Yet what are they doing? Forcing a politcal mindset upon a population!
"Of course we're not surprised that the Germans are against war. We taught you so."
A senior member of the US diplomatic corps, talking to DER SPIEGEL magazine about Germany's stand in the UN security council, requesting that his name was withheld.
It's often claimed that there's a difference in culture between Europe and the US when it comes on what is acceptable on TV and what not.
The US shy away from showing naked people on screen, while a woman flashing bare breasts is part of more or less every shower gel or deodorant commercial over here. And what they show on late night TV here would classify as hard porn for some Americans.
The Europeans shy away from showing violent movies that are violent for the sake of violence (e.g. Slasher movies) while you guys didn't seem to have a problem with taking your kids to the Rambo and Schwarzenegger killfests. Which, btw., where age restricted in Germany and cut when shown on TV.
The problem of "C&C Generals" is that it portrays war as a "fun thing" - yay, let's go to war! The spoken comments of the game characters, the game's settings - I read a report that says that the game campaign includes targetting civilians (and calls this "acceptable collateral damage") and bombing UN convoys. The game is, in one word, cynical.
Yes, I do like strategy games and first person shooters. But these games are usually set in an alternate reality or at least use broad irony. "C&C Generals" is set in a copy of today's world and it uses conflicts similar to current ones as blueprints for its scenarios, using highly cynical approaches to "solve" them.
There's a difference between James Bond and the late Rambo movies...
make even faster (and hopefully cooler) processors
Decide. You can only have one at a time.
They either give you faster CPUs or cooler CPUs.
First, they go for faster for the price of creating way more heat. Those were the last few years.
Right now, the market has decided that it doesn't need any more speed and that it is more concerned about heat and energy consumption. Alas, not for enviromental reasons, since then we'd see low voltage CPUs and chipsets in desktops, but because it affects laptop battery life and it's potentially unpleasant.
I hope that low voltage CPUs will be seen more often in desktops. I hate my computer's cooling fans.
I'm a bit puzzled about the good and bad things of the various low power x86 CPU series. So far, I have identified at least five different:
- Transmeta Crusoe - Via C3 - Intel ULV (old, now outdated by the new Centrino) - Intel Pentium-M (aka Centrino, which appears to be a chipset strategy as well) - AMD XP-M (aka Low Voltage Thoroughbred)
So, please tell me, why should I choose over the other? Where are the conceptual differences?
More information from here, in an article from an Anime mailing list, in reference to bootlegged DVDs:
Further to my last e-mail. I went to a lecture at the Leeds East Asian Research Society tonight. It was by a police officer from the Met. in London talking about Chinese triads. He said that one of the big money spinners for mainland triads was - yep! you guessed it! - bootlegging DVD's. Actually it was a bit gruesome - perhaps more to your taste as a former forensic scientist then to a sensitive, squeamish soul like myself! To titillate his student audience he brought in full colour photo's of what these guys do to folk with whom they have some difference of opinion. It seems they like to slice them up with meat cleavers. The Chinese gangs are apparently quite artistic about it - they prefer not to kill their victims, just to slice chunks off them to leave them permanently scarred and disfigured as living warnings to anyone else who might be tempted to go their own way. The Vietnamese gangs are, it seems, less cultured in their use of ironmongery and merely stab their victims with often fatal consequences. Perhaps this is because of the mainland triads other big money spinner - people smuggling. (Do you remember all those poor kids who died in a container lorry in Dover a while back?) Apparently this is such a big thing the gangs give their customers professional training appropriate to their destination. For the UK this is a 2 week course in stir fry cookery! (Apparently they say this is all that's required as the Brits only eat half a dozen Chinese dishes!)
I thought I'd send you this because it reinforces the points you made. People who buy bootleg goods don't want their money to go to the people who created the goods they so desire but would rather it go into the coffers of murderers like these. I don't suppose people who buy bootleg DVD's think that they are supporting the sort of organisation that condemned all those young people to such an appalling death sealed in the container in Dover - but then they probably don't think all that much at all. Perhaps that's unfair. Maybe it's a problem for this generation that in a world dominated by consumer power people are going to be more aware of where their hard earned cash actually ends up.
Still I find the link to terrorism a bit of a stretch.
