Hardware | r-echos

OLPC 2.0: A Striking eBook and a Step In the Right Direction

OLPC 2.0: A Striking eBook and a Step In the Right Direction

Here is the the next-generation OLPC. It will consist of dual touchscreens on a single spine and include keyboard, face-to-face, and ebook functionality. The touchscreens will be built by a start-up by OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen. These screens will be readable in direct sunlight, just like the OLPC.

I’m glad that the second generation OLPC is more of an ebook than a laptop. While the “laptop,” as a designed object, is an excellent tool, books are what define our early education and creating an electronic book that works and is actively useful seems far more intelligent than the original OLPC, which is a stab at a “less is more” mentality that eventually hobbles the very people it is designed to help.

I remember a very interesting statistic from Freakonomics: the single, traceable correlation between a child’s ability in school and his home life are the number of books a family has in their home. I’m paraphrasing, but I’ve taken it to heart and I believe it to be true. A laptop is an interactive tool. An ebook, even if it’s just a glorified, dual screen laptop, is a reading tool. That is why tablet PCs never took off in the mainstream: people don’t know what to do with a form factor that is clearly not a laptop yet is also clearly a powerful computer. There is no way to connect the act of “scratching out words on a tablet” to processing worksheets in a spreadsheet. Why doesn’t the iPhone have handwriting recognition? Because it’s a horrible way to talk to a computer, even now. But that’s a different rant entirely.

That said, I worry about the project as a whole.

Read more plus video…

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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(via TechCrunch.)

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May 21, 2008
Category: electronic culture, interaction design, nice products
Tags: hardware, interface, laptop, touch
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Rollo Press™

Rollo Press™

Rollo Press™
Rollo Press™ is a small print studio located in Zürich and is operated by Urs Lehni.
The only printing machine available is an old Risograph RC 4000.

”

(via manystuff.org.)

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May 17, 2008
Category: art, design
Tags: book, hardware, print, production, workshop
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Google’s Secret Sauce

Google’s Secret Sauce: “
While there are many start-ups called by the media ‘Google killers‘, becoming more popular than Google is increasingly difficult. Even if Google started with an algorithm for search, it built an infrastructure that prepared its later expansion and became more important than the initial innovation. From New York Times:

Consider the question of Google’s greatest business secret. Is it the algorithms behind its search tools? Or is it the way it organizes vast clusters of computers around the globe to answer queries so quickly? Perhaps predictably, Google won’t disclose the number of computers deployed in its vast information network (though outsiders speculate that the network has at least 450,000 computers).

I believe that the physical network is Google’s ’secret sauce,’ its premier competitive advantage. While a brilliant lone wolf can conceive of a dazzling algorithm, only a superwealthy and well-managed organization can run what is arguably the most valuable computer network on the planet. Without the computer network, Google is nothing.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, appears to agree. Last year he declared, ‘We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures.’

Process innovations like Google’s computer network are often invisible to the public, and impossible to duplicate by rivals. Yet successful companies realize that maintaining competitive advantage depends heavily on sustaining process innovations. Great process innovators often support basic research in relevant fields, maintain complete control over the creation of every aspect of a product and refuse to rely on outside suppliers for important components.

Google built a file system ‘for large distributed data-intensive applications’, a programming model and a distributed storage system called BigTable that works on top of Google’s file system. Hadoop, an open source project supported by Yahoo, wants to replicate Google’s distributed systems.

{ Image from Eric Schmidt’s presentation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April 2004. }

“

(Via Google Operating System.)

March 19, 2008
Category: electronic culture, hardware, software, technology
Tags: business, company, expansion, hardware, infrastructure, model
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Understanding the undersea cable cuts… (updated: “fifth cable cut”)

Understanding the undersea cable cuts… (updated: “fifth cable cut”): ”

By Jesse Robbins

The Fiber Cuts in the Middle East are getting a lot of attention. The economic damage is real and the geopolitical issues are extremely complex (which is why I edited my earlier post).

