hardware

Dec 10 2008   11:43AM GMT

Happy 40th birthday, computer mouse!

Posted by: Alexander Howard
hardware, Apple, Technology, cool, learning, invention, gadgets, desktop, tool, science, fundamentals, history, geek

Today the computer mouse celebrates its 40th anniversary.

Pictured is version 1.0, held held by inventor Douglas Engelbart.

[Image credit: CERN Courier]

Modern mice have come a long way since this wooden prototype but the essential function — transferring physical motion to moving a cursor on the screen — remains the same.

 

Some great factoids about the computer mouse, via Wikipedia:

• The name ‘mouse’ originated at originated at the Stanford Research Institute, where researchers noted its similarity of the cord to a certain rodent’s tail
• Bill English, builder of Engelbart’s original mouse, invented the so-called ball mouse in 1972 while working for Xerox PARC.
• The first mouse shipped as a part of a computer came with the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981
• Inclusion with Apple’s Macintosh is where the mouse really took off

The BBC has posted videos of Englebart explaining how the mouse got its name and the first demonstration of the mouse in a fascinating story that includes extensive quotes from the inventor.  (Sorry, no embeds available for BBC video content.)

Gearlog also has a great guided tour of 40 Years of The Mouse, if you’d like to take look back at the evolution of modern computing’s most ubiquitous peripheral.

Just move that cursor over and click on the hyperlink above — and thank Engelbart for his vision.

May 22 2008   11:55AM GMT

What is the missing link of integrated circuitry? The memristor!

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Storage, hardware, Technology, innovation, education, learning, invention, conversation, fundamentals, history, memory

The discovery of Thursday’s Word of the Day, memristor, has been theorized about since 1971, when the possibility for a fourth fundamental passive circuit element was first described. The invention, fully described in a Nature article on memristance, The Missing Memristor Found, has thrown the science of integrated circuitry into a bit of…. flux.

[Image Credit: IEEE's Spectrum]

Ok, terrible electrical engineering joke. Leon Chua (the scientist who first hypothesized about the memristor back in the seventies), as quoted by Margaret Rouse in Overheard in the Blogosphere:

“Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years–voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge. “

Read HP’s Memristor FAQ for more information.

NPR’s Science Friday recorded a terrific show on May 9th on the discovery. From the shownotes:

Introductory classes in electronics are big on circuit diagrams involving different combinations of resistors, capacitors and inductors. Now, researchers say that they have discovered a fourth fundamental passive circuit element, one that complements those well-known three and fills in a gap in the basic equations that describe the relationships between voltage, current, and magnetic flux. The possibility of such a circuit element, known as the ‘memristor,’ was first described in 1971, but until now no one has found a device with the properties of that missing element. A group of scientists at HP Labs found that in nanoscale materials, however, the ‘memristance’ property becomes easier to see.

The find could lead to lower power, instant-on computers, as well as novel types of circuitry. We’ll talk with one of the discoverers of the modern memristor about the find and its potential applications.

Listen to the memristor show on at ScienceFriday. com or download the MP3 directly to your hard drive. You can subscribe to the Science Friday podcast there as well.

Mar 28 2008   8:53AM GMT

Video: IBM Rolls Out New Mainframe, the z10

Posted by: Alexander Howard
hardware, IBM, operating systems, server, data center, energy efficiency, video, YouTube, mainframe

John Belmont demonstrates IBM’s newest mainframe, the Z10. It has a starting price of about a million dollars.

IBM asserts that it represents a 50 percent performance boost and has dramatically lower energy costs over its predecessor.

Mark Fontecchio, one of the intrepid writers over at SearchDataCenter, reported on the announcement in IBM pushes System z10 mainframe as consolidation savior. In the story, Mark wrote that the newest version of “big iron”includes highlights like:

• the capability to run 64 4.4 GHz processors, compared with 54 1.7 GHz processors on the z9;
• 1.52 TB of memory capacity, compared with 512 GB on z9;
• Five models, ranging from a unit with a maximum of 12 central processors, to one with up to 64; and
• a larger physical footprint than the z9, standing more than 6 feet tall, taking up 30 square feet of floor space, and weighing in at about 2.5 tons.

IBM also previewed the new version of z/OS 1.10 due out in September.

Mark also wrote about an IBM System z10 mainframe beta user who touts HiperDispatch, a new feature allows mainframers to limit the amount of data that is moved during different sessions.

Mar 19 2008   3:17PM GMT

Video: Project Blackbox Tour

Posted by: Alexander Howard
hardware, Mobile, data center, YouTube, innovation, Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems uploaded this tour of their “data center in a box” to YouTube.

