Expensive compared to CD-R, maybe, but cheap as hell compared to CF or similar media (a much more accurate comparison in regards to size and reusability).
NetMD has been out for a year or so now and allows easy transfer from computers at respectable speeds.
Market share is pitiful, and the proprietariness is a bad thing, but I much prefer my (pre-NetMD) MD player to CD-Rs based on size alone.
Ok, it's apparent that these things succeed by preventing themselves from being read by CD-ROM drives.
But what happens if you stick it in one of those new stereos that has a CD burner built in? I know Philips has released several models like this, and other companies probably have, too.
Either it's a simple way of copying them, or the RIAA has broken much more than PCs with these non-standard discs.
It's obvious why. Collins stayed up during the mission while the other two went down. They just got so used to those positions, it carried over to form-signing.
Concept devices, even the ridiculously priced ones, will often end up breeding a more reasonable market for the regular Joe.
Best example I can think of: Aibo. Horribly expensive, hard to find, produced in very limited quantinties, and insanely popular.
Shortly after its release, the market was flooded with cheap little animatronic pets. Sure, they're not nearly as fancy as Aibo, but you get a good market spread, from low-end to high-end.
So, concept products often do create something, eventually.
If any one of the big American sports leagues were to be suddenly disbanded, the money that was going to be spent on salaries, merchandise, stadiums, and all the other stuff could most likely pay more than enough for us to not only get to Pluto, but to hook up a bunch of tow-rockets and bring it back home.
When you spend a majority of your free time on MU*s like I do, you tend to meet all sorts of people. Almost a year ago, I met someone who lived well over 1,500 miles from me, but we seemed to get along so well.
Online chats turned to (expensive) phone conversations, and I eventually flew over to visit her for a weekend. We had a great time, but unfortunately there was just no way either of us could move. It was a good thing, but not phenomenal, and not worth an incredible amount of trouble.
On the other hand, I've met people who have moved or are planning to do so for people they've met online. Some of them are insanely happy. Some of them didn't work out. And I've even known someone who found herself someone with severe mental instability that could've been dangerous.
In the end, it's not all that different from real life meetings. You just get a wider selection, and don't see them face to face. That can cause problems with two women I know who've been starting a relationship, since one of them had masqueraded online as a man for her own protection. But it seems to be working out.
At least when you meet someone online, you know that in the long run they'll understand your need for DSL or cable modem.;)
To all those who raise their voices to proclaim the evils of genetic engineering, I'd just like to remind people that we've been doing this sorta thing for centuries, albeit a little bit slower.
Domesticated dogs are the prime example of this. From a chihuahua to a great dane, all of these animals have been carefully inbred for a long time to produce certain ideal qualities. Unfortunately, many of these breeds are now exhibiting rampant genetic defects. I don't remember which is which off the top of my head, but certain breeds a prone to be born with brain damage, while others go blind almost invariably.
So what's different about what we're doing now? It's a bit quicker, we've got a wider range of options, and we know what we're doing to a greater extent. There's still a lot that we don't know about, but from the Human Genome Project onwards, we're making some serious progress.
For an analogy that fits most people here, the past practices of selective breeding are like slowly and meticulously swapping jumpers around. But now we've actually got the chance to look at the documentation before making any changes.
I've been using paypal for a while now, just for transactions between myself and friends and the occasional auction. And you don't even have to have a credit card to use it. I've got it patched into my bank account.
All transactions on the personal level are free, but they go to $.30 for all purchases under $15 and 2.2% (for credit card) or 1.6% (for non-credit card) plus $.30 for all purchases over $15 if you're using the premier or business account.
I haven't checked the amazon rates, but these seem fairly reasonable to me for any normal transaction. It gets a little tricky when you're just doing micropayments, but you can stick with a personal account if you don't plan to be raking in lots of cash.
For everyone who seems to think that this is doctors wasting their patients' money or time, I can tell you from experience that a paperless office would be an incredible improvement for almost any medical center.
I worked in a hepatology (liver disease) clinic for a while, and was responsible for filing all the lab reports and other patient information that came into the office. We would get several hundred, sometimes almost a thousand, different sheets of paper a day. All of these had to be sorted and placed in the patient's chart (If the chart was even in the office. Oftentimes it would've been set out in any of a dozen different places). Based on the volume and the fact that I was only there part-time, there were some labs that didn't get filed until weeks after they were received.
