That's the ideal use for the Windows Powered Smart Displays that MS showed at Comdex. Undock your flatscreen and carry it around the house. The system stays where it is and your touch screen display talks to it over 802.11b.
Info at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/smartdisplay/
Actually, they've been optimizing for battery life on these for a while and they're pretty low power.
Granted you won't get 12 hours of heavy use but if you're not using them to play DVDs all day, they should get you closer to 6 hours rather than the two you talk about.
Hey, I've made my living off of a couple of Dan Bricklin's programs. That's a lot more than I can say for any of the other "reviewers" out there.
Who do YOU trust? John Dvorak?
Re:Ok so Bill did a good job of naming it...
on
Bricklin on Tablet PCs
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, the list of Microsoft trademarks at http://www.microsoft.com/trademarks/docs/mstmark.r tf does NOT list Tablet.
Guess we all didn't know the answer to that one but were just making assumptions with no basis.
Exactly. The professional "UFO Skeptics" are the worst example I've ever seen of "If the observations don't agree with the theory, the observations must be eliminated" reasoning. The consistently come up with explanations that only explain part of a report and then claim that anything that didn't fit their theory was either a lie or at best mass delusion.
By the same level of "logic" you could equally prove that almost every UFO sighting was really Santa Claus and Rudolph's nose. But amazingly they get people to believe their twaddle.
Very simply, including the source code (or, for that matter open source) merely removes the economic incentives to pay technical people. The differentiators between products become how much they pay their marketing, sales, support, packaging, documentation and executive staff. The only one who gets screwed in the equation are programmers.
Funny thing, I kind of feel that the work of the people actually inventing a product is actually worth more than the people piggybacking on top of it.
Re:Court- MS disk compression was infringement
on
MS-DOS 1981-2002 RIP
·
· Score: 2
True but the court has been known to be clueless about "Prior Art" claims.
That's the old BASIC in a new version. The new BASIC would be a language designed for beginning non-programmers to get an idea of programming concepts in a SIMPLE, friendly environment.
Compare Dartmouth BASIC running on its interactive time-sharing terminals to batch Fortran on punch cards to get an idea of what a revolution it was at the time.
Nope. Just a common misconception by the ignorant.
Windows 9x does NOT boot off of MS-DOS. It can invoke MS-DOS if needed to support legacy drivers and hardware but without those, no MS-DOS gets loaded.
Saying that Windows 9x uses MS-DOS makes as much sense as saying that Apples OS/X really uses OS 9 because it is bundled with it so you can dual boot.
PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1.0 - purchased PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1.1 - developed in house on 1.0 codebase PC-DOS/MS-DOS 2.x-7.x - developed in house (except for 4.0 developed by IBM and 4.01 developed by MS when 4.0 didn't pass MS testing)
Disk compression - developed in house using well known algorithms (that were also used by everyone else in the industry)
Word - developed in house
Access - developed in house as a simple version of a scrapped DB project
Powerpoint - MS purchased entire company (1.0 purchased, later versions in house)
Windows - developed in house
Game software - mostly developed externally with MS as publisher (typical in game industry)
FrontPage - developed in house after purchase of original company that did "Blackbird" which was totally different
C# - developed in house but they did hire the architect. (What do you think, they breed them internally?)
For the most part the industry has stagnated. Let's get real. This is a site that primarily is a haven for people who dislike innovation and who worship variants of an OS (Unix) originally designed in 1969 to run on a PDP-7 minicomputer. The languages espoused here are virtually all derivatives of C which was a quick hack developed at roughly the same time.
Even in 1969, C (and Unix) weren't state of the art. But, they were, mostly by accident, available for free to universities with little budget for their math departments. Hence a generation of coders who actually think that C has value.
Let's get real. A language with no concept of a string? A language with no concept of buffer validation? A language with enough precedent levels to keep thousands of programmers confused and making errors? A language with symbols and operators that mean different things based on context? A language with standards that actually consider order of compilation rather than requiring multiple pass evaluation? A language with case sensitivity?
These things were all obsolete in the early to mid 1960s. That C and its descendants continue to this day is both a tragedy and a source of shame for all of us yet we see few new languages that aren't designed to look like C.
Perl, Python, Java, LiveScript/JavaScript/JScript/ECMAScript, C++, C#, ObjectiveC are all children of a badly designed parent that inherited many of the faulty designs. Where is the new Simula? Where is the new SmallTalk? Where is the new PL/I? Where is the new GPSS? Where is the new Algol? For that matter, where is the new BASIC?
The difference is that IT's job isn't to support the people on the internet. It IS, however, their job to make the people who are doing the real work of the company more productive.
Just the same as the plumbers working on the bathrooms. It's a job of supporting the real workers. IT seems to get that backwards.
