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Next Devel Yopy Version To Run X and GTK+
chrisd writes "From the yopy developers list, Young Hoon Kim notes that :"G-Mate will introduce the next generation of Yopy which targets the end user
in the 3rd or last quarter of this year. This time, it will have 64MB of RAM and 16MB Flash, and it will use ramfs. Of course it will have X windows installed and all the application will be run on X too. Therefore, if you are planning to develop any application for Yopy, you have to port your application to be used with X windows. Since we will include GTK+ toolkit, it's a good idea to start making application using GTK". I've got the yopy, and I have to say I really like it, the screen is very nice and it's -very- fast.
The development version shipped with something called w-windows which was weird, but I quickly installed X from the Yopy X Server Project."
The next generation? What happened to the original? Did they decide to not release it and to try again? I would like to purchase a PDA, perferrably one w/ linux. Unfortunately, they are either vaporware, very high priced developer/prototype modes, and/or not very good at what PDAs are supposed to do. A company can only make promises for so long. Sooner or later they are going to have to start delivering on those promises.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Aren't these the same clowns who keep spamming me about buying their developers' kit every time I post to one or two mailing lists? Hmmm, yopydeveloper.com...yep, that's them. Annoying little buggers, and won't stop spamming you despite requests to desist.
-Ed Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.
Actually, you are completely wrong. True, some people who are called "mad" are not "mad" by any known objective metric, but diseases which induce "madness" via neurochemical imbalance are well documented. If your body has issues with how certain neurotransmitters are either generated or used, causing an imbalance, it can make the brain run seriously out-of-spec. E.g. it's been found that manic depressives have very high levels of seratonin during the manic ("happy") phase, but very low levels during a depressive phase. There's tons of info on the web about this: search for schizophrenia, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and related info on neurotransmitters, etc.
You've got a political-correctness-of-conformity issue, which you are wrongly using to ignore valuable medical science. This is especially bad when the medical viewpoint is far more compassionate and humanitarian than, for example, the historical view of the medically "mad" as "posessed by satan," with the horrible treatments that endengered.
But all the promises about new designs don't mean dick unless you're shipping the product NOW.
I've been floowing Yopy since it was released, and I'm becomming steadily disapointed. The Spec sheet, when it was first announced in '99, was very impressive -- TFT colour, fast CPU, built in Mpeg decoder and FM/TV tuner... but the features dwindled and eve those it retained started looking less stellar every time they pushed back the relase date.
I want to like the Yopy, I really do, but G-Mate is going to hve to impove it's track record before I'mm but my weight behind it again. Sorry.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Actually, if I remember correctly, the very first email was about how Toyota was aiming to be low end crap, so just give them that market. The big strong US auto makers would always dominate the mainstream market anyway...
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One thing I find interesting about the Yopy is that it's Korean. Samsung seems to have made some steady inroads into American electronics shops with low- and mid-grade VCRs (I had one for a few years, liked the design, but it was not long-lived) and DVD players. (And Samsung, KDS, and LG Electronics have become very visible when shopping for monitors, too.)
:)) Japanese and Korean products.
...
We've come to think of Japanese companies like Sony and Sharp as being the high-end makers for certain types of consumer goods, and I wonder if people can point to interesting / overlooked brands from other countries as well.
The large Korean combines / Chaebol (Hyundai, Daewoo, Samsung, etc) make products in so many lines it's hard to keep track, but I don't see many of them in this country. (though my recent RAM shopping expedition through Pricewatch led me to a lot of Samsung memory.)
Any thoughts on whether "the next Sony" could be one of these? Right now it seems to me like the qualitative differences (texture, ergonomics, colors) are really the biggest thing separating (for instance, and ignoring other countries for now
If not, why so?
Random thought
timothy
p.s. I really want a free yopy, anyone who has an extra can please send it along.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Korean products, in terms of market share and quality, are about where Japanese products were in the early-70's. Hyundai has the best car warranty around. I have a KDS monitor at home and am quite satisfied with it. True, it's not as good as a NEC MultiSynch or Sony Trinitron, but a 19" only cost $250. I suspect that Hyundai and Samsung are perfectly positioned to be the "next Sony". Or perhaps the next Honda and next Sony.
