My wife wants a player that can do timed radio recordings so she can listen to shows at her convenience. The iRiver iFP range seemed to be one of the few to do this, but has been phased out. However, in part II of the list is the iRiver N11 which looks like the successor to the iFP. I may still go for one of the old models if I can find it at a good price. I can't bring myself to pay over £100 for a flash player these days, even if it does do OGG.
Weren't they called 'luggables' or 'transportables'?
I used a couple. One was a TI suitcase-sized box with a tiny CRT, several ISA slots and enough metal shielding to build a small tank. I'm sure I saw Windows 1.0 on that box.
The other was a Compaq 'lunchbox' with an orange plasma screen, 5.25" floppy and a couple of card slots. I seem to remember some similar IBMs that kept breaking down. I liked that form-factor as it let you have an expandable PC in an easily carryable form. I guess things like the Shuttle are almost as transportable, but still consist of too many separate parts.
I can see that people will argue that laptops are just as expandable via USB or PC card. Relatively cheap these days too. 15 years ago things were different.
Maybe some bright spark will just build a PC into the back of an LCD screen!
Until about 4 months ago I was playing with Knoppix and haviong a few issues with things like sound. I then tried Hoary (5.04) and things got better. I still needed to tweak some files to get it all working.
Application install has been very easy. Everything I wanted just works, apart from Wine, but I may have been expecting too much of it. Some hardware is unsupported (webcam totally, printer partially), but I don't think any other distro does better on those.
I went from a IIIx to a Zire 71 about 3 years ago and didn't regret buying either. The IIIx was a great little organiser, but the Zire took me into the world of multimedia. I've played a few short movies on it, but it gets much more use as an audio player using Aeroplayer. Just plug in an SD card and you are sorted for several hours of music before it needs a recharge.
The IIIx still sort of works, but may have developed a dodgy joint as it keeps losing power.
The Zire does have some issues with reliability due to the ribbon cable between the two parts and mine has been back once. The camera is crap, but handy if you don't have anything else with you. Wifi might be nice, but there are few available options and they tend to mean giving up the memory card.
The Palm software is good at what it does and hardly ever crashes. It's usually 3rd-party apps that cause problems. I need to work out which one is causing search to crash. The GUI is limited, but it's not meant to be a full PC. That will cost you more and mean compromises in size and battery life.
I would consider the TX as an upgrade, but don't really need it. There's just too few cases where I need internet when out and about. If the Zire died I would think about it.
I enjoyed it on C4 too. Most people have heard of the equation, but have no idea what it means. This programme helps to rectify that, but will probably be preaching to the converted.
Desperately slow and uses a lot of CPU. I imported all my feeds from Bloglines via an OPML file, but I'll be sticking with BL for now. It just works, even if it's interface is not the cleverest.
For many years I have had a Yahoo mail account and used their My Yahoo portal as a home page, simply because it gave me some of the news, weather, stocks and cartoons I liked. The email has only been a backup ever since I got my domain. Yahoo groups is still useful for some non-technical areas.
Now Google is muscling in with Gmail and the personal home page. There's not quite enough content to be my main home page, but it has some nice features. I've played with Gmail, but it's just another reserve system for now.
I like the idea of having everything in one place, but for now I'll get by cherry-picking the best services for each purpose.
My thoughts exactly. Our culture is already far too disposable. Just multiply everything you throw away by a few million to try and imagine the scale of the problem.
Recycling is good, but reducing is much better.
Anyway, with 24Mb broadband coming now, won't it be quicker to download a film than to go to the shops and buy a disposable DVD? I remember reading years ago that the bit rate you got by going to the video shop and carrying a tape home was much better than you could get electronically at the time. Now it's changing over.
Are we not trying to control something which is not ment to be controled?
Meant by whom? A hurricane is the result of a set of conditions, not as an intentional act. Some people (and insurance companies) would consider this an 'act of god'.
If we do act to stop/prevent hurricanes it will have consequences, but I don't know if those will be good or bad.
I blame the butterflies.
My sympathies are with those who are suffering there and anywhere else in the world.
I think my first MP3 was downloaded and played on my Amiga. David Bowie released a remix that you could download. That took ages on my old modem. Then I seem to remember I had to do some sort of conversion on the file that took another hour or two. I'm not sure what stage my 1200 was at then. Probably either a 40MHz 030 or 33MHz 040.
I miss the Amiga (yep I sold it), but Linux has brought back some of the fun.
Gizmo is going to have an uphill battle. Skype regularly has over 3 million users on-line and basically, it works. I use it on Windows and Linux. The Linux version even has the extra feature of grouping contacts.
My employer is already deploying USB Skype phones to most people to save on international calls. When we expand into extra office space they intend to use wi-fi and Skype to avoid having to cable it.
