I've never done anything big in WSH, only creating a bunch of small scripts, here and there. Distrubuting them was easy- I put the entirity of the script in one file and double-clicked it on the other computer. It isn't an exe, but for the little on-off's, why would you want anything more complex? Why not just share the.wsh file? (Or whatever the extension- the XML WSH files)
IIRC, Turing and OOT are commercial packages, for which there is no free version. At least it was the last time I looked into it. They may provide an evaluation for someone seriously looking into it- I never tried to contact anyone. I was teaching at a little after-school computer club, and was looking at my options.
If you're against a Windows only thing (I imagine the majority of kids wanting to learn couldn't care less), MUDS and MOOs have been doing the same thing, although non-graphically, for a longtime. Hell, a lot of MOOs are really quite awesome from a technical standpoint- a multi-user, distributed, persistent object system with user-programmability and security to go with it. Sounds tasty!
I was going to say "nope, you don't get the C# compiler with just the runtime, you need to download the SDK" but I did a "dir/s csc.exe," and behold! No only does the.NET runtime come with the C# compiler, you also get the VB.NET compiler (vbc.exe) and the JScript.NET compiler (jsc.exe)
For those wodnering where it is, the compilers and such can be found in: C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322
At least on my Win2k install with that version of the.NET framework.
You can get a free (mmm, speech) IDE in #develop- even does GUI buildling.
Kids like to do things. We don't program to learn how to program - I learnt because I wanted to write a game.
Amen! It's good to see a post with something about what a kid wants. Kids like games. Often a simple game is what gets them into programming- not learning Python/MySQL for creating web apps. Scripting-language-X+MySQL may get a lot of teenagers and 20s into programming, but it's not what younger kids are looking for.
Heh. If I was handed NetBeans as the answer to my request to learn programming, I don't think I would've gotten to the point where I am today. Why the hell would a kid sit through the hell known as NetBeans to program in an overcomplicated language, where you have to type a lot to get little return? Eclipse would be less painful from a UI-responsiveness standpoint, but it is still a lot more complicated than a beginner's IDE should be. While I still dislike Java, especially for teaching to youngsters (to 18-year old CS1 students is another thing), I'd at least recommend something like BlueJ. Heck, even as a non-beginner, BlueJ is good for playing around with Java objects.
I agree that a beginner programmer should learn to use real programming structures, but there is no reason they have ti learn it formally.
For a second, I thought your post was in jest, but I think it's more that you don't know any kids. While I'll admit to having played with some DOS SQL databases when I was young, most kids - especially bright kids- aren't interested in a structured course where they learn how to be a good warm body for the programming market... They have the rest of their life for that kind of bullshit, why raise them on it?
There is this awesome movie by Xerox (part of a big series) with Alan Kay called "Doing With Images Makes Symbols." It's about the creation of Smalltalk, the history of the GUI, including great stuff about Sutherland's Sketchpad and Doug Engelbart's work.
Anywho, in this video, Alan talks about the Smalltalk team's experiments with teaching Smalltalk to kids- ages 8-16 or so. One thing that kind of blew me away is that this one kid, on his own, created a circuit design application that had all the features and more of an application that had won a Nobel prize 10 years before it. Yes, a lot of this had to do with the immense power of the Smalltalk language *and* environment, but the fact that kind of power is available to a 12 year old (and not some super-freak genius) is pretty cool.
OO doesn't mean a scary IDE. OO doesn't mean VB.NET or any other language on the.NET object model.
Smalltalk has been used for teaching kids for 30 years, and with a good amount of success.
Part of the reason kids can learn Smalltalk well is that there is no need to learn and use OO off the bat. You can do a fair amount of stuff in Smalltalk just by using Object-Based Programming, rather than OOP. Object-based means *using* objects, creating them, but without a full dose of creating classes, etc.
Now a days, we have Squeak, which takes it to the next level. Kids can get a big return on their investment of time, creating moving, colorful things, while writing a very small amount of code. Unlike some environments for beginners, it scales up, being useful for creating big and scary applications with a lot of code.:) Kids end up learning OO by manipulating actual objects, in the form of graphical "Morphs," giving them functionality, changing their properties... until the day it clicks, and they decide they want a totally new "kind" of Morph.
