I bought the N900 and have the Even More Plus plan, and it was $10 less per month for the voice only plan at the time. Unfortunately T-Mobile no longer lists the Even More Plus plan price on their web site, you have to go to one of their stores to find out. I think that's pretty clear that they are no longer promoting it.
Speaking of UI quirks/misfeatures, is there a way to get to the end of a list of files other than using the "inertial scrolling" repeatedly? I've got waaaaaay too many pictures to be scrolling through ALL of them when attaching more than one to an email.
You can start typing out the filename and it will narrow down the selection list. Or the date such as 02/17 is good enough for all pictures that day. But yes, it would have been nice in the picture attachment example to reverse sort by date, that's the most likely picture to be attached.
If you want a change like that here's the place to do it. http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU/ That they've already fixed the terminal enter problem was all it took for me to install it. Changelog here
Unlikely, just look at displayport. Displayport can cannel both USB and audio despite the fact both signals do not originate from the graphics card. It would be safe to assume that Light Peak can do something similar.
Dig a little deeper. My latest graphics card has a DisplayPort connector and a built in sound card, so the only connection between the graphics card and the motherboard is PCIe. It's probably not on the GPU, but it is on the graphics card so they can combine the audio with the video as it goes out. It was also telling when PulseAudio decided it wanted to play audio to the graphics card even though that audio doesn't go anywhere, so I was less than pleased trying to figure out what happened to my sound.
Note the.0 vs.1
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Juniper [Radeon HD 5700 Series]
05:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Juniper HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5700 Series]
I've been concluding that the Nokia N900 has poor antenna performance. At least this is based on my brother and his wife sending blackberry text messages back and forth while in the same car while the N900 didn't even show a cell connection, and all three are T-Mobile. That and being at a friend's house who said some phones work, some don't there, they currently have cell phones that work, mine frequently said no cell tower there. So, I'm curious what any one else's experience with the N900 antenna performace is.
These lawsuits claim that Comcast promised and advertised specific speeds and unlimited Internet access but impaired use of some P2P file-sharing traffic on its High-Speed Internet network. Comcast denies these claims, but has revised its management of P2P and is settling to avoid the burden and cost of further litigation.
Comcast is getting off easy because the attorney's bringing the suit were bribed with $3 million dollars and decided they would take the money and let Comcast continue to deny that they interfered with their customer's traffic. That also makes the summary inaccurate, not only did they at first deny they were blocking traffic, but the class action suit legal papers still deny that they were blocking traffic.
While tethering over Bluetooth DUN doesn't come out of the box on N900, it's only a few button presses away to install. Enable the maemo.org catalog and install, no root, jailbreaking, or bricking required.
I really hate to defend flash, but then again most of what he brought up isn't even flash specific, it applies just as well to javascript, take Google maps for example. It does mouse hover, left click, drag, and right click to name a few. Saying you can't do flash on a tablet touchscreen because it's missing the hover etc, will also eliminate some very useful non-flash sites as well.
The N900 microbe browser address most of those. By default in the N900 press and drag will scroll the page up, down, left, or right, it doesn't pass that on to javascript as a mouse drag. The N900 has a mouse over/hover mode, swipe from the left at nearly the bottom and a pointer appears where your finger/styless is. That works as long as you keep dragging your finger around without letting up. To click, or click and drag press or hold the shift key (or space). That's enough to get around in google maps, but in agreeing with the author it's slow and awkward, I mean just trying to hold the device with your left hand and sometimes press shift while pressing and moving with your right. It's almost enough to want to find a hard surface to set the device on.
As far as I know there isn't a right or middle click, if it's there I haven't discovered it. Though, they could easily assign another two keys for them. That makes some of the google map functions unreachable. So yes, a good part of what he mentioned is supported, it's just slow to do, but so is doing about anything on such a small device. If you are wanting to play a fast action game that needs three buttons and keyboard chording, use a full sized computer, but most of it is there if a N900 is all you have at the time.
