Still haven't improved handwriting recongition
on
Zaurus SL-6000 Review
·
· Score: 1
The Sharp Zaurus SL-6000 still has the same lame Graphiti style handwriting recongnition. They did not take the opportunity of a new, more powerful device to improve handwriting recognition.
Palm really did the world a huge disserivce by making everyone believe that handwriting recognition was basically unusable for any serious data input. Most people who were never exposed to the Apple Newton (post MP-110) treat PDA's as read-only devices with some limited input capabilities. That's really too bad because PDA's have the potential to provide a truely superior user input experience.
Unfortunately, Sharp followed Palm's lead in this and provided only Graphiti style handwriting recongition and didn't really bother to design a user interface that could take advantage of pen gestures at all. The SL-6000 continues this pathetic tradition.
I could understand this oversight with the first generation of a PDA that has to deal with a lot of time to market pressure, but this is the fifth or sixth of the new series of Zaurus PDA's. Why can't they put decent handwriting recognition on the damned thing?
Thumb typing is not sufficient for any serious data input. At least with my Newton, I could sit in a meeting or a lecture (ok, not math or physics) and take notes as fast as I could on paper. People at a meeting often consider someone typing away on a laptop rude, but have no problem with people scribbling notes on paper or a PDA, but you need good recognition to do that. Thumb typing and Graphiti style handwriting recognition are really holding back the potential of this device!
Depdending on what you're installing, there can be lots of hoops to jump through. A lot of applications were build for the SL-5500. Naturally, the 5600 and 6000 just have to be different enough that many applications refuse to install because some directory that it tries to install to doesn't exist. Then you end up having to unpack the installer and hack the script, guessing what the corresponding directories for things might be, repack it and hope it'll work. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
Even if you want to do something simple like install your application on a removable device, many of the installers barf, or even worse, work just fine, but result in unstable behaviour.
So, either you've been very lucky or haven't installed many applications on a non-5500 device.
At the IBM PartnerWorld 2004 conference the guys at the Sharp booth had a pre-release version of the Sharp SL-6000 Linux based PDA and they claimed that there was a cell phone card or sleeve available for it. As far as I can tell, this card is not commercially available yet.
As compared to the older Zaurii, this device was much larger, but was also, clearly, designed with some thought towards making it a viable phone. For example, the mic and speaker on the back of the case were positioned so it would be usable as a phone. In addition, the audio jack was a 3.5mm stereo jack suitable for use with stereo output, but was also configured to be able work with an earphone/boom mike combo so it could be used as a phone and PDA at the same time. This sure beats most other PDA's that choose either a sub-mini earbud/mic jack, sacraficing the ability to use the device as an MP3 player or a stereo out only jack. They also designed the SL-6000 so that it could accomodate a sleeve rather than being limited to the small form factor slots, so this would make a cell phone easier to incorporate. The darned thing even has voice recognition technology, though it doesn't seem to be integrated with the phone technology, so you can't ask it to dial the phone via a voice command... yet.
While it's great to see that there are all sorts of free tools and software libraries that handle various types scientific computation, visualization and analysis, it is disappointing that there doesn't seem to be a 'free', integrated tool that can compete with Mathematica.
While Wolfram and his team have done some truely amazing things and produced a product that is worthy of the $1880 price tag, I am astonished that the mathematic and scientific communities have not pooled their resrouces to produce something like it (please tell me I'm wrong about this... if there's something better than Mathematica I'd love to know, especially if it can do symbolic tensor calculus).
There seem to be lots of computer science and mathematics researchers who churn out papers on computational methods for various 'hard' calculations, analysis, symbolic manipulation and visualization. C libraries, produced by their graduate students, for doing these things seem to be abundant.
As mentioned by other posters there are plenty of free graphing, plotting and analysis packages that can deal with specific areas of interest, but there doesn't seem to be a general purpose, extendable, package that can do all of that stuff the way that Mathematica can. I'm sure that Universities all over the world have enough demand for Mathematica licenses from their mathematics and physics professors alone to justify some colaborative effort to create an open tool that can do the same. In addition, a co-ordinated effort like that would provide a platform for those grad students to extend rather than just toss out another computation or analysis library that will gather dust.
