So add the Zaurus, a CF wifi card, a 256 mb SD card, a serial keyboard and serial cable (or, alternatively, an IR keyboard) and you basically get an overpriced Microlaptop, but not a PDA.
I agree with everything you said, except I consider it a reasonably priced microlaptop, a job which it does very well. I agree that the palm is a better pure PDA, but the Zaurus is just so much more versitile.
1) Little to no "widgetry" visible on-screen. The user should be able to concentrate on what he's working on, rather than be distracted by UI information. Think "vi" vs "MS Word."
First let me state that I am a vim fan that it's pretty much the only text editor I use.
Now, the problem with a "vi" style interface is that it is hard to work out how to do something if you don't know how. In Word I could probably work out how to, for example insert an image simply by digging around a few menues that looked vaugly correct. In a vim styled world you would have to know that the correct command is "I" or whatever. Now this works great once you've learned it, but the first time you try to insert an image you will have to refere to a manual. The interface for WP5 for example is a good example of this. Once I got the hang of it it was great, but I still had that little reference card over the "f" keys.
A next gen GUI should be based on a full-screen application mechanism
Generally agree. Perhaps some kind of tabbed window where I have a,web browser tab a mail tab, a text editor tab etc. I looked at a linux desktop called OEOne a while back which was based on this concept. It was kind of cool but showed that apps really need to designed for this kind of environment and can't easily be retrofitted. However this will also require some kind of dynamic scaling. For example for video compositing I want my app running 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor, running a wordprocessor like that would be very annoying.
But this isn't really about user levels as such, but more about eye-candy. Having one setting where you get transparent windows with drop shadows and animated minimizing etc. and one where you don't doesn't affect the UI in the way they are describing, but only affacts the speed of your desktop. Being able to easlit turn of eye candy on slower machines is a Good Thing. Hell if you wanted to get really fancy you could have KDE probe for memory and cpu speed and choose a sensible default value based on that.
with java and c# you have exactly what you need for this
No you don't. What you need is some really easy to use RAD environment in which people who can't tell a for loop from an if-then statement can be productive. Something where 'writing' and app is just as easy as coming up with it's features. Much like people can make homepages in Dreamweaver without knowing any HTML, people should be able to make apps in this program without knowing any programming.
This will require some radically new thinking and goes beyond simply designing a new language. Once we have that though, then we can start seeing som changes in the desktop/UI paradigm as we will be able to basically provide a blank slate on top of which the end user can easily and transparantly build whatever he needs and wants.
Now Linux is much, much, MUCH cheaper than MS products
Irrelevant and not true. Windows comes 'free' with all new workstations purchased and when you are dropping a few thousand dollars pr person on software anyway the cost of windows makes no difference.
The main reason of linux over IRIX is simply the price and (lack of) performance of sgi workstation hardware. Call sgi and ask for the price of 20 dual-proc Octane2's with a couple of gigs of RAM and then call someone like HP and ask for the price of 20 similar machines. Notice the order of magnitude difference. Add to this the fact that the Intel workstations will performe a lot better in 90% of the tasks you will be throwing at it, it starts to become obvious. There are VERY few tasks left where sgi hardware outperforms Intel hardware.
The reason for linux over Windows is primarily that porting from one unix to another is easier than porting to windows.
Not even close. Most film and effects shops have written and released some kind Open source, pd or freeware tool. It's actually quite common.
The motion picture industry is very different from the big movie studios. Most people actually in the trenches making the movies dislike the MPAA and their tactics as much as anybody.
IF I WANT LAPTOP FUNCTIONALITY, I'LL BUY A LAPTOP.I just need a basic name/address/phone/email catalog and time organizer.
Good for you, now go and buy a cheap palm device.
I want laptop functionality in something that is a lot easier and convenient to carry than a laptop. Basically this looks perfect. Not everybody has the exact same needs as you.
In Europe just about every 9 year old allready owns a mobile phone, so the obvious answer to that is yes. The real question is does a 9-year old cell phone junkie need a GBA like device.
