The biggest thing that irritates me if fluorescent lighting.
I mean, it literally irritates me, physically. The strobing is somewhat noticeable, the tone of light is somewhat painful, and worst of all, over time it gives me a headache. My eyes will get exceedingly tired, and I'm unable to concentrate when that happens. I need me eyes to work.
I've heard that prolonged fluorescent light exposure can lead to other health complications as well, but I don't know what.
I'd strongly suggest natural lighting if at all possible, and if not, opt for low-key ambient lighting around the perimeters of the floor/wall/whatever. Also, have lighting which doesn't cast direct light, but shines light on walls or the ceiling - such as those lights-on-a-pole with the upside-down light cover (not sure what they're called). If at all possible, have natural lighting: tinted skylights, open windows.
The stress of a CRT/LCD on a person's eyes is bad enough. Don't add fluorescents.
The spread of curdled milk and possible security breaches by curd-lovers? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have easy access to all that curdled goodness on my coffee break. But what is to prevent a person from using curdled dairy products for devious activities during their personal use? It seems like until we have methods for identifying criminals that hold these curdled dairy containers, and locking down security, public curd consumption is extended to even those who would abuse it.... in other words, you use a completely inadequate analogy. While phone networks are similar to data networks, and are actually mostly digital themselves nowadays, it misses the requirements of being a proper analogy; that is, having critical similarities that make it analogous.
The simple fact is that data networks are much more vulnerable in general to use activities than a phone network, and have more known vulnerabilities to boot. A person (or a group of persons) could theoretically take down large amounts of connectivity (DNS, gateway routers, etc.), destroy financial information (bank security, etc.), or what have you with -relative- ease. There are a lot more tools, and a lot more tools for making tools, available on the Internet. Phone networks are significantly less versatile.
Who are they to decide on something like that? Am I not a human myself, able to make ethical decisions if asked? All people are. Granted, most people don't, because they act selfishly. But what's to stop an ethicist to get blindsided by the glory of being someone that helped instigate the colonization of Mars for humanity, to forever go down in history?
Does anyone else think that it's about time for Intel to retire the "Pentium" monicker? I, for one, find that it brings forth connotations of "overly expensive" and "marketing-inflated", and the likely desired effect is lost in today's world where AMD stuff is performance, and Intel is trailing. Granted, Intel has better low-heat and low-power chips, but most folks don't even see that as a potential feature to be considered, let alone a feature.
On the other hand, Intel has probably spent trillions of dollars advertising "Pentium" via the brand name and the little tin-foil-clad men (and TBMG). Have they over-extended their brand name to a point where it's entered into common acceptance (ie, "google" or "tuperware")?
What's everyone else think? Is "Pentium" old and tired, or does it still have viable commercial life left? How about as appeal to geeks (as we all know that geeks are the ones that push the next industry trend into the forefront)? My personal opinion is that "Pentium" is outliving any usefulness it might have, and doesn't really have the "whiz bang super-fast" association that it used to (there are Opterons, Xeons, and god knows what else now, after all), at least with the geeks. Also, I think Intel could benefit from a newly marketed name (provided they have the chip to back it up - maybe a low-power portable chip?) to blow away the industry again, leading to the trend of further portable device purchases (supplanting desktops with laptops, for instance).
You're definately forgetting the cost of cooling a building during the summer.
I know of a facility that doesn't run heat - at all. They do a lot of software devel for electronics, and each engineer has about 5 devices in his work area - hdtv, system and monitor, etc. They even have the heating system set up so as to pump heat from the engineer area over to the other parts of the company, there's so much excessive heat.
The money saved, however, is negligible compared to the additional cooling bills in the summer.
They're kids. For the most part, they've not reached the point where they realize that things actually break, deteriorate, or die - they don't have the perspective of multiple years of life yet to reflect back on. A week is a very long time for 10 year old, and a month an eternity.
Sure, kids shouldn't abuse their stuff, and most don't unless they're spoiled. But expecting a kid to keep a CDROM scratch-free is a bit absurd when most grown adults have difficulty with it.
That's contradictive. If you've given up on linux, you are a newbie. Just because you know windows does not mean you're hot shit in the Linux world of knowledge. They're knowledge sets that are not mutually exchangeable.
