I second this nomination. When I read his book Red Mars I thought to myself, "this is so obviously the way it would really work to colonize Mars. Anyone writing a new novel on colonizing Mars is going to be following in this guy's footsteps, or wrong."
I'm not sure if I would say that after long reflection, but that's how I felt while I was reading it. His style isn't much like Heinlein, but like Heinlein he thrusts you into a well-thought-out and convincing world.
They said that the peak load was 11 hits per second, with 4 pages being served. They also said that their CPU was 21% loaded to serve this much traffic.
This says nothing about what they can serve under ideal conditions; this is what they actually served up during an actual slashdotting. If you want to max out their server, you will need to get more/. readers to hit them all at once, or perhaps they need a bigger pipe connecting them to the Net.
Read the article; on ApacheBench with one particular page they tested, the server tested out at five dozen pages served up per second.
I don't know about you, but I was somewhat impressed by all this. A $1000 Sun does seem to have been a wise choice for them.
Okay, Apple didn't join the push to put DRM into hardware everywhere. This doesn't make them saints. It also doesn't make them evil.
Some of the people at Apple probably hate DRM as much as you do. Others probably felt it makes business sense, for Apple, to not put DRM junk into their hardware. The company as a whole stood opposed to built-in DRM hardware, but I doubt there was enough consensus to really say why.
Maybe a year from now Apple will change its mind and jump aboard the DRM bandwagon. Or maybe not. How can we really know what Apple will do? It may depend on stupid corporate power struggles we cannot know about. It may even depend on who annoyed Steve Jobs this week.
I feel the need to provide an alternative view to your knee-jerk rewriting of recent technological history.
Oh, please do. I hate it when I knee-jerk rewrite recent technological history, and I try not to.
You stipulate that Graffiti was "re-invent[ed] independently".
Actually, I didn't stipulate that. I said: "If something is very easy to re-invent independently, it shouldn't be patentable."
And I think the concept of an alphabet of single-stroke gestures is an obvious idea. I even presented a hypothetical chain of ideas that leads to single-stroke gestures.
If I understood the article, Xerox has a patent on the very idea of a recognition system that uses just one stroke per character.
This sounds to me like another bogus patent. If something is very easy to re-invent independently, it shouldn't be patentable. I thought patents were supposed to be non-obvious.
Hmmm. We want to recognize letters. Our big problem is that it's hard to tell which stroke belongs to which character. Hey... many characters are only one stroke; why not make a simplified alphabet so they ALL are only one stroke?
I mean, it's a little bit more complicated than using XOR to draw a cursor, but not that much.
P.S. Xerox may score a few bucks from this, but that is all they can manage. Palm doesn't really need Graffiti anymore.
When the PalmPilot first came out, it really did need Graffiti; handwriting recognition on an 8 MHz CPU with a tiny amount of RAM needs all the help it can get. Now, with much more computing power in the latest Palm devices, a trainable system that adapts to the user's writing is probably the right thing.
I consider GNOME and KDE big failures of open source. They could have epitomized great design, they could have demonstrated how to write reliable, fast software. Instead, they are bug ridden bloat monsters.
I must disagree about the "great design" part. Both GNOME and KDE were designed to be a collection of small components that work together, which to me is great design.
Perhaps if GNOME and KDE had been designed as huge monolithic shells with everything built in, they could more easily be tweaked to start up fast and not make your system swap as much; all the communicating between little pieces could be considered overhead. But the component design makes the system more flexible, easier to debug, easier to add to. It's the right thing.
Remember the old saying: "Make it work before you make it faster." GNOME 1.x was the "make it work" stage. GNOME 2.x is still somewhat at that stage, but they have worked a lot on speed (Nautilus was unusable on my K6-III/450, but Nautilus2 is quite peppy). As they fix bugs and polish the system, it's only going to get better.
And as GCC improves, it will help GNOME and KDE as well: tighter code means smaller components, and that will help with the memory footprint.
