I just downloaded the 14 CD set for Debian, 8 GB. Suprised my ethernet port is still on here at work. 4 is looking pretty small after that, though to me one CD is what I expect linux to be...
There is a CF card you can buy for the Zaurus that lets you do presentations over VGA. However, there is only one program that supports it and it doesn't show PDFs. The program is Hancom Mobile Presenter. You cannot use the VGA out for any Zaurus app, unfortunately.
Re:Crazy Fad or New Social Activity
on
Geeks Playing Poker?
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Does it irritate you because you don't like to play poker, or because you were playing it before it was "cool?"
They're useful for many things. An uncle of mine built a hovercraft out of one, one capable of lifting a man off the ground with 6" of clearence between the ground and the hover-skirt. fun fun fun.
MySQL and PostreSQL are overkill for a lot of the projects people use them for. More power to them, but it seems a bit much to use MySQL to keep track of what CDs or DVDs you own.
But screw j00 all. I just use a OODBMS and let whomever wrote the thing worry about this crap. All I want to do is store data and pull it back to work with when I need it again. Yeah, it's slower, but if I'm not writing some 1000 user web app it takes a tenth of the time to write code for and get the work done.
Not to say that OODBMS are inherently slower or that everyone should switch to them- it's just what I use because it does what I want and need with minimal fuss.
I quite don't agree - I've had my Palm V for 4 maybe 5 years now, and it works quite well. So far the only reason I have to replace it is that it is physically falling appart.
I agree. I just stopped using my Newton MP2100 around 9 months ago, and it was made in 1997, making it 7 years old. Though I have gone through a number of other PDAs during that time, the MP2100 is the one that I was using the whole time. But the MP2100 is an exceptional machine and fit my needs very well, and also very upgradable.
I had an iPAQ 3150, which did get replaced after a year. The sleeves made it incredibly upgradeable, but at the expensve of being huge. And it had crappy battery life compared to my MP2100, something that wasn't upgradable. The iPAQ 31xx/36xx is an example of a PDA that wouldn't last for a long time, at least nor for me.
Naturally, how often you have to replace it is very dependent on how you use it. Plenty of people could still be content using a Palm III or even a Palm Pro, esp if you are only using it for scheduling and an occasional game of solitaire.
And hell, even if you are a hardcore kind of user, but one who doesn't want to spend a lot of money on a new PDA, there are plenty of models from a few years ago that could still be just as useful and full featured as anything out today, provided you upgrade with wifi or extra memory, etc... The one true advance you can't upgrade is a VGA screen. But then again, if you had a PDA that started off ahead of the game- like my Newton MP2100 with its 480x320 screen- most of the world still isn't caught up to it...
14 may be a bit of an exageration- no memory is perfect, but I did get 12. If I used my 5 GB PCMCIA HD, it cut the battery life down a ton, to like 5 hours. Using an orinoco waveLAN gold card I got 7 hours of battery life with the backlight on. A few times I went to bed, forgetting to turn off of my Jornada 720 and woke up to find it still logged onto IRC without a dropped connection. Mind you, the J720 turned the screen off after like 10 minutes of inactivity, but still, it is still pretty impressive, esp considering the fact that the waveLAN sucks power more than a lot of the newer lower power cards. Also, I did not have the extended battery, which did like 24 hours of battery life, just the standard one.
I get good battery life out of my NX70V, but I keep my CPU clocked low, so perhaps it is cheating, though other folks have said they do that. I never neeed the NX70V to run at the full 200 MHz, unless I'm playing a game like Collapse or Warfare Unlimited... The rest of the time I'm at 33 MHz (when reading ebooks, dates/addresses) or at 100 MHz (when listening to MP3s).
I didn't swap estimates. Though I did make a typo- I have a C760 not a C860, though the batteries are the same with the Cx60s, with the C700.
I bet the underclocking helps a lot, though I don't do it. What app do you use? On the Palm OS I have a really sweet app called Lightspeed for my POS 5 Clie NX70V that doesn't just let me underclock the CPU, but does so depending on which app I'm in. It is slick as hell. In PalmReader, I only run it at 33 MHz, in most other apps 100 MHz, but with the movie player and camera I run it at the full 200 MHz. I've always wanted something like that for WinCE/PPC or the Zaurus but never found it, just apps that let you do one-time adjustments to CPU speed.
But heck, even Sharp only claims 7-8 hours of battery life in their promo material for the Cx60, and as everyone knows, that is always very optimistic. No cards, lowest backlight, low CPU speed. Maybe you could get 8 hours of battery then, I'd believe that certainly.
