Tag Archives: hardware

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Would you buy a Kindle DX?

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Well, we’ve all had a few days to take a look at the specifications and hear the debates, so it’s time to ask – would you consider buying the new Kindle DX? If not, why not?

Amazon Kindle DX ebook reader

Frankly, if I had the money to hand I’d order one now – in full knowledge that something better will be along in a year and make me regret it. They’ve just passed the utility point past which my early-adopter organ starts releasing the hormones; PDF compatibility is the big issue for me, second to a bigger screen size, though apparently there is a small charge for sending a PDF through the system to your device (which is a bit cheeky). Lucky I’m skint right now, I guess… but this is surely much closer to a game-changer device than the last iteration, not to mention easier on the aesthetic eye. What do you think?

Bob Lefsetz seems to agree with me:

The Kindle breeds excitement.  At your fingertips is a breadth of excitement and knowledge.  My little device is always at the ready, and calls me not only at night, but during the day, to delve into a story that tells me so much about the world but is not laden with the hit and run facts of today’s infotainment society.

Fiction tells you more about life than non-fiction.  All these years later, to rediscover the experience of reading stories is thrilling.

But I don’t expect the mainstream to join me on my adventure quite yet.  The buy-in price of the device is way too high, $349.  And the new Kindle, $489, this is not something for the masses!

iPods got cheaper.

Kindles are getting more expensive.

Buy the third or fourth generation.  Maybe the fifth.  The ergonomics will be better and the price will be lower.

Granted, Lefsetz’s experience is in the music industry, but I (and he) still hold that the similarities between the two industries are strong, albeit with change occuring in the book industry at a somewhat more manageable pace. The writing is on the wall… or rather on the screen. 😉

But the response on everyone’s lips seems to be “ooh, just wait until Apple put out a tablet device!” I’d agree that if Apple can nuke the punch-bowl in the same way they did with the iPod, they’ll be onto a winner… but I’m not sure they care enough about books as an industry. Everyone listens to music, and you can listen to music while doing something else; neither of those factors apply to reading. Reading is a very different (and smaller) lifestyle niche, and I’m not sure the iPod business model would scale in the same way.

Furthermore, an Apple tablet will doubtless do loads of other fancy latte-sippin’ Apple stuff as well, and doubtless have the fashionably high price tag to match… so while I’m not feeling the Kindle DX as the apogee of ebook tech, I’m not expecting Steve Jobs and company to lead the field either. My money’s on someone else coming up with a more open and utilitarian platform at a lower price; that’s when things are going to get really lively. [image courtesy Engadget]

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War-porn for the week – smart bullets

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sniperRegardless of your opinion about the Somalian pirate situation, if you’ve a jones for high-tech weaponry you’ll have been enjoying the brief flurry of military hardware reportage that emerged in the wake of the kidnapping rescue mission.

Wired has the low-down on how much more awesome the armed forces might be once DARPA has churned through a bit more R&D work:

Already, we’ve seen Navy SEAL shooters take out three pirates with three trigger-pulls — despite uneven seas and bobbing ships. Imagine how much easier the snipers’ jobs would have been, if they had rounds that could change course in mid-air, to account for crosswinds, air density, and moving targets. Darpa, the Defense Department’s way-out research arm, launched a $22 million effort in November to do just that. By countering these “fundamental limitation[s] of accuracy,” Darpa thinks it can dramatically improve American snipers’ range — and “provide a dramatic new capability to the U.S. military.”

Dramatic? Not the ideal choice of word, perhaps. Surely it would be more dramatic for the sniper to miss with every bullet but his last? But I digress – there’s more to come:

A companion project, Super-Resolution Vision System (SRVS), wouldn’t just make snipers more accurate. It would make them functionally invisible, as well. The system is trying to use “heat haze” — that shimmer you see on summer days, out in the distance — for helping snipers, instead of inhibiting them. In any given instant, the heated air acts as a series of lenses; you may be able to look right through them and see a magnified view of the scene beyond. The trick is to use digital technology to identify the “lucky regions” or “lucky frames” when a clear view appears and assemble them into a complete picture. SRVS researchers are aiming to do just that.

It’s always a relief to know that, even in the depths of a global economic slump, we’re still working hard at finding new and inventive ways to kill one another. [image by mateus27_24-25]

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The silicon brain

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neural networkMost attempts to simulate the function of organic brains using computers have been software simulations – models built with code, if you like. An international team of computer scientists have been trying the other approach, however: building computer hardware that mimics the dense interconnection of brain cells.

