GNOME "gives you all the configuration options you could want to make the system your own". It just doesn't shove them all in your face in one go. It rightly assumes that desktop does not need to be crowded out by advanced, arcane and the obscure options. You can still use GConf or text files to change them though, once you know what you are doing.
In consequence of following basic human interface guidelines, GNOME has a much, much cleaner feel about it and is immediately more accesible to new users.
I'd think the greatest news service in the world would be a newspaper or internet source. Television news has a very limited ability to bring news just based upon the format. No news source I know of in any free country is beholden to the government.
What is news.bbc.co.uk then if not an internet source? I bet it beats the pants off any other singular news source you care to mention. CNN is a pale shadow, especially on world news. Obviously you might consider a meta-news source such as Google News to be superior, but it is a superset of any single news source so (by definition) it has to be.
As for advertising, the point I'm trying to make is that if you were to look at your station's balance sheet that advertising makes up a significant proportion of their revenue, possibly even more than subscriptions. Assume that for argument's sake that it was 50:50 and your annual sub were $400. That means advertisers consider every subscriber to be worth $400 again. For them to think that implies that they gain $400 of purchases denied to non-advertisers. I.e your subscription is actually $800 - where $400 represents extra (subconscious) purchases or at the very least $400 of brand switches (where you switch from brand X to brand Y). More likely it is significantly the former with a little bit of the latter.
Concerning accountability, PBS is the nearest thing to the BBC in the US in terms of non-profit (i.e. documentary) programming. But clearly PBS struggles to survive, otherwise why must they continually be holding out the begging bowl from one telethon to another? Their survival is a precarious matter of the public whim, rather than being the public remit of a state appointed body. The BBC doesn't have to look to where the next penny is coming from which explains in part why it continues to excel in so many ways.
It isn't a perfect system, but the evidence demonstrates that the licence system works. Naturally there are some moaners who don't want to pay, but in the grand scheme of things, $120 is a pittance to pay for the quality of service they get. Even a basic supscription to Sky costs more than that by double. The costs to the UK of making the BBC 'opt-in' or 'subscription' would be incalculable. We're not just talking about the quality of TV programming or lack thereof but also how well informed the public is in general.
The 'crazy TV tax' as you put it means the UK has the best news service in the world, and have a remit to produce high quality radio and TV programming. And all without any advertising. Oh, and the BBC is not beholden to the government of the day meaning it often takes a contrary stand to hold it accountable.
Okay, so sometimes the BBC does show crap, but it also produces high quality drama, comedy, news, documentaries, education (including school and university courses) and more. It has two channels devoted to advert-free kids viewing. It has regional TV and radio. It has terrestrial digital broadcasting. They even have shows where tit appears or a profanity is uttered without the screaming moral minority being able to do a damned thing about it.
Okay, so the tax is compulsary for TV owners. But how much does *your* TV subscription cost? How much advertising must you put up with (despite subscribing)? How many products do you subconsciously buy because of that advertising? Who are your TV stations accountable to? Whose agenda is driving their news and politics? What remit do they use when producing programming for - advertising, ratings, or what?
It wouldn't surprise me if you were directly or indirectly paying several factors higher for considerably worse quality programming.
The bought Netscape for the chance to wield a big stick over Microsoft in the form of an 'alternative browser' during the lawsuit. I don't believe there was any other reason.
When Microsoft handed over the cash, AOL gutted Netscape. There might still be a portal, but count the number of employess in AOL West (Netscape) and I doubt it's a tenth of what it was in 2002. They couldn't even build Netscape 7.2 in house because there was no one left in Netscape to do it - they paid Mozilla.org to build it.
The lawsuit might have been great for coffers, but it is monumentally short sighted and plain dumb in the long term to stick with IE. The last thing you do is tie yourself to your main competitors browsing technology. Why not let a mental patient shave your balls with a razor while you're at it?
Microsoft might be obligated to fix bugs AOL raises but so what? It's not like the browser code is being developed much anyway. If need be Microsoft can simply let the code go so mouldy that AOL loses years relying on it when clearer minds would have jumped to something better.
Secondly, while AOL is rotting away on an obsolete code base, MSN will suddenly relaunch around around XAML or some other tech. The result is AOL will look like a dinosaur and will haemmorage even more customers.
