Software support: only use the standard configuration where possible. Your support will be better, because they are dealing in known quantities.
Hardware support: send it back, hope they make good on it. Sounds like they messed this one up.
Past that, VA Linux systems seem severely overpriced. I'm sure they use excellent components, put it together for you, and give you a working system. But I'd rather do it myself, and it sounds like you would too... so we're probably not their target audience.
I have a feeling they're marketing to clueless companies who want a "Linux Solution" and don't know the first thing about it. Therefore, they get a nice box, a stock configuration, and tech support, and they pay a healthy premium for it. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, it looks really cool, and I would so love to run 'ls' with a stylus!
...but I'm not about to pay $500 for just that. Okay, if I had an expensive net connection I could run telnet too, or check out that GNOME article from my lean-to...
One thing I love about Transmeta's devices is the x86 compatibility. Okay, I'm biased, but I think there's some value to being able to run DOSEmu or Wine, or for that matter RealPlayer 7...
But also, I just can't see a lot that I'd want to use this for... Maybe I'm just not a PDA kind of person. I guess I could run 'cal', but I despise post-it notes, and I'd want to use that stylus as little as possible.
Okay; end of useful content.
Wow, imagine a beowulf of these things!
Where are the warez for the StrongArm, dude?
Hey, can it play mp3's?;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Next time I'll try to be more obvious in my humor.
How about this:
The Justice Department brought a lawsuit against Apple Computer (AAPL) yesterday over their "There's always room for iMac!" campaign. The Gov't charged them with diluting the Jello trademark and confusing consumers. A class-action suit is pending as well, from angry iMac owners who, eager to try their fruit-flavored iMacs, chipped their teeth on the hard plastic casings. The only winners in this long, sad ride were the investors who thought they had bought into "some fruit company". Fortunately, we the American people are being protected by these fraudulent product promotions and deceptive advertising once again by our loving government. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'm using a nightly build of Mozilla to browse with at the moment, and it doesn't do Java; meanwhile, IBM doesn't know how to make a link in PLAIN HTML for the rest of us, furthering my point about clueless web design.
IBM: I'm really interested in what you have to say. Please provide a response in HTML next time. Not Java. Not Windows Media Player. Not For-IBM-Internal-Use-Only Format-A220B59. You can use all that and more, but make sure you have it in HTML first! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'd love to be able to play.asf files on Linux! Heck, what's the word on the MPEG4 spec? If we could get a (Free!) player that supported that much, I doubt.asf would be too far away.
(well, depending on the codec; I bet it's Yet-Another-Container-Format(tm), which means it's just as useless and annoying as AVI and QuickTime files...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Put the frickin' slides up in HTML! Heck, make a transcript of the conversation!
Why would I want to watch and listen to this when I could read or skim it?
Forget Publius, we need a speech-to-text server to translate RealAudio and Windows Media content. Taking snapshots of the video occasionally as jpegs would be nice too.
Or, barring that, we need some major web designers with half a clue. But I think that's even less likely to happen. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I completely agree, but I think they didn't want to appear to be a threat to Intel, and whatnot. It didn't work, though, which is why Intel will need to shape up, or become the next lawsuit target.
...and you could play some "Silence-related".mp3's. There are some excellent songs like that, with silence in the title or whatnot.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I've been waiting to see these in production since before the launch!
Unfortunately, I'll probably be waiting some more. My next computer is almost certainly going to be an Athlon, and I doubt we'll see a line of Transmeta desktop machines for a while.
Also, I don't want a notebook, and I'd only get an embedded device if it were really cheap and really cool. (although, if it were a tiny, fully x86 compatible device, that'd be pretty cool!)
However, if they ever manage to support another type of processor or provide hooks for emulation/translation (even less likely), then I might get one regardless. I'd love to be able to run multiple instances of random OSes at hardware speeds! (VMWare for a later version of Crusoe would be downright confusing, though...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Not only should they not change these laws, they should use them across the board, not on just cable!
That's because it's ridiculous to make privacy laws based on the medium. If I send an e-mail over copper wire, over fiber, over the airwaves, whatever, I still just sent an e-mail. And that should have the same privacy protections, (even though sending it UNENCRYPTED over the airwaves is phenomenally stupid as well...) because I did the same thing. I just sent an e-mail. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
PostScript is a good counter-example here. Remember, PDF is gzipped postscript beaten with an ugly stick.
