I've been coveting one of these for a long time now, and finally saved up enough to order one! I had thought about getting a used one on Ebay but decided to order a brand new one instead and help boost sales for Sharp.
I can't wait to start porting programs to it, I already have a StrongARM based Netwinder which is running Debian Woody, got a SanDisk SDDR-009 Compact Flash Card writer, I'm totally set and ready for some serious Linux PDA hacking fun. And there is already a Debian Zaurus specific port in progress. There is going to be tons of software for these things before too long, as the Debian ARM port is quite mature and already has some 9000 packages!
Face it, most of the commercial software out there is to make up for some deficiency in Windows. Linux, on the other hand, has tons and tons of software that can do about whatever you want. Why should I buy some commercial app when there are probably a hundred free ones that are superior anyways.
Linux is lacking in CAD badly. If IMSI were to release TurboCAD 8 Professional for Linux, I would buy that soo fast...
And the other is games. With NVidia cards and kickass OpenGL, OSS sound, and SDL, Linux finally has what it takes to be a major gaming system.
I wouldn't say that Linux users are cheapskates, I'd say that most of them are just broke. I used it for years when I was a peniless college student. I couldn't really afford anything at all, and I was lucky to have a computer of my own to run Linux on.
Nowadays I buy Linux stuff. Next on my get list is Neverwinter Nights (when the client is released and not before) and probably Majesty. I already have a legit copy of about every other commercial Linux game ever made. My cdrom case looks like a Loki warehouse. The fact is, I have all the Linux games there are that interest me. I'm waiting for new ones now, and still playing the old ones.
January and May are good times for used equipment. People just got new stuff either for Christmas or using their income tax return and are dumping the old stuff.
For new products, wait until the "replacement" has been released, and get the old one shortly thereafter.
By the way, get a dual processor machine if you can. I run a dual PII-450 box and it is still really great and totally usable. Dualie machines hold their usability a lot better, they don't really run much faster than a uniprocessor box, but they never seem to get bogged down, so you get a consistently fast machine. I guess Sun's and SGI boxes are more scalable so 2 cpus = 2x speed. One of these days I'm going to upgrade to dual 1GHz PIII's though. Luckily my mobo can handle it. (Tyan Rules!)
Heck, I had to help out one of our guys the other day because his document was "Jumping all over the place like crazy, and this little LED light is out too!" So I showed him the "Num-Lock" key. And this guy has been using windows for _years_. Hell I could switch Word with Wordpad on his computer and he'd never even notice. Office97 is still fine, it fixed most of the bugs in Office95 and thats really all that matters. At work you have to crank out documents pretty fast and you don't have time to fsck around with all the advanced features.
I also like the part about their factory on one of the other pages:
Electricity that powers the 1,800 Square foot electric vehicle building is from another invention, currently being tested, that uses no outside power source. It needs no fuel, wind, solar or hydroelectric to operate. It is a totally new type of self contained and self generating alternative energy invention and is completely different from what is used in the electric car.
This is where the little alarm bells start ringing and warning flags go up. I knew it! The car and the factory must be powered by Black Magic! Doubtless they have summoned small demons and bound them to little squirrel cages hidden inside the works somewhere... the price: your soul! Muahhahah...
You have apparently never worked in a company which has sold its IT soul to the Microsoft devil. My poor shop pays out the a$$ for crummy Win2K servers which constantly crash, perform poorly, and only serve to ensnare us deeper into the pit of Windows. I doubt we could ever escape now, as too much documentation has been written in MS Word format, too many tools are made with Excel, and too much info is stored in Access. We have to pay major licensing fees for every shitting little piece of software are are always in danger of being audited. Our MIS crew are a bunch of spies who are constantly monitoring our installed software, it really sucks.
If we could break away and use Linux or BSD, we could thumb our noses at M$ auditors and kick their sorry asses out of the building, or have them hauled off to jail for trespassing. See how the worm has turned on us?
Why bother? Do you fear Debian install? Why?
on
Libranet 2.7 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Here's an example of a company who is scaring you into thinking that you are not smart enough to install Debian on your own, and making good money at it.
