Slashdot Mirror
ViewSonic AirPanel v150 Review at Ars Technica
Haxby writes "Ars Technica has a pretty thorough review of the ViewSonic AirPanel (15 inch model). You might recall that this device/design won 'Best of Comdex' in 2002, but as the review clearly shows, it's not really all that great, and it's way overpriced. The biggest problem is video performance: it sucks. Poor resolution and hideous rendering times (partly Microsoft's RDC's fault) make it next to useless. Is more bandwidth the key to making these things more palatable?"
i like it wet
Is more bandwidth the key to making these things more palatable?
I think better use of the available bandwidth is more important than more bandwidth. You can have all the bandwidth you want, but if it doesn't use it properley, then it'll still be a poor piece of equipment.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Spirit of America has come loose from its mooring
Gone limp -- deflated
Nosedived into a pile of crap
I won't give away anything here that can single me out.
When I started at SCO in the late 90s it was a fun, vibrant place to work. The coffee was free as was lunch most Fridays. It was replete with friendly competition to write the best code we could while finding problems and fixing the code of others. It was sheer joy.
Then, in late 2001, several of the core systems people were told we had to attend a meeting (we later started calling that meeting "Salem Tuesday" after the witch hunts) in which we were told that effective immediately our job functions were to change.
One man, who I'd just seen around the office recently, announced himself as an intellectual property attorney from Washington. He said that Linux, which we all knew about of course, was infringing on SCO's IP. We couldn't ask questions during this meeting, it was strictly a one-way conversation. We were told of how the GPL was bad for business and bad for America (remember that this was just after Sept. 11 and patriotism was still on a high). Free software, we were told, was killing the 150 billion dollar software industry. In effect, by supporting Linux we were cutting our own throats.
None of use believed that, we had some great sales lined up for our server software and support contracts were bringing in loads of cash. The lawyer continued on about how Free wasn't and how we would be unemployed if we continued to give away Linux.
He sat down (interestingly, I never saw this man again), and another lawyer stood up and gave us our plans: from that moment forth we were to dissect the Linux kernel source and compare it with our own internal code. If things looked close we were to try getting our code into the Linux tree through our contacts at IBM and SGI. The funny thing is that much code that did the same stuff was replicated but with out unique comments in there it was obvious that our internal source had to be the initial source for the code.
The rest is history.
Here we are, 10 months after the rocks started flying: IBM didn't bite and buy us out, SGI is fighting back, Sun and MS bought licenses. That wasn't how it was supposed to go I guess. The atmosphere here is thick with paranoia. We're no longer systems coders in a software company, we're inventing evidence in a litigation firm.
Oh, for the record: SCO monitors outgoing connections to sites such as Groklaw and Slashdot. We've had a handful of job terminations for people saying things that may hurt SCO on various forums. A single AC posting on
I'm ssh'd out through another machine I have access too. Keep the fight going. Hopefully the board will turf the pirates that took over and let us get back to what we love: programming.
An Anonymous Coward at SCO.
Linux user here.
And I don't even know who you are.
doesn't add anything to the quote, and check out his/her/its post history, it's filled with offtopic, flamebait, and troll posts.
GAY HOMOSEXUAL FAGGOT.
Throw more resources at it!
business as usual!
As stated in the post, microsoft's RDC is abysmal as far as bandwidth usage goes. Improve the protocol and there's plenty of bandwidth available.
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
I've only just started looking at LCDs and need to know if anyone else sees them ALL looking like trash? I'm rarely up on new hardware tech, 3D stuff doesn't impress me and the ancient 17" CRT I have has done me well. However looking at several brands of LCDs I'm wondering whether I just see them different to other people, or if they truly only have one advantage, clarity. I've taken a look at the screens on Dell, Acer and Apple laptops, 15 & 17" screens from Dell Samsung and BenQ, and a few Apple Cinema Displays. I can only say I see the BEST of them as under a quarter the quality of even an average CRT. I couldn't see any reason to pay even HALF the price of a CRT for one, let alone MORE. Anyone else see LCDs like this, or are my eyes just plaine fucked?
toaster,toaster toaser, do you have toast in you yet i think
so!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Im not a toaster!!!!!!!!!!And one more
thing........YOUR A TOASER!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND A COOKIE WITH MILK SOAGE
MILK!!!!!!!!!!AND A BUTT WITH POOP IN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is where tablet pc's should be heading. You get all the power of your desktop, in a thin and light form factor you can carry around anywhere within a decent range. I hope R&D continues on these things. Maybe even build a very basic laptop into it so you can use it to take notes when outside of the range, and get full power and sync all your data automatically when you get back within range.
