News flash: there is a pie. It's called the Earth. And there are simply not enough raw materials to provide every man, woman and child on the planet with their own:
Television and portable walkman TV for trips.
Laptop computer and desktop computer.
Dreamcast, Playstation, Playstation2 and GameCube.
Car for daily driving, and gas and oil to operate it.
Sports car or SUV for weekends, and gas and oil to operate it.
Jet ski and yacht, and gas and oil to operate them..
Snowmobile, and gas and oil to operate it.
Riding lawn mower, and gas and oil to operate it.
Closet full of clothes full of artificial petroleum-based fibers and chemical dyes.
3,000 square foot house.
DVD player, VCR, home stereo, walkman, cordless phone, mobile phone, pager and PDA.
Full complement of kitchen appliances.
...and 2,500-5,000 calories daily, at least half of it from meat.
Try to do this and you will soon find out just how small the "pie" really is. Now just figure in our exponential population growth for kicks.
I live in Utah and the man on the street isn't "letting it [unfair trade and US ecnonomic imperialism] happen" -- the common man is willing it! There's a kind of right-wing nationalism in many of the "heartland" areas of the U.S. that causes people to shop at Wal-Mart because it is a huge multinational that demonstrates and increases the power and wealth of the United States relative to other countries, and they will openly discuss this.
For the same reason, many locals will buy Nike and avoid fair trade -- they have been indoctrinated with the sense that the U.S. is a nebulous force for all that is good and other cultures or peoples are a force for all that is bad. To these right-wingers, it is a good thing to see non-whites in sweatshops, because the perception is that they somehow deserve it, because they are (a) not white and (b) not American, ergo not primary parts of "free enterprise and the American way" and are thus evil and against god.
It is often hard for people from the urban coastal areas to understand and see this attitude until they actually visit the heartland and witness (real example) local schools forbidden from collecting for UNICEF because the city has been declared a "UN-free zone." and there are severe penalties for violation of the exclusion.
This is flawed logic which places profit and commerce above the needs of society on both macrocosmic and microcosmic scales.
Following this logic to its logical conclusion, the heroin trade may be the best business ever. The customers can't seem to get enough, the profits are huge, and there's a lovely international network to foster understanding. It's all very efficient indeed.
There are fundamental misconceptions here, two of which need to be addressed before I explode:
1) That so-called "3rd world" wealth is increasing at the same or greater rate as the wealth of the top of the American pay scale. This is total crap and none of the economic indicators support this. Sorry, but the top echelons of American society continue to suck resources and wealth from the rest of the world at a stunning rate.
2) That so-called "3rd world" populations anywhere outside of urban areas actually want to be "like Americans" and live the "western lifestyle." Generally, they don't. Many of them (especially adults in these populations) are quite literally losing their religion, their language, their traditions, their family land, their traditional rights & priveleges under law, etc. etc. etc., all under the banner of "increasing standard of living" (a.k.a. westernization, in which most profits and resources will end up at some point in the pockets of the western nations).
Homogeneity is not merely a problem of corporate life, it is a problem of American culture. We are losing worldwide diversity in cultures and in peoples much faster than we are losing diversity in the marketplace. Most in the western world have no idea just how diverse the cultures and lifestyles of the world once were. Most westerners also have a prejudice that "our way is the way of truth and right" and all other lifestyles, political structures, or economic systems are somehow evil. How ugly it is to watch them all disappear, no matter whether traditional or local ways are replaced by a McDonald's or by a "mom and pop" burger stand that appears in their place. Quite simply, it is a shame to see a for-profit "burger stand" in some places at all.
I own the original CD for every MP3 I have so that's no problem... It's a very big job, though (about 400 CDs here) so I don't want to do it until I know that I'll be using the new format for a while!