From an operations perspective these kinds of outages are nothing new, and underscore why having ‘many eggs in few baskets’ is such a problem. I believe we will see similar incidents when we have the first multi-datacenter failures where multiple providers lose significant parts of their infrastructure in a single geographic area. (Remember: location is a basket too!)

To really understand the current issue, I recommend Neal Stephenson’s incredible (and lengthy) Wired article from 1996 entitled ‘Mother Earth Mother Board‘:

[...] It sometimes seems as though every force of nature, every flaw in the human character, and every biological organism on the planet is engaged in a competition to see which can sever the most cables. The Museum of Submarine Telegraphy in Porthcurno, England, has a display of wrecked cables bracketed to a slab of wood. Each is labeled with its cause of failure, some of which sound dramatic, some cryptic, some both: trawler maul, spewed core, intermittent disconnection, strained core, teredo worms, crab’s nest, perished core, fish bite, even ’spliced by Italians.’ The teredo worm is like a science fiction creature, a bivalve with a rasp-edged shell that it uses like a buzz saw to cut through wood – or through submarine cables. Cable companies learned the hard way, early on, that it likes to eat gutta-percha, and subsequent cables received a helical wrapping of copper tape to stop it.

[...] There is also the obvious threat of sabotage by a hostile government, but, surprisingly, this almost never happens. When cypherpunk Doug Barnes was researching his Caribbean project, he spent some time looking into this, because it was exactly the kind of threat he was worried about in the case of a data haven. Somewhat to his own surprise and relief, he concluded that it simply wasn’t going to happen. ‘Cutting a submarine cable,’ Barnes says, ‘is like starting a nuclear war. It’s easy to do, the results are devastating, and as soon as one country does it, all of the others will retaliate.’

As the capacity of optical fibers climbs, so does the economic damage caused when the cable is severed. FLAG makes its money by selling capacity to long-distance carriers, who turn around and resell it to end users at rates that are increasingly determined by what the market will bear. If FLAG gets chopped, no calls get through. The carriers’ phone calls get routed to FLAG’s competitors (other cables or satellites), and FLAG loses the revenue represented by those calls until the cable is repaired. The amount of revenue it loses is a function of how many calls the cable is physically capable of carrying, how close to capacity the cable is running, and what prices the market will bear for calls on the broken cable segment. In other words, a break between Dubai and Bombay might cost FLAG more in revenue loss than a break between Korea and Japan if calls between Dubai and Bombay cost more.

The rule of thumb for calculating revenue loss works like this: for every penny per minute that the long distance market will bear on a particular route, the loss of revenue, should FLAG be severed on that route, is about $3,000 a minute. So if calls on that route are a dime a minute, the damage is $30,000 a minute, and if calls are a dollar a minute, the damage is almost a third of a million dollars for every minute the cable is down. Upcoming advances in fiber bandwidth may push this figure, for some cables, past the million-dollar-a-minute mark. [Link]

Update Feb-06 @ 08:52 GMT: I am aware of five cable segments that are experiencing problems, including one that was reported on January 23rd which had a repair already underway. I don’t think this is a ‘fifth cut’ as some people are starting to report, and I’ll post an update if that changes.

A lot of needless confusion and worry could be avoided if FLAG Telecom and the other carriers involved would provide timely and useful updates on their website. It appears that they are doing a good job of restoring connectivity, but they are terrible job of telling an increasingly concerned public exactly what is going on. This kind of confusion resulted in false reports that ‘Iran was completely offline‘, which was corrected by the Renesys blog team after the story spread to influential blogs, Slashdot, Digg, and the mainstream media.

“

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)

February 08, 2008
Category: politics
Tags: hardware, internet, middle east, politics
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Is there a cable-cutting conspiracy in the Middle East?