Best Slashdot Co
Heh. It's about time we all admitted that the Palm Pilot is a game boy in business attire. :)
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Hmm, if this is a troll, apparently it's slipped past the slashdot troll detectors by being modded up so quickly, so I'll respond.
You're basically saying that people will become uncreative if you give them convenient calendars? I've rarely heard such alarmist nonsense.
Certainly for some people they can serve to help regiment their life. But in my experience, a disorganized person (such as myself) will stay disorganized what utilities you provide them with. Start back in grade school with the trapper keeper, I found that no amount of effort or organizational products could keep tendencies in check.
For people like myself, a handheld's organizational capabilities will likely go completely unutilized (as I can attest with my palm pilot). Instead, they serve the role of a mnemonic enhancer, an extension of my brain that can store information far more carefully than my own frazzled bundle of neurons.
As a result, I can remember more, and potentially be more creative by cross indexing ideas I have now, with ideas I had a year ago. These ideas I would have surely lost had I not written them down somewhere. Physical notebooks don't allow one to dynamically rearrange one's notes, so a handheld helps in this enormously.
X was originally designed and run on computers with less than a meg of RAM. While it didn't have all the features a modern X implementation has, it had all the biggies.
:) Over a LAN, it's nice and snappy. Over cable or DSL, it's also rather fast, despite sometimes obvious latency(which is a factor of the network, not so much the X protocol).
;) Suuure, you *could* use something lighter. But then why not run Linux with a single shell in the console text-mode? 'cause we don't have to :)
:)
The idea that "X is bloated" is most definetly a vast misconception. What do you base this observation on? It definetly isn't quantitative analysis, elsewise you wouldn't say it's bloated.
So, you must be basing your opinion on subjective analysis. Now, KDE2 is pretty beefy. I bet at least 75% of people who use it, and this it's slow, will blame that on X. But if that were the case, how can I run, oh, say, Blackbox which is very fast? Since the X implementation is the same between the two, obviously that's not it. The same applies to GNOME; X isn't the bottleneck.
Now, running remote X apps is a bit of a bandwidth hog. On a slow modem.
Anyways, there are projects around which have entire X implentations that take up a few megs in storage, and less than a meg in RAM. XFree86-based implementations, to boot. Considerng this Yopy will have 64M of RAM, and 16M of flash, I don't think it's an issue
Just a misconception
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Well, I have had a Palm (first a III, then a Vx) for a little over two years now, and I use it mainly for playing backgammon while I'm on the can.
In other words, I think you're taking this a little too seriously.
I have not seen a yopy. I have not played with a Yopy. I cannot fully stand by what I say until I see a real, live yopy and play with it. But from what I can tell from all the people in the linux community buzzing about it, the yopy will not be designed for the true end user. It will be designed for geeks for whom technology is the ends and not the means. A goal and not a tool. We've seen the same exact thing with CE, where the whole point of the technology was "look, you can put a desktop in the palm of your hand! Isn't that cool? Looks, feel, and acts just like the desktop!" Unfortunately, the end-user who does not share the early-adopter blind optimism of us geeks and is not going to buy into the idea of the Yopy if it's simply "Now we can port all those X applications in their exact desktop form to a handheld". Hand held usage is going to have different issues than that of the desktop. Efficient UI design is going to be twice as important because the user will often have to input and extract information in a time critical fashion. If the user can't interact with the UI in such a way that they can boot up and jot down that phone number or directions to the concert in 8 seconds, the handheld will be nothing more than a expensive piece of junk in your pocket. A piece of junk that can play solitaire and run gimp, mind you, but a piece of junk nonetheless. A handheld is also going to have certain constraints a desktop won't. The amount of screen real-estate the UI design has to use drops severly, and the difficulty in accessing an interface element in a fast manner greatly increases. Finally, the only tasks that most end-users have had for handhelds has been stuff like taking down addresses, phone numbers, etc. Stuff that can already be adequately handled by the Palm. New and unique tasks for such a beast as the Yopy will have to be thought up in order to be a justifiable purchase for your non-geek.
