Even still, your choices only run from "Smallest" to "Largest", a variance of only about 50% of the size of the font. Need it bigger, and don't know how to write your own style sheet? Sucks to be you, d00d.
Mozilla and Opera let you run up several multiples of the original size. Opera even zooms images so the page scales.
Those of you who've been complaining on this thread about why those pesky old people don't take the time to navigate a million preferences should instead be asking why those pesky browser makers are making it so difficult to understand and set them in the first place, or making it look like there are no relevant options at all. For one thing, if I were 80 and using a computer, the last place I'd be looking is a button called "Accessibility".
For that matter, they've also announced a partnership with Toshiba to produce a TiVo with DVD output (okay, it's only DVD-RAM in this one, but DVD(+/-)RW is a logical extension).
When you start out having one thing that's bigger (e.g., your Braille&Speak or other such device), and needing a second device to match its functionality (i.e., a phone, and not just any phone, but one that's usable without the display) you can call just about anything "more mobile."
Blind computer users don't often have the luxury of taking advantages of economies of scale. That is, they're used to things being bigger and more expensive, because the R&D costs to produce stuff like this are often as high as other products, and the developers can only expect to sell a few thousand units, tops, compared to the millions of cell phones and PDAs manufactured annually. Yes, it could be smaller, but then it would take longer to make and be more expensive.
he uses the power of the most powerful lobby in the country, composed of people of similarly advanced, uh, stature, and gets them to push for free software.
Come on. Picture it. GNU/Raging Grannies. You know you want to.
There's another Re-PC in Seattle proper, a couple blocks east of Safeco Field. (I think it's on 6th Ave S, 2 blocks south of Royal Brougham.)
Two features that make it worth the trip: a computer museum, with stuff like Osbornes and Commodore PETs and more old-school goodness; and a gigantic "as-is" section where you peel what you want (laptop keyboards, broken laser printers, SCSI boxes) out of the heap, and make an offer.
First: Bulk snail mail is controlled in other civilized countries like the Netherlands. You can put a sticker on your mail slot to say you don't want to receive it. Just because something is a certain way does not suggest that it or its derivatives should be that way. That's called a "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy.
Second: The resources consumed in snail mail are compensated for in the form of postage to the carrier. It is comparatively zero cost to the recipient. Spam is paid for by people providing service to themselves, not to the person or bot sending the spam.
And then there's the situation regarding sites being bombarded with spam. I've received hundreds of messages in a tight timeframe (i.e., minutes). That's different from the onesie-twosie nature of most bulk snail mail. I suspect that if some jackass started walking up to your mailbox and stuffing it with 300 letters, all requiring sorting and inspection to ensure that good email isn't being thrown out unread, you'd probably be begging for this kind of restriction in The Real World(tm) as well.
According to this CNet article, the 1/14 issue of Time hit newsstands in NYC on Sunday night, iMac on the cover and e'ythang. No need for the conspiracy theories this time.
The NIC doesn't do NFS (or SMB, for that matter) out of the box.
I've been maintaining the NICfit site, and one of the concepts I've been toying with has been to create "personality discs" for the NIC. I'm thinking the NIC is going to catch on, once they're ready to meet demand, and their current OS catches up with the others (it looks like they were planning on Mozilla, but Mozilla fell short, so they hacked in Navigator 4.73...), but I can see a whole lot of uses for a machine like this that are as easy as flipping a new disc in the drive. I don't think the hardware is ready for games, per se, but certainly there's more than one group out there who'd like to make their configuration management a little easier by burning a copy of a Linux install that can't be hacked...
The other project we've got designs on is a kernel with NFS and SMB, mpg123, busybox, and so on, to run in flash and free up the CD-ROM for MP3s as well. There's room for more, certainly, such as support for any cheap, USB-based wireless options that show up with Linux support.
It's probably a part of the reason why work on Mac IE is finished, after they put out the version for Mac OS X.
Yes, completely.
