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Epocrates will do that. It's free. BUT it has the same problem that every other adverse drug effect database has - it is sensitive, but not specific. Most entries basically imply that you will explode, dissolve or get turned into a Newt if you take the drug.

What's needed are accurate statistics on how many people get Newted and whether you are more likely to get into trouble if you take other medications or have other conditions. This paper says you can do some data mining to get at new insights to the problem but you still need to go out and see if your model is real. And that's the problem - it's hard to get a representative sample of people taking SSRIs and thiazide diuretics. Now, smaller countries, especially the Scandinavian countries (God baiting evil socialists that they are) have databases that might help answer those questions, but it's still lots of work.

I don't know the reason, but I think it's mostly because people just don't trust the fact that information that would be available over a WiFi net would be hackable enough that someone could get in and download all sorts of tidbits.

It's not voice activated but you have http://www.epocrates.com/

And I can bet that Cory Doctorow wasn't even invited

Or the Blackberry. Epocrates is the big one. There are a number of smaller companies that take medical books and format them for PDAs with Palm OS being the dominant base (still). Back in Ye Olden Days I thought they were a great idea, even if it was really, really hard to get much out of Harrison's Internal Medicine in 480 x 320 pixels. With the ubiquity of real computers and Internet access, I've used them less and less.

Most of the publishers had various and incompatible DRM strategies - you couldn't easily load the book on another PDA if yours got flushed down the toilet. Updates were sporadic and difficult. The search function in the Palm OS is pretty primitive. The Internet gave Palm a pretty good broadside. (They never could get a decent browser in the things). Palm managed to finish themselves off. While the Pre may be a marginal success in the increasingly crowded smartphone market, I don't see Palm regaining anything resembling the dominance in the field.

Would this even be necessary? I can install and run Truecrypt off of a USB Thumb drive or an SD card on a Win or Lin based PC.

Yes it's necessary, because currently in Windows there's no way to run TrueCrypt unless you have admin privilege on the target machine.

The original parent wanted to use TrueCrypt to secure data before transporting them (so the loss of the USB key isn't a critical leak) and then being able to retrieve the data from the USB key once arrived at the destination, EVEN if he doesn't have admin access on the machine on which said key is plugged (and thus can't install TrueCrypt from the key).

If you use a Windows PC to install the Win version of Trucrypt, and then plug the SD card into a Win-based PDA, would it not function normally?

No. Won't work. The only thing that "Windows CE" and "Windows XP" have in common is having the word "Windows" appearing in their names. As other have pointed out both don't even run on the same architecture (x86, AMD64 and Itanium for WinXP ; ARM, MIPS and SuperH for WinCE).

So :
- either you run the usual TrueCrypt on a portable device that runs Windows *XP* (or Linux or BSD or Mac) - this was my first suggestion, anything cheap like an Asus EEE PC or an OLPC is OK.

- or you use a PDA running Windows CE (or Palm OS, or Symbian, or RIM) and use a TrueCrypt version that was adapted for the differences and recompiled for the processor.

That was my second suggestion : if there exist a version of TrueCrypt which works on PDA, then the PDA could be used to do the decryption (but stock WinXP software can't run on WinCE).

Linux is an exception : the Linux running on PDAs (Sharp Zaurus, Nokia Maemo, Trolltech GreenPhone, OpenMoko/FIC NeoRunner, etc...) is much closer to the full Linux running on desktop.
Usually the graphic interface is different (often the PDAs don't have X-Windows but use special purpose GUIs) but the system are POSIX compliant and any console software usually run as-is after being simply recompiled from source (because the processors are still different and the binaries are different - but the source is the same for console applications).
So that's the exception to the rule.
Note: That also true for a lot of different Linux enabled appliace (modem/routers, file servers, etc.) - although lots of them have very limited resource which put a hard top at what you can manage to get run.

