Microsoft Surface

Microsoft has created a nice piece of furniture: a table. Unlike regular wood or steel tables we know of, this table has a touch screen on it's surface. The new product is call Microsoft Surface. Unlike early touch screens which allowed a person to use one finger to manipulate objects on the screen, the Microsoft Surface allows one to use to fingers simultaneously to manipulate screen objects.

Binary Clocks!

No, it has nothing to do with atomic clocks. A binary clock operates the same way as other digital clocks, except that intead of displaying decimal numbers it shows binary numbers as its output!

IBM Releases Fastest Processor

IBM has released POWER6, that fastest computer processor ever till this day. POWER6 is a dual-core 4.7 GHz chip with a total cache size of 8MB. The edge of POWER6 is that it does not consume more energy or electricity than its slower predecessor.

Linux and Windows XP on Dell Computers

It's interesting that after offering Windows Vista on its new computers, Dell is now offering new computers with Windows XP on them. Dell followed this by introducing new Dell desktops and laptops with Ubnutu, a popular Linux distro, installed on them instead of Windows. It seems Linux is starting to take over on mainstream computers. This is sure a hard time on Microsoft.

Dell is Listening

Dell IdeaStorm is a web site launched by Dell to act as a place for users to give feedback on Dell's products and spell out their wishes for future products. An interesting way to keep an eye on what customers want as well as an excellent source of new ideas for designing new products. Reminds me of how Google is keeping an open ear and eagerly taking in user feedback.

Intel Makes Dust Resistant Computers

Ever sicnce I faced the problem of noisy computers I've been thinking a lot about the amount of heat and dust computers in Egypt go through. These computers are not actually designed for our weather conditions. They are designed for dust-free environments and places with lower temperatures than hours. Both heat and dust accumulated in a computer in Egypt cause it to become more noisy with time, reduce its lifetime and may in extreme cases cause headaches to the user and reduce work efficiency or gaming pleasure.

I've been increasingly thinking about why not someone design a computer specially for our type of environment. A computer that is dust-resistant and can work efficiently in high temperatures. That's why I was delighted to know that Intel is developing computers that can accommodate environments with high temperatures, high humidity and dust. The ruggedized PC was initially designed for India, but other countries are expressing interest in it.

I believe when such dust-resistant computers enter the mainstream Egyptian hardware market they will be a blockbuster.

Apple Makes Mobile Phones

Apple Computer Inc. has changed its name today to Apple Inc. Apple has revealed the release of its first mobile phone. Apple will be competing with giant players in the mobile phone industry like Nokia and Motorola.

Renting Computer Processors

EC2 is a service offered by Amazon.com. It allows you to rent computing power. Renting hard drives to store your data has been a service offered by many and used by an increasing number of consumers. Now EC2 is offering rent not of storage space, but of computing power. Computing power of course is comprised of computer processors and RAM. The interesting thing about this service is that you can rent computing power as small as a 1.7 GHz processor to as large as thousands of such processors. Such processing power is prices by the hour. A very interesting concept.