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 a lot from cell phones. I expect my cell phone to continue operating normally unless it's physically damaged--and I expect that it will not be damaged even by fairly rough handling.
PCs, by comparison, are pretty fragile. I know that if I drop my laptop, even if it falls only a few feet to a carpeted floor, there's a good chance it will be damaged. The LCD could crack, the case could bend, the hard disk could crash, the battery latch could break. In fact, I've managed to do all of these things to one or more of the 15-plus laptops I've owned and used since 1984.
Not all laptops need to be rugged; for example, some laptops are used as small-footprint desktop computers and rarely moved at all, so ruggedness would be an unnecessary expense.
There are many situations, however, where greater ruggedness is obviously valuable: laptops for students (even in a classroom), field photographers, mechanics, factory workers, the military, and so on.
Some companies already make rugged systems for these applications, but demand for such systems is low, and they require a lot of additional engineering. The combination of small quantities and extra design work leads to very high prices; it isn't unusual to see rugged laptops with the features of a typical low-cost notebook selling for $4,000 or more.
There have been very few standard mass-market personal computers with any real degree of ruggedization. In the old days of 8-bit microcomputers, some consumer-oriented systems such as the popular Atari 400 and Commodore 64 were fairly robust due to heavy plastic cases designed to survive casual home use, but these weren't portable machines.
In the mid-1990s, Dell's Latitude line earned the favor of serious road warriors in part due to a high degree of ruggedness, if only in comparison with other mainstream laptops. Sometimes these Latitude models were the only survivors of annual notebook torture tests run by PC Computing magazine.
Panasonic's Toughbook line took over later in that decade as the first truly rugged notebooks. (I have a Toughbook 25 myself; alas, it's dead.) It's easy to see how these machines differ from ordinary notebooks: heavy magnesium casings with stiffening ribs to resist twisting, shock-mounted hard disks, water- and dust-resistant connectors, and so on. They aren't suitable for most people, though.
Three trends are bringing rugged systems closer to the mainstream today.
First, portable PCs are becoming increasingly more integrated into our daily lives. As power efficiency improves to the point that we can run them all day, portable machines will be even more important to us. But if these devices aren't rugged, we won't really be able take them with us as often as we'd like.
A simplified view of a small ruggedized notebook that I designed in 2005.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)Second, the components themselves are getting smaller, lighter, and in some cases more rugged. It's possible to buy a decent dual-core CPU that doesn't need a huge heat sink. Solid-state disk drives are a huge step forward; and with 128GB of capacity requiring only 32 flash chips, they can be much smaller than traditional hard disks. Smaller, lighter components are easier to support and protect.
Third, materials science is making a lot of progress. The glass used in LCDs is much better today than it was a decade ago--better able to absorb shock and flex a little when needed. (It's actually a little scary just how flexible the displays of some super-thin notebooks are.) New chassis materials such as milled aluminum and CFRP (carbon-fiber reinforced plastic) can produce very strong machines, though in most consumer systems they're used to reduce weight instead. In the near future, carbon nanotube-reinforced materials will become available in commercial quantities; while expensive, they will be very strong.
These new materials can be used in new ways to make very rugged machines that don't have to cost dramatically more than existing systems.
In 2005, as a practical exercise, I designed a small notebook with a milled titanium case and a novel mechanical design that provided exceptional stiffness. With a fixed battery and few external connectors (another improvement enabled by new technology), it would have provided Toughbook-like ruggedness in a very small and convenient package.
That design didn't go anywhere, but there are plenty of designers out there. I expect that someone will develop something similar before too long.
The current Netbook craze is directing a lot of attention to ruggedness as a design goal. These machines are small, light, and obviously portable, but they tend to be cheaply made and more fragile than many consumers would like. Adapting these designs to more rugged enclosures would add significant cost, but I think there's a good market for such machines.
Ready for a 250-watt notebook? Intel is helping its OEMs to design such extremes.
A presentation at the Intel Developer Forum last week discussed how to build notebooks around the Core i7-920XM Extreme Edition mobile processor, code-named Clarksfield XE.
It turns out that when I estimated the maximum power consumption of a 920XM-based laptop at 80 watts to 100 watts, I was way off! (A typical notebook, by the way, averages somewhere between 40 and 90 watts.)
My estimate was reasonable for the kind of typical 920XM laptop I had in mind, but Intel showed how to go so far beyond "typical" that the resulting machine could need a 250-watt power brick.
