Actually, that probably is generous. $700 artist-profit out of $7000 spent is 10%. I doubt most musicians get as high as 10% of the end-sale price. He's not talking about musicians getting $700 total for their efforts, but $700 from his $7000 spent.
Couple years back, when I was taking General Biology I my sophomore year, we saw some video about the Human Genome Project, where Venter said just this. Which makes this old news. Not like this matters, old news is a popular topic on slashdot.:P
Huh? Newtons don't need keyboards. But there is a Newton keyboard. And it can be great for word processing, or programing NewtonScript or Lisp on the Newton itself.:)
Someone should tell these fine people about eBay- it's a great place to pick up used crap. They can get their Newtons and SEs for cheap. Oi. If not, I've an MP2100u that I'm willing to part with for a measly $500 (including keyboard, ethernet card, modem, nice carrying case, 4 MB and 2 MB flash cards) and an SE for $100! WITH A 10 MB HD! If you're really lucky, I'll sell you my AT&T UNIXpc or NeXT cube for $2000!
Pretty ticky area around here. They don't usually inhabit trees, but grasses. Also, the kinds of woods I'd usually take naps in are in parts of the greenbar of this town. Middle of a city with 100k people, but miles of beautiful wooded area right next to my house.
Not very often. Not been to the woods many time, have you?
Ticks are very common in grassy areas. Laying down on a bed of pine needles is not really tick territory. You're far more likely to get ticks by walking through prarie-type grasslands. However, in field work in wetlands, I've taken offf 40+ ticks in a day...
Call me crazy, but just because I'm a geek, it doesn't mean I have to be some lazy tard that can't do anything but drink coffee and read 'blogs.' Maybe I'm abnormal, but I do things outside of using a computer.
I camp. I walk a lot. I bike a lot. I go take naps in the woods. I garden. I hike. I program on my iBook or my iPAQ (with Squeak) while sitting in the woods, having had to hike a few miles to get to a nice place to sit.
For the biking and walking, I don't go out of my way to do it. It's just part of the way I live. When there's not snow on the ground, it's my main method of getting around. I suppose that's not possible if you're living in some gigantic post-apocalyptic hell hole, though.
And for the other things, I live in a very green town, with lots of nice big parts and a sanctioned green-belt, so taking naps in the woods isn't extraordinary. Just a way of life.:)
Now, I suppose some people really strive for their activities to be labeled as something a 'geek' would do, trying to live that 'cool' middle school clique feeling that they may have missed out on the first time around. Can't say I identify with that, but to each her own.
So, I suppose you could make the above activities 'geeky' by bringing a PDA and doing something useful with it. If you're not going to do something useful with it, however, do yourself a favor and leave it at home.
For instance, I'll write a bunch of code on my iPAQ. May not be as practical for others, but the programming environment I use on my desktop is the same one I use on my PDA, so code flows back and forth easily, and I can work on the same problems as if I were at my desk. Some people think it's some disgrace to "Nature" to program in the middle of a forest. Frankly, I find it beautiful and peaceful. Especially after a mind-clearing hike. And it sure beats being stuck inside on a beautiful spring day!
The Rev A iMac doesn't have FireWire ports. Unless you know something we don't, FireWire isn't an option.
For external options, there's SCSI and USB left. USB sucks really hard for CD-RW drives. My girlfriend bought a QPS Que! drive for her Rev B iMac. Besides being a horrible company, their drive is shit too, but some of that I fear has something to do with the speed of USB.
SCSI may be an option, see this. I'm not sure how easy these SCSI cards for the mezzanine slot in the Rev A and B iMacs are to come around anymore. My girlfriend has a Voodoo2 in her iMac and it works great. A USB-SCSI converter wouldn't be advisable.
I've seen an *internal* iMac CD-RW model or two, but they were pretty spendy. I'm told they they were kind of flaky too. I think your best bet would be to have an external enclosure.
There also: Sawfish which is written using rep, which is a lisp-dialect similar to elisp.
GWM, another lisp-based WM, dialect is called "WOOL" (Window Object Oriented Language). Interesting and old.
