Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

We recently purchased two HP Touchsmart PCs for the Arts Learning centre. Our goal is to encourage our faculty members to experiment with new touch based user interface which would allow us to observe and develop new applications to enhance their teaching experiences. HP TouchSmart is an all-in-one computer, similar to an iMac. It has a touch-sensitive screen, allowing users to control the navigation using their fingers. With the built-in HP navigation software, users can scroll through menus and files using their hands very much like using an iPhone.

My colleagues and I got excited and opened up one to play around during our weekly staff meeting. We soon found some pros and cons about this new PC:
PROs:
- Relative accurate touch panel allows us to perform simple image manipulations and video editing easily using standard Windows software such as Photoshop and Premiere
- A very bright and large screen makes the viewing experience pleasant
- To many less-technical learners, touching the screen is much more comfortable and intuitive when learning new web applications and image databases
- Very straight forward to set up, took less than 10 minutes to initialize the PC, my grandma can do it without hassling me
- The built in microphone and camera makes it to be very convenient for video conferencing
- No wires other than the power cord, makes it essential to mount on the wall, saves desktop spaces. The wireless keyboard and mouse works instantly and pretty far ranged

CONs:
- No Ethernet connection, only wifi, this requires the users to have a decent speed wireless connection when using the SmartTouch
- No multi-touch function, it would be cool if one can manipulate images like using an iPhone, but can not do with this PC, don’t know if it’s the hardware limitation or the software limitation
- The unit is very heavy, my grandma won’t be able to move it
- The HP navigation platform is rather slow when it comes to high resolution images or video

We will present this to the general Arts faculty members, will see how they would react to the new UI and input method.

The computer graphic card producer NVIDIA released information on the Personal Supercomputer named "Tesla Personal Supercomputer". This computer is calculated to be 250 times faster than standard PCs today.

Weeks long calculations can be shortened to just a few hours with Tesla PSC (Personal SuperComputer:)) Thans to the GPUs used in the Tesla system is 3 or 4 Tesla C1060 computing processors with 4GB of dedicated memory per GPU. It offers the performance of a cluster in a desktop system, delivering close to 4 teraflops of performance.

Pretty much anything that you do on your PC that takes a lot of time can be accelerated with this. These supercomputers can improve the time it takes to process info by 1,000 times. If you imagine it takes a week to get a result (from running an experiment), you can only do it 52 times a year. If it takes you minutes, you can do it constantly, and learn just as much in a day. (Chief Scientist of NVIDIA - David Kirk)

Some of the comparisons and ideas on Tesla are remarkable:

Synchronize a movie to an iPod normally takes up to 6 hours now can be done by Tesla within 20 minutes

New computer applications/games can be written to optimize the multi-tasking graphic ability of Tesla so that motion graphics can be presented at much higher quality than the best computer graphics today.

Tesla would allow doctors who will be able to process results for brain and body scans within hours instead of the days taken on a regular PC.

With it's high computing speed, Tesla will also help scientists to run hundreds of thousands of simulations in order to shortlist drugs that may likely be a cure to diseases such as cancer and malaria.

The biggest question on this computer would be affordability. Unfortunately, it's still priced at the much higher end, well , it is a Super Computer after all. It's suggested marking price is at US$6,000 today. But this price will be lowered dramatically in no time just as all the other hardware on the market.

At first Tesla will be sold to the scientific and research institutes and organizations. Then Dell will later bring it to the consumer market.

There seems to be some debates around if this personal supercomputer is breaking the famous Moore's law in the technology world. A more thorough discussion on Tesla's computing power and technical specifications can be found here.

Remember how Tom Cruise navigated the "special computer interface" which would tell him the future crimes? Well, the future telling machine is not yet invented, but the hand/glove based navigation system is out. Mouse was the key to the computer revolution in the past century. However, more and more researchers are experimenting with finger navigation systems which turns the users' hands into a complex input device. G-Speak seems to be one of the pioneers in the field. John Underkoffler is the chief scientist behind the G-Speak OS development. Using special Input/Output bulbs, the computer may detect the movement from the specially made gloves hence execute certain command in the computer. I think this is going to emerge with the 3D virtual world project in the near future. Because once a new input device being widely adopted, new user interfaces will be followed. The current 2D based web simply won't cut it.

