Daily Archives: January 16, 2008

The MacBook Air Compromise

A few days ago I described a laptop for “end-of-year 2009.”

Closed it’s impossibly thin – maybe a quarter inch thick. You open it up and the upper half is entirely screen. The lower half is keyboard and touchpad…

Ten days later it now looks like I was describing the MacBook Air:

This really is a thing of beauty. But to make the device this thin a couple of compromises were made. It has no optical drive. They argue, somewhat convincingly, that you won’t miss it. You can get an external drive if you like, but they are pushing the idea that you can use the optical drive of other computers wirelessly.

The other compromise is that there are no built-in stereo speakers. There’s a mono speaker. But Apple really envisions you using earbuds or plugging into a stereo.

In a way, this is what I’m already doing with my latest laptop. The stereo quality of my new machine is less than my last because the thinner profile meant smaller speakers. The MacBook Air just takes this compromise to the ultimate end. Why bother with built-in stereo if the quality is bad?

Maybe the next generation MacBook Air will incorporate stereo into the screen with SurfaceSound technology.

Facing the Serious Questions

I, for one, welcome our new monkey overlords with their thought-controlled robotic henchmen.

Of course, the real point of this research is that if monkey’s can do it, so can humans. So the serious question about the future that we all have to face is whether we will go with straight-up thought-controlled robotic henchmen, or whether we will develop a human-monkeybrain interface whereby what we think will be carried out by the monkeys, and what the monkeys think (as instructed by us) will by carried out by the robots. I personally prefer this model, in that I get not only henchman, but a tiered reporting structure as well.

But that’s just me

Also, if it matters, this research might have some kind of obscure side benefits for victims of paralysis:

In a major step toward helping victims of paralysis walk again, researchers at Duke University Medical Center today announced that they had proved monkeys can use their brainpower to control the walking patterns of robots.

The Duke researchers, working with the Computational Brain Project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, implanted Idoya, a rhesus monkey, with electrodes that gathered signals from her brain’s motor and sensory cortex cells as she ambled along on a specially built child-size treadmill. The electrodes recorded the cells’ responses as the monkey walked on the treadmill at different speeds; simultaneously, sensors on Idoya’s legs tracked their patterns of movement. The information was transmitted in real time from their lab in Durham, N.C., to control the commands of a five-foot-tall humanoid robot (see video here) in Kyoto, Japan.

That part all seems a little far-out to me. But who knows? Maybe the human interest angle will help them keep the work funded.

Via GeekPress.