They are not drivers for the ATI Card itself, they are drivers for the ATI CHIPSET.
ATI makes cards with its own Chipset but they also let other companies (such as Sapphire) makes their own boards with ATI GPU's, and they are supposed to use the same drivers.
Incase anyone is wondering, Sapphires cards are way cheaper and sometimes (in the 8500's case) they outperform ati's own cards.
The few advantages that VoIP has do not outweigh the reliability of the regular telephone. Not once in my lifetime do I ever remember my phone not working. The internet on the other hand, goes down often enough.
I don't think VoIP is anywhere near becoming mainstream for consumers but I can see it becoming very large in large corporations that constantly do long distance between offices or just want to save on network/phone infrastructure in the building.
when you buy a radio do you get the schematics for how it was built and with what parts?
When you buy a painting does it come with an instructional video starring a hippy with an afro on how to recreate it?
I don't care how you guys think, not everyone else is into open source. You think source should be open, alot of developers like to keep their work secret.
Does David Copperfield show you how he does his tricks? I don't think so.
To say that everything should be open source is absolutely ridiculous. Why should any company be forced to go the extra mile and clean up their source and make it available and ship it and support it when it gives no extra income, or 99.9% of the population doens't give a rats ass about it.?
Apart from the known issues with IE, outlook, and IIS, what is insecure in Windows?
You forget that IE is windows. Its built in. Its integrated. Use IE or not, its there and its vulnerable.
most people buy it just for the "gee-whiz" factor of it. Or they just want to be james bond (I am sure sales of gadgets go up after a james bond movie).
I have never bought a PDA but I have received 2 in hand me downs from my dad. I had a Palm IIIx a few years ago when I was still in high school but rarely found any use for it. I tried using it while I worked a technician during the summer but it wasn't so useful that I would bother carrying it arround with me everywhere.
A few months ago I got a Sony CLIE and its awesome, its smaller then my old IIIx and its easier to use with one hand thanks to the jog wheel. Anyways now that I am in college I use it everyday. I have my workschedule in it, class schedule, assignment due dates, test dates, etc. I don't really use it for phone numbers or anything since they are all in my cell phone, but they are all in my palm also.
I don't like inputting data into it, its much faster to jot down on piece of paper and then input it later in Outlook and synchronize.
I do use the memo pad in my palm to jot down something when I don't have pen and paper with me though.
I would be interested in seeing how a viewer only PDA would work. Viewer only as in no input on the PDA itself, only on your computer or via an optional thumb keyboard or fold out keyboard.
So that I can keep my input device in my bag or briefcase and my viewer in my pocket.
If they did not have a microsoft employee on the board I wouldn't think that they are just trying to get a good deal.
Why on earth would they have someone from microsoft there? They are obviously just going to spit out pre written marketing crap. They sure as hell won't say "ok so OSS is free, more secure and more stable.. but come on plz chose us!!". More like "Here are the top 10 reasons to switch to XP: Chat with friends and family.!!..."
This would be like you being on a panel of people to decide if you should get a raise or not.
"Man, if I only had a bunch of virtual desktops so I could have an uncluttered screen."
For the past year nVidia drivers for Windows XP lets you have virtual desktops.
"Wow, what I wouldn't give for grep right now."
I don't know if any of you ever bother to look at the Windows 2000/XP Command prompt but there are similar commands.
"Hell, why is it that the registry is so incomprehensible? I wish I had a manpage or a README describing this crap."
I use this thing called google.
"Stupid spam. I'd love to have procmail running here. Ah well, I guess I'll wait until I reboot to Linux to read my non-web email."
After a few weeks of tweaking my Outlook filters don't let any spam come by.
"It's so great that I've got tabs in Mozilla. Why can't I have them on my windows too like I do in Linux?"
I guess my tabs in the Win32 version of Mozilla have been imaginary.
It doesn't look like much. A drab, gray piece of plastic, about five inches long and three inches wide. A black-and-white screen, three inches by two inches, showing a few simple snippets of text. And yet this nondescript little computer may hold the key to bringing information technology to Third World countries.