One other old saying applies: you have to walk before you can run, and you have to crawl before you can walk. Only within the past year has GNOME started to get really good. Give them another year or two and it will be great.
I used "GNU/Linux" instead of just "Linux" because I wasn't just talking about the kernel. I was talking about the whole system. Then for BSD, I just said BSD, because the BSD project includes the whole system, not just the kernel.
If I had said "Let's release one kernel under GPL", I would have said "and call it 'Linux'".
Okay, I propose a real-world test. Let's release one system under GPL, and call it "GNU/Linux". Let's release another under BSD license, and call it "BSD". Then stand back and see if anyone develops for either.
Oh wait, that test has been done. And what do we see? Lots of people are working on Linux and the GNU stuff, even though it is licensed under GPL! (Also, people are working on BSD. Several flavors of BSD, even.)
Look at all the progress GNOME and GNOME apps have made just in the past year. GPL-licensed software is not just surviving, it is thriving.
an Open Source tax should be introduced
Good grief! Who will decide how much this tax will be? Who will decide who gets paid? How much will the tax authority skim for their own purposes? What regulations will exist to regulate what projects may be funded and what projects may not be? What will happen when companies like Microsoft start lobbying the government?
If this happens, it will waste a huge amount of money, add a whole lot of red tape, and attract people interested in milking the system for money, as opposed to people who want to develop software. Bad, bad, bad idea.
The speed of light IS achievable with the use of a propulsion system that is acceleration based *AND* not matter based.
I look forward to seeing you test your working prototype. Every physics textbook I have ever seen says you are wrong, so it will be a triumph when you prove you are right.
You will need a catchy name for your amazing new space drive. I suggest you call it "impulse drive".
The new-style Klingons made their first appearance in the first theatre movie (Star Trek: The Motion Picture). Gene Roddenberry was asked why the Klingons looked different, and he explained that "they always looked that way".
There is just no good way to explain why all Klingons in movies and TV from Next Generation on are bumpy, and all Klingons in the prequel TV show Enterprise are bumpy, and the 1000-years-previous holy guy Keh'less (or however you spell it) was bumpy, but all the Klingons ever met by Kirk looked like Fu Manchu.
The word "retcon", short for "retroactive continuity", was coined for situations like this one.
steveha
FTL == Time Travel ?
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'd like to understand why theory says faster-than-light travel is impossible.
I do understand why you cannot ever reach or exceed the speed of light through normal acceleration. The closer you get to the speed of light, the more aparrent mass you get, and thus the more energy it takes to accelerate you. To hit the speed of light would take infinite energy (and you would have infinite mass when you hit it). Infinite energy and mass aren't really available, so you can't have a speeed >= C by accelerating, no matter how hard you try.
The part I don't understand:
I have been told that theory forbids any travel faster than light, no matter what the means ("warp drive", "hyperspace", "teleporter", whatever). My understanding is that if you could, some observers would see you traveling back in time, and this is forbidden.
I would appreciate any explanation of this, or even just a pointer to a reference I can understand. Thanks.
Tod Frye was assigned the task of converting the smash hit arcade game, Pac-Man, to the VCS. This was before programmers were paid royalties. It was an immensely important assignment. Towards the end of the project, the Atari Marketing people made the mistake of emphasizing just how many millions of dollars were riding on his timely completion of the game. Realizing his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Tod put a gun to the head of his managers: pay me royalties of ten cents per cartridge for this, or I walk. You'll have to start all over with a new programmer, and the game will be delayed by months, costing you millions in wasted marketing expenses. Atari was caught in a terrible position. They had presumed that, having agreed to take the project, Tod would finish it in good faith. Now they were caught in a trap. They had no recourse -- they had to cave in to Tod's demands. His ploy gained him several million dollars.
This is from someone who claims to have worked at Atari at the time. Not really evidence for why the game sucked, but still interesting.
