...what were you thinking posting half a meg of screen caps, and then posting to Slashdot?
Good review, though.
Here it is:
NVMAX EXCLUSIVE: C750 Review/Conversion Information
Sharp has recently announced the release of their newest additions to the Sharp Zaurus clamshell line of Zaurii. The SL-C750 and SL-C760 bring a new style and power to the Zaurus line. Using the latest Intel Xscale PXA255, the new units not only feels extremely responsive, but most of the applications are launching in mere seconds. As well, the new units double the amount of RAM eliminating many of the issues with the previous SL-C700. Unfortunately, Sharp also made this unit available in Japan only. Dynamism, again with the help of the Open Source community, has converted the units to English and are now available.
The C750 is a different animal then the C700. First, they changed the color on the units, added the new Xscale processor, doubled the RAM, added a movie player, presentation software, support for the VGA Compact Flash cards (available also from Dynamism), switch the JMV and added VPN support. The downside is the new stylus. I just don't feel as comfortable with it. Since it is lighter, I do feel that I am not pressing as hard against the screen. The biggest plus of the new units it the correction to the screen hinge. It is now very easy to turn to the left and very difficult to move to the right. Many people broke their screens by turning them the wrong way.
The speed difference is amazing. On my C700, I had hacked my kernel to allow for more speed and it doesn't even touch the responsiveness of the C750. They are amazingly fast!
Conversion difference: In this conversion we have added a multi-language keyboard support and corrected the small font issue. This was a must if Dynamism is going to sell the unit outside of the US. We also took care of the input method switching issues (it now stays in English). As well, we made it easy for users to add back in the Japanese input methods. We also applied some of the same performance fixes that we applied to the C700.
Not converted: There is still an issue with the tabs in the AddressBook being Japanese phonetics (yet English lettering) and the new MoviePlayer's menu is not converted. The movie player still plays movies quite nicely. That is about it.
Sync: I was able to sync the C750 using the latest software for the SL-5500. I was able to just unplug my 5500, plug in the C750, install the drivers, change one network setting and sync. This is a great plus for those upgrading their 5500/5600.
The sync software that is on the CD-Rom supplied by Sharp is still in Japanese, but that will also allow you to sync to an English version of Windows.
Java: Here is the information on the new JVM for the C750. java version "J2ME Personal Profile for Zaurus 1.0" J2ME Personal Profile 1.0 (build 1.0_fcs-b25) J2ME CDC-HI 1.0_v01
Installed Software Size: Some of the packages that came installed on the C700 are now addons. The JVM (personal-profile) is one of them. It is also rather large. By Sharp placing it in an ipkg allows the user to install it on a CF or SD card.
Note: Remember that Dynamism is the only company (that I am aware of) that not only fully supports the hardware (they pay all of the shipping costs for fixing or replacing the units), they also fully support the English conversion. There is no need for the user to contact Sharp on these units.
The previous entry in his blog is even more interesting:
Winamp 2.92 will have CD ripping support, with support for OGG. OGG VBR at
0.0 sounds pretty decent, listenable, at like 60kbps. I'm pretty impressed
with it.
'bout damn time. Hopefully his leaving won't change Nullsoft's plans to provide real OGG support. I still can't get it to pick up very low bitrate HTTP Vorbis streams via a straight.m3u ala XMMS.
Re:The only problem is
on
PeltierBeer
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's also "Irish" Guiness. As in, when you go into a real Irish pub, in the actual country of Ireland, they serve it to you (and the actual Irish people) ice cold, straight from the tap.
The room-temperature thing is a just a piss-take on the pedantic Yanks.
Just think, you've been doing it wrong all this time.
I've never understood why they used static images for those fake alert ads; I mean, yeah, it's usually the default colors of some flavor of windows, but wouldn't they have better luck using CSS and system colors? Or maybe that part of the spec doesn't work with IE... I wouldn't know.
I'm just happy that I got my computer illiterate parents to use Mozilla. When the telco guy was installing DSL, he told them that they'd have to use IE and Outlook. I nearly kicked him out on his ass.
Though it doesn't fit the technical definition of peeling, I've found that importing 128kbs ogg into Audacity, and then exporting them @ 64, results in passable quality.
Put me in as one of those who isn't going to run out and buy an ogg player until I can get one that's teeny tiny (ie, smaller than my MiniDisc player) with at least 128MB.
I'm currently using my Zaurus. Since I can get two hours of oggs at q0 (plenty for work) on half of a 128MB MMC card, I'm not quite ready to run out and buy another device of comparable size just for tunes. If I'm going on vacation, I can get a 512MB CF card for 90 bucks and keep my gadgets down to the Zaurus and an external battery pack.