What is the quality like on the HipZip? When MP3 first happened, I discovered that there can be HUGE quality differences between devices when I bought a D-Link MP3 player that (a) cut off the first four seconds of every file during playback, (b) added its own "pops" and "skips" which didn't occur when playing the same MP3 file back on a PC and (c) started dropping plastic parts on the floor within two or three months.
With Iomega's track record (i.e. ZipClicks) I'm a little wary about using another product based on the same fundamental technology... Do you (or does anyone) who has a HipZip have any complaints and/or endorsements, durability or quality-wise?
What I want to know is whether there are any portable Ogg players out there yet? Can someone point me to one? I've got a whole music collection in MP3 that I'm ready to re-encode from CD into OGG format as soon as I can get a portable player.
I experienced severe corruption in the early 2.4 series on my own personal KT133A board (Asus A7V133) but all recent kernels (I started trying again around 2.4.8) have been perfect with the Via UDMA enabled using two Maxtor and two IBM drives. Very fast and very stable... so in my experience, it's been fixed.
A lot of other naggish problems with the early 2.4 series (broken 2048-byte secotrs in FAT, nonfunctioning or error-prone CDRW output, clock skew and resultant bad DPMS stuff under load) have also been fixed. I found 2.4.10-ac12 to be very stable on my VIA 133a system and have now switched to 2.4.13, which seems equally stable so far.
The system is up 24/7 and is running Samba services for a small network of friends as well as web, mail, dns and a few other things. I run KDE 2.2.1 and routinely have a bucketfull of apps (OpenOffice, many GIMP windows, emacs, etc.) running as well as freeamp playing music files. I also have a script that grabs the nightly mozilla snapshot and builds it once a day.
Since I switched to the late 2.4 series, no problems or complaints. I honestly haven't had trouble with either Rik's VM in the -ac tree or the new AA vm and UDMA has been rock solid.
I do this... I live in Salt Lake City (not nearly as good as Quebec for this sort of thing) but every year I get in about 3-4 months of excellent overclocking on my gaming box by sticking it on a small, protected ledge just outside the window where the temperature is usually at or below freezing. The machine runs 24/7 that way throughout most of the winter, and I can get an additional 70-100 MHz out of it with a CPU temperature that remains quite low. Last year I also was able to crank my (then new) GF2-Pro much higher as well.
I'd never do it on any of my work machines, but it lets me crank the game visuals up during the snowy months on the game system.
It has been much longer than a couple of months for Wine. Wine has been around for years as well (it significantly predates Mozilla) and has never once been able to install and run a version of MS Word (let alone the rest of office) out of the box on a clean disk yet.
There are scattered success stories with big hacks and careful choosing of DLLs on pre-installed windows partitions, but I've yet been able to duplicate any of them over the years. I've got Office 4.3, Office 95, Office 97 and Office 2000 here on-site and none of them work with Wine yet.
Now they're going to try DirectX too... I think somebody is just way too optimistic. Good luck to them, though, it would be cool if they ever get any of it to work.
Is that it's using Wine. Maybe I'm behind the times or biased, but Wine has been around for a long time now and still can't even be used to run already-installed business applications like MS Word, much less the Word installer, much less still DirectX games, much less even that that installers for DirectX games...
The one important commercial product released so far using Wine is Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, which was such a dismal failure that many users who paid hundreds in cash for it ended up buying the windows version in addition anyway to run under VMWare or Win4Lin.
Wine simply has not proven itself a viable project. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not complaining about the Wine developers at all. I'm just wondering whether it's really possible (both legally and technically) to get a working, current implementation of the Windows and DirectX APIs on Linux.
This question is, of course, in addition to the significant question of performance, not even addressed in this post...
Um, X blows VNC away for speed... Perhaps you haven't used them on a fast enough network connection+machine to tell? Given a fast enough machine and network, you have trouble noticing that your X clients are remote at all. You can always tell you're on a network with VNC.
