Active RFID provider Ingecom, headquartered in La Neuveville, Switzerland, has unveiled a new 2.45 GHz active RFID tag and reader (which Ingecom calls a controller), designed to track such items as reusable containers, including plastic pallets, totes, crates or metal pallets.

The new ActiveRFID tag, approximately the size of half a credit card, will cost €5 ($7) apiece at high volumes,. The new controller costs less than €400 ($538). This second-generation tag is built on a new ASIC, leverages a completely new proprietary communication protocol between the tag and the reader, and is covered by two new Ingecom patents. The tag can operate at temperature ranges from -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit) to +70 degrees Celsius (+158 degrees Fahrenheit) without impacting the laptop battery lifetime, and is expected to last 10 years with a tag ping rate of 2 seconds.

Battery life has also been extended in the new machines. Toshiba said the standard Dell Vostro 1310 Battery Originalshould last up to about four hours, compared with 2.9 hours for the NB100.

Despite its larger screen the new model is smaller, at 10.3 by 7.5 by 1.2 in. The computer weighs between 2.6 and 2.8 lb., depending on the configuration.

The UX-series computers will be launched in Japan on Friday and follow in other markets, although exact international launch dates have not been decided, said Toshiba. Prices for the computers range from about $606 to $707 in Japan.

"Netbooks, and lower-priced PCs in general, show a fundamental shift in buying," Krans argued. "It's not something that will go back to the way it was any time soon. The shift is away from bigger and better toward simplicity and ease-of-use." The latter, he said, was one reason that Apple M8403 Battery  continues to do relatively well, even though its Macs are premium-priced. "People want something that's easy to use, not heavy and complex," said Krans, referring to operating systems.

The launch of Windows 7, which most analysts believe will happen in the second half of this year, may not put an end to the netbook Satellite A300 Battery  revenue problem for Microsoft. The company has said it will sell Windows 7 Starter, the lowest-priced version, to netbook makers.

Disk storage solutions like hard drives are slower but lower in cost than RAM-based memories. They are also persistent; that is, as noted earlier, data is retained on the device even when power is removed. From a PCFE perspective, balancing memory and storage performance, availability, capacity, and energy to a given function, quality of service, and service-level objective for a given cost needs to be kept in perspective.

It is not enough to consider only the lowest cost for the most amount of memory or storage. In addition to capacity, other storage-related metrics that should be considered include percent utilization, operating system page faults and page read/write operations, memory swap activity, and memory errors.

When I was at South by Southwest last month, I couldn't help wondering how much of a presentation someone can really be watching while also paying attention to a Twitter stream and blogging, as most of the audience seemed to be doing. I was the Luddite taking notes on paper (to save my laptop batteries). I also believe that social media doesn't always enhance experience--sometimes, it takes you out of the experience to be had.