Also, Apple is touting that their desktops' Mac OS X and the iPhone and iPodTouch's OS X are similarly very related, and some developers (like Epocrates who are making medial PDA software) have mentioned that porting their application to the portable OS X was a matter of couple of days.
On the other hand, I haven't heard the iPhone / iPodTouch having a POSIX-compatible console environment (still hearing that the current SDK imposes limits on what can be done), so I don't know if getting a console application to work on those platforms is a simple matter of recompile.

How many people *have to* play Oblivion as *their work* ?
(I mean, really. Not what's the average slashdotter's dream).

Look around : in most enterprise, computer are just used for basic office work and accessing the intranet/googling information from the internet.

A lot of enterprise (inssurance companies, etc...) are starting to use laptops as working station for their employee, because it's easier for them to move their data around with them, faster to relocate them to different office, lets them work at home or in their train etc...

And docking a laptop to nice big screen and a full sized keyboard, isn't that much different than hooking a smartphone/PDA to those same peripherals. The only difference is in the "work in their train" part, where the Smartphone/PDA user loose some screen/keyboard estate.
(although there're nice fullsized foldable keyboards. I use one with my Palm. And in some professions having a pocketable unit is BETTER than a laptop. HINT: Doctors. We like to have drugs database on pockter-sized devices that are much more handy than carying around a full sized laptop when visiting patients)

Now look at the current trends in products :
- foldable keyboard (like Thinkoutside's, Targus', etc...)
- or even laser virtual keyboards
- smart phone that can be hooked to TV-Set and Projectors (initially designed so you can watch the nice picture you took with you phone. But now company realised that they can market them as "able to display your PowerPoint presentation without a PC !!!")
- Laser-based matchbox-sized Projectors are currently researched.

So yes, your home made l33t Beige Box is more powerful.
But for a corporate worker it is also clunky.

Tomorrow traveling salesman are very likely to have their work stored on their Smartphone/PDA.
(Even today some doctors keep their patient's medical imaging handy in iPods - Powerful radiology stations are nice, but taking an iPod to a patient's bed is easier).

For those in the medical fields, PDAs are a necessity. I'm a medical resident and I consult my PDA a couple dozen times a day. This includes checking reference texts, normal lab values, and most of all, prescribing drugs. Epocrates, a free drug database, is THE killer app for anyone who prescribes meds. The alternative is lugging around a PDR (physician's desk reference), a phone-book sized drug reference.

I also use my PDA to track and record all procedures I perform (babies delivered, lumbar punctures, lacerations sutured, etc). At the end of residency, I hit the button and it spits out all my procedures into a database. When I check out patients when I'm not on call, I simply beam a list of my patients to the on-call person and they've got all the data.

For me, it's essential.

• IQnotes - a hierarchical database that can store almost anything. A few minutes in emacs and almost anything can be turned into a compatible XML document
• Keyring to store those ever proliferating passwords, pins, account numbers, etc.

Then there is my wife, an RN. She started out with a Palm to keep contacts and her schedule. After a few months, the calendar didn't get updated anymore, but she still carries it everyday thanks to ePocrates, a really comprehensive medication database.

If all you can think of to do with one is the typical PIM stuff, and you are not already disciplined with something like Day Timer, you might not get much real use out of a PDA. But if you can find the right apps for the right PDA, you might find a very useful tool.

Other kinds of grad students in different niches also use these.

There is a formulary and clinical drug database program that is very popular with young doctors and medical students. It's called ePocrates, and it updates itself automatically when you are online and you hotsync. This is very useful because the books are very heavy, and the info changes almost daily.

I'd say this is a genuinely useful application.

(I am not an employee of ePocrates. Just a friend of a med student.)

I work at the Health Sciences Center in our local university, and I've become something of a campus go-to-guy for handheld computers. We've got entire departments buying these things up by the TRUCKLOAD, deploying them to the staff and faculty, getting all hot and bothered over having these little things (mostly Palm M505s, but a few visors here and there... fortunately few iPaqs)... but no idea what to do with them. They jump the gun on the technology curve, and have a hard time settling in when their wallets catch up with their brains.

