I have the SL-5500, and I won't be upgrading it to another Zaurus.
First, it's big--even PocketPC machines have gotten much smaller. Sharp sells a Zaurus in Japan that's much smaller (no keyboard, no CF), and they should bring that to the US.
Second, while they have managed to create some decent apps in it, the use of Qt/Embedded causes problems. Qt/Embedded eats up lots of memory (much more than X11+XLib+FLTK) and it makes porting software to the Zaurus a lot of work. Also, it has some annoying bugs, for example, locking up the GUI with focus problems. I thought I could live with Qt/Embedded, but I can't. Having a standard Linux command line environment on the handheld has turned out to be great, and I want the same convenience for the GUI, not some oddball hack.
The main reason for getting a Linux PDA for me is to have something that it's easy to port software to, and something I can carry with me, and the Zaurus just falls short on both accounts. I think the iPaq running Handhelds.org or a Yopy may be a better choice.
As I understand it, the reason why Xscale doesn't perform as well on code not compiled for it is that some instructions have been eliminated and are now emulated, including one instruction commonly used during procedure call. If code is compiled using those instructions, it will be pretty slow. Since Linux applications come in source form, I suspect it just takes gcc support and a simple recompile.
Sure it does, if the gift is intended to improve the public's perception of oneself. And it works, and you can bet that that's why people like Gates do it.
So, you think that the future of the Indian computer industry should be in selling overpriced trash? Sorry, but I don't think that will work.
If open source is truly more cost effective (as I firmly believe) than Microsoft software, it will succeed in the long run. Of course, you are right that being "more cost effective" means less opportunity for revenue. In particular, open source eliminates much useless duplication of effort, meaning that it needs fewer programmers to provide the same range of products--but it still needs paid programmers to create the software in the first place. Open source software still offers plenty of opportunities for making money: consulting, custom development, some closed source packages running on top of open source systems, etc.
Don't bet on a loser--bet on what economics tells you must win in the long run. And I think that's pretty clearly open source.
FYI, you can find a world population growth rate map by country here.
As you can see, the only countries that have negative growth rates (a decrease in population) are some of the former Eastern Block countries--because their infrastructure and economy are crumbling.
The other correlation that is clear is that disease and famine go away as technology increases. [...] One only has to correlate the statistics and one can see that countries with the most technology do the best overall.
You are confusing "technology" and "technological development". You are saying that there is a correlation between a country's technological development and their wealth. That's undoubtedly true, but it has nothing to do with whether the development of new technologies solves the problems that underdeveloped countries have today. What we are discussing here is whether the development of new technologies will help underdeveloped nations. Underdevelopment is not a problem of any lack of new technologies, it's a social problem of the lack of deployment of existing technologies.
With every technological improvement population size decreases.
Take a look here. Technological improvements bring about massive population growth. It is only that when individual countries become enormously wealthy that their population growth slows. It is wealth, not technology, that causes population growth rates to decline.
And even in most of the wealthiest and technologically most developed countries, populations are still growing today. There are very few countries in the world where population sizes actually are decreasing.
Dams are actually the major cause of flooding; many countries are ripping them out again. Harmful flooding is most easily avoided by not building in flood plains and by not building dams.
Disease -- Vaccines.
Decreases in morbidity and mortality have mostly been due to low-tech improvements in public health, not medicine or vaccines. And the threat from many diseases is simply a consequence of high population densities brought about by technology.
Famine -- GM Food and technology in agriculture.
We have more than enough food to feed everybody on earth--producing more isn't going to solve famine. The real problem is distribution, as well as the simple fact that with every improvement in productivity, population size increases and people move into more marginal areas.
Technology is a good thing.
Technology is a good thing: it's fun, it's entertaining, it lets us experience more, and it helps us with some important things. I'm not against technology by any means. But almost all of the serious problems our world is facing are not technological problems and they can't be solved with technology. Furthermore, just because we have created the technology to do something and people can be convinced that they want it doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it.
You can provide whatever you like. However, once it arrives at the user-selected user agent (proxy or browser), it can get rewritten, and there is nothing you can do about it. People do this all the time removing blink tags, scripts, and ads from web sites.
