Besides the more (infamous) Windows Mobile, WinCE powers anything from various embedded automotive and industrial applications, set-top boxes, and more. I think you are getting WinMo mixed up with WinCE because WinMo is just a skin on top of WinCE roughly speaking. The reason why most mobile phone maker uses WinMo over WinCE is that the OS and all of its applications (not just the UI) are developed for by Microsoft and the manufacturer could focus more on the hardware. With WinCE, the manufacturer pretty much get all the say on the UI design so saying that they will look horrible I think would be too early of a statement to make.

P.S. Believe it or not, there is also WinXP for Embedded Systems.

I think the problem is not with the display, but with the content available. With the cable and satellite TV providers and content producers fail to produce and deliver shows in 1080p, people would not see a need to upgrade to something even higher resolution when the content isn't here to deliver at that resolution. As much as I love 4K (I have been fortunate enough to see one of those sweet 4K Sony projectors in action in a private demo) being used to model mechanical designs and movie projections, the market from content producer (difficult to edit because it is computationally expensive), to the delivery infrastructure and equipment (again computationally intensive and high requirement for bandwidth with today's H264 and VC-1 compression), and user (the clarity brought at such close distance could cause dizziness) are simply not ready to adopt the resolution yet.

Bottom line is that while the 4K resolution may be good for large theatre projection or for companies doing mechanical design, the capital cost of investing into this resolution maybe too much for everybody in the process from content production to consumption. Perhaps it will take at least another 5 to 10 years before 2K and 4K becomes widely adopted as computation power increases and more efficient compression algorithm allows for efficient and cost effective production and delivery.

I saw one of these in Tokyo this year. They are just stunning. Thank goodness for the slow traffic of Tokyo because I was able to take a few more pictures.

BMW has been there and done that with their Z8 which I think inspired a lot of later high performance vehicles from manufacturers like MB and Audi, while Porsche has always have cars in that same range as the Z8. BMW has shown once and again, that regardless of its Z8 "halo" car, it can sell their other vehicles because they speak for themselves when one drives a BMW.

I am not a big BMW fanatics. In fact, I have preferring Audi over BMW recently. I think BMW's vision is much more long-term focused. As it has shown in the M5 (one of the very first vehicles to hit the then-stratospheric 400bhp sedan from a major auto manufacturer), Z8 (out much earlier than the other halo cars like R8 or SLR), and iDrive (which hate it or like it, one of the first attempt at merging all controls of a car into one interface). The fact that BMW is willing to try and then move on to other thing has proved to me that this company knows what it is doing. Yeah, X6 or X3 may not be big sellers. But if the market isn't there, BMW will kill it off just like what other manufacturers do. Let the market speak for themselves.

One thing we have to consider is programming these devices. While CUDA is Nvidia-specific, as far as I know this is NOT the de-facto API for accessing all GPGPU from all vendors (regardless of whether it is Nvidia or ATI), and picking a choosing one platform over another may become costly in the future in the other one becomes the prevalent one (think Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD). Then the programmer could have kept two versions or three, one for Nvidia, one for ATI and one for the Cell. However, the problem now becomes the maintainability of the code, while some can probably be shared amongst different architecture. I'd suspect that most cannot be kept same across. And we will have to account for the architectural differences across these hardware as well.

This is why I think the x86-larrabee solution is elegant in a way that you are still working with the same instruction set which means that there is very little to change over in terms of porting of code. The other is that now the same code can run on the CPU (with larrabee or not) and it would be transparent to the end-user and even the programmer.

They already have everything on a chip, it is called System-On-Chip (SOC). In fact, this technology has been around for ages and can be readily found in many embedded device like your super cellphone that can listen to MP3, watch video in HD while getting your GPS information and yet still able to handle all that e-mail and voice calls. Without SOC, you won't have the Razr, or many of the thin multimedia cell phones out there.

With the Pentium, they could have gone down that path. And I'd suspect that SOC for Pentium (with all the subsystems) on the same chip isn't difficult at all because many manufacturers like TI have been doing that for a long time. But integrating all these subsystems requires a lot of budget and in a time, when people are looking for performance, you would want to spend all that budget, resources and transistor count on adding performance to your chip.

Rogers can activate my ass.

The rule is rule. Just because a product is very well documented and pictured during development is not an excuse for being able to take pictures without prior consent.

I take photos at my facility (which is the headquarter of one of the largest electronic companies in the world), and usually if I ask my manager before hand and let them review the photos before hand, I can show my friends and family. And as long as I don't take pictures of unannounced products, they will be fine with that.

Is it really that difficult to just ask before hand? Maybe they will say OK to photos, and as long as your superiors know and that the pictures are reviewed to make sure no trade secrets are photographed, maybe situations like this won't happen.

Just say... from someone who work in a facility which probably is more secure than the one mentioned in the article.

Haha funny that Hutchison is owned by the dad (Lee Ka Shing) and PCCW is owned by the son (Richard Lee), so either way, the same money will go back to their family.

I think EU has one of the stringiest emission requirement in the world, right up along with the California for being tough to pass.