Samba configuration is exceedingly simple.Most distros even come with a very thorough config template made out for you. You can get it set up and running in a matter of seconds:
[global]
netbios name = machine
workgroup = name
security = share [shares]
path =/shares
browseable = yes
wide links = yes
guest ok = yes
That's all you need for basic functionality. Probably more than could be gotten by with. To add insult to injury, there are dozens of tools to do more advanced configuration for you. Are you sure you were reading the correct documentation?
Do we let undergraduates tell the professors what they need to know? Do we let middle schoolers decide on their curriculum? No?
The point being is this: newbies do not know what they need, anymore than the examples above, or the person buying a Dell running WinXP which comes with only 128Mb of RAM.
I'm tired of people trying to make linux something that it is fundamentally not. Linux is not designed to be an OS for the masses; it is designed to work. Breaking that paradigm will inevitably break the core of what Linux is.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention. Spacial navigating file managers have been here and gone quite a long time ago as a 'standard', because people hate them. (Windows pre-IE4, MacOS classic)
Ok, you're not forced to create a user account - however, you are prompted to during the installation process (with, I believe, a suggestion to operate as a non-root user).
I've not read such a bunch of poorly written flaptrap rhetoric in quite a long time.
There is not a single case of anything there but first-hand anecdotal nonsense. Not only that, but it ignores the fact that spatial browsing (as they call it) was tried with Windows - and dumped, because it largely sucked.
Some people might like GNOME, but most do not. I do not like it because it is not configureable. Even Windows is more configurable than GNOME is in some respects.
The author tried to say that hard disks should be browsed like a file cabinet's folder. That's fine - but I like to browse by task (if I'm browsing at all). It would drive me nuts if i had a seperate bash instance or state for every directory I navigated to - as I've evidently moved from those directories, and no longer need them.
That said, this guy's writeup is borderline incomprehendable. How'd this make it to the front page, again? My left testicle could make a more sound argument for castration than this guy's half-assed attempts at arguing for spatial file browsing.
Debian hasn't had such behavior since 1999, at least, which is when I started using it. I seem to recall distros such as redhat and mandrake not automatically prompting the user to create a user account during setup prior to that time, as well.
Thanks, but if I want problems to crop up, I'll use Windows. I don't think I'll be dabbling with the mess that is Fedora anytime soon for that very reason.
RPM is just a broken system, anyway. Fedora has no advantage over Mandrake, as far as I'm concerned (and I don't use either regularly).
This is a shitty review. I just quickly glanced (no more than 30 seconds reading), and here are a couple glarring problems:
- It's stated that perl's shortest "test file existence" code would be: -e "/etc/mtab" or exit 1. The "or exit 1" is extraneous. - There's no mention of php, which is a widely used scripting language. - it refers to bash as sh, which are, technically speaking, not the same thing. - doesn't take into account the "scratch the itch" need of a good scripting language. ie, the language needs to be versatile in addition to be able to carry out routine tasks.
There's really nothing to see here. Pretty worthless 'review'
If basic math, science, and writing skills could be learned effectively in high school, then maybe you'd be correct.
Public education merely gives a small, biased subset of information about the world ahead.
As it stands, a relatively intelligent person with even a small amount of motivation could knock off your average 4-year high school level of knowledge in under a year without too much pain or suffering. Public school is a joke. Him fingering it as bullshit speaks nothing of his particular level of academic success. I got A's in high school, completed in 3 years, and I will say as well: high school is bullshit. College is, for the most part, bullshit. People graduate high school all the time as illiterate fools. Quite often there are illiterate college graduates, and even more often, they're simply uneducated.
I think the next step of PDA evolution should be to either integrate more useful things into them (IR-related tools, mostly, to interact with all those IR gadgets about today's modern environment), or for a form factor change away from the awkward square single-hand "palmtop" device.
If the second evolution, this is why: PDAs are much more powerful than the data assistants of 5+ years ago, and are even as powerful, if not more powerful than, the desktop processors of the time. They could do a Lot More than they are currently being used for - glorified contact books and notepads, with a little bit of playing cards and fooling around. Even holding a square PDA is a strain on the wrist for a prolonged period of time - it's awkward.
When I bought my laptop, I was looking for something that was ultra portable, sturdy, and had good battery life. I couldn't find anything on the market with a reasonable price which fit my needs and could still serve as a short-term-use device (ie, something I could use for a day or two, and then sync with a workstation/server, only keeping small amounts of work at a time). There is currently nothing in the market which provides a full day's worth of battery life and allows for use as a general use computing device (and by "general computing" I mean geeky shit, not Word and solitaire).