Check out the demos- it's open source, and runs on just about every platform worth runnning, including Mac OS Classic/X, Windows > 3.1 (incl WinCE), and all modern Unices under X11 (or DirectFB, Linux FB, SDL).
The GUI tools you use under Unix seem relatively painless becuase of your background in the command-line and that way of thinking. To a person who is coming from a more blank or a just-a-user of Mac or Windows background will not feel even remotely the same way. There is a way of think involved which most people do not innately posess, it is something which is cultured.
I've never heard about any standard Windows scripting *language,* but there is a standard Windows scripting system, called the Windows Scripting Host, WSH. It's not quite as nice the the Open Scripting Archetecture in Mac OS, but it isn't horrible.
WSH, like the OSA, is neat in that you can plug-in a number of different languages into it. In some ways, sort of a proto-.NET, as you can share functions between languages. That is, if I write up a function in Perl, I can share it throug the WSH to JScript, VBScript, or any other WSH language. Or vice-versa. PerlScript- the bridge between perl and the WSH- comes with the ActivePerl distro for Windows.
WSH is a neat toy, and I've used it for some automation on my work windows machine. But having done a lot of AppleScripting on my own and work Macs, I can say that WSH isn't as useful- most apps have no idea was WSH, and the apps which do support it, don't support the wealth of actions like Mac OS's OSA does. Mind you, AppleScript is just one language in the Mac OS OSA, and it happens to be the default one. However, you can get language extensions to script apps- just like you would in AppleScript- for Perl, JavaScript, Ruby and Tcl and more. (that was just off the top of my head)
Nobody is programming Doom III in anything except C, assembly, and maybe some C++. Does that make every other language irrelevant and worthless? No! I personally couldn't give a flying fuck about Doom III, and thankfully, never have to use C++. I must work on phantom appliacations! OOOOH SPOOKY!
I can't say I enjoy VB or use it anymore, but even being a staunch Smalltalk programmer, will not hesitate to use RealBasic (with which I can support Mac OS 9, X, and Windows) for an application for which it makes sense. There are a lot of applications out there which are written in VB, a lot more than you seem to think. Not just for very small, internal apps. Heck, a fair amount of people write a bunch of their code in C++, COMize it, then use it all from VB.
No, I feel the same way. I'm sure a lot of others do, considering how half of the posts we see in the Ask Slashdots today are full of "try google retard!" It wouldn't seem that far out for a/. editor to spend the 3 seconds to do so (google for palmos ssh client) that the poster didn't, and reject based on the ease of which something would be found.
Or, there might be more of an agenda here. Perhaps the editor which posted this is a Zaurus user, and figured a lot of people would be like "H4h4 my Z can dooo it! PalmOS and WinCE CAN'T DO SSH! Hehahaaehe!" Followed by a bunch of suggestions for the user to buy an SL-5500. Maybe I'm just being paranoid though.;)
Uh, how would this be related? Compressing data files is a lot different from compiling to bytecode, or to a machine language which uses dynamic libraries.
I use mine DC a fair bit. Like others have mentioned, I use mine for emulation. For $30 it can't be beat- cheaper than buying even just another NES with a bunch of the games I wanted. Also cheaper than buying a TV out card and a gamepad for my iBook.
Heck, I didn't even own any real DC games until a month ago, when I picked up "Caution: Seaman." It was just NES, SNES, and GB up until then....
I found one method of real HWR for PalmOS- MyScript. And it lets you right anywhere on the screen, in recent versions.
Good enoguh to get me to switch to PalmOS? Not likely- I've played with the PocketPC version, and it requires a lot more getting used to than CalliGrapher or Transcriber do for getting reliable results. But something to consider all the same...
How do you figure you can reuse "most" of the speech recognition code for handwriting recognition? Largely a different problem. I could see using *some* of the code, the stuff that changes what is typed based on analysis of what the speaker/writing is trying to say, but that's about it...
Nope, as I pointed out, that is *character* recognition. Similarily, the PalmOS has no known methods of real HWR either, although there area couple of options for character recognition.
