Well, if only the German gov'ment had similar foresight WRT the economy and in general entering the 21st century in some other similar respects. As it stands I can only assume that this love for OSS must be a pure accident, a random if fortuitous firing of some collective synapses.
Certain products and companies can rise above being mere market participants, particularly when they affect national security, or are perceived to do so. Foreign shareholders for example are not allowed to acquire a controlling interest in US airlines, and while I don't know if there are similar laws governing it, you can bet that the government would be disinclined to allow foreigners to buy certain key military contractors. Why should other countries act any differently? If the German government perceives SuSe to be of at least economic (and potentially much more given the contracts at stake) importance to it, why shouldn't it take some steps to prevent one of its chief economic competitors from acquiring SuSe?
Yeah, I believe the buyer's name was "Fido" or "Rex" or something. Someone who woudn't object too much to selling the stock right back after the term in office.
In German it's similar, with "Sie" being the formal and "du" the informal version of "you". But since living in the English-speaking world I've started to get quite impatient with and intolerant of these silly formalisms, which seem a throwback to times past. Besides, they just add a layer of awkwardness having to transition from "Sie" to "du" and finally "pass the cigarette" when romancing the other sex.
> the copyright bit on the personal dat recorder i purchased did a pretty good job of stopping me
Then you bought the wrong deck. Back when DAT still mattered many manufacturers made circumvention of copy restrictions quite easy, sometimes even deliberately so. I remember reading about various decks where disabling copy restrictions involved nothing more than cutting a simple wire or circuit board trace. This wasn't that surprising since copy restriction was seen as a market killer by the manufacturers and very unpopular with most.
> bottom of the range Focus sells for around $11k in the USA and compares > or exceeds the top of the range model in the UK, which is over $21k
Cars ARE more expensive in Europe (in particular in the UK--hint: switch to the other side of the road:-), but your figures are extreme. The advertised US prices don't include a lot of costs that are hidden to a casual European observer, such as tax, destination charges, and various other just-because-we-can sleaze fees. That $11K Focus on the street would be more like $13-14K.
Still, the EU seems to be very sensitive about inflated car prices. They've fined at least VW serious amounts of money for price fixing with their dealer networks, and I hope they won't let up. You do start seeing a lot more cross-border purchases, especially now with the bigger price transparency of the Euro. For example, in Italy you can buy an Audi for as much as 20% less than in Germany where it's made, and people do notice that.
> Universities/colleges enforce professors to use the latest edition of books every 2 years
I don't know if other universities do, but my wife's certainly doesn't. She has to regularly fight off the text book salesman and has told him to not bother calling unless his wares change substantially. She only switches to new editions if there is considerable change in content, and is very suspicious of merely renumbered exercises. Some of the best teachers I've had actually used their own photocopied handouts exclusively, material that they laboriously compiled and refined over the years.
SVG would be an option, but so is Java. Check out Map24, a European map service that uses client-side Java to do exactly what you're talking about. A kind soul was nice enough to post the link in this thread. Select a country from "Quickselect" at the top left, then click "max" in the top right of the map to detach the map window. This is exactly what the doctor ordered.
God, I LOVE that! That's exactly what I've been expecting and hoping MapQuest would eventually evolve into. It's so much more bandwidth (and server) efficient than the near-Stone-Age technique of static bitmaps, not to mention the added flexibility you get from resizeable windows and having live data on the client-side, such as detailed tooltips when hovering the mouse over map features. I especially like that you can detach the applet into a floating, resizeable window that can maximize to my whole 1600x1200 desktop and show a sh!tload of map data. Pity it's only useful when I'm back in Europe.
> The display and sound would be though my glasses
What about those of us that don't wear glasses? Starting to wear some just for the benefit of the PDA would be too much of a lifestyle change for most.
Also, eye fatigue isn't so much an issue of refresh rate as of focusing distance. With conventional LCD goggles you're focusing on a plane an inch or so away from your eyes, something they're not trained (or apparently meant) to do. That's what's giving you headaches and eye fatigue.
Instead, the most promising technology is probably retinal scanning, which holds the promise of high resolution and focus-free viewing. But it will be a while yet before it's cheap and small enough, unless PDA, notbook and/or phone screen replacement emerges as a killer app that drives development.
> Or are you going to claim that most Palm powered PDAs are not running at 160x160x4bpp?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm claiming. Since we're talking about new phones here, let's also talk about new PDAs. Very few new PDAs are coming out with 160x160 screens. IOW phones of the same generation still seriously lag their PDA cousins in screen resolution, and that will be true for a while yet. With PDAs the trend is towards larger screens, wheras with phones the trend is towards smaller overall sizes, and the twain just don't mix.
I think convergence will eventually happen, but I wish it would look somewhat different and take advantage of some useful technologies. You still want a large screen to view lots of info, so convergence towards phone-size displays is bad. You also want a SEPARATE handset so you can read the screen and talk at the same time. How about moving the communications guts of the phone into the PDA and connecting a separate handset to it via Bluetooth? Perhaps make an oversized pen than also doubles as a handet. That would still make taking notes during a call pretty difficult, so maybe just use a regular old Bluetooth headset instead.
> Nokia series 60 phones is 176x208x12bpp [...] Palm screens which run at 160x160x4bpp.
Hardly so anymore. All new Palm PDA releases except two (Zire 21 and Treo 600) are moving to 320x320x16 or 320x480x16 screens, which will probably be the standard sizes for a while. Phone will be playing catch-up for a while yet.
PDA choice nowadays is a religion, just like OSs. Even with the same PDA OS you have your die-hard Sony, Palm or (much less so nowadays) Handspring devotees, attached to various features of the devices offered by a particular vendor. Once you integrate the phone and PDA your choices dwindle, at least for the forseable future. Especially in the fragmented US market I see a truly generic PDA phone less likely, because the vendor would have to create versions for at least GSM and CDMA, and for the latter several versions for various carriers (Sprint, Verizon).
> It's just the conventional PC world that is taking its sweet time adopting Bluetooth.
While Bluetooth in conjunction with a PC opens some interesting possibilities, the real killer use for Bluetooth is in intelligent consumer devices, especially the portable variety. Convergence may be really popular, and we may indeed one day simply carry The Gadget and nothing else, but in the real world there is always yet another bit of functionality or new technology that The Gadget doesn't yet have, so some sort of expandability is always advised. You could go with slots and such, but with time those tend to get smaller and smaller, and less and less useful for new emerging technology (think PCMCIA->CF->SD and trying to fit a hard drive or GPS unit in an SD card). If OTOH you had some external expansion capability, you would never need to build that hard drive or GPS unit into The Gadget, and your cell phone wouldn't also need to be your organizer. I think the PDA/cell phone symbiosis could be one of the strongest drivers for Bluetooth if properly marketed. Most people that I demonstrate browsing the web on the PDA via an unconnected cell phone to are impressed (especially using GPRS).
Like I've said in another post, saying that 802.11 will replace Bluetooth is like saying that Ethernet will replace HTTP. You need a communications protocol to run over 802.11 (TCP/IP), you need a device and service recovery protocol to find other devices to interact with (Rendezvous/Zeroconf, UPnP), you need authentication and encryption (I guess you could rely on WEP to some extent). Bluetooth is so much more than just 802.11 by another name. It makes it really easy for vendors to support a highly interoperable standard without having to decide which subcomponents of a loosely bundled set of standards to pick.
