The Treo looks like a good Smartphone/all-on-one-device/whatever you want to call it... but at $399 with activation, how many can they realistically expect to sell? While the price isn't too terrible when you compare the cost of purchasing PDA/Cell Phone/RIM-style devices separately, that's a pretty good chunk of money to lay down especially if you've already invested the $$$ in separate devices (and already have a wireless contract with another carrier.)
And then there's the longevity issue; Handspring has put all their eggs in one basket with the Treo. Donna Dubinsky made a vague announcement back in January that Handspring is exiting the traditional organizer market... they're dropping their only color device, the Prism, and the rest of the Visors are still stuck at Palm OS 3.5 with no plans for improvement to the Visor line.
While a company has to do what's in its best interests in the long term, the episode could have been handled better than it was; Dubinsky's vague statement pissed off a lot of current Visor owners, and Handspring probably lost a lot of potential Treo customers right there; why buy a Treo if Handspring is going to be belly up in a couple of years, or move on to some other product after you've invested hundreds of dollars on the Treo and accessories?
That being said, if I could comfortably afford one and needed a new wireless contract, I'd probably go for it.:)
"If you think that dotcommers are the first people to live on Internet time,"
I don't know which is more irksome, the use of the phrase "Internet time", or the implication that I'm supposed to be amazed that in all of human history, I was not the first person to pull an all-nighter because I worked at a dot com.
But I'll bet Thomas Edison's crew didn't have Nerf guns.
But United Virtualities hopes to convince Web surfers that Ooqa Ooqa is useful, not a nuisance.
I would say that having a web site hijack my 'Home' button is about as useful as scanning a barcode out of a magazine (which I must be reading while sitting at my desk) instead of typing in a URL.
Which is to say, not useful at all. And a complete nuisance.
Hmm, I don't think that's what MS/Unisys meant...
on
March Netcraft survey
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
How many people actually sit down at the computer, open a browser, and think to themselves "Let's see what's on the Internet tonight" ?
While there are some very entertaining threads on message boards like/., the reason I come here is to find out what's going on in the sci/tech/geek world.
I do searches for programming reference, I look up maps and driving directions, I occaisionally buy stuff. I know that some people like to stream/download lots of music/video clips, but your average AOL dialup user? It doesn't seem likely.
I use the internet all the damn time, but it would never occur to me to draw some kind of correlation between how much TV I watch per week and how much time I spend on the internet, and come up with some kind of conclusion re: the internet as entertainment medium.
Here's my half-serious theory - given how many dot coms went under between 3/2000 and 3/2001, maybe we can attribute some of that decline in web surfing to the those thousands of dot com employees who were suddenly wrenched from the teat of the company T1.
Granted, I would be pretty upset if my external e-mail and internet access were taken away, but my employer would be well within their rights to do so.
I use the internet quite a bit while at work; it's an invaluable programming reference. Any surfing beyond that, though, is technically an abuse of company resources. I'm pretty good about sneaking over here to Slashdot only on short breaks, but there are times when I let the mouse wander a little more than I should.
In a big company, lots of employees surfing around and forwarding stupid jokes and viruses to one another can cost a company in terms of both bandwidth and lost productivity.
Having internet access at work is nice and all, but a God-given right it ain't.
The first being simplicity; KDE and GNOME look great, and usually run well, but I think somebody coming from a Win98 sort of environment could be easily overwhelmed by the extensive config menus and excessive drek that a lot of distros tend to install. (Although it sounds like Lycoris is better than some in that regard). As for installing software, ROX has a nice system. ROX Apps are self contained within their own directories, with config options stored in a ~/Choices directory. This way of doing things is especially well-suited for apps written in scripting languages with GTK bindings, like Perl, Python, or PHP... installation is just a matter of unzip/tarring the App directory into/usr/apps (or wherever). Uninstallation is as simple as deleting the program directory. I think this way of installing things would make more sense to a longtime Win9X user than an RPM manager.
The other reason I think ROX would be a good candidate is speed... it runs so much faster on my 566 Celeron than GNOME or KDE ever did. GNOME and KDE's sluggish performance was one of the reasons I never used my Linux partition much... things were just faster in Windows.
It's not the most polished environment, but it's very usable... and if a company did decide to get behind ROX for a distro, I think it could quite a contender. YMMV.
