I've had IM on my phone for donkeys (some ICQ client that I forget the name of). It's not like I've got some kick-ass smartphone - it's a run-of-the-mill SE K700i. Works fine, but the only real reason for using it as an alternative to SMS is that it's a hell of a lot cheaper...
Looks elitist to me - those photo's don't show regular London primary school kids. They look distinctly like the privately educated kid's of rich families, from an all girls public school nearby in Chelsea. Probably the school attended by the Google UK management's kids...
Note: for those of you lucky enough not to be familiar with London, that's some of the most expensive real estate in the world. And in the UK, public school == fee paying school. Ie. Only the rich and privileged get to go there.
I suspect Adam knows all about FSM's - he was also the original author of the LIWP TCP/IP stack.
Your point about only working on a particular kind of OS isn't a valid one. Why would it need to be the highest priority native thread?
I've actually used the Protothread library in implementing the playback code of a PVR - and what it actually provides is explicit scheduling between a set of tasks. For example - playing back an MPEG2 Transport stream requires you to do perform several distinct tasks: 1) Demultiplex the Transport stream 2) Feed the MPEG video decoder hardware 3) Feed the MPEG audio decoder ie. 1 producer, 2 consumers.
You can implement this using normal threads. Or you can cut down on overheads and use protothreads, given that you only have a single instance of the MPEG hardware blocks, and can only play a single TS anyway.
The system level thread for playback can be thought of as a container for the conceptual Protothreads that schedule cooperatively within the system thread in a producer/consumer type relationship. Kind of like a process/thread separation on a larger OS (the code was running on Nucleus).
Using protothreads provides a deterministic task swap behaviour that removes the need for any locking primitives on the shared data structures between the producer (in this case the Demux thread) and the consumers (hardware feed threads). You can have a task swap occur based on your own complex conditions (for instance, threshold levels in stream buffers vs time until next frame decode is required), rather than the much more simplistic time slice scheduling or message blocking you'd see in a typical "real" threaded system.
The priority give to the thread which contains the Protothread scheduled tasks doesn't have to be the highest priority on the system at all. All that priority signifies is how important the actual process of playing the MPEG stream is relative to the other functions going on in the system in parallel - eg. it'd be lower priority than a flash update that was going on in parallel, or any interrupt service threads, or threads that respond to user input. But it'd be more important than the thread that's just doing the nightly scan for new DTT channels in the background.
That's rubbish. Flash isn't an "open to interpretation" type of standard like HTML. It's all laid out on a fixed coordinate system. If you get an instruction that says "draw a 100x100 square at location 50 using the RGB colour FF:00:00" there's not that many ways to misinterpret it. It's all mathematical, and it you follow the ruleset (which is a hell of a lot simpler than the ones for HTML), you get the same result as Macromedia when rendering it.
It's not like a DTT receiver is an expensive item. You can pick one up for like, £30 retail. And to manufacture, they're sub-$20. It's pin money...
(and you can receive DTT signals with a basic hoop antenna, even with a poverty spec receiver with a cheapo Philips digital tuner in it, nothing exotic needed)
Rubish - I've got a VTech Helio kicking around from a few years ago. Cost me £50 back then. Had a (for the time) superb CPU (80Mhz MIPS R3000). You could install Linux on it. It still bombed, even though it was cheap.
Yes, the SLC3000 has USB host port. Yes, you can plug in an external USB HDD (just like you can on an SL6000). You can even plug in a USB mouse and use that instead of a stylus.
If Opera doesn't run on your PDA, you don't deserve to be posting on Slashdot (it run's on my PDA just fine.....).
Opera on the Zaurus is definitely the best PDA browser you can get (don't talk about Konqueror/Embedded - it just isn't in the same league, and Minimo is still an order of magnitude to big, takes to long to load and runs to slow).
See, if you'd bought a Zaurus that'd not be a problem...you can walk into any brick & mortar and buy a keyboard - my IRK driver for the Zaurus supports Targus, Palm, Pocketop and Belkin PDA keyboards on all Zaurus models from the old SL5000-D right up to the latest clamshell models...). Praise be to the gods of open source....(folks in the US, Canada, Europe and Japan have contributed code just to this one tiny little project).
I'd probably be happy. It's running QTE phone edition, so I could port my fave apps over from the Zaurus. I'd probably port IRK over to it so I could use my Pocketop IR keyboard (on-screen keyboards leave me cold).