Re:Bluetooth will take off like USB did
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
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· Score: 1
> the ever lowering prices of 802.11b devices and the continued minaturization / reduction in power consumption
802.11b is a lower level technology than Bluetooth. You still need higher level protocols for communications (e.g. TCP/IP), service discovery (Rendezvous, UPnP etc.), and authentication and encryption (even fewer popular standards). Bluetooth OTOH specifies a complete collection of physical layer plus protocol stack etc. Supporting 802.11, TCP/IP, Rendezvous and some sort of authentication and encryption standard requires a lot meatier hardware than supporting Bluetooth, and the chance that a substantial number of vendors will get behind the same collection of standards to make a wide variety of devices work together seamlessly is fairly slim, as can be observed in the wired world. Merely supporting Bluetooth would simplify matters substantially, and it's very cheap and easy to do nowadays.
The main devices supporting fast IR are notebooks and PCs. Very few consumer devices do, and Palms certainly don't. That's why it takes bloody forever to sync over IR. I believe Palms only support 115Kbps over IR, so I would definitely expect BT to sync faster. Maybe the OP'er misconfigured something?!
> All these sweet features and they gave it a low-res 160x160 screen
That's what I thought, too. It seems 320x320 HiRez is now the standard, with 320x480 becoming more and more popular. The extra amount of web content you can display with the higher resolution makes a big difference on small screens.
Your way, where exactly would reinventing the wheel come in?! Must you really expose the fact that this company is prepared to shell out development money without even doing a quick Usenet search? Please, your MANNERS!
> The market really does tend to solve many of these problems.
At least you'd hope so. But Lexmark might instead pull an RIAA on the market and assume that its declining fortunes are due to people pirating--I mean refilling ink cartridges. Next, they'll send out their legal hounds to try and make it illegal to comparison shop. Quoting a Lexmark spokesperson, "not buying Lexmark is the same as stealing! Shopping for other brands is depriving our hard-working engineers of the well-deserved dues for their talent and creativity."
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Well, if only the German gov'ment had similar foresight WRT the economy and in general entering the 21st century in some other similar respects. As it stands I can only assume that this love for OSS must be a pure accident, a random if fortuitous firing of some collective synapses.
Certain products and companies can rise above being mere market participants, particularly when they affect national security, or are perceived to do so. Foreign shareholders for example are not allowed to acquire a controlling interest in US airlines, and while I don't know if there are similar laws governing it, you can bet that the government would be disinclined to allow foreigners to buy certain key military contractors. Why should other countries act any differently? If the German government perceives SuSe to be of at least economic (and potentially much more given the contracts at stake) importance to it, why shouldn't it take some steps to prevent one of its chief economic competitors from acquiring SuSe?
> VP sold off all his stock
Yeah, I believe the buyer's name was "Fido" or "Rex" or something. Someone who woudn't object too much to selling the stock right back after the term in office.
In German it's similar, with "Sie" being the formal and "du" the informal version of "you". But since living in the English-speaking world I've started to get quite impatient with and intolerant of these silly formalisms, which seem a throwback to times past. Besides, they just add a layer of awkwardness having to transition from "Sie" to "du" and finally "pass the cigarette" when romancing the other sex.
> the copyright bit on the personal dat recorder i purchased did a pretty good job of stopping me
Then you bought the wrong deck. Back when DAT still mattered many manufacturers made circumvention of copy restrictions quite easy, sometimes even deliberately so. I remember reading about various decks where disabling copy restrictions involved nothing more than cutting a simple wire or circuit board trace. This wasn't that surprising since copy restriction was seen as a market killer by the manufacturers and very unpopular with most.
> bottom of the range Focus sells for around $11k in the USA and compares
:-), but your figures are extreme. The advertised US prices don't include a lot of costs that are hidden to a casual European observer, such as tax, destination charges, and various other just-because-we-can sleaze fees. That $11K Focus on the street would be more like $13-14K.
