Rob Beschizza

Kohjinsha SK3 is filofax for the 21st century

The SK3 is a small, well-specced netbook that would be called a UMPC in a past life. What intrigues me about it is how it's made to integrate with this standard-form business planner. It's strange and pointless and wonderful, like something from an old science fiction movie.

Check out the unboxing at UMPC Portal: Kohjinsha SK3. Ultra-Portable and Portfolio-Ready! (Unboxing video).

Rob Beschizza

CrunchPad of Singapore

More CrunchPad details, in a Mike Arrington profile published by the SF Business Times:

"We're going to make some really big announcements," said Arrington, who predicted a prototype would be ready for unveiling by the end of July. "We're full on. These prototypes are real."

Arrington started work on the Crunchpad after meeting an expert in electronics manufacturing in China, and these days he estimates the project commands three-quarters of his time.

"There's factories that just churn stuff out. It's pretty simple," said Arrington, who has incorporated a separate company called Crunchpad Inc. that has 14 employees in Singapore.

Tech blog titan Michael Arrington's next big thing: Hardware [Bizjournals]

Rob Beschizza

Marvell SheevaPlug fits computer inside wallwart

SheevaPlug is even tinier than the Fit PC 2 reviewed just a day or two ago, and does away with the power brick by being the power brick. It's an entire computer housed in similar fashion to Apple's Airport Express -- the key question being whether it has any more computing power than a router.

Not a lot, frankly, but what is there is interesting enough: USB and gigabit ethernet backed by a 1.2 GHz CPU, 512MB of flash storage and 512MB of RAM. There's no video output on the reference design (pictured), but it could be added by an OEM, or even piped through USB. It's clearly intended for use with Linux derivatives -- are drivers available for the recent batch of USB displays?

Marvell_SheevaPlug_Product_Brief.pdf">Product Briefing (PDF) [Marvell]

Rob Beschizza

Blackest black meet blackest Mac

Colorware's Stealth MacBook Pro is a top of the line 15" model with a 256 HB solid state drive, a 3 GHz CPU and a custom matte display that's not available in official models. But it's the paint job that demands the $6,000 price tag: a zero gloss carbon black with a "soft luxuriant feel."

Only a handful will be made, but that tag seems a couple of grand more than it should be, even with the specs maxed out. It's also very cheesy that this very expensive paint job includes branding, even if it is in a discreet location.

Product Page [Colorware]

Update: Super headline by commenter Torchwood.

Steven Leckart

Byte Magazine, August 1981

Steven Leckart

PARC: Un-fumbling the Future

In 1983, my former professor and friend Howard Rheingold read an article by Alan Kay. Immediately, he wanted to experience the Alto and the future of networked minds. He started calling PARC on a weekly basis. Nothing. Then when he called back to remind HR of his existence, he was given an immediate assignment: write a last-minute speech for a Xerox executive.

With that, Howard had landed himself his "dream job" at PARC as an in-house writer. Howard's gig involved interviewing researchers and scientists about their work with interfaces, LAN, etc. Super cool in retrospect and at the time, I'm sure.

He goes into great detail in his book Tools for Thought (pictured), which explores batch processing, the 1960s, time sharing, and more at Xerox PARC. Howard's insights into the successes and failures of Xerox PARC are well worth a read.

Here's how he framed PARC's trajectory and missed opportunity in his Wired article from 1994:

Personal computers did not spring naturally from the computer industry. They were deliberately realized by a radical fringe, against all the force of the day's accepted wisdom... These zealous wizards handed Xerox an astounding lead in information technology in the early 1980s, but by the end of the decade, Xerox watched as upstarts like Apple and Microsoft grew wealthy off Xerox's discoveries. Neither Apple nor Microsoft even existed when the first Altos were designed in the early 1970s; by 1990 either company could have bought Xerox. The tragicomic Xerox saga is recorded in Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander's Fumbling the Future.

