Hawkins new device prediction (update: Palm introduces the Foleo, a sub-notebook with proprietary Linux OS)

Tomorrow Jeff Hawkins will be revealing a new product for Palm, Inc. Despite him claiming that the product would not be a handheld or smartphone, plenty of people has been making predictions that it would. Knowing Palm's past business practice I highly doubt that the device would be revolutionary, but just to be safe I am going to predict something big.

Remember a few years ago when IBM research announced a mobile PC concept called the MetaPad (then later called the Mobile Computer Core, then later by IBM Japan as the PC Core System)? If not you can read about it here. While the concept never really took off (concepts has been shown by other companies, but I doubt it ever made it into the consumer market, at least not outside Japan), I do hope someone (be it IBM or another PC vendor) would attempt to market something similar. If it is Palm with their new Linux-based OS then that would be awesome, but like I said earlier, I highly doubt they have the ability to do so.

But one of the reasons I am bringing this up was because of Hawkin's assertion that it will be something to do with mobile computing with plenty of storage. UMPCs, PDAs, smartphones, dumphones and mobile internet tablets can all do that, but if Hawkins were to announce a new product that would fit into any of those categories that I just mentioned then I would be very disappointed. Well we will see about it tomorrow.

Update (30/05/07):

Ugh, this is the exciting new product?



A proprietary sub-notebook running on a proprietary version of Linux? The cost is even more ridiculous. US$599 (probably £499 here). If this were to cost say... US$299-399 (depending on specs), then I can think of a reason why people would want one (eg. a permanent and cheap internet only notebook for the living room), but right now most can already sync their Treos/Blackberries/smartphones etc. to a proper Wintel ultra-portable. This would be a pretty exciting product if it was released in 2001, when I still had a desire for a consumer Psion 7 series or a HPC. Corporate ITs may consider the product but I doubt there is a significant consumer market for it.

At least the design of the Foleo notebook looks pretty good. It appears to have a proper keyboard and it does come with a trackpoint/nipple mouse, the best mousey technology ever created. But still...

World Community Grid

Rather than donating money to charity chuggers, who pocket 50% of the monies for 'administrative' and tax purposes, do something better for a change by donating surplus computing power to research institute that can, in the long-run, benefit man-kind. And I know for a fact that everything I donated will be put to good use, unlike that of charities.

For the past month I have been donating computing power to the World Community Grid via United Devices client (you can also use the more popular BOINC client). Because the client only takes up idle CPU time (and it rarely put the processor under stress), electricity consumption is minimal. I only turn it on when I am actually using the computer, rather than leaving my PC on 24/7. Right now there are four projects on WCG, two of which my PCs are crunching for: FightAIDS@home and the Fiocruz Genome Comparison Project.


United Devices client calculating a WU for the Genome Comparison project on Windows XP

There are plenty of distributed computing projects around to suit anyone. CERN's LHC@home would probably suit physics geeks and Einstein worshippers more. Sci-fi nerds would most likely prefer to run SETI@home. Then there's the PS3 - Folding@home does demonstrate the crunching capability of STI's Cell processor.

Configuring IBM ThinkPad's TrackPoint middle button

If you are a fan of a ThinkPad notebook like I am, you would know that they come with old school TrackPoint mouse system, something I referred to as the "nipple" when I first used it ten years ago. As I am a TrackPoint veteran having played with them on selected Toshiba notebooks, so it worked well with me.

The thing about the TrackPoint is there are three buttons for it. The usual left and right are there but also a light blue middle button which the previous owner does not know what it does. I believe IBM calls it the scroll button, but it is a mainly disabled button for most part of this decade. Apparently. It used to work well in applications like MS Office and IE, but is now 'broken' due to it being not supported by newer versions of those software. It does not work with Firefox 2.x as well as the new IE 7.

Here's a tip that I swiped off jdavidb, download Logitech's Mouseware if you have any intentions of using the TrackPoint's middle button. After rebooting Windows XP, the Mouseware application would allow you to configure the middle button to do almost anything, including scrolling if you wish. As a person who missed the Windows button on the IBM keyboard (it doesn't have that until Lenovo changed the policy recently), I configured the middle button to launch the start button. Yay.

IBM ThinkPad X31-2672

See that ThinkPad X31 above with the lovely wallpaper of Keira and Scarlett? That is my new laptop! Five years since selling my Dell Inspiron 8100, I decided I needed a notebook after all. It isn't exactly new as this is a second hand notebook., but I did get it for £200 from a guy I know. He was planning on getting a new ThinkPad (R-series or T-series), so I guess was lucky I got this cheap! He even bought a new 6-cell battery recently (these costs around £100) and true enough the battery charge hold is almost 99% of the advertised capacity (according to PC Wizard).

