As Published In November/December 2005

Brighter and Bigger, Naturally

Laptop screens get brighter, smaller hard drives store more, and coding like you speak.

Sunscreen for Your Laptop

Wireless technology has created new ways to work, such as the ability to compute outdoors. But on a sunny day, it's hard to see anything on your dim laptop screen, so you trudge reluctantly back to your plastic plants in your florescent-lit cubicle and put on noise-canceling headphones to drown out your neighbor. The reason you can't see your screen has to do with the laptop's ability to generate enough nits. A nit is a unit of measurement of brightness (luminance) equal to one candela (a unit of measure of luminous intensity) per square meter. Today most laptop screens produce anywhere between 200 and 300 nits—not enough to enjoy a spreadsheet in bright sunlight. However, Panasonic, known for rugged laptops, has started shipping some of its laptops with screens capable of 540 nits and will soon convert its entire laptop line to screens capable of 500 nits or greater. Soon parks and beaches will be filled with people staring intently at their laptops—because they can.

Web Locator Panasonic Toughbook Toshiba hard drives MIT Media Laboratory

Perpendicular Magnetic Recording

A new method of writing data to a hard disk is hitting the streets. The result? Smaller drives, higher storage capacity, and greater data reliability. Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) uses a perpendicular magnetic head, while traditional longitudinal recording stores data on a magnetic disk as microscopic magnet bits aligned in a plane. Although advances in magnetic coatings continue to improve data recording densities on hard disks, when the densities become too extreme, the magnetic bits repulse each other due to in-plane alignment. Squeezing more bits onto a disk eventually degrades recorded bit quality. By standing the magnetic bits on end, PMR reinforces magnetic coupling between neighboring bits, for higher, more stable recording densities and improved storage capacity. Toshiba is shipping 1.8-inch-form-factor PMR drives with data density of 206 megabits per square millimeter (133 gigabits per square inch). That translates to 10,000 songs on an MP3 player.

Natural Language Programming

Future software design will still depend on programming, but actual coding may become easy enough for Mom or Dad to do. Researchers at MIT Media Laboratory are working on a project called Metaphor, an intelligent user interface that understands and converts plain English stories into code. For example, Metaphor automatically understands that "a box full of toys is ready for wrapping" means that a box is a container that can be used to hold objects like a "list" and wrapping is an "action" to be performed on items in a list. Applications of this technology include allowing business users to express their ideas for a product in plain English and almost instantly producing a code skeleton that can be passed along to coders for cleaning and streamlining. Natural language programming takes the business world from concept to reality in drastically reduced time. What's more important, programmers who finalize the code can visualize the final product using the same language and never rely on requirement specification documents again.