Here's the question he ended his 1994 article with:

So how will PARC guarantee that this time they won't fumble their new future? Three ways, says JSB [John Seely Brown]. "One, we are more careful about intellectual property. Two, we are working smart - looking for entrepreneurial partnerships to develop ideas quickly. And three, Xerox has radically repositioned its organization so that its corporate strategy is shaped and informed by PARC and PARC is being shaped and informed by corporate strategy."

And, of course, here's what eventually happened:

By 2002, PARC became in independent research business with the ability to license its own patented tech and discoveries to other companies, institutions, and start-ups, especially the recent wave of alternative energy upstarts. While there are still ties to Xerox, PARC's profits are entirely its own. What's more, I'm told revenue is even split up among PARC employees.

Lessons learned.

Steven Leckart

Mr.Taggy & the History of Search at PARC

There are plenty of nifty search engines that don't begin with "Goo" and end with "gle," as Wired points out. But one site they forgot to include is MrTaggy, which was created by PARC's Augmented Social Cognition Area.

Unlike other engines, this one doesn't index the content of web pages. Instead, it uses PARC's TagSearch algorithm, which aggregates and sorts the user-generated tags added to social bookmarking sites like Delicious. From there, users can give thumbs up or down for each and every result. The goal: be part-search, part-recommendation engine by tapping the wisdom of the crowd.

BBG asked the ASCA researchers to connect the dots between PARC's earlier forays into search and MrTaggy. Here's what Ed Chi, Manager of ASCA, shared with us:

First, one of the most efficient ways of browsing and navigating toward a desired information space was illustrated by the pioneering research on Scatter/Gather, a collaborative project on large-scale document space navigation between amazing researchers such as Doug Cutting (of Lucene, Hadoop fame) and Jan Pedersen (chief scientist at AltaVista, Yahoo, Microsoft for search).

The research done in early to mid 90s, showed how a textual clustering algorithm can be used to quickly divide up an information space (scatter step), ask the user to specify which subspaces they're interested in (gather step). By iterating over this process, one can very quickly narrow down to just the subset of information items they're interested in. Think of it as playing 20 questions with the computer.

Second, also around the mid-90s, an important information access theory was being developed at PARC in our research group called Information Foraging, which showed that you can mathematically model the way people seek information using the same ecological equations used to model how animals forage for food. We noticed that we can use information foraging ideas to model how people used Scatter/Gather to browse for information. It turns out that it was possible to predict how people use the information cues (which we called 'information scent') in each cluster to determine whether they were interested in the contents inside the cluster. It turns out that Scatter/Gather can be shown to be a very efficient way to communicate to the user the topic structure of a very large document collection. In other words, people learned the structure of the information space much more efficiently using Scatter/Gather interfaces.

I hope it is quite clear that the relevance feedback mechanisms are very much inspired by Scatter/Gather. The related tags communicate the topic structure of what's available in the collection. Through this process, we designed MrTaggy, hoping that it would be just as efficient as Scatter/Gather in communicating the topic structure of the space.

Third, our group had developed Information Scent algorithms and concepts to build real search and recommendation systems. These algorithms build upon earlier work on a human memory model called Spreading Activation.

TagSearch algorithm uses similar concepts here. It constructs a kind of Bayesian modeling of the topic space using the tag co-occurrence patterns.

TagSearch's algorithm owes its heart and soul in concepts in Spreading Activation, which helps us find documents that are related to certain tags, and vice versa.

So what it's like to actually use MrTaggy?

I started a search with the suggested tags "funny" and "video." Less than 30 seconds later, I discovered this Bruno-related gem from FunnyorDie that had, until now, somehow escaped my attention.

Good find, MrTaggy!

Steven Leckart

Contest: Win an Alto User's Handbook & Smalltalk Instruction Manual

When I visited PARC for the second time, I asked the staff what kinds of historical mementos they had lying around. Not only did they promptly hand me a copy of the Alto User's Handbook from 1979 and a Smalltalk-72 Instruction Manual from 1976, BUT they also told me I could keep them.

How cool is that?

