new products

[totient]

On the way to miss_chance's studio the other day I saw this:

in the window of this:

---

MacWorld is coming up. Folks are predicting a thin laptop. I'm predicting that it's a tablet with a capacitive multi-touch screen. Whether it has a keyboard at all, and whether there's an option to put a traditional HD in it instead of flash, still remain to be seen.

Comments

[ceo]

Where is that?

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

smartcar!!!

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

Oh, I totally should have done this as a "what's this (http://maps.google.com/?ll=42.378119,-71.08857&t=h&z=19&om=0)" game.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22285320/ says Seattle is getting them too.

[lifecollage.livejournal.com]

My car! Let me show you it!

Hell, let me show *me* it! Road trip!

[mrf-arch.livejournal.com]

Yay, smartcars!

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

They're in Boston now? Neat!

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I'm skeptical that they're ready to put a journaling filesystem on a flash drive.

[jered]

Why? Journaled file systems are great for flash, because they even the wear. Or are we caught in the journaled (log-structured) vs. journaled (transaction-logged) swamp?

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that all the modern flash drives have wear-leveling built into the hardware now, so even running plain old FAT on them is still OK.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that didn't make any sense, did it? OK. The thing I wonder about is putting *swap* on a flash drive, because the constant writes will wear it out faster. Am I still behind the times on that?

[jered]

Personally, I'm against swap on multi-gigabyte non-server machines -- and have you noticed that the standard config for a MacBook Pro is 2 GB RAM now?

Not quite swap, but Microsoft Vista uses flash drives for a feature called ReadyBoost, which is an application pre-caching feature.

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

Journaling file system in fact available for flash. No capacitive screen -- so it's crow for dinner for me. I guess it's up to Nokia to push this envelope now.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I'm sharing some of that crow, clearly :-)