Are Psion moving in the wrong direction
on
New Psion Palmtop
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· Score: 3
Until about 1990, Psion were a small company making hand-held data-entry machines. Their big break came with the Series 3. The 3 packs a lot of usability into a tiny package and is still selling well, due to a few minor upgrades over the years. My series 3 is used every day, does pretty much everything I want it to and lasts about 3 months on 2 AA batteries. Psion's newer machines (the 5 and now the 7) are larger, heavier and have comparatively short battery lives.
My series 3 lives in my pocket, it's always there and always ready when I need it. I couldn't do that with anything any bigger or heavier. I don't have to worry about it running low on batteries either. The 7 wouldn't fit in a pocket (at least not without the optional 'special trousers') and according to Psion's press release, would need recharging every day.
What (IMHO) Psion should be doing, is concentrating on the area in which they are strongest. That is, on a replacement for the now long-in-the-tooth series 3, with more power, maybe colour, maybe a JVM and definitely comms, decent PC connectivity and Epoch. All in a package as small as the 3 and with decent battery life (say a month for 2 AA cells).
The last machines that Psion produced that were the size of the 7 got great reviews and didn't sell. I hope that they have more luck with the 7 and the netbook, but I really think that they should be concentrating on their core area of excellence, which is producing brilliant pocket-sized palmtops.
I believe that the colour (& design) of the original iMac is the major reason it sold so well. The Mac's traditional market is to creative people (designers, architects etc), who loved the iMac's looks. The new 'graphite' look is obviously designed to appeal to PHB's and wearers of grey suits - those people who equate 'businesslike' with 'boring'. Having said that, I think that the G4 looks super-cool and I'm a scuffy programmer in jeans and t-shirt.
HH (dreaming of an metalic purple athlon-linux box)
Our glorious leader sez, If your IP or your User Account has a -5 or worse total, your comment will not be posted.
I read (and post to)/. from two net connections. One is at work and the other is at home (via adsl). Both of these connections have transparent HTTP proxying, that I cannot bypass. It is the addresses of these proxys and not my own IP addresses that the moderation system will see. Therefore, if a troll uses my ISP (or works at the same company as me), I would lose my ability to post to slashdot.
Something similar to this has already happened when the Internet Movie Database blocked my ISP's proxy IP address, due to the action of one person.
Since there is not a one-to-one mapping between IP addresses and users, and many hundreds of people can share one IP address, this kind of moderation is extremely stupid.
According to Linux Today, Aspen Systems have just released their 'Twin Peaks' dual alpha server, which runs Linux and Tru-64 Unix. There's a press release at
How fast? They're claiming a score of 53.7 in SPECfp_base95. AMD claims 22.4 for a 650Mhz Athlon and 15.1 for a Pentium II Xeon. According to the Aspen web site (www.aspen.com, a basic single-processor system with Red Hat Linux starts at over $10,000. You'd be looking at around $14,000 for a dual 500Mhz alpha system. HH
The article is dated 15th November 1997, so it's not exactly news, is it. And I'm almost certain that this same story was posted to Slashdot a couple of months ago.
Microsoft's embrace of open standards is not the embrace of a lover. It's more like the embrace a boa constrictor has for it's prey, shortly before it's swallowed whole.
Microsoft's policy towards standards is to 'embrace and extend' them, i.e. to subvert them from open standards to being Microsoft specific. I was told yesterday that they've now done this with WebDav too (I haven't yet confirmed that).
How about this for arrogance:- my Windows NT box lists all *.html files as being of type "Microsoft HTML Document 5.0". Since when did Microsoft own HTML?
My initial reaction is that is could be terrible, but...
The thought of Pixar 'completely misunderstanding' computers and the net is laughable. Pixar are one of the most technologically savvy companies about. Look at who works for them, it's almost a who's who of the computer graphics industry. And they developed RenderMan, one of the coolest pieces of software on the planet.
The first released version of DiskDrake is beta software, but it should improve rapidly with the contribution of the free-software community.
Just make sure you've got at least 2 backups of your drive first. I wouldn't let partitioning software that's in need of rapid improvement anywhere near my hard drive.
So the article is saying that it's the older hackers who love BSD. Hardly suprising, really. BSD has traditionally been the 'hackers Unix'. Back then, the big rival was AT&T SysV which was seen as commercial and uncool by hackers. I grew up with BSD in the late 80's on Suns and v.good it was too. I think that BSD lost the momentum when Sun dropped it in favour of the SVR4-based Solaris, perhaps due to pressure from AT&T. I was working at Sun during the internal switch-over, porting software from BSD to Solaris. There were a lot of complaints from developers about how slow Solaris was, compared to the much-loved BSD.
Sadly, I can't really see a resurgence of BSD happening. Linux has the momentum behind it now and, quite frankly, I think that the BSD fans are extremely jealous. I can't really blame them as, had things gone right, it would be BSD vs NT now and no-one would have heard of Linux. But that's not what happened and I'm certainly not complaining as long as I've got a good alternative to M$.
The Linux supporters at IBM who set up this page are very crafty. They know that they're going to get slashdotted, so greet us with an interview with our very own CmdrBurrito, thereby instantly doubling the slashdot effect. The IBM Linux guys then go to the Important Suits and say, "Look, Important Suits, at the stats from the first few hours of our linux pages going online".
