The eMate is the coolest thing. Ever. But what's wrong with it is that the processor is too slow. And while it's true that there are projects making the newton OS work with wifi, bluetooth, etc., in practice, I can do very little with this stuff. I bought a wifi card that is supposed to be compatible but found out it doesn't work with 802.11b. I'm not sure what it works with, but it's useless to me since my network, like most people's, is 802.11. I got an ethernet card that is supposed to work. There are drivers. But the catch is the ethernet card is only good to use for AppleTalk, and I can't see the device under OS X. I got a Keyspan USB adapter to install programs and it works for five minutes then the computer (not the newton) crashes. This happens whether I use Escale, NewTen, or NewtSync.
All of these may be problems stemming from my own impatience; I haven't spent more than a few sleepless nights trying to get this stuff to work. But in answer to your question about why new hardware, two reasons: 1 - faster processing. It would be so great to have this emate run as fast as a new palm. 2 - you don't need to give up your job and family and friends to spend time getting things to connect to modern systems that it really isn't intended to connect to. It's great for hackers but not for the rest of us.
Finally, I want to add why I do want a new newton -- the OS is great, but what I really love is the form factor of the emate. The newton handhelds are cool too but as the parent points out, too large. But for someone like me who needs to write a lot and who likes a good keyboard, the eMate is the godfather of portables. It's light. It's plastic, and it takes a beating. Its keyboard has great response but is almost totally silent so you can sit in a lecture room and type notes without bugging your neighbors. It has a handle. Handles rule. Apple should put handles on everything. It has instant on -- no waiting for the damn thing to boot. And it's a chick magnet!
Oh please Apple, or anyone, figure out how to put a modern processor in a case like this. I don't even need a color screen (prefer battery life!) or tons of disk space or mp3 player or camera or any of that stuff -- just give me portability, battery life, basic text editor applications, some internet stuff - web browser, minimalistic email program, and a telnet/ssh terminal program.
Yes, Apple is going to abandon its proprietary GUI with its consistent interface and beautiful eye candy in order to jump on the X.org bandwagon. Steve Jobs was quoted in an interview saying, "yes, the new interface will make all current applications on OS X unusable and be an absolute nightmare for developers, but we think Apple users will like it in the end, as long as we keep the icons on the right side of the desktop. We at Apple now think X.org is cooler than flying bicycles!"
I thought it was an eyeball that shoots laser beams, so you can, you know, like, destroy your enemies and stuff. I hear they have similar surgery for sharks.
This thing is more than the price of a new Treo. $600? You've got to be kidding. No phone, no wifi, no camera, and you even pay extra for a usb cord. It's not clear what the OS is or whether it will play well with my computer (on the list of software is included "PC Synchro" but no explanation). It's not clear how the input interface will allow you to input more than a few clicks at a time -- not great for entering significant amounts of text. I like that you can choose your GUI, but with names like "Ghost," "Femina," and "Leather" (and no other indication besides the name of what the gui looks like) you really gotta wonder.
I got one of these off ebay a few months ago and it is the coolest thing in the world. I can't get it to sync with OS X in any meaningful way so it isn't very useful, but with an updated processor - something like they use in new PDAs. The form factor is just incredible. It is simple, the keyboard is easy to type on, small, the screen doubles as a touch pad, and the whole thing is made out of sturdy plastic. I've dropped it on concrete with no problems other than scratches. And it has a freakin handle. This thing is also a babe magnet, and had the potential to be as ubiquitous as the iPod. But of course Apple dumped it because Newton is a "bad idea." *sigh*
I want someone to put a modern PDA processor in this clamshell and maybe put palmOS on it or Symbian, since Apple killed the newton, but otherwise leave it basically the same -- black and white is fine for me; throw out a tricked out color version for a few hundred more of course, and you can put all the silly gadgets they're putting in PDAs nowadays, but give me for $200-300 a basic greyscale PDA that you can type or draw on that is as easy and wonderful to use as the eMate. Throw in wireless, a usb or firewire port, and it's set. Basic text editor, web browser, terminal emulater, drawing program, etc., decent amount of nonvolatile memory but no hard drive -- simple, inexpensive, and elegant.
Oh yeah, it's a cool looking green color too, but Apple of course could produce these things in iPod colors.
