Before everyone swears up and down that 2 or 3-button mice are the "standard" let's put this in perspective.
Apple has been shipping computers with 1-button mice when the PC was shipped WITHOUT a mouse--because back then all you had was DOS.
Now, I may like more than one mouse button, but Apple's got their reasons for sticking to the traditional 1-button mouse that they've had for 20 years.
My idea is to write a piece of software for the Atari that turns the keyboard into a serial-port-driven keyboard for the PC.
That way there isn't any hardware hacking.
I have not been able to find any modern keyboards that feel as good as an Atari 800 or 1200XL keyboard. I don't like the clackity clack of mechanical IBM keyboards. The 800 and 1200XL have IBM selectric-type keyboards that are smooth and quiet and NOT mushy.
If you could have An Atari running as a keyboard for the PC you could keep your existing keyboard online for keys you can't easily hit with the Atari, and do most of your basic text entry with the Atari.
Anyone know of a starting point for writing custom keyboard drivers?
Opera has versions that run on relatively slow hardware (PDAs without floating point units). An 060 Amiga probably has as much floating point muscle as a modern 206mhz ARM simulating FP in integer math.
I don't see any reason why it's not theoretically possible to write a fast and compatible browser for Amigas with 68060 accelerators.
If you look at An 060 Amiga as having comparable throughput to something like a fast Dragonball Palm or a slow ARM but with lots more RAM, then it might be possible to adapt J2ME VMs and PDA-based plugins (like Flash) to the Amiga.
Not everyone has PPC accelerators in their Amigas since almost all software of any consequence was written for 68K and depending on your setup, it might not be possible to find an accelerator fast enough to justify the cost (most PPC accelerators cards for original Amiga hardware are ancient by today's standards).
PNG is probably the best format out there for full color images w/alpha channel. It's definitely the smallest in this mode.
You can import PNGs into Macromedia Flash and preserve the alpha channel.
What this means is, for instance, you could import an image sequence generated by a rendering package like Lightwave and when you output the Flash, you are left with the equivalent of a JPEG image sequence layer with a perfect alpha channel on the edges. Even though the JPEG introduces blocky artefacting as the compression is ramped up, it doesn't mess up the alpha blending.
There is nothing else I know of that can do something like that.
I really wish JPEG had a mode with an alpha channel but it doesn't.
Laptops are the future of computer hardware. Apple knows it. The rest of the industry is starting to catch up. People want internet on the go. Wireless internet access in the home/workplace is taking off, but people are going to want internet everywhere.
Is it not hard to see that there is a void there that cellular networks can fill?
Once you are using a laptop or uber-PDA on a cellular internet then you are going to use up as much bandwidth as you are given, so let's not be stupid enough to say that nobody is going to want broadband speeds on cellular networks.
If they can offer something fast, and more importantly, something affordable, it will be a huge market. It could be as huge as this first wave of cell phone adoption that we've just gone through.
If it's kept too expensive and limited, though, then it will NEVER take off.
I think the problem here is that Sharp is really slightly behind the curve on all the new PDA developments other than screen tech, and behind in the business model as well.
Wireless will soon be a built-in feature in just about every portable device and none of the Zaurus models are scheduled to include even bluetooth, so you'll have to sacrifice an expansion slot for that which could otherwise be used for an important purpose.
Plus, the 32MB SDRAM is just not progress. It should be at least 64MB of SDRAM by now. 64MB is not asking for much these days, really.
The only significant improvement here is the move to XScale.
But for those who might want to use the Zaurus as a media player, the interface to the screen is still a dumb, slow, CPU-drive frame-buffer. Add to that the XScale's lack of floating point and you have hardware that just won't want to handle DivX type codecs.
However, there are now graphics accelerators being built for PDAs in order to take more of the load off the CPU. Sharp should look into these.
Sharp is targeting these devices purely at niche enterprise users, but I feel the future will mean the blending of PDA with laptop.
When PDAs are running at 500+Mhz there is no reason for them not to support just about every class of application a laptop a few years ago could do, which includes 3D games and full-framerate video playback.
It won't be long before something like an IPOD which is like a dumbed down PDA that just plays media will evolve into a sub-$1000 laptop class machine that is designed for END USERS rather than the enterprise.