I looked around, and the biggest power adapter I could find belongs to the Dell Alienware M17x, which needs a 210-watt brick. (I trust someone will tell me if there's a bigger one out there somewhere...Just leave a comment below.)
... Read more
This is the second part to my early analysis of the new Kindle DX large-format e-book reader. In the first post ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview") I discussed the physical and software features of the new device. In the third post, "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks", I'll talk about how the DX will fit into the educational market.
The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with more than twice the screen resolution.
(Credit: Amazon.com)But here, let's talk about the DX's suitability for reading electronic newspapers.
Newspapers are about text, and there's only a moderate need for interactivity. For each story, the reader views the headline and perhaps skims the opening paragraph, and if it doesn't look interesting, moves on to the next story.
Even with these relatively undemanding requirements, the Kindle DX isn't as good for reading newspapers as a real newspaper. We're all used to the ability to glance over a full newspaper page worth of articles at once. You can't do that with the Kindle.
This issue boils down to the amount of time we spend reading articles vs. the amount of time we spend glancing at headlines and turning pages. Call that the "reading ratio." A real newspaper offers a very high reading ratio even if we're not reading much of the paper, because it takes so little time to flip through the pages looking for articles to read.
On the Kindle DX, the ratio will depend very heavily on how much of the paper we're reading. For those who just read through the whole paper, the ratio can be fairly high, probably 90 percent or better. It'll still be lower than a real newspaper because it takes a certain amount of time to turn the virtual pages of the Kindle, and page turning is much more frequent.
(Demonstration videos seem to show that page turning takes about the same amount of time on the DX as on the earlier Kindles.)
For those who read only a fraction of the stories in the day's paper, the reading ratio of the Kindle DX will be much worse than a real newspaper because the experience will be dominated by page turning. Since most of us can't simply increase the amount of time we spend reading the paper each day, I'm afraid that the Kindle approach to e-news will actually reduce the amount of news we read.
It's also worth comparing the Kindle e-news experience with that of the iPhone and a laptop. These devices have active displays with fast update rates, greatly reducing the page-turning delays. I use The New York Times application on my iPhone pretty regularly (once or twice a week, at least), and it's really quite easy to flick through the day's top stories, which appear on the iPhone with the headline, a thumbnail photo, and usually about half of the lede.
On the other hand, the delay to read the story itself is quite long, since the Times' iPhone software is not designed to pre-load the stories, as the Kindle does. The iPhone takes about 10 seconds to bring up a story once selected, but once it's in, there are no further delays. The rest of the story scrolls past as fast as I want to flick through it.
At home, on my laptop, The New York Times Web site is even faster. It's easy to skim the titles and ledes of about a dozen stories on the main page for each "section," and loading a story takes no more than a second or two. Once loaded, again, there are no further delays.
The Kindle DX simply can't deliver that kind of e-news experience because the screen technology is inherently too slow to support scrolling or fast page-turning.
In fact, it looks like the Kindle DX isn't even taking full advantage of its own capabilities. The newspaper interface is very basic: one wide column of text, not the multiple narrow columns that help us skim through real newspapers. I wonder why?
But again, I think the DX will do an adequate job for people who like to read most of the day's news stories. How much of the market that is, I can't guess, but I suspect it's a higher fraction among older, wealthier customers.
(Now, continue on to "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks", or return to "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview".)
This is the third part to my early analysis of the new Kindle DX large-format e-book reader. In the first post ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview") I discussed the physical and software features of the new device. In the second post, "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news", I described the limitations of the DX for news reading.
The textbook market represents an even greater challenge for the Kindle DX. There's a lot of variety among textbooks. Some textbooks will work well enough on the DX's display, but most, I think, will not.
The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with over twice the screen resolution.
(Credit: Amazon.com, Inc.)I think the key issues here are how each textbook is used, and what kind of illustrations are present in it.
Textbooks that are fundamentally like collections of stories, such as those in sociology, history, and literature, will likely be most suitable for use as e-books. These texts are read sequentially, so that the reading ratio (the time spent reading vs. the time spent finding the next thing to read or waiting for the display to update) can be high, and they can usually be written so as not to rely on complex color illustrations. (Though complex color illustrations are still valuable, and the Kindle DX doesn't support them.)
Texts for the natural and formal sciences will not work so well.
A biology textbook without color is almost inconceivable, except that if you have a Kindle, it's pretty easy to see how that works. Just download the sample for the Kindle edition of Steven Daniel Garber's "Biology: A Self-Teaching Guide".