In most clinics, the paperwork can come close to burying people. There's vast amounts of information passing through, most of it unnecessary and a lot of it being misplaced. An electronic system would not only save a lot of paper, but a lot of headaches and would expedite many areas of doctor-patient information exhange.
I don't know if anyone's noticed this yet, but every article that shows up on the space.com slashbox get submitted for a story within a week. Couldn't we just hurry things up and funnel those directly to the frontpage?
Well, he doesn't really have to make $60 bil that quick. I'm not sure of any numbers, but I do know that Kamen is already worth a good deal.
He owns a lot of patents (And as far as I know, they're all the good kind. On real inventions that he actually innovated.) and is the idea and money man behind the FIRST competition that was mentioned here a few days ago.
How much information do you expect them to be able to give you in the little blurbs that they use for news articles? Sure, it might've been nice to see an extended review, but that's not the main purpose of this place.
The beauty of/. is that they put up the blurb, and then all us proles fill in the details. I haven't finished reading the comments for this one, but I'm willing to bet that somebody out there has been able to find some hard numbers.
No offense to them, but the/. guys aren't real journalists. This isn't a real news site. If you want lots of details in the article, go someplace else. All they do is give is a little tiny pebble, and we glom onto it and build up a pearl.
Motorola has said that the new ARMs will work just fine with backwards compatability. All old Palm apps should run without a significant (if any) performance hit.
Size probably isn't an issue when it comes to the processor, although both the Palm IIIc and the Visor Prism are larger than their B&W counterparts, so color is probably more of a size affecting factor than that. Power requirements will most definitely increase. If they're moving to full color, then there's no way they'll be running these of AAAs like the old Palms and Visors. The color devices that are out now are all (that I know of) running off internal NiMH with chargers built into the cradle. It works well enough as long as you can access a cradle on a regular basis. Again, the color screen is more of a determinant than the processor.
Not exactly. The 3.1H used on the Visor Solo and Deluxe is basically PalmOS 3.0 with a few improvements, most of it to support springboard modules and the USB hotsync. There's also some differences in the basic software package.
The new Visor Prism and Visor Platinum both come with a modified version of PalmOS 3.5. So, all they're really doing is taking the basic PalmOS and adding a few things here and there. So far it hasn't been a problem with them for 3.x, but it might become a little more difficult when 4.0 finally comes out. We'll see.
Also, I'm not sure about this, but for most wireless modules to work perfectly with old Visors, they have to be sent back to Handspring and replaced with upgrades that reduce RF interference. I believe that these upgraded Visors also come with a modified PalmOS 3.3 or 3.5, but I'm really not all that sure about it.
In any event, Visors are stuck with the OS they come with, unless you can do what you want with software patches or you want to go in and physically change the chips. The ROM on the Palms is flashable, and can be upgraded to a new OS. But it's still up in the air whether 4.0 will work on the Dragonball devices.
AFAIK, PalmOS will only run on the Dragonball processors that are in all the Palm and PalmOS devices. Unless someone's created a port for it, it won't run on what you've got.
However, there's probably a Linux out there that'll work. There's a company called Agenda that's making a Linux-based pda with a look that is somewhat similar to Palm's, running on a 66MHz NEC processor. Maybe they'll be able to help you out.
You also might want to check out some of the software dl sites for pdas. I know I've seen some ROM replacements for Palms, but I haven't done much looking when it comes to WinCE devices.
I've been running NS 4.5 for as long as it's been out, and I've been able to tolerate the glitches and problems.
I think it's finally time to start giving the upgrades a serious look, and right now I'm trying to decide what exactly the difference is between NS 6 and Mozilla.6.
Is there anything that this Mozilla is missing that would make me need to use another browser? I need support for several different people's emails, the occassional secure page, cookies, and all the other goodies that the web has now (shockwave, flash, java, etc.)
Keep in mind that I'm running Win95 on a P100 (which has been very good to me for the past 5 years).
I just want to know if there's one good reason that this new Mozilla won't cut it for me. If not, then I'lll go for it.
You might want to read the article before posting.
It's not that they're charging sales tax on whatever the store price is, it's that they're charging tax as if it were priced equivalently to Windows or MS Office.
Picture walking into the supermarket. They've got Pepsi for $2.00 a carton, and a sale on Coke so it's only $1.50 a carton. You don't have any real preference, so you go for the cheaper Coke. But when you get to the checkout, they calculate the tax based on 'market value,' which in this case is $2.00. They're charging tax on money you never spent.
Ok, I've always thought I understood most British words pretty well. Heck, I'm even reading a great series of books by a Brit, and it's heavy on the 'bloody lorry tyres' and such.