Plus, there are still a LOT of very important environments with existing Unix installations and existing X-terminal installations that Linux needs to be interoperable with, unless we are willing to give up on Linux for anything other than a "home" operating system for desktops.
This argument may be a good one, but can go either way. There is no denying that there are benefits to being able to use a single X server to get at a kernel-based framebuffer.
However, I also cannot name the number of times I have been able to ssh from one workstation to another which has "hung" and type:
killall X
and "rescue" the unresponsive station from a power cycle. This has happened with a number of different types of graphics hardware. Had those video drivers been in the kernel, there would have been no choice but to hard reset or power cycle.
2. Migrate Linux users to DirectFB, lose interoperability with the rest of the open software (a.k.a. Unix) world.
3. X is not necessarily slower than a framebuffer, it depends more on the driver than on anything architectural. Even for 3D Nvidia's driver gets X to within 1% or so of the Windows FPS rates. DirectFB with the same driver implementation as X for each type of hardware will end up with more or less the same performance for each card.
Some people use X as a scapegoat for everything... Yet it's fast (with good drivers), it keeps adapting (anti-aliasing, dga, xvideo, xtt, etc.), it's network-transparent, and it's a long-standing standard that is open and interoperable. It should be a model for open software longevity, rather than a whipping-boy for Linux's hardware support shortcomings.
That's bull, you've bought the anti-hype about Newton. I don't know why people still feel the need to beat on Newton after all these years. It's like a religion.
I'll tell you about my Newton 2100:
* Rechargable battery life 12+ hours continuous on-time
* 480x320 display, which you still can't get in any other PDA
* 162 MHz StrongARM CPU (slow did you say?!)
* Perfect handwriting recognition from Paragraph which is now used by Microsoft in Transcriber for PocketPC!
It is the perfect PDA and I've owned PocketPC, HPC Pro, PalmOS and even full Windows Tablets (i.e. Fujitsu Stylistic). My Newton is small enough to fit in one hand, yet I:
* Took all of my class notes on it in college(using the recognizer!)
* Browse the Web and send e-mail in real time on our Ethernet network
* Use VNC on Newton to access my Linux desktop
The Newton was/is a great device that was killed by public ridicule from people who had never even tried to use one.
Apple is a normal company. Why does the public constantly expect them to do the impossible?
I think over history, Apple has shown with some regularity that they can pull "the impossible" out of their hat. Now with Jobs and NeXT genes on board, that sense is even more intense.
Whether Apple's products are brilliant successes or bizarrely interesting failures, nobody can deny that what they're doing as a rule seems more interesting that what Dell/Gateway/Microsoft et al are ever doing. And occasionally (Macintosh, NeXT, Newton, iMac) Apple/NeXT have done things that were completely mind-blowing and heretofore impossible.
I'm speaking as a longtime PC owner and Linux, not a Mac owner (though I do love my Newton)-- I have a healthy respect for the real innovation Apple has brought to the industry (compare to Microsoft's "innovation"...) and I have trouble understanding why Slashot users are such haters when it comes to Apple and Steve Jobs.
- Holds over 1000 songs
- Weights just 6.5 ounces -- fits in your pocket
- Plays up to 10 hours with 20 minutes skip protection
- Auto synchronize all your music with iTunes
- Transfer a whole CD is less than 10 seconds
- Charge with the included power adapter or over FireWire
- Breakthrough UI with an innovative scroll wheel
- 60 mWatt amp powers high-fidelity sound earbuds
- Ultra-slim 5-gigabyte hard drive doubles as a FireWire disk
The difference being that Newton was a great product which actually worked. The only two bad things people can generally name about Newton are a) the handwriting recognition, which was actually very good (better than anything for CE or Palm today) but first needed time to "learn" your handwriting and b) the infrared, which can't be blamed on Apple since it was implemented before current IrDA standards were even complete.
And by the Newton 2000/2100 series, these things were all fixed -- the handwriting recognition was actually good out of the box, and the device would then continue to learn even more, and software is available to allow Newton 2000/2100 machines to interoperate using infrared with, for example, Palm devices.