He said we need 64-bit so we can address large amounts of memory. That 64-bit Sun workstation has a maximum memory of 2 GB, and I can put more than that into my Athlon system, so the Sun is irrelevant to this discussion.
I have heard that Atari management only wanted Pac Man to be a 2KB game, and that's why it sucked so bad. According to this story, the guy writing the code pleaded for more room and was denied.
The problem with this theory is that, with Google, I found an emulator site with a ROM image, and that ROM image is exactly 4096 bytes. A hex dump reveals that the second half isn't all zeroes, either.
On the other hand, the Ms. Pac Man game (much better than the original Pac Man) is an 8K image. Maybe the story was true, but it was 4K he was stuck with.
I've searched the web for an interview with the guy who wrote the original Pac Man, but didn't find it. (There are so many sites that mention Pac Man, it's hard to find wheat in all the chaff.)
But I'll bet someone on Slashdot knows the answer. Heck, the guy who wrote Pac Man might read Slashdot for all I know.
About four years ago, my wife and I visited Hong Kong. At the airport, I needed to make a phone call... and the only phones available were the Phones of Evil.
These were phones with a touch-screen LCD display. You could touch icons to get news web pages, or you could try to use it as a phone. I say "try" because I found it was very insensitive to my attempts to dial, until (in frustration) I started pressing hard and it would dial the same digit twice, making me need to start over. Finally, in desperation, I carefully dialed for an operator and asked to be connected to the number I was trying to dial.
Next to me, I saw a phone crash. It displayed a Windows NT error message (in English!). I don't remember what the error was, just that it wanted to be rebooted.
I wonder if the evil touchscreen phones are still there, or if they have been ripped out by now? (If they need help ripping them out, I'll volunteer.)
When the Windows Toaster comes out, I am so not getting one.
William Shatner, in his book, said that Star Trek was done in by the primitive Nielson ratings of the day. At the time, they only looked at overall numbers, and other shows pulled higher overall numbers.
These days they break the numbers out by demographics, and look at numbers within various categories. Star Trek appealed to some of the very desirable demographics: college-age people, for example.
Had the studios been using more sophisticated ratings systems, Star Trek would have been seen as a success, and would have been around longer.
Because X allows the developer so much freedom, it deprives the user of the ability to anticipate how a program will operate.
This is true. But it is not a reason to replace X. Rather, it is a reason to run a layer over X, and that is what GNOME and KDE are.
GNOME and KDE make consistent environments for users.
For most people, X is overkill, and a "thinner" layer under GNOME and KDE would be enough. Yet X works well and we have it now. Talk to me when there is something a lot faster and smaller than X, and GNOME runs on it.
The linked article describes the game very generally, because they don't have a copy yet to test. They do have some screenshots.
Screenshots look nice. Dirk still looks the same, i.e. like a 2D animated character. He really was animated last time; now the game is being generated on the fly.
The one thing that it's missing and I don't think they plan on adding is allowing you to leave the messages on server, but delete them from the server when you delete them like Outlook does.
I'm not sure why you think that feature is missing. I use Evolution that way, every day: my email lives on an IMAP server.
Sometimes Evolution doesn't show me the latest messages until I hit the "Send/Receive" button. The tree view will show "Inbox (5)" but I don't see the 5 messages until I hit "Send/Receive". Other times I don't need to hit that button. Its odd but not hard to live with.
Also, I'm pretty sure you can leave messages on a POP3 server too. Check the "leave messages on the server" option. I don't use POP3 so I can't be certain whether it will delete messages from the server when you delete them locally, or not.
Look, if you don't like vi, just use emacs and be happy. Keep a copy of pico or nano around for the times when you reach for emacs and it isn't there.
I like vi, though. It's partly because I learned it early, but it's mostly because I am a fast touch-typist who doesn't need to look at his hands while typing. The editing commands in vi are very easy to type; you rarely need to hold down Ctrl or Alt or anything like that. Just switch into editing mode and you are good to go.
