If I'm going to put windows on it I'm better off just spending $30 more and getting this with a intel atom, one gig ram, 160gb hard drive and windows 7.
The Livescribe Smartpen would probably make a good alternative if you're in a class that forbids laptops or don't have access to a power outlet since this review claims it'll last over a week between charges, but I can't see spending $150 on a pen when you can buy a fully functional Tablet PC for about the same price.
I agree: Why was the iPad even mentioned? It's not a tablet PC, there is no stylus to write on the screen with. The closest equivalent to the iPad is the iPod Touch and I can't imagine anyone taking notes with an iPod touch.
Tablets are not expensive either, you can get a nice Pentium M 1.6ghz for under $300, some even sell for $150. I know everyone thinks they need a 3ghz quad core, but the Pentium M is plenty to run office and watch youtube videos.
Using laptops in class is so 2000. Tablet PCs are the only way to go for taking notes.
"Exactly. That's why I refuse to use a phone for anything but making calls"
Sure that's fine... for now, but in time you'll be looked on as the wierdo that doesn't have a smartphone, in the same manner that people think it's strange for someone not to own a cellphone now, or as I'm sure 60+ years ago it became strange to not have a phone in your house.
As technology advances you're pretty much forced by society to either adapt or be shunned. Phones that were $400 with contract and very basic internet access 5 years ago are less than $100 today with a full internet browser and voice search. Imagine what it will be like in just another 5 years?
I think it works better for a phone than a computer. We're use to our computers being open, just finding software ourselves online or browsing computer software aisles and reading the backs of boxes.
Phones, for the most part, have always been closed boxes, so when Apple offered a closed box with an "apple approved" app store, people were impressed. No one has ever offered a store on phones before, and if they did they didn't do a very good job.
I hope all Xbox 360 owners remember this announcement, because approximately 5 years after whatever the new Xbox is called is released, Microsoft might be shutting you guys down too.
First they came for the original Xbox owners, and I did not speak out....
"It's 's' unless it's American English. No, I don't mean it in the Microsoft way of dictation, but rather the international standard.
Honestly, only Americans could bastardize the word bastardise."
" I don't care what's in the books - the Lynch movie is what the Dune universe is to me"
You, good sir, are probably speaking for about 90% of the population that has seen the original 1984 Dune movie.
My issue is his quote " 'Peter had an approach which was not mine at all, and we're starting over again'...he recognises** that he must try to delete the images associated with David Lynch's 1984 version of Dune from the public's consciousness."
Probably not a good idea, to remake a movie completely different from the from the popular original. I'm just saying ain't broke, don't fix it. I'd watch the exact 1984 Dune redone with fresh graphics, but I'm not sure about erasing the original from our minds. I think we liked the original and would like to see more of that.
**it's recognizes, with a z, unless the guy's in britian but i don't see a.uk domain. Sorry for being a grammer nazi when I'm far from perfect, but it's kinda a pain to quote the article and have Chrome tell me I'm misspelling words I didn't write.
True, and everything sounded find until I read this "Every time the system starts, HDDBOOST will initiate mirror backup automatically to ensure front-end data between the two drives are the same."
on every system start it's going to create a mirror backup, which sounded bad unless it works like Mirror RAID which doesn't take any time at all, it mirrors in real-time
So basically on every startup it mirrors the HD to the SSD, then pulls everything from the SSD until it needs to write data. Writing data goes on the HD, not the SSD. When starting up again the SSD mirrors all the new written data from the HD and continues on.
Sounds technically feasible and that should be faster and I'd love to see some benchmarks although I'm not sure how that'd work because reading data should look incredibly fast since it's on the SSD but written data goes to the HD so that'd be normal speed meaning a benchmark might not show amazingly fast speeds yet your PC should be noticeably quicker.
"Xbox360 has had a huge struggle with hardware failures. WinMo is old and clunky, Vista left a really bad taste in peoples mouth, Office is facing competition from Google Docs and OpenOffice, and Play For Sure failed publicly."
