The Eyes of the Dragon is a good fantasy book for a 12 year old to read. Tried it again more recently, and it does not compare to other fantasy books, although it has its good moments. Stephen King, however writes excellent horror, and the Talisman books, as the man below says, are good. Yet to read the Dark Tower series, I hear that they are good though.
My wife is an avid fantasy reader, but also very picky. She likes Robin Hobb and many other authors, but didn't like the Stephen King one at all - thought it was weak.
The person who wrote "Chasm" deserves to be in my list. His books are great. I should look it up on Amazon, but I am a lazy arse. Probably another Stephen anyway. Yes, it is! Stephen Laws. Graham Masterton is a good author as well. But I am migrating towards Horror, not SciFi/Fantasy (although Horror is Fantasy, is it not?).
Stephen R. Donaldson will not be read in 50 years time as a popular 20th century author. Unless everyone is a manic depressive leper, that is.
To be read *by the general public* in 50 years time, a story has to stand the test of time, especially in the Sci Fi arena. Fantasy authors are 2 a dozen (thank god, 'cos I like fantasy - currently reading Mark Anthony's Keep of Fire, but got a lot of Robin Hobb books to trawl through as well).
And remember, these are authors who are alive and writing today. In the horror arena it is easy - Stephen King, Dean Koontz, etc. Fantasy... hmmm. Stephen Lawhead perhaps. Katherine Kerr maybe. I don't follow Sci Fi - Arthur C Clarke would be my choice there.
Basically, modern technology has made anyone with a good idea an author (erm, also some without a good idea, Pathless Way fans). So there are 50 books for every book 50 years ago. Which is good. But it makes choosing the timeless authors much harder...
It is fluff in the context of the fact that you can connect multiple Northbridges (with CPUs, memory, PCI-PCI bridge possibly) to a PCI bus, and the PCI bus will be fine.
The BIOS is located off an LPC device connected to the southbridge.
A modern PC is a subset of what a PC could be. As I said.
You can view a PC any way you like. But you can connect PPC computers on PCI cards to PCs, and they can access any resource on that PCI bus just like the host can. Because, it is simply another host on the PCI bus.
Hence, PCI backplanes work. PCI-PCI bridges are there so you can have more than 6 PCI slots!
You have to remember from a certain aspect, you can add a PCI card to a motherboard which made the motherboard the PCI slave.
PCI = PCI = PCI = CPU = PCI = PCI
I I I I
IDE CPU CPU CPU
I I I
USB PCIs PCIs
I I
IDE..
I
USB
I have left out memory controllers, northbridge, etc, and modern fancy chip interconnects because they are just fluff (no, not fluffers, that is another industry). In the above diagram, what is the host CPU? Is there actually such a thing as a host? The PCI bus is arguably the center of a modern PC, with CPUs and controllers hanging off of it.
Modern motherboards are just a restriction on what you can do in reality. Reality is a PCI backplane on a case, maybe with a couple of PCI-PCI bridges. You can then add anything into any PCI card that you want - normal PCI cards, or CPUs (NB, Memory, CPU, etc).
That is why you can configure these cards to use the 'host' IDE drive. It is just a device on every 'computer' within the case...
I can't post a diagram though, because I must use "fewer junk characters". Bloody lameness filter - affects the real users, the people it is meant to trap just work around it. Would you call this a "lame post"?
I forgot to add (5) Standard fixed OEM prices for Windows - no favouritism, and thus no pressure to not support other operating systems or other software by default. Dell would pay the same as JoeBlowPC for Windows.
People have to understand that a monopoly can be held back further by law that its potential competitors. When you say "Apple can include quicktime with its OS, so why can't Microsoft include Media Player?" this is because Apple is not a monopoly in overall computer sales.
Getting rid of cross-subsidisation within Microsoft will mean that the OS division will have to pay the applications and internet division to bundle their software, and a fair price will have to be paid as each division will effectively have to make a profit so as not to be doing more illegal activities. This will mean that Windows + IE + Media Player + video editor + word will have to be realistically priced for one, and that it will cost significantly more than Windows on its own.
"MS would not bundle an VM claiming to be a Java VM that was not conformant with the Java specification".
Meaning that MS sould bundle a VM called something else that just happened to run Java, but they wouldn't get a license to use the "Java" name. Unless they passed compliance tests at any rate. Now we have J#... and that is fine.