Platforms with real HWR that I know of are: Newton OS (CalliGrapher and Rosetta) EPOC32/Psion (using CalliGrapher) Windows CE, incl PocketPC (CalliGrapher, Transcriber [uses same engine as CG]) Windows 9x/ME/NT/2k: PenOffice (uses CalliGrapher)
There is also Lexicus's real HWR, which although crappy, qualifies.
On a PocketPC using CalliGrapher 6, or my Newton MP2100, I easily can achieve 50 WPM with 99% accuracy in recognition. Much faster than I've been able to achieve with any character recognition scheme.
Also, FYI, the character recognition on the SL-5500 was brought into sync with what you can get on the SL-5600 with the new 3.10 ROM update. Which is good- prior to that, the CR on the SL-5500 was downright unusable- very slow and inaccurate. I'm happy to see that Trolltech or Sharp (?) has improved it. Waiting 500ms or more (when the multi-stroke delay was set to 250, the lowest) just to recognize a single letter is unacceptable.
I agree- the way MS has it setup by default in Tablet PC XP is... suboptimal. Digital Ink is stupid unless the whole OS supports it- the Newton is a good example of how that can be done well. Non-ink-based HWR works fine in an OS which wasn't built around it- you draw and it makes text. You can edit the text, and the HWR software takes care of faking keystrokes. A good setup.
I've used a PC with CalliGrapher/PenOffice on it and it worked pretty well. Naturally, nothing as nice as the integration that you get with an OS designed with the pen in mind from the start, but still.
Yo're not reduced to that on the tabletPC- no reason you cannot install PenOffice. I agree that you can get soft-kbs and stroke recognition on Linux that are as good as anything like that will get.
I think the lack of real HWR for Linux goes beyond just there not being many tablets. I think there is a deeper issue, although the lack of tablet-x86-ish hardware is a factor. From my discussions on a number of forums and irc channels, it seems that most Linux developers and users don't think there is any value in connected handwriting recognition. They often think that there is no psychological difference between writing a *word* just as you'd write it on paper and having the system be intelligent enough to translate that into plain-old text and picking apart each word you want to input into letters, seperating it all into the strokes which match up with them.
I am not saying there will never be real HWR for Linux, but it is likely a long way off. For one, as I mused about above, too many Linux users and developers think that real HWR is a good for nothing "Eat Up Martha." Second, real HWR that is accurate, consistent, and fast enough on semi-modern hardware isn't the easiest thing to code. It's the kind of thing people do real research on, spending a lot of man-hours developing. Not to say that kind of work isn't or hasn't been done in the OSS community- it certainly has. It just seems to be a level beyond the majority of OSS projects. Granted, a good HWR system is a level beyond most software projects in general... I hope I'm proven wrong! It may take a number of years, but I'd love to be able to have my handwriting recognizer be open source.
Ink software is something I think will come even slower. Sure, folks will probably hack something on ala Microsoft, but creating a good Ink/Text system will require the rewrite of GUI toolkits. Who knows? Perhaps we'll see a new GUI or X11 toolkit integrate this at the ground floor, and take over within a few short years...:)
The Sharp Zaurus- all models- have character recognition, not HWR. Unless there is a 3rd party app I've not heard of. Granted, I owned a 5500, not a 5600, but I have been lucky enough to play with a 5600. Are you thinking of the input method sharp calls "Handwriting," in the input panel which is used for character recognition, or something completely different?
But for me, I won't bother with Linux on any stylus-only machine until you can get something resembling real HWR for Linux. Yes, there are softkeyboards and plenty of character recognition schemes. That isn't HWR.
While I'd rather use Linux than Windows for a number of the usual reasons, if I had a tablet, I'd use Win2k on it. At least with Windows I can get real HWR- in the form of PenOffice/CalliGrapher.
While the regular consumer cannot get real HWR for Linux, it does exist. Motorola's Lexicus division makes real HWR software for a number of platforms including Linux. However, you can't download it and install it for free, or even purchse it. You can as an OEM, but that doesn't do me much good. That, and it really blows- I've used Lexicus's HWR on a ProGear webpad under Linux. First, you have to write in a little box, not just anywhere on the screen. You cannot expand the dictionary- so you'll likely be going back to the softkb for names, etc. It is also very slow, at least on a 400 MHz Crusoe. Oh well...