Toms Hardware, the next week they discover ArsTechnica.
Get a clue morons. Do your fucking jobs and find some interesting and/or unique news rather than just leeching common tech sites. The part that bugs me is that you ask a question at the end like some kind of retard to spur discussion and try to make the article relevant. 'When will these things get better?' Who the hell knows? Fuck off.
Because when one thinks of video driver support and lightning fast rendering, obviously they think of X11 running on a linux box.
Know what? It's ViewSonics device, it's up to ViewSonic to sink or swim. Quit making excuses, quit making everything into a "MS= teh sock!" argument.
Besides, CRAMAK GONA FIX IT!!!1!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
That is all.
don't know, but I SURE know that the site needs more bandwidth, it got /.ed after the second post.
If i am only interested for console (bash like) use, will prevent to suck that much??? like having all the super power of a 1mb ISA vga card on WinXP??? browse with Lynx, and with mutt read your email
Putting a windows cd backwards, plays evil messages, but it gets worse, putting it right, installs windows.
CHESAPEAKE, Va. - Consumed with righting racial inequality and injustice, sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo became yesterday the latest young defendant to use the film The Matrix as part of an insanity defense to explain killings that seem to have no clear explanation.
The 1999 film has been used, with some success, in at least three other murder cases in which young defendants attempted to justify their crimes with allusions to the movie's philosophy that the world people live in is only a dream sequence controlled by a computer. Violence is condoned as a way to get out of the fake, oppressive world of The Matrix.
More than a hundred drawings and notes found in Malvo's jail cell, as well as the testimony yesterday of a social worker who met with the teen-age sniper suspect, indicate that the youth had an obsession with The Matrix. He told detectives and the social worker to watch the film to understand the motive behind the sniper shootings.
"Mr. Malvo wanted me to know how unjust this society was and how important it was for them to build a new and just society," said court-appointed forensic social worker Carmeta Albarus, who spent 70 hours with Malvo this year. "I recognized something was amiss with this Jamaican boy who had not been in this country three years and is speaking as if he had lived here his whole life and suffered years of social injustice."
Albarus' testimony dovetailed with the drawings introduced into evidence Wednesday. In those ink sketches on blue-lined notebook paper, Malvo creates a heroic portrait of Neo, the central character in The Matrix, and makes numerous references to the film's slogans of freeing one's mind.
"The outside force has arrived, free yourself of the Matrix 'control,'" Malvo wrote on one drawing that depicted him handcuffed with the word Bondage on his chest. "Free first your mind. Trust me!! The body will follow."
The 'Matrix' defense
This is not the first time a disenfranchised teen-ager has used the film as an explanation for violent acts.
Two notable Matrix defenses, in San Francisco and Ohio, saw judges accept insanity pleas based on a defendant's infatuation with the movie.
In the San Francisco case, a 27-year-old Swiss exchange student said he dismembered his landlady in May 2000 because she was emitting "evil vibes" and he was afraid of being "sucked into the Matrix," according to news reports. The case did not go to trial after the judge accepted the insanity plea.
Last year in Hamilton, Ohio, a 36-year-old bartender shot her landlady three times with a pistol. She said her landlady had been controlling her mind and justified the killing by telling the court: "They commit a lot of crimes in The Matrix." Her insanity plea was accepted.
Robert F. Horan Jr., lead prosecutor in the Malvo trial, faced The Matrix defense in another case he prosecuted this year - that of Joshua Cooke, a 19-year-old Oakton, Va., resident who killed his parents with a 12-gauge shotgun and blamed the movie.