But can anyone please tell me just what the hell 'boiled sweets' are? Pretty please?
And libertarianism is exactly what the article is about.
Sure, it would be wonderful if we could all live together in peace and harmony in the happy land of candy, but life isn't like that. People aren't fair. And libertarianism just gives them a beautiful veneer to hide behind.
We need a strong government not just to protect us from the active criminals, but to look out for the rights of those citizens who can't do so themselves.
The libertarian ideal doesn't give a crap about the people starving in third world countries. It doesn't even concern itself with the poor schmuck down the street who can't get himself a job. Sure, nobody may have hurt him or stolen from him, but they sure as hell didn't help him.
But according to your philosophy, that's alright. Nobody needs to help those people. And the reality of it is that there's certainly not enough charity to go around. Look at what capitalism did to the US during the industril revolution and then apply that to all aspects of society. That's libertarianism at work.
Apparently the fix for the DRAM problem has to do with how the unit refreshes itself while off.
The update from handspring states that "depending on individual usage, the patch may impact battery life. But how much exactly?
There's a thread here on Deja with details that somebody reached by working from the specs on the particular RAM used in the Palms and Visors. His results are a doubling of power drain while the unit is turned off.
A lot people have been comparing selling faulty software to someone selling faulty cars or other physical things.
I think that an important distinction needs to be made in how the things are used. The software probably works fine on the machines at the writer's office, and worked well for the trials and beta tests they gave it. This is comparable to an auto being road tested on good-quality highways.
But when people start taking that piece of software and using it on systems with widely varying specs, and expecting it to run along with other software and hardware that the manufacturer didn't or couldn't test; this is similar to someone taking their nice little sedan out into the middle of the woods and expecting it to run fine.
If people expect to be able to hold software companies responsible for the reliable operation of their software, those companies are easily going to be able to place restrictions and expectations on the use of that software. There's no way to win this situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Expensive compared to CD-R, maybe, but cheap as hell compared to CF or similar media (a much more accurate comparison in regards to size and reusability).
NetMD has been out for a year or so now and allows easy transfer from computers at respectable speeds.
Market share is pitiful, and the proprietariness is a bad thing, but I much prefer my (pre-NetMD) MD player to CD-Rs based on size alone.
Ok, it's apparent that these things succeed by preventing themselves from being read by CD-ROM drives.
But what happens if you stick it in one of those new stereos that has a CD burner built in? I know Philips has released several models like this, and other companies probably have, too.
Either it's a simple way of copying them, or the RIAA has broken much more than PCs with these non-standard discs.
It's obvious why. Collins stayed up during the mission while the other two went down. They just got so used to those positions, it carried over to form-signing.
Concept devices, even the ridiculously priced ones, will often end up breeding a more reasonable market for the regular Joe.
Best example I can think of: Aibo. Horribly expensive, hard to find, produced in very limited quantinties, and insanely popular.
Shortly after its release, the market was flooded with cheap little animatronic pets. Sure, they're not nearly as fancy as Aibo, but you get a good market spread, from low-end to high-end.
So, concept products often do create something, eventually.
And just how far will you be able to run while playing Quake before you trip over a curb or run smack-dab into a telephone pole?
No, it won't be pretty. I guess we'll just have to buy treadmills.
If any one of the big American sports leagues were to be suddenly disbanded, the money that was going to be spent on salaries, merchandise, stadiums, and all the other stuff could most likely pay more than enough for us to not only get to Pluto, but to hook up a bunch of tow-rockets and bring it back home.
When you spend a majority of your free time on MU*s like I do, you tend to meet all sorts of people. Almost a year ago, I met someone who lived well over 1,500 miles from me, but we seemed to get along so well.
;)
Online chats turned to (expensive) phone conversations, and I eventually flew over to visit her for a weekend. We had a great time, but unfortunately there was just no way either of us could move. It was a good thing, but not phenomenal, and not worth an incredible amount of trouble.
On the other hand, I've met people who have moved or are planning to do so for people they've met online. Some of them are insanely happy. Some of them didn't work out. And I've even known someone who found herself someone with severe mental instability that could've been dangerous.
In the end, it's not all that different from real life meetings. You just get a wider selection, and don't see them face to face. That can cause problems with two women I know who've been starting a relationship, since one of them had masqueraded online as a man for her own protection. But it seems to be working out.
At least when you meet someone online, you know that in the long run they'll understand your need for DSL or cable modem.
