Tag: hardware

How fast is a modern computer?

Once in a while I get into one of those discussions on how fast modern computers are.  Unfortunately, most of the times, the metrics which are compared, are of those computers that were before, not the ones which are now.  Today I came across a story in Slashdot that very nicely shows how fast modern computers are.  Just read this snippet to get an idea:

Engineers at UCLA, led by Bahram Jalali and Dino Di Carlo, have developed a camera that can take 36.7 million frames per second, with a shutter speed of 27 picoseconds. By far the fastest and most sensitive camera in the world — it is some 100 times faster than existing optical microscopes, and it has a false-positive rate of just one in a million — it is hoped, among other applications, that the device will massively improve our ability to diagnose early-stage and pre-metastatic cancer. This camera can photograph single cells as they flow through a microfluidic system at four meters per second (9 mph — about 100,000 particles per second), with comparable image quality to a still CCD camera (with a max shooting speed of around 60 fps). Existing optical microscopes use CMOS sensors, but they’re not fast enough to image more than 1,000 particles per second. With training, the brains of the operation — an FPGA image processor — can automatically analyze 100,000 particles per second and detect rare particles (such as cancer cells) 75% of the time.

Touchscreen with morphing out buttons

Slashdot reports that the future is here, ladies and gentlemen:

Wouldn’t it be awesome if our tablets and smartphones could have buttons that morphed out of the touchscreen, and then went away again when we didn’t need them? It sounds like magic, but now it is reality. Created by Tactus Technology, a Fremont, California-based start-up, Tactus is a deformable layer that sits on top of a touchscreen sensor and display. ‘The layer is about 0.75mm to 1mm thick, and at its top sits a deformable, clear layer 200 nm thick. Beneath the clear layer a fluid travels through micro-channels and is pushed up through tiny holes, deforming the clear layer to create buttons or shapes. The buttons or patterns remain for however long they are needed, just for a few seconds or for hours when you’re using your iPad to write that novel. And because the fluid is trapped inside the buttons, they can remain for however long without additional power consumption. They come or go pretty quickly, taking only a second to form or disappear.

These might not look or feel the greatest right now, but we all know how quickly technology develops, once the prototype is available. Brilliant direction, I think.

Old headphones

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I have these headphones for less than a year. But somehow they feel ancient. They are all bent and twisted. The left earplug does not work no more. The rubber on the plug pops out every time I unplug them. And they make me think I hear aliens sometimes. Why I don’t get myself another pair is beyond me.

10 World’s Most Expensive Laptops

The other day I got into an interesting discussion with dad about laptops.  Specifically, about expensive laptops.  Using Linux, enjoying a greater utilization of any resource, and being constantly broke, I am not very versed in expensive hardware, laptop or not.  So I did a couple of Google searches to educate myself.  Here is a good lineup of the world’s most expensive laptops for the year of 2011:

  1. Luvaglio. $1,000,000.  Yeah, right.
  2. Tulip E-go Diamond. $355,000.  Girly fashion thing.
  3. Ego for Bentley. $20,000. Another girly fashion thing.
  4. Voodoo Envy H-171. $8,500. This is where the list starts getting real.
  5. Rock Xtreme SL8. $5,000.  The specs for this machine look nice.
  6. Alienware Area 51. $5,000. If I had to choose a laptop from that list, this would be the one.
  7. Lenovo Thinkpad W700DS. $4,500.  Yey! for a dual screen laptop.
  8. Toshiba Qosmio G-35-AV660. $3,500.  If I had that much money to spend on a laptop, I’d get myself a Lenovo or HP with a few extra options.
  9. Dell M6400. $3,000.  They tried to put as much as stuff in it as would fit.
  10. Acer Ferrari 1100.  $3,000. The only reason this is here, because a list of 10 items sounds better than a list of 9 items.