Right up front, you'll get a hint that all may not be well. The e-book includes a disclaimer: "Due to the nature of digital conversion, some of the images included in this e-book may lack the detail and clarity of the originals."
And indeed, that's true. Much of the fine detail that would be visible in a printed copy of this book is lost here. Remember, textbooks are commonly printed on offset presses with more than ten times the linear resolution of a Kindle display.
And even if a reader were willing to zoom in to see the fine detail on an illustration (and if the Kindle DX allows it, which the earlier Kindle models often don't), the lack of color is utterly crippling. Biology textbooks rely on photomicrographs of cells in which subtle color gradations are essential to understanding the cell structure.
Perhaps some of these figures could be replaced by line drawings carefully crafted to communicate the same facts without relying on color, but some photographs are irreplaceable.
And line drawings have their own problems. I downloaded the Kindle sample version of "History of the Ancient World" by Susan Wise Bauer and looked at the book's maps on my Kindle. Some are fine, but many have notations that are virtually illegible at a normal reading distance, to the point where I can be sure that 50% more linear resolution isn't going to help enough.
For math, science, and engineering, I think the Kindle DX will also be inadequate. I remember studying these subjects, and what I remember about using the textbooks is frequently flipping back and forth through the pages to compare new material to old and find the applicable explanations and formulas when answering review questions at the end of each chapter.
The Kindle DX simply doesn't support page flipping. Backing up twenty pages takes two seconds with a paper textbook, but most of a minute on a Kindle.
Amazon has made deals with several major publishers to bring texts to the Kindle DX, and with several major universities to support the DX in some classes next fall. These are encouraging announcements, but these are just experiments, not evidence of the DX's suitability.
I'll be interested to see whether Amazon, its publishing partners, and these universities initially limit themselves to the low-hanging fruit in history and literature classes, or go after some of the more challenging courses.
Ultimately, I don't think any e-book reader is really the right answer for educational use. The better solution is to adapt textbooks and other educational materials such as exams to notebook computers, which can support more types of content (including full-motion video) and provide valuable interactivity.
And the even better answer, in the long run, is to develop systems that are even more tightly focused on education, with long-life batteries, rugged construction, and specific software and hardware features that aren't generally found in laptop PCs. I've been studying this problem for a long time (since I was in college myself!) and if there's interest, I'll go into more detail in a future post.
As expected, Amazon rolled out its new large-screen e-book reader, the Kindle DX. See Caroline McCarthy's coverage of the announcement here on CNET: "Amazon's big-screen Kindle DX makes its debut." I've spent much of the day reviewing the available information, and here are my first thoughts on the announcement.
Inevitably, the DX isn't exactly what I expected when I wrote my predictions earlier this week ("What to expect from Amazon and Apple"), but I got most of the major points right.
The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with over twice the screen resolution.
(Credit: Amazon.com, Inc.)Here are the basic facts:
It's 7.2" wide and 10.4" tall, just a little smaller than I expected. With so many things in our lives adapted to the size of a standard 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper, it seems to me that would have been a better target for the DX. (Internationally, A4 paper serves the same purpose at 8.3 x 11.7 inches, so perhaps 8.3 x 11.0 inches would have been a good compromise.)
The DX's monochrome E Ink display is much smaller than I was hoping for, only 9.7" diagonal. Like the original Kindle, much of the space on the front of the unit is occupied by page-turning buttons and a physical keyboard.
The screen has 1,200 x 824 pixels, about the number on the LCD of a 12" Dell Latitude E4200 laptop, so the Kindle DX's linear resolution is significantly higher than that of most notebook displays. However, it's about 10% lower than that of the 6" E Ink display on the Kindle 2 (150 dpi vs. 167 dpi).
As Amazon says, the DX's display is about 2.5 times larger than the Kindle 2's screen. But that's in square inches. In pixels, it's only 50% taller and 37% wider.
That's a key point, I think, because of the markets Amazon says the DX was developed for: newspapers and textbooks. I'll deal with these topics in two subsequent posts ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news" and "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks").
The Kindle DX does have a few unique advantages over the earlier Kindles. It supports rotation, providing a landscape display mode, a feature long available on Sony's Reader. Also like the Sony Reader, the DX has PDF support. On the Reader, PDF documents support zooming to a certain point, but even when zoomed in all the way in landscape mode, illustrations in PDFs of technical books are often unreadable. I expect the same will be true of the Kindle DX.