I'm having crash problems with the Sharp ROM 3.10 and the current Vorbis plugin, but I expect somebody will remedy that soon enough. Of course, if Sony ever supports vorbis and Linux on the NetMD players, the whole question will be moot. Yeah, right after pigs fly outta Hillary Rosen's ass...
One more thing: anybody who thinks that mp3 at 128 sounds as good as.ogg at 64 needs to have their ears checked... I suppose you could like it when cymbals sound like breaking glass, but there's no accounting for taste...
Unions give no less money in bribers....errr.. donations, than companies.
Cite for that horseshit, por favor?
According to this list, corporations spent shitloads more than unions did last year. Of the top 10 industries/sectors, only one is a union, and it's #9. In fact, I count only five unions on that list of 50.
Granted, historically, unions in aggregate have spent more than anybody else, but these days the amounts are relatively piddling.
Still, you can make an external battery pack that takes AAs for about $7, or get one on ebay for between eight and ten bucks. I can get about 11 hours with the initial charge + 4 AAs.
The most amazing part of this story is that there are still people who think it's safe to look at porn, let alone child porn, while at work.
I've got an uncle in fucking IT who was busted pulling kiddie stuff off Usenet at work. Since it was only maybe a half-dozen illegal pictures, and he's such an "upstanding" "Christian" (read: virulently conservative Catholic asshole), he got off with probation and getting shitcanned. If it weren't for the fact that his wife and kids would suffer, I would have liked to see him locked up. Fucker.
Anyway, telling the boss is a courtesy, but telling the Law is a responsibility. I'm not gonna be party to the crime by helping to cover it up.
I'm running the default Moz 1.2 install in SuSE 1.2, and antialiasing is complete crap. To the point that I've switched to Konq.
I mean, I'd rather have no antialiasing at all (a la IE) than the halfassed way it's implemented in 1.2. Actually, I'd prefer decent bitmap rendering in the first place. On my cheapass, washed-out notebook screen, small AAed fonts are only slightly better than illegible.
I'd really really like to switch back, too. I'm less concerned with load times than the responsiveness of the GUI, and for that, Mozilla/Phoenix beat Konqueror hands down. It shouldn't take 3-10 seconds for a background tab to open.
Still, the Konq's better font rendering is enough to make me stick with it.
I've never had much use for TiVo. I grew up with hippie social worker parents, so television was strictly regulated and I've never developed much of an affection for it. Well, except for Six Feet Under.
But my burg has a handful of really good shows amongst all the usual Clearchannel Crappity Crap. Most of them are on at really odd hours; the blues shows on the local community nanowatt station all seem to be on at either 10:00 on a Tuesday morning or in the middle of the night; we've got a really good R&B/Soul rarities (think old Andre Williams) show on an NPR affiliate Saturday nights; and a kickass vinyl-vault type deal (that plays the Blue Cheer!) on the otherwise shitty classic rock station Sunday nights when I'm watching Six Feet Under.
I've considered just plugging in my Minidisc recorder to the reciever, then capturing/encoding the tunes, but that would be a pain in the ass to remember.
If I could just set something and forget about it, I'd be all over it.
Since most of it is public radio, anyway, I won't even have to worry about the weak, fleeting ethical twinge when skipping the commercials.
Hell, I can see myself recording All Things Considered every evening to listen to at work the next day...
The LCD sub-pixel font rendering also works in Konqueror. If Mozilla has it, I can't find where to turn it on. The bar keeps getting raised; Mozilla used to look jaggy, now it looks fuzzy.
Amen. I'd rather that they didn't even try to implement antialiasing at all than the halfassed way they've done it. Verdana looks like complete crap, and the point sizes are all fucked up. I've gone back to the default Butt Ugly Helvetica until I can find some way to fix the problem. Is Phoenix any better?
Then again, Konq's got the AAing right, but the fonts are huuuuge. Maybe I'm just completely screwed.
I tried StarOffice 5.x for Win32... and, well, if it were the ONLY alternative to M$Office, I'd gladly embrace WinWord and Powerpoint. StarOffice was *that* annoying and inadequate. Its word processor reminds me of nothing so much as a bad miscegenation of Wordstar 5.x and DOSWord6. And it's SLOW!! (Nothing else ran that poorly on that machine, including OfficeXP.) I gather SO 6.0 is somewhat better, but I doubt that the basic design has changed all that much.
???
So you haven't even tried OOo/SO6, but feel qualified to comment on it?