WebMacro has moved into the beta phase of release 2.0!
WebMacro is the original templating engine that velocity is based on. Unfortunately, due to licensing issues, they were never able to merge and have now diverged enough that they are now quite different despite the base similarities.
Version 2.0b1 of WebMacro has new and exciting features as well as efficiency gains. One of the most interesting new features is actually a result of the improvements in Java technology itself. The older versions had a lot of factories and contexts in order to get around the inefficiencies of object creation and clean-up, but now, much of this has been removed or hidden because of improvments in Java garbage collection has made them supurflous.
You are very smart and have clearly figured out that this is a real product based on real science and not any sort of ruse to take over America by providing motors to industry that will fail after a few months of use. You must have a very large American penis!
You Americans with your large penises are very superior and will undoutedly jump on this huge opportunity to continue your dominance of world industry. To hear more about how you're extreme prowess will prevail, listen to the following messages:
A previous article, Passive E-Mail Monitoring Leads To Arrest, had a comment that proposed also showed how spam can be used as a covert communication channel. So, even slashdoters can figure this stuff out.
Actually, in order to keep your actual message content clean while still adding lots of noise for the NSA to filter, spookmime.el will add the spook words to the MIME boundaries in your messages.
in your mail headers and mime boundary lines like:
--SDI-Saddam_Hussein-NSA-DScyP
Of course, this also means that nobody ever asks what this wierd stuff at the end of your email is for, but it also keeps your employer from asking the same question.
Mozilla Thunderbird has made a considerable effort to make S/MIME easy to use. Although not enabled by default, it's just a preferences checkbox away. I vaguely remember hearing that they came a hair's breadth from making it the default.
I certainly have noticed a significant increase in the number of S/MIME signed emails from Mozilla email clients showing up in the various newsgroups that I subscribe to.
Once they get to a certain level of installed base, it'll be fairly easy for your average internet user to not even notice that they're using S/MIME. This has the potential to go way beyond the short lived fad that PGP turned out to be and get to the point where many emails get completely encrypted automatically because both parties have sent signed messages to each other in the past.
This doesn't exactly qualify as a hack, but I figured it might be of intersest to the same crowd... I managed to crash a gas pump at a Stinker Station once.
It was a fairly new self serve gas pump and I had selected the type of gas that I wanted, but then realized that their labelling was confusing and that I really wanted a different type of gas.
Naturally, I applied my problem solving skills to the situation, deviated from the process shown in the illustrated instuctions printed on the side and attempted to re-select the type of gas that I wanted. There was no response! In fact, ALL of the pumps at the station stopped and the operator's terminal inside of the store locked up too!
They had to reboot the system to get everything working again. They told me that nothing like that had ever happened before and we were all just lucky that the manager, who knew how to restart the sytem, was on duty at the time.
At the very least the cops, err... bobbies, might have been able to get a finger print or two, trace the purchase of the camera or the serial number on the SD card. Even if it doesn't lead to a direct capture, this sort of thing stays on record and can be used later when these scammers inevitably get nabbed for something else down the road.
Besides, what about the other victims? Now there's no evidence that they were scammed too. They might have to eat the loss themselves without some corroboration that they were scammed.
Also, the equipment may have cost the scammers more than this particular victim lost, but is this junk really worth much at all to the victim other than bragging rights?
Finally, aren't a lot of British cities brimming with cameras these days? If this stuff had been left in place it might have been possible to track the scammers when they picked the equipment up.
I guess that's why there was a slashdot story, India Woos Medical Tourists recently. They're not just outsourcing coders, they're outsourcing medical care too.
there is a new holiness cult around using objects the divine-ordained way -- aspect-oriented programming, Law of Demeter, MVC bad, and the like.
