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I’ve been following the story of Pixel Qi for some time.  I bought an OLPC during the first G1G1 event and I’ve been impressed with the screen’s visibility and low-cost construction.  On top of that, it can turn into a black-and-white, e-ink-like screen with minimal power draw using the same individual pixels it uses for color display, but at 3x the resolution.

Check out the comparison between the Kindle’s e-ink screen, a regular laptop and the new 3Qi screen below. I’ve always been somewhat irritated by the inverted flash of most ebook readers - probably the reason I’ve been avoiding buying them for the last few years. An interesting factoid from the video: some touchscreen technologies can absorb 50% of your screen’s brightness!

(via techvideoblog)

UPDATE: I just found an interesting video on OLPC News, saying that “… the new Pixel [Qi] screen has actually evolved past the OLPC screen, to the point where it is not longer even using the XO laptop display technology.”

April showers? Ha! Taken outside my driveway:

Update: getting heavier now, near white-out at times.  Another shot from the Apple iBlurryCamPhone:

Digg just released a prototype of their optimized data streams.  This this is pretty cool.  It uses MIME multipart HTTP responses to return a stream of responses, dispatching each one as it comes in.  Bugzilla has been using MIME multipart for a while, though only to serve a short “Bugzilla is searching for your bugs” message before returning the actual results.

I’m still digging through it but it looks like a great way to deal with large numbers of resources at pageload time.  As an example, you can batch 50 individual profile images in a single HTTP connection roundtrip to populate your frontpage, versus having to serve 50 individual images, or having to manually stitch them into a single image on the server side.

Assuming you can scale it well on the server, you could potentially multiplex a few long-running API calls on a single stream as well.  As each one is ready, you could then throw it down the pipe and deal with it on the client.

The concept is cool.  There are some limitations obviously, but it’s a fantastic way to deal with bulk data transfer.

More at ReadWriteWeb and Digg the Blog.

1. Obscurity
2. Relative obscurity
3. Robert Scoble gets it
4. The ?-erati get it
5. The SEO and marketing “experts” abuse it and annoy everyone
6. Oprah ?s on her show
7. Soccer moms and your grandma try ?ing
8. Charmin Ultra-Soft becomes your friend on ?
9. Someone in the ? space gets bought
10. Time passes
11. Robert Scoble declares that ? is dead

The news that Oracle bought Sun caught me off guard.  I was moderately disappointed when they were courting IBM as a suitor, but I would have been more than happy if they had gone through with the deal.  IBM understands open-source and has a proven track record in Eclipse.

The best case scenario for Java would have been a acquisition by  or a merger with RedHat, though that would be very unlikely considering the size of RedHat itself - Sun is almost four times bigger than RedHat.  Out of some of the big software names large enough to buy and aggregate Sun’s high-end open-source assets, Google would have been a great choice.  They have shown a great deal of leadership in the open-source community.  We would have seen a vibrant community spring up out of this - consider how well the large GWT open-source projects are run.

So, what does the future hold for Java now?  I can’t tell, but the I think the best case is status quo for now.  I hope that Oracle spins Java off into its own, independent organization in the future.

If it comes down to it, the community will route around any damage.  It started down that path once before with Classpath and Apache Harmony, but those didn’t turn out to be necessary at the time.  Who knows - maybe Oracle will change through this whole process?  I’m not holding my breath, however.