On topic - as far as I am concerned there are several things that need to be done: 1) full disclosure of Windows API, 2) full disclosure of Office file formats, 3) Ability to buy the MS OS without the bundled applications, 4) No cross-subsidisation within MS (i.e., apps cannot subsidised internet).
Whilst I appreciate that it wouldn't be possible for the 2.4 series kernels, this sounds more like an issue arriving from heavy integration into the kernel. If the VM was truly a modular piece of code, communicating with the rest of the kernel (FS manager, memory manager, etc) via a documented API, then choosing whatever VM to use would basically just be a choice of pointing at the relevant VM code that implements that API in the source code and using that.
I don't know what the performance issues of having it so modularised would be however. I think that as it is a compile time modularisation, not a run time modularisation that it shouldn't be that bad.
It is just getting the kernel into a state where this can be done. The same goes for SCSI, etc, which apparently need a huge rewrite. Maybe for kernel 3.0?
Bear in mind that I don't know much of what I am talking about except what seems to be reasonably sensible to me to do at a high level.
Why not make it a build option in the kernel (along with the preemption patches and the like). A single kernel is not going to satisfy every use of an OS - Server, Multimedia, Desktop, Games, etc. VM is one thing that can change OS functionality with regards for this.
So in a Linux Distro install it can ask you "Are you using this computer as a (a) server (b) Multimedia (c) Desktop (d) Games (e) Mixture, and then it can install an appropriate kernel for you with the appropriate VM and preemption patches. A multimedia computer would like the low latency preemption, for example...
The linux kernel has 5 main parts. There is no reason that each part cannot be modularised away in order to get alternative functionality depending on build options and the target environment.
Do you think that Windows 2000 DataCenter has the same VM system as Windows 2000 Professional? I severely doubt it. ANd I bet that MS' in-house kernel build tool will have VM type as a selectable option, as well as many other subsystems.
Re:and in the end it doesn't really matter
on
AMD And THG update
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, but there is another video conflicting with THG's "P4 graceful slowdown" video. In the new video (linked elsewhere on this page), the P4 turns off.
So, in the end, your computer's reliability depends only a little bit on the CPU's reliability, which in turn depends only a little bit on the reliability of the heatsink retaining mechanism. The motherboard, BIOS, and everything else counts as well. Which is pretty obvious. Sure, I can accept that THG burnt up an AMD CPU by using a motherboard that didn't support the new thermal diode, but their subsequent investigations (didn't ask AMD for a start) left a lot to be desired, and now it appears their P4 video isn't a sure fact either...
I don't see how this comment is redundant. There is supporting evidence here: http://www.hardtecs4u.com/reviews/2001/agp4x_e/
To Quote: The Pentium 4 Chipsets i850 & i845 only support 1.5 volt 4x AGP.
Older chipsets (e.g. VIA 693 and Intel BX) support 3.3 volts AGP 2x, however newer chipsets are downward compatible to 2x/4x (e.g. 815EP, 815EP B stepping and VIA 694X) and support 3.3 volts as well as 1.5 volts.
This does not apply to the Pentium 4 chipsets because the i850 und i845 only support 1.5 volts graphic boards (regardless of 2x or 4x). Therefore the 3.3 volts 2x VGA graphic boards cannot be installed in a Pentium 4 system any longer.
The graphic board as well as the motherboard will be destroyed after installing a 3.3 volt graphic board. EPoX grants no guarantee in these cases of user's own faults. You find a corresponding hint to the 1.5 volts graphic boards on the pages 1-5 of the P4 user's manuals
This sound pretty serious to me. Modern cards like the Kyro II run at 3.3V!
Re:and in the end it doesn't really matter
on
AMD And THG update
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· Score: 1
Except that the P4 also shutdowns when the heatsink is taken off! THG is at odds with other videos *again*. So there is data loss.
Luckily, servers are usially in racks. Hence the heatsink is on top of the CPU and motherboard. So if the retention clips broke then (less reason to as well), the heatsink would remain on the chipset.
Look here: http://www.hardtecs4u.com/reviews/2001/agp4x_e/
A good reason not to get an Intel based motherboard! "The graphic board as well as the motherboard will be destroyed after installing a 3.3 volt graphic board"...
Personally, if I had a Nokia communicator, I would use it on my lap as a tiny-computer, and use handfree for the mobile aspect. Now if oonly the phone had a little spindle inside of it for the handfree wire to automatically retract inside the phone when not in use....
