I call bullshit (as do about 1/2 a dozen more people while I typed this up ;)) - even if optical technology required the number of ‘lenses’ this guy is throwing around, the ones in the second image down on the right go nowhere. My WAG - he’s got part of a dot-matrix print head with parts from a webcam on top of it. I’m also 99% sure that what he calls ‘Fibers Optical cable’ are just regular heat-pipes you’d see in any laptop.
Initially, I was figuring on some fake site that’ll turn out to be owned by IBM or something (like their Bagotronics thing (Warning, PDF)), but it looks like not.
whois says the registrant (from 2002) is one Shimon Gendlin (this is also his page BTW), who was pushing some similarly bullshit vaporware implementation for magnetic memory in '97. It looks like he updated his buzzwords in '02 when he took part in the ‘World Genius’ expo in Tokyo, apparently displaying exactly the same thing as is touted on his website today.
If it was real, he’s a double-genius for managing to stave off the avalanche of media and public interest someone with such a working prototype would garner.
I don’t know why, but I decided I had to know what laptop that really was: behold, from Elitegroup Computer Systems, the ECS G200. (click on ‘Live Demo’ for a similar angle).
For those of you ragging on his 4-way scroll pad, sorry, it really does have one.
The main thing is that it’s all predicated on this “Gendlin effect” which manipulates and reads the direction of the spin of individual electrons in some unspecified compound in a silicon substrate. Yeah, it describes basic holography – but just because these techniques that work on a standard sized holographic plate using simple photosensitive chemicals, doesn’t mean that they’re useful on a nanoscale. The guy claims that he’s got no mechanical parts, but the design is based on an device that’s way beyond anything engineered so far-- a precision controlled mirror that can direct an undistorted micrometre-wide image over a 10X4X4mm area – and continues to function when submerged in boiling water. Hooey.
Man, you gotta love Google. In addition to the info on the good Dr. Gendlin uncovered by Nanoda, here is a now-defunct but cached page purporting to present his credentials, and decribing the so-called “Gendlin Effect”. I’m no expert in physics, but the whole thing sounds like some sort of bizarre hoax to me. If I were to guess, I’d say the Atom Chip site is nothing more than an address-harvesting operation of some sort.
I’ll leave it for someone else to turn up Gendlin’s name, or the Gendlin Effect, anywhere in the peer-reviewed literature. I’ve got five bucks here says no such citation exists.
Oh yeah, also the referenced page links Gendlin to eccentric Japanese inventor Yoshiro NakaMats via something called the “Dr. NakaMats-Gendlin International Hi-Tech Innovation Institute”, although there is no other evidence that such an organization actually exists.
Nah, he seems to have perhaps started out legit before his current loopiness, plus there’s way better ways to harvest email addresses. (Doing as search at the uspto gives lots of wierdness from him) I put him in the same category as Carl Tilley - his revolutionary technology will continue to be mere months away from consumer level production. You’d be crazy not to invest now before it takes off. :rolleyes:
Oh yeah, due to his amateur image-resizing, I didn’t notice that he does seem to have some ‘fiber optic’ wire tossed in his laptop, though it’s all on top of the heatsink, so ripping it out wouldn’t affect anything (and won’t someone please do just that in the middle of his next demo? :D) That, and I think bouv has it right with the Compact Flash thing - he’s just replaced the HD with a compact flash -> ATA adapter and added some re-branded flash carts.
To be fair, he’s talking about memory that competes with RAM, not hard drives, in terms of speed. So $150.00/GB is at least competitive. Which doesn’t mean I believe any of this. If someone had been developing 6 GHZ processors and effective optical memory, the computer press would have been all over it.
They can see into the future? I just found if amusing that the photo is captioned as “Las Vegas, January 2006.” Not “We’ll be at CES in January 2006.”
I’m also highly amused that they’re doing all these mockups with 1/8" stereo headphone plugs. Last I looked, there aren’t any optical lenses at the ends of those plugs.
And their home page - Showing one of their clean room air showers means they’re serious.
I’ve been to CES, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of frayed shoestring operations holed up in the outlying hotels, all hoping someone will see their Barnumware and buy the company.