Then it occurred to me that not just anyone can call up PARC, schedule an appointment and commandeer these classic manuals. Sure you could visit the DigiBarn and ask to see one, or try eBay and Amazon. But I do realize it's a bit gauche to show off my good fortune, which is why BBG is going to give away these collector's items to one reader.

What to Enter:

1) share any pics of yourself using an Alto
2) share any stories about your use of an Alto/Smalltalk, memories of the first Alto you saw, etc.
3) write a poem, paint a watercolor portrait of Alan Kay or create some other homage to PARC

How to Enter:

1) include text and/or links in the comments OR email me steven AT boingboing DOT net
2) if you leave your entry via the comments, be sure to include your email address, and be sure to write/format the address as I did to avoid spammers

Who Wins:

BBG will choose one person, winner-take-all. Good luck!

Alto photo provided by PARC

Rob Beschizza

Review: a weekend with the Fit PC 2

The Fit PC 2 is an inch thick, about 4 inches each way, and pipes 1080p video through an HDMI port. Though a perfectly usable PC with a 160GB hard drive, Atom Z CPU and a gig of RAM, it's so small that it makes even netbooks look bulky.

READ THE REST

Steven Leckart

Wait, Where is Alan Kay's Office?

I figured it was a simple question: Can you show me Alan Kay's office?

I was wrong.

After the jump, find out why and whether I ever found his office...

photo by Marcin Wichary

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

Touch Book, a convertible netbook/all-in-one PC

The Touch Book, by the dashingly-named Always Innovating, has a 9" detachable touchscreen display, OMAP3530 CPU from Texas Instruments, 256MB of RAM, 256MB of NAND flash, and uses an 8GB SD card for storage. There is also WiFi, Bluetooth, and three USB ports.

Cute! But at $400, one can already hear the exaggerated seething and wincing, the tut-tutting and dont-know-about-thatting. [Laptop Mag via Wired]

Rob Beschizza

Sony Vaio Signature Collection

I mock Sony only to be reminded that the leviathan has its charms. Check out the Vaio Signature Collection, a lineup of fancied-up editions of its laptops. Alongside my favorite (the Vaio TT Kaleidoscope, above), there are three particularly remarkable items:

• A limited edition faux-crocodile skin laptop that is just $800.
• A Vaio P that costs $2,000. (Sherry time!)
• A Vaio CS that only Prince could conceivably get away with owning.

Via Sony Insider

Rob Beschizza

Yes, the Fit PC 2 is tiny

A tiny nettop with the 1080p-happy Z530 Atom, HDMI and an upgradeable hard drive just came in though the letterbox. Review coming soon.

Rob Beschizza

The Mac Mini Rules

Dave Caolo of TUAW wrote a paean to the Mac Mini.

This machine has been absolutely rock solid. ... In a world where the new and shiny gets most of the attention, the plain and reliable is often overlooked. So here's a post to meant to praise the Mac mini. The tiny, go-anywhere, do-anything, ultra-reliable computer that I absolutely love. No wonder there are racks full of them at Macminicolo and other facilities.

I use a Mac Mini (2009 base model upgraded with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive) as my main machine. I'd picked it up as a stopgap, imagining that I would get a Mac Pro at some point, but I find it completely satisfactory for the light-pro work I do (Photoshop and audio, but no transcoding, video editing or rendering), so it stays. When its life as a tiny, perfectly-formed desktop PC is done, it shall become a tiny, perfectly-formed home server.

If you meet the following three requirements, the Mac Mini is the computer you should buy.

• You don't play the latest games or use demanding professional apps.
• You already have peripherals.
• You don't want a laptop or a built-in display.

I'd even consider it if I preferred Windows to OSX, but only if I had a retail copy to install. Who could resist a Mac Mini carefully mounted on the back of a 30" Cinema Display? Apart from someone who likes money.

Rob Beschizza

OSX Hypnowheel Pin Badge

It's just a dollar at Bean Forest. Spotted by Cult of Mac.