Other people hate the edit mode/insert mode split, and it sounds like you hate it. No big deal. Just use what you like.
By the way, if you ever have the misfortune to need to do your work on an ADM3A dumb terminal, you will probably be happier in vi. No Alt or Meta keys. No function keys. Not even arrow keys! vi still just works.
Newer versions of Microsoft Word have a sort of "version control": the Undo stack gets saved with the rest of the document, and you can save a document, open it days later, and undo things.
Until users really understand this, however, there are potential privacy problems. "I don't want anyone to know my salary, so I'll just delete the part where it mentions that." And the salary info is still there, just an undo away.
If you use Word and you have any concern about private data, do a Save As in RTF format, and distribute the RTF.
I think it should have been named "XPX". This combines "XP" (as in "Windows XP" or "Athlon XP") with "X" (as in "OS X"). Thus it would ride the coattails of about a hojillion dollars of advertisements.
There should also be a dodgy logo, "Designed for XPX", that uses the same font Apple uses in their ads.
Do it right and no one will be sure what the heck XPX is, but they will figure they need it.
This is the first Palm PDA that will have an Ogg player. It has enough horsepower under the hood to run a software MP3 decoder, so an Ogg player will be possible. Which in turn means that someone will write one!
I wonder how many hours of life you will get from one battery while playing Ogg or MP3 music, with the screen blanked.
You could carry some sort of emergency charger that uses AA cells or something. But that sort of defeats the smallness and convenience; you might as well carry some small player like the Diva.
If Palm really was losing sales to PocketPC, then this is exactly what they need. But it doesn't make me want to run out and buy one.
What I have always liked best about Palm PDAs is that they run forever on their batteries. Palm is claiming the new device is good for a week of typical use, but how much is that? The InfoSync review notes that under a torture test, the battery life was a little under 3 hours.
I was pleased to read that the emulation mode runs current PalmOS programs fast enough. Recompiled applications should be very fast.
While in many ways it sounds tasty, I don't really want one right now. And the price is going to need to fall in half before I'll even consider it.
Slashdot Mirror
I second this nomination. When I read his book Red Mars I thought to myself, "this is so obviously the way it would really work to colonize Mars. Anyone writing a new novel on colonizing Mars is going to be following in this guy's footsteps, or wrong."
I'm not sure if I would say that after long reflection, but that's how I felt while I was reading it. His style isn't much like Heinlein, but like Heinlein he thrusts you into a well-thought-out and convincing world.
steveha
They said that the peak load was 11 hits per second, with 4 pages being served. They also said that their CPU was 21% loaded to serve this much traffic.
/. readers to hit them all at once, or perhaps they need a bigger pipe connecting them to the Net.
This says nothing about what they can serve under ideal conditions; this is what they actually served up during an actual slashdotting. If you want to max out their server, you will need to get more
Read the article; on ApacheBench with one particular page they tested, the server tested out at five dozen pages served up per second.
I don't know about you, but I was somewhat impressed by all this. A $1000 Sun does seem to have been a wise choice for them.
steveha
Okay, Apple didn't join the push to put DRM into hardware everywhere. This doesn't make them saints. It also doesn't make them evil.
Some of the people at Apple probably hate DRM as much as you do. Others probably felt it makes business sense, for Apple, to not put DRM junk into their hardware. The company as a whole stood opposed to built-in DRM hardware, but I doubt there was enough consensus to really say why.
Maybe a year from now Apple will change its mind and jump aboard the DRM bandwagon. Or maybe not. How can we really know what Apple will do? It may depend on stupid corporate power struggles we cannot know about. It may even depend on who annoyed Steve Jobs this week.
steveha
I feel the need to provide an alternative view to your knee-jerk rewriting of recent technological history.
Oh, please do. I hate it when I knee-jerk rewrite recent technological history, and I try not to.
You stipulate that Graffiti was "re-invent[ed] independently".
Actually, I didn't stipulate that. I said: "If something is very easy to re-invent independently, it shouldn't be patentable."