It's amazing how any good idea can be discredited/ruined by zealots over doing it. Politics is full of examples of this effect.
Despite this affect, I think that the NakedObjects approach is a practical solution to the temptation to write code in ways that are more likely to be buggy, hard to understand and hard to test.
Besides, the NakedObjects Framework won't satisfy the purists because it can be argued that it is, itself, an MVC framework that is simply hidden from the developer... yet another abstraction, albeit one that allows the developer to ignore the MVC issues and concentrate on the behavioural completeness of the object.
Many of the problems with the currently popular software design antipatterns like MVC are that they throw out all of the advantages of true Object Orientation in their zeal to re-invent the 1970's style data processing in OO languages. The NakedObjects folks have an approach that makes it much easier to code in a truely object oriented fashion. This results in more natural, behaviourly complete, objects that are easier to understand, test and refactor. Although this doesn't solve all of the problems that Livschitz mentions, it definitely mitigates the common problems that developers who use OO languages experience and reduces bugs for some of the same reasons that Livschitz cites because it solves the same problems.
Many countries place quotas on immigrants from various other countries. So, whether Greeks who emigratate to Saudi Arabia can get to a level that they can form a robust community... oh, wait. GEEKS.
garageband.com looks like an interesting music web site. Unfortunately, they are mostly RealAudio oriented. Yes, they do have mp3 downloads for many tunes, but not all. Also their radio station is real audio only. This effectively makes garageband.com a non starter for me.
Actually, we don't need these. There's a better way to get to the single sex species. I read an article a long time ago about using a simple trick from IVF to fuse two ova together rather than a sperm and an ovum. So, you see, men are no longer necessary... geeks even less so.
I wish I could find a link to this article, but I haven't had any luck. Then again, the forces that fight over reproductive rights on both sides probably hate this concept and have squashed any mention of it. I'm expecting a knock on the door any minute now from a black bag team accusing me of supporting ungodly lesbian... aghh... help..
It's really a shame that the potential of JINI never materialized for this same problem.
Think of how nice it would've been to plug a device in and have it automagically make its platform independent driver and configuration software available to the local network. Theoretically, it wouldn't matter if the device was a printer, scanner or toaster or whether the machines on the network were Windows, Linux or eComstation or even a mixture of all of them. No drivers to install, simply plug in the device and it would just work. Although that's, surely an overly rosey view, it sure has a lot of appeal and it's a shame that there wasn't much of a serious effort to even try to make it work.
I was very surprised that there wasn't a huge demand from the user community for the universal adoption of JINI for this sort of application. Even the year after JINI was introduced, there was only ONE demonstration product on the show floor at JavaOne -- a JINI enabled digital camera. Now, JINI seems to be relegated to a specialized web services niche.
There is a technology, known as teergrube that does exactly that. It slows down email from spammers, thus increasing their costs of sending spam.
Many have suggested various ways to fight back like bouncing all spam, but since most headers are forged these days, such practices just use up network bandwidth and hurt spoofed victimes. Teergrube seems to be one of the few ways to fight back that might actually work.
Now we just have to convince our ISP's to universally adopt terrgube MTA's and spam will be dealt a serious blow.
At least SETI@home had an OS/2 port and ports for lots of other 'out there' OS's. BOINC does not. This leaves out all those lovers of esoteric OS's... for now.
Yes, the LightCraft is very cool, but it has several problems that limit it's practical applications.
One is that the laser required to launch it has to use so much power that it heats the air, which causes the beam to disperse. This puts an upper limit on the payload.
Also, it turns out not to be very effective once it gets high enough that the atmosphere has thinned out. The developers have had to add layers of ablative material to the inside of the cone lip to provide material that can be accelerated away from the craft to provide proplusion. It's debatable whether this counts as fuel because most rocket fuel provides both reactive mass and energy, but, in this case it provides only the reactive mass. Just like conventional rockets, this extra material places limits on the lifting power of the craft.