I have apcupsd setup so when the battery is a 50% the system hibernates to disk. That way when the power comes back on they pick up where they left off and an extended power outage turns into a break instead of trying to remember what was gone on. I justify hibernating at 50% battery left to avoid deep discharging the battery and there's a few minutes of reserve capacity if I really need something before the power comes back on. The wake on lan feature is one thing I haven't implemented yet, and is needed for one of my systems that doesn't have a BIOS mode always turn on when it gets power.
Actually T-Mobile has two types of plans.
Even More with a 2 year contract and subsidized phone, which which is the historic US cell plan.
Even More Plus is the month to month no contract plan but you buy or bring your own cell phone and it's $10 cheaper per month than the Even More plan. Sounds like the plan to get if you buy an unlocked cell phone. I just wonder with the Nokia N900 going to backorder every other day it seems T-Mobile has had a run on SIM Cards, because right now it's grayed out.
3. the only one who will ever see his personal data is some senior sysadmin and some viral marketing salespeople at Google, and you can totally trust those guys.
Well, with that one I agree, but it'll be open source, so hopefully "internal trojans" can be spotted.
If an exploit is spotted who holds the keys to compile and install the fix? If it is in flash storage, and anyone can update it, then they can just as well get access to install their own programs. I wouldn't expect that to be the case as they can't very well ban harddrives and prevent anyone from installing USB mass storage and plug a drive in otherwise. If only Google has the encryption keys to load updates, then you are at Google's mercy to fix any problems even if you find them.
Then there's long term support. I have a useful computer older than Google, where do you think these computers will be in a decade and a half if you can't do your own upgrades and support? It's a 486 that I use everyday to play back some audio, it's well matched to the application. That was no where near the original application as it didn't come with a sound card or USB, but I could change the software and hardware and so its usefulness was far beyond the sales pitch. You won't get the kind of extendability from a closed and locked down computer
A web browser only computer will get by until you move and have to telnet or ssh into your router to configure it for your new location's user and password to get online.
Updating is a manual process. I run power and Ethernet to the trunk, then ssh/scp/rsync to remove old files and add new files. It might be two or three months before I run out of material and have to connect up for more, so I haven't had that much incentive to automate the process. Going Wifi would make the network setup easier, and automating the transfers would be handy, but even then there wouldn't be time in normal daily use to transfer the files. In leaving, I would be out of range before computer boots up and is ready. If it had a DC power supply with some timeout features it could work to keep the system on long enough when I got home to transfer the files before turning off again, that would be cool, but it's using an inverter, so ignition goes off, so does it.
It has worked out really nice over the years. Stuck in traffic? No problem, I have hours of the Dave Ramsey Show, Planetary Society Planetary Radio, etc.
It's not for everyone. I was curious about Morse code when I started, so that's the interface. It started with a three button mouse and no scroll wheel, you have to overload the commands somehow. On the plus side I can take notes on it while driving, on the down side I learned how fast it is, ie, you have to be really good to do it with any speed. The character rate is 15 words per minute, but add in some extra time between words, and it isn't nearly that fast.
I wrote the software so I have control of the mouse input and ogg vorbis has a library that provides the decoding and seeking I needed so it's no mp3 player. The original idea was to record talk radio at home, then play it back in the car skipping the uninteresting parts. I thought a game pad would be ideal, but started with a mouse because that's what I had and never got around to switching. The mouse has its advantages, it's wedged in place and right where my hand naturally falls, a game pad would have to be held. I'm mostly downloading and listening to podcasts these days.
It isn't mousing and driving that is a problem, or rather, it's not the mouse it's the display. You have two hands, one hand on the wheel, one on the mouse. If you think that's a problem, try driving a stick, same idea. You have two eyes, but if you are looking at the monitor, you aren't looking at the road.
That's why my in car entertainment (Linux computer in the trunk) has a mouse wedged between the driver's seat and center console for input (just buttons, it doesn't move), and an audio connection to the car radio. There's no display to take my eyes off the road.
If you are talking about the Open Source options, http://gpsdrive.de/ and tangoGPS for two. Naturally none of the above does me any good as I don't have a GPS receiver, but as I already have a computer in the trunk running Linux.