Steve Jobs has already stated that he thinks the Laptop is the future of hardware sales, and I think once you can offer something that gives you the basic functionality you want in a laptop within a PDA formfactor (more importantly, a PDA pricerange) then your sales will literally explode. Something like this eliminates your MP3 player, provides a portable video player, AND eliminates the need for a tablet PC/webpad also.
For most people on modest budgets, the idea of shelling out $1200+ for a laptop is just unacceptable, not in the era of $500 desktop machines... So a single device that can be the swiss-army-knife is going to be the killer app.
Eventually the industry will realize this, even if it has to happen by accident or something.
Back in the 60s there was a show that many of you may remember called Thunderbirds.
It featured puppets as the main characters, where the best you could get was simple lip synch and some eye movement.
That's fine for kiddie fare, where the plot and the action is all that counts, but you can hardly emote through that.
And that's the problem with CGI these days because all the focus is on the textures and the models and not enough on the animation.
There are too many muscles in the face alone to truly get a performance out of a computer animated character. Gollum was about as close as we've come and that took a TREMENDOUS amount of effort. There is simply NO REASON to do this from a financial standpoint vs. shoot live action.
Even considering how bad TV acting tends to be, it's still capable of better performances than you see from things like the Starship Troopers show that was on a couple years back, and even that was chock full of motion capture cheats.
You really do only achieve a kind of "Thunderbirds plus" or "Weekend at Bernies" like effect with very realistic looking objects that simply do not have that breath of life to them, at least with the faces.
We are able to accept more stylized characters because our minds are programmed to fill in the blanks and accept various exaggerations and such (squash and stretch for instance) to accentuate mood that don't make sense with realistic characters.
That's why the Pixar films, and to a lesser extent, even things like Jimmy Neutron, worked, whereas Final Fantasy didn't.
And for those who would like to defend FF, I think the box office and the current financial troubles of Square speaks for itself.
Opera is cross-platform and it's tiny.
Using cross-platform as an excuse for Mozilla's bloat makes no sense.
It's the general programming approach that was taken with Mozilla that is flawed.
-- Do you suppose this might have had something to do with battery life? As I recall, you were lucky to get a couple of hours out of the GameGear. --
Have you ever heard of something called a SWITCH? Let the USER decide whether he wants to suck his batteries dry or not. How does a backlight suck the batteries dry if you decide to keep it off, or dim it down like on a PDA?
-- These people aren't driven by pure evil but rather extreme frustration. --
Nobody acts without "reasons". Hitler published an impassioned rationalization for his upcoming genocide in Mein Kampf that, if you read it, sounds oh so similar to the B.S. moral justifications that you hear coming from Arafat, Saudi, or Egyptian officials.
You might blame the rest of Europe for punishing Germany too much for the rise of Naziism before after WWI. That doesn't absolve Hitler or his followers for the sins of WWII.
To me, the core of Islamic fundementalism is equally based in anti-semitism as Naziism was, and is nothing for us to sympathize with.
It only legitimizes these deviant beliefs to try to "understand" them. Since the radical followers of this ideology have as closed minds as any hard-core cult member, it's too late to try to deprogram them, especially when the country they are in is feeding their hatred with a steady dose of hate. All you can hope to do is neutralize their threat to the civilized world to such a degree that they realize on a practical level that they are just not going to get what they want regardless of their degree of sacrifice. And if this has no effect other than creating a slow and protracted ethnic suicide, one suicide bomber after the next, then so be it.
To reward that behavior with any sort of perceived dignity, sympathies, or undue attention will only further encourage it in a "natural born killers" sort of way. Attention on the overcrowded world stage is what they really want.
Reducing the equation to "evil doers", as simplistic as it may sound, is indeed the proper tactic, because let's face it, they've already dehumanized us in their eyes.
What a silly statement this is. Consoles have been a major industry since 1980 when the Atari VCS took off.
There was a time before the crash when just about every household with kids had a VCS. I'd call that mainstream acceptance to me. They certainly were more likely to have a console than a PC back then.
If anything, PC game sales should be higher because of the PC's increased mainstream acceptance... It was the PC that used to be relegated just to geeks but is now increasingly a home appliance. PCs also still have internet play mastered (i.e. MMORPGs, FPSs, and RTS) while consoles are barely managing to catch up.
I think the reason the game industry has grown since then has been the changing demographic. The kids of the 2600 generation, by and large, have not given up videogames, and a whole new generation or two have taken their place. So the medium in general has become less relegated to the kid demographic. But even if it were still just kids it would still be a pretty big market.