Oddly, Amazon isn't retrofitting these features to the Kindle 2. The Kindle 2 may lack the position sensor that makes rotation automatic on the Kindle DX, but it could still allow manual rotation. PDF support should be even easier to add.
Perhaps Amazon is holding these features back from the Kindle 2 to promote sales of the DX, but if so, I think that's extremely short-sighted.
Although it isn't particularly a Kindle DX feature, I'll mention something disappointing that I came across while browsing through Amazon's Kindle pages just now. Since the Kindle was launched, users have been able to email documents in various formats such as Word, HTML, PDF, and JPEG to their Kindles to name@kindle.com, where they go through an Amazon server that converts them, if necessary, into a Kindle-friendly format and downloads them automatically to the user's Kindle.
The fee for this super-convenient conversion and download service was ten cents per document. But now, Amazon charges $0.15 per megabyte, rounded up to the next megabyte. For PDF files and image-rich Word documents that exceed a megabyte in size-- a common situation-- the cost of this convenience has tripled or worse. Fortunately, Amazon still supports the "name@free.kindle.com" method, which results in the converted documents showing up in the user's email, from where they can be manually moved to the Kindle via USB.
I'm surprised that Amazon didn't equip the DX with an improved web browser. As far as I can tell, the DX has the same browser as the Kindle 2. It's still called "experimental," at least. The screen size of the Kindle 2 (800 x 600 pixels) is a little on the small side for effective web browsing, but the Kindle DX's screen is big enough to display almost any web page, especially in landscape mode.
Now, I'll move on to the two new markets for which the Kindle DX was developed. See "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news" and "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks".
I miss the old SGI. Silicon Graphics was widely regarded as the greatest computer company in Silicon Valley back in the 1990s. Sometimes forgotten--but not gone--SGI was one of our greatest success stories and one of our greatest tragedies.
(Credit:
Boxx Technologies)
Apple may have had more revenue by virtue of shipping millions of small systems, but SGI's hardware spanned the range from video-game consoles (the Nintendo 64) to workstations to supercomputers. SGI's Unix-based operating system, IRIX, was one of the most sophisticated in the industry.
I used to lust over SGI machines. I'd obsess over lists of used SGI gear, looking for a great deal that would let me have my own IRIX box at home. In 2004, I finally bought an Octane with MXI graphics... but that was years after these machines were effectively obsolete, and I paid less than 0.5% (1/200th!) of the original retail price of the machine.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, SGI was not well managed, losing huge amounts of money because its leaders would not... Read more
As usual, there were many specific rumors about what Steve Jobs would be announcing at MacWorld Expo this week. Several were reasonably credible, but Apple runs a tight ship; there's really no way to be sure what will come out at any given show.
The MacBook Air is remarkably thin and stylish, but it isn't for everyone.
(Credit: Courtesy of Apple)At the beginning of the year, based on the better rumors and some discounting of existing Mac products, I was pretty sure we'd see four things: new Mac Pro workstations, a refresh of the MacBook Pro line with Blu-ray optical drives and Intel 45nm processors, minor improvements for the iPhone, and a new subnotebook.
New Mac Pro configurations were announced a week before the show-- minor updates, but significant for the professional audience. We got the new subnotebook, the MacBook Air, this week. The iPhone and iPod got only some software tweaks. There was nothing new for the MacBook Pro family.
But that's okay. I'll keep waiting for a better iPhone, and I'm still sure there'll be Blu-ray equipped MacBook Pro models before long.
In the meantime, the MacBook Air is worth a closer look.
The first thing to understand about this machine is that it's aimed at a relatively small market. Apple made a series of design decisions that limit the audience for the Air, but for those potential buyers who aren't turned off by these choices, the Air is the best machine on the market.
If you're not part of the target audience, though, the Air might look like a poor choice. To quote a friend of mine, Mac book author Brian Tiemann, "Is it just me, or is this a ridiculously overpriced, feature-poor, and generally useless pig of an idea?" Honestly, I can see where he's coming from. I think he just doesn't see where the Air is coming from.
Let's list the obvious objections:
- Non-expandable RAM.
- Small hard disk.
- No optical drive.
- Non-removable battery.
- Peripheral interfaces limited to one USB port and one monitor output.
- High price for the included features ($1,799 and up).