GwML, a WM written in O'Caml. You even get an emacs clone scriptable and written in O'Caml as part of the package!
Tkwm doesn't look maintained, for creating WMs (not just desktops, mind you) in Tcl/Tk.
There are straight-up X11 bindings for other languages, which could also be used for creating window managers, with the same method of doing so in C. Ruby and Squeak Smalltalk has them for sure.
A lot of people scoff at the idea of doing this, but frankly, I can't imagine how and why people deal with static, inconsistent environments. Having your parts of your system written in a dynamic language that you can grok means that you can make the changes to your enviornment when you want to. May seem stupid to a lot of computer users and self-proclaimed hax0rs, but for me, that is what makes a computer personal. Same reason people like emacs, I suppose.
Actually, I've read a study or two that suggests that you can have a debt of sleep, that can be repaid, eventually bringing you to a 7.5-8 hour/night pattern.
You can already create your own window managers in perl. Perlwm comes with what you need. I have a feeling you're not talking about creating window managers, but simply GUI apps. Not sure why you'd create a WM in XUL. For creating RAD GUI apps, you can use one of the GUI builders for Tk, Qt, or GTK+ (among others, probably) and create a GUI for perl.
The guy who said: "He said "they'll all be as 'first-class' as an app written in C#". You're the troll, dumbass. If you knew anything about the JVM you'd know the other languages are a hack compared to Java."
Was right.
Compiling to the JVM isn't special. I cannot subclass a Python class from within Java, but more importantly, from yet another language on the JVM, Silk for example. Other languages running on the JVM isn't "transparent language interop" it's retargeting for a different instruction set. Nice troll though.
Amen. Frankly, I don't like C#. I don't generally like to put up with lame-ass ALGOL-derived languages like C, C++, Java or C#. The beauty of.NET is that I don't have to. I can code apps in Smalltalk, Lisp or Perl, and they'll all be as 'first-class' as an app written in C#.
I agree, taking notes on my iPAQ is a pain in ass. Again, the weight didn't bother me, comapred to the weight of a bookbag. But a modern version would be quite a bit smaller and lighter, yet retaining the big screen.
Making the oft-made mistake of reading the comments, I've noticed that there is a lot of ignotance in regards to handwriting recognition (HWR).
It seems people equate real HWR with the HWR on the first Newton model, as seen on the Simpsons. That's not the case. After a couple years, when the Newton devices reached the Newton OS 2.0 version, HWR had progressed lightyears. HWR has come a long way in the last 9 years since the original Newton MessagePad.
Fortunately, real HWR didn't die with the Newton. On the downside, it seems that the ParaGraph system is the only provider that exists today, with the same engine (derived from the Newton OS system) in a few implementations.
For desktop Windows, there is PenOffice; for WinCE/PocketPC, there is CalliGrapher; and MS Transcriber, a free version with the same core as CalliGrapher, but with fewer handy features.
With either CalliGrapher or the Newton, the experience of myself and others is that with 2 months of training the neural net by making corrections brings the accuracy up to 99%+ at 40-60 WPM. I tried to use Graffiti and other character recognition (CR) methods before finding real HWR for longer periods of time with pitiful results.
I have horrible handwriting. The great thing about real HWR is that it's incrementally trainable. A neural net learns your handwriting style better than even programmable stroke-based systems can.
Pure real HWR isn't always the best thing when writing code for languages with an overly complex algol-ish syntax. However, used in tandem with programmable a stroke system or macros within the HWR system, it can work out very well.
For example, a program called PenCommander comes with CalliGrapher for PocketPC. PenCommander allows you to program macros. I like to hack Smalltalk, Scheme, and perl on my iPAQ. Smalltalk and Scheme aren't problems, due to the fact that there's almost no syntax and punctuation, and that the function, method and class names are more word-like.