Has anybody had a chance to play with the guts of one of these yet? I'm thinking primarily from a sys admin point of view. The place where I work will probably be getting rid of our NT boxes and replacing them with OS X as soon as Maya is out. Now pretty interfaces and flashing icons may make our designers happy, but I want to know about the core UNIX setup. Can I admin them by telneting in and treating them like any other BSD box? Can all the changes I would need to make be made with vim? Basically will this be a Unix box or a Mac box from my point of view as a sysadmin?
One of the main resons I don't use a Mac instead of my wintel box is 'cause Macs are so damn expensive. Sure, they're high quality. But I'm not that rich. For the price of a G4, at the very lest, I could get a 1gighz Athlon (i hope i'm right there, but of not, u get the drift).
If you would actually compare prices you would find that this is not the case. Sure it used to be true, but not any more.
Go to Dell and Apples web pages and put together a basic workstation (G4 400/PIII 600, 256MB RAM, 18GB SCSI is what I used to compare prices, since I consider that minum spec for a machine here at work). Now compare the price of the two, remember that you have to pay extra for DVD and firewire from Dell. Notice how similar the prices are?
Why doesn't anybody do any worthwhile server reviews? I'm really not that interested in how well it handles compared to some Celeron in some multimedia benchmark. I want to know how it compares to Sun, SGI, IBM and Compaq Alpha hardware. I want to know how well it can serve up a couple of 100 remote X sessions or how it handles a 500 GB Database that get's hit heavliy 24 hours a day. This is essenitally a server set up, so why do they insist on testing it like they would test some crappy games box. Wow it's faster that a dual PIII 500, big deal, is it faster than a dual Alpha set up?
So while the test may have been somewhat entertaining it is completley useless. The benchmark isn't anything I recognise as an accurate simulation of a server environment and there are no real life tests. Show me a test comparing this to a Sun box running Oracle and 500GB of data and I might be interested.
Do you have any sort of clue just how much of each CD the band rakes in? 3/4ths? Keep dreaming. Half? Not even close.
Depends a lot on the deal. One friend of mine basically did it all on her own and pressed a 1000 CD's paying out of her own pocket. She expecpects to recover all her costs after selling 500 of them. Thus she pockets 50%, but she has to do all of her own promotion and has to put up money up front. Also if she becomes popular pressing more copies is relatively cheap since all the recording and mixing is done, thus she'll get a larger chunk of profit.
Another friend went the other way and got a deal with a largish record lable. For his first CD he gets a small amount of cash up front and hardly getting anything pr. CD sold. However he considers it worth it since it means he doesn't have to do as much of the promtional work himself, he will be on a recognized and well know lable and thus will probably get a larger audience. Also he has to put up a lot less of his own money, since the record lable is taking most of the risk and if his record doesn't sell, it doesn't mean he'll be sitting with a large debt he can't pay. That's also some of what the record lables get paid for, to take the risk of losing money if the album doesn't sell.
One of the problems with standard UNIX backup utilities is the fact that they don't have a friendly interface.
It's been a while since I used it, but I seem to recall Legato Networker having a quite useable GUI. Sure it wasn't stunning but it worked and made simple backup/recovery jobs easy to do by just pointing and clicking.
Of course the price for Networker is rather high. Esp. if you use a tape jukebox or want to back up a number of client machines in a multi OS network.
I bet you could push gigabits through the damn things....
Actually you can push 9.6kb through them. They are lying GSM stations and GSM is limited to 9.6 kb/s data (yes I know there are some funky hacks being worked on that can push this limit slightly).
There has been a second organization that is based on the Hitler Youth organization. It's international....it's called the Boy Scouts (and Girl Scouts). That's right...they even use the same uniforms, teach arms use, survivalism, reconnaisance, infiltration (not officially), and many other diciplines. Also, most BSA summer camps are laid out in the same way and with the same equipment as military boot camp. Th military still gets to play with larger guns though.:-)
Ummm...OK. I'm kind of lost at how you managed to draw a connection between Hitler Youth and scouts, considering that the scouting movement predates Hitler Youth by more than 50 years. If anything the Hitler Youth was based on the scouting movement.