Start with 100 million potential buyers and go down the list. Most will get past the first two points, but the lack of an internal optical drive will turn away a lot of people. The fixed battery is a big problem for a lot of people, and still more folks won't accept the limited I/O options. If you care about any of these things, the Air doesn't look like a good value for money. By the time you reach the end of the list, only a few people will still be paying attention.
But once they look at the Air, those remaining candidates may be quickly won over. It's so thin! The case is so cleverly curvy that it's actually deceptive. Visually it looks thinner than a fashion magazine, but in fact it's three-quarters as thick as a regular MacBook Pro, at least at the back edge. At the front edge it's thinner, but it doesn't taper smoothly down to 0.16" (4mm) as Jobs claimed in his speech. That edge actually hangs in air almost half an inch off the desk. (I didn't bring one of my digital calipers to the Expo, but I do intend to measure a real machine when I get the chance.)
It's too thin for a removable battery; the Air's battery is a lithium-polymer pack just a few millimeters thick spread across the full width of the machine under the palm rests and trackpad. (If you need longer battery life, you'll need an external battery such as the PPS-118 Portable Power Station from Battery Geek. There aren't many other options for MacBooks because of Apple's proprietary MagSafe magnetic power connector.)
The Air is also too thin for a conventional motherboard with sockets for the processor, memory, network interface, and other configurable options. The Air's processor, chipset, and memory are all soldered down on a board about three by six inches that sits to one side below the keyboard. The 80GB hard disk or optional solid-state disk ($999 extra for 16GB less space!) sits beside it. And that's all that's down there; that's all there's room for.
Apple says the Air is the thinnest laptop on the market, and I think that's true. I checked the websites for some notably thin notebooks including the Toshiba Portégé R500, the Sharp Actius MM20, and the Sony VGN-X505; all are thicker. (But most are lighter, and the R500 has an internal optical drive, so I'd have to say Toshiba deserves similar praise for the sophistication of its mechanical engineering.)
Also, the Air is faster than any physically comparable ultraportable, and probably offers better battery life when comparing the standard batteries. It doesn't have the performance of a full-size notebook, but at 1.6 GHz or (for $300 more) 1.8 GHz, it's plenty fast enough for Mac OS X or (if you prefer) Windows Vista.
And while you would inevitably run into bandwidth limitations, that one USB port can be connected through a hub to multiple devices-- flash drives, external hard disks, external Ethernet adapters, even additional external displays using the DisplayLink standard.
There are a lot of small notebooks on the market that sell pretty well. Dell's Latitude D430, for example, is the same weight as the Air, has the same display resolution (on a slightly smaller screen), has all the usual I/O ports and expandability, and it's a good bit cheaper. It's a decent-looking machine, but it makes no sacrifices to style.
By comparison, the MacBook Air looks like it's from a different planet, a more advanced civilization. It's like that because it's missing all of the functionality that forces the Dell machine to look relatively clunky-- all the connectors, buttons, and lights that make it more usable, all the latches and screws that make it expandable. The Air has almost none of that stuff, but while that makes it irrelevant to most people, the Air's clean, thin lines make it uniquely attractive for others.
If I was a Hollywood studio executive, a New York art-gallery owner, or an editor of one of those fashion magazines, there's just no other computer I'd want to use. I'm not any of these things, of course; very few people are. But do understand: there are people who are exceptionally style-conscious for personal and professional reasons, and the MacBook Air was designed for these people.
There are also people who wouldn't use an internal optical drive or an Ethernet cable or an Option GT Max 3.6 Express HSDPA wireless WAN adapter anyway. For these people, simplicity is a positive advantage. The Air is a complete computer; it just isn't designed to be the center of a complex computer system.
If all you need is a display, a keyboard, and a WiFi interface, and you don't mind paying a slight premium for high style, maybe the MacBook Air is for you, too.
On Wednesday at Siggraph, I attended an interesting panel (details here) on the subject of "The Potential of End-User-Programmable Worlds."
In addition to the two organizers, the panelists included Paul Hemp of Harvard Business Review, Asi Lang of Linden Labs (the company that runs Second Life), and Vernor Vinge. Vinge is a faculty alumnus of San Diego State University, but better known as the author of "9 or 10 science-fiction novels," as he says. (I asked about that uncertainty; he said it's more about the definition of a novel than his ability to remember what he's written.)
You may have seen some of the recent news about Second Life. Last week, Linden Labs shut down ... Read more
- prev
- 1
- next
