Buy a cheap PDA with a PCMCIA drive. What would be the cheapest and best for this would be an iPAQ 31xx along with the PCMCIA sleeve. Pop in the 1.5" drive and there you go. I highly reccomend getting the iPAQ 31xx over a color 36xx- battery life will be *tons* better, though you will have the screen off a lot of the times if you were listening to music. They'd be a lot cheaper too. You could get a setup like this for under $150 very easily, perhaps under $100. You can get the iPAQ 3135/3150 itself for $30-50 on eBay, not sure about the PCMCIA sleeve, but still pretty cheap. It'll be a brick, but cheap and very functional.
You have a bunch of them lying around? Are you sure you don't have a bunch of 2.5" drives? 1.5" is a PCMCIA-sized drive, usually in a PCMCIA card form factor; 2.5" is the size of drive in a laptop.
The IBM Microdrive hasn't had any advantages for a while. That is, as long as that's what you are talking about, rather than meaning the 1.5" PCMCIA drives, as found in the iPod. The PCMCIA drives still have plenty of advantages, price and size being among them- I bought a 2 GB PCMCIA Toshiba HD for $70 over a year ago; how much is that 2 GB key drive? That said, that is $35 per GB, whereas with the Microdrive it's hundreds. And you'd need two of them, which is about the size of the single PCMCIA card.:P
Yes, there's a reason you'd want a mechanical device like this over solid state. Price. That's about it. Depending on the application there may be other factors- if you're doing *tons* of writes then a flash-based solution will pitter out after some time. Any flash will, but usually it's not a big deal, consider how most people use it. But if you were using the flash as swap (as some folks do with their Zauruses), or certain embedded applications, your flash chips could die right quick.
I used to use a little 2 GB PCMCIA hard drive- like in the iPod- in my PDA, a Jornada 720. It was awesome- 2 GB of storage for a piddly $70- next to nothing compared to the price of similar storage in CF or SD cards. I wish my newer PDA, a Sigmarion III, had PCMCIA for this puppy- with a faster CPU and a bigger and better screen (5" 800x480 rather than 640x240 [compared to 320x240 for PocketPCs) it would be great for watching DivXs. It seems to decode them well enough with my experiements. A shame no media player (that I know of, at least) uses the built-in MPEG4 decoder on the GPU in the Sig3- an ATI Imageon 3200.
Just working with something that is raw calculations, I wouldn't doubt that Linux can squeeze out a percent or two more than WinCE. What does this matter when the applications and libraries written on top of this perform poorly? No, the blame can't go to Linux, but as far as the majority of folks are concerned, it's irrelevant.
But when it comes down to actually using the thing, the whole WinCE package *feels* a ton faster (even using MFC, provided it's a newer machine) than using Linux/Qtopia or Linux/X11. Linux/PicoGUI is another story, though not far enough along.
Yes, Linux, NetBSD and others support MIPS. But this isn't a standard x86 PC; support chips and other factors vary so widely that it isn't a matter of putting in some standard bootable CD/floppy/CF card and letting the install fly. Folks without any embedded experience often don't appreciate this. (not saying you don't, so don't freak out) One MIPS machine can be entirely and totally different from another, even when the CPU is identical; but since there are about a million and one MIPS variants, that too is likely to be an issue.
It's pretty unlikely that this is ready to go. But you never know- PMC may have been doing work toward this end as a way to push their products in the non-Asian world.
No it isn't x86. It's a NEC VR5701, which is a MIPS CPU, running a 400 MHz. Uhh, sure it could emulate x86- you could port bochs and run Linux or Windows that way. haha, that'd suck.
Such a beast exists, although it runs WinCE. My main machine has an 800x480 screen, though only 5" in size. Touch typable keyboard, etc too. sigmarion III. Fits in my pocket though, unlike a clamshell with a 7" screen. $500, which is very cheap compared to the handful of contenders.
Buuut, there is a similar beast with a bigger screen and very similar stats. The Zupera Smartbook. Has a slower CPU though- 206 MHz StrongARM. (XGA = 800x480)
Now all someone has to do is port Linux, NetBSD, whatver. Shouldn't be that bad, though I don't know what support chips it uses, which really is where the work comes in with these PDAs.
There have been various *TRON-based desktops in Japan for quite a while. See bTRON. Looking at those screenshots it looks like this is what the T-Cube is running, although it's been renamed and remarketed. Same company, PMC.