The underlying problem with any desktop environment that tries to cater to non-techie Windows users is the dependance on shared libraries that so many Linux apps have; packages from the original installation disk might conceivably work fine with the system, but user used to just downloading the InstallShield wizard and double clicking on it is going to be frustrated when he goes to install a program from somewhere else and it tells them they have to install some other library first, etc.
On the other hand, if a distro tries to compensate and include every damn library under the sun, more experienced users will scream about bloat.:)
Right... especially when the EULA of whatever software you install indemnifies the creator of any damage the software might cause your system.
It's like suing tobacco companies after getting cancer/emphysema after years of smoking cigarettes that have a GREAT BIG SURGEON GENERAL WARNING on them.
Speaking of which, was Donna Dubinsky's vague conference call statement that Handspring is 'exiting the traditional organizer market' on the list? (Site is slashdotted, so I don't know.)
She did a great job of alienate Handspring's existing customer base and rendering their inventory unsellable before the Treo was available.:P
And Handspring's damage control was just as bad as the original statement... lots of "We want to reassure our customers and Springboard developers that we're not discontinuing the Visor, uh, right away. We're still behind the Visor line, but we're dropping our only color model and sticking with OS 3.5."
This will be modded Offtopic/Flamebait/Troll, but I'm just irked enough to post it anyway.
Reviews are most helpful when they draw some kind of consistent conclusion; One sentence says "The interface isn't bad" but is followed by a whole paragraph about what a pain the interface is to use. So, which is it?
Most of the article is more critical than complimentary, and yet the conclusion is "All in all, this is a pretty neat device." Feh.
I'm glad I'm not paying to read posts like this ad-free.
By the time this posts it will probably get modded redundant, but nowhere did Apple's ad say "Rip, Mix, Burn, Steal", or even "Rip, Mix, Burn, Swap."
This is one of the most offensive aspects of Disney et al's push for the SSSCA; I don't begrudge them the desire to protect their IP from piracy, but the attitude that everyone who owns a computer (especially an Apple, apparently) is a dirty, dirty pirate really chaps my hide. Well, that plus the fact that the SSSCA would effectively put me out of work if passed in its current form.
God forbid I rip all of my CD's which I legitimately own by a particular band and burn all of the MP3s onto one mix CD that I can leave at the office.
The bug that was found in that seal was invented by none other than Leon Theremin, inventor of the instrument of the same name.
There's an excellent biography available about Theremin by Albert Glinsky called "Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage" - there's a review here. (No affiliate link here, just a review.)
Theremin was quite an inventor - Glinksy's book is a good read, managing to be interesting and informative in equal measures.
Go here for more about Theremins, or here to buy one.
Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler said the company had proved during the trial that it is impossible to remove software features from Windows without damaging the operating system.
Cue::Cats are only to be destroyed with the special Cue::Hammer.
The Cue::Hammer, when connected to your computer's serial port, will digitally scan any object it is used upon and automatically take you to a website featuring...
Just last week I read an article about this - I think it was at Wired.com, but I can't find it now.
Anyway, apparently there was a snippet of film made at (I think) Xerox PARC in the 1960's wherein somebody demonstrated navigating from one screen of text to another by way of a linked word; a hyperlink, in other words.
If these bastards get away with this, what happens when they set their sites on Mozilla, Konqueror, et al? Well, maybe nothing, since they're probably only interested in going after companies they stand to make large wads of $$$ by suing.:-/
Money is just one form of recognition for being one of the "Best and Brightest."
I'm oversimplifying here, but Ayn Rand's take on money is more about not being apologetic for any huge sums of money you might accumulate for being one of the Best and Brightest.
Being true to yourself and getting fulfillment out of whatever it is you feel you were put on this earth to do is another key component of Rand's take on things... (I.E. Where all the captains of industry go after they disappear in 'Atlas Shrugged'.)
Some government jobs may not pay as competitively as those in the private sector, but that can translate into better compensation in other forms, like not having to work 60+ hour weeks or weekends, not worrying about getting laid off so that the company stock go up 1/2 a point, and generally feeling more appreciated by your superiors because they *know* you could be making more money elsewhere- if you're doing good work, they'll let you know.
YMMV, but working as I have at a not-for-profit healthcare organization for most of the last year, I've come to realize that I would certainly consider a government job even if it didn't pay as well as a position with [insert megacorp here].