Specs:
Intel Pentium-M (Banias core) 1.4Ghz 1MB L2-cache
Intel i855 chipset
512MB DDR333 PC2700 SO-DIMM RAM (upgraded to 1.25GB, capable of 2GB maximum)
40GB 4200rpm 2.5" (IBM branded, not sure about the actual manufacturer as I haven't open it up yet)
ATi Radeon Mobility M6 16MB AGP 4x (enough for super old games like Red Alert)
1024x768 LCD
Ralink RT2500 Wireless mini-PCI card (I will be upgrading to an Atheros a/b/g, hopefully)
PCMCIA Cardbus type-II slot (powered by Ricoh)
Compact Flash type-II slot
2x USB 2.0, 1x Firewire 1394
D-sub, Parallel port (this may seem useless but I have a laser printer that uses parallel)
Intel PRO 10/100 Gigabeat Ethernet LAN port
Agere AC'97 Modem
IBM infrared port

As the first ultra portable I have ever own I am very pleased with the ThinkPad X31. It is small and light enough, yet gives enough performance for everyday tasks. Despite being three years old, there isn't a single crack on the laptop, only some chipped paint on the LCD screen where a security tagged used to reside. The keyboard keys are still intact and not a single key label is missing (in comparison my old Inspiron 7000 keyboard had keys popping up in the first 8 months of ownership).

I have already replaced one of the 256MB memory stick with a 1GB stick giving the notebook a total of 1.25GB RAM. Other upgrades planned (but not too soon) includes another 1GB RAM stick (bringing it to a maximum of 2GB RAM), an IBM branded Atheros wireless card (£25) and a Travelstar 7K100 hard drive (£100). The priority is to get rid of the unauthorised Ralink card (IBM disables features such as fn+F5 and the WiFi icon for unrecognised cards) as its signal is very weak (though better than my desktop's Belkin PCI card).

Because these upgrades will push the price upwards closer to £400-£500 some might be wondering why I didn't just purchase a new notebook for £700 and save all the trouble (as well as getting Vista and newer processor/RAM and screen technology). Well I like to be able to spread my cost over a period of time and getting a notebook for £200 is the perfect way to do that. I won't be upgrading everything straight away as I see this notebook as an investment that would last 2-3 years. Besides the cheapest 12" ultra portable (X60) by IBM is easily over a thousand quid, and I really couldn't care less about dual core of 64-bit. Gaming can be done on my desktop PC and my consoles.

Upgrading also tends to give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

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Update: I finally purchased another 1GB stick and chuck it in. Now I never ever experience any slowdowns due to low RAM! I also installed a Ramdisk driver and allocated 400MB of my RAM as a ramdisk for Firefox cache. I also moved the pagefile there. Even though I have forced Windows to ignore the pagefile (by deleting it at first), some P2P programs always insists on using a pagefile. So there is a reason for creating a pagefile on a Ramdisk after all. With the 400MB ramdisk, Windows XP boots up leaving 1.2GB of free RAM to play with - and that is after loading ZoneAlarm Pro, avast! anti-virus scanner and Spybot S&D. Not bad.

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Update: If you are wondering, this is what I have currently installed on my ThinkPad under the Windows partition:

Windows XP SP2
Office 2003
- Word 2003
- Excel 2003
- Outlook 2003
Firefox 2
Opera 9.2
Agnitum Outpost Firewall Pro (trial)
avast! 4.7 Home Edition
AVG Anti-Rootkit 1.1
Spybot Search & Destroy 1.4
O&O Defrag Pro 10 (trial)
PC-Doctor 5
Nero 7
XnView

There are other junks as well but most are too trivial to list and some are just trials for testing purposes.

Blogger of the year: Groklaw

I couldn't agree more with Dana Blankerhorn that if anyone ever deserves the title of blogger of the year, it would be Pamela Jones of Groklaw. I have been reading PJ's blog since August 2003 when the SCO Vs IBM case came to my attention. PJ has been a huge asset to the Linux community in digesting the legal documents that so many geeks would not understand if not of her.

Congratulations Pam!

Cell - Intel chip killer unveiled

Information regarding the Cell chip has been released by IBM, Sony Corporation, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SEC) and Toshiba Corporation.