Neither scenario makes any business sense for AOL. Why do they even care what browser they use? They are supposed to be a media company - "AOL Anywhere". Adopting open standards means not paying for proprietary tech, it means more eyeballs can see your content. It should be open standards first and proprietary second. The fact is they already have to support Safari (since Netscape.com is the Apple portal) and Gecko (for the Mac OS X AOL client).
So it would make more sense for any standalone browser to be based on open standards. They could even skin a version of Firefox with a few extra extensions slapped on it. Use the browser as a test bed for the AOL client content and the scales should have tilted over enough to flip the client proper to Gecko. Once that happens IE is out of the picture completely and AOL is one step closer to being a media company again rather than Microsoft's bitch.
You can of course do that. The issue with that is, Google could also figure ways to spoil such attempts.
For example, they could toss in some random ids / class names, with random nesting. So instead of something obvious such as "hidden" or "content", they say "78hsdf7". This would foil explicit rules so you'd have to resort to broader rules. I suppose you could have a rule such as "@media print { div,img { display: inline!important; } }" which might work but will probably foul up printing other sites in the process.
The most promising way would be some JS (hooked up to a bookmark javascript: url), that you could click on from the bookmarks tool bar. When run it would turn off any JS timers & mouse handlers, inspect divs and create img tags with their "background-image: url(x)" style, trash any media specific styles and blast the transparent img / div overlay. I'm guessing that it could be done without any major issues.
The whole point of CSS2 is to enable styles to be applicable to different media - screens, printers, braille devices etc. I suppose what can be used with good intentions could also be used for bad too.
I think that RFID for some reason just always triggers a negative response from the/. hivemind, whether merited or not
And the reason as you illustrated yourself is because in practically every case where it is proposed that a person should carry an RFID, there are already less intrusive and just as effective solutions available.
I don't think most people care if RFIDs were used to track Fedex parcels, or to help in logistics. But when the technology turns everyone into trackable globally unique identifiers - that's where the problems arise.
I doubt an RFID in a drivers licence is any kind of deterrent when you're prepared to hijack a plane and kill yourself and everyone else in it by crashing it into a building.
Re:That explains those mysterious hirings
on
Breaking Google's DRM
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's not that hard to mess with a browser in this way. For example, to hide content when you print is a matter of some CSS2.
@media print {
#content { display: none; }
}
Toss in half a dozen other spoilers such as multi-part mime & redirects (to hide URLs), DOM event handlers (to handle & ignore mouse clicks), transparent gifs (to mangle context menus), transparent DIVs that become opaque when printed and you achieve the desired effect.
They're all surmountable, but I suppose Google want to be seen to be making a concious effort to block people from printing out pages.
The preliminary notes are Slashdotted, but my educated guess is that they obscure the book image in some way. For example they overlay a DIV containing a transparent GIF over the whole page. This could stop you getting the right mouse context menu for whatever was underneath. It might also screw up the printing - or if it didn't then a "@media print" specific CSS rule could render the transparent GIF with an opaque backdrop, to obscure the page.
In addition, toss in some DOM event handlers and you disable mouse operation.
Still, you might find that with some judicial and creative hacking that you can around this issue. Pressing the context menu key on your keyboard (for people with Windows keyboards) might work. Alternatively Mozilla allows you to override page definitions with user-specific style sheets. Or you could even bookmark a javascript: URL that you click on to blasts the offending elements out of existence, e.g. "javascript: var foo = document.getElementById('blocker'); foo.style = 'display:none'". No doubt someone will produce encapsulate the functionality into a Google Print extension before long if need be.
However they do it, the fact is that it will be circumventable.
I'd favour the "Casino" approach to spammers. They can choose walk away without the money; or keep the money and have their fingers pounded into bloody mess.
I have high hopes that will be another classic video game transfer. Just like Super Mario Brothers, Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Tombraider and Wing Commander.
Many races have a built immunity to malaria too thanks to a genetic mutation. Which is all fine and good until you consider the mutation also causes sickle cell anaemia.
In other other words the mutation might stop you dying in childhood from malaria, only to see an increased chance that you die painfully in adulthood. The mutation is only semi-recessive so even if you get it from one parent you will exhibit some symptoms. If you're really unfortunate however, both parents will pass on the mutation to you in which case you're really screwed.
From the DNA's perspective the mutation is still successful since it means a greater chance of reproducing (over the more malaria prone normal gene pool). But it it's not so great for the individual whose natural defence against malaria could see them die painfully and prematurely in either case.