I'd agree that SO5 was a stinking pile of crappity crap, but the post-open source versions are nothing like it. The annoying integrated desktop is gone, and now the apps are all modular.
Granted, it still takes awhile to load the first time, but if you leave it in memory, it's not a problem.
The word processor and spreadsheet are good enough for 99% of anybody who uses Word or Excel, and since that other 1% are the people who can't write a fucking newsletter without using WordArt, who the hell cares, anyway?
I wouldn't know anything about the presentation app, because I find the entire concept of Powerpoint and its ilk to be evil and wrong, even if harvested directly from RMSes colon. Meetings suck.
I'm a technically inclined dude with a relatively useless history BA. I've been contemplating going for a Master of Library Science, but with all the bullshit going on with the budget in my state, I'm losing some of the passion for it.
The Business IT track at my local Uni is looking a lot more fun at the moment. Since I've already got a liberal arts degree, I could probably get out with a Bachelors in about 2 1/2 years vs. 2 for the MLIS.
Am I completely stupid for wanting to get in to IT right now? I mean, nothing will preclude me from getting a MLIS in the future, but I'm not really keen on memorizing Dewey for the next two years.
After hosing the RH8 install that I set up in October, I decided to completely wipe it and the Windows partition that I hadn't used for months from my HD.
After getting the 8.2 Pro CDs, I did the install in less than an hour on my cheapass KDS notebook. Other than having to use generic drivers for my LCD, the installation's gone flawlessly.
I'm amazed at how refined the distro is, and the number of packages I got. Beats Redhat, and sure as hell beats Windows. I've had some problems getting used to KDE, but it's nothing serious.
Slashdot Mirror
...or the estate of Carl Sagan.
Good review, though.
Here it is:
'bout damn time. Hopefully his leaving won't change Nullsoft's plans to provide real OGG support. I still can't get it to pick up very low bitrate HTTP Vorbis streams via a straight .m3u ala XMMS.
The room-temperature thing is a just a piss-take on the pedantic Yanks.
Just think, you've been doing it wrong all this time.
--kotj.mf, who has been in an actual Irish pub.
I'm just happy that I got my computer illiterate parents to use Mozilla. When the telco guy was installing DSL, he told them that they'd have to use IE and Outlook. I nearly kicked him out on his ass.
Though it doesn't fit the technical definition of peeling, I've found that importing 128kbs ogg into Audacity, and then exporting them @ 64, results in passable quality.
From:
"Frontier Labs"
To:
kotj.mf
Date:
Today 04:50:14
Dear Sir,
Yes, we are working on the Ogg Vorbis format now. When it is ready, we will
release a firmware upgrade.
Thank you.
Customer Support
Frontier Labs.
Actually, once I get around to ripping it, I'm gonna give OZ a shot. Still, the new Sharp ROM (3.1) is leaps and bounds better than the last one.
I just fired off an email to their customer service dept asking about it. I'll post any response I get here.
I'm currently using my Zaurus. Since I can get two hours of oggs at q0 (plenty for work) on half of a 128MB MMC card, I'm not quite ready to run out and buy another device of comparable size just for tunes. If I'm going on vacation, I can get a 512MB CF card for 90 bucks and keep my gadgets down to the Zaurus and an external battery pack.
I'm having crash problems with the Sharp ROM 3.10 and the current Vorbis plugin, but I expect somebody will remedy that soon enough. Of course, if Sony ever supports vorbis and Linux on the NetMD players, the whole question will be moot. Yeah, right after pigs fly outta Hillary Rosen's ass...
One more thing: anybody who thinks that mp3 at 128 sounds as good as .ogg at 64 needs to have their ears checked... I suppose you could like it when cymbals sound like breaking glass, but there's no accounting for taste...
According to this list, corporations spent shitloads more than unions did last year. Of the top 10 industries/sectors, only one is a union, and it's #9. In fact, I count only five unions on that list of 50.
Granted, historically, unions in aggregate have spent more than anybody else, but these days the amounts are relatively piddling.
While loading the first page of comments, my Zaurus ran outta memory and crashed. Figures.
Still, you can make an external battery pack that takes AAs for about $7, or get one on ebay for between eight and ten bucks. I can get about 11 hours with the initial charge + 4 AAs.
...Sharp is continuing to support the old models very well.
I got the 5500 I'm typing this on from the HSN deal, and I don't think I've ever blown a better 200 bucks.
Sharp released a new version of the ROM a couple of days ago:
http://community.zaurus.com
It's got Opera Embedded v6, which is just amazing.
Between Sharp and OZ, these things should remain useful for quite awhile.
I've got an uncle in fucking IT who was busted pulling kiddie stuff off Usenet at work. Since it was only maybe a half-dozen illegal pictures, and he's such an "upstanding" "Christian" (read: virulently conservative Catholic asshole), he got off with probation and getting shitcanned. If it weren't for the fact that his wife and kids would suffer, I would have liked to see him locked up. Fucker.
Anyway, telling the boss is a courtesy, but telling the Law is a responsibility. I'm not gonna be party to the crime by helping to cover it up.
I'm running the default Moz 1.2 install in SuSE 1.2, and antialiasing is complete crap. To the point that I've switched to Konq.
I mean, I'd rather have no antialiasing at all (a la IE) than the halfassed way it's implemented in 1.2. Actually, I'd prefer decent bitmap rendering in the first place. On my cheapass, washed-out notebook screen, small AAed fonts are only slightly better than illegible.
I'd really really like to switch back, too. I'm less concerned with load times than the responsiveness of the GUI, and for that, Mozilla/Phoenix beat Konqueror hands down. It shouldn't take 3-10 seconds for a background tab to open.
Still, the Konq's better font rendering is enough to make me stick with it.
Oh Christ, somebody mod that down. It's early.
And its "its."
...sorry.
I've never had much use for TiVo. I grew up with hippie social worker parents, so television was strictly regulated and I've never developed much of an affection for it. Well, except for Six Feet Under.
But my burg has a handful of really good shows amongst all the usual Clearchannel Crappity Crap. Most of them are on at really odd hours; the blues shows on the local community nanowatt station all seem to be on at either 10:00 on a Tuesday morning or in the middle of the night; we've got a really good R&B/Soul rarities (think old Andre Williams) show on an NPR affiliate Saturday nights; and a kickass vinyl-vault type deal (that plays the Blue Cheer!) on the otherwise shitty classic rock station Sunday nights when I'm watching Six Feet Under.
I've considered just plugging in my Minidisc recorder to the reciever, then capturing/encoding the tunes, but that would be a pain in the ass to remember.
If I could just set something and forget about it, I'd be all over it.
Since most of it is public radio, anyway, I won't even have to worry about the weak, fleeting ethical twinge when skipping the commercials.
Hell, I can see myself recording All Things Considered every evening to listen to at work the next day...
Jeebus do I feel like a maroon.
Amen. I'd rather that they didn't even try to implement antialiasing at all than the halfassed way they've done it. Verdana looks like complete crap, and the point sizes are all fucked up. I've gone back to the default Butt Ugly Helvetica until I can find some way to fix the problem. Is Phoenix any better?
Then again, Konq's got the AAing right, but the fonts are huuuuge. Maybe I'm just completely screwed.
Little help, anybody?
???
So you haven't even tried OOo/SO6, but feel qualified to comment on it?
I'd agree that SO5 was a stinking pile of crappity crap, but the post-open source versions are nothing like it. The annoying integrated desktop is gone, and now the apps are all modular.
Granted, it still takes awhile to load the first time, but if you leave it in memory, it's not a problem.
The word processor and spreadsheet are good enough for 99% of anybody who uses Word or Excel, and since that other 1% are the people who can't write a fucking newsletter without using WordArt, who the hell cares, anyway?
I wouldn't know anything about the presentation app, because I find the entire concept of Powerpoint and its ilk to be evil and wrong, even if harvested directly from RMSes colon. Meetings suck.
I'm a technically inclined dude with a relatively useless history BA. I've been contemplating going for a Master of Library Science, but with all the bullshit going on with the budget in my state, I'm losing some of the passion for it.
The Business IT track at my local Uni is looking a lot more fun at the moment. Since I've already got a liberal arts degree, I could probably get out with a Bachelors in about 2 1/2 years vs. 2 for the MLIS.
Am I completely stupid for wanting to get in to IT right now? I mean, nothing will preclude me from getting a MLIS in the future, but I'm not really keen on memorizing Dewey for the next two years.
After hosing the RH8 install that I set up in October, I decided to completely wipe it and the Windows partition that I hadn't used for months from my HD.
After getting the 8.2 Pro CDs, I did the install in less than an hour on my cheapass KDS notebook. Other than having to use generic drivers for my LCD, the installation's gone flawlessly.
I'm amazed at how refined the distro is, and the number of packages I got. Beats Redhat, and sure as hell beats Windows. I've had some problems getting used to KDE, but it's nothing serious.
I mean, if it's a complete pain in the ass to type on the teeny tiny keyboard on either model, what's the point of a 20 gig HD?
Plus, the Vulcan is fugly.