I see the technology employed in handhelds as ideal for this. The Sony Clie Communicator (to be RIP shortly, it would seem), as well as the already extinct clamshell Zaurus were steps in the right direction, I feel - but they stopped short by failing to have a 10-finger keyboard. They also cost obscene amounts of money - largely, I suspect, due to the novelty of such a device.
I imagine there's a fairly large undeveloped market for devices with 4x3 aspect ratio screens with 10-finger typeable keyboards, sturdy construction (aka, TI calculator/gameboy classic sturdy), and day-long portable use characteristics. I can imagine paying $600 for such a device personally - even if the technical specification is less than current 'cutting edge' PDAs - because there is a significant amount of functionality which is gained by having durability and full-fledged typing characteristics.
I imagine an inexpensive solidstate 'laptop'/typeable PDA/palmtop/whatever could be made for under $1000, and maybe even $600, quite reasonably and would see a fair amount of sales, considering the popularity of some similar attempts in the past - the original Libretto, the Fujitsu Lifebook P1000, and any number of others. I imagine the actual cost would be roughly 800$+, though, as demand would likely make them fairly expensive. Considering the cost of a Sony Clie peg-ux50 is $600 and comes with a built-in camera and wireless, and the Zaurus SL-C860 can be found for $700 with much more impressive statistics than the Clie. Here's what I imagine could be made for such a general fee:
- Xscale 400MHz CPU - 96Mb RAM - 64Mb storage - 640x460 res screen of moderate (5"? 6"?) size - typeable keyboard (large enough for an average person to fit a full set of hands on) - TypeII CF and SD Card slots - direct USB connectivity to other devices - a microphone and an earphone jack - a reasonably rich operating environment (I'm thinking Linux/Qtopia, as you'd be able to do actual work) - a sturdy titanium case w/ rubber corner pads - a 10 hour battery (which the clie communicator has) - possibly built in wifi, or an easy way to 'perminantly' add it (so as to not require the use of a wifi CF card when a CF storage device is in use)
The basic idea here would be for an ultraportable device which wouldn't need a seperate keyboard, and could be used for a full day's worth of work on a single charge of a standard battery for actual productive work (coding, presentation, whatever). I believe that I've heard there already are similar products in Japan; they just haven't made their way over here yet in serious number.
It's my personal opinion that PDAs do not serve much more than a personal organizer or a toy for 90% of the people out there. Most people do not need a personal organizer, let alone most of the other functions on a PDA.
PDA input is awkward still in most cases. We don't have voice input unless you're recording audio - and a specialized device is still better at that. Handwriting recognition is finickey at best, and chic-key keyboards are only marginally better.
It would be my suspicion that PDAs were so wildly popular for a couple years there because of Star Trek and its tricorders - people wanted those nifty tricorders, but jumped the gun a bit. However, PDAs don't have enough practical use for the common person. Even for business use, PDAs seem to be a niche market for those that are more into technology. A pad of paper is often less hastle and more convenient for most folks, what with battery concerns, keeping it from falling on the floor, etc.
I don't think PDAs will become truely useful for most people until they become the "ultimate information tool" with little tinkering - a digital keychain, of sorts. Use it to store your unlock codes for your car, use it as a TV remote, use it as a dictionary, use it with GPS and for referencing city maps, and use it to communicate.
I'm sure there are a lot of interesting, truly useful features which will crop up in the next couple of years. Current phones seem to be going in that general direction, but at htis point they've just got gimicky features - much like the first PDAs were themselves - such as cameras. The market might very well kill itself off (due to the quickly-evolving cell phone networks), but if not, I suspect highly-integrated "communicators/tricorders" will become all the more niche, while most people stick to the phone + camera.
I love the way the submitter underhandedly insulted the timelyness of slashdot maintainers by saying that this project would result in a lot of good material for the site...
Dude, with 533MHz, a decent graphics accelerator (relatively speaking), and a hack of MAME to get it to run on console under linux (or some other minimalist OS - BSD?) and you'd have an ideal portable game system.
If there is dust building up on the solar panels, what makes them think that when spring rolls around again, that there will be enough of the solar panels left uncovered to power the things back up again?
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest thing that irritates me if fluorescent lighting.
I mean, it literally irritates me, physically. The strobing is somewhat noticeable, the tone of light is somewhat painful, and worst of all, over time it gives me a headache. My eyes will get exceedingly tired, and I'm unable to concentrate when that happens. I need me eyes to work.
I've heard that prolonged fluorescent light exposure can lead to other health complications as well, but I don't know what.
