particlestorm.net

A few days ago Nokia and several Gnome Project related companies announced the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. The device is only 5.5 x 3.1 inches in dimension and 0.75 inches thick, making it about the size of your typical PDA. It includa a 800×480 touch screen in full color, 802.11 b/g WIFI, and a nice brushed metal case. But, the best part about this device, is that it runs Linux and Gnome!!! Nokia has even completely open sourced all the software on the device and is supporting it as a community project called maemo.

The device is expected to go on sale within the next few months and cost $350. Anyone want to buy me one so I can start hacking on it? With such an open platform, the possibilities for this device are limitless. Lots more information about this device can be found on Nokia’s web site.

I have had my new Tungsten E2 for several days now and I think it was worth the upgrade. The main reason I bought it was so Aliciana could have my old Tungsten E. That way she can keep her work calendar and contacts on it. Plus, I wanted a new toy.

The first thing you will notice about the Tungsten E2 when compared to the older Tungsten E is how much more responsive it is. The E has a 126 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP311 processor while the new E2 has a 200 MHz Intel XScale processor. Don’t let the similar sized numbers fool you, a 200 MHz XScale is much faster feeling than the 126 MHz OMAP.

A lot of reviews on the E2 make a big deal about the new screen, which is brighter than the older one found on the E. But, in my opinion and having the 2 devices side by side, I can’t tell much of a difference. I think that the biggest improvement in the screen is that it doesn’t suffer from the high pitched buzzing sound of the older screen.

The Palm OS is the newer 5.4.1 version of Garnet, which includes newer versions of the PIM apps. It also adds a “focus” highlight around the current control in the application that has the navigator focus, which I didn’t like at first but have been getting use to. My main complaints with the new focus feature is that it gets cut-off around many of the buttons where it doesn’t fit and it’s color scheme doesn’t change with the selected theme. Hopefully, they will fix both and make the fix available to current owners.

My biggest complaint is the new “Universal Connector” on the bottom of the device that replaces standard the mini-B usb plug. This is a typical move to a proprietary interface instead of an industry standard. While I like that the cable now has a ‘hotsync’ button on it, I hate that I can’t use the same cable with between my digital camera and PDA. Until I see some useful devices come out that take advantage of the proprietary that couldn’t have been implemented using standard USB I will remain convinced that this change is just a scheme to sell additional expensive cables.

The E2 includes some other new features, such as the integrated bluetooth, which is totally insecure and will remain turn off. It also has better photo integration which allows you to finally place a photo of a contact with his info. Still no WIFI, which is sad and makes the included web browser pretty useless.

Overall, buy an E2 over the E because of the much faster processor. It is still a great device, relatively inexpensive (around $250), and does information management very well. If Palm PalmOne Palm ever combines it with built-in WIFI it will be a killer device. We can only hope that happens at some point.

IBM is expected to take back the title of fastest supercomputer when the new Top 500 list is released next week. The Top 500 supercomputers list is available at www.top500.org and is the official authority on whose computer is the fastest.

Nasa’s Columbia supercomputer was expected to take the top spot, with a speed of 42.7 teraflops, until IBM announced today that their computer is hitting speeds of 70.7 teraflops. This computer, called Blue Gene/L, is being built by IBM for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, which is part of the US Department of Energy. What is even more amazing is that this machine is only a ‘prototype’ version and the full thing, when competed next year, should be capable of hitting speeds faster than 360 tereflops!

For more information, take a look at the news articles running on CNet, BBC News, and lots of other places.

Nasa and SGI just announced that the newly created Columbia Supercomputer is the worlds fastest, hitting 42.7 teraflops on the LINPACK performance tests. This beats the previous record, held by Japan’s Earth Simulator Supercomputer, of 35.86 teraflops. The new Columbia Supercomputer consists of 10240 Itanium 2 CPUs which live in 20 interconnected SGI Altix systems. And, of course, the system is running Linux

Slashdot and The Register are both carrying announcements of the success. You can also read the official press release from SGI by clicking here or find out more information on the new supercomputer by going to this SGI site.

If you are running out of hard drive space on your computer you might want to go to Best Buy today. There is a Western Digital Caviar 80.0GB internal hard drive available at the store for $25.49 after rebates! The drive is 7200 RPM and 8 MB cache, which means it is as fast as IDE hard drives get. I am leaving right now to go pick one up (you can never have too many hard drives) and you should do the same. Here is a link to the hard drive on Best Buy’s web site: Click Here.

It is getting too late in the night to write anything profound, so instead I will drool over a piece of hardware I saw advertised in my latest Linux Journal. The Tyan Thunder K8QS Pro motherboard is amazing simply because it takes four AMD Opteron processors. To translate for non-geeks, that means you can build a single computer that has four very fast processors in it, all doing things for you at the same time. Mmmmmm…. four processors….