Slashdot Mirror

From the images that Google image search turns up (such as this one), it appears to be a symmetrical mouse, which should work just fine for using left-handed or ambidextrously. (My Razer is the same way, and I love it.) The buttons are surely reconfigurable in the driver software, also.

Done

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2007/12/nanosolar_ships_its_first_1_per_watt_panel.html

$1/watt and they are shipping now.

Nanosolar is who you may be looking for then.

They found a cheap way to make solar cells and print them
much like a computer printer.

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2007/12/nanosolar_ships_its_first_1_per_watt_panel.html

The first $1/watt panel has shipped.

Universally known eh?

Every review of the iPad I have seen was written on the iPad and every reviewer I have read has said that, while not quite as good as a physical keyboard it is quite sufficient for something like writing an article for a magazine or blog. If that's not good enough for sending emails or posting on facebook or slashdot then you aren't doing it right.

David Pogue's Review

CNET's iPad Review

UberGizmo iPad Review

Mossberg had positive things to say about the iPad's keyboard (no surprise there), and Engadget didn't slam it, but they only really talked about "banging out e-mails" on it.

About the only thing the iPad's keyboard has going for it is that it's larger than some netbook keyboards. But you have to balance that against the fact that it's not tactile, so there's no touch typing.

I suppose that if you're used to typing on an iPhone, you'd love the iPad. But for those who need to do any type of document production -- other than short e-mails -- it's not going to work as a netbook replacement.

Could you combine this with the lip reading technology that was introduce to allow "voiceless" cell phone calls? http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2010/03/lip_reading_technology_unveiled.html Wouldn't that improve the accuracy for those scenes where the speakers mouth is visible?

Or how about using the subtitle tracks that are in a different language and reverse translating them to provide additional clues as to what the speaker might have been saying? It might help a little.

One major point for the traveling crowd: can I transfer the photos from my camera to the iPad and upload my photos to flickr?

Yes.

And Yes.

That was just two ways I found in literally a minute. I'm sure there are others.

and if you want the A500 feel today, fire up AROS on this:
http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2009/12/gecko_surfboard_packs_in_everything.html

TFA title is a bit over reaching. To make matters worse, the guy handed the app over to someone else to continue development in the App store.

The second link lists 3 that are leaving. This doesn't strike me as the same as rats leaving a sinking ship.

There are thousands of developers lined up behind them.

Yes the approval process sucks, and yes it needs improvement. To be fair, they are making it more transparent. They are also still swamped with submissions meaning there are still way to many developers submitting apps. The 'not so great' developers that we end up with tomorrow will hopefully be great developers in a couple of years.

IMO, the app store is too much like Steam. It's too easy and convenient, all around, to fail.

What has me puzzled is why Nokia hasn't got any commercials out for it's N900. It runs a Debian Linux variant, and runs full flash right now, and it's [sic] hardware is superior to the Droids in some ways. Why they aren't shouting about it from the rooftops, I don't know.

Well, the N900 doesn't seem to be intended to be a mass-market device. I can't find the exact quotes at the moment, but I think the Maemo people are discouraging ordinary consumers from buying the N900. It's definitely step four out of five for making a mass-market device, and not a mass-market device itself.

Nevertheless, they do have a few ads for the N900.

Too late, the Buddha phone is out there already.

Picture here: http://www.ubergizmo.com/tags/octane-3

Cardboard PC Case by Lupo.
Another article, from Gizmodo.

PC cases are one thing, but please don't take it too far!

I have been raptly awaiting Pegatron's $200 arm netbook with an 8 hour runtime:
from January
from July

If Dell is willing to ship what is practically the same device, then this competition can be nothing but good for everyone who wants one.

You can get a long way towards the goal with OLED displays. I've posted about that before.

You can get OLED displays that are flexible as well as partly transparent, so you've already built the display into the glasses. Obviously compute functionality needs to be elsewhere, as you don't want to have too much weight hanging on your ears and nose. The DPI probably needs to increase on them as well, before they get really good.

