This seems a lot cooler than Citrix, VNC, TS, or remote X11, at least when it comes to getting to the data on your desktop with your PDA. This sort of thing is neat, but only neccesary because most current software- for PDAs and desktops a like, suck. They're not designed for sharing data. I'd rather be using an interface made for a PDA than have to be constantly scrolling a huge desktop app.
I have a Zaurus SL-5500. It doesn't do a lot of things that the commercial solutions have achieved- including what this article is talking about. Read it. There also isn't a decent notetaking app that anywhere near the quality or functionality of the Newton notes from the original newton released in 1993. Hell, nothing on the Z is as good as the notes app that comes with PocketPC.
The Z is cool in a lot of ways, but it is moronic to lie about such things. The Zaurus has no way to reproduce this functionality. Yes, you can do SSH and/or X11 on the Z- but you can also do it on PocketPC. And just like on the Z, you can do X and/or SSH on PocketPC and WinCE devices using Open and Free Software.
That would explain the time when "THE SHRUB" appeared with his pants on backwards. This whole time we thought he was an incompetant idiot- he should've just told us it was Opposite Day! But then again, I guess as a part of OD, he had to say "Hey folks, it is a Normal Day today!" Asshole.
I've not tried this new version, so I can't say whether or not is feels faster than older releases. I've had a similar experience with NetBeans myself. I don't think it could get *much* faster, as it does still rely on Swing; and it relies on Swing to do some pretty complex stuff with a bucket-load of widgets used at the same time.
So, I imagine it still chugs. Keep on using Eclipse, which doesn't use Swing, if something non-chugging suits your fancy. Or, buy a new super-mega-ultra-fast machine just so you can run Swing apps without wait 10 seconds for menus to pop up.
I am not sure about this Java cart (slashdotted!), but you can get 128 MB and plus flash cart for the GBA that you can program on you PC. You can use this for MP3s, stolen GBA ROMs, homebrew s/w or emulators. Tasty.
It would depend on the speed of the Java stamp. The Java stamp could provide a Java-based user experience that was faster or slower than the equivalent of a C program written for the GBA; or it could provide a faster or even slower user experience than even a Java app written for the GBA itself. I presume they've aimed for a decent speed though... But just using a Java chip says nothing about the speed at which it executes bytecodes compared to how the GBA does its own instructions.
I must admit- I was an Opera fan myself. But... Why the hell should I put up with ads or buy Opera when I have a perfectly good browser in Safari or Camino? With decent browsers to take the place of Opera, I no longer have to waste my time and trouble my conscience looking for copies of Surfer's Serials for an Opera reg.:/
I do use Opera on my Zaurus. Recently though, I've been using Konq instead of it though.:P (multiple windows)
Call me lucky or average, but I've not had any real problems with using the finder to do the FTP stuff. At first it was weird, because it gaave me no indication that it was delegating it to the finder, but past that... no problems. One time, however, I did get 10 instances of an FTP site mounted- not sure what is up with that. But I just selected all of them and Cmd-E'd them into non-existance. Don't have any problems with the SWOD though.
Why use a browser where you'd have to wait around for the same features that Safari have to be added later? Why use Camino anymore when Safari is doing what Camino does, and faster?
All the same, who cares? Why start this shit when there is no real answer?
You can get HP calc emulators for PocketPC and WinCE as well. I was using one on an iPAQ over a year ago. I do not know how new this POS version is, but all the same, it isn't something you can do on WinCE/PPC and Linux PDAs already.
Why the hell would this emulator- not written or supported by HP- have anything to do with HP producing POS-based PDAs? It's like making the deduction that OH! Windows runs on my Mac using VPC or Bochs - I bet Apple will be dumping OS X and switching to Win 95 soon! OOHHHOO!
EXEs could also use overlay files. I that that just got you around the limitation of the size of EXE files- I don't remember the cap, but they must've been.
I can see it now- while your droid is cooking dinner, DroidSoftCE crashes, and you see the Blue Eyes of Death- flashing, blinking solid bright, electric, full navy blue as he slowly approaches you.... SCARY.
Seriously though: Does WinCE have a BSOD? I've run WinCE quite a bit in the last few years, both as a PDA platform, but more so as a general OS for doing my everyday computing. (Web browsing, programming [on WinCE, not just for it], SSHing, email, IRC, LaTeX) I have had it crash some, but it's actually been quite stable- far fewer crashes for me on my Jornada 720 and iPAQ than I've had with desktop Windows 98 and XP. You'd think XP could manage to keep stable- who knew? For me, WinCE and Win2k have similar stabilities. I'd much rather have WinCE powering my droids than anything else by M$.:)
Many years back- well, not that many- I used to make a lot of music. This was back under DOS using FastTracker ][ on the family 486. From ages 13 to 19, I put together a couple albums worth of crappy industrial and electronic music- above all, it was fun.