It's a shame you can't just turn the backlight off and have a reflective screen. *sigh*
Maybe your friends bought one of the crappy battery 750's and are lying their asses off to not seem poor.
Unless somehow my C760 and the two folks I know in person were ripped off by Dynamism and Conics, putting in a fake battery. It is certainly the big battery, the one that sticks out a bunch and requires the cheesey new battery cover.
Pffft. Who needs to talk on the phone! Just put a new message on your voicemail: "hey. this is the numbster. i decided to enact a meat or text only comm policy, so if you need to get a hold of me do it in person or send some sort of digital message- email, text, IM, IRC, whatever. sorry grandma!" works like a charm!
Why use a Zaurus? There aren't that many reasons... There was a time when the C-series were the only VGA PDAs out there. Not the case anymore. That was a compelling reason for some folks. Most people who get a Zaurus do so because it runs Linux, which sometimes is a very good reason and other times seems a bit silly- but to each his own.
Though the intent here is just to plug your app, TextMaker (which is very nice), I feel like I should mention another good piece of software, new to this Zaurus model: Picsel Browser. Some folks don't like it, but I've used it on WinCE (on a japanese Sigmarion 3 handheld PC) and on Palm OS (Sony Clie NX70V) and I must say I like it, a lot. The Picsel Browser is great for viewing PDFs, HTML/webpages, MS Office docs, and many image formats, with very convenient scrolling and zooming. You can use it like a regular web browser too, and it isn't bad, though Opera or NetFront are better as a day-to-day web browser. But it means that the Zaurus finally has a decent PDF viewer- qpdf2 on the Z is passable, but it really kind of... sucks. Picsel renders PDFs as they were intended, not half-assedly.:)
The price in JPY is 80,000, which is $734 USD according to xe.com. Which means a $900-1000 price at places like Dynamism who will get 'em first, closer to $900 for conics and some of the others who tend to have a lower price. In other words, an assload.
I thought the same thing about my Sharp 5500. If there was some way I could plug in a full size keyboard in monitor, then I wouldn't need to carry my laptop home. Just plug the Zaurus into some old monitor and keyboard for intense work.
I used to do that with my Sigmarion 3. I used a VGA out card to display at 1024x768 on an external monitor, and an external USB keyboard and mouse. Just like using a desktop. The parts needed for this are: 1. a way to output VGA and 2. a USB host. The other PDA that can do this now is the Dell Axim X50V, which also has a VGA screen. But has built-in VGA out support, and with Nyditot's Virtual Display, you can have any high res display that the chip and monitor support. On my Sig 3's card the limit was 1024x768, but IIRC it is higher on the Dell. The new Axim also has USB host support.
The new Zaurus, unfortunately, cannot do this. It does have USB host support (or so we think it does), but there are no VGA out cards that would allow you to do this. There are a couple VGA out cards that let you pipe a presentation out through the Hancom app, but unfortunately it's the only app that supports the VGA out card- you can't use it to just display your desktop or whatever apps you are running. Alas, but disapointments are nothing new in the world of the Z.
My Clie (a NX70V) gets 10 hours of continuous battery life, mind you I mostly listen to MP3s and read eBooks. Doing the same on my Zaurus C860 I get 4 or 5 hours of battery life. On my Jornada 720, I got 14 hours of battery life, at that even had a usable keyboard.
PocketPC uses 2-4 MB of RAM on boot. CE on my Jornada 720 used 2 MB. Linux+Qtopia on my Zaurus C760? 18 MB. Palm OS uses the least amount of RAM, but at the expense of a lot of lost functionality. CE is a lot closer to Linux than Palm OS in the kind of power it has. CE is not just some "slimmed down" version of desktop Windows, but a completely new OS. A rather efficient and unbloated OS.
Indeed, smart and efficient programming can work wonders.
4 G od HD space on a PDA isn't very 2002, is it?:-)
Sure it is. I had a 5 GB PCMCIA HD in my Jornada 720 PDA back in 2002. And the whole package- Jornada 720 and 5 GB HD didn't cost the $750 USD that this Zaurus does in Japan.
In Japan, many devices have both SD and CF slots. The CF slot can take memory, but its main purpose is to add connectivity. Wi-Fi limits one to sitting around in a hotspot. Japan has better solutions: all three major carriers have 3G cards with thoughputs of up to 2Mbps. DDI and bMobile offer PHS-based cellular solutions up to 384kbps at flat rates. Connected users expect far more in the way of ubiquitous connectivity than Wi-Fi allows. The majority of the population, for example, sends and receives most of its email via cellphone rather than computer.