Is there a cable-cutting conspiracy in the Middle East?: “
Various reports between 23-Jan-08 and 04-Feb-08 have the nets buzzing with conspiracy theories. Over that period, there have been five underwater cables cut or damaged. Here are some of the details:

23-Jan-08: A FALCON cable near Bandar Abbas in Iran was cut. There were no initial reports of the damage at the time; I found out about it from Wikipedia of all places!

30-Jan: Two cables, SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG Telecom, are cut in separate incidents near Alexandria, Egypt and Marseilles, France. Wide net disruption in the Middle East and India reported. New York Times report.

01-Feb: The FACLON cable suffers a second cutting, this time 56 km from Dubai.

03-Feb: Qtel reported that a cable called DOHA-HALOUL connecting Qatar to the United Arab Emirates had been damaged.

04-Feb: SEA-ME-WE-4 suffers a second cut near Malaysia.

The casualty count so far is five cuts in four cables in six days.

Additional information can be found at Khaleej Times Online.

‘

Mermaids with scissors? Cables, even underwater ones, are bound to fail sooner or later. But the rate of failures and who is being affected has some calling conspiracy. Here’s what is being claimed so far:

Anchors away… the wrong way. The two simultaneous cable cuts were first attributed to ship’s anchors. Egypt, however, reportedly has evidence to the contrary:
ITP.net report:

Egypt’s Transport Ministry said footage recorded by onshore video cameras of the location of the cables shows no maritime traffic in the area when the cables were damaged.

‘The ministry’s maritime transport committee reviewed footage covering the period of 12 hours before and 12 hours after the cables were cut and no ships sailed the area,’ a statement by the Communications Ministry said.

‘The area is also marked on maps as a no-go zone and it is therefore ruled out that the damage to the cables was caused by ships.’

One conspiracy disproved…

Mother nature on PMS. It’s possible storms in the area(s) may have generated underwater currents strong enough to snap the cables. Some people believe that sharks may be chewing on the lines, being confused by electromagnetic fields around the cables.

Probable, but I have doubts…

Information warfare. Perhaps the most likely answer may be Iran.
From Arabian Business.com:

The location of the breaks and short space of time in which they have happened has sparked fears the cables were intentionally damaged by the US and Israel to deprive Iran of internet access.
…
‘Clearly Iran, who was most affected, would gain nothing from such an action and is perhaps the target of those responsible,’ said another reader.
…
It is not clear how badly Iran’s internet access has been affected by the cable breaks.

The Iranian embassy in Abu Dhabi told ArabianBusiness.com that ‘everything is fine’, but internet connectivity reports on the web, citing a router in Tehran, appear to indicate that there is currently no connection to the outside world.

Unfortunately, India is America’s outsourced call center and was affected as well. Cutting the cables would have a negative effect on companies, and the government does not want to make their corporate masters angry.

There are also theories that certain agencies cut the cables to stop file sharing, and a YouTube video proclaiming this as a Neo-Con pretext to more Mid-East wars to make up for Duh’bya’s failures in Iraq.

‘

The TRUTH is out there. Maybe. It’s going to take a couple of weeks before the cables are repaired and service is fully restored. Maybe the truth of how and why the cables were cut will be found out. Until then, the conspiracies are going to fly.

“

(Via cyberpunkreview.com.)

February 08, 2008
Category: politics
Tags: hardware, internet, middle east, politics
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Cable cuts, conspiracies, and submarines…

Cable cuts, conspiracies, and submarines…: ”

By Jesse Robbins

It is 3AM at Social Graph Foo Camp and it seems conversations about data portability and authentication will continue until breakfast. As I was leaving to find my sleeping bag, several people insisted that sharing conspiracy theories about the three recent transcontinental fiber cuts was of greater importance than my own desire to sleep. Here goes…

It’s no secret that many governments tap undersea communications lines to install surveillance systems. One theory is that the cuts, initially reported as being caused by ships anchoring in rough seas, are actually a diversion to cover taps installed by a special submarine hundreds of miles away or by the repair ships themselves.