And I think the concept of an alphabet of single-stroke gestures is an obvious idea. I even presented a hypothetical chain of ideas that leads to single-stroke gestures.
steveha
If I understood the article, Xerox has a patent on the very idea of a recognition system that uses just one stroke per character.
This sounds to me like another bogus patent. If something is very easy to re-invent independently, it shouldn't be patentable. I thought patents were supposed to be non-obvious.
Hmmm. We want to recognize letters. Our big problem is that it's hard to tell which stroke belongs to which character. Hey... many characters are only one stroke; why not make a simplified alphabet so they ALL are only one stroke?
I mean, it's a little bit more complicated than using XOR to draw a cursor, but not that much.
P.S. Xerox may score a few bucks from this, but that is all they can manage. Palm doesn't really need Graffiti anymore.
When the PalmPilot first came out, it really did need Graffiti; handwriting recognition on an 8 MHz CPU with a tiny amount of RAM needs all the help it can get. Now, with much more computing power in the latest Palm devices, a trainable system that adapts to the user's writing is probably the right thing.
I consider GNOME and KDE big failures of open source. They could have epitomized great design, they could have demonstrated how to write reliable, fast software. Instead, they are bug ridden bloat monsters.
I must disagree about the "great design" part. Both GNOME and KDE were designed to be a collection of small components that work together, which to me is great design.
Perhaps if GNOME and KDE had been designed as huge monolithic shells with everything built in, they could more easily be tweaked to start up fast and not make your system swap as much; all the communicating between little pieces could be considered overhead. But the component design makes the system more flexible, easier to debug, easier to add to. It's the right thing.
Remember the old saying: "Make it work before you make it faster." GNOME 1.x was the "make it work" stage. GNOME 2.x is still somewhat at that stage, but they have worked a lot on speed (Nautilus was unusable on my K6-III/450, but Nautilus2 is quite peppy). As they fix bugs and polish the system, it's only going to get better.
And as GCC improves, it will help GNOME and KDE as well: tighter code means smaller components, and that will help with the memory footprint.
One other old saying applies: you have to walk before you can run, and you have to crawl before you can walk. Only within the past year has GNOME started to get really good. Give them another year or two and it will be great.
steveha
RMS wishes you would, though.
I used "GNU/Linux" instead of just "Linux" because I wasn't just talking about the kernel. I was talking about the whole system. Then for BSD, I just said BSD, because the BSD project includes the whole system, not just the kernel.
If I had said "Let's release one kernel under GPL", I would have said "and call it 'Linux'".
Pedantically yours,
steveha
Okay, I propose a real-world test. Let's release one system under GPL, and call it "GNU/Linux". Let's release another under BSD license, and call it "BSD". Then stand back and see if anyone develops for either.
Oh wait, that test has been done. And what do we see? Lots of people are working on Linux and the GNU stuff, even though it is licensed under GPL! (Also, people are working on BSD. Several flavors of BSD, even.)
Look at all the progress GNOME and GNOME apps have made just in the past year. GPL-licensed software is not just surviving, it is thriving.
an Open Source tax should be introduced
Good grief! Who will decide how much this tax will be? Who will decide who gets paid? How much will the tax authority skim for their own purposes? What regulations will exist to regulate what projects may be funded and what projects may not be? What will happen when companies like Microsoft start lobbying the government?
If this happens, it will waste a huge amount of money, add a whole lot of red tape, and attract people interested in milking the system for money, as opposed to people who want to develop software. Bad, bad, bad idea.
steveha
The speed of light IS achievable with the use of a propulsion system that is acceleration based *AND* not matter based.
I look forward to seeing you test your working prototype. Every physics textbook I have ever seen says you are wrong, so it will be a triumph when you prove you are right.
You will need a catchy name for your amazing new space drive. I suggest you call it "impulse drive".
steveha
Nonsense. It doesn't take much budget to make Klingons look bumpy. They could have done it in the 60's; they just hadn't thought of it yet.
