Hardware

You've got to hand it to the buzz-marketing folks that work for Apple Computer... or, er, Apple! Apple! Apparently something happened yesterday. Apple managed to be bigger than the whole of CES and they were not even there.

In a stunning move, Steve Jobs invented -- or, pardon me, "innovated" -- the cell phone, the music player, digital camera and personal digital assistant. It does look cool but I have never gotten the appeal of these all in one things. Inevitably they do nothing well.

You think this is going to appeal to the Blackberry crowd? (Disclosure: I have a 7130e) Not a chance. How do you type coherent emails on a touch screen? Want to listen to music? Well not for very long because if need the iPhone available for calls you don't want to be wearing down the battery.

[Content in this post originates from www.bradfordgibson.net.]

The neatest trick that this box does is OS X. Apple has shrunken the kid in the family; this is the new Mac Mini. Elegant and sleek, with a bit more memory, a bluetooth keyboard and mouse; you may have the start of a super portable computer. I do feel kind of vindicated (ie: hear my prediction on Victor's New Year's Eve show) that the touch screen interface is somewhat tablet like... watch for the invention, or, er, the "innovation" of tablet computing in a future iteration of this device.

Victor Cajiao of the Typical Mac User podcast hosted a live Talkshoe edition of his podcast on New Year's Eve. The theme of the event was Apple predictions for 2007. I was privileged to take part in the conversation and would like to thank all of the participants for their positive contributions; it was a blast.

You can listen to or pick up the podcast here.

Have you noticed how popular all the gadget and gizmo sites are? Those sites are always full of upcoming product info; secret photos, leaks from manufacturers, rumours and hoaxes. Well -- in advance of THE most IMPORTANT product annoucement since... well... since the last one -- here is some interesting conjecture regarding product development of the Zune line.

Let's put two and too together; Zune rhymes with tune and, according to podcaster Paul Colligan and Scoble, there is no obvious podcast tie-in for Zune. You want to know why? Could it be that Microsoft will release a Zalk just for talk and that by next year we will all be Zalkcasting? There may also be a further spin-off with a Zame that will only be for gamers. The Zame unit will feature digital rights managed claymation. Sources say these units may be delayed until the plain English EULA's can be re-written so that all legitimate uses of the units can be disallowed. Test units at research locations have also been spotted -- code-named Zribble -- that shake uncontrollably within 10 feet of a person using an iPod.

I'm suspicious. This recent item from engadget is setting all kinds of tongues wagging. I on the other hand hear, 'Danger, Danger Will Robinson!'.

News organizations in other countries are starting to quote the story which engadget has sourced from only one spot; forums.somethingawful.com.

Couple the single, unreliable source with the fact that the EXIF tags for "Date Time Original" and "Date Time Digitized" are from January 7, 2004 and I think we have a problem here...

Where is Lenovo's press release? What about an LAX release? Why no local stories in TV or the newspapers?

UPDATE: Well duh... somethingawful.com specializes in hoaxes.

UPDATE 2 (Sept. 21): This is just getting weirder. Tom Krazit of cnet.com assures me that Lenovo has told him that "there was an fire incident at LAX and that their laptop was involved". Brian Humphrey (Firefighter/Specialist, Public Service Officer, Los Angeles Fire Department) at first reported no fire calls but subsequently discovered that(check out the comments):
"One media caller today provided more detail in the way of a date and approximate time, and I discovered our response on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 5:44 PM to Terminal 7 at LAX.
We responded to a 'fire out' in the terminal area involving a personal laptop computer. The apparent fire had been completely extinguished with a dry chemical extinguisher by bystanders prior to our arrival.
There were no injuries.
The LAFD notified custodial staff at LAX to handled the cleanup. Firefighters did not determine the make and model of the device or the cause of the fire."

The original source and the photo anomalies are still very problematic. On top of that, there are not yet any reported corroborating eye-witness accounts from people who are not using pseudonyms. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 3 (Sept. 29, 2006): Lenovo announces a re-call on some R, T and X series notebooks. There are still big questions to be answered about how this story originally broke and got reported but, sadly, I don't think we're going to get the answers. The truth is out there...

... If so drop me a line by clicking on the comment or feedback links at this site.

As an electrical engineer and former engineering physics guy (back when fibre optics was "full of promise"), I have been following the whole business of Broadband Over Power Lines (BPL) for years now. Or should I say the "lack of business".

BPL has always just been around the corner. I've figuratively fallen asleep waiting for the technology to be ready for market. Well this caught my eye today..."Texas to get broadband over its power lines". While this announcement is typically premature in its joy; the article does reference an actual working service in Ohio. The model seems to be that the power companies lease the lines and let somebody manage the network for them. Cinergy is offering the service through Current Communications residentially to parts of Cincinnati. (Is Peter Frampton still living there?)

What I am interested in are customer comments on quality of service and relative speed. Information on the network operator's web site indicates that the speed is "up to 75 times faster than dial-up". Why use dial-up as a relative measure? Are there issues with speed? One positive aspect of the service is that the speed is the same both downloading and uploading -- no artificial speed traps to stop you from effectively peering on the network. I wonder how long that will last.

Comment, email or feedback is welcome.

Robert Cringely has made an impact with his latest piece from the PBS bully-tech pulpit. (catch it here http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051020.html and also the tech.memeorandum coverage here)

I design reliable power systems and data centers for a living.

In general terms, you don't need 3 to 4 times more electricity for cooling a data center than you need to power the electronic loads. The rough rule of thumb is 1 to 1. That means 1 watt of connected data center load will need 1 watt of electricity for connected mechanical loads. A watt of electricity does not automatically become a watt of heat; some of that electricity is converted to light and motion. Cringely overstates the actual (as opposed to the name-plate rated value) power consumption of the drive arrays by at least double. He also gets muddled up when he discusses data center floor space; mixing up total square footage with the square footage of the connected load space. He uses an incorrect approach to calculating "necessary" space to support "equipment" space. He makes some incorrect assumptions about the types of drives used in many of the arrays. The Cringely argument also completely overlooks load diversity in a data center. Even if 6,500 square feet required 330 Watts per square foot, the total equipment foot print over the remainder of the space would have a much lower density on average. We refer to stacked racks of blade servers and drive arrays as "spot" loads. You don't need to provision the entire facility at the load density of its densest loads; what you do have to do is provide the flexibility to power those loads in a range of locations and to provide appropriate cooling for installation conditions. It is true that load densities are starting to increase over the norms of the last few years, however.

It's worth noting that Cringely is treading down a path we've been on before and the evidence regarding actual data center electricity utilization demonstrates different usage patterns than what was predicted.

If you're interested in discussing data center electricity usage and design with me Robert, then call me at my Calgary office at (403) 541-6475 (Updated: 2006/12/10)

The technology behind podcasting is so ordinary that my 83 year old father -- who has never used a computer and worked in radio for 40 years -- can understand it. That's why podcasting represents a revolution in media content delivery. Podcasting is not just the "it" technology of the moment. It's not PointCast or streaming or Flash or a meme. Podcasting is not just a technology. It is a technology married to an installed base. If this was 1930 and somebody had shipped 10 million radios as record players over the previous 5 years and then discovered they could also be used for listening to broadcast voice and music... Well that's podcasting. Only now we're looking at an installed base of any thing that can play an MP3 or an Ogg Vorbis. That's millions of potential listeners.

If you need to catch up; better get to www.ipodder.org now!