As for how to see what is being displayed without removing your focus from the 'background', that's beyond my own knowledge, but I wouldn't be surprised if you can either use some kind of infinite focus trick (like with BoCode, where what is displayed on screen is out of focus if you look at it, but looking 'through' it puts it into focus. Obviously that'd require that your compute device knows where you're looking, but we already have technology for that. Not sure about the size though.

I'm completely with you on the "looks stupid" point of view. First of all, it needs to be see-through. The ones that blocks out your direct view of the outside world ruin your peripheral vision. Personally I wouldn't want to walk down the street wearing a pair of these

They don't have to be stylish, just don't make me look like an idiot. A pair of decent safety glasses would work nicely as a building block, as they're designed to handle high stresses without breaking. And as such they're usually designed to keep from ruining your ears and nose and thus rather comfortable.

People are making all their appliances twitter now.

Okay, i'll look like some troll already mods, but give me a second.

I just feel that this is just another promo ad that gets sent to tech sites from some publicists to get the title of the technology spread with their name on it.

this article, (06/29/2009)
Brain controlled wheelchair developed at University of South Florida (02/11/2009)
from European scientists, Brain Controlled Wheelchair (05/11/2008)
Ambient Tech creates brain controlled wheelchair (09/06/2007)
Brain controlled wheelchair from spanish inventor (01/29/2007)
University of Electro Communications in Japan develop brain controlled wheelchair (08/11/2006)

Yeah I'll stop. Mod me down. I just think it's odd that this stuff gets press like it's something brand new. Perhaps sell us by saying its much better? Something. Please.

My biggest question is, what's the big deal with Quake 3? It's quite old and was never anything special...heck, I had it running my Dell Axim PDA nearly four years ago (shortly after the source was released).

Is it just because it's one of the most recent game engines where the source is availible? Or is there some other attribute that people like?

That's not entirely true. Most LCD TVs have speakers and most have paper cones. (Ok, most have metal or plastic support structures).

Thin speakers are not particularly new.

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2009/04/paperthin_speakers_for_advertising.html (also covered by Slash dot here: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/03/147246

And see also:
http://www.eurekalert.org/features/kids/2008-12/acs-tps121508.php

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/05/diy_portable_wikipedia.html

The population of Iran isn't quite like the populations of western countries or industrializing China and India. Of those 70.4 million people, few of the are in a position to buy these printers. I would guess, from old numbers (I don't care to look up the current stats), that of that population, probably less then 15% outside the government would be in a position to buy one. While Iran has a pretty good web presence, the computers are getting old and a lot is because of university and cafe access.

In 2007, there was an estimated 11.6 computers for every 100 people in Iran. I'm not sure if that counted government computers of not, I know it did for the Universities and cafes. But 11.6% ownership is relatively low compared to 2006 numbers like 25.6% in United Arab Emirates or 23.7% in Kuwait or 87.6% in Canada. Israel has something like 122.1 computers for every 100 people which seems a bit odd. But the market, as large as it might seem, isn't that large in reality. It brings that 70.4 million back to a realistic and less impressive 8.1 million.

You joke, but actually you're onto something :

And an NES emulator

Once an SDK appears for whatever the platfrom, in addition to enabling MP3 support and running Linux (if not already supported, otherwise replace with *BSD), what are the two next thing that are compiled on absolutely whatever device ?
- A port of Doom/Quake/Duke/Unreal/whatever latest opensource is still within hardware perfs.
- A port of ZSnes/Gens/Mame/whatever emulator fits into the perfs of the machine.

(And only the perfs, even if the hardware control scheme lacks any decent input : Having only touch screens and accelerometers hasn't stopped the OpenMoko and the iPhone receiving ports of Doom. At least at some future point in time, the OpenMoko would probably get gamepad-over-bluetooth support like PalmOS device).