Newtons don't crash all the time, lose your data, or have a totally inelegant and mis-matched operating system for the task at hand. In fact, my Newton 2100 has *never* crashed on me in all the years I've used it, while a CE 2.11 HPC Pro I used for a few months crashed and required a hard reset almost daily, not to mention that the Newton's NOS 2.1 was incredibly well-designed as a PDA operating system while CE was so klunky it took lots of taps an arm movements to perform the simplest tasks.
Then there's the fact that Newton was way ahead of its time, a paradigm-shifter, a visionary device when it was first released and which the industry wouldn't fully understand and follow properly until years later, while XBox is just yet-another-game-console-with-optional-peripherals without an original idea in it.
Newton didn't fail on its own terms, it was in the black when it was killed. Maybe XBox is a lousy product (in fact, I think most people would bet on it), but don't compare it to the Newton.
>>Why are people so obsessed with the idea of Apple releasin a PDA anyway? >Because the Newton was so *close* to what we all wanted.
Adding my $0.02: Not to mention that if Apple did come out with a reborn Newton, some of us [me] would buy it in a second and pay $$$ for it, too because out existing Apple PDAs are now several years old and heavily worn from use...
As a matter of fact, yes, I can sync to Outlook with my Newton, but so what? If you or anyone else wants to know what Newton can/can't do, I suggest asking on the NewtonTalk list. But that's not what my post was about, jack... My post was about my enjoying the use of a webserver on the device, not about you thinking you'd found a forum for anything-but-PalmOS-bashing.
If you want to get vicious, I can also run VNC over Ethernet or wireless LAN on the Newton's 480x320 display after I'm done syncing with my PC and interacting over http. And after my VNC session, I can browse the Web and send/receive POP3/SMTP e-mail in real time on an Ethernet or wireless LAN from my Newton as well. Let's see your little Palm do all of that.
It can't, I know, I had a Palm before the Newton!:O
Webserver on your PDA is not useless. I run NPDS on my Newton 2100 all the time and it's one of the most convenient ways of interacting with your PDA while you're at your desk. I got it a static IP and got it put in the DNS.
Now, when I need to get at some information that's in the device while I'm at my PC, I don't have to pull the PDA out and pen-tap through things, I just point the browser (usually already running) to:
http://newton.xyz.com
From there I can search my contacts, get at my notes, use my datebook etc. Data can be entered this way as well.
Webserver-in-a-PDA: Don't knock it until you've tried it...
What, did they rewrite the whole thing from the ground up between 1.0 and 1.05? I much prefer GMC (for GNOME) and Konqueror (for KDE). Nautilus makes the same mistake the early versions of Enlightenment made. It can either be called a) dog fscking slow or b) 5 years ahead in terms of both vision and [important] in terms of the common man's average computing power. Either way it's a loss.
Nautilus is so slow compared to other file managers on my existing (far faster than average) hardware that it just seems broken, period. First impressions mean a lot and I'm not going to be first in line to try a Nautilus release until I hear something about massive performance increases in the headline.
Basically eBay has a really strong policy about changing feedback -- they just won't do it unless you have attorneys and courts and things involved.
So in my case (some time ago now) it came down to having my attorney look into going after the bidder himself with whatever we could. When the bidder received what my attorney had set in motion, the bidder then apparently talked things over with his attorney. Then both attorneys got together and worked something out amidst a whole stack of paperwork. They then approached eBay with the deal they'd worked out and, in the end, both pieces of feedback were removed.
I don't want to get any more specific than this without first asking my attorney, as you can see I have no real idea when it comes to legal issues. Basically the whole thing wasn't worth it and really soured me on leaving negative feedback without first warning people that I'm considering doing so and seeing how they react.
Slashdot Mirror
- Television and portable walkman TV for trips.
