Dynamism.com has been selling these for months. Not a new release.
I'm a big fan of small computers, and am glad to see some manufacturers resisting the touchpad, which is a huge space hog on small units. I do wish the new U1 went with a trackpoint, or a libretto-like mouse on the screen. Having it where they located it on the U1, almost makes it necessary to pick up the unit to use the mouse, which is unacceptable.
WHY don't they look for them? Cams aren't the smallest of shapes, a little enforcement of theatre policies would go a long way.
Oh, I'm sure the/. crowd will be all over you for suggesting such a horrible "invasion of privacy" or something. Sigh.
The same thing did cross my mind, except using bright infrared to light up the crowd, and infrared camera to check out suspicious activity. Heck, bright infrared flooding the theatre would probably blank out a lot of camcorders anyway.
I've had a Picturebook C1-XS for years, which is exactly the same form factor, had the motion eye camera, firewire, yadda, yadda, yadda. A bigger hard drive, faster transmeta processor, more memory are the main diffs with this unit, it seems.
One of my favorite things about the unit is the extended battery. It's big (folds under the unit), and expensive (think it was a good chunk of $1K), but getting 8 hours of battery life really made those long flights productive. It was truly amazing. Even in it's later life, it got close to 5 hours on the battery. (Unfortunately, my picturebook died recently, works fine, but won't charge any batteries. Sigh.) With the transmeta, the battery life should be even more amazing.
We found CNN, abc, etc., etc., to be completely inaccessible on September 11th. The only online news about it that I could access, was what was relayed through postings on/.
I've seen an awful lot of money spent during the.COM boom, in awfully questionable ways. Ways that were just completely beyond comprehension. I've often thought that a better explanation than sheer stupidity, might be that there were kickbacks and other shady dealings going on (you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours).
With so much money having been tossed around, surely there was a lot of corrupt dealings; however, I haven't seen any press or other talk of such happenings.
Is it primarily because these companies weren't public and thus publicly accountable that any mini-Enron's were simply never discovered?
In some ways, corruption would be a little more comforting of an explanation than sheer stupidity.
I feel like I might be pretty naive in not realizing some of this is going on. What's your take on corrupt dealings, patronage, and such in the industry?
I'd highly recommend working *hard* to define an internal interface (API) that allows *every* functionl part of your program to be done as pluggable modules. It makes it very easy to isolate problems, it makes things more rebust, it makes things extensible. (3DS does a good job in many ways with modules.)
By doing this, 95% of the system could be done as modules, and you can also keep all system-dependant stuff out of these modules, greatly enhancing portability. Thing of the core of the system as being a meta-operating system, a 3D animation operating system supporting these plugin modules.
Another possibility with this approach, is that with proper definition of the interface between the core and the modules, you could even have language indepedence in the modules. (Probably not a biggie initially, but might be good for extensibility at some point; or even good initially for prototyping parts.)
In almost every project I've seen go awry, taking additional time to properly define "internal interfaces," how the parts speak to each other, would have saved a lot of grief.
Take a long hard look at 3D studio's transformation stack; being able to keep track of what took place to get where you are, and being able to apply that to other objects, modifying or branching as appropriate, is incredibly powerful. Being able to animate every parameter of these transformations is also key to a powerful package.
Again, to summarize, modules, modules, modules, modules.:-)
What virtualization software is that? The only stuff I'm aware of that could run something like Win2K, is VMWare. Is it VMWare? If so, why don't they say VMWare?
but there is a brief note about using it in the future for staff
And this is a bad thing because...? Verification that airport staff aren't impostors, and making sure there's no outsiders there seems like a good thing to me. How is this an invasion of privacy or such?
What I suggest, now when we have lots of transistors to play with, are asyncronous designs! Yes they are harder to design and verify, but that is largely because the lack of supporting tools. But what if designing these complex asynchronous systems efficiently requires 5ghz processors?:-)
Is this true? I thought it was commonly known that if you create a hotmail account with a suitably obscure name xyxxaqqf2, and use it for nothing, and don't give out the address, you will receive spam (even after turning on hotmail's spam filters).
