The poster seems to make the standard mistakeas and try ton bring all the features of a desktop to his portable. If you want solar, you need to limit power and thus capabilities. Palm has suceeded, where, M$ has failed be cause the though about what people needed and not force fitting every possible feature in. The Palm devices us 16-33MHz dragonball processors at 2.7-5 MIPS while M$ has forced everyone to the StrongARM at 206MHz (180Mips IIRC), they've dropped support for any non ARM processor and general purpose ARM processors can't compete with the strong arm. But if you are a bussiness man who needs to maintain a contact list do you need 206MHz with color screen , backlighting etc... and a 10Hr life or low resolution monochrome at 30 day life??? Video confrencing has failed on the desktop, bluetooth is all but dead on the vine, I'd lose both. The digital paper (from Xerox, or Digital Ink) will not have resonable update rates for anything but static images or text forget web surfing, video, video conrfencing. The LEP technology will support those but at higher power than digital paper (but better than a color LCD with backlighting). 60GB of storage seems rediculous as well I don't have that on my desktop yet, and it certainly isn't a player at 2.5inch, 1.8 or 1" drives might work but the power to spinup a drive is generally 1 Amp at 5 volts, with 1/2 Amps sustained, again a nonstarter, your just building a laptop with handwritting recognition.
So lets consider what really makes sense in a portable device and what can reasonably expected. We can't use a heavy OS so no Linux, Unix or Windows, some low overhead, multitasking OS ala MicroC/OS, processor should be some low power device limited to lets say 50MHz. I've always thought that the Palm devices screens were too small so I'd like to see VGA (640x480) monchrome so we don't need backlighting, maybe 4 levels of gray, monochrome is much better in sun light anyway.
The thought that I've had is people want to do major work at a desk and are happy enough with desktops/laptops, PDA's are fine for addressbooks and caladers but too small for much else. When you see people going to meetings they are carry paper noetbooks, or pads of paper and want to be able to sketch diagrams and write notes, maybe lookup some reference doc's so a device A4/8.5x11 is the right idea just toss everything desktop out. Flash memory is good enough for storage and 128MB at something like $70 should keep most people happy the other just need to buy more.
Re:It's great to have sites like this
on
The Guts Of An iPod
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Speaking of the Gameboy this could be a terrific Gamebody emulator. Surely you could store every gameboy game ever made in 5GB, and have backlighting which the True GB always lacked. If they upgraded to a colour screen and offered low cost downloads, this could be the ultimate portable gaming machine of all time, the screen is a little small, but you could also emulate the Palm on a device like this. People have been waiting ages to get a Apple PDA, probably not the best time to introduce another consumer device, but all that storage to sync home and work machines plus PDA functions like calendar and address/phonebook would be a killer product.
Re:Ternary has been known to be efficient...
on
Ternary Computing
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· Score: 0
I don't think that power or lower volatges are real issues I'm not sure what ternary gate looks like exactly, but as stated in the article, you don't have much benifit in 0,1,2 (0,0.5,1) the benifit comes with -1,0,1 which is easy to build electronics with, and a half way change would use half the power of a full range change. Bipolar is the more effienent type of circuit and regenerative (I think that the right word) can run on almost no power, rather than just burning the current by changing stages you have balanced circuits, much like an elevator counter weight, that are in balance and the energy is switched from on state to another rather than here, gone, here. So 3 state logic can be substantialy more effeceient, and the whole reference everything to a single ground stops existing. All analog signals (audio, rf etc...) have no concept of a hard ground they have min, maxes and the artificial concept of center (non-high, non-low).
I'm not sure what the density of a 3" DVD-RAM, would be bu it would definately store enough music to be more interesting 185MB is only 3hrs at 96Kbit and many people use 128Kbit. Flash is cheap at the moment I think you can get 128MBs (memory stick, CF) for the $60-70 range if you shop arround. The battery life would be much better as well. If this is small enough people start to putv them in thier pockets, I'm not sure that I want a CD spinning up in my pocket, but it has been a while since she left me so it maynot be that bad either.
K-PAX much like "The Usual Suspects" http://us.imdb.com/Title?0114814 completely depends on Spacey's ability to act straight faced and not give a thing away, I'm pretty sure that this wouldn't have worked with any other actor. Very good movie, but a little disturbing at the end, with recent events I was hoping for more of a comedy or sci-fi mystery.
What is SOE????
I work on-site at one of our companies, subcontractors, and the provided machine has extremely limited access, half the software I try to install fails for lack of privledges, others install fine, not sure what the specific differences are. (Win2K)
Code Bloat
on
Debian On DVD
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· Score: 0, Insightful
Why does everyone complain that Windoze is so big and slow. Windows with every driver known (probbaly more devices than Linux)fits on one CD, Linux even with source should be smaller, why 6 CDs or a DVD?????