Around age 18, I built my own PC, moving off of the 5 year old family 486 onto a K6-2. I transfered all of my samples, MIDI files, and XMs to the new and flashy 8 GB HD from the 10 or so ZIP disks I had litering the family 'puter area.
Shortly thereafter, I lost all of my music to a harddrive crash. (Haven't considered buying a Maxtor since!) Fuck. With my only reason for using DOS/Windows gone, I switched to OpenStep as my primary OS. I had been usign Linux and Windows before that, and retained Linux for some stuff, but OpenStep was bootiful. But no tracker software.
Later that year, I bought a Mac, in love with OpenStep and Rhapsody DR2/x86. I was dispointed to find that there were no good tracking apps, or MIDI apps that gave you a tracker-like interface for doing MIDI out. There was PlayerPro, but I couldn't afford it, especially when I had never used it and didn't want to buy it if it was going to be yet another piano roll tracker. I guess I was just so used to using FT][, knowing all of the kb commands, etc, that I never was efficient with a piano roll or regular score.
Perhaps now I'll take the time to relearn my lost art with this new source-opening. Kudos to the PP folks, and here's to so much crappy music made by so many of us!!
I can't make any claims about doing CE development for the last five years- I've been doing development on CE only for the last two, and didn't start using it until WinCE 3.0.
However, for me, it has been quite stable- more so than Win98 and WinXP. Perhaps your code is a bit... ugly. All the same, WinCE should be able to deal with it. But for me, in the two years of use and development, I've had next to no real crashes. I use it as a tool quite often, although for the time being, I've switched to embedded Linux for the same development and use. That said, there isn't anything which I can do on my Zaurus that I couldn't also do on my iPAQ and Jornada 720. On the other hand, there was plenty that I could do on my WinCE PDAs, but not on the Zaurus, unfortunately. But I had my reasons for switching.
I think there is tons more development going on WinCE in the area of business apps. Take a look at PocketPC and other uses of WinCE. Yes, there are tons of games, but the primary purpose of a PDA isn't gaming, and who develops what reflects this.
Gaming would be great for WinCE, but not until there are some real gaming APIs, I don't see it taking over in that area. The Dreamcast ran WinCE- surely there was some game API there, and there is GAPI on PocketPC. But what kind of contenders to OpenGL or DirectX can any developer get now? On the other hand, business (very liberally used) apps have most or all of the API support they need already in place.
Call me crazy (again), but I can't wait until a PDA can replace my desktop/notebook. It got pretty close with the Newton, and could've within a generation or two (at most) of Newton technology.
Current PDAs suck, though. Very much so a step backwards. Even so, there are some good things, like the HP Jornada 72x and the Sharp Zaurii. Give me a Sharp Zaurus with a touch-typable keyboard around the size of the Jornada 720's (not just a big thumboard like the C700), a ~600 MHz XScale, some means of using a larger monitor and a larger res, and I'd be happy with all other features being the same with something like the current Zaurus SL-C700- 640x480 screen, 64 MB RAM, 32 MB Flash ROM, SD + CF slots. I'd sell my iBook in a minute if I could get one of those.
I have actually been using a Jornada 720 with a 206 MHz StrongARM CPU largely as my main machine. Wireless and wired web browsing, writing up reports (with LaTeX), email, SSH, and programming all on the device, never neededing to do anything silly like sync with a desktop. Hell, I probably would have sold my iBook and just used the Jornada 720 as my only machine, but the screen isn't readable at all out of doors- it isn't reflective like the Zaurus or iPAQ screen. Nor is my iBook's, but if I'm going to consolodate all devices into one, I better be able to use it for everything I currently use my PDAs and iBook for.
And I'm definately a special case in the general computer using population, perhaps more or less so with the nerd/programming community. But I want a computer that I can power off of a relatively small solar panel, and I want it now!
Call me nuts, but I must prefer Windows CE to desktop versions of Windows. In my experience, on comparable hardware, WinCE is a lot faster, more stable, and far less bloated. A lot of this has to do with the reduced functionality along with the fact that it was made from scratch (more or less)- but WinCE does what I need from desktop Windows.
