Posts tagged: HARDWARE

This is amateur science at its best. Peter Klausler, an aficionado of the Dvorak keyboard layout, decided to see if there were better permutations of keys yet unrealized:

…I constructed a complicated function that measures the amount of “work” needed to touch-type a given text with a given layout.

Very good. But where does the primordial soup of keyboard layouts come from?

…4096 keyboard layouts compete with each other. The layouts in the initial pool are entirely random. In each generation, they all race to “type” a word list, and their per-word times are multiplied by the word frequencies in the input sample. After the race, the fastest half are kept. The pool is then repopulated by generating a single mutation for each survivor.

Apple customers have a long tradition of griping about Apple’s silly naming policies. But I take it all back after going over this Kaypro timeline from the ’80s. Let’s see, in chronological order starting in 1982 we have:

• Kaypro II (the first model, so naturally we call it “II”)
• Kaypro IV
• Kaypro 10
• Kaypro 4 (totally different from the “IV” of course!)
• Kaypro 2 (totally… never mind)

This madness continued through several more models until the Kaypro 1 was released in 1986, at which point the company completely imploded, possibly due to a logic vacuum deep in its core or a breach in the space-time continuum.

There’s a fine line between collecting and just not knowing when to throw stuff out. Sometime in the last few years I switched from the latter to the former – in the realm of vintage computer hardware, anyway. Because the OCD aspects of collecting kind of freak me out, I don’t get too organized about it. I like portable stuff; I like Apple stuff; I like stuff that’s cleverly designed. I like stuff I’ve actually used; I like getting stuff really cheap on eBay.

Hitachi really made a splash with their “Hard Drive is the New Bling” promotion, or contest, or campaign, or practical joke, or whatever it is. We all had a good laugh and the writers of Engadget swore off the word “bling” forevermore. But the tin-eared marketing pales next to the sheer wrongness underneath.

The pitch wasn’t really about bling at all, or even geek bling. I imagine what it said before Cory Coolhunter in Marketing got hold of it was, “We should tell everybody that the best portable electronic devices use Hitachi microdrives.” I think in the end that will prove to have been briefly true. But microdrives are on the way out. They have no inherent advantages over flash (that I know of), so they only exist at a particular size tier as long as flash memory at that tier is significantly more expensive. This is surely obvious to everyone, except maybe to Hitachi – who don’t seem to make flash memory devices.

I got my hands on one of the new OWC Mercury Elite cases last week – the big one that looks most like a mini-G5 tower. I think it would make a fantastic casemod project for the Mini-ITX crowd (with a nano-ITX board, I’d guess). Imagine a little card-reader slot right where the CD/DVD drive is on the real PowerMac. Dare I say it would be cute?

The irony is that, if somebody builds such a thing, it will likely be Windows/Linux only – unless they do it by stuffing the guts of a Mini inside.