What - a bad heatsink retention mechanism on the socket or a badly fitted heatsink in the first place? Because heatsinks falling off happen once in a blue moon when you are transmogrified into a vole and are the subject of a ritual sacrifice.
Is this equivalent to the i845/i850 problem where placing certain video cards in the AGP slot of some motherboards will burn out the motherboard? This will happen a lot more often than a heatsink falling off. Vans Hardware has an article up at the moment about how a Kyro II is not supported by i845 and burnt out the Shuttle motherboard.
and in the end it doesn't really matter
on
AMD And THG update
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Basically, the XP in combination with all currently available motherboards will kill itself if a disaster happens (the heatsink falling off of a CPU happens very rarely). AMD responded and designed a circuit so that the CPU will shut itself down if it gets too hot, causing data loss. In this rare case, data loss isn't an issue.
In the more common case of the CPU fan failing, the CPU will heat up more slowly. Hence the other protection mechanisms in the CPU will be used, and the user will get a chance to save their data.
However, AMD should have designed the safety circuit they have shown off in the article INTO the actual CPU itself, so it can save itself. And it should save itself by basically clocking itself down to 100MHz or slower, so that data loss does not occur and the user can save their data. Hopefully this will be implemented in a future revision of the CPU.
However, the instances of CPU heatsinks falling off are extremely rare, and probably attributable to either a poor initial fitting of the heatsink, or a bad socket with a weakened retention mechanism. In a tower case, the heatsink would probably fall onto the graphics card or spring onto the memory and damage these anyway...
Folk, its a telephone, for christ's sake. I wish that these marketing drones would eat a piece of the clue pie and realize that just becasue they can add a stupid feature does not mean that they must add that stupid feature.
Agreed. Maybe the telcos should start reselling the idea of 3G without the word "phone" in there. Mobile Communications possibly. Mobile Multimedia... but they will still have to find people who need that. In 10 years time we will probably all be using 3G networks because compelling applications will have appeared by that time - requiring extensible OS devices and devices you can download apps onto.
Have you ever tried "typing" using the numeric keypad of a phone? Its not worth the trouble.
Heh, I've seen teenagers that can type on a mobile phone quicker than they can probably type on a normal keyboard. They can send messages without looking at the phone (e.g., in exams when the phone is in their pocket, etc).
One of the popular mobile phones in this country is just a two-way pager device from Motorola with a built-in keyboard. A device designed for SMS basically. Small as well.
Forget about wireless internet, email, MP3 playing, etc, etc. Improve the phone so that it doesn't sound like I'm talking into a tin can. Please.
Yep. Make it thinner, smaller, higher resolution display, easier interface, longer battery life, better sound quality. This is what the mobile phone companies were doing in the 90's.
Agreed. I don't care. I have a Motorola Triband phone in the UK (so I can use it in the US in supported areas, except I have never been to the US, so that was a waste of time) and it does what I want it to do, is a reasonable size (would like it to be shorter though), and does not have those willy mobile phone games on it.
4 lines with maybe 25 characters each... nothing particularly special.
That is an implementation problem. America and Europe are not technology hotbeds to be honest. In Japan they designed phones that have large colour screens and the like for their 3G networks. 160x160x16bit colour or better. Over here we get stuck with the standard 96x64x1bit phone screen. Apart from the Ericcson R380, which has a proper screen for a mobile phone, and does what I want a phone/mobile contacts device should do very well.
I don't have a burning desire to check my e-mail from my mobile phone...
I wouldn't mind SSH on a mobile phone. Oh, the Nokia Communicator! Shame that is a 2.5G device, but I bet it is being reengineered for the 3G world. That is a decent PDA with keyboard and integrated phone capabilities.
Most every mobile provider offers quick messaging, and several of them DO offer e-mail to the phone.
I can even send emails from the phone, using One2One in the UK. My phone is 2 years old. It doesn't do WAP. The emails are short - basically an SMS message sent to an SMS-email gateway. But it works. I have used it once. In two years.
In the end, I want a smaller phone. With a higher-resolution screen, possibly greyscale as well, but no need for colour. A manner of putting my contacts on it, and my calendar, and possibly a couple of games for when I am stuck on the train without a book. Heh, ebooks as well. I don't need mp3. I don't need video. I want a usable interface. I don't need things which I need to make expensive calls on to use. I think I have just described the new Handspring devices...