Android is a complete linux distribution that uses a different Window Manager and has a well defined consistent Object Oriented development platform.
Different window manager? It doesn't even run X-windows. Between not having X11 and not using glibc (trying building shared library for google android), means you can't even begin to compile an existing Unix GUI application for Android. That is the bigger gripe to me than if it shipped with all the normal programs I expect with a complete Linux distribution. With a Linux Standard Base distribution, download the source, compile, and run, not with Android.
iPhone: That clicky sequence you made just now, I hear that a couple dozen times a day, what is it?
user: That's my password.
iPhone: Thanks, let me just back that up for future reference.
user: <BLINK> "Where's the battery on this thing?"
Google is putting a stake in the ground for the first category, the open category, the one that resembles computers as we all know them. Apple and the carriers want to turn phones into consoles.
Until one of the categories requires that the end user has root access and the ability to reload all the software on the phone possibly modified by themselves, none of them are going to resemble the desktop computer. Until then it would be like buying a Packard Bell computer that was locked down to only allow loading Packard Bell's bloated branded version of windows, checked by BIOS, and when they go out of business you will never be able to upgrade. That's not open, that's lock down, I don't see the open category.
Even if there was a open category that allowed the user to control their software, there's still no X windows. Without X windows you can't run anything not designed for Android. What's the point if in the future phone gets to be as powerful as today's desktop if it can't run today's software?
Done, for Debian at least, Debian For Android Installer Released, so you can run all those programs that don't need GUI output. Wake me when they have X-windows as the native graphics system. Then I can run the same programs on the smart phone as the desktop, instead of rewriting them.
dict book
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
2: physical objects consisting of a number of pages bound together; "he used a large book as a doorstop" [syn: {book}, {volume}]
Ah, an object used to hold doors open, but I fail to see the entertainment value in a doorstop.
Nice setup to still be able to get to the computers from remote, but what hibernate doesn't do is keep you long lived network connections alive. More like X and ssh connections that I always have going. I have my systems to hibernate when the power is off and the UPS is lower than half power. Keeping the local programs up beats shutting down and loosing them, and there's a chance if all the systems go down and back up about the same time the network connections will stay up.
From, Intel IA-64 Architecture Software Manual page 1-1 "EPIC Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. A key feature of the IA-64 architecture is IA-32 instruction set compatibility."
So much for the key feature, they dropped the IA-32 part.
For the people wanting to speed up their boot time, look at your bootloader. How many seconds is the delay?
lilo, set timeout to 0, boots without a delay, but hold control when it goes to boot and you can still get to the lilo prompt.
grub, set timeout to 0 and it boots without a delay and no chance to get to the grub prompt.
I sent in one patch (subject: [PATCH] hold shift or control to disable timeout even timeout=0), to disable the timeout when control or shift are held, seems the 10 assembly instructions I added to the core was frowned upon as that routine wasn't called in the core, so they had half a point. If I get time I'll rework it again.
I was helping a relative with their new flat digital TV. As far as I could tell for that Digital TV, the only choice was autoscan, and it was a come back in an hour type operation. With the indoor amplified antenna it was only one station I think. It would be much faster to go to antennaweb.org, and put in the few physical channel available in their area. But now 9.1 isn't on the frequency assigned to channel 9 it's on 39, so I assume to reduce that confusion they didn't get them a choice and only allowed autoscan.
At home on Linux and the pcHDTV card autoscan didn't take all that long, but antennaweb.org said I was missing one station. After looking up the frequency, and telling it to tune to that, it locked. Autoscan is nice, but it assumes whoever did it got it completely right. It is also doesn't take additional information, like I know there is a channel here, tune to it, and I'll move the antenna around to see if I can pick anything up.
Tuning was one part of the problem. The other part was they thought their old TV had a better picture, they didn't realize they were still on analog, or how to switch it to digital or how to start an autoscan. Clearly there is a need for some more education. That or they just needed to read the manual.