I have to admit, I’d be a bit more excited if KITT rolled out of this thing rather than multiple racks of servers. Data center managers may feel differently, of course.

Mar 19 2008   2:52PM GMT

Overheard in the Tech Blogosphere: Project Blackbox = a “data center in can?”

Posted by: Alexander Howard
hardware, Virtualization, business, enterprise, data center, energy efficiency, innovation, blog, quotes

“All told, I really like the idea of my brand new datacenter rolling in on the back of a tractor-trailer truck. It kinda reminds me of the setup the bad guys had in latest Die Hard movie. I just hope nobody buys one and hires only one person to run it.”

- Cliff R. Pearson

Project Blackbox (now officially called the “Sun Modular Datacenter S20“) is a modular virtualized data center housed within a shipping container.

For more, head over to our sister site, SearchDataCenter.com, whose writers and editors have been covering the development of Project Blackbox since its introduction:

• Sun renames, rejiggers Project Blackbox, a modular data center
• Prefabricated data centers offer modular expansion alternatives
• Sun Black box: A data center Winnebago

Mar 17 2008   10:20AM GMT

Video: Sony’s flexible OLED

Posted by: Alexander Howard
hardware, Mobile, media, Technology, video, YouTube, multimedia, innovation, cool, invention, gadgets, desktop, display

This clip demonstrates a prototype of Sony’s flexible OLED display. The color screen is only 0.3mm thick and fully flexible, even while content is being player upon it.

HowStuffWorks has posted a helpful explanation for how OLEDs work.

While the above video shows Sony’s prototype, the technology is actually licensed from Kodak. The Eastman Kodak Company, in fact, has been busy signing licensing deals with a number of electronics manufacturers, including an agreement with LG this past week.

GE’s announcement of a successful demonstration of the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured OLEDs lighting devices (press release) spurred the normal engaging commentary on a Slashdot thread.

Kyoto Prize winner Hiroo Inokuchi, whose organic chemistry work led to the development of OLEDs, is bullish on the techology. In this interview with Wired, he forsees applications in photovoltaics and improved energy conversion.

Will these thin, cheap and green color displays be embedded in surfaces around us within the next ten years? Maybe. Toshiba engineers are reporting problems with high OLED power requirements. In other words, cereal box cartoons may take a bit longer than that to play at a breakfast table near you.

Jan 4 2008   11:40AM GMT

The future is now. And the silicon cockroach has evolved and flourished

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Security, hardware, messaging, Mobile, Apple, Technology, Audio, multimedia, MP3, futurism, traffic, Bluetooth, gadgets, trend, telephony, science, texting, geek, grayware

It’s sometimes said that the only constant that you can count on is change. Change is necessary, after all — “Adapt or die” being an imperative of the natural world. And perhaps even more so in the world of technology…

These are the sorts of thoughts that occur as I poke around in the definition database, reviewing likely suspects for Words of the Day.  WhatIs has been around since 1996, when founder Lowell Thing started his little “dining room table experiment in hypertext.” Eleven calendar years ago. I’m not sure how long ago that is in Web years, for which the calibration must always be ramping up. However long the years since, though, what it means for us editors is a whole lot of updating.

We try, with varying success, to make definitions as future shock proof as we can without compromising the value of current information. Today’s Word of the Day, Antikythera mechanism, lends itself to that approach pretty well. You don’t expect a lot to change on a 2000-year-old computer. But for breaking news and link rot, we’re pretty much set with that one.

On the other hand, there are those definitions that seem to have been written in a simpler time, probably in the last century. Occasionally, I review a definition that predicts future developments that have either not panned out or have proven so prescient that all we have to do is change the tenses and phrases like “might become” to “is.”

Take silicon cockroach for example. I came across that one yesterday, looking for WODs for the weekend. John Sidgmore coined the term back in ‘98 to refer to the multiplicity of small electronic devices that he predicted would prevail in the future. We added the definition in ‘01. Now, as we flip lightly over into ‘08, I see that not only do the tenses need to be changed from future to present but a host of new life forms added to the species. No mention of MP3 players, GPS , USB drives…

What does our definition say now? Well … that depends. How far into the future are you reading it?
~ Ivy Wigmore

Dec 4 2007   2:54PM GMT

Year in Review: ‘Tis the season for the top tech trends and tools of 2007

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, hardware, Mobile, applications, Web 2.0, Web services, AJAX, Internet, innovation, blog, commentary, culture, social publishing, invention, green, reviews, resource, downloads, Development, listings, tool, trend, telephony, backup, science, nanotech, humor, communications, Web applications, e-cycling, buzzword, cloud computing, Amazon

Ah, December. The first real snow has fallen here in Boston, the malls are full of holiday shoppers and the blogosphere and pages of industry mags are full of annual summaries of the best and worst of the year in technology. We’ll be coming out with our own most notable word of the year, as you’d expect from an IT encyclopedia, so stay tuned. In the meantime, read on for a summary of some of the best (and worst) tech of 2007.