- Laptop computer and desktop computer.
- Dreamcast, Playstation, Playstation2 and GameCube.
- Car for daily driving, and gas and oil to operate it.
- Sports car or SUV for weekends, and gas and oil to operate it.
- Jet ski and yacht, and gas and oil to operate them..
- Snowmobile, and gas and oil to operate it.
- Riding lawn mower, and gas and oil to operate it.
- Closet full of clothes full of artificial petroleum-based fibers and chemical dyes.
- 3,000 square foot house.
- DVD player, VCR, home stereo, walkman, cordless phone, mobile phone, pager and PDA.
- Full complement of kitchen appliances.
- ...and 2,500-5,000 calories daily, at least half of it from meat.
Try to do this and you will soon find out just how small the "pie" really is. Now just figure in our exponential population growth for kicks.I live in Utah and the man on the street isn't "letting it [unfair trade and US ecnonomic imperialism] happen" -- the common man is willing it! There's a kind of right-wing nationalism in many of the "heartland" areas of the U.S. that causes people to shop at Wal-Mart because it is a huge multinational that demonstrates and increases the power and wealth of the United States relative to other countries, and they will openly discuss this.
For the same reason, many locals will buy Nike and avoid fair trade -- they have been indoctrinated with the sense that the U.S. is a nebulous force for all that is good and other cultures or peoples are a force for all that is bad. To these right-wingers, it is a good thing to see non-whites in sweatshops, because the perception is that they somehow deserve it, because they are (a) not white and (b) not American, ergo not primary parts of "free enterprise and the American way" and are thus evil and against god.
It is often hard for people from the urban coastal areas to understand and see this attitude until they actually visit the heartland and witness (real example) local schools forbidden from collecting for UNICEF because the city has been declared a "UN-free zone." and there are severe penalties for violation of the exclusion.
This is flawed logic which places profit and commerce above the needs of society on both macrocosmic and microcosmic scales.
Following this logic to its logical conclusion, the heroin trade may be the best business ever. The customers can't seem to get enough, the profits are huge, and there's a lovely international network to foster understanding. It's all very efficient indeed.
There are fundamental misconceptions here, two of which need to be addressed before I explode:
1) That so-called "3rd world" wealth is increasing at the same or greater rate as the wealth of the top of the American pay scale. This is total crap and none of the economic indicators support this. Sorry, but the top echelons of American society continue to suck resources and wealth from the rest of the world at a stunning rate.
2) That so-called "3rd world" populations anywhere outside of urban areas actually want to be "like Americans" and live the "western lifestyle." Generally, they don't. Many of them (especially adults in these populations) are quite literally losing their religion, their language, their traditions, their family land, their traditional rights & priveleges under law, etc. etc. etc., all under the banner of "increasing standard of living" (a.k.a. westernization, in which most profits and resources will end up at some point in the pockets of the western nations).
Homogeneity is not merely a problem of corporate life, it is a problem of American culture. We are losing worldwide diversity in cultures and in peoples much faster than we are losing diversity in the marketplace. Most in the western world have no idea just how diverse the cultures and lifestyles of the world once were. Most westerners also have a prejudice that "our way is the way of truth and right" and all other lifestyles, political structures, or economic systems are somehow evil. How ugly it is to watch them all disappear, no matter whether traditional or local ways are replaced by a McDonald's or by a "mom and pop" burger stand that appears in their place. Quite simply, it is a shame to see a for-profit "burger stand" in some places at all.
I own the original CD for every MP3 I have so that's no problem... It's a very big job, though (about 400 CDs here) so I don't want to do it until I know that I'll be using the new format for a while!
What is the quality like on the HipZip? When MP3 first happened, I discovered that there can be HUGE quality differences between devices when I bought a D-Link MP3 player that (a) cut off the first four seconds of every file during playback, (b) added its own "pops" and "skips" which didn't occur when playing the same MP3 file back on a PC and (c) started dropping plastic parts on the floor within two or three months.