Text will compress better, and after it has been converted into an internal format, the uncompressed text can be discarded too. Also, if a description language for vector graphics is used correctly, the files shouldn't be that much bigger anyhow.
I'd trust it a lot more than a binary format, too; at least here I can tell if the source is clean, or clean it up myself if I have to. The flexibility text adds is not to be denied.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with making a binary format *too*... That's why we have converters. What sorts of vector graphics formats are out there? Coreldraw, Flash,.wmf? I haven't been keeping up with it. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think there should be a limit on court costs based on the fine, like maybe a percentage.
I can't understand how, if I got a ticket and didn't contest it, the court costs could easily be EIGHT TIMES the size of the fee, and still generate revenue for anyone.
How about making sure the court costs are less-than-or-equal-to the fee, and making the fee $40 or something? Same sort of money, but at least we know what we're getting. 'Cause if anyone tried to pull a fee like that on me, government or not, you'd bet I'd contest it! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Release it when you have at least a proof-of-concept, and a good design.
...and tell us more! I want to hear about a model where we can take control of our personal information. Heck, I'd like to be able to allow and disallow people myself, and update it sometimes, too, and have recourse against people who sell it without my permission, and... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Sure you can. You can define something as intensely personal as feelings through somethign as crude and impersonal as words. They'll be able to write an algorithm that will contain what's different about X piece of music from Y piece of music. Do that for a while, and do it well, and you'll have a lot of useful and interesting data to correlate.
You can reduce a piece of music to a generic set of characteristics by writing it out in SHEET MUSIC. It isn't that hard. I doubt that an algorithm would always categorize things the same way as you would, but I bet it could still do a good job, or come up with some insights.
For any further dissenters: the "humans are intrinsically superior because we are human" crowd said the same thing about chess. Where are they now? Oh, they just jumped to a new topic.
Jeez. If you're not going to contribute, but just want to sit on the sidelines and talk about how people shouldn't be able to do WHAT THEY ARE DOING, shut the hell up and go somewhere else. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If you can classify music with fractals, and you can generate music with fractals...
Could you fuse categories of music as well?
That is, if you can detect the unique patterns of, say, hip-hop, or classical music, could you feed that back into a program and get some really funky classical music?:)
This is all pure speculation on my part, mind you. I'd love to help program something like this, but I wouldn't know where to start. I know something about fractals, but very little about music.
(or at least I'm not any good--whatever program I came up with would compose better than I would!) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think the *only* reason for this device would be to hack it; after all, there isn't anything decent on TV anymore....and I can watch "Survivor" every Wednesday all by myself.:)
Actually, I need a device that notifies me if there's *ever* anything worth watching on TV. If that happens, I'll drop everything, see what it is, and run back home. Beating the end of the world by about 3 seconds, I'm sure. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hmm. That second challenge sounds more interesting; I know that there is a free flash player for linux, but the only realplayer code I ever found really sucked. It could decode older streams at 14.4 and 28.8, I believe. Using the vendor-supplied versions would bloat things, but it's possible; just find the oldest version. For web browser/mail client/java, well, it's time to hack mozilla, since it has components that can be removed...
Well, X *is* a framebuffer; the windowing is optional; therefore, it should be exactly as good at 160x160 graphics as everything else--that part just depends on the pixels you push. Heck, play crappy movies fullscreen with DGA.:)
Now, X might be somewhat large and cumbersome for a handheld, but the remote display options and the compatibility would still be cool... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, I'd hope they had a separate.c file for driver-specific code. Any changes they made that get folded back would have to be more general.
However, there are lots of good examples of how this can happen: check out rxvt, for example. It's a reimplementation of xterm, without some features that apparently no one uses. As one of the original X applications, I'm sure that xterm has suffered a lot from bloat, maybe even more than xclock and xload.:)
And yes, I have yet to use an XFree86 server on my machine that can take up, say, less than a megabyte. Maybe after this, we'll be able to really take the QNX challenge! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What are you talking about? Most games designed for the IBM PC Jr. should look just *fine* even reduced to 160x100! Why, I bet Leisure Suit Larry I would still look excellent.;)
The only issue I can think of here would be cost, which is probably why they did it that way originally. But I'm sure a vendor would want to sell the coolest little handheld ever, for however much they can charge, so I'd love to know what the other issues are... Anyone? Power consumption? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Re:The most important thing...
on
Plex86 Runs DOS
·
· Score: 1
Amen to that, brother.
