Speeds and Feeds

Wrapping up Speeds and Feeds, part 5: Access

In this last wrap-up post for Speeds and Feeds, I address what may be the most important issue in the future of personal computing architecture: consistent data access across multiple platforms.

Perhaps it's my multi-platform background, but I've never demanded or expected consistency in form factors, user interfaces or even capabilities. Variety in these areas is great; it's what makes the personal computing market so big. Variety is also why I keep so many PCs and consumer electronic devices around (see photo); I like knowing I have the right tools for many different jobs.

On the other … Read more

Wrapping up Speeds and Feeds, part 4: Security

Nothing disappoints me more about the evolution of the personal computer than the PC's lack of ubiquitous security.

There's no technical reason why PCs can't provide strong security. Improving security costs money, which provides a business reason not to do it, but the way I see it, the costs associated with insecure computing have long since eclipsed the costs of making systems more secure.

It's also true that there's always a way around any layer of protection, which is sometimes taken as another argument against improving security. As the argument goes, you have to be … Read more

Wrapping up Speeds and Feeds, part 3: Ruggedness

As I continue to wind down Speeds and Feeds, I picked ruggedness as the topic for part 3.

In part 2 of this wrap-up series, I on Tuesday discussed reliability, suggesting that an increasing portion of the transistor budget in personal computers should be used to avoid, detect, and recover from hardware, software, and data errors.

Ruggedness, the ability of a PC to survive adverse physical conditions, complements reliability by further increasing the practical availability of a PC to do useful work.

As with efficiency in power management (part 1's topic), this is an area where PCs can learn … Read more

Wrapping up Speeds and Feeds, part 2: Reliability

Personal computers have become much more reliable over the last 10 years or so, mostly due to the introduction of advanced operating systems with memory protection and hardware abstraction. The hardware itself has gotten better too; uncorrectable random errors are rare in PCs and extraordinarily rare in server-class systems.

These and other improvements have largely eliminated machine crashes. Blue-screen errors on Windows and kernel panics in Linux and Mac OS X still occur, but much more rarely.

Error-reporting services have become common, helping software developers figure out what went wrong. Most large developers now issue regular patches to fix newly … Read more

Wrapping up Speeds and Feeds, part 1: Efficiency

After 19 months of consulting--in Silicon Valley, we prefer that term to "unemployment"--I've accepted a job.

Once I start, I'll have to stop blogging. But while I'm still independent, I'd like to wrap up here by offering a short series of articles addressing several key topics in the area of personal computing.

Today, the topic is energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency has become a major selling point of today's personal computers, especially laptops, because power consumption determines battery life.

Unfortunately, laptops are being optimized for energy efficiency in a way that isn't … Read more

Tilera's balancing act: 100 cores vs. market realities

While we're all familiar with the steady increase in the number of cores in mainstream PC and server processors, the corresponding progress in the embedded-processor market has been anything but steady.

With mainstream PC microprocessors standardizing on four-core designs such as Intel's Core i7 and leading-edge server chips ranging from 8 to 16 cores, single-core chips are no longer competitive. For embedded systems, however, one core may still be the right answer; if more are needed, the choices range up into the hundreds.

The latest announcement in the many-core embedded processor market is Tilera's Tile-Gx family, which … Read more

The Gizmo Report: WikiReader--simple, singular

It's been years since the concept of a digital convergence was seriously debated. Today, it's rare to see a single-function electronic device.

Digital still cameras can record video, and camcorders can take still photos. Even cheap cell phones include cameras. There are Web browsers in cell phones, cameras, televisions, and digital picture frames. In fact, it seems like it's only a matter of time before everything with a battery or power cord will be connected to the Internet.

So it's a little startling to see a new gizmo that does nothing but display text, especially when … Read more

Taking a look at Nook

I'm very impressed by the Nook, Barnes & Noble's new e-book reader. It's clear B&N has studied Sony's Reader and Amazon's Kindle very carefully.

The Nook has almost all of the major features of both product lines, plus a few more, with few competitive disadvantages. B&N has also followed Amazon's lead on support services. The Nook has a very good online e-book store as well as applications to support e-book reading on Macs, Windows machines, and smartphones.

The Nook doesn't ship until the end of November, but here's what I found most significant from the announcement and the pages at nook.com:

Industrial design I think the Nook is attractive and well-designed. It looks better than the Kindle 2, but not as good as Sony's Reader Touch Edition, which offers a larger screen in a smaller form factor. Also, Sony's forthcoming Reader Daily Edition is only slightly larger than the Nook, but offers a much larger screen.

Secondary color display This feature surprised me. It seems expensive and insufficiently functional for what must be a significant added cost. The low resolution of this display (480 x 144, according to a CNET blog post) means it won't be useful for much beyond the basic user-interface features B&N has already described: book covers, menus, and a keyboard for note-taking. (Although I should note for the record that while B&N says "Its full-color touchscreen encourages you to bookmark, add notes, and highlight passages," I haven't found a photo on the company Web site depicting the virtual keyboard shown in some of the pre-release images. Perhaps that's one of the features still under development.)

By comparison, the secondary color screen built into the Alex e-book reader from Spring Design, shown in another recent CNET story, is large enough to be useful. Unfortunately, it's also large enough to be very much in the way, leading to an awkward device. Spring Design and B&N need to make up their minds-- are they making e-book readers or something else?… Read more

Mulling mobile broadband options

I've been thinking about buying a new gizmo, and it turns out I'm not the only one in the family having these thoughts.

My sister sent me an e-mail over the weekend:

I need a 3G card for my laptop and I'm going to get it from Verizon. What should I ask for? I just don't want them to try to sell me more or less than I need.

Coincidentally, I've been looking into the latest options for mobile broadband access for a couple of months now, ever since the two-year contract ran out on … Read more