AT&T is rolling out their U-Verse here. There's only two big problems, no static ip addresses plans, and they are pushing their TV service to the point that they won't let you get just internet service. I even asked their commercial side and they don't offer static ip addresses.
I think it is fiber to those new neighborhood nodes, and then DSL from there. The call center people I've talked to say it is fiber to the house, and my house was shown as wired up already. Given the lack of cable puller cut marks in the grass, I tend to not believe the call center people.
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I bought the N900 and have the Even More Plus plan, and it was $10 less per month for the voice only plan at the time. Unfortunately T-Mobile no longer lists the Even More Plus plan price on their web site, you have to go to one of their stores to find out. I think that's pretty clear that they are no longer promoting it.
You can start typing out the filename and it will narrow down the selection list. Or the date such as 02/17 is good enough for all pictures that day. But yes, it would have been nice in the picture attachment example to reverse sort by date, that's the most likely picture to be attached.
If you want a change like that here's the place to do it. http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU/ That they've already fixed the terminal enter problem was all it took for me to install it. Changelog here
Dig a little deeper. My latest graphics card has a DisplayPort connector and a built in sound card, so the only connection between the graphics card and the motherboard is PCIe. It's probably not on the GPU, but it is on the graphics card so they can combine the audio with the video as it goes out. It was also telling when PulseAudio decided it wanted to play audio to the graphics card even though that audio doesn't go anywhere, so I was less than pleased trying to figure out what happened to my sound. .0 vs .1
Note the
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Juniper [Radeon HD 5700 Series]
05:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Juniper HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5700 Series]
I've been concluding that the Nokia N900 has poor antenna performance. At least this is based on my brother and his wife sending blackberry text messages back and forth while in the same car while the N900 didn't even show a cell connection, and all three are T-Mobile. That and being at a friend's house who said some phones work, some don't there, they currently have cell phones that work, mine frequently said no cell tower there. So, I'm curious what any one else's experience with the N900 antenna performace is.
Comcast is getting off easy because the attorney's bringing the suit were bribed with $3 million dollars and decided they would take the money and let Comcast continue to deny that they interfered with their customer's traffic. That also makes the summary inaccurate, not only did they at first deny they were blocking traffic, but the class action suit legal papers still deny that they were blocking traffic.
While tethering over Bluetooth DUN doesn't come out of the box on N900, it's only a few button presses away to install. Enable the maemo.org catalog and install, no root, jailbreaking, or bricking required.
I really hate to defend flash, but then again most of what he brought up isn't even flash specific, it applies just as well to javascript, take Google maps for example. It does mouse hover, left click, drag, and right click to name a few. Saying you can't do flash on a tablet touchscreen because it's missing the hover etc, will also eliminate some very useful non-flash sites as well.
The N900 microbe browser address most of those. By default in the N900 press and drag will scroll the page up, down, left, or right, it doesn't pass that on to javascript as a mouse drag. The N900 has a mouse over/hover mode, swipe from the left at nearly the bottom and a pointer appears where your finger/styless is. That works as long as you keep dragging your finger around without letting up. To click, or click and drag press or hold the shift key (or space). That's enough to get around in google maps, but in agreeing with the author it's slow and awkward, I mean just trying to hold the device with your left hand and sometimes press shift while pressing and moving with your right. It's almost enough to want to find a hard surface to set the device on.
As far as I know there isn't a right or middle click, if it's there I haven't discovered it. Though, they could easily assign another two keys for them. That makes some of the google map functions unreachable. So yes, a good part of what he mentioned is supported, it's just slow to do, but so is doing about anything on such a small device. If you are wanting to play a fast action game that needs three buttons and keyboard chording, use a full sized computer, but most of it is there if a N900 is all you have at the time.
I have apcupsd setup so when the battery is a 50% the system hibernates to disk. That way when the power comes back on they pick up where they left off and an extended power outage turns into a break instead of trying to remember what was gone on. I justify hibernating at 50% battery left to avoid deep discharging the battery and there's a few minutes of reserve capacity if I really need something before the power comes back on. The wake on lan feature is one thing I haven't implemented yet, and is needed for one of my systems that doesn't have a BIOS mode always turn on when it gets power.