But, esp for the size of this Zaurus there is absolutely no reason that bluetooth, wifi *and* both SD and CF cards can't be there. It's not like Japan doesn't have wifi. Yes, a lot of people use cellular connectivity with their tiny devices there, but people still use the faster wifi connection at home, or where there is a hotspot. The iPAQ hx4700 and Dell Axim X50V both have VGA screens, 624 MHz XScale CPU (50% faster than this sad excuse for a new Z), built-in bluetooth and wifi and CF and SD slots for more memory or cellular connection cards. It isn't one or the other, not for a while.
That argument makes sense when you're talking about a cheaper device. Like someone else said, adding wifi could add maybe $25-50 to the price of the device- a signifigant addition percentage-wise when you're PDA only costs $200... But this new Zaurus costs 80,000 Yen, which comes out to $734 USD. Which means it'll probably cost around $900 from Dynamism. These days, if you're buying a PDA that costs that much, you get wifi. And bluetooth.
Hahah. Man. Only on/. would something so completely incorrect- even after you corrected yourself- score a +3 Interesting. Er, OK, not just/.. Do not take my comment as a rip on you, since you did at least correct yourself that I applaud- but yeah.:)
There is a reason those diamonds look just like those in the sims...;)
Though, I have to say, this comic looks pretty ass lame. At least, the first one that was on the website. Maybe I need to play the Urbz or even the Sims regularily to see the humor. I see the attempt at humor, but I see a lot of attempts at humor that fall flat on their faces./me shrug Here's to hoping they just get better and better... After all, it is something one would hope for any new endevour, no matter how food the first crack was. Good luck guys!
So, if I steal a physical CD from the store, one I don't like much and would never pay for, that also isn't stealing? After all, if I *had* to pay for it, I wouldn't get the CD- it's only appealing to me because it's free.
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I just downloaded the 14 CD set for Debian, 8 GB. Suprised my ethernet port is still on here at work. 4 is looking pretty small after that, though to me one CD is what I expect linux to be...
Haha... I came upon your post right when I was righting myself after doing the very same thing. eh eh eh. Luckily I have an office all to myself...
There is a CF card you can buy for the Zaurus that lets you do presentations over VGA. However, there is only one program that supports it and it doesn't show PDFs. The program is Hancom Mobile Presenter. You cannot use the VGA out for any Zaurus app, unfortunately.
Does it irritate you because you don't like to play poker, or because you were playing it before it was "cool?"
They're useful for many things. An uncle of mine built a hovercraft out of one, one capable of lifting a man off the ground with 6" of clearence between the ground and the hover-skirt. fun fun fun.
MySQL and PostreSQL are overkill for a lot of the projects people use them for. More power to them, but it seems a bit much to use MySQL to keep track of what CDs or DVDs you own.
But screw j00 all. I just use a OODBMS and let whomever wrote the thing worry about this crap. All I want to do is store data and pull it back to work with when I need it again. Yeah, it's slower, but if I'm not writing some 1000 user web app it takes a tenth of the time to write code for and get the work done.
Not to say that OODBMS are inherently slower or that everyone should switch to them- it's just what I use because it does what I want and need with minimal fuss.
I quite don't agree - I've had my Palm V for 4 maybe 5 years now, and it works quite well. So far the only reason I have to replace it is that it is physically falling appart.
I agree. I just stopped using my Newton MP2100 around 9 months ago, and it was made in 1997, making it 7 years old. Though I have gone through a number of other PDAs during that time, the MP2100 is the one that I was using the whole time. But the MP2100 is an exceptional machine and fit my needs very well, and also very upgradable.
I had an iPAQ 3150, which did get replaced after a year. The sleeves made it incredibly upgradeable, but at the expensve of being huge. And it had crappy battery life compared to my MP2100, something that wasn't upgradable. The iPAQ 31xx/36xx is an example of a PDA that wouldn't last for a long time, at least nor for me.
Naturally, how often you have to replace it is very dependent on how you use it. Plenty of people could still be content using a Palm III or even a Palm Pro, esp if you are only using it for scheduling and an occasional game of solitaire.
And hell, even if you are a hardcore kind of user, but one who doesn't want to spend a lot of money on a new PDA, there are plenty of models from a few years ago that could still be just as useful and full featured as anything out today, provided you upgrade with wifi or extra memory, etc... The one true advance you can't upgrade is a VGA screen. But then again, if you had a PDA that started off ahead of the game- like my Newton MP2100 with its 480x320 screen- most of the world still isn't caught up to it...