So the fact that there is a gene that grants increased immunity to HIV is meaningless unless it has no other sideeffects. If these women consequently die of breast cancer or something else as a result of it, it could hardly be said to be a 'miracle cure'.
It's odd that Doom 3 actually shipped on CD. DVDs cost pennies to produce these days and I reckon any difference in cost would recovered because there is less labelling, packaging and shipping weight. Far Cry came out on DVD and it's much better for it too.
Anyway I've grabbed my Doom 3 for Linux now and its blissfully copy protection free. It's just too bad my Linux w/ NVidia NX2 is too underpowered to play it. I tried running it there and it was getting about 12fps. Still, I might be able to use it as a server.
Yes, but in this instance has a CD key in addition to copy protection. What's it matter that I have the disc inserted thereafter, so long as I've fed the thing a validated key.
If it wants to verify the disc is copy protected it can do it during the key validation. Thereafter it should really make no difference.
Besides copy protection is a joke. It takes literally a few hours at most for someone to crack a game - I'm sure Doom 3 is already available over P2P in cracked versions - and I know there are cracks on GameCopyWorld. But I'd rather trust ID to produce a CD-free version that Joe R00t. If
As I see it, copy protection at play time is a pain in the ass, especially as so many games require a key or serial number to play.
But since the Linux version doesn't care about copy protection, shouldn't ID release a patch that also allows the Win32 version to run without the CD? Make it so you have to have the CD and a valid key to apply the patch, but after that it works without it.
WiFi might suck power like crazy, but it's an important feature these days. And to not have smacks of enormous oversite. Extraordinarily stupid in fact. At least it has bluetooth, but IMHO wi-fi is just as important and it strikes me as odd that they wouldn't include both.
And I'm not some Pocket PC fanatic dissing Palm. I loved my Palm Vx, but it was the lack of wi-fi that made me choose an iPaq (although that sucks for other reasons). Being able to turn on a PDA and sync up or browse from anywhere is a very useful feature.
Okay, so someone can buy an SD wireless card - if they like an expensive snappable thing protruding from the top of their device. But that ruins the looks of the device and is impractical anyway if like me you happen to use the SD for storage.
I don't see why not. The speed of the system is obviously network bound, not computational bound. I'm assuming that Netflix would have a library of titles pre-ripped into the appropriate media format. Then it's a matter of sending them over the wire, encrypting / DRM'ing them as you go.
I doubt it would be too tricky to twiddle the odd key frame to insert customer specific data. This could be done overtly as with those annoying dots that some film prints have these days, or covertly by changing some insignificant bits in the video / sound. Or a mix of covert and overt. We're not talking much data here either. I'd guess that 64 bits would uniquely identify every user / box combo in existence with room to spare.
Of course if someone grabbed two hacked movies, a naive scheme might allow them to splice the two watermarked movies into a single 'clean' movie. e.g. compare each frame, identify the different ones and pick the one that looks clean.
So on top of basic watermarking you might also toss in some random salt (e.g. random bits every now and then), vary the embedded id based on some formula, and even imperceptably stretch / compress parts of the audio / video to make it hard to what is clean and what isn't.
It also has to be robust enough that it is discernable even if the video is recompressed. But beyond that you're pursuing diminishing returns.
All you're trying to do is scare your users into compliance. If they really want that movie, there are plenty of easier ways of doing it, including just going out and renting / ripping it. The quality would probably be better anyway.
Whether the encryption is cracked or not is irrelevant really. It's not as if you're getting movies that aren't out on DVD. And a DVD is a much easier thing to crack than some format being sent between TIVO & Netflix.
As proof of that, note that you can easily get DVD rips right now. So what's the point of cracking the TIVO system? And even if it is cracked, it seems highly likely that each movie would be digitally watermarked with your account number, TIVO box and other incriminating info. So releasing it out onto the P2P networks seems like a very foolhardy thing to do.
The only benefit from a cracked system is perhaps you could build your own personal jukebox of movies. Again, it's not like you can't do that already so I wonder what the point is.
Not just annoying but they don't rip to Sony laptops, or Sony HD Walkmen, or copy on Sony RW drives, or play on whatever random Sony gear that happens (the horror) to comply to the Compact Disc specification and not some copy protected chimera.
Toss in some other stupid Sony tech such as ATRAC (and the inability to play MP3) and memory sticks and what do you have? A big frigging slump in sales when consumers buy elsewhere.