Cooke's attorney said his client believed he was living in the virtual reality world of The Matrix when he shot his parents. Horan argued that the defense was nonsense, and the judge later sentenced Cooke to 40 years in prison.
"How many million people have seen this movie and how many have committed murder?" asked Horan rhetorically during a Boston Globe interview.
'A common theme'
Some legal experts say the film may be no more than a convenient framework to explain crimes committed by people who do not exhibit typical forms of insanity.
"If you cast aside the notion that the laws of the land matter, it allows us to behave in a very different way. It gives us license," said John Kennedy, director of the University of Cincinnati's Institute of Psychiatry and Law. "There's a common theme of oppression and unfairness that requires abandoning the status quo and turning to a new way, and it just so happens that this behavior and the movie express that same theme."
It
Compliments to the author for including that "15 inch" reference!
The strength of these Smart Displays is that they can have the capability to be a detachable monitor: when docked, they can act just like a normal DVI display, with full video speed, acceleration, etc etc, but when you want to get up, you just pick it up and it automatically goes into "remote" mode. Bring it back and put it in the dock, and *poof* you're back in normal monitor mode.
The problem is most manufacturers haven't implemented that capability. I'm pretty sure that Viewsonic hasn't, but others (such as the Philips DesXcape) have.
Not that I've seen it in action, so who knows how well it actually works.
It is a neat idea and all, but i'd prefer a simple VGA->radio->VGA system over a tablet PC + wifi (which is what this looks like). Then I could use my wireless mouse and keyboard and be set. Back when I had a windows machine, I never needed to remotely administrate it (it was just a gaming machine-- it didn't matter if it crashed while i was out). Of course, then there is VNC if you want a full blown desktop anywhere solution.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
... mod the article into /dev/null. In fact, mod this comment there, too.
Yawn.
sigs, as if you care.
They need to complete the package. These things were intended to be sort of like removable monitors. At least that was the initial intention. Picture this: Instead of buying a plain Jane 15" LCD panel, you pay $100 more and get the new version airpanel XP yada yada model. Now here's the key. You setup the monitor like any other LCD panel. DVI connected to your computer and all that jazz. You use it as normal, and it sits in a little docking station at your desk, which makes the connection to the DVI connection and power for battery charging... Nature calls! You have to go drop a deuce, but you don't want to stop reading the most recent Slashback. What do you do! Well, since you upgraded to the newfangeled peripheral, you just pull your monitor out of it's docking station, and, ideally, it would automatigically connect over wi-fi just as the current model does to the account you were just logged into. So maybe it blanks out for a few seconds as it transitions to the XP remote desktop mode and the Windows CE control. Or maybe it just switches to the login screen as soon as you unhook it. How cool would that be? You have the best of both worlds, and it doesn't cost all THAT much as you are getting a full monitor that works at full speed as well. Now how HARD could it be to make a hardware bypass for this thing? I swear, make this work, and quickly and easily, and these will actually sell! NOone will pay that kind of cash for a glorified gigantic PDA. The really missed the boat on this one. The original concept was "a monitor you can take with you" but instead they just made a weak-ass remote desktop unit. Get me in that think tank and I'd have set them straight... -BaumSquad
After chatting with Caesar (who also helped test the airpanel), we agreed that this device is really a "glimpse of the future". We imagine that one day we will not need to be right in front of a computer just to control our other computers. We will be able to travel anywhere in a modern city and use an independent, portable device (cell phone, PDA, tablet PC, airpanel, etc.) to access or control the PC sitting at home. Will such a day ever arrive? Who's to say? But the airpanel does seem kind of futuristic.
Not that I necessarily agree with these comments, but if such a future were to come to pass, the likely hood of me choosing my living room to host my desktop-server would be slim to none. Ah, centrailized computing, here we come again... At least the iterations are close enough to each other now that we don't ever have to implement anything - by the time we might be thinking about actually moving towards centralizing, decentralizing will be the "next (er, current) big thing" again.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
The very next time a fundie comes up to you and asks, "are you saved?" share with them this information: Take a letter, one by one from the word Evangelists and it forms two words: Evil's Agents.
