Items by Dylan Tweney
Wired: Top Stories
-
Mini Movie Machine Almost Breaks Into the Big Time
Posted: March 25th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
The Dell Mini 10 is a netbook that thinks it's a multimedia computer. It's delusional. Sure it has an HDMI-out port and a robust Atom processor, but when you try to stream HD video to a big screen, the result is choppier than an episode of Yan Can Cook. -
Microsoft Releases Windows 7 Beta as a Free Download
Posted: January 7th, 2009, 9:30pm EST by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer uses his first appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show to announce that his company will make the Windows 7 beta available worldwide as a free download this week.
-
Backstage at CES 2009
Posted: January 7th, 2009, 7:00pm EST by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comLAS VEGAS — It's the eve of the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, and the floor is a flurry of activity as thousands of vendors set up their wares. Teamsters and union carpenters rub elbows with electronics industry representatives. Forklifts jostle for position in the narrow pathways, which are lined with shrink-wrapped booth parts and gigantic HDTVs displaying test patterns. Wired.com took a backstage tour of the preparations to bring you a glimpse of what, in a few short hours, will be the latest incarnation of North America's largest technology tradeshow.
Left: Microsoft representatives set up the laptops and screens the company will use to show off its latest software and web services.
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comLess than 24 hours before the show opens, construction is still underway on most of the floor. Carpet awaits unrolling, and pallets are stacked high with high-tech gear.
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comThe gigantic Panasonic booth includes a row of partition-enclosed meeting rooms along its back edge. In those rooms the real business of CES will happen: furious dealmaking between manufacturers, distributors and retailers. But today, construction is still in progress. Here, a worker opens the door to reveal a mysterious blue screen in the background.
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comWorkers scurry to turn the showroom floor into something presentable. Some will remain overnight, working until the moment the show opens here at 10 a.m. Thursday. Organizers expect 130,000 people to attend CES 2009 — an 8 percent drop from last year's attendance, but still enough to ensure that every cab line is at least 30 minutes long.
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comThese small electric carts are the transportation method of choice for workers to hustle from one end of the convention center to the other.
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comBikes lean against the wall of an unfinished Panasonic exhibit. With more than 1.7 million square feet of exhibition space spread across the Las Vegas Convention Center's three massive halls, getting from point A to point B can be a challenge.
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comA Pioneer booth is still under construction. Large corporate logos lie here and there around the hall, awaiting placement far above the heads of the crowd.
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com"Say, you're not looking at that chart upside down, are you?"
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comHitachi representatives check out a display panel. Maybe it will work after the guy on the right plugs it in.
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comBanks of high-definition displays in the Sharp booth will show off the company's HDTV prowess with eye-catching videos. But that's tomorrow; today, the displays show only color bars.
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comWorkers set up RCA monitors.
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comSony's exhibit is located at the very end of the central hall and is more built-out than most booths. Putting together a show of this size is a massive undertaking: The first advance teams arrived Dec. 26 to begin setting up, a CES rep said.
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comSony is already drawing attention with its new screens and a message of eco-friendliness.
-
Apple Won't Invent the iPhone Shuffle, But You Can
Posted: December 15th, 2008, 3:27pm EST by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
Blogs are buzzing about Apple's plans to announce an "iPhone Nano" in January. While the rumors are almost certainly false, that shouldn't stop you from mocking up your own future iPhone concepts. You could even win a prize from Wired.com.
-
Gallery: 40 Years of Mighty Mice
Posted: December 9th, 2008, 12:00am EST by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
: Photo: Courtesy SRI InternationalThe computer mouse made its worldwide debut 40 years ago in a presentation by Stanford Research Institute engineer Douglas Engelbart. Later called "the mother of all demos," it was a groundbreaking demonstration of how computers could help ordinary people work together, think better and — hopefully — make solving the world's problems that much easier.
But it was the mouse that people really latched onto. Billions of mice later, it still rules the desktop, second only to the keyboard as the most ubiquitous input device of all time.
But mice — and related input devices — come in all shapes and sizes. In this gallery, Wired.com takes a look at some of the more awe-inspiring (and guffaw-inspiring) inventions aimed at helping you get your thoughts out of your brain and into the Matrix.
Left: Engelbart's first mouse was carved out of a block of wood and had just one button, just like Apple's. Underneath were two wheels connected to potentiometers: One recorded the mouse's movement along the x axis, the other one tracked the y axis.
: Photo: Courtesy Bootstrap InstituteBefore settling on the hand-controlled mouse, Engelbart's lab investigated other possibilities, including the "knee mouse" shown here. Engelbart later said in an interview that the knee controller "was based on my observation that the human foot was a pretty sensitive controller of the gas pedal in cars. With a little work, we discovered that the knee offered even better control at slight movements in all directions. In tests, it outperformed the mouse by a small margin." However, its slight performance advantage was no doubt outweighed by the fact that it was really, really goofy.
: Mice may have been used here and there in research labs like Xerox PARC, but they didn't hit the big time until Apple released its revolutionary Macintosh in 1984. It was the first consumer computer to use a truly rich graphical user interface — and a one-button mouse was a standard part of the package. The mouse was so much a part of the Mac's unique identity that Apple didn't even include arrow keys on the computer's keyboard.
: Apple has since relented, but for years the company drove its customers up the wall by refusing to put more than a single button on its mice. That meant you had to buy mice from Logitech, Macally or — gasp — Microsoft if you wanted to take advantage of many applications' right-click capabilities. But Apple's worst mouse misstep? Making a translucent and perfectly circular one-button mouse for the G3 iMacs. With the shape of a hockey puck, the mouse made it much too easy for eyes-on-the-screen users to wind up grasping the mouse at a slant, sending their cursors zooming northeast when they meant to go southeast. Arrgh!
: Photo: Courtesy Royal Canadian NavyThe world's first trackball actually predates Engelbart's mouse by more than a decade, and it was invented by Canadians, no less. Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor developed this elaborate gizmo for a Canadian Navy project in 1952. For the rotating part, it used a standard bowling ball from Canada's unique five-pin game. There's no word on whether it was ever used for aiming Canadian anti-missile defense systems, Missile Command-style.