You could define your own subset of XML or ASN.1 for in-house data transmission. The problem comes with all this new fangled "B2B" connections and stuff, where common, standard formats are damn useful.
Basically, if you, and only you will be needing to transfer the data, then do it in any damn way you want (tar czf data.tar.gz data ; scp data.tar.gz user@host: etc ). If you are transferring the data to third parties however, use a standard format as much as possible.
Hopefully your B2B transaction will not be a 1TB database (hmmm, spammer email list sales?:) ) transaction. In that case however, you would probably spend some time getting the data to them in another manner, so it isn't relevant there. Yet.
XML has been said to reinvent ASN.1 notation, but in a more readable format. ASN.1 is said to be a lot more compact than XML (I only have used it in SNMP MIB definitions, so I can't comment on size issues). XML is definitely a lot more human readable - great for the debugging stage of writing XML apps and DTDs...
But a lot of effort has gone into XML, and we can afford the extra overhead now, and it is standard and widely available for most languages and platforms. It isn't time to throw that away. I would use XML for all now application development, however the benefits of migrating old applications and their datatypes to XML is marginal - why fix something that isn't broken?
So you could argue that Bluetooth is better because it is designed to have a smaller range (~10m), hence it will not interfere on a wider scale, whereas 802.11b will (~100m)?
Ignore for the time being the fact that Bluetooth has been shown to work at 40m ranges, because I am sure that 802.11b (what is the catch name for this?) has been proven to work at 200m ranges or something similar.
Please note that I don't care which way, except that I don't want to have to allocate IP addresses to mice/keyboard/scanners/etc. On the other hand, the Bluetooth protocol looks like someone found a book on protocols and wanted to mush them all together into one great protocol that uses everything at some point...
So in the end, using 2.4GHz for all these different things is a bit of a crap idea? Hence 802.11a moving to 5GHz to get some fresh air... (and extra bandwidth, etc).
Modern chipsets include 2 or 3 USB controllers, and have 2 or 3 ports for each controller.
e.g., SiS735: 2 controller, 3 ports / controller = 6 ports, total bandwidth 3MBps
However some motherboards actually have an integrated USB hub - was it the ASUS A7V that had this as an option - you could have 7 USB ports off that one (Two controllers in the chipset, 2 ports / controller, one port went to a 4 port hub).
The "big science" projects are the obvious target of Grid Computing; but there the grid is only useful for research institutions and R&D labs of corporations.
I also wonder if the oft-cited electricity analogy breaks down. Consumers and businesses pay for having electricity on tap - and they don't have their own power generators onsite. However, many people (and certainly businesses) have computer resources on location - these will get more powerful, so by the time The Grid starts becoming more ubiquitious, why would they have any need to use it?
However, IBM seem to think it's the next biggest thing to happen to modern-day computing, so I'm obviously missing something here...!
The monitor and keyboard would have USB ports on them so you could plug other stuff into them, etc, etc. But it hasn't really happened.
Yes, keyboards with 2 USB ports on them are available everywhere, and for not much money. I have my mouse plugged into my keyboard. You can also go the Microsoft way and pay more for the keyboard and mouse with the same functionality (like I did).
But I agree, USB has not done much for getting rid of cables. My mouse does not have a 2 ft cable because it can assume it is plugged into the keyboard, it has a 5ft+ cable so it can be plugged into a computer. That is why PCs now have tonnes of USB ports in them.
Monitors with USB support seem to cost a lot more than without USB support though. There is no good reason for this in my opinion...
To be honest, I don't want to have batteries in my mouse or keyboard, and prefer the cable. For a PDA - it needs to be recharged at some point anyway, so recharge it via USB or Firewire and sync at that time. Scanners and printers are fixed, they don't need wireless capabilities. So the only need for wireless at all is for people with laptops who want to pay $200 for a wireless LAN card instead of $40. Just so they can surf the net in meetings or whatever...
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My wife is an avid fantasy reader, but also very picky. She likes Robin Hobb and many other authors, but didn't like the Stephen King one at all - thought it was weak.
The person who wrote "Chasm" deserves to be in my list. His books are great. I should look it up on Amazon, but I am a lazy arse. Probably another Stephen anyway. Yes, it is! Stephen Laws. Graham Masterton is a good author as well. But I am migrating towards Horror, not SciFi/Fantasy (although Horror is Fantasy, is it not?).
