"A toy operating system, for the price of a real one!"
(Shatner did some commercials for the Commodore VIC-20 where his line was "A real computer, for the price of a toy." Of course, the VIC-20 was pretty close to a toy, with its 22-column display and 5k RAM.)
(Sorry for the lack of paragraph breaks in that; I forgot that Slashdot doesn't automatically turn blank lines to paragraph breaks.)
Just wanted to follow up to say that I upgraded my firmware last night, and the new firmware fixes the UTF-8 display problem, although that fix wasn't mentioned on iRiver's web site. Now my tracks by Czech, Turkish, and Chinese artists all display fine.:-)
The interface is very logical, but a little slow. I find it fine, but I have my music organized into hierarchical directories. If you had lots of files in a single directory, it would be clumsy.
"Native Linux support" amounts to mounting it as a hard drive and putting files on it; it's easy and straightforward. (It also follows that you wouldn't need to use the software that comes with the iRiver on a PC, although it does come with some, and that it works just fine with a Mac. Anything that can access a FAT-formatted USB mass-storage device should work fine with it.)
You can also put m3u playlists on it that way, but you have to munge them so that (1) the pathnames are absolute on the iRiver, (2) the pathnames use backslashes instead of forward slashes, and (3) the lines end in CR-LF, DOS style, rather than just LF. The iRiver does not support creating playlists on the unit itself; you have to create them in advance on the PC.
Incidentally, I upgraded my firmware last night, and the new firmware corrected a Unicode display bug, although that fix is not mentioned on iRiver's list of new features and bug fixes. It also added little symbols on the file icons to tell you what format the file is (Ogg, MP3, WAV, text, etc.); that was likewise not mentioned on iRiver's site.
I haven't actually used a Rio Karma, but I'm really happy with my iRiver iHP 120 (now renamed H120). When I was in the market for something like this, I needed:
Linux support (I don't have Windows and didn't have a Mac at the time), and
OGG support
(The OGG support is not for ideological reasons or geek street cred, but because I'd already ripped a sizable fraction of my CD collection to OGG and didn't want to have to redo it. I like OGG very well at low bitrates, too, but with a hard-drive player that's not such an issue, assuming you control the original.)
The iRiver supports Linux just fine, because it appears as a USB mass-storage device -- just copy your files to it (or from it). As an added benefit, well, it's a USB mass-storage device, so you can use it to carry non-music files around. And it supports OGG.
I've heard people complain about the slightly clunky directory tree navigation for selecting files, and that's true. I don't have too much trouble, because I have a directory level for genre, and then a directory level for artist, and then a directory for each album, but if you had a thousand tracks in one directory it would be incredibly tedious to select a particular track. It also doesn't do on-the-fly playlists, but you can drop playlists on it and use them. (With Linux that's slightly clunky because you need to adjust the pathnames.)
I've also heard people complain about the size and boxiness, but it doesn't bother me. Fits fine in my pocket, and that's all I care about.
The iRiver comes with a corded remote (with display), which I don't actually use, but if you want to pick songs without taking your music player out of your pocket or purse, that might be a win.
The Ethernet support on the Rio Karma dock sounds really nifty! However, I wouldn't want to give up the ability to mount the iRiver as a mass-storage device in exchange for Ethernet support.
(One mildly frustrating thing about the iRiver's USB support is that you can't continue to play while it's mounted -- it can be either a music player or a mass-storage device, but not both at once. So when you plug the USB cable in, whatever you're playing stops and the controls on the iRiver become inactive. Kind of makes sense; I'm sure it was a lot easier to implement the mass-storage support that way, since you're just giving the host access to the raw hard drive. I guess the only way to let the iRiver be mounted as a drive at the same time the user had full functionality on the iRiver as a music player would be to add an abstraction layer and serve a virtualized copy of the hard drive to the USB host.)
Another nice feature of the iRiver is that it records (to MP3 or WAV) from an audio-in jack or the built-in microphone (the latter meaning you can use it as a voice recorder without carrying around a microphone). It also has an integrated FM radio, although you can't record directly from the radio. That would be a nice capability to have.