I'd love to be proven wrong. If anyonem knows of any other real HWR software for Linux commercial or free, please holler!
People may blow off Altivec G4 performance, thinking that it's something very few applications take advantage of. That was true with Mac OS 9- all but a few, specifically coded apps would be any faster on a G4 than a G3, given the same bus, RAM, CPU MHz. Without Altivec, a G4 is about 15% or so faster in raw FP ops than a G3 of the same speed. Int ops are about the same.
But most folks don't run OS 9 anymore as their primary OS, for a number of good reasons. People run OS X. And OS X has Altivec optimization throughout the core of the system- in libmath and others. Anyone who has used both has noticed a signifigant speed increase in OS X when moving from, say, a G3/500 to a G4/500 that doesn't exist in OS 9.
It is a good thing to know, acedemically, that Altivec is the reason dnetc is so fast on a G4 and that there is no equivalent on the Athlon or a P4. However, this does not change the fact that the G4 performs so much better than the x86 processors available- and isn't that end-of-the-day, real-world performance what matters? It's not like someone can say "The Athlon doesn't have a vector processing unit- so you have to take it out of the G4!" and expect some "more fair" comparison. The G4 is the G4 and the Athlon is the Athlon.
It may come as a shock, but XP has terminals too. You can also to such crazy things as run emacs and ssh. I know, it sounds crazy- and the first time I heard this, I didn't believe it either! All these years of people telling me that you could only run Solitaire and FPS on Windows... All these years were a lie. Well, at least people like you are lucky to have nice folks like me keep you out of the closet of ignorance!:)
Slashdot Mirror
I've never done anything big in WSH, only creating a bunch of small scripts, here and there. Distrubuting them was easy- I put the entirity of the script in one file and double-clicked it on the other computer. It isn't an exe, but for the little on-off's, why would you want anything more complex? Why not just share the .wsh file? (Or whatever the extension- the XML WSH files)
IIRC, Turing and OOT are commercial packages, for which there is no free version. At least it was the last time I looked into it. They may provide an evaluation for someone seriously looking into it- I never tried to contact anyone. I was teaching at a little after-school computer club, and was looking at my options.
http://www.holtsoft.com/turing/
If you're against a Windows only thing (I imagine the majority of kids wanting to learn couldn't care less), MUDS and MOOs have been doing the same thing, although non-graphically, for a longtime. Hell, a lot of MOOs are really quite awesome from a technical standpoint- a multi-user, distributed, persistent object system with user-programmability and security to go with it. Sounds tasty!
I was going to say "nope, you don't get the C# compiler with just the runtime, you need to download the SDK" but I did a "dir /s csc.exe," and behold! No only does the .NET runtime come with the C# compiler, you also get the VB.NET compiler (vbc.exe) and the JScript.NET compiler (jsc.exe)
.NET framework.
For those wodnering where it is, the compilers and such can be found in:
C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322
At least on my Win2k install with that version of the
You can get a free (mmm, speech) IDE in #develop- even does GUI buildling.
Kids like to do things. We don't program to learn how to program - I learnt because I wanted to write a game.
Amen! It's good to see a post with something about what a kid wants. Kids like games. Often a simple game is what gets them into programming- not learning Python/MySQL for creating web apps. Scripting-language-X+MySQL may get a lot of teenagers and 20s into programming, but it's not what younger kids are looking for.
Heh. If I was handed NetBeans as the answer to my request to learn programming, I don't think I would've gotten to the point where I am today. Why the hell would a kid sit through the hell known as NetBeans to program in an overcomplicated language, where you have to type a lot to get little return? Eclipse would be less painful from a UI-responsiveness standpoint, but it is still a lot more complicated than a beginner's IDE should be. While I still dislike Java, especially for teaching to youngsters (to 18-year old CS1 students is another thing), I'd at least recommend something like BlueJ. Heck, even as a non-beginner, BlueJ is good for playing around with Java objects.