The device is known as the Simputer. I recently got a chance to evaluate one of the preproduction models that have been put together by the Simputer Trust, a nonprofit organization based in Bangalore, India. This year Encore Software, a Bangalore company that licensed the technology from the trust (not to be confused with the California software company of the same name), plans to sell thousands of the handheld devices, capping an effort that began in 1998.
Simputer stands for " simple, inexpensive, multilingual computer." It was designed to meet the needs of rural villagers in countries such as India, Malaysia, Nigeria and Indonesia. Many of these potential users are illiterate and have never even seen a computer before. Loaded with some elementary software, the Simputer will sell for about $250 (or $300 for a model with a color screen). That's a sizable chunk of the yearly per capita income in many developing nations. But the Simputer's proponents argue that a single device could enable an entire village to access the Internet, perform transactions, keep track of agricultural prices and educate its children. Says Shreyas Patel, a consultant to Encore who has been setting up pilot tests of the Simputer in East Africa: " This will bring computing power to isolated communities. It can have an enormous impact."
The Simputer was conceived by a team of computer scientists at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. To make the machine cheap enough to sell in poor regions, the developers kept the hardware requirements to a minimum. The Simputer's microprocessor is an Intel Strong-ARM chip, which is known for its low power consumption. The device will have as much as 64 megabytes of random-access memory and 32 megabytes of flash memory, as well as a modem that can connect to a telephone line. And the computer runs on the Linux operating system, which is available free of charge.
Like the Palm, the Visor and other personal digital assistants (PDAs), the Simputer has a touch-sensitive screen. You use a stylus to tap on icons and to input information. The device doesn't have a keyboard or handwriting-recognition software, but in certain applications the user can select letters or numbers from a software-generated keyboard that pops up on the screen. In addition, the Simputer has a program called Tapatap that displays a three-by-three grid; you can input a letter or number by tapping on the squares of the grid in a particular sequence. Although this method is easier than hunting and pecking on a software keyboard, it is still somewhat laborious, so the Simputer's applications have been carefully designed to minimize the need for tapping in text.
But how will illiterate people be able to use the Simputer if they can't read the directions on the screen? There are two answers. One is the simplicity of the device's interface: because each display page shows only a few possible commands, even illiterate users should be able to learn by trial and error the purpose of the icons and buttons on each page. The second answer is software that can turn text into speech. The Simputer holds a database of phonemes-- basic linguistic sounds-- and from these it can generate an audio representation of any word as long as it is spelled phonetically and in characters from the Roman alphabet. It will work for various Indian languages, including Hindi, Kannada and Tamil, allowing the Simputer to read the text aloud on its tiny built-in speakers. The Simputer Trust says the software will be made available in other languages as well, depending on where the device is used.
I was unable to test this function on my preproduction model, which lacked the text-to-speech program. I can confirm, however, that the Simputer is remarkably easy to use. Its screen is free of the annoying graphical clutter that most of us are accustomed to seeing on our PCs. Below the screen are seven small buttons, one an on-off switch and the rest for use with certain embedded applications such as the Tapatap program. I found that I did not need to bother with the buttons very often, because the design of the software made it easier to use the stylus.
The Simputer also has a slot for " smart" cards, a feature that its makers see as crucial. Because the device lacks a hard drive, smart cards will act as the device's portable storage units. In this way, many people will be able to share a single Simputer without having to share their private information with one another. The cards will cost between $1 and $3 apiece and will hold four to eight kilobytes of data-- not very much by commercial standards but enough to carry some basic information for each user. " We envisage that a village might club together to buy one," notes Shashank Garg, vice president for product development at Encore. A farmer in India, for example, could use the Simputer to find out the latest prices for cotton, allowing him to strike a better deal when selling his crop. The next day one of his neighbors could use the same device to examine government property records, eliminating the need to make a difficult journey to the city.