The hours are good, the benefits are good, and I don't go home stressed out of my mind anymore... so maybe I can't afford premium cable any more, but I watched too much of that anyway.:)
I can't help but wonder if Microsoft has somebody hard at work translating Kurt Sibold's open letter to English, declaring those 15,000 critical comments slanderous.:/
Unless I'm mistaken, all of Handspring's products use PalmOS 3.5 with some proprietary tweaks that handle the Springboard interface.
A number of the new features in PalmOS4, like support for 16-bit color, were already present in Handspring's version(s) of OS 3.5; that's how they got the Prism to display 16-bit color back when the Palm IIIc was still top of the line with its 8-bit color.
The original Visor Deluxe were stuck at 3.1, which meant that even though the DragonBall EZ processors it had was capable of displaying 16 shades of gray, the OS could only display 4... it got to be kind of a drag.
Since Handspring is in all likelihood killing off the Visor within the next year or two, it seems doubtful that there will ever be a Visor that runs OS 4, much less OS 5.
I had two Amigas, a 500 and a 2000 (40 meg hard drive, 1MB RAM, 7Mhz... w00t!). I used my Amiga 2000 right through 1996, when I moved cross-country and had to leave it behind... it is currently gathering dust in my inlaws' basement.:(
I'm still amazed when I remember what that computer could do at the time compared to its PC counterparts... and it worked so well/quickly because graphics, and sound were handled by separate processors on the mobo, and the core OS was stored on a ROM chip... so even though that Motorola 68000-whatever was only doing 7mhz, overall performance was stellar.
The workbench environment was great, but I don't know if it's great enough to be worth emulating on x86 hardware; The attraction of the Amiga (for me, anyway) was its overall performance compared to everything else that was out there at the time.
Now that x86 and PowerPC hardware is exponentially faster than the Amigas ever were and can get away without having separate processors for video, OS, etc, I don't really see what the point is. I hope the upcoming AmigaOS 4.0 does well, but the original Amiga was more than an operating system; its hardware was just as important.
And then the monkey typed...
on
Think And Click
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· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
The Treo looks like a good Smartphone/all-on-one-device/whatever you want to call it... but at $399 with activation, how many can they realistically expect to sell? While the price isn't too terrible when you compare the cost of purchasing PDA/Cell Phone/RIM-style devices separately, that's a pretty good chunk of money to lay down especially if you've already invested the $$$ in separate devices (and already have a wireless contract with another carrier.)
:)
And then there's the longevity issue; Handspring has put all their eggs in one basket with the Treo. Donna Dubinsky made a vague announcement back in January that Handspring is exiting the traditional organizer market... they're dropping their only color device, the Prism, and the rest of the Visors are still stuck at Palm OS 3.5 with no plans for improvement to the Visor line.
While a company has to do what's in its best interests in the long term, the episode could have been handled better than it was; Dubinsky's vague statement pissed off a lot of current Visor owners, and Handspring probably lost a lot of potential Treo customers right there; why buy a Treo if Handspring is going to be belly up in a couple of years, or move on to some other product after you've invested hundreds of dollars on the Treo and accessories?
That being said, if I could comfortably afford one and needed a new wireless contract, I'd probably go for it.
This is just what they're looking for!
But I'll bet Thomas Edison's crew didn't have Nerf guns.
...when they said "We Have the Way Out!"
-1 Redundant, but isn't it interesting that the new anti-Unix site isn't among that 4% IIS increase (and not hacked).
"...It's a solar panel for a sex machine."
D'oh!
How many people actually sit down at the computer, open a browser, and think to themselves "Let's see what's on the Internet tonight" ?
/., the reason I come here is to find out what's going on in the sci/tech/geek world.
While there are some very entertaining threads on message boards like
I do searches for programming reference, I look up maps and driving directions, I occaisionally buy stuff. I know that some people like to stream/download lots of music/video clips, but your average AOL dialup user? It doesn't seem likely.
I use the internet all the damn time, but it would never occur to me to draw some kind of correlation between how much TV I watch per week and how much time I spend on the internet, and come up with some kind of conclusion re: the internet as entertainment medium.