And I usually like those fantasy books with 1000+ miles of travelling in them... :)
To be read *by the general public* in 50 years time, a story has to stand the test of time, especially in the Sci Fi arena. Fantasy authors are 2 a dozen (thank god, 'cos I like fantasy - currently reading Mark Anthony's Keep of Fire, but got a lot of Robin Hobb books to trawl through as well).
And remember, these are authors who are alive and writing today. In the horror arena it is easy - Stephen King, Dean Koontz, etc. Fantasy ... hmmm. Stephen Lawhead perhaps. Katherine Kerr maybe. I don't follow Sci Fi - Arthur C Clarke would be my choice there.
Basically, modern technology has made anyone with a good idea an author (erm, also some without a good idea, Pathless Way fans). So there are 50 books for every book 50 years ago. Which is good. But it makes choosing the timeless authors much harder...
The BIOS is located off an LPC device connected to the southbridge.
A modern PC is a subset of what a PC could be. As I said.
You can view a PC any way you like. But you can connect PPC computers on PCI cards to PCs, and they can access any resource on that PCI bus just like the host can. Because, it is simply another host on the PCI bus.
Hence, PCI backplanes work. PCI-PCI bridges are there so you can have more than 6 PCI slots!
PCI = PCI = PCI = CPU = PCI = PCI ..
I I I I
IDE CPU CPU CPU
I I I
USB PCIs PCIs
I I
IDE
I
USB
I have left out memory controllers, northbridge, etc, and modern fancy chip interconnects because they are just fluff (no, not fluffers, that is another industry). In the above diagram, what is the host CPU? Is there actually such a thing as a host? The PCI bus is arguably the center of a modern PC, with CPUs and controllers hanging off of it.
Modern motherboards are just a restriction on what you can do in reality. Reality is a PCI backplane on a case, maybe with a couple of PCI-PCI bridges. You can then add anything into any PCI card that you want - normal PCI cards, or CPUs (NB, Memory, CPU, etc).
That is why you can configure these cards to use the 'host' IDE drive. It is just a device on every 'computer' within the case...
I can't post a diagram though, because I must use "fewer junk characters". Bloody lameness filter - affects the real users, the people it is meant to trap just work around it. Would you call this a "lame post"?
People have to understand that a monopoly can be held back further by law that its potential competitors. When you say "Apple can include quicktime with its OS, so why can't Microsoft include Media Player?" this is because Apple is not a monopoly in overall computer sales.
Getting rid of cross-subsidisation within Microsoft will mean that the OS division will have to pay the applications and internet division to bundle their software, and a fair price will have to be paid as each division will effectively have to make a profit so as not to be doing more illegal activities. This will mean that Windows + IE + Media Player + video editor + word will have to be realistically priced for one, and that it will cost significantly more than Windows on its own.
"MS would not bundle an VM claiming to be a Java VM that was not conformant with the Java specification".
Meaning that MS sould bundle a VM called something else that just happened to run Java, but they wouldn't get a license to use the "Java" name. Unless they passed compliance tests at any rate. Now we have J#... and that is fine.
On topic - as far as I am concerned there are several things that need to be done: 1) full disclosure of Windows API, 2) full disclosure of Office file formats, 3) Ability to buy the MS OS without the bundled applications, 4) No cross-subsidisation within MS (i.e., apps cannot subsidised internet).
I don't know what the performance issues of having it so modularised would be however. I think that as it is a compile time modularisation, not a run time modularisation that it shouldn't be that bad.
It is just getting the kernel into a state where this can be done. The same goes for SCSI, etc, which apparently need a huge rewrite. Maybe for kernel 3.0?
Bear in mind that I don't know much of what I am talking about except what seems to be reasonably sensible to me to do at a high level.
So in a Linux Distro install it can ask you "Are you using this computer as a (a) server (b) Multimedia (c) Desktop (d) Games (e) Mixture, and then it can install an appropriate kernel for you with the appropriate VM and preemption patches. A multimedia computer would like the low latency preemption, for example...
The linux kernel has 5 main parts. There is no reason that each part cannot be modularised away in order to get alternative functionality depending on build options and the target environment.
Do you think that Windows 2000 DataCenter has the same VM system as Windows 2000 Professional? I severely doubt it. ANd I bet that MS' in-house kernel build tool will have VM type as a selectable option, as well as many other subsystems.
