I highly recommend Jumbo Seafood (in Chinatown but nearer the South Station subway stop than the Chinatown stop) if you're going out for Chinese food in Boston. The Fire+Ice restaurants are also excellent - one is at 50 Church St near the Harvard Square T stop, the other is at 205 Berkeley St in the Back Bay area. See their website at fire-ice.com.
Jumptec/Adastra DIMM-PCs - okay, they're not quite full PCs (or fast), but definitely smaller than the even just the motherboard of the PC review in the article. (Of course, most people would probably have issues over only having 32MB of "disk" space....)
Sorry, but in my book, the HandEra 330 takes the crown for coolest Palm-compatible PDA. 240X320 screen, virtual Graffiti area. All it's missing is color.
While I hate to accuse IBM of this, I think they may be pulling a fast one on us with this. The following things seem very odd to me:
They state the watch has "a powerful processor", but don't specify which one. Granted, it's probably an IBM-designed chip that hasn't been released to the public, but they could have at least said something along the lines of "a powerful new processor developed by IBM".
They claim to have X11 running on it, but don't have any pictures of it running X11.
8MB Flash memory and 8MB DRAM seems like rather a lot to put in that watch - especially when it has to share that space with the processor, IrDA and radio communication equipment, and an LCD sreen.
All this leads me to wonder: is this thing for real? I'm not completely skeptical - IBM has created some really cool things that I wasn't sure were even possible - but this one is straining the limits of believability.
What CmdrTaco didn't mention is that the original Royal daVinci PDA came out a couple of years ago. They provided almost no customer support, missed their release data for the software developer's kit by several months, and have ignored hundreds of e-mails about people not being able to sync their daVincis to desktop computers.
Then they got sued by Palm for steal parts of the PalmOS. They decided to redesign the machine and its operating system. They moved from a Motorola 68EZ328 CPU to a 12MHz Sharp CPU - unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to play with the "revised" (actually totally redesigned) model. The original was similar to the PalmPilot in functions, but with fewer options.
About a month back, I dropped my daVinci and the screen died. (I might be able to fix it, but haven't had time yet.) Due to Royal's history, I'm going to either wait until the new daVinci is an established product with good support from the user base or just a Palm instead.
Why not? Because it's just a Windows keyboard that's been relabelled. The whole point is to get rid of the extra Windows. I have a 101-key keyboard at home and a Windows keyboard at work - I actually pulled the left-hand windows key off the keyboard at work because I kept hitting it instead of "Alt" when I was trying to use keyboard shortcuts.
Now I just wish I could get a split 101-key layout so that my wrists would stop hurting from spending too much time typing.
"Combining this with the 3-button input device they have, you can free up one button to dedicate to keyboard input. How? You can either use a morse-code system (ick!) or you could use something ala the palm pilot. Use the thumb button as a toggle to bring up a visual keyboard, and "click" away by looking at the letter and clicking what you want. The 2nd mouse button in this mode could be backspace."
If you're going to emulate the Palm Pilot in any way in a wearable, add a writing "pad" that accepts the Pilot's Graffiti writing system. It can be small enough to put on one side of the mouse thingy, and it will make entering text...well, not as fast as having a keyboard, but not so slow as to be unusable (which is what I find on-screen keyboards to be.)
If you have a small network (under 20 machines or so), pick one theme and then some sort of naming convention under it. For example: Greek mythology, where monsters and heroes are workstations, and gods are servers. Within this, you can also say that a certain type of server (primary DNS controller, for example) must begin with a certain letter.
If you have a big network - the organization you work for is probably divided up into groups. Choose one theme for the servers, then choose seperate themes for each of the groups. (Or let them choose their own.) This is what the company I work for did - the group I'm in has all it's computers named after things have to do with beer. Ale, Hops, Lager, and Lite are all ours. Other groups have other naming conventions - there are machines named "PURCH##" (our purchasing dept. isn't too creative), machines named after cartoon characters (Stimpy, but no Ren...), etc. All the corporate servers are in the corp.xxx.com domain - troll.corp, otter.corp, barney.corp.
To everyone that replied to me: The only thing that I was not aware of that you pointed out to me was the automounter. I knew everything else was out there. My point is, for Joe Blow computer user, he takes a look at it and either says, "This is a peice of crap!" (without even trying to learn how to use it, especially in the case of *sh) or, when confronted with choices, "What the hell do I do now?" (at which point he goes back to using Windows, where he doesn't have to choose).
Oh, and I wasn't trying to imply that MacOS has a CLI. M$ has a decent (if not the most wonderful) CLI, MacOS has a GUI with some of the best features I've ever seen.
Also, as to KDE/Gnome: They both run on top of X, and frankly, X is a dinosaur; big, lumbering, and slow. KDE/Gnome/Enlightenment/fvwm95/etc don't offer the same level of consistency, which is what Joe Blow wants to see, even if all the programs are compatible with X.
Anyway, y'all missed the point of what I was trying to say. Which is this: If you want Linux to dominate the desktop, make it as easy to use as Windows is today.
Uh, I think that's it. (Anybody want to flame me some more? Bring it on! Burn, baby, burn!)
1. Command shell that doesn't involve a lot of learning. "move" should be the command to move a file, "copy" should be the command to copy a file, "delete" and "remove" should remove a file. Joe Blow doesn't care that when all we had was 6 letter commands, using "rm" for delete a good idea. We don't have those limits any more, we shouldn't be limited by them. (My suggestion is to call this DOS, for Dumb Old Shell, and make it work much like the MS-DOS command line.)
2. Plug and Play Everywhere! Joe Blow does not want to mount and unmount CDs himself, nor does he want to figure out the IRQ, base I/O address, etc. for his hardware. So make sure that Joe Blow doesn't have to deal with those things.
3. A good GUI/WM combination that comes default with all Linux distros. Joe Blow does not like command line interfaces and will avoid them wherever possible. So give him a GUI he can use easily and not be (too) confused by.
4. Official suppourt from hardware vendors. If Joe Blow can't buy a new peice of hardware, plug it in, turn it on, install some drivers, and start using it; Joe Blow doesn't want it.
The upshot of this whole comment? Take lessons from Microsoft and from MacOS. They've got the (relatively) painless-to-use CLI and the universal GUI. Just because M$ and Apple are the big commercial doesn't necessarily make all their ideas evil; we should feel free to clone the parts of their interfaces that make computers easy to use.
It's not, though. On my Win95 machine, I double-click the My Computer icon and a window pops up showing my drivers and the controls folders. On my mom's Win98 machine, I double-click the My Computer icon, the computer thinks about it for about thirty seconds, then loads this two-paned thing that shows all the icons I have, plus a gratuitous extra pane that shows annoying graphics, gives file descriptions, and shows previews of some types of files. I'll take the fast version over the pretty version any day. (But then again, unlike most people (who get Win98 pre-installed on their computers), I'm generally trying to use my computer to do actual work rather than just "get on that internet thing".)
The browser/file manager in Windows98 has the same problems with inconsistency that the Win95 interface did. (Dammit, if I wanted to create a shortcut to a program, I would have right clicked and gone to the "New->Shortcut" option. If I'm dragging a file around, I expect the file to go where I put it!)
And as for having you're wallpaper be a webpage: Yeah, it's kind of neat, it's also a huge waste of memory, and if you click on links on your wallpaper, the web page that it links to doesn't get displayed as your wallpaper.
Software companies should go back to doing things the Unix way: Write programs that only do one thing, but that one thing right.
While this is a really really neat idea, I can't think of very many real-world applications for it.
(Due the fact that either the firewall at my job sucks or the site has been slashdotted, I haven't actually been able to see the site yet, but...)
Things you could do with it- 1. Implant it in sex offenders. Check the records when someone accuses them. You can apply this to just about any other class of criminals known for repetitive behavior. Very high potential for misuse.
2. Find out what the pets really do when you're not at home. Or what animals do when observers can't study them.
That's about it that I can think of. Any other ideas?
Can you imagine having both automatic and manual transmissions in your car?
At least one modern has car has had this. It never caught on. I've never had the opportunity to drive one, so I don't know if there were useability flaws, or other technical problems, or if the manufacturer just decided to drop it because it wasn't popular enough.
(I believe that the car was the Mercury Mystique, but I haven't been able to find a link for you...)
Voice control is the best thing that IBM can come up with? That's pretty sad. Anyone who has used today's voice recognition software knows that it pretty much sucks. You have to speak very slowly and very clearly in order to get it to understand you. IBM has to know that this speech recognition will not work for your average geek walking down the street - there's simply too much other noise.
The best input device, IMO, is a full-size 101-key IBM keyboard. (104-key KBs suck!) Of course, this is not an option for a portable computer, so IBM had to come up with something else. The Twiddler keyboard looks like it wouldn't be bad, but I've never tried it. I think that for this application, the best input system would be a touch-sensor tablet that's connected (both physically and informationally) through a high-speed serial connection and uses handwriting recognition for inputting characters.
Let's consider this for a moment. We need the following:
Accounting software
Contact management
Cash Register
Point-of-Sale System
Probably a few other things, too, but I'm sure you'll think of them and give suggestions as see fit.
Accounting software: Needs Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, needs to be able to figure out who owes what and what is owed to who; print capability would be nice. Sounds like it shouldn't be too hard, but this is a pretty simle view; I probably left a whole bunch of stuff out. You might want to integrate time tracking and sales commissions into this, but then it gets more complicated. Do things the Unix way: Write a program that does one thing and does it right.
Contact Management: What you do with this depends on how you want to manage your contacts. You'll probably want company-wide read access with a more tightly controlled edit access.
Cash Register: We need a mini-HOWTO on how to implement/dev/cash_drawer.:)
Point-of-Sale system: This is probably going to be the biggest pain. It needs to know a lot of things. Info about the inventory (How many blue guitars do we have in stock?), the price list, the tax rates in each area where you operate. Plus, depending on the business, you might want it to work with touch screens. (Then again, you might not need that.)
as the world's population gets more education, and computers spread, I think things will get better.
I think that as computer spread, things will get worse. More usefulness per employee == fewer employees needed == fewer jobs where we can use our brains. This hasn't happened yet in the computer industry, but it's essentially the same thing that has happened to manufacturing.
And most people don't get more education than they need, period. Most people are inherently lazy, and do only what is necessary to survive. Hence, end users will continue to act like idiots, more geeks will end up in tech support, and life will be hell for everyone.
-Ender (Or maybe it's just that I'm in a bad mood because M$ Access is pissing me off today.)
...if ever, before email replaces snail mail. Reasons? Okay, here ya go:
1. It can't happen until pretty much everyone has email. EVERYONE. Worldwide. What percentage of people in Africe today have email? Hell, what percentage of people in the US have email today?
2. There are still a lot of things you can't do through email. You can't send birthday cards to your friends. Your SO can't send you a letter with lipstick marks in the shape of a mouth puckered up for a kiss on the flap of the envelope (or you can't do so, if you're the one in the relationship inclided to do so). You can't send checks. (You can send credit card info. But, dammit, I want a check. None of this credit-card-direct-deposit-get-all-your-cash-from- an-ATM BS. (Okay, I do get all my cash from an ATM, but I like having the option to talk to an actual teller.))
3. Lack of a physical address. Just because my email is @something.demon.co.uk doesn't mean I'm actually in the UK. I could be in Germany. Or Canada. Or New Zealand. Or Antartica (I'll grant that it's unlikely, but...). Companies, for some reason, frequently want to know where you are. Some will only ship to the billing address on your credit card. Those companies might not like the idea of sending something to an @{ISP name}.nz address if the billing address is Boston, Mass.
So: email will not snail mail because of it's not universal, it's can't carry all the things that snail mail can, and, in some cases, disparities between physical and email addresses.
I don't see why Palm is bothering. I have a daVinci, and trust me, it's no winner. Actually, it sucks. I can never sync. Not a lot of software, and what software there is sucks. Can't sync. Handwriting recognition has trouble telling the difference between "b" and "d", and "f" only works right about 1/2 the time. Can't sync. No support for repeating events. Can't sync. Single-tone alarm that keeps beeping for 1 minute, then stops instead of going off for five minutes, then beeping again. Can't sync.
I wouldn't be surprised if the daVinci OS was copied from Palm's. Royal doesn't seem to know very much about it, and Palm asm compilers work fine - you just have to strip some bytes of the beginning of the binary to get it to work.
Frankly, I expect the daVinci to be dead within a year or two. At $99, they can't be making much of a profit off it, and support for it ROYALLY [sic] sucks.
-Ender Stonebender (And did I mention I can't get the damn to synchronize with my PC?)
Bose is already working with a prototype network system that they're planning on imbedding in cars. It's called an "entertainment ring" network, according to a friend of mine who works for them. But removing any one component brings the entire network down. MP3 player's broken? Sorry, can't use you GPS. Doesn't seem like a bright idea to me.
Dedicated encryption hardware. People are going to want this type of thing in lots of hardware. It'll be implement as an ASIC that will divulge a public key to anyone. The U.S. government is not going to like that, because they want it to be nice and easy for their (thought) police to spy on their citizens. So before anything like this goes into mass production, the government will insist that their be a code to get the thing to spit out its private key, and the government will be able to decode our data.
Paranoia? Certainly. Is it justified? Given what the U.S. government has been like lately, it might be. Time will tell.
Let's stick to software encryption. You can write your own, which makes it really hard for the government to screw with it.
My PDA gives me information quickly when and where I need it. This is, to me, the definition of PDA. The Factoid doesn't do that. Therefore, it doesn't qualify as a PDA. With the Factoid, the information is only available from "the user's home base." Granted, I don't want my PDA carrying around gigabytes of stuff. But what I do want it carrying around, I want to have near-instanteous access to - people's phone numbers, my schedule, my to-do list, etc. It's all about data I need right away, and frankly, I don't need Coke ads right away.
A PDA without a screen is worse than useless to me. It's useless and a waste of money.
They left all sorts of questions unanswered. And they left out a picture - I wanna know what these things look like!
I doubt that they have very much processing power or a very big communications range. IMO, this is good. Smart government spy robots recording what we're saying and doing that can pretend to be flies would be decidedly bad.
I remain skeptical as to how useful linking many of them together will be - at a few milliters, capable of lifting a gram a piece, it takes a hell of a lot of them to lift anything of significant size.
Slashdot Mirror
I highly recommend Jumbo Seafood (in Chinatown but nearer the South Station subway stop than the Chinatown stop) if you're going out for Chinese food in Boston. The Fire+Ice restaurants are also excellent - one is at 50 Church St near the Harvard Square T stop, the other is at 205 Berkeley St in the Back Bay area. See their website at fire-ice.com.
Jumptec/Adastra DIMM-PCs - okay, they're not quite full PCs (or fast), but definitely smaller than the even just the motherboard of the PC review in the article. (Of course, most people would probably have issues over only having 32MB of "disk" space....)
--Ender
Sorry, but in my book, the HandEra 330 takes the crown for coolest Palm-compatible PDA. 240X320 screen, virtual Graffiti area. All it's missing is color.
Ender
- They state the watch has "a powerful processor", but don't specify which one. Granted, it's probably an IBM-designed chip that hasn't been released to the public, but they could have at least said something along the lines of "a powerful new processor developed by IBM".
- They claim to have X11 running on it, but don't have any pictures of it running X11.
- 8MB Flash memory and 8MB DRAM seems like rather a lot to put in that watch - especially when it has to share that space with the processor, IrDA and radio communication equipment, and an LCD sreen.
All this leads me to wonder: is this thing for real? I'm not completely skeptical - IBM has created some really cool things that I wasn't sure were even possible - but this one is straining the limits of believability.-Ender
What CmdrTaco didn't mention is that the original Royal daVinci PDA came out a couple of years ago. They provided almost no customer support, missed their release data for the software developer's kit by several months, and have ignored hundreds of e-mails about people not being able to sync their daVincis to desktop computers.
Then they got sued by Palm for steal parts of the PalmOS. They decided to redesign the machine and its operating system. They moved from a Motorola 68EZ328 CPU to a 12MHz Sharp CPU - unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to play with the "revised" (actually totally redesigned) model. The original was similar to the PalmPilot in functions, but with fewer options.
About a month back, I dropped my daVinci and the screen died. (I might be able to fix it, but haven't had time yet.) Due to Royal's history, I'm going to either wait until the new daVinci is an established product with good support from the user base or just a Palm instead.
-Ender
It would kill the Cancer that is New York City. Most of the rest of New York State is made up of trees, grass, and cows.
-Ender
(Trust me. I'm from the place with the trees, grass, and cows.)
No.
Why not? Because it's just a Windows keyboard that's been relabelled. The whole point is to get rid of the extra Windows. I have a 101-key keyboard at home and a Windows keyboard at work - I actually pulled the left-hand windows key off the keyboard at work because I kept hitting it instead of "Alt" when I was trying to use keyboard shortcuts.
Now I just wish I could get a split 101-key layout so that my wrists would stop hurting from spending too much time typing.
-Ender
"Combining this with the 3-button input device they have, you can free up one button to dedicate to keyboard input. How? You can either use a morse-code system (ick!) or you could use something ala the palm pilot. Use the thumb button as a toggle to bring up a visual keyboard, and "click" away by looking at the letter and clicking what you want. The 2nd mouse button in this mode could be backspace."
If you're going to emulate the Palm Pilot in any way in a wearable, add a writing "pad" that accepts the Pilot's Graffiti writing system. It can be small enough to put on one side of the mouse thingy, and it will make entering text...well, not as fast as having a keyboard, but not so slow as to be unusable (which is what I find on-screen keyboards to be.)
-Ender
Yahoo stands for "Yet Another Highly Overrated Oracle." Or so a friend of mine claims, at least.
-Ender
If you have a small network (under 20 machines or so), pick one theme and then some sort of naming convention under it. For example: Greek mythology, where monsters and heroes are workstations, and gods are servers. Within this, you can also say that a certain type of server (primary DNS controller, for example) must begin with a certain letter.
If you have a big network - the organization you work for is probably divided up into groups. Choose one theme for the servers, then choose seperate themes for each of the groups. (Or let them choose their own.) This is what the company I work for did - the group I'm in has all it's computers named after things have to do with beer. Ale, Hops, Lager, and Lite are all ours. Other groups have other naming conventions - there are machines named "PURCH##" (our purchasing dept. isn't too creative), machines named after cartoon characters (Stimpy, but no Ren...), etc. All the corporate servers are in the corp.xxx.com domain - troll.corp, otter.corp, barney.corp.
-Ender
To everyone that replied to me: The only thing that I was not aware of that you pointed out to me was the automounter. I knew everything else was out there. My point is, for Joe Blow computer user, he takes a look at it and either says, "This is a peice of crap!" (without even trying to learn how to use it, especially in the case of *sh) or, when confronted with choices, "What the hell do I do now?" (at which point he goes back to using Windows, where he doesn't have to choose).
Oh, and I wasn't trying to imply that MacOS has a CLI. M$ has a decent (if not the most wonderful) CLI, MacOS has a GUI with some of the best features I've ever seen.
Also, as to KDE/Gnome: They both run on top of X, and frankly, X is a dinosaur; big, lumbering, and slow. KDE/Gnome/Enlightenment/fvwm95/etc don't offer the same level of consistency, which is what Joe Blow wants to see, even if all the programs are compatible with X.
Anyway, y'all missed the point of what I was trying to say. Which is this: If you want Linux to dominate the desktop, make it as easy to use as Windows is today.
Uh, I think that's it. (Anybody want to flame me some more? Bring it on! Burn, baby, burn!)
-Ender
1. Command shell that doesn't involve a lot of learning. "move" should be the command to move a file, "copy" should be the command to copy a file, "delete" and "remove" should remove a file. Joe Blow doesn't care that when all we had was 6 letter commands, using "rm" for delete a good idea. We don't have those limits any more, we shouldn't be limited by them. (My suggestion is to call this DOS, for Dumb Old Shell, and make it work much like the MS-DOS command line.)
2. Plug and Play Everywhere! Joe Blow does not want to mount and unmount CDs himself, nor does he want to figure out the IRQ, base I/O address, etc. for his hardware. So make sure that Joe Blow doesn't have to deal with those things.
3. A good GUI/WM combination that comes default with all Linux distros. Joe Blow does not like command line interfaces and will avoid them wherever possible. So give him a GUI he can use easily and not be (too) confused by.
4. Official suppourt from hardware vendors. If Joe Blow can't buy a new peice of hardware, plug it in, turn it on, install some drivers, and start using it; Joe Blow doesn't want it.
The upshot of this whole comment? Take lessons from Microsoft and from MacOS. They've got the (relatively) painless-to-use CLI and the universal GUI. Just because M$ and Apple are the big commercial doesn't necessarily make all their ideas evil; we should feel free to clone the parts of their interfaces that make computers easy to use.
-Ender
It's just too damn convienent.
It's not, though. On my Win95 machine, I double-click the My Computer icon and a window pops up showing my drivers and the controls folders. On my mom's Win98 machine, I double-click the My Computer icon, the computer thinks about it for about thirty seconds, then loads this two-paned thing that shows all the icons I have, plus a gratuitous extra pane that shows annoying graphics, gives file descriptions, and shows previews of some types of files. I'll take the fast version over the pretty version any day. (But then again, unlike most people (who get Win98 pre-installed on their computers), I'm generally trying to use my computer to do actual work rather than just "get on that internet thing".)
The browser/file manager in Windows98 has the same problems with inconsistency that the Win95 interface did. (Dammit, if I wanted to create a shortcut to a program, I would have right clicked and gone to the "New->Shortcut" option. If I'm dragging a file around, I expect the file to go where I put it!)
And as for having you're wallpaper be a webpage: Yeah, it's kind of neat, it's also a huge waste of memory, and if you click on links on your wallpaper, the web page that it links to doesn't get displayed as your wallpaper.
Software companies should go back to doing things the Unix way: Write programs that only do one thing, but that one thing right.
-Ender
While this is a really really neat idea, I can't think of very many real-world applications for it.
(Due the fact that either the firewall at my job sucks or the site has been slashdotted, I haven't actually been able to see the site yet, but...)
Things you could do with it-
1. Implant it in sex offenders. Check the records when someone accuses them. You can apply this to just about any other class of criminals known for repetitive behavior. Very high potential for misuse.
2. Find out what the pets really do when you're not at home. Or what animals do when observers can't study them.
That's about it that I can think of. Any other ideas?
-Ender
Can you imagine having both automatic and manual transmissions in your car?
At least one modern has car has had this. It never caught on. I've never had the opportunity to drive one, so I don't know if there were useability flaws, or other technical problems, or if the manufacturer just decided to drop it because it wasn't popular enough.
(I believe that the car was the Mercury Mystique, but I haven't been able to find a link for you...)
-Ender
Voice control is the best thing that IBM can come up with? That's pretty sad. Anyone who has used today's voice recognition software knows that it pretty much sucks. You have to speak very slowly and very clearly in order to get it to understand you. IBM has to know that this speech recognition will not work for your average geek walking down the street - there's simply too much other noise.
The best input device, IMO, is a full-size 101-key IBM keyboard. (104-key KBs suck!) Of course, this is not an option for a portable computer, so IBM had to come up with something else. The Twiddler keyboard looks like it wouldn't be bad, but I've never tried it. I think that for this application, the best input system would be a touch-sensor tablet that's connected (both physically and informationally) through a high-speed serial connection and uses handwriting recognition for inputting characters.
Just my 2 cents.
-Ender
We need the following:
Probably a few other things, too, but I'm sure you'll think of them and give suggestions as see fit.
Accounting software: Needs Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, needs to be able to figure out who owes what and what is owed to who; print capability would be nice. Sounds like it shouldn't be too hard, but this is a pretty simle view; I probably left a whole bunch of stuff out.
You might want to integrate time tracking and sales commissions into this, but then it gets more complicated. Do things the Unix way: Write a program that does one thing and does it right.
Contact Management: What you do with this depends on how you want to manage your contacts. You'll probably want company-wide read access with a more tightly controlled edit access.
Cash Register: We need a mini-HOWTO on how to implement
Point-of-Sale system: This is probably going to be the biggest pain. It needs to know a lot of things. Info about the inventory (How many blue guitars do we have in stock?), the price list, the tax rates in each area where you operate. Plus, depending on the business, you might want it to work with touch screens. (Then again, you might not need that.)
-Ender
as the world's population gets more education, and computers spread, I think things will get better.
I think that as computer spread, things will get worse. More usefulness per employee == fewer employees needed == fewer jobs where we can use our brains. This hasn't happened yet in the computer industry, but it's essentially the same thing that has happened to manufacturing.
And most people don't get more education than they need, period. Most people are inherently lazy, and do only what is necessary to survive. Hence, end users will continue to act like idiots, more geeks will end up in tech support, and life will be hell for everyone.
-Ender
(Or maybe it's just that I'm in a bad mood because M$ Access is pissing me off today.)
...if ever, before email replaces snail mail. Reasons? Okay, here ya go:
- an-ATM BS. (Okay, I do get all my cash from an ATM, but I like having the option to talk to an actual teller.))
1. It can't happen until pretty much everyone has email. EVERYONE. Worldwide. What percentage of people in Africe today have email? Hell, what percentage of people in the US have email today?
2. There are still a lot of things you can't do through email. You can't send birthday cards to your friends. Your SO can't send you a letter with lipstick marks in the shape of a mouth puckered up for a kiss on the flap of the envelope (or you can't do so, if you're the one in the relationship inclided to do so). You can't send checks. (You can send credit card info. But, dammit, I want a check. None of this credit-card-direct-deposit-get-all-your-cash-from
3. Lack of a physical address. Just because my email is @something.demon.co.uk doesn't mean I'm actually in the UK. I could be in Germany. Or Canada. Or New Zealand. Or Antartica (I'll grant that it's unlikely, but...). Companies, for some reason, frequently want to know where you are. Some will only ship to the billing address on your credit card. Those companies might not like the idea of sending something to an @{ISP name}.nz address if the billing address is Boston, Mass.
So: email will not snail mail because of it's not universal, it's can't carry all the things that snail mail can, and, in some cases, disparities between physical and email addresses.
Just my 1/50 of a dollar.
-Ender
I don't see why Palm is bothering. I have a daVinci, and trust me, it's no winner. Actually, it sucks. I can never sync. Not a lot of software, and what software there is sucks. Can't sync. Handwriting recognition has trouble telling the difference between "b" and "d", and "f" only works right about 1/2 the time. Can't sync. No support for repeating events. Can't sync. Single-tone alarm that keeps beeping for 1 minute, then stops instead of going off for five minutes, then beeping again. Can't sync.
I wouldn't be surprised if the daVinci OS was copied from Palm's. Royal doesn't seem to know very much about it, and Palm asm compilers work fine - you just have to strip some bytes of the beginning of the binary to get it to work.
Frankly, I expect the daVinci to be dead within a year or two. At $99, they can't be making much of a profit off it, and support for it ROYALLY [sic] sucks.
-Ender Stonebender
(And did I mention I can't get the damn to synchronize with my PC?)
Bose is already working with a prototype network system that they're planning on imbedding in cars. It's called an "entertainment ring" network, according to a friend of mine who works for them. But removing any one component brings the entire network down. MP3 player's broken? Sorry, can't use you GPS. Doesn't seem like a bright idea to me.
-Ender
...is doing a similar design. I saw it somewhere on their web page, which is at http://www.logitech.com
Dedicated encryption hardware. People are going to want this type of thing in lots of hardware. It'll be implement as an ASIC that will divulge a public key to anyone. The U.S. government is not going to like that, because they want it to be nice and easy for their (thought) police to spy on their citizens. So before anything like this goes into mass production, the government will insist that their be a code to get the thing to spit out its private key, and the government will be able to decode our data.
Paranoia? Certainly. Is it justified? Given what the U.S. government has been like lately, it might be. Time will tell.
Let's stick to software encryption. You can write your own, which makes it really hard for the government to screw with it.
-Ender
My PDA gives me information quickly when and where I need it. This is, to me, the definition of PDA. The Factoid doesn't do that. Therefore, it doesn't qualify as a PDA. With the Factoid, the information is only available from "the user's home base." Granted, I don't want my PDA carrying around gigabytes of stuff. But what I do want it carrying around, I want to have near-instanteous access to - people's phone numbers, my schedule, my to-do list, etc. It's all about data I need right away, and frankly, I don't need Coke ads right away.
A PDA without a screen is worse than useless to me. It's useless and a waste of money.
-Ender
They left all sorts of questions unanswered. And they left out a picture - I wanna know what these things look like!
I doubt that they have very much processing power or a very big communications range. IMO, this is good. Smart government spy robots recording what we're saying and doing that can pretend to be flies would be decidedly bad.
I remain skeptical as to how useful linking many of them together will be - at a few milliters, capable of lifting a gram a piece, it takes a hell of a lot of them to lift anything of significant size.
-Ender