Yes, but apparently it is dangerous to prop my PC and 19" monitor on my knees in the bath, and the salt water on the beach is bad for the bearings in my mouse. Personally, I'm willing to pay for a book-shaped "distro". If other people aren't, that's fine, but they won't learn anything about the life cycle of some endangered species in sub-saharan Africa, which is surely the main reason that people buy O Reilly books...
Does the article have anything to do with open source? Unless I'm missing something, it's about how games now get ported from PCs to games machines and back. Games machines tend to be even more proprietary than PCs running MS, and none of this is exactly new: I remember Elite being ported from the BBC Micro to DOS 20-odd years ago. And does anyone out there believe, even in their dreams, that Linux games are currently a driving force in the industry?
So what's this about then? I'm genuinely interested in the answer: we've toyed with the idea of setting up a wifi network in the centre of Cavaillon (84) off the back (well, top) of our cybercafe, but I really don't want to spend 6 months inventing sets of accounts for one antenna and a bit of electricity...
Incidentally, as of yesterday evening, I have local radio transmitting off my roof. Now that's heavy regulation for you...
Note that the original post is about a WISP, not a private network between the author's bathroom and dining room.
Have a look at this. As far as I can see (articles 1 - 4), the frequency is only authorised for very low power networks on private property. For anything else you need to get a licence. There is a list of current licence holders on the site. I have a 6-page article in the Chambre de Commerce magazine, for example, which appears to agree with my assessment (and deplore the situation).
Provence Wireless, 20 minutes down the road, who export large amounts of wireless stuff to Australia, for example, had a pilot network in a small village, which was shut down by the ART because, apparently 'the technology was not proven'. Which a lot of us think means 'because France Télécom wasn't ready to compete on that ground yet.'
Now it is quite possible that there are another 5,000 groups doing this sort of thing without telling anyone: that would be a very French solution...
The two are hardly comparable: SECAM was a quirky version of the German PAL system, which has given Europe far better TV quality than the USA for the last several decades. The first time I saw an American TV (what is it, 405 lines instead of 625?!), I thought it was broken...
As protectionism through technology goes, of course, SECAM was a masterstroke. It is trivial to make a PAL system work with SECAM, but only the French companies bothered, so they could sell to the whole of Europe whilst keeping their own market to themselves, without any trade barriers as such.
There are still very strict limits on signal strength in normal circumstances outside buildings. But the regulatory body started to grant 'exceptional' licences last October, mainly in rural areas where France Telecom refuse to install terrestial broadband (FT replaced MS as the company I most like to hate some time ago...)
As with anything else in France, you have to produce an enormous dossier, a large part of which involves showing that your installation won't crash any jets at the local air base, as wifi uses a French military frequency. You would have thought that the military would shift, but there you are.
Last time I looked (a couple of weeks ago) I think 20 or so licences had been awarded across the country.
Predictions of the demise of computing, or even the demise of European computing, seem a little premature, IMO. Whenever this sort of thing is discussed on/., people respond as if we are talking about the law of the Medes and the Persians, ie once it's passed it can't be modified or recinded. A brief look at EU legislation in any other area shows that this is not the case.
Take farming legislation. At one point, the EU was paying farmers to remove hedges from between fields to allow US-scale farming technology. Lots of people said it was a dumb idea, the EU persisted, the topsoil blew away, and now the EU is paying farmers to put the hedges back. Probably not the best environmental scenario imaginable, but it could have been a lot worse.
On the 35-hour week, one of the cornerstones of EU employment law, countries like the UK never bothered to enforce it, and countries like France who did are now backpeddling like mad before unemployment rises any further.
The EU is not the Beast, it's just not clever enough. It doesn't have much of an ideology, despite France's best efforts to give it one. It's the world's biggest fudge factory. The people who draft the legislation like regulation, but if it hurts national interests those people get stomped on.
IF software patents are approved, and IF they are enforced at national level (in Italy?? Greece???), and IF large companies set out to destroy small companies, the legislation will be changed. The first time a non-French company threatens French jobs through patents enforcement, I would expect the French government to take unilateral action, backed by the majority of their population and the Germans, and simply refuse to budge until the EU caves in, much as they did over BSE (the UK had the law squarely on their side, but what difference did it make?) I saw an article in a national French newspaper six months ago about a powerful French lobby demanding that French computer games be classified as 'art', like films, so that the government can limit and tax US imports, subsidise French computer games, enforce quotas in shops and cybercafes...
So if you guys the other side of the Pond want to see this law withdrawn, lobby a big American company to threaten a French one, and Chirac will do the rest:-)
The same is true for patents in the US, except that the rebound would be faster and harder. Politicians are stupid, but they aren't that stupid.
I loved the first edition, probably for the reasons you didn't. I'd read several short overviews of regexes, including Larry Wall's one in the Camel book, and, while they got me doing simple stuff, they left me with lots of unanswered questions, and the more I experimented the more my "why doesn't that work?" list grew. The Friedl book is totally thorough, and, I thought, aggessively pedagogical, if you want to learn about how a regex engine works rather than pick up stuff in a cookbook fashion.
That said, I do wonder about the guy. The colophon was astounding: he wrote half the book using regexes on a computer on the other side of the world, using a 37.5 bit/hour connection by the sound of it, and then he proceeded to write his own typesetting system so he could produce a phoenetically alphabetical index in English, Japanese and probably some other languages that I missed. I think he ought to get out more...
The big problem with PHP and regexes is that the C-like syntax makes no concessions to the needs of regular expressions. I ported some regexes from Perl to PHP using preg a while back, and while the regexes themselves didn't change, the guff around them was a lot more opaque in PHP. I guess this is the price PHP users pay for a 'consistent' language: pity the syntax was designed for writing operating systems at quasi-assembler level, not applications...
Why do people chase a little white ball around 10km of grass?
For me, the difference is that if I lose the little white ball I don't go out of business, or fail my degree, or whatever. All this stuff is fine if messing with hardware is the goal and actually using it to do something is a bonus. But if your machine is a means to an end, innovation is not necessarily that great.
The same is true of cars. I have a motor caravan on which the previous owner did a cut and weld job to get the exhaust to come out the side rather than the back. Which was great until said exhaust fell off the day I had a ferry to catch and the garage had to do mild steel sculpture to get the stock part to fit...
You are of course right, in that messing with PCs is probably one of the more harmless way of filling a spare afternoon. But I think it's better to do it on a spare machine!
I really don't get this product. It lets you run Windows 95, 98 or ME, none of which are great for a networking envirinment, over a network, and this is progress? The end result can't be any more stable than Windows 98, at least on a terminal to terminal basis.
Alternatively, they could run LTSP and rdesktop on one server, buy licences for W2K or 2003 server at a 90% educational discount to run on another server, and pay for the licences by selling their hard discs from the terminals to the school kids...
Only because most users are using very little bandwidth and effectively subsidising the P2P bandwidth hogs. If/when user behaviour mirrors current UK or US behaviour, the contention rates will have to drop, and one of four things will happen:
ISP prices will rise
The government will start/continue to subsidise the ISP until the EU intervenes
The ISP will cap bandwidth
The whole system will slow down and effectively cap itself
The result will be that bandwidth hogs will end up clumping their computers together and paying for the bandwidth they use, while the majority of users will have cheaper access. We could call the clump of computers serving a 'server park'...
But how many of the customers for this kind of machine would be buying their software legally anyway? Even here in France, I reckon about one PC in 5 is running a legal version of Windows, let alone the applications. So a machine with no OS plus bootleg software sounds highly plausible to me. Indeed, a lot of these machines are going to get Windows installed on them anyway...
Sending a few dozen letters to big corporations is cheap and potentially lucrative. Does anyone have SCO's legal department's address? I'm thinking of writing to them (in French), asking them to explain fully (in French) the implications of their claims for the two Linux servers in my cybercafe, which binaries in my particular distro are affected, how they calculate the value of those binaries as a percentage of the whole, and so on and so on, and stating that if I don't hear from them in 28 days I will assume that everything is OK. If 50 million other Linux users did the same, I think they would have a problem...
To me, it makes sense to separate the search for primary material (like slashdot's links and features) from the commentary on it (the comments).
I can't see how you could even begin to do this consistently. Most of the 'primary' (by your definition) material referred to on/. is summaries of or comments on something else. In many cases you could argue that it is 4 or 5 levels away from 'primary'.
On the other hand, you often get genuinely creative stuff in response to someone else's article. In the academic community, it is not unusual for the responses to or critiques of someone else's work to end up being rated more highly than the 'primary' stuff they are commenting on (IIRC, Chomsky's review of one of Skinner's long-forgotten books is a classic example: in the process of trashing Skinner, he floated a radical new theory on linguistics).
The Internet is all about linking content in non-linear ways. If we really want to go back to 100% primary sources, we are going to end up with "There is nothing new under the sun" as the only entry in the Google DB:-)
(On the other matter, the O'Reilly manual title "Running weblogs with Slash" would appear to support your case...)
This looks GREAT: I work on server-side stuff on several sites, and being able to carry around my own Apache server in my pocket and use it with whichever machine happens to be there would be a lot more sensible than lugging a laptop around. (Internet access from at least one site is slow and expensive).
No-one is going to talk about Mozilla Browser, except maybe on the Mozilla mailing list. It will get shortened to Mozilla, which now apparently means at least 2 different programs that do two entirely different jobs. It's going to be like dropping the second word of "MS Word" and "MS Outlook" and then wondering why everyone gets confused.
Can't we have short if arcane Linux-like contractions such as moznav and mozmail? At least then we would know what we are talking about.
I've been various non-MS OSs for 20 years, and running a Linux-only cybercafe for 18 months. I installed my first Windows server last week. W2K Server (yeah yeah, I know, it took me 6 months to get round to installing it...).
I haven't seen anything radically innovative yet, but then I'm not sure that there is much radically innovative about Linux either. But I have had a few surprises:
On balance, installing W2K server is about as easy as installing Linux. It's certainly easier than installing Redhat 9 in France, as Redhat refuses to use my French keyboard (is this the action Colin Powell was threatening the other day?)
Terminal Server is very slick. The interface feels like Redhat, only finished. I can get from one of my ltsp terminals into a Windows session in one mouse click. Unlike X, W2K doesn't lose the customers' data if the terminal connection goes down, and it works quite happily over a phone line. The only thing I don't like is 8-bit displays, but apparently Server 2003 has fixed that.
On the other hand, I am surprised to find that IE seems to fall over on about as many sites as Mozilla (though not the same ones)
Doing everything with the mouse is driving me mad, but I expect I could get used to it. I don't see me ditching Linux as a result of the experiment, but some sites, especially chat ones, run ten times faster than with Linux on equivalent hardware, and don't keep hanging.
All of which is to say that I have now met with the enemy, and it doesn't seem quite as bad as the anti-MS propaganda suggests, and even has a few endearing features...
I haven't seen many details, because the link is still/.ed. If it works the way you say, then I guess you are right, it won't make any difference to the network.
My point is that if you run a 7 year-old window manager like we were using 7 years ago, your network doesn't slow down. KDE has a lot more window furniture than, say, windowmaker, and seems to do a lot more redraws. Of course a cybercafe may well be a worst-case scenario: all you need is for all ten clients to leave an animated gif pop-up on their screen and you have a serious redraw issue.
'One of the compressed X extensions' sounds potentially interesting: can you give me a name or a url? The issue is always getting these things working with LTSP, which is pretty convoluted to bootstrap to start with.
Also necessary is a 2.4.x kernel with a working framebuffer device.
So (thinking aloud here), I would still need to network boot the terminals using DHCP, but I guess after that I could potentially drop into VNC...
But where do things like moving the mouse pointer get handled? I have dim memories of using VNC a while back, and of the pointer lagging 3 seconds behind the mouse. In a cybercafe this could be a bit of a drawback... the mouse pointer is one part of the system that does keep up at present...
I'm running LTSP, ie my terminals don't have a hard disc, and get all their resources using NFS, XFS etc. My assumption had always been that I would need quite a lot of a Linux system on the terminal end to run a VNC-type solution. If I'm wrong about this, please tell me!
(I should maybe say that I'm sure part of the network gridlock is due to non-Window manager traffic - xfs seems to have gone bananas since I upgraded to RH8, for example.)
Personally, I'd be a lot more excited if someone was working on a useable desktop that used less bandwidth, especially in terms of network traffic with remote sessions. The amount of bloat on KDE, for example, gets worse with each new release, and it is killing my local network.
Alternatively, I suppose I could go for an older window manager that makes DOS look futuristic.
Please, can't someone come up with a Linux Window manager that doesn't give Windows users hysterics, but which can run over, say, a dial-up connection at a reasonable speed? In other words, something that performs a bit like MS Terminal Server (the 2000 version, let alone the XP 16-bit one)? I shouldn't need a gigabit backbone to run 10 diskless terminals...
Good Old Psion Organizer II. Now lying unloved at the bottom of a dusty old drawer. Wouldn't do to be seen with it now!
It's probably still one of the most robust palmtops ever built. My brother once dropped his onto tarmac from the top of a Land Rover doing 40mph (I never did work out how...), and, apart from a crack in the glass in front of the lcd, it worked fine for the next couple of years. I wouldn't rate the chances of any modern PDA after such an adventure.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but apparently it is dangerous to prop my PC and 19" monitor on my knees in the bath, and the salt water on the beach is bad for the bearings in my mouse. Personally, I'm willing to pay for a book-shaped "distro". If other people aren't, that's fine, but they won't learn anything about the life cycle of some endangered species in sub-saharan Africa, which is surely the main reason that people buy O Reilly books...
Does the article have anything to do with open source? Unless I'm missing something, it's about how games now get ported from PCs to games machines and back. Games machines tend to be even more proprietary than PCs running MS, and none of this is exactly new: I remember Elite being ported from the BBC Micro to DOS 20-odd years ago. And does anyone out there believe, even in their dreams, that Linux games are currently a driving force in the industry?
OK, can you send me an email using the form on the cyberporte.com website and we'll take it from there?
So what's this about then? I'm genuinely interested in the answer: we've toyed with the idea of setting up a wifi network in the centre of Cavaillon (84) off the back (well, top) of our cybercafe, but I really don't want to spend 6 months inventing sets of accounts for one antenna and a bit of electricity...
Incidentally, as of yesterday evening, I have local radio transmitting off my roof. Now that's heavy regulation for you...
Note that the original post is about a WISP, not a private network between the author's bathroom and dining room.
Have a look at this. As far as I can see (articles 1 - 4), the frequency is only authorised for very low power networks on private property. For anything else you need to get a licence. There is a list of current licence holders on the site. I have a 6-page article in the Chambre de Commerce magazine, for example, which appears to agree with my assessment (and deplore the situation).
Provence Wireless, 20 minutes down the road, who export large amounts of wireless stuff to Australia, for example, had a pilot network in a small village, which was shut down by the ART because, apparently 'the technology was not proven'. Which a lot of us think means 'because France Télécom wasn't ready to compete on that ground yet.'
Now it is quite possible that there are another 5,000 groups doing this sort of thing without telling anyone: that would be a very French solution...
The two are hardly comparable: SECAM was a quirky version of the German PAL system, which has given Europe far better TV quality than the USA for the last several decades. The first time I saw an American TV (what is it, 405 lines instead of 625?!), I thought it was broken...
As protectionism through technology goes, of course, SECAM was a masterstroke. It is trivial to make a PAL system work with SECAM, but only the French companies bothered, so they could sell to the whole of Europe whilst keeping their own market to themselves, without any trade barriers as such.
It's getting better, just.
There are still very strict limits on signal strength in normal circumstances outside buildings. But the regulatory body started to grant 'exceptional' licences last October, mainly in rural areas where France Telecom refuse to install terrestial broadband (FT replaced MS as the company I most like to hate some time ago...)
As with anything else in France, you have to produce an enormous dossier, a large part of which involves showing that your installation won't crash any jets at the local air base, as wifi uses a French military frequency. You would have thought that the military would shift, but there you are.
Last time I looked (a couple of weeks ago) I think 20 or so licences had been awarded across the country.
Predictions of the demise of computing, or even the demise of European computing, seem a little premature, IMO. Whenever this sort of thing is discussed on /., people respond as if we are talking about the law of the Medes and the Persians, ie once it's passed it can't be modified or recinded. A brief look at EU legislation in any other area shows that this is not the case.
Take farming legislation. At one point, the EU was paying farmers to remove hedges from between fields to allow US-scale farming technology. Lots of people said it was a dumb idea, the EU persisted, the topsoil blew away, and now the EU is paying farmers to put the hedges back. Probably not the best environmental scenario imaginable, but it could have been a lot worse.
On the 35-hour week, one of the cornerstones of EU employment law, countries like the UK never bothered to enforce it, and countries like France who did are now backpeddling like mad before unemployment rises any further.
The EU is not the Beast, it's just not clever enough. It doesn't have much of an ideology, despite France's best efforts to give it one. It's the world's biggest fudge factory. The people who draft the legislation like regulation, but if it hurts national interests those people get stomped on.
IF software patents are approved, and IF they are enforced at national level (in Italy?? Greece???), and IF large companies set out to destroy small companies, the legislation will be changed. The first time a non-French company threatens French jobs through patents enforcement, I would expect the French government to take unilateral action, backed by the majority of their population and the Germans, and simply refuse to budge until the EU caves in, much as they did over BSE (the UK had the law squarely on their side, but what difference did it make?) I saw an article in a national French newspaper six months ago about a powerful French lobby demanding that French computer games be classified as 'art', like films, so that the government can limit and tax US imports, subsidise French computer games, enforce quotas in shops and cybercafes...
So if you guys the other side of the Pond want to see this law withdrawn, lobby a big American company to threaten a French one, and Chirac will do the rest :-)
The same is true for patents in the US, except that the rebound would be faster and harder. Politicians are stupid, but they aren't that stupid.
I loved the first edition, probably for the reasons you didn't. I'd read several short overviews of regexes, including Larry Wall's one in the Camel book, and, while they got me doing simple stuff, they left me with lots of unanswered questions, and the more I experimented the more my "why doesn't that work?" list grew. The Friedl book is totally thorough, and, I thought, aggessively pedagogical, if you want to learn about how a regex engine works rather than pick up stuff in a cookbook fashion.
That said, I do wonder about the guy. The colophon was astounding: he wrote half the book using regexes on a computer on the other side of the world, using a 37.5 bit/hour connection by the sound of it, and then he proceeded to write his own typesetting system so he could produce a phoenetically alphabetical index in English, Japanese and probably some other languages that I missed. I think he ought to get out more...
The big problem with PHP and regexes is that the C-like syntax makes no concessions to the needs of regular expressions. I ported some regexes from Perl to PHP using preg a while back, and while the regexes themselves didn't change, the guff around them was a lot more opaque in PHP. I guess this is the price PHP users pay for a 'consistent' language: pity the syntax was designed for writing operating systems at quasi-assembler level, not applications...
Why do people chase a little white ball around 10km of grass?
For me, the difference is that if I lose the little white ball I don't go out of business, or fail my degree, or whatever. All this stuff is fine if messing with hardware is the goal and actually using it to do something is a bonus. But if your machine is a means to an end, innovation is not necessarily that great.
The same is true of cars. I have a motor caravan on which the previous owner did a cut and weld job to get the exhaust to come out the side rather than the back. Which was great until said exhaust fell off the day I had a ferry to catch and the garage had to do mild steel sculpture to get the stock part to fit...
You are of course right, in that messing with PCs is probably one of the more harmless way of filling a spare afternoon. But I think it's better to do it on a spare machine!
I really don't get this product. It lets you run Windows 95, 98 or ME, none of which are great for a networking envirinment, over a network, and this is progress? The end result can't be any more stable than Windows 98, at least on a terminal to terminal basis.
Alternatively, they could run LTSP and rdesktop on one server, buy licences for W2K or 2003 server at a 90% educational discount to run on another server, and pay for the licences by selling their hard discs from the terminals to the school kids...
Only because most users are using very little bandwidth and effectively subsidising the P2P bandwidth hogs. If/when user behaviour mirrors current UK or US behaviour, the contention rates will have to drop, and one of four things will happen:
The result will be that bandwidth hogs will end up clumping their computers together and paying for the bandwidth they use, while the majority of users will have cheaper access. We could call the clump of computers serving a 'server park'...
But how many of the customers for this kind of machine would be buying their software legally anyway? Even here in France, I reckon about one PC in 5 is running a legal version of Windows, let alone the applications. So a machine with no OS plus bootleg software sounds highly plausible to me. Indeed, a lot of these machines are going to get Windows installed on them anyway...
If you can pick up a pirated version of XP on the market, next to the durians, for $3, how much of a price advantage does Linux have?
Sending a few dozen letters to big corporations is cheap and potentially lucrative. Does anyone have SCO's legal department's address? I'm thinking of writing to them (in French), asking them to explain fully (in French) the implications of their claims for the two Linux servers in my cybercafe, which binaries in my particular distro are affected, how they calculate the value of those binaries as a percentage of the whole, and so on and so on, and stating that if I don't hear from them in 28 days I will assume that everything is OK. If 50 million other Linux users did the same, I think they would have a problem...
To me, it makes sense to separate the search for primary material (like slashdot's links and features) from the commentary on it (the comments).
I can't see how you could even begin to do this consistently. Most of the 'primary' (by your definition) material referred to on /. is summaries of or comments on something else. In many cases you could argue that it is 4 or 5 levels away from 'primary'.
On the other hand, you often get genuinely creative stuff in response to someone else's article. In the academic community, it is not unusual for the responses to or critiques of someone else's work to end up being rated more highly than the 'primary' stuff they are commenting on (IIRC, Chomsky's review of one of Skinner's long-forgotten books is a classic example: in the process of trashing Skinner, he floated a radical new theory on linguistics).
The Internet is all about linking content in non-linear ways. If we really want to go back to 100% primary sources, we are going to end up with "There is nothing new under the sun" as the only entry in the Google DB :-)
(On the other matter, the O'Reilly manual title "Running weblogs with Slash" would appear to support your case...)
This looks GREAT: I work on server-side stuff on several sites, and being able to carry around my own Apache server in my pocket and use it with whichever machine happens to be there would be a lot more sensible than lugging a laptop around. (Internet access from at least one site is slow and expensive).
No-one is going to talk about Mozilla Browser, except maybe on the Mozilla mailing list. It will get shortened to Mozilla, which now apparently means at least 2 different programs that do two entirely different jobs. It's going to be like dropping the second word of "MS Word" and "MS Outlook" and then wondering why everyone gets confused.
Can't we have short if arcane Linux-like contractions such as moznav and mozmail? At least then we would know what we are talking about.
I've been various non-MS OSs for 20 years, and running a Linux-only cybercafe for 18 months. I installed my first Windows server last week. W2K Server (yeah yeah, I know, it took me 6 months to get round to installing it...).
I haven't seen anything radically innovative yet, but then I'm not sure that there is much radically innovative about Linux either. But I have had a few surprises:
Doing everything with the mouse is driving me mad, but I expect I could get used to it. I don't see me ditching Linux as a result of the experiment, but some sites, especially chat ones, run ten times faster than with Linux on equivalent hardware, and don't keep hanging.
All of which is to say that I have now met with the enemy, and it doesn't seem quite as bad as the anti-MS propaganda suggests, and even has a few endearing features...
I haven't seen many details, because the link is still /.ed. If it works the way you say, then I guess you are right, it won't make any difference to the network.
My point is that if you run a 7 year-old window manager like we were using 7 years ago, your network doesn't slow down. KDE has a lot more window furniture than, say, windowmaker, and seems to do a lot more redraws. Of course a cybercafe may well be a worst-case scenario: all you need is for all ten clients to leave an animated gif pop-up on their screen and you have a serious redraw issue.
'One of the compressed X extensions' sounds potentially interesting: can you give me a name or a url? The issue is always getting these things working with LTSP, which is pretty convoluted to bootstrap to start with.
From the directvnc site:
So (thinking aloud here), I would still need to network boot the terminals using DHCP, but I guess after that I could potentially drop into VNC...
But where do things like moving the mouse pointer get handled? I have dim memories of using VNC a while back, and of the pointer lagging 3 seconds behind the mouse. In a cybercafe this could be a bit of a drawback... the mouse pointer is one part of the system that does keep up at present...
I'm running LTSP, ie my terminals don't have a hard disc, and get all their resources using NFS, XFS etc. My assumption had always been that I would need quite a lot of a Linux system on the terminal end to run a VNC-type solution. If I'm wrong about this, please tell me!
(I should maybe say that I'm sure part of the network gridlock is due to non-Window manager traffic - xfs seems to have gone bananas since I upgraded to RH8, for example.)
Yep, the site is dead, that must be a record.
Personally, I'd be a lot more excited if someone was working on a useable desktop that used less bandwidth, especially in terms of network traffic with remote sessions. The amount of bloat on KDE, for example, gets worse with each new release, and it is killing my local network.
Alternatively, I suppose I could go for an older window manager that makes DOS look futuristic.
Please, can't someone come up with a Linux Window manager that doesn't give Windows users hysterics, but which can run over, say, a dial-up connection at a reasonable speed? In other words, something that performs a bit like MS Terminal Server (the 2000 version, let alone the XP 16-bit one)? I shouldn't need a gigabit backbone to run 10 diskless terminals...
Good Old Psion Organizer II. Now lying unloved at the bottom of a dusty old drawer. Wouldn't do to be seen with it now!
It's probably still one of the most robust palmtops ever built. My brother once dropped his onto tarmac from the top of a Land Rover doing 40mph (I never did work out how...), and, apart from a crack in the glass in front of the lcd, it worked fine for the next couple of years. I wouldn't rate the chances of any modern PDA after such an adventure.