I agree that a beginner programmer should learn to use real programming structures, but there is no reason they have ti learn it formally.
For a second, I thought your post was in jest, but I think it's more that you don't know any kids. While I'll admit to having played with some DOS SQL databases when I was young, most kids - especially bright kids- aren't interested in a structured course where they learn how to be a good warm body for the programming market... They have the rest of their life for that kind of bullshit, why raise them on it?
There is this awesome movie by Xerox (part of a big series) with Alan Kay called "Doing With Images Makes Symbols." It's about the creation of Smalltalk, the history of the GUI, including great stuff about Sutherland's Sketchpad and Doug Engelbart's work.
Anywho, in this video, Alan talks about the Smalltalk team's experiments with teaching Smalltalk to kids- ages 8-16 or so. One thing that kind of blew me away is that this one kid, on his own, created a circuit design application that had all the features and more of an application that had won a Nobel prize 10 years before it. Yes, a lot of this had to do with the immense power of the Smalltalk language *and* environment, but the fact that kind of power is available to a 12 year old (and not some super-freak genius) is pretty cool.
Just FYI- it's Squeak at Squeak.org There are a few newish Squeak books out, I've heard the book yuo mentioned is great.
OO doesn't mean a scary IDE. OO doesn't mean VB.NET or any other language on the .NET object model.
:) Kids end up learning OO by manipulating actual objects, in the form of graphical "Morphs," giving them functionality, changing their properties... until the day it clicks, and they decide they want a totally new "kind" of Morph.
Smalltalk has been used for teaching kids for 30 years, and with a good amount of success.
Part of the reason kids can learn Smalltalk well is that there is no need to learn and use OO off the bat. You can do a fair amount of stuff in Smalltalk just by using Object-Based Programming, rather than OOP. Object-based means *using* objects, creating them, but without a full dose of creating classes, etc.
Now a days, we have Squeak, which takes it to the next level. Kids can get a big return on their investment of time, creating moving, colorful things, while writing a very small amount of code. Unlike some environments for beginners, it scales up, being useful for creating big and scary applications with a lot of code.
Check out the demos- it's open source, and runs on just about every platform worth runnning, including Mac OS Classic/X, Windows > 3.1 (incl WinCE), and all modern Unices under X11 (or DirectFB, Linux FB, SDL).
The GUI tools you use under Unix seem relatively painless becuase of your background in the command-line and that way of thinking. To a person who is coming from a more blank or a just-a-user of Mac or Windows background will not feel even remotely the same way. There is a way of think involved which most people do not innately posess, it is something which is cultured.
And no, it's not the result of a fark photoshop contest.
Ha! You read my mind- I had at first thought it was something along those lines, too ugly to be real...
I've never heard about any standard Windows scripting *language,* but there is a standard Windows scripting system, called the Windows Scripting Host, WSH. It's not quite as nice the the Open Scripting Archetecture in Mac OS, but it isn't horrible.
WSH, like the OSA, is neat in that you can plug-in a number of different languages into it. In some ways, sort of a proto-.NET, as you can share functions between languages. That is, if I write up a function in Perl, I can share it throug the WSH to JScript, VBScript, or any other WSH language. Or vice-versa. PerlScript- the bridge between perl and the WSH- comes with the ActivePerl distro for Windows.
WSH is a neat toy, and I've used it for some automation on my work windows machine. But having done a lot of AppleScripting on my own and work Macs, I can say that WSH isn't as useful- most apps have no idea was WSH, and the apps which do support it, don't support the wealth of actions like Mac OS's OSA does. Mind you, AppleScript is just one language in the Mac OS OSA, and it happens to be the default one. However, you can get language extensions to script apps- just like you would in AppleScript- for Perl, JavaScript, Ruby and Tcl and more. (that was just off the top of my head)
Nobody is programming Doom III in anything except C, assembly, and maybe some C++. Does that make every other language irrelevant and worthless? No! I personally couldn't give a flying fuck about Doom III, and thankfully, never have to use C++. I must work on phantom appliacations! OOOOH SPOOKY!
