I was travelling throughout Japan for three weeks in October, and found my PDA was indispensable. I'm learning Japanese anyway, but I only know 100 or so kanji (and a pretty limited vocabulary too, so not many compounds). The freeware Pocket PC kanji input method and dictionary by Mike Johnson were invaluable. Yes, as said before, a few of the signs have translations and romanji, and most of the Japanese seem to be able to understand a little English (but are quite reserved around foreigners), however being able to look up words here and there really made a difference.
Unfortunately the single biggest problem for westerners has to be the Japanese addressing system. One or two of the major streets have names, the others just plain don't. Blocks are numbered in an ad-hoc way within each area, and buildings are numbered again in seemingly random and totally incomprehensible ways. A large number of frustrating hours were spent wandering around going "this must be 1-3-11 here, no hold on, aaaarrrh!". Mind you, you got to interact with plenty of locals when asking directions, all of whom were very helpful, and quite a few were lost themselves.
So, I can certainly appreciate a PDA as a language tool, but they killer app would be if the Japanese tourist authority links it in with a GPS receiver and clear tourist-oriented mapping so one don't end up wandering around bizarre areas for hours on end (although the container processing area of Fukuoka's port is, er, an interesting side of Japan I wouldn't have otherwise seen had I taken the correct exit from the station). Link the GPS coordinates to a database of useful snippets of information (perhaps user-extendable), so that you could for example see what restaurants were recommended within 2 minutes walk, or be told that the restaurant you were visiting was good for a certain local speciality, etc.
Of course, things went slightly more Microsoft-standard when my Pocket PC crashed and hard-reset wiping everything, but thankfully that was towards the end of the last week. Hey Ho.
From the BBC site: > They will also be using the famous Enigma machine to help them in their quest.
So how's that going to help? Do we really need it encrypted further?
The machine designed by Turing to assist the manual decryption of the Engima machines' output at Bletchley was called the Bombe. I could go on (colussus etc), but it's all covered concisely here: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
This is purely an example of "New British Journalism", i.e. it's simply a press release to increase the profile of Bletchley's conference facilities.
Have to second this: if you haven't played it or are new to IF, go get it now. Incidentally, the author, Adam Cadre, has also published a couple of novels. I've not tried them myself - anyone here read them?
A few years ago, I ported an inform interpreter to GEOS for the Nokia 9110 communicator; discovering Photopia made all the hard work seem worthwhile. It's the only game that has actually made me cry.
If enough people get one, reinstall the OS of their choice we'd probably get to keep the machines.
No advertisers would advertise because nobody will be wathching, the costs of retrieving the equipment will be huge, any legal action would be prohibitively expensive. So voila - the company collapses after three months, the PCs are written off, and we get to keep 'em.
Of course, you're absolutely right. Ada Byron Lovelace was the woman I was thinking of, I don't know why my mind replaced it with Miranda - suppose they're both filed under 'languages with girls names' somewhere in wetware.
Anybody remember Miranda - not just named after a girl (or rather a Lady), but also named after the first computer programmer (she was a mathematician friend of Babbage's who designed some 'programs' - I use the term loosely - for his analytical engine).
Neat declarative language (qsort in one short line, and readable to boot!), but crippled by the designers insistance that he controlled all development and distribution.
No, it's Symbian. The Word/Sheet applications are part of the Symbian package, and have been around since the Psion/3s. They're not bad - better than the PPC's pocket versions.
Does it have an object->CSS cross reference yet? Although I use the 1st edition a lot, it lacks a way of quickly checking which css styles an element supports in which browsers.
A similar thing happened this year with the UK's booker prize
The winner.htm page was up before the winner was officially announced, not a difficult url to guess.
I just wish I'd placed a bet on the results, as the "Life of Pi" did indeed turn out to be the winner (note: it's not a novel about maths).
I've had a 9210 (European model) for about 6 months now, so just to clear up some of the conjecture above:
Yes it's big. But it fits nicely in my jacket pocket. People look at it and laugh. You open it up, show Doom running (or a java app to a techie), and they stop laughing.
