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More Itsy in the News
DJ Jose wrote in to note that the Compaq Itsy is
making the PR rounds again.
We've mentioned this a few times in the past (seems that every
few months it gets some new publicity). For those who haven't
been here all along, Itsy is a tiny little butt kicking Linux
box that I lust after and occasionally have erotic dreams
about. But lets not talk about that now.
Its hard to beat that with a stick. All religion aside, the mobile market is where the PPC truly blows the doors off the x86.
If voice input was integral to a device, the killer apps would make it easy to use by taking advantage of that rather than just carrying along the CLI. If the directory were graphically displayed, you would use Up, Down, Back and Enter (and maybe Parent and Root). Yes, the CLI is powerful and I feel at home ther, but I do not think that I would want to control an Itsy with one.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I'm not against voice recognition in this or other applications--I actually think future applications could work quite well with voice recog.--but I would include an alternative input interface for more complex applications.
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
Digital produced this more than two years ago.
Then development was stopped.
It would be nice if Compaq actually _did_ something with it.
.. That this sort of thing is meant to use voice recognition (The 200Mhz StrongARM if enough to hack it apparently), so everyone stop complaining about how small it is.
only if they distribute the binary... then they have to include the source... as long as it's not in production and it's all internal to the company.... they can do whatever they want..
Whoever has the software, has the source.
I don't believe Compaq is required by the GPL to release the kernel, since they're not distributing this device. Nothing forces you to release the source to something you're not releasing in binary/at all.
/El Niño
Something I noticed after reading through the slides from the Compaq/digital presentation to the Users group was that it was planning on using USB to interface to other machines. What this means to me is that a company like digital/compaq is working on USB support for linux which is something that is lacking right now. This is an exciting idea. I think the big picture here is that as a side result, certain things are going to be developed farther.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
The digital etch-a-sketch...
-
Editor - Dualism.org
President - Ophelan.com
Oops, looks like you forgot one of the moderator rules, don't reveal you're a moderator
I don't think it matters anymore, cos almost everyone is a moderator briefly now (AFAIK). Besides, since he posted a comment to this article, he's no longer able to moderate for this one.
dylan_-
--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
I bought an Acer Travelmate 312T sub-notebook, it's got a 233 MMX Pentium, 32 Mb RAM, 3 Gb disk, 2 PC card slots and includes floppy disk and cdrom for about UKP 1,000 (US Price - $ 1000 - 1500 ??).
... quite yet (;^(). The PCMCIA needs a quite new version of the PCMCIA package (I forget which, but RedHat 5.2 won't work, whereas RedHat 6.0 will), but the included PCMCIA CD-ROM is not quite standard and I need to rebuild the kernel with some fixes (see Linux Laptops pages for more, basically an extra delay in ide_cs.c) before I can install from CD. But as soon as I get a spare weekend I'll start work on that again, or get a SCSI card and hook up my Jaz drive maybe.
The screen is 8.4 inch TFT and runs 800x600.
The keyboard is fine for me (JAPH typing speed), and it has a drag-pad thing rather than one of those terrible "nipple" things.
The built in 56k modem is a WinModem, so only works under MS environments - time for another PC card I guess.
It's almost exactly the same size and weight as a decent O'Reilly book (slightly thinner than The Perl Cookbook). The power supply is small enough to stick in a pocket - I just leave spare leads at work and home, the battery normally lasts about 90 minutes for me, which is fine.
But I haven't got Linux on it
I'd recommend it heavily, the only real competition right now I can see is the Sony Vaio Picturebook, but that costs at least 50% more.
Tim
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
Are vastly reduced by increasing volume, my dear, lovely, handsome, tender boy.
Within 5 years there will be pretty good handheld devices in the form of information devices (smartphones etc.). The 3rd generation devices use IP-protocol and high speeds (over 400kBps IIRC) which enable high quality live picture and sound transferred wirelessly. AFAIK they'll start using such things in Japan next year and in Europe and America later (a year or two).
You can expect the devices from the owners of Symbian.
>> Its hard to beat that with a stick. All religion aside, the mobile market is where the PPC truly blows the doors off the x86.
... well that'd be enough for me.