I do think anytime you buy a PC game you have to worry in the back of your mind how well it's going to run on your system, and since many of us are still hanging onto machinces 2-3 years old which serve well enough for internet and home office apps, we're not on the bleeding edge of game technology anymore. Our PCs might even be weaker or about on the same level as an XBox. (Mine is a 700mhz Athlon so I'm in that category.) This might explain the apparent dropoff. With a console purchase you are assured the game is going to run as advertised.
>>
With HTML, you can force it to wrap to your viewpoint. Converting the web to flash will certainly kill small-screen devices' web browsing.
If that were the case then Opera and WebTV wouldn't have to completely reformat the HTML for small resolutions, and when you go too far with that, breaking up table structure and stuff, you risk making the page hard to understand because you remove chunks of it from its original visual context. You can't _completely_ separate meaning (in the data) from the presentation (the style).
At least Flash is vector and scalable. But if your display is only 320x200 or less, that's a tough one even with antialiased vector fonts if the amount of text that's trying to render per page results in 1px characters.
Flash has also been ported to a LOT of platforms and should be compact enough to run on today's PDAs if it doesn't already.
And there is no reason that these PDAs couldn't render the flash differently to make it more legible either. Like a zoom in function or some such.
The bottom line is that small screens are a challenge regardless of whether Flash is employed or not.
Just because there is a P3P privacy policy doesn't mean the policy itself is being truthful or accurate. There is no real accountability or certification of P3P policies, so companies can put any sort of generic boilerplate BS in their P3P policies and as long as there IS one, the browser will accept cookies, etc...
It can say "oh yeah, we're not selling your information to 3rd parties or anything" when in fact they are. If you trust what it says, then you allow the site to set cookies. You shouldn't be trusting the word of the site itself. It should be a 3rd party certification.
That's not really protecting privacy, IMHO.
If P3P policies could be used as evidence in court cases for misrepresentation, then it might force companies to provide more accurate P3P policies, but I haven't heard of any lawsuits coming from inaccurate P3P policies. You'd have to KNOW their policy was misleading in order to take them to court anyway, which is hard to do.
a) the pricepoint for these things is outrageous. We're talking about laptop pricing here. As long as that's the case, "joe sixpack" will never buy one of these things to kick around the house as a home web appliance sort of thing. I know I would not waste $1000+ on a tabletPC. I'd rather get a used laptop with the keyboard and all the trimmings.
b) since it runs full blown windows, it needs more resources than PDAs. It can't get by with just Flash memory. So getting decent battery life and keeping it light is a big challenge.
I think the next "big thing" in the evolution of the PC is the rise of the budget (commodity) subnotebook. Something with most of the power of laptops, but a fraction of the price. You could think of it like a PDA on steroids. Something like this is unlikely to be running windows for the reasons I stated. It's going to take advantage of larger capacity flash memory and new display technologies (maybe eventually OLED/OLEP) and built-in wireless connectivity.
The problem in the PDA field is that PDA screens are too damn small and the vertical orientation makes reading webpages a chore. It's okay for calendars and other simple apps that PDAs were invented for, but it SUCKS for the kinds of things people now want to use them for. There is too much bad ergonomics in the traditional PDA design that just doesn't want to go away.
I think the new Zaurus design that was posted on/. is a lot closer to what I think people are going to ultimately want to use. Higher resolution screen, horizontal 4:3 aspect ratio, a usable keyboard and a swivel design so you can switch back and forth from tablet/pda mode to subnotebook. (They are also going to need a wee bit more speed than SA1100 so that video will play better.)
The trick is to be able to sell something like that for under $500. It's great that Palm can offer PDAs for $99 and all, but Moore's law has to catch up to the point where you can get notebook performance from PDA hardware (hence PDA pricepoints). Desktop PC prices have tumbled, and it's time to see this happen in the notebook/PDA space.
As long as the hardware manufacturers keep chasing the "Enterprise" markets and nothing else, these devices will never penetrate the mainstream.
Annan is a blind idealist, which makes him perfect for the ineffectual UN. His words have little effect in the world because they are so far removed from practical reality. So I don't know why people are even listening to him. (If he were a weapons inspector in Iraq and he stumbled upon a nuclear warhead, if the Iraqi's said it was a prop for a movie he'd probably believe it he's so gullible, or should I say UNABLE to believe that some nation states just can't be trusted.)
Anyway, as for the digital divide, some in this thread have suggested that there is one in the US, and while I might have agreed with that 5 years ago, there is no longer any excuse today.
PC costs have hit rock bottom and they probably can't get much cheaper. And that's for brand new state of the art hardware... Even someone in the rural south should be able to afford a handmedown used PII350 which still has enough muscle to run Win2K effectively.
A few generations of PC ago there were big enough gaps in CPU speed that certain classes of application (i.e. MP3) and operating system were opened up. (Like a 486/66 was pretty much the bare minumum for Windows95.) At that time, an old 286 or an XT didn't really seem that useful.
It was around the 350-500mhz mark that PCs hit a sweet spot in throughput beyond which anything else is really only needed for games. So as we go ever onward on the development curve, all those previous machines that were created could be put to use. And the number of these "outdated" PCs will skyrocket in the future. Sure, people will always come up with new applications that require speed (like video codecs) but for the majority of what people do with computers these days (i.e. simple office and internet apps) these machines will continue to be adequate indefinitely.
So if there IS a digital divide, it's more because of education. You have literacy, and then you have COMPUTER literacy.
And since in this country for the longest time, knowing how to use a computer made you a GEEK and therefore uncool, there is this cultural aversion to using computers in the US that we're only recently leaving behind.
So to say it's just a class thing is an outdated notion. Sure, monthly dialup fees cost money, but it's cheaper than your phone bill if you call long-distance at all. The internet just becomes another "must have" utility. It's about as cheap as it's going to get.
The problem is that modern desktop CPUs don't power scale. Why run your 2.4GHZ machine AT 2.4GHZ if the apps you are running at that time of the day do not require it?
This is only going to get worse as CPUs get faster, take even more power, and get hotter. We're already basically running supercomputer class machines to do glorified typewriter operations, which is really wasteful.
Desktop CPUs should scale the way mobile CPUs do. Then for mom and pop applications your computer wouldn't suck that much juice and the fan could be turned off entirely, but run a zillion apps at once or a raytracer and it will kick into turbo.
Slashdot Mirror
Before everyone swears up and down that 2 or 3-button mice are the "standard" let's put this in perspective.
Apple has been shipping computers with 1-button mice when the PC was shipped WITHOUT a mouse--because back then all you had was DOS.
Now, I may like more than one mouse button, but Apple's got their reasons for sticking to the traditional 1-button mouse that they've had for 20 years.
My idea is to write a piece of software for the Atari that turns the keyboard into a serial-port-driven keyboard for the PC.
That way there isn't any hardware hacking.
I have not been able to find any modern keyboards that feel as good as an Atari 800 or 1200XL keyboard. I don't like the clackity clack of mechanical IBM keyboards. The 800 and 1200XL have IBM selectric-type keyboards that are smooth and quiet and NOT mushy.
If you could have An Atari running as a keyboard for the PC you could keep your existing keyboard online for keys you can't easily hit with the Atari, and do most of your basic text entry with the Atari.
Anyone know of a starting point for writing custom keyboard drivers?
Opera has versions that run on relatively slow hardware (PDAs without floating point units). An 060 Amiga probably has as much floating point muscle as a modern 206mhz ARM simulating FP in integer math.
I don't see any reason why it's not theoretically possible to write a fast and compatible browser for Amigas with 68060 accelerators.
If you look at An 060 Amiga as having comparable throughput to something like a fast Dragonball Palm or a slow ARM but with lots more RAM, then it might be possible to adapt J2ME VMs and PDA-based plugins (like Flash) to the Amiga.
Not everyone has PPC accelerators in their Amigas since almost all software of any consequence was written for 68K and depending on your setup, it might not be possible to find an accelerator fast enough to justify the cost (most PPC accelerators cards for original Amiga hardware are ancient by today's standards).
PNG is probably the best format out there for full color images w/alpha channel. It's definitely the smallest in this mode.
You can import PNGs into Macromedia Flash and preserve the alpha channel.
What this means is, for instance, you could import an image sequence generated by a rendering package like Lightwave and when you output the Flash, you are left with the equivalent of a JPEG image sequence layer with a perfect alpha channel on the edges. Even though the JPEG introduces blocky artefacting as the compression is ramped up, it doesn't mess up the alpha blending.