A recent report in German magazin DER SPIEGEL indicates that hip bone operations performed by "robodoc" surgeons still have a high rate of failure.
Robodoc is only an example, the report's main focus is that US regulations for medical procedures require more safety testing than German regulations. As a result, German clinics are a testbed for new, untested technology from abroad, sometimes with chilling results.
German clinics already use Robodoc for hip bone operations on a quasi-regular basis (the report estimates 10000 operations in Germany so far) while the same procedure still hasn't been in approved in the US by the FDA since 1993.
The report quotes critics who see a blind faith in technology, patients are told that Robodoc is far more exact than any human operator, while there are still a number of embarassing failures.
My Palm PDA runs on one set of rechargeable batteries for two or three weeks. My Zaurus runs two or three days. Even if I'm away and can't recharge the Palm's batteries, I can get standard AAA batteries anywhere. The Zaurus battery is too small and it's a proprietary format, so I always have to bring the AC adapter.
Granted, there are Palm PDAs with proprietary batteries, as well. But I see the limited battery lifetime and the price tag of replacement batteries as two of the major minuses of the Zaurus.
I can't imagine using PalmOS with graffitti and all that bs
Yes, you obviously can't since you never did. The Palm's applications do their job and that's it - and that's all I want from a PDA.
Graffiti is a blessing. It works and I learned it within minutes, while the Zaurus' joke of a handwriting recognition software still doesn't recognize my handwriting, despite using about two hours of training on it, after which I gave up.
You're right, though, the Zaurus keyboard is great. But I would love to see Graffiti or something similar on it. Yes, you can teach the Zaurus different strokes and there is a software package with the Graffiti strokes, but it just plain and simply doesn't work as good as the PalmOS PDAs.
Considering the fact that the Zaurus CPU is more powerful than the one used in the older Palms, I'm sure that better recognition could be possible. But there just isn't anything in it now.
yes the Zaurus runs real Linux. Yes, Debian [debian.org] has been ported. Yes, a better pda environment [openzaurus.org] than sharp's is under development.
The Zaurus' Linux environment is neat, but in daily use, the PalmOS standard software is way more productive for me. The Qtopia apps aren't as well thought out. I personally don't mind, but the Palm PDAs are easy to understand and easy to use for everyone (including my Mom), while the Zaurus is a techno toy that also includes a mediocre calendar and addressbook software.
It's nice to write software for the Zaurus, though, much nicer than for PalmOS, since there are so many alternatives to choose from in the Linux world. Yet it's kind of sad that the Linux sync support of the Zaurus is so bad and kernel driver needed for the desktop side still crashes the PC every now and then.
Yes, having a wifi CF card and a 256mb SD card is the high life.
If you can afford them and can live with the limited battery lifetime of your PDA as a consequence.
Yes you can connect that that serial terminal or k/b up.
Show me a decent serial keyboard that's not sold for a ridiculously high price tag. Also, the cable needed to connect a serial keyboard is sold at 40$ and above.
So add the Zaurus, a CF wifi card, a 256 mb SD card, a serial keyboard and serial cable (or, alternatively, an IR keyboard) and you basically get an overpriced Microlaptop, but not a PDA.
I use the Palm for my daily calendar and address book. I use the Zaurus as a (great) techno toy and I sometimes wonder if I should have saved the money I spent on it.
My father is an ex Army helicopter pilot and flight instructor. We just love James Bond movies.
Whenever there's a computer on screen, I tell him: "Well, actually that's impossible" and why. Whenever there's a helicopter on screen, he tells me: "well, actually, no helicopter is capable of that" and why. Or: "See that Russian soldier? Well, he's using a rifle of the Isreali army, wrong equipment again."
Yeah, I know that it's just a movie, but we get the kicks out of it...:-)
"Golden Eye" was an example, with its wonderful IBM product placement and unique chat software used by the geek and the bond girl. And virtually every modern Bond film includes an impossible or close-to-impossible helicopter stunt.
You won't care, probably, but ten years ago when I didn't yet decide on what to study, I just called R&H while I was in LA as a German tourist, because I tried to find out about the folks behind the Star Trek special effects.
They gave me, a foreign High School kid, the grand tour of their facilities, showed and explained almost everything I asked for and were really really nice people - considering the fact that I just called them hours in advance and had no prior appointment with them.