The story circling on sites like Macintouch is that, despite press releases suggesting otherwise, there is no Mac IE team at Microsoft anymore, as they've been reorged into a WebTV group.
I can only guess that the fact that OS X is shaping up to compete with Windows with Unix-like features is one of the data points Microsoft used to axe the Mac IE project.
Oh, and for the record, Microsoft has been making Unix software for years. They worked on XENIX with SCO (which is why you see a MS copyright notice on OpenServer). They've even made versions of IE for Solaris and HP/UX, in a very half-assed, security-ignorant, binary-only way, since 4.0.
The reason they're interested in open source is that they're currently paying out the ass to license QNX. Why else do you suppose they're asking on their devcorner site for a version of embedded Linux that does all the same stuff? You make it sound like altruism on their part, when in reality they're trying to make a quick buck off the/.ers they spent the better part of a month screwing.
Problem is, nobody in their right mind is interested in making hardware. Look at Apple. NeXT. Be. To a lesser extent, many of the top- and second-tier PC makers. All companies who overextended themselves making boxes, only to find themselves hopelessly under- or overstocked. Either way, they lose money. Worse, they'd be stuck building an unproven product with a bad track record for a company with a bad reputation. You don't need an MBA to realize your upside potential sucks.
If you want i-opener-like hardware at cost, Merinta will sell you the iBrow, the unit Virgin Connect is using, without the contract. Just don't hold your breath for Netpliance to do the right thing.
They'd probably call it Windows 40,000, and it could run on a PC, a handheld, or a Predator Annihilator Tank.
This is so true: In the grim darkness of the far future of BeOS, there is only war. (Don't get it? Look here.)
Be is getting squeezed from all sides: Windows on the consumer desktop, Mac OS in multimedia, Linux and QNX on the set-top. They don't have the resources to fight on all fronts all the time, and the most wide-open field at this point in time is the web toaster. It's a smart move for them. Rejoice!
You don't have to be a gearhead your whole life to get cred. One of Vint Cerf's claims to fame is standing on a table at an IAHC (?) committee meeting, and as everyone debated diverging standards, stripped down to a t-shirt that read "IP Over Everything".
Oh, and something about founding cerf.net, which was sucked up into MCI. He didn't take the money and run, he pioneered the commercial push onto the web.
Rumors had been circling about a port of Darwin to x86 (and even less-reliable ones about a complete OSX port to x86, for that matter).
For those looking at the code, how feasible is a port like that, and would it provide any real benefit to, say, Mac admins trying to set up a Mac-friendly OSX Server-like box on the cheap? (That is, advantages over Mac tools on Linux/BSD.)
someone violates the spirit of patent law so egregiously that it causes politicians to make it an issue; or
after the 2004 election, which is likely to be driven heavily by tech-zillionaires who aren't well-informed enough politically to get pols' attention this time around.
If 1. happens, it's likely to happen to something that will at minimum inconvenience a large number of net users: e.g., an underlying patent in most common browsers, based on "obvious technology", results in a fundamental step back in web technology.
In any case, none of this is going to happen with the USPTO as the driving force. It's already well-documented that technically, they can't find their ass with both hands, 5,000 pages of documentation, and forms filled out in triplicate. It's clear they don't understand the pace of tech, or the urgency of the reform they're contemplating, and won't until something changes the landscape for them.
These people are tilting at windmills. Yeah, let's collect $650M so we can fly some space junk around for a while.
Remember when people first started complaining at the extravagance of a $2500 Aibo? Now/. is actually giving some measure of credibility to a half-assed attempt to collect money for the ultimate vanity project. It's asinine. Hell, _they_ don't even know what they're going to do with it.
What makes this a story? Is it the concept of saving some company's ill-advised investment, or the herd mentality of gearheads who are driven to rescue a high-tech project, just because they can?
Let the freaking thing die already, until someone with better, more sustainable tech, with a model that would adequately maintain it, takes its place.
2.5 person-hours were spent today alone between 5 people in my office figuring out where to go for lunch.
And you're talking about running a satellite system as a community project?
Bah. Save your CDN$10. It'd take 50 times that, easy, just to cover overhead.
And that's presuming 2/3 of the citizens of the world want a satellite phone. (Remember, half the world can't afford a Coke, much less an Iridium phone; a third are under 18; and 1 in 4 worldwide still hasn't SEEN a telephone!)
The big issue here isn't whether the networks are going to begin migrating onto the net, it's when.
AOL's building set-top boxes. They've got Time-Warner under their wing. I bet 10 years from now, most cable will be video-on-demand in MPEG-2 fed over IP. We can see the groundwork being laid already.
Don't question the motivation of the networks to get their product out. iCraveTV drew fire from them because if successful, it would have prevented the networks from drawing a premium for TV content partnerships, both domestic and international. Additionally, they'd have no control over the advertising: who's going to shop Al's Auto Barn in Buffalo over the net from a 30-second spot? The networks will want much more control of their content, and they sure as hell don't want an intermediary such as iCraveTV stealing their thunder.
And anyway, the quality was terrible. Let's track it. Network, to station, over the air, and then served up on Real? I'd have sued them just on general principle. It's like pumping out a tape I recorded from an AM radio station using a microphone. The only way this stuff happens is via a reliable broadband connection. Think about it: the cable goes out for five minutes and everybody loses their mind. You're going to put that content on low-bandwidth, low-quality (see: AOL) connections and hope to derive a userbase from it? Bah!
The WorkPad z50 was the only CE device made by IBM. Other WorkPads are Palm devices (rebranded PalmPilot Pro, Palm III, and Palm V), usually bundled with a Notes client or somesuch.
I say "was" because at the time of the WorkPad z50 price drop, IBM had already dropped it from its store and elsewhere on its site. I presume it's in the process of being discontinued. Not that that's an issue so much, with a CE 3.0 coming RSN, and ongoing ports of NetBSD and (at least in theory) Linux.
WorkPad z50 specs: 131MHz MIPS VR4131 CPU 16MB RAM 8.4" passive-matrix display, 640x480 1 PCMCIA Type 2 1 CF slot Upgrade socket for 32MB SO-DIMM VGA out mic in/spkr out TrackPoint (that's right, no touch screen.)
Sorry, this is all from memory, as mine is currently _in the shop_. Doh!
Not on a IIIe, either.
on
Linux on Palm
·
· Score: 1
Like the Visor, IIIe devices are not flashable.
Your choices are: III/IIIx V/Vx VII (and if it could handle InetLib and WebLib, oh, baby. I'm going to use up my 1000k/mo on palm.net in no time!) TRG Pro (which you can't buy quite yet) TRG SuperPilot-equipped PalmPilots
Yeah, personally, I'm thrilled about running Linux on a 16MHz (well, 20MHz in my Vx) 68k-derivative. It'll be so powerful, with such an intuitive user interface, I just don't know what to do with myself! Ooh! When can I run the GIMP on my Timex DataLink watch? That would be spiffy!
Cobalt, Amiga - GW seems to be all over the place.
Got that right.
I still don't get the Amiga purchase. Apparently, neither do they. I think at least this one makes sense: Gateway couldn't get into the server closet if their lives depended on it, because of their (relatively poor) reputation as a desktop vendor. They needed some way to get their foot in the door.
That the way to serverland is through Linux (and not on Intel!) is just gravy.:)
If you want a keyboard, or a net card, get a CE device. Palm's gotten where it is by _not_ adding that kind of crap where it's not needed, not by shoehorning PC functionality into a handheld.
"Software is not perfect when there is nothing left to add, but rather when there is nothing extraneous left to take away." Trust me. I've seen both the CE and the PalmOS APIs. One of them is sane, and I'd really like to keep it that way. CompactFlash is great, but it introduces a whole lot of issues PalmOS is not ready to handle. My opinion is that it shouldn't be made to.
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Even still, your choices only run from "Smallest" to "Largest", a variance of only about 50% of the size of the font. Need it bigger, and don't know how to write your own style sheet? Sucks to be you, d00d.
Mozilla and Opera let you run up several multiples of the original size. Opera even zooms images so the page scales.
Those of you who've been complaining on this thread about why those pesky old people don't take the time to navigate a million preferences should instead be asking why those pesky browser makers are making it so difficult to understand and set them in the first place, or making it look like there are no relevant options at all. For one thing, if I were 80 and using a computer, the last place I'd be looking is a button called "Accessibility".
More prior art: Netscape submitted a frames proposal to a W3C working group in September 1995.
TiVo has already developed a platform for HDTV recording.
For that matter, they've also announced a partnership with Toshiba to produce a TiVo with DVD output (okay, it's only DVD-RAM in this one, but DVD(+/-)RW is a logical extension).
Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic.
The GNU Free Document License is neither a gnu, nor free, nor a document license.
Discuss.
When you start out having one thing that's bigger (e.g., your Braille&Speak or other such device), and needing a second device to match its functionality (i.e., a phone, and not just any phone, but one that's usable without the display) you can call just about anything "more mobile."
Blind computer users don't often have the luxury of taking advantages of economies of scale. That is, they're used to things being bigger and more expensive, because the R&D costs to produce stuff like this are often as high as other products, and the developers can only expect to sell a few thousand units, tops, compared to the millions of cell phones and PDAs manufactured annually. Yes, it could be smaller, but then it would take longer to make and be more expensive.
he uses the power of the most powerful lobby in the country, composed of people of similarly advanced, uh, stature, and gets them to push for free software.
Come on. Picture it. GNU/Raging Grannies. You know you want to.
There's another Re-PC in Seattle proper, a couple blocks east of Safeco Field. (I think it's on 6th Ave S, 2 blocks south of Royal Brougham.)
Two features that make it worth the trip: a computer museum, with stuff like Osbornes and Commodore PETs and more old-school goodness; and a gigantic "as-is" section where you peel what you want (laptop keyboards, broken laser printers, SCSI boxes) out of the heap, and make an offer.
First: Bulk snail mail is controlled in other civilized countries like the Netherlands. You can put a sticker on your mail slot to say you don't want to receive it. Just because something is a certain way does not suggest that it or its derivatives should be that way. That's called a "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy.
Second: The resources consumed in snail mail are compensated for in the form of postage to the carrier. It is comparatively zero cost to the recipient. Spam is paid for by people providing service to themselves, not to the person or bot sending the spam.
And then there's the situation regarding sites being bombarded with spam. I've received hundreds of messages in a tight timeframe (i.e., minutes). That's different from the onesie-twosie nature of most bulk snail mail. I suspect that if some jackass started walking up to your mailbox and stuffing it with 300 letters, all requiring sorting and inspection to ensure that good email isn't being thrown out unread, you'd probably be begging for this kind of restriction in The Real World(tm) as well.
According to this CNet article, the 1/14 issue of Time hit newsstands in NYC on Sunday night, iMac on the cover and e'ythang. No need for the conspiracy theories this time.
I've been maintaining the NICfit site, and one of the concepts I've been toying with has been to create "personality discs" for the NIC. I'm thinking the NIC is going to catch on, once they're ready to meet demand, and their current OS catches up with the others (it looks like they were planning on Mozilla, but Mozilla fell short, so they hacked in Navigator 4.73...), but I can see a whole lot of uses for a machine like this that are as easy as flipping a new disc in the drive. I don't think the hardware is ready for games, per se, but certainly there's more than one group out there who'd like to make their configuration management a little easier by burning a copy of a Linux install that can't be hacked...
The other project we've got designs on is a kernel with NFS and SMB, mpg123, busybox, and so on, to run in flash and free up the CD-ROM for MP3s as well. There's room for more, certainly, such as support for any cheap, USB-based wireless options that show up with Linux support.
The thinknic-tech and thinknic lists on eGroups are dreaming up new NIC projects, and I'm keeping track of them on the NICfit projects page...
Yes, completely.
The story circling on sites like Macintouch is that, despite press releases suggesting otherwise, there is no Mac IE team at Microsoft anymore, as they've been reorged into a WebTV group.
I can only guess that the fact that OS X is shaping up to compete with Windows with Unix-like features is one of the data points Microsoft used to axe the Mac IE project.
Oh, and for the record, Microsoft has been making Unix software for years. They worked on XENIX with SCO (which is why you see a MS copyright notice on OpenServer). They've even made versions of IE for Solaris and HP/UX, in a very half-assed, security-ignorant, binary-only way, since 4.0.
Problem is, nobody in their right mind is interested in making hardware. Look at Apple. NeXT. Be. To a lesser extent, many of the top- and second-tier PC makers. All companies who overextended themselves making boxes, only to find themselves hopelessly under- or overstocked. Either way, they lose money. Worse, they'd be stuck building an unproven product with a bad track record for a company with a bad reputation. You don't need an MBA to realize your upside potential sucks.
If you want i-opener-like hardware at cost, Merinta will sell you the iBrow, the unit Virgin Connect is using, without the contract. Just don't hold your breath for Netpliance to do the right thing.
This is so true:
In the grim darkness of the far future of BeOS, there is only war. (Don't get it? Look here.)
Be is getting squeezed from all sides: Windows on the consumer desktop, Mac OS in multimedia, Linux and QNX on the set-top. They don't have the resources to fight on all fronts all the time, and the most wide-open field at this point in time is the web toaster. It's a smart move for them. Rejoice!
You don't have to be a gearhead your whole life to get cred.
One of Vint Cerf's claims to fame is standing on a table at an IAHC (?) committee meeting, and as everyone debated diverging standards, stripped down to a t-shirt that read "IP Over Everything".
Oh, and something about founding cerf.net, which was sucked up into MCI. He didn't take the money and run, he pioneered the commercial push onto the web.
Rumors had been circling about a port of Darwin to x86 (and even less-reliable ones about a complete OSX port to x86, for that matter).
For those looking at the code, how feasible is a port like that, and would it provide any real benefit to, say, Mac admins trying to set up a Mac-friendly OSX Server-like box on the cheap? (That is, advantages over Mac tools on Linux/BSD.)
- someone violates the spirit of patent law so egregiously that it causes politicians to make it an issue; or
- after the 2004 election, which is likely to be driven heavily by tech-zillionaires who aren't well-informed enough politically to get pols' attention this time around.
If 1. happens, it's likely to happen to something that will at minimum inconvenience a large number of net users: e.g., an underlying patent in most common browsers, based on "obvious technology", results in a fundamental step back in web technology.In any case, none of this is going to happen with the USPTO as the driving force. It's already well-documented that technically, they can't find their ass with both hands, 5,000 pages of documentation, and forms filled out in triplicate. It's clear they don't understand the pace of tech, or the urgency of the reform they're contemplating, and won't until something changes the landscape for them.
These people are tilting at windmills. Yeah, let's collect $650M so we can fly some space junk around for a while.
/. is actually giving some measure of credibility to a half-assed attempt to collect money for the ultimate vanity project. It's asinine. Hell, _they_ don't even know what they're going to do with it.
Remember when people first started complaining at the extravagance of a $2500 Aibo? Now
What makes this a story? Is it the concept of saving some company's ill-advised investment, or the herd mentality of gearheads who are driven to rescue a high-tech project, just because they can?
Let the freaking thing die already, until someone with better, more sustainable tech, with a model that would adequately maintain it, takes its place.
2.5 person-hours were spent today alone between 5 people in my office figuring out where to go for lunch.
And you're talking about running a satellite system as a community project?
Bah. Save your CDN$10. It'd take 50 times that, easy, just to cover overhead.
And that's presuming 2/3 of the citizens of the world want a satellite phone. (Remember, half the world can't afford a Coke, much less an Iridium phone; a third are under 18; and 1 in 4 worldwide still hasn't SEEN a telephone!)
AOL's building set-top boxes. They've got Time-Warner under their wing. I bet 10 years from now, most cable will be video-on-demand in MPEG-2 fed over IP. We can see the groundwork being laid already.
Don't question the motivation of the networks to get their product out. iCraveTV drew fire from them because if successful, it would have prevented the networks from drawing a premium for TV content partnerships, both domestic and international. Additionally, they'd have no control over the advertising: who's going to shop Al's Auto Barn in Buffalo over the net from a 30-second spot? The networks will want much more control of their content, and they sure as hell don't want an intermediary such as iCraveTV stealing their thunder.
And anyway, the quality was terrible. Let's track it. Network, to station, over the air, and then served up on Real? I'd have sued them just on general principle. It's like pumping out a tape I recorded from an AM radio station using a microphone. The only way this stuff happens is via a reliable broadband connection. Think about it: the cable goes out for five minutes and everybody loses their mind. You're going to put that content on low-bandwidth, low-quality (see: AOL) connections and hope to derive a userbase from it? Bah!
CE devices don't have hard drives. The RAM is divided between system memory and object space.
The WorkPad z50 was the only CE device made by IBM. Other WorkPads are Palm devices (rebranded PalmPilot Pro, Palm III, and Palm V), usually bundled with a Notes client or somesuch.
I say "was" because at the time of the WorkPad z50 price drop, IBM had already dropped it from its store and elsewhere on its site. I presume it's in the process of being discontinued. Not that that's an issue so much, with a CE 3.0 coming RSN, and ongoing ports of NetBSD and (at least in theory) Linux.
WorkPad z50 specs:
131MHz MIPS VR4131 CPU
16MB RAM
8.4" passive-matrix display, 640x480
1 PCMCIA Type 2
1 CF slot
Upgrade socket for 32MB SO-DIMM
VGA out
mic in/spkr out
TrackPoint (that's right, no touch screen.)
Sorry, this is all from memory, as mine is currently _in the shop_. Doh!
Like the Visor, IIIe devices are not flashable.
Your choices are:
III/IIIx
V/Vx
VII (and if it could handle InetLib and WebLib, oh, baby. I'm going to use up my 1000k/mo on palm.net in no time!)
TRG Pro (which you can't buy quite yet)
TRG SuperPilot-equipped PalmPilots
Yeah, personally, I'm thrilled about running Linux on a 16MHz (well, 20MHz in my Vx) 68k-derivative. It'll be so powerful, with such an intuitive user interface, I just don't know what to do with myself!
Ooh! When can I run the GIMP on my Timex DataLink watch? That would be spiffy!
Co-author Jeff Hawkins = Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Product Officer of Handspring.
;)
I bet it's covered.
I still don't get the Amiga purchase. Apparently, neither do they. I think at least this one makes sense: Gateway couldn't get into the server closet if their lives depended on it, because of their (relatively poor) reputation as a desktop vendor. They needed some way to get their foot in the door.
That the way to serverland is through Linux (and not on Intel!) is just gravy. :)
AUIGH!
If you want a keyboard, or a net card, get a CE device. Palm's gotten where it is by _not_ adding that kind of crap where it's not needed, not by shoehorning PC functionality into a handheld.
"Software is not perfect when there is nothing left to add, but rather when there is nothing extraneous left to take away." Trust me. I've seen both the CE and the PalmOS APIs. One of them is sane, and I'd really like to keep it that way. CompactFlash is great, but it introduces a whole lot of issues PalmOS is not ready to handle. My opinion is that it shouldn't be made to.