Indeed, without a big, slow OS a lot can be done. Certain things will be slow no metter the OS on a 400 MHz CPU- MP3 encoding, for example. My main machine is a 400 MHz WindowsCE box. Tiny, light, and fast as hell. Anything else that Win9x/NT has I don't need and haven't missed. And in a ROM of 32 MB the whole OS and a ton of support apps fit.
A lot of people are probably wondering here why I'd be running Windows CE instead of Linux on a slower CPU. There are a lot of reasons, the biggest being that Linux can't hack it in this area yet. The Zaurus C760- even with the same CPU, twice the RAM and twice the ROM- is less functional and tons slower. I may run Linux on my file server (was a desktop, long ago), but I'm not going to cripple myself again. One day I'll be able to switch back on my primary...
Still a bit awkward to have in one's pocket, though. That said, this isn't a PDA- it's a damn tiny computer. You're not going to be carrying it aroudn with you at all times like one often does with a PDA. You may have it in your pocket as you travel between work and home, sure- and in that case, it's a helluva lot smaller than any laptop.
The T-Cube and CerfCube would use very similar amounts of power. Why would you assume the CerfCube uses less? PDA CPUs being used in both. Unless you're running on battery- which you're not by default, but still not likely in both these cases- the difference in power is negligable. We're not comparing a CerfCube and a laptop here.
I imagine any difference in power has a lot to do with the functionality that the CerfCube lacks- no display out or input in. There's ethernet and CF. Not very useful as some ultra-mini-tiny desktop as they show the T-Cube.
Unless you run everything via VNC serving from the CerfCube, and have a big, loud, 'n ugly 486 where you run your VNC client.:P
I totally agree. A small computer has a huge appeal to me and a lot of other folks. No, it'll never be the thing for gamers, or folks who prefer having a large and loud computer. Some people like that, just like some folks like having a large and loud car.
I have a WinCE-based PDA/handheld PC/palmtop, the Sigmarion III. Japanese-only (like all the good stuf!), but as a non-Japanese speaker it works great for me after I had it imported.
It has USB, which is rare on a PDA- so there is external kb and mouse. One day, I'd like to get a VGA out card for it. Software comes with it to run it on an external monitor at 1024x768- and not just for presentations, but acting as a regular video card. The cost is prohibative for me at this point, though, and not all that neccesary. As long as I have at least 640x480 I'm fine, and this thing runs at 800x480. VNC, remote X11, SSH/telnet, etc etc- I usually run all of my apps locally, but having the ability to run any app I need from my Linux file server (can't keep all those mp3s on SD cards!) is a bonus.
First, this isn't meant as a PocketPC. Yes, there's no screen and instead a VGA port- duh.
The TRON family of OSes (of which this t-engine is a derivative) have plenty of support- in Asia. Not in the US, no.
Rarely stable PocketPC? You should get a Linux PDA! I had to reboot my Zaurus far more times than I've had to reboot any PocketPC; and the reboots take 5 minutes instead of 20 seconds. Count your blessings.:)
Sounds a bit more like the 70s than the 80s- I you sure you're not thinking about 8" floppies rather than 5.25"?
As handled in KSR's "Red Mars"
on
Living on Mars Time
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I always thought the way that this extra 40 minutes was handled in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars) was great.I can't remember what they call that time period- but they just leave it off the clock. Every night at midnight, the transition from 12:00 AM to 12:01 AM takes 39.5 minutes rather than only 1. That way, you can go to bed later than you should've and still get a decent rest.:)
For any of you interested in Mars colonization, I highly reccomend the books. I've yet to read the last of the trilogy, but Red Mars was absolutely amazing. The second book was pretty good too, but it's hard to follow up something like the first. KSR portrays a very realistic near-future, and a lot of the technology it'd take in the book's version is already here. I think KSR serves on some various NASA committes regarding the future manned mission to Mars, etc.
We need some sort of way of putting the archive on bit torrent and then making it easily viewable. That is, someone saves the pertinent pages into a zip file, puts the zip up on bit torrent, and when you click the url, Moz or whatever your browser be unzips it to a temp dir, and opens up the index.html... VIOLA! that'd be slick as snot.
You can do all that without having to hack the camera.
As if!