So, in the end, your computer's reliability depends only a little bit on the CPU's reliability, which in turn depends only a little bit on the reliability of the heatsink retaining mechanism. The motherboard, BIOS, and everything else counts as well. Which is pretty obvious. Sure, I can accept that THG burnt up an AMD CPU by using a motherboard that didn't support the new thermal diode, but their subsequent investigations (didn't ask AMD for a start) left a lot to be desired, and now it appears their P4 video isn't a sure fact either...
To Quote: The Pentium 4 Chipsets i850 & i845 only support 1.5 volt 4x AGP.
Older chipsets (e.g. VIA 693 and Intel BX) support 3.3 volts AGP 2x, however newer chipsets are downward compatible to 2x/4x (e.g. 815EP, 815EP B stepping and VIA 694X) and support 3.3 volts as well as 1.5 volts.
This does not apply to the Pentium 4 chipsets because the i850 und i845 only support 1.5 volts graphic boards (regardless of 2x or 4x). Therefore the 3.3 volts 2x VGA graphic boards cannot be installed in a Pentium 4 system any longer.
The graphic board as well as the motherboard will be destroyed after installing a 3.3 volt graphic board. EPoX grants no guarantee in these cases of user's own faults. You find a corresponding hint to the 1.5 volts graphic boards on the pages 1-5 of the P4 user's manuals
This sound pretty serious to me. Modern cards like the Kyro II run at 3.3V!
Luckily, servers are usially in racks. Hence the heatsink is on top of the CPU and motherboard. So if the retention clips broke then (less reason to as well), the heatsink would remain on the chipset.
Look here: http://www.hardtecs4u.com/reviews/2001/agp4x_e/ A good reason not to get an Intel based motherboard! "The graphic board as well as the motherboard will be destroyed after installing a 3.3 volt graphic board"...
Personally, if I had a Nokia communicator, I would use it on my lap as a tiny-computer, and use handfree for the mobile aspect. Now if oonly the phone had a little spindle inside of it for the handfree wire to automatically retract inside the phone when not in use....
What - a bad heatsink retention mechanism on the socket or a badly fitted heatsink in the first place? Because heatsinks falling off happen once in a blue moon when you are transmogrified into a vole and are the subject of a ritual sacrifice.
Is this equivalent to the i845/i850 problem where placing certain video cards in the AGP slot of some motherboards will burn out the motherboard? This will happen a lot more often than a heatsink falling off. Vans Hardware has an article up at the moment about how a Kyro II is not supported by i845 and burnt out the Shuttle motherboard.
In the more common case of the CPU fan failing, the CPU will heat up more slowly. Hence the other protection mechanisms in the CPU will be used, and the user will get a chance to save their data.
However, AMD should have designed the safety circuit they have shown off in the article INTO the actual CPU itself, so it can save itself. And it should save itself by basically clocking itself down to 100MHz or slower, so that data loss does not occur and the user can save their data. Hopefully this will be implemented in a future revision of the CPU.
However, the instances of CPU heatsinks falling off are extremely rare, and probably attributable to either a poor initial fitting of the heatsink, or a bad socket with a weakened retention mechanism. In a tower case, the heatsink would probably fall onto the graphics card or spring onto the memory and damage these anyway...
Agreed. Maybe the telcos should start reselling the idea of 3G without the word "phone" in there. Mobile Communications possibly. Mobile Multimedia... but they will still have to find people who need that. In 10 years time we will probably all be using 3G networks because compelling applications will have appeared by that time - requiring extensible OS devices and devices you can download apps onto.
Have you ever tried "typing" using the numeric keypad of a phone? Its not worth the trouble.
Heh, I've seen teenagers that can type on a mobile phone quicker than they can probably type on a normal keyboard. They can send messages without looking at the phone (e.g., in exams when the phone is in their pocket, etc).
One of the popular mobile phones in this country is just a two-way pager device from Motorola with a built-in keyboard. A device designed for SMS basically. Small as well.
Forget about wireless internet, email, MP3 playing, etc, etc. Improve the phone so that it doesn't sound like I'm talking into a tin can. Please.
Yep. Make it thinner, smaller, higher resolution display, easier interface, longer battery life, better sound quality. This is what the mobile phone companies were doing in the 90's.
Agreed. I don't care. I have a Motorola Triband phone in the UK (so I can use it in the US in supported areas, except I have never been to the US, so that was a waste of time) and it does what I want it to do, is a reasonable size (would like it to be shorter though), and does not have those willy mobile phone games on it.
4 lines with maybe 25 characters each... nothing particularly special.
That is an implementation problem. America and Europe are not technology hotbeds to be honest. In Japan they designed phones that have large colour screens and the like for their 3G networks. 160x160x16bit colour or better. Over here we get stuck with the standard 96x64x1bit phone screen. Apart from the Ericcson R380, which has a proper screen for a mobile phone, and does what I want a phone/mobile contacts device should do very well.
I don't have a burning desire to check my e-mail from my mobile phone...
I wouldn't mind SSH on a mobile phone. Oh, the Nokia Communicator! Shame that is a 2.5G device, but I bet it is being reengineered for the 3G world. That is a decent PDA with keyboard and integrated phone capabilities.
Most every mobile provider offers quick messaging, and several of them DO offer e-mail to the phone.
I can even send emails from the phone, using One2One in the UK. My phone is 2 years old. It doesn't do WAP. The emails are short - basically an SMS message sent to an SMS-email gateway. But it works. I have used it once. In two years.
In the end, I want a smaller phone. With a higher-resolution screen, possibly greyscale as well, but no need for colour. A manner of putting my contacts on it, and my calendar, and possibly a couple of games for when I am stuck on the train without a book. Heh, ebooks as well. I don't need mp3. I don't need video. I want a usable interface. I don't need things which I need to make expensive calls on to use. I think I have just described the new Handspring devices...
Basically, if you, and only you will be needing to transfer the data, then do it in any damn way you want (tar czf data.tar.gz data ; scp data.tar.gz user@host: etc ). If you are transferring the data to third parties however, use a standard format as much as possible.
Hopefully your B2B transaction will not be a 1TB database (hmmm, spammer email list sales? :) ) transaction. In that case however, you would probably spend some time getting the data to them in another manner, so it isn't relevant there. Yet.
But a lot of effort has gone into XML, and we can afford the extra overhead now, and it is standard and widely available for most languages and platforms. It isn't time to throw that away. I would use XML for all now application development, however the benefits of migrating old applications and their datatypes to XML is marginal - why fix something that isn't broken?
Ignore for the time being the fact that Bluetooth has been shown to work at 40m ranges, because I am sure that 802.11b (what is the catch name for this?) has been proven to work at 200m ranges or something similar.
Please note that I don't care which way, except that I don't want to have to allocate IP addresses to mice/keyboard/scanners/etc. On the other hand, the Bluetooth protocol looks like someone found a book on protocols and wanted to mush them all together into one great protocol that uses everything at some point...
So in the end, using 2.4GHz for all these different things is a bit of a crap idea? Hence 802.11a moving to 5GHz to get some fresh air... (and extra bandwidth, etc).
e.g., KT266A: 3 controllers, 2 ports / controller = 6 ports, total bandwidth 4.5MBps
However some motherboards actually have an integrated USB hub - was it the ASUS A7V that had this as an option - you could have 7 USB ports off that one (Two controllers in the chipset, 2 ports / controller, one port went to a 4 port hub).
1) CPU burns out internally, then everything stops
2) Nice metal case around computer
You can set fire to chocolate if you use it as a heatsink though - look at the HardOCP archives.
I also wonder if the oft-cited electricity analogy breaks down. Consumers and businesses pay for having electricity on tap - and they don't have their own power generators onsite. However, many people (and certainly businesses) have computer resources on location - these will get more powerful, so by the time The Grid starts becoming more ubiquitious, why would they have any need to use it?
However, IBM seem to think it's the next biggest thing to happen to modern-day computing, so I'm obviously missing something here...!
Yes, keyboards with 2 USB ports on them are available everywhere, and for not much money. I have my mouse plugged into my keyboard. You can also go the Microsoft way and pay more for the keyboard and mouse with the same functionality (like I did). But I agree, USB has not done much for getting rid of cables. My mouse does not have a 2 ft cable because it can assume it is plugged into the keyboard, it has a 5ft+ cable so it can be plugged into a computer. That is why PCs now have tonnes of USB ports in them.
Monitors with USB support seem to cost a lot more than without USB support though. There is no good reason for this in my opinion...
To be honest, I don't want to have batteries in my mouse or keyboard, and prefer the cable. For a PDA - it needs to be recharged at some point anyway, so recharge it via USB or Firewire and sync at that time. Scanners and printers are fixed, they don't need wireless capabilities. So the only need for wireless at all is for people with laptops who want to pay $200 for a wireless LAN card instead of $40. Just so they can surf the net in meetings or whatever...