There is nothing else I know of that can do something like that.
I really wish JPEG had a mode with an alpha channel but it doesn't.
Laptops are the future of computer hardware. Apple knows it. The rest of the industry is starting to catch up. People want internet on the go. Wireless internet access in the home/workplace is taking off, but people are going to want internet everywhere.
Is it not hard to see that there is a void there that cellular networks can fill?
Once you are using a laptop or uber-PDA on a cellular internet then you are going to use up as much bandwidth as you are given, so let's not be stupid enough to say that nobody is going to want broadband speeds on cellular networks.
If they can offer something fast, and more importantly, something affordable, it will be a huge market. It could be as huge as this first wave of cell phone adoption that we've just gone through.
If it's kept too expensive and limited, though, then it will NEVER take off.
I think the problem here is that Sharp is really slightly behind the curve on all the new PDA developments other than screen tech, and behind in the business model as well.
Wireless will soon be a built-in feature in just about every portable device and none of the Zaurus models are scheduled to include even bluetooth, so you'll have to sacrifice an expansion slot for that which could otherwise be used for an important purpose.
Plus, the 32MB SDRAM is just not progress. It should be at least 64MB of SDRAM by now. 64MB is not asking for much these days, really.
The only significant improvement here is the move to XScale.
But for those who might want to use the Zaurus as a media player, the interface to the screen is still a dumb, slow, CPU-drive frame-buffer. Add to that the XScale's lack of floating point and you have hardware that just won't want to handle DivX type codecs.
However, there are now graphics accelerators being built for PDAs in order to take more of the load off the CPU. Sharp should look into these.
Sharp is targeting these devices purely at niche enterprise users, but I feel the future will mean the blending of PDA with laptop.
When PDAs are running at 500+Mhz there is no reason for them not to support just about every class of application a laptop a few years ago could do, which includes 3D games and full-framerate video playback.
It won't be long before something like an IPOD which is like a dumbed down PDA that just plays media will evolve into a sub-$1000 laptop class machine that is designed for END USERS rather than the enterprise.
Steve Jobs has already stated that he thinks the Laptop is the future of hardware sales, and I think once you can offer something that gives you the basic functionality you want in a laptop within a PDA formfactor (more importantly, a PDA pricerange) then your sales will literally explode. Something like this eliminates your MP3 player, provides a portable video player, AND eliminates the need for a tablet PC/webpad also.
For most people on modest budgets, the idea of shelling out $1200+ for a laptop is just unacceptable, not in the era of $500 desktop machines... So a single device that can be the swiss-army-knife is going to be the killer app.
Eventually the industry will realize this, even if it has to happen by accident or something.
Back in the 60s there was a show that many of you may remember called Thunderbirds. It featured puppets as the main characters, where the best you could get was simple lip synch and some eye movement. That's fine for kiddie fare, where the plot and the action is all that counts, but you can hardly emote through that. And that's the problem with CGI these days because all the focus is on the textures and the models and not enough on the animation. There are too many muscles in the face alone to truly get a performance out of a computer animated character. Gollum was about as close as we've come and that took a TREMENDOUS amount of effort. There is simply NO REASON to do this from a financial standpoint vs. shoot live action. Even considering how bad TV acting tends to be, it's still capable of better performances than you see from things like the Starship Troopers show that was on a couple years back, and even that was chock full of motion capture cheats. You really do only achieve a kind of "Thunderbirds plus" or "Weekend at Bernies" like effect with very realistic looking objects that simply do not have that breath of life to them, at least with the faces. We are able to accept more stylized characters because our minds are programmed to fill in the blanks and accept various exaggerations and such (squash and stretch for instance) to accentuate mood that don't make sense with realistic characters. That's why the Pixar films, and to a lesser extent, even things like Jimmy Neutron, worked, whereas Final Fantasy didn't. And for those who would like to defend FF, I think the box office and the current financial troubles of Square speaks for itself.
Opera is cross-platform and it's tiny. Using cross-platform as an excuse for Mozilla's bloat makes no sense. It's the general programming approach that was taken with Mozilla that is flawed.
--
Do you suppose this might have had something to do with battery life? As I recall, you were lucky to get a couple of hours out of the GameGear.
--
Have you ever heard of something called a SWITCH? Let the USER decide whether he wants to suck his batteries dry or not. How does a backlight suck the batteries dry if you decide to keep it off, or dim it down like on a PDA?