I'd strongly suggest natural lighting if at all possible, and if not, opt for low-key ambient lighting around the perimeters of the floor/wall/whatever. Also, have lighting which doesn't cast direct light, but shines light on walls or the ceiling - such as those lights-on-a-pole with the upside-down light cover (not sure what they're called). If at all possible, have natural lighting: tinted skylights, open windows.
The stress of a CRT/LCD on a person's eyes is bad enough. Don't add fluorescents.
- someone with sensitive eyes
So, to paraphrase what you're saying:
... in other words, you use a completely inadequate analogy. While phone networks are similar to data networks, and are actually mostly digital themselves nowadays, it misses the requirements of being a proper analogy; that is, having critical similarities that make it analogous.
The spread of curdled milk and possible security breaches by curd-lovers? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have easy access to all that curdled goodness on my coffee break. But what is to prevent a person from using curdled dairy products for devious activities during their personal use? It seems like until we have methods for identifying criminals that hold these curdled dairy containers, and locking down security, public curd consumption is extended to even those who would abuse it.
The simple fact is that data networks are much more vulnerable in general to use activities than a phone network, and have more known vulnerabilities to boot. A person (or a group of persons) could theoretically take down large amounts of connectivity (DNS, gateway routers, etc.), destroy financial information (bank security, etc.), or what have you with -relative- ease. There are a lot more tools, and a lot more tools for making tools, available on the Internet. Phone networks are significantly less versatile.
Ask ethicists if we should?
Who are they to decide on something like that? Am I not a human myself, able to make ethical decisions if asked? All people are. Granted, most people don't, because they act selfishly. But what's to stop an ethicist to get blindsided by the glory of being someone that helped instigate the colonization of Mars for humanity, to forever go down in history?
Does anyone else think that it's about time for Intel to retire the "Pentium" monicker? I, for one, find that it brings forth connotations of "overly expensive" and "marketing-inflated", and the likely desired effect is lost in today's world where AMD stuff is performance, and Intel is trailing. Granted, Intel has better low-heat and low-power chips, but most folks don't even see that as a potential feature to be considered, let alone a feature.
On the other hand, Intel has probably spent trillions of dollars advertising "Pentium" via the brand name and the little tin-foil-clad men (and TBMG). Have they over-extended their brand name to a point where it's entered into common acceptance (ie, "google" or "tuperware")?
What's everyone else think? Is "Pentium" old and tired, or does it still have viable commercial life left? How about as appeal to geeks (as we all know that geeks are the ones that push the next industry trend into the forefront)? My personal opinion is that "Pentium" is outliving any usefulness it might have, and doesn't really have the "whiz bang super-fast" association that it used to (there are Opterons, Xeons, and god knows what else now, after all), at least with the geeks. Also, I think Intel could benefit from a newly marketed name (provided they have the chip to back it up - maybe a low-power portable chip?) to blow away the industry again, leading to the trend of further portable device purchases (supplanting desktops with laptops, for instance).
You're definately forgetting the cost of cooling a building during the summer.
I know of a facility that doesn't run heat - at all. They do a lot of software devel for electronics, and each engineer has about 5 devices in his work area - hdtv, system and monitor, etc. They even have the heating system set up so as to pump heat from the engineer area over to the other parts of the company, there's so much excessive heat.
The money saved, however, is negligible compared to the additional cooling bills in the summer.
They're kids. For the most part, they've not reached the point where they realize that things actually break, deteriorate, or die - they don't have the perspective of multiple years of life yet to reflect back on. A week is a very long time for 10 year old, and a month an eternity.
Sure, kids shouldn't abuse their stuff, and most don't unless they're spoiled. But expecting a kid to keep a CDROM scratch-free is a bit absurd when most grown adults have difficulty with it.
That's contradictive. If you've given up on linux, you are a newbie. Just because you know windows does not mean you're hot shit in the Linux world of knowledge. They're knowledge sets that are not mutually exchangeable.
/shares
Samba configuration is exceedingly simple.Most distros even come with a very thorough config template made out for you. You can get it set up and running in a matter of seconds:
[global]
netbios name = machine
workgroup = name
security = share
[shares]
path =
browseable = yes
wide links = yes
guest ok = yes
That's all you need for basic functionality. Probably more than could be gotten by with. To add insult to injury, there are dozens of tools to do more advanced configuration for you. Are you sure you were reading the correct documentation?