Lucky for us we have a God who we can actually SEE. His name is Lord Captain Kirk.
The Captain Kirk Bible comes with remote controlled twitching rubber Spock ears to wear during worship. Lord Captain Kirk defeated or outwitted many Klingons and Romulans. In celebration of Lord Kirk's Godly wonder I offer the following prayer:
"Lord Captain Kirk you gave us your holy prophet Picard to introduce your sacrament of tea earl grey hot. BEHOLD! Before me I have prepared a cup of this tea become present to me in the holy sacrament of the tea earl grey hot - this I command! I do summon, invoke, and command thee O mighty Lord Captain Kirk! Amen Amen."
I've been hoping for something like this for a long time: a tablet that I can take somewhere like out on my porch or to school or wherever, and it mimics or uses my computer at home and all of it's programs. Basically, just a screen with USB ports that can connect (not sync, actually connect) with my home computer to enable me to have a moveable workspace. :)
Keyboard, mouse, Screen, and BAM protable workstation that's EXACTLY like the one I'm used to using. I'd be willing to have some sort of trade-off of performance, i.e. for more complicated things such as video editing or Photoshop, it would have the main computer (the desktop) do the work and just send the results when done to the tablet, all I need it for is basically a fancy display that allows remote control over my main computer and a place to plug in a keyboard
I came up with the idea of a portable, wireless terminal that transmitted the KVM signals to and from your desktop PC about ten years ago for an 8th grade science project...
I got a 'C'.
XeoMage
I use an iBook with RDC to my WinXP desktop. I get a good-sized keyboard, very good battery life, and acceptable WiFi performance. Granted, video plays poorly via RDC, but cut-and-paste works betweent RDC (I use RDC in a window) and Mac OS X, so if I have to pull up a video URL, I don't have too many problems.
The iBook is very reasonably priced for this purpose; at $1100-$1200 to set up, it makes working wirelessly on a desktop a lot more fun (and then you can start thinking about getting rid of your desktop monitor and keyboard, and sticking the CPU in a more unobtrusive place . . . and opening port 3389 on your firewall at home, so you can use your home fixed IP to access the machine via RDC . . . )
Ahhhh... but then again it's always fun to get an "M$ sux" quippy on the front page. I get it now. Of course if this was some open source software the reviewers would definitely be on crack. Not only that, they'd probably be in Microsoft's pocket and have an evil agenda.
No, that's OK. Don't thank me.
WIFI enabled laptops now, so you really should have recieved a D- . Chester Gould has already thought about that crap back in the day. Dick Tracy had a wrist TV/Communicator. Make that an F for plagarism.
I have a 15" LCD monitor just like this, with better resolution support and a better video card that supports 3D acceleration. It is so small and light that I can carry this monitor around. It has a built in mouse and keyboard on it, so I don't have to punch LCD screen for input. Everything all in one. Runs Linux. Interested? It is called ThinkPad.
I use RDC from work to home over my cable modem, which only has a 20K/sec upload rate and it works great. A network packet capture would probably show plenty of excess bandwidth.
RDC is great for checking email or web browsing, in my experience much better than anything else. I doubt any "remote desktop" type software is going to handle multimedia well.
The problem is a 1000 dollar remote monitor. Why not just buy a cheap laptop and get more functionality. You can even get a decent compaq centrino laptop with a 15.2 inch screen for 1200. It doesnt even have a weight advantage, at 6 pounds its just as much or more then most laptops.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
BTW Did you notice "Weight ~6 lbs"? That's pretty bad.
Only remote desktop display, and it's 6lbs???
My new Toshiba laptop with 17" display, hard drive, DVD drive, battery, keyboard, partridge in a pear tree, etc is 9lbs! What have they put in this thing???
Even the Apple powerbook with all it's internal goodies is 6+ lbs. For what it does, the weight and battery life of this thing is inexcusable. Fire your engineers!