I'm sure the Libranet folks have brewed up a mighty fine installer, but the fact is that Debian is not really very hard to install. Heck if you want to be safe about it, just add an extra hard drive to your system and have at it!
Possibly what takes time about Debian is totally customizing it to make it l337 just like you are, but unfortunately you just can't buy that kind of thing.
I'll tell you what, getting XFree86 up and running with 3.3.6 used to be a major hassle because the modelines were always wrong. XFree86 v 4.x is an incredible improvement in that it can autodetect your modes via a PnP monitor a lot of the times. Heck I have a GeForce2MX in my box and never made a single modeline! (And I get 125fps with QuakeForge!) The days of pain are over, I say!
Don't be fooled, Debian is not for total gnubies, unless they be exceptionally perseverent, but anybody with a smidgeon of Linux or Unix savvy should have few troubles with it. You need to know your network parameters, and it helps a lot if you know how to edit an XF86Config-4 file, but it isn't totally neccessary anymore like it used to be.
Sounds like a good deal. Just last night I added an IBM 9.1 Gb UW-SCSI drive to my chain, giving me that, two Seagate Elite-23's, and another smaller IBM SCSI drive. When I spin all those disks up it makes a lot of racket - sounds like jet engine whine. But the drives are cheap, plentiful, and pretty fast.
This tech looks like it might make diskless stations a lot more feasable around the house. Nice!
I agree that maintenance issues are greatly reduced if you can put all the drives into one hotswappable array somewhere and still get decent performance. The downside is that the drives would probably have to be spinning 24/7 in a lot of cases, might reduce their service life. Wouldn't be a big deal for something like the Elite-23's, but they are really the exception, most drives probably wouldn't last a year.
The Blender Foundation has done an unprecedented thing by raising so much cash to bring Blender into the Free Software Fold. I'm not aware of any program in the free software base which is so sophisticated as a 3d modeler. I think they are pioneers and should be lauded for their efforts!
What the heck is WMA? No, wait, I bet it is some fantastic new Microsoft-only audio format which will do for music what BMP did for images! Heck I guess I better format my hard drive and go get WinXP or else I will be left behind, hey everybody jump on the WMA bandwagon! Look, everybody's doing it!
Why, oh why, must they always reinvent everything. Reminds me of the Serious Sam Easter Egg where the Old Man Murray guys are riding around in a little car with square wheels...
Oggs are great. I don't share my music with anybody else anyways, so I couldn't give a rat's ass what everybody else uses. Yessir, I like 'em.
Geez, what is this guy, some kind of mp3 activist? Why don't you just take your mp3s and go somewhere and listen to them instead of trolling at those kind-hearted Xiph developers who's only goal was to give you a free music codec. So you like mp3s, fine, but keep your trap shut in this discussion about Vorbis.
I have a Netwinder 2100 which has the StrongARM SA110 running at 275 MHz. It doesn't have a FPU, and neither does the Zaurus, although it does have some kind of MMU unit and the Zaurus might as well. I'm planning on getting a Zaurus anyways. The fact of the matter is that probably none of these Pocket PC's are going to have one, at least the Arm variants.
Luckily the arm linux kernel has pretty good FPU emulation. You can either choose the industrial strength double precision model, or the somewhat experimental Acorn Fast FPU emulator. I personally use the double precision one on my Netwinder.
Anyways, it really doesn't affect the general performance too much. The integer math is very fast and most Zaurus apps are tuned to use the integer ops just like this Vorbis decoder. I know the Netwinder is plenty fast for web surfing, and it makes a great firewall/router/server box. It runs X very snappy at 1024x768 and the Zaurus only has to contend with 320x200 and not even full XFree86 but QTopia instead.
If you really need a FPU you should probably look into some kind of sub-notebook instead of a pocket pc, or just run your number crunching app remotely through the docking station:-)
I decided to sell my spare Netwinder to a fellow Linux developer and roll my profits over to the SL-5500. Its an awesome looking machine, and has a mini-keyboard to boot. I think it is a much better pocket pc than this SL-A300 which is more of a PDA IMHO.