14 may be a bit of an exageration- no memory is perfect, but I did get 12. If I used my 5 GB PCMCIA HD, it cut the battery life down a ton, to like 5 hours. Using an orinoco waveLAN gold card I got 7 hours of battery life with the backlight on. A few times I went to bed, forgetting to turn off of my Jornada 720 and woke up to find it still logged onto IRC without a dropped connection. Mind you, the J720 turned the screen off after like 10 minutes of inactivity, but still, it is still pretty impressive, esp considering the fact that the waveLAN sucks power more than a lot of the newer lower power cards. Also, I did not have the extended battery, which did like 24 hours of battery life, just the standard one.
I get good battery life out of my NX70V, but I keep my CPU clocked low, so perhaps it is cheating, though other folks have said they do that. I never neeed the NX70V to run at the full 200 MHz, unless I'm playing a game like Collapse or Warfare Unlimited... The rest of the time I'm at 33 MHz (when reading ebooks, dates/addresses) or at 100 MHz (when listening to MP3s).
I didn't swap estimates. Though I did make a typo- I have a C760 not a C860, though the batteries are the same with the Cx60s, with the C700.
I bet the underclocking helps a lot, though I don't do it. What app do you use? On the Palm OS I have a really sweet app called Lightspeed for my POS 5 Clie NX70V that doesn't just let me underclock the CPU, but does so depending on which app I'm in. It is slick as hell. In PalmReader, I only run it at 33 MHz, in most other apps 100 MHz, but with the movie player and camera I run it at the full 200 MHz. I've always wanted something like that for WinCE/PPC or the Zaurus but never found it, just apps that let you do one-time adjustments to CPU speed.
But heck, even Sharp only claims 7-8 hours of battery life in their promo material for the Cx60, and as everyone knows, that is always very optimistic. No cards, lowest backlight, low CPU speed. Maybe you could get 8 hours of battery then, I'd believe that certainly.
It's a shame you can't just turn the backlight off and have a reflective screen. *sigh*
Maybe your friends bought one of the crappy battery 750's and are lying their asses off to not seem poor.
Unless somehow my C760 and the two folks I know in person were ripped off by Dynamism and Conics, putting in a fake battery. It is certainly the big battery, the one that sticks out a bunch and requires the cheesey new battery cover.
Pffft. Who needs to talk on the phone! Just put a new message on your voicemail: "hey. this is the numbster. i decided to enact a meat or text only comm policy, so if you need to get a hold of me do it in person or send some sort of digital message- email, text, IM, IRC, whatever. sorry grandma!" works like a charm!
Uhh... Any PDA, WinCE, PocketPC or Linux, with a Type II CF slot could use an IBM Microdrive. Not just the old SL-5000D.
Why use a Zaurus? There aren't that many reasons... There was a time when the C-series were the only VGA PDAs out there. Not the case anymore. That was a compelling reason for some folks. Most people who get a Zaurus do so because it runs Linux, which sometimes is a very good reason and other times seems a bit silly- but to each his own.
Not sure how contracts like this work, but Spring has a CDMA CF data card that works with the Zaurus. CF 2031 IIRC?
Though the intent here is just to plug your app, TextMaker (which is very nice), I feel like I should mention another good piece of software, new to this Zaurus model: Picsel Browser. Some folks don't like it, but I've used it on WinCE (on a japanese Sigmarion 3 handheld PC) and on Palm OS (Sony Clie NX70V) and I must say I like it, a lot. The Picsel Browser is great for viewing PDFs, HTML/webpages, MS Office docs, and many image formats, with very convenient scrolling and zooming. You can use it like a regular web browser too, and it isn't bad, though Opera or NetFront are better as a day-to-day web browser. But it means that the Zaurus finally has a decent PDF viewer- qpdf2 on the Z is passable, but it really kind of ... sucks. Picsel renders PDFs as they were intended, not half-assedly. :)
The price in JPY is 80,000, which is $734 USD according to xe.com. Which means a $900-1000 price at places like Dynamism who will get 'em first, closer to $900 for conics and some of the others who tend to have a lower price. In other words, an assload.
I thought the same thing about my Sharp 5500. If there was some way I could plug in a full size keyboard in monitor, then I wouldn't need to carry my laptop home. Just plug the Zaurus into some old monitor and keyboard for intense work.