Around this time year, I laid out the top 20 IT buzzwords of 2006. To be fair, calling some of these technologies “buzzwords” now looks like a bit of a stretch, in terms of the strict definition for buzzword. Virtualization is everywhere now, in the network, server, desktop PC, storage hardware and data center. Web 2.0 may have been massively overhyped, but blogs, RSS, Ajax, wikis, podcasting and social bookmarking have all made an impact this year too, in a wave of adoption that many have now settled down to term “Enterprise 2.0.”

“2.0″ itself could be the word of the year, were it not for the discussions of Web 3.0 that led to some buzz fatigue and gentle reminders of the Semantic Web. (See this list of semantic apps for some insight into how this space is evolving).

SaaS applications from industry giants continue to be important for CRM. And at the end of every year, IT admins and CFOs alike can’t help but think of SOX compliance. Mash-ups, VoIP, BPM, 3G SOA, XML and data mining all continued to be relevant too, with nary a buzzword to be seen.

Anyone who creates, markets or sells content or services online know the value and importance of search engine optimization (SEO) by now as well.

While they didn’t make the number one spot (you’ll have to wait for that one) there’s no question that IT became greener, as tracked by the surge in spending, research — and hype. Green data centers , green computing, LEED certification, and, unfortunately, greenwashing all make the trend list.

Dealing with Vista is also right at the top of any trend list. Microsoft’s new OS has met with slow adoption and a slew of backwards compatibility headaches, and, as SearchWinIT’s Christina Torode reports, “Few Windows shops had plans for Windows Vista migrations in 2007, and it appears that there may also be little interest well into next year. Of more than 800 responses from IT managers to an online survey conducted by SearchWinIT.com, 37% said they had no plans whatsoever in place to install Vista, while 8% said they would begin adding the new desktop OS in the first quarter of 2008, and 9% expect to begin the upgrade in Q2 2008.”

So what else is new? What else mattered? If I just pulled from the words on WhatIs.com that received the most attention from you, our audience, you’d think it was dialectric materials, FUBAR , chaos theory, IEEE, heuristics, nanometers and compilers — but there’s more to the year that that!

I won’t aggregate every 2007 list here (after all, Fimoculous.com has, yet again, done a great job of pulling together 2007 lists) but following are some of the best that cover IT. You’ll find great new Websites, tools and services — exactly what we promise to provide you in this space from week to week.

Enjoy the lists — and, of course, don’t forget to subscribe to to our newsfeed for the best enterprise IT news or subscribe to our tipsfeed for the best enterprise IT tools and expert advice to help you work better and faster.

Jason Hiner takes aim at hardware and software in The 10 most important business technology products of 2007, noting the i-Mate, Sprint Xohm, Salesforce.com, Vista/Leopard, LinkedIn, Zoho Office, Cisco Telepresence, Microsoft Office 2007, OQO and the Apple iPhone.Personally, I agree with the commenters that the XO of the OLPC project should be in the conversation, though perhaps not on this list, as Jason says. I’d add OpenOffice, personally.

PCWorld misses that one too — though not many others — in this immense roundup of the Top 100 Products of 2007.

This list is a grab bag of hardware, software, Web sites and services. Techies will find plenty to quibble with — can you really compare the Intel Core 2 Duo with Pandora.com, Guitar Hero 2 and Netflix without segmenting them out — but if you’re looking for a good list of what mattered to techies and netizens alike to discover the best of the best, you could do much worse.

PCWorld also featured a terrific list of the top 100 undiscovered Web sites in August, if you missed it, along with their top 100 classic Web sites.

Some of my favorites (and now bookmarks) include Wink, Footnote, Wikisky, DZone, Programmable Web, VideoJug and Zoho and Meebo. Happy surfing!Time Magazine, in much the same vein, offers up their 50 Best Websites of 2007.

My favorites here have to be CellSwapper.com, Last.fm, Newsvine.com, Tumblr, Twitter, GrandCentral and, for some of the best laughs of the year, the outrageous FunnyOrDie.com.

If you didn’t see Will Ferrell’s “The Landlord,” you missed out. StumbleUpon is, for my money, the breakout Web site of the year, though YouTube and Facebook fans may disagree.

(Stumble this blog and find out what I mean).

I liked Mozy.com for online backup, too.