And as to Scouts being similar to army, well...duh really? Where do you think scouting comes from? It was started as an organization to train future soldiers.
So they weren't paying for the access; that's service theft. Technically, the university has the right to arrest them.
But *why*? It's not that big a deal.
Personally I would have run some traffic shaping on their port limiting them to 10kb and then seen if they where still using it after a couple of weeks. Re-routing their traffic could also have its amusement value.
No, you're incorrect. The Win2K box that was up never got hacked, unlike the LinuxPPC box. Nice try, though.
The main point with the LinuxPPC box was that it was an out of the box install with no tweaking or patches installed. It was a test to show how secure LinuxPPC was out of the box, not how secure linux could be.
The security hole that was used is known and has been patched a long time ago. Thus if the box had been correctly admined, that hole would have been patched and the crack wouldn't have been possible.
As for the article saying that they'd be available in September...um, they're available right now
Actually Sony has two versions of these. The ones you saw, which have been out since the begining of the year, and these new ones. The new ones apparantly have bigger view area, better colors and transparancy option
The only thing that DVD audio offers is a higher bits per sample rate. It will make a difference, but its significance will not warrant replacing current technologies. Lets say it samples at 88 kHz. Whoop dee doo, it can accurately reconstruct a signal up to 44 kHz (but a safe frequency would be 40 kHz). What good is 20 kHz you can't hear going to do?
The sound quality upgrade (190+kHz/96 bits if I recall, compared to CD's 44kHz/16bits) will be noticeable, but only to people with good systems and who know what to listen for. But that is not what they are using to market DVD audio to the masses. The main selling points are 5 channel surround music and extra info on a DVD. A DVD can hold a lot more data than a CD, but people are not going to start recording 5 hour albums, just because of it. So the record companies are going to use the extra space to include things like interactive info and pictures about the artist, music videos, lyrics scrolling by as the song plays and other extra bits, just like they do with DVD movies now. They are assuming that most DVD players will be connected to a TV so they are going to use this to offer a more mulitmedia presentation.
Trying to argue higher music quality with people who think MP3s are good is a waste of time and they realize this. Thus they are focusing on the "added value" they can bundle with DVD's.
WE GET MUSIC TO LISTEN TO IT, FORE WHICH MP3S ARE THE BEST OF THE CHOICES
Here it seems that we disagree on the meaning of listen. When I want to LISTEN to music LP's are the only things that will really do (Although a well recorded CD is pretty close). Compared to vinyl, everything else just sounds flat and boring. If I just want to hear some music in the background then CD's are fine and MP3's might do if the music is fairly dynamicly flat to start with, and it's done with a good comp. rate.
No matter how you argue, you will never get away from the fact that MP3's are of lousy quality. They have little dynamic range and lack true stereo. Their only feature is they are convenient if you have a computer handy and sound quality is irrelevant.
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So add the Zaurus, a CF wifi card, a 256 mb SD card, a serial keyboard and serial cable (or, alternatively, an IR keyboard) and you basically get an overpriced Microlaptop, but not a PDA.
I agree with everything you said, except I consider it a reasonably priced microlaptop, a job which it does very well. I agree that the palm is a better pure PDA, but the Zaurus is just so much more versitile.
First let me state that I am a vim fan that it's pretty much the only text editor I use.
Now, the problem with a "vi" style interface is that it is hard to work out how to do something if you don't know how. In Word I could probably work out how to, for example insert an image simply by digging around a few menues that looked vaugly correct. In a vim styled world you would have to know that the correct command is "I" or whatever. Now this works great once you've learned it, but the first time you try to insert an image you will have to refere to a manual. The interface for WP5 for example is a good example of this. Once I got the hang of it it was great, but I still had that little reference card over the "f" keys.