Slashdot Mirror
The Sharp Zaurus SL-6000 still has the same lame Graphiti style handwriting recongnition. They did not take the opportunity of a new, more powerful device to improve handwriting recognition.
Palm really did the world a huge disserivce by making everyone believe that handwriting recognition was basically unusable for any serious data input. Most people who were never exposed to the Apple Newton (post MP-110) treat PDA's as read-only devices with some limited input capabilities. That's really too bad because PDA's have the potential to provide a truely superior user input experience.
Unfortunately, Sharp followed Palm's lead in this and provided only Graphiti style handwriting recongition and didn't really bother to design a user interface that could take advantage of pen gestures at all. The SL-6000 continues this pathetic tradition.
I could understand this oversight with the first generation of a PDA that has to deal with a lot of time to market pressure, but this is the fifth or sixth of the new series of Zaurus PDA's. Why can't they put decent handwriting recognition on the damned thing?
Thumb typing is not sufficient for any serious data input. At least with my Newton, I could sit in a meeting or a lecture (ok, not math or physics) and take notes as fast as I could on paper. People at a meeting often consider someone typing away on a laptop rude, but have no problem with people scribbling notes on paper or a PDA, but you need good recognition to do that. Thumb typing and Graphiti style handwriting recognition are really holding back the potential of this device!
Depdending on what you're installing, there can be lots of hoops to jump through. A lot of applications were build for the SL-5500. Naturally, the 5600 and 6000 just have to be different enough that many applications refuse to install because some directory that it tries to install to doesn't exist. Then you end up having to unpack the installer and hack the script, guessing what the corresponding directories for things might be, repack it and hope it'll work. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
Even if you want to do something simple like install your application on a removable device, many of the installers barf, or even worse, work just fine, but result in unstable behaviour.
So, either you've been very lucky or haven't installed many applications on a non-5500 device.
At the IBM PartnerWorld 2004 conference the guys at the Sharp booth had a pre-release version of the Sharp SL-6000 Linux based PDA and they claimed that there was a cell phone card or sleeve available for it. As far as I can tell, this card is not commercially available yet.
As compared to the older Zaurii, this device was much larger, but was also, clearly, designed with some thought towards making it a viable phone. For example, the mic and speaker on the back of the case were positioned so it would be usable as a phone. In addition, the audio jack was a 3.5mm stereo jack suitable for use with stereo output, but was also configured to be able work with an earphone/boom mike combo so it could be used as a phone and PDA at the same time. This sure beats most other PDA's that choose either a sub-mini earbud/mic jack, sacraficing the ability to use the device as an MP3 player or a stereo out only jack. They also designed the SL-6000 so that it could accomodate a sleeve rather than being limited to the small form factor slots, so this would make a cell phone easier to incorporate. The darned thing even has voice recognition technology, though it doesn't seem to be integrated with the phone technology, so you can't ask it to dial the phone via a voice command... yet.
While it's great to see that there are all sorts of free tools and software libraries that handle various types scientific computation, visualization and analysis, it is disappointing that there doesn't seem to be a 'free', integrated tool that can compete with Mathematica.
While Wolfram and his team have done some truely amazing things and produced a product that is worthy of the $1880 price tag, I am astonished that the mathematic and scientific communities have not pooled their resrouces to produce something like it (please tell me I'm wrong about this... if there's something better than Mathematica I'd love to know, especially if it can do symbolic tensor calculus).
There seem to be lots of computer science and mathematics researchers who churn out papers on computational methods for various 'hard' calculations, analysis, symbolic manipulation and visualization. C libraries, produced by their graduate students, for doing these things seem to be abundant.
As mentioned by other posters there are plenty of free graphing, plotting and analysis packages that can deal with specific areas of interest, but there doesn't seem to be a general purpose, extendable, package that can do all of that stuff the way that Mathematica can. I'm sure that Universities all over the world have enough demand for Mathematica licenses from their mathematics and physics professors alone to justify some colaborative effort to create an open tool that can do the same. In addition, a co-ordinated effort like that would provide a platform for those grad students to extend rather than just toss out another computation or analysis library that will gather dust.