When you design a piece of technology that will interact intimately with the user (like GUI's or handhelds), you have to design from the end user backwards. You don't think about what GUI toolkit you use, or how you code it, or what chip you'll use. You look at the user's real tasks at hand. You look at their tolerance for dealing with technological details. You look at what shapes would fit comfortably in a user's pocket. When the guy who designed the palm first set about his task, he didn't think "what gui toolkit am I going to use?" or "how am I going to implement the OS?". The first thing he did was put a block of wood in his pocket and carry it around with him the entire day. The block of wood served as a reference point for how the palm would be implemented. As ideas about how the user would interact with the device formed in this guy's head, the palm slowly turned from a block of wood to the most successful portable technology ever created. It is this kind of "organic" thinking that we need when designing the next generation of handhelds. If yopy wasn't thought of as a block of wood, it will only turn into an expensive brick. Wood floats, bricks sink.
I want to export applications from my PDA. Using my system keyboard rather than the PDA input when I'm at my desk makes a lot more sense. I just want to plug it in and automagically have all its apps exported to my main display. Hopefully that functionality would be available.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We were working on an embedded device and had an X server in about 700K. The view of X as bloated is largely a misconception.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Little tip from an ex-troll.
Trolls like it more when you say things like that, and then proceed to respond to their points. It's similar to saying, "I know that you know that 2+2 does not equal 5, but here's a proof as to why it doesn't".
Either way, you lose.
HTH
I never really got into the whole 'multiple personality' thing. Except when I had signal 11's account. But after that I got kind of bored and stopped. I haven't really trolled since then.
this is true, and I even have an 4 digit account that I stopped using when I started trolling. KTB is a 6 digit (high 6) new schooler, but he has adapted very well. Most accounts above 180K or so get so annoyed with trying to play the game here that they end up trolling out of pure disgust. That's what happened to me about 90K ;)
...for lusers, and developers who release code under GPL.
but if you want to do "commercial development" or "closed source" it's something like $1550 per developer seat...more than Win2K and Visual C++ pro combined!!
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
True radicals and free thinkers should have nothing to do with them, as they force one to limit one's ambitions and thoughts.
That's fair enough.
We should be constraining the use of these devices, not promoting them.
OK, here's where you lose me. If these devices are bad because the power elite force them on us, wouldn't the power elite preventing us from using them be equally bad?
That said, I know where you're coming from. Devices like this have the potential to become the brain-strangling neck ties of the 21st century.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
...it's just getting the code developed that hasn't completely happened.
BlackNova Traders
the wrist watch! Throw off your shackles, and refuse to be a slave to others notions of 'time'!
been there, done that, love it...:-)
Monkey sense
And I get a little irritated when I hear phrases like "technocratic elite" and "corporate power structure". Not that I consider big power centers in our society to be totally benign entities. But they are a simple fact of life. Even if we could get rid of them, to do so would destroy the very social infrastructure we depend on.
If you're concerned about the impact of technology and corporate power, work on ways to mitigate their evils. If you just stand on a soapbox and yell, "Repent! Repent!", you're not contributing anything. Worse, you're making yourself into a convenient strawman for the very power groups you're afraid of.
Also consider your audience. Slashdotters are primarily people for whom technology is very important. It's an outlet for their creative energy. It's a way for them to make a living. Most of all, it's an endless source of fun. You're not going to change that with any amount of moralizing.
Are we sufficiently offtopic yet?
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You're assuming that Sociology Major thinks that power elites are bad. He never said that. He just want the power elite to have the same priorities he does.