I find it very clunky. It's actually slightly modified dumb terminal. It has a processor and it connects to windows through some implementation of remote desktop. The whole experience is just slow. You have to use one to really feel how slow it is, not to mention its high-magnitude gravitational pull (it's heavy). We ended up plugging the AC adaptor to a 220v outlet and returning it to the store.
I have an old Dell 233MHz Celeron-based laptop running Windows XP Pro and with a 802.11g card. For roughly half the price of the airpad (used at half.com), I still use RDP to connect to my desktop most of the time, but I get 5x the network speed (54Mbps) and a perfectly-capable (if somewhat outdated) independent machine that I travel with. Since I'm not *required* to use RDP, I can also pop open Mozilla in the living room if my wife is already on the desktop in the office (XP doesn't allow simultaneous console and RDP sessions).
Personally, I thought the review's take on RDP was a little harsh. It's light-years ahead of VNC (which I'm also a fan of but only for cross-platform situations), etc., transparently connects your local printers, USB devices, etc. to the remote machine, and is perfectly usable even over a dialup connection. There's even a freeware third-party utility to transfer small files w/o resorting to FTP, etc. Anyone expecting top-notch multimedia performance over a remote control via wireless is a friggin' moron. You either have to send uncompressed streams (BIG), aggressively recompress (as RDP does, leading to lag and quality loss), or implement fully-functional media playback at the local end (with all of the same codecs, etc.).
Anyway, I use RDP daily, and for general coding and browsing, I often forget that I'm running remotely.
The Achilles Heel for this device, IMHO, is price (I have a beautiful 19" Samsung LCD that was cheaper) and lack of VGA/DVI input (can't use it as a regular monitor). If I'm going to pay that much, I want a fully-functional tablet PC, not just a wirelessly-tethered LCD screen.
I bought an Apple 22" Cinema Display when they were first introduced about 3 years back, after having much experience with high-end CRT displays. So far, that first-generation Cinema Display has sold 14 others like it to people who saw mine. I don't expect to buy another CRT in my remaining lifetime.
This has been done a long time ago (early 90s) by Zenith -- the Zenith Cruisepad :)
That thing had a little AMD 386 chip embedded, and ran a Citrix WinFrame client, and your PC ran a WinFrame server.
I got one recently, to play with, and tried to get it to work, but couldn't, since the Citrix SW they use only runs on windows 3.1, which I can't even find an old disk of
Anyway, the point is that everything you do is being rendered/processed on the client side, which should theoretically make the display very lightweight in terms of hardware and therefore cheaper than a laptop. Unfortunately, I think Viewsonic missed the price point they were aiming for. If this thing were cheaper it would rock, as it stands now you might as well buy an inexpensive laptop.
The reviewer doesn't seem to understand what RDP is and what it's used for. Obviously you cannot expect any remote desktop solution to come anywhere near the performance of a monitor plugged into your video card. It's just not possible.
We have one of these puppies at home. It's not perfect, but it's very nice. My wife uses it to browse online shops while she watches TV. It is absolutely perfect for that kind of usage.
This technology has a lot of room for improvement but if you have a basic understand of what it is and what the limitations are you can get a lot of use out of it. Asking for streaming video over RDP is just not reasonable today.
Be happy. Nothing else matters.
The fucking Apple/Linux zealotry around here by people who have never even used XP makes me want to puke.
From the article:
After chatting with Caesar (who also helped test the airpanel), we agreed that this device is really a "glimpse of the future". We imagine that one day we will not need to be right in front of a computer just to control our other computers. We will be able to travel anywhere in a modern city and use an independent, portable device (cell phone, PDA, tablet PC, airpanel, etc.) to access or control the PC sitting at home. Will such a day ever arrive? Who's to say? But the airpanel does seem kind of futuristic.
Such a day came for me a long time ago, when I started running a TightVNC server on my desktop. I can access it on my laptop. I can access it on my PDA (a little cumbersome on my iPaq's 320x240 screen, though). And, here's the best part, I can access it anywhere, through any java-enabled web browser.
VNC, on my home network, is extremely zippy (as in watching DVDs is no problem zippy), and is even entirely useful for web browsing and document editing from far across the Internet. The TightVNC enhancements (integrated JPEG compression, etc.) also make a big difference in maximizing the intelligent use of available bandwidth which, judging by the article, Microsoft's RDC definitely does not. There is, however, one caveat: no integrated audio support. For that, I suppose you'll have to look at the network transparency feature in arts.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Actual laptop computer to connect to your main box wirelessly: $800.00
HP Omnibook 6000 $700 from Infinity Micro. 15" screen, plus other stuff that makes it an actual computer. So, it's not a badass machine. What do you want for $700.00? And you'd have to buy a wireless ethernet setup. Linksys W11S4PC11--about a hundred bucks from newegg.com.
Just a monitor (but it has a touch screen): $900.00
Airpanel APV150P about $880 from thenerds.net 15" screen. Oh, yeah--you still need to buy a WAP for it to talk to. Fifty bucks.
Ummm...why would you buy an airpanel? Is a touch screen really that cool.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
The answer is DVI. I have two 19" Samsung LCD monitors. With analog they were a little disappointing; with DVI they are fantastic. The image quality is excellent.
Both the HPs can use the TS Client, and can connect to ANY TS or RDC server.
The ViewSonic is supported only for single-session RDC, and it does NOT have the client-side configurations available within the actual TS Client.
The 6-year-old Jornadas can even use the CITRIX Client. The NEW ViewSonic has no Citrix capability whatsoever.
Since these are Win CE Devices, following both the HW and SW reference designs, it is amazing that every other aspect of CE capability was removed but for the MIRA Shell.
The only thing keeping these from being "Super PDAs" is the OEM simply choses to leave the necessary components out of the ROM
A Super PDA could sync with your ActiveSync, browse without PC host, exchange files, run local apps like PDAWin, MiniStumbler or any other CE app.
Some people are already hacking these panels to break out of the MIRA Shell, but even then, capabilities are severely limited by what has been omitted from the CE code by the OEMs.
See http://www.aibohack.com/panel/install.htm for the current hack status.
With the premium price, you would be right to expect more. These things are more expensive than some full Tablet PCs capable of running WinXP or Linux, not CE burned into ROM.
The Jornadas (680,690 or 820) are available on eBay for (depending upon model) under $100.
The ViewSonics are $800-$1000 and the comparable Philips DexScape is around $1400.
Both Gateway and Dell are offering full-feature laptops for as low as $599. I can't imagine that the touch screen costs so much more that eliminating HD, CD, Floppy, ports, memory and PC CPU don't offset the cost.
And instant-on? If I choose between this crippled device and a Tablet or Laptop, I'll tolerate 45 seconds to boot for the rest of the capabilities.
Simply put, they ought to be cheaper than laptops.
This thing ought to sell for $299-$399.
The screen was way too small, yeah I know they said it was too big, but thats ok for these midgits, but I'm built like a truck, so big is no problem, any thing < 20", even in this mode is way too small. Also I'd need choice of OS, (linux for me) why would you want to run some other OS on it, what ever you run on the main machine needs to run on the portable interface as well, so they need to look at some way for it to pull it's OS from the main box, or some other easy soln to get the OS/interface you want on it.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
Okay having read the artical- its disappointing that the prices were not included in the spec table with the other stats.
The device did nothing much that cannot be done with a proper tablet/laptop pc. As I run Linux for most serious applications(except gaming and music creation) then the lack of compatibility would put me off a great deal too. At work I regularly use X-on-SSH to interact with smaller apps(we have a very high bandwidth there and I have broadband here).
For streaming video - it would be better to just stream/dl the file and play/decode locally. Although slimp have a nice method of decoding, the re-encoding all streams as mp3s. The only issue I found with that was that it was not easy to reset the encoding bandwidth(AFAIK).
Overall - I cannot see why at that price, plus the price of a PC and all of its trappings, you would not want to buy a proper tablet pc or laptop pc instead.
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol