I have to admit, I kind of liked the Newton. It was a handy dandy device that was more than happy to accept a hand drawn sketch, straighten out all the lines, and output to a post script printer.
The palm in my mind was sort of a lightweight in contrast. Good appointment manager and contact list.
I wonder if there is anything your average palm can do that a cell phone can not. Sure the screen is smaller, and most don't have options for full keyboards or stylus entry. But with bluetooth, or a data sync cable, one can effectively have a keyboard for phonebook or date entry. Heck, one can use web to phone options. A digital pad was kind of nice to write down things, but I can do the same thing on my mobile, and it has a shitty camera to boot. If I wanted to price bamboo flooring, I can just snapshot the price tag, faster than hand writing by any standard.
If I'm transporting kids, you kind of have a point. If I'm transporting adults, I'd say use a damn laptop, which odds are has wifi onboard... though a repeater with an external antenna would be rather handy.
It is kind of nice to be treated like an adult to have the choice to drink responsibly...key word there being personal choice. If you get busted driving drunk, it is as bad as anywhere else in the country. I personally feel the new DWI blood alcohol levels are too low at.08....it should have stayed at the old levels...but, that's a different soapbox. .08 is pretty damn low. At the old level one could have a burger and a beer, or a glass of wine at lunch, wait a half hour, and be legal. But that doesn't bug me so much as getting hassled by police walking home from a bar. The only time I've been arrested was one of those times I had one too many, thought to my self "I should call a cab" and got arrested outside the bar WAITING FOR A CAB. That's nuts.
I've dealt with i-405 and I know I'd prefer to hang out in my car with a Wifi connection and wait two hours until the traffic dies down.
On the other, people who honestly think they can READ E-MAIL on the road are nuts. Even when the average speed is below 15mph, you're just asking for a fender bender.
So my feelings are mixed. I would enjoy a car with his gear onboard rather than a mickeymouse laptop solution, but most of the world are idiots.
I'd love it if everyone in China were to download my compositions - they are all Creative Commons-licensed. That's no fun. Tell you what, release something with a draconian license then I might download your material.
$2.50? What kind of insanely expensive video store are you going to? No, it's more like
Rental - $1 Hard disk space - $0.25c (re-encoding an MPEG2 DVD into XviD/DivX cuts it down to about 1GB without any substatial quality loss, and hard drives are about 25c/GB atm)
Plus, you can keep them for more than 48 hours (depending on how new the movie is). I was just using $2.50 as an example, which actually to me seems rather normal. I've also seen.99cent rentals which while common is rather bottom of the price structure. Last time I check blockbuster movies were $3.00 new releases were $4.50. $2.50 represents about what it would cost to rent 1 new release @ 4.50, one old release @ $3.00, a pair of movies at the supermarket for $1.00, and tax. It's a number I pulled out of my ass but one which I think represents reality.
But as I stated, after looking for the movies I discovered the packaging isn't exactly long box but a cardboard sheath.
What about those hapless people who buy one of these things, take it home, and open the package, only to discover that their particular unit had a pinhole leak that let air in and ruined the disc prior to purchase. Actually I found an image of the disc and packaging. It looks like you can view the package before you buy, and it even has a black ring so you can compare it to the rest of it.
Not that I like this system, and I'm even going to be critical of the fact that these things have a shelf life of a year before they expire. But I want to be as accurate as possible.
Not necessarily. These things look like they arrive in some kind of vacuum sealed pouch which is probably held inside one of those tamper proof plastic shells that you have to cut open. Looking up by patent didn't help United States Patent 6678239
I found an image of the case and package and it looks like it would be impractical to take a flexplay cover and pop it in a longbox. I can't see if there is any spine to speak of, but this looks like it would be an impractical home storage solution.
I met one 386 laptop powered by D-cells. This was back during the time before laptops moved their hinges totally to the rear. The best thing about it was you could replace the stock cell with those radio shack extra life D cells and actually get close to 4 hours. Not as good as the model 100 by any measure, but ultra practical.
No we don't. Who's this group to know or decide how people use their computer, or what an interface should look like.