An example of one of the eight SPEs on the Cell chip (Source: Electronic Weekly)

The multicore chip has eight synergistic processors and is OS independant meaning it could work on a multiple of devices including consumer products like televisions and mobile phones (providing the issue of heat and size is tackled first).


Cell chip - you can see all eight SPEs on this multicore chip (Source: Eectronic Weekly)

These are the facts on the prototype Cell chip:

- Multicore architecture (nine core)
- Contains a single PowerPC chip with eight synergistic processors with 128 entry 128-bit register file and 256k cache per SPE
- Contains 64-bit Power Architecture with VMX (dual thread SMT)
- 2.5Mb on chip memory (PowerPC 32kb L1-Cache, 512kb L2-Cache and 256kb per SPE)
- 234 million transistors
- 221 mm2 die size
- Fabricated with 90nm SOI process technology
- 256 billion calculations per second
- 100 gigabytes per second processor bandwidth
- 4Ghz clock speed and above
- Memory interface by Rambus

The chips will initially be fabricated in IBM's 300mm fab plant in New York followed by Sony's Nagasaki Fab this year. Among the first consumer products to feature the chip would be Sony's Playstation 3 and IBM's powerful workstations.


Cell chip (Source: Tomshardware)

Source: SlashDot.org, GamesIndustry.biz, Electronic Weekly

IBM frees up 500 patents

IBM has pledge to release 500 software patents into the open source community as it proves its commitment into the Linux operating system.

This is great news. Although IBM will still own the patents, royalties are not expected by developers and users who use them in their open source softwares.

Hopefully the European Union will see fit to reject the pending and controversial uphaul to the EU's way of handling software patents.

Source: Groklaw

SCO's case crumbling

Those who knows me will know I am a Linux advocate. Not that I use Linux much or do programming but because I believe in open source. Although Microsoft is a necessary evil to me, I do use a lot of open source programs such as Firefox and OpenOffice.

I did not know that one day I would be supporting the Goliath - in this case IBM! I won't bother you with the history of SCO Vs IBM. For those who wants to know more you can visit Linux.org or Groklaw for more information.

Anyway here is part of Dr. Randall Davis of MIT's second declaration:

III. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

16. Despite an extensive review, I could find no source code in any of the IBM Code that incorporates any portion of the source code contained in the Unix System V Code or is in any other manner similar to such source code. Accordingly, the IBM Code cannot be said, in my opinion, to be a modification or a derivative work based on Unix System V Code.

17. As explained in detail below, I used two programs, called COMPARATOR and SIM, to help automate the process. COMPARATOR looks for lines of text that are literally or nearly literally identical, while SIM looks for code that is syntactically the same.

18. I used both programs to compare all 26, 759 lines of the IBM Code identified by SCO against all 67,797,569 lines in the Unix System V Code.

19. I believe that the comparisons I performed using these tools are conservative and hence resulted in more potential matches than might otherwise be found using a less conservative approach.

20. These comparisons required on the order of 10 hours of computation time on a dual 3 GHz Xeon processor system with 2 GB of RAM. This is a high-end workstation routinely and easily available off the shelf from commercial vendors such as Dell.

21. COMPARATOR reported 15 potential hits. I reviewed each of these potential hits in detail and determined them not to be true matches of copied code, but rather coincidental matches of common terms in the C programming language. (Paragraphs 30 below discuss conincidental matches in COMPARATOR.

22. SIM did not report any potential hits.

It is pretty obvious that the courts would never find any so called 'SCO owned Unix' code in Linux and SCO's arguement is getting thinner by the day. You can find the whole text at Groklaw.

Source: Groklaw

Patent spending: How the net is being trade marked

This article by Mark Ward for the BBC highlights the problem concerning software patents. You would not think much about it but large firms frequently apply for broad patents which they can later use to sue small firms who infringe the patent.
 
For those who are against such patents, I urge you to visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation Patent Busting Project. The project involves a campaign to root out the most broad patents or inventions that has prior art. This usually only concern the US patent office although Europe isn't safe yet. Earlier this year, France and Germany attempted to block reforms to the EC patent law from evolving adopting US style procedures - so its safe for now. Groklaw is a good place to read about patent laws although the blog site concerns mostly about the ongoing SCO Vs IBM case. Go IBM!
 
Some of those patented includes:

• One-click online shopping
• Online shopping carts
• The hyperlink
• Video streaming
• Internationalising domain names
• Pop-up windows
• Targeted banner adverts
• Paying with a credit card online
• Framed browsing
• Affiliate linking

Shocking isn't?

Source: BBC News