We're still waiting for our all-in-one solution, the company that will provide us with all our devices. Apple has surprisingly made some great strides in the last ten years with the iPhone, Apple TV and being a major media content provider with iTunes. They appear to be the front runner in this game, all they need now is to add gaming to the Apple TV and they'd be hard to beat. Only thing they keep missing on is Flash support: iPhone/Touch only does Youtube streaming, no other sites. If they removed that limitation it'd be a far more attractive form factor.
"What East is really saying is, "Behold. I shall inflate stock values by making false and pointless claims."... He is trying to make the claim that no one needs computing power... If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!"
Who watches DVDs anymore? I stream everything, my DVD collection was put on the network years ago, and while the latest ARM might not be a quad cpu today where do you think it'll be in 5 years? He did say "...we believe over the next several years that could completely change..."
Really 90% of the market will become a cheap internet device with a mainstream browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc), full Flash support with full speed 1080p streaming. Whatever device offers "best bang for the buck" will take over. Right now it looks like netbooks fit the bill, but if somehow the price of screen only tablets similar to the iPad dropped to half that of netbooks then tablets would make up 90% of the market. Problem is it seems it's still cheaper to throw in a LCD, keyboard and touchpad than a single touchscreen, but that could change in the next few years.
"Last time I called Dell about a laptop that was completely dead, no power lights, no fans, they asked me what the error message on screen was and it took a few minutes to explain to them something as simple as the fact that I couldn't get an error message on screen because the laptop was dead."
I had a problem with a Whirlpool wash machine. It was a few years old and the warranty expired, but I took a video of the problem and posted it on Youtube.
Within a week and less than 50 views I had an email from someone claiming to be whirlpool offering to help resolve the situation with a 800 number and extension attached.
I use to work tech support for a huge hosting provider (they're in the top 5). We'd get threats of lawsuits every day, but one time someone blogged about us and management had an all hands meeting, telling us to ignore lawsuits because those are easy to fight but if a customer threatens to blog about us to escalate to a manager immediately (usually we could only offer manager call backs... yes i know stupid).
People forget how powerful the internet is yet we see the effects of millions of/. readers every day.
"The PSP Go isn't a direction that I like. I don't want my "licensing" of a game to be present on a server; I'd rather have a physical disk/cartridge/whatever instead. It's bulkier, sure, but at least I can sell the thing when I'm done with it!"
Not only that, but it takes 40 minutes to download a gigabyte thanks to the slow 802.11b connection. Wow! I have a PS3, and I'm tired of the constant forced updates of everything. iPhone/Touch doesn't force updates, they tell you they're available but nothing makes you download an update to the app store or apps to work. And now they slap a 11 mBit/s connection to it? Are they kidding? Sure the PSP had the same connection but that was 2005 and the game was on a 1.8gb UMD, no download required. For 2010 I expected something better.
Sony just doesn't "get" it's customers, they continue to make glaringly obvious mistakes and we keep scratching our heads saying "why Sony?" Maybe it's time we stop scratching and just buy something else.
"But now Sony sells what you are looking for. Welcome to October 2008 [wikipedia.org] or if you want to be charitable to yourself, November, 2009. [wikipedia.org] Take heart; some people are still crying about Amiga and Be, so you're not that far behind."
I'm not sure if you're trying to be ironic or not, but the PSP Go doesn't offer any of features I asked for. The selection isn't larger (actually it's smaller than the PSP until they get all the games online), still no input to developers, still no visible feedback and ratings from users, very few free "lite" games and no games that cost under $5.
And the Go still uses 802.11b which only offers a maximum of 11 Mbit/s vs 802.11g's 54 Mbit/s. For comparison, anyone remember USB 1.0? USB 1.0 was 12 Mbit/s. That was fine in the 90's, not so much now. I can't imagine trying to download just a 1 gigabyte game to the PSP Go, much less fill the total 16 gigabytes over a 802.11b connection.
"I see people play games on their phone all the time. Every phone is a gaming phone."
Agreed, and I think the Sony's trying to save face. After pre-ordering a PSP back in 2005 and starting the largest PSP group on Yahoo Groups, I sold my PSP after a month with the iPhone 3GS. Larger selection, direct input to developers, visible feedback and ratings from users, an abundance of free "lite" games and most games costing $1-$3 finally put the nail in the coffin for the PSP.
