploy their own handset-specific APIs.
Erica Sadun
* 240GB iPod modification now available for 5G owners
* Review: Duck Shoot tickles for short-term fun
* Apple righting iTunes Plus upgrade snafus
* iPhone devs, access Emoji for free with Freemoji
Cupcake is a development branch rather than a release branch. According to the cupcake roadmap page, it remains distinctly a work in progress. This first release represents a big commit of changes since Android's 1.0 release; future plans are for smaller updates as the cupcake changes stabilize. The announcement page emphasizes that cupcake is an outgrowth of Android's roadmap; the roadmap allows for project forking with development continuing on in private branches, which is what cupcake is.
The cupcake branch updates will eventually be merged back into the main Android trunk. This will probably not happen until early to mid January due to the American holiday season. Given the number of bug fixes covered by the cupcake release, this will likely be a welcome update for most Android users.
OPUC Interview with Dr. Jepsen, CTO
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/why-lcd-is-the-cool-new-techno.html
In an early test of the OLPC XO in Nigeria, the student users dropped every laptop several times a day. Despite the laptops' rugged construction, they occasionally needed fixing, and a group of six-year-old girls opened up a "hospital" to reseat cables and do other simpler repairs. Mary Lou Jepson, One Laptop Per Child project's CTO, had this response: "I put extra screws underneath the battery cover so that if they lost one, they could have an extra one. And kids trade them almost like marbles, when they want to try to get something fixed in their laptop."
Mary Lou led the development of the OLPC's breakthrough low-power transflective display, combining a traditional backlit color display with a black and white display that could be used outdoors. She left OLPC to form Pixel Qi, and bring the revolutionary engineering used in the XO to the broader consumer market. In this interview, she discusses lessons learned from OLPC and shares her vision of "cool screens that can ship in high volume, really quickly, at price points that are equivalent to what you pay for standard liquid crystal displays."
At ETech, Mary Lou's keynote presentation delves further into Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing.
JAMES TURNER: I'm speaking today with Mary Lou Jepsen, Founder and CEO of Pixel Qi. Dr. Jepsen previously served as chief technology officer for the One Laptop per Child program where she was an instrumental player in the development of the OLPC's revolutionary hybrid screen. She also previously served as CTO of Intel's display division. Dr. Jepsen was also named by Time Magazine recently as one of the 100 most influential people in the world for 2008. She'll be speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference in March, and we're pleased she's taken the time to talk to us. Good evening.
MARY LOU JEPSEN: Hi. Nice to speak with you tonight.
JT: So in some ways, you're kind of uniquely qualified to comment on the current travails of the OLPC since you've been in highly influential positions both in the OLPC effort itself and at Intel, who some believe tried to sabotage the OLPC. Do you think that the OLPC would've had wider acceptance if the Intel Classmate wasn't competing against it?
MLJ: It is interesting. I think the OLPC, and I haven't seen the latest numbers, sold a lot more than the Classmate. I think head-to-head there's no comparison which is the better machine, and I'm not saying that just because I'm the architect. But what's really happened has been extraordinary. I think OLPC's impact in sort of spearheading the movement to Netbooks is fairly undisputed, although OLPC is not the best selling Netbook; 17 million Netbooks shipped in 2008 and that's through companies like Acer, Asus, MSI, HP, Dell. And that impact on the world is starting to be felt.
JT: What were the factors that led you to leave the OLPC program and start Pixel Qi?
MLJ: You know, I started OLPC with Nicholas in his office in the beginning, in January of 2005. And at that point, right after that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, all said it was impossible. So it became my job to sort of take that, create an architecture, invent a few things, convince the manufacturers to work with me to develop it, get a team together, and take it into high-volume mass production. And then it got to the point where my days were spent getting safety certifications for various countries.
And I just realized, it's time for me to continue doing this; this is the best job I've ever done, but to keep going, why not make these components that are inside of the XO and let everybody buy them rather than just exclusively making and designing them for the OLPC laptop. If you make more of something, you can sell it for less. So rather than just serving the bottom of the pyramid, why not take the fantastic technology that we developed at OLPC and serve the whole pyramid? Everybody wants their batteries to last a lot longer. Everybody wants screens that are e-paper-like and high resolution and sunlight readable. So why not make these for the whole world?
JT: The new Netbooks that are now emerging don't meet some of the OLPC design goals such as outdoor readable screens or low power usage, but they are being produced in huge quantities. Might it make sense to let the market drive the price of these down, and then use a Netbook as a starting point for a system for the developing world?
MLJ: Sure. But the problem in the developing world, if you've been to some of the development sites of say OLPC in the Middle East or in Africa or even any computer lab in the developing world, you fast realize that it's not even the price per machine. And admittedly, while my initial goal at OLPC was to make a hundred dollar laptop, it fast became a goal to make a 1-watt laptop. It's a lot harder and it's a lot more important because the infrastructure of electricity and telecoms is thin, if existent at all. And so a Netbook at 10 watts--how do you power it? You're okay for the reverse battery charge, but then how do you power not just one but a million of them? And that's the problem we tried to solve at OLPC by developing a 1-watt laptop. Because then you can crank to recharge it, use a small solar panel. You can use all sorts of different energy solutions. And the XO actually takes anything from 10 to 20 volts as an input. It deals with spikes of weird power and the electronics don't fry if there's spikes and so forth. But that needs to be solved for the developing world solution. Netbooks are part of the solution. And certainly, the laptops are a lot cheaper now than before we started at OLPC.
The impact has been extraordinary, but it's only the start. And the Netbooks that are being sold right now are essentially laptops miniaturized, regular laptops miniaturized. In the XO from OLPC, everything's new. New screen. New architecture. New power management. New touchpad. New keyboard. You know, it's like you can drop it from five feet. It's rugged. It's rain-resistant. New mesh networking. New software. It just goes on and on and on what is new in the XO. Everything's new in it. But in the Netbooks, it's a new size, but the motherboard and the basic design is pretty traditional. And so it occurred to me at OLPC with the demand, a lot of different Netbook companies tried very hard to buy, for example, the screen that I designed to use in their Netbook products. And we were just in the situation at OLPC of saying, "Well, our mission isn't to sell components to the IT industry; our mission is the name of the organization: One Laptop per Child. And so we should concentrate on that and why don't you just buy a screen from some other company?" But the truth is I think that we can make better Netbooks by making better components for them and helping to teach the Netbook companies some of the learnings we had at OLPC. And they are very anxious to get these improvements.
A lot of people want screens that have an e-paper look in reflection, that are sunlight readable, that dramatically improve their battery life. And everybody knows the screens are the power hogs in the laptops. And different companies say they have 8 to 10-hour battery life, but that's with the screen at a brightness level that you can barely see. And so it's not really 8 to 10 hours, but what we're providing are screens that let the laptops have that 8 to 10-hour battery life.
JT: I actually had a question about the form factor of the OLPC because I had one, I got one from the Give One, Get One program. I had my wife try to use it. She was going back to school for a master's and she tried to use it to take notes. And she's a very small person. And even she had trouble with the keyboard. We eventually got her an Aspire One Linux version. And the question is it seems like there were a few minor tweaks like a 90 percent keyboard that would've made it something that could've still been used by kids, but would've given it a more general ability to be used?