Actually T-Mobile has two types of plans.
Even More with a 2 year contract and subsidized phone, which which is the historic US cell plan.
Even More Plus is the month to month no contract plan but you buy or bring your own cell phone and it's $10 cheaper per month than the Even More plan. Sounds like the plan to get if you buy an unlocked cell phone. I just wonder with the Nokia N900 going to backorder every other day it seems T-Mobile has had a run on SIM Cards, because right now it's grayed out.
If an exploit is spotted who holds the keys to compile and install the fix? If it is in flash storage, and anyone can update it, then they can just as well get access to install their own programs. I wouldn't expect that to be the case as they can't very well ban harddrives and prevent anyone from installing USB mass storage and plug a drive in otherwise. If only Google has the encryption keys to load updates, then you are at Google's mercy to fix any problems even if you find them.
Then there's long term support. I have a useful computer older than Google, where do you think these computers will be in a decade and a half if you can't do your own upgrades and support? It's a 486 that I use everyday to play back some audio, it's well matched to the application. That was no where near the original application as it didn't come with a sound card or USB, but I could change the software and hardware and so its usefulness was far beyond the sales pitch. You won't get the kind of extendability from a closed and locked down computer
A web browser only computer will get by until you move and have to telnet or ssh into your router to configure it for your new location's user and password to get online.
Updating is a manual process. I run power and Ethernet to the trunk, then ssh/scp/rsync to remove old files and add new files. It might be two or three months before I run out of material and have to connect up for more, so I haven't had that much incentive to automate the process. Going Wifi would make the network setup easier, and automating the transfers would be handy, but even then there wouldn't be time in normal daily use to transfer the files. In leaving, I would be out of range before computer boots up and is ready. If it had a DC power supply with some timeout features it could work to keep the system on long enough when I got home to transfer the files before turning off again, that would be cool, but it's using an inverter, so ignition goes off, so does it.
It has worked out really nice over the years. Stuck in traffic? No problem, I have hours of the Dave Ramsey Show, Planetary Society Planetary Radio, etc.
It's not for everyone. I was curious about Morse code when I started, so that's the interface. It started with a three button mouse and no scroll wheel, you have to overload the commands somehow. On the plus side I can take notes on it while driving, on the down side I learned how fast it is, ie, you have to be really good to do it with any speed. The character rate is 15 words per minute, but add in some extra time between words, and it isn't nearly that fast.
I wrote the software so I have control of the mouse input and ogg vorbis has a library that provides the decoding and seeking I needed so it's no mp3 player. The original idea was to record talk radio at home, then play it back in the car skipping the uninteresting parts. I thought a game pad would be ideal, but started with a mouse because that's what I had and never got around to switching. The mouse has its advantages, it's wedged in place and right where my hand naturally falls, a game pad would have to be held. I'm mostly downloading and listening to podcasts these days.
It isn't mousing and driving that is a problem, or rather, it's not the mouse it's the display. You have two hands, one hand on the wheel, one on the mouse. If you think that's a problem, try driving a stick, same idea. You have two eyes, but if you are looking at the monitor, you aren't looking at the road.
That's why my in car entertainment (Linux computer in the trunk) has a mouse wedged between the driver's seat and center console for input (just buttons, it doesn't move), and an audio connection to the car radio. There's no display to take my eyes off the road.
One of my friends has DashDAQ GPS Navigation, and then there is that company called TomTom.
If you are talking about the Open Source options, http://gpsdrive.de/ and tangoGPS for two. Naturally none of the above does me any good as I don't have a GPS receiver, but as I already have a computer in the trunk running Linux.
They referenced TV output, PAL at least, maybe next time they'll put an HDMI port on it.
