In the last months, Zii gained a lot of interest for their StemCell computing announcement. Basically, the concept of the ZMS-05 chip sounds like a FPGA, combined with some sort of dynamic frequency scaling. Which is still not a good enough explanation, since they don't need to change frequency (just switching parts of the processor "off") and the reprogramming of the chip takes milliseconds, not seconds.
Since this all sounds to good to be true, most comments on these claims are quite reserved.
Today, Zii introduced the Zii Egg.
I'm quite sold: A handheld offering full HD resolution to a TV? How great is that? There are still a lot of questions open, one of them is a real world check on their energy efficiency claims.
If half of their claims are true, I'm quite convinced that this will change the whole chip industry. Not only for handhelds, but all kinds of mobile equipment, desktop computers and servers. Having a ultra scalable architecture, able to hard-wire tasks on the fly and just switch off if there's nothing to do still sounds to good to be true.
Let's see how this works out. If you see Intel offering a takeover or Microsoft starting to port Windows to the ZMS-O5, the claims might be true.
Today, Canonical released Launchpad, their collaboration and code hosting platform for software projects as free and open source software. They choose AGLPv3 as software license, which allows everyone to use the software for private or business matters, as long as they allow others to get the (changed) code as well.
Installation was pretty forward, only a small bug prevented me to install it right away. Thanks to the launchpad developers, the bug was fixed within minutes. Additional to that, the installer didn't agree with my PostgreSQL setup, so I needed to change that as well. Fortunately, there's a really great Howto on that matter as well.
Congratulations to the Launchpad developers, they did great work on that piece of software.
It seems all modules of Launchpad are open sourced. So I'd like to pass a big thank you to Mark Shuttleworth. This is a great contribution of Canonical to the open software community.
/* * * Copyright (c) 2009, Microsoft Corporation. * * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it * under the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License, * version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation. * * This program is distributed in the hope it will be useful, but WITHOUT * ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or * FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for * more details. * * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with * this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple * Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA. * * Authors: * Haiyang Zhang <haiyangz@microsoft.com> * Hank Janssen <hjanssen@microsoft.com> * */