I can't say I enjoy VB or use it anymore, but even being a staunch Smalltalk programmer, will not hesitate to use RealBasic (with which I can support Mac OS 9, X, and Windows) for an application for which it makes sense. There are a lot of applications out there which are written in VB, a lot more than you seem to think. Not just for very small, internal apps. Heck, a fair amount of people write a bunch of their code in C++, COMize it, then use it all from VB.
No, I feel the same way. I'm sure a lot of others do, considering how half of the posts we see in the Ask Slashdots today are full of "try google retard!" It wouldn't seem that far out for a /. editor to spend the 3 seconds to do so (google for palmos ssh client) that the poster didn't, and reject based on the ease of which something would be found.
;)
Or, there might be more of an agenda here. Perhaps the editor which posted this is a Zaurus user, and figured a lot of people would be like "H4h4 my Z can dooo it! PalmOS and WinCE CAN'T DO SSH! Hehahaaehe!" Followed by a bunch of suggestions for the user to buy an SL-5500. Maybe I'm just being paranoid though.
Uh, how would this be related? Compressing data files is a lot different from compiling to bytecode, or to a machine language which uses dynamic libraries.
I use mine DC a fair bit. Like others have mentioned, I use mine for emulation. For $30 it can't be beat- cheaper than buying even just another NES with a bunch of the games I wanted. Also cheaper than buying a TV out card and a gamepad for my iBook.
Heck, I didn't even own any real DC games until a month ago, when I picked up "Caution: Seaman." It was just NES, SNES, and GB up until then....
Ooh!
I found one method of real HWR for PalmOS- MyScript. And it lets you right anywhere on the screen, in recent versions.
Good enoguh to get me to switch to PalmOS? Not likely- I've played with the PocketPC version, and it requires a lot more getting used to than CalliGrapher or Transcriber do for getting reliable results. But something to consider all the same...
How do you figure you can reuse "most" of the speech recognition code for handwriting recognition? Largely a different problem. I could see using *some* of the code, the stuff that changes what is typed based on analysis of what the speaker/writing is trying to say, but that's about it...
Nope, as I pointed out, that is *character* recognition. Similarily, the PalmOS has no known methods of real HWR either, although there area couple of options for character recognition.
Platforms with real HWR that I know of are:
Newton OS (CalliGrapher and Rosetta)
EPOC32/Psion (using CalliGrapher)
Windows CE, incl PocketPC (CalliGrapher, Transcriber [uses same engine as CG])
Windows 9x/ME/NT/2k: PenOffice (uses CalliGrapher)
There is also Lexicus's real HWR, which although crappy, qualifies.
On a PocketPC using CalliGrapher 6, or my Newton MP2100, I easily can achieve 50 WPM with 99% accuracy in recognition. Much faster than I've been able to achieve with any character recognition scheme.
Also, FYI, the character recognition on the SL-5500 was brought into sync with what you can get on the SL-5600 with the new 3.10 ROM update. Which is good- prior to that, the CR on the SL-5500 was downright unusable- very slow and inaccurate. I'm happy to see that Trolltech or Sharp (?) has improved it. Waiting 500ms or more (when the multi-stroke delay was set to 250, the lowest) just to recognize a single letter is unacceptable.
I agree- the way MS has it setup by default in Tablet PC XP is ... suboptimal. Digital Ink is stupid unless the whole OS supports it- the Newton is a good example of how that can be done well. Non-ink-based HWR works fine in an OS which wasn't built around it- you draw and it makes text. You can edit the text, and the HWR software takes care of faking keystrokes. A good setup.
:)
I've used a PC with CalliGrapher/PenOffice on it and it worked pretty well. Naturally, nothing as nice as the integration that you get with an OS designed with the pen in mind from the start, but still.
Yo're not reduced to that on the tabletPC- no reason you cannot install PenOffice. I agree that you can get soft-kbs and stroke recognition on Linux that are as good as anything like that will get.
I think the lack of real HWR for Linux goes beyond just there not being many tablets. I think there is a deeper issue, although the lack of tablet-x86-ish hardware is a factor. From my discussions on a number of forums and irc channels, it seems that most Linux developers and users don't think there is any value in connected handwriting recognition. They often think that there is no psychological difference between writing a *word* just as you'd write it on paper and having the system be intelligent enough to translate that into plain-old text and picking apart each word you want to input into letters, seperating it all into the strokes which match up with them.