(Incidentally, I was surprised to discover that the iRiver supports Unicode in Vorbis comments and track/artist names. Chinese characters display properly. There are some bugs in display of comments with non-Latin1 alphabetic characters, but Chinese at least displays properly.)
In other late-breaking news, we have just received word that President Lincoln has signed a proclamation freeing the slaves. No word yet on what impact this will have on Union efforts to win the war.
whether their license is compatible with my CreativeCommons one or not
If you want to donate your own photos, there's no problem: You can license your work under the GFDL for contribution to the Wikipedia, and license the same work under your favourite Creative Commons license for other purposes. (People who get it from Wikipedia are free to use it however the GFDL allows them to, and people who get it from people you've licensed it to under a Creative Commons license are free to use it however that license permits them to.) Similarly, you might see that a piece of software is available under a proprietary license if you pay money (so it can be embedded in commercial products without revealing source), but under the GPL for free, or it might be available under the Apache license and the Artistic license, to make it convenient to use in both the Apache and the Perl communities. If it's your intellectual property, then absent a contractual agreement of exclusivity with somebody, you can license it as many different ways to as many different people as you like.
This is a matter of preference, I think. It would really bother me if my OS claimed that 'n' and 'N' were the same character, just as it would bother me if my OS claimed that 'wrap' and 'rap' were the same word. (It wouldn't bother me if my environment said '"joNes.txt" not found; did you mean "jones.txt"?', though.) But then, I'm the sort of person who spells out "you" and "before" in SMS messages and corrects spelling errors in them before sending.
Well, if Red Hat takes actions that ultimately help level the playing field, even if those actions involve giving stuff away, long-term it might help Red Hat's profitability. MS didn't give away IE out of altruism; they thought it would cut the legs out from under Netscape and ultimately give them another market segment where they could leverage monopoly power, and they were right. If giving away the copyright to ecos helps prevent WinCE from taking over the embedded market, that might enable Red Hat to compete down the road in areas (including outside the embedded market) where they otherwise couldn't.
(Of course, this is sort of irrelevant in this case, since ecos was open-source to start with. But my point is that giving stuff away can be a sensible thing to do from a competitive point of view, as well as from a moral point of view.)
AFS uses it's own filesystem rather than riding on top of the O/S. That's fine, and better for security, but sucks if you want to do something fancy like distribute the same filesystem via samba, NFSv3 and AFS simultaneously.
Another side effect is that the symantics of AFS aren't the same as the symantics of traditional Unix filesystems. For instance, there are some permissions issues that can make building/installing software onto an AFS-served filesystem a hassle. I had to administer (commercial) AFS once, and it's not an experience I'd like to repeat.
I absolutely agree with your point about the overuse of antibiotics, but I have to say I question whether somebody who refers to his/her patients as "little brats" should be practicing medicine. (Of course, what this all has to do with Mandrake is beyond me.)
Presumably, the grandparent poster is not North American, and doesn't pronounce the "r" as such. To quote Christopher Robin in the introduction to Winnie the Pooh "Don't you know what ther means?"
So does an older iPAQ (3600-3900, although I think audio playback is working on the 5500 now too) if you put Linux on it. On the other hand, that's a lot less space for music (in my case, approximately the size of a MMC and a CF card) than a music player with a spinning disk.
Teach them the fundimentals using the computer as a tool. Linux is ideal for this because you can set it up where the kids will never see the guts of the operating system.
I'd actually argue the reverse: Linux is ideal for teaching computing (as opposed to just using a tool) because it's so transparent. Little effort is made to hide the guts and plumbing, so it's easy to see exactly what's going on. Windows (since 95) and MacOS (especially 9 and previous) do a good job of hiding the grungy details from the user, which is fine for just using the machine as a tool, but not so great for learning how the tool works, or how to adapt the tool to new uses.