Joel Johnson

SAGE (1954)

Joel Johnson

Vizio connected HDTV remote reminds that everything is turning into a PC

Available soon, budget HDTV maker Vizio will soon be selling televisions that can stream internet content, including Netfli, Amazon, Showtime, Yahoo widgets, and more. But check out that snazzy slide-out QWERTY keyboard!

Previous ⌦ DIGITAL PICTURE FRAME REMINDS THAT EVERYTHING IS TURNING INTO A PC

Xeni Jardin

Exploit code for China's "Green Dam" censorship app permits remote control of any Chinese PC

Green Dam is a new Chinese state censorship program mandated to be provided with all PC's sold in China after July 1, 2009. The program "complements" the existing internet censorship system, and extends it to many third party applications, such as Skype and text editors which are monitored for the use of forbidden phrases such as "falun gong". This ZIP file provides a web page and associated computer code that can be used to remotely take control of any computer system running the Green Dam software. The only requirement is that the user is enticed to look at a site hosting a copy of the exploit page. The technique used is a buffer-overflow using Microsoft's ".net" encoding.

Xeni Jardin

The Great Leap Backward: will computer makers kowtow to Beijing's censorware demands?

"Green Dam-Youth Escort" will block political and religious websites and kill apps when users input "sensitive terms. The tool will also monitor personal communications, and track where users go online.

As noted in a previous BB post, the app has a secondary effect of exposing users to serious security vulnerabilities.

Snip from Crovitz' piece in the Journal:

In essence, bureaucrats in China want the world's computer makers to make it easier for their Thought Police to block access to news and information from the outside world, and to punish citizens for the sites they visit and the views they express online.

The pressure is on companies such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Apple, plus Lenovo, which bought IBM's PC business and whose largest shareholder is the Chinese government. The computer companies have kept a low profile, relying on trade associations to lobby Beijing to reconsider the regulations. Technologists would prefer just to be in the business of business, but politics is a fact of business life in China. (And even Chinese people who don't care about blocked information about Tiananmen or anonymity online will object if their new computers have kludgy software that is prone to crashing operating systems.)

Yet when the interests of foreign businesses coincide with the interests of the Chinese people, the kowtow may not be the only corporate option.

Xeni Jardin

BB Video: Day in the Cloud - Google + Virgin America + Boing Boing + netbooks + mile-high networked fragging

(Download MP4 / YouTube)

Google Apps and Virgin America are teaming up for a day of cloud computing in the clouds: "Day in the Cloud," Wednesday, June 24.

Boing Boing will be on board -- me (Xeni), Rob Beschizza from Boing Boing Gadgets, and our friend Jane McGonigal, of Avantgame and Institute for the Future.

In this Boing Boing Video episode, I speak with Porter Gale of Virgin America, and Jen Mazzon, a "digital mom" from Google, about the in-flight game smackdown planned (one plane competes against the other to win a litter of brand-new netbooks), and about how always-connected data experience could change our lives.

Folks at home are also invited to play:

All you'll need is a net connection, a Google Account, and the warm, comforting glow of your computer screen. Become one of the top scorers and we'll set you up with your own personal "Year in the Cloud," complete with a brand-new HP netbook and 1 terabyte of Google Account storage for your photos and mail--all of which will come in handy when you fly free for a year on Virgin America with complimentary WiFi.

Virgin produced a short, funny promotional video for Day in the Cloud which is also worth a watch, below.

Sponsor shout-out

Steven Leckart

Retro Floppy Flash Drive

[via Guaraná Rosa via Book of Joe]

Rob Beschizza

The $1,500 netbook

Sony heads into la-la land with the latest Vaio P model, which adds a 1.6GHz Atom CPU and 128GB SSD to bump the price to $1,499.99. Engadget points out that all still come with Vista, whose bloat does serious damage to the P's usefulness. So that's a $1,500 ticket to a day of tinkering just to get a productive machine. [Engadget]

Seriously, I love my $800 Vaio P with Windows XP, but this? You can get a MacBook Air for a grand and a half.