No single device has ever made an exception. Even RockBox has emulators.
What makes things worse is, whereas BlackBerrys have been a niche market and Palms are dying, iPhone is going to be a mass consumed accessory.

And that may piss off Nintendo, because every game ran on an emulator is one less <strike>pigeon</strike> consumer, who may have had a chance of rebuying once-again all the classics.

The old (suit-happy) Nintendo would probably have tried suing the emulators into disappearance (and may have had some limited success given Apple totalitarian control of app distribution). But since then they have changed and partly recognized potential market for emulation (see their Wii's Virtual Console).

Except the DS to follow these trends and some future version starting to feature emulators with downloadable-over-Wifi legal ROMs from their online store (or sync-able with the home Wii).

In that circumstances, PDAs running emulators are in direct concurrence with their products.
And as such, any sexy feature that they add to their DS to make it more looking like a PDA, is one feature less that will encourage people to get PDAs/SmartPhone, and instead encourages them to stay with simplier featurephone running Java (and unable to run a decent emulator, at least for some time).

The whole may simply a defence to make players less compelled to buy a device that will on the long term, turn out to be competitor.

So.. it's a blast from the past?

Ah, but what if the only thing they find in your pocket is a tempura shrimp?

Well you've lost, the reason I reacted the way I did is that it must be the third time that I read about this LCD improvement which I consider to be less interesting than OLED or SED techno.

I don't like Microsoft softwares&tactics in general, but that's not the reason why I reacted like this. Note that the company at the forefrount of the OLED is Sony, the rootkit company..

Now of course, any working technology is better than 'pipe dream', but the prototypes shown by Sony make me hope that OLEDs will truly arrive in a few years (there is speculation that Sony's XEL-1 despite its price is sold at a loss):
http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/01/sony_27inch_oled_tv_prototype.html

I hear that if you upset the new Toyota robot, it will rip out your guts and string you with them. After which it rips off your leg or arm and uses it as a bow to play its new toy violin!

People are doing it with SD: http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2007/05/sd_to_ssd_conversion_made_easy.html
Here is the CF version: http://forevergeek.com/gadgets/compact_flash_to_ssd_converter.php
If you are not limited to the 2.5" form factor of a laptop chassis, there are better/faster ways of doing this: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/242281-32-drives

About four months ago I walked out of an AU store on the corner of Teramachi Sanjo in Kyoto. The trip cost me about 5000yen (US$45 or so) up front for the phone and activation fees. I pay 4000Yen (~US$37) a month for, as far as I can tell, unlimited emails and free calls under ten minutes. The phone is a Casio W41CA and comes with English support for most of the software, which allows me to play music, listen to radio, watch tv, spend money (ez felica, aka ketai saifu), find where I'm at via GPS, search the web with an Opera browser (mostly to check stock prices), take and edit pictures etc (alarms, clocks, notepads, customizable led's that indicate who has sent me an email...on and on and on).

The standby screen (maybe only AU) is a flash animation of penguins doing everything from stretching in the morning to turning off the lights at night. Besides the thirty or so cartoons that exist to make my day better, the penguins also tell me when the battery is low, help send emails, and ride the subway with me. No, I'm not kidding. There are that many animations. The user interface is a subway map. And there are three other animation sets that I don't use. The phone is absolutely amazing from the software interface perspective, and the screen is more than sufficient to let that aspect show.

The buttons are very large, have a very easy to feel rounded rooftop shape, and are adjacent to each other so that I write emails faster with my ketai than with a keyboard. The directional button at the top has a nice ledge around it that makes it very easy to navigate from it back to the keypad. The body itself is a flip-spin phone where the top part becomes the screen for the camera. Again, there are some extra buttons that make the design as intuitive as a camera as it is as a phone. They also double as volume and track/frequency when the phone is used to play music. Although the frame did not seem to me to be as stout as I would have liked at first, I breakdance all the time and the phone isn't broken yet. Either I'm lucky or it's good enough.