To all those who raise their voices to proclaim the evils of genetic engineering, I'd just like to remind people that we've been doing this sorta thing for centuries, albeit a little bit slower.
Domesticated dogs are the prime example of this. From a chihuahua to a great dane, all of these animals have been carefully inbred for a long time to produce certain ideal qualities. Unfortunately, many of these breeds are now exhibiting rampant genetic defects. I don't remember which is which off the top of my head, but certain breeds a prone to be born with brain damage, while others go blind almost invariably.
So what's different about what we're doing now? It's a bit quicker, we've got a wider range of options, and we know what we're doing to a greater extent. There's still a lot that we don't know about, but from the Human Genome Project onwards, we're making some serious progress.
For an analogy that fits most people here, the past practices of selective breeding are like slowly and meticulously swapping jumpers around. But now we've actually got the chance to look at the documentation before making any changes.
Knowledge is power.
I've been using paypal for a while now, just for transactions between myself and friends and the occasional auction. And you don't even have to have a credit card to use it. I've got it patched into my bank account.
All transactions on the personal level are free, but they go to $.30 for all purchases under $15 and 2.2% (for credit card) or 1.6% (for non-credit card) plus $.30 for all purchases over $15 if you're using the premier or business account.
I haven't checked the amazon rates, but these seem fairly reasonable to me for any normal transaction. It gets a little tricky when you're just doing micropayments, but you can stick with a personal account if you don't plan to be raking in lots of cash.
For everyone who seems to think that this is doctors wasting their patients' money or time, I can tell you from experience that a paperless office would be an incredible improvement for almost any medical center.
I worked in a hepatology (liver disease) clinic for a while, and was responsible for filing all the lab reports and other patient information that came into the office. We would get several hundred, sometimes almost a thousand, different sheets of paper a day. All of these had to be sorted and placed in the patient's chart (If the chart was even in the office. Oftentimes it would've been set out in any of a dozen different places). Based on the volume and the fact that I was only there part-time, there were some labs that didn't get filed until weeks after they were received.
In most clinics, the paperwork can come close to burying people. There's vast amounts of information passing through, most of it unnecessary and a lot of it being misplaced. An electronic system would not only save a lot of paper, but a lot of headaches and would expedite many areas of doctor-patient information exhange.
I don't know if anyone's noticed this yet, but every article that shows up on the space.com slashbox get submitted for a story within a week. Couldn't we just hurry things up and funnel those directly to the frontpage?
Well, he doesn't really have to make $60 bil that quick. I'm not sure of any numbers, but I do know that Kamen is already worth a good deal.
He owns a lot of patents (And as far as I know, they're all the good kind. On real inventions that he actually innovated.) and is the idea and money man behind the FIRST competition that was mentioned here a few days ago.
But you seem to be missing the whole point of /.
/. is that they put up the blurb, and then all us proles fill in the details. I haven't finished reading the comments for this one, but I'm willing to bet that somebody out there has been able to find some hard numbers.
/. guys aren't real journalists. This isn't a real news site. If you want lots of details in the article, go someplace else. All they do is give is a little tiny pebble, and we glom onto it and build up a pearl.
How much information do you expect them to be able to give you in the little blurbs that they use for news articles? Sure, it might've been nice to see an extended review, but that's not the main purpose of this place.
The beauty of
No offense to them, but the
Motorola has said that the new ARMs will work just fine with backwards compatability. All old Palm apps should run without a significant (if any) performance hit.
Size probably isn't an issue when it comes to the processor, although both the Palm IIIc and the Visor Prism are larger than their B&W counterparts, so color is probably more of a size affecting factor than that. Power requirements will most definitely increase. If they're moving to full color, then there's no way they'll be running these of AAAs like the old Palms and Visors. The color devices that are out now are all (that I know of) running off internal NiMH with chargers built into the cradle. It works well enough as long as you can access a cradle on a regular basis. Again, the color screen is more of a determinant than the processor.
Not exactly. The 3.1H used on the Visor Solo and Deluxe is basically PalmOS 3.0 with a few improvements, most of it to support springboard modules and the USB hotsync. There's also some differences in the basic software package.
The new Visor Prism and Visor Platinum both come with a modified version of PalmOS 3.5. So, all they're really doing is taking the basic PalmOS and adding a few things here and there. So far it hasn't been a problem with them for 3.x, but it might become a little more difficult when 4.0 finally comes out. We'll see.