You know, as much as I don't like what he did with computers, I almost feel sorry for him. He took all the excitement out of computers and made them into mundane common tools of business. I remember when the sky was the limit "you can program this sucker to do *anything*" and that really seems to have gone away now. Now he's stuck on top of a huge pile of windows shit with nowhere to go except keep adding to the pile.
Linux / BSD / OSX / et al just seems to keep the excitement alive. Yes, you can still program this puppy and all the compilers are FREE!
The first mistake Gates made was to wipe DOS tools out when one upgraded from Win3.1 to Win95. And they never provided any compilers for free. It burned me when I paid big bucks for Borland C++ for windows and it was obsoleted in a couple years (about when I finally figured it out) by Win95.
Well, enough of this. Like I said, I think he took the excitement out of computers, and if he wasn't so freaking rich I'd feel sorry for him.
Dangit, I really want one of those electric cars. Right now I have about a 2 mile commute to work, and my truck engine doesn't even get warmed up. An EV would be so ideal for me, heck I could probably go all week on one charge if I had to.
I never thought much of Ford's anyways. "For Old Retired Drivers." I guess their quality isn't too bad, but working on them seems a lot tougher than GM vehicles. Never liked how Fords handled either.
Well, I guess they dropped the ball. I hate it when a company buys a promising startup and then kills it.
But you can edit jpegs with a command line. ImageMagick has a slew of command line stuff, as does the Python Imaging Library. I have written Python programs which crop, filter, enhance, and zoom in preparation for automatic optical character recognition.
I admit, its kind of tough editing pictures when you can't see whats being done, but you can still do it.
Heh heh. Amen to that! Anytime I add some hardware to my system, with Linux at most I have a 15 minute kernel recompile and a reboot, since I always roll my own kernels.
Windows, on the other hand, can be infuriating. Sometimes adding a board will cause all of your IRQ's to change and then Windows stupidly wants to re-"Plug and Play" all of your hardware, resulting in hours of reboots and much foul cussing as you re-download and re-apply patch after patch and driver after driver. Hell its even made my network go down, and without network, how are you supposed to get the drivers!
I use wine because I have a bunch of games that I already own and would like to play. Since I hardly ever boot to windoze anymore, I periodically get out my stack of cdroms and see if the work with Wine yet.
I don't buy "new" windows games, except maybe out of the bargain bin. I will, however buy new Linux games.
So I guess I'll have to settle for some Quake, or Quake2, or Quake3, or Wolfenstein, or Kingpin, or Soldier of Fortune, or Rune, or Alpha Centauri, or Heavy Metal FAKK2, or Railroad Tycoon, or Tuxracer, or Hexen II, or Hexen, or Doom, or any of the scores of other lesser games I have installed. I guess I could play Unreal Gold, or Fallout, or Fallout2, or Warcraft II using Wine if I felt like it too.
Reboot just to play Serious Sam, nah. Its too much of a hassle, and I just get mad every time I see that damn Windows boot screen. I've probably wasted a month of my life staring at that stupid thing over the years. Screw that.
Which Windows do the 90%+ use? Windows 3.0, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows ME, Windows 2000, or Windows XP?
The fact is that most of these "Windows" are in fact pretty incompatible with each other. It takes major kluging to get something to run on all of these different versions.
IMHO, Linux actually presents a more consolidated scenario. You just statically link your app, and try to minimize the system calls. Then by dynamic linking with something like SDL, your app should work on different kernels by recompiling the SDL code, so your binary still works without recompiling. If you are concerned about version creep, then you include the source code for the libraries with the application.
Patience grasshoppers, the juggernaut moves slowly, but see how much closer it has gotten already...
In a way, it is kind of true. When I originally started using Linux I could just barely afford the computer itself. I wasn't real happy with DOS, and Windows 3.0 seemed like a very cheap sucky inferior MacOS rip-off. I found out about Linux via the college mainframe newsgroups, and managed to ftp myself a pile of disk images.
Years later, I was still broke, and still using Linux. I couldn't afford crap for software, so I really appreciated the freebies, even though they were not as flashy as commercial programs.
Now I finally have two nickels to rub together, and guess what, I'm spending it on Linux stuff. I have a pile of Loki games, frequently browse around on TuxGames, I pitched in on the Blender Foundation, I bought a copy of LinuxCAD (which was a mistake), and I'm saving up for a Zaurus.
So there was a long incubation period for me, but now I'm contributing to the Linux microeconomy in a big way, and its just a matter of time before others reach my stage.
Destined to be the next "Silicon Valley," Venezualans today passed a law which will attract elite open-source developers like a moth to a bug-zapper. The abundance of local coffee is said be another bonus. Programmers are busily packing their bags in preparation for the mass exodus.
Right On! Who cares about the web, in that respect VRML is probably fine. If you are into any kind of modeling, or drafting, you immediately hit the wall of incompatible 3D formats. Each of these apps are extremely expensive, so you really cannot pick and choose your CAD program. For example, try to convert ProE to AutoCAD, or MicroStation, or TurboCAD, or Blender or Serious Sam, and you will be sorely disappointed. Most of the conversions involve using DXF as an intermediate which is totally unacceptable. Some of these programs can keep circles and curves in an equation or spline curve vector representation and when you convert them to a DXF or OBJ or 3DS they get autoconverted into polygons which usually totally screws them up.
Polygons, as in maybe an OBJ file, are fine, but if you have a more advanced modeler which uses nurbs or splines or something, your drawing will be almost useless after conversion into polygons. Usually the edges don't match, it doesn't form a true solid, and the wire count increases by about a thousandfold.
Some sort of standardized vector format which can use equations to represent curved surfaces is absoultely needed. Polygons just can't cut it anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't wait to start porting programs to it, I already have a StrongARM based Netwinder which is running Debian Woody, got a SanDisk SDDR-009 Compact Flash Card writer, I'm totally set and ready for some serious Linux PDA hacking fun. And there is already a Debian Zaurus specific port in progress. There is going to be tons of software for these things before too long, as the Debian ARM port is quite mature and already has some 9000 packages!
Linux is lacking in CAD badly. If IMSI were to release TurboCAD 8 Professional for Linux, I would buy that soo fast...
And the other is games. With NVidia cards and kickass OpenGL, OSS sound, and SDL, Linux finally has what it takes to be a major gaming system.
I wouldn't say that Linux users are cheapskates, I'd say that most of them are just broke. I used it for years when I was a peniless college student. I couldn't really afford anything at all, and I was lucky to have a computer of my own to run Linux on.
Nowadays I buy Linux stuff. Next on my get list is Neverwinter Nights (when the client is released and not before) and probably Majesty. I already have a legit copy of about every other commercial Linux game ever made. My cdrom case looks like a Loki warehouse. The fact is, I have all the Linux games there are that interest me. I'm waiting for new ones now, and still playing the old ones.
For new products, wait until the "replacement" has been released, and get the old one shortly thereafter.
By the way, get a dual processor machine if you can. I run a dual PII-450 box and it is still really great and totally usable. Dualie machines hold their usability a lot better, they don't really run much faster than a uniprocessor box, but they never seem to get bogged down, so you get a consistently fast machine. I guess Sun's and SGI boxes are more scalable so 2 cpus = 2x speed. One of these days I'm going to upgrade to dual 1GHz PIII's though. Luckily my mobo can handle it. (Tyan Rules!)
Heck, I had to help out one of our guys the other day because his document was "Jumping all over the place like crazy, and this little LED light is out too!" So I showed him the "Num-Lock" key. And this guy has been using windows for _years_. Hell I could switch Word with Wordpad on his computer and he'd never even notice. Office97 is still fine, it fixed most of the bugs in Office95 and thats really all that matters. At work you have to crank out documents pretty fast and you don't have time to fsck around with all the advanced features.
