I've been using a tablet for the past year (acer travelmate c110). We're a High School, all the students have laptops (some tablets last year, all tablets for incoming students this year). It's a convertable model, and haven't seen any more damage related trouble than a conventional laptop. Unless it's in a weird configuration (screen offset 90 deg and the like), there isn't much difference. The 'slate' stile of tablets are insane, but more because you can't effectivley protect the screen. This is unrelated, but they're not that much more expensive (at least from acer). When we worked the numbers, the tablet ended up costing about as much as a laptop with the same processor/ram, and a gaming GPU. We couldn't see any academic reason to give them killer 3d graphics, however the tabletPC's have been amazingley useful. We've finally got non-geek kids choosing to bring/take notes on their computers.
I've been monkeying with an EPIA M-9000 board and MythTV for about a month now.
The C3 900 is too slow to do the whole job on it's own. The M-series boards show promise, with the onboard MPEG decoder, but VIA's support for the video hardware is poor, and the mpeg decoder support is non-existent at this time. When everything is being done in software (color conversion and decoding) is able to play most video file formats (not DVD). Right now, if I could do it over again, I'd go with one of those PCI all singing all dancing video card/pvr cards (remember that the EPIA boards only have 1 PCI slot, or 2 with a riser). If VIA wants to (and is able deal with legal/company issues), it might be able to do everything at once (mencoder can record divx 320x240 movies in realtime, and possibly a larger format at higher quality), but right now, it'll 'just' work as the set-top portion.
Remember that before Apollo 13, the same might have been said about the chances of the crew's survival if a service module had an explosion, but they worked on the problem, and got the crew home alive. I'd imagine that a shuttle 'could' stay in orbit for quite a while on it's supplies if it really had to. Probably wouldn't be comfortable, but it's better to know.
There is dgps, and I'm pretty rusty but it goes something like this.
You have a gps at a fixed location (like a building) logging where it is (which would wander from the introduced errors) If you were to plot the latitude and longitude, it would be circle like, with the center being a good bet on where your gps receiver is located. Knowing that, you could then broadcast the correction over radio as a differential. I remember that the University of Rhode Island's research vessel used it back in the bad old days of SA.
Though this is irritating, it's not that tough to set up an image (even with product activation). I was wondering how they would lure enterprise users to switch to Windows XP considering the nebulous features for corporate users.
I'm in a similar position regarding P2P software. What we did was install a
Packet Shaper between our router and out network (It's a 1U box that sits in our rack). It lets us reserve bandwidth and set priorities of what services (so even if Kazaa and Audiogalaxy is able to use all of the availible bandwidth, the packet shaper starts dropping packets for that service. We group all the P2p services together, throttle down the outbound bandwidth for p2p (don't want to pay for bandwidth that my users aren't using), set http as top priority and let them (teachers and students alike) share as much as they want. From the user point of view, the program is very slow. We do get some complaints, but when we explain (and demonstrate) that when the filter is off, then the web stops working (and show some handy charts showing what is using the internet connection) most users understand (even the 15 year olds trying to download LOTR)
Don't knock ebooks on the palm, with current eBook software (I like WordSmith and TealDoc) reading books is nice. I've got all the features that you mention, plus I've got an organizer, for a lower cost than your typical eBook hardware. As far as scrolling is concerned, autoscroll is very easy on the eyes. Also, in defense of color, when the device is in color, you start to get options like ClearTypeTM or FineTypeTM (sub-pixel font rendering) which makes the book much easier on the eyes.
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I've been using a tablet for the past year (acer travelmate c110). We're a High School, all the students have laptops (some tablets last year, all tablets for incoming students this year). It's a convertable model, and haven't seen any more damage related trouble than a conventional laptop. Unless it's in a weird configuration (screen offset 90 deg and the like), there isn't much difference. The 'slate' stile of tablets are insane, but more because you can't effectivley protect the screen. This is unrelated, but they're not that much more expensive (at least from acer). When we worked the numbers, the tablet ended up costing about as much as a laptop with the same processor/ram, and a gaming GPU. We couldn't see any academic reason to give them killer 3d graphics, however the tabletPC's have been amazingley useful. We've finally got non-geek kids choosing to bring/take notes on their computers.
I've been monkeying with an EPIA M-9000 board and MythTV for about a month now.
The C3 900 is too slow to do the whole job on it's own. The M-series boards show promise, with the onboard MPEG decoder, but VIA's support for the video hardware is poor, and the mpeg decoder support is non-existent at this time. When everything is being done in software (color conversion and decoding) is able to play most video file formats (not DVD). Right now, if I could do it over again, I'd go with one of those PCI all singing all dancing video card/pvr cards (remember that the EPIA boards only have 1 PCI slot, or 2 with a riser). If VIA wants to (and is able deal with legal/company issues), it might be able to do everything at once (mencoder can record divx 320x240 movies in realtime, and possibly a larger format at higher quality), but right now, it'll 'just' work as the set-top portion.
Remember that before Apollo 13, the same might have been said about the chances of the crew's survival if a service module had an explosion, but they worked on the problem, and got the crew home alive. I'd imagine that a shuttle 'could' stay in orbit for quite a while on it's supplies if it really had to. Probably wouldn't be comfortable, but it's better to know.
There is dgps, and I'm pretty rusty but it goes something like this.
You have a gps at a fixed location (like a building) logging where it is (which would wander from the introduced errors)
If you were to plot the latitude and longitude, it would be circle like, with the center being a good bet on where your gps receiver is located. Knowing that, you could then broadcast the correction over radio as a differential. I remember that the University of Rhode Island's research vessel used it back in the bad old days of SA.
Though this is irritating, it's not that tough to set up an image (even with product activation). I was wondering how they would lure enterprise users to switch to Windows XP considering the nebulous features for corporate users.
Would it even be a violation of the DMCA, it's not like there was any circumvention involved.
I'm in a similar position regarding P2P software. What we did was install a Packet Shaper between our router and out network (It's a 1U box that sits in our rack). It lets us reserve bandwidth and set priorities of what services (so even if Kazaa and Audiogalaxy is able to use all of the availible bandwidth, the packet shaper starts dropping packets for that service. We group all the P2p services together, throttle down the outbound bandwidth for p2p (don't want to pay for bandwidth that my users aren't using), set http as top priority and let them (teachers and students alike) share as much as they want. From the user point of view, the program is very slow. We do get some complaints, but when we explain (and demonstrate) that when the filter is off, then the web stops working (and show some handy charts showing what is using the internet connection) most users understand (even the 15 year olds trying to download LOTR)
Don't knock ebooks on the palm, with current eBook software (I like WordSmith and TealDoc) reading books is nice. I've got all the features that you mention, plus I've got an organizer, for a lower cost than your typical eBook hardware. As far as scrolling is concerned, autoscroll is very easy on the eyes. Also, in defense of color, when the device is in color, you start to get options like ClearTypeTM or FineTypeTM (sub-pixel font rendering) which makes the book much easier on the eyes.