I really can't imagine ever buying another portable gaming system that didn't include those features. Shame Sony didn't introduce those features themselves, they have a store and the PSP has wifi, they could had offered everything the iPhone does but they decided not to. I don't see a future for the PSP without major changes. If you don't want an iPhone, get a iPod Touch. All the games still work and it's cheaper than a PSP.
That's what I was thinking. They've been doing wireless communication for almost as long as submarines has existed. I'm sure 1940's sciencists are rolling in their graves right now.
The problem I heard with underground is that VLF required a very long cable. From what I heard submarines would let out a cable hundreds, sometimes thousands of yards long to commuicate. Maybe just 1,000 ft underground wouldn't need hundreds of yards but I'm sure it still needs a few dozen, far too much to carry down with you in a cave.
His invention might work but it's not a practical solution which is why no one has bothered to "invent" this before
"People really should learn about the car before they drive it, but this is a monumental fuck-up on the part of Toyota."
But the emergency brake is still by cable and emergency brakes are required by lawn in some areas so they are installed on all vehicles. Why the driver did not pull the ebrake when a passenger had over a minute to call 911 is beyond me, I'm guessing he thought he could regain control over the vehicle so this is still driver error.
yes cheap laptops exist, but the point is the last cheap Hivision laptop that showed up everywhere never materialized so it's safe to assume this might be vaporware as well.
The hivision mini note was reported to offer Linux, wifi, 1gb flash storage, 3 USB ports, ethernet, SDHC card reader, audio in and out, voice chat and the multi-tabbed firefox browser.
The devices you linked to run the 6 yr old Windows CE 5.0 OS which was popular for $200 PDAs in 2004, 266 and 400mhz processors, and no mention of the type of browser but claim to play flash videos by downloading them and watching on a flash player. The only difference between these "cheap laptops" and PDAs from 2004 is the $100 price difference, the larger screen and the attached keyboard.
"My Acer Aspire [amazon.com] cost less than any tablet I've seen "
here you go (or here). Granted it's used, but offers core 2 duo processor vs your Aspire's 1.3ghz celeron.
I'll concede a tablet's extra functionality isn't immediately obvious, but if you've ever had to desire to write on the screen it's usefulness is clear. The two types of groups I see buying tablets are students who need to take notes, draw graphs, write equations, etc, or professionals who need to sign documents. For couch surfing it's overkill, but if you have ~$400 to spend on a laptop or tablet why limit yourself to the laptop?
I've owned several tablets and that's the future. Like laptops where people use to have to decide between a PC for speed and gaming or a laptop for portability, tablets are quickly becoming fast and cheap enough to replace laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm going to put windows on it I'm better off just spending $30 more and getting this with a intel atom, one gig ram, 160gb hard drive and windows 7.
drop the price to $100 and I'll consider it
The $150 Livescribe Smartpen already exceeds the price of a tablet pc. Not only that, but the Smartpen requires $5 notebooks to work
The Livescribe Smartpen would probably make a good alternative if you're in a class that forbids laptops or don't have access to a power outlet since this review claims it'll last over a week between charges, but I can't see spending $150 on a pen when you can buy a fully functional Tablet PC for about the same price.
"I don't buy the handwriting being better for memory. "
You don't have to "buy" it, it's true
Sorry, here's the first link: Tablet Tips - Tablet PC & Pen vs. Paper and Pen
"But what does iPad have to do with this? "
I agree: Why was the iPad even mentioned? It's not a tablet PC, there is no stylus to write on the screen with. The closest equivalent to the iPad is the iPod Touch and I can't imagine anyone taking notes with an iPod touch.
Why were Tablet PCs left out? Here's a great video review of how to take notes with graphs on a tablet PC. Here's another example
Tablets are not expensive either, you can get a nice Pentium M 1.6ghz for under $300, some even sell for $150. I know everyone thinks they need a 3ghz quad core, but the Pentium M is plenty to run office and watch youtube videos.
Using laptops in class is so 2000. Tablet PCs are the only way to go for taking notes.