It rocks! It has a lot of features and no bloat. Instant-on; you never have to wait for it to boot up. A keyboard would be nice but the graffiti input feature works just like your handwriting! It even works with script! And notes are automatically saved. Great drawing programs, spreadsheets, etc. And it's not the best gaming platform, but with tic-tac-toe and exquisite corpse you've still got more games than a Mac.
it gives me a chance to finally complete my business plan that I've been working on. This is what I have so far; thanks to slashdot I can finally fill in step 2:
By the way, it occurs to me that the Wikipedia is a good example of the success (so far) of this distributed method of maintaining accurate content. While the technology and interface are very different, the idea of a distributed network of fact-checkers can work. There are distortions, but they tend to get noticed and fixed pretty regularly. P2p makes that somewhat more difficult -- you can never trust the integrity of the whole database -- but there are plenty ways to publicize the problems that do occur. So the fake file will still be floating out there, but people will know it's fake.
It's important to add that people researching such things are generally attuned to the issue of potential document tampering and are likely to be more wary when documents are gotten off p2p. Significant alterations are likely to be noticed by *someone*. I realize this is a risk, especially because lots of people will share the documents without ever looking at them, but when people do find bad data they will publicize it. md5 will be used, or other more simple ways of detecting changes in a document (change in file size).
Now what would be really cool would be funding for an employee in the FOIA Office whose job is to check p2p-shared documents for accuracy and post information about problems. But that is likely to have to wait for more enlightened times.
Not just linux distros. I've been downloading government information like this from p2p for a long time now. When I heard about Abu Ghraib, p2p was the first place I looked for the photos, rather than the CBS website. I got the Diebold documents off p2p when that scandal first broke. At the beginning of the Iraq war, many documents were being shared that were useful to critics of the war rationale. Not just government documents either but interviews with people and snippets of news coverage, etc.
I think what makes this effort unique is not the sharing of government information but the fact that it's being done systematically with a real index of documents that are available so that you know what the hell you're getting. I've downloaded things that look like they will be interesting docs and turn out to be some photoshopped joke. And a lot of it is hit or miss; I type in "Iraq" and get hundreds of hits, very few of them all that significant. But having a list of what is likely to be available and what the file name would be is really useful. What would be really exciting is a tool to organize many lists of such material that could be easily searched.
And yet, p2p is also arguably a great benefit for national security, at least insofar as such security is improved by access to information.
(The real problem, of course, is those in charge of national security actually using the information they have access to, as is well established by examples in the excellent book Imperial Hubris with regard to US government actions in the war on terrorism.)
Name one instance where a private party altered its website against its wishes due to the U.S. Gov't for political reasons.
First, it's not just private parties -- the US govt owns websites too, and these are where many important documents lie. Ari Fleischer's transcript was altered to remove the embarrassing comment "Watch what you say." Documents on Iraq on whitehouse.gov were not altered but were intentionally obscured so that search engines couldn't find them easily. And the website of the National Cancer Institute was changed to suggest a connection between abortion and breast cancer, a link that the scientific community has consistently rejected. Worse, many documents are simply not being made available at all -- this has been increasing under the Bush Administration by deliberate design, but it has always been a significant problem. In other cases the documents are being made accessible only through publicly-owned databases that are not on the internet and often require a trip to DC.
Second, there have been instances of private parties doing this to appease government officials. Sometimes they are just ordered to take stuff down, as in the case of Sherman Austin's website. Other times the pressure is less obvious, but it is there, like in the case of the San Jose Mercury News website about drug trafficking started by the Gary Webb series in 1996. The website included photos, audio, video, and scanned court documents and it was really well organized (it was well ahead of it's time, and, if it were still around, I think it would still be ahead of it's time! hard to believe that was 8 years ago). The paper eventually published a rebuttal to its own series, which was also linked on the website (and every page on the website was given a link to the brief rebuttal and a note to the effect of "oops! we were wrong about all this! sorry!") Eventually the whole website was taken down. It reappeared briefly a few years later on a website funded by Webb personally and then disappeared again.
That's just the most compelling and extreme example I can think of; there have certainly been others. Another related problem is the increasing privatization of such information -- do you realize that there are whole segments of federal and state law that are not accessible at all without purchasing privately-held (yet nevertheless public) information from a single party? I'm required to obey the law, but if I want to find out what it actually says I have to pay a private party to use their database? Again, this is a trend that has accelerated dramatically over the last few years.