If Gene Roddenberry had decided that Klingons had big bumpy foreheads, the makeup guys would have made it so.
steveha
The new-style Klingons made their first appearance in the first theatre movie (Star Trek: The Motion Picture). Gene Roddenberry was asked why the Klingons looked different, and he explained that "they always looked that way".
There is just no good way to explain why all Klingons in movies and TV from Next Generation on are bumpy, and all Klingons in the prequel TV show Enterprise are bumpy, and the 1000-years-previous holy guy Keh'less (or however you spell it) was bumpy, but all the Klingons ever met by Kirk looked like Fu Manchu.
The word "retcon", short for "retroactive continuity", was coined for situations like this one.
steveha
I'd like to understand why theory says faster-than-light travel is impossible.
I do understand why you cannot ever reach or exceed the speed of light through normal acceleration. The closer you get to the speed of light, the more aparrent mass you get, and thus the more energy it takes to accelerate you. To hit the speed of light would take infinite energy (and you would have infinite mass when you hit it). Infinite energy and mass aren't really available, so you can't have a speeed >= C by accelerating, no matter how hard you try.
The part I don't understand:
I have been told that theory forbids any travel faster than light, no matter what the means ("warp drive", "hyperspace", "teleporter", whatever). My understanding is that if you could, some observers would see you traveling back in time, and this is forbidden.
I would appreciate any explanation of this, or even just a pointer to a reference I can understand. Thanks.
steveha
http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/Miscellania/Onc
The key quote:
This is from someone who claims to have worked at Atari at the time. Not really evidence for why the game sucked, but still interesting.
steveha
He said we need 64-bit so we can address large amounts of memory. That 64-bit Sun workstation has a maximum memory of 2 GB, and I can put more than that into my Athlon system, so the Sun is irrelevant to this discussion.
steveha
I have heard rumors, but I don't know for sure.
I have heard that Atari management only wanted Pac Man to be a 2KB game, and that's why it sucked so bad. According to this story, the guy writing the code pleaded for more room and was denied.
The problem with this theory is that, with Google, I found an emulator site with a ROM image, and that ROM image is exactly 4096 bytes. A hex dump reveals that the second half isn't all zeroes, either.
On the other hand, the Ms. Pac Man game (much better than the original Pac Man) is an 8K image. Maybe the story was true, but it was 4K he was stuck with.
I've searched the web for an interview with the guy who wrote the original Pac Man, but didn't find it. (There are so many sites that mention Pac Man, it's hard to find wheat in all the chaff.)
But I'll bet someone on Slashdot knows the answer. Heck, the guy who wrote Pac Man might read Slashdot for all I know.
steveha
About four years ago, my wife and I visited Hong Kong. At the airport, I needed to make a phone call... and the only phones available were the Phones of Evil.
These were phones with a touch-screen LCD display. You could touch icons to get news web pages, or you could try to use it as a phone. I say "try" because I found it was very insensitive to my attempts to dial, until (in frustration) I started pressing hard and it would dial the same digit twice, making me need to start over. Finally, in desperation, I carefully dialed for an operator and asked to be connected to the number I was trying to dial.
Next to me, I saw a phone crash. It displayed a Windows NT error message (in English!). I don't remember what the error was, just that it wanted to be rebooted.
I wonder if the evil touchscreen phones are still there, or if they have been ripped out by now? (If they need help ripping them out, I'll volunteer.)
When the Windows Toaster comes out, I am so not getting one.
steveha
William Shatner, in his book, said that Star Trek was done in by the primitive Nielson ratings of the day. At the time, they only looked at overall numbers, and other shows pulled higher overall numbers.
These days they break the numbers out by demographics, and look at numbers within various categories. Star Trek appealed to some of the very desirable demographics: college-age people, for example.