Slashdot Mirror
How come Linux is only up to 2.4 when windows is up to 2002????
The poster seems to make the standard mistakeas and try ton bring all the features of a desktop to his portable. If you want solar, you need to limit power and thus capabilities. Palm has suceeded, where, M$ has failed be cause the though about what people needed and not force fitting every possible feature in. The Palm devices us 16-33MHz dragonball processors at 2.7-5 MIPS while M$ has forced everyone to the StrongARM at 206MHz (180Mips IIRC), they've dropped support for any non ARM processor and general purpose ARM processors can't compete with the strong arm. But if you are a bussiness man who needs to maintain a contact list do you need 206MHz with color screen , backlighting etc... and a 10Hr life or low resolution monochrome at 30 day life??? Video confrencing has failed on the desktop, bluetooth is all but dead on the vine, I'd lose both. The digital paper (from Xerox, or Digital Ink) will not have resonable update rates for anything but static images or text forget web surfing, video, video conrfencing. The LEP technology will support those but at higher power than digital paper (but better than a color LCD with backlighting). 60GB of storage seems rediculous as well I don't have that on my desktop yet, and it certainly isn't a player at 2.5inch, 1.8 or 1" drives might work but the power to spinup a drive is generally 1 Amp at 5 volts, with 1/2 Amps sustained, again a nonstarter, your just building a laptop with handwritting recognition.
So lets consider what really makes sense in a portable device and what can reasonably expected. We can't use a heavy OS so no Linux, Unix or Windows, some low overhead, multitasking OS ala MicroC/OS, processor should be some low power device limited to lets say 50MHz. I've always thought that the Palm devices screens were too small so I'd like to see VGA (640x480) monchrome so we don't need backlighting, maybe 4 levels of gray, monochrome is much better in sun light anyway.
The thought that I've had is people want to do major work at a desk and are happy enough with desktops/laptops, PDA's are fine for addressbooks and caladers but too small for much else. When you see people going to meetings they are carry paper noetbooks, or pads of paper and want to be able to sketch diagrams and write notes, maybe lookup some reference doc's so a device A4/8.5x11 is the right idea just toss everything desktop out. Flash memory is good enough for storage and 128MB at something like $70 should keep most people happy the other just need to buy more.
Speaking of the Gameboy this could be a terrific Gamebody emulator. Surely you could store every gameboy game ever made in 5GB, and have backlighting which the True GB always lacked. If they upgraded to a colour screen and offered low cost downloads, this could be the ultimate portable gaming machine of all time, the screen is a little small, but you could also emulate the Palm on a device like this. People have been waiting ages to get a Apple PDA, probably not the best time to introduce another consumer device, but all that storage to sync home and work machines plus PDA functions like calendar and address/phonebook would be a killer product.
I don't think that power or lower volatges are real issues I'm not sure what ternary gate looks like exactly, but as stated in the article, you don't have much benifit in 0,1,2 (0,0.5,1) the benifit comes with -1,0,1 which is easy to build electronics with, and a half way change would use half the power of a full range change. Bipolar is the more effienent type of circuit and regenerative (I think that the right word) can run on almost no power, rather than just burning the current by changing stages you have balanced circuits, much like an elevator counter weight, that are in balance and the energy is switched from on state to another rather than here, gone, here. So 3 state logic can be substantialy more effeceient, and the whole reference everything to a single ground stops existing. All analog signals (audio, rf etc...) have no concept of a hard ground they have min, maxes and the artificial concept of center (non-high, non-low).
I'm not sure what the density of a 3" DVD-RAM, would be bu it would definately store enough music to be more interesting 185MB is only 3hrs at 96Kbit and many people use 128Kbit. Flash is cheap at the moment I think you can get 128MBs (memory stick, CF) for the $60-70 range if you shop arround. The battery life would be much better as well. If this is small enough people start to putv them in thier pockets, I'm not sure that I want a CD spinning up in my pocket, but it has been a while since she left me so it maynot be that bad either.
K-PAX much like "The Usual Suspects" http://us.imdb.com/Title?0114814 completely depends on Spacey's ability to act straight faced and not give a thing away, I'm pretty sure that this wouldn't have worked with any other actor. Very good movie, but a little disturbing at the end, with recent events I was hoping for more of a comedy or sci-fi mystery.
What is SOE????
I work on-site at one of our companies, subcontractors, and the provided machine has extremely limited access, half the software I try to install fails for lack of privledges, others install fine, not sure what the specific differences are. (Win2K)
Why does everyone complain that Windoze is so big and slow. Windows with every driver known (probbaly more devices than Linux)fits on one CD, Linux even with source should be smaller, why 6 CDs or a DVD?????
1st post finally
Now we don't have to use Linux of cross platform support now we can cross compile windows!!!