"Exactly. That's why I refuse to use a phone for anything but making calls"
Sure that's fine... for now, but in time you'll be looked on as the wierdo that doesn't have a smartphone, in the same manner that people think it's strange for someone not to own a cellphone now, or as I'm sure 60+ years ago it became strange to not have a phone in your house.
As technology advances you're pretty much forced by society to either adapt or be shunned. Phones that were $400 with contract and very basic internet access 5 years ago are less than $100 today with a full internet browser and voice search. Imagine what it will be like in just another 5 years?
I think it works better for a phone than a computer. We're use to our computers being open, just finding software ourselves online or browsing computer software aisles and reading the backs of boxes.
Phones, for the most part, have always been closed boxes, so when Apple offered a closed box with an "apple approved" app store, people were impressed. No one has ever offered a store on phones before, and if they did they didn't do a very good job.
I hope all Xbox 360 owners remember this announcement, because approximately 5 years after whatever the new Xbox is called is released, Microsoft might be shutting you guys down too.
First they came for the original Xbox owners, and I did not speak out....
"We can't sit around and hope that everything will be maintained for ever..."
Forever? Is four years "forever"? The Xbox360 was released late 2005, and the original Xbox was discontinued late 2006 and the last game was released August 2008, so that means there's easily people with 4 year old Xbox consoles and 2 year old games looking at Microsoft saying "WTF?! I just bought this thing!" . If you bought your computer brand new in 2006 and Microsoft said "hey you can't have internet anymore after April, go buy a new system!" I'd imagine you'd be pretty upset.
"It's 's' unless it's American English. No, I don't mean it in the Microsoft way of dictation, but rather the international standard. Honestly, only Americans could bastardize the word bastardise."
google disagrees
"Or maybe I'm just showing my age by knowing exactly what he was talking about"
You're showing your age, because virtually no one under 30 (born 1980, making them 4 when the game came out) would have any idea what he's talking about. There was a NES version for kids of the 80s but it wasn't released in the US.
" I don't care what's in the books - the Lynch movie is what the Dune universe is to me"
.uk domain. Sorry for being a grammer nazi when I'm far from perfect, but it's kinda a pain to quote the article and have Chrome tell me I'm misspelling words I didn't write.
You, good sir, are probably speaking for about 90% of the population that has seen the original 1984 Dune movie.
My issue is his quote " 'Peter had an approach which was not mine at all, and we're starting over again'...he recognises** that he must try to delete the images associated with David Lynch's 1984 version of Dune from the public's consciousness."
Probably not a good idea, to remake a movie completely different from the from the popular original. I'm just saying ain't broke, don't fix it. I'd watch the exact 1984 Dune redone with fresh graphics, but I'm not sure about erasing the original from our minds. I think we liked the original and would like to see more of that.
**it's recognizes, with a z, unless the guy's in britian but i don't see a
True, and everything sounded find until I read this
"Every time the system starts, HDDBOOST will initiate mirror backup automatically to ensure front-end data between the two drives are the same."
on every system start it's going to create a mirror backup, which sounded bad unless it works like Mirror RAID which doesn't take any time at all, it mirrors in real-time
So basically on every startup it mirrors the HD to the SSD, then pulls everything from the SSD until it needs to write data. Writing data goes on the HD, not the SSD. When starting up again the SSD mirrors all the new written data from the HD and continues on.
Sounds technically feasible and that should be faster and I'd love to see some benchmarks although I'm not sure how that'd work because reading data should look incredibly fast since it's on the SSD but written data goes to the HD so that'd be normal speed meaning a benchmark might not show amazingly fast speeds yet your PC should be noticeably quicker.
"Xbox360 has had a huge struggle with hardware failures. WinMo is old and clunky, Vista left a really bad taste in peoples mouth, Office is facing competition from Google Docs and OpenOffice, and Play For Sure failed publicly."
Not exactly. Xbox 360 is far ahead in the media center game, which is what people want, the days of a $300 gaming only system are over. Only thing PS3 still has going for it is the built-in blu-ray drive, but to do something as simple as stream Netflix requires a Netflix disc that the Xbox 360 does not. Microsoft designed the Xbox 360 to be a media center, while the PS3 seems to be focused on being a blu-ray player, probably so Sony can protect and encourage movie sales.