Point taken, I didn't want a CE machine, I wanted something I could run/develop Perl on and enough of an OS to make it useful. Right now, that means an Intel machine, if PPC or the LinuxCE project gives me a usable environment on something better, well, I'll be even happier.
If I could get a realistic dev env (Perl, C++ and email) on a Psion 5
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
I really like my PalmPilot and it does indeed fit in my pocket. However, I am really interested in what the e-book market will be like in say 2 years. These are the units that have, by comparison, a HUGE screen. It is almost like a LCD from a laptop where the laptop is still in the enclosure of the screen. The Itsy seems like it is small enough to ride on the back of such a screen and could be used as a plugable daugter CPU. For a 8.5" by 11" display unit you could probably get at least 4 Itsy's on the back of it. Just add in a scrollable/foldable keyboard and you could have some serious portable and extendable computing. Imagine an SMP e-book. Of course, all this is just fluff unless battery technology comes out of the dark ages (from a consumer standpoint). That or power consumption be devices has to drop considerably.
"You cannot uncook Mushoo pork once is has been cooked" -- wiseman
http://fudge.org
I surfed all around Compaq's site and found nowhere to post my, er, lust for this type of unit.
I use a RexPro now, and I love it. It's the size of a pcmia card.
But Franklin/Starfish have informed me they have no intent/plans to port the product over to Linux.
Idiots!
This "rock and scroll" thing seems silly.
However, I do recall running across a hardware hack for Palm pilots that integrated an 'acceleration' sensor; it could detect the direction that the Palm was tilted - leading to similar applications (and a cool port of Onyx!). (I cant find the link, sorry!)
As for the limited size for writing and the eternal lust for the trekkie supercomputer-in-a-waffle PADD, checkout the CrossPad - Cross Pen Computing Group: Pad , it has limited handwriting recognition, and isnt really an organizer, but man, is it cool!
An old sig
a bit drops in
Sound of ascii
try:
i tsy-linux.tar.gz
l inux-brutus.html
http://www.research.digital.com/wrl/itsy/linux/
or
http://www.research.digital.com/wrl/itsy/linux/
aaron
not speaking for compaq
A larger screen would be nice, but it doesn't come free. First of all there is the added weight. That isn't a really big issue, but the increased power is.
The Itsy research is looking at multible interfaces including rock'n'scroll, speech to text and text to speech, as well as handwriting and graphitti like interfaces.
Personally I would like a combo of the rock'n'scroll and voice.
As there is the LSB, or linux standard base for linux compatibility, there needs to be a standard for handheld/embedded applications. Sort of a 'LInux CE' (i.g. LICE ??? ;-)) )
What would be really visionary is if the linux standard base team did a 'CE' standard at the same time as the general LSB.
If anybody likes this idea, email them please.....
Want one! Want two.
Life sucks but death doesn't put out at all....
The article mentioned that the kernal was out in the open, as it has to be. For being so 'open' I can't find it anywhere. Anyone else have any luck?
:)
(i'm first
- Sig
This thing seems like a great, flexible tool, particularly for a sysadmin or an IT person on call all the time.
Is the problem that each one costs >>$1000 to mass-produce?
I was about to moderate this one up a notch, but the URL seems to be a bit out of date:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~pleb/
--The more you know, the less you know.
Were Itsy to become a retaile product (which the Compaq website denies =( ), does anyone have any guesses as to how much it would cost? Or even better, how much would 15 cost? =)
And who can I bribe for a prototype? I love that Doom "rock'n'scroll" idea. . .
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Oh, you had to bring up the DS9 PADDs didn't you? It breaks my heart to watch those things every week.. do you ever see blue screens on them? Or the back covers off? And they have on-board video.. and subspace (?) Internet..
Ma-Ma...
Several university students are working on a tiny ARM-based linux box. When I last checked the design was to be Open.
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~compsoc/linux/pleb/
This uses the same Kaffe Java virutal machine which was featured in the earlier story about Kaffe's MS extentions. It good to see a great product like Kaffe showing up in different contexts like that.
My first Newton was the MP110. It worked well enough, but you quickly ran out of screen when writing longer words on it. The size also limited the amount of information the Newton could display. The screen was monochrome at 320x240
My current Newton is the MP2100, and boy what a difference the slightly larger form makes. The screen is 16 greyscale at 320x480. The DPI is higher on the MP2100, so even though the resolution is twice the MP110, the screen isn't twice as big.
