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Showing posts from March, 2007

Croquet SDK 1.0 released

Get it while it's hot from the equally new Croquet Consortium web site.

In-depth review of XO in German c't magazine

There's a glowing review of the OLPC project and its XO machine in the current issue 07/2007 of c't magazine . The in-depth article by Dr. Jürgen Rink describes the project's history and educational ambitions as well as its current prototype hardware and software. One very interesting detail is a comparison of the XO's novel dual-mode display in low light and bright sun light, at normal size and magnified: On the left, under indoor lighting, the colored backlight shines through holes in the reflective layer. On the right, when brightly lit outdoors, the reflection is so strong that the backlight is not even visible anymore, thus creating a gray-scale image. The photographs show one of the example Etoys projects. The magazine is available now at kiosks until next week, or via mail order . In a few weeks the article should be available online via click&buy .

Croquet for Business: Qwaq Forums

So Qwaq came out of "stealth-mode" and reveiled what they have been working on for a while now, Qwaq Forums : Qwaq Forums, the company's first product, is a secure virtual workspace application that significantly increases the productivity of distributed teams by bringing critical resources together in virtual places, as if they were in an actual physical location. A highly interactive and persistent environment, Qwaq Forums enables users to work, collaborate with others, and identify and solve problems. And I'm proud to say I contributed a little, which most probably will find its way into the next Croquet release. Update: Here's a few nice stories of fellow bloggers who have seen Forums already. From Steve Borsch's Connecting The Dots : Qwaq will get traction only because they completely understand that giving someone a semi-trailer truck (i.e., an engine like There or Second Life) doesn't do much good if the person has a small garage and needs a vehi...

Interactive OLPC XO Display Simulation

Many people still have not seen the innovative display of the OLPC project's "XO" laptop. It has twice the resolution of a regular LCD (200 dpi), and works in bright daylight in gray-scale reflective mode. It's impossible for me to increase your screen's resolution by software, and I cannot make your display reflective, but here is an interactive simulation of the backlight mode with its interesting color pattern. This pattern is the source of a lot of confusion about the "color resolution" of the display. The LCD has 1200x900 square pixels, but the backlight puts a full color through each pixel. It is not made of red, green, and blue sub-pixels like a regular LCD, but the first pixel is full red, the second green, the third blue, and so on. The DCON chip (Display CONtroller) selects the color components from the full-color frame buffer. My simulation of the DCON achieves the same effect by selecting either the red, green, or blue color component in each...