Yes there's no touchscreen, and the keyboard's not brilliant. But the keyboard is infinitely better than scratching out letters with a separate pen. I can flip it open, compose a properly punctuated and capitalised text message, attach a picture, and send it off before most other phone users manage to click out CUL8R. Touchscreen users are still looking for their stylus.
The screen is great, lots of real-estate for taking notes in a meeting, viewing an incoming fax, remote admin via Telnet/SSH, or browsing the web. Good brightness and colour (12bit - don't know where the 4098 came from above, it's 4096).
Battery life is very, very good. No problems taking it away for the weekend without the charger.
The speakerphone is, as mentioned above, superb.
Bad points now:
No vibration alert, but apart from that the phone side is fine, pretty much good standard Nokia fare.
Major design flaw - there's too little RAM supplied. You have to use a 3rd party app to close down running programs in order to open up other ones.
You can't flash a new OS release yourself, annoyingly you have to send it away for a week or so to an approved service centre.
Slow - it's only running at 52MHz, so you can't do full screen or decent framerate video, and will never see some of the apps that a regular 206MHz PocketPC can handle.
Sound - basic audio spec for the device is 8KHz 16bit Mono - Completely useless as a MP3 player replacement.
Symbian - OK it's not Microsoft, it's quite reasonable for a PDA, but it's got a long way to go from a developer's perspective. It may be a preemptive multitasking OS, but the standard application framework is based around cooperative multitasking, so if you're running anything processor intensive, everything else grinds. The memory design issue cripples the OS, and there's no way of accessing more memory (short of writing your own paging software to offload stuff to the MMC - incidentally this is well slow). There's no concept of security in the OS - a bad program can trash everything. The OS is 'mostly' open for developers, but there are lots of closed private APIs.
Synching to your desktop - Absolutely awful. Serial cable!? Is this the 1980s? The connection is unstable and the PC software was written by monkeys. I gave up and brought a USB MMC reader and do my synching manually.
The web browser is HTML3.2, with frames added. No CSS or javascript. One page at a time. A large majority of sites just don't work very well (though/. is readable). There was an Opera6 browser promised, but this is unlikely to materialise due to the memory problems.
Java is pretty much unusable (unless you're very careful and close everything else down beforehand) again because of the memory issues.
The killer - the connection speed is 9.6Kbps. You may be able to use 14.4 or HSCSD if your provider offers it, but most don't. Be prepared to wait 30 seconds between each page, with all graphics turned off. I rarely use it for web browsing, except in an emergency. A little bit of email is bearable, but my no means quick.
All in all - If you want a clamshell PDA/Phone with a large screen and a half-decent keyboard, then it's bearable; as there's no other device out there like this, you might as well get one. If you're in Europe, wait for the 9210i as it fixes some of the memory problems.
Just some info for anybody thinking of getting a 9210i, in no particular order:
The 9210 has been out for 9 months already, and the 9210i doesn't offer much more technically (basically just a little extra system file memory so that Opera can run without crashing).
The 9210 is crippled by low memory, and while it is possible to use Personal Java (approx JDK 1.1.8) applications (not unwrapped applets), you usually have to shut down all other running applications in order to free up enough memory - this includes the telephone app. Nokia originally allowed applets to run in the webbrowser, but there really wasn't enough memory so they removed it from the specs to stop complaints.
The low power DRAM Nokia's used for the execution memory cannot match the speed of the ARM CPU, so the CPU is underclocked from 206 to 56MHz.
Symbian does not have any form of virtual memory, so you really are stuck with the 8MB (about 4 of which is used by the OS).
Not much of the OS functionality is available to PJ, but it's fairly straightforward to use JNI to wrap up any functions from the OS you need.
Symbian is a strange operating system - while it does offer preemptive task switching, it advises against using it for performance reasons; the recommended application framework is based around a form of cooperative multitasking.