What we *might* need is a framework to make it themeable... you set it once and it gets carried over to as many apps possible. It'd be up to the distro to set sane defaults. Who the hell was it that decided that the Hayes command set was the best for modems. Often times it doesn't matter what a standard is, as long as there is a standard. Who the hell was it that decided qwerty was best for typewriters even in nations that have a a ton of accents.
If you look at many a modern keyboard, you'll observe that many of the f-keys are repurposed for commands such as Save, Print, and what not. Good idea. There is nothing worse than having to hunt around for common commands in a given application.
I don't propose EVERY video application use the same set of defaults. I do propose that someone setup a set of intelligent defaults that can be accepted as default. This way the end user can switch between one video application and another without having to learn a new set of keyboard commands.
This may include applying the numeric keypad, the home/end insert/delete pageup/pagedown keys. Give the layout a name.
AAC audio with high-profile h.264 video in a Makrosta wrapper with ASS subtitles is the current standard in the anime fansubbing Is it? I rather thought that Anime fansub groups preferred to hardsub than to softsub. Reason is this, so some other group doesn't steal their styles, or so their subs don't get ripped and then in turn get sold as a commercial product. Also there is playback performance, advanced SRT/ASS effects does suck up CPU time which you might notice on lesser systems.
I ahven't had any iossue with VLC in over 2 years;which is about as long as I have been using it. I have had issues with it when the video file is corrupted. On the one hand, that's more a fault with the video than the player... but on the other VLC shouldn't crash because of a fault with the video.
Have they made it accurately display subtitles in different positions yet? Valid point!
I use VLC often simply because it works. I recommend it to people who get a movie file because more often than not it works without having to troubleshoot codec hell. I am not a fan of it's user interface.
I am a big fan of the WinAmp user interface, esp it's use of the scroll wheel where it does volume or seek if you hold down mouse three.
Mplayer is pretty spiffy as well. The window front ends are far from stellar but the playback interface is decent.
Now everyone is going to say you can do custom keys (not that you can define mouse3 + wheel in mplayer AFAIK). Actually what we NEED is for a group to get together and propose a standard layout and propose a purpose for each action.
p.s. the accent comment also means any strong accent, even southern or north eastern ones. Strong accents are, however, easier to find outside of the country. I found that support outside of this country, while access tend to be stronger, often are easier to understand than natives. Case in point... I think I was getting support on a tape drive unit back in the day where it was normal to buy a Wangtek mech, slap it in a case, offer some qic-02 / qic-36 board and some minimal dedicated software. Drivers? We don't need no stinking drivers.
Anyhow I was told "You were fishing for crawdads and got your self a june bug, better sketter those gizzards and hush that puppy".
To this day I have no idea what they meant. Even if there are some thick accents in India, I doubt Apu would tell me to hush that puppy.
I have to disagree. I think there is a market for this sort of thing because I am in that market. I set up lots of computers for friends and family and this Asus thing is exactly what I'd get for them. I'm willing to be totally wrong on the subject. For size and power consumption, you have laptops. The real question I have is how does this thing perform in contrast to laptops in the 2000+mhz class.
What I'd hope for personally is some standardization of laptop motherboards and screens based on this. One of my biggest complaints about buying into a laptop is the fact that the boards and screens are rather proprietary. If you lose a screen or a system board, you are stuck having to buy an old part at new prices.
So long as the EEEbox takes a reasonably standard motherboard, so long as it can be upgraded, odds are I'd be happy with it.
noise - the EEE is nearly silent in use. power consumption the EEE uses only 22 watts tops. how does that compare with your old desktop system? Valid point. To be fair I never measured it, but it's safe to presume above 150watts.
However.. for the $200-$300 bracket, you can get a used laptop. HP compaq 6720s Compaq Presario v2000s are just two examples I found in seattle.craigslist.org.
It could be a good mythtv frontend, music server. it has the wife acceptance factor built in. You know it could be, presuming it has some sort of expansion slots on it.
Before I go into monologue mode, it looks like Dell already has something in the ultra slim ultra cheap arena. Dell EPP Inspiron 530S starts under $400, ok not as cheap as the Asus solution, but still.
