2. There is no tactile QWERTY keyboard as part of the device. dada, as a previous Hiptop user and now with the P3600, you have to know how great a real keyboard is compared to a touchscreen based one. I could NOT get along by tapping the screen -- it's just not the same and touch typing would become extremely difficult.
Just to be picky, there is no such thing as "touch typing" on a PDA.
More importantly, it amazes me how people are continually knocking on the iPhone's touch screen as being "death" to the product when they can literally have no idea what it actually feels like to use it.
Touch screens have evolved quite a bit since the Palm Pilot days, they are not all the same, and the iPhone's touch screen has been specifically mentioned as using a type of touch screen technology that no other product is using. Additionally, every single person that has done a hands on with the device has mentioned that the touch screen is "fantastic" (or some other equivalent gushing remark), and far exceeded the expectations the user had previous to actually trying it.
Why don't we wait until the product actually shows up before we start completely dismissing it on the basis of a technology that no one has any experience with yet?
PS - My last Clie cost almost 800 dollars new, lots and lots of people will pay 500 bucks for this thing IMO.
Problems this probably would have:
* Paper jams. Paper definitely doesn't come out exactly the same way it went in, and any handling of the output will probably make a jam a lot more likely. I think this post really hits the nail on the head.
I once had a job where I was responsible for husbanding a small print centre and the top four causes of jams (and these four things pretty much covered 100% of the jams), were...
1) Dust (leaving stacks of paper uncovered, or leaving the printer tray uncovered causes large numbers of paper jams)
2) Too much black in the image (the exponential increase in toner on the page changes the timing of the printing cycle enough to cause a jam)
3) Slight creases in the paper
4) Re-using old paper
It's really only the very careful handling of absolutely *pristine* paper supplies that ensures that jams are history. Most bulk printing/copying shops will toss reams of paper in the recycle for minor faults like bent corners just to avoid the possibility of jamming half way through a big job.
From what I am hearing (I can't actually load the link), this purported technology actually seems to *rely* on loading and reloading the same paper over and over again, and requires the user to be even *more* careful with this "superpaper" than with the regular stuff.
Also worth noting that the link to the alpha site mentions nothing of integrated desktop search at all. Even if it did, merely *saying* in 2002 that you are going to do this cool search thingie is not at all like actually designing and creating one.
I don't think Fermi is talking about mere visits, but colonization. Actually this is wrong. The "Fermi paradox" was just a response by Fermi to someone else's argument at a dinner party. The argument was in regards the numbers from Drake's equation and the hypothetical exploration of the galaxy by an alien species. Fermi's response to this construction was simply the statement "So, where are they?"
Fermi specifically did not refer to colonisation at all (at least in the original formulation of his remarks), he also never explicitly stated the theorem he is so famous for. He merely pointed out the obvious which is that if the theory of space colonisation and the numbers being associated with it were true, then the hypothetical aliens "... should be here by now."
While the Fermi paradox has been used over and over as a means to prove that alien civilisations don't exist (because they are not here already), Fermi was actually more interested in pointing out the faulty data than he was interested in using this so-called paradox as proof of the concept that we are alone in the universe. While that may have been the agenda of many that followed, there is no indication that Fermi himself had a strong opinion one way or the other.
It's not so much a paradox as an attempt to point out that either something must be wrong with the numbers, or with our powers of observation. There are just as many solutions to the paradox that involve us being alone as there are ones that do not.
What most people who investigate the Fermi paradox also seem to ignore is how unlikely it is that any "galaxy-wide" civilisation could form in the first place. We already know that the idea of interplanetary wars (a la Star Wars), and regular commerce in goods and materials between different worlds is untenable due to the nature of gravity wells and spaceships. Add to that the sheer bureaucracy in maintaining even a single world government, let alone one that spans the galaxy, and it's easy to see that the administration of such a huge civilisation would be virtually impossible.
The driving force behind the Fermi paradox is really our own Sci-Fi based fantasies of interstellar civilisation, not any reasonable expectation that this is a desirable, achievable, or historically inevitable goal. That's not science, it's merely imposing our own Colonial history on some distant future that in truth we don't really know anything about. It's about as relevant as a person from the middle ages who has never left his village speculating on a future government that encompasses the entire world.
The mistake being made here is in the association between the idea that we "must leave the planet" to ensure future survival, with this mythical concoction of a future Galactic civilisation. While it's true that we must evolve the capability of leaving earth to survive into the future, that's not the same thing as spreading human kind across the stars.
