Computers are getting smaller and smaller over time.  The current vision of the ultimate size is that of a power socket on the wall and such commercial products are available already.  Without doubt, the limited size of a power socket means less components as today’s mass market technology size is indicated by a 3.5” Hard Disk (HDD) for storage or 1.8” Solid State Disk (SSD) if price is not a concern.  For sure no HDD or SSD can fit inside the wall socket at this stage.  There will be a functional compromise towards miniaturisation.   After 15 months of research and visualization efforts, Compucon has arrived at a new box that complies with open technology standards and is 1/3 in size of the current smallest computer models- Jasper and Diamond without losing much functionality. 
 
How much functionality has the new box lost and is the new box cheaper or more expensive?  The new box can have 1 or 2 memory slots for up to 2 or 4GB of memory.  The new box can have one add-on card max.  The new box can take one laptop size hard disk if we need an internal DVD RW.  The price is about 15% higher than Jasper or Diamond.  Is there a place in the school for such a desk top or desk bottom or wall mounted computer?  Please give us some comments.

Please go to the Compucon Home Page and click Products for the Mini-PC.

The writer attended the largest computer hardware exhibition in the world recently and has read a report by 2 NZ journalists on the event.  The report is about the drop of attendees due to economic recession and the proliferation of netbooks.  The points are accurate but vastly incomplete. They see one face of hardware trend only.  Netbooks are in fact a transitional product.  It is cheap, small and low powered.  It is on the way to get smaller, cheaper and lowered powered and to merge with PDA (personal digital assistant) to become MID (mobile Internet devices).

The other face of hardware is about heavy computing fabrics such as blade servers and storage servers for backroom installations. Two new products are particularly impressive.  One is a 2U Twin system providing 4 full and independent systems.  It fulfils a mid way requirement between blade servers and individualised servers.  The other is a GPU server which combines the power of GPU from VGA cards with the CPU of a standard system.  GPU is a lot faster than CPU for some scientific calculations.  Do you want one?

PC is staying as the centre of personal computing.  MID is just an interface and backend server is the arsenal and archive.  Feel free to seek more info from This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it on hardware trends relating to school ICT planning. 

We have been preaching the benefits of Information Systems in raising productivity and competitiveness.  Two recent developments overseas have echoed our views but in a more vigorous manner.

How does the Post Office use Information Technology (IT) for better handling traditional snail mail?  Certainly the Post Area Code on every mail will help but it will not produce a quantum jump in productivity. A recent news article about Swiss Post provides a better answer.  Swiss Post scans paper letters received from the public for mailing into electronic forms and sends them through a secure electronic mail network to individual email boxes.  Sweet!  What if the recipient does not have email?  We do not know the answer but a local post office in Hong Kong for example can print the mail onto paper and deliver locally.

Another news article suggested a threatening approach.  Telstra Australia has introduced steep fees in an attempt to herd customers into making online bill payments.  They estimated that a face to face bill collection service costs them as much as 2% of the bill value and online payments will save them several hundred million dollars a year. 

New Zealand as a country has not improved on productivity for a while.  This means that whilst some companies have taken up more IT, most are doing me-too movements without reaping the benefits. Food for thought here.

After months of searching for an engineering based solution for reducing noises from computers that are fitted with case ventilation fans, we have at last succeeded.  Our approach does not involve any resistor which is commonly used by others as a resistor will generate more heat to the computer.  We go to the PSU and take voltage supply from the 5V rail instead of 12V.   Consequently, the noise level of the fan drops to a level that is considered very soft and acceptable.  This feature is now available to all Compucon system models for a price of $10.  Stock code is 7C4F.

Diamond and Jasper have provisions for a case fan but we do not connect the fan by default because it is not necessary for default base system hardware configuration.  

Superhawk and Thunderbird class of workstations are fitted with a 12cm case fan.  The fan is not noisy in the first place and it can be quiet down with 7C4F as necessary.