For perl, I have macros set-up. For example, to create a new sub, I have write the word "sub" and circle it, which expands to:
sub SUB {
my ($x, $y, @z) = @_;
return 0; }
It's a shame that real HWR is confined to the one implementation by ParaGraph. I imagine this is due, at least in part, to the mythology of the Newton, and the impressions of the first three models. As a result, there is only real HWR for the Newton, WinCE, and desktop Windows. I reccomend you try one out for a few months, if you have a PPC or a tablet-based Windows machine. If there was real HWR for Linux, I could dump WinCE on my iPAQ. The only reasons I use WinCE is for the real HWR- I can't imagine putting up with Jot, Graffiti, xstroke, wavvy, &c again!
One of the reasons why the Apple Newton PDA failed so miserably was its promise of usable handwriting recognition. Unfortunately, that promise turned out to be more a case of wishful thinking.
Heh. Good thing you're not modded up, or you'd be perpetuating this myth- one that is especially blindly spouted here on slashdot.
The first few models of the Newton's HWR sucked. Pretty bad. After a year and a half, Newton OS 2.0 came out, with new HWR recognizers, and it got it right. Far faster input than Graffiti or other character and stroke based methods.
Fortunately, real HWR didn't die with the Newton. ParaGraph's CalliGrapher exists for WinCE, providing a more efficient, real HWR based, means of inputting on a PDA. There is also a version for the Windoze on the desktop called PenOffice. Unfortunately there is no such thing as real HWR for the Mac or Linux platforms though.
Having used both a Newton 2100u and an iPAQ with CalliGrapher, both a Newton and Palm device with Graffiti (originated on the Newton), Jot, the built-in character recognizer in PocketPC, as well as various programmable character recognition means, I've quite a bit of experience with HWR in the real world.
It appears that you don't have experience with much in the way of HWR, except perhaps on a Palm. That's fine, but it isn't very scientific to pull stuff out of your rear without any experience to back it.
After 3 months of using my Newton and iPAQ (w/ CalliGrapher), I found I can get between 40-60 WPM. That was not counting any words fewer than three characters, so that number may be higher, but I wasn't sure how to determine WPM for sure. That's including making corrections. Around 99% accuracy for words, 90% for punctuation.
I tend to get higher WPMs on the Newton, mostly because the larger screen accomdates more words at a time, and that the recognition is rolling, rather than happening at once when I lift the pen. That is, if I write "hello my name is armondo," it will have recognized as text "hello my name" by the time I am writing the word "armondo."
Individual handwriting recognition technology for the masses may still be a pipe dream.
Try a real HWR system for a while, meaning a month or two. The same amount of time is required to get used to Graffiti, so I think that's fair. During that time, correct it. The real HWR schemes of which I know train a neural net against your corrections, and learn your HWR style over time.
Indeed. On slashdot, most of the kids here have no idea of what the Newton was, other than "it sux0r3d d00d!" But the sad fact, is on this iPAQ, everything is so relatively inconsistent and pain-in-the-ass. You don't really notice appreciate the Newton until it's gone, or until you start to try to use WinCE/PocketPC or PalmOS.:P There's nothing that a Newton can do that a Palm OS/PPC device can't, just like you can do everything in assembly that you can in Common Lisp. It'll just take a lot more time and be a lot less elegant.
As far as size, yeah it was kind of a pain. Until recently, I carried around a MP2100u to my classes and generally most places I went. The size didn't much bother me, because it was better to carry the Newton than a book bag with a bunch of notes and books and/or my iBook- I had it all in the Newton. So, if you want a PDA just for an overpriced, status-symbol daybook, the Newton is definately not what you need. But, if you're like me, and want to be able to carry a huge amount of information around, take all of your college lecture notes, play games, read books, and hack on genetic algorithms all in one place, the Newton definately beats out the other options.
Frankly, I'm disapointed by the other options in the PDA market today. It's sad, really. So, to try to recreate a little of the Newton spirit, I'm working on Dynapad, which isn't a Newton clone per se, but a PDA environment that will embody many of the core ideas and goals of the Newton, as a truly personal communicator, a computer, and an information device.
Slashdot Mirror
Then why don't you do it?
Actually, that probably is generous. $700 artist-profit out of $7000 spent is 10%. I doubt most musicians get as high as 10% of the end-sale price. He's not talking about musicians getting $700 total for their efforts, but $700 from his $7000 spent.