Perhaps the best feature of the phone is the IR port. They are fairly ubiquitous, especially compared to the states where I didn't even have one, and having an IR port makes sharing numbers painless to the extent that if they existed in the states, World of Warcraft would be about as popular as LARPG's. Simply put, it makes social networking far easier.

Knowing what I know now about the iPhone and my Ketai, I not only choose my Ketai that cost me essentially jack shit, but can't help wondering wtf is going through Apple's collective brain. The iPhone is not designed like a phone. It has horrid buttons. In fact, if I had to email with touchscreen buttons, it would be half as fast and a hundred times more frustrating, as instead of using touch-finger coordination, it would be more like hand-eye coordination. The screen is always open. I guess I should just buy an iPhone Racket Jacket since that's the price of being cool enough to have a iPod that makes calls, but my phone is a hell of a lot easier to take care of. I can already feel myself being angry at an iPhone.

I guess somebody recognized that the majority of phones in the states are horrible in comparison to what my 1800Yen (about $15) bought, and that having one gadget is easier than two. However, they completely missed the mark with flexibility. A phone has a complicated interface because there are more things to coordinate. A music player is simple because it doesn't need to be complex. Phones have enough buttons to act as music players no problem, but an iPod has nowhere near enough hardware to be useful as a phone interface. Thus we have the cop-out; instead of sacrificing the elegance of the clickwheel and admitting its defficiency with regard to being a phone interface, Apple has sacrificed utility.

The largest complaint I have is that Apple has simply introduced a gadget based

Always keep in mind: USB is only good for HID (Human Interface Devices) and Mass Storage Devices... It really is that simple.

Adding them, no.

Making them work, yes.

It takes a knockin' and keeps on rockin'. Blueberry Clamshell 300MHz...it's been around the world with its original owner (my aunt) and has lived to tell the tale. Very happily running Panther like a champ. The stupid Yo-Yo power supply is misbehaving now but everyone knows that was a real design botch. Yeah, it's not the most masculine lappie on the planet. However, it's not as bad as the pink lappies that some of the PC makers are starting to put out "for the girls."

Between my Clamshell and my ThinkPad 600x I am in laptop heaven. Once the bugs are worked out of the MacBook that's probably what I'll be getting next.

3-4 sizes/forms for laptops, 3 types for cameras, (which is my pet peeve, I've got 3 types of very similar batteries, but each has its own connectors. (Canon/Olympus/Nikon)). Small/flat for compact, larger for larger cameras, and big one for cameras with vertical grips. Camcorder batteries seems to be very similar too.

My favorite site is going to the wall!
Some other /. regulars may be aware of 'Tech news/social bookmarking (or however it's being described this week)' website, digg.com.
It's taken a lot of it's modding ideas from /. but iplemented them rather differently and there is no editorial control - stories make it to the homepage by virtue of their mod rating.
That site featured this 'news' last week where its legitimacy was quickly demolished (it's hardly difficult).
I mention this because I see a number of digg.com stories making their way to /. some days later and I suspect it's because folk are reading digg and then submitting the item here where the editorial intervention creates the few days of lag.
I've always considered Slashdot to be a place for interesting and intelligent news and debate. The more I see of stories like this making their way on here, the more I am (sadly) beginning to doubt that.
I'm all for a bit of 'dumbing down' for light relief every now and then (that's why I dig digg) but can we please try and maintain at least a reasonable level of genuine geek newsworthiness?

See: http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2005/07/new_w ifienabled.html

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2005/03/super _shuffle_f.html

The Shuffle wasn't the only thing they copied ....

Just saw this on Ubergizmo this week. The Sonos ZonePlayer looks like it does every thing you're looking for. They have a PDA-like controller, too, that you can carry around with you.

It's not cheap, though. the ZonePlayer costs $499 and the controller price is $399.

Ubergizmo has a report about an electronic paper product coming out in 2006. It has a thickness of 3mm and delivers full color images. Competition for the Tablet PC?