Finally perhaps Sony has gotten a clue. They are perfectly at liberty to foist whatever crap they like onto consumers, but they're going to have an awful lot of inventory sitting around if they do.
The funny thing is that the likes of Panasonic sell CD players for $49 that can play MP3. In other words the tech is cheap and readily available - any modern device capable of DSP should be able to play MP3s.
It would be ironic however if Sony devices actually did have the capability to play MP3 but their own copy protection circuitry and firmware prevented them from offering an upgrade path.
I agree that paperweight is probably an exagerration, but I really feel the life of my new device has been artificially limited.
I never felt that way with my Palm Vx. It's true that Palm have come out with numerous new devices since the Vx, but I was still able to upgrade from Palm OS 3.5 to 4.1, and new Hotsync / Palm Desktop and receive updates for a long time. The battery life is still exceptional - I went away for a month this year and the Vx still had power.
I find having upgraded that none of that is true for my iPaq. The support has gone almost as soon as I owned the thing, and the way eats power. I fully expect that come this time next year, I'll be faced with a dilemma - pay 50 for a new battery, or upgrade again.
The only ray of light at the end of the tunnel is that I may be able to turn my iPaq into a Linux device. If the PDA functionality were adequate (i.e. comparable to Windows Mobile if not Palm), and the wireless worked on Linux I would be a very happy bunny.
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In consequence of following basic human interface guidelines, GNOME has a much, much cleaner feel about it and is immediately more accesible to new users.
What is news.bbc.co.uk then if not an internet source? I bet it beats the pants off any other singular news source you care to mention. CNN is a pale shadow, especially on world news. Obviously you might consider a meta-news source such as Google News to be superior, but it is a superset of any single news source so (by definition) it has to be.
As for advertising, the point I'm trying to make is that if you were to look at your station's balance sheet that advertising makes up a significant proportion of their revenue, possibly even more than subscriptions. Assume that for argument's sake that it was 50:50 and your annual sub were $400. That means advertisers consider every subscriber to be worth $400 again. For them to think that implies that they gain $400 of purchases denied to non-advertisers. I.e your subscription is actually $800 - where $400 represents extra (subconscious) purchases or at the very least $400 of brand switches (where you switch from brand X to brand Y). More likely it is significantly the former with a little bit of the latter.
Concerning accountability, PBS is the nearest thing to the BBC in the US in terms of non-profit (i.e. documentary) programming. But clearly PBS struggles to survive, otherwise why must they continually be holding out the begging bowl from one telethon to another? Their survival is a precarious matter of the public whim, rather than being the public remit of a state appointed body. The BBC doesn't have to look to where the next penny is coming from which explains in part why it continues to excel in so many ways.
It isn't a perfect system, but the evidence demonstrates that the licence system works. Naturally there are some moaners who don't want to pay, but in the grand scheme of things, $120 is a pittance to pay for the quality of service they get. Even a basic supscription to Sky costs more than that by double. The costs to the UK of making the BBC 'opt-in' or 'subscription' would be incalculable. We're not just talking about the quality of TV programming or lack thereof but also how well informed the public is in general.
Okay, so sometimes the BBC does show crap, but it also produces high quality drama, comedy, news, documentaries, education (including school and university courses) and more. It has two channels devoted to advert-free kids viewing. It has regional TV and radio. It has terrestrial digital broadcasting. They even have shows where tit appears or a profanity is uttered without the screaming moral minority being able to do a damned thing about it.
Okay, so the tax is compulsary for TV owners. But how much does *your* TV subscription cost? How much advertising must you put up with (despite subscribing)? How many products do you subconsciously buy because of that advertising? Who are your TV stations accountable to? Whose agenda is driving their news and politics? What remit do they use when producing programming for - advertising, ratings, or what?
It wouldn't surprise me if you were directly or indirectly paying several factors higher for considerably worse quality programming.
When Microsoft handed over the cash, AOL gutted Netscape. There might still be a portal, but count the number of employess in AOL West (Netscape) and I doubt it's a tenth of what it was in 2002. They couldn't even build Netscape 7.2 in house because there was no one left in Netscape to do it - they paid Mozilla.org to build it.
The lawsuit might have been great for coffers, but it is monumentally short sighted and plain dumb in the long term to stick with IE. The last thing you do is tie yourself to your main competitors browsing technology. Why not let a mental patient shave your balls with a razor while you're at it?