Same with the model shop, btw, who allowed me to see the actual DS9 model. I still can't quite believe that they just took the time for that weird German fanboy that I was...
While I didn't end up in computer graphics software development, it's nice to know that since I made minor contributions to Linux, some of my code now runs on R&H's computers...
So anyway, good luck to them. I hope they are still as cool as they used to be.
Does anyone know if the Opera team tried to contact Microsoft to fix the problem?
Well, it's been reported in all the major tech news online sites two weeks ago.
Seriously, if one of my clients' web page was in worldwide news because of a problem that involves fixing one line of CSS, I'd be sure to fix it the very next day.
MS, however, hasn't fixed it in 14 days. Go figure.
I'm surprised we haven't seen this come out earlier..
I'm surprised this is considered news, since it's an age-old idea.
Friends of mine once used a cheapo ISP who did not offer shell access, but who made the mistake of running Apache with root priviledges. They used a similar script years ago to do remote administration of their site on that mis-configured server. They never exploited the security hole, but they always thought it was funny that they had a "limited web account" yet full access to everything on the server.
Laptop batteries are disposable components with a very limited lifetime. You will have to replace them after a year or two. Every manufacturer and every experienced user knows this. The same is true for AC adapters. These, too, are designed to break.
Laptops are only just taking to grab the market, after desktop PCs have become commonplace and profit margins declined, the best profits are now in mobile computing.
But I still wonder why we, the users, accept overpriced short-life batteries, after all these years.
Read here [zaurus.com] for info about getting a folding IRDA keyboard for a good price. (It's not quite ready yet, but it should be within a couple weeks.)
Great! This is good news! I contacted that company a few months ago, but they were undecided back then. So maybe mails like mine helped them to make up their mind. Wonderful, I'll be sure to buy one of those keyboards - once it hits below 50$, that is...
But did you ever own a Palmpilot so that you know the difference?
and it does real handwriting recognition - not the pseudo one that is graffiti.
Nope.
The Zaurus uses a pop-up input field that is divided in three fields for upper case letters, lower case letters and for numbers. Very much like Graffiti.
"Real handwriting recognition" is what the Newton did and the new Windows XP pen computers do.
Why don't you take the time to teach it your writing style? If you love graffiti all that much, teaching the Zaurus to do graffiti is not at all difficult.
Why do I have to bother to take the time? Graffiti was easy to learn, as is Jots (I tried it), the upcoming replacement of Graffiti.
The pre-installed handwriting patterns of the Zaurus are tough to learn, Graffiti and Jots were not. At least not for me.
USB cables are only $5.99 w/ free shiiping in the US (see buy.com and search on 'usb cable' and sort by price)
You're talking about normal USB cables. The Zaurus doesn't use a normal USB connector, see the link in my post. That was one of the points I made in my original post.
I own a Zaurus and I am not really that thrilled with it.
The Sharp Zaurus has several disadvantages that the IBM reference design appears to avoid.
First and foremost, the Zaurus uses a non-standard connector. I wasn't looking hard, but I doubt that I can buy the connector in a shop for electronics parts, and I consider that a major problem. It already was a problem for the Palm.
A simple serial or USB cable costs a whopping 40 Dollars in the US and 50 Euros in Europe.
Then, the Zaurus features USB, but only as a device, not as a host. Oh, the thousands of possibilities that the Zaurus designers gave away with this design decision! If, oh, if only they had incluced full host support for USB! I for one would love to simply plug in a USB keyboard in my Zaurus and start typing. (I'm aware of the power consumption issues with USB host support. But that's a question of adding a battery, that's it.)
So, to use an external keyboard, I'd have to buy a 50 Euro serial cable and an expensive keyboard that uses RS232, which is also hard to find and hard to get from Europe.
Or, I can get an IRDA keyboard. Which practically doesn't exist. Well, there are two companies offering an IRDA keyboard, but one of them appears to be vaporware and the other one does not work well with the Zaurus.