It was a myth?
Couple years back, when I was taking General Biology I my sophomore year, we saw some video about the Human Genome Project, where Venter said just this. Which makes this old news. Not like this matters, old news is a popular topic on slashdot. :P
Huh? Newtons don't need keyboards. But there is a Newton keyboard. And it can be great for word processing, or programing NewtonScript or Lisp on the Newton itself. :)
Someone should tell these fine people about eBay- it's a great place to pick up used crap. They can get their Newtons and SEs for cheap. Oi. If not, I've an MP2100u that I'm willing to part with for a measly $500 (including keyboard, ethernet card, modem, nice carrying case, 4 MB and 2 MB flash cards) and an SE for $100! WITH A 10 MB HD! If you're really lucky, I'll sell you my AT&T UNIXpc or NeXT cube for $2000!
Pretty ticky area around here. They don't usually inhabit trees, but grasses. Also, the kinds of woods I'd usually take naps in are in parts of the greenbar of this town. Middle of a city with 100k people, but miles of beautiful wooded area right next to my house.
Not very often. Not been to the woods many time, have you?
Ticks are very common in grassy areas. Laying down on a bed of pine needles is not really tick territory. You're far more likely to get ticks by walking through prarie-type grasslands. However, in field work in wetlands, I've taken offf 40+ ticks in a day...
Call me crazy, but just because I'm a geek, it doesn't mean I have to be some lazy tard that can't do anything but drink coffee and read 'blogs.' Maybe I'm abnormal, but I do things outside of using a computer.
:)
I camp. I walk a lot. I bike a lot. I go take naps in the woods. I garden. I hike. I program on my iBook or my iPAQ (with Squeak) while sitting in the woods, having had to hike a few miles to get to a nice place to sit.
For the biking and walking, I don't go out of my way to do it. It's just part of the way I live. When there's not snow on the ground, it's my main method of getting around. I suppose that's not possible if you're living in some gigantic post-apocalyptic hell hole, though.
And for the other things, I live in a very green town, with lots of nice big parts and a sanctioned green-belt, so taking naps in the woods isn't extraordinary. Just a way of life.
Now, I suppose some people really strive for their activities to be labeled as something a 'geek' would do, trying to live that 'cool' middle school clique feeling that they may have missed out on the first time around. Can't say I identify with that, but to each her own.
So, I suppose you could make the above activities 'geeky' by bringing a PDA and doing something useful with it. If you're not going to do something useful with it, however, do yourself a favor and leave it at home.
For instance, I'll write a bunch of code on my iPAQ. May not be as practical for others, but the programming environment I use on my desktop is the same one I use on my PDA, so code flows back and forth easily, and I can work on the same problems as if I were at my desk. Some people think it's some disgrace to "Nature" to program in the middle of a forest. Frankly, I find it beautiful and peaceful. Especially after a mind-clearing hike. And it sure beats being stuck inside on a beautiful spring day!
Most importantly- have fun!
Perhaps, but it's a pretty darned spendy option- $300 for the 500 MHz version, $400 for the 600. Then the drive on top of that.
RTFM.
...my iMac (revision A...
The Rev A iMac doesn't have FireWire ports. Unless you know something we don't, FireWire isn't an option.
For external options, there's SCSI and USB left. USB sucks really hard for CD-RW drives. My girlfriend bought a QPS Que! drive for her Rev B iMac. Besides being a horrible company, their drive is shit too, but some of that I fear has something to do with the speed of USB.
SCSI may be an option, see this. I'm not sure how easy these SCSI cards for the mezzanine slot in the Rev A and B iMacs are to come around anymore. My girlfriend has a Voodoo2 in her iMac and it works great. A USB-SCSI converter wouldn't be advisable.
I've seen an *internal* iMac CD-RW model or two, but they were pretty spendy. I'm told they they were kind of flaky too. I think your best bet would be to have an external enclosure.
Yes he did indicate. Revision A.
Perfect for the blind.
Well, if we're going to get into it...
There also:
Sawfish which is written using rep, which is a lisp-dialect similar to elisp.