If I were going to go around banning any kind of intellectual inquiry (and I'm opposed to the idea in any form) I would probably start with disciplines like Sociology, that seem to think that fixing a broken society is something like fixing a toaster.
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Am I the only one completely turned off by the high ($400-$600) price target if and when it's released? I'd rather pay half the price for the Agenda even at a sacrifice of those features. Besides, the specs look a whole lot like the Compaq Ipaq, which runs the Evil Handheld OS (and Linux nicely enough). The thing is, the Compaq is available now, and is in the same price category.
More important to pretty full-color screens and digital camera add-ons are long battery life, quick and easy PIM applications, and excellent handwriting recognition. The Palm and Visor have this, and until WinCE devices and Linux devices do, they'll fail.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I'm sure a lot of /. readers are in the same boat, but what is wrong with organization? We all agree that if our tools are in the toolbox things are better... we know that for people to consume our communication, it too must be organized. Is organization so wrong?
I do agree with you. I *feel* my life when I'm not organized... its a great sense to feel how I'm doing financially by keeping it in my head, and its good to get into hyper-focus mode and acheive something intricate and involved by being able to *feel* what needs to be done.
Not by lists, procedures, timetables, order of operations, etc, but by being in tune...
OR
Perhaps I should have more organization. Often I'm inhibited when I loose information, or my means of not looking things up is missing. I think that perhaps my mind works more like a relational database or XML, and when it gets to heart of the matter, perhaps us geek-types should just learn RDBMS or XML and implement that uniformly across all of our data keeping.
I agree with your statement that conformity and insane non-intuitive organization can be a hinderence, but the problem still lies in "how do we make sense of the madness?" For organized people, organization works (even if it is a crutch) and the rest of us will just have to *feel* it.
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but on a more realistic note, why are we being told now? I could understand if this was to encourage application development before it shipped, but it seems more like a way to hype up possible vaporware than to encourage development. Does anyone know how far along this project really is? If so, how's it look?
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
It's spreading! Make your time!
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Hell, lets do something about that great inhibitor of personal free and individual thinking--the wrist watch! Throw off your shackles, and refuse to be a slave to others notions of 'time'!
Actually, I have read in a Forbes magazine article about a year ago, that Samsung (for one) really is aiming to be 'low end crap' (although they obviously didn't word it like that) as the above slashdotter mentions in reply to your comment. So I doubt they will try to change their overall business plan to accomodate being known for their high quality products. Not to say that they wouldn't venture into the high-end market, but for now their business plan is aimed at the cheap sector of the market, and for good reason: There is lots of money to be made in the cheap market.
Disclaimer: I realize Windows and Linux can do the same jobs like running a server, but each OS has it's own specialties that it's better at.
Sophocles: Antigone, C. 450 BC
Sophocles had a great insight. Madness is a social phenomenon; people are said to be mad when they deviate from the norm. Madness does not exist in any objective sense. In the eyes of God, we are all sane.
The problem with handheld computers and indeed computers generally is that they raise the bar of sanity. Everyone is expected to be super organised, utterly confirmist and organise the details of their life such that they can be described in Microsoft Outlook's diary functions.
The onset of portable computers continues this trend, and it is most worrysome. Where will the creative free spirits of our society come from when they are expected to obey the whims of the technocratic elite? Portable computers such as the yopy are always imposed on us by the corporate power structures above.
True radicals and free thinkers should have nothing to do with them, as they force one to limit one's ambitions and thoughts.
We should be constraining the use of these devices, not promoting them.
Let's see... Let's get a good yet questionnable idea (PDA w/ Linux), launch a wave of PR talking how great this device will be. Let's incur all kinds of delays possible promising the device soon. At some stage let's do 'goto start' and do it all over again with the new version of the device without releasing the original one.
Finally, let's make a great step towards establishing the device on the market - let's charge developers for the dev. kit (much more than what other companies charge) for the device that is based on a free system and is supposed to use free development tools (gcc et al.)
There are way too many sleazy companies trying to ride the Linux popularity wave as well as to save on the O/S royalties.