I also like the part about their factory on one of the other pages:
This is where the little alarm bells start ringing and warning flags go up. I knew it! The car and the factory must be powered by Black Magic! Doubtless they have summoned small demons and bound them to little squirrel cages hidden inside the works somewhere... the price: your soul! Muahhahah...
If we could break away and use Linux or BSD, we could thumb our noses at M$ auditors and kick their sorry asses out of the building, or have them hauled off to jail for trespassing. See how the worm has turned on us?
I'm sure the Libranet folks have brewed up a mighty fine installer, but the fact is that Debian is not really very hard to install. Heck if you want to be safe about it, just add an extra hard drive to your system and have at it!
Possibly what takes time about Debian is totally customizing it to make it l337 just like you are, but unfortunately you just can't buy that kind of thing.
I'll tell you what, getting XFree86 up and running with 3.3.6 used to be a major hassle because the modelines were always wrong. XFree86 v 4.x is an incredible improvement in that it can autodetect your modes via a PnP monitor a lot of the times. Heck I have a GeForce2MX in my box and never made a single modeline! (And I get 125fps with QuakeForge!) The days of pain are over, I say!
Don't be fooled, Debian is not for total gnubies, unless they be exceptionally perseverent, but anybody with a smidgeon of Linux or Unix savvy should have few troubles with it. You need to know your network parameters, and it helps a lot if you know how to edit an XF86Config-4 file, but it isn't totally neccessary anymore like it used to be.
This tech looks like it might make diskless stations a lot more feasable around the house. Nice!
I agree that maintenance issues are greatly reduced if you can put all the drives into one hotswappable array somewhere and still get decent performance. The downside is that the drives would probably have to be spinning 24/7 in a lot of cases, might reduce their service life. Wouldn't be a big deal for something like the Elite-23's, but they are really the exception, most drives probably wouldn't last a year.
The Blender Foundation has done an unprecedented thing by raising so much cash to bring Blender into the Free Software Fold. I'm not aware of any program in the free software base which is so sophisticated as a 3d modeler. I think they are pioneers and should be lauded for their efforts!
Or Oof Vommit?
or how about o99 v04b15? Make it l337 like mp3.
If you wanna find out what OGG means, just catch this football and stand there.
Why, oh why, must they always reinvent everything. Reminds me of the Serious Sam Easter Egg where the Old Man Murray guys are riding around in a little car with square wheels...
Oggs are great. I don't share my music with anybody else anyways, so I couldn't give a rat's ass what everybody else uses. Yessir, I like 'em.
> All ten vorbis users jump for joy.
Geez, what is this guy, some kind of mp3 activist? Why don't you just take your mp3s and go somewhere and listen to them instead of trolling at those kind-hearted Xiph developers who's only goal was to give you a free music codec. So you like mp3s, fine, but keep your trap shut in this discussion about Vorbis.
Don't be ripping on me shillelagh!
Luckily the arm linux kernel has pretty good FPU emulation. You can either choose the industrial strength double precision model, or the somewhat experimental Acorn Fast FPU emulator. I personally use the double precision one on my Netwinder.
Anyways, it really doesn't affect the general performance too much. The integer math is very fast and most Zaurus apps are tuned to use the integer ops just like this Vorbis decoder. I know the Netwinder is plenty fast for web surfing, and it makes a great firewall/router/server box. It runs X very snappy at 1024x768 and the Zaurus only has to contend with 320x200 and not even full XFree86 but QTopia instead.
If you really need a FPU you should probably look into some kind of sub-notebook instead of a pocket pc, or just run your number crunching app remotely through the docking station :-)
I decided to sell my spare Netwinder to a fellow Linux developer and roll my profits over to the SL-5500. Its an awesome looking machine, and has a mini-keyboard to boot. I think it is a much better pocket pc than this SL-A300 which is more of a PDA IMHO.
Linux / BSD / OSX / et al just seems to keep the excitement alive. Yes, you can still program this puppy and all the compilers are FREE!