Also all exception handling has to be done manually (no structured execption handling) - to the point that they've abandoned Hungarian notation in favour of a postfix notation detailing what memory cleanup is necessary if there's a error. Developing for it really doesn't feel like developing for a 'modern' OS.
It's also completely mono, so forget using it as a decent MP3 player.
Having said all that, it's quite a nice device, and handy for playing Doom on the train, checking email, writing docs/spreadsheets, sending SMSs, scanning the odd (simple) website (/. is just about readable), and impressing your colleagues with video clips.
Can somebody enlighten me as to what's considered strange about tinned anchovies? OK, ones in jars are generally nicer, but tinned ones are useful when you run out.
What is wiered is the jar of snails eggs I saw in Fauchon in Paris. Nice clear jar so that you could see them in all their transparent glisteniness. Yum.
Fair enough. I agree the term's not really correct, but it's used quite a lot in the marketing industry to describe the behaviour of people trying to justify purchases thet they were unsure about, after the event.
>Is there a word for the phenomenon that occurs when someone shells out money for something and then feels the need to factor its presence into anything remotely related to it?
Interestingly enough, Stephen Hawking (and a bunch of his school chums) built something along these lines at the age of 16, and was featured in the Meccano magazine for his efforts.
I'm a bit of a Mindstorms fan, and have followed the development of the cubesolver in the lego forums for quite a while. The engineering of the robot is superb, but as mentioned before, the algorithm runs on a PC which sends manipulation instructions to the robot.
I've been working on a chess robot myself with the AI running on the RCX (the CPU brick), which is nearing v1.0. It's been fun to develop, considering you've only got 32K to play with.
Anyway, here's the link to my mindstorms page:
Lego Chess
Slashdot Mirror
I was travelling throughout Japan for three weeks in October, and found my PDA was indispensable.
I'm learning Japanese anyway, but I only know 100 or so kanji (and a pretty limited vocabulary too, so not many compounds). The freeware Pocket PC kanji input method and dictionary by Mike Johnson were invaluable. Yes, as said before, a few of the signs have translations and romanji, and most of the Japanese seem to be able to understand a little English (but are quite reserved around foreigners), however being able to look up words here and there really made a difference.
Unfortunately the single biggest problem for westerners has to be the Japanese addressing system. One or two of the major streets have names, the others just plain don't. Blocks are numbered in an ad-hoc way within each area, and buildings are numbered again in seemingly random and totally incomprehensible ways. A large number of frustrating hours were spent wandering around going "this must be 1-3-11 here, no hold on, aaaarrrh!". Mind you, you got to interact with plenty of locals when asking directions, all of whom were very helpful, and quite a few were lost themselves.
So, I can certainly appreciate a PDA as a language tool, but they killer app would be if the Japanese tourist authority links it in with a GPS receiver and clear tourist-oriented mapping so one don't end up wandering around bizarre areas for hours on end (although the container processing area of Fukuoka's port is, er, an interesting side of Japan I wouldn't have otherwise seen had I taken the correct exit from the station). Link the GPS coordinates to a database of useful snippets of information (perhaps user-extendable), so that you could for example see what restaurants were recommended within 2 minutes walk, or be told that the restaurant you were visiting was good for a certain local speciality, etc.
Of course, things went slightly more Microsoft-standard when my Pocket PC crashed and hard-reset wiping everything, but thankfully that was towards the end of the last week. Hey Ho.
There was no AND, just an implied comma.
From the BBC site:
> They will also be using the famous Enigma machine to help them in their quest.
So how's that going to help? Do we really need it encrypted further?
The machine designed by Turing to assist the manual decryption of the Engima machines' output at Bletchley was called the Bombe.
I could go on (colussus etc), but it's all covered concisely here: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
This is purely an example of "New British Journalism", i.e. it's simply a press release to increase the profile of Bletchley's conference facilities.
Have to second this: if you haven't played it or are new to IF, go get it now.
Incidentally, the author, Adam Cadre, has also published a couple of novels. I've not tried them myself - anyone here read them?