With Iomega's track record (i.e. ZipClicks) I'm a little wary about using another product based on the same fundamental technology... Do you (or does anyone) who has a HipZip have any complaints and/or endorsements, durability or quality-wise?
What I want to know is whether there are any portable Ogg players out there yet? Can someone point me to one? I've got a whole music collection in MP3 that I'm ready to re-encode from CD into OGG format as soon as I can get a portable player.
I experienced severe corruption in the early 2.4 series on my own personal KT133A board (Asus A7V133) but all recent kernels (I started trying again around 2.4.8) have been perfect with the Via UDMA enabled using two Maxtor and two IBM drives. Very fast and very stable... so in my experience, it's been fixed.
A lot of other naggish problems with the early 2.4 series (broken 2048-byte secotrs in FAT, nonfunctioning or error-prone CDRW output, clock skew and resultant bad DPMS stuff under load) have also been fixed. I found 2.4.10-ac12 to be very stable on my VIA 133a system and have now switched to 2.4.13, which seems equally stable so far.
The system is up 24/7 and is running Samba services for a small network of friends as well as web, mail, dns and a few other things. I run KDE 2.2.1 and routinely have a bucketfull of apps (OpenOffice, many GIMP windows, emacs, etc.) running as well as freeamp playing music files. I also have a script that grabs the nightly mozilla snapshot and builds it once a day.
Since I switched to the late 2.4 series, no problems or complaints. I honestly haven't had trouble with either Rik's VM in the -ac tree or the new AA vm and UDMA has been rock solid.
I do this... I live in Salt Lake City (not nearly as good as Quebec for this sort of thing) but every year I get in about 3-4 months of excellent overclocking on my gaming box by sticking it on a small, protected ledge just outside the window where the temperature is usually at or below freezing. The machine runs 24/7 that way throughout most of the winter, and I can get an additional 70-100 MHz out of it with a CPU temperature that remains quite low. Last year I also was able to crank my (then new) GF2-Pro much higher as well.
I'd never do it on any of my work machines, but it lets me crank the game visuals up during the snowy months on the game system.
What!? Mozilla really started with Mosaic?
In that case, Wine really started with Windows 3.0 and should easily be done by now.
It has been much longer than a couple of months for Wine. Wine has been around for years as well (it significantly predates Mozilla) and has never once been able to install and run a version of MS Word (let alone the rest of office) out of the box on a clean disk yet.
There are scattered success stories with big hacks and careful choosing of DLLs on pre-installed windows partitions, but I've yet been able to duplicate any of them over the years. I've got Office 4.3, Office 95, Office 97 and Office 2000 here on-site and none of them work with Wine yet.
Now they're going to try DirectX too... I think somebody is just way too optimistic. Good luck to them, though, it would be cool if they ever get any of it to work.
Is that it's using Wine. Maybe I'm behind the times or biased, but Wine has been around for a long time now and still can't even be used to run already-installed business applications like MS Word, much less the Word installer, much less still DirectX games, much less even that that installers for DirectX games...
The one important commercial product released so far using Wine is Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, which was such a dismal failure that many users who paid hundreds in cash for it ended up buying the windows version in addition anyway to run under VMWare or Win4Lin.
Wine simply has not proven itself a viable project. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not complaining about the Wine developers at all. I'm just wondering whether it's really possible (both legally and technically) to get a working, current implementation of the Windows and DirectX APIs on Linux.
This question is, of course, in addition to the significant question of performance, not even addressed in this post...
Um, X blows VNC away for speed... Perhaps you haven't used them on a fast enough network connection+machine to tell? Given a fast enough machine and network, you have trouble noticing that your X clients are remote at all. You can always tell you're on a network with VNC.
Plus, there are still a LOT of very important environments with existing Unix installations and existing X-terminal installations that Linux needs to be interoperable with, unless we are willing to give up on Linux for anything other than a "home" operating system for desktops.