MLJ: Right. In fact, the keyboard size and the dimensions of the XO are not that different than what the Netbook dimensions have come to be, a 9-inch screen or a 10-inch screen is actually our screen, just a little bit wider because its aspect ratio. And the keyboard really determines the screen size. But what we ended up doing is given that this was for small children and it had to work in multiple languages, is using basically more keys than are on some of the Netbooks, so that we could silk screen on different languages. For example, OLPC made the first Amharic keyboard. That's the language they speak in Ethiopia. There's about 100 million people in Ethiopia. They've never had a keyboard for their language before. So we had to sort of trail blaze that and several other languages as well. And just in order to do that, you need the extra keys.
And yes, it does admittedly make it uncomfortable for people that are used to a conventional QWERTY keyboard, for example, and used to typing on that. So there's a switchover that's required. Kids aren't used to that. I mean they're learning language for the first time. But admittedly, OLPC, in their next generation laptop, is omitting the keyboard, is using a multi-touch screen--two screens together, both multi-touch but you can use it like a book with two leaves of a book open, or put one of the leaves on the desk or in your lap and use that to type. And the advantage there is that you can make any kind of keyboard. Little kids need different big keys and probably less of them. They're not typing a manuscript yet. They're learning different things. And to learn chemistry maybe you need a different keyboard than to learn whatever--pick a language, Chinese, Arabic than you need to learn math or optics or what have you.
JT: That's almost like that Russian keyboard design where every key had an LED or an LCD key cap on it so you could remap the whole keyboard.
MLJ: Yes. And so more generic than that, it's a screen so you can remap it to absolutely anything that you want. And that's what OLPC's working on now. We're helping them. We're designing the screens for that. But right now, the advantage of this keyboard is, kids do spill stuff and drop stuff and you've got to make something--the XO is--it's a tank. It's hard to destroy it. It's not a little delicate machine.
It's got to last in the field in tough conditions with kids that will drop it sometimes. And I think in Nigeria we had a test pilot back in OLPC days, where the cables on the keyboard were a millimeter too short and there were these slanted desks with a concrete floor. And the desks were bolted to benches in front of them. And the laptops, every time the kid would jostle on the bench, the benches were supposed to hold two kids. So, of course, five kids were on the bench because more kids showed up to school when the laptop showed up. And every once in a while when the laptops would fall on the floor, a cable would come loose.
Nothing would break. Once after six months, I got a bug report that a screen broke. Once. Can you imagine? With laptops falling every 15 minutes for months during the school day. But these little girls opened up an XO hospital. The name of the laptop's the XO. And they opened up a hospital and started fixing the laptops as if they were patients. And the boys really missed out. But you had six-year-old girls repairing laptops and reseating cables. And, you know, it's really fixable. And it's very, very different than a normal laptop that's not designed to be fixed.
I saw that and I thought, you know, when I was a little girl fixing stuff, sometimes I'd lose screws on the floor and these girls might -- or boys. And I put extra screws underneath the battery cover so that if they lost one, they could have an extra one. And kids trade them almost like marbles, when they want to try to get something fixed in their laptop.
JT: So these are the people I'm going to get the next time I call Gateway technical support, right?
MLJ: Maybe. I mean part of learning is also learning the hardware. It's okay to open it up. You actually--you know, when you first get a car, maybe you change the oil yourself or do something else, but it's a way of becoming sort of one with your machine, you know? It's good.
JT: So you obviously are on top of current display technologies, to say the least. What is the current state of displays? Where is the market driving them? And what are the game-changing technologies we might see soon?
MLJ: It's interesting. What's happening in display--I mean post-economic meltdown is what's happening everywhere. The factories are, relatively speaking, empty. Perhaps half-full. Perhaps half of them are shutdown. And there are some new really interesting display technologies. And you're talking to somebody who spent 20 years developing new display technologies. And us display people think we have to invent our own new molecule, and invent the manufacturing process, and driving scheme and so forth. And I think that after 20 years of doing this, when I started at One Laptop per Child, I just said, "You know, the kids we're trying to reach will be adults if we do sort of business as usual in the display industry where the original fundamental patents, in I think every case, have expired before the new display technology has shipped over the last 100 years, and patents last for 20 years."
So I'm trying something different now, which is let's do like what the silicon people do. This is what I learned at Intel [laughter]. Wow, the silicon people, you have these people designing to the manufacturing processes, and what we can ship in high-volume mass production, and they're able to design pretty interesting silicon chips.
So I thought at OLPC, "Why don't we do that with the existing manufacturing processes for liquid crystal display? Use liquid crystal display manufacturing processes, but in different new ways. But in ways that we can ship in six months to a year." And so that's sort of what I did. I was the first small entity that the large LCD manufacturers let into their factory. They said no many times first, but finally, I got one that said yes. And you know what? We went from spec to mass production ready in six months and shipped a million of them. And everybody, all the Netbook companies, wanted these screens that I made.
And so that was enough of a sort of hit where at Pixel Qi, my new company, we've been able to convince the largest manufacturers in the world to work with us to develop our designs into really cool screens, that can ship in high volume, really quickly, at price points that are equivalent to what you pay for standard liquid crystal displays. They use the same materials, the same processes. We just sort of look at how we put it together quite differently, just like a silicon designer uses the same silicon fabs and processes to create radically different functions in silicon chips.
JT: I thought my monitor had died tonight and I was actually pricing out 24, 25-inch monitors. I was shocked at how inexpensive they've gotten. You can get any number of the lower brands for under $400 now. Is that mainly because of excess capacity or has the production cost gone down?
MLJ: Well, the production cost has gone down. I mean the price of screens has halved in the last nine months or so. Yes, it's been an extraordinarily difficult time. The manufacturers would love to sell them for more. One thing is amortization schedules. There was a lot of build out of LCD factories, five, six, seven years ago. And those are expensive propositions. They're a couple billion dollars at the low end and at the sort of big -- the way you sort of describe the sizes of these, they're in the sizes of the mother glass, the glass from which screens are cut. And at the biggest end, the size of the mother glass is the size of a double bed or a queen-sized bed. The sort of smaller ones are 1.5 square meters. But they are fully paid off.
And the cost per screen goes down as a result of that. Plus, the LCD manufacturing industry, as DRAM and a lot of the hardware, are extraordinary at cost down. And that's what they call it, cost down. And that's the constant march. The constant focus is to deliver the same product for lower price. And so on average, the LCD industry has hit, I think, a 20 to 30 percent cost down year over year over year for the last decade. If you think about what, yeah, your 19 to 20-inch monitor cost what people started buying them in 1998-99, they were pretty pricey. And now you can buy--I think a standard 20-inch monitor you can get for $100-$150 right now, which is a nice thing to be able to leverage if you're trying to design screens for high-volume mass production.