Technology won't solve flooding, disease, or famine, ever, because those are not technological problems. If they were, the orders of magnitude increases in productivity and safety we have achieved would keep those things from happening already. Instead, people just push the limits of population and risk to the same level. The only way to change that is to change behavior, not technology.
Global warming has lots of other benefits as well:
makes Alaska and Minnesota more livable
reduces global overpopulation by
drowning people in sudden floods
spreading disease
making the ground water more saline
altering precipitation patterns and causing famine
create lots of new beachfront property in formerly hot, dry, inland
areas
create lots of new islands, as coastal mountain ranges get surrounded
by water
lets you grow Marijuna more quickly in Northern California
George is probably also not all that unhappy that the more liberal enclaves
in the US tend to be coastal and will likely get flooded. But I suspect
Texas won't be doing so well either. Sorry about that one, George.
You end up with a floor plan that is submitted to your local planning and zoning department for approval
That's kind of funny if you think about it. The zoning department doesn't care that you put a junk air craft on your land, an eye sore for all the neighbors, and a potential hazard in high winds. Yet, they do care about how you divide your living room from your bed room. Maybe they have their priorities mixed up?
The thing that's unforgivable about.Mac is that Apple discontinued free iTools: Apple had advertised that "every new Mac comes with free iTools services", implying that this was a regular part of their customer service and support, not with "three months of free iTools services".
If you think this is legitimate, maybe Apple will next start charging for iTunes. They can wipe it from your disk any time they please (through one of their software updates), and they never promised you that you could keep using it for free. Or maybe the whole OS will just stop working on Jan 1 2003--nobody ever guaranteed that you could keep using it indefinitely.
If Apple sold the.Mac clients as a client-suite, they would have to commit
publically to open protocols, not merely use them. The way it is, they can
change things around whenever they like and leave any intranet that has come
to rely on them high-and-dry. And change around things they can because
of the update pipeline that every Internet-connected Mac more-or-less has
to subscribe to.
But Apple probably will never commit to using specific protocols that because
then third parties could make a business of offering.Mac services for a
fraction of Apple's service. And intranets and corporate users would
end up using their own internal servers.
I think it is desirable for different creators to reuse characters and ideas
from other works. Companies and individuals other than Paramound should be
able to create Star Trek fiction and movies. Anybody should be able
to sell Darth Vader dolls. Etc. That's the way storytelling has
worked until the 20th century.
However, the ostensible reason for the draconian copyright laws we have is
to protect the creative people. Individual artists like Stanley Mouse
are far and few between, but when they come up, I think companies should
be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law when they violate
the copyright laws they themselves lobbied for (and probably bribed for).
If Pixar is guilty, they should have to pay a large fraction of their
proceeds to Mouse as punitive damages.
Huh? JavaScript is the Mozilla implementation of ECMAScript, a standard (not W3C) invented by Netscape. The DOM was also a Netscape idea, now standardized.
Yes, but the W3C gave it its blessing and built lots of other standards on it.
Why should we keep it simple now? Just for the sake of it? I'd rather have power. If that means there are only 3 or 4 quality implementations as opposed to 20, then so be it.
You are confusing complexity with power. The W3C standards are complex, but they aren't powerful. And that's the problem. Despite all the junk coming out of the W3C, it's still basically impossible to do reliable animations, drag-and-drop, document image display, editing, and other commonly desired things in web browsers.
I want to do complex things, but after 10 years, the W3C standards still don't support it.
The world is not a simple place, and the things we want to do with the web nowadays aren't simple either.
Yes, and the W3C fails to meet the needs of people who want to do complex things. All the W3C does is provide people with ever more complex ways of doing simple things. That is not progress.
If you want simplicity then feel free to write a web browser
More likely, there are new web browsers and plugins around the corner that build on HTML/XHTML, but come up with better ways of doing the other stuff. It's harder now than it was 10 years ago, when any kind of bogus idea could succeed, but it's still possible. Perhaps Curl could have succeeded in that area if they had open sourced it. But something else will come along.