Here's my half-serious theory - given how many dot coms went under between 3/2000 and 3/2001, maybe we can attribute some of that decline in web surfing to the those thousands of dot com employees who were suddenly wrenched from the teat of the company T1.
Granted, I would be pretty upset if my external e-mail and internet access were taken away, but my employer would be well within their rights to do so.
I use the internet quite a bit while at work; it's an invaluable programming reference. Any surfing beyond that, though, is technically an abuse of company resources. I'm pretty good about sneaking over here to Slashdot only on short breaks, but there are times when I let the mouse wander a little more than I should.
In a big company, lots of employees surfing around and forwarding stupid jokes and viruses to one another can cost a company in terms of both bandwidth and lost productivity.
Having internet access at work is nice and all, but a God-given right it ain't.
For a couple of reasons..
/usr/apps (or wherever). Uninstallation is as simple as deleting the program directory. I think this way of installing things would make more sense to a longtime Win9X user than an RPM manager.
:)
The first being simplicity; KDE and GNOME look great, and usually run well, but I think somebody coming from a Win98 sort of environment could be easily overwhelmed by the extensive config menus and excessive drek that a lot of distros tend to install. (Although it sounds like Lycoris is better than some in that regard). As for installing software, ROX has a nice system. ROX Apps are self contained within their own directories, with config options stored in a ~/Choices directory. This way of doing things is especially well-suited for apps written in scripting languages with GTK bindings, like Perl, Python, or PHP... installation is just a matter of unzip/tarring the App directory into
The other reason I think ROX would be a good candidate is speed... it runs so much faster on my 566 Celeron than GNOME or KDE ever did. GNOME and KDE's sluggish performance was one of the reasons I never used my Linux partition much... things were just faster in Windows.
It's not the most polished environment, but it's very usable... and if a company did decide to get behind ROX for a distro, I think it could quite a contender. YMMV.
The underlying problem with any desktop environment that tries to cater to non-techie Windows users is the dependance on shared libraries that so many Linux apps have; packages from the original installation disk might conceivably work fine with the system, but user used to just downloading the InstallShield wizard and double clicking on it is going to be frustrated when he goes to install a program from somewhere else and it tells them they have to install some other library first, etc.
On the other hand, if a distro tries to compensate and include every damn library under the sun, more experienced users will scream about bloat.
Right... especially when the EULA of whatever software you install indemnifies the creator of any damage the software might cause your system.
It's like suing tobacco companies after getting cancer/emphysema after years of smoking cigarettes that have a GREAT BIG SURGEON GENERAL WARNING on them.
Speaking of which, was Donna Dubinsky's vague conference call statement that Handspring is 'exiting the traditional organizer market' on the list? (Site is slashdotted, so I don't know.)
:P
She did a great job of alienate Handspring's existing customer base and rendering their inventory unsellable before the Treo was available.
And Handspring's damage control was just as bad as the original statement... lots of "We want to reassure our customers and Springboard developers that we're not discontinuing the Visor, uh, right away. We're still behind the Visor line, but we're dropping our only color model and sticking with OS 3.5."
This will be modded Offtopic/Flamebait/Troll, but I'm just irked enough to post it anyway.
Reviews are most helpful when they draw some kind of consistent conclusion; One sentence says "The interface isn't bad" but is followed by a whole paragraph about what a pain the interface is to use. So, which is it?
Most of the article is more critical than complimentary, and yet the conclusion is "All in all, this is a pretty neat device." Feh.
I'm glad I'm not paying to read posts like this ad-free.
Outraged parents of Disney employees filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, claiming Apple advertising caused their children to "Create a theft."
By the time this posts it will probably get modded redundant, but nowhere did Apple's ad say "Rip, Mix, Burn, Steal", or even "Rip, Mix, Burn, Swap."
This is one of the most offensive aspects of Disney et al's push for the SSSCA; I don't begrudge them the desire to protect their IP from piracy, but the attitude that everyone who owns a computer (especially an Apple, apparently) is a dirty, dirty pirate really chaps my hide. Well, that plus the fact that the SSSCA would effectively put me out of work if passed in its current form.
God forbid I rip all of my CD's which I legitimately own by a particular band and burn all of the MP3s onto one mix CD that I can leave at the office.
Rip, Mix, Burn, Fair Use.
Hmm, time for some slightly OT karma whoring...
The bug that was found in that seal was invented by none other than Leon Theremin, inventor of the instrument of the same name.