The Important Suits, not having heard of the Slashdot effect, are suit-ably impressed and before you can say "Micro$oft sux", the dollar signs are lighting up in their eyes.
Seriously, IBM's recent commitments to Linux are very encouraging and hopefully should increase Linux's credibility as a serious OS for business.
Whilst they won't make Micro$oft amounts of money from selling the OS, they could potentially make quite a bit as Linux gains in popularity (assuming it will). The support side can be rectified, especially with the money that the IPO will bring in. Companies depending on RH Linux would probably be quite keen to purchase support from them, if they're going to get good service. They could also negotiate lucrative support deals with hardware manufacturers, simular to the one that Linuxcare have done with Dell(?).
I may invest a few quid, especially as I got RH6 free off the net - rather them than lining Bill's pockets.
HH
PCs are like air-conditioning. When you open the Windows, they cease functioning.
$10-$12 a share, multiplied by 6 million, is quite a nice bit of spare cash to have. Hopefully, a significant amount of this will be spent on improvements to Linux. I really hope that some of the people who put in the real work behind the scenes (like Alan Cox, for example) benefit from this. After all, it's their contributions of free source code that have allowed Red Hat to build their business.
Free shares for significant Linux contributors would be a Very Good Thing (and no, I'm not one myself - wish I was).
Re:Toasters and traffic lights? Let's get realisti
on
IANA Deploying IPv6
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· Score: 1
Of course, zip software will have to be created or modified for the new functionality that IPv6 will give us. I propose creating pzip and punzip. I don't think that we should bother with pzcat.
AMD need to survive this. One by one, Intels rivals are dropping out, first Cyrix, now IDT. If AMD can't survive the price war with Intel, then Intel will be under far less pressure to reduce prices (and may raise them), and chip development will no longer be pushed forward by competition. This will be very Bad Thing for all x86 users.
Linux needs to become a good enterprise server. Firstly to run the enterprise applications (e.g Oracle) that are being ported to Linux. Secondly to run them better than NT and beat NT in enterprise computing benchmarks.
The problem is that in order to achieve this, the linux gurus need to have access to enterprise hardware, which is *very* expensive. How many hackers can afford $10,000 for a development machine, let alone $100,000?
There are two potential solutions to this. One is serious investment by successful linux distributors (e.g RedHat & SuSe), the other is support from the hardware manufacturers.
This support could either be in the form of donations / loans of hardware, or by employing gurus to tune Linux for enterprise hardware.
If this does not happen, then M$ will keep tuning NT for high-end hardware and we'll continue to see results like the Mindcraft ones.
Since it's using LCD, it will have 832*624*3 = 1.55M dots. Someone's just forgotten the decimal point. However, this may mean that LCD sub-pixel rendering (see www.grc.com/cleartype.htm) giving an effective 2496 dot horizontal resolution for anti-aliased text.
I wouldn't get too excited about nanocomputing just yet. Most announcements like this never make it into reality. Even if it does, it's still a very long way ahead. We've got many more exciting developments coming along much sooner, like cheap SMP (the next big thing, IMHO). Even if we do get cheap, fast nanocomputers, Windows 2010 (or whatever) will still take just as long to reboot.
Who else thought of Dr. Evil's 'Mini-Me' when reading, "gates as being a thousand times smaller than current gates"?
I wouldn't get *too* excited about nanocomputing just yet. Most announcements like this never make it into reality. Even if it does, it's still a very long way ahead. We've got many more exciting developments coming along much sooner, like cheap SMP (the next big thing, IMHO). Even if we do get cheap, fast nanocomputers, Windows 2010 (or whatever) will still take just as long to reboot.
Who else thought of Dr. Evil's 'Mini-Me' when reading, "gates as being a thousand times smaller than current gates"?
I've been on the BT adsl trial for a few months. It currently costs 30 quid a month for a permanently connected 2m/bit line (512k/bit upstream). The most reliable rumours are saying that the live service will charge 'about the same amount', but there are also rumours that the bandwidth will be cut (to 256 or 512k/bits). National rollout is likely to start around September. Expect more announcements from BT soon. This may also force the cable companies to finally get their act together.
Slashdot Mirror
Until about 1990, Psion were a small company making hand-held data-entry machines. Their big break came with the Series 3. The 3 packs a lot of usability into a tiny package and is still selling well, due to a few minor upgrades over the years. My series 3 is used every day, does pretty much everything I want it to and lasts about 3 months on 2 AA batteries. Psion's newer machines (the 5 and now the 7) are larger, heavier and have comparatively short battery lives.
My series 3 lives in my pocket, it's always there and always ready when I need it. I couldn't do that with anything any bigger or heavier. I don't have to worry about it running low on batteries either. The 7 wouldn't fit in a pocket (at least not without the optional 'special trousers') and according to Psion's press release, would need recharging every day.
What (IMHO) Psion should be doing, is concentrating on the area in which they are strongest. That is, on a replacement for the now long-in-the-tooth series 3, with more power, maybe colour, maybe a JVM and definitely comms, decent PC connectivity and Epoch. All in a package as