Then, the Zaurus' use of an obscure ethernet-over-USB protocol gave me quite a headache. Both the Windows 98SE and the Linux desktop drivers used to crash frequently, with the Linux driver being close to unusable, at least on my machine. It seems to be working perfectly now with 2.4.20, but it was a royal pain with previous kernels. So to use my Zaurus, I had to install XP. Yay. Which still crashes now and then as a result of using the Zaurus cradle and sometimes hard-resets the desktop the moment I put the Zaurus in there.
Finally, the Zaurus' handwriting recognition stinks. I learned Graffiti in 15 minutes, I still haven't mastered the Zaurus input method for handwritten letters. In fact, I still keep my Palm for the "actual" calendar and address management and use the Zaurus mostly for games: The SCUMM virtual machine is my personal killer app. Right now, I'm playing Monkey Island 1 during the bus rides to my office and back.
The Zaurus was the first useful Linux PDA, but it has some serious design mistakes. The missing USB host is the main mistake in my opinion. Can't wait to see the IBM reference design catching market share.
Best part appears to be: Zaurus applications' source should be easily ported to the IBM platform. And the Zaurus collection of ported software is already impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
Then my identity got used for illegal purposes, which wasn't fun, and damn near killed my career.
Tell the tale, please. I'd like to know what happened.
Yet what are they doing? Forcing a politcal mindset upon a population!
"Of course we're not surprised that the Germans are against war. We taught you so."
A senior member of the US diplomatic corps, talking to DER SPIEGEL magazine about Germany's stand in the UN security council, requesting that his name was withheld.
It's often claimed that there's a difference in culture between Europe and the US when it comes on what is acceptable on TV and what not.
The US shy away from showing naked people on screen, while a woman flashing bare breasts is part of more or less every shower gel or deodorant commercial over here. And what they show on late night TV here would classify as hard porn for some Americans.
The Europeans shy away from showing violent movies that are violent for the sake of violence (e.g. Slasher movies) while you guys didn't seem to have a problem with taking your kids to the Rambo and Schwarzenegger killfests. Which, btw., where age restricted in Germany and cut when shown on TV.
The problem of "C&C Generals" is that it portrays war as a "fun thing" - yay, let's go to war! The spoken comments of the game characters, the game's settings - I read a report that says that the game campaign includes targetting civilians (and calls this "acceptable collateral damage") and bombing UN convoys. The game is, in one word, cynical.
Yes, I do like strategy games and first person shooters. But these games are usually set in an alternate reality or at least use broad irony. "C&C Generals" is set in a copy of today's world and it uses conflicts similar to current ones as blueprints for its scenarios, using highly cynical approaches to "solve" them.
There's a difference between James Bond and the late Rambo movies...
make even faster (and hopefully cooler) processors
Decide. You can only have one at a time.
They either give you faster CPUs or cooler CPUs.
First, they go for faster for the price of creating way more heat. Those were the last few years.
Right now, the market has decided that it doesn't need any more speed and that it is more concerned about heat and energy consumption. Alas, not for enviromental reasons, since then we'd see low voltage CPUs and chipsets in desktops, but because it affects laptop battery life and it's potentially unpleasant.
I hope that low voltage CPUs will be seen more often in desktops. I hate my computer's cooling fans.
I'm a bit puzzled about the good and bad things of the various low power x86 CPU series. So far, I have identified at least five different:
- Transmeta Crusoe
- Via C3
- Intel ULV (old, now outdated by the new Centrino)
- Intel Pentium-M (aka Centrino, which appears to be a chipset strategy as well)
- AMD XP-M (aka Low Voltage Thoroughbred)
So, please tell me, why should I choose over the other? Where are the conceptual differences?
More information from here, in an article from an Anime mailing list, in reference to bootlegged DVDs:
Further to my last e-mail. I went to a lecture at the Leeds East Asian Research Society tonight. It was by a police officer from the Met. in London talking about Chinese triads. He said that one of the big money spinners for mainland triads was - yep! you guessed it! - bootlegging DVD's. Actually it was a bit gruesome - perhaps more to your taste as a former forensic scientist then to a sensitive, squeamish soul like myself! To titillate his student audience he brought in full colour photo's of what these guys do to folk with whom they have some difference of opinion. It seems they like to slice them up with meat cleavers. The Chinese gangs are apparently quite artistic about it - they prefer not to kill their victims, just to slice chunks off them to leave them permanently scarred and disfigured as living warnings to anyone else who might be tempted to go their own way. The Vietnamese gangs are, it seems, less cultured in their use of ironmongery and merely stab their victims with often fatal consequences. Perhaps this is because of the mainland triads other big money spinner - people smuggling. (Do you remember all those poor kids who died in a container lorry in Dover a while back?) Apparently this is such a big thing the gangs give their customers professional training appropriate to their destination. For the UK this is a 2 week course in stir fry cookery! (Apparently they say this is all that's required as the Brits only eat half a dozen Chinese dishes!)