I have yet to see *any* emulator get either one right. I can get further in Ultima 7, though.
Second Reality probably does some nasty stuff with protected mode (if I know future crew) and also has some severe timing issues. It's incredibly slow on DosEMU, and of course sound doesn't work either.
Ultima VII does its own memory management, which was annoying even on native DOS; I had a special configuration that rebooted into Ultima VII even back then.
I'll probably install DOS again on my old P133, *just* so I can run all that stuff correctly again. If anyone finds an x86 emulator that runs these correctly on x86, let me know! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It's scary to think that a reimplemented version of X for a hand-held computer would be equivalently functional and so much less bloated to warrant folding it back into X.
...I guess no one has wanted to rewrite some of that code for a long time, and I can't say I blame them.
Of course, I'll laugh my ass off when I find out that "Windows 2005" is actually "Windows CE 5.0"...;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It just annoys me when people talk about cool graphics and computer stuff, and then move to movie special effects instead of demos. Shows how lame SIGGRAPH is.:)
I'm sure I can't make it, but I do love to d/l the demos. I've seen some reasonable demos written in Java of all things. I guess that emulates the speed of a 386 well...;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
Software support: only use the standard configuration where possible. Your support will be better, because they are dealing in known quantities.
Hardware support: send it back, hope they make good on it. Sounds like they messed this one up.
Past that, VA Linux systems seem severely overpriced. I'm sure they use excellent components, put it together for you, and give you a working system. But I'd rather do it myself, and it sounds like you would too... so we're probably not their target audience.
I have a feeling they're marketing to clueless companies who want a "Linux Solution" and don't know the first thing about it. Therefore, they get a nice box, a stock configuration, and tech support, and they pay a healthy premium for it.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
...but I'm not about to pay $500 for just that. Okay, if I had an expensive net connection I could run telnet too, or check out that GNOME article from my lean-to...
One thing I love about Transmeta's devices is the x86 compatibility. Okay, I'm biased, but I think there's some value to being able to run DOSEmu or Wine, or for that matter RealPlayer 7...
But also, I just can't see a lot that I'd want to use this for... Maybe I'm just not a PDA kind of person. I guess I could run 'cal', but I despise post-it notes, and I'd want to use that stylus as little as possible.
Okay; end of useful content.
Wow, imagine a beowulf of these things!
Where are the warez for the StrongArm, dude?
Hey, can it play mp3's? ;)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hence, the joke.
Next time I'll try to be more obvious in my humor.
How about this:
The Justice Department brought a lawsuit against Apple Computer (AAPL) yesterday over their "There's always room for iMac!" campaign. The Gov't charged them with diluting the Jello trademark and confusing consumers. A class-action suit is pending as well, from angry iMac owners who, eager to try their fruit-flavored iMacs, chipped their teeth on the hard plastic casings. The only winners in this long, sad ride were the investors who thought they had bought into "some fruit company". Fortunately, we the American people are being protected by these fraudulent product promotions and deceptive advertising once again by our loving government.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
In that case, tell me what link it refreshes to!
I'm using a nightly build of Mozilla to browse with at the moment, and it doesn't do Java; meanwhile, IBM doesn't know how to make a link in PLAIN HTML for the rest of us, furthering my point about clueless web design.
IBM: I'm really interested in what you have to say. Please provide a response in HTML next time. Not Java. Not Windows Media Player. Not For-IBM-Internal-Use-Only Format-A220B59. You can use all that and more, but make sure you have it in HTML first!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Geez, some people just want everything.
:)
.asf files on Linux! Heck, what's the word on the MPEG4 spec? If we could get a (Free!) player that supported that much, I doubt .asf would be too far away.
...and, for the record, I'm one of them.
I'd love to be able to play
(well, depending on the codec; I bet it's Yet-Another-Container-Format(tm), which means it's just as useless and annoying as AVI and QuickTime files...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What do they think this is, television?