Do we let undergraduates tell the professors what they need to know? Do we let middle schoolers decide on their curriculum? No?
The point being is this: newbies do not know what they need, anymore than the examples above, or the person buying a Dell running WinXP which comes with only 128Mb of RAM.
I'm tired of people trying to make linux something that it is fundamentally not. Linux is not designed to be an OS for the masses; it is designed to work. Breaking that paradigm will inevitably break the core of what Linux is.
You debunked nothing. "Easy to configure" - hello? How does that have anything to do with a gconf key?
what's wrong with gnome-pilot?
Maybe you haven't been paying attention. Spacial navigating file managers have been here and gone quite a long time ago as a 'standard', because people hate them. (Windows pre-IE4, MacOS classic)
Ok, you're not forced to create a user account - however, you are prompted to during the installation process (with, I believe, a suggestion to operate as a non-root user).
I've not read such a bunch of poorly written flaptrap rhetoric in quite a long time.
There is not a single case of anything there but first-hand anecdotal nonsense. Not only that, but it ignores the fact that spatial browsing (as they call it) was tried with Windows - and dumped, because it largely sucked.
Some people might like GNOME, but most do not. I do not like it because it is not configureable. Even Windows is more configurable than GNOME is in some respects.
The author tried to say that hard disks should be browsed like a file cabinet's folder. That's fine - but I like to browse by task (if I'm browsing at all). It would drive me nuts if i had a seperate bash instance or state for every directory I navigated to - as I've evidently moved from those directories, and no longer need them.
That said, this guy's writeup is borderline incomprehendable. How'd this make it to the front page, again? My left testicle could make a more sound argument for castration than this guy's half-assed attempts at arguing for spatial file browsing.
And hen did you try debian? In 1993?
Debian hasn't had such behavior since 1999, at least, which is when I started using it. I seem to recall distros such as redhat and mandrake not automatically prompting the user to create a user account during setup prior to that time, as well.
difficult to use != advanced user
Thanks, but if I want problems to crop up, I'll use Windows. I don't think I'll be dabbling with the mess that is Fedora anytime soon for that very reason.
RPM is just a broken system, anyway. Fedora has no advantage over Mandrake, as far as I'm concerned (and I don't use either regularly).
This is a shitty review. I just quickly glanced (no more than 30 seconds reading), and here are a couple glarring problems:
- It's stated that perl's shortest "test file existence" code would be: -e "/etc/mtab" or exit 1. The "or exit 1" is extraneous.
- There's no mention of php, which is a widely used scripting language.
- it refers to bash as sh, which are, technically speaking, not the same thing.
- doesn't take into account the "scratch the itch" need of a good scripting language. ie, the language needs to be versatile in addition to be able to carry out routine tasks.
There's really nothing to see here. Pretty worthless 'review'
If basic math, science, and writing skills could be learned effectively in high school, then maybe you'd be correct.
Public education merely gives a small, biased subset of information about the world ahead.
As it stands, a relatively intelligent person with even a small amount of motivation could knock off your average 4-year high school level of knowledge in under a year without too much pain or suffering. Public school is a joke. Him fingering it as bullshit speaks nothing of his particular level of academic success. I got A's in high school, completed in 3 years, and I will say as well: high school is bullshit. College is, for the most part, bullshit. People graduate high school all the time as illiterate fools. Quite often there are illiterate college graduates, and even more often, they're simply uneducated.
I treated myself with copious amounts of drugs. I'm pretty average now, thank goodness. The condition was getting fairly serious.
I think the next step of PDA evolution should be to either integrate more useful things into them (IR-related tools, mostly, to interact with all those IR gadgets about today's modern environment), or for a form factor change away from the awkward square single-hand "palmtop" device.
If the second evolution, this is why: PDAs are much more powerful than the data assistants of 5+ years ago, and are even as powerful, if not more powerful than, the desktop processors of the time. They could do a Lot More than they are currently being used for - glorified contact books and notepads, with a little bit of playing cards and fooling around. Even holding a square PDA is a strain on the wrist for a prolonged period of time - it's awkward.
When I bought my laptop, I was looking for something that was ultra portable, sturdy, and had good battery life. I couldn't find anything on the market with a reasonable price which fit my needs and could still serve as a short-term-use device (ie, something I could use for a day or two, and then sync with a workstation/server, only keeping small amounts of work at a time). There is currently nothing in the market which provides a full day's worth of battery life and allows for use as a general use computing device (and by "general computing" I mean geeky shit, not Word and solitaire).