The hope is that recreating the structure of the brain in computer form may help to further our understanding of how to develop massively parallel, powerful new computers, says Meier.

This is not the first time someone has tried to recreate the workings of the brain. One effort called the Blue Brain project, run by Henry Markram at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, has been using vast databases of biological data recorded by neurologists to create a hugely complex and realistic simulation of the brain on an IBM supercomputer.

[snip]

The advantage of this hardwired approach, as opposed to a simulation, Karlheinz continues, is that it allows researchers to recreate the brain-like structure in a way that is truly parallel. Getting simulations to run in real time requires huge amounts of computing power. Plus, physical models are able to run much faster and are more scalable. In fact, the current prototype can operate about 100,000 times faster than a real human brain. “We can simulate a day in a second,” says Karlheinz.

A day in a second, huh? That’s straight out of your favourite Singularity sf story, right there. [image by neurollero]

Transhumanists talk a great deal about the inevitability of human-equivalent artificial intelligence in the very near future, and it’s easy to dismiss them as dreamers until you read an article like this. I’m not saying that silicon brainware means the Singularity is inevitable, or even likely… but I think I’ll start learning to speak in machine code. Y’know, just in case.

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Peer-to-peer open-source hardware funding

electronic hardwareIn a moment of pure blogging synchronicity – right after a commenter dismissed the story about Detroit artists buying cheap houses as irrelevant, using the phrase “[c]all me when it is a commune of semiconductor engineers” – here’s a story about open-source hardware engineers getting together and forming a communal bank to provide start-up loans:

… open source hardware requires more financial investment than open source software. It isn’t as easy as downloading a few open source programs on to your existing computer, explains Stack. “With open source hardware you don’t get a finished product until you have put in some money,” he says. For instance, there’s the cost of the printed circuit boards, the solder and the components.

“To build open source software you just need to set up a project on Sourceforge,” says Huynh. “But if you get open source hardware wrong, it burns a hole in the wallet.”

The Open Source Hardware Bank, which isn’t yet fully up and running as a federally regulated lending institution, allows those interested in open source hardware to make investments in specific projects, then (hopefully) reap returns ranging from 5 percent to 15 percent from the successful sale of the projects. For the creators, the bank offers funding that could bring down the costs of their project and give them the stimulus to try out new ideas.

So, a miniature investment banking system based around a community with common interests; financial mobility and specialist knowledge are the main differences from more traditional models.

“Groups of people that have strong shared interest are really the perfect place for peer-to-peer financing to work,” says Scott Pitts, former managing director of Zopa U.S. “As a group they are not out to make a billion dollars, they just want to fund their passion and do it in a sustainable way.”

Only time will tell whether it will stay the course, naturally (and they may not be working on VLSI chip fabrication) but there’s your proof that it’s not just “hippies” and drop-outs who are trying to extricate themselves from the old systems. [via BoingBoing; image by jpokele]

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Regulating military robots

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triple-gun robot droneFollowing on neatly from Tom’s post about the Pentagon’s future war brainstorms and the US Office of Naval Research’s recent report on battlebot morality, philosopher A C Grayling takes to his soapbox at New Scientist to warn us that we need to regulate the use of robots for military and domestic policing uses now… before it’s too late.

In the next decades, completely autonomous robots might be involved in many military, policing, transport and even caring roles. What if they malfunction? What if a programming glitch makes them kill, electrocute, demolish, drown and explode, or fail at the crucial moment? Whose insurance will pay for damage to furniture, other traffic or the baby, when things go wrong? The software company, the manufacturer, the owner?

[snip]

The civil liberties implications of robot devices capable of surveillance involving listening and photographing, conducting searches, entering premises through chimneys or pipes, and overpowering suspects are obvious. Such devices are already on the way. Even more frighteningly obvious is the threat posed by military or police-type robots in the hands of criminals and terrorists.

As has been pointed out before, the appeal of robots to the military mind seems to be that they’re a form of moral short-cut, a way to do the traditional tasks of battle and control without risking the lives of real people. But as Grayling says, that’s a short-sighted approach: it’s not a case of wondering if things will go wrong, but when… and then who will carry the can?

Call me a cynic, but I doubt the generals and politicians will be any keener to shoulder the blame for mistakes than they already are. [image by jurvetson]