The price really does matter. And if you're developing new manufacturing processes and plants, that development cost is extremely expensive, extremely. And in fact, to the point where in the last 50 years, there's only been one new display technology that's come in to really, really high-volume mass production and that's been liquid crystal display. And as much as we love--we do really, I think, fall in love with these new prototypes, these new display prototypes, OLEDs, electrowetting, electrophoretics. I myself can tell you I developed a holographic video system as a master's student at MIT in the late 80s, and it's still running. And it's still pretty far away from high-volume mass production, but it looks great.
And what really ends up delaying it is the cost of making these prototypes, that look so great, but commercializing them--it's not like software where once you make it work, you can make millions of the things. And it's not even like silicon, or a motherboard, or something, where you can tweak a couple of things. It's really, historically at least, only worked a couple of times. And there's a couple of notable exceptions. Texas Instruments did something called--well, they had many names, but it ended up calling it DLP, three initials. But it was a micro-mirror MEMS device that ships in about half of the boardroom projectors that are used in the world and that has a volume of about 3 million units a year. It's an amazing technological achievement. It's a marvel that they were able to do it, but the volume doesn't come anywhere near what LCD does.
Another notable exception is plasma television. But the EU is trying to outlaw plasma because the power consumption is so high. It's like, you know how a refrigerator is a really high power consumer in a typical home? Well, a plasma TV equals two refrigerators. And so if you just look at the environmental impact, in terms of the power it consumes, it's a negative.
JT: One technology that has come along recently, and certainly Amazon is pushing it, is the new kind of electric ink displays that you see, for instance, in the Kindle. Is that going to mainstream more do you think?
MLJ: Oh, the electrophoretics--the founder of that company is a good friend of mine. We were freshman in college together. Joe Jacobson founded E Ink and it's a phenomenal technology, but they're working on color. They're working on video. When you hit the page turn button, it takes--you have to stop reading until--I have a Kindle and I have to hit the page turn button when I'm three-quarters of the way down the page, and wait for it to refresh while I read the rest of the page. And then if I get stuck on something, then I have to go back. And we really need something with video, or a way to do fast page change and color. And I believe it's actually a lot easier to do that with standard LCD. The screen that we have in prototype in March has the reflectivity about of the electrophoretic technologies, E Ink is one of them, There's about 20 different companies working on that.
But in addition, it's got color and video and a price point of LCD. And so I don't know how--and here's the thing; if the electrophoretics could get into high-volume mass production, at Pixel Qi, we'd be right there using the manufacturing processes. But right now, at this moment, the factories of the world are empty. And the deals that can be struck are extraordinary on price. And so if you can find a way to use the fabs that exist to make something, the price that you can hit is really hard to beat compared to developing a new manufacturing plant or technology.
And one of the advantages of electrophoretic is supposed to be the power consumption, in that you don't need to refresh the screen every 30th or 60th of a second, with all of the pixels, and doing that takes power, because it holds its charge. But as a result, you have to unwrite the charge before you can write something in. And the voltage which you have rewrite it at is hard. And so if you actually look in at the details, the advantage, kind of when looked at from a systems perspective, according to everything that we know, it kind of disappears.
And so what we're trying to provide are screens that look like the electrophoretics, when you have the backlight turned off. But when you have the backlight turned on, you get color and so forth. But all the time, you get video. And so, one of the interesting things, people want a backlight. So even if the electrophoretic technology beats us, you know, so be it. They still want a backlight, and they call it kind of the marriage saving device, so that you don't have to turn on the light if you can't sleep and you want to read in bed, you really don't want to make a lot of light in the room. And so having the small backlight behind the thing really focuses the light towards just the person reading it, is a big advantage.
JT: So developing nations aren't the only place that energy consumption is starting to become a factor as you mentioned. LCD and certainly plasma monitors are becoming a whipping boy for the idle power reduction fanatics. How much can be done in this area without sacrificing picture quality or startup time too greatly?
MLJ: I think enormous things can be done. For example, right now in front of me, I have my laptop on. Not a single pixel is changing on the screen and I run Linux, pretty nice. I run Ubuntu. And still the question, is what's the motherboard doing on? What's the CPU doing on? What is all of that doing on right now when nothing is changing? And I still want to see the screen maybe, but why is the rest of the motherboard on? And, of course, what we did at One Laptop per Child was say--I got to design the laptop. I had never designed a laptop before. I designed a lot of screens. And I said, "You know, let's design it from the screen backwards. If the screen isn't getting any new information and the motherboard's not doing anything, the big secret to lowering power consumption is turn stuff off that you're not using."
So if you're not using the motherboard or the CPU or the rest of the chips on the thing, turn them off to save power. So that was the big secret in lowering the power consumption of the XO. But I mean to do that, we had to turn everything on a dime, the way motherboards are made, the way the low level software works. Everything was turning on and off all the time. So even if you're idle for two to five seconds, the motherboard turns off and then turns back on. And that is a lot bigger, than say, the efforts to make more efficient AC adapters or wall warts, which is laudable. But if you look, they're already there at 85 percent efficiency, and so there's some movements to make them 90 percent efficiency. That's all great and important to do, but by turning off the motherboard and the CPU when you're not using it, you can make the battery life go to 5X what is normal, and so the sort of bang for the buck in doing that is tremendous.
And what we're trying to do at Pixel Qi, and I think other efforts are also taking shape. We've shipped a million units doing that with One Laptop per Child, my former project. And why not get other people to do this? Some of the green efforts--I work with Greener Electronics Council. They put together something called EPEAT, which is an award system for how green a laptop is. It sort of takes a spec from IEEE. It's called IEEE--I'm going to forget the number--2006 and there's four more digits. Anyway, it's like this sushi card, where a laptop is green for the more checkmarks you have on this sort of sushi card of 20 to 30 different items.
The strange thing is nowhere in that IEEE spec, which was a thing that the industry got together to create, does it note the lifetime of the laptop. Does it last one year or five years? Or nor does it note the size and weight. And while Energy Star compliance is mandated by that spec, you don't get extra credit for doing, say, ten times better than Energy Star.
And so if you really want--and I've mentioned this at several different meetings. I go to periodically some of the green electronics meetings to sort of speak and talk about different things. And a lot of the legislators say, "Well, what do we do? We can't legislate that everybody has to do ten times better in a year." And so the question is, how do you do something like Silicon Valley does, right? They fund ten startups; they know five of them won't make it, but one or two will be off the charts, 10, 20, 100X success rates. And how do you encourage that kind of improvement, year-over-year, with some people washing out sometimes, and rather than this sort of incremental improvement? It's a question really for the industry.
JT: Just out of curiosity, when you get, not so much the computational display market, but the consumer market, why are my LCD TVs drawing as much as they do? It strikes me there's not a lot that's going on when the thing's off.
MLJ: Right. On the LCD TV, there's really a motherboard. Your LCD TV is essentially a computer. That's why there's so many different things you can plug into it. Do you even know what half of them are?
JT: I was actually really amused that I got a big like a 50-inch last year and the last page of the manual has a GPL notice because it's evidentially running a copy of Linux inside of it.
