INTEL HAD TWO morning keynotes at IDF on software and Intel research. Nothing was hugely new in either but, as is always the case, there were bright spots aplenty.

The first one was that Spikesource is supporting Intel Moblin so if you are developing for that stack, you can get help. Maybe that is not the best choice of words, but if you sign up for the Intel Software Support Program, Spikesource will support you. They even had Kim Polese wave at the audience, so you know they are serious!

Next up was the big announcement of the day, the Classmate 2 with a larger 9 " screen. It may come as a shock, but more hardware thrown at a bad idea will not make it a good idea. Let me reiterate things so maybe someone in power will understand: hardware does not a learning tool make.

The PC as it stands is a lousy learning tool, really lousy. You need a big software ecosystem around it, and that is what OLPC does. Making Classmate 2 twice as fast does nothing to address the problems that that the first had. Until they make a machine that has those bits, it will just be a faster inappropriate device.

Intel tunable Raman laser

One of the more interesting things that has been done lately is a methane sensor built from an Intel tunable laser. The theory is simple, you take a laser at the frequencies absorbed by methane and if your signal is blocked, you have methane. The problem is getting lasers at that frequency.

Intel's Raman lasers are frequency tunable, so it is not much of a trick to get the right frequency. You put one tuned right in front of a sensor, and if the light gets dim, you should smell something funny. Nice trick.

Lightfield vectors

The last cool idea is called Lightfield Photography (LP) by a company called Refocus. The idea is that, instead of capturing pixels, LP captures the light vectors and then puts them together with software to form the pixels you and I can parse.

The result is an image on which you can shift the plane of focus after you take it. You can also put everything in focus at once, or arbitrarily move the focal distance. They had a line of three models for photography, and a picture of them had the middle one in focus. With a click, they put the rearmost model in focus, and another click had all three clear at once.

This kind of trick makes Intel smile because it takes hideous amounts of computer power. It also lets photographers do things that were impossible until this point. Once it becomes more mainstream, you can adapt lenses to the technique, theoretically making them lighter and cheaper. µ