Whether or not you may be aware of it, those of us into SCUBA and EXTREME SPORTS are into HACKING everything... I mean, XTREME SPORTZ are all about HACKING LIFE itself!!!!!!1 sooo stffu to your naysayingZ and BIG ^^ (upss) to hacking4life!
Yeah, except you don't know which shots suck. Rather, you may know some- like you took a photo of the ground when drunk. But it's not like you can have a look and see which photos suck, then go back to re-take them.
I guess you could err on the side of caution and just do three takes for all the photos on the camera- make sure they're grrrrreat!
Read the post again, gramps. He didn't say "what's the point of photography without an LCD?" rather "what's the point of digital without an LCD?" That is, for a dirt-cheap and shitty-image'd camera such as this, one of the only advantages it would have is the fact you can go back and delete photos that sucked on a digicam- out in the field, without your computer there- so you can squeeze a few more in the flash space.
That said, on our digicam, I usually use the viewfinder instead of the LCD. Just seems weird to use the LCD unless it's on a tripod. But I sure as hell use the LCD to delete the photos with my fingers over the lens or when I'm blinking...
Actually... I don't know about this camera (slashdotted), but the similar Ritz version of this contains an 8051 CPU. There was a time when the 8051 was a top of the line microprocessor. So get out your centronics connectors and git working on a way to network these puppies- because we're gunna have a cluster of these!
Well, it is a language in a sense. No, it's not a programming language, but Ms. Blain didn't claim such.
I suppose it would've been better if she said, with a lisp filter on the sentence- "ASCII is a super cool computer codification of the letters and numbers we hu-mans use to communicate with each other and our cool computer counter-parts. yessss. you see, 65 translates to one letter and 128 to another! seeeee! it is so exciting!"
Heh. I work with a woman who did this, although using white paper with a printed message in ink rather than an all-black piece of paper. The killer was an 800 fax number; they had a helluva bill I imagine.
Yeah, and your mom is unscalable. Or at least, that's what your brother told me when it was my turn.
Anywho, thanks for the heads up Yuri- I've never seen this place or anything like it. I will certainly start using it- and even if only "half the places" (*which* places?) don't accept it, that's still half the spam.
Slashdot Mirror
Buy a cheap PDA with a PCMCIA drive. What would be the cheapest and best for this would be an iPAQ 31xx along with the PCMCIA sleeve. Pop in the 1.5" drive and there you go. I highly reccomend getting the iPAQ 31xx over a color 36xx- battery life will be *tons* better, though you will have the screen off a lot of the times if you were listening to music. They'd be a lot cheaper too. You could get a setup like this for under $150 very easily, perhaps under $100. You can get the iPAQ 3135/3150 itself for $30-50 on eBay, not sure about the PCMCIA sleeve, but still pretty cheap. It'll be a brick, but cheap and very functional.
You have a bunch of them lying around? Are you sure you don't have a bunch of 2.5" drives? 1.5" is a PCMCIA-sized drive, usually in a PCMCIA card form factor; 2.5" is the size of drive in a laptop.
The IBM Microdrive hasn't had any advantages for a while. That is, as long as that's what you are talking about, rather than meaning the 1.5" PCMCIA drives, as found in the iPod. The PCMCIA drives still have plenty of advantages, price and size being among them- I bought a 2 GB PCMCIA Toshiba HD for $70 over a year ago; how much is that 2 GB key drive? That said, that is $35 per GB, whereas with the Microdrive it's hundreds. And you'd need two of them, which is about the size of the single PCMCIA card. :P
Yes, there's a reason you'd want a mechanical device like this over solid state. Price. That's about it. Depending on the application there may be other factors- if you're doing *tons* of writes then a flash-based solution will pitter out after some time. Any flash will, but usually it's not a big deal, consider how most people use it. But if you were using the flash as swap (as some folks do with their Zauruses), or certain embedded applications, your flash chips could die right quick.
I used to use a little 2 GB PCMCIA hard drive- like in the iPod- in my PDA, a Jornada 720. It was awesome- 2 GB of storage for a piddly $70- next to nothing compared to the price of similar storage in CF or SD cards. I wish my newer PDA, a Sigmarion III, had PCMCIA for this puppy- with a faster CPU and a bigger and better screen (5" 800x480 rather than 640x240 [compared to 320x240 for PocketPCs) it would be great for watching DivXs. It seems to decode them well enough with my experiements. A shame no media player (that I know of, at least) uses the built-in MPEG4 decoder on the GPU in the Sig3- an ATI Imageon 3200.