A few years ago, I ported an inform interpreter to GEOS for the Nokia 9110 communicator; discovering Photopia made all the hard work seem worthwhile. It's the only game that has actually made me cry.
If enough people get one, reinstall the OS of their choice we'd probably get to keep the machines.
No advertisers would advertise because nobody will be wathching, the costs of retrieving the equipment will be huge, any legal action would be prohibitively expensive.
So voila - the company collapses after three months, the PCs are written off, and we get to keep 'em.
It'd be cruel, but it'd be their own fault.
Of course, you're absolutely right. Ada Byron Lovelace was the woman I was thinking of, I don't know why my mind replaced it with Miranda - suppose they're both filed under 'languages with girls names' somewhere in wetware.
Anybody remember Miranda - not just named after a girl (or rather a Lady), but also named after the first computer programmer (she was a mathematician friend of Babbage's who designed some 'programs' - I use the term loosely - for his analytical engine).
Neat declarative language (qsort in one short line, and readable to boot!), but crippled by the designers insistance that he controlled all development and distribution.
No, it's Symbian. The Word/Sheet applications are part of the Symbian package, and have been around since the Psion/3s. They're not bad - better than the PPC's pocket versions.
I'm sorry, but our comnpany has patented First Posts. Our lawyers will be in touch shortly.
Oh, I see you have a different implementation (first Pists), but that means diddly squat nowadays doesn't it, bwah-ha-ha.
Does it have an object->CSS cross reference yet? Although I use the 1st edition a lot, it lacks a way of quickly checking which css styles an element supports in which browsers.
Sorry, no mod points, but just to let you know I now feel sick from laughing at that. In more ways than one.
They were considered unmarketable as one had to enter the phone number backwards ;)
A similar thing happened this year with the UK's booker prize
The winner.htm page was up before the winner was officially announced, not a difficult url to guess.
I just wish I'd placed a bet on the results, as the "Life of Pi" did indeed turn out to be the winner (note: it's not a novel about maths).
Oh poo, had HTML formatting on and forgot to preview. Mod it down, and forget about it. I'm off to bed.
I've had a 9210 (European model) for about 6 months now, so just to clear up some of the conjecture above: Yes it's big. But it fits nicely in my jacket pocket. People look at it and laugh. You open it up, show Doom running (or a java app to a techie), and they stop laughing. Yes there's no touchscreen, and the keyboard's not brilliant. But the keyboard is infinitely better than scratching out letters with a separate pen. I can flip it open, compose a properly punctuated and capitalised text message, attach a picture, and send it off before most other phone users manage to click out CUL8R. Touchscreen users are still looking for their stylus. The screen is great, lots of real-estate for taking notes in a meeting, viewing an incoming fax, remote admin via Telnet/SSH, or browsing the web. Good brightness and colour (12bit - don't know where the 4098 came from above, it's 4096). Battery life is very, very good. No problems taking it away for the weekend without the charger. The speakerphone is, as mentioned above, superb. Bad points now: No vibration alert, but apart from that the phone side is fine, pretty much good standard Nokia fare. Major design flaw - there's too little RAM supplied. You have to use a 3rd party app to close down running programs in order to open up other ones. You can't flash a new OS release yourself, annoyingly you have to send it away for a week or so to an approved service centre. Slow - it's only running at 52MHz, so you can't do full screen or decent framerate video, and will never see some of the apps that a regular 206MHz PocketPC can handle. Sound - basic audio spec for the device is 8KHz 16bit Mono - Completely useless as a MP3 player replacement. Symbian - OK it's not Microsoft, it's quite reasonable for a PDA, but it's got a long way to go from a developer's perspective. It may be a preemptive multitasking OS, but the standard application framework is based around cooperative multitasking, so if you're running anything processor intensive, everything else grinds. The memory design issue cripples the OS, and there's no way of accessing more memory (short of writing your own paging software to offload stuff to the MMC - incidentally this is well slow). There's no concept of security in the OS - a bad program can trash everything. The OS is 'mostly' open for developers, but there are lots of closed private APIs. Synching to your desktop - Absolutely awful. Serial cable!? Is this the 1980s? The connection is unstable and the PC software was written by monkeys. I gave up and brought a USB MMC reader and do my synching manually. The web browser is HTML3.2, with frames added. No CSS or javascript. One page at a time. A large majority of sites just don't work very well (though /. is readable). There was an Opera6 browser promised, but this is unlikely to materialise due to the memory problems.