On Handheld PC 2000, based on WinCE 3.0, you even have a full version of IE 4.5. A little dated, yes, but it renders pages well enough for me. It does a lot more than the version of IE that comes with PocketPC, which doesn't d as much as the IE on H/PC. I imagine in WinCE 4.0 the IE will be derived from 5 or 5.5- even better.
Granted, I'm working on my own environment to completely supplant PocketPC on my PDA, run OS X on my notebook, and have been developing my PDA OS on a Zaurus (switched from an iPAQ and a Jornada 720 recently). That said, if I were going to buy a webpad that wasn't running Linux or OS X, I'd much rather it be running Windows CE than Windows 95/98/2k/XP. Hell, you can get a lot of Unix ports for WinCE even. I wrote a lot of papers on my Jornada 720 (with the nice built-in keyboard) using LaTeX. Pocket Word sucks, but WinCE could certainly accomodate a much better word processor, and 3rd parties have written them.
No, in current conditions, WinCE wouldn't be good for using as a gaming PC, but for almost anything else, it would be better for a lot of users.
There are a lot of inexperienced users who run every program maximized, at least such is my experience doing support with a few different groups. Sometimes these people get freaked out when you un-maximize something and proceed to drag data from one window to another- bound to freak 'em out every time.:)
heh...doesn't it make you feel old when you recall the days of single and double diget Mhz computers:-)
Nah- you don't have to be that old to remember those. Especially double-digit MHzes- plenty of 16 year olders grew up with original Pentium machines.
Now, you gotta feel old if you recall the days where people actually measured clock speed in KHz, not MHz. I mean, I'm only 22 and used to use 1 MHz machines all the time when I was a kid.:P...and slower!
Except that people like Alan Kay are doing new things, continuing to be visionaries. See Squeak Smalltalk (http://www.squeak.org) - the platform of development for Alan Kay and a lot of others. They are doing a lot of cool, new stuff- most of which is written off by most Slashkiddies because it isn't C/GTK+/Unix.
OPIE is based on the software that the Zaurus runs. Both OPIE and the stock Sharp ROM support Unicode. How well they support Japanese out of the box is another issue- just supporting Unicode isn't enough. I imagine that it can support these languages- the Sharp Zaurus SL-C700 supports Jp well enough that it is sold to Japenese consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems a lot cooler than Citrix, VNC, TS, or remote X11, at least when it comes to getting to the data on your desktop with your PDA. This sort of thing is neat, but only neccesary because most current software- for PDAs and desktops a like, suck. They're not designed for sharing data. I'd rather be using an interface made for a PDA than have to be constantly scrolling a huge desktop app.
Read the article.
I have a Zaurus SL-5500. It doesn't do a lot of things that the commercial solutions have achieved- including what this article is talking about. Read it. There also isn't a decent notetaking app that anywhere near the quality or functionality of the Newton notes from the original newton released in 1993. Hell, nothing on the Z is as good as the notes app that comes with PocketPC.
The Z is cool in a lot of ways, but it is moronic to lie about such things. The Zaurus has no way to reproduce this functionality. Yes, you can do SSH and/or X11 on the Z- but you can also do it on PocketPC. And just like on the Z, you can do X and/or SSH on PocketPC and WinCE devices using Open and Free Software.
What about syncing with a Mac?
haha,
C: Fuck it up Bush!
W: I'm about to!
C: Fuck it up Bush!
W: That's what I was born to do!
That would explain the time when "THE SHRUB" appeared with his pants on backwards. This whole time we thought he was an incompetant idiot- he should've just told us it was Opposite Day! But then again, I guess as a part of OD, he had to say "Hey folks, it is a Normal Day today!" Asshole.
I've not tried this new version, so I can't say whether or not is feels faster than older releases. I've had a similar experience with NetBeans myself. I don't think it could get *much* faster, as it does still rely on Swing; and it relies on Swing to do some pretty complex stuff with a bucket-load of widgets used at the same time.
So, I imagine it still chugs. Keep on using Eclipse, which doesn't use Swing, if something non-chugging suits your fancy. Or, buy a new super-mega-ultra-fast machine just so you can run Swing apps without wait 10 seconds for menus to pop up.
I am not sure about this Java cart (slashdotted!), but you can get 128 MB and plus flash cart for the GBA that you can program on you PC. You can use this for MP3s, stolen GBA ROMs, homebrew s/w or emulators. Tasty.
It would depend on the speed of the Java stamp. The Java stamp could provide a Java-based user experience that was faster or slower than the equivalent of a C program written for the GBA; or it could provide a faster or even slower user experience than even a Java app written for the GBA itself. I presume they've aimed for a decent speed though... But just using a Java chip says nothing about the speed at which it executes bytecodes compared to how the GBA does its own instructions.