It's only been around for a short time, but Skype has really established itself. I know it's not an open standard, but the average user doesn't care. I'd prefer to use an open standard (as I do with Jabber), but it can be hard to persuade others to do so.
One of the scientists was standing in front of what looked like glass panels etched with some form of program code. There were even some brief close-ups, but I couldn't work out what it was supposed to be.
Any ideas what it was and where can I get a printer that does that? Glass lasts longer than paper!
I saw it too and it was frightening stuff. I'll admit to not reading much scientific literature, so I don't have much background on this, but it looked like they had found a real affect.
If it turns out that our ideas about the scale of glbal warming were wrong, then we may be in serious trouble.
For those who say 'drive your SUV more to cancel out global warming', that does no good.
a. because your SUV should have a catalytic converter that stops the particles which cause global dimming
b. because global dimming has it's own problems. It may have caused the African famines in the 80s
I don't think we can go on like we do now, especially if the 2nd and 3rd world wants to have it all too.
BTW I drive 400 miles a week getting to work, so I'm not helping that much, but I do try to compensate in other areas. I have kids and I want them to have a decent world to live in.
I had a IIIx for about 4 years before I bought my Zire 71. Both cost about the same, but the Zire is a much more capable device (camera, MP3, video). Eventually you have to move on if you want the new fun stuff.
Mind you, if someone ported the emulator to the old Palms I'd be very impressed.
I just got a Palm Zire 71 (187UKP at Heathrow). Out of the box it can't play MP3 as you need an SD card. (I can't see why you couldn't use the built in 16MB to hold a few tunes to try it out).
I bought a 256MB SD card and now I can carry about 5 hours of music in my pocket. I find that enough for the few long journeys I make. What I really like is that the same gadget is also my PDA and a basic camera. You can even play movies on it.
This way you get a much bigger screen than any MP3 player and possibly easier music organisation. Using Aeroplayer you can even have skins if that floats your boat.
Some people rave about CF, but SD is getting cheaper all the time and the cards are tiny.
I believe Jaguar already have a voice activated radio/telephone in their latest models.
Must be some clever programming to distinguish the driver from the radio sound. What if the presenter says 'and now for something louder'?
I used a voice recognition system at Texas Instruments in about 1984. It cam on a full length ISA card which slotted neatly into the 40lb 'portable' computer I was using (5" colour CRT). I felt pretty foolish talking to the computer in an office.
The uh-oh reminds me of the definition of an ohnosecond as the time between making a mistake and realising you'd done it.
A British politician/civil servant and his wife were staying in a hotel in Russia. They suspected they might be bugged, so they just spoke the whole time in their native language, Welsh. Not totally secure, but I suspect there were not too many Welsh speakers in the USSR.
I'm in the Uk, but our government has their own views on encryption.
Anyway, I think your analogy is a little flawed. A closer one would be that the government will allow you to lock your doors, but they want a key as well. Would you trust them with that?
The driving laws do save a lot of lives and those who break them can and should be prosecuted. That's a different issue.
Any incidences of terrorists using locked doors to kill people?
I'm suprised you're the first to mention this. I wrote my own Ciphersabre program as an exercise in learning Java. I don't have the program to hand, otherwise I might have responded in code.
The whole algorithm can be written in a few lines of text. It's a very easy thing to carry around and practically impossible to stop.
I've just looked at the web site and apparently there is a possible attack on the RC4 cipher, but as it requires access to hundreds of thousands of messages it may not be a realistic threat.
Check out http://www.longnow.org/ for information on preserving information for thousands of years. Even if your CDs do last, will anyone be able to read them in the future? Who even has a 5.25" floppy drive these days?
I was getting a lot of spam via my Bigfoot address which I do tend to give out, but it now diverts to my web account at www.msgto.com which checks for 'human' senders by sending them a picture where they have to pick on a given word. You can also manually add people to your acceptable list. I use their POP3 facility to pick up my mail in Outlook and I don't see any spam there now. I just check the spam folder once in a while in case a mailing list ends up there and just delete the spam.
Well said. Mind you, cutting the population by that much so quickly sounds a bit optimistic.
The current rate of extinction is a symptom of what we're doing to the planet. Has anyone worked out how long before there's no 'natural' landscape left? The UK probably has very little natural land as it's nearly all been farmed or deforested for house and ship building.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife wants a player that can do timed radio recordings so she can listen to shows at her convenience. The iRiver iFP range seemed to be one of the few to do this, but has been phased out. However, in part II of the list is the iRiver N11 which looks like the successor to the iFP. I may still go for one of the old models if I can find it at a good price. I can't bring myself to pay over £100 for a flash player these days, even if it does do OGG.
Weren't they called 'luggables' or 'transportables'?
I used a couple. One was a TI suitcase-sized box with a tiny CRT, several ISA slots and enough metal shielding to build a small tank. I'm sure I saw Windows 1.0 on that box.
The other was a Compaq 'lunchbox' with an orange plasma screen, 5.25" floppy and a couple of card slots. I seem to remember some similar IBMs that kept breaking down. I liked that form-factor as it let you have an expandable PC in an easily carryable form. I guess things like the Shuttle are almost as transportable, but still consist of too many separate parts.
I can see that people will argue that laptops are just as expandable via USB or PC card. Relatively cheap these days too. 15 years ago things were different.
Maybe some bright spark will just build a PC into the back of an LCD screen!
Until about 4 months ago I was playing with Knoppix and haviong a few issues with things like sound. I then tried Hoary (5.04) and things got better. I still needed to tweak some files to get it all working.
Application install has been very easy. Everything I wanted just works, apart from Wine, but I may have been expecting too much of it. Some hardware is unsupported (webcam totally, printer partially), but I don't think any other distro does better on those.
I'll be upgrading to Breezy in the next week.
I went from a IIIx to a Zire 71 about 3 years ago and didn't regret buying either. The IIIx was a great little organiser, but the Zire took me into the world of multimedia. I've played a few short movies on it, but it gets much more use as an audio player using Aeroplayer. Just plug in an SD card and you are sorted for several hours of music before it needs a recharge.
The IIIx still sort of works, but may have developed a dodgy joint as it keeps losing power.
The Zire does have some issues with reliability due to the ribbon cable between the two parts and mine has been back once. The camera is crap, but handy if you don't have anything else with you. Wifi might be nice, but there are few available options and they tend to mean giving up the memory card.
The Palm software is good at what it does and hardly ever crashes. It's usually 3rd-party apps that cause problems. I need to work out which one is causing search to crash. The GUI is limited, but it's not meant to be a full PC. That will cost you more and mean compromises in size and battery life.
I would consider the TX as an upgrade, but don't really need it. There's just too few cases where I need internet when out and about. If the Zire died I would think about it.
I enjoyed it on C4 too. Most people have heard of the equation, but have no idea what it means. This programme helps to rectify that, but will probably be preaching to the converted.
Desperately slow and uses a lot of CPU. I imported all my feeds from Bloglines via an OPML file, but I'll be sticking with BL for now. It just works, even if it's interface is not the cleverest.
For many years I have had a Yahoo mail account and used their My Yahoo portal as a home page, simply because it gave me some of the news, weather, stocks and cartoons I liked. The email has only been a backup ever since I got my domain. Yahoo groups is still useful for some non-technical areas.
Now Google is muscling in with Gmail and the personal home page. There's not quite enough content to be my main home page, but it has some nice features. I've played with Gmail, but it's just another reserve system for now.
I like the idea of having everything in one place, but for now I'll get by cherry-picking the best services for each purpose.
My thoughts exactly. Our culture is already far too disposable. Just multiply everything you throw away by a few million to try and imagine the scale of the problem.
Recycling is good, but reducing is much better.
Anyway, with 24Mb broadband coming now, won't it be quicker to download a film than to go to the shops and buy a disposable DVD? I remember reading years ago that the bit rate you got by going to the video shop and carrying a tape home was much better than you could get electronically at the time. Now it's changing over.
Meant by whom? A hurricane is the result of a set of conditions, not as an intentional act. Some people (and insurance companies) would consider this an 'act of god'.
If we do act to stop/prevent hurricanes it will have consequences, but I don't know if those will be good or bad.
I blame the butterflies.
My sympathies are with those who are suffering there and anywhere else in the world.
I think my first MP3 was downloaded and played on my Amiga. David Bowie released a remix that you could download. That took ages on my old modem. Then I seem to remember I had to do some sort of conversion on the file that took another hour or two. I'm not sure what stage my 1200 was at then. Probably either a 40MHz 030 or 33MHz 040.
I miss the Amiga (yep I sold it), but Linux has brought back some of the fun.
Gizmo is going to have an uphill battle. Skype regularly has over 3 million users on-line and basically, it works. I use it on Windows and Linux. The Linux version even has the extra feature of grouping contacts.
My employer is already deploying USB Skype phones to most people to save on international calls. When we expand into extra office space they intend to use wi-fi and Skype to avoid having to cable it.
It's only been around for a short time, but Skype has really established itself. I know it's not an open standard, but the average user doesn't care. I'd prefer to use an open standard (as I do with Jabber), but it can be hard to persuade others to do so.
I think that must be what they sell as the Petasite
t e.html
http://www.cybernetics.com/tape_backup/dtf/petasi
Some TV companies use them to store their video.
But there's quite a difference between storing that much on disk rather than tape.
Give it a few years and we'll have that much storage in whatever we use as home PCs then.
One of the scientists was standing in front of what looked like glass panels etched with some form of program code. There were even some brief close-ups, but I couldn't work out what it was supposed to be.
Any ideas what it was and where can I get a printer that does that? Glass lasts longer than paper!
I saw it too and it was frightening stuff. I'll admit to not reading much scientific literature, so I don't have much background on this, but it looked like they had found a real affect.
If it turns out that our ideas about the scale of glbal warming were wrong, then we may be in serious trouble.
For those who say 'drive your SUV more to cancel out global warming', that does no good.
a. because your SUV should have a catalytic converter that stops the particles which cause global dimming
b. because global dimming has it's own problems. It may have caused the African famines in the 80s
I don't think we can go on like we do now, especially if the 2nd and 3rd world wants to have it all too.
BTW I drive 400 miles a week getting to work, so I'm not helping that much, but I do try to compensate in other areas. I have kids and I want them to have a decent world to live in.
My Aikido dojo included several IT people. It's as much mental as physical and great if you're not really into fighting.
--
Steve
I had a IIIx for about 4 years before I bought my Zire 71. Both cost about the same, but the Zire is a much more capable device (camera, MP3, video). Eventually you have to move on if you want the new fun stuff.
Mind you, if someone ported the emulator to the old Palms I'd be very impressed.
Steve (not a suit, just a normal geek)
I just got a Palm Zire 71 (187UKP at Heathrow). Out of the box it can't play MP3 as you need an SD card. (I can't see why you couldn't use the built in 16MB to hold a few tunes to try it out).
I bought a 256MB SD card and now I can carry about 5 hours of music in my pocket. I find that enough for the few long journeys I make. What I really like is that the same gadget is also my PDA and a basic camera. You can even play movies on it.
This way you get a much bigger screen than any MP3 player and possibly easier music organisation. Using Aeroplayer you can even have skins if that floats your boat.
Some people rave about CF, but SD is getting cheaper all the time and the cards are tiny.
Doh! I was just about to post something in that vein.
In W2K if you use
/f:on
cmd
then Ctrl-F completes file names and Ctrl-D does files and paths. Very useful for paths with spaces as it does the quotes for you.
Steve
I believe Jaguar already have a voice activated radio/telephone in their latest models.
Must be some clever programming to distinguish the driver from the radio sound. What if the presenter says 'and now for something louder'?
I used a voice recognition system at Texas Instruments in about 1984. It cam on a full length ISA card which slotted neatly into the 40lb 'portable' computer I was using (5" colour CRT). I felt pretty foolish talking to the computer in an office.
The uh-oh reminds me of the definition of an ohnosecond as the time between making a mistake and realising you'd done it.
Steve
This reminded me of something I read ages ago.
A British politician/civil servant and his wife were staying in a hotel in Russia. They suspected they might be bugged, so they just spoke the whole time in their native language, Welsh. Not totally secure, but I suspect there were not too many Welsh speakers in the USSR.
Steve
I'm in the Uk, but our government has their own views on encryption.
Anyway, I think your analogy is a little flawed. A closer one would be that the government will allow you to lock your doors, but they want a key as well. Would you trust them with that?
The driving laws do save a lot of lives and those who break them can and should be prosecuted. That's a different issue.
Any incidences of terrorists using locked doors to kill people?
My 2p
Steve
I'm suprised you're the first to mention this. I wrote my own Ciphersabre program as an exercise in learning Java. I don't have the program to hand, otherwise I might have responded in code.
The whole algorithm can be written in a few lines of text. It's a very easy thing to carry around and practically impossible to stop.
I've just looked at the web site and apparently there is a possible attack on the RC4 cipher, but as it requires access to hundreds of thousands of messages it may not be a realistic threat.
Check out http://www.longnow.org/ for information on preserving information for thousands of years. Even if your CDs do last, will anyone be able to read them in the future? Who even has a 5.25" floppy drive these days?
Steve
I was getting a lot of spam via my Bigfoot address which I do tend to give out, but it now diverts to my web account at www.msgto.com which checks for 'human' senders by sending them a picture where they have to pick on a given word. You can also manually add people to your acceptable list. I use their POP3 facility to pick up my mail in Outlook and I don't see any spam there now. I just check the spam folder once in a while in case a mailing list ends up there and just delete the spam.
msgto is still in beta, but so far looks good.
Well said. Mind you, cutting the population by that much so quickly sounds a bit optimistic.
The current rate of extinction is a symptom of what we're doing to the planet. Has anyone worked out how long before there's no 'natural' landscape left? The UK probably has very little natural land as it's nearly all been farmed or deforested for house and ship building.