--
These people aren't driven by pure evil but rather extreme frustration.
--
Nobody acts without "reasons". Hitler published an impassioned rationalization for his upcoming genocide in Mein Kampf that, if you read it, sounds oh so similar to the B.S. moral justifications that you hear coming from Arafat, Saudi, or Egyptian officials.
You might blame the rest of Europe for punishing Germany too much for the rise of Naziism before after WWI. That doesn't absolve Hitler or his followers for the sins of WWII.
To me, the core of Islamic fundementalism is equally based in anti-semitism as Naziism was, and is nothing for us to sympathize with.
It only legitimizes these deviant beliefs to try to "understand" them. Since the radical followers of this ideology have as closed minds as any hard-core cult member, it's too late to try to deprogram them, especially when the country they are in is feeding their hatred with a steady dose of hate. All you can hope to do is neutralize their threat to the civilized world to such a degree that they realize on a practical level that they are just not going to get what they want regardless of their degree of sacrifice. And if this has no effect other than creating a slow and protracted ethnic suicide, one suicide bomber after the next, then so be it.
To reward that behavior with any sort of perceived dignity, sympathies, or undue attention will only further encourage it in a "natural born killers" sort of way. Attention on the overcrowded world stage is what they really want.
Reducing the equation to "evil doers", as simplistic as it may sound, is indeed the proper tactic, because let's face it, they've already dehumanized us in their eyes.
>
What a silly statement this is. Consoles have been a major industry since 1980 when the Atari VCS took off.
There was a time before the crash when just about every household with kids had a VCS. I'd call that mainstream acceptance to me. They certainly were more likely to have a console than a PC back then.
If anything, PC game sales should be higher because of the PC's increased mainstream acceptance... It was the PC that used to be relegated just to geeks but is now increasingly a home appliance. PCs also still have internet play mastered (i.e. MMORPGs, FPSs, and RTS) while consoles are barely managing to catch up.
I think the reason the game industry has grown since then has been the changing demographic. The kids of the 2600 generation, by and large, have not given up videogames, and a whole new generation or two have taken their place. So the medium in general has become less relegated to the kid demographic. But even if it were still just kids it would still be a pretty big market.
I do think anytime you buy a PC game you have to worry in the back of your mind how well it's going to run on your system, and since many of us are still hanging onto machinces 2-3 years old which serve well enough for internet and home office apps, we're not on the bleeding edge of game technology anymore. Our PCs might even be weaker or about on the same level as an XBox. (Mine is a 700mhz Athlon so I'm in that category.) This might explain the apparent dropoff. With a console purchase you are assured the game is going to run as advertised.
>> With HTML, you can force it to wrap to your viewpoint. Converting the web to flash will certainly kill small-screen devices' web browsing. If that were the case then Opera and WebTV wouldn't have to completely reformat the HTML for small resolutions, and when you go too far with that, breaking up table structure and stuff, you risk making the page hard to understand because you remove chunks of it from its original visual context. You can't _completely_ separate meaning (in the data) from the presentation (the style). At least Flash is vector and scalable. But if your display is only 320x200 or less, that's a tough one even with antialiased vector fonts if the amount of text that's trying to render per page results in 1px characters. Flash has also been ported to a LOT of platforms and should be compact enough to run on today's PDAs if it doesn't already. And there is no reason that these PDAs couldn't render the flash differently to make it more legible either. Like a zoom in function or some such. The bottom line is that small screens are a challenge regardless of whether Flash is employed or not.
Just because there is a P3P privacy policy doesn't mean the policy itself is being truthful or accurate. There is no real accountability or certification of P3P policies, so companies can put any sort of generic boilerplate BS in their P3P policies and as long as there IS one, the browser will accept cookies, etc...
It can say "oh yeah, we're not selling your information to 3rd parties or anything" when in fact they are. If you trust what it says, then you allow the site to set cookies. You shouldn't be trusting the word of the site itself. It should be a 3rd party certification.
That's not really protecting privacy, IMHO.
If P3P policies could be used as evidence in court cases for misrepresentation, then it might force companies to provide more accurate P3P policies, but I haven't heard of any lawsuits coming from inaccurate P3P policies. You'd have to KNOW their policy was misleading in order to take them to court anyway, which is hard to do.