Put the frickin' slides up in HTML! Heck, make a transcript of the conversation!
Why would I want to watch and listen to this when I could read or skim it?
Forget Publius, we need a speech-to-text server to translate RealAudio and Windows Media content. Taking snapshots of the video occasionally as jpegs would be nice too.
Or, barring that, we need some major web designers with half a clue. But I think that's even less likely to happen.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I completely agree, but I think they didn't want to appear to be a threat to Intel, and whatnot. It didn't work, though, which is why Intel will need to shape up, or become the next lawsuit target.
.mp3's. There are some excellent songs like that, with silence in the title or whatnot. :)
...and you could play some "Silence-related"
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Why?
Transmeta *doesn't*, they do it in software; that's the whole point. (smaller chip, better profiling)
AMD and Intel do; therefore, a lawsuit would be truly anticompetitive and inane, either way.
Next question?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I've been waiting to see these in production since before the launch!
Unfortunately, I'll probably be waiting some more. My next computer is almost certainly going to be an Athlon, and I doubt we'll see a line of Transmeta desktop machines for a while.
Also, I don't want a notebook, and I'd only get an embedded device if it were really cheap and really cool. (although, if it were a tiny, fully x86 compatible device, that'd be pretty cool!)
However, if they ever manage to support another type of processor or provide hooks for emulation/translation (even less likely), then I might get one regardless. I'd love to be able to run multiple instances of random OSes at hardware speeds! (VMWare for a later version of Crusoe would be downright confusing, though...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Not only should they not change these laws, they should use them across the board, not on just cable!
That's because it's ridiculous to make privacy laws based on the medium. If I send an e-mail over copper wire, over fiber, over the airwaves, whatever, I still just sent an e-mail. And that should have the same privacy protections, (even though sending it UNENCRYPTED over the airwaves is phenomenally stupid as well...) because I did the same thing. I just sent an e-mail.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
PostScript is a good counter-example here. Remember, PDF is gzipped postscript beaten with an ugly stick.
.wmf? I haven't been keeping up with it.
Text will compress better, and after it has been converted into an internal format, the uncompressed text can be discarded too. Also, if a description language for vector graphics is used correctly, the files shouldn't be that much bigger anyhow.
I'd trust it a lot more than a binary format, too; at least here I can tell if the source is clean, or clean it up myself if I have to. The flexibility text adds is not to be denied.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with making a binary format *too*... That's why we have converters. What sorts of vector graphics formats are out there? Coreldraw, Flash,
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think there should be a limit on court costs based on the fine, like maybe a percentage.
I can't understand how, if I got a ticket and didn't contest it, the court costs could easily be EIGHT TIMES the size of the fee, and still generate revenue for anyone.
How about making sure the court costs are less-than-or-equal-to the fee, and making the fee $40 or something? Same sort of money, but at least we know what we're getting. 'Cause if anyone tried to pull a fee like that on me, government or not, you'd bet I'd contest it!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Release it when you have at least a proof-of-concept, and a good design.
...and tell us more! I want to hear about a model where we can take control of our personal information. Heck, I'd like to be able to allow and disallow people myself, and update it sometimes, too, and have recourse against people who sell it without my permission, and...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I was noticing the same thing, actually. I've been modded up a couple of times, but I'm stuck at 350 at the moment.
;)
...so is this Offtopic? I'm following the thread, honest!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Fred Moody is to Jesse Berst as a court jester is to a soulless accountant.
...so it doesn't even matter that his argument was flawed.
That is to say, exactly why do we care, again?
However, it is funny that Moody can't even get his statistics right.
I guess he was just being Moody about it...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Sure you can. You can define something as intensely personal as feelings through somethign as crude and impersonal as words. They'll be able to write an algorithm that will contain what's different about X piece of music from Y piece of music. Do that for a while, and do it well, and you'll have a lot of useful and interesting data to correlate.
You can reduce a piece of music to a generic set of characteristics by writing it out in SHEET MUSIC. It isn't that hard. I doubt that an algorithm would always categorize things the same way as you would, but I bet it could still do a good job, or come up with some insights.
For any further dissenters: the "humans are intrinsically superior because we are human" crowd said the same thing about chess. Where are they now? Oh, they just jumped to a new topic.
