One Laptop Pogue Critiqued

I'm no great fan of David Pogue.

However, he recently did quite a decent review of the One Laptop Per Child project's XO-1 hardware, including a video showing off it's features.

Epoq Matchbook-Sized Video Player

According to this article over at Cool Gadgets, a company named Epoq has created a video player just a little bigger than a standard book of matches.

Amazingly, it packs in a 320 X 240 screen and a processor capable of playing back unconverted video at 25 frames per second. The price is $US100.

My complaint about every non-PC video player I've owned is that they all have piddling little CPUs, so unless you transcode the videos to match the screen size, they stutter, so I wish these guys good luck ... and hope they bring out a bigger model sometime soon.

RapidMind

My mate Paul has had a couple of articles recently on the rise of multi-processor computers. In particular, there was one on the difficulty of programming them.

Well, yesterday I read on Slashdot about a company called RapidMind, that has a technology which allows developers to write standard C++ code, but using data types from the RapidMind library which do their work in parallel, on a variety of architectures.

These include GPUs from ATI and Nvidia, Cell processors from IBM (as found in the PlayStation 3) or multi-core chips from Intel and AMD.

There's a nice video of one of their chaps giving a talk about it. The discussion is vaguely technical, but should be reasonably clear. In any case, the demo of 16,000 autonomous chickens and other examples starting at around the 32 minute mark are definitely worth a look!

Super-Duper Computing

Tyan has announced the release of its T-600 series of "Personal Supercomputers".

These things have up to ten Intel 1.85GHz quad core Xeon CPUs installed. Now, that's some serious processing power ... about 250 gigaflops worth!

They come with either Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (which I'd never heard of until now) or Linux pre-installed.

I had better finish reading my Erlang book quick smart!

Promise vs Reality

  
Art.Lebedev Studio's Optimus Keyboard was originally slated for release on July 14th, 2005. It was a marvel to behold, with colour LCD screens on each keycap, allowing you to completely reconfigure the keyboard for different languages or different usage. The original page is still available.

After many, many delays while they tried to keep the price reasonable, according to the Optimus project blog, they've finally announced that it will be available for pre-order on December 12th. However, the keycaps are no longer colour and their idea of "reasonable" is ... wait for it ... $US1200 !!