This is either caused by MS allowing or sending the spam, or selling the addresses of all accounts (which is just as bad).
What we need is a Unified Marketing Voice for Linux. One of Microsoft's advantage is that they have a single coordinated marketing voice (well, most of the time) and strategy for dealing with the competition.
Linux, on the other hand, is fragmented by its own nature, and has no "central voice" to counter absurd MS FUD. For example, if IBM makes a statement about MS, what would the press do, but go to MS for a counter point and publish it. MS makes a statement about Linux, what does the press do? There is no single obvious place to go for the real story, so our voice is never heard, unless someone happens to stumble across Slashdot or another such site.
How about a central Linux Marketing/Advocacy Project, with a budget, and a few dedicated people on staff, to deal with MS FUD, and promote the real advantages of Linux and other open source initiatives; I'd toss in $100 a year to such an organization; if a few thousand fellow geeks did the same thing, it'd be funded enough to make a difference, and have the visibility needed.
Now, getting the Linux community to agree on a central voice might be an exercise in futility, but it would sure help stop the MS steamroller, and wake up the public a bit.
Exciting concept, the universal desktop. Sun had something called the WebTop they were pitching at one point (iPlanet, I think), which *looked* pretty exciting. Supposedly all Sun employees could just go to any SSL enabled browser, use their little handheld key generator thingy, authenticate themselves, and have access to a full virtual desktop with all the apps they could need, their intranet access, and so on and so forth.
Sounded good. I tried a demo of iPlanet a year or so ago, I couldn't get it working; *way* to complicated and fragmented. And I haven't heard much of Sun employees using it.
I have dreamed of a portable virtual desktop for years. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist yet; but for each specific application, there are some solutions (and some general solutinos). The best I have come up with is the following arrangement:
Use IMAP for mail. This lets you get at the same set of folders, no matter where you are. If you're on a different laptop, desktop, or PDA, banging in the server name and username/password is pretty quick, for getting at your email stored centrally.
For web browsing, you really don't need to do much specially, since it's fairly stateless to start with. I have on my own personal web server, a list of links of stuff I use frequently, which is a good common jumping off point that I can access from anywhere, authenticated via SSL. There may be automated tools for this type of thing, I don't know.
For general central application access, use VNC VNC for remote desktop access; there are clients available for a wide variety of platforms, and source available. Sort of portable PC-Anywhere; not quite as efficient, but pretty good.
A little rough around the edges, but 90% of what I do (and probably 98% of what typical users do) revolves around email, the web, and a couple of specific applications, it goes a long way towards the ultimate solution, which hopefully will be available some day.
The true solution to this is a unversal open *protocol* for applications. IMAP lets universal email be *very* portable. There is no equivalent for calendaring. This is no equivalent for TODO lists. There is no equivalent for most other important applications. If there were, then mutliple vendors could implement it on different platforms, giving true portability.
Until this happens, there will be fragmented proprietary solutions, which by definition, will not be the universal solution. Sigh.
Oh great, MS will push their CPU-based Win-WiFi devices, get the bundled with all the makers overwhich they exert control or pressure, and Linux will have all the grief we've had with WinModems, all over again in the networking world. This is a powerful anti-competitive move by MS, if they truly are winmodem-ish.
But RM101, they won't *change* the API's, they will instead add more and more *new* API's, not document them, and use them in their latest office suite, so no one could reasonably keep up compatabilitry in a competing operating system.
I've seen this type of thing from them regularly over the years.
I think a lot of this could be timing. I used a pretty early XFS. I suspect they rapidly worked out the early porting bugs, giving the traditional XFS stability.
I've used all three of Resier, XFS, and Ext3fs on a couple of different machines.
I've had *all three* result in a corrupted file systems for me, not due to hardware failures, but improper shutdown (typically on laptops that don't resume from a restore, or otherwise die suddenly).
I would say the severity of the corruption in each case, for me, from greatest to least, would be XFS, Reiser, and Ext3.
From what I've read, XFS's design is by *far* the most advanced, and the potential reliability and performance are far greater than the other two; the white papers on it are truly impressive. Hopefully, the corruption I experienced was due to using an earlier version, and that those glitches have been resolved.