We're still waiting for our all-in-one solution, the company that will provide us with all our devices. Apple has surprisingly made some great strides in the last ten years with the iPhone, Apple TV and being a major media content provider with iTunes. They appear to be the front runner in this game, all they need now is to add gaming to the Apple TV and they'd be hard to beat. Only thing they keep missing on is Flash support: iPhone/Touch only does Youtube streaming, no other sites. If they removed that limitation it'd be a far more attractive form factor.
"What East is really saying is, "Behold. I shall inflate stock values by making false and pointless claims." ... He is trying to make the claim that no one needs computing power... If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!"
Who watches DVDs anymore? I stream everything, my DVD collection was put on the network years ago, and while the latest ARM might not be a quad cpu today where do you think it'll be in 5 years? He did say "...we believe over the next several years that could completely change..."
Really 90% of the market will become a cheap internet device with a mainstream browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc), full Flash support with full speed 1080p streaming. Whatever device offers "best bang for the buck" will take over. Right now it looks like netbooks fit the bill, but if somehow the price of screen only tablets similar to the iPad dropped to half that of netbooks then tablets would make up 90% of the market. Problem is it seems it's still cheaper to throw in a LCD, keyboard and touchpad than a single touchscreen, but that could change in the next few years.
"Last time I called Dell about a laptop that was completely dead, no power lights, no fans, they asked me what the error message on screen was and it took a few minutes to explain to them something as simple as the fact that I couldn't get an error message on screen because the laptop was dead."
/. readers every day.
Next time you call support take a video, it might be the next "verizon math fail" with 30,000+ hits. All that bad press over $71.
I had a problem with a Whirlpool wash machine. It was a few years old and the warranty expired, but I took a video of the problem and posted it on Youtube. Within a week and less than 50 views I had an email from someone claiming to be whirlpool offering to help resolve the situation with a 800 number and extension attached.
I use to work tech support for a huge hosting provider (they're in the top 5). We'd get threats of lawsuits every day, but one time someone blogged about us and management had an all hands meeting, telling us to ignore lawsuits because those are easy to fight but if a customer threatens to blog about us to escalate to a manager immediately (usually we could only offer manager call backs... yes i know stupid).
People forget how powerful the internet is yet we see the effects of millions of
"The PSP Go isn't a direction that I like. I don't want my "licensing" of a game to be present on a server; I'd rather have a physical disk/cartridge/whatever instead. It's bulkier, sure, but at least I can sell the thing when I'm done with it!"
I wouldn't mind if the games only cost a dollar or two like iPhone/Touch, but considering the price to download a PSP Go game is more than Amazon or Best Buy makes it not worth it. Why pay $40 to download when it's $29 at Walmart and then I don't even have something I can resell or trade?
Not only that, but it takes 40 minutes to download a gigabyte thanks to the slow 802.11b connection. Wow! I have a PS3, and I'm tired of the constant forced updates of everything. iPhone/Touch doesn't force updates, they tell you they're available but nothing makes you download an update to the app store or apps to work. And now they slap a 11 mBit/s connection to it? Are they kidding? Sure the PSP had the same connection but that was 2005 and the game was on a 1.8gb UMD, no download required. For 2010 I expected something better.
Sony just doesn't "get" it's customers, they continue to make glaringly obvious mistakes and we keep scratching our heads saying "why Sony?" Maybe it's time we stop scratching and just buy something else.
"But now Sony sells what you are looking for. Welcome to October 2008 [wikipedia.org] or if you want to be charitable to yourself, November, 2009. [wikipedia.org] Take heart; some people are still crying about Amiga and Be, so you're not that far behind."
I'm not sure if you're trying to be ironic or not, but the PSP Go doesn't offer any of features I asked for. The selection isn't larger (actually it's smaller than the PSP until they get all the games online), still no input to developers, still no visible feedback and ratings from users, very few free "lite" games and no games that cost under $5.