Part of the problem is that I don't think the user base in general doesn't even know what these things are, what they're designed for, and what they're really like to use day to day. The idea of the tricorder may have given use a heads-up on what technology was capable of, but the flip side of that is that people expect all tricorder-like things to be FUCKING TRICORDERS.

Here's what I tell people who ask me what kind of PDA to buy and what it's for:

• The Palm Pilot is best likened to a collection of self-organized Rolodex Of Many Colors. Anything you can put on a post-it note, put it on a Palm-compatible device. It will serve you well, but you'll have to start thinking of information in bite-size chunks (like a fun-size Snickers bar).
• Windows-CE devices are a scaled down version of Windows on a screen the size of an index card. Want a free demonstration? Go to your desktop. Change the screen resolution to 640x480. Now block half of that out and fire up Word and write your grant proposal. I mean, that's what you're buying a micro-PC for, right? To work on those important things in the few off-minutes you have in your busy lifestyle? Write write write. Erase erase erase. Squint squint squint. Happy with it? Fine, buy an iPaq.

I can't imagine why Joe User would want to turn a Palm-type device into a replacement for the desktop. I've got apps (ThoughtManager comes to mind, Pocket Quicken too) on my Visor Prism that have done more for organizing my thoughts, ideas, presentations and life in general than ANYTHING my PC has ever done for me, and it's simple to use. I also don't have to worry about loading my Visor up with apps that, for some inexplicable reason, hate each other's guts and duke it out in the form of GPFs and incompatible DLLs (Outlook and GroupWise come to mind). I don't have to rebuild the OS everytime I add a bit of hardware with screwy drivers.

I turn it on, and the information is instantly there in fun-size form. No wading through menus. No waiting for the desktop to come up. It's just THERE. With the right hacks and a little finger-training, I can find any information I want in three actions or less.

That's what I want out of these things, and I think it's a common goal.

Relating this to the Health Sciences field - ePocrates is a beautiful little app that maintains a portable drug interaction database. Our residents and other medical-type people swear by it, and it updates itself every time the user does a sync.

Instant info, on demand. That's the Information Age - not MP3s, Powerpoint presentations (dear God, don't even get me started on these fucking wastes of time), voice recognition doo-dads that talk back to me and sound like HAL, or whatever. Just give me a place to put and organise my ideas until I get to the resources I need to make them a reality. Everything else is just a distraction - not bad per se, but it doesn't contribute to my productivity. Until you can fit something like that directly into my brain, you can replace my Visor with anything trying to be more PC-like when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

The Visor also has the added advantage of being a great platform for hobbyists to develop on - being able to beam a program around has, I think, done wonders for the shareware concept.

/me ducks,
Tatsujin

I receive my MD in a few months, and let me tell you - I can't imagine big American hospital medical care without a Palm. You have no idea how many times I've sat in the OR, reading the list of medications that a patient has filled out about themselves, and have to use Epocrates (literally the best free program EVER written) to sort out what's going on based on phonetics. Sounds crazy, huh? Trust me, it's an improvement.

Anyways, I think the fact we (doctor-types) get labeled as "always want to do it the old way" is a sign of intelligence. Systems for med info can't tolerate the kind of crap you have to put up with your standard freshmeat development cycles(ie. paper and handwriting may suck, but it works). However, I think once you have an exmaple of a breakthrough and useful and reliable UI, like epocrates and some others, there pretty much >80% incorporation across the resident housestaff at the big hospitals.

Don't forget the network effect when it comes to patient tracking software because of the Palm-to-Palm beaming. Once some programmer-doodz figure out a quick checkbox way to initiate patient records, you'll get widespread acceptance. It really is only the patient record setup time that is the bottleneck now, as I see it. I would kill to have an accurate Palm-based patient census. We're carrying ~10-50 patients per, and right now it's the lowest level team member's (ie. intern) job to type an MS Word file EVERY 3AM with all the updated info.