Java is pretty much unusable (unless you're very careful and close everything else down beforehand) again because of the memory issues.
The killer - the connection speed is 9.6Kbps. You may be able to use 14.4 or HSCSD if your provider offers it, but most don't. Be prepared to wait 30 seconds between each page, with all graphics turned off. I rarely use it for web browsing, except in an emergency. A little bit of email is bearable, but my no means quick.
All in all - If you want a clamshell PDA/Phone with a large screen and a half-decent keyboard, then it's bearable; as there's no other device out there like this, you might as well get one. If you're in Europe, wait for the 9210i as it fixes some of the memory problems.
The 9210 has been out for 9 months already, and the 9210i doesn't offer much more technically (basically just a little extra system file memory so that Opera can run without crashing).
The 9210 is crippled by low memory, and while it is possible to use Personal Java (approx JDK 1.1.8) applications (not unwrapped applets), you usually have to shut down all other running applications in order to free up enough memory - this includes the telephone app.
Nokia originally allowed applets to run in the webbrowser, but there really wasn't enough memory so they removed it from the specs to stop complaints.
The low power DRAM Nokia's used for the execution memory cannot match the speed of the ARM CPU, so the CPU is underclocked from 206 to 56MHz.
Symbian does not have any form of virtual memory, so you really are stuck with the 8MB (about 4 of which is used by the OS).
Not much of the OS functionality is available to PJ, but it's fairly straightforward to use JNI to wrap up any functions from the OS you need.
Symbian is a strange operating system - while it does offer preemptive task switching, it advises against using it for performance reasons; the recommended application framework is based around a form of cooperative multitasking.
Also all exception handling has to be done manually (no structured execption handling) - to the point that they've abandoned Hungarian notation in favour of a postfix notation detailing what memory cleanup is necessary if there's a error.
Developing for it really doesn't feel like developing for a 'modern' OS.
It's also completely mono, so forget using it as a decent MP3 player.
Having said all that, it's quite a nice device, and handy for playing Doom on the train, checking email, writing docs/spreadsheets, sending SMSs, scanning the odd (simple) website (/. is just about readable), and impressing your colleagues with video clips.
Can somebody enlighten me as to what's considered strange about tinned anchovies? OK, ones in jars are generally nicer, but tinned ones are useful when you run out.
What is wiered is the jar of snails eggs I saw in Fauchon in Paris. Nice clear jar so that you could see them in all their transparent glisteniness. Yum.
Fair enough. I agree the term's not really correct, but it's used quite a lot in the marketing industry to describe the behaviour of people trying to justify purchases thet they were unsure about, after the event.
>Is there a word for the phenomenon that occurs when someone shells out money for something and then feels the need to factor its presence into anything remotely related to it?
:)
Well, two words, cognitive dissonance
Just a bit of background reading
Interestingly enough, Stephen Hawking (and a bunch of his school chums) built something along these lines at the age of 16, and was featured in the Meccano magazine for his efforts.
Lego produces plastic castles, Meccano produces engineers.
Not that I'm adverse to a bit of lego - I'm currently building a chess computer using mindstorms - see my chess page on Lego's website (which is riddled with bugs)
I'm a bit of a Mindstorms fan, and have followed the development of the cubesolver in the lego forums for quite a while. The engineering of the robot is superb, but as mentioned before, the algorithm runs on a PC which sends manipulation instructions to the robot.
I've been working on a chess robot myself with the AI running on the RCX (the CPU brick), which is nearing v1.0. It's been fun to develop, considering you've only got 32K to play with.
Anyway, here's the link to my mindstorms page: Lego Chess