All of these are good reasons to consider p2p for government documents. Of course, there is risk of corruption of such documents, and such corruption might be harder to trace on p2p (especially since many people will be sharing documents they haven't read or even looked at very closely). But I think it is still a good solution to the problem of making the documents more easily accessible, and when alterations are discovered that can be publicized this way too. I'm not sure it would address the last problem I mentioned (privatization), since in those cases the private companies are legally entitled to control the flow of information (for reasons that make no sense to me). Then again, one might expect p2p to facilitate illegal distribution of such information (and the moral argument would be far more compelling than the one for infringing copyrights on music, movies, etc.)
Is there FLAC for Mac? I would love to do this with my music library but I don't know where to start. Can QuickTime play FLAC with a plugin (like ogg)? Can iTunes recognize FLAC files?
Slashdot Mirror
The eMate is the coolest thing. Ever. But what's wrong with it is that the processor is too slow. And while it's true that there are projects making the newton OS work with wifi, bluetooth, etc., in practice, I can do very little with this stuff. I bought a wifi card that is supposed to be compatible but found out it doesn't work with 802.11b. I'm not sure what it works with, but it's useless to me since my network, like most people's, is 802.11. I got an ethernet card that is supposed to work. There are drivers. But the catch is the ethernet card is only good to use for AppleTalk, and I can't see the device under OS X. I got a Keyspan USB adapter to install programs and it works for five minutes then the computer (not the newton) crashes. This happens whether I use Escale, NewTen, or NewtSync. All of these may be problems stemming from my own impatience; I haven't spent more than a few sleepless nights trying to get this stuff to work. But in answer to your question about why new hardware, two reasons: 1 - faster processing. It would be so great to have this emate run as fast as a new palm. 2 - you don't need to give up your job and family and friends to spend time getting things to connect to modern systems that it really isn't intended to connect to. It's great for hackers but not for the rest of us. Finally, I want to add why I do want a new newton -- the OS is great, but what I really love is the form factor of the emate. The newton handhelds are cool too but as the parent points out, too large. But for someone like me who needs to write a lot and who likes a good keyboard, the eMate is the godfather of portables. It's light. It's plastic, and it takes a beating. Its keyboard has great response but is almost totally silent so you can sit in a lecture room and type notes without bugging your neighbors. It has a handle. Handles rule. Apple should put handles on everything. It has instant on -- no waiting for the damn thing to boot. And it's a chick magnet! Oh please Apple, or anyone, figure out how to put a modern processor in a case like this. I don't even need a color screen (prefer battery life!) or tons of disk space or mp3 player or camera or any of that stuff -- just give me portability, battery life, basic text editor applications, some internet stuff - web browser, minimalistic email program, and a telnet/ssh terminal program.
Yes, Apple is going to abandon its proprietary GUI with its consistent interface and beautiful eye candy in order to jump on the X.org bandwagon. Steve Jobs was quoted in an interview saying, "yes, the new interface will make all current applications on OS X unusable and be an absolute nightmare for developers, but we think Apple users will like it in the end, as long as we keep the icons on the right side of the desktop. We at Apple now think X.org is cooler than flying bicycles!"
does anyone know the real origin of this photo?
where I have the Matrix.
Imagine reading Beowulf with your new improved eyesight!
I thought it was an eyeball that shoots laser beams, so you can, you know, like, destroy your enemies and stuff. I hear they have similar surgery for sharks.
This thing is more than the price of a new Treo. $600? You've got to be kidding. No phone, no wifi, no camera, and you even pay extra for a usb cord. It's not clear what the OS is or whether it will play well with my computer (on the list of software is included "PC Synchro" but no explanation). It's not clear how the input interface will allow you to input more than a few clicks at a time -- not great for entering significant amounts of text. I like that you can choose your GUI, but with names like "Ghost," "Femina," and "Leather" (and no other indication besides the name of what the gui looks like) you really gotta wonder.
But not, in standard slashdot fashion, before posting a comment here.
And I thought slashdotters were bad. I mean, all we want is for it to play ogg.
I want someone to put a modern PDA processor in this clamshell and maybe put palmOS on it or Symbian, since Apple killed the newton, but otherwise leave it basically the same -- black and white is fine for me; throw out a tricked out color version for a few hundred more of course, and you can put all the silly gadgets they're putting in PDAs nowadays, but give me for $200-300 a basic greyscale PDA that you can type or draw on that is as easy and wonderful to use as the eMate. Throw in wireless, a usb or firewire port, and it's set. Basic text editor, web browser, terminal emulater, drawing program, etc., decent amount of nonvolatile memory but no hard drive -- simple, inexpensive, and elegant.
Oh yeah, it's a cool looking green color too, but Apple of course could produce these things in iPod colors.
It rocks! It has a lot of features and no bloat. Instant-on; you never have to wait for it to boot up. A keyboard would be nice but the graffiti input feature works just like your handwriting! It even works with script! And notes are automatically saved. Great drawing programs, spreadsheets, etc. And it's not the best gaming platform, but with tic-tac-toe and exquisite corpse you've still got more games than a Mac.
Everything.
(now where's my pocket mulch?)
By the way, it occurs to me that the Wikipedia is a good example of the success (so far) of this distributed method of maintaining accurate content. While the technology and interface are very different, the idea of a distributed network of fact-checkers can work. There are distortions, but they tend to get noticed and fixed pretty regularly. P2p makes that somewhat more difficult -- you can never trust the integrity of the whole database -- but there are plenty ways to publicize the problems that do occur. So the fake file will still be floating out there, but people will know it's fake.
Now what would be really cool would be funding for an employee in the FOIA Office whose job is to check p2p-shared documents for accuracy and post information about problems. But that is likely to have to wait for more enlightened times.
I think what makes this effort unique is not the sharing of government information but the fact that it's being done systematically with a real index of documents that are available so that you know what the hell you're getting. I've downloaded things that look like they will be interesting docs and turn out to be some photoshopped joke. And a lot of it is hit or miss; I type in "Iraq" and get hundreds of hits, very few of them all that significant. But having a list of what is likely to be available and what the file name would be is really useful. What would be really exciting is a tool to organize many lists of such material that could be easily searched.
(The real problem, of course, is those in charge of national security actually using the information they have access to, as is well established by examples in the excellent book Imperial Hubris with regard to US government actions in the war on terrorism.)
First, it's not just private parties -- the US govt owns websites too, and these are where many important documents lie. Ari Fleischer's transcript was altered to remove the embarrassing comment "Watch what you say." Documents on Iraq on whitehouse.gov were not altered but were intentionally obscured so that search engines couldn't find them easily. And the website of the National Cancer Institute was changed to suggest a connection between abortion and breast cancer, a link that the scientific community has consistently rejected. Worse, many documents are simply not being made available at all -- this has been increasing under the Bush Administration by deliberate design, but it has always been a significant problem. In other cases the documents are being made accessible only through publicly-owned databases that are not on the internet and often require a trip to DC.
Second, there have been instances of private parties doing this to appease government officials. Sometimes they are just ordered to take stuff down, as in the case of Sherman Austin's website. Other times the pressure is less obvious, but it is there, like in the case of the San Jose Mercury News website about drug trafficking started by the Gary Webb series in 1996. The website included photos, audio, video, and scanned court documents and it was really well organized (it was well ahead of it's time, and, if it were still around, I think it would still be ahead of it's time! hard to believe that was 8 years ago). The paper eventually published a rebuttal to its own series, which was also linked on the website (and every page on the website was given a link to the brief rebuttal and a note to the effect of "oops! we were wrong about all this! sorry!") Eventually the whole website was taken down. It reappeared briefly a few years later on a website funded by Webb personally and then disappeared again.
That's just the most compelling and extreme example I can think of; there have certainly been others. Another related problem is the increasing privatization of such information -- do you realize that there are whole segments of federal and state law that are not accessible at all without purchasing privately-held (yet nevertheless public) information from a single party? I'm required to obey the law, but if I want to find out what it actually says I have to pay a private party to use their database? Again, this is a trend that has accelerated dramatically over the last few years.
All of these are good reasons to consider p2p for government documents. Of course, there is risk of corruption of such documents, and such corruption might be harder to trace on p2p (especially since many people will be sharing documents they haven't read or even looked at very closely). But I think it is still a good solution to the problem of making the documents more easily accessible, and when alterations are discovered that can be publicized this way too. I'm not sure it would address the last problem I mentioned (privatization), since in those cases the private companies are legally entitled to control the flow of information (for reasons that make no sense to me). Then again, one might expect p2p to facilitate illegal distribution of such information (and the moral argument would be far more compelling than the one for infringing copyrights on music, movies, etc.)
Notice, the iPod doesn't have support for POTS either.
They live in trailer parks. You think they can afford iPods?
Is there FLAC for Mac? I would love to do this with my music library but I don't know where to start. Can QuickTime play FLAC with a plugin (like ogg)? Can iTunes recognize FLAC files?
This link has some info that will help you install gentoo on your toaster.
Wow, did you figure that out all by yourself? You must be one of those really smart Mac users.
We're talking about real knowledge here, not sports.