Just working with something that is raw calculations, I wouldn't doubt that Linux can squeeze out a percent or two more than WinCE. What does this matter when the applications and libraries written on top of this perform poorly? No, the blame can't go to Linux, but as far as the majority of folks are concerned, it's irrelevant.
But when it comes down to actually using the thing, the whole WinCE package *feels* a ton faster (even using MFC, provided it's a newer machine) than using Linux/Qtopia or Linux/X11. Linux/PicoGUI is another story, though not far enough along.
Yes, Linux, NetBSD and others support MIPS. But this isn't a standard x86 PC; support chips and other factors vary so widely that it isn't a matter of putting in some standard bootable CD/floppy/CF card and letting the install fly. Folks without any embedded experience often don't appreciate this. (not saying you don't, so don't freak out) One MIPS machine can be entirely and totally different from another, even when the CPU is identical; but since there are about a million and one MIPS variants, that too is likely to be an issue.
It's pretty unlikely that this is ready to go. But you never know- PMC may have been doing work toward this end as a way to push their products in the non-Asian world.
That the Burt Reynolds? I can't tell if that ruined my unending adoration for the Out-of-this-World Dad (#1!!) or if it boosted it. Wow. What a day.
hahahahaha. bochs. yeah right.
Do you know what the cerfcube is? It's expensive. And it doesn't have almost any of the features he listed. Seems enough to disqualify it.
Such a beast exists, although it runs WinCE. My main machine has an 800x480 screen, though only 5" in size. Touch typable keyboard, etc too. sigmarion III. Fits in my pocket though, unlike a clamshell with a 7" screen. $500, which is very cheap compared to the handful of contenders.
Buuut, there is a similar beast with a bigger screen and very similar stats. The Zupera Smartbook. Has a slower CPU though- 206 MHz StrongARM. (XGA = 800x480)
Now all someone has to do is port Linux, NetBSD, whatver. Shouldn't be that bad, though I don't know what support chips it uses, which really is where the work comes in with these PDAs.
There have been various *TRON-based desktops in Japan for quite a while. See bTRON. Looking at those screenshots it looks like this is what the T-Cube is running, although it's been renamed and remarketed. Same company, PMC.
Indeed, without a big, slow OS a lot can be done. Certain things will be slow no metter the OS on a 400 MHz CPU- MP3 encoding, for example. My main machine is a 400 MHz WindowsCE box. Tiny, light, and fast as hell. Anything else that Win9x/NT has I don't need and haven't missed. And in a ROM of 32 MB the whole OS and a ton of support apps fit.
A lot of people are probably wondering here why I'd be running Windows CE instead of Linux on a slower CPU. There are a lot of reasons, the biggest being that Linux can't hack it in this area yet. The Zaurus C760- even with the same CPU, twice the RAM and twice the ROM- is less functional and tons slower. I may run Linux on my file server (was a desktop, long ago), but I'm not going to cripple myself again. One day I'll be able to switch back on my primary...
Still a bit awkward to have in one's pocket, though. That said, this isn't a PDA- it's a damn tiny computer. You're not going to be carrying it aroudn with you at all times like one often does with a PDA. You may have it in your pocket as you travel between work and home, sure- and in that case, it's a helluva lot smaller than any laptop.
The T-Cube and CerfCube would use very similar amounts of power. Why would you assume the CerfCube uses less? PDA CPUs being used in both. Unless you're running on battery- which you're not by default, but still not likely in both these cases- the difference in power is negligable. We're not comparing a CerfCube and a laptop here.
:P
I imagine any difference in power has a lot to do with the functionality that the CerfCube lacks- no display out or input in. There's ethernet and CF. Not very useful as some ultra-mini-tiny desktop as they show the T-Cube.
Unless you run everything via VNC serving from the CerfCube, and have a big, loud, 'n ugly 486 where you run your VNC client.
I totally agree. A small computer has a huge appeal to me and a lot of other folks. No, it'll never be the thing for gamers, or folks who prefer having a large and loud computer. Some people like that, just like some folks like having a large and loud car.
I have a WinCE-based PDA/handheld PC/palmtop, the Sigmarion III. Japanese-only (like all the good stuf!), but as a non-Japanese speaker it works great for me after I had it imported.