First of all, the title cheated, it's a server, but designed in a desktop layout. Our IT department recently received a new desktop server-Dell Poweredge 2900, for a department in the faculty. Since it is "the most expensive" desktop computer (It cost over $10K) I have encountered so far, therefore I better take a few pictures. I am so far quite impressed by Dell's Laptop quality but never knew they can build a high quality server box with such an efficient design. The Power Edge 2900 is one of the newest and most powerful desktop servers in the market today. A lockable panel in the front prevents access to the hard drives and a small on-box LCD panel with color variations provide quick summary of the server status. The Dell Poweredge 2900 has a similar height as a normal desktop and 1/3 longer than a regular desktop.

The desktop server provide amazingly flexible storage options: you can plug in up to 8 SAS or SATA hard drives in hot-swap carriers. An optional flex-bay can be inserted in the lower of the two spare 5.25in bays above, with its own backplane and interface.

There are six easily removable fans providing a good access of air through the interior front to back, for the purpose of cooling the monster down: 5050 Xeon processor mounted on it, both sockets have dedicated fans and the (max. up to 48GB) memory slots also have dedicated fans.

It’s got a dual 93w hot-swap power supplies in case of one breaks down.

Unfortunately, it is "too noisy" for anyone to hide it under the desk. Therefore, it still needs to go into a server room. But it certainly got the "Ferrari" look.

Found a nice old fountain pen made by Parker in the storage box today. Wow, I can't remember when was the last time I used one of these to write. Then I came across with this Chinese article on the top ten brand names for Fountain Pen products: Parker, Mont Blanc, Wahl Eversharp, Waterman, Cartire, Sheaffer, Ideal, Aurora, Cross and Montegrappa.

My father has always favored the Parker Pen. I think he received a pair of Parker's Pen with golden tips as the wedding gift over 30 years ago. It was (and still is) a quite luxury and delicate gift in China. I believe my grandfather owns an original collector's edition of the “Lucky Curve” Parker's fountain pen which he bought from a British business man whom was leaving Shanghai in a hurry back in 1949. Why is it so famous in China? Well, one of the reason could be that it was the very first gift the People's Republic of China received from the president of the United States - Richard Nixon back in 1972 for the opening of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China.

Parker Duofolds from the 1920s used the Lucky Curve feed system

I just received an early Christmas gift - a Samsung NV10 digital camera. This ought be the smallest 10.1 mega pixels camera available today!

While the North American high quality digital camera market is flooded by Canon Digital Rebel XTi which weight 556 g (1.2 lb) and has a dimension of 127 x 94 x 65 mm (5.0 x 3.7 x 2.5 in), the Asian market is introducing an alternative product – Samsung NV10. The Samsung NV10 only weight 148.7 g and has a tiny size of 96.5 x 60 x 18.5 mm. Look at the picture, it merely at the same size of a 60GB iPod! It comes with a rechargeable battery SLB-0837(B).

With a sensor of 10.3 million pixels total, the maximum quality of image size Samsung NV10 takes is 3648 x 2736 which is almost the same with the Canon Rebel Xti. The Samsung NV10 also support 640 x 480 movie recording at 30 fps. The file formats generated by this camera includes JPEG, Exif 2.2, DPOF 1.1 and AVI / MPEG-4. It has a 35-105mm Lens with a 3X optical zoom. Samsung NV10 comes with an advanced shake reduction technology which I was quite impressed with. I took a few pictures while walking in the snow, the result was not bad at all. Not to mention the highest ISO sensitivity for this camera is ISO 1000. Samsung NV10 also support continuous shooting where the shutter speed is decreased to the minimal. My favorite feature of this camera is its 2.5-inch TFT LCD monitor which supports up to 230,000 pixels viewing point! It's a huge lcd display for a tiny sized camera!

The only thing I don't like is it's connection cable, where Samsung NV10 uses its own cable with a SE connector on the camera end instead of the standard ones. This makes the cable replacement a challenge and I have to carry it around at all times. You will need this cable to charge the battery as well. So, don't lose it!

I printed out a picture (8x11) taken by Samsung NV10, the quality is impressive! You can see the obvious difference from pictures taken using 5 mega pixels cameras at this printing size.

Anyway, going to bring it with me over the holidays and will tell you more about it after a few hundreds of pictures.

Just how cheap can a desktop PC be? Around $300 US, with a Intel Processor. Intel's chairman of the board - Craig Barrett is in China today and announced the plan of launching the wave of cheap desktop PCs that are just made for the rural geographic locations in China. In the next four years, Intel will invest over 1 billion US dollars into 4 world regional manufactures to produce low cost desktop PCs for the locals.

Dell has been using Intel for all of their products. However, this is about to change. In Dell's first quarter financial report (2006), they have indicated that Dell will introduce AMD processors to their product line. Dell did not indicate the reason of the new movement, but I assume this has everything to do with cutting the cost and reaching a bigger market.