The first mistake Gates made was to wipe DOS tools out when one upgraded from Win3.1 to Win95. And they never provided any compilers for free. It burned me when I paid big bucks for Borland C++ for windows and it was obsoleted in a couple years (about when I finally figured it out) by Win95.
Well, enough of this. Like I said, I think he took the excitement out of computers, and if he wasn't so freaking rich I'd feel sorry for him.
Actually, I always liked that game. Maybe spiff it up a bit, 3rd person OpenGL view, might be kind of fun!
Dangit, I really want one of those electric cars. Right now I have about a 2 mile commute to work, and my truck engine doesn't even get warmed up. An EV would be so ideal for me, heck I could probably go all week on one charge if I had to.
I never thought much of Ford's anyways. "For Old Retired Drivers." I guess their quality isn't too bad, but working on them seems a lot tougher than GM vehicles. Never liked how Fords handled either.
Well, I guess they dropped the ball. I hate it when a company buys a promising startup and then kills it.
But you can edit jpegs with a command line. ImageMagick has a slew of command line stuff, as does the Python Imaging Library. I have written Python programs which crop, filter, enhance, and zoom in preparation for automatic optical character recognition.
I admit, its kind of tough editing pictures when you can't see whats being done, but you can still do it.
Windows, on the other hand, can be infuriating. Sometimes adding a board will cause all of your IRQ's to change and then Windows stupidly wants to re-"Plug and Play" all of your hardware, resulting in hours of reboots and much foul cussing as you re-download and re-apply patch after patch and driver after driver. Hell its even made my network go down, and without network, how are you supposed to get the drivers!
I don't buy "new" windows games, except maybe out of the bargain bin. I will, however buy new Linux games.
So I guess I'll have to settle for some Quake, or Quake2, or Quake3, or Wolfenstein, or Kingpin, or Soldier of Fortune, or Rune, or Alpha Centauri, or Heavy Metal FAKK2, or Railroad Tycoon, or Tuxracer, or Hexen II, or Hexen, or Doom, or any of the scores of other lesser games I have installed. I guess I could play Unreal Gold, or Fallout, or Fallout2, or Warcraft II using Wine if I felt like it too.
Reboot just to play Serious Sam, nah. Its too much of a hassle, and I just get mad every time I see that damn Windows boot screen. I've probably wasted a month of my life staring at that stupid thing over the years. Screw that.
The fact is that most of these "Windows" are in fact pretty incompatible with each other. It takes major kluging to get something to run on all of these different versions.
IMHO, Linux actually presents a more consolidated scenario. You just statically link your app, and try to minimize the system calls. Then by dynamic linking with something like SDL, your app should work on different kernels by recompiling the SDL code, so your binary still works without recompiling. If you are concerned about version creep, then you include the source code for the libraries with the application.
Patience grasshoppers, the juggernaut moves slowly, but see how much closer it has gotten already...
Years later, I was still broke, and still using Linux. I couldn't afford crap for software, so I really appreciated the freebies, even though they were not as flashy as commercial programs.
Now I finally have two nickels to rub together, and guess what, I'm spending it on Linux stuff. I have a pile of Loki games, frequently browse around on TuxGames, I pitched in on the Blender Foundation, I bought a copy of LinuxCAD (which was a mistake), and I'm saving up for a Zaurus.
So there was a long incubation period for me, but now I'm contributing to the Linux microeconomy in a big way, and its just a matter of time before others reach my stage.
Destined to be the next "Silicon Valley," Venezualans today passed a law which will attract elite open-source developers like a moth to a bug-zapper. The abundance of local coffee is said be another bonus. Programmers are busily packing their bags in preparation for the mass exodus.
Polygons, as in maybe an OBJ file, are fine, but if you have a more advanced modeler which uses nurbs or splines or something, your drawing will be almost useless after conversion into polygons. Usually the edges don't match, it doesn't form a true solid, and the wire count increases by about a thousandfold.
Some sort of standardized vector format which can use equations to represent curved surfaces is absoultely needed. Polygons just can't cut it anymore.