It isn’t quite a 2007 roundup but Esquire’s six ideas that will change the world offered such intriguing suggestions that I couldn’t help but mention them:

• a low energy method for getting rust nanoparticles to bind to arsenic for water purification in the developing world
• Internet “hacktivists” who use Psiphon to provide uncensored Net access to netizens stranded in regimes hostile to the free flow of information and ideas
• flexible circuits embedded in silicone skin that can be used for prostheses and wearable computers
• self-modeling robots who use the principles of natural selection found in evolutionary theory to arrive at the optimal model for a structure or mechanism
• CO2 sequestering in the deepest water of the oceans to force it to become a liquid heavier than water
• biodegradable plastic produced in an environmentally friendly way

For more in that vein, make sure to consult the pages of MIT’s Technology Review, where they list the following exciting emerging technologies:

• optical antennas and meta­materials
• peer-to-peer video,
• personalized medical monitors
• compressive sensing
• nanohealing and quantum-dot solar power
• single-cell analysis
• mobile augmented reality

On the other side of the coin, eWeek’s Brian Moore illustrated a list of technologies and services that flopped, floundered or aren’t quite ready for prime time in 2007’s Biggest Emerging Technology Disappointments. You’ll find virtual worlds, in the form of Second Life, ultramobile micro-PCs, home-based VoIP, mobile security for smartphones, IPv6, ebook reader (Hello, Kindle!), WiMax, BlueRay/HD DVD and MuniWiFi.

It’s hard to argue with the selections, though I do think that Kindle’s eInk technology offers the closest thing to a pleasant electronic reading experience yet.

Wired is calling for nominees for its 10th anniversary vaporware awards, too, if you want to get in on voting for what didn’t materialize this year.

Personally, and I know I’m burying the lede here, 2007 was the year that the network took a huge step towards being the computer, a trend acknowledged by Amazon, IBM and Microsoft in one form or another. (And yes, I’m talking about our word of the year again here.) Sun talked about that phenomenon ten years ago, though it missed an opportunity by not open sourcing Java. This model of Internet-based supercomputing, where vast stores of information and processing resources can be tapped into remotely by a laptop, PC, smartphone or other connected device is still building momentum..

2007 saw the introduction of more devices than ever before, including the gPC, iPhone and XO, that all move the user into this browser-based, Web application world, enabled and enobled by Ajax. Between open source operating systems, browsers, office productivity applications and inexpensive hardware, users and organizations can do more and create more than ever before, albeit in increasingly insecure environments.

We may take a stab at some predictions for the year ahead some time soon, once we finish digesting the year that was. Feel free to let me know what YOU think the most important trends and technologies for 2008 will be through email or in the comments.

Oct 24 2007   1:09PM GMT

Went to Vegas, lost my RFID (chips)

Posted by: Dennis Shiao
hardware, business, useful

I’ve always considered RFID to be “neat technology”.  I knew that Walmart was starting to mandate the use of RFID by its many suppliers, but beyond that, I never really heard of any practical, “real world” use of the technology.  I guess some credit card suppliers were considering it (or perhaps already are using it), but RFID had never really “hit home” at a personal level.

Now granted, I’m not big on gambling (I go to casinos for the buffets, frankly) - but here, to me is a “real world” example of RFID in action:

http://www.progressivegaming.net/pages/cis.html 

The Chip Inventory System, from a company called Progressive Gaming, uses RFID technology to provide tracking of chips in a casino environment.  Casinos can use this technology to track chip flow, detect counterfeit chips and determine how much was just won/lost on a particular bet.

It’s a little too “Big Brother” to me, but I can imagine that investment in this technology (by casinos) may have a nice return.  When I go for seconds on the buffet desert line, I’ll leave my RFIDs with a friend - back at the table.

Sep 14 2007   11:45AM GMT

Printer technology to deliver medication

Posted by: Dennis Shiao
hardware, Technology, invention, science, medicine

I’m sure we all have an old laser printer or two around the house - you know, the one that’s sits in the corner unplugged, gathering dust.  One of these days, we’ll put it up for sale on eBay or Craigslist.  One of these days.  Well, that printer just might contain technology that can aid in medical treatment!

Victoria Colliver, reporting in a San Francisco Chronicle article earlier this week, highlighted printer technology from HP that can be adapted for use in administering drugs to patients.  Here’s an excerpt from the article:

The same technology that Hewlett-Packard printers use to squirt ink soon could be administering drugs to patients through thousands of tiny needles embedded in a skin patch.

And just like a cartridge that can fire different colors, this new smart patch would be able to deliver several medications - at various doses and times, according to a person’s needs.

This is great stuff.  I will think about it the next time I’m buying a toner cartridge for the one printer that I do have plugged in.