This argument may be a good one, but can go either way. There is no denying that there are benefits to being able to use a single X server to get at a kernel-based framebuffer.
However, I also cannot name the number of times I have been able to ssh from one workstation to another which has "hung" and type:
killall X
and "rescue" the unresponsive station from a power cycle. This has happened with a number of different types of graphics hardware. Had those video drivers been in the kernel, there would have been no choice but to hard reset or power cycle.
Not everything should be in the kernel...
1. X Window System (not "Xwindows")
2. Migrate Linux users to DirectFB, lose interoperability with the rest of the open software (a.k.a. Unix) world.
3. X is not necessarily slower than a framebuffer, it depends more on the driver than on anything architectural. Even for 3D Nvidia's driver gets X to within 1% or so of the Windows FPS rates. DirectFB with the same driver implementation as X for each type of hardware will end up with more or less the same performance for each card.
Some people use X as a scapegoat for everything... Yet it's fast (with good drivers), it keeps adapting (anti-aliasing, dga, xvideo, xtt, etc.), it's network-transparent, and it's a long-standing standard that is open and interoperable. It should be a model for open software longevity, rather than a whipping-boy for Linux's hardware support shortcomings.
That's bull, you've bought the anti-hype about Newton. I don't know why people still feel the need to beat on Newton after all these years. It's like a religion.
I'll tell you about my Newton 2100:
* Rechargable battery life 12+ hours continuous on-time
* 480x320 display, which you still can't get in any other PDA
* 162 MHz StrongARM CPU (slow did you say?!)
* Perfect handwriting recognition from Paragraph which is now used by Microsoft in Transcriber for PocketPC!
It is the perfect PDA and I've owned PocketPC, HPC Pro, PalmOS and even full Windows Tablets (i.e. Fujitsu Stylistic). My Newton is small enough to fit in one hand, yet I:
* Took all of my class notes on it in college(using the recognizer!)
* Browse the Web and send e-mail in real time on our Ethernet network
* Use VNC on Newton to access my Linux desktop
The Newton was/is a great device that was killed by public ridicule from people who had never even tried to use one.
Apple is a normal company. Why does the public constantly expect them to do the impossible?
I think over history, Apple has shown with some regularity that they can pull "the impossible" out of their hat. Now with Jobs and NeXT genes on board, that sense is even more intense.
Whether Apple's products are brilliant successes or bizarrely interesting failures, nobody can deny that what they're doing as a rule seems more interesting that what Dell/Gateway/Microsoft et al are ever doing. And occasionally (Macintosh, NeXT, Newton, iMac) Apple/NeXT have done things that were completely mind-blowing and heretofore impossible.
I'm speaking as a longtime PC owner and Linux, not a Mac owner (though I do love my Newton)-- I have a healthy respect for the real innovation Apple has brought to the industry (compare to Microsoft's "innovation"...) and I have trouble understanding why Slashot users are such haters when it comes to Apple and Steve Jobs.
iPod:
- Holds over 1000 songs
- Weights just 6.5 ounces -- fits in your pocket
- Plays up to 10 hours with 20 minutes skip protection
- Auto synchronize all your music with iTunes
- Transfer a whole CD is less than 10 seconds
- Charge with the included power adapter or over FireWire
- Breakthrough UI with an innovative scroll wheel
- 60 mWatt amp powers high-fidelity sound earbuds
- Ultra-slim 5-gigabyte hard drive doubles as a FireWire disk
Price $399
The difference being that Newton was a great product which actually worked. The only two bad things people can generally name about Newton are a) the handwriting recognition, which was actually very good (better than anything for CE or Palm today) but first needed time to "learn" your handwriting and b) the infrared, which can't be blamed on Apple since it was implemented before current IrDA standards were even complete.
s without an original idea in it.