The information on the Cypress Micro site is nearly unreadable: it's a big PDF document squeezed into a tiny frame, with no datasheet summary. I'm wondering:
What's the resultion and speed of the D/A and A/D converters?
Are there any open source compilers that work with these chips?
Are there any comparable chips from other manufacturers?
Those are all useful things to do. The problem is with how JavaScript does them. For example, for making HTML documents smaller, a client-side macro facility would be more reliable, more efficient, and simpler. For doing input checks, a pattern language would be better. And on and on.
If JavaScript (by which I mean JavaScript, DOM, DHTML, etc.) were a simple, if limited, solution to those problems, it would be OK. But it isn't. It is much more complicated than technically better solutions, yet it still is extremely limited.
Simple and limited, and complex and powerful are both acceptable engineering tradeoffs. But complex and limited and buggy is a bad engineering tradeoff. And that's JavaScript.
Should everyone just copy whatever Microsoft comes up with
Everybody is, for practical purposes. Who do you think is dreaming up a lot of the stuff that comes out of the W3C? Look at the authorships of the standards. And if you sit in those meetings, you'll quickly see that Microsoft doesn't often take "no" for an answer.
Microsoft has even told us why they like their standards to be complicated: they believe that if they just make it complicated enough, nobody else but them can implement them. Of course, Microsoft's reasoning is at the level of Wiley Coyote, with Open Source being the Roadrunner, but what can you do.
One thing that's obvious is that these technologies are needed,
We have a problem with creating dynamic web content, but the current crop of W3C standards for addressing that problem isn't working; it has turned into a Rube Goldberg contraption. Someone needs to start from scratch, and the W3C appears to be incapable of doing it.
If we don't have someone like the W3C putting this stuff in writing somewhere, how else are we going to have a hope in hell of browsers talking to each other?
Of course, things need to get written down and standardized. But the way standards are supposed to work is that people try things out in practice, whatever works well survives in the marketplace or among users, people create multiple implementations, then people get together and work out the differences among the implementations, then it all gets written up as a standard, and finally everybody goes back and makes their implementations standards compliant. It's a long, tedious process, but it does result in reasonable standards that real people can actually implement.
What the W3C is often doing is using its position to create completely unproven systems on paper and let the rest of the world figure out how to deal with it. Or, worse, the W3C is used by powerful companies to push through "standards" that haven't stood the test of time and for which only they themselves have a working implementation. If you give that kind of junk the stamp of approval of a standards body, you make things worse, not better.
Slashdot Mirror
First, it's big--even PocketPC machines have gotten much smaller. Sharp sells a Zaurus in Japan that's much smaller (no keyboard, no CF), and they should bring that to the US.
Second, while they have managed to create some decent apps in it, the use of Qt/Embedded causes problems. Qt/Embedded eats up lots of memory (much more than X11+XLib+FLTK) and it makes porting software to the Zaurus a lot of work. Also, it has some annoying bugs, for example, locking up the GUI with focus problems. I thought I could live with Qt/Embedded, but I can't. Having a standard Linux command line environment on the handheld has turned out to be great, and I want the same convenience for the GUI, not some oddball hack.
The main reason for getting a Linux PDA for me is to have something that it's easy to port software to, and something I can carry with me, and the Zaurus just falls short on both accounts. I think the iPaq running Handhelds.org or a Yopy may be a better choice.
As I understand it, the reason why Xscale doesn't perform as well on code not compiled for it is that some instructions have been eliminated and are now emulated, including one instruction commonly used during procedure call. If code is compiled using those instructions, it will be pretty slow. Since Linux applications come in source form, I suspect it just takes gcc support and a simple recompile.
A corporation built on "tar -cf - . | gzip | crypt". And people wonder why TCO for Windows systems is so high.
EOM
Sleeping with a lot of men/women makes someone a slut; it requires getting paid for it to be considered a professional.
Sure it does, if the gift is intended to improve the public's perception of oneself. And it works, and you can bet that that's why people like Gates do it.
He does? Any evidence for that? I don't think the NGOs he gives to are accountable to the people they supposedly help.
Gates's donations are effective publicity, as your naive endorsement shows. They are, however, not obviously good public policy.
If open source is truly more cost effective (as I firmly believe) than Microsoft software, it will succeed in the long run. Of course, you are right that being "more cost effective" means less opportunity for revenue. In particular, open source eliminates much useless duplication of effort, meaning that it needs fewer programmers to provide the same range of products--but it still needs paid programmers to create the software in the first place. Open source software still offers plenty of opportunities for making money: consulting, custom development, some closed source packages running on top of open source systems, etc.
Don't bet on a loser--bet on what economics tells you must win in the long run. And I think that's pretty clearly open source.
Sure it does: you use some form of VPN for clients on the wireless LAN. Only they can get routed anywhere.
As you can see, the only countries that have negative growth rates (a decrease in population) are some of the former Eastern Block countries--because their infrastructure and economy are crumbling.
You are confusing "technology" and "technological development". You are saying that there is a correlation between a country's technological development and their wealth. That's undoubtedly true, but it has nothing to do with whether the development of new technologies solves the problems that underdeveloped countries have today. What we are discussing here is whether the development of new technologies will help underdeveloped nations. Underdevelopment is not a problem of any lack of new technologies, it's a social problem of the lack of deployment of existing technologies.
With every technological improvement population size decreases.
Take a look here. Technological improvements bring about massive population growth. It is only that when individual countries become enormously wealthy that their population growth slows. It is wealth, not technology, that causes population growth rates to decline.
And even in most of the wealthiest and technologically most developed countries, populations are still growing today. There are very few countries in the world where population sizes actually are decreasing.
You are making the same point I'm making: famine in today's world is not a technological problem, it's a social problem.
Dams are actually the major cause of flooding; many countries are ripping them out again. Harmful flooding is most easily avoided by not building in flood plains and by not building dams.
Disease -- Vaccines.
Decreases in morbidity and mortality have mostly been due to low-tech improvements in public health, not medicine or vaccines. And the threat from many diseases is simply a consequence of high population densities brought about by technology.
Famine -- GM Food and technology in agriculture.
We have more than enough food to feed everybody on earth--producing more isn't going to solve famine. The real problem is distribution, as well as the simple fact that with every improvement in productivity, population size increases and people move into more marginal areas.
Technology is a good thing.
Technology is a good thing: it's fun, it's entertaining, it lets us experience more, and it helps us with some important things. I'm not against technology by any means. But almost all of the serious problems our world is facing are not technological problems and they can't be solved with technology. Furthermore, just because we have created the technology to do something and people can be convinced that they want it doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it.
You can provide whatever you like. However, once it arrives at the user-selected user agent (proxy or browser), it can get rewritten, and there is nothing you can do about it. People do this all the time removing blink tags, scripts, and ads from web sites.
I don't get it. If you really, really need this, why not just epoxy a clock to the case?
Technology won't solve flooding, disease, or famine, ever, because those are not technological problems. If they were, the orders of magnitude increases in productivity and safety we have achieved would keep those things from happening already. Instead, people just push the limits of population and risk to the same level. The only way to change that is to change behavior, not technology.
- makes Alaska and Minnesota more livable
- reduces global overpopulation by
- drowning people in sudden floods
- spreading disease
- making the ground water more saline
- altering precipitation patterns and causing famine
- create lots of new beachfront property in formerly hot, dry, inland
areas
- create lots of new islands, as coastal mountain ranges get surrounded
by water
- lets you grow Marijuna more quickly in Northern California
George is probably also not all that unhappy that the more liberal enclaves in the US tend to be coastal and will likely get flooded. But I suspect Texas won't be doing so well either. Sorry about that one, George.That's kind of funny if you think about it. The zoning department doesn't care that you put a junk air craft on your land, an eye sore for all the neighbors, and a potential hazard in high winds. Yet, they do care about how you divide your living room from your bed room. Maybe they have their priorities mixed up?
If you think this is legitimate, maybe Apple will next start charging for iTunes. They can wipe it from your disk any time they please (through one of their software updates), and they never promised you that you could keep using it for free. Or maybe the whole OS will just stop working on Jan 1 2003--nobody ever guaranteed that you could keep using it indefinitely.
If Apple sold the .Mac clients as a client-suite, they would have to commit
publically to open protocols, not merely use them. The way it is, they can
change things around whenever they like and leave any intranet that has come
to rely on them high-and-dry. And change around things they can because
of the update pipeline that every Internet-connected Mac more-or-less has
to subscribe to.
.Mac services for a
fraction of Apple's service. And intranets and corporate users would
end up using their own internal servers.
But Apple probably will never commit to using specific protocols that because then third parties could make a business of offering
I think it is desirable for different creators to reuse characters and ideas from other works. Companies and individuals other than Paramound should be able to create Star Trek fiction and movies. Anybody should be able to sell Darth Vader dolls. Etc. That's the way storytelling has worked until the 20th century.
However, the ostensible reason for the draconian copyright laws we have is to protect the creative people. Individual artists like Stanley Mouse are far and few between, but when they come up, I think companies should be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law when they violate the copyright laws they themselves lobbied for (and probably bribed for). If Pixar is guilty, they should have to pay a large fraction of their proceeds to Mouse as punitive damages.
Yes, but the W3C gave it its blessing and built lots of other standards on it.
Why should we keep it simple now? Just for the sake of it? I'd rather have power. If that means there are only 3 or 4 quality implementations as opposed to 20, then so be it.
You are confusing complexity with power. The W3C standards are complex, but they aren't powerful. And that's the problem. Despite all the junk coming out of the W3C, it's still basically impossible to do reliable animations, drag-and-drop, document image display, editing, and other commonly desired things in web browsers.
I want to do complex things, but after 10 years, the W3C standards still don't support it.
The world is not a simple place, and the things we want to do with the web nowadays aren't simple either.
Yes, and the W3C fails to meet the needs of people who want to do complex things. All the W3C does is provide people with ever more complex ways of doing simple things. That is not progress.
If you want simplicity then feel free to write a web browser
More likely, there are new web browsers and plugins around the corner that build on HTML/XHTML, but come up with better ways of doing the other stuff. It's harder now than it was 10 years ago, when any kind of bogus idea could succeed, but it's still possible. Perhaps Curl could have succeeded in that area if they had open sourced it. But something else will come along.
If JavaScript (by which I mean JavaScript, DOM, DHTML, etc.) were a simple, if limited, solution to those problems, it would be OK. But it isn't. It is much more complicated than technically better solutions, yet it still is extremely limited.
Simple and limited, and complex and powerful are both acceptable engineering tradeoffs. But complex and limited and buggy is a bad engineering tradeoff. And that's JavaScript.
Everybody is, for practical purposes. Who do you think is dreaming up a lot of the stuff that comes out of the W3C? Look at the authorships of the standards. And if you sit in those meetings, you'll quickly see that Microsoft doesn't often take "no" for an answer.
Microsoft has even told us why they like their standards to be complicated: they believe that if they just make it complicated enough, nobody else but them can implement them. Of course, Microsoft's reasoning is at the level of Wiley Coyote, with Open Source being the Roadrunner, but what can you do.
One thing that's obvious is that these technologies are needed,
We have a problem with creating dynamic web content, but the current crop of W3C standards for addressing that problem isn't working; it has turned into a Rube Goldberg contraption. Someone needs to start from scratch, and the W3C appears to be incapable of doing it.
If we don't have someone like the W3C putting this stuff in writing somewhere, how else are we going to have a hope in hell of browsers talking to each other?
Of course, things need to get written down and standardized. But the way standards are supposed to work is that people try things out in practice, whatever works well survives in the marketplace or among users, people create multiple implementations, then people get together and work out the differences among the implementations, then it all gets written up as a standard, and finally everybody goes back and makes their implementations standards compliant. It's a long, tedious process, but it does result in reasonable standards that real people can actually implement.
What the W3C is often doing is using its position to create completely unproven systems on paper and let the rest of the world figure out how to deal with it. Or, worse, the W3C is used by powerful companies to push through "standards" that haven't stood the test of time and for which only they themselves have a working implementation. If you give that kind of junk the stamp of approval of a standards body, you make things worse, not better.