The USS Jimmy Carter is an example of a United States submarine equipped for this kind of mission, although other nations probably have this capability too. If such a submarine were doing this it seems unlikely that it would cause such massive interruptions. The whole point would be to do this covertly and so interruption would be momentary if it were noticed at all. More importantly, a tap is useless when the lines are out-of-service.

If the outages are intentional I suspect that there is something else going on.

(Updated: Feb-04 12:30 PST) I’ve edited this post and removed the ‘lolsub’. These theories are getting more attention after Egypt retracted an earlier statement about this being caused by ships and a fourth cable had problems. I don’t want to confuse the issue with humor that might not translate well outside of the technical community.

“

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)

February 05, 2008
Category: electronic culture
Tags: cable, connection, egypt, hardware, internet, middle east, politic
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Egypt finds no ships in area of fiber cuts and unconfirmed reports of problems with a fourth cable

Egypt finds no ships in area of fiber cuts and unconfirmed reports of problems with a fourth cable: ”

By Jesse Robbins

The UK Press Association is reporting that Egyptian authorities no longer believe that a ship at anchor is responsible for the recent fiber cuts affecting much of the Middle East.

No ships were present when two marine cables carrying much of the Middle East’s internet traffic were severed, Egypt’s Ministry of Communications has said, contrary to earlier speculation about the causes of the cut.

The ministry had originally stated that a ship dropping its anchor on the two key cables was most likely responsible for Wednesday’s cut in service that robbed Egypt, Saudi Arabia and India of most of their internet connections.

‘A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time,’ said the statement.

There are also unconfirmed reports of problems with a fourth cable.

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)

February 04, 2008
Category: electronic culture
Tags: connection, fiber, hardware, internet
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Flow 5.0

>Flow 5.0

Flow 5.0: a mashup of Art & Technology. Take hundreds of fan, stick them together, give them a sound and movement sensor and make people interact.

(Via NOTCOT.ORG.)

December 19, 2007
Category: art
Tags: air, body, diy, fan, flow, hardware, interraction, mirror, movement, tangible, visualisation
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Hack Turns iPhone Camera Into HD Camcorder

Hack Turns iPhone Camera Into HD Camcorder

An anonymous reader writes “Monsters and Friends has just released the beta of Drunknbass, a new iPhone hack that allows the unit’s camera to capture video. ‘While the iPhone’s 2.0 megapixel camera resolution may be mediocre for a still camera, it is excellent resolution for a consumer video camera.’ A standard definition Canon digital camcorder uses a 680K pixel sensor chip (because a standard definition TV’s resolution is only 520 x 360), while one of Canon’s HD camcorders uses a 2.9 megapixel sensor. The beta presently allows 5 second clips at 10 frames per second, but the finished version will soon allow infinite recording at 45 frames per second. Video of Drunknbass in action can be found on YouTube.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Via Slashdot: Apple.)

December 18, 2007
Category: hardware
Tags: camcorder, camera, hack, hardware, image, iphone, photography, time, video
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DIY hand-based 3D input

DIY hand-based 3D input

Filed under: Peripherals

If you’ve ever felt the burning desire to give your index finger a little more prominence in your day-to-day computing exercises, here’s your chance. A DIY’er has combined an IR-based, homemade tracking system with a piece of software that he’s coded which can translate the IR data into 3D navigation. So far, the system can track the movement of two hands using six individual points (we assume one per axis, per hand). Details are scarce on the project right now, but the prospect of manipulating onscreen images or spaces in three dimensions with a cheap and simple solution is definitely enticing. Check the video after the break to see a finger in action.
Continue reading DIY hand-based 3D input

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

(Via Engadget.)

December 14, 2007
Category: hardware
Tags: computre, control, device, diy, hardware, input, interface, tangible
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