I do see a need for an Asus EEE laptop. Something ultra cheap that you can kick around, get some work done on it, but not be too worried if it gets lost or stolen. I see slightly less of a need for an Asus EEE desktop. The market is pretty flooded with desktops, so much so that getting something in the Socket A to 939 class for $200-$300 on closeout is very possible. While duel core is all the rage, the last time I checked new egg a 4000+ single core 939 was well under $50, and that is nothing to sneeze at. A 2000mhz socket A system does the job for most people IMHO.
So the real question is this... do I want a trimmed down might as well be a laptop desktop, or do I want an older machine that might out perform it. There are no facts or specs to backup this assertion, it's just been my experience that new ultra cheap has often been outclassed by 3 year old goods.
Seriously, if it is slim and small enough I can clearly think of several nice uses. It's a perfect living room pc, a kitchen computer ( I dont want my mom to get my laptop dirty when browsing recipes ), a car pc (someone would definitely do this), what else.. ohhh.. and a beowulf cluster, imagine a server rack of these.. Why not a laptop?
I would have thought you could shave at least $50 off the price if you built it in a really boring, plain case, without silly stands or LED buttons... I don't know what it costs to manufacture PC cases. I would guess $10 to $15 for a cheap one with a power supply. While you can get away with some cheap sheet metal, there are those folds for the card cage. This thing looks like you can mass produce it in a mold without those pesky inside folds or rivets. I mean it looks nice, but I'm thinking the price mark would be similar to that of a regular PC case.
Also, I think also tried their hand at beige box PCs. I had a couple of hand me downs which were not quite to atx spec, though for the life of me I don't remember the issue. Going cheap isn't going to do a company any good if no bugger buys it.
I recall no issues with graphic adaptors. I had a Trident VGA card with a whopping 1MB of graphics RAM on my 386DX. I can't think of the last ISA graphics adapter I had, since when I bought them chipset was of little concern. All I do remember is I had a Commodore B&W monitor which was an upgrade from Hercules monochrome. First card I bought wouldn't drive my monitor, the second card would. I also remember that you could upgrade the memory on these cards, and if you needed 512k or 1meg you could often pull the chips from a dead card and pop them onto another card.
What I do remember while 4bit 640x480 was pretty universally supported, there wasn't a true standard for 8bit 640x480. While a given game might be able to use 4bit color, it may render it unplayable. I don't remember which games, but I do remember that Word Perfect 6.x and IBM's attempt at a dos based web browser did support higher bitplanes but only on specific chipsets. I know about IBM's web browser attempt as I got given a batch of 486slc PS2s which were not supported by IBM.
Adlib/SB/SB Pro/SB16/GUS/Roland were extras you could have if you had money to spare. Some games supported rare soundcards (Megatraveller: The Zhodani Conspiracy?), but that was it. This you are likely correct on... though the PC speaker isn't exactly all that good. There were some issues with soundcard drivers that took up just a little bit more memory than others, and you might be pretty screwed... well, until memory managers came into vogue, and even then sometimes what little you had in that 640k would be too much and you couldn't run the program.
All that chipset mess belongs to the mid to late 90s, with the first 3dfx, Matrox, etc. cards. IIRC, Matrox even bundled a Mechwarrior 2 or 3 version specially compiled form the Matrox Mystique line of cards. What I remember is pre 3dfx. That's the PCI age of games, perhaps early AGP, where I do recall a number of people returning $200+ graphics cards to get that "other" $200+ graphics card by the same company but in a different colored box.
The time period I'm thinking of was when 8bit color was in vogue, you start of the game and it asks you which graphics card you have. If it wasn't on the list, or if nothing on the list worked, well... you had to go with lame mode 4bit mode.
But either way, PC games were a royal pain in the arse because of the lack of standards for graphics adapters.
And where does the stealing come in? You have to pay for the PS3 in order to install Linux on it, and Linux doesn't run PS3 games. At what point does this become and issue of piracy? From a corp. perspective, they often under sell these products based under the assumption that they will make back money on media. I wouldn't call it stealing, piracy. or even illegal since the product is sold, not rented. In fact I would just call it modding.