I see the technology employed in handhelds as ideal for this. The Sony Clie Communicator (to be RIP shortly, it would seem), as well as the already extinct clamshell Zaurus were steps in the right direction, I feel - but they stopped short by failing to have a 10-finger keyboard. They also cost obscene amounts of money - largely, I suspect, due to the novelty of such a device.
I imagine there's a fairly large undeveloped market for devices with 4x3 aspect ratio screens with 10-finger typeable keyboards, sturdy construction (aka, TI calculator/gameboy classic sturdy), and day-long portable use characteristics. I can imagine paying $600 for such a device personally - even if the technical specification is less than current 'cutting edge' PDAs - because there is a significant amount of functionality which is gained by having durability and full-fledged typing characteristics.
I imagine an inexpensive solidstate 'laptop'/typeable PDA/palmtop/whatever could be made for under $1000, and maybe even $600, quite reasonably and would see a fair amount of sales, considering the popularity of some similar attempts in the past - the original Libretto, the Fujitsu Lifebook P1000, and any number of others. I imagine the actual cost would be roughly 800$+, though, as demand would likely make them fairly expensive. Considering the cost of a Sony Clie peg-ux50 is $600 and comes with a built-in camera and wireless, and the Zaurus SL-C860 can be found for $700 with much more impressive statistics than the Clie. Here's what I imagine could be made for such a general fee:
- Xscale 400MHz CPU
- 96Mb RAM
- 64Mb storage
- 640x460 res screen of moderate (5"? 6"?) size
- typeable keyboard (large enough for an average person to fit a full set of hands on)
- TypeII CF and SD Card slots
- direct USB connectivity to other devices
- a microphone and an earphone jack
- a reasonably rich operating environment (I'm thinking Linux/Qtopia, as you'd be able to do actual work)
- a sturdy titanium case w/ rubber corner pads
- a 10 hour battery (which the clie communicator has)
- possibly built in wifi, or an easy way to 'perminantly' add it (so as to not require the use of a wifi CF card when a CF storage device is in use)
The basic idea here would be for an ultraportable device which wouldn't need a seperate keyboard, and could be used for a full day's worth of work on a single charge of a standard battery for actual productive work (coding, presentation, whatever). I believe that I've heard there already are similar products in Japan; they just haven't made their way over here yet in serious number.
It's my personal opinion that PDAs do not serve much more than a personal organizer or a toy for 90% of the people out there. Most people do not need a personal organizer, let alone most of the other functions on a PDA.
PDA input is awkward still in most cases. We don't have voice input unless you're recording audio - and a specialized device is still better at that. Handwriting recognition is finickey at best, and chic-key keyboards are only marginally better.
It would be my suspicion that PDAs were so wildly popular for a couple years there because of Star Trek and its tricorders - people wanted those nifty tricorders, but jumped the gun a bit. However, PDAs don't have enough practical use for the common person. Even for business use, PDAs seem to be a niche market for those that are more into technology. A pad of paper is often less hastle and more convenient for most folks, what with battery concerns, keeping it from falling on the floor, etc.
I don't think PDAs will become truely useful for most people until they become the "ultimate information tool" with little tinkering - a digital keychain, of sorts. Use it to store your unlock codes for your car, use it as a TV remote, use it as a dictionary, use it with GPS and for referencing city maps, and use it to communicate.
I'm sure there are a lot of interesting, truly useful features which will crop up in the next couple of years. Current phones seem to be going in that general direction, but at htis point they've just got gimicky features - much like the first PDAs were themselves - such as cameras. The market might very well kill itself off (due to the quickly-evolving cell phone networks), but if not, I suspect highly-integrated "communicators/tricorders" will become all the more niche, while most people stick to the phone + camera.
I love the way the submitter underhandedly insulted the timelyness of slashdot maintainers by saying that this project would result in a lot of good material for the site...
6Mb of RAM? What OS are you running on it to route packets with? That's not exactly enough for Linux...
Unless it's kernel 2.0 or something like that, of course...
Dude, with 533MHz, a decent graphics accelerator (relatively speaking), and a hack of MAME to get it to run on console under linux (or some other minimalist OS - BSD?) and you'd have an ideal portable game system.
If there is dust building up on the solar panels, what makes them think that when spring rolls around again, that there will be enough of the solar panels left uncovered to power the things back up again?
I hear she used to be a practicing MCSE... maybe there's some explaination to be found in that.