Unofficial Tex Murphy

I think my main gripe with Vista is that it wants as optimum 4GB of RAM. XP didn't even support over 3GB! For a slower (by today's standards) system I'd currently install Windows 2000 on it. It's virtually XP but quite a bit less bloated. For more demanding stuff I'd use XP. Vista just seems part of some masterplan between Micro$oft and hardware companies to get you to upgrade so you can see the pretty effects.
I'm going to continue using XP until they stop making drivers for it.

OMFG! That is so cool. We'll have Holographic HUDs in no time

DrPaul wrote:But I think that 5 cameras is more than usual and may be how they handle two or more cursors, but I'm just guessing.

From the article I linked to:

Ars spoke with Nigel Keam, a member of the Surface team, about the technology in the device, and he explained that five cameras were needed because of field angle issues. In order to get the table as low as it is, five cameras are used so that each one can have a small field of view. That translates into better resolution and speed (measured in pixels/second) than a single camera with an exceptionally wide-angle view of the table surface.

Here's another interesting quote:

Those cameras, which are located below the acrylic surface of the table, can read a nearly infinite number of simultaneous touches, and are limited only by processing power. Keam says that Surface has been optimized for 52 touches—enough for four people to use all 10 fingers at once and still have 12 objects sitting on the table.

I have no idea how new this technology is, but it seems pretty cool. However I'll be waiting for them to implent it in PDAs.

Was the keyboard something like this?

Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. Actually, $175 isn't too bad if you consider that a 'hard' wireless keyboard from Palm is about $100. So this one is just another 75 bucks for cool-factor.

...five cameras were needed because of field angle issues. In order to get the table as low as it is,...

I did not realize that the cameras were below the table. The optically scanned touch screens I was thinking of have tiny scanners located in the corners. The scanners 'look' along the surface and then triangulate the touches. But since they look along the surface instead of from below, they don't have a thickness issue.

Anyway, this is a slightly different technology.

Apparently they bathe the table so to speak in near-infrared light and the from-below cameras pick up on the darkness (not visible to the human eye) where someone is breaking the light by touching the screen.