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Actually, in Japan you can not only buy beer and pornography from vending machines, you can also buy used panties...
I don't know about these used panties. At 1000 to 3000 yen I think it would be more cost effective to get new panties.
I have to admit, I kind of liked the Newton. It was a handy dandy device that was more than happy to accept a hand drawn sketch, straighten out all the lines, and output to a post script printer.
The palm in my mind was sort of a lightweight in contrast. Good appointment manager and contact list.
I wonder if there is anything your average palm can do that a cell phone can not. Sure the screen is smaller, and most don't have options for full keyboards or stylus entry. But with bluetooth, or a data sync cable, one can effectively have a keyboard for phonebook or date entry. Heck, one can use web to phone options. A digital pad was kind of nice to write down things, but I can do the same thing on my mobile, and it has a shitty camera to boot. If I wanted to price bamboo flooring, I can just snapshot the price tag, faster than hand writing by any standard.
So to me, a Palm would be kind of redundant.
Perhaps some cars have room for passengers?
If I'm transporting kids, you kind of have a point. If I'm transporting adults, I'd say use a damn laptop, which odds are has wifi onboard... though a repeater with an external antenna would be rather handy.
I've dealt with i-405 and I know I'd prefer to hang out in my car with a Wifi connection and wait two hours until the traffic dies down.
On the other, people who honestly think they can READ E-MAIL on the road are nuts. Even when the average speed is below 15mph, you're just asking for a fender bender.
So my feelings are mixed. I would enjoy a car with his gear onboard rather than a mickeymouse laptop solution, but most of the world are idiots.
Rental - $1
Hard disk space - $0.25c (re-encoding an MPEG2 DVD into XviD/DivX cuts it down to about 1GB without any substatial quality loss, and hard drives are about 25c/GB atm)
Plus, you can keep them for more than 48 hours (depending on how new the movie is). I was just using $2.50 as an example, which actually to me seems rather normal. I've also seen
But as I stated, after looking for the movies I discovered the packaging isn't exactly long box but a cardboard sheath.
Not that I like this system, and I'm even going to be critical of the fact that these things have a shelf life of a year before they expire. But I want to be as accurate as possible.
United States Patent 6678239
It looks like the disk is in a plastic sheath.
I found an image of the case and package and it looks like it would be impractical to take a flexplay cover and pop it in a longbox. I can't see if there is any spine to speak of, but this looks like it would be an impractical home storage solution.
1. Rent movie.
2. Rip it to harddrive.
3. Return it.
4. ???????
5. PROFIT! You get a case with what I presume has a decent cover.
Rental $2.50
Longbox $.50
Photo paper $.25
Ink - $.75
To copy a rental could easily cost you $4. For an extra $1 I presume you get the case and cover. That's not so bad.
I met one 386 laptop powered by D-cells. This was back during the time before laptops moved their hinges totally to the rear. The best thing about it was you could replace the stock cell with those radio shack extra life D cells and actually get close to 4 hours. Not as good as the model 100 by any measure, but ultra practical.
What we *might* need is a framework to make it themeable... you set it once and it gets carried over to as many apps possible. It'd be up to the distro to set sane defaults. Who the hell was it that decided that the Hayes command set was the best for modems. Often times it doesn't matter what a standard is, as long as there is a standard. Who the hell was it that decided qwerty was best for typewriters even in nations that have a a ton of accents.
If you look at many a modern keyboard, you'll observe that many of the f-keys are repurposed for commands such as Save, Print, and what not. Good idea. There is nothing worse than having to hunt around for common commands in a given application.
I don't propose EVERY video application use the same set of defaults. I do propose that someone setup a set of intelligent defaults that can be accepted as default. This way the end user can switch between one video application and another without having to learn a new set of keyboard commands.
This may include applying the numeric keypad, the home/end insert/delete pageup/pagedown keys. Give the layout a name.
My info could be out of date.
I use VLC often simply because it works. I recommend it to people who get a movie file because more often than not it works without having to troubleshoot codec hell. I am not a fan of it's user interface.
I am a big fan of the WinAmp user interface, esp it's use of the scroll wheel where it does volume or seek if you hold down mouse three.