The ext3 corruption was in some ways the most frightening, because no problem was ever actually reported, until a fsck I did one day reported a whole bunch of problems.
I think that once people try out the mature XFS, that it's benefits will become more and more obvious, and hopefully someday it will be the default filesystem in major distributions.
I remember a story at a company I once worked for, where customer support was working with someone on the phone installing the product. They kept having trouble after inserting the third 5 1/4" floppy.
Eventually the support guy was able to figure out that the user was inserting the second and third floppys, *in addition* to the one that was already in there! I'm amazed it worked when the user managed to get two in the drive at once.
Then there was the user who kept getting bad floppies; the support guy finally found out from the user that he stored the floppies on his metal filing cabinet, held there by a magnet. Ouch.
Surely with slightly more advanced, but far more available, and stable and simple technologies (programmable gate arrays, etc), they could do a next generation (well,.5 generations ahead) version of this.
The 7400's and such are just interface hardware; that logic, as well as replacement for the 64k ram, etc., could all be put on a single reliable chip (no I386, no heavy OS, no emulator).
There's got to be an only-slightly-more-complicated and nearly-as-reliable by not being too ambitious with the latest tech.
I've bought quite a few of 80/100 Gig hard drives from Maxtor and WD over the past two years (probably about 60 of them). And I have to say, I've found them to be far less reliable than other drives I've used. Probably about 5 or 6 (close to 10%) of the drives we bought failed in under a month's use.
So I'm not surprised at the shortening of the warrantee. Yes, it's probably a "cost cutting measure," but only because I'm sure their warrantee costs have shot up with the less reliable drives they're now producing.
Just one guy's empirical experience of these bigger drives...
The whole Java fiasco is a great example of why MS is more interested in anti-competitive behaviour, than "freedom to innovate."
Initially, they developed one of the leanest, fastest JVM's around (and fastest compilers). An actual sign of innovation; but they nuked that to try and get rid of that annoying portable Java thing. That's not innovation, that's stifling something that they don't fully control in their monopoly.
A shame, it was a great start, and I'm sure if they had done the same for Java 2.0, the consumers would have been better off overall (which they claim is a goal, but is not).
The comparison to the BBC and licensing fees doesn't cut it. A couple of hundred bucks a year for under 10 channels would never fly in the US, where broadcasters provide, and consumer expect 10x that number of channels. For the economics to translate, consumers would have to pay thousands a year in licensing fees. Not gonna happen.
The box can be hidden. It's the poor integration of various bits of software that is the problem with integrating into a home theatre system.
Having to pull out a keyboard to do certain things, poor flexibility in IR remotes for PCs (and their integration to software), having to reboot Windows when it gets grumpy, and so forth, are the reasons why it's painful to get a PC as a regular part of your home theatre. The box color or size is trivial as compared to those issues.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a big fan of small computers, and am glad to see some manufacturers resisting the touchpad, which is a huge space hog on small units. I do wish the new U1 went with a trackpoint, or a libretto-like mouse on the screen. Having it where they located it on the U1, almost makes it necessary to pick up the unit to use the mouse, which is unacceptable.
Oh, I'm sure the /. crowd will be all over you for suggesting such a horrible "invasion of privacy" or something. Sigh.
The same thing did cross my mind, except using bright infrared to light up the crowd, and infrared camera to check out suspicious activity. Heck, bright infrared flooding the theatre would probably blank out a lot of camcorders anyway.
There have been other Cringelys both before and after Stephens writing the column for InfoWorld.
What?? Cringley is just like Shamu? For some reason it just doesn't seem as tragic.
One of my favorite things about the unit is the extended battery. It's big (folds under the unit), and expensive (think it was a good chunk of $1K), but getting 8 hours of battery life really made those long flights productive. It was truly amazing. Even in it's later life, it got close to 5 hours on the battery. (Unfortunately, my picturebook died recently, works fine, but won't charge any batteries. Sigh.) With the transmeta, the battery life should be even more amazing.
-me
With so much money having been tossed around, surely there was a lot of corrupt dealings; however, I haven't seen any press or other talk of such happenings.