GWM, another lisp-based WM, dialect is called "WOOL" (Window Object Oriented Language). Interesting and old.
GwML, a WM written in O'Caml. You even get an emacs clone scriptable and written in O'Caml as part of the package!
Tkwm doesn't look maintained, for creating WMs (not just desktops, mind you) in Tcl/Tk.
There are straight-up X11 bindings for other languages, which could also be used for creating window managers, with the same method of doing so in C. Ruby and Squeak Smalltalk has them for sure.
A lot of people scoff at the idea of doing this, but frankly, I can't imagine how and why people deal with static, inconsistent environments. Having your parts of your system written in a dynamic language that you can grok means that you can make the changes to your enviornment when you want to. May seem stupid to a lot of computer users and self-proclaimed hax0rs, but for me, that is what makes a computer personal. Same reason people like emacs, I suppose.
Heh, better pay up foo!
Actually, I've read a study or two that suggests that you can have a debt of sleep, that can be repaid, eventually bringing you to a 7.5-8 hour/night pattern.
You can already create your own window managers in perl. Perlwm comes with what you need. I have a feeling you're not talking about creating window managers, but simply GUI apps. Not sure why you'd create a WM in XUL. For creating RAD GUI apps, you can use one of the GUI builders for Tk, Qt, or GTK+ (among others, probably) and create a GUI for perl.
The guy who said:
"He said "they'll all be as 'first-class' as an app written in C#". You're the troll, dumbass. If you knew anything about the JVM you'd know the other languages are a hack compared to Java."
Was right.
Compiling to the JVM isn't special. I cannot subclass a Python class from within Java, but more importantly, from yet another language on the JVM, Silk for example. Other languages running on the JVM isn't "transparent language interop" it's retargeting for a different instruction set. Nice troll though.
Amen. Frankly, I don't like C#. I don't generally like to put up with lame-ass ALGOL-derived languages like C, C++, Java or C#. The beauty of .NET is that I don't have to. I can code apps in Smalltalk, Lisp or Perl, and they'll all be as 'first-class' as an app written in C#.
hehehehe ur kool asl?
I agree, taking notes on my iPAQ is a pain in ass. Again, the weight didn't bother me, comapred to the weight of a bookbag. But a modern version would be quite a bit smaller and lighter, yet retaining the big screen.
Making the oft-made mistake of reading the comments, I've noticed that there is a lot of ignotance in regards to handwriting recognition (HWR).
It seems people equate real HWR with the HWR on the first Newton model, as seen on the Simpsons. That's not the case. After a couple years, when the Newton devices reached the Newton OS 2.0 version, HWR had progressed lightyears. HWR has come a long way in the last 9 years since the original Newton MessagePad.
Fortunately, real HWR didn't die with the Newton. On the downside, it seems that the ParaGraph system is the only provider that exists today, with the same engine (derived from the Newton OS system) in a few implementations.
For desktop Windows, there is PenOffice; for WinCE/PocketPC, there is
CalliGrapher; and MS Transcriber, a free version with the same core as CalliGrapher, but with fewer handy features.
With either CalliGrapher or the Newton, the experience of myself and others is that with 2 months of training the neural net by making corrections brings the accuracy up to 99%+ at 40-60 WPM. I tried to use Graffiti and other character recognition (CR) methods before finding real HWR for longer periods of time with pitiful results.
I have horrible handwriting. The great thing about real HWR is that it's incrementally trainable. A neural net learns your handwriting style better than even programmable stroke-based systems can.
Pure real HWR isn't always the best thing when writing code for languages with an overly complex algol-ish syntax. However, used in tandem with programmable a stroke system or macros within the HWR system, it can work out very well.
For example, a program called PenCommander comes with CalliGrapher for PocketPC. PenCommander allows you to program macros. I like to hack Smalltalk, Scheme, and perl on my iPAQ. Smalltalk and Scheme aren't problems, due to the fact that there's almost no syntax and punctuation, and that the function, method and class names are more word-like.