Microsoft might be obligated to fix bugs AOL raises but so what? It's not like the browser code is being developed much anyway. If need be Microsoft can simply let the code go so mouldy that AOL loses years relying on it when clearer minds would have jumped to something better.
Secondly, while AOL is rotting away on an obsolete code base, MSN will suddenly relaunch around around XAML or some other tech. The result is AOL will look like a dinosaur and will haemmorage even more customers.
Neither scenario makes any business sense for AOL. Why do they even care what browser they use? They are supposed to be a media company - "AOL Anywhere". Adopting open standards means not paying for proprietary tech, it means more eyeballs can see your content. It should be open standards first and proprietary second. The fact is they already have to support Safari (since Netscape.com is the Apple portal) and Gecko (for the Mac OS X AOL client).
So it would make more sense for any standalone browser to be based on open standards. They could even skin a version of Firefox with a few extra extensions slapped on it. Use the browser as a test bed for the AOL client content and the scales should have tilted over enough to flip the client proper to Gecko. Once that happens IE is out of the picture completely and AOL is one step closer to being a media company again rather than Microsoft's bitch.
For example, they could toss in some random ids / class names, with random nesting. So instead of something obvious such as "hidden" or "content", they say "78hsdf7". This would foil explicit rules so you'd have to resort to broader rules. I suppose you could have a rule such as "@media print { div,img { display: inline!important; } }" which might work but will probably foul up printing other sites in the process.
The most promising way would be some JS (hooked up to a bookmark javascript: url), that you could click on from the bookmarks tool bar. When run it would turn off any JS timers & mouse handlers, inspect divs and create img tags with their "background-image: url(x)" style, trash any media specific styles and blast the transparent img / div overlay. I'm guessing that it could be done without any major issues.
The whole point of CSS2 is to enable styles to be applicable to different media - screens, printers, braille devices etc. I suppose what can be used with good intentions could also be used for bad too.
And the reason as you illustrated yourself is because in practically every case where it is proposed that a person should carry an RFID, there are already less intrusive and just as effective solutions available.
I don't think most people care if RFIDs were used to track Fedex parcels, or to help in logistics. But when the technology turns everyone into trackable globally unique identifiers - that's where the problems arise.
I doubt an RFID in a drivers licence is any kind of deterrent when you're prepared to hijack a plane and kill yourself and everyone else in it by crashing it into a building.
It's not that hard to mess with a browser in this way. For example, to hide content when you print is a matter of some CSS2.
@media print {
#content { display: none; }
}
Toss in half a dozen other spoilers such as multi-part mime & redirects (to hide URLs), DOM event handlers (to handle & ignore mouse clicks), transparent gifs (to mangle context menus), transparent DIVs that become opaque when printed and you achieve the desired effect.
They're all surmountable, but I suppose Google want to be seen to be making a concious effort to block people from printing out pages.
You can search for "mastering digital photography" to get a result. Unfortunately their server is down or has been slashdotted already.
In addition, toss in some DOM event handlers and you disable mouse operation.
Still, you might find that with some judicial and creative hacking that you can around this issue. Pressing the context menu key on your keyboard (for people with Windows keyboards) might work. Alternatively Mozilla allows you to override page definitions with user-specific style sheets. Or you could even bookmark a javascript: URL that you click on to blasts the offending elements out of existence, e.g. "javascript: var foo = document.getElementById('blocker'); foo.style = 'display:none'". No doubt someone will produce encapsulate the functionality into a Google Print extension before long if need be.
However they do it, the fact is that it will be circumventable.
I'd favour the "Casino" approach to spammers. They can choose walk away without the money; or keep the money and have their fingers pounded into bloody mess.
The love interest will be supplied by a flayed (but rather comely) lady zombie who the hero gets to fuck before blowing her away half way through.
Don't forget the flashlight and wading through tedious PDA voice mail for locker codes.
I have high hopes that will be another classic video game transfer. Just like Super Mario Brothers, Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Tombraider and Wing Commander.
In other other words the mutation might stop you dying in childhood from malaria, only to see an increased chance that you die painfully in adulthood. The mutation is only semi-recessive so even if you get it from one parent you will exhibit some symptoms. If you're really unfortunate however, both parents will pass on the mutation to you in which case you're really screwed.