Had the studios been using more sophisticated ratings systems, Star Trek would have been seen as a success, and would have been around longer.
steveha
Because X allows the developer so much freedom, it deprives the user of the ability to anticipate how a program will operate.
This is true. But it is not a reason to replace X. Rather, it is a reason to run a layer over X, and that is what GNOME and KDE are.
GNOME and KDE make consistent environments for users.
For most people, X is overkill, and a "thinner" layer under GNOME and KDE would be enough. Yet X works well and we have it now. Talk to me when there is something a lot faster and smaller than X, and GNOME runs on it.
steveha
The linked article describes the game very generally, because they don't have a copy yet to test. They do have some screenshots.
Screenshots look nice. Dirk still looks the same, i.e. like a 2D animated character. He really was animated last time; now the game is being generated on the fly.
steveha
The one thing that it's missing and I don't think they plan on adding is allowing you to leave the messages on server, but delete them from the server when you delete them like Outlook does.
I'm not sure why you think that feature is missing. I use Evolution that way, every day: my email lives on an IMAP server.
Sometimes Evolution doesn't show me the latest messages until I hit the "Send/Receive" button. The tree view will show "Inbox (5)" but I don't see the 5 messages until I hit "Send/Receive". Other times I don't need to hit that button. Its odd but not hard to live with.
Also, I'm pretty sure you can leave messages on a POP3 server too. Check the "leave messages on the server" option. I don't use POP3 so I can't be certain whether it will delete messages from the server when you delete them locally, or not.
steveha
Look, if you don't like vi, just use emacs and be happy. Keep a copy of pico or nano around for the times when you reach for emacs and it isn't there.
I like vi, though. It's partly because I learned it early, but it's mostly because I am a fast touch-typist who doesn't need to look at his hands while typing. The editing commands in vi are very easy to type; you rarely need to hold down Ctrl or Alt or anything like that. Just switch into editing mode and you are good to go.
Other people hate the edit mode/insert mode split, and it sounds like you hate it. No big deal. Just use what you like.
By the way, if you ever have the misfortune to need to do your work on an ADM3A dumb terminal, you will probably be happier in vi. No Alt or Meta keys. No function keys. Not even arrow keys! vi still just works.
steveha
Newer versions of Microsoft Word have a sort of "version control": the Undo stack gets saved with the rest of the document, and you can save a document, open it days later, and undo things.
Until users really understand this, however, there are potential privacy problems. "I don't want anyone to know my salary, so I'll just delete the part where it mentions that." And the salary info is still there, just an undo away.
If you use Word and you have any concern about private data, do a Save As in RTF format, and distribute the RTF.
steveha
I think it should have been named "XPX". This combines "XP" (as in "Windows XP" or "Athlon XP") with "X" (as in "OS X"). Thus it would ride the coattails of about a hojillion dollars of advertisements.
There should also be a dodgy logo, "Designed for XPX", that uses the same font Apple uses in their ads.
Do it right and no one will be sure what the heck XPX is, but they will figure they need it.
steveha
This is the first Palm PDA that will have an Ogg player. It has enough horsepower under the hood to run a software MP3 decoder, so an Ogg player will be possible. Which in turn means that someone will write one!
I wonder how many hours of life you will get from one battery while playing Ogg or MP3 music, with the screen blanked.
You could carry some sort of emergency charger that uses AA cells or something. But that sort of defeats the smallness and convenience; you might as well carry some small player like the Diva.
steveha
If Palm really was losing sales to PocketPC, then this is exactly what they need. But it doesn't make me want to run out and buy one.
What I have always liked best about Palm PDAs is that they run forever on their batteries. Palm is claiming the new device is good for a week of typical use, but how much is that? The InfoSync review notes that under a torture test, the battery life was a little under 3 hours.
I was pleased to read that the emulation mode runs current PalmOS programs fast enough. Recompiled applications should be very fast.
While in many ways it sounds tasty, I don't really want one right now. And the price is going to need to fall in half before I'll even consider it.
steveha