I thought I'd send you this because it reinforces the points you made. People who buy bootleg goods don't want their money to go to the people who created the goods they so desire but would rather it go into the coffers of murderers like these. I don't suppose people who buy bootleg DVD's think that they are supporting the sort of organisation that condemned all those young people to such an appalling death sealed in the container in Dover - but then they probably don't think all that much at all. Perhaps that's unfair. Maybe it's a problem for this generation that in a world dominated by consumer power people are going to be more aware of where their hard earned cash actually ends up.
Still I find the link to terrorism a bit of a stretch.
Nostalgia.
I recently tried an emulator and had a look at some of the games that I spent hours and days on as a teen. Games such as Mercenary.
And frankly, most of those games that I had the fondest memory of, from today's perspective, plain and simply suck.
Can he tell the difference between a real ID and any old fake one that can be had for $20?
Well, the US ID cards I have seen are indeed easy to fake and nothing compared to the German ID card.
There is a comprehensive list of the German ID card's security features at the Bundesdruckerei web site. And the crime statistics of 2001 and earlier years report of comparatively few falsified German passports.
Identity theft is hardly a problem in German, while it's a big topic in the US. Draw your own conclusions.
A recent report in German magazin DER SPIEGEL indicates that hip bone operations performed by "robodoc" surgeons still have a high rate of failure.
Robodoc is only an example, the report's main focus is that US regulations for medical procedures require more safety testing than German regulations. As a result, German clinics are a testbed for new, untested technology from abroad, sometimes with chilling results.
German clinics already use Robodoc for hip bone operations on a quasi-regular basis (the report estimates 10000 operations in Germany so far) while the same procedure still hasn't been in approved in the US by the FDA since 1993.
The report quotes critics who see a blind faith in technology, patients are told that Robodoc is far more exact than any human operator, while there are still a number of embarassing failures.
Ok, I doubt anyone from them would dare to do it, but I'd love to see an official BSA representative to step up for a /. interview.
I own a PalmOS PDA and a Zaurus.
Yes, I'm a geek and I love techno toys. But I beg to differ: The Zaurus is not a good PDA.
In addition to my earlier rant:
My Palm PDA runs on one set of rechargeable batteries for two or three weeks. My Zaurus runs two or three days. Even if I'm away and can't recharge the Palm's batteries, I can get standard AAA batteries anywhere. The Zaurus battery is too small and it's a proprietary format, so I always have to bring the AC adapter.
Granted, there are Palm PDAs with proprietary batteries, as well. But I see the limited battery lifetime and the price tag of replacement batteries as two of the major minuses of the Zaurus.
I can't imagine using PalmOS with graffitti and all that bs
Yes, you obviously can't since you never did. The Palm's applications do their job and that's it - and that's all I want from a PDA.
Graffiti is a blessing. It works and I learned it within minutes, while the Zaurus' joke of a handwriting recognition software still doesn't recognize my handwriting, despite using about two hours of training on it, after which I gave up.
You're right, though, the Zaurus keyboard is great. But I would love to see Graffiti or something similar on it. Yes, you can teach the Zaurus different strokes and there is a software package with the Graffiti strokes, but it just plain and simply doesn't work as good as the PalmOS PDAs.
Considering the fact that the Zaurus CPU is more powerful than the one used in the older Palms, I'm sure that better recognition could be possible. But there just isn't anything in it now.
yes the Zaurus runs real Linux. Yes, Debian [debian.org] has been ported. Yes, a better pda environment [openzaurus.org] than sharp's is under development.
The Zaurus' Linux environment is neat, but in daily use, the PalmOS standard software is way more productive for me. The Qtopia apps aren't as well thought out. I personally don't mind, but the Palm PDAs are easy to understand and easy to use for everyone (including my Mom), while the Zaurus is a techno toy that also includes a mediocre calendar and addressbook software.