I used to do that with my Sigmarion 3. I used a VGA out card to display at 1024x768 on an external monitor, and an external USB keyboard and mouse. Just like using a desktop. The parts needed for this are: 1. a way to output VGA and 2. a USB host. The other PDA that can do this now is the Dell Axim X50V, which also has a VGA screen. But has built-in VGA out support, and with Nyditot's Virtual Display, you can have any high res display that the chip and monitor support. On my Sig 3's card the limit was 1024x768, but IIRC it is higher on the Dell. The new Axim also has USB host support.
The new Zaurus, unfortunately, cannot do this. It does have USB host support (or so we think it does), but there are no VGA out cards that would allow you to do this. There are a couple VGA out cards that let you pipe a presentation out through the Hancom app, but unfortunately it's the only app that supports the VGA out card- you can't use it to just display your desktop or whatever apps you are running. Alas, but disapointments are nothing new in the world of the Z.
My Clie (a NX70V) gets 10 hours of continuous battery life, mind you I mostly listen to MP3s and read eBooks. Doing the same on my Zaurus C860 I get 4 or 5 hours of battery life. On my Jornada 720, I got 14 hours of battery life, at that even had a usable keyboard.
9 hours of battery life on your Z? Heh. It is cheating to use some sort of external battery extender.
Everyone with a C760 and C860 that I've known on #zaurus on freenode gets 4-5 hours of battery life.
Though Opera for Qtopia is pretty nice. So is netFront.
PocketPC uses 2-4 MB of RAM on boot. CE on my Jornada 720 used 2 MB. Linux+Qtopia on my Zaurus C760? 18 MB. Palm OS uses the least amount of RAM, but at the expense of a lot of lost functionality. CE is a lot closer to Linux than Palm OS in the kind of power it has. CE is not just some "slimmed down" version of desktop Windows, but a completely new OS. A rather efficient and unbloated OS.
Indeed, smart and efficient programming can work wonders.
4 G od HD space on a PDA isn't very 2002, is it? :-)
Sure it is. I had a 5 GB PCMCIA HD in my Jornada 720 PDA back in 2002. And the whole package- Jornada 720 and 5 GB HD didn't cost the $750 USD that this Zaurus does in Japan.
In Japan, many devices have both SD and CF slots. The CF slot can take memory, but its main purpose is to add connectivity. Wi-Fi limits one to sitting around in a hotspot. Japan has better solutions: all three major carriers have 3G cards with thoughputs of up to 2Mbps. DDI and bMobile offer PHS-based cellular solutions up to 384kbps at flat rates. Connected users expect far more in the way of ubiquitous connectivity than Wi-Fi allows. The majority of the population, for example, sends and receives most of its email via cellphone rather than computer.
But, esp for the size of this Zaurus there is absolutely no reason that bluetooth, wifi *and* both SD and CF cards can't be there. It's not like Japan doesn't have wifi. Yes, a lot of people use cellular connectivity with their tiny devices there, but people still use the faster wifi connection at home, or where there is a hotspot. The iPAQ hx4700 and Dell Axim X50V both have VGA screens, 624 MHz XScale CPU (50% faster than this sad excuse for a new Z), built-in bluetooth and wifi and CF and SD slots for more memory or cellular connection cards. It isn't one or the other, not for a while.
That argument makes sense when you're talking about a cheaper device. Like someone else said, adding wifi could add maybe $25-50 to the price of the device- a signifigant addition percentage-wise when you're PDA only costs $200... But this new Zaurus costs 80,000 Yen, which comes out to $734 USD. Which means it'll probably cost around $900 from Dynamism. These days, if you're buying a PDA that costs that much, you get wifi. And bluetooth.
Hahah. Man. Only on /. would something so completely incorrect- even after you corrected yourself- score a +3 Interesting. Er, OK, not just /.. Do not take my comment as a rip on you, since you did at least correct yourself that I applaud- but yeah. :)
;)
/me shrug Here's to hoping they just get better and better... After all, it is something one would hope for any new endevour, no matter how food the first crack was. Good luck guys!
There is a reason those diamonds look just like those in the sims...
Though, I have to say, this comic looks pretty ass lame. At least, the first one that was on the website. Maybe I need to play the Urbz or even the Sims regularily to see the humor. I see the attempt at humor, but I see a lot of attempts at humor that fall flat on their faces.
So, if I steal a physical CD from the store, one I don't like much and would never pay for, that also isn't stealing? After all, if I *had* to pay for it, I wouldn't get the CD- it's only appealing to me because it's free.
That is what I am doing with Dynapad, though it isn't a straight clone, but rather embodies the spirit of the Newton OS.