Dell's financial report indicates their first quarter profit was 762 million dollars which is 18% lower than the first quarter in 2005.

UPDATE: Check out my new review on the world smallest laptop pc - Sony VAIO UX!

UPDATE: Top 5 Student Laptops in 2007

I have been looking for a desktop replacement laptop for quite some time now - P4 1.8 GHz desktop to be replaced by a laptop. I had to brush up my hardware knowledge in a short amount of time. Let’s just say after hours of reading, I have learned much about the current laptop market and want to write a review of all the knowledge I have learned along with some reviews of the laptops that I have checked out, read about and tested. Hope this review will help someone to purchase a laptop for an education-related profession this summer. I am going to organize the review into different categories based on the laptop components that I think are most critical to identify and compare. The review is written for the newbie (plain English) which I was one a few days ago.

1. Laptop CPU Review (Central Processing Unit)

This determines the general speed of your laptop. The newest technology in laptops on CPU structure is Intel’s Dual Core (Core Duo in Mac Vocab) technology. In short, it means two processors engineered onto a single chip. Theoretically, you would get twice the computational power of a traditional single processor. Watch the following two Flash demos created by Intel, you will understand why dual-core and what is multi-thread calculation.
Why Intel Dual Core Processor
What is Intel Multi-Core Platforms

However, I do need to point out what’s coming on the horizon – AMD Turion 64 X2 or Athlon 64 for 64-bit processing. It is scheduled to reach the market by mid June or July 2006 which will cause the Intel Dual Core chip based laptops to drop price. The AMD Turion Dual Core will be 64 bits where Intel dual cores are 32 bits. If you want to dig deeper on AMD VS. Intel in the multi-processor race, read this review. For those of you trust my opinion? You don’t need to worry about the 64 bits processing until the year 2008 when the major software corporations upgrade their product line to 64 bits. But even then, can they be brave enough to discontinue the 32 bits supported products? I highly doubt it.

Conclusion on CPU, don’t buy a Pentium M (single core) notebook at this point, go for an Intel Dual Core laptop if you need it right now. If you can wait until the summer is over, go for an AMD Turion 64 Dual Core Processor based laptop. As expected, the chips use Intel's new model-numbering scheme. The Intel dual core products are labeled as T2600 (2.16GHz), T2500 (2GHz), T2400 (, 1.83GHz) and T2300 (1.66GHz). I have chosen a T2500 (2GHz). Today’s laptop technology makes it possible to upgrade CPUs down the road, but it does depends on the particular laptop you buy and expect for an expensive labor cost.

2. Laptop Graphic Cards Review (or GPU – Graphics Processing Unit)
A graphic card is probably the second most important in computer hardware configurations. It determines how well you run the graphic based programs (where 99.9% of the software programs today have fancy graphic user interfaces). If you ever want to use the laptop to watch video contents, view animations or play games, you must know your graphic card chart well. When it comes to graphic cards, I put them into two categories: Integrated Graphics Cards, and Add-on Graphic Cards. Simply put, if you are going to use your laptop mainly for surfing the net, checking email, word processing, 2D graphic design and occasionally playing some games, a laptop with an integrated graphic card would do for you. However, if you work with animation creations, multimedia developments (e.g. video rendering) or game playing (3D games like Quake 4, Half Life 2, Far Cry, FEAR, Battle Field 2), you do need the add-on graphic cards. The graphic cards makes a huge difference on laptop prices, but the one thing you can bet, the more expensive the graphic cards are, the better 3D support they provide. The top of the line graphic cards today are: ATI Radeon X800, ATI Radeon X800XT, ATI Radeon X1800, ATI Radeon X1800XT, Nvidia Go6800. Nvidia Go7800, Nvidia Go6800 Ultra, Nvidia Go7900GS, Nvidia Go7800GTX, Nvidia Go7900GTX. These graphic cards come with minimum of 128 MB GPU memory and the Go7900GTX comes with 512 MB Memory. In the common laptop brands: Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Lenovo (IBM) and HP, Dell XPS 1710 is the only laptop that comes with the Go7900GTX card and of course it’s overall performance is also the highest. In general, Nvidia cards have higher 3D benchmarks over ATI cards based on the similar models. Here is a very well written article on Mobile Graphic Cards, read it for a better understanding on the graphic cards comparisons. Don’t worry, this article is also written for newbie.

Conclusion on Graphic cards, try to get an add-on graphic card when your budget allow and don’t go for the high end ones if you do not play games. I personally believe ATI cards are good for video editing and nVidia cards are great for gaming. Please note that it is awfully difficult (almost impossible) to change the graphic card on laptops for upgrade down the road, therefore, think wisely and choose carefully.

3. Memory (RAM)
Hardware people would tell you, when you have a limited budget, the most “bang-on-the-buck” investment would be computer memory. Same thing for the laptops. If you don’t want to invest an extra $400 on a 512MB graphic card, or $300 on the next line of CPU, you can always choose to spend an extra hundreds dollar or so to get a memory upgrade.

My opinion is that don’t settle with 512MB RAM today, go for the minimum 1G. Do make sure the laptop has room for further memory upgrade because if you want to use Windows Vista, 1G is the minimum requirement. You might need to kick in another 1G pretty soon. Laptop Rams are fairly easy to upgrade.

4. Screen, Laptop Size and Weight
Two types of laptops today if we categorize them by size and weight, the desktop replacement laptops and day-to-day carry around laptops. The desktop replacement laptops come with 17 inch wide screen and heavy bodies (8 lbs to 12 lbs) while the day-to-day carry around laptops ranges from 9 inch to 12 inch to 14/15 inch with a weight from 3 lbs to 7 lbs. My experience tells me that you don’t want to carry an 8 lbs+ laptop walking around. A good trick I learned from the forums is you should find out the weight of the particular laptop you want and put books with equivalent weight into a backpack and walk around. Trust me, avoid buying an over-weight laptop!

One thing to note is that many manufacturers today (Dell, Toshiba, Sony) offers ultra-bright and ultra-sharp LCD as an upgrade option for their laptops. If the price is under $250, I’d suggest you go for it. Because they do make a huge difference when you watch a movie or play games. These screens used to cost over thousands of dollars a couple of years ago.

5. Hard Drive
Laptop Hard Drives are easy to choose, the common ones today are 60GB, 80GB, 100GB and 120GB in two different speed 5400RPM and 7200 RPM. The second one is relatively faster than the first.

I suggest go for 80GB which gives you enough space to hold contents and software and not blow your pocket. Speed wise, if you are not don’t any video editing or running software that needs constant access of the hard drive, 5400RPM would simply do it. Other wise, spend the extra $350 for a 7200 RPM drive. Laptop hard drives today are easy to replace and upgrade.

6. Battery
Now battery life has everything to do with the parts mentioned above. If you use faster CPU, powerful graphic card, bigger and brighter screen, and a large hard drive to watch movie or play games, well, good luck with your battery life. Laptop batteries come with different number of cells: the 6-cell, all the way to 10-cell Lithium Ion Battery. The higher the number of cells, the more power it stores. But like I said, if you do heavy duty tasks with your laptop, plug it into the wall!

7. Peripherals

- Make sure the laptop come with enough USB plugs. (at the least 2)
- A 5-in-1 or 6-in-1 card reader will be really handy on the road
- DVD burner would be nice when you have a smaller hard drive (smaller than 80GB )
- All laptops today have wireless card build in, but you might want to check on Bluetooth. It would be useful since more printers, communication devices and home appliances are Bluetooth equipped.
- A IEEE 1394 Port (Fire Wire) is important for video editing
- DVI Connector for the new laptops and Mac cinema displays
- S-video out if you want to project the laptop content to home TV

Personal Picks
Here is list of laptops I personally recommend, Google them or check with your local venders for the latest prices:

$1000-$2000:
Lenovo (IBM) ThinkPad T60, for around $1550, this is a fast enough laptop with a dual core processor and ATI X1400 graphic card for normal computing an home entertainment. Specs: 5.1 lbs, Intel (1.66 GHz Core Duo), 512 MB, 14.1 in TFT active matrix. The specs are little low I would say, but for daily computing, this is more than enough.

Sony VAIO SZ120P/B, one of the smallest dual core laptop available in the market today. With a LCD of 13.3 in TFT active matrix, the laptop is only 4 lbs. I have seen the local London Drugs carry this laptop with NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 (128MB Dedicated Memory) as the graphic card, you may even use this laptop for some high end gaming experiences. This laptop comes just around $2000. If you wait for another month, I bet it will drop to $1900 or lower.

Dell Inspiron 6400, a very nicely priced unit, for under $1800, you can get this laptop bundled with Intel® Core™ Duo processor T2500 (2MB Cache/2GHz/667MHz FSB ), 15.4 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen SXGA+ Display with TrueLife™, 1GB DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz, 100GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive, and 256MB ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON® X1400 HyperMemory™. This set up is good enough for daily computing plus home entertainment and gaming purposes.

