Posts Tagged ‘computers’

Keyboard that glows in the dark

Sunday, January 21st, 2007
glowinthedark

Now you can light up your Quake sessions between friends. I’m going to review the Zippy EL-610 USB keyboard. In its essence, it’s a notebook style keyboard, with a low keystroke and with a special feature. The buttons will glow in the dark, lightening up your keyboard when it’s dark in the room. As you can see in the picture, the light has a blue nuance.

Behind the 88-translucent keys is a flat sheet of electro-luminescent material – the same stuff that puts the glow in “Indiglo” which lights up watch faces around the world.

Like I mentioned, the keyboard should be connected to your USB plug, to receive power, and its main purpose is usage in environments where there is insufficient light. Being only 18mm thick and weighting less than 500g, it would be a great asset to any travel bag. No software is required for this keyboard to work on Windows 2000 or WindowsXP platforms which have at least one USB port free.

The electro-luminescent light generates no heat, but it creates a little imperceptible buzz sound that you hear when you’re a first time users. By using it everyday on a regular basis you finally get to automatically ignore the sound.

Despite my thinking, they’re not expensive. The cheapest I’ve found goes up to ~$45 and the most expensive retails around $60.

Funniest PC Pranks you can play on your friends ( explained )

Friday, January 19th, 2007

Have you ever found yourself wanting to play a prank on somebody, but the traditional methods just aren’t available, or aren’t enough? If you’re the kind of guy I am, I bet you did. But again, if you’re anything like I am, you won’t give up so easy. So here’s some of the funniest pranks you can play on your friends, colleagues, even parents or neighbours. (more…)

The first Apple computer – 30 years ago (photo)

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

thefirstapple

This is Apple I. The first Apple computer. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the most famous members of the Homebrew Computer Club, designed it over 30 years ago, in 1976. It was mostly a kit computer. Users bought the workings and built their own case.

Many leaders in mainline computer companies like IBM and Digitial did not believe at that time that personal computers were powerful enough to have a market. Sales of the Apple I and other PC’s that followed it, proved them wrong.

World’s biggest computer

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007
supercomputer.jpg

Reading all about the World’s smallest computer and wall mounted computers made me think how does the world’s biggest computer look like.

Well that’s one question I haven’t find a answer to just yet. It seems that the World’s biggest computer is not build just yet but the project was won by IBM in September 2006. We’re talking about the supercomputer project for Los Alamos National Laboratory. Roadrunner, as the supercomputer was nicknamed is meant to perform one petaflop ( that’s 1 quadrillion, for those not familiar with Star Wars like slang) calculations per second, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has disposed a sum of $35 million for the first phase of the project.

The idea behind Roadrunner is to combine 16,000 AMD Opteron processor cores and over 16,000 Cell processors special designed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba to perform physics calculations for the Play Station 3 gaming platform, all that mounted on System x3755 servers with four Opteron processors apiece and IBM BladeCenter H servers with Cell-based systems.They will run using Linux (choke on it Bill) to assign the tasks to be processed to the part of the system that’s ready to handle it, this means that basic tasks can be handled by the Opteron processors and the more complicated mathematical problems will be solved by the Cell processors.

There are several issues to discuss such as the estimated $10 million in operating expenses just for electricity, but by now the project is well underway and we can expect to see the finished behemoth sometimes in the near future, for now the US Government will settle with the smaller brother, the IBM Blue Gene/L, located in the sister laboratory of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Blue Gene can ‘only’ performs 280 trillion calculations per second, or 280 terraflops (for you to compare Roadrunner will be one quadruple times faster).

A PC that you can install in your WALL!

Monday, January 15th, 2007
ani_chippc1.gif

After Etherfast presented the world’s smallest PC, we were invaded with comments and feedback. One of them linked to what I am going to present.

It’s called Jack PC, and it can fit into a network wall port. Just plug your keyboard, mouse and monitor into the wall. The Jack PC runs Windows CE and it’s equipped with an equivalent of a 800MHz to 1.2GHz x86 desktop processor.

The Jack PC comes in 3 models, ranging from �209 to �349, and it’s produced by a company in Israel, called Chip PC Technologies. So, if you’re fed up with your big old PC, you can always get a replacement the size of a small box, or one that can fit into your wall. Below are several pictures of the latter. (Note: If you enlarge them, please be patient). (more…)

World’s smallest PC

Monday, January 15th, 2007
worldssmallestpc

It’s only 2x2x2.2 inch! It’s called the Space Cube and it’s supposed to be the smallest personal computer in the world. It has a built-in 300MhZ processor and it’s also equipped with 64MB of SDRAM. There are a bunch of ports visible in the picture, such as USB, Ethernet, Flash memory, a monitor output port, serial connection and even a microphone slot.

The monitor is capable of displaying up to 65k colors at a resolution of 1280×1024 pixels. Less than a year ago, this fancy piece of equipment was retailing ~$325/piece. Isn’t that cool?

Supposing I’d posses ten of these beauties, I would be running a LAN party from a small cardboard box ;)

Apple Computers Inc. is now Apple Inc.

Wednesday, January 10th, 2007

“The first 30 years were just the beginning. Welcome to 2007”.

After looking into yesterday’s keynote and saw what’s Apple preparing, I find the above mentioned slogan nothing but truth. After all, every company that wishes to survive on the IT market has to evolve.

Let’s leave behind the iPhone, the Apple TV and all the rest and concentrate on the name change instead. “What name change?” Well, some might say it’s not that big, since Apple is still Apple, but if we look closer, a change from “Apple Computer, Inc.” to “Apple Inc.” is not something to overlook. “Why, are they going to stop manufacturing computers?”, some may ask. No, of course not!

applecomputers

That name change isn’t just a strange idea of Steve Jobs. Apple started as a company that started from manufacturing computers, and ended up 30 years later with many other consumer electronics, including iPhone, Apple TV and many many others. Now, wouldn’t Apple Computers be inappropriate?

Analysts say that the iPhone will conquer 1% of the total number of cellphones worldwide by 2008. That’s 10 million phones, if you might wonder.

Overall, I don’t think there will be someone to complain about the name change. It’s just a new start for an experienced corporation.