It's nice to write software for the Zaurus, though, much nicer than for PalmOS, since there are so many alternatives to choose from in the Linux world. Yet it's kind of sad that the Linux sync support of the Zaurus is so bad and kernel driver needed for the desktop side still crashes the PC every now and then.
Yes, having a wifi CF card and a 256mb SD card is the high life.
If you can afford them and can live with the limited battery lifetime of your PDA as a consequence.
Yes you can connect that that serial terminal or k/b up.
Show me a decent serial keyboard that's not sold for a ridiculously high price tag. Also, the cable needed to connect a serial keyboard is sold at 40$ and above.
So add the Zaurus, a CF wifi card, a 256 mb SD card, a serial keyboard and serial cable (or, alternatively, an IR keyboard) and you basically get an overpriced Microlaptop, but not a PDA.
I use the Palm for my daily calendar and address book. I use the Zaurus as a (great) techno toy and I sometimes wonder if I should have saved the money I spent on it.
My father is an ex Army helicopter pilot and flight instructor. We just love James Bond movies.
:-)
Whenever there's a computer on screen, I tell him: "Well, actually that's impossible" and why. Whenever there's a helicopter on screen, he tells me: "well, actually, no helicopter is capable of that" and why. Or: "See that Russian soldier? Well, he's using a rifle of the Isreali army, wrong equipment again."
Yeah, I know that it's just a movie, but we get the kicks out of it...
"Golden Eye" was an example, with its wonderful IBM product placement and unique chat software used by the geek and the bond girl. And virtually every modern Bond film includes an impossible or close-to-impossible helicopter stunt.
You forgot to mention their site layout:
Newer. (Click next)
Processors. (Click next)
Are. (Click next)
Faster. (Click next)
Than. (Click next)
Older. (Click next)
Processors. (Click next)
You won't care, probably, but ten years ago when I didn't yet decide on what to study, I just called R&H while I was in LA as a German tourist, because I tried to find out about the folks behind the Star Trek special effects.
They gave me, a foreign High School kid, the grand tour of their facilities, showed and explained almost everything I asked for and were really really nice people - considering the fact that I just called them hours in advance and had no prior appointment with them.
Same with the model shop, btw, who allowed me to see the actual DS9 model. I still can't quite believe that they just took the time for that weird German fanboy that I was...
While I didn't end up in computer graphics software development, it's nice to know that since I made minor contributions to Linux, some of my code now runs on R&H's computers...
So anyway, good luck to them. I hope they are still as cool as they used to be.
Does anyone know if the Opera team tried to contact Microsoft to fix the problem?
Well, it's been reported in all the major tech news online sites two weeks ago.
Seriously, if one of my clients' web page was in worldwide news because of a problem that involves fixing one line of CSS, I'd be sure to fix it the very next day.
MS, however, hasn't fixed it in 14 days. Go figure.
I'm surprised this is considered news, since it's an age-old idea.
Friends of mine once used a cheapo ISP who did not offer shell access, but who made the mistake of running Apache with root priviledges. They used a similar script years ago to do remote administration of their site on that mis-configured server. They never exploited the security hole, but they always thought it was funny that they had a "limited web account" yet full access to everything on the server.
Laptop batteries are disposable components with a very limited lifetime. You will have to replace them after a year or two. Every manufacturer and every experienced user knows this. The same is true for AC adapters. These, too, are designed to break.
Laptops are only just taking to grab the market, after desktop PCs have become commonplace and profit margins declined, the best profits are now in mobile computing.
But I still wonder why we, the users, accept overpriced short-life batteries, after all these years.
A few weeks ago, I wrote up a text for an online petition with a long list of reasons why we need an industry standard for laptop batteries, similar to consumber electronics battery cells.
Noone really showed interest, though, so I didn't expect enough people to join the cause and haven't started the actual petition.
So again, I welcome your comments.
(And I'm looking for someone willing to host the petition, too, since my puny web server isn't quite ready for that...)
Read here [zaurus.com] for info about getting a folding IRDA keyboard for a good price. (It's not quite ready yet, but it should be within a couple weeks.)