The Simputer Trust believes the range of applications will prove compelling. But the device does have some drawbacks. It's slow, taking about 15 seconds to boot up and often needing several seconds to digest the information that the user inputs. And the Simputer sometimes crashes when it is left idle for a while, making it necessary to reboot the machine. Also, powering the device may be a daunting task in areas that do not have a reliable electricity supply. Although the Simputer can run on three AAA batteries, it can operate for only a few hours before draining them. And in the developing world, even batteries are expensive and hard to come by.
Fortunately, Simputer users may be able to draw on muscle power instead. A decade ago English inventor Trevor G. Baylis created the Freeplay radio, which is powered by turning a crank that winds up a spring inside the machine. As the spring unwinds, it turns a shaft that runs a small electric generator. Freeplay Energy Group, the company that now sells these radios, recently produced a similar charger that can power a mobile phone. In a demonstration this year some energetic hand-cranking yielded enough energy to run an Apple laptop for a few minutes. With a few adaptations, devices such as these could charge up the Simputer.
But the Simputer may not be the best tool for bringing information to the world's poorest nations. Because most people in developing countries have no access to fixed telephone lines, many mobile-phone operators are setting up networks in those areas. Mobile phones are cheaper than the Simputer, and the most advanced models can send text messages and access the Internet. Communities choosing between the devices may find a mobile phone more immediately attractive for keeping in touch with the outside world and conducting business.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle for the Simputer, though, is cost. Will people in developing countries be able to justify the expenditure of $250 on a device that may be helpful but is not essential? When so many communities in the Third World still lack clean drinking water and adequate medical facilities, are computers really a priority?
Posters note: I am karma capped
Deepsace nine had the most intense battle scenes ever in any tv show. Those big war scenes with those crazy camera angles was awesome!
One thing that I loved was when they simulated a camera being attached to the hull of the defiant. That looked really awesome when they were flying in circles and shooting people.
You are right that the first few seasons were like a soap opera but every few episodes it got to be more then that. I suggest you watch the last 3 seasons of DS9, you'll realize its one of the best sci-fi shows ever.
I bank online with TD Canadtrust daily with Mozilla and it worked fine until tonight when I went through the process of ordering new cheques online. It involved alot of silly java applets and just didn't make mozilla too happy.
It seems that apple has always had a strong connection with schools until I started working at a college. Apple barely offers any deals to colleges. Even if you go for a student discount (and spend about an hour filling out the forms) you'll only get about $50 off a new macintosh (too bad they don't tell you that BEFORE you fill out the forms).
How is apple supposed to expect support from the developer community or the student community when no one is being trained on using macs in school (other then graphics design people)?
The only people I know who know anything about macs are the graphic design people who will probably never own a mac because they will be supplied one from their employer.
Apple should really try and get the techies into macs at school. For example, a local college here offers a 3 year "Computer Systems Technician" Diploma and not once do any of their students touch a macintosh.
Graphic designers won't be developing software for your macs Apple.. clue in.
"Though it may be a while before this becomes part of our daily lives"
If ever, probably never.
Holographic projection systems will never become part of our daily lives until its actually a 3d image being projected into the air that EVERYONE can see, not just one person with two camera looking at him.
but at this point, this thing is basicly a laptop without any output or input devices. It's nothing spectacular. A mini pc would be good to keep arround if you are a technician and you just need a portable machine to plug a hard drive in to recover files (or something similar, you get my drift) but this is just not practical.
I am hoping shuttle makes a semi-mini pc since the mini pc is a little too small for me (I like to add pci cards). Or have they already?
There was never any doubt. America laws are applicable to you if you sell/ship to america. If you have a building there, you are under their jurisdiction. There are no clear cut rules for internation e-commerce but thats the way its been working so far. You deal with americans, you deal with their laws.
Slashdot Mirror
This review won't change Sci-Fi fans minds, most of us will see anything sci-fi related (unless it starts rap stars or dicaprio).
Just look at us, we watched Star Trek Voyager for years even though it was terrible.
They are not drivers for the ATI Card itself, they are drivers for the ATI CHIPSET.
ATI makes cards with its own Chipset but they also let other companies (such as Sapphire) makes their own boards with ATI GPU's, and they are supposed to use the same drivers.
Incase anyone is wondering, Sapphires cards are way cheaper and sometimes (in the 8500's case) they outperform ati's own cards.
The few advantages that VoIP has do not outweigh the reliability of the regular telephone. Not once in my lifetime do I ever remember my phone not working. The internet on the other hand, goes down often enough.
I don't think VoIP is anywhere near becoming mainstream for consumers but I can see it becoming very large in large corporations that constantly do long distance between offices or just want to save on network/phone infrastructure in the building.
when you buy a radio do you get the schematics for how it was built and with what parts?
When you buy a painting does it come with an instructional video starring a hippy with an afro on how to recreate it?
I don't care how you guys think, not everyone else is into open source. You think source should be open, alot of developers like to keep their work secret.
Does David Copperfield show you how he does his tricks? I don't think so.
To say that everything should be open source is absolutely ridiculous. Why should any company be forced to go the extra mile and clean up their source and make it available and ship it and support it when it gives no extra income, or 99.9% of the population doens't give a rats ass about it.?
Apart from the known issues with IE, outlook, and IIS, what is insecure in Windows? You forget that IE is windows. Its built in. Its integrated. Use IE or not, its there and its vulnerable.
most people buy it just for the "gee-whiz" factor of it. Or they just want to be james bond (I am sure sales of gadgets go up after a james bond movie).
I have never bought a PDA but I have received 2 in hand me downs from my dad. I had a Palm IIIx a few years ago when I was still in high school but rarely found any use for it. I tried using it while I worked a technician during the summer but it wasn't so useful that I would bother carrying it arround with me everywhere.
A few months ago I got a Sony CLIE and its awesome, its smaller then my old IIIx and its easier to use with one hand thanks to the jog wheel. Anyways now that I am in college I use it everyday. I have my workschedule in it, class schedule, assignment due dates, test dates, etc. I don't really use it for phone numbers or anything since they are all in my cell phone, but they are all in my palm also.
I don't like inputting data into it, its much faster to jot down on piece of paper and then input it later in Outlook and synchronize.
I do use the memo pad in my palm to jot down something when I don't have pen and paper with me though.
I would be interested in seeing how a viewer only PDA would work. Viewer only as in no input on the PDA itself, only on your computer or via an optional thumb keyboard or fold out keyboard.
So that I can keep my input device in my bag or briefcase and my viewer in my pocket.
do you mean 4 months old?
have Ellen Feiss on the panel?
This same person?
mod parent up!
This isn't redundant, its different.
I can just picture the Microsoft Reprensting reading off the back of the Windows XP box, or even worst that girl who did the fake Mac-2-XP switch.
If they did not have a microsoft employee on the board I wouldn't think that they are just trying to get a good deal.
Why on earth would they have someone from microsoft there? They are obviously just going to spit out pre written marketing crap. They sure as hell won't say "ok so OSS is free, more secure and more stable.. but come on plz chose us!!". More like "Here are the top 10 reasons to switch to XP: Chat with friends and family.!!..."
This would be like you being on a panel of people to decide if you should get a raise or not.
"Man, if I only had a bunch of virtual desktops so I could have an uncluttered screen."
For the past year nVidia drivers for Windows XP lets you have virtual desktops.
"Wow, what I wouldn't give for grep right now."
I don't know if any of you ever bother to look at the Windows 2000/XP Command prompt but there are similar commands.
"Hell, why is it that the registry is so incomprehensible? I wish I had a manpage or a README describing this crap."
I use this thing called google.
"Stupid spam. I'd love to have procmail running here. Ah well, I guess I'll wait until I reboot to Linux to read my non-web email."
After a few weeks of tweaking my Outlook filters don't let any spam come by.
"It's so great that I've got tabs in Mozilla. Why can't I have them on my windows too like I do in Linux?"
I guess my tabs in the Win32 version of Mozilla have been imaginary.
Images used in document: Indian man with child holding Simputer, Close-up Picture of Simputer
Images Courtesy of ENCORE SOFTWARE LTD
Article Mirror
The article:
It doesn't look like much. A drab, gray piece of plastic, about five inches long and three inches wide. A black-and-white screen, three inches by two inches, showing a few simple snippets of text. And yet this nondescript little computer may hold the key to bringing information technology to Third World countries.
The device is known as the Simputer. I recently got a chance to evaluate one of the preproduction models that have been put together by the Simputer Trust, a nonprofit organization based in Bangalore, India. This year Encore Software, a Bangalore company that licensed the technology from the trust (not to be confused with the California software company of the same name), plans to sell thousands of the handheld devices, capping an effort that began in 1998.
Simputer stands for " simple, inexpensive, multilingual computer." It was designed to meet the needs of rural villagers in countries such as India, Malaysia, Nigeria and Indonesia. Many of these potential users are illiterate and have never even seen a computer before. Loaded with some elementary software, the Simputer will sell for about $250 (or $300 for a model with a color screen). That's a sizable chunk of the yearly per capita income in many developing nations. But the Simputer's proponents argue that a single device could enable an entire village to access the Internet, perform transactions, keep track of agricultural prices and educate its children. Says Shreyas Patel, a consultant to Encore who has been setting up pilot tests of the Simputer in East Africa: " This will bring computing power to isolated communities. It can have an enormous impact."
The Simputer was conceived by a team of computer scientists at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. To make the machine cheap enough to sell in poor regions, the developers kept the hardware requirements to a minimum. The Simputer's microprocessor is an Intel Strong-ARM chip, which is known for its low power consumption. The device will have as much as 64 megabytes of random-access memory and 32 megabytes of flash memory, as well as a modem that can connect to a telephone line. And the computer runs on the Linux operating system, which is available free of charge.
Like the Palm, the Visor and other personal digital assistants (PDAs), the Simputer has a touch-sensitive screen. You use a stylus to tap on icons and to input information. The device doesn't have a keyboard or handwriting-recognition software, but in certain applications the user can select letters or numbers from a software-generated keyboard that pops up on the screen. In addition, the Simputer has a program called Tapatap that displays a three-by-three grid; you can input a letter or number by tapping on the squares of the grid in a particular sequence. Although this method is easier than hunting and pecking on a software keyboard, it is still somewhat laborious, so the Simputer's applications have been carefully designed to minimize the need for tapping in text.
But how will illiterate people be able to use the Simputer if they can't read the directions on the screen? There are two answers. One is the simplicity of the device's interface: because each display page shows only a few possible commands, even illiterate users should be able to learn by trial and error the purpose of the icons and buttons on each page. The second answer is software that can turn text into speech. The Simputer holds a database of phonemes-- basic linguistic sounds-- and from these it can generate an audio representation of any word as long as it is spelled phonetically and in characters from the Roman alphabet. It will work for various Indian languages, including Hindi, Kannada and Tamil, allowing the Simputer to read the text aloud on its tiny built-in speakers. The Simputer Trust says the software will be made available in other languages as well, depending on where the device is used.
I was unable to test this function on my preproduction model, which lacked the text-to-speech program. I can confirm, however, that the Simputer is remarkably easy to use. Its screen is free of the annoying graphical clutter that most of us are accustomed to seeing on our PCs. Below the screen are seven small buttons, one an on-off switch and the rest for use with certain embedded applications such as the Tapatap program. I found that I did not need to bother with the buttons very often, because the design of the software made it easier to use the stylus.
The Simputer also has a slot for " smart" cards, a feature that its makers see as crucial. Because the device lacks a hard drive, smart cards will act as the device's portable storage units. In this way, many people will be able to share a single Simputer without having to share their private information with one another. The cards will cost between $1 and $3 apiece and will hold four to eight kilobytes of data-- not very much by commercial standards but enough to carry some basic information for each user. " We envisage that a village might club together to buy one," notes Shashank Garg, vice president for product development at Encore. A farmer in India, for example, could use the Simputer to find out the latest prices for cotton, allowing him to strike a better deal when selling his crop. The next day one of his neighbors could use the same device to examine government property records, eliminating the need to make a difficult journey to the city.
The Simputer Trust believes the range of applications will prove compelling. But the device does have some drawbacks. It's slow, taking about 15 seconds to boot up and often needing several seconds to digest the information that the user inputs. And the Simputer sometimes crashes when it is left idle for a while, making it necessary to reboot the machine. Also, powering the device may be a daunting task in areas that do not have a reliable electricity supply. Although the Simputer can run on three AAA batteries, it can operate for only a few hours before draining them. And in the developing world, even batteries are expensive and hard to come by.
Fortunately, Simputer users may be able to draw on muscle power instead. A decade ago English inventor Trevor G. Baylis created the Freeplay radio, which is powered by turning a crank that winds up a spring inside the machine. As the spring unwinds, it turns a shaft that runs a small electric generator. Freeplay Energy Group, the company that now sells these radios, recently produced a similar charger that can power a mobile phone. In a demonstration this year some energetic hand-cranking yielded enough energy to run an Apple laptop for a few minutes. With a few adaptations, devices such as these could charge up the Simputer.
But the Simputer may not be the best tool for bringing information to the world's poorest nations. Because most people in developing countries have no access to fixed telephone lines, many mobile-phone operators are setting up networks in those areas. Mobile phones are cheaper than the Simputer, and the most advanced models can send text messages and access the Internet. Communities choosing between the devices may find a mobile phone more immediately attractive for keeping in touch with the outside world and conducting business.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle for the Simputer, though, is cost. Will people in developing countries be able to justify the expenditure of $250 on a device that may be helpful but is not essential? When so many communities in the Third World still lack clean drinking water and adequate medical facilities, are computers really a priority? Posters note: I am karma capped
Deepsace nine had the most intense battle scenes ever in any tv show. Those big war scenes with those crazy camera angles was awesome!
One thing that I loved was when they simulated a camera being attached to the hull of the defiant. That looked really awesome when they were flying in circles and shooting people.
You are right that the first few seasons were like a soap opera but every few episodes it got to be more then that. I suggest you watch the last 3 seasons of DS9, you'll realize its one of the best sci-fi shows ever.
TCO stands for Total Cost of Ownership.
Its also coming out for the PS2, Gamecube and PC.
nah she was probably just delivering some coffee and muffins.
difference from then and now is that we have desktop computers to look at porn.
Come on, you know that operator with the thick glasses is just waiting for the porn to come out.
a time when computer geeks looked respectable.
I bank online with TD Canadtrust daily with Mozilla and it worked fine until tonight when I went through the process of ordering new cheques online. It involved alot of silly java applets and just didn't make mozilla too happy.
It seems that apple has always had a strong connection with schools until I started working at a college. Apple barely offers any deals to colleges. Even if you go for a student discount (and spend about an hour filling out the forms) you'll only get about $50 off a new macintosh (too bad they don't tell you that BEFORE you fill out the forms).
How is apple supposed to expect support from the developer community or the student community when no one is being trained on using macs in school (other then graphics design people)?
The only people I know who know anything about macs are the graphic design people who will probably never own a mac because they will be supplied one from their employer.
Apple should really try and get the techies into macs at school. For example, a local college here offers a 3 year "Computer Systems Technician" Diploma and not once do any of their students touch a macintosh.
Graphic designers won't be developing software for your macs Apple.. clue in.
and release some source code.
Not that theres anything in there that is very secret.
"Though it may be a while before this becomes part of our daily lives"
If ever, probably never.
Holographic projection systems will never become part of our daily lives until its actually a 3d image being projected into the air that EVERYONE can see, not just one person with two camera looking at him.
but at this point, this thing is basicly a laptop without any output or input devices. It's nothing spectacular. A mini pc would be good to keep arround if you are a technician and you just need a portable machine to plug a hard drive in to recover files (or something similar, you get my drift) but this is just not practical.
I am hoping shuttle makes a semi-mini pc since the mini pc is a little too small for me (I like to add pci cards). Or have they already?
There was never any doubt. America laws are applicable to you if you sell/ship to america. If you have a building there, you are under their jurisdiction. There are no clear cut rules for internation e-commerce but thats the way its been working so far. You deal with americans, you deal with their laws.