Heaven forbid that users actually get to use their personal computers. That might make IT staff have to work at supporting users rather than just preemptive retrofitting to make new tech just as useless as it was 20 years ago.
Maybe you could get all the computers in a room with you. Maybe with glass walls so they could see the magic boxes and the elite. Maybe you could have them submit requests to you for things the computer could do. In triplicate. With VP level approval and several months of costing analysis. Wouldn't that make life so much better.
So does toggling in binary machine code by hand. That you can do what you want with it doesn't make it good, it only demonstrates a level of masochism that shouldn't be necessary forty years after better languages than C were available.
The universal adoption of C is a disaster that has crippled this industry more than any other event. It was a poor hack of a language when it came out and its evolution has only made it worse.
C# is a small step in the right direction but only a small step since it is so C-like in its design and constructs. Granted that was a necessary design choice to wean people who don't know better away but...
C# was developed in house. Some of the concepts behind CLI and CLR were pre-existing but even then only parts. After all, UCSD p-System predates MS-DOS and it wasn't the first.
Re:Interesting tidbit
on
Book on NR-1
·
· Score: 2
Not enough at human speeds to make a difference with pulling out a control rod. (And, don't tell me)
Re:Interesting tidbit
on
Book on NR-1
·
· Score: 2
Exactly. Moving the control rods is equivalent to pressing on the accelerator in a car. Saying that going supercritical is bad is like saying that you'd never want to make a car accelerate.
Re:Interesting tidbit
on
Book on NR-1
·
· Score: 2
the amount of reactivity from control rod movement is a function of the speed with which the rod is moved
Nope. It is the presence or absence of a neutron absorbing material (in a damping control rod design) that determines reactivity. You aren't going to change accelleration of neutrons no matter how fast you are at pulling a rod. The guy killed pulled the rod out too far. It wouldn't have mattered if it took him a tenth of a second or a week.
I'm guessing the Navy training you got may have slipped a bit over the years.
I knew someone connected with that program who said they used to be able to hear Soviet subs leave the Baltic from their station at Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. (About 6000 miles away)
Slashdot Mirror
That's the ideal use for the Windows Powered Smart Displays that MS showed at Comdex. Undock your flatscreen and carry it around the house. The system stays where it is and your touch screen display talks to it over 802.11b. Info at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/smartdisplay/
Actually, they've been optimizing for battery life on these for a while and they're pretty low power. Granted you won't get 12 hours of heavy use but if you're not using them to play DVDs all day, they should get you closer to 6 hours rather than the two you talk about.
Hey, I've made my living off of a couple of Dan Bricklin's programs. That's a lot more than I can say for any of the other "reviewers" out there. Who do YOU trust? John Dvorak?
Actually, the list of Microsoft trademarks at http://www.microsoft.com/trademarks/docs/mstmark.r tf does NOT list Tablet.
Guess we all didn't know the answer to that one but were just making assumptions with no basis.
Anybody who takes notes in meetings, anybody who needs to use a computer without a counter to put it down on. I know I'm seriously in lust.
Exactly. The professional "UFO Skeptics" are the worst example I've ever seen of "If the observations don't agree with the theory, the observations must be eliminated" reasoning. The consistently come up with explanations that only explain part of a report and then claim that anything that didn't fit their theory was either a lie or at best mass delusion. By the same level of "logic" you could equally prove that almost every UFO sighting was really Santa Claus and Rudolph's nose. But amazingly they get people to believe their twaddle.
Which at least steals from the marketing, sales and management people as much as from the techies.
Very simply, including the source code (or, for that matter open source) merely removes the economic incentives to pay technical people. The differentiators between products become how much they pay their marketing, sales, support, packaging, documentation and executive staff. The only one who gets screwed in the equation are programmers. Funny thing, I kind of feel that the work of the people actually inventing a product is actually worth more than the people piggybacking on top of it.
True but the court has been known to be clueless about "Prior Art" claims.
That's the old BASIC in a new version. The new BASIC would be a language designed for beginning non-programmers to get an idea of programming concepts in a SIMPLE, friendly environment.
Compare Dartmouth BASIC running on its interactive time-sharing terminals to batch Fortran on punch cards to get an idea of what a revolution it was at the time.
Nope. Just a common misconception by the ignorant.
Windows 9x does NOT boot off of MS-DOS. It can invoke MS-DOS if needed to support legacy drivers and hardware but without those, no MS-DOS gets loaded.
Saying that Windows 9x uses MS-DOS makes as much sense as saying that Apples OS/X really uses OS 9 because it is bundled with it so you can dual boot.
Sorry to ruin your misconceptions.
PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1.0 - purchased
PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1.1 - developed in house on 1.0 codebase
PC-DOS/MS-DOS 2.x-7.x - developed in house (except for 4.0 developed by IBM and 4.01 developed by MS when 4.0 didn't pass MS testing)
Disk compression - developed in house using well known algorithms (that were also used by everyone else in the industry)
Word - developed in house
Access - developed in house as a simple version of a scrapped DB project
Powerpoint - MS purchased entire company (1.0 purchased, later versions in house)
Windows - developed in house
Game software - mostly developed externally with MS as publisher (typical in game industry)
FrontPage - developed in house after purchase of original company that did "Blackbird" which was totally different
C# - developed in house but they did hire the architect. (What do you think, they breed them internally?)
Nope. The order was:
Windows 1.x
Windows 2.x
OS/2 1.x
Windows 3.x
OS/2 2.x
OS/2 3.x (became Windows NT)
The IBM/Microsoft joint development started after Windows 1 had shipped and ended after OS/2 2.x and 3.x were in development but before they shipped.
(I worked at both IBM and Microsoft during that time)
People die if a bridge isn't designed right. People have to do things by hand if the software doesn't work. Which of these is more real?
On the other hand, if a sidwalk curb isn't designed right, it wastes some concrete. People die if the software in their pacemaker doesn't work.
It's the project, not the discipline.
For the most part the industry has stagnated. Let's get real. This is a site that primarily is a haven for people who dislike innovation and who worship variants of an OS (Unix) originally designed in 1969 to run on a PDP-7 minicomputer. The languages espoused here are virtually all derivatives of C which was a quick hack developed at roughly the same time.
Even in 1969, C (and Unix) weren't state of the art. But, they were, mostly by accident, available for free to universities with little budget for their math departments. Hence a generation of coders who actually think that C has value.
Let's get real. A language with no concept of a string? A language with no concept of buffer validation? A language with enough precedent levels to keep thousands of programmers confused and making errors? A language with symbols and operators that mean different things based on context? A language with standards that actually consider order of compilation rather than requiring multiple pass evaluation? A language with case sensitivity?
These things were all obsolete in the early to mid 1960s. That C and its descendants continue to this day is both a tragedy and a source of shame for all of us yet we see few new languages that aren't designed to look like C.
Perl, Python, Java, LiveScript/JavaScript/JScript/ECMAScript, C++, C#, ObjectiveC are all children of a badly designed parent that inherited many of the faulty designs. Where is the new Simula? Where is the new SmallTalk? Where is the new PL/I? Where is the new GPSS? Where is the new Algol? For that matter, where is the new BASIC?
But BillG did write the OS for the Tandy 100 and the mini OS that was part of Disk Basic for the 8080. (That was the origin of the FAT file system)
The difference is that IT's job isn't to support the people on the internet. It IS, however, their job to make the people who are doing the real work of the company more productive.
Just the same as the plumbers working on the bathrooms. It's a job of supporting the real workers. IT seems to get that backwards.
You obviously don't bother training users or have a company culture that discourages their thinking.
Treat them like mindless sheep and they'll generally act like it. Treat them like responsible people and they'll generally act that way, too.
But, then that would mean treating users like people. Can't have that.
Heaven forbid that users actually get to use their personal computers. That might make IT staff have to work at supporting users rather than just preemptive retrofitting to make new tech just as useless as it was 20 years ago.
Maybe you could get all the computers in a room with you. Maybe with glass walls so they could see the magic boxes and the elite. Maybe you could have them submit requests to you for things the computer could do. In triplicate. With VP level approval and several months of costing analysis. Wouldn't that make life so much better.
So does toggling in binary machine code by hand. That you can do what you want with it doesn't make it good, it only demonstrates a level of masochism that shouldn't be necessary forty years after better languages than C were available.
The universal adoption of C is a disaster that has crippled this industry more than any other event. It was a poor hack of a language when it came out and its evolution has only made it worse.
C# is a small step in the right direction but only a small step since it is so C-like in its design and constructs. Granted that was a necessary design choice to wean people who don't know better away but...
C# was developed in house. Some of the concepts behind CLI and CLR were pre-existing but even then only parts. After all, UCSD p-System predates MS-DOS and it wasn't the first.
Not enough at human speeds to make a difference with pulling out a control rod. (And, don't tell me)
Exactly. Moving the control rods is equivalent to pressing on the accelerator in a car. Saying that going supercritical is bad is like saying that you'd never want to make a car accelerate.
the amount of reactivity from control rod movement is a function of the speed with which the rod is moved
Nope. It is the presence or absence of a neutron absorbing material (in a damping control rod design) that determines reactivity. You aren't going to change accelleration of neutrons no matter how fast you are at pulling a rod. The guy killed pulled the rod out too far. It wouldn't have mattered if it took him a tenth of a second or a week.
I'm guessing the Navy training you got may have slipped a bit over the years.
I knew someone connected with that program who said they used to be able to hear Soviet subs leave the Baltic from their station at Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. (About 6000 miles away)