> or exceeds the top of the range model in the UK, which is over $21k
Cars ARE more expensive in Europe (in particular in the UK--hint: switch to the other side of the road
Still, the EU seems to be very sensitive about inflated car prices. They've fined at least VW serious amounts of money for price fixing with their dealer networks, and I hope they won't let up. You do start seeing a lot more cross-border purchases, especially now with the bigger price transparency of the Euro. For example, in Italy you can buy an Audi for as much as 20% less than in Germany where it's made, and people do notice that.
> Universities/colleges enforce professors to use the latest edition of books every 2 years
I don't know if other universities do, but my wife's certainly doesn't. She has to regularly fight off the text book salesman and has told him to not bother calling unless his wares change substantially. She only switches to new editions if there is considerable change in content, and is very suspicious of merely renumbered exercises. Some of the best teachers I've had actually used their own photocopied handouts exclusively, material that they laboriously compiled and refined over the years.
> I'm Dutch and I buy a lot of books, around 20 per month
What kind of books? Text books or otherwise? Big difference!
SVG would be an option, but so is Java. Check out Map24, a European map service that uses client-side Java to do exactly what you're talking about. A kind soul was nice enough to post the link in this thread. Select a country from "Quickselect" at the top left, then click "max" in the top right of the map to detach the map window. This is exactly what the doctor ordered.
God, I LOVE that! That's exactly what I've been expecting and hoping MapQuest would eventually evolve into. It's so much more bandwidth (and server) efficient than the near-Stone-Age technique of static bitmaps, not to mention the added flexibility you get from resizeable windows and having live data on the client-side, such as detailed tooltips when hovering the mouse over map features. I especially like that you can detach the applet into a floating, resizeable window that can maximize to my whole 1600x1200 desktop and show a sh!tload of map data. Pity it's only useful when I'm back in Europe.
> The display and sound would be though my glasses
What about those of us that don't wear glasses? Starting to wear some just for the benefit of the PDA would be too much of a lifestyle change for most.
Also, eye fatigue isn't so much an issue of refresh rate as of focusing distance. With conventional LCD goggles you're focusing on a plane an inch or so away from your eyes, something they're not trained (or apparently meant) to do. That's what's giving you headaches and eye fatigue.
Instead, the most promising technology is probably retinal scanning, which holds the promise of high resolution and focus-free viewing. But it will be a while yet before it's cheap and small enough, unless PDA, notbook and/or phone screen replacement emerges as a killer app that drives development.
> why not use a bog-standard hands-free kit?
Where's the high-tech glamor in that, dude 8^O ?
> Or are you going to claim that most Palm powered PDAs are not running at 160x160x4bpp?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm claiming. Since we're talking about new phones here, let's also talk about new PDAs. Very few new PDAs are coming out with 160x160 screens. IOW phones of the same generation still seriously lag their PDA cousins in screen resolution, and that will be true for a while yet. With PDAs the trend is towards larger screens, wheras with phones the trend is towards smaller overall sizes, and the twain just don't mix.
I think convergence will eventually happen, but I wish it would look somewhat different and take advantage of some useful technologies. You still want a large screen to view lots of info, so convergence towards phone-size displays is bad. You also want a SEPARATE handset so you can read the screen and talk at the same time. How about moving the communications guts of the phone into the PDA and connecting a separate handset to it via Bluetooth? Perhaps make an oversized pen than also doubles as a handet. That would still make taking notes during a call pretty difficult, so maybe just use a regular old Bluetooth headset instead.
> Nokia series 60 phones is 176x208x12bpp [...] Palm screens which run at 160x160x4bpp.
Hardly so anymore. All new Palm PDA releases except two (Zire 21 and Treo 600) are moving to 320x320x16 or 320x480x16 screens, which will probably be the standard sizes for a while. Phone will be playing catch-up for a while yet.
PDA choice nowadays is a religion, just like OSs. Even with the same PDA OS you have your die-hard Sony, Palm or (much less so nowadays) Handspring devotees, attached to various features of the devices offered by a particular vendor. Once you integrate the phone and PDA your choices dwindle, at least for the forseable future. Especially in the fragmented US market I see a truly generic PDA phone less likely, because the vendor would have to create versions for at least GSM and CDMA, and for the latter several versions for various carriers (Sprint, Verizon).
> It's just the conventional PC world that is taking its sweet time adopting Bluetooth.
While Bluetooth in conjunction with a PC opens some interesting possibilities, the real killer use for Bluetooth is in intelligent consumer devices, especially the portable variety. Convergence may be really popular, and we may indeed one day simply carry The Gadget and nothing else, but in the real world there is always yet another bit of functionality or new technology that The Gadget doesn't yet have, so some sort of expandability is always advised. You could go with slots and such, but with time those tend to get smaller and smaller, and less and less useful for new emerging technology (think PCMCIA->CF->SD and trying to fit a hard drive or GPS unit in an SD card). If OTOH you had some external expansion capability, you would never need to build that hard drive or GPS unit into The Gadget, and your cell phone wouldn't also need to be your organizer. I think the PDA/cell phone symbiosis could be one of the strongest drivers for Bluetooth if properly marketed. Most people that I demonstrate browsing the web on the PDA via an unconnected cell phone to are impressed (especially using GPRS).
Like I've said in another post, saying that 802.11 will replace Bluetooth is like saying that Ethernet will replace HTTP. You need a communications protocol to run over 802.11 (TCP/IP), you need a device and service recovery protocol to find other devices to interact with (Rendezvous/Zeroconf, UPnP), you need authentication and encryption (I guess you could rely on WEP to some extent). Bluetooth is so much more than just 802.11 by another name. It makes it really easy for vendors to support a highly interoperable standard without having to decide which subcomponents of a loosely bundled set of standards to pick.
> the ever lowering prices of 802.11b devices and the continued minaturization / reduction in power consumption
802.11b is a lower level technology than Bluetooth. You still need higher level protocols for communications (e.g. TCP/IP), service discovery (Rendezvous, UPnP etc.), and authentication and encryption (even fewer popular standards). Bluetooth OTOH specifies a complete collection of physical layer plus protocol stack etc. Supporting 802.11, TCP/IP, Rendezvous and some sort of authentication and encryption standard requires a lot meatier hardware than supporting Bluetooth, and the chance that a substantial number of vendors will get behind the same collection of standards to make a wide variety of devices work together seamlessly is fairly slim, as can be observed in the wired world. Merely supporting Bluetooth would simplify matters substantially, and it's very cheap and easy to do nowadays.
> IR tops out at 4Mbps
The main devices supporting fast IR are notebooks and PCs. Very few consumer devices do, and Palms certainly don't. That's why it takes bloody forever to sync over IR. I believe Palms only support 115Kbps over IR, so I would definitely expect BT to sync faster. Maybe the OP'er misconfigured something?!
> All these sweet features and they gave it a low-res 160x160 screen
That's what I thought, too. It seems 320x320 HiRez is now the standard, with 320x480 becoming more and more popular. The extra amount of web content you can display with the higher resolution makes a big difference on small screens.
Your way, where exactly would reinventing the wheel come in?! Must you really expose the fact that this company is prepared to shell out development money without even doing a quick Usenet search? Please, your MANNERS!
> The market really does tend to solve many of these problems.
At least you'd hope so. But Lexmark might instead pull an RIAA on the market and assume that its declining fortunes are due to people pirating--I mean refilling ink cartridges. Next, they'll send out their legal hounds to try and make it illegal to comparison shop. Quoting a Lexmark spokesperson, "not buying Lexmark is the same as stealing! Shopping for other brands is depriving our hard-working engineers of the well-deserved dues for their talent and creativity."
> I now carry [...] a Leatherman [...]
You sad, sad, sad person you! Where do you find the space to stash the cape?
> Unless you fell off halfway up or something.
Or perhaps something like the last line in Scene 29: "Excuse me, could, uh, could somebody give me a push, please...?"