Europe: HP offers peek at future of large, plastic displays
By Scarlet Pruitt; IDG News Service (London Bureau)
Imagine sitting down to your computer and seeing thin, plastic color displays on either side of your monitor, showing high- resolution text pages you can refer to and print from. On the wall next to you is another large display on which you can show colleagues a power point presentation, or display family photos and notes.
This is just one vision of the future that Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) hopes to make possible with re-sarch into large, lower-cost displays. HP Labs in Bristol, England, has been working on developing a high-resolution paper-like display technology using plastic instead of glass for applications such as electronic books, magazines and posters, as well as a whole new range of products that might be made possible, such as electronic white boards.
HP researchers showed off a prototype using the new display technology at the National Gallery in London on Monday, saying it was the first step in breaking out of the 1,000 pixel by 1,000 pixel display barrier through which we see much of the electronic world.
"We have a thousand times more disc space and a thousand times more computer power but we're still looking through a little display window that's essentially the same as it was 10 years ago," said Adrian Geisow, manager of displays research at HP Labs.
While the liquid crystal display (LCD) prototype on show was small - just 3 centimeters by 4cm - it could display 125 colors and featured a "bistable" passive matrix, meaning that the researchers could build displays with as many pixels as they desired.
The fingernail-thin prototype displayed clear images from the Gallery's famous collection, and the researchers were confident that they could scale the technology to much larger displays. More developed plans for using the display technology are expected in about three years after more work has been done, the researchers said.
"We think this is a substantial milestone for large, low-cost, quality displays," said Huw Robson, manager of the digital media department and HP Labs.
Once scaled to around 43cm by 58cm, or about the size of a sheet of A2 paper, the researchers expect the displays to be about five times cheaper than today's glass LCD displays. "We've done cost modelling to suggest that this kind of savings is reasonable," Geisow said.
The source of the researchers' enthusiasm is not just the size and potential cost of the displays, but that they have created a whole new process for making them which employs a print-like process on plastic. The manufacturing process is much more simple and affor-dble than making a glass LCD display using photolithography, they said, which requires a process much like film developing on a substrate to achieve a pattern for displaying images. What's more, the technology allows for 200 or more ppi (pixels per inch), giving images a resolution normally confined to paper. That's why the technology is suited for art and text, the researchers said.
"This technology is targeted at print and paper-like applications," Geisow said, noting that none of the current commercial display technologies compete well with paper when it comes to presenting information in the way that books, magazines and posters do. "With this technology we think we've opened the door for whole new possibilities."
While commercial plans for the technology are several years away, the research fits squarely with HP's strength in the printing market.
Asia and Pacific: Q&A: Red Hat exec talks of challenges to open source
By John Ribeiro, IDG News Service (Bangalore Bureau)
The biggest challenge for the open source community is that there are too few open source developers, according to Michael Tiemann, vice president of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc. (...) In a telephone interview from Mumbai, Tiemann talked to IDG News Service on issues relating to the open source movement and Red Hat's strategies.
? Worldwide, are you seeing a greater turnout of developers using open source?
MT: The leading developer regions I have seen have been the U.S. and Europe. But I think that is going to be changing very rapidly. We are getting a lot of news from South America. Brazil, Venezuela, Peru have all either announced or are in the process of announcing mainstream Linux work for government. When Brazil puts their developers on open source, that is going to be a huge increase. (..)
? What is the biggest challenge for the open source community?
MT: The biggest challenge right now is that there are not nearly as many open source developers as there could be. The biggest chal-lenge right now is getting more people excited (about open source development). The open source community is a challenging environment to work in. Opinions are very strongly held, and it is not really who you are, but what you can do (that counts). Some developers respond positively to the meritocracy of open source, and some do not at all.
? What are the management challenges involved when you scale to, say, 100 million open source developers spread across a number of countries?
MT: There is a study from James Herbsleb at Carnegie Mellon University about both open source and proprietary projects. In this study 10 to 15 developers are typically responsible for 80 percent of the project. What that math tells you is that open source scales by being able to have more and more projects. I don't ever think that there will be a 100 million people working on one library in Linux. Because of the super-modularity of open source, the ideal resource allocation for a 100 million developers is to be working on say 10 million projects. (...)
? The Linux Standard Base 2.0 (LSB 2.0) of the Free Standards Group attempts to get some standardization into various distribu-tions of Linux. When will Red Hat start shipping LSB 2.0 compliant products?
MT: We are really looking towards LSB 3.0 because the 2.0 compromise is not compatible with prior decisions we have made with respect to C++. We have been very successful to certify against LSB version 1.0, and we will continue to stay compatible with that. We think 2.0 over-reached in what it was trying to do. We have it from the LSB people that there will be a 3.0 out in less than six months, and we are quite confident that that version will be adequate for our needs and everybody else's. (...)