But I suspect you were not talking about learning computing, but about the use of computers as conveniences in other subjects. (Looking up stuff on the web, graphing functions, running simulations, that sort of thing.) For that stuff, of course, the OS is irrelevant, as long as it works and it's cheap. (Sorry for the cheap shot at Windows.:-)
Too volatile to use as a replacement for your swap partition, but not too volatile to use as a medium for distributing published, pre-"printed" music. How many times have you needed to write new data to a commercial music CD you bought? I'm a-guessin' a lot less than 100,000, since commercial music CDs can't be rewritten, and yet they're a viable format for distributing music.
You may well do what I do and grab the digital audio off them and play it from disk, but you could do that if you had the music on flash, too.
Currently, the problem is that flash memory is way too expensive for this use, but if music publishers could get 650Mb of flash for a few cents as they can with CDs, there's no reason flash memory couldn't be used for distributing music. (Of course, the music publishers probably don't want us to be able to overwrite their music with something else, so ROM would be likelier -- probably cheaper, too, since you don't need any of the circuitry/pins to allow writing.)
SSL encryption does precisely nothing to stop people who can intercept your connection unless you verify the server certificate.
That's a gross overstatement. If you don't verify the server certificate (which as another poster has pointed out your browser will probably do for you automatically), then there's one set of people who can grab your information illegitimately -- the people who run the web server you're connecting to (which may or may not be the web server you mean to connect to). If you don't use SSL at all, then anybody with access to any network between you and the web server you're connecting to can grab your information illegitimately -- the tech-support person at your ISP, researching somebody else's connectivity issues, the cracker who happened to break in to a Linux box being used as a router at your company, the networking people at the ISP of the web server you're connecting to, and so on. Properly implemented, SSL addresses two issues: Is the person you're talking to who they say they are, and can other people eavesdrop. But even if you don't verify the certificate, it still addresses the second of those questions. (And even if you do verify the certificate, all you know is that the Certificate Authority was willing to issue a certificate for that web site. Most CAs are relatively lax about checking identities.)
The ideographs have to be learnt by rote, since they contain no phonetic information as an aid to pronunciation.
Not quite true. Most Chinese characters contain two parts, a "radical", which communicates something about the meaning of the character -- does it refer to a person? an animal? a sound? something to do with wood or trees? -- and a "phonetic", which gives you some idea of the pronunciation of the character. Sometimes, two characters with the same phonetic will be pronounced identically, and the radical serves to disambiguate homophones. More typically, two characters with the same radical differ in their tone and/or have different but similar initial consonants. They almost always rhyme.
So the short of this is that most Chinese characters can be reduced into smaller component parts (albeit fewer and more complex parts than a word written in an alphabetic script), and often one of those component parts says something about the pronunciation.
Japanese is trickier, because Japanese generally adopted Chinese characters and character-combinations for Japanese words that mean the same thing, so the phonetic doesn't have any relationship to the pronunciation of the Japanese word. (A lot of Chinese words were also borrowed, and in those cases the phonetic still has a connection to the pronunciation. To make it more complicated, lots of Chinese characters occur in both native Japanese words and words borrowed from Chinese, and are pronounced differently in the two cases.)
For more on the composition of Chinese characters (although not much about phonetics), see http://my.execpc.com/~mbosley/main.html.
For an example of three common characters with the same phonetic but different radicals, see http://users.belgacom.net/chardic/writing.html and scroll about a quarter of the way down the page to "Another way to obtain a new meaning".
It's a trademark infringement case, not patent or copyright. Assuming that's the only issue, OCLC is not complaining that the hotel uses certain ranges of numbers to classify books (that would be patent infringement, but as the parent points out the patent would long since have expired), but that the hotel uses a trademarked term with Dewey in it in their advertising and promotion -- in effect, that they're making a profit off of OCLC's "brand". If I'm understanding this correctly, there would be no problem if the Library Hotel had used the same numbers with the same meanings, but had referred to it throughout as the Library Hotel Classification System or something like that. (They'd probably even have been fine if they'd said that it was "similar to the Dewey Decimal classification system. Dewey Decimal is a trademark of OCLC.")