And by the Newton 2000/2100 series, these things were all fixed -- the handwriting recognition was actually good out of the box, and the device would then continue to learn even more, and software is available to allow Newton 2000/2100 machines to interoperate using infrared with, for example, Palm devices.
Newtons don't crash all the time, lose your data, or have a totally inelegant and mis-matched operating system for the task at hand. In fact, my Newton 2100 has *never* crashed on me in all the years I've used it, while a CE 2.11 HPC Pro I used for a few months crashed and required a hard reset almost daily, not to mention that the Newton's NOS 2.1 was incredibly well-designed as a PDA operating system while CE was so klunky it took lots of taps an arm movements to perform the simplest tasks.
Then there's the fact that Newton was way ahead of its time, a paradigm-shifter, a visionary device when it was first released and which the industry wouldn't fully understand and follow properly until years later, while XBox is just yet-another-game-console-with-optional-peripheral
Newton didn't fail on its own terms, it was in the black when it was killed. Maybe XBox is a lousy product (in fact, I think most people would bet on it), but don't compare it to the Newton.
Adding my $0.02: Not to mention that if Apple did come out with a reborn Newton, some of us [me] would buy it in a second and pay $$$ for it, too because out existing Apple PDAs are now several years old and heavily worn from use...
If you want to get vicious, I can also run VNC over Ethernet or wireless LAN on the Newton's 480x320 display after I'm done syncing with my PC and interacting over http. And after my VNC session, I can browse the Web and send/receive POP3/SMTP e-mail in real time on an Ethernet or wireless LAN from my Newton as well. Let's see your little Palm do all of that.
It can't, I know, I had a Palm before the Newton! :O
Webserver on your PDA is not useless. I run NPDS on my Newton 2100 all the time and it's one of the most convenient ways of interacting with your PDA while you're at your desk. I got it a static IP and got it put in the DNS.
Now, when I need to get at some information that's in the device while I'm at my PC, I don't have to pull the PDA out and pen-tap through things, I just point the browser (usually already running) to:
http://newton.xyz.com
From there I can search my contacts, get at my notes, use my datebook etc. Data can be entered this way as well.
Webserver-in-a-PDA: Don't knock it until you've tried it...
Yes:
M-x coffee-percolate-mode
M-x coffee-cappucino-mode
M-x breakfast-mode
M-x quick-donut-instant-coffee-shit-late-mode
What, did they rewrite the whole thing from the ground up between 1.0 and 1.05? I much prefer GMC (for GNOME) and Konqueror (for KDE). Nautilus makes the same mistake the early versions of Enlightenment made. It can either be called a) dog fscking slow or b) 5 years ahead in terms of both vision and [important] in terms of the common man's average computing power. Either way it's a loss.
Nautilus is so slow compared to other file managers on my existing (far faster than average) hardware that it just seems broken, period. First impressions mean a lot and I'm not going to be first in line to try a Nautilus release until I hear something about massive performance increases in the headline.
I ran Nautilus 1.0 on a 10,000 RPM 80MB/sec LVD SCSI RAID-5 (video workstation) and found it to be horrible.
Even when it wasn't accessing the disk it was munching CPU time like nothing else. I hope it's improved since 1.0.
Basically eBay has a really strong policy about changing feedback -- they just won't do it unless you have attorneys and courts and things involved.
So in my case (some time ago now) it came down to having my attorney look into going after the bidder himself with whatever we could. When the bidder received what my attorney had set in motion, the bidder then apparently talked things over with his attorney. Then both attorneys got together and worked something out amidst a whole stack of paperwork. They then approached eBay with the deal they'd worked out and, in the end, both pieces of feedback were removed.
I don't want to get any more specific than this without first asking my attorney, as you can see I have no real idea when it comes to legal issues. Basically the whole thing wasn't worth it and really soured me on leaving negative feedback without first warning people that I'm considering doing so and seeing how they react.