Jeez. If you're not going to contribute, but just want to sit on the sidelines and talk about how people shouldn't be able to do WHAT THEY ARE DOING, shut the hell up and go somewhere else.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If you can classify music with fractals, and you can generate music with fractals...
:)
Could you fuse categories of music as well?
That is, if you can detect the unique patterns of, say, hip-hop, or classical music, could you feed that back into a program and get some really funky classical music?
This is all pure speculation on my part, mind you. I'd love to help program something like this, but I wouldn't know where to start. I know something about fractals, but very little about music.
(or at least I'm not any good--whatever program I came up with would compose better than I would!)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Here's a link to the actual Tivo FAQ instead of that crap they linked to...
...and I can watch "Survivor" every Wednesday all by myself. :)
I think the *only* reason for this device would be to hack it; after all, there isn't anything decent on TV anymore.
Actually, I need a device that notifies me if there's *ever* anything worth watching on TV. If that happens, I'll drop everything, see what it is, and run back home. Beating the end of the world by about 3 seconds, I'm sure.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hmm. That second challenge sounds more interesting; I know that there is a free flash player for linux, but the only realplayer code I ever found really sucked. It could decode older streams at 14.4 and 28.8, I believe. Using the vendor-supplied versions would bloat things, but it's possible; just find the oldest version. For web browser/mail client/java, well, it's time to hack mozilla, since it has components that can be removed...
:)
Well, X *is* a framebuffer; the windowing is optional; therefore, it should be exactly as good at 160x160 graphics as everything else--that part just depends on the pixels you push. Heck, play crappy movies fullscreen with DGA.
Now, X might be somewhat large and cumbersome for a handheld, but the remote display options and the compatibility would still be cool...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, I'd hope they had a separate .c file for driver-specific code. Any changes they made that get folded back would have to be more general.
:)
However, there are lots of good examples of how this can happen: check out rxvt, for example. It's a reimplementation of xterm, without some features that apparently no one uses. As one of the original X applications, I'm sure that xterm has suffered a lot from bloat, maybe even more than xclock and xload.
And yes, I have yet to use an XFree86 server on my machine that can take up, say, less than a megabyte. Maybe after this, we'll be able to really take the QNX challenge!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What are you talking about? Most games designed for the IBM PC Jr. should look just *fine* even reduced to 160x100! Why, I bet Leisure Suit Larry I would still look excellent. ;)
The only issue I can think of here would be cost, which is probably why they did it that way originally. But I'm sure a vendor would want to sell the coolest little handheld ever, for however much they can charge, so I'd love to know what the other issues are... Anyone? Power consumption?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Amen to that, brother.
I have yet to see *any* emulator get either one right. I can get further in Ultima 7, though.
Second Reality probably does some nasty stuff with protected mode (if I know future crew) and also has some severe timing issues. It's incredibly slow on DosEMU, and of course sound doesn't work either.
Ultima VII does its own memory management, which was annoying even on native DOS; I had a special configuration that rebooted into Ultima VII even back then.
I'll probably install DOS again on my old P133, *just* so I can run all that stuff correctly again. If anyone finds an x86 emulator that runs these correctly on x86, let me know!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
X really is that bloated.
;)
It's scary to think that a reimplemented version of X for a hand-held computer would be equivalently functional and so much less bloated to warrant folding it back into X.
...I guess no one has wanted to rewrite some of that code for a long time, and I can't say I blame them.
Of course, I'll laugh my ass off when I find out that "Windows 2005" is actually "Windows CE 5.0"...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yes, that would be much better.
:)
;)
It just annoys me when people talk about cool graphics and computer stuff, and then move to movie special effects instead of demos. Shows how lame SIGGRAPH is.
I'm sure I can't make it, but I do love to d/l the demos. I've seen some reasonable demos written in Java of all things. I guess that emulates the speed of a 386 well...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Animation Festivals are cool and all, but...
:)
...can't we have a demo competition instead?
I mean, really: games, graphics, cool special effects....
DEMOS! IN ASSEMBLER! x86, C64, Linux, Amiga, Amiga Linux, I don't care, as long as it looks cool!
Oh, and sounds good too. PC speakers need not apply.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.