Rob Beschizza

Leather laptop bag folds 8 ways

Hard Graft's 2UNFOLD laptop bag is, well, my kind of laptop bag: leather, lots of pockets and compartments, and unnecessarily complicated. Designed to transform into 8 different styles--briefcase, shoulder bag, rucksack, reversible courier (leather or canvas) and reversible clutch--it can fit a 17" or 13" laptop depending on which config you fold it into, and is made in Italy.

Rob Beschizza

Do your own Ioning

Kuroutoshikokou's Nvidia Ion motherboard includes an Atom CPU, 16x PCI-E slot, HDMI out and 6 USB ports. [Akihabara News]

Rob Beschizza

The eBayed employee gifts of Cray Research

Supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray didn't just develop some of the world's most distinctive supercomputers. His company also put out some natty promo junk. Described as a "very heavy glass globe," this promotional item up for auction at eBay is probably the closest I'll get to owning an X-MP. From the auction blurb:

To the best of my knowledge the first time it was ever taken out of the box is when I took a picture of it. An image of the continents is etched on the globe. On the base is the word "CRAY" and the number "15". This is one of the gifts available when an employee reaches 15 years of service. This globe also comes with its own box for storage.

Alas, it's already been bid up to $50. Perhaps a pen holder is more my speed.

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

It is 580 AD in computing years.

Sick of "early car" metaphors for the state of computer usability? Dan Rutter has a better one:

Let's, instead, consider that weird old phrase "computer literacy", these days seldom used except by the hardy souls teaching Windows to the elderly. Let's compare computer literacy with ordinary literacy. Reading and writing.

In this respect, I think you can make a case that computer technology has made it to the late sixth century AD, at best. In the olden days, you see, the upper classes were able to read and write, but they generally preferred not to. They left it to people who had to do it, like scribes and clergymen.

The last recorded act of the Roman Senate was to send a gift box to Tiberius II, emperor in the east, in 580. In it was an apology for not sending troops to help fight the Persians, season IV of The Sopranos, and a shitty netbook.

A bold new computer metaphor [Dan's Data]

Rob Beschizza

Review: 90 minutes with the Viliv S5

The Viliv S5 is compact, very well built, has custom UI software, and runs Windows XP at a fair clip. At $600, it's as cheap as a fancy netbook, and has an 4.8" touchscreen display, 60GB hard drive, 1.33 GHz Atom CPU and 6 claimed hours of battery life (I got about 4:30). It weighs just one pound.

That said, its hard to find a use for it that something else doesn't already do better. The biggest sweet spot it hits is "pocket PC with good battery life," a proposition that'll appetize longtime fans of the niche, but won't be saving any new souls for MID Jesus.

READ THE REST

Xeni Jardin

Vintage Tech archives in Bay Area seek moving volunteers today.

Phil Lapsley, vintage computing history buff, writes:

VintageTech, the organizers of the Vintage Computer Festival, are moving their warehouse of historical computers, equipment, software, and documentation from Livermore, CA to Stockton, CA. Volunteers are needed today (Sunday) and tomorrow (Monday) in Livermore to help pack and palletize all their wonderful machines and related ephemera. It is an amazing chance to help a good cause and get up close and personal with a bunch of interesting historical stuff. I have posted a set of photos of some of their wonders at this Flickr link. If you can spare some time, even an hour or two, please contact Sellam Ismail at sellam@vintagetech.com.

Rob Beschizza

Does the 13" Mac Laptop deserve its Pro designation?

Some say that the new MacBook Pros aren't pro-quality machines. The evidence given seems compelling, but a second look suggests sacred cows of the sort that Apple's never been afraid to slay.

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Rob Beschizza

Sony Vaio NW is for the movies

Pros: It has Blu-ray, a 1.2" thick body and HDMI output for just $880. It takes SD cards as well as Memory Sticks; has 3 USB ports; and an optional Radeon 4570 graphics chip for better gaming. Con: 1366x768 screen resolution. [Sony]