The Flying Laptop is a micro-satellite currently under development by the Institute of Space Systems. Several promising technologies will be implemented. A high agile attitude control system with a pointing knowledge better than 7 arcseconds, operating in a target pointing mode for image acquisition is necessary to achieve the planned scientific measurements. For communication a high speed Ka-b...

Squeak Etoys is a free and open source media-rich authoring system with a user-friendly visual interface which comes preinstalled on One Laptop Per Child XO computers. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project1 is a revolutionary blueprint for children’s personal computer use created to bring an efficient and functional educational technological tool to nearly every child between six and twelve y...

While personal computers have been used for over twenty years in live music contexts, the proliferation of powerful and affordable portable systems (laptops) has spurred the emergence of new music creation styles and venues outside of academia. Laptop performance is the practice of live computer music using software tools exclusively. This paper surveys the current state of laptop performance p...

A three CPU, two node cluster-based parallel multiprocessor system is developed with a Core Duo laptop and an AMD Athlon Desktop using Fedora Core 5 (smp and non-smp kernels respectively) and OSCAR. Such a system is used to execute a number of parallel programs to evaluate their performance and to optimize the number of tasks to be scheduled on laptop and Desktop respectively, depending upon th...

The goal of this project is to provide an interface that frees the ‘laptop musician’ from the laptop and in doing so, encourages more interactive performances within the genre of electronic music. This paper examines interactive systems that use motion and other sensors to control computer music applications and discusses interface design in this context. The various interfaces already tackling...

During the past few years, mobile technologies have become common in everyday life. Almost everyone carry some kind of mobile technological equipment with him or her, for example a personal digital assistant (PDA), a mobile phone, a multimedia player, such as an iPod, or a laptop computer. The use of these equipments is not limited only to workplaces, schools or homes. Particularly useful infor...

Eighty-four students distributed between two different courses at a major research university (one a communication course, the other a computer science course) were given laptop computers with wireless network access during the course of a semester. Awide variety of data (from questionnaires, e-mail logs, proxy server logs, and diaries) regarding students’ use of the laptops for electronic comm...

An eight-channel surface stimulation system, designed for paraplegic stepping was adapted for paraplegic cycling on a newly developed tricycle. The stimulation system consists of two four-channel modules an Inter Integrated Bus (I2C) to RS232 interface for direct stimulator control and data exchange and a standard laptop computer. A software package for personal computers with a comfortable gra...

Expert system technology has now matured so that task-oriented business programs can be rapidly prototyped, developed, coded, and deployed on desktop and laptop personal computers. This rapid development and deployment is especially true when the task is well defined, and the target user has little knowledge in the specified domain. This chapter sketches the successful implementation of an actu...