Ouch, There was something special about the $99 price tag. The price was so low that it made it worth while over its other limitations and was why I bought it.
Someone suggests that it is because their customers are finding out about the domain bankofamericasucks.com which has a forum and existing comments by customers and employees.
While advertising makes it look like BluRay has won last I checked it had a big 8% market share. It isn't exactly hot. I personally never plan on owning one and am going to skip over it.
I recently went through the same search, two good options show up
1) Get a mac mini. The idle power consumption is 13 watts. You get a dvd rom, intel cpu, video out if you need it etc. It costs more and the high cpu usage is 110W. Make sure to not get the older mac mini's, only the ones starting I believe last January had the low idle watt usage. And as a bonus at the end you have a mac you can resell.
2) Get a Sheeva Plug. It only costs $99 and only draws 5 Watts of power. It is arm. I myself simply put a usb stick in it loaded up debian and have been happy ever sense (So I am running at 5.5 W). Silent, low power draw. Downside it that it takes 10 minutes to setup and you can't just plugin a monitor and drop in a install cd you have to drop an install image in a sd or usb stick, but there are helpful webpages people have made showing you step by step how to do this.
RFID doesn't work very well through water so if you drop it in a bathtub it pretty much will stop the RFID. At least until you take it out of the backtub.
I am not so sure that users actually care that much about standards and fitting into each desktop at the end of the day. If you have a feature they want users will use your application no matter what it looks like. A nice Example is Google Chrome. By default they paint their own window handles/boarders on X11 pretty much guaranteeing that it wont fit into any desktop. This is a case where they are going directly against having a native standard control, actually putting in effort to break it in the name of consistent branding* and users put up with it because they want to use Chrome.
* From Ben Goodger: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/thread/b89ab99a0c848b89?pli=1
Mod parent up. The board is not where the data is and replacing the board with a good one or swapping the disks into a case+board that is good is a common practice.
That would make no sense though. The point of running chrome is that you use the process-per-tab. You can make firefox now download any images, disable flash css and javascript and then it uses even less memory, but that isn't how [normal] people use the browser.
The Windows version took two years. The linux and osx ports will easily take 18 months and you wont see a somewhat complete port for linux or osx until next Christmas as the earliest. They are re-inventing a lot of cross platform classes.
Not to mention the new laws that are being proposed about using less power in TV's. When I turned off flash I doubled the battery life of my macbook. Using ads in ads is widespread enough that it it seems to be always running using up a good chunk of cpu.
Who cares about 90% of software, we are talking about browsers. Browsers come on all platforms these days. And to top this Chome is advertising on slashdot which is known for have tons of Windows Loving users and users who like to talk about windows only software in positive ways. As long as Chrome does not exist on LInux or exists in a form that is a joke expect it to get trashed on slashdot. And for the second part I have contributed to Chrome to help get it to compile on Linux, but it is a long way off before these is anything close to what a user would expect. Chrome really has a PR problem with Linux which a lot of early adopters use.
Every time you visit any website you tell them exactly what you are doing. What pages you go to, what links you click on and even what link brought you to this site. Using javascript they can even see where you mouse goes on every page. They have a complete log of every page you visited on their site. Scared?
What user indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Ouch, There was something special about the $99 price tag. The price was so low that it made it worth while over its other limitations and was why I bought it.
Someone suggests that it is because their customers are finding out about the domain bankofamericasucks.com which has a forum and existing comments by customers and employees.
Surprised it isn't in the summary, but this phone is also the first Blackberry to have a WebKit based browser which is big news.
There are development board that come with a ipod connector. http://hackaday.com/2010/03/29/microchips-pic-development-for-iphone-and-ipod/ Combine with some buttons and wood and it doesn't look like it would be that hard of a project.
Perhaps the new UI is built on Qt and the new kinetics framework?
While advertising makes it look like BluRay has won last I checked it had a big 8% market share. It isn't exactly hot. I personally never plan on owning one and am going to skip over it.
Some more links:
Sheeva Plug review/picture: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/marvell-sheevaplug-plug-computing-linux,7104.html
Where to buy the Sheeva Plug: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-kit-us.aspx
Installing Debian on the Sheeva Plug: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/
I recently went through the same search, two good options show up 1) Get a mac mini. The idle power consumption is 13 watts. You get a dvd rom, intel cpu, video out if you need it etc. It costs more and the high cpu usage is 110W. Make sure to not get the older mac mini's, only the ones starting I believe last January had the low idle watt usage. And as a bonus at the end you have a mac you can resell. 2) Get a Sheeva Plug. It only costs $99 and only draws 5 Watts of power. It is arm. I myself simply put a usb stick in it loaded up debian and have been happy ever sense (So I am running at 5.5 W). Silent, low power draw. Downside it that it takes 10 minutes to setup and you can't just plugin a monitor and drop in a install cd you have to drop an install image in a sd or usb stick, but there are helpful webpages people have made showing you step by step how to do this.
RFID doesn't work very well through water so if you drop it in a bathtub it pretty much will stop the RFID. At least until you take it out of the backtub.
If the user doesn't upgrade does it disable the plugin?
I am not so sure that users actually care that much about standards and fitting into each desktop at the end of the day. If you have a feature they want users will use your application no matter what it looks like. A nice Example is Google Chrome. By default they paint their own window handles/boarders on X11 pretty much guaranteeing that it wont fit into any desktop. This is a case where they are going directly against having a native standard control, actually putting in effort to break it in the name of consistent branding* and users put up with it because they want to use Chrome. * From Ben Goodger: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/thread/b89ab99a0c848b89?pli=1
Mod parent up. The board is not where the data is and replacing the board with a good one or swapping the disks into a case+board that is good is a common practice.
After all of Ben's ranting about how inconstant Linux is I am sure glad they choose to turn on the silly blue boarder by default on Linux. Because now it really fits into every Linux desktop. Yah for branding. http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/thread/b89ab99a0c848b89#
That would make no sense though. The point of running chrome is that you use the process-per-tab. You can make firefox now download any images, disable flash css and javascript and then it uses even less memory, but that isn't how [normal] people use the browser.
Well a lot of the chrome developers are Windows developers so I could see how it could be embarrassing.
The Windows version took two years. The linux and osx ports will easily take 18 months and you wont see a somewhat complete port for linux or osx until next Christmas as the earliest. They are re-inventing a lot of cross platform classes.
Not to mention the new laws that are being proposed about using less power in TV's. When I turned off flash I doubled the battery life of my macbook. Using ads in ads is widespread enough that it it seems to be always running using up a good chunk of cpu.
Why didn't you just tell every student to change the screensaver and turn on the monitor power management at your next class?
He ripped off my childhood!
The year that gmail launched was better. Every story was so unbelievable that it was assumed to be a joke, but it turned out they were all true.
Who cares about 90% of software, we are talking about browsers. Browsers come on all platforms these days. And to top this Chome is advertising on slashdot which is known for have tons of Windows Loving users and users who like to talk about windows only software in positive ways. As long as Chrome does not exist on LInux or exists in a form that is a joke expect it to get trashed on slashdot. And for the second part I have contributed to Chrome to help get it to compile on Linux, but it is a long way off before these is anything close to what a user would expect. Chrome really has a PR problem with Linux which a lot of early adopters use.
What about Iris
After the rc was released the last fixes went in so 4.5.0 QtWebKit gets 100/100 on the acid3 test.
Every time you visit any website you tell them exactly what you are doing. What pages you go to, what links you click on and even what link brought you to this site. Using javascript they can even see where you mouse goes on every page. They have a complete log of every page you visited on their site. Scared? What user indeed.
Fun small world :)
mem mapping was a feature I added to Qt 4.4. I even wrote a blog entry on it on labs.trolltech.com
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2007/10/15/file-mapping/