WebMacro has moved into the beta phase of release 2.0!
WebMacro is the original templating engine that velocity is based on. Unfortunately, due to licensing issues, they were never able to merge and have now diverged enough that they are now quite different despite the base similarities.
Version 2.0b1 of WebMacro has new and exciting features as well as efficiency gains. One of the most interesting new features is actually a result of the improvements in Java technology itself. The older versions had a lot of factories and contexts in order to get around the inefficiencies of object creation and clean-up, but now, much of this has been removed or hidden because of improvments in Java garbage collection has made them supurflous.
You Americans with your large penises are very superior and will undoutedly jump on this huge opportunity to continue your dominance of world industry. To hear more about how you're extreme prowess will prevail, listen to the following messages:
A previous article, Passive E-Mail Monitoring Leads To Arrest, had a comment that proposed also showed how spam can be used as a covert communication channel. So, even slashdoters can figure this stuff out.
Actually, in order to keep your actual message content clean while still adding lots of noise for the NSA to filter, spookmime.el will add the spook words to the MIME boundaries in your messages.
n m"
You end up with stuff like this:
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="counter-intelligence-Legion_of_Doom-bVC
in your mail headers and mime boundary lines like:
--SDI-Saddam_Hussein-NSA-DScyP
Of course, this also means that nobody ever asks what this wierd stuff at the end of your email is for, but it also keeps your employer from asking the same question.
Mozilla Thunderbird has made a considerable effort to make S/MIME easy to use. Although not enabled by default, it's just a preferences checkbox away. I vaguely remember hearing that they came a hair's breadth from making it the default.
I certainly have noticed a significant increase in the number of S/MIME signed emails from Mozilla email clients showing up in the various newsgroups that I subscribe to.
Once they get to a certain level of installed base, it'll be fairly easy for your average internet user to not even notice that they're using S/MIME. This has the potential to go way beyond the short lived fad that PGP turned out to be and get to the point where many emails get completely encrypted automatically because both parties have sent signed messages to each other in the past.
Java has ALREADY been forked. For example, check out Waba and SuperWaba.
This doesn't exactly qualify as a hack, but I figured it might be of intersest to the same crowd... I managed to crash a gas pump at a Stinker Station once.
It was a fairly new self serve gas pump and I had selected the type of gas that I wanted, but then realized that their labelling was confusing and that I really wanted a different type of gas.
Naturally, I applied my problem solving skills to the situation, deviated from the process shown in the illustrated instuctions printed on the side and attempted to re-select the type of gas that I wanted. There was no response! In fact, ALL of the pumps at the station stopped and the operator's terminal inside of the store locked up too!
They had to reboot the system to get everything working again. They told me that nothing like that had ever happened before and we were all just lucky that the manager, who knew how to restart the sytem, was on duty at the time.
If you're going to complain about 'grammer' [sic], then, at least try to spell ridiculous correctly.
At the very least the cops, err... bobbies, might have been able to get a finger print or two, trace the purchase of the camera or the serial number on the SD card. Even if it doesn't lead to a direct capture, this sort of thing stays on record and can be used later when these scammers inevitably get nabbed for something else down the road.
Besides, what about the other victims? Now there's no evidence that they were scammed too. They might have to eat the loss themselves without some corroboration that they were scammed.
Also, the equipment may have cost the scammers more than this particular victim lost, but is this junk really worth much at all to the victim other than bragging rights?
Finally, aren't a lot of British cities brimming with cameras these days? If this stuff had been left in place it might have been possible to track the scammers when they picked the equipment up.
I guess that's why there was a slashdot story, India Woos Medical Tourists recently. They're not just outsourcing coders, they're outsourcing medical care too.
It's amazing how any good idea can be discredited/ruined by zealots over doing it. Politics is full of examples of this effect.
Despite this affect, I think that the NakedObjects approach is a practical solution to the temptation to write code in ways that are more likely to be buggy, hard to understand and hard to test.