There's an excellent biography available about Theremin by Albert Glinsky called "Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage" - there's a review here. (No affiliate link here, just a review.)
Theremin was quite an inventor - Glinksy's book is a good read, managing to be interesting and informative in equal measures.
Go here for more about Theremins, or here to buy one.
I got rid of Internet Explorer a few months ago, and my system is just fine.
I wonder if their proof involved deleting C:\winnt\system32\kernel32.dll.
Are you downloading pr0n on your wearable internet appliance, or are you just happy to see me?
Cue::Cats are only to be destroyed with the special Cue::Hammer.
The Cue::Hammer, when connected to your computer's serial port, will digitally scan any object it is used upon and automatically take you to a website featuring...
oh, never mind.
Just last week I read an article about this - I think it was at Wired.com, but I can't find it now.
:-/
Anyway, apparently there was a snippet of film made at (I think) Xerox PARC in the 1960's wherein somebody demonstrated navigating from one screen of text to another by way of a linked word; a hyperlink, in other words.
If these bastards get away with this, what happens when they set their sites on Mozilla, Konqueror, et al? Well, maybe nothing, since they're probably only interested in going after companies they stand to make large wads of $$$ by suing.
Or as one of my Sims likes to Say,
"This graa es fredushay!"
Money is just one form of recognition for being one of the "Best and Brightest."
:)
I'm oversimplifying here, but Ayn Rand's take on money is more about not being apologetic for any huge sums of money you might accumulate for being one of the Best and Brightest.
Being true to yourself and getting fulfillment out of whatever it is you feel you were put on this earth to do is another key component of Rand's take on things... (I.E. Where all the captains of industry go after they disappear in 'Atlas Shrugged'.)
Some government jobs may not pay as competitively as those in the private sector, but that can translate into better compensation in other forms, like not having to work 60+ hour weeks or weekends, not worrying about getting laid off so that the company stock go up 1/2 a point, and generally feeling more appreciated by your superiors because they *know* you could be making more money elsewhere- if you're doing good work, they'll let you know.
YMMV, but working as I have at a not-for-profit healthcare organization for most of the last year, I've come to realize that I would certainly consider a government job even if it didn't pay as well as a position with [insert megacorp here].
The hours are good, the benefits are good, and I don't go home stressed out of my mind anymore... so maybe I can't afford premium cable any more, but I watched too much of that anyway.
I can't help but wonder if Microsoft has somebody hard at work translating Kurt Sibold's open letter to English, declaring those 15,000 critical comments slanderous. :/
Unless I'm mistaken, all of Handspring's products use PalmOS 3.5 with some proprietary tweaks that handle the Springboard interface.
A number of the new features in PalmOS4, like support for 16-bit color, were already present in Handspring's version(s) of OS 3.5; that's how they got the Prism to display 16-bit color back when the Palm IIIc was still top of the line with its 8-bit color.
The original Visor Deluxe were stuck at 3.1, which meant that even though the DragonBall EZ processors it had was capable of displaying 16 shades of gray, the OS could only display 4... it got to be kind of a drag.
Since Handspring is in all likelihood killing off the Visor within the next year or two, it seems doubtful that there will ever be a Visor that runs OS 4, much less OS 5.
I had two Amigas, a 500 and a 2000 (40 meg hard drive, 1MB RAM, 7Mhz... w00t!). I used my Amiga 2000 right through 1996, when I moved cross-country and had to leave it behind... it is currently gathering dust in my inlaws' basement. :(
I'm still amazed when I remember what that computer could do at the time compared to its PC counterparts... and it worked so well/quickly because graphics, and sound were handled by separate processors on the mobo, and the core OS was stored on a ROM chip... so even though that Motorola 68000-whatever was only doing 7mhz, overall performance was stellar.
The workbench environment was great, but I don't know if it's great enough to be worth emulating on x86 hardware; The attraction of the Amiga (for me, anyway) was its overall performance compared to everything else that was out there at the time.
Now that x86 and PowerPC hardware is exponentially faster than the Amigas ever were and can get away without having separate processors for video, OS, etc, I don't really see what the point is. I hope the upcoming AmigaOS 4.0 does well, but the original Amiga was more than an operating system; its hardware was just as important.
... PRAY FOR MOJO