My guess is that it has to do with the aligment of the planets. :P I am behind a NAT as well.
I must admit- I was an Opera fan myself. But... Why the hell should I put up with ads or buy Opera when I have a perfectly good browser in Safari or Camino? With decent browsers to take the place of Opera, I no longer have to waste my time and trouble my conscience looking for copies of Surfer's Serials for an Opera reg. :/
:P (multiple windows)
I do use Opera on my Zaurus. Recently though, I've been using Konq instead of it though.
Call me lucky or average, but I've not had any real problems with using the finder to do the FTP stuff. At first it was weird, because it gaave me no indication that it was delegating it to the finder, but past that... no problems. One time, however, I did get 10 instances of an FTP site mounted- not sure what is up with that. But I just selected all of them and Cmd-E'd them into non-existance. Don't have any problems with the SWOD though.
Why use a browser where you'd have to wait around for the same features that Safari have to be added later? Why use Camino anymore when Safari is doing what Camino does, and faster?
All the same, who cares? Why start this shit when there is no real answer?
You can get HP calc emulators for PocketPC and WinCE as well. I was using one on an iPAQ over a year ago. I do not know how new this POS version is, but all the same, it isn't something you can do on WinCE/PPC and Linux PDAs already.
Why the hell would this emulator- not written or supported by HP- have anything to do with HP producing POS-based PDAs? It's like making the deduction that OH! Windows runs on my Mac using VPC or Bochs - I bet Apple will be dumping OS X and switching to Win 95 soon! OOHHHOO!
EXEs could also use overlay files. I that that just got you around the limitation of the size of EXE files- I don't remember the cap, but they must've been.
I can see it now- while your droid is cooking dinner, DroidSoftCE crashes, and you see the Blue Eyes of Death- flashing, blinking solid bright, electric, full navy blue as he slowly approaches you.... SCARY.
:)
Seriously though: Does WinCE have a BSOD? I've run WinCE quite a bit in the last few years, both as a PDA platform, but more so as a general OS for doing my everyday computing. (Web browsing, programming [on WinCE, not just for it], SSHing, email, IRC, LaTeX) I have had it crash some, but it's actually been quite stable- far fewer crashes for me on my Jornada 720 and iPAQ than I've had with desktop Windows 98 and XP. You'd think XP could manage to keep stable- who knew? For me, WinCE and Win2k have similar stabilities. I'd much rather have WinCE powering my droids than anything else by M$.
This sounds great!
Many years back- well, not that many- I used to make a lot of music. This was back under DOS using FastTracker ][ on the family 486. From ages 13 to 19, I put together a couple albums worth of crappy industrial and electronic music- above all, it was fun.
Around age 18, I built my own PC, moving off of the 5 year old family 486 onto a K6-2. I transfered all of my samples, MIDI files, and XMs to the new and flashy 8 GB HD from the 10 or so ZIP disks I had litering the family 'puter area.
Shortly thereafter, I lost all of my music to a harddrive crash. (Haven't considered buying a Maxtor since!) Fuck. With my only reason for using DOS/Windows gone, I switched to OpenStep as my primary OS. I had been usign Linux and Windows before that, and retained Linux for some stuff, but OpenStep was bootiful. But no tracker software.
Later that year, I bought a Mac, in love with OpenStep and Rhapsody DR2/x86. I was dispointed to find that there were no good tracking apps, or MIDI apps that gave you a tracker-like interface for doing MIDI out. There was PlayerPro, but I couldn't afford it, especially when I had never used it and didn't want to buy it if it was going to be yet another piano roll tracker. I guess I was just so used to using FT][, knowing all of the kb commands, etc, that I never was efficient with a piano roll or regular score.
Perhaps now I'll take the time to relearn my lost art with this new source-opening. Kudos to the PP folks, and here's to so much crappy music made by so many of us!!
I can't make any claims about doing CE development for the last five years- I've been doing development on CE only for the last two, and didn't start using it until WinCE 3.0.
However, for me, it has been quite stable- more so than Win98 and WinXP. Perhaps your code is a bit... ugly. All the same, WinCE should be able to deal with it. But for me, in the two years of use and development, I've had next to no real crashes. I use it as a tool quite often, although for the time being, I've switched to embedded Linux for the same development and use. That said, there isn't anything which I can do on my Zaurus that I couldn't also do on my iPAQ and Jornada 720. On the other hand, there was plenty that I could do on my WinCE PDAs, but not on the Zaurus, unfortunately. But I had my reasons for switching.