A next gen GUI should be based on a full-screen application mechanism
Generally agree. Perhaps some kind of tabbed window where I have a ,web browser tab a mail tab, a text editor tab etc. I looked at a linux desktop called OEOne a while back which was based on this concept. It was kind of cool but showed that apps really need to designed for this kind of environment and can't easily be retrofitted. However this will also require some kind of dynamic scaling. For example for video compositing I want my app running 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor, running a wordprocessor like that would be very annoying.
But this isn't really about user levels as such, but more about eye-candy. Having one setting where you get transparent windows with drop shadows and animated minimizing etc. and one where you don't doesn't affect the UI in the way they are describing, but only affacts the speed of your desktop. Being able to easlit turn of eye candy on slower machines is a Good Thing.
Hell if you wanted to get really fancy you could have KDE probe for memory and cpu speed and choose a sensible default value based on that.
No you don't. What you need is some really easy to use RAD environment in which people who can't tell a for loop from an if-then statement can be productive. Something where 'writing' and app is just as easy as coming up with it's features. Much like people can make homepages in Dreamweaver without knowing any HTML, people should be able to make apps in this program without knowing any programming.
This will require some radically new thinking and goes beyond simply designing a new language. Once we have that though, then we can start seeing som changes in the desktop/UI paradigm as we will be able to basically provide a blank slate on top of which the end user can easily and transparantly build whatever he needs and wants.
Irrelevant and not true. Windows comes 'free' with all new workstations purchased and when you are dropping a few thousand dollars pr person on software anyway the cost of windows makes no difference.
The main reason of linux over IRIX is simply the price and (lack of) performance of sgi workstation hardware. Call sgi and ask for the price of 20 dual-proc Octane2's with a couple of gigs of RAM and then call someone like HP and ask for the price of 20 similar machines. Notice the order of magnitude difference. Add to this the fact that the Intel workstations will performe a lot better in 90% of the tasks you will be throwing at it, it starts to become obvious. There are VERY few tasks left where sgi hardware outperforms Intel hardware.
The reason for linux over Windows is primarily that porting from one unix to another is easier than porting to windows.
Not even close. Most film and effects shops have written and released some kind Open source, pd or freeware tool. It's actually quite common.
The motion picture industry is very different from the big movie studios. Most people actually in the trenches making the movies dislike the MPAA and their tactics as much as anybody.
IF I WANT LAPTOP FUNCTIONALITY, I'LL BUY A LAPTOP.I just need a basic name/address/phone/email catalog and time organizer.
Good for you, now go and buy a cheap palm device.
I want laptop functionality in something that is a lot easier and convenient to carry than a laptop. Basically this looks perfect. Not everybody has the exact same needs as you.
>Does a 9-year old GBA junkie need a cell phone?
In Europe just about every 9 year old allready owns a mobile phone, so the obvious answer to that is yes. The real question is does a 9-year old cell phone junkie need a GBA like device.
Has anybody had a chance to play with the guts of one of these yet? I'm thinking primarily from a sys admin point of view. The place where I work will probably be getting rid of our NT boxes and replacing them with OS X as soon as Maya is out. Now pretty interfaces and flashing icons may make our designers happy, but I want to know about the core UNIX setup.
Can I admin them by telneting in and treating them like any other BSD box? Can all the changes I would need to make be made with vim? Basically will this be a Unix box or a Mac box from my point of view as a sysadmin?
If you would actually compare prices you would find that this is not the case. Sure it used to be true, but not any more.
Go to Dell and Apples web pages and put together a basic workstation (G4 400/PIII 600, 256MB RAM, 18GB SCSI is what I used to compare prices, since I consider that minum spec for a machine here at work). Now compare the price of the two, remember that you have to pay extra for DVD and firewire from Dell. Notice how similar the prices are?
So while the test may have been somewhat entertaining it is completley useless. The benchmark isn't anything I recognise as an accurate simulation of a server environment and there are no real life tests. Show me a test comparing this to a Sun box running Oracle and 500GB of data and I might be interested.
You're sounds like you need Mosix. I haven't played with it myself, but it sounds really cool.