Yes, it still seems kind of silly, but it's not the gross abuse of IP law or the ridiculous state of affairs that lots of respondents are taking it for. It's more as if I opened the Soup Hotel, and named all the floors after trademarked Campbell's Soup brand names. I'd be fine if I named the floors "Chicken and Rice" and "Beef Stew", but if I named them "Campbell's Mega Noodle" and "Campbell's Chicken & Stars" and used promotional material that talked about all the soup flavours you grew up with, and service as good as the soup you love, and that sort of thing, then you can bet Campbell's Soup would come after me if I didn't have a licensing agreement with them, because I'm profiting off of their trademark.
In fact, the fact that OCLC tried a couple of times to contact the hotel before pursuing legal action makes me think that they may mostly care about this because they don't want to lose the trademark (which can happen if you don't defend it and people start using it generically).
The advantage I appreciate about having a Linux-based PDA is that I can put the same software on it I have on my desktop, I can use the same development tools (eg Perl, Python, Tcl, gcc, Gtk) to develop for it as I use to develop for my desktop, and when I'm at my desk I can ssh in to it and run the X-based apps on it using my 19" monitor and ergonomic keyboard. However, I really want to use it as a portable PC. If I just wanted a personal information manager (addressbook, calendar, etc.), I'm sure I'd be a lot happier with a PalmOS device.
Interesting. I have a 3850 running Linux, and while I have some significant problems, they happen to be different from your problems under PocketPC. However, the wireless card and microdrives are going to use HUGE amounts of power, and some of them do not shut down properly when the thing is suspended (under Linux, but I've heard that some don't under WinCE either -- I think this is a driver issue). I bet you'd have much better battery life if you were using actual flash memory (and you can get 1Gb flash memory cards now, although they're very expensive) and if you make sure to pull out the wireless card before suspending. In my particular configuration, I can easily get through a weekend without charging the iPAQ, and use it during that weekend (for PDAish sorts of things, not for listening to music for hours).
I use it every day for calendar syncing and Geocaching but I think it's nearly worthless for useful things.
Calendar syncing sure strikes me as useful. So does managing an address book. What sorts of useful things are you unable to do with your WinCE machine?
(I admit the things I use my iPAQ most for, in terms of clock time spent, are listening to music, reading ebooks, and playing games. But since that prevents me having to schlep other stuff around, I find it "useful".)
Anybody interested in Linux on iPAQ should check out handhelds.org. Be warned that it's limited in what hardware it works on (and has various quirks on most of them), and the Gtk-based PIM apps are still very young. (The Opie-based - QT-embedded - ones are more mature, because they're based on the ones that ship with the Zaurus, but I depend on X11.)
Whoops, looks like I was wrong about Mayan. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mayan.htm says "Further progress in the decipherment was made during the 1970s and 1980s when more linguistics began to take an interest in the script. Today most Mayan texts can be read, though there are still some unknown glyphs" (and that it is in fact logographic rather than phonetic).
Their system of language is based on ideograms where one ideogram represents a word or part of a word. It's the same with
Korean
Nope. Korean used to be written in Chinese characters, but now all writing in North Korea and almost all writing in South Korea is alphabetic. (Chinese characters are occasionally scattered into highbrow writing in South Korea, but it's still mostly alphabetic.) Korean writing arranges the letters into syllables in such a way that the syllables sort of look like Chinese characters, though -- quite pretty. (Link with examples)
Japanese
Japanese writing is a mix of phonetic and ideographic writing (with the ideograms borrowed from Chinese; they're called kanji, which is just Japanese-borrowed-from-Chinese for "Chinese characters").
Mayan
Unless there's recent news I've missed, Mayan hieroglyphs haven't been deciphered yet. (I guess people could still have an idea whether they're likely to be phonetic or likely to be ideographic based on the variety and distribution of symbols, though -- I don't know much about them.)
