phyllostachys 42.27: Minute Tech 027

Show notes/transcript for Minute Tech 27:


27 - What is touch-screen glass?

- Apple's iPhone sells 10,000 units in Germany;
- What is touch-screen glass?
- Pittsburgh computer companies; Semi-Coherent Computing podcast.


Good morning, this is the Minute Tech podcast -

coming to you for Saturday and Sunday, November 10th & 11th, 2007

We take a few minutes to talk about technology
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This is Alex Landefeld with minute tech 27 - What is touch-screen glass?

Tech items:

Apple iphone sells some 10,000 phones friday in Germany. much speculation that as the German population is 1/4 the US population

phones being sold through t-mobiles stores in germany

what is wplug? western pennsylvania linux users group

founded in fall of 1997 with Jeremy Dinsel, of California university of pennsylvania

Red Hat released Fedora 8, the free version of Red Hat's Linux product, this past week.
Ryan Paul at Ars Technica references the PulseAudio sound daemon as the most impressive feature

Tech Question:

what is touch screen glass?

Apple's iphone and ipod touch uses a scratch resistant glass surface, with a subsurface that detects the users electric field and responds with screen interaction.

wikipedia describes several techonologies that can be associated with a touch screen interface: the Capacitive touch screen panel of the iPhone and iPod touch have a coating that carries a continuous charge that detects touches by unshield human touch, since the human body had a slight electric field (that's how signals get from your fingertips to your central nervous system).

other touch screen technologies:
An infrared surface might either detect thermal interaction with the screen or disturbance of vertical and horizontal light beams.

a SAW or surface acoustic wave technology detects the disturbance of a sound wave that's passed over a surface.

A resistive touch screen has several layers which include electrically conductive and resistive layers, separated by a thin space - when the two layers come in contact, the resulting electrical charge provides the interface.

in related technology, a graphics tablet uses a grid system to transmit coordinates to a receiving circuit in the pen, identifying location information on the tablet, useful for artist to simulate painting or drawing.

podcasting/blogging tidbit:

Attended a pre-wedding party for a lucky Pittsburgh couple at a local Dave and Buster's facility - the attendee's were a sort of who's who of the local university computing establishment. Some of the people I met work at a local software company called Sherpa software - they produce e-mail management systems for MS Exchange and Lotus Notes - their motto is "Your guide to email terrain".

Of two other couples we interacted with, one is associated with IBM via their Almaden research facility in San Jose, CA, and the other with Seagate technology in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, because of Carnegie Mellon and Pitt, has become an interesting computer company town, with offices for Seagate, Apple, Intel and Google, as relatively recent startups like Panasas.

The Register, a British Internet-based technology newspaper, has a podcast called semi-coherent computing, by Ashlee Vance, interview with Dave Patterson
Talking about Dave's history of studying RISC & multicore processing, as a well as his authorship of paper at Berkeley in 1985, with Garth Gibson of Panasas, the seminal paper on RAID storage architecture.

How to make computing more powerefficient, and how many multi-cores to add to pcs? When will software writers say enough cores are enough? And when they do cry uncle, will that stop meaningful software development....or is the accumulation of multi-cores just another facet of Moore's law?



- Apple's iPhone sells 10,000 units in Germany;
- What is touch-screen glass?
- Pittsburgh computer companies; Semi-Coherent Computing podcast.

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