From the DNA's perspective the mutation is still successful since it means a greater chance of reproducing (over the more malaria prone normal gene pool). But it it's not so great for the individual whose natural defence against malaria could see them die painfully and prematurely in either case.
So the fact that there is a gene that grants increased immunity to HIV is meaningless unless it has no other sideeffects. If these women consequently die of breast cancer or something else as a result of it, it could hardly be said to be a 'miracle cure'.
Anyway I've grabbed my Doom 3 for Linux now and its blissfully copy protection free. It's just too bad my Linux w/ NVidia NX2 is too underpowered to play it. I tried running it there and it was getting about 12fps. Still, I might be able to use it as a server.
If it wants to verify the disc is copy protected it can do it during the key validation. Thereafter it should really make no difference.
Besides copy protection is a joke. It takes literally a few hours at most for someone to crack a game - I'm sure Doom 3 is already available over P2P in cracked versions - and I know there are cracks on GameCopyWorld. But I'd rather trust ID to produce a CD-free version that Joe R00t. If
As I see it, copy protection at play time is a pain in the ass, especially as so many games require a key or serial number to play.
But since the Linux version doesn't care about copy protection, shouldn't ID release a patch that also allows the Win32 version to run without the CD? Make it so you have to have the CD and a valid key to apply the patch, but after that it works without it.
And I'm not some Pocket PC fanatic dissing Palm. I loved my Palm Vx, but it was the lack of wi-fi that made me choose an iPaq (although that sucks for other reasons). Being able to turn on a PDA and sync up or browse from anywhere is a very useful feature.
Okay, so someone can buy an SD wireless card - if they like an expensive snappable thing protruding from the top of their device. But that ruins the looks of the device and is impractical anyway if like me you happen to use the SD for storage.
I doubt it would be too tricky to twiddle the odd key frame to insert customer specific data. This could be done overtly as with those annoying dots that some film prints have these days, or covertly by changing some insignificant bits in the video / sound. Or a mix of covert and overt. We're not talking much data here either. I'd guess that 64 bits would uniquely identify every user / box combo in existence with room to spare.
Of course if someone grabbed two hacked movies, a naive scheme might allow them to splice the two watermarked movies into a single 'clean' movie. e.g. compare each frame, identify the different ones and pick the one that looks clean.
So on top of basic watermarking you might also toss in some random salt (e.g. random bits every now and then), vary the embedded id based on some formula, and even imperceptably stretch / compress parts of the audio / video to make it hard to what is clean and what isn't.
It also has to be robust enough that it is discernable even if the video is recompressed. But beyond that you're pursuing diminishing returns.
All you're trying to do is scare your users into compliance. If they really want that movie, there are plenty of easier ways of doing it, including just going out and renting / ripping it. The quality would probably be better anyway.
As proof of that, note that you can easily get DVD rips right now. So what's the point of cracking the TIVO system? And even if it is cracked, it seems highly likely that each movie would be digitally watermarked with your account number, TIVO box and other incriminating info. So releasing it out onto the P2P networks seems like a very foolhardy thing to do.
The only benefit from a cracked system is perhaps you could build your own personal jukebox of movies. Again, it's not like you can't do that already so I wonder what the point is.
Toss in some other stupid Sony tech such as ATRAC (and the inability to play MP3) and memory sticks and what do you have? A big frigging slump in sales when consumers buy elsewhere.
Finally perhaps Sony has gotten a clue. They are perfectly at liberty to foist whatever crap they like onto consumers, but they're going to have an awful lot of inventory sitting around if they do.
It would be ironic however if Sony devices actually did have the capability to play MP3 but their own copy protection circuitry and firmware prevented them from offering an upgrade path.
I never felt that way with my Palm Vx. It's true that Palm have come out with numerous new devices since the Vx, but I was still able to upgrade from Palm OS 3.5 to 4.1, and new Hotsync / Palm Desktop and receive updates for a long time. The battery life is still exceptional - I went away for a month this year and the Vx still had power.
I find having upgraded that none of that is true for my iPaq. The support has gone almost as soon as I owned the thing, and the way eats power. I fully expect that come this time next year, I'll be faced with a dilemma - pay 50 for a new battery, or upgrade again.
The only ray of light at the end of the tunnel is that I may be able to turn my iPaq into a Linux device. If the PDA functionality were adequate (i.e. comparable to Windows Mobile if not Palm), and the wireless worked on Linux I would be a very happy bunny.