I am not saying there will never be real HWR for Linux, but it is likely a long way off. For one, as I mused about above, too many Linux users and developers think that real HWR is a good for nothing "Eat Up Martha." Second, real HWR that is accurate, consistent, and fast enough on semi-modern hardware isn't the easiest thing to code. It's the kind of thing people do real research on, spending a lot of man-hours developing. Not to say that kind of work isn't or hasn't been done in the OSS community- it certainly has. It just seems to be a level beyond the majority of OSS projects. Granted, a good HWR system is a level beyond most software projects in general... I hope I'm proven wrong! It may take a number of years, but I'd love to be able to have my handwriting recognizer be open source.
Ink software is something I think will come even slower. Sure, folks will probably hack something on ala Microsoft, but creating a good Ink/Text system will require the rewrite of GUI toolkits. Who knows? Perhaps we'll see a new GUI or X11 toolkit integrate this at the ground floor, and take over within a few short years...
The Sharp Zaurus- all models- have character recognition, not HWR. Unless there is a 3rd party app I've not heard of. Granted, I owned a 5500, not a 5600, but I have been lucky enough to play with a 5600. Are you thinking of the input method sharp calls "Handwriting," in the input panel which is used for character recognition, or something completely different?
Yes, this is kind of neat.
But for me, I won't bother with Linux on any stylus-only machine until you can get something resembling real HWR for Linux. Yes, there are softkeyboards and plenty of character recognition schemes. That isn't HWR.
While I'd rather use Linux than Windows for a number of the usual reasons, if I had a tablet, I'd use Win2k on it. At least with Windows I can get real HWR- in the form of PenOffice/CalliGrapher.
While the regular consumer cannot get real HWR for Linux, it does exist. Motorola's Lexicus division makes real HWR software for a number of platforms including Linux. However, you can't download it and install it for free, or even purchse it. You can as an OEM, but that doesn't do me much good. That, and it really blows- I've used Lexicus's HWR on a ProGear webpad under Linux. First, you have to write in a little box, not just anywhere on the screen. You cannot expand the dictionary- so you'll likely be going back to the softkb for names, etc. It is also very slow, at least on a 400 MHz Crusoe. Oh well...
I'd love to be proven wrong. If anyonem knows of any other real HWR software for Linux commercial or free, please holler!
People may blow off Altivec G4 performance, thinking that it's something very few applications take advantage of. That was true with Mac OS 9- all but a few, specifically coded apps would be any faster on a G4 than a G3, given the same bus, RAM, CPU MHz. Without Altivec, a G4 is about 15% or so faster in raw FP ops than a G3 of the same speed. Int ops are about the same.
But most folks don't run OS 9 anymore as their primary OS, for a number of good reasons. People run OS X. And OS X has Altivec optimization throughout the core of the system- in libmath and others. Anyone who has used both has noticed a signifigant speed increase in OS X when moving from, say, a G3/500 to a G4/500 that doesn't exist in OS 9.
It is a good thing to know, acedemically, that Altivec is the reason dnetc is so fast on a G4 and that there is no equivalent on the Athlon or a P4. However, this does not change the fact that the G4 performs so much better than the x86 processors available- and isn't that end-of-the-day, real-world performance what matters? It's not like someone can say "The Athlon doesn't have a vector processing unit- so you have to take it out of the G4!" and expect some "more fair" comparison. The G4 is the G4 and the Athlon is the Athlon.
I think he uses it for TV. He showed a CD for WinTV in one of the photos. Maybe it's a crazy jump, but he just might have a TV in card...
It may come as a shock, but XP has terminals too. You can also to such crazy things as run emacs and ssh. I know, it sounds crazy- and the first time I heard this, I didn't believe it either! All these years of people telling me that you could only run Solitaire and FPS on Windows... All these years were a lie. Well, at least people like you are lucky to have nice folks like me keep you out of the closet of ignorance! :)