Would have got one of these puppies instead of my K700i:(
This sounds like another variant using the IBM STBx25xx chip, as used in the Hauppage Media MVP.
It's probably derived from the same IBM sourced reference design as the MVP (bolting on a DVB tuner is a doddle). If it's anything like the MVP, it'll even be running linux as well....
Goodness - Llamazap! Now that *is* an obscure title. Only released on the Atari Falcon as far as I know (I've got it on my Falcon's hard drive somewhere)...
Flamebait my arse....back in the day, Jeff Minter was a god-like figure among game coders - Llamatron (atari version) and T2K (Jaguar version) are among my fave games of all time.
So - words from the hand of God....? Certainly, Edge worship's him;)
Add to this list: o credit cards o computers o VTOL aircraft o The modern toilet (and most of france has only recently caught up with that one...) o the english language (even if it got stolen and modified to make it incompatible so the american's could call it their own - hey! that's probably where Microsoft got the idea from).
Qtopia/Opie/QTE don't require apps to manage windows themselves, and apps don't HAVE to be full screen (you can open a smaller window and have it dragable/resizable just like in X). It's just that most Apps don't bother 'coz on a screen that small there's not much point in not using the whole screen.
There's also the ARC processors (from what was originally Argonaut's hardware team that developed booster chipset's for the SNES). That's another UK design.....
Actually, recompiling Qtopia (QPE) is perfectly possible. Check out the OpenZaurus project (www.openzaurus.org) - this is an entire replacment for the ROM on an SL5500, and will no doubt support the SL-C700 soonish.
Terry Pratchett (strata, discworld,etc) Peter F. Hamilton (Nights Dawn trilogy, Fallen Dragon, Another Chance At Eden, etc) Ken MacLeod (The Star Fraction)
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I've had IM on my phone for donkeys (some ICQ client that I forget the name of). It's not like I've got some kick-ass smartphone - it's a run-of-the-mill SE K700i. Works fine, but the only real reason for using it as an alternative to SMS is that it's a hell of a lot cheaper...
What exactly is new here?????
Looks elitist to me - those photo's don't show regular London primary school kids. They look distinctly like the privately educated kid's of rich families, from an all girls public school nearby in Chelsea. Probably the school attended by the Google UK management's kids...
Note: for those of you lucky enough not to be familiar with London, that's some of the most expensive real estate in the world. And in the UK, public school == fee paying school. Ie. Only the rich and privileged get to go there.
I suspect Adam knows all about FSM's - he was also the original author of the LIWP TCP/IP stack.
Your point about only working on a particular kind of OS isn't a valid one. Why would it need to be the highest priority native thread?
I've actually used the Protothread library in implementing the playback code of a PVR - and what it actually provides is explicit scheduling between a set of tasks. For example - playing back an MPEG2 Transport stream requires you to do perform several distinct tasks:
1) Demultiplex the Transport stream
2) Feed the MPEG video decoder hardware
3) Feed the MPEG audio decoder
ie. 1 producer, 2 consumers.
You can implement this using normal threads. Or you can cut down on overheads and use protothreads, given that you only have a single instance of the MPEG hardware blocks, and can only play a single TS anyway.
The system level thread for playback can be thought of as a container for the conceptual Protothreads that schedule cooperatively within the system thread in a producer/consumer type relationship. Kind of like a process/thread separation on a larger OS (the code was running on Nucleus).
Using protothreads provides a deterministic task swap behaviour that removes the need for any locking primitives on the shared data structures between the producer (in this case the Demux thread) and the consumers (hardware feed threads). You can have a task swap occur based on your own complex conditions (for instance, threshold levels in stream buffers vs time until next frame decode is required), rather than the much more simplistic time slice scheduling or message blocking you'd see in a typical "real" threaded system.
The priority give to the thread which contains the Protothread scheduled tasks doesn't have to be the highest priority on the system at all. All that priority signifies is how important the actual process of playing the MPEG stream is relative to the other functions going on in the system in parallel - eg. it'd be lower priority than a flash update that was going on in parallel, or any interrupt service threads, or threads that respond to user input. But it'd be more important than the thread that's just doing the nightly scan for new DTT channels in the background.
I know - I do go on a bit.......