Besides, the NakedObjects Framework won't satisfy the purists because it can be argued that it is, itself, an MVC framework that is simply hidden from the developer... yet another abstraction, albeit one that allows the developer to ignore the MVC issues and concentrate on the behavioural completeness of the object.
Many of the problems with the currently popular software design antipatterns like MVC are that they throw out all of the advantages of true Object Orientation in their zeal to re-invent the 1970's style data processing in OO languages. The NakedObjects folks have an approach that makes it much easier to code in a truely object oriented fashion. This results in more natural, behaviourly complete, objects that are easier to understand, test and refactor. Although this doesn't solve all of the problems that Livschitz mentions, it definitely mitigates the common problems that developers who use OO languages experience and reduces bugs for some of the same reasons that Livschitz cites because it solves the same problems.
Many countries place quotas on immigrants from various other countries. So, whether Greeks who emigratate to Saudi Arabia can get to a level that they can form a robust community... oh, wait. GEEKS.
garageband.com looks like an interesting music web site. Unfortunately, they are mostly RealAudio oriented. Yes, they do have mp3 downloads for many tunes, but not all. Also their radio station is real audio only. This effectively makes garageband.com a non starter for me.
Actually, we don't need these. There's a better way to get to the single sex species. I read an article a long time ago about using a simple trick from IVF to fuse two ova together rather than a sperm and an ovum. So, you see, men are no longer necessary... geeks even less so.
I wish I could find a link to this article, but I haven't had any luck. Then again, the forces that fight over reproductive rights on both sides probably hate this concept and have squashed any mention of it. I'm expecting a knock on the door any minute now from a black bag team accusing me of supporting ungodly lesbian... aghh... help..
It's really a shame that the potential of JINI never materialized for this same problem.
Think of how nice it would've been to plug a device in and have it automagically make its platform independent driver and configuration software available to the local network. Theoretically, it wouldn't matter if the device was a printer, scanner or toaster or whether the machines on the network were Windows, Linux or eComstation or even a mixture of all of them. No drivers to install, simply plug in the device and it would just work. Although that's, surely an overly rosey view, it sure has a lot of appeal and it's a shame that there wasn't much of a serious effort to even try to make it work.
I was very surprised that there wasn't a huge demand from the user community for the universal adoption of JINI for this sort of application. Even the year after JINI was introduced, there was only ONE demonstration product on the show floor at JavaOne -- a JINI enabled digital camera. Now, JINI seems to be relegated to a specialized web services niche.
The picuture of Dilbert is included in the second image gallery from Chipworks silicon art. It also shows up on an ICE poster
My first time as a karma whore... here's a link you can click on:
http://www.chipworks.com/art/siliconart.htm
I actually used to work with some of these folks. We used to see all sorts of cool stuff.
There is a technology, known as teergrube that does exactly that. It slows down email from spammers, thus increasing their costs of sending spam.
Many have suggested various ways to fight back like bouncing all spam, but since most headers are forged these days, such practices just use up network bandwidth and hurt spoofed victimes. Teergrube seems to be one of the few ways to fight back that might actually work.
Now we just have to convince our ISP's to universally adopt terrgube MTA's and spam will be dealt a serious blow.
At least SETI@home had an OS/2 port and ports for lots of other 'out there' OS's. BOINC does not. This leaves out all those lovers of esoteric OS's... for now.
Yes, the LightCraft is very cool, but it has several problems that limit it's practical applications.
One is that the laser required to launch it has to use so much power that it heats the air, which causes the beam to disperse. This puts an upper limit on the payload.
Also, it turns out not to be very effective once it gets high enough that the atmosphere has thinned out. The developers have had to add layers of ablative material to the inside of the cone lip to provide material that can be accelerated away from the craft to provide proplusion. It's debatable whether this counts as fuel because most rocket fuel provides both reactive mass and energy, but, in this case it provides only the reactive mass. Just like conventional rockets, this extra material places limits on the lifting power of the craft.