Different window manager? It doesn't even run X-windows. Between not having X11 and not using glibc (trying building shared library for google android), means you can't even begin to compile an existing Unix GUI application for Android. That is the bigger gripe to me than if it shipped with all the normal programs I expect with a complete Linux distribution. With a Linux Standard Base distribution, download the source, compile, and run, not with Android.
iPhone: That clicky sequence you made just now, I hear that a couple dozen times a day, what is it?
user: That's my password.
iPhone: Thanks, let me just back that up for future reference.
user: <BLINK> "Where's the battery on this thing?"
Can anyone find what the requirements actually say? This is the best I've found. What's the Difference Between Android and Google? And Why Does it Matter?
Until one of the categories requires that the end user has root access and the ability to reload all the software on the phone possibly modified by themselves, none of them are going to resemble the desktop computer. Until then it would be like buying a Packard Bell computer that was locked down to only allow loading Packard Bell's bloated branded version of windows, checked by BIOS, and when they go out of business you will never be able to upgrade. That's not open, that's lock down, I don't see the open category.
Even if there was a open category that allowed the user to control their software, there's still no X windows. Without X windows you can't run anything not designed for Android. What's the point if in the future phone gets to be as powerful as today's desktop if it can't run today's software?
Done, for Debian at least, Debian For Android Installer Released, so you can run all those programs that don't need GUI output. Wake me when they have X-windows as the native graphics system. Then I can run the same programs on the smart phone as the desktop, instead of rewriting them.
dict book
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
2: physical objects consisting of a number of pages bound together; "he used a large book as a doorstop" [syn: {book}, {volume}]
Ah, an object used to hold doors open, but I fail to see the entertainment value in a doorstop.
Nice setup to still be able to get to the computers from remote, but what hibernate doesn't do is keep you long lived network connections alive. More like X and ssh connections that I always have going. I have my systems to hibernate when the power is off and the UPS is lower than half power. Keeping the local programs up beats shutting down and loosing them, and there's a chance if all the systems go down and back up about the same time the network connections will stay up.
From, Intel IA-64 Architecture Software Manual page 1-1 "EPIC Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. A key feature of the IA-64 architecture is IA-32 instruction set compatibility."
So much for the key feature, they dropped the IA-32 part.
For the people wanting to speed up their boot time, look at your bootloader. How many seconds is the delay?
lilo, set timeout to 0, boots without a delay, but hold control when it goes to boot and you can still get to the lilo prompt.
grub, set timeout to 0 and it boots without a delay and no chance to get to the grub prompt.
I sent in one patch (subject: [PATCH] hold shift or control to disable timeout even timeout=0), to disable the timeout when control or shift are held, seems the 10 assembly instructions I added to the core was frowned upon as that routine wasn't called in the core, so they had half a point. If I get time I'll rework it again.
I was helping a relative with their new flat digital TV. As far as I could tell for that Digital TV, the only choice was autoscan, and it was a come back in an hour type operation. With the indoor amplified antenna it was only one station I think. It would be much faster to go to antennaweb.org, and put in the few physical channel available in their area. But now 9.1 isn't on the frequency assigned to channel 9 it's on 39, so I assume to reduce that confusion they didn't get them a choice and only allowed autoscan.
At home on Linux and the pcHDTV card autoscan didn't take all that long, but antennaweb.org said I was missing one station. After looking up the frequency, and telling it to tune to that, it locked. Autoscan is nice, but it assumes whoever did it got it completely right. It is also doesn't take additional information, like I know there is a channel here, tune to it, and I'll move the antenna around to see if I can pick anything up.
Tuning was one part of the problem. The other part was they thought their old TV had a better picture, they didn't realize they were still on analog, or how to switch it to digital or how to start an autoscan. Clearly there is a need for some more education. That or they just needed to read the manual.
AT&T is rolling out their U-Verse here. There's only two big problems, no static ip addresses plans, and they are pushing their TV service to the point that they won't let you get just internet service. I even asked their commercial side and they don't offer static ip addresses.
I think it is fiber to those new neighborhood nodes, and then DSL from there. The call center people I've talked to say it is fiber to the house, and my house was shown as wired up already. Given the lack of cable puller cut marks in the grass, I tend to not believe the call center people.