That's rubbish. Flash isn't an "open to interpretation" type of standard like HTML. It's all laid out on a fixed coordinate system. If you get an instruction that says "draw a 100x100 square at location 50 using the RGB colour FF:00:00" there's not that many ways to misinterpret it. It's all mathematical, and it you follow the ruleset (which is a hell of a lot simpler than the ones for HTML), you get the same result as Macromedia when rendering it.
It's not like a DTT receiver is an expensive item. You can pick one up for like, £30 retail. And to manufacture, they're sub-$20. It's pin money...
(and you can receive DTT signals with a basic hoop antenna, even with a poverty spec receiver with a cheapo Philips digital tuner in it, nothing exotic needed)
Rubish - I've got a VTech Helio kicking around from a few years ago. Cost me £50 back then. Had a (for the time) superb CPU (80Mhz MIPS R3000). You could install Linux on it. It still bombed, even though it was cheap.
Move along...
Yes, the SLC3000 has USB host port. Yes, you can plug in an external USB HDD (just like you can on an SL6000). You can even plug in a USB mouse and use that instead of a stylus.
If Opera doesn't run on your PDA, you don't deserve to be posting on Slashdot (it run's on my PDA just fine.....).
Opera on the Zaurus is definitely the best PDA browser you can get (don't talk about Konqueror/Embedded - it just isn't in the same league, and Minimo is still an order of magnitude to big, takes to long to load and runs to slow).
See, if you'd bought a Zaurus that'd not be a problem...you can walk into any brick & mortar and buy a keyboard - my IRK driver for the Zaurus supports Targus, Palm, Pocketop and Belkin PDA keyboards on all Zaurus models from the old SL5000-D right up to the latest clamshell models...). Praise be to the gods of open source....(folks in the US, Canada, Europe and Japan have contributed code just to this one tiny little project).
When did Bluetooth count as a cutting edge technology? It's been a feature of most decent phones for years...
I'd probably be happy. It's running QTE phone edition, so I could port my fave apps over from the Zaurus. I'd probably port IRK over to it so I could use my Pocketop IR keyboard (on-screen keyboards leave me cold).
:(
Would have got one of these puppies instead of my K700i
It's probably derived from the same IBM sourced reference design as the MVP (bolting on a DVB tuner is a doddle). If it's anything like the MVP, it'll even be running linux as well....
Goodness - Llamazap! Now that *is* an obscure title. Only released on the Atari Falcon as far as I know (I've got it on my Falcon's hard drive somewhere)...
T3K (Nuon).
Working on Unity for Lionhead these days...
Flamebait my arse....back in the day, Jeff Minter was a god-like figure among game coders - Llamatron (atari version) and T2K (Jaguar version) are among my fave games of all time.
;)
So - words from the hand of God....? Certainly, Edge worship's him
Words from the hand of God.....
The HP Apollo workstation's I used at university back in the early 90's had virtual desktops...yawn.....
Even in the UK, it varies widely...
But no "high school" awards degree's of any type in the UK - only universities do that.
Most universities subscribe to the 3years==Batchelor's degree (BSc / BEng)
+1year == Masters
Some also do 4 year masters in engineering subjects (where you don't get a BEng, you go straight to the MEng after 4 years).
The top UK universities (eg. Cambridge) use a totally different system altogether...
Add to this list:
o credit cards
o computers
o VTOL aircraft
o The modern toilet (and most of france has only recently caught up with that one...)
o the english language (even if it got stolen and modified to make it incompatible so the american's could call it their own - hey! that's probably where Microsoft got the idea from).
Qtopia/Opie/QTE don't require apps to manage windows themselves, and apps don't HAVE to be full screen (you can open a smaller window and have it dragable/resizable just like in X). It's just that most Apps don't bother 'coz on a screen that small there's not much point in not using the whole screen.
There's also the ARC processors (from what was originally Argonaut's hardware team that developed booster chipset's for the SNES). That's another UK design.....
The 3.1 sharp rom doesn't have the JVM or the demos installed by default - they're optional extras.
Actually, recompiling Qtopia (QPE) is perfectly possible. Check out the OpenZaurus project (www.openzaurus.org) - this is an entire replacment for the ROM on an SL5500, and will no doubt support the SL-C700 soonish.
So, what exactly does this get me beyond my SL5500 + Pocketop (www.pocketop.net) keyboard?
Terry Pratchett (strata, discworld,etc)
Peter F. Hamilton (Nights Dawn trilogy, Fallen Dragon, Another Chance At Eden, etc)
Ken MacLeod (The Star Fraction)