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.
My active gizmo collection. Back row: Apple MacBook Pro (note the discolored helicopter tape protecting the palm rests), Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, NEC Versa LitePad Tablet PC. Front row: 4G iPod, iPhone, iPod Classic, OLPC XO-1. All of these items provide independent data storage.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)On the other hand, I really don't like the fact that all of these machines are, in effect, independent little islands of data storage. Sure, most of these things have sync functions to help move the relevant data among them, and syncing is fine if you only have one PC and one gizmo, but at some point it becomes a pain in the neck.
In 2000, as a columnist for Electronic Business magazine, I wrote a piece titled "Where do your data live?" In it, I lamented the proliferation of isolated data stores on the growing number of personal electronic devices.
I pointed out that the computer industry had already found a better way to manage this problem: caching. Caching technology allows data to be shared among many storage subsystems. Each datum is "owned" by exactly one storage device, and all of the stores negotiate among themselves to change ownership as needed according to how the data are used.
I proposed that we adopt a caching model instead of thinking of every gizmo as a separate storage device. Each file could carry tags that identify where the master copy of the data should reside and what other devices should have copies of each item. (This tagging can even be extended to individual records in databases such as address books.)
This approach would eliminate the need to move data around manually. Any two connected devices could figure out for themselves if any data need to be synchronized between them--and the Internet can keep all of our devices connected almost all the time. Cloud storage makes a pretty effective location for those master copies, too.
I still think this is a good idea. There are some proprietary solutions along these lines, such as the sync features of Apple's MobileMe and Microsoft's Windows Mobile Device Center, but these solutions leave much to be desired, including interoperability. I'd love to see an open standard for data sharing, including file system extensions to support the necessary tags.
A few things have changed since 2000. USB and Wi-Fi have become ubiquitous, making it much easier to connect devices together (though there's still plenty of room for improvement in that area). The storage capacity of personal electronic devices has soared; the Newton I used in 2000 has been replaced by an iPhone with over 680 times as much flash memory.
Perhaps even more importantly, it's become practical for almost any personal electronic device to access and process the vast majority of data objects we own. There aren't very many files on my laptop hard disk that can't be at least viewed on my iPhone. Most of the exceptions, things like Photoshop images and HD video files, can at least be converted to compatible formats.
These changes have made a caching strategy even more valuable. Of course, automated data movement makes effective data security even more important (see "Wrapping up Speeds and Feeds, part 4: Security").
Ideally, our devices should stop acting like separate systems at all, but rather as multiple views into one consistent set of documents. Each device can still have its own look and feel, but not its own independent storage.
I think these last five posts have suggested enough projects to keep everyone busy for a while. When that's all done, I'll explain what we need to do next!
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.
(Credit:
Barnes & Noble)
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
As has been widely reported (for example, by EDN Magazine and both Brooke Crothers and Dan Ackerman here at CNET), Intel has delayed the first customer shipments (FCS) of its "Montevina" chipsets, part of the new Centrino 2 platform.
The delays are pretty short, however... a matter of just a few weeks.
Intel attributes the delays to two independent problems: one with FCC certification of the 802.11n WiFi feature in the chips (just "paperwork," Intel says), and one with the integrated graphics engines in some models.
Intel's probably right about the WiFi certification problem. I've been through the FCC certification process (for electromagnetic interference (EMI), at least); there sure is a lot of paperwork involved.
For the graphics problem, I see a couple of possible explanations.
Intel could have discovered a design flaw in the first production units severe enough to prevent them from being shipped, which would have caused a substantial delay while a new run of production units was completed. (See my earlier blog post, "Design flaws, defects, and faults", for an explanation of how design flaws are related to product defects and faults.) This delay would have been largely hidden by the usual rounds of testing, but perhaps it just used up a little more time than the slack that was available in the schedule.
Or perhaps there was a design or manufacturing flaw that didn't require trashing the first production run, but which did require some additional testing and qualification to reject specific problematic parts. This could be caused by slower or hotter operation than expected, for example. Such a problem would cause a shorter delay-- just the extra testing time. A statement from Intel in the Crothers post referring to "re-screening" suggests this is the situation here, although potentially that statement could also describe testing a second production run to ensure the problem has been solved.
I find it interesting that this problem is related to Intel's new graphics engine, which is certainly the most important element of the new chipset. Intel's previous integrated graphics products have been criticized for not really being up to the challenges of running Windows Vista, including by Microsoft itself, but due to pressure from Intel, Microsoft certified these chips as "Vista Capable." That's technically true-- I've used integrated-graphics platforms under Vista myself-- but the resulting shortfalls in performance and features probably discouraged many new Vista users.
Graphics engines are very complicated, and getting more complicated every year. Intel started out well enough in the graphics business when it worked with Real3D (now defunct) to develop the Intel740, a discrete graphics chip, but 18 months later it found itself already 18 months behind ATI and NVIDIA, and fell back to selling only integrated-graphics chipsets, where the graphics component is worth only a few dollars in incremental revenue.
Intel plans to get back into the market for discrete graphics chips in 2009 or (more likely) 2010 with "Larrabee", a multi-core CPU in which some cores are optimized for graphics processing. I think Larrabee will turn out to be a technical disaster, but Intel has leveraged its market domination to turn previous technical disasters into financial windfalls. Think of the Pentium 4's "Hyper-Pipelined" design, for example, which was too hot and too inefficient, ultimately forcing Intel to bring its predecessor, the P6 design, back from the grave several years later. Intel's current graphics engines, however, are barely worth selling today, and they won't be worth reviving after Larrabee has run its course.
I'm a little late to the party with this unboxing of my new OLPC XO-1 laptop, but the machine arrived while I was out of town visiting my family for Christmas. In fact, there's a story there.
Before I left, I started hearing that people were receiving their XO-1's, and I realized that if mine didn't show up before I left, it would almost certainly arrive while I was gone. The OLPC people sent out no shipment notifications and didn't reply to several emails, so I had no way to delay the shipment or contact the carrier.
I left a note on my front doorstep: "PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE PACKAGES HERE. HOLD FOR PICKUP. THANKS."
But on Dec. 21, a FedEx delivery person left the XO-1 box right next to the note, and they were both still there six days later when I got home. All that time, the package was in clear view of the street. Never mind New York-- I love Cupertino.
If you get an XO-1, don't throw away the box! You'll need it for the free year of Internet access through T-Mobile WiFi hot spots. The box has the reference number for account activation.
In keeping with the low-cost nature of the XO-1, its packaging is minimal but adequate.
The OLPC XO-1 comes with only a few sheets of basic “Getting Started” documentation.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)The XO-1 comes with no manual, just two sheets of paper: one showing the hardware and software features of the unit plus some warning icons, and one with a thank-you note from OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte.
There's also no warranty booklet. The XO-1 comes with a 30-day limited warranty, but that's it, and it isn't written down anywhere.
I was somewhat surprised-- and pleased-- to see that OLPC provided a toll-free support phone number. As I'll describe in my forthcoming review, that might prove to be an expensive decision; the XO-1 is not yet very well documented, and some aspects of its operation are difficult to understand.
Of course, there's some XO-1 documentation online. Negroponte's letter points buyers to the laptopgiving.com website, which in turn points to the main laptop.org site, and from there a diligent search will reveal more detailed information on the OLPC Wiki.
But many aspects of laptop operation that are familiar to Windows, Mac, or Linux users aren't documented anywhere, as far as I can tell, probably because they aren't even supported. I can't find any way to control power-management features, for example.
Bottom line: the OLPC developers have a lot of work to do. These early systems don't even qualify as beta-test devices; they're just an alpha release, not feature-complete.
But they do work, and I still believe the XO-1's primitive state of development could actually be a positive benefit for bright children, who will be challenged to learn about these machines in ways they'd never have to do with a mainstream laptop PC.
Other than the documentation, the box contains only three items: the XO-1, the battery, and the AC adapter.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)The XO-1's limited hardware budget isn't wasted on unnecessary doo-dads. It arrives with the bare minimum of accessories: a battery and an AC adapter.
The battery is rated at 6.5V, 3.1AH (20.15 watt-hours); the AC adapter is rated at 12V, 1.42A (17.04W).
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)Both of these items are in keeping with the low-power design of the XO-1. Most laptops today come with larger batteries, often in the 50 watt-hour range; the XO-1's battery provides only 40% as much capacity. The AC adapters for full-size notebook PCs usually provide over 65W of power; this one is about a quarter as powerful.
But these are advantages, not disadvantages. A low-power laptop is like a lightweight car. A lighter car can use a smaller engine, brakes, and suspension without compromising performance. If the car gets heavier, the other components have to bulk up too. Similarly, reducing a laptop's power consumption saves weight in the machine itself and in its battery and power adapter.
The XO-1's battery compartment is well integrated into the bottom of the unit.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)You can see here that the whole surface of the XO-1's hard plastic case is covered by a pattern of nubbly dots that make it easier to grip without making it any more difficult to clean-- a wise decision by the developers. There's also a bit of whimsy around the handle section, where the openings are ringed by little "X" shapes that form the XO-1 logo.
There are four soft narrow feet at the corners of the unit.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)Since the hard plastic would still be too slippery on a desk, the XO-1 has molded-in feet made of some non-skid rubbery material. They aren't very tall; since the XO-1 consumes so little power, there's no need to create airspace under the case.
Each XO-1 gets a logo with a distinctive color combination.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)My XO-1 came with a nice blue/green logo color combination. I don't know how many combinations there are, but I gather it's a large number, reducing the odds that two students in the same class will have the same colors.
Open, the XO-1 shows its most distinctive feature: the antenna “ears”.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)The XO-1's ears contain 2.4 GHz antennas shared between the WiFi and proprietary mesh networks. They're also the locks that hold the machine closed. They engage with spring-loaded pins so the top will snap closed even if the ears are stowed first.
The left side of the XO-1 provides microphone, headphone, and USB jacks.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)There aren't a lot of I/O options on the XO-1, just the basic requirements. The microphone jack can also be used as a generic analog input; the XO-1 comes with an application that works like a simple oscilloscope. Neat.
(Actually, applications are called "activities" on the XO-1. Sometimes it seems like the developers are thinking too differently.)
Two more USB jacks are located on the right side.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)Another clever design feature on the other side of the unit: two USB jacks are positioned at different angles to make it more likely that awkwardly-shaped USB devices can be accommodated.
The XO-1 display is flanked by more buttons including a D-pad and a cluster of buttons like a game controller.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)The XO-1's display is about what I expected. Resolution is good, but colors aren't as vibrant as on traditional LCDs. As I should have predicted, color saturation is related to the ratio of backlighting to ambient light. Outdoors or under a strong indoor light, colors are very washed out even with the backlight cranked up all the way. In sunlight, color disappears entirely, and you might as well turn off the backlight since it doesn't help.
The LCD viewing angle, unfortunately, is very poor. At little as 30 degrees off-axis, contrast begins to drop sharply. Two children sitting side-by-side would have trouble viewing the screen together. For ebook reading, the XO-1's display can't match those of the Sony PRS-505 Reader and the Amazon Kindle.
Not shown here is the Secure Digital (SD-card) slot, which is under the lower edge of the right side of the display unit. The positioning helps protect the slot, but there's no way to get clear access to it, which may limit the range of SD-card peripherals that can be used with the XO-1. I'm not sure this was so clever.
The XO-1 keyboard uses a flimsy rubber membrane over soft springy keyswitches.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)To me, the low point of the XO-1's physical design is the keyboard. The synthetic rubber membrane is very thin and the keyswitches are very soft so there's almost no tactile feedback. Hitting a key feels almost the same as missing one.
Perhaps children's fingertips are sensitive enough to get the feedback they need for good touch-typing. But even if that's true, I fear this keyboard may be too fragile.
The keys are also smaller than necessary, even given the focus on small hands. The keyboard is 15 keys wide, with a double-wide Enter key plus tab, [, and ] keys on the QWERTY row. Although the OLPC developers took a fresh look at pretty much everything else, they slavishly imitated the high key counts of full-size notebooks to their detriment.
Since the XO-1 has multiple modifier keys-- shift, control, alt, fn, "hand", and alt-graph keys-- it would have been better to move more of the punctuation symbols to letter keys, reducing the key count and allowing the keys themselves to be slightly larger, making typing easier.
The keyboard is printed with many international characters, but it isn't as cluttered as it could be. Only one key has four different symbols on it (semicolon, colon, and underlined lower-case a and o characters); most have three, and some have two. G, K, L, Z, X, V, and B are left alone. Oddly, there's a whole extra key just for the "times" and "divide" symbols.
There are also many extra keys for features unique to the XO-1's "Sugar" user interface, which is a good thing. Sugar relies too much on tricks like hot corners and tabs, disappearing borders and drawers, and other features that require a lot of careful cursor motion. Unfortunately, the XO-1's touchpad doesn't operate very smoothly or accurately, at least for me, and there's no apparent way to control its sensitivity or the speed of cursor motion.
Because I was somewhat critical of OLPC in earlier blog posts (here and here) for making strong promises about battery life that weren't supported by the early prototype hardware, the first thing I did with the new machine after charging it for a few hours was to run a couple of simple battery-life benchmark tests.
In the first test, I connected the XO-1 to my home WiFi network (which required falling back from WPA security to the relatively insecure WEP standard), cranked the backlight up to maximum, and opened my favorite webcam page: Ben Lovejoy's auto-refreshing feed for the camera at the public entrance to the Nürburgring racetrack in Germany.
The page didn't load reliably-- sometimes the WiFi connection would drop, provoking Server Not Found errors-- but I kept an eye on it and got it back on track each time it derailed. This wasn't the "heavy use" that OLPC's Walter Bender was describing in his comments on 60 Minutes last May, but at least it was something.
The result? The XO-1 ran for just 45 seconds short of four hours. Not so great.
Well, it's a prototype, and OLPC vice-president Jim Gettys said that "heavy use" could be construed to cover uses as lightweight as reading an ebook outdoors with the backlight off. So I charged the machine overnight and, this morning, from a clean reboot, I started an ebook-reading test with the backlight off. I opened a PDF provided with the XO-1 and pushed the page-down button once every 20 minutes to keep the display from turning off entirely. The machine ran for 4 hours and 59 minutes. (I swear these are the actual numbers.) That's a long way from Bender's promise of "10 to 12 hours... with heavy use."
But still, it's a prototype, and as Gettys explained, there are many opportunities for further power reductions. Similarly, there will undoubtedly be other improvements over time. We'll see.
This is the seventh in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. The previous installments looked at technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!
This session has two presentations--one from SiBeam describing wireless HDTV transmission for home use, the other from Broadcom on new 802.11n Wi-Fi technology.
The SiBeam presentation is easily summarized: It describes a chipset that sends uncompressed HDTV video over ... Read more
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