Month: July 2008

I love Battlestar Galactica. it has, once again, taught me something useful in life. According to an article in TheStar:

The armed forces will be called in to assist police in maintaining public order if the security situation of the country warrants it.

In light of this comment, I am reminded of the following quote by Commander Adama:

There’s a reason we separate military and the police: o­ne fights the enemy of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

I do not want to see the military in our streets. If that ever happens, we are just one step away from Zimbabwe.

Man, this is a machine that is aiming straight for my heart! Ignoring for a moment, the blatantly cheesy name “Eee Monitor”, it is still a svelte and sexy machine. Photos of it are just making the rounds around the Internet. It’s not just a monitor, but carries a full blown PC inside it. Plus, it will come standard with Linux for under $500!

This machine is definitely going to give the iMac a run for it’s money. Some people may complain about the fact that these machines are a little underpowered compared to the iMac. That is true as the Eee will only come with an Atom processor, which is the new line of low-powered mobile focused processor chips from Chipzilla. It is a processor that is essentially a Pentium inside the body of a i386. So, it is certainly underpowered for computational fluid dynamics. But it’s more than enough for your everyday applications.

Furthermore, people should stop thinking of computers as singular entities whose computing powers are limited to what’s inside the box. Think clusters. If someone were to be setting up a small office, for example, networking 10 of these machines with a single quad core computer server, would actually be more efficient and powerful than having 10 top end boxes individually. Not to mention, it would look far cooler than having 10 regular beige boxes sitting on the desk.

Personally, I think that ASUS has been doing a great job recently, innovating like crazy and opening up new market niches where no one has gone before, which is forcing everyone else to follow along. They started with the Eee PC, which has opened up a market that is now known as the “NetBook” market. This has forced everyone else, from HP, Dell, Acer, MSI to play catch-up. Then, ASUS released it’s Eee Box, which is trying to give the Apple mini, a run for it’s money. And now this!

Whomever says that the PC computing market is dead, is obviously wrong. Although the Eee PC may be a novelty that appeals mainly to road-warriors and hacker-like people, I can potentially see an Eee Monitor in every home and office. I’d like to see Acer come up with an equivalent device at a $400 price point instead. That would be just snazzy and I’ll grab one or more of these for myself.

PS: They should fire their marketing department though, for coming up with such lame names as Eee PC, Eee Box and Eee Monitor. What will they think of next?

Typical reactions about my mobile phone and I:

• 1998: Wah, you got mobile phone!
• 1999: Eh, pinjam your phone.
• 2000: What’s your number?
• 2001: Why your battery die so fast ah?
• 2002: Eh, cannot call u lar!
• 2003: Why your phone so simple one, ah?
• 2004: Eh, phone so cheap, get new one lar!
• 2005: Why don’t you ever pick up?
• 2006: So, how can I contact you?
• 2007: Why don’t you use your phone?

The thing is, I bought myself a mobile a decade ago. At the time, it was rather a novelty and I did use it a lot as I had just gone to university and the public phones there were never in working order. Then, phones became common and I realised that I began to use it less and less, as it was a device for people to get in touch with me, not the other way round. I tend to prefer face-to-face communications. Then, phones became so packed with features that I ended up buying the simplest phone on the market.

But now, I’m actually thinking on spending close to £300 for a new mobile phone (and it’s not the iPhone!). The phone that I am planning to get is the OpenMoko, a fully open sourced mobile phone. I love the whole idea of a open sourced mobile stack. It would not only be a phone to me, but a fun new toy for me to build interesting apps on. They have also worked hard to secure hardware documentation for the community. That changes the whole dynamic of the relationship.

The only problem is that it’s still in a very alpha stage. Although the hardware platform is mostly fixed, the software is still under heavy development. At the moment, it is not guaranteed to be able to make a stable call but they are constantly releasing new firmware revisions each day. I might wait till it stabilises a little and at least allows me to make phone calls and send text messages, before buying it for myself.

The hardware is quite elegant, except for one extremely rookie mistake. They must have left that part to an intern to do, or something. They had actually connected the graphics accelerator onto a slow SPI bus. That’s like fitting a Ferrari with bicycle wheels. But other than that, everything else looks quite nice. As I will be leaving the UK soon, I would need to buy this thing soon. It isn’t easily available in Malaysia.