$2000 or above:
Apple MacBook Pro, comes in either 1.83 GHz or 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 1 GB DDR SDRAM, ATI X1600 and 15.4 in TFT active matrix. With a light weight of 5.6 pounds, this laptop is ideal to carry around or use as a desktop replacement computer. The ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics processor is good enough for almost all of today’s newest games and it has great video play back capabilities. One can get this unit for around $2500 which is worth the investment by far. One thing I do want to point out is that with the Mac Boot Camp, you can install Windows XP to this machine as well!

Dell XPS M1710, now this is a monster Laptop; it is one of the top 3 laptops available in today’s market. With the Intel dual core processors, 1GB + RAM, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS (GTX) with 256MB (512MB ) DDR memory, this is the fastest laptop with a popular brand name (one of the Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Lenovo, Asus, Apple and HP) you can find on the market. With a similar price as the MacBook Pro, PC users certainly also get a bang-on-the-bucks product on this product as well.

Lenovo acquired the personal computer department of IBM in 2005. The 2006 Winter Olympic, Lenovo becomes the first official Olympic sponsor from China. (From: Xinhua Net)

It was a sad moment to watch Canada Men's hockey team lost in the quater finals. Man, the last period... Many friends question if this "SUPER STAR" team actually is the best team to represent Canada. Maybe a team with a bit more "team spirit" would have result a better outcome. All I care is I better get a ticket to the 2010 Olympic game which is HERE - Vancouver!

I purchased a HP color inkjet printer over a year ago. It is one of the all-in-one models. I barely used it for printing, mainly for scanning and ocassionaly for photo copying. Yesterday, I turned it on and tried to print something, it gave me an error message: "Error: Right cartridge incorrect." After a few reboot of the printer, the message doesn't go away, and it blocks all printing and photo-copying tasks. I then called HP support line and they were going to charge me $30 for the support call but I told them I can spend extra $20 to buy another printer, and the support staff paused for a few second and suggested me TO DO SO! Anyway, I then tried to clean the printer from inside out, Air-brushed every inch of the machine, cotton cleaned (with alcohol) the cartridge connecting heads and electronic clips. But nothing helped. I then turned to the Internet...

Surprisingly, many others have had the same experience as me and they have come to some shocking conclusion after hours of research and discussion with the printer manufacturers:

Many newer HP Printers internally keep track of your cartridges by a serial number embedded into the cartridge. When it's low, the printer remembers. This is entirely done within the printer itself, and not the printer software. Some printers EXPIRE the cartridges after 18 months according to the installation date even it is not empty.

I find this is outrageous, it's like buy a pen and it won't let you use it after 1 month even the ink is still half full?! If this is true, there should some serious polices to prevent the manufacturers from doing so. An alternative solution I have found so far is:

Most HP printers will only keep 2 cartridges in memory, so if you have 2 extra cartridges, (even empty ones) you could cycle them through to reset the printers memory, and reset the ink level to full. Basically, even though you've refilled your cartridge, the printers has the cartridge's serial number stored in memory. This will reset it.

I will give this a try, but it still needs me to go out and purchase a brand new HP #56 black cartridge while the original one is not empty yet... If you have any experiences like this, please share it with me.

Found this from some old blog postings... Yummy... A set of USB flash memory storage devices that made in sushi shells. Maguro, Uni and the ever popular Ikura... And my favorite maki... Where is my Wasabi?!?!?!

Me and a couple of my colleagues were talking about the best display devices out there. I was just describing my dream set, 5 LCDs all around me, spread out from one base, all connected, can be used for both PC and Mac... Then I found this one on the web:

This is a real display set, created by Liebermann, highest resolution reaches 19200 X 2400. Only 2.5 inch thick. 16.7 million color.

Went to the legendary "Cell Phone Mall" today and could not resist, bought the brand new Motorola PDA/Media/Cell Phone - A780. Love the phone, some worth to mention features: 1.3 megapixel camera with full-screen viewfinder; Video record/playback and streamed video* playback; MP3 player supporting MIDI/WAV/AMR/WMA, Real and AAC files; Embedded Bluetooth wireless technology; Viewer for PDF and Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents; Java (J2ME) MIDP 2.0 with 3D Graphics; Internet access via WAP 2.0, WML, xHTML, HTML (Opera7). Going back to the mall tomorrow to get a 256 MB flash card and a bluetooth ear plug then I will be all set... What else do I need? maybe a portable data projector based on my watch... :)

Sorry for lack of blog lately, just too much to write and don't know where to start...