I think there is tons more development going on WinCE in the area of business apps. Take a look at PocketPC and other uses of WinCE. Yes, there are tons of games, but the primary purpose of a PDA isn't gaming, and who develops what reflects this.
Gaming would be great for WinCE, but not until there are some real gaming APIs, I don't see it taking over in that area. The Dreamcast ran WinCE- surely there was some game API there, and there is GAPI on PocketPC. But what kind of contenders to OpenGL or DirectX can any developer get now? On the other hand, business (very liberally used) apps have most or all of the API support they need already in place.
Yes.
Heh.
Call me crazy (again), but I can't wait until a PDA can replace my desktop/notebook. It got pretty close with the Newton, and could've within a generation or two (at most) of Newton technology.
Current PDAs suck, though. Very much so a step backwards. Even so, there are some good things, like the HP Jornada 72x and the Sharp Zaurii. Give me a Sharp Zaurus with a touch-typable keyboard around the size of the Jornada 720's (not just a big thumboard like the C700), a ~600 MHz XScale, some means of using a larger monitor and a larger res, and I'd be happy with all other features being the same with something like the current Zaurus SL-C700- 640x480 screen, 64 MB RAM, 32 MB Flash ROM, SD + CF slots. I'd sell my iBook in a minute if I could get one of those.
I have actually been using a Jornada 720 with a 206 MHz StrongARM CPU largely as my main machine. Wireless and wired web browsing, writing up reports (with LaTeX), email, SSH, and programming all on the device, never neededing to do anything silly like sync with a desktop. Hell, I probably would have sold my iBook and just used the Jornada 720 as my only machine, but the screen isn't readable at all out of doors- it isn't reflective like the Zaurus or iPAQ screen. Nor is my iBook's, but if I'm going to consolodate all devices into one, I better be able to use it for everything I currently use my PDAs and iBook for.
And I'm definately a special case in the general computer using population, perhaps more or less so with the nerd/programming community. But I want a computer that I can power off of a relatively small solar panel, and I want it now!
Call me nuts, but I must prefer Windows CE to desktop versions of Windows. In my experience, on comparable hardware, WinCE is a lot faster, more stable, and far less bloated. A lot of this has to do with the reduced functionality along with the fact that it was made from scratch (more or less)- but WinCE does what I need from desktop Windows.
On Handheld PC 2000, based on WinCE 3.0, you even have a full version of IE 4.5. A little dated, yes, but it renders pages well enough for me. It does a lot more than the version of IE that comes with PocketPC, which doesn't d as much as the IE on H/PC. I imagine in WinCE 4.0 the IE will be derived from 5 or 5.5- even better.
Granted, I'm working on my own environment to completely supplant PocketPC on my PDA, run OS X on my notebook, and have been developing my PDA OS on a Zaurus (switched from an iPAQ and a Jornada 720 recently). That said, if I were going to buy a webpad that wasn't running Linux or OS X, I'd much rather it be running Windows CE than Windows 95/98/2k/XP. Hell, you can get a lot of Unix ports for WinCE even. I wrote a lot of papers on my Jornada 720 (with the nice built-in keyboard) using LaTeX. Pocket Word sucks, but WinCE could certainly accomodate a much better word processor, and 3rd parties have written them.
No, in current conditions, WinCE wouldn't be good for using as a gaming PC, but for almost anything else, it would be better for a lot of users.
There are a lot of inexperienced users who run every program maximized, at least such is my experience doing support with a few different groups. Sometimes these people get freaked out when you un-maximize something and proceed to drag data from one window to another- bound to freak 'em out every time. :)
heh...doesn't it make you feel old when you recall the days of single and double diget Mhz computers :-)
:P ...and slower!
Nah- you don't have to be that old to remember those. Especially double-digit MHzes- plenty of 16 year olders grew up with original Pentium machines.
Now, you gotta feel old if you recall the days where people actually measured clock speed in KHz, not MHz. I mean, I'm only 22 and used to use 1 MHz machines all the time when I was a kid.
Except that people like Alan Kay are doing new things, continuing to be visionaries. See Squeak Smalltalk (http://www.squeak.org) - the platform of development for Alan Kay and a lot of others. They are doing a lot of cool, new stuff- most of which is written off by most Slashkiddies because it isn't C/GTK+/Unix.
OPIE is based on the software that the Zaurus runs. Both OPIE and the stock Sharp ROM support Unicode. How well they support Japanese out of the box is another issue- just supporting Unicode isn't enough. I imagine that it can support these languages- the Sharp Zaurus SL-C700 supports Jp well enough that it is sold to Japenese consumers.