For perl, I have macros set-up. For example, to create a new sub, I have write the word "sub" and circle it, which expands to:
sub SUB {
my ($x, $y, @z) = @_;
return 0;
}
It's a shame that real HWR is confined to the one implementation by ParaGraph. I imagine this is due, at least in part, to the mythology of the Newton, and the impressions of the first three models. As a result, there is only real HWR for the Newton, WinCE, and desktop Windows. I reccomend you try one out for a few months, if you have a PPC or a tablet-based Windows machine. If there was real HWR for Linux, I could dump WinCE on my iPAQ. The only reasons I use WinCE is for the real HWR- I can't imagine putting up with Jot, Graffiti, xstroke, wavvy, &c again!
One of the reasons why the Apple Newton PDA failed so miserably was its promise of usable handwriting recognition. Unfortunately, that promise turned out to be more a case of wishful thinking.
Heh. Good thing you're not modded up, or you'd be perpetuating this myth- one that is especially blindly spouted here on slashdot.
The first few models of the Newton's HWR sucked. Pretty bad. After a year and a half, Newton OS 2.0 came out, with new HWR recognizers, and it got it right. Far faster input than Graffiti or other character and stroke based methods.
Fortunately, real HWR didn't die with the Newton. ParaGraph's CalliGrapher exists for WinCE, providing a more efficient, real HWR based, means of inputting on a PDA. There is also a version for the Windoze on the desktop called PenOffice. Unfortunately there is no such thing as real HWR for the Mac or Linux platforms though.
Having used both a Newton 2100u and an iPAQ with CalliGrapher, both a Newton and Palm device with Graffiti (originated on the Newton), Jot, the built-in character recognizer in PocketPC, as well as various programmable character recognition means, I've quite a bit of experience with HWR in the real world.
It appears that you don't have experience with much in the way of HWR, except perhaps on a Palm. That's fine, but it isn't very scientific to pull stuff out of your rear without any
experience to back it.
After 3 months of using my Newton and iPAQ (w/ CalliGrapher), I found I can get between 40-60 WPM. That was not counting any words fewer than three characters, so that number may be higher, but I wasn't sure how to determine WPM for sure. That's including making corrections. Around 99% accuracy for words, 90% for punctuation.
I tend to get higher WPMs on the Newton, mostly because the larger screen accomdates more words at a time, and that the recognition is rolling, rather than happening at once when I lift the pen. That is, if I write "hello my name is armondo," it will have recognized as text "hello my name" by the time I am writing the word "armondo."
Individual handwriting recognition technology for the masses may still be a pipe dream.
Try a real HWR system for a while, meaning a month or two. The same amount of time is required to get used to Graffiti, so I think that's fair. During that time, correct it. The real HWR schemes of which I know train a neural net against your corrections, and learn your HWR style over time.
Indeed. On slashdot, most of the kids here have no idea of what the Newton was, other than "it sux0r3d d00d!" But the sad fact, is on this iPAQ, everything is so relatively inconsistent and pain-in-the-ass. You don't really notice appreciate the Newton until it's gone, or until you start to try to use WinCE/PocketPC or PalmOS. :P There's nothing that a Newton can do that a Palm OS/PPC device can't, just like you can do everything in assembly that you can in Common Lisp. It'll just take a lot more time and be a lot less elegant.
As far as size, yeah it was kind of a pain. Until recently, I carried around a MP2100u to my classes and generally most places I went. The size didn't much bother me, because it was better to carry the Newton than a book bag with a bunch of notes and books and/or my iBook- I had it all in the Newton. So, if you want a PDA just for an overpriced, status-symbol daybook, the Newton is definately not what you need. But, if you're like me, and want to be able to carry a huge amount of information around, take all of your college lecture notes, play games, read books, and hack on genetic algorithms all in one place, the Newton definately beats out the other options.
What a shame!
Frankly, I'm disapointed by the other options in the PDA market today. It's sad, really. So, to try to recreate a little of the Newton spirit, I'm working on Dynapad, which isn't a Newton clone per se, but a PDA environment that will embody many of the core ideas and goals of the Newton, as a truly personal communicator, a computer, and an information device.
shameless plug out...