Check out http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il
Depends a lot on the deal.
One friend of mine basically did it all on her own and pressed a 1000 CD's paying out of her own pocket. She expecpects to recover all her costs after selling 500 of them. Thus she pockets 50%, but she has to do all of her own promotion and has to put up money up front. Also if she becomes popular pressing more copies is relatively cheap since all the recording and mixing is done, thus she'll get a larger chunk of profit.
Another friend went the other way and got a deal with a largish record lable. For his first CD he gets a small amount of cash up front and hardly getting anything pr. CD sold. However he considers it worth it since it means he doesn't have to do as much of the promtional work himself, he will be on a recognized and well know lable and thus will probably get a larger audience. Also he has to put up a lot less of his own money, since the record lable is taking most of the risk and if his record doesn't sell, it doesn't mean he'll be sitting with a large debt he can't pay.
That's also some of what the record lables get paid for, to take the risk of losing money if the album doesn't sell.
It's been a while since I used it, but I seem to recall Legato Networker having a quite useable GUI. Sure it wasn't stunning but it worked and made simple backup/recovery jobs easy to do by just pointing and clicking.
Of course the price for Networker is rather high. Esp. if you use a tape jukebox or want to back up a number of client machines in a multi OS network.
Actually you can push 9.6kb through them. They are lying GSM stations and GSM is limited to 9.6 kb/s data (yes I know there are some funky hacks being worked on that can push this limit slightly).
Ummm...OK. I'm kind of lost at how you managed to draw a connection between Hitler Youth and scouts, considering that the scouting movement predates Hitler Youth by more than 50 years. If anything the Hitler Youth was based on the scouting movement.
And as to Scouts being similar to army, well...duh really? Where do you think scouting comes from? It was started as an organization to train future soldiers.
But *why*? It's not that big a deal.
Personally I would have run some traffic shaping on their port limiting them to 10kb and then seen if they where still using it after a couple of weeks. Re-routing their traffic could also have its amusement value.
The main point with the LinuxPPC box was that it was an out of the box install with no tweaking or patches installed. It was a test to show how secure LinuxPPC was out of the box, not how secure linux could be.
The security hole that was used is known and has been patched a long time ago. Thus if the box had been correctly admined, that hole would have been patched and the crack wouldn't have been possible.
Compaq Unix is at least as secure, if not more so.
Actually Sony has two versions of these. The ones you saw, which have been out since the begining of the year, and these new ones. The new ones apparantly have bigger view area, better colors and transparancy option
The sound quality upgrade (190+kHz/96 bits if I recall, compared to CD's 44kHz/16bits) will be noticeable, but only to people with good systems and who know what to listen for. But that is not what they are using to market DVD audio to the masses. The main selling points are 5 channel surround music and extra info on a DVD.
A DVD can hold a lot more data than a CD, but people are not going to start recording 5 hour albums, just because of it. So the record companies are going to use the extra space to include things like interactive info and pictures about the artist, music videos, lyrics scrolling by as the song plays and other extra bits, just like they do with DVD movies now. They are assuming that most DVD players will be connected to a TV so they are going to use this to offer a more mulitmedia presentation.
Trying to argue higher music quality with people who think MP3s are good is a waste of time and they realize this. Thus they are focusing on the "added value" they can bundle with DVD's.
Here it seems that we disagree on the meaning of listen. When I want to LISTEN to music LP's are the only things that will really do (Although a well recorded CD is pretty close). Compared to vinyl, everything else just sounds flat and boring. If I just want to hear some music in the background then CD's are fine and MP3's might do if the music is fairly dynamicly flat to start with, and it's done with a good comp. rate.
No matter how you argue, you will never get away from the fact that MP3's are of lousy quality. They have little dynamic range and lack true stereo. Their only feature is they are convenient if you have a computer handy and sound quality is irrelevant.
Last time I checked several closed source Unix versions were more secure than Linux
Sure, but at $250+ they can forget it. If IBM were to sell copies for somewhere in the $50 region I would seriously consider giving it a look.