this will spur some people to try their best to hack this DRM system. After all, if you already have 2000 songs on your HDD you might want to access them, if just for the sport aspect;-)
is one that I am currently experimenting with: Allwell Set-Top Boxes.
I bought one through my employer, and the cool things about these boxes are:
small size, these are set-top boxes !
remote control and keyboard, both are normal PS/2 mouse and keyboard to the machine ! No drivers needed, and you can even switch the set-top box on and off with it... woohoo !:-)
SCART output !! (if you want to connect a normal VGA monitor you have to get a slot plate with a VGA connector and connect it with the main-board)
even has a SCART input, but I don't know how to use it
my version even has a SIGMA MPEG2 decoder chip
room for one normal PCI card, e.g. my old Bt878 card
you have to glue your 2,5" HDD to the cover, actually... at least in my version. There are also versions of this set-top-box which have a socket for 2,5" HDDs
I have seen versions with ~300 MHz Geode processors, mine has a 667 MHz VIA processor, IIRC
Only problem is the display driver, the video chip is a Tvia 5005 and so far I had no succes in finding drivers for Linux... VESA FB works well but it could be much faster/smoother/use real PAL resolutions if I had the correct drivers. If anyone knows where to get them, please tell me !
Sound works fine BTW, but I don't remember what chip that was... CX5530 ?
so bad that I can only suggest to avoid it when possible ! Sometimes cost-considerations force one to use IDE RAID, which is the only reason for it to exist IMHO because so far I had only trouble with it.
Well, to be precise with Promise IDE RAID, that's all I can talk about. Problem is they only release binary drivers, and if you need to run a Linux distro or just a kernel that isn't supported by them you're lost.
We had to install several servers with Promise FastTrak 133 IDE RAID controllers, and we had to run Linux and VMWare with Windows 2000 Servers on it (don't ask:-).
Problem was, those machines where dual-processor, and the normal SuSE 8.0 SMP kernel uses PAE (aka 64 GB RAM support), but VMWare doesn't support this. But Promise only provides modules for the SMP-64GB and Uniprocessor kernel. No support for Debian or SuSE 8.1 or SuSE SMP-4GB. To make a long story short, in the end we were forced to use software RAID, which is an ugly solution but one that works.
If we had used those excellent Adapted SCSI RAID adapters from the beginning we would have saved us a LOT of trouble and time, and with time=money we would probably have spent the same amount of money plus have a solid solution that we planed from the beginning.
This is Lotus effect is actually known for some time now. I saw an article about it and the (already successful) attempts to mimic this well over a year ago. My girlfried, who is varnisher, said there is already varnish avaible with such an effect but it's way too expensive to paint a car with it. And AFAIK there is already keramics avaible with this effect, being very expensive, too. But as always, prices should drop once going into mass-production:-)
Good to know, thank you... I've never set up something beyond the 200GB scale, not even RAID servers so I didn't run into any of your mentioned problems yet... except for the 5% root-reservation, but normally I just don't care about that;-)
I don't know about XFS and other journalling fs's since I've only used ReiserFS and Ext3 so far.
My experience so far is that Ext3 is more reliable (read: repairable) than ReiserFS simply due to the fact that Ext3 is a kind of "extension" to Ext2, so you can just run the good old well tested and known to work fsck.ext2 on a Ext3 partition should it screw up.
But I have yet to see a Ext3 partition screwing up, I've set up several PCs and servers with Ext3 and it works fine, no single problem to date.
Unlinke ReiserFS. I have to admit, my only experiences with ReiserFS were about one and a half years ago or so, but at that time I had set up a home PC with ReiserFS and somehow I f***ed it up beyond all repair. I don't remember what I did then but I just got scared of ReiserFS:-)
On the other hand I have still another home PC, running SuSE Linux 7.2 updated to 7.3 with ReiserFS which just runs fine, and this is my home server, running 24-7.
So I guess until you don't do anything stupid like I did both ReiserFS and Ext3 are pretty reliable today, given their widespread use you would probably have heard of any major glitches/problems;-) The decision whether to use on or another is more performance/religion-wise, IMHO:-)
...this is a desaster ! Especially since many DJs I know have migrated to MP3, with me currently archiving my collection to Ogg Vorbis... lifting one PC is easier than several hundred CDs (and you get cool search functionality and beatmixing with some programs, too).
I've found one CD so far that I'm pretty sure is copy protected (Genesis.1 single from VNV Nation), because it plays in normal CD players but not in the CD drive at my work. So I can't currently rip it (yes, I know that there are ways to circumvent that, but since it's just a single I don't care;-)
But the real problem is that some friends of mine already had real problems with copyrighted CDs: they seem to get "jumpy" even with just slight scratches (which just occur when using them, even when being careful). It's always bad when people are dancing and suddenly get irritated because the music just stopped due to a bad CD (it's always the DJ's fault, mind you !:-)
... is a good book that I found very useful. It has everything from the basics to inverse kinematics and stuff, as well as sectoring and optimizations. It has a CD with full sources.
This is so sad... why do they try this when they already must know they will fail ?
The whole flair and mood of Akira is so end-time. And since Bladrunner I haven't seen any Hollywood movie doing end-time properly. Most of the time they do some steril and ultra-clean version of end-time which is just making me go mad.
And without the author of Akira helping them they will just miss the flair and story as well, IMHO.
It's just plain sad that every now and then some idiot wants to try to make a live-action remake of a good anime or even normal film that he liked... they all fail horribly. Look at the Streetfighter live-action remake, or for normal films look at Rollerball. What's next ? Ghost in the Shell, directed by Steven Spielberg ?
Those people just don't understand that really good films are events that occur only once ! Rocky Horror Picture Show can't ever be done again, the same is true for every outstanding anime (don't forget the hundreds of bad animes that we don't get to see just because the aren't those lucky events with the right people at the right time being in the same boat).
As a goth, I normally wear a traditional costume (I'm a Bavarian) or flashy bright colors... both are equally spooky and damaging to ones' taste neurons, IMHO;-)
"Oh, what a nice halloween costume !" - "Uhm, oh, it's halloween again ? Actually I'm just on my way to disco..." (conversation between my girl-friend and her neighbour two years ago)
There is a German independent (wave) formation called "Welle: Erdball" (word-for-word translation: Wave: Earthball). They state in their CD booklets that all sounds and effects are directly from a C-64. They even sometimes list the Commodore C-64 as a band member:-) And they make some damn good wave, I tell ya:-)
Here is their homepage, they even have an excellent section dedicated to the C-64 with lots of infos, how and what types of the C-64 they use, what types of C-64 exist, etc.:-) Worth a look.
I'm working quite often with Geode systems and they are pretty good. And cheap. Allwell sells complete STB's with MPEG2 decoder chip and SCART in and out for around $250.
Unfortunately the support from National Semiconductor is not that good. There is a site for Geode powered set-top boxes, http://www.linux4.tv , but the software provided there is abandoned. They call it a "distribution" but you can't get a running system from the stuff provided, and the kernel is a 2.4.0 (yes, no typo) with support for the Geode framebuffer. You can get newer versions of the framebuffer code from National Semidestructor, but you have to get registered as a developer by your company.
The last message from the message board is from 03-19-02. I talked to some folks from National at the CeBIT 2002 and they said they wanted to release new software on www.linux4.tv right after the CeBIT but they haven't, which is a shame since the Geode plattform is quite good but developing on it can be quite frustating because the docu and software are not of the quality one likes to have it.
Well, I just learned only a week ago that SAP released (part of) their DB as open-source. Everyone and their dog know that MySQL and Postgres are free, but I guess SAP's DB being free as well is a fact that is not well known enough.
The part from globalsecurity.com (that one that says the system has about 1.7 millions lines of Ada code) says this:
Ninety percent of the software is written in Ada, the Department of Defense's common computer language. Exceptions to the Ada requirement are granted only for special processing or maintenance requirements.
This means the developers were forced to use Ada, but why ? To me, it seems some suits think it's especially "safe" for some reason, does anyone know more about that ?
But I think you can try to make a programming language as "safe" as you want, it won't prevent you from implementing bugs, it just causes a false sense of safety instead which can be even more dangerous, IMHO.
This is exactly what a friend observed, although at a lower speed of 20x, IIRC: he inserted a CD that had a small crack which he noticed but didn't worry about. The CD drive spun up and then *BANG* *crunch* *crackle*:-) He had to completely replace his CD drive. And that was already about two years ago... made him look at his CD's more carefully and not to ignore cracks;-)
Thats nothing check out some of this posters past +5 comments. Makes you wonder who really mods slashdot.
More embarrasing is doing meta-moderation and all but one or two comment being rated as Off-Topic, Flame or Troll. The idea behind the rating system is to propagate good articles. Unfortunately there are people that like to try to "clean up" the bad things instead of rewarding the good things.
But it could be worse... no meta-moderation at all, for example;-)
Heh, I find myself listening to Doom midi's frequently these days.
I'm still listening to the music of FutureCrew's Second Reality demo from time to time... there are songs that just remind you of a good time long gone by, when men were men and processors were numbered;-)
I tried it with a real DOS 6.22 installation, not Windows-9x/ME or something. That's what surprised me, since IIRC the Athlon still should be in 8086-compability mode then as there shouldn't be any code switching into protected mode or something...
Maybe Athlon's 8086-compability mode is not that compatible ?;-)
Wow, I guess I was an "early adopter" then;-) I always thought it to be older... My uncle, who happens to be a pilot for a major airline, brought me a copy of Spectrum Holobyte's Tetris for my 8088 when I was seven or eight years old (that's '86 or '87). It was one of my very first games, along with Boulder Dash II and Academy (strange game, btw;-)
I tried to get that version running on my Athlon some months ago and was very disappointed that it does not even start. Downloaded that Tetris version from several abandonware sites all with that same effect. I guess I really have to finish my computer room and get one of my 286's or 386's running. Does anyone know if that Spectrum Holobyte PC version runs on them ?
I wonder what the real, original Tetris looked liked. Does anyone have a link to a screenshot ?
I really like Blender, mainly because of it's completely different user interface. The learning curve is steep, but once you know the most important keys the interface is very cool because you then have one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard, which is very efficient.
Making blender open-source is really nice as it would be a shame to let such a fine product die.
I think one problem is the people that are using technology: I guess in the days when VCR's were new mainly people that liked to play with technology bought them. Same with computers: when computers became avaible for private people, mainly people that liked to play around with them bought them.
Those people are willing to read manuals or at least try everything till it works. That's people like us:-)
But today even people that hate technology have to use computers in their workplace. Those people see the benefits of things like VCRs but they don't like playing around with them. They think there is too much magic going which they don't want to understand and because of that "magic" they also expect them to "automagically" work like they want them to.
I guess there was a quote like "Any reasonable advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", which describes just that. We/.ers know technology, we love technology and most of us understand technology;-) We like to play around with nifty gadgets and even to take them apart. But most people see machines simply as tools and as such they have to do what people expect from them, and often they simply expect too much. They don't understand those machines and they don't like to which leads to the various problems we all know.
Or is there anyone who hasn't heard something like this before: "Oh my god, an error dialog ! It says I did something wrong ! Oh my god oh my god I damaged something ! I sure must have damaged something ! HELP ME!" - "Just press OK and everything's fine." - "Oh.";-)
Considering Falun Gong's trouble with the chinese government this is a very stupid move as it gives the government more arguments in attacking and arresting Falun Gong members.
Hijacking a satellite can easily be declared as a direct attack on the government, thus pouring oil into the flames... not a very clever move.
In fact, I remember Gates several years ago bragging about how he prefers not to hire CS grads because they come out of school with too many limitations programmed into their brains.
This time, I have to agree with Bill. My experience is that graduated CS student DON'T write good code, they know to do software design but they don't know how to code. They often are not able to use a command line let alone know the tools !
My experience with CS graduates is they know Java, some might know a bit C++, but throw C or shell scripts at them and they are lost. Cross plattform coding ? Makefiles ? How to avoid buffer overflows and stuff ? Same story here.
Give a self-educated coder something he doesn't know and give a CS student/graduate something he doesn't know, I bet most of the time the self-educated "gets" this way faster.
I don't think CS graduates are dumb or something, but they're educated in different areas than "real" coders, IMHO. The main things that lacks most CS students and graduates is the urge to explore, to try something out, to widen their horizon... and experience, of course;-)
But maybe I've just met the wrong CS students/graduates...
After some sentences you pretty quickly get how to use this, even with uncommon words... like move your cursor back and it zooms out again, deleting what you typed. And it learns: I "entered" the sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", with 25.something cps because words like "fox" and "lazy" were not known, and the second time the characters were better sized so I could write the same sentence with 52.something cps... really awesome.
But as a friend pointed out, this is only really useful for entering sentences (like you do when writing SMS). With a normal PDA you often just note down appointments and things, and Dasher wouldn't be that good on those things (like having to type lots of odd company names). Also missing punctuation and missing numbers are a thing to improve.
But the overall concept is really awesome ! It's quite fun, IMHO:-)
Obviously, this is a very cool app, no doubt about it. But using DirectX is just brain dead as it locks the app into Win32 machines only... as if the world would consist just of Win32 machines *sigh*
Slashdot Mirror
this will spur some people to try their best to hack this DRM system. After all, if you already have 2000 songs on your HDD you might want to access them, if just for the sport aspect ;-)
is one that I am currently experimenting with: Allwell Set-Top Boxes.
I bought one through my employer, and the cool things about these boxes are:
Can be seen here.
Only problem is the display driver, the video chip is a Tvia 5005 and so far I had no succes in finding drivers for Linux... VESA FB works well but it could be much faster/smoother/use real PAL resolutions if I had the correct drivers. If anyone knows where to get them, please tell me !
Sound works fine BTW, but I don't remember what chip that was... CX5530 ?
so bad that I can only suggest to avoid it when possible ! Sometimes cost-considerations force one to use IDE RAID, which is the only reason for it to exist IMHO because so far I had only trouble with it.
:-).
Well, to be precise with Promise IDE RAID, that's all I can talk about. Problem is they only release binary drivers, and if you need to run a Linux distro or just a kernel that isn't supported by them you're lost.
We had to install several servers with Promise FastTrak 133 IDE RAID controllers, and we had to run Linux and VMWare with Windows 2000 Servers on it (don't ask
Problem was, those machines where dual-processor, and the normal SuSE 8.0 SMP kernel uses PAE (aka 64 GB RAM support), but VMWare doesn't support this. But Promise only provides modules for the SMP-64GB and Uniprocessor kernel. No support for Debian or SuSE 8.1 or SuSE SMP-4GB. To make a long story short, in the end we were forced to use software RAID, which is an ugly solution but one that works.
If we had used those excellent Adapted SCSI RAID adapters from the beginning we would have saved us a LOT of trouble and time, and with time=money we would probably have spent the same amount of money plus have a solid solution that we planed from the beginning.
This is Lotus effect is actually known for some time now. I saw an article about it and the (already successful) attempts to mimic this well over a year ago. My girlfried, who is varnisher, said there is already varnish avaible with such an effect but it's way too expensive to paint a car with it. And AFAIK there is already keramics avaible with this effect, being very expensive, too. But as always, prices should drop once going into mass-production :-)
Good to know, thank you... I've never set up something beyond the 200GB scale, not even RAID servers so I didn't run into any of your mentioned problems yet... except for the 5% root-reservation, but normally I just don't care about that ;-)
I don't know about XFS and other journalling fs's since I've only used ReiserFS and Ext3 so far.
:-)
;-) The decision whether to use on or another is more performance/religion-wise, IMHO :-)
My experience so far is that Ext3 is more reliable (read: repairable) than ReiserFS simply due to the fact that Ext3 is a kind of "extension" to Ext2, so you can just run the good old well tested and known to work fsck.ext2 on a Ext3 partition should it screw up.
But I have yet to see a Ext3 partition screwing up, I've set up several PCs and servers with Ext3 and it works fine, no single problem to date.
Unlinke ReiserFS. I have to admit, my only experiences with ReiserFS were about one and a half years ago or so, but at that time I had set up a home PC with ReiserFS and somehow I f***ed it up beyond all repair. I don't remember what I did then but I just got scared of ReiserFS
On the other hand I have still another home PC, running SuSE Linux 7.2 updated to 7.3 with ReiserFS which just runs fine, and this is my home server, running 24-7.
So I guess until you don't do anything stupid like I did both ReiserFS and Ext3 are pretty reliable today, given their widespread use you would probably have heard of any major glitches/problems
...this is a desaster ! Especially since many DJs I know have migrated to MP3, with me currently archiving my collection to Ogg Vorbis... lifting one PC is easier than several hundred CDs (and you get cool search functionality and beatmixing with some programs, too).
;-)
:-)
I've found one CD so far that I'm pretty sure is copy protected (Genesis.1 single from VNV Nation), because it plays in normal CD players but not in the CD drive at my work. So I can't currently rip it (yes, I know that there are ways to circumvent that, but since it's just a single I don't care
But the real problem is that some friends of mine already had real problems with copyrighted CDs: they seem to get "jumpy" even with just slight scratches (which just occur when using them, even when being careful). It's always bad when people are dancing and suddenly get irritated because the music just stopped due to a bad CD (it's always the DJ's fault, mind you !
... is a good book that I found very useful. It has everything from the basics to inverse kinematics and stuff, as well as sectoring and optimizations. It has a CD with full sources.
Read the reviews at Amazon.
This is so sad... why do they try this when they already must know they will fail ?
The whole flair and mood of Akira is so end-time. And since Bladrunner I haven't seen any Hollywood movie doing end-time properly. Most of the time they do some steril and ultra-clean version of end-time which is just making me go mad.
And without the author of Akira helping them they will just miss the flair and story as well, IMHO.
It's just plain sad that every now and then some idiot wants to try to make a live-action remake of a good anime or even normal film that he liked... they all fail horribly. Look at the Streetfighter live-action remake, or for normal films look at Rollerball. What's next ? Ghost in the Shell, directed by Steven Spielberg ?
Those people just don't understand that really good films are events that occur only once ! Rocky Horror Picture Show can't ever be done again, the same is true for every outstanding anime (don't forget the hundreds of bad animes that we don't get to see just because the aren't those lucky events with the right people at the right time being in the same boat).
As a goth, I normally wear a traditional costume (I'm a Bavarian) or flashy bright colors... both are equally spooky and damaging to ones' taste neurons, IMHO ;-)
"Oh, what a nice halloween costume !" - "Uhm, oh, it's halloween again ? Actually I'm just on my way to disco..." (conversation between my girl-friend and her neighbour two years ago)
There is a German independent (wave) formation called "Welle: Erdball" (word-for-word translation: Wave: Earthball). They state in their CD booklets that all sounds and effects are directly from a C-64. They even sometimes list the Commodore C-64 as a band member :-) And they make some damn good wave, I tell ya :-)
:-) Worth a look.
Here is their homepage, they even have an excellent section dedicated to the C-64 with lots of infos, how and what types of the C-64 they use, what types of C-64 exist, etc.
I'm working quite often with Geode systems and they are pretty good. And cheap. Allwell sells complete STB's with MPEG2 decoder chip and SCART in and out for around $250.
Unfortunately the support from National Semiconductor is not that good. There is a site for Geode powered set-top boxes, http://www.linux4.tv , but the software provided there is abandoned. They call it a "distribution" but you can't get a running system from the stuff provided, and the kernel is a 2.4.0 (yes, no typo) with support for the Geode framebuffer. You can get newer versions of the framebuffer code from National Semidestructor, but you have to get registered as a developer by your company.
The last message from the message board is from 03-19-02. I talked to some folks from National at the CeBIT 2002 and they said they wanted to release new software on www.linux4.tv right after the CeBIT but they haven't, which is a shame since the Geode plattform is quite good but developing on it can be quite frustating because the docu and software are not of the quality one likes to have it.
Well, I just learned only a week ago that SAP released (part of) their DB as open-source. Everyone and their dog know that MySQL and Postgres are free, but I guess SAP's DB being free as well is a fact that is not well known enough.
The part from globalsecurity.com (that one that says the system has about 1.7 millions lines of Ada code) says this:
Ninety percent of the software is written in Ada, the Department of Defense's common computer language. Exceptions to the Ada requirement are granted only for special processing or maintenance requirements.
This means the developers were forced to use Ada, but why ? To me, it seems some suits think it's especially "safe" for some reason, does anyone know more about that ?
But I think you can try to make a programming language as "safe" as you want, it won't prevent you from implementing bugs, it just causes a false sense of safety instead which can be even more dangerous, IMHO.
This is exactly what a friend observed, although at a lower speed of 20x, IIRC: he inserted a CD that had a small crack which he noticed but didn't worry about. The CD drive spun up and then *BANG* *crunch* *crackle* :-) He had to completely replace his CD drive. And that was already about two years ago... made him look at his CD's more carefully and not to ignore cracks ;-)
Thats nothing check out some of this posters past +5 comments. Makes you wonder who really mods slashdot.
;-)
More embarrasing is doing meta-moderation and all but one or two comment being rated as Off-Topic, Flame or Troll. The idea behind the rating system is to propagate good articles. Unfortunately there are people that like to try to "clean up" the bad things instead of rewarding the good things.
But it could be worse... no meta-moderation at all, for example
Heh, I find myself listening to Doom midi's frequently these days.
;-)
I'm still listening to the music of FutureCrew's Second Reality demo from time to time... there are songs that just remind you of a good time long gone by, when men were men and processors were numbered
I tried it with a real DOS 6.22 installation, not Windows-9x/ME or something. That's what surprised me, since IIRC the Athlon still should be in 8086-compability mode then as there shouldn't be any code switching into protected mode or something... Maybe Athlon's 8086-compability mode is not that compatible ? ;-)
Wow, I guess I was an "early adopter" then ;-) I always thought it to be older... My uncle, who happens to be a pilot for a major airline, brought me a copy of Spectrum Holobyte's Tetris for my 8088 when I was seven or eight years old (that's '86 or '87). It was one of my very first games, along with Boulder Dash II and Academy (strange game, btw ;-)
I tried to get that version running on my Athlon some months ago and was very disappointed that it does not even start. Downloaded that Tetris version from several abandonware sites all with that same effect. I guess I really have to finish my computer room and get one of my 286's or 386's running. Does anyone know if that Spectrum Holobyte PC version runs on them ?
I wonder what the real, original Tetris looked liked. Does anyone have a link to a screenshot ?
I really like Blender, mainly because of it's completely different user interface. The learning curve is steep, but once you know the most important keys the interface is very cool because you then have one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard, which is very efficient.
Making blender open-source is really nice as it would be a shame to let such a fine product die.
I think one problem is the people that are using technology: I guess in the days when VCR's were new mainly people that liked to play with technology bought them. Same with computers: when computers became avaible for private people, mainly people that liked to play around with them bought them.
:-)
/.ers know technology, we love technology and most of us understand technology ;-) We like to play around with nifty gadgets and even to take them apart. But most people see machines simply as tools and as such they have to do what people expect from them, and often they simply expect too much. They don't understand those machines and they don't like to which leads to the various problems we all know.
;-)
Those people are willing to read manuals or at least try everything till it works. That's people like us
But today even people that hate technology have to use computers in their workplace. Those people see the benefits of things like VCRs but they don't like playing around with them. They think there is too much magic going which they don't want to understand and because of that "magic" they also expect them to "automagically" work like they want them to.
I guess there was a quote like "Any reasonable advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", which describes just that. We
Or is there anyone who hasn't heard something like this before:
"Oh my god, an error dialog ! It says I did something wrong ! Oh my god oh my god I damaged something ! I sure must have damaged something ! HELP ME!" - "Just press OK and everything's fine." - "Oh."
Considering Falun Gong's trouble with the chinese government this is a very stupid move as it gives the government more arguments in attacking and arresting Falun Gong members.
Hijacking a satellite can easily be declared as a direct attack on the government, thus pouring oil into the flames... not a very clever move.
In fact, I remember Gates several years ago bragging about how he prefers not to hire CS grads because they come out of school with too many limitations programmed into their brains.
;-)
This time, I have to agree with Bill. My experience is that graduated CS student DON'T write good code, they know to do software design but they don't know how to code. They often are not able to use a command line let alone know the tools !
My experience with CS graduates is they know Java, some might know a bit C++, but throw C or shell scripts at them and they are lost. Cross plattform coding ? Makefiles ? How to avoid buffer overflows and stuff ? Same story here.
Give a self-educated coder something he doesn't know and give a CS student/graduate something he doesn't know, I bet most of the time the self-educated "gets" this way faster.
I don't think CS graduates are dumb or something, but they're educated in different areas than "real" coders, IMHO. The main things that lacks most CS students and graduates is the urge to explore, to try something out, to widen their horizon... and experience, of course
But maybe I've just met the wrong CS students/graduates...
After some sentences you pretty quickly get how to use this, even with uncommon words... like move your cursor back and it zooms out again, deleting what you typed. And it learns: I "entered" the sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", with 25.something cps because words like "fox" and "lazy" were not known, and the second time the characters were better sized so I could write the same sentence with 52.something cps... really awesome.
:-)
But as a friend pointed out, this is only really useful for entering sentences (like you do when writing SMS). With a normal PDA you often just note down appointments and things, and Dasher wouldn't be that good on those things (like having to type lots of odd company names). Also missing punctuation and missing numbers are a thing to improve.
But the overall concept is really awesome ! It's quite fun, IMHO
Obviously, this is a very cool app, no doubt about it. But using DirectX is just brain dead as it locks the app into Win32 machines only... as if the world would consist just of Win32 machines *sigh*
Very sad, it looked quite promising