It has USB, which is rare on a PDA- so there is external kb and mouse. One day, I'd like to get a VGA out card for it. Software comes with it to run it on an external monitor at 1024x768- and not just for presentations, but acting as a regular video card. The cost is prohibative for me at this point, though, and not all that neccesary. As long as I have at least 640x480 I'm fine, and this thing runs at 800x480. VNC, remote X11, SSH/telnet, etc etc- I usually run all of my apps locally, but having the ability to run any app I need from my Linux file server (can't keep all those mp3s on SD cards!) is a bonus.
First, this isn't meant as a PocketPC. Yes, there's no screen and instead a VGA port- duh.
:)
The TRON family of OSes (of which this t-engine is a derivative) have plenty of support- in Asia. Not in the US, no.
Rarely stable PocketPC? You should get a Linux PDA! I had to reboot my Zaurus far more times than I've had to reboot any PocketPC; and the reboots take 5 minutes instead of 20 seconds. Count your blessings.
Sounds a bit more like the 70s than the 80s- I you sure you're not thinking about 8" floppies rather than 5.25"?
I always thought the way that this extra 40 minutes was handled in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars) was great.I can't remember what they call that time period- but they just leave it off the clock. Every night at midnight, the transition from 12:00 AM to 12:01 AM takes 39.5 minutes rather than only 1. That way, you can go to bed later than you should've and still get a decent rest. :)
For any of you interested in Mars colonization, I highly reccomend the books. I've yet to read the last of the trilogy, but Red Mars was absolutely amazing. The second book was pretty good too, but it's hard to follow up something like the first. KSR portrays a very realistic near-future, and a lot of the technology it'd take in the book's version is already here. I think KSR serves on some various NASA committes regarding the future manned mission to Mars, etc.
We need some sort of way of putting the archive on bit torrent and then making it easily viewable. That is, someone saves the pertinent pages into a zip file, puts the zip up on bit torrent, and when you click the url, Moz or whatever your browser be unzips it to a temp dir, and opens up the index.html ... VIOLA! that'd be slick as snot.
Shit man, you'd have to give him a lot of CueCats. Like a million of them. or more.
You can do all that without having to hack the camera.
As if!
Whether or not you may be aware of it, those of us into SCUBA and EXTREME SPORTS are into HACKING everything... I mean, XTREME SPORTZ are all about HACKING LIFE itself!!!!!!1 sooo stffu to your naysayingZ and BIG ^^ (upss) to hacking4life!
Yeah, except you don't know which shots suck. Rather, you may know some- like you took a photo of the ground when drunk. But it's not like you can have a look and see which photos suck, then go back to re-take them.
I guess you could err on the side of caution and just do three takes for all the photos on the camera- make sure they're grrrrreat!
Read the post again, gramps. He didn't say "what's the point of photography without an LCD?" rather "what's the point of digital without an LCD?" That is, for a dirt-cheap and shitty-image'd camera such as this, one of the only advantages it would have is the fact you can go back and delete photos that sucked on a digicam- out in the field, without your computer there- so you can squeeze a few more in the flash space.
That said, on our digicam, I usually use the viewfinder instead of the LCD. Just seems weird to use the LCD unless it's on a tripod. But I sure as hell use the LCD to delete the photos with my fingers over the lens or when I'm blinking...
Actually... I don't know about this camera (slashdotted), but the similar Ritz version of this contains an 8051 CPU. There was a time when the 8051 was a top of the line microprocessor. So get out your centronics connectors and git working on a way to network these puppies- because we're gunna have a cluster of these!
Well, it is a language in a sense. No, it's not a programming language, but Ms. Blain didn't claim such.
I suppose it would've been better if she said, with a lisp filter on the sentence- "ASCII is a super cool computer codification of the letters and numbers we hu-mans use to communicate with each other and our cool computer counter-parts. yessss. you see, 65 translates to one letter and 128 to another! seeeee! it is so exciting!"
yeah, that would've been better.
Heh. I work with a woman who did this, although using white paper with a printed message in ink rather than an all-black piece of paper. The killer was an 800 fax number; they had a helluva bill I imagine.
Yeah, and your mom is unscalable. Or at least, that's what your brother told me when it was my turn.
Anywho, thanks for the heads up Yuri- I've never seen this place or anything like it. I will certainly start using it- and even if only "half the places" (*which* places?) don't accept it, that's still half the spam.
werd.