: Some videogame players suffer an inconvenient and disabling malady: Just as the action gets hot and heavy, their ability to shoot straight is thrown off by a physiological malfunction. Yes, we're talking about sweaty palms. Nyko's AirFlo comes to the rescue, with a built-in fan that blows cooling air onto your mouse hand, helping its grip remain firm and sweat-free.
: Graphics tablets that let you draw electronic images by tracing lines on a flat surface go as far back as 1888, or as far as 1957 in the modern computer age. But they didn't hit the consumer market until Koala Technologies introduced its KoalaPad for the Apple II in 1984. It also later supported the TRS-80, Atari, Commodore 64 and IBM PC. With its bundled drawing software, the KoalaPad was a hit among artists and school kids.
: Who wouldn't want to have a big, chunky, silver metal knob on their desk? Reminiscent of the volume knob on an old stereo, the PowerMate is a USB peripheral that can be configured to control your computer's volume, "scrub" back and forth in video-editing software or scroll through text documents. Best of all, its functions are app-specific, so you can make it do different things depending on which program you're using. It's even got ground effects: A blue LED light glows brighter or dimmer depending on the level you're dialing in.
: Also known as a touchpad, this flat sensor replicates the effect of a mouse by letting you drag your fingers across its surface to control a pointer on the screen. The trackpad made its first appearance in a laptop with the Apple PowerBook 500 in 1994, and has since become nearly ubiquitous on notebook computers and netbooks. Recent tweaks to the technology have included multitouch support (so you can use more than one finger at a time) and even limited display capabilities using the pad's embedded status lights.
: Perhaps the most reviled pointing device ever, the TrackPoint was invented by IBM for use in its line of ThinkPad notebooks. It had the advantage of being compact, requiring far less space than a touchpad. With a little practice, it was also a reasonably efficient and ergonomic controller. On the downside, many people found it difficult to use, it was useless for anything that required finesse (like drawing applications), and it just plain felt weird. As a result, the TrackPoint collected a wide range of nicknames, of which we'll list just a few of the more printable ones: cat's tongue, nub, nubby mouse, pointing stick, stick mouse, stupid little red pointer, nipple mouse.
: Everyone who has had to rely on a mouse, trackball or digitizer tablet fantasizes at some point about a device that would let you control the cursor without having to take your hands off the keyboard. Like, for instance, a foot mouse! Bili's Foot Mouse/Slipper Mouse fits the bill, and it's even programmable, so you can assign different functions to each of the buttons. However, at $199, it's a little pricey for most of us.
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comThe Falcon Novint looks like a menacing alien orb held delicately by a three-fingered metal claw, with a pistol grip on the end. But grab the grip and dive into your favorite first-person shooter and it becomes an awesome 3-D controller, complete with realistic force feedback — so you can actually feel the recoil when you pull the trigger. Game on!
: Brainwave-reading devices like the Emotiv EPOC and NeuroSky promise to take human-computer interfaces to the next level by letting you control an application (or better yet, a game) simply through the power of thought. While there's still a lot of work to be done, these technologies hold the greatest promise of helping us truly jack in to cyberspace.
-
Dec. 9, 1968: The Mother of All Demos
Posted: December 9th, 2008, 12:00am EST by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
1968: Computer scientist Douglas Engelbart kicks off the personal computer revolution with a product demonstration that is so amazing it inspires a generation of technologists. It will become known as "the mother of all demos."
The presentation included the debut of the computer mouse, which Engelbart used to control an onscreen pointer in exactly the same way we do today. For a world used to thinking of computers as impersonal boxes that read punched cards, whir awhile, then spit out reams of teletype paper, this kind of real-time graphical control was amazing enough.
But Engelbart went beyond merely demonstrating a new input device — way beyond. His demo that day in San Francisco's Brooks Hall also premiered "what you see is what you get" editing, text and graphics displayed on a single screen, shared-screen videoconferencing, outlining, windows, version control, context-sensitive help and hyperlinks. Bam!
What's more, it was likely the first appearance of computer-generated slides, complete with bullet lists and Engelbart reading aloud every word onscreen. Fortunately, the proto-PowerPoint section only made up a small fraction of his otherwise understated and impressive tour de force. And though it took years for the industry to catch up, many later computer scientists acknowledged their debt to Engelbart.
The demo was the fruit of nearly 10 years' work into ways that computers might be used to help ordinary people work better on intellectual tasks. And by "intellectual," Engelbart wasn't thinking of analyzing data on nuclear fission experiments, he was thinking of ordinary office workers whose jobs involved writing memos, looking up information, filing things, communicating with others, persuading groups of people through presentations, and working collaboratively to solve difficult problems.
While most computer scientists concentrated on making computers smart (artificial intelligence), Engelbart was interested in how computers could make humans smarter, or what he called augmented intelligence.
The initial inspiration for Engelbart's life work came in the mid-1940s, when he was an electronics technician for the U.S. Navy. Looking at a radar screen, and perhaps inspired by Vannevar Bush's groundbreaking essay "As We May Think," Engelbart imagined a radarlike display that would let people manipulate symbols and concepts instead of merely monitoring bogies and blips.
At the Stanford Research Institute, a think-tank–research-lab offshoot of Stanford University, Engelbart was finally able to set up a lab, the Augmentation Research Center, to develop his ideas on computer-assisted intelligence.
By 1968, the lab had developed a complete system, which the researchers called NLS (a somewhat oblique abbreviation for oNLine System). The system included an SDS 940 mainframe computer with 12 time-sharing terminals — each of which had a keyboard, a cathode-ray–tube display, a mouse and a strange five-key "chord key set" for operators to enter commands. The SRI team ate their own dog food, too: They used NLS for their daily work, including using it to write and organize the code that ran NLS itself.
NLS was more difficult to learn than today's graphical user interfaces, but for an adept user it was remarkably fast and efficient. Watching the film of Engelbart's demo, even a modern-day computer user might feel envious at the speed and ease with which he moved words, sentences and outline headings on the page.
Helping Engelbart make the demo a success was a team of engineers back at SRI headquarters in Menlo Park. The computers were connected to Brooks Hall with a microwave link and two high-speed 1,200-baud modem lines (which were capable of not quite 1,200 bits per second, or about 0.3 percent the speed of a modern DSL line). And a young Stewart Brand — who would shortly launch The Whole Earth Catalog — operated one of the cameras in Menlo Park. Brand, along with others, would later take Engelbart's ideas about computers, add a dose of psychedelia and populism, and kick off the personal computer revolution in earnest.
Engelbart's career never again hit quite such a high note, and his ambitious visions for computer-assisted collaboration were never fully realized. While the tech industry enthusiastically adopted the mouse and many other innovations from his lab, few people carried forward the idea of making computers tools for collaborative problem-solving. Now 83 years old, Engelbart is still committed to his program — and still uses a version of NLS on his computer at home.
President Bill Clinton honored Engelbart in 2000 with the National Medal of Technology for his groundbreaking work in "creating the foundations of personal computing."
An event at Stanford Tuesday commemorates the 40th anniversary of the historic demo.
Sources: SRI, Stanford University, Douglas Engelbart
-
Nov. 26, 1894: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener Born
Posted: November 26th, 2008, 12:00am EST by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
1894: Norbert Wiener is born in Columbia, Missouri. A child prodigy, he goes on to become one of the 20th century's most famous mathematicians and the founder of the discipline of cybernetics, the study of self-regulating systems.
Norbert's father, Leo Wiener, was a lecturer (and later professor) of Slavic languages at Harvard University, where the family moved shortly after Norbert's birth. Leo Wiener's interests, however, were wide-ranging. Leo educated his son at home according to his own eclectic (and harsh) methods, allowing young Norbert full access to his diverse library. The precocious Norbert showed an early aptitude for languages, mathematics and logic — although he later admitted that basic arithmetic caused him trouble.
Wiener graduated from high school and entered Tufts University at age 11. He graduated from Tufts at 14 and then earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard at age 18 with a dissertation on mathematical logic.
Wiener continued his studies of mathematics and philosophy at England's Cambridge University, studying with Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, George Santayana and G.H. Hardy, and making the acquaintance of the poet (and fellow Missourian) T.S. Eliot.
Rebuffed from a teaching appointment at Harvard because he was Jewish (despite his father's having been a professor there), Wiener joined the mathematics faculty across town at MIT in 1919. He remained there for a remarkably productive 41 years.
Within a decade of his MIT appointment, Wiener made several enormous contributions to mathematics, including a mathematical explanation of Brownian motion (the random movement of particles in a fluid), a problem Einstein had first explained in terms of the movements of molecules in 1905. Wiener's discovery led to modern probability theory and has implications in understanding many situations where countless tiny inputs produce a single output, from the movements of the Dow Jones averages to the distortions that a noisy line introduces in an electronic signal.
Unlike some mathematicians, Wiener was sympathetic to the engineering applications of his work and focused much attention on providing mathematical foundations to engineering problems, including wave-form analysis, signal theory and noise filtering. He worked on ballistics computations during World War I and on techniques for automatically aiming anti-aircraft guns in World War II.
That latter work led Wiener to a theory of cybernetics, also known as systems theory. Cybernetics is not so much a defined discipline as an interdisciplinary approach to the study of complex systems and how they regulate themselves to remain in equilibrium or on target toward a defined goal. A key notion of cybernetics is the feedback principle, whereby a system constantly adjusts itself based on feedback from the environment and from its prior adjustments. Wiener noticed that this principle is active not only in automation, but also in living creatures.
The word cybernetics derives from the Greek work kybernetes, meaning "helmsman." The verb kybernan, to steer or govern, also gives us (through Latin) words like government, governor and gubernatorial. Cybernetics itself spawned a series of other neologisms, including cyborg, cyberspace, cyberpunk, cybercash, cyberculture, cybersex, and just plain cyber.
Cybernetic theory has been applied to the understanding of biological systems (organisms), ecological systems, neuroscience, society, economics and more, but has arguably had its greatest impact in computers. Wiener's work had a powerful influence on later generations of computer scientists and robotics engineers, including J.C.R. Licklider, a key figure in the early development of the internet.
Despite his fascination with cybernetics and robotics, Wiener was also a critic of automation, warning that it would lead to widespread unemployment. In later years, he also feared that the increasing power of computers would some day lead to a devaluing of human intellect.
Wiener achieved so much fame during his lifetime that he was widely recognized beyond academia, and his likeness was even used on billboards. The quintessential absent-minded professor, he was a cheerful and lively conversationalist but left something to be desired as a lecturer. His discoveries put MIT on the map as a first-rate mathematics institution, and his personality and interdisciplinary way of working helped establish MIT's distinctively collaborative culture.
He retired from MIT in 1960, and President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the National Medal of Science in 1964.
Wiener died just a few weeks later, in Stockholm, on March 18, 1964. An obituary for Wiener in Time attributed the following "gospel" to the pioneering mathematician and humanist:
"Render unto man the things that are man's, and unto the computer only the things that are the computer's."
Sources: International Society for Systems Sciences biography, the American Mathematical Society biography (.pdf), the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive and Tufts University, others.
-
How Google Can Save Android From Certain Failure
Posted: September 23rd, 2008, 2:15pm EDT by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
T-Mobile's new G1 is the first phone to be based on Google's Android operating system -- but it's not a "Googlephone." If Google really wants to compete with Apple's iPhone, it needs to fix that, and fast.
Wired.com -
Bigfoot Hunters Fail to Produce Creature's Corpse
Posted: August 15th, 2008, 4:36pm EDT by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
A high-profile press conference raises more questions than it answers about two Georgia men's cryptozoological claim to have found a Sasquatch.
-
Science and Tech Go to the Olympics: Wired.com's Coverage
Posted: August 8th, 2008, 6:40pm EDT by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
From next-generation doping techniques to Chinese air quality to high-tech gadgets that help athletes compete better, Wired.com takes a look at the science and technology of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
-
Global Geek Out: iPhone 3G Launches Worldwide
Posted: July 10th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
Geeks around the world are lining up to be among the first to buy Apple's upgraded iPhone 3G, which goes on sale everywhere at 8 am (local time) July 11. Gadget Lab has ongoing coverage of the launch -- and the phone itself.
-
Nanotubes Hold Promise for Next-Generation Computing
Posted: July 8th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
Carbon nanotubes have been around for more than a decade, but so far they haven't shown up anywhere outside of R&D labs and tennis racquets.
Now, two separate groups of researchers have recently published papers demonstrating advances in creating, sorting and organizing carbon nanotubes so they can be used in electronics.
Because they are so small and could potentially replace two of the basic components of modern microchips (conductors and semiconductors), nanotubes have continued to pique the interest of electronics researchers. And that interest continues to grow, especially as the current technology used to make chips for electronics begins to reach its physical limits.
The trouble is that, until recently, making nanotubes was a somewhat random affair: You'd mix the required ingredients, grow a batch of nanotubes, and then sort through the resulting batch to see what you got. Researchers had no effective way to grow exclusively metallic or exclusively semiconducting nanotubes, and even ordering the nanotubes in regular patterns was a challenge. That has made using nanotubes on an industrial scale impractical to the point of impossibility.
"An ant is incredibly strong for its size. But nobody uses ants to do useful work, because they all run around in different directions," says Mike Mayberry, the director of components research for Intel. (Mayberry was not involved in the research.)
And so nanotubes have grown for the past 15 years -- knotty and bent -- since the single-walled variety were discovered in 1993 by IBM researcher Donald S. Bethune and NEC researcher Sumio Ijima. As molecular oddities, carbon nanotubes have always been fascinating. Each nanotube is made of a "sheet" of interlocked carbon atoms, rolled up into a single- or multi-walled cylinder. Although each cylinder is a single, narrow molecule no more than a nanometer (nm) or two in diameter, the molecules can grow up to several centimeters in length -- or 30 million times their width. A human hair that long would stretch 1.5 miles.
Even better, these strange carbon molecules exhibit great physical strength because they're held together by atomic bonds. They've also got unusual electrical properties: Depending on which way the sheets of carbon are rolled up, nanotubes are either metallic, making them good electrical conductors, or semiconducting, making them potentially useful components for the logic components of microchips.
A paper -- presented last month at the VLSI Symposium by Nishant Patil, Albert Lin, Edward R. Myers, H.-S. Philip Wong and Subhasish Mitra, all of Stanford's electrical engineering department -- addresses the problem of getting the nanotubes straightened out so they could be put to work in chips.
To be useful in large-scale chip manufacturing, nanotube components will have to be integrated with existing silicon-based chips. Unfortunately, growing nanotubes on silicon wafers produce a disorderly mess. The authors tackled that problem by growing the nanotubes on crystalline quartz, where they grow in orderly rows, then transferring them to a silicon wafer.
"If you grow carbon nanotubes on silicon, you will see that the carbon nanotubes are really unruly, like a bowl of thin rice noodles," says Mitra. "If you use a quartz wafer, the nanotubes are largely aligned with each other. They still have kinks and bends and so on, but they're pretty good."
Even if the nanotubes are reasonably straight, the problem of selectively creating semiconducting and metallic carbon nanotubes remains. Another paper, published last week in Science by Stanford and Samsung chemical engineers Melburne C. LeMieux, Mark Roberts, Soumendra Barman, Yong Wan Jin, Jong Min Kim and Zhenan Bao, reports that by changing the substrate on which the nanotubes are grown, manufacturers can control what kind of nanotubes form. Using a substrate of aminosilanes, the resulting nanotubes were almost entirely semiconducting, while substrates of aromatic compounds (such as phenyls) produced metallic nanotubes.
That's a more effective way of getting the right kind of nanotube than previous techniques, which involved sorting nanotubes after they are made using electrical or magnetic fields -- and which weren't usable on a commercial scale.
Nanotubes might be coming on the scene just in time, as modern chipmaking technologies approach their physical limits. Current cutting-edge chip technology creates circuit elements that are 45nm wide, and the next-generation technology, expected in prototype form later this year, will be 32nm. (Smaller circuits are faster and also allow chipmakers to pack more components into a single chip, making processors more powerful and capable.) That's getting pretty close to the limit of current technologies for two reasons: leakage and light.
As silicon-and-copper circuits get smaller, electricity leakage and heat dissipation become proportionally greater problems than they are with larger circuits. By contrast, a nanotube circuit could potentially be as small as 1 or 2nm, and it would be extremely efficient, even over comparatively long distances.
Also, the photolithography techniques used to etch microchip circuits are running into a physical barrier: The components are smaller than the wavelengths of the light used to etch them. Going smaller will require a completely different technology.
"Lithography is running out of steam," notes Subhasish Mitra, a co-author of one of the nanotube papers.
While industry researchers welcomed the new papers, they cautioned that it will be quite awhile before nanotubes are used inside microchips.
"These techniques and others are all steps in the right direction. They're good progress along the way," says Mayberry.
In the meantime, however, nanotubes might find applications on a larger scale than the inside of a chip. For instance, Mayberry notes that Intel has done research into using nanotube-based wiring as the interconnecting wires between different sections of microchips, or even as part of a chip package's cooling system.
-
So Long, Bill Gates, and Thanks for the Monopoly
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:45am EDT by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
He's a merciless competitor, a shameless "fan" of other people's ideas and an unapologetic monopolist. And because of all that, Bill Gates has done more to create the thriving computer industry than anybody else.
As Gates prepares to retire from full-time work at Microsoft July 1, after 33 years of doing everything from writing code to defending his company's business practices in court, many people are saying 'good riddance' to the man most techies loved to hate. What the critics won't acknowledge is that it was Gates' most obnoxious qualities that made it possible for the tech industry to grow as large as it has.
"In his prime, Gates combined the monomania of the compulsive software programmer with the competitiveness of Attila the Hun," said Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter and The Big Switch.
And that was a good thing. "A lot of people see Microsoft as the enemy of openness and innovation, but it's worth remembering that it was the open architecture of the Microsoft-based PC that spurred massive creativity in both hardware and software and sped the adoption of computers both at home and at work," Carr said.
In fact, the monopoly that Microsoft once had on computer operating systems was essential to the development of the computer industry, enforcing a de facto standard that permitted thousands of software and hardware companies to blossom.
' width=424 height=346 scrolling='no' frameborder=0 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0>
The Microsoft monopoly was one part luck, one part business acumen. The lucky part: When IBM asked Microsoft to provide an operating system for its new personal computer in 1980, Gates got the contract, even though he didn't have an OS to sell.
No problem. Gates immediately bought the rights to another operating system, QDOS, which he then recast as MS-DOS and sold to IBM.
The savvy part: Gates' fledgling company was able to retain rights to the new operating system, securing Microsoft's place at the hub of the PC industry. Later, Gates leveraged that monopoly into such complete dominance of the PC industry that Microsoft was able to collect payments from PC manufacturers for every PC they sold -- even if those PCs didn't carry a Microsoft operating system.
That monopoly was bad for competitors who had arguably superior operating systems -- including, later, IBM's OS/2. And it was built in large part on appropriating the best ideas of other companies, from Gary Kildall's CP/M to Apple's Macintosh.
But the upside was enormous because the monopoly created a stable environment where entrepreneurs could develop new companies and new products around a common platform.
Without that standard, the computer industry in the 1990s would have resembled the web today: diverse, vibrant and flowering with abundant innovation, but also frequently broken because of the inability of disparate products to make the most basic connections with one another.
"Unlike oil, pharmaceutical or steel, monopolies are a necessary ingredient in the technology business," Forrester Research founder George Colony wrote in a recent blog post. "It's only when de facto standards like Windows or de jure standards like HTML become dominant that usefulness soars."
Contrast that to the state of the internet today. While the web abounds in standards, a frequent problem is that companies don't hew to them (and since 1996, Microsoft has been guilty of this behavior too). Having trouble syncing your Google calendar with your Yahoo calendar? Wondering why your camcorder won't upload to your new Macbook, your iPod can't share files with your friends' MP3 players and your mobile phone can't display webpages properly? All of these problems are traceable to a lack of widely supported standards.
Just imagine if the same chaos had reigned throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Hardware manufacturers like Dell, Hewlett Packard, Compaq and IBM would still be battling it out with incompatible systems. And software like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and, yes, even Microsoft Office never would have achieved widespread success.
"[Bill Gates] made an unbelievable contribution," said Netscape, Opsware and Ning founder Marc Andreessen, while speaking at a keynote with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year. "It's hard to conceive what this industry would look like today if Microsoft hadn't standardized the OS ... I think the industry would be much smaller if that hadn't happened."
Of course, success breeds resentment, and Gates' aggressive business practices -- and less-than-polished personal style -- made him many enemies.
"The problem is when you're the biggest sequoia in the woods, everyone wants to cut you down," said Paul Santinelli, a general partner with North Bridge Venture Partners, a venture capital firm.
Gates didn't help matters by overreaching once his company's monopoly was firmly established.
"Gates became kind of a Godfather figure in the industry, demanding tributes from his partners and whacking those who threatened his power," Carr said. "So Microsoft deserves both praise for stimulating innovation and criticism for stifling it."
And then there was the problem that many of Microsoft's products simply didn't work that well. Indeed, as the chorus of complaints about Windows Vista grows louder day by day, it could be said that Gates is leaving Microsoft at exactly the right time, before the company's long decline sullies his reputation.
"If all that stuff worked right out of the box, we'd all be out of a job," said David Strom, an independent technology consultant and speaker in St. Louis. Strom has a speech praising Gates for, among other things, effectively guaranteeing full employment for IT people called in to make Microsoft products work properly.
But while technologists may curse Gates' aggressiveness and the buggyness of Microsoft software, they should also raise a glass to toast him as he departs the computer business.
"He didn't have the zest of a Philippe Kahn, or the elegance of a Steve Jobs, or the stage presence of a Larry Ellison. But the guy revolutionized the PC industry, and that's what people need to remember," said Santinelli.
-
By Open Sourcing Symbian, Nokia Kicks Off the Mobile Age
Posted: June 24th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
The mobile software age is here.
Symbian co-founder Nokia announced Monday night that it is buying the 52 percent of the software maker that it doesn’t already own and releasing its mobile operating system under an open source license.
With that move, Symbian joins two other major platforms -- the Google-backed Android operating system and Apple's OS X iPhone -- that give programmers tools for creating and deploying software for smartphones.
The Symbian OS dominates the world market, with about 60 percent of the installed base among smartphones. According to Nokia, more than 200 million phones currently in use worldwide are running Symbian software. But Symbian trails in the United States, where Research in Motion, Palm, Windows Mobile -- and now the iPhone -- are the major players.
Nokia uses Symbian software across its range of mobile devices, primarily with the extremely popular S60 interface. Other handset companies also use some variety of the Symbian operating system, including Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo.
"Nokia could, if they found inside the corporation the resolve to do so, come out with the definitive open platform," said Bruce Perens, an open source advocate and CEO of Kiloboot. "They would have a platform of the type we haven't seen since the original Palm. When that was dominant, there were 16,000 applications available to install. The question is, can they find the corporate resolve?"
The prospect of thousands of mobile apps -- instead of the few dozen typically available through most wireless carriers -- is something new in the wireless world. And the 6 million iPhones sold to date show that mobile users like having open, unfettered access to web applications and online content.
In short, what matters to handsets now is not so much features, graphics chips and innovative interfaces -- though those do help. What's critical is an easy-to-use development platform that enables programmers to create a wide range of software quickly and easily, so that they can give consumers the content and the software they demand.
Android (whose first handsets are expected later this year) is clearly aimed at that goal. And while it's not open source, Apple has built a complete developer ecosystem around the iPhone, including everything from development tools to a store (which will open next month) for selling finished applications.
That's a significant shift from just a year ago, when programming tools for handsets were specialized and difficult to use, and carriers and handset manufacturers alike kept a tight rein on mobile application deployment.
To support the new open source project, Nokia is establishing the Symbian Foundation, a collective of hardware and software companies that have pledged to donate code and resources to Symbian's development. Phone makers Motorola and Sony Ericsson are on board, contributing software from their UIQ project, a touchscreen interface for Symbian. Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo has pledged support and is contributing its Symbian interface, MOAP(S). Other supporters include AT&T, Samsung and Texas Instruments.
"Establishing the foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia, somewhat hyperbolically. But it is true that Nokia has, at one stroke, created an enormous open-source ecosystem, thanks to the huge number of Symbian phones already in use.
Nokia's move is a defensive one, of course. The Symbian Foundation plan is strikingly similar to Google's plan with the Open Handset Alliance, a collective of industry players who have come together to build and nurture the Android open source mobile operating system. On the carrier side, Google has NTT DoCoMo, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile on board. On the hardware side, HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung have signed on to support Android.
Nokia says it is even taking a Google-like approach to rolling out the open source code. It will release components of its code under an open source license at first, with the full OS to follow "over the next two years." Right now, Nokia says, it intends to release Symbian under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.
But not everyone is convinced that open source operating systems are the way to go.
"With the success of Apple's and RIM's models, we would have thought traditional handset vendors would develop and maintain similar proprietary OS models," said Tavis McCourt, a Morgan Keegan analyst. "We view this move as a long-term positive for the smartphone vendors that own their own OS (RIM, Apple and, soon, Palm)."
And it's still too soon to tell which mobile platform will win out. Symbian has the advantage of a large installed base; Android will benefit from the pure innovation seen when developers take a "sky's the limit" approach to building a new OS. And Apple provides a complete, turnkey approach to software sales via its iTunes App Store, which may appeal to consumers.
One thing's for sure: The floodgates are opening, and the coming year will see an explosion of mobile software for a wide range of smartphones.
Additional reporting by Betsy Schiffman.
-
Gallery: Mechanical Marvels Hide in Plain Sight
Posted: June 20th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
: You don't have to trek out to the dusty hell of Burning Man in order to see inspired feats of mechanical art and engineering. In fact, the back rooms and museums of your hometown may conceal feats of industrial genius that would put any steampunk artist to shame.
Take San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. Tourists know it for picturesque views of the bay, vendors selling clam chowder in bread bowls and bad street-corner buskers. But tucked into the corners of the San Francisco waterfront are such marvels as the most advanced mechanical computer ever made, prototypes of a gigantic clock intended to run for 10,000 years and a working steam engine three stories tall.
"It just occurred to me -- the most mechanical geek I know -- that if I didn't put these things together, the rest of San Francisco didn't either," says Alexander Rose, one of the organizers of a one-day, self-guided tour of San Francisco's mechanical marvels.
The tour, dubbed Mechanicrawl and sponsored by the Long Now Foundation, where Rose works, will take place on July 12. Wired.com got an early preview of some of the day's attractions, which include special access to exhibits at the Exploratorium, the Long Now Foundation's offices, a World War II submarine and Liberty ship, and the Musée Mécanique.
Left: One of the stops on the tour is San Francisco's hands-on museum, the Exploratorium. During the tour, volunteer docents will point out exhibits that are particularly interesting to the mechanically minded. Here, kids pedal to generate electrical power in an exhibit built by museum founder Frank Oppenheimer. The generator is mounted on an early 20th-century cast iron lathe.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Caution: 2,000-Degree Sparks
The Exploratorium's "Catch a Falling Spark" exhibit gives visitors a chance to turn a hand-cranked grinding wheel, spinning it against a thick piece of twisted steel cable to generate white-hot sparks and a distinct odor of burnt clutch. Although the sparks are 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, they're so small that it's safe to let them bounce off your bare hand.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Loop Dreams
The Exploratorium's "Rope Squirter" is a simple powered flywheel that throws a loop of rope into the air, forming an appealing curve of string that you can play with.
The museum's "head explainer" Ken Finn says he took this exhibit to a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where it sparked a controversy about whether the shape of the rope's arc is parabolic or not. Of course, the exhibit is equally appealing to children, making it a good vehicle for stimulating mechanical imagination in young and old alike.
"My six-year-old can enjoy it and I can watch geophysicists argue about it," says Finn.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Visible Sound
The Exploratorium's Kenn Finn shows how the museum's "Oscylinderscope" works: An oversized "guitar" with extra-long nylon strings is set up in front of a spinning drum that has alternating bands of black and white. As the drum spins, you can actually see the vibrating strings' waveforms against the moving stripes. Pluck the strings closer to their middles and you get nice, round sine waves; pluck them closer to the guitar's bridge and you get sharper saw-tooth waves that correspond to the harsher sound.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Never Needs Winding
At the offices of the Long Now Foundation, visitors check out some of the foundation's recent work. The foundation is designing and building a clock intended to run for 10,000 years -- an engineering challenge that requires designers to anticipate problems like the accumulation of dust and the fact that ball bearings will freeze up if they sit for long periods without moving.
In the middle of this picture is a mechanical orrery -- a kind of planetarium -- designed to show the current positions of the six planets visible to the naked eye.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Mechanical Binary Computing
The mechanism of the Long Now Foundation's orrery lies underneath the model planets. It consists of a stacked set of geared wheels. The rotation of each wheel corresponds to the rotation of one of the planets in the orrery above.
The orrery's mechanism is a binary mechanical computer with 28 digits of precision for calculating each planetary period. The wheels and levers of each layer comprise a mechanical code for calculating the rotational speed of each planet (for example, 224.68 Earth days for Venus, 11.862 Earth years for Jupiter).
The gear-and-lever design of the orrery resembles that of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, although the Difference Engine operates on decimal (base 10) numbers instead of binary (base 2).
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Equation of Time
Some early clockmakers used a kidney-shaped cam to convert between clock time and solar time. That's because the Earth does not revolve around the sun at a constant speed, so solar noon (when the sun is at its highest point) varies from clock noon by as much as several minutes, depending on what time of year it is. The shape of these cams was governed by something known as the equation of time.
The Long Now Foundation's clock uses an equation of time, too, because it resets itself daily based on local solar noon, ensuring continued accuracy over the millennia it will be working. However, the Earth's orbit varies slightly from year to year. For a clock that's expected to run for 10,000 years, those differences mean that a single cam would be reasonably accurate only for a relatively short time (just a few hundred years at most).
To overcome that problem, the clock's designers came up with a three-dimensional cam, whose cross-section gradually changes shape along its vertical axis. This complex, compact shape enables the clock to compute the difference between solar time and clock time for every day over a period of 12 millennia (there's a grace period of 1,000 years on either end of the cam's expected useful life). The numbers along the cam correspond to years (02000, at the bottom, is the year 2000).
The Long Now's Equation of Time cam is available in the foundation's gift shop for $500.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Torpedo Targeting
Volunteer docent Richard Pekelney shows off the torpedo data computer (TDC) aboard the U.S.S. Pampanito, a World War II-era diesel submarine docked on San Francisco's waterfront.
The TDC was built in 1943. It was -- and may still be -- the most-sophisticated mechanical computer ever made. It used a combination of clockworks, electric motors, dials and levers to compute the angles at which torpedoes should be launched in order to hit their targets.
Torpedo targeting wasn't the only computation-intensive problem at the time. High-powered naval guns developed in the early 20th century proved difficult to aim, because of their long trajectories, the effects of wind and even the Earth's rotation. As a result, research into mechanical and electronic computing proceeded hand-in-hand with weapons research throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
"Most of what we consider early computing was driven by the need to aim these long guns," says Pekelney.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Stay on Target
The Pampanito's torpedo computer was hand-built in the 1940s in New York, primarily by Jewish émigrés from Germany, says Pekelney.
"What you've got here is the precision of a fine Swiss watch," says Pekelney.
In order to perform its calculations, the TDC incorporated data about the sub's location, bearing and speed as well as those of the target ship. The computation involved multiple differential equations, integrations and mathematical operations.
The TDC resides in the Pamapanito's conning tower, an area of the sub usually off-limits to visitors. However, it will be open to Mechanicrawl visitors on July 12.
For people interested in how the targeting computer worked, the complete TDC manual is available online. Archivists have also digitized rare audio recordings of a successful torpedo attack utilizing a TDC.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Torpedo Tube
World War II-era torpedoes could make a single turn, shortly after being fired from the sub, so the TDC computed the radius of that turn, then transmitted the setting to the torpedo by means of a remote servo before the torpedo launched. The servo controlled a small rod, which extended into the torpedo tube and connected with a mechanical linkage on the torpedo itself.
This image shows a close-up of the hatch on the back of a torpedo tube. The painted-on flag represents a Japanese ship sunk by a torpedo fired from that tube.
According to Pekelney, submarines were among the most dangerous places to work during World War II, but also were one of the war's most effective weapons. Submariners represented less than two percent of the fleet's personnel, but they were responsible for more than half of enemy ships sunk by the Navy.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Three-Cylinder Steam Engine
In the berth next to the Pamapanito floats the S. S. Jeremiah O'Brien, a World War II Liberty ship. This vast cargo ship has been restored to working order and the O'Brien now makes occasional fundraising cruises in the San Francisco Bay.
The O'Brien, like other Liberty ships, is powered by an enormous three-cylinder steam engine. It was designed to be very simple to build and very reliable.
This photo shows the engine's three cylinder heads. High-pressure, superheated steam enters the smallest cylinder on the right, then passes to a larger, lower-pressure cylinder in the middle, and finally goes to the largest, lowest-pressure cylinder on the left. This design, known as a triple expansion steam engine design, enables the engine to capture as much of the steam's energy as possible.
At cruising speed, the engine spins at just 76 RPM, pushing the metal hulk through the water at 7 knots. Although the ship will remain docked, the engine will be running during the Mechanicrawl event July 12.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Wrench Collection
At least 2,715 Liberty ships were built; only a few survive. The Jeremiah O'Brien was restored in the 1970s but, says the Long Now Foundation's Alexander Rose, many of the people who restored the ship are no longer living.
Rose hopes that the Mechanicrawl will inspire a new generation to begin restoring and caring for mechanical treasures like the O'Brien.
"The steampunk crowd, they go all the way to the point of dressing up in period clothing and restoring old steam engines. It would be really awesome if they'd help the Jeremiah O'Brien maintain its steam engine," says Rose.
Plus, then they'd get to play with cool tools, like these enormous wrenches in the Jeremiah O'Brien's engine room.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
-
Gallery: The iPhone 2.0 Keynote
Posted: June 9th, 2008, 8:45pm EDT by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.comSAN FRANCISCO -- As conferences go, Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference ranks low on the sexiness factor. It's a good bet that, without the promise of a new, iPhone 3G, the programmer-centric conference would not have drawn the hundreds of broadcast, print and blog journalists that it did.
Fortunately, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did have a new iPhone up his sleeve, and after spending an hour selling the company's new iPhone development tools and previewing some of the platform's forthcoming apps, Jobs delivered what we all came for: the new phone.
The iPhone 3G, as it will be called, will cost $200 for an 8-GB version, $300 for a 16-GB version. Both will be available in a new, slightly rounded case with a shiny black-plastic back. The 16-GB version will also be available with a white back.
Breaking with Jobs' keynote tradition, the iPhone 3G is not yet available: Both models will go on sale July 11 in 22 countries. Apple plans to make the phone available in 75 countries within several months.
For details, check out our full coverage of the WWDC 2008 keynote, or browse these slides for the highlights.
Left: Jobs' normal "reality-distortion field" seemed to be at ebb during today's keynote, which many observers noted was less exciting than a typical Jobs presentation. Indeed, Jobs -- looking thinner than ever in his trademark black mock-turtleneck -- let his deputies take most of the stage time. More than one audience member noticed that Jobs seemed to be looking a little wan and have less energy than usual. And maybe it's time for a new turtleneck? This one was looking a little gray, not to mention baggy.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.comApple's Phil Schiller, a regular fixture at Apple keynotes, touted the phone's new integration with Microsoft Exchange using "ActiveStink -- I mean ActiveSync." Was that an intentional dig at the Cupertino company's sometime competitor, sometime partner? Or was it a true Freudian slip, indicating Schiller's habitual distaste for the nearly ubiquitous Microsoft standard?
It's not clear. One thing is sure, though: Apple has provided deep and meaningful enterprise tools in the 2.0 version of the iPhone software, including the ability to "push" e-mail, calendar and contact updates. The company has also given IT managers the ability to zero out any data on a corporate iPhone, remotely -- handy when one of them goes missing.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.comApple executive Scott Forstall demonstrates how easy it is to create an iPhone application using the software development kit's new tools. You just drag in this snippet of code here, drop a button there and presto! Instant contact manager.
Like other software-development demos, this one had a lot in common with cooking demonstrations on TV: So much depends on having everything set up just right, ahead of time. In real life, you'd spend half a day doing prep work before you got to do the five minutes of dragging-and-dropping that Forstall showed onstage.
Still, developer after developer testified to the ease of developing iPhone apps. It's clear that if you're used to coding OS X apps, the iPhone should be a cakewalk.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.comOne of the applications shown at the March preview of the iPhone SDK was Sega's popular Nintendo DS title Super Monkey Ball. This game will be available for the iPhone for $10 -- once the iPhone App Store opens -- and will feature all four cute little monkeys and more than 100 different levels. Players control the rolling monkeys simply by tilting the iPhone this way and that.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.comDevelopers who want to create location-aware applications have plenty to drool over with the new iPhone 2.0 operating system, which has plenty of support for geographic data. In addition to the first-generation iPhone's ability to do geolocation by triangulating nearby WiFi hotspots and cell towers, the iPhone 3G will also have a GPS receiver, giving the device the ability to track its movements with great precision.
In this demo by location-sensitive social network Loopt, the orange pin denotes the user's location, while blue pins show nearby friends. Looking for someone to have lunch with? Loopt can help you hook up with someone and can even help recommend a cute little local cafe. (Friends not included.)
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.comMajor League Baseball's iPhone app takes advantage of the phone's fast 3-G and WiFi data connections to provide real-time game scores -- and "real-time video clips." That doesn't mean you'll be able to watch streaming video of the whole game, but highlight clips will be available for you to view within "minutes" after they happen, the MLB developer promised.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.comAmong the most impressive iPhone app demos of the day were graphics-intensive ones, including a medical-imaging program and this game, called Kroll, from Digital Legends. In the demo, a fully animated character ran through a beautifully rendered fantasy landscape, battling winged demons and an immense, scary-looking giant whose steps shook the very screen.
Like the many other developers who took the stage, Digital Legends touted the ease of porting its OS X software to the iPhone -- and also provided an impressive demonstration of the phone's built-in 3-D video capabilities. In terms of graphics quality, this game looked comparable to what you might find on a PlayStation 2.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.comPerhaps the biggest news of the day was a three-digit number: $199, the price of the 8-GB iPhone 3G. That's a significant drop from the current price for the 8-GB first-generation iPhone ($399), and a huge drop from the $600 that it cost when Apple first introduced the iPhone a year ago.
As if the mere figure weren't impressive enough, Jobs had the price stomp onto the screen with massive booming sounds, saving him from having to actually say the word Boom.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.comThe new iPhone 3G comes with a shiny black-plastic back, in contrast to the current model's matte aluminum. If you decide to spring for the more capacious 16-GB model (which will cost $299), you can also choose a shiny white-plastic back.
The iPhone 3G itself doesn't appear to be any smaller, thinner or lighter than the current version, although it has tapered, slightly rounded edges, which will either make it feel thinner or make it feel more like a bar of soap.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.comJobs made his customary brief appearance in the middle of the crowd, surrounded by burly bodyguards, after the keynote wrapped up. However, he didn't spend any time chitchatting with the hoi polloi, and no one got any hands-on time with his shiny new gadget.
-
Chip Company Unveils Open Source PC Design
Posted: May 27th, 2008, 6:00am EDT by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
Call it the Tom Sawyer approach to selling CPUs.
VIA Technologies, the self-proclaimed No. 3 maker of Intel-compatible processors, has unveiled a new "reference design" for ultra-portable computers based on the company's own low-power chips.
Making a reference design is common fare in the high-tech industry. Chipmakers like Intel have been doing it for years as a way of proving the technical viability of a product concept. What sets VIA's approach apart is that the company is posting the computer-aided design (CAD) files for its OpenBook PC under a Creative Commons license. Anyone with design skills and a burning desire to get into the PC business can download the files, modify the design and go into business selling ultra portables.
Taiwan-based VIA will even help aspiring Michael Dells find Asian manufacturers to do the hard work of turning those CAD files into real, plastic-and-silicon products.
VIA's design is on the commercial end of a growing spectrum of "open source" hardware. On the other, more noncommercial end are hackable hardware kits like the Arduino platform, which was used by many exhibitors at the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo, California. Open source aficionados were also buzzing last week about the release of the OGD1, a development kit that could be used to create open-source graphics cards.
If VIA's idea takes off, it could help add more juice to the already-humming market for ultra portables. That market, which had long foundered on the impractical aspirations of a tiny minority of mobility-obsessed hardware geeks, took off in earnest last year with the success of the Eee PC, Asus' $400, Linux-based ultra portable.
For industrial designer Scott Summit, VIA's move is part of a gradual shift toward more highly-customized manufacturing, in which small companies and even individuals are able to design and build their own products, thanks to the decreasing costs of fabrication.
"The idea of open source manufacture is taking shape, and we're going to see more of it because the barriers (to highly customized production) are really starting to evaporate," says Summit.
VIA's design calls for a 2.2-pound PC with an 8.9-inch screen, a webcam, up to 2GB of RAM, an 80GB or larger hard drive, and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (or, optionally, WiMax or 3G cellular data). It's not wanting for ports, either, with an Ethernet jack, three USB ports and an SD card slot.
The design is aimed at smaller design-manufacturers and upstart PC companies rather than big PC manufacturers like HP or Dell, who create their own designs (like HP's new MiniNote) from scratch.
"When we look at reference designs, they're helpful, they're insightful, they give us an optimal layout from an engineering perspective -- but they don't target what we're aiming for," says Stacy Wolff, a notebook design director for HP.
VIA's hope is that its design will encourage new designers to make ultra portables that are a little less ugly than the usual fare. It's a bet that the PC market will soon follow in the footsteps of the cellphone market, where what's under the hood is less important than how it looks.
"It's not really about the components inside at all," says VIA vice president Richard Brown. "It's personal jewelry."
Almost makes the idea of starting your own computer brand sound a little sexy, doesn't it? And for the chipmaker, it's not far from the notion that if you want to get a fence painted, start painting it yourself and try to make it look fun.
-
CES Video Gallery: Neonode, OLED, Mylo 2 and 150-inch Plasma
Posted: January 10th, 2008, 8:00pm EST by Dylan Tweney
Tags: [edit]
Wired News reprises the week at CES in video: lots of eye candy.