The problem with the Tablet PC is two-fold:
/. is a lot closer to what I think people are going to ultimately want to use. Higher resolution screen, horizontal 4:3 aspect ratio, a usable keyboard and a swivel design so you can switch back and forth from tablet/pda mode to subnotebook. (They are also going to need a wee bit more speed than SA1100 so that video will play better.)
a) the pricepoint for these things is outrageous. We're talking about laptop pricing here. As long as that's the case, "joe sixpack" will never buy one of these things to kick around the house as a home web appliance sort of thing. I know I would not waste $1000+ on a tabletPC. I'd rather get a used laptop with the keyboard and all the trimmings.
b) since it runs full blown windows, it needs more resources than PDAs. It can't get by with just Flash memory. So getting decent battery life and keeping it light is a big challenge.
I think the next "big thing" in the evolution of the PC is the rise of the budget (commodity) subnotebook. Something with most of the power of laptops, but a fraction of the price. You could think of it like a PDA on steroids. Something like this is unlikely to be running windows for the reasons I stated. It's going to take advantage of larger capacity flash memory and new display technologies (maybe eventually OLED/OLEP) and built-in wireless connectivity.
The problem in the PDA field is that PDA screens are too damn small and the vertical orientation makes reading webpages a chore. It's okay for calendars and other simple apps that PDAs were invented for, but it SUCKS for the kinds of things people now want to use them for. There is too much bad ergonomics in the traditional PDA design that just doesn't want to go away.
I think the new Zaurus design that was posted on
The trick is to be able to sell something like that for under $500. It's great that Palm can offer PDAs for $99 and all, but Moore's law has to catch up to the point where you can get notebook performance from PDA hardware (hence PDA pricepoints). Desktop PC prices have tumbled, and it's time to see this happen in the notebook/PDA space.
As long as the hardware manufacturers keep chasing the "Enterprise" markets and nothing else, these devices will never penetrate the mainstream.
Annan is a blind idealist, which makes him perfect for the ineffectual UN. His words have little effect in the world because they are so far removed from practical reality. So I don't know why people are even listening to him. (If he were a weapons inspector in Iraq and he stumbled upon a nuclear warhead, if the Iraqi's said it was a prop for a movie he'd probably believe it he's so gullible, or should I say UNABLE to believe that some nation states just can't be trusted.) Anyway, as for the digital divide, some in this thread have suggested that there is one in the US, and while I might have agreed with that 5 years ago, there is no longer any excuse today. PC costs have hit rock bottom and they probably can't get much cheaper. And that's for brand new state of the art hardware... Even someone in the rural south should be able to afford a handmedown used PII350 which still has enough muscle to run Win2K effectively. A few generations of PC ago there were big enough gaps in CPU speed that certain classes of application (i.e. MP3) and operating system were opened up. (Like a 486/66 was pretty much the bare minumum for Windows95.) At that time, an old 286 or an XT didn't really seem that useful. It was around the 350-500mhz mark that PCs hit a sweet spot in throughput beyond which anything else is really only needed for games. So as we go ever onward on the development curve, all those previous machines that were created could be put to use. And the number of these "outdated" PCs will skyrocket in the future. Sure, people will always come up with new applications that require speed (like video codecs) but for the majority of what people do with computers these days (i.e. simple office and internet apps) these machines will continue to be adequate indefinitely. So if there IS a digital divide, it's more because of education. You have literacy, and then you have COMPUTER literacy. And since in this country for the longest time, knowing how to use a computer made you a GEEK and therefore uncool, there is this cultural aversion to using computers in the US that we're only recently leaving behind. So to say it's just a class thing is an outdated notion. Sure, monthly dialup fees cost money, but it's cheaper than your phone bill if you call long-distance at all. The internet just becomes another "must have" utility. It's about as cheap as it's going to get.
The problem is that modern desktop CPUs don't power scale. Why run your 2.4GHZ machine AT 2.4GHZ if the apps you are running at that time of the day do not require it? This is only going to get worse as CPUs get faster, take even more power, and get hotter. We're already basically running supercomputer class machines to do glorified typewriter operations, which is really wasteful. Desktop CPUs should scale the way mobile CPUs do. Then for mom and pop applications your computer wouldn't suck that much juice and the fan could be turned off entirely, but run a zillion apps at once or a raytracer and it will kick into turbo.