dynamics

General Dynamics' most ruggederiest laptop ever

"We have the most rugged laptop." "No, WE have the ruggedest!" "Psshhh, ours is even ruggedier!"

No, those aren't real words, but that's kind of how the marketing and advertising goes among the niche of companies making laptops that can stand up to dust, wind, rain, vibration, and getting dropped.

The latest entrant is General Dynamics subsidiary GD-Itronix, which has rebranded its GoBook XR-1 as the GD8000. According to the company, it's the ruggederiest of them all.

It's built to "mil spec," or military specifications for rugged gear, … Read more

IBM cloud announcement disappoints...again

Update: This post covers the Tivoli specific announcements that Gordon Haff covered in the post referred below. IBM made significant, additional announcements after this post was written, which I cover in a separate post.

I looked forward with great anticipation to Gordon Haff's post on Monday covering the Tivoli announcements at IBM's Pulse conference.

Specifically, I was especially interested in what Tivoli was going to offer to support dynamic infrastructure, in part because IBM's cloud DNA holds so much promise, and I have yet to see any magic from them.

As would be expected from Pulse, the bulk of the announcements are geared toward service management. From Gordon's post:

IBM service management software and services from IBM Global Business Services, IBM Global Technology Services, and specialized IBM Business Partner capabilities. Together, they enable organizations to design and implement IT systems that centrally manage and monitor an entire industry infrastructure, enabling greater performance of both traditional assets, such as manufacturing robotic equipment, as well as emerging technologies like "smart meters" and RFID (radio frequency identification). A new governance-consulting practice. Through the practice, IBM works with clients to design governance systems to help mitigate risks related to business changes, changing market conditions, and regulatory requirements. New Tivoli Service Automation Manager software, which automates the design, deployment, and management of services such as middleware, applications, hardware, and networks, tasks that today are largely done manually and thus are subject to error, time constraints, and other human limitations. New Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager software, which helps organizations simplify the life cycle of encryption keys by enabling them to centralize, automate, and strengthen security through key management processes, with an increasing number of IT infrastructure elements having built in encryption to protect them.

Ugh.… Read more

Video: Obama's new 'BlackBerry'

Much has been made of President Barack Obama's desire to keep his beloved BlackBerry as a communications device. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that, thanks to a "compromise," his boss will be able to keep a security-enhanced BlackBerry and use it for e-mail.

What's unclear is whether the device he will use is a BlackBerry made by Research In Motion, or a similar smartphone. The one that keeps getting pointed to as an option is the Sectera Edge, made by General Dynamics. It's the only such device in the category … Read more

Simple configuration for a robust security app

Short of an USB drive you keep on your person, a password-protected and encrypted folder is the easiest way to protect sensitive files. SafeHouse Professional Edition is easy to install and use, and quickly delivers a protected folder.

Installation is the most time-consuming aspect of this app, and it is a short process. Users merely answer a few questions with simple pull-downs and check boxes. You can create the safe folder in any size to fill the hard-drive free space. There are six folder encryption methods including the popular AES 128 and 256 bit, but the publisher recommends Twofish 256-bit. … Read more

Only open news is good news: Apture, Washington Post, Times Extra

These days, you don't need to launch portal sites that vie for new audiences. You're better served leveraging existing applications to provide new functionality for venues that already attract a fair share of eyeballs or that even cultivate their own communities.

Internet activist Lawrence Lessig points out a feature of Apture, a rich media content compilation platform, that promotes government transparency by allowing bloggers and other publishers to embed links to rich media background info on politicians and their records (i.e., key moments of testimony in videos, historical source materials, government documents, and even bills and resolutions). … Read more

Gizmine.com enables your Japanese gadget addiction

Thousands of delightfully inexplicable gadgets made only for the Japanese market are hard to come by outside the country. A new site from Japanese importer Dynamism is making it easier for us gaijin to get our hands on them.

Gizmine.com is the new specialty gadgets site from Dynamism. (Dynamism.com sticks mostly to laptops, phones, and watches--"luxury goods," in other words--sold only in Japan.) Gizmine allows the import company to expand into categories of products like alarm clocks, robots, and USB-powered toys.

The site is easy enough to navigate. You can sort by product category, theme (&… Read more

Scaling Amazon EC2 to 512 active nodes

Among all the cloud-computing hype, one thing that hasn't been evident is just how far you can scale across a provider. I haven't seen any other vendor come near Amazon.com's ability to reach the massive scale that the cloud itself connotes.

Max Gorbunov from Grid Dynamics ran a 512-node Monte Carlo simulation to find out how well Amazon EC2--short for Elastic Compute Cloud--would perform. He used GridGain, a Java-based open-source grid computing infrastructure for the test.

All in all, this test clearly shows that you can utilize Amazon's massive infrastructure for high-end processing with an acceptable performance hit. And while I am sure I am oversimplifying the difficulty associated with getting this all set up, based on the development notes it seems like it was fairly easy (at least for Max.) … Read more

Just what's so 'dynamic' about contrast ratio anyway?

Vendors want to sell you stuff! There, it's finally been said. Don't believe me? Well, you wouldn't be the first, but thankfully, I have evidence.

Within the last year I've seen a new spec, called dynamic contrast ratio (DCR), tossed around for computer displays. If you didn't know before, contrast ratio is simply the difference between the darkest blacks and the brightest whites a given display can produce.

Typically, computer displays have a contrast ratio of about 1000:1. However with DCR, you'll see numbers like 4000:1, 10,000:1, and higher. Basically, it's just a way for Company A to proclaim, "Don't buy Company B's monitor because it has a much lower DCR than our monitor." Since more and more vendors have been pushing this, I want to delve further into how they're getting these numbers. I also covered this topic in less detail (but with a sexy voice thrown in) in episode 2 of the Inside CNET Labs podcast.

Before a monitor is released to the public it goes through a bunch of testing in the vendor's own lab. These tests produce the specs that the vendor will then publish with the release. Specs like maximum brightness, pixel pitch, pixel response time, contrast ratio, and dynamic contrast ratio are all determined in the vendor's own lab.

When testing normal contrast ratio, vendors use a device that measures light to determine how much light is emanating from a display while it's showing both a completely black and a completely white screen. They then take each number, do a bit of math, and come up with the contrast ratio. … Read more

Viewsonic offers affordable 26-inch display

Twnety-six-inch displays are not the most common size of monitor out there, but Viewsonic is doing their part in changing that. Today they announced the Viewsonic VA2626mw for a price of $530. This price makes it cheaper than Dell's 24-inch model, but still more expensive than some of the others we've reviewed. I mean you are getting two extra inches here, though...

You're also getting a DVI, VGA, and HDMI input for your video connection needs and two built-in 2.5-watt stereo speakers.

Viewsonic claims a native resolution of 1920x1200 and a dynamic contrast ratio of 6,… Read more