A much more likely scenario is that galactic civilisations should they exist would have much more proscribed areas of occupation and merely explore the rest of the galaxy as scientific tourists. Therefore, they could indeed exist and occaisionaly even visit here, but there is no "Federation" and no ambassadors from a future galactic civilisation is ever going to land on the White House lawn.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be picky, there is no such thing as "touch typing" on a PDA.
More importantly, it amazes me how people are continually knocking on the iPhone's touch screen as being "death" to the product when they can literally have no idea what it actually feels like to use it.
Touch screens have evolved quite a bit since the Palm Pilot days, they are not all the same, and the iPhone's touch screen has been specifically mentioned as using a type of touch screen technology that no other product is using. Additionally, every single person that has done a hands on with the device has mentioned that the touch screen is "fantastic" (or some other equivalent gushing remark), and far exceeded the expectations the user had previous to actually trying it.
Why don't we wait until the product actually shows up before we start completely dismissing it on the basis of a technology that no one has any experience with yet?
PS - My last Clie cost almost 800 dollars new, lots and lots of people will pay 500 bucks for this thing IMO.
* Paper jams. Paper definitely doesn't come out exactly the same way it went in, and any handling of the output will probably make a jam a lot more likely. I think this post really hits the nail on the head.
I once had a job where I was responsible for husbanding a small print centre and the top four causes of jams (and these four things pretty much covered 100% of the jams), were
1) Dust (leaving stacks of paper uncovered, or leaving the printer tray uncovered causes large numbers of paper jams)
2) Too much black in the image (the exponential increase in toner on the page changes the timing of the printing cycle enough to cause a jam)
3) Slight creases in the paper
4) Re-using old paper
It's really only the very careful handling of absolutely *pristine* paper supplies that ensures that jams are history. Most bulk printing/copying shops will toss reams of paper in the recycle for minor faults like bent corners just to avoid the possibility of jamming half way through a big job.
From what I am hearing (I can't actually load the link), this purported technology actually seems to *rely* on loading and reloading the same paper over and over again, and requires the user to be even *more* careful with this "superpaper" than with the regular stuff.
That's not a benefit, that's a major problem.
Also worth noting that the link to the alpha site mentions nothing of integrated desktop search at all. Even if it did, merely *saying* in 2002 that you are going to do this cool search thingie is not at all like actually designing and creating one.
Fermi specifically did not refer to colonisation at all (at least in the original formulation of his remarks), he also never explicitly stated the theorem he is so famous for. He merely pointed out the obvious which is that if the theory of space colonisation and the numbers being associated with it were true, then the hypothetical aliens "... should be here by now."
While the Fermi paradox has been used over and over as a means to prove that alien civilisations don't exist (because they are not here already), Fermi was actually more interested in pointing out the faulty data than he was interested in using this so-called paradox as proof of the concept that we are alone in the universe. While that may have been the agenda of many that followed, there is no indication that Fermi himself had a strong opinion one way or the other.
It's not so much a paradox as an attempt to point out that either something must be wrong with the numbers, or with our powers of observation. There are just as many solutions to the paradox that involve us being alone as there are ones that do not.
What most people who investigate the Fermi paradox also seem to ignore is how unlikely it is that any "galaxy-wide" civilisation could form in the first place. We already know that the idea of interplanetary wars (a la Star Wars), and regular commerce in goods and materials between different worlds is untenable due to the nature of gravity wells and spaceships. Add to that the sheer bureaucracy in maintaining even a single world government, let alone one that spans the galaxy, and it's easy to see that the administration of such a huge civilisation would be virtually impossible.
The driving force behind the Fermi paradox is really our own Sci-Fi based fantasies of interstellar civilisation, not any reasonable expectation that this is a desirable, achievable, or historically inevitable goal. That's not science, it's merely imposing our own Colonial history on some distant future that in truth we don't really know anything about. It's about as relevant as a person from the middle ages who has never left his village speculating on a future government that encompasses the entire world.
The mistake being made here is in the association between the idea that we "must leave the planet" to ensure future survival, with this mythical concoction of a future Galactic civilisation. While it's true that we must evolve the capability of leaving earth to survive into the future, that's not the same thing as spreading human kind across the stars.
A much more likely scenario is that galactic civilisations should they exist would have much more proscribed areas of occupation and merely explore the rest of the galaxy as scientific tourists. Therefore, they could indeed exist and occaisionaly even visit here, but there is no "Federation" and no ambassadors from a future galactic civilisation is ever going to land on the White House lawn.