Is it primarily because these companies weren't public and thus publicly accountable that any mini-Enron's were simply never discovered?
In some ways, corruption would be a little more comforting of an explanation than sheer stupidity.
I feel like I might be pretty naive in not realizing some of this is going on. What's your take on corrupt dealings, patronage, and such in the industry?
-me
Man, when Jr. destroys that CD (as he has many others), the propagation of my DNA will be halted...
I'd highly recommend working *hard* to define an internal interface (API) that allows *every* functionl part of your program to be done as pluggable modules. It makes it very easy to isolate problems, it makes things more rebust, it makes things extensible. (3DS does a good job in many ways with modules.)
By doing this, 95% of the system could be done as modules, and you can also keep all system-dependant stuff out of these modules, greatly enhancing portability. Thing of the core of the system as being a meta-operating system, a 3D animation operating system supporting these plugin modules.
Another possibility with this approach, is that with proper definition of the interface between the core and the modules, you could even have language indepedence in the modules. (Probably not a biggie initially, but might be good for extensibility at some point; or even good initially for prototyping parts.)
In almost every project I've seen go awry, taking additional time to properly define "internal interfaces," how the parts speak to each other, would have saved a lot of grief.
Take a long hard look at 3D studio's transformation stack; being able to keep track of what took place to get where you are, and being able to apply that to other objects, modifying or branching as appropriate, is incredibly powerful. Being able to animate every parameter of these transformations is also key to a powerful package.
Again, to summarize, modules, modules, modules, modules. :-)
Just curious.
And this is a bad thing because...? Verification that airport staff aren't impostors, and making sure there's no outsiders there seems like a good thing to me. How is this an invasion of privacy or such?
What I suggest, now when we have lots of transistors to play with, are asyncronous designs! Yes they are harder to design and verify, but that is largely because the lack of supporting tools. :-)
But what if designing these complex asynchronous systems efficiently requires 5ghz processors?
-me
Is this true? I thought it was commonly known that if you create a hotmail account with a suitably obscure name xyxxaqqf2, and use it for nothing, and don't give out the address, you will receive spam (even after turning on hotmail's spam filters).
This is either caused by MS allowing or sending the spam, or selling the addresses of all accounts (which is just as bad).
Anyone know the true lowdown on this?
Linux, on the other hand, is fragmented by its own nature, and has no "central voice" to counter absurd MS FUD. For example, if IBM makes a statement about MS, what would the press do, but go to MS for a counter point and publish it. MS makes a statement about Linux, what does the press do? There is no single obvious place to go for the real story, so our voice is never heard, unless someone happens to stumble across Slashdot or another such site.
How about a central Linux Marketing/Advocacy Project, with a budget, and a few dedicated people on staff, to deal with MS FUD, and promote the real advantages of Linux and other open source initiatives; I'd toss in $100 a year to such an organization; if a few thousand fellow geeks did the same thing, it'd be funded enough to make a difference, and have the visibility needed.
Now, getting the Linux community to agree on a central voice might be an exercise in futility, but it would sure help stop the MS steamroller, and wake up the public a bit.
-me
Sounded good. I tried a demo of iPlanet a year or so ago, I couldn't get it working; *way* to complicated and fragmented. And I haven't heard much of Sun employees using it.
I have dreamed of a portable virtual desktop for years. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist yet; but for each specific application, there are some solutions (and some general solutinos). The best I have come up with is the following arrangement:
A little rough around the edges, but 90% of what I do (and probably 98% of what typical users do) revolves around email, the web, and a couple of specific applications, it goes a long way towards the ultimate solution, which hopefully will be available some day.
The true solution to this is a unversal open *protocol* for applications. IMAP lets universal email be *very* portable. There is no equivalent for calendaring. This is no equivalent for TODO lists. There is no equivalent for most other important applications. If there were, then mutliple vendors could implement it on different platforms, giving true portability.
Until this happens, there will be fragmented proprietary solutions, which by definition, will not be the universal solution. Sigh.
So if I fail to lock the door on my car or my house, it's a free-for-all, and anybody can take anything with impunity?
Oh great, MS will push their CPU-based Win-WiFi devices, get the bundled with all the makers overwhich they exert control or pressure, and Linux will have all the grief we've had with WinModems, all over again in the networking world. This is a powerful anti-competitive move by MS, if they truly are winmodem-ish.
> 2) But RM101! They'll just change the APIs!!!!
But RM101, they won't *change* the API's, they will instead add more and more *new* API's, not document them, and use them in their latest office suite, so no one could reasonably keep up compatabilitry in a competing operating system.
I've seen this type of thing from them regularly over the years.
-me
I think a lot of this could be timing. I used a pretty early XFS. I suspect they rapidly worked out the early porting bugs, giving the traditional XFS stability.
I've used all three of Resier, XFS, and Ext3fs on a couple of different machines.
I've had *all three* result in a corrupted file systems for me, not due to hardware failures, but improper shutdown (typically on laptops that don't resume from a restore, or otherwise die suddenly).
I would say the severity of the corruption in each case, for me, from greatest to least, would be XFS, Reiser, and Ext3.
From what I've read, XFS's design is by *far* the most advanced, and the potential reliability and performance are far greater than the other two; the white papers on it are truly impressive. Hopefully, the corruption I experienced was due to using an earlier version, and that those glitches have been resolved.
The ext3 corruption was in some ways the most frightening, because no problem was ever actually reported, until a fsck I did one day reported a whole bunch of problems.
I think that once people try out the mature XFS, that it's benefits will become more and more obvious, and hopefully someday it will be the default filesystem in major distributions.
I remember a story at a company I once worked for, where customer support was working with someone on the phone installing the product. They kept having trouble after inserting the third 5 1/4" floppy.
Eventually the support guy was able to figure out that the user was inserting the second and third floppys, *in addition* to the one that was already in there! I'm amazed it worked when the user managed to get two in the drive at once.
Then there was the user who kept getting bad floppies; the support guy finally found out from the user that he stored the floppies on his metal filing cabinet, held there by a magnet. Ouch.
Surely with slightly more advanced, but far more available, and stable and simple technologies (programmable gate arrays, etc), they could do a next generation (well, .5 generations ahead) version of this.
The 7400's and such are just interface hardware; that logic, as well as replacement for the 64k ram, etc., could all be put on a single reliable chip (no I386, no heavy OS, no emulator).
There's got to be an only-slightly-more-complicated and nearly-as-reliable by not being too ambitious with the latest tech.
I've bought quite a few of 80/100 Gig hard drives from Maxtor and WD over the past two years (probably about 60 of them). And I have to say, I've found them to be far less reliable than other drives I've used. Probably about 5 or 6 (close to 10%) of the drives we bought failed in under a month's use.
So I'm not surprised at the shortening of the warrantee. Yes, it's probably a "cost cutting measure," but only because I'm sure their warrantee costs have shot up with the less reliable drives they're now producing.
Just one guy's empirical experience of these bigger drives...
-me
The whole Java fiasco is a great example of why MS is more interested in anti-competitive behaviour, than "freedom to innovate."
Initially, they developed one of the leanest, fastest JVM's around (and fastest compilers). An actual sign of innovation; but they nuked that to try and get rid of that annoying portable Java thing. That's not innovation, that's stifling something that they don't fully control in their monopoly.
A shame, it was a great start, and I'm sure if they had done the same for Java 2.0, the consumers would have been better off overall (which they claim is a goal, but is not).
-me
The comparison to the BBC and licensing fees doesn't cut it. A couple of hundred bucks a year for under 10 channels would never fly in the US, where broadcasters provide, and consumer expect 10x that number of channels. For the economics to translate, consumers would have to pay thousands a year in licensing fees. Not gonna happen.
The box can be hidden. It's the poor integration of various bits of software that is the problem with integrating into a home theatre system.
Having to pull out a keyboard to do certain things, poor flexibility in IR remotes for PCs (and their integration to software), having to reboot Windows when it gets grumpy, and so forth, are the reasons why it's painful to get a PC as a regular part of your home theatre. The box color or size is trivial as compared to those issues.
-me