It looks like this: http://junk.kegetys.net/xzy/quantum_clock.jpg

I have seen similar clocks made so that the platters are visible and the clock hands are made out of the read heads. That way it looks better, mine is just quick hack job out of clock parts I had lying around that happened to fit inside the drive casing :)

I have a wall clock made out of a Quantum Bigfoot drive, does that count as use?

Dedicated head trackers like TrackIR and Freetrack have allowed this for quite some time now.

> When this is done well, the visual effect is spectacular. [youtube.com]

This "window" effect only really works if you close one of your eyes though. In a video it looks good since you have no depth perception, but when you look at something like this with both eyes you constantly see that it is just a flat surface that is displaying a moving image and the wanted effect largely goes away.

> It's pretty crappy when you have to switch to "virtual cursor" mode in order to interact with a site. That's really going to win users over.

Yes, it is crappy design - from whoever designed the website (flash or not, it applies to some javascript things too). As a user I do prefer to have the capability to use such websites if I ever need to, even if it means an extra tap to turn a special feature on. Its a small annoyance compared to not being able to use the site at all because the device/software isn't capable of providing a compatible interface.

> You also can't drag anything because this just scrolls the website.

The N900 has a special "cursor mode" that, when enabled, changes the dragging from scrolling to moving a virtual cursor that allows sending drag events to the browser (flash or javascript). I'd guess android could have something similar added if it doesn't have it already.

> 66 ppi isn't a "little bit denser". It's a 25% increase, which is huge for a mature
> technology. At this size, nothing even close to this density has yet been achieved.

The Toshiba Portege G900 came out in 2007 and it has a 311dpi display, same for the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 in 2008. So in 3 years the increase is about 5%, not 25%.

> Bollocks. The X1 has a 3" display providing 800*480 pixels. 800/3 = 267ppi.
The 3" is the diagonal size, therefore:
sqrt((800^2) + (480^2)) / 3 = ~311

> Why do people not check these things before the post with such faux-authority?
Excellent question ;)

This also brings into question the typical promises from publishers that if their DRM servers were to go offline some day then they would release a DRM-free patch for their games. Even if the company would still be standing to do that, would they still have the necessary assets to make such a patch?

If Max Payne 2 would have used some form of "uncrackable" DRM and would never have been cracked, would Rockstar have been able to release the game at all for resale in Steam? Would have been funny if they would have been blocked by their own copyprotection.

Create a service/background task that downloads a program or script from your website and executes it. Have it do nothing by default, but if your laptop ever gets stolen replace the script with one that wipes the hard drive... Only works if the thief uses an internet connection with your laptop though.

> Good quality 6-cell batteries in other (also Atom-based) netbooks last 6-8 hours.

Of course you can always throw in a bigger capacity battery but that's not the point. How big of a battery would you need to get 7 days of standby time from a typical Atom netbook? With todays battery technology I doubt it would be possible at all in what I'd call the "netbook" form factor. With a low power ARM you wouldn't _need_ a big, heavy and expensive battery, even the Aspire One's by-x86-standards low capacity (and cheap!) battery would propably be enough to get something like 7-10 hours of use and a week of standby time from it.

> Cost is only half the issue here. Power consumption is the other half. Even the current Atom offerings are absurdly more power hungry than your average system-on-chip ARM, and by absurdly I mean 100-1000 times more at "near-idle" tasks.

Indeed - I would happily pay more for an ARM SoC based "netbook" than an Atom based one, simply because of the extra freedom the low idle power consumption would give me. I have both an Atom based netbook (Acer Aspire One) and an ARM based internet tablet (Nokia N810). The Acer with its stock ~23Wh battery can do a bit over 2 hours of "desktop" use and maybe 3 hours of idle time. Because of this every time I want to use it, I need to wait for it to boot up which takes a significant amount of time*.

Compare that to the N810, which can do 5-6 hours of use with its tiny ~6Wh battery and about 6-7 days of idle time. This means I dont ever need to bother turning it off or on, it is always ready to be used at any time. I can pick it up from the table, tap the screen and I can immediately begin browsing the web for example. When I'm done I just put it back, no need to turn anything off.

Now the N810 of course is overall much much slower than the Acer (400MHz TI OMAP processor vs the Acer's 1.6GHz Atom), but you could quadruple its power use and it would still wipe the floor with the Atom. Give it a battery as big as as the Acer and it would propably go on for weeks of random daily use without needing a charge.

* I can use suspend as well, but even waking up from it takes a while and when suspended it still seems to eat the battery at a good rate. Not to mention it cannot do any background tasks such as incoming email notification when suspended.

Windows CE, yes. I was thinking "Windows" as in desktop PC Windows (xp/vista) that is able to run your normal Windows desktop applications (Windows CE requires Windows CE applications)

What reasons are there to put an x86 processor in a device like this? The Nano is not exactly low power, with an ARM based solution (Nvidia Tegra would seem pretty great for this for example) you could have many days of standby power without needing to reboot it all the time. Only reason for x86 I can think of is that it could run Windows, but is that really needed for this type of device?

> The nokia barcode reader required the neighbouring codes to be at almost the full width of the screen

Instead of the Nokia reader, try Kaywa reader: http://reader.kaywa.com/ For what I have tested it is very fast(pretty much instant) and works from rather big angles as well.

The fact that the microsoft tag is in color does seem to limit its use to color print only. Also I wonder how well it works if the colors are not perfectly aligned as is often possible for example in newspaper print.