Also, I'm not sure about this, but for most wireless modules to work perfectly with old Visors, they have to be sent back to Handspring and replaced with upgrades that reduce RF interference. I believe that these upgraded Visors also come with a modified PalmOS 3.3 or 3.5, but I'm really not all that sure about it.
In any event, Visors are stuck with the OS they come with, unless you can do what you want with software patches or you want to go in and physically change the chips. The ROM on the Palms is flashable, and can be upgraded to a new OS. But it's still up in the air whether 4.0 will work on the Dragonball devices.
Try taking a look at these guys.
AFAIK, PalmOS will only run on the Dragonball processors that are in all the Palm and PalmOS devices. Unless someone's created a port for it, it won't run on what you've got.
However, there's probably a Linux out there that'll work. There's a company called Agenda that's making a Linux-based pda with a look that is somewhat similar to Palm's, running on a 66MHz NEC processor. Maybe they'll be able to help you out.
You also might want to check out some of the software dl sites for pdas. I know I've seen some ROM replacements for Palms, but I haven't done much looking when it comes to WinCE devices.
I've been running NS 4.5 for as long as it's been out, and I've been able to tolerate the glitches and problems.
.6.
I think it's finally time to start giving the upgrades a serious look, and right now I'm trying to decide what exactly the difference is between NS 6 and Mozilla
Is there anything that this Mozilla is missing that would make me need to use another browser? I need support for several different people's emails, the occassional secure page, cookies, and all the other goodies that the web has now (shockwave, flash, java, etc.)
Keep in mind that I'm running Win95 on a P100 (which has been very good to me for the past 5 years).
I just want to know if there's one good reason that this new Mozilla won't cut it for me. If not, then I'lll go for it.
You might want to read the article before posting.
It's not that they're charging sales tax on whatever the store price is, it's that they're charging tax as if it were priced equivalently to Windows or MS Office.
Picture walking into the supermarket. They've got Pepsi for $2.00 a carton, and a sale on Coke so it's only $1.50 a carton. You don't have any real preference, so you go for the cheaper Coke. But when you get to the checkout, they calculate the tax based on 'market value,' which in this case is $2.00. They're charging tax on money you never spent.
There's a few good options. If you merely want to be able to carry it around without worrying, you can check out an Otterbox.
But if you want to actually be able to use the Palm in wet conditions, you'll want to check out Aquapac.
Good stuff, both of em.
Ok, I've always thought I understood most British words pretty well. Heck, I'm even reading a great series of books by a Brit, and it's heavy on the 'bloody lorry tyres' and such.
But can anyone please tell me just what the hell 'boiled sweets' are? Pretty please?
And libertarianism is exactly what the article is about.
Sure, it would be wonderful if we could all live together in peace and harmony in the happy land of candy, but life isn't like that. People aren't fair. And libertarianism just gives them a beautiful veneer to hide behind.
We need a strong government not just to protect us from the active criminals, but to look out for the rights of those citizens who can't do so themselves.
The libertarian ideal doesn't give a crap about the people starving in third world countries. It doesn't even concern itself with the poor schmuck down the street who can't get himself a job. Sure, nobody may have hurt him or stolen from him, but they sure as hell didn't help him.
But according to your philosophy, that's alright. Nobody needs to help those people. And the reality of it is that there's certainly not enough charity to go around. Look at what capitalism did to the US during the industril revolution and then apply that to all aspects of society. That's libertarianism at work.
Funny, the link right here at the Palm site says that they're using DRAM in the III's and V's.
Maybe they use PSRAM in the old Pilots, but not anymore.
Apparently the fix for the DRAM problem has to do with how the unit refreshes itself while off.
The update from handspring states that "depending on individual usage, the patch may impact battery life. But how much exactly?
There's a thread here on Deja with details that somebody reached by working from the specs on the particular RAM used in the Palms and Visors. His results are a doubling of power drain while the unit is turned off.
Here's to hoping he's wrong.
A lot people have been comparing selling faulty software to someone selling faulty cars or other physical things.
I think that an important distinction needs to be made in how the things are used. The software probably works fine on the machines at the writer's office, and worked well for the trials and beta tests they gave it. This is comparable to an auto being road tested on good-quality highways.
But when people start taking that piece of software and using it on systems with widely varying specs, and expecting it to run along with other software and hardware that the manufacturer didn't or couldn't test; this is similar to someone taking their nice little sedan out into the middle of the woods and expecting it to run fine.
If people expect to be able to hold software companies responsible for the reliable operation of their software, those companies are easily going to be able to place restrictions and expectations on the use of that software. There's no way to win this situation.