Great! This is good news! I contacted that company a few months ago, but they were undecided back then. So maybe mails like mine helped them to make up their mind. Wonderful, I'll be sure to buy one of those keyboards - once it hits below 50$, that is...
I own a Zaurus
But did you ever own a Palmpilot so that you know the difference?
and it does real handwriting recognition - not the pseudo one that is graffiti.
Nope.
The Zaurus uses a pop-up input field that is divided in three fields for upper case letters, lower case letters and for numbers. Very much like Graffiti.
"Real handwriting recognition" is what the Newton did and the new Windows XP pen computers do.
Why don't you take the time to teach it your writing style? If you love graffiti all that much, teaching the Zaurus to do graffiti is not at all difficult.
Why do I have to bother to take the time? Graffiti was easy to learn, as is Jots (I tried it), the upcoming replacement of Graffiti.
The pre-installed handwriting patterns of the Zaurus are tough to learn, Graffiti and Jots were not. At least not for me.
USB cables are only $5.99 w/ free shiiping in the US (see buy.com and search on 'usb cable' and sort by price)
You're talking about normal USB cables. The Zaurus doesn't use a normal USB connector, see the link in my post. That was one of the points I made in my original post.
I own a Zaurus and I am not really that thrilled with it.
The Sharp Zaurus has several disadvantages that the IBM reference design appears to avoid.
First and foremost, the Zaurus uses a non-standard connector. I wasn't looking hard, but I doubt that I can buy the connector in a shop for electronics parts, and I consider that a major problem. It already was a problem for the Palm.
A simple serial or USB cable costs a whopping 40 Dollars in the US and 50 Euros in Europe.
Then, the Zaurus features USB, but only as a device, not as a host. Oh, the thousands of possibilities that the Zaurus designers gave away with this design decision! If, oh, if only they had incluced full host support for USB! I for one would love to simply plug in a USB keyboard in my Zaurus and start typing. (I'm aware of the power consumption issues with USB host support. But that's a question of adding a battery, that's it.)
So, to use an external keyboard, I'd have to buy a 50 Euro serial cable and an expensive keyboard that uses RS232, which is also hard to find and hard to get from Europe.
Or, I can get an IRDA keyboard. Which practically doesn't exist. Well, there are two companies offering an IRDA keyboard, but one of them appears to be vaporware and the other one does not work well with the Zaurus.
Then, the Zaurus' use of an obscure ethernet-over-USB protocol gave me quite a headache. Both the Windows 98SE and the Linux desktop drivers used to crash frequently, with the Linux driver being close to unusable, at least on my machine. It seems to be working perfectly now with 2.4.20, but it was a royal pain with previous kernels. So to use my Zaurus, I had to install XP. Yay. Which still crashes now and then as a result of using the Zaurus cradle and sometimes hard-resets the desktop the moment I put the Zaurus in there.
Finally, the Zaurus' handwriting recognition stinks. I learned Graffiti in 15 minutes, I still haven't mastered the Zaurus input method for handwritten letters. In fact, I still keep my Palm for the "actual" calendar and address management and use the Zaurus mostly for games: The SCUMM virtual machine is my personal killer app. Right now, I'm playing Monkey Island 1 during the bus rides to my office and back.
The Zaurus was the first useful Linux PDA, but it has some serious design mistakes. The missing USB host is the main mistake in my opinion. Can't wait to see the IBM reference design catching market share.
Best part appears to be: Zaurus applications' source should be easily ported to the IBM platform. And the Zaurus collection of ported software is already impressive.
Yes, but the English track is 2 channel stereo ("only"), while the French and Japanese tracks are 5.1.
Also, the French DVD comes with English Dubtitles of the English language track, not literal translated subtitles of the Japanese language track.
I, btw, own the French DVD and am very happy with it. The Dubtitles are fine with me.
The Libretto, while being a great machine, had a number of problems:
- crappy plastic casing (it broke _way_ too easily)
- too short battery time (I owned a 75 MHz P1 Libretto and it ran 45 to 70 minutes one one battery - too short!)
Both may have been improved with later models. But a lightweight ultra-portable PC with a good case and long battery time is something I'd buy.
Of course, they are now all on a shelf gathering dust .........
Contact me at kontakt@hanno.de if you wish to sell one of them used. I'm interested.