Mplayer is pretty spiffy as well. The window front ends are far from stellar but the playback interface is decent.
Now everyone is going to say you can do custom keys (not that you can define mouse3 + wheel in mplayer AFAIK). Actually what we NEED is for a group to get together and propose a standard layout and propose a purpose for each action.
Anyhow I was told "You were fishing for crawdads and got your self a june bug, better sketter those gizzards and hush that puppy".
To this day I have no idea what they meant. Even if there are some thick accents in India, I doubt Apu would tell me to hush that puppy.
But they have Men without Pants
What I'd hope for personally is some standardization of laptop motherboards and screens based on this. One of my biggest complaints about buying into a laptop is the fact that the boards and screens are rather proprietary. If you lose a screen or a system board, you are stuck having to buy an old part at new prices.
So long as the EEEbox takes a reasonably standard motherboard, so long as it can be upgraded, odds are I'd be happy with it.
power consumption the EEE uses only 22 watts tops.
how does that compare with your old desktop system? Valid point. To be fair I never measured it, but it's safe to presume above 150watts.
However.. for the $200-$300 bracket, you can get a used laptop.
HP compaq 6720s Compaq Presario v2000s are just two examples I found in seattle.craigslist.org. It could be a good mythtv frontend, music server. it has the wife acceptance factor built in. You know it could be, presuming it has some sort of expansion slots on it.
Before I go into monologue mode, it looks like Dell already has something in the ultra slim ultra cheap arena. Dell EPP Inspiron 530S starts under $400, ok not as cheap as the Asus solution, but still.
I do see a need for an Asus EEE laptop. Something ultra cheap that you can kick around, get some work done on it, but not be too worried if it gets lost or stolen. I see slightly less of a need for an Asus EEE desktop. The market is pretty flooded with desktops, so much so that getting something in the Socket A to 939 class for $200-$300 on closeout is very possible. While duel core is all the rage, the last time I checked new egg a 4000+ single core 939 was well under $50, and that is nothing to sneeze at. A 2000mhz socket A system does the job for most people IMHO.
So the real question is this... do I want a trimmed down might as well be a laptop desktop, or do I want an older machine that might out perform it. There are no facts or specs to backup this assertion, it's just been my experience that new ultra cheap has often been outclassed by 3 year old goods.
Also, I think also tried their hand at beige box PCs. I had a couple of hand me downs which were not quite to atx spec, though for the life of me I don't remember the issue. Going cheap isn't going to do a company any good if no bugger buys it.
What I do remember while 4bit 640x480 was pretty universally supported, there wasn't a true standard for 8bit 640x480. While a given game might be able to use 4bit color, it may render it unplayable. I don't remember which games, but I do remember that Word Perfect 6.x and IBM's attempt at a dos based web browser did support higher bitplanes but only on specific chipsets. I know about IBM's web browser attempt as I got given a batch of 486slc PS2s which were not supported by IBM. Adlib/SB/SB Pro/SB16/GUS/Roland were extras you could have if you had money to spare. Some games supported rare soundcards (Megatraveller: The Zhodani Conspiracy?), but that was it. This you are likely correct on... though the PC speaker isn't exactly all that good. There were some issues with soundcard drivers that took up just a little bit more memory than others, and you might be pretty screwed... well, until memory managers came into vogue, and even then sometimes what little you had in that 640k would be too much and you couldn't run the program. All that chipset mess belongs to the mid to late 90s, with the first 3dfx, Matrox, etc. cards. IIRC, Matrox even bundled a Mechwarrior 2 or 3 version specially compiled form the Matrox Mystique line of cards. What I remember is pre 3dfx. That's the PCI age of games, perhaps early AGP, where I do recall a number of people returning $200+ graphics cards to get that "other" $200+ graphics card by the same company but in a different colored box.
The time period I'm thinking of was when 8bit color was in vogue, you start of the game and it asks you which graphics card you have. If it wasn't on the list, or if nothing on the list worked, well... you had to go with lame mode 4bit mode.
But either way, PC games were a royal pain in the arse because of the lack of standards for graphics adapters.