Egyptian
Egyptian is a fascinating mix of ideographic and phonetic writing. There are symbols that are used only for their sound, and symbols that are used only for their meaning, and lots of symbols that can be used rebus-like for either. I found a neat page about it at http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm.
(The main point I wanted to make is that modern Korean isn't ideographic, and Japanese and Egyptian are only partly so.)
Slashdot Mirror
"A toy operating system, for the price of a real one!" (Shatner did some commercials for the Commodore VIC-20 where his line was "A real computer, for the price of a toy." Of course, the VIC-20 was pretty close to a toy, with its 22-column display and 5k RAM.)
Just wanted to follow up to say that I upgraded my firmware last night, and the new firmware fixes the UTF-8 display problem, although that fix wasn't mentioned on iRiver's web site. Now my tracks by Czech, Turkish, and Chinese artists all display fine. :-)
"Native Linux support" amounts to mounting it as a hard drive and putting files on it; it's easy and straightforward. (It also follows that you wouldn't need to use the software that comes with the iRiver on a PC, although it does come with some, and that it works just fine with a Mac. Anything that can access a FAT-formatted USB mass-storage device should work fine with it.)
You can also put m3u playlists on it that way, but you have to munge them so that (1) the pathnames are absolute on the iRiver, (2) the pathnames use backslashes instead of forward slashes, and (3) the lines end in CR-LF, DOS style, rather than just LF. The iRiver does not support creating playlists on the unit itself; you have to create them in advance on the PC.
Incidentally, I upgraded my firmware last night, and the new firmware corrected a Unicode display bug, although that fix is not mentioned on iRiver's list of new features and bug fixes. It also added little symbols on the file icons to tell you what format the file is (Ogg, MP3, WAV, text, etc.); that was likewise not mentioned on iRiver's site.
- Linux support (I don't have Windows and didn't have a Mac at the time), and
- OGG support
(The OGG support is not for ideological reasons or geek street cred, but because I'd already ripped a sizable fraction of my CD collection to OGG and didn't want to have to redo it. I like OGG very well at low bitrates, too, but with a hard-drive player that's not such an issue, assuming you control the original.) The iRiver supports Linux just fine, because it appears as a USB mass-storage device -- just copy your files to it (or from it). As an added benefit, well, it's a USB mass-storage device, so you can use it to carry non-music files around. And it supports OGG. I've heard people complain about the slightly clunky directory tree navigation for selecting files, and that's true. I don't have too much trouble, because I have a directory level for genre, and then a directory level for artist, and then a directory for each album, but if you had a thousand tracks in one directory it would be incredibly tedious to select a particular track. It also doesn't do on-the-fly playlists, but you can drop playlists on it and use them. (With Linux that's slightly clunky because you need to adjust the pathnames.) I've also heard people complain about the size and boxiness, but it doesn't bother me. Fits fine in my pocket, and that's all I care about. The iRiver comes with a corded remote (with display), which I don't actually use, but if you want to pick songs without taking your music player out of your pocket or purse, that might be a win. The Ethernet support on the Rio Karma dock sounds really nifty! However, I wouldn't want to give up the ability to mount the iRiver as a mass-storage device in exchange for Ethernet support. (One mildly frustrating thing about the iRiver's USB support is that you can't continue to play while it's mounted -- it can be either a music player or a mass-storage device, but not both at once. So when you plug the USB cable in, whatever you're playing stops and the controls on the iRiver become inactive. Kind of makes sense; I'm sure it was a lot easier to implement the mass-storage support that way, since you're just giving the host access to the raw hard drive. I guess the only way to let the iRiver be mounted as a drive at the same time the user had full functionality on the iRiver as a music player would be to add an abstraction layer and serve a virtualized copy of the hard drive to the USB host.) Another nice feature of the iRiver is that it records (to MP3 or WAV) from an audio-in jack or the built-in microphone (the latter meaning you can use it as a voice recorder without carrying around a microphone). It also has an integrated FM radio, although you can't record directly from the radio. That would be a nice capability to have. (Incidentally, I was surprised to discover that the iRiver supports Unicode in Vorbis comments and track/artist names. Chinese characters display properly. There are some bugs in display of comments with non-Latin1 alphabetic characters, but Chinese at least displays properly.)In other late-breaking news, we have just received word that President Lincoln has signed a proclamation freeing the slaves. No word yet on what impact this will have on Union efforts to win the war.