MLJ: Oh, cool. That's pretty cool. But I mean there's so many different connectors on it. And there's a big motherboard that does something called scaling. So if your DVDs are a different resolution than HD, than standard TV, than the signal out from your computer for example. And so it has to translate all of those different video formats and display them on the screen. And so that takes some power.
But the other sort of big power draw is, you know, they say it's the screen and updating the screen across that area has some power draw. But really, it's the backlight, which is a big light and only about--well, typically five percent of the light from the backlight gets through to outside of the LCD, to your living room. Five percent. So let's start there. We can improve that. Can we get to 10 percent? That would halve the power consumption, in very rough numbers. Shouldn't be so hard to get to 10 percent. But it has improved a lot. It used to be one to two percent that got through. And so there has been improvement. But we're really working on that here at Pixel Qi.
And if you look at where the losses are, there's well, the color filters absorb, you know, they let red or green or blue light through. And so they absorb basically two-thirds or three-quarters of the light, the color filters, the way they're set up. And so is there instead a way to spread out the color and give a different color to a different area of the pixel, so you can have the color pixeled out. But we're working on that.
Another thing is something called polarizers. I don't know if you remember back to physics days, they said light is a particle or light is a wave. Well, if you take the wave theory, half of the light is sort of vibrating up and down like an ocean wave. And the other half of the light, you can divide it into vibrating side-to-side, moving like a snake in the grass let's say, side-to-side. And in an LCD, only half of the light is absorbed. Let's say the snake light gets absorbed, and only the light that's vibrating sort of like an ocean wave gets through. Well, you've thrown away another half of your light because, the way that we use liquid crystals now, the way that pretty much all liquid crystal displays throw away another 40 to 55 percent of light, because it is not totally perfectly efficient, because they have to modulate the polarization state of the light. And so we're working on ways to stop doing that.
Another thing is it's pretty hard to see your cell phone or camera or laptop when it's outside because the light behind the screen is in competition with the light from the outdoor light or even a bright indoor light. Why don't we use the light from the outside or the bright room light to enhance the brightness of the display? We're doing that, too. It's like there's a lot of things you can do and you can use the standard manufacturing processes if you really understand what the layers are, you use these bottles of liquid crystals. Well, there's a certain number of bottles of liquid crystals that are approved to use in the factory, that they've tested and tested for years, and they know they work. And there's different layers of aluminum and glass and amorphous silicon. And there's different rules about how you can pattern it, the size of the lines and the spaces between the lines, and what kind of blobs that you can put down.
But those are the basic rules and then after that it's well, what can you think of? How can you instead rearrange this with existing--you know, there's these different optical films that you can use that scatter the light in different ways, or bend the light in different ways, and make color in different ways. And with that, what can you invent that addresses the five percent throughput? We should be able to do better than that, right? And then actually, if you look at the LED efficacy, you know, the power in to the power out, that is not a 100 percent efficient system. And if you look at that, you lower the efficiency from power in to light into your light into your living room, dramatically even lower than five percent; it's closer to two. Which we should be able to do better, shouldn't we?
JT: What role do you see Pixel Qi having in the next few years of portable computing?
MLJ: Portable computing? I think it's often said Apple and the iPhone and all of that's really visionary. But I mean people do want kind of a big iPhone, a tablet. And when you look in an iPhone, all you see is the screen. There could be little green men inside of the thing, or the thing could be just steel with a screen. You don't know. And with the advent of all of the services now that are doing cloud computing, and widely available different wireless telecommunications systems, what you still need is the screen, and a battery that doesn't weigh a lot and that lasts a long time.
Where the actual electronics are, and how that works, whether the image is rendered in the device itself or exterior to it, it doesn't matter. Touch is obviously coming, and there's many, many different efforts in touch. An analyst I spoke with about six months ago was tracking 200 different nascent, and much more mature, multi-touch efforts. And we are working on a couple and have favorites of ourselves at Pixel Qi, but I mean I think that more and more it's really about a screen that you can carry somehow, that's not too heavy, that you can see that your batteries last a long time, and that's more readable. What we do actually, eight hours or more a day as professionals, is we use our laptops. And we're essentially staring into a flashlight eight hours a day, on a low resolution screen.
And the reason we prefer to read off of paper is A) it's higher resolution by a lot, and B) we don't have to stare into a flashlight to read the paper, so it's easier to read. One of the things that we're saying at Pixel Qi is that some people actually want to read off of their laptop screens. Right? It's not--sort of 20 centimeters away from your eye, you want to read. You can see high resolution data at that text, at that distance. And we're making a screen that is optimized for reading, and for multimedia. We can't give away and we can't go without supersaturated gorgeous color, but it's hard to read a long legal document on the screen of your laptop and not miss some key words.
And we're trying to make a screen--and the OLPC XO screen was the first step, but the next step is a nice improvement over the performance of the XO screen, both in color and in the sort of paper white, white state that we can get. And that will be on the market this year. And then for 2010, we've got a bunch of new things. But we think that the future of computing is really kind of all about the screen. The chip wars are over. The screen wars, I suppose, are starting.
JT: When you talk about not really caring what's inside and cloud computing, that almost sounds like you're heartening back to the thin client day where you would use WiMax or 4G and essentially, you'd be just moving all of your computing off somewhere else and just trying to do the display in I/O.
MLJ: Maybe. I mean thin computing never really got a bad name. And maybe cloud computing is the new name for thin client. I think you might be right. But you can do so much more. I mean isn't the iPhone kind of like a thin client right now? I mean I don't know. But even some of the Netbooks are kind of thin client, but with a 2 gigahertz processor, it's not that thin. Ten years ago, the Sony Vaio I had ten years ago had a 500 megahertz CPU in it and it was the chichi expensive laptop of that whatever, pick your time period, of that six months or year or whatever. I'm sure there were other good laptops out, too, of course.
But yeah, maybe thin client. Not everybody is--well, maybe you and I are crunching numbers all of the time on our laptop. Half the time, a laptop is idle on average. Idle. And people need things to do, email and web browsing. Read books. People would like to read books and newspapers and magazines, blogs, and write, and watch videos. Yeah. Sure. Watch videos and so forth. But even for books, if you look at the education market, you need to have color for illustrations. It's hard to learn geography without color for the maps, or chemistry without a way to sort of show molecules or whatever for diagrams. You do have to have the color in there in the books, especially for learning.
There's a crossover coming right now between E-Readers and Netbooks. And I think that we'll see a whole new class of--well, I guess the Netbook's a new class. I guess maybe a maturing of that space, and form factors that allow more comfortable reading than your typical clamshell laptop, and a lot of more use, I think, as clearly pioneered by Apple and the iPhone, of multi-touch in that space.
JT: So can you give a brief overview of what you're going to be talking about at ETech?
MLJ: Um, I would love to give a brief overview of what I'm going to be talking about at ETech, but honestly, I'm talking to the conference organizers this week to fine tune what the message is. And so it's a little premature. But perhaps we'll touch on these subjects and others of interest to the audience. I mean maybe the question could be back on you. What is the audience most interested in at ETech? This is my first time at ETech so I want to, I suppose, be provocative and get some conversations going, maybe talking about hardware, but maybe sort of generalizing that out to what's happening more generally in IT, and the way hardware touches that.
JT: I'll keep an eye on the comments for the podcast here and maybe somebody will suggest something.
MLJ: Okay. Great.
JT: I've been talking to Mary Lou Jepsen, who is the Founder and CEO of Pixel Qi. She will be talking at the Emerging Technology Conference which will be occurring in early March. Thank you so much for talking to us.
MLJ: Thank you.
In an early test of the OLPC XO in Nigeria, the student users dropped every laptop several times a day. Despite the laptops' rugged construction, they occasionally needed fixing, and a group of six-year-old girls opened up a "hospital" to reseat cables and do other simpler repairs. Mary Lou Jepson, One Laptop Per Child project's CTO, had this response: "I put extra screws underneath the battery cover so that if they lost one, they could have an extra one. And kids trade them almost like marbles, when they want to try to get something fixed in their laptop."
Mary Lou led the development of the OLPC's breakthrough low-power transflective display, combining a traditional backlit color display with a black and white display that could be used outdoors. She left OLPC to form Pixel Qi, and bring the revolutionary engineering used in the XO to the broader consumer market. In this interview, she discusses lessons learned from OLPC and shares her vision of "cool screens that can ship in high volume, really quickly, at price points that are equivalent to what you pay for standard liquid crystal displays."
At ETech, Mary Lou's keynote presentation delves further into Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing.
JAMES TURNER: I'm speaking today with Mary Lou Jepsen, Founder and CEO of Pixel Qi. Dr. Jepsen previously served as chief technology officer for the One Laptop per Child program where she was an instrumental player in the development of the OLPC's revolutionary hybrid screen. She also previously served as CTO of Intel's display division. Dr. Jepsen was also named by Time Magazine recently as one of the 100 most influential people in the world for 2008. She'll be speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference in March, and we're pleased she's taken the time to talk to us. Good evening.
MARY LOU JEPSEN: Hi. Nice to speak with you tonight.
JT: So in some ways, you're kind of uniquely qualified to comment on the current travails of the OLPC since you've been in highly influential positions both in the OLPC effort itself and at Intel, who some believe tried to sabotage the OLPC. Do you think that the OLPC would've had wider acceptance if the Intel Classmate wasn't competing against it?
MLJ: It is interesting. I think the OLPC, and I haven't seen the latest numbers, sold a lot more than the Classmate. I think head-to-head there's no comparison which is the better machine, and I'm not saying that just because I'm the architect. But what's really happened has been extraordinary. I think OLPC's impact in sort of spearheading the movement to Netbooks is fairly undisputed, although OLPC is not the best selling Netbook; 17 million Netbooks shipped in 2008 and that's through companies like Acer, Asus, MSI, HP, Dell. And that impact on the world is starting to be felt.
JT: What were the factors that led you to leave the OLPC program and start Pixel Qi?
MLJ: You know, I started OLPC with Nicholas in his office in the beginning, in January of 2005. And at that point, right after that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, all said it was impossible. So it became my job to sort of take that, create an architecture, invent a few things, convince the manufacturers to work with me to develop it, get a team together, and take it into high-volume mass production. And then it got to the point where my days were spent getting safety certifications for various countries.
And I just realized, it's time for me to continue doing this; this is the best job I've ever done, but to keep going, why not make these components that are inside of the XO and let everybody buy them rather than just exclusively making and designing them for the OLPC laptop. If you make more of something, you can sell it for less. So rather than just serving the bottom of the pyramid, why not take the fantastic technology that we developed at OLPC and serve the whole pyramid? Everybody wants their batteries to last a lot longer. Everybody wants screens that are e-paper-like and high resolution and sunlight readable. So why not make these for the whole world?
JT: The new Netbooks that are now emerging don't meet some of the OLPC design goals such as outdoor readable screens or low power usage, but they are being produced in huge quantities. Might it make sense to let the market drive the price of these down, and then use a Netbook as a starting point for a system for the developing world?
MLJ: Sure. But the problem in the developing world, if you've been to some of the development sites of say OLPC in the Middle East or in Africa or even any computer lab in the developing world, you fast realize that it's not even the price per machine. And admittedly, while my initial goal at OLPC was to make a hundred dollar laptop, it fast became a goal to make a 1-watt laptop. It's a lot harder and it's a lot more important because the infrastructure of electricity and telecoms is thin, if existent at all. And so a Netbook at 10 watts--how do you power it? You're okay for the reverse battery charge, but then how do you power not just one but a million of them? And that's the problem we tried to solve at OLPC by developing a 1-watt laptop. Because then you can crank to recharge it, use a small solar panel. You can use all sorts of different energy solutions. And the XO actually takes anything from 10 to 20 volts as an input. It deals with spikes of weird power and the electronics don't fry if there's spikes and so forth. But that needs to be solved for the developing world solution. Netbooks are part of the solution. And certainly, the laptops are a lot cheaper now than before we started at OLPC.
The impact has been extraordinary, but it's only the start. And the Netbooks that are being sold right now are essentially laptops miniaturized, regular laptops miniaturized. In the XO from OLPC, everything's new. New screen. New architecture. New power management. New touchpad. New keyboard. You know, it's like you can drop it from five feet. It's rugged. It's rain-resistant. New mesh networking. New software. It just goes on and on and on what is new in the XO. Everything's new in it. But in the Netbooks, it's a new size, but the motherboard and the basic design is pretty traditional. And so it occurred to me at OLPC with the demand, a lot of different Netbook companies tried very hard to buy, for example, the screen that I designed to use in their Netbook products. And we were just in the situation at OLPC of saying, "Well, our mission isn't to sell components to the IT industry; our mission is the name of the organization: One Laptop per Child. And so we should concentrate on that and why don't you just buy a screen from some other company?" But the truth is I think that we can make better Netbooks by making better components for them and helping to teach the Netbook companies some of the learnings we had at OLPC. And they are very anxious to get these improvements.
A lot of people want screens that have an e-paper look in reflection, that are sunlight readable, that dramatically improve their battery life. And everybody knows the screens are the power hogs in the laptops. And different companies say they have 8 to 10-hour battery life, but that's with the screen at a brightness level that you can barely see. And so it's not really 8 to 10 hours, but what we're providing are screens that let the laptops have that 8 to 10-hour battery life.
JT: I actually had a question about the form factor of the OLPC because I had one, I got one from the Give One, Get One program. I had my wife try to use it. She was going back to school for a master's and she tried to use it to take notes. And she's a very small person. And even she had trouble with the keyboard. We eventually got her an Aspire One Linux version. And the question is it seems like there were a few minor tweaks like a 90 percent keyboard that would've made it something that could've still been used by kids, but would've given it a more general ability to be used?
MLJ: Right. In fact, the keyboard size and the dimensions of the XO are not that different than what the Netbook dimensions have come to be, a 9-inch screen or a 10-inch screen is actually our screen, just a little bit wider because its aspect ratio. And the keyboard really determines the screen size. But what we ended up doing is given that this was for small children and it had to work in multiple languages, is using basically more keys than are on some of the Netbooks, so that we could silk screen on different languages. For example, OLPC made the first Amharic keyboard. That's the language they speak in Ethiopia. There's about 100 million people in Ethiopia. They've never had a keyboard for their language before. So we had to sort of trail blaze that and several other languages as well. And just in order to do that, you need the extra keys.
And yes, it does admittedly make it uncomfortable for people that are used to a conventional QWERTY keyboard, for example, and used to typing on that. So there's a switchover that's required. Kids aren't used to that. I mean they're learning language for the first time. But admittedly, OLPC, in their next generation laptop, is omitting the keyboard, is using a multi-touch screen--two screens together, both multi-touch but you can use it like a book with two leaves of a book open, or put one of the leaves on the desk or in your lap and use that to type. And the advantage there is that you can make any kind of keyboard. Little kids need different big keys and probably less of them. They're not typing a manuscript yet. They're learning different things. And to learn chemistry maybe you need a different keyboard than to learn whatever--pick a language, Chinese, Arabic than you need to learn math or optics or what have you.
JT: That's almost like that Russian keyboard design where every key had an LED or an LCD key cap on it so you could remap the whole keyboard.
MLJ: Yes. And so more generic than that, it's a screen so you can remap it to absolutely anything that you want. And that's what OLPC's working on now. We're helping them. We're designing the screens for that. But right now, the advantage of this keyboard is, kids do spill stuff and drop stuff and you've got to make something--the XO is--it's a tank. It's hard to destroy it. It's not a little delicate machine.
It's got to last in the field in tough conditions with kids that will drop it sometimes. And I think in Nigeria we had a test pilot back in OLPC days, where the cables on the keyboard were a millimeter too short and there were these slanted desks with a concrete floor. And the desks were bolted to benches in front of them. And the laptops, every time the kid would jostle on the bench, the benches were supposed to hold two kids. So, of course, five kids were on the bench because more kids showed up to school when the laptop showed up. And every once in a while when the laptops would fall on the floor, a cable would come loose.
Nothing would break. Once after six months, I got a bug report that a screen broke. Once. Can you imagine? With laptops falling every 15 minutes for months during the school day. But these little girls opened up an XO hospital. The name of the laptop's the XO. And they opened up a hospital and started fixing the laptops as if they were patients. And the boys really missed out. But you had six-year-old girls repairing laptops and reseating cables. And, you know, it's really fixable. And it's very, very different than a normal laptop that's not designed to be fixed.
I saw that and I thought, you know, when I was a little girl fixing stuff, sometimes I'd lose screws on the floor and these girls might -- or boys. And I put extra screws underneath the battery cover so that if they lost one, they could have an extra one. And kids trade them almost like marbles, when they want to try to get something fixed in their laptop.
JT: So these are the people I'm going to get the next time I call Gateway technical support, right?
MLJ: Maybe. I mean part of learning is also learning the hardware. It's okay to open it up. You actually--you know, when you first get a car, maybe you change the oil yourself or do something else, but it's a way of becoming sort of one with your machine, you know? It's good.
JT: So you obviously are on top of current display technologies, to say the least. What is the current state of displays? Where is the market driving them? And what are the game-changing technologies we might see soon?
MLJ: It's interesting. What's happening in display--I mean post-economic meltdown is what's happening everywhere. The factories are, relatively speaking, empty. Perhaps half-full. Perhaps half of them are shutdown. And there are some new really interesting display technologies. And you're talking to somebody who spent 20 years developing new display technologies. And us display people think we have to invent our own new molecule, and invent the manufacturing process, and driving scheme and so forth. And I think that after 20 years of doing this, when I started at One Laptop per Child, I just said, "You know, the kids we're trying to reach will be adults if we do sort of business as usual in the display industry where the original fundamental patents, in I think every case, have expired before the new display technology has shipped over the last 100 years, and patents last for 20 years."
So I'm trying something different now, which is let's do like what the silicon people do. This is what I learned at Intel [laughter]. Wow, the silicon people, you have these people designing to the manufacturing processes, and what we can ship in high-volume mass production, and they're able to design pretty interesting silicon chips.
So I thought at OLPC, "Why don't we do that with the existing manufacturing processes for liquid crystal display? Use liquid crystal display manufacturing processes, but in different new ways. But in ways that we can ship in six months to a year." And so that's sort of what I did. I was the first small entity that the large LCD manufacturers let into their factory. They said no many times first, but finally, I got one that said yes. And you know what? We went from spec to mass production ready in six months and shipped a million of them. And everybody, all the Netbook companies, wanted these screens that I made.
And so that was enough of a sort of hit where at Pixel Qi, my new company, we've been able to convince the largest manufacturers in the world to work with us to develop our designs into really cool screens, that can ship in high volume, really quickly, at price points that are equivalent to what you pay for standard liquid crystal displays. They use the same materials, the same processes. We just sort of look at how we put it together quite differently, just like a silicon designer uses the same silicon fabs and processes to create radically different functions in silicon chips.
JT: I thought my monitor had died tonight and I was actually pricing out 24, 25-inch monitors. I was shocked at how inexpensive they've gotten. You can get any number of the lower brands for under $400 now. Is that mainly because of excess capacity or has the production cost gone down?
MLJ: Well, the production cost has gone down. I mean the price of screens has halved in the last nine months or so. Yes, it's been an extraordinarily difficult time. The manufacturers would love to sell them for more. One thing is amortization schedules. There was a lot of build out of LCD factories, five, six, seven years ago. And those are expensive propositions. They're a couple billion dollars at the low end and at the sort of big -- the way you sort of describe the sizes of these, they're in the sizes of the mother glass, the glass from which screens are cut. And at the biggest end, the size of the mother glass is the size of a double bed or a queen-sized bed. The sort of smaller ones are 1.5 square meters. But they are fully paid off.
And the cost per screen goes down as a result of that. Plus, the LCD manufacturing industry, as DRAM and a lot of the hardware, are extraordinary at cost down. And that's what they call it, cost down. And that's the constant march. The constant focus is to deliver the same product for lower price. And so on average, the LCD industry has hit, I think, a 20 to 30 percent cost down year over year over year for the last decade. If you think about what, yeah, your 19 to 20-inch monitor cost what people started buying them in 1998-99, they were pretty pricey. And now you can buy--I think a standard 20-inch monitor you can get for $100-$150 right now, which is a nice thing to be able to leverage if you're trying to design screens for high-volume mass production.
The price really does matter. And if you're developing new manufacturing processes and plants, that development cost is extremely expensive, extremely. And in fact, to the point where in the last 50 years, there's only been one new display technology that's come in to really, really high-volume mass production and that's been liquid crystal display. And as much as we love--we do really, I think, fall in love with these new prototypes, these new display prototypes, OLEDs, electrowetting, electrophoretics. I myself can tell you I developed a holographic video system as a master's student at MIT in the late 80s, and it's still running. And it's still pretty far away from high-volume mass production, but it looks great.
And what really ends up delaying it is the cost of making these prototypes, that look so great, but commercializing them--it's not like software where once you make it work, you can make millions of the things. And it's not even like silicon, or a motherboard, or something, where you can tweak a couple of things. It's really, historically at least, only worked a couple of times. And there's a couple of notable exceptions. Texas Instruments did something called--well, they had many names, but it ended up calling it DLP, three initials. But it was a micro-mirror MEMS device that ships in about half of the boardroom projectors that are used in the world and that has a volume of about 3 million units a year. It's an amazing technological achievement. It's a marvel that they were able to do it, but the volume doesn't come anywhere near what LCD does.
Another notable exception is plasma television. But the EU is trying to outlaw plasma because the power consumption is so high. It's like, you know how a refrigerator is a really high power consumer in a typical home? Well, a plasma TV equals two refrigerators. And so if you just look at the environmental impact, in terms of the power it consumes, it's a negative.
JT: One technology that has come along recently, and certainly Amazon is pushing it, is the new kind of electric ink displays that you see, for instance, in the Kindle. Is that going to mainstream more do you think?
MLJ: Oh, the electrophoretics--the founder of that company is a good friend of mine. We were freshman in college together. Joe Jacobson founded E Ink and it's a phenomenal technology, but they're working on color. They're working on video. When you hit the page turn button, it takes--you have to stop reading until--I have a Kindle and I have to hit the page turn button when I'm three-quarters of the way down the page, and wait for it to refresh while I read the rest of the page. And then if I get stuck on something, then I have to go back. And we really need something with video, or a way to do fast page change and color. And I believe it's actually a lot easier to do that with standard LCD. The screen that we have in prototype in March has the reflectivity about of the electrophoretic technologies, E Ink is one of them, There's about 20 different companies working on that.
But in addition, it's got color and video and a price point of LCD. And so I don't know how--and here's the thing; if the electrophoretics could get into high-volume mass production, at Pixel Qi, we'd be right there using the manufacturing processes. But right now, at this moment, the factories of the world are empty. And the deals that can be struck are extraordinary on price. And so if you can find a way to use the fabs that exist to make something, the price that you can hit is really hard to beat compared to developing a new manufacturing plant or technology.
And one of the advantages of electrophoretic is supposed to be the power consumption, in that you don't need to refresh the screen every 30th or 60th of a second, with all of the pixels, and doing that takes power, because it holds its charge. But as a result, you have to unwrite the charge before you can write something in. And the voltage which you have rewrite it at is hard. And so if you actually look in at the details, the advantage, kind of when looked at from a systems perspective, according to everything that we know, it kind of disappears.
And so what we're trying to provide are screens that look like the electrophoretics, when you have the backlight turned off. But when you have the backlight turned on, you get color and so forth. But all the time, you get video. And so, one of the interesting things, people want a backlight. So even if the electrophoretic technology beats us, you know, so be it. They still want a backlight, and they call it kind of the marriage saving device, so that you don't have to turn on the light if you can't sleep and you want to read in bed, you really don't want to make a lot of light in the room. And so having the small backlight behind the thing really focuses the light towards just the person reading it, is a big advantage.
JT: So developing nations aren't the only place that energy consumption is starting to become a factor as you mentioned. LCD and certainly plasma monitors are becoming a whipping boy for the idle power reduction fanatics. How much can be done in this area without sacrificing picture quality or startup time too greatly?
MLJ: I think enormous things can be done. For example, right now in front of me, I have my laptop on. Not a single pixel is changing on the screen and I run Linux, pretty nice. I run Ubuntu. And still the question, is what's the motherboard doing on? What's the CPU doing on? What is all of that doing on right now when nothing is changing? And I still want to see the screen maybe, but why is the rest of the motherboard on? And, of course, what we did at One Laptop per Child was say--I got to design the laptop. I had never designed a laptop before. I designed a lot of screens. And I said, "You know, let's design it from the screen backwards. If the screen isn't getting any new information and the motherboard's not doing anything, the big secret to lowering power consumption is turn stuff off that you're not using."
So if you're not using the motherboard or the CPU or the rest of the chips on the thing, turn them off to save power. So that was the big secret in lowering the power consumption of the XO. But I mean to do that, we had to turn everything on a dime, the way motherboards are made, the way the low level software works. Everything was turning on and off all the time. So even if you're idle for two to five seconds, the motherboard turns off and then turns back on. And that is a lot bigger, than say, the efforts to make more efficient AC adapters or wall warts, which is laudable. But if you look, they're already there at 85 percent efficiency, and so there's some movements to make them 90 percent efficiency. That's all great and important to do, but by turning off the motherboard and the CPU when you're not using it, you can make the battery life go to 5X what is normal, and so the sort of bang for the buck in doing that is tremendous.
And what we're trying to do at Pixel Qi, and I think other efforts are also taking shape. We've shipped a million units doing that with One Laptop per Child, my former project. And why not get other people to do this? Some of the green efforts--I work with Greener Electronics Council. They put together something called EPEAT, which is an award system for how green a laptop is. It sort of takes a spec from IEEE. It's called IEEE--I'm going to forget the number--2006 and there's four more digits. Anyway, it's like this sushi card, where a laptop is green for the more checkmarks you have on this sort of sushi card of 20 to 30 different items.
The strange thing is nowhere in that IEEE spec, which was a thing that the industry got together to create, does it note the lifetime of the laptop. Does it last one year or five years? Or nor does it note the size and weight. And while Energy Star compliance is mandated by that spec, you don't get extra credit for doing, say, ten times better than Energy Star.
And so if you really want--and I've mentioned this at several different meetings. I go to periodically some of the green electronics meetings to sort of speak and talk about different things. And a lot of the legislators say, "Well, what do we do? We can't legislate that everybody has to do ten times better in a year." And so the question is, how do you do something like Silicon Valley does, right? They fund ten startups; they know five of them won't make it, but one or two will be off the charts, 10, 20, 100X success rates. And how do you encourage that kind of improvement, year-over-year, with some people washing out sometimes, and rather than this sort of incremental improvement? It's a question really for the industry.
JT: Just out of curiosity, when you get, not so much the computational display market, but the consumer market, why are my LCD TVs drawing as much as they do? It strikes me there's not a lot that's going on when the thing's off.
MLJ: Right. On the LCD TV, there's really a motherboard. Your LCD TV is essentially a computer. That's why there's so many different things you can plug into it. Do you even know what half of them are?
JT: I was actually really amused that I got a big like a 50-inch last year and the last page of the manual has a GPL notice because it's evidentially running a copy of Linux inside of it.
MLJ: Oh, cool. That's pretty cool. But I mean there's so many different connectors on it. And there's a big motherboard that does something called scaling. So if your DVDs are a different resolution than HD, than standard TV, than the signal out from your computer for example. And so it has to translate all of those different video formats and display them on the screen. And so that takes some power.
But the other sort of big power draw is, you know, they say it's the screen and updating the screen across that area has some power draw. But really, it's the backlight, which is a big light and only about--well, typically five percent of the light from the backlight gets through to outside of the LCD, to your living room. Five percent. So let's start there. We can improve that. Can we get to 10 percent? That would halve the power consumption, in very rough numbers. Shouldn't be so hard to get to 10 percent. But it has improved a lot. It used to be one to two percent that got through. And so there has been improvement. But we're really working on that here at Pixel Qi.
And if you look at where the losses are, there's well, the color filters absorb, you know, they let red or green or blue light through. And so they absorb basically two-thirds or three-quarters of the light, the color filters, the way they're set up. And so is there instead a way to spread out the color and give a different color to a different area of the pixel, so you can have the color pixeled out. But we're working on that.
Another thing is something called polarizers. I don't know if you remember back to physics days, they said light is a particle or light is a wave. Well, if you take the wave theory, half of the light is sort of vibrating up and down like an ocean wave. And the other half of the light, you can divide it into vibrating side-to-side, moving like a snake in the grass let's say, side-to-side. And in an LCD, only half of the light is absorbed. Let's say the snake light gets absorbed, and only the light that's vibrating sort of like an ocean wave gets through. Well, you've thrown away another half of your light because, the way that we use liquid crystals now, the way that pretty much all liquid crystal displays throw away another 40 to 55 percent of light, because it is not totally perfectly efficient, because they have to modulate the polarization state of the light. And so we're working on ways to stop doing that.
Another thing is it's pretty hard to see your cell phone or camera or laptop when it's outside because the light behind the screen is in competition with the light from the outdoor light or even a bright indoor light. Why don't we use the light from the outside or the bright room light to enhance the brightness of the display? We're doing that, too. It's like there's a lot of things you can do and you can use the standard manufacturing processes if you really understand what the layers are, you use these bottles of liquid crystals. Well, there's a certain number of bottles of liquid crystals that are approved to use in the factory, that they've tested and tested for years, and they know they work. And there's different layers of aluminum and glass and amorphous silicon. And there's different rules about how you can pattern it, the size of the lines and the spaces between the lines, and what kind of blobs that you can put down.
But those are the basic rules and then after that it's well, what can you think of? How can you instead rearrange this with existing--you know, there's these different optical films that you can use that scatter the light in different ways, or bend the light in different ways, and make color in different ways. And with that, what can you invent that addresses the five percent throughput? We should be able to do better than that, right? And then actually, if you look at the LED efficacy, you know, the power in to the power out, that is not a 100 percent efficient system. And if you look at that, you lower the efficiency from power in to light into your light into your living room, dramatically even lower than five percent; it's closer to two. Which we should be able to do better, shouldn't we?
JT: What role do you see Pixel Qi having in the next few years of portable computing?
MLJ: Portable computing? I think it's often said Apple and the iPhone and all of that's really visionary. But I mean people do want kind of a big iPhone, a tablet. And when you look in an iPhone, all you see is the screen. There could be little green men inside of the thing, or the thing could be just steel with a screen. You don't know. And with the advent of all of the services now that are doing cloud computing, and widely available different wireless telecommunications systems, what you still need is the screen, and a battery that doesn't weigh a lot and that lasts a long time.
Where the actual electronics are, and how that works, whether the image is rendered in the device itself or exterior to it, it doesn't matter. Touch is obviously coming, and there's many, many different efforts in touch. An analyst I spoke with about six months ago was tracking 200 different nascent, and much more mature, multi-touch efforts. And we are working on a couple and have favorites of ourselves at Pixel Qi, but I mean I think that more and more it's really about a screen that you can carry somehow, that's not too heavy, that you can see that your batteries last a long time, and that's more readable. What we do actually, eight hours or more a day as professionals, is we use our laptops. And we're essentially staring into a flashlight eight hours a day, on a low resolution screen.
And the reason we prefer to read off of paper is A) it's higher resolution by a lot, and B) we don't have to stare into a flashlight to read the paper, so it's easier to read. One of the things that we're saying at Pixel Qi is that some people actually want to read off of their laptop screens. Right? It's not--sort of 20 centimeters away from your eye, you want to read. You can see high resolution data at that text, at that distance. And we're making a screen that is optimized for reading, and for multimedia. We can't give away and we can't go without supersaturated gorgeous color, but it's hard to read a long legal document on the screen of your laptop and not miss some key words.
And we're trying to make a screen--and the OLPC XO screen was the first step, but the next step is a nice improvement over the performance of the XO screen, both in color and in the sort of paper white, white state that we can get. And that will be on the market this year. And then for 2010, we've got a bunch of new things. But we think that the future of computing is really kind of all about the screen. The chip wars are over. The screen wars, I suppose, are starting.
JT: When you talk about not really caring what's inside and cloud computing, that almost sounds like you're heartening back to the thin client day where you would use WiMax or 4G and essentially, you'd be just moving all of your computing off somewhere else and just trying to do the display in I/O.
MLJ: Maybe. I mean thin computing never really got a bad name. And maybe cloud computing is the new name for thin client. I think you might be right. But you can do so much more. I mean isn't the iPhone kind of like a thin client right now? I mean I don't know. But even some of the Netbooks are kind of thin client, but with a 2 gigahertz processor, it's not that thin. Ten years ago, the Sony Vaio I had ten years ago had a 500 megahertz CPU in it and it was the chichi expensive laptop of that whatever, pick your time period, of that six months or year or whatever. I'm sure there were other good laptops out, too, of course.
But yeah, maybe thin client. Not everybody is--well, maybe you and I are crunching numbers all of the time on our laptop. Half the time, a laptop is idle on average. Idle. And people need things to do, email and web browsing. Read books. People would like to read books and newspapers and magazines, blogs, and write, and watch videos. Yeah. Sure. Watch videos and so forth. But even for books, if you look at the education market, you need to have color for illustrations. It's hard to learn geography without color for the maps, or chemistry without a way to sort of show molecules or whatever for diagrams. You do have to have the color in there in the books, especially for learning.
There's a crossover coming right now between E-Readers and Netbooks. And I think that we'll see a whole new class of--well, I guess the Netbook's a new class. I guess maybe a maturing of that space, and form factors that allow more comfortable reading than your typical clamshell laptop, and a lot of more use, I think, as clearly pioneered by Apple and the iPhone, of multi-touch in that space.
JT: So can you give a brief overview of what you're going to be talking about at ETech?
MLJ: Um, I would love to give a brief overview of what I'm going to be talking about at ETech, but honestly, I'm talking to the conference organizers this week to fine tune what the message is. And so it's a little premature. But perhaps we'll touch on these subjects and others of interest to the audience. I mean maybe the question could be back on you. What is the audience most interested in at ETech? This is my first time at ETech so I want to, I suppose, be provocative and get some conversations going, maybe talking about hardware, but maybe sort of generalizing that out to what's happening more generally in IT, and the way hardware touches that.
JT: I'll keep an eye on the comments for the podcast here and maybe somebody will suggest something.
MLJ: Okay. Great.
JT: I've been talking to Mary Lou Jepsen, who is the Founder and CEO of Pixel Qi. She will be talking at the Emerging Technology Conference which will be occurring in early March. Thank you so much for talking to us.
MLJ: Thank you.
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