And the Go still uses 802.11b which only offers a maximum of 11 Mbit/s vs 802.11g's 54 Mbit/s. For comparison, anyone remember USB 1.0? USB 1.0 was 12 Mbit/s. That was fine in the 90's, not so much now. I can't imagine trying to download just a 1 gigabyte game to the PSP Go, much less fill the total 16 gigabytes over a 802.11b connection.
"I see people play games on their phone all the time. Every phone is a gaming phone."
Agreed, and I think the Sony's trying to save face. After pre-ordering a PSP back in 2005 and starting the largest PSP group on Yahoo Groups, I sold my PSP after a month with the iPhone 3GS. Larger selection, direct input to developers, visible feedback and ratings from users, an abundance of free "lite" games and most games costing $1-$3 finally put the nail in the coffin for the PSP.
I really can't imagine ever buying another portable gaming system that didn't include those features. Shame Sony didn't introduce those features themselves, they have a store and the PSP has wifi, they could had offered everything the iPhone does but they decided not to. I don't see a future for the PSP without major changes. If you don't want an iPhone, get a iPod Touch. All the games still work and it's cheaper than a PSP.
That's what I was thinking. They've been doing wireless communication for almost as long as submarines has existed. I'm sure 1940's sciencists are rolling in their graves right now.
The problem I heard with underground is that VLF required a very long cable. From what I heard submarines would let out a cable hundreds, sometimes thousands of yards long to commuicate. Maybe just 1,000 ft underground wouldn't need hundreds of yards but I'm sure it still needs a few dozen, far too much to carry down with you in a cave. His invention might work but it's not a practical solution which is why no one has bothered to "invent" this before
"People really should learn about the car before they drive it, but this is a monumental fuck-up on the part of Toyota."
But the emergency brake is still by cable and emergency brakes are required by lawn in some areas so they are installed on all vehicles. Why the driver did not pull the ebrake when a passenger had over a minute to call 911 is beyond me, I'm guessing he thought he could regain control over the vehicle so this is still driver error.
"Newzbin should be found guilty of indexing"
Then I think Google should be found guilty of indexing. After all that link provided me with thousands of valid Windows XP CD keys, and Google indexed those sites and provided me with the information, that's illegal, right? Oops, google just gave me valid credit card numbers!
When will Google and all the search engines of the world be brought up on charges and this madness end!?
yes cheap laptops exist, but the point is the last cheap Hivision laptop that showed up everywhere never materialized so it's safe to assume this might be vaporware as well.
The hivision mini note was reported to offer Linux, wifi, 1gb flash storage, 3 USB ports, ethernet, SDHC card reader, audio in and out, voice chat and the multi-tabbed firefox browser.
The devices you linked to run the 6 yr old Windows CE 5.0 OS which was popular for $200 PDAs in 2004, 266 and 400mhz processors, and no mention of the type of browser but claim to play flash videos by downloading them and watching on a flash player. The only difference between these "cheap laptops" and PDAs from 2004 is the $100 price difference, the larger screen and the attached keyboard.
I really hope I'm wrong, I'd love to see a $100 Android laptop because someone already offers the $100 Android PDA
"just hope these don't turn out to be vaporware"
Hivision's last laptop turned out to be vapoware so I don't expect to see this one either.
The $98 Hivision Mini Note never materialized, despite tons of press. It's been almost 18 months since the supposed release date and they still don't even exist on ebay.
"My Acer Aspire [amazon.com] cost less than any tablet I've seen "
here you go (or here). Granted it's used, but offers core 2 duo processor vs your Aspire's 1.3ghz celeron.
I'll concede a tablet's extra functionality isn't immediately obvious, but if you've ever had to desire to write on the screen it's usefulness is clear. The two types of groups I see buying tablets are students who need to take notes, draw graphs, write equations, etc, or professionals who need to sign documents. For couch surfing it's overkill, but if you have ~$400 to spend on a laptop or tablet why limit yourself to the laptop?
I've owned several tablets and that's the future. Like laptops where people use to have to decide between a PC for speed and gaming or a laptop for portability, tablets are quickly becoming fast and cheap enough to replace laptops.