Looks like they only ship to the UK and Europe, though. (I found that out when I went to check out.) Anybody know a source that ships to the US?
Oh, so it's only one third then? Sheesh, is there egg on my face!
This is a matter of preference, I think. It would really bother me if my OS claimed that 'n' and 'N' were the same character, just as it would bother me if my OS claimed that 'wrap' and 'rap' were the same word. (It wouldn't bother me if my environment said '"joNes.txt" not found; did you mean "jones.txt"?', though.) But then, I'm the sort of person who spells out "you" and "before" in SMS messages and corrects spelling errors in them before sending.
Well, if Red Hat takes actions that ultimately help level the playing field, even if those actions involve giving stuff away, long-term it might help Red Hat's profitability. MS didn't give away IE out of altruism; they thought it would cut the legs out from under Netscape and ultimately give them another market segment where they could leverage monopoly power, and they were right. If giving away the copyright to ecos helps prevent WinCE from taking over the embedded market, that might enable Red Hat to compete down the road in areas (including outside the embedded market) where they otherwise couldn't. (Of course, this is sort of irrelevant in this case, since ecos was open-source to start with. But my point is that giving stuff away can be a sensible thing to do from a competitive point of view, as well as from a moral point of view.)
I absolutely agree with your point about the overuse of antibiotics, but I have to say I question whether somebody who refers to his/her patients as "little brats" should be practicing medicine. (Of course, what this all has to do with Mandrake is beyond me.)
Presumably, the grandparent poster is not North American, and doesn't pronounce the "r" as such. To quote Christopher Robin in the introduction to Winnie the Pooh "Don't you know what ther means?"
So does an older iPAQ (3600-3900, although I think audio playback is working on the 5500 now too) if you put Linux on it. On the other hand, that's a lot less space for music (in my case, approximately the size of a MMC and a CF card) than a music player with a spinning disk.
But I suspect you were not talking about learning computing, but about the use of computers as conveniences in other subjects. (Looking up stuff on the web, graphing functions, running simulations, that sort of thing.) For that stuff, of course, the OS is irrelevant, as long as it works and it's cheap. (Sorry for the cheap shot at Windows. :-)
You may well do what I do and grab the digital audio off them and play it from disk, but you could do that if you had the music on flash, too.
Currently, the problem is that flash memory is way too expensive for this use, but if music publishers could get 650Mb of flash for a few cents as they can with CDs, there's no reason flash memory couldn't be used for distributing music. (Of course, the music publishers probably don't want us to be able to overwrite their music with something else, so ROM would be likelier -- probably cheaper, too, since you don't need any of the circuitry/pins to allow writing.)
So the short of this is that most Chinese characters can be reduced into smaller component parts (albeit fewer and more complex parts than a word written in an alphabetic script), and often one of those component parts says something about the pronunciation.
Japanese is trickier, because Japanese generally adopted Chinese characters and character-combinations for Japanese words that mean the same thing, so the phonetic doesn't have any relationship to the pronunciation of the Japanese word. (A lot of Chinese words were also borrowed, and in those cases the phonetic still has a connection to the pronunciation. To make it more complicated, lots of Chinese characters occur in both native Japanese words and words borrowed from Chinese, and are pronounced differently in the two cases.)
For more on the composition of Chinese characters (although not much about phonetics), see http://my.execpc.com/~mbosley/main.html . For an example of three common characters with the same phonetic but different radicals, see http://users.belgacom.net/chardic/writing.html and scroll about a quarter of the way down the page to "Another way to obtain a new meaning".
It's a trademark infringement case, not patent or copyright. Assuming that's the only issue, OCLC is not complaining that the hotel uses certain ranges of numbers to classify books (that would be patent infringement, but as the parent points out the patent would long since have expired), but that the hotel uses a trademarked term with Dewey in it in their advertising and promotion -- in effect, that they're making a profit off of OCLC's "brand". If I'm understanding this correctly, there would be no problem if the Library Hotel had used the same numbers with the same meanings, but had referred to it throughout as the Library Hotel Classification System or something like that. (They'd probably even have been fine if they'd said that it was "similar to the Dewey Decimal classification system. Dewey Decimal is a trademark of OCLC.")
Yes, it still seems kind of silly, but it's not the gross abuse of IP law or the ridiculous state of affairs that lots of respondents are taking it for. It's more as if I opened the Soup Hotel, and named all the floors after trademarked Campbell's Soup brand names. I'd be fine if I named the floors "Chicken and Rice" and "Beef Stew", but if I named them "Campbell's Mega Noodle" and "Campbell's Chicken & Stars" and used promotional material that talked about all the soup flavours you grew up with, and service as good as the soup you love, and that sort of thing, then you can bet Campbell's Soup would come after me if I didn't have a licensing agreement with them, because I'm profiting off of their trademark.
In fact, the fact that OCLC tried a couple of times to contact the hotel before pursuing legal action makes me think that they may mostly care about this because they don't want to lose the trademark (which can happen if you don't defend it and people start using it generically).
The advantage I appreciate about having a Linux-based PDA is that I can put the same software on it I have on my desktop, I can use the same development tools (eg Perl, Python, Tcl, gcc, Gtk) to develop for it as I use to develop for my desktop, and when I'm at my desk I can ssh in to it and run the X-based apps on it using my 19" monitor and ergonomic keyboard. However, I really want to use it as a portable PC. If I just wanted a personal information manager (addressbook, calendar, etc.), I'm sure I'd be a lot happier with a PalmOS device.
(I admit the things I use my iPAQ most for, in terms of clock time spent, are listening to music, reading ebooks, and playing games. But since that prevents me having to schlep other stuff around, I find it "useful".)
Anybody interested in Linux on iPAQ should check out handhelds.org . Be warned that it's limited in what hardware it works on (and has various quirks on most of them), and the Gtk-based PIM apps are still very young. (The Opie-based - QT-embedded - ones are more mature, because they're based on the ones that ship with the Zaurus, but I depend on X11.)
Whoops, looks like I was wrong about Mayan. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mayan.htm says "Further progress in the decipherment was made during the 1970s and 1980s when more linguistics began to take an interest in the script. Today most Mayan texts can be read, though there are still some unknown glyphs" (and that it is in fact logographic rather than phonetic).
- Korean
- Japanese
- Mayan
- Egyptian
(The main point I wanted to make is that modern Korean isn't ideographic, and Japanese and Egyptian are only partly so.)Nope. Korean used to be written in Chinese characters, but now all writing in North Korea and almost all writing in South Korea is alphabetic. (Chinese characters are occasionally scattered into highbrow writing in South Korea, but it's still mostly alphabetic.) Korean writing arranges the letters into syllables in such a way that the syllables sort of look like Chinese characters, though -- quite pretty. (Link with examples)
Japanese writing is a mix of phonetic and ideographic writing (with the ideograms borrowed from Chinese; they're called kanji, which is just Japanese-borrowed-from-Chinese for "Chinese characters").
Unless there's recent news I've missed, Mayan hieroglyphs haven't been deciphered yet. (I guess people could still have an idea whether they're likely to be phonetic or likely to be ideographic based on the variety and distribution of symbols, though -- I don't know much about them.)
Egyptian is a fascinating mix of ideographic and phonetic writing. There are symbols that are used only for their sound, and symbols that are used only for their meaning, and lots of symbols that can be used rebus-like for either. I found a neat page about it at http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm .