It is nice to see that there is currently a majority for "I'm not a US Citizen".
It is great that Slashdot is Multi-Country, we get a good broad base of info and opinions.
No at the moment they do not have a left handed version on the drawing boards. I have spoken to Jason Ferraro the designer, and with the production costs in Australia, he has no intention of making one.
If you really want one, leave a message for him on their website and ask him.
I have one that was given to me to review by the designer, Jason Ferraro. I spent about 8 hours with it on Saturday playing Thief, and it is great.
I have big hands but it is still comfortable, and once you get get it configured correctly, you can eliminate most of the keyboard useage. I say most, because there are is only so much you can do with nine buttons, but that is all you can keep track of without looking.
How it works is by capturing (in program mode) the keystroke(s) (up to five per key) you type into its own flash ram. Then when you hit that button it sends the keystroke(s) like you had pressed them at the keyboard.
My current config is still under devolopment, but at the moment Im using: (brackets is the number of buttons in that location)
Thumb: Walk, Fast Walk, Walk Backward & ?? (4)
Index: Strafe Left & Right (2)
Middle: Use (1)
Ring: Crouch (1)
Little: ?? (1)
Mouse: Attack, Jump, Switch Weapons
One thing that this shows me is that the author that uses this "pay as you go" scheme might have to change his writing style to make sure that interest is developed early on.
That is exactly how he wrote the Green Mile. Six individual books over six months. Of course, that was written from scratch, this one is an old one he has returned to work on (i think)
Mark
RMIT IT Test Lab Network Engineer RMIT Bundoora East Campus. Bundoora Vic Australia
They are a rebadged Cobalt box, with a MIPS based RISC CPU from QED @ 250 Mhz. with a "customised Linux OS kernel ver 2.0"
They cost Aust $2999 Performance was fairly low, topping out at 260,000 bytes per second of throughput.
here is part of the article..
The Gateway server is easily the cutest of the servers. A little black box not much bigger than a tissue box, it sits and grins at you with its single huge green LED across the front. As far as specifications go, the Gateway was very different to the other servers tested in that it had a dedicated RISC processor, and no option of a keyboard/mouse/monitor for installation. To set the machine up, you plug it in, program the network details (IP Address, Subnet Mask, Gateway Etc from a small 6 button control panel with a 2 line segmented LCD mounted on the back of the unit. From here, all the setup can be done via a nice friendly web interface or CD Setup Wizard.
One of the things we noted was the slow boot time of this machine. If the machine is not shut down properly, it takes an inordinate amount of time to check the disk on restart.
Transfer of data to the server can be done using FTP, SMB (Windows file sharing) and Appletalk. Finding the root of the web server involved a little poking around though the web interface, but once found, we were able to FTP the files with little trouble. The FTP transfer was a little slower than the other machines, which led us to believe that the gateway was not in the same league as its competitors in the raw speed stakes.
In the static tests, we confirmed that the lack of RAM and slower hard disk of the Gateway made it struggle as far as performance is concerned. In fact, during the test, I received the following e-mail from the unit:
The CPU in the server is overloaded; it is attempting to do too many things at the same time. An amber light means that there are 3 times as many tasks waiting to be executed as are actually running, and a red light means that there are 6 times as many. Consider moving some of the services to other servers, or reduce the complexity of the CGI scripts running on the server itself.
There are several other monitoring features built in including a user disk space monitor that tells you when disk space is running short for a particular user.
The Gateway has a backup facility built in, though we did not test it. There is no redundancy of disk drives or power supplies so the server will need to be removed from service to have these parts replaced or upgraded. There is very little about the Gateway that can be upgraded, you could upgrade to more disk space and add more RAM but the CPU is a RISC chip, and is not in a socket. There are 2 10/100 Ethernet ports and a modem, allowing you to set this server up as a small office router with dialup Internet Access.
A 5 port DSS-5+ Dlink Fast Ethernet Switch is included in the package. The micro server will run as a small departmental File Server with quotas, a DHCP Server, and an e-mail server.
Other features of note are: Packet Filtering (Firewall), Web & DNS Caching, Private discussion Groups, Web based HTML creation and FrontPage Extensions.
A simple to use Setup Card and CD Setup Wizard (Win 32 only) was included, although not tested. Mark
We at the RMIT PC Test lab tested Wireless Netorking products (mainly under Windows) for the Ziff Davis PC Magazine Australia. I found the Lucent Wavelan to be the best of the products tested, and the only one to offer support for Linux. The PC Cards and Access Points were simple to configure and provided good results in the speed tests Mark
Slashdot Mirror
(I wonder what it costs to look at the Windows source.) :)
Only one soul. A small price to pay.
Mark
RMIT IT Test Lab Engineer
It is great that Slashdot is Multi-Country, we get a good broad base of info and opinions.
Mark
RMIT IT Test Lab Engineer
If you really want one, leave a message for him on their website and ask him.
Mark
RMIT IT Test Lab Engineer
I have big hands but it is still comfortable, and once you get get it configured correctly, you can eliminate most of the keyboard useage. I say most, because there are is only so much you can do with nine buttons, but that is all you can keep track of without looking.
How it works is by capturing (in program mode) the keystroke(s) (up to five per key) you type into its own flash ram. Then when you hit that button it sends the keystroke(s) like you had pressed them at the keyboard.
My current config is still under devolopment, but at the moment Im using: (brackets is the number of buttons in that location)
Thumb: Walk, Fast Walk, Walk Backward & ?? (4)
Index: Strafe Left & Right (2)
Middle: Use (1)
Ring: Crouch (1)
Little: ?? (1)
Mouse: Attack, Jump, Switch Weapons
?? means I'm having an attach of monday morning.
RMIT IT Test Lab Engineer
That is exactly how he wrote the Green Mile. Six individual books over six months. Of course, that was written from scratch, this one is an old one he has returned to work on (i think)
Mark
RMIT IT Test Lab Network Engineer
RMIT Bundoora East Campus. Bundoora Vic Australia
They cost Aust $2999 Performance was fairly low, topping out at 260,000 bytes per second of throughput.
here is part of the article..
The Gateway server is easily the cutest of the servers. A little black box not much bigger than a tissue box, it sits and grins at you with its single huge green LED across the front.
As far as specifications go, the Gateway was very different to the other servers tested in that it had a dedicated RISC processor, and no option of a keyboard/mouse/monitor for installation. To set the machine up, you plug it in, program the network details (IP Address, Subnet Mask, Gateway Etc from a small 6 button control panel with a 2 line segmented LCD mounted on the back of the unit. From here, all the setup can be done via a nice friendly web interface or CD Setup Wizard.
One of the things we noted was the slow boot time of this machine. If the machine is not shut down properly, it takes an inordinate amount of time to check the disk on restart.
Transfer of data to the server can be done using FTP, SMB (Windows file sharing) and Appletalk. Finding the root of the web server involved a little poking around though the web interface, but once found, we were able to FTP the files with little trouble. The FTP transfer was a little slower than the other machines, which led us to believe that the gateway was not in the same league as its competitors in the raw speed stakes.
In the static tests, we confirmed that the lack of RAM and slower hard disk of the Gateway made it struggle as far as performance is concerned. In fact, during the test, I received the following e-mail from the unit:
There are several other monitoring features built in including a user disk space monitor that tells you when disk space is running short for a particular user.
The Gateway has a backup facility built in, though we did not test it. There is no redundancy of disk drives or power supplies so the server will need to be removed from service to have these parts replaced or upgraded. There is very little about the Gateway that can be upgraded, you could upgrade to more disk space and add more RAM but the CPU is a RISC chip, and is not in a socket. There are 2 10/100 Ethernet ports and a modem, allowing you to set this server up as a small office router with dialup Internet Access.
A 5 port DSS-5+ Dlink Fast Ethernet Switch is included in the package. The micro server will run as a small departmental File Server with quotas, a DHCP Server, and an e-mail server.
Other features of note are:
Packet Filtering (Firewall), Web & DNS Caching, Private discussion Groups, Web based HTML creation and FrontPage Extensions.
A simple to use Setup Card and CD Setup Wizard (Win 32 only) was included, although not tested. Mark
We at the RMIT PC Test lab tested Wireless Netorking products (mainly under Windows) for the Ziff Davis PC Magazine Australia. I found the Lucent Wavelan to be the best of the products tested, and the only one to offer support for Linux. The PC Cards and Access Points were simple to configure and provided good results in the speed tests Mark