If we're talking about a PDA, I might not mind something so small (my primary concern being the input interface--Graphitti?--where would you write?). But for more general purpose portable computing, I think I'd go for something about 4"x6" or 5"x7" (somewhere around the size of a Star Trek DS9 data report pad).
I'd love to see 3com (or someone else) put together a device this size for electronic books, general web browsing and the like.
Then again, I also want an ntp client, procmail, and Perl in my VCR, so it'll never not know the time and so I can program it by e-mail (TiVo, maybe?). But companies never listen to me . . .
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
It is a 200 MHz Strong arm processor, it is capable of voice recognition, or possibly, keyboard gloves. Don't rule it out
is something with a little more room for me to do my work. I dont WANT a pocket device to do work on or read my email and/or web pages. Something with a screen maybe the size of the Sharp Tripad, I dont need million of colors but at least 16bit color. Keyboard? No. I'd rather write and use handwriting recognition or have a virtual keyboard. As for overall size, about the size of a regular paper notebook would be great. This is what i would pay a few hundred dollars for. It wouldnt be that hard to build one comparable to a wintel desktop, especially if you used a MediaGX processor, a small hard drive (a PCMCIA hard drive would work fine, especially if you were using linux or maybe BeOS), and a decent amount of RAM (32 megs). Thats what I would pay money for. Something with decent size and capability that I could use without bending myself to it's ergonomic will.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
But Compaq doesn't intend to market the Itsy at retail. "This research could influence future products, but there are no plans to bring this to market," Frazier said.
but...but...but...apart from being Linux based and running generic PDA functions in savvy style...it plays DOOM!
not sure about the COMPAQ coined "rock and scroll" to describe the navigation through the video game universe by tilting the Itsy forward and back. hello! rock and scroll?
more info on this product tease here. what about a limited edition then eh?
she wore an itsy bitsy teeny weeny...hey i'm rock n' scrolling!
BLAMMO shaken not stirred
So we now have a Linux PDA. With voice recognition and sound capabilities. How about an infrared port? or OCR? My in-laws (from Newfoundland) just got back from a trip to Greece and this made me think...A hand held PDA or computer, running linux for stability, Java GUI, which can not only store numbers/emails/etc but, using voice recognition and a mini soundboard, translate speech into either sound or text on the screen (with phonetics so you can answer) or use the OCR to "read" menus and road signs (which would be typed in of course)?
My god!.. perfect for the traveller, either the power suit, retired couple or the backpacker. Buy a flash card or better yet one of those Sony mini HDDs and plug in translation modules for different languages/alphabets (can you say Strategy Pattern?)and you've just made it extensible. A REAL universal Translator or Babel Fish.
Does anyone know if this is going on? If I knew how to program PDA's (like the Casiopia E-100, sans the WinCE) man this would be one cool GNU/OSS project...
Don't ya think?
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Does anyone know where we should send email to Compaq, to inform them that there is a demand for such a device?
I have wanted something like this for a long time, but Palm Pilots don't have the resources to do anything useful, and CE devices require MS VC++, NT Workstion, and an additional $100 bucks for the CE dev kit...
MetallicBurgundy
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
The closest shipping match to the Itsy are the Casio E-15 and E-100; with 69MHz/131MHz CPUs and 16M of RAM, they're somewhat larger machines than the 8M 486SX/25 I bought to run Linux 0.12, and you can get larger CompactFlash cards (IDE interface internally) than the 60M SCSI disk that was home for a few years. Both Casios are a bit bigger than the Palm III, although I suppose you could get an Everex Freestyle if you wanted the exact size.
If Digital---uh, I mean Compaq---had seeded the right places with proto hardware, I think the excitement about this project would be more justified. I'm glad they're finally releasing their port (dunno where, but this slide has it as a bullet); if nothing else, it will make work on other Linux PDA environments easier. But the commercial marketplace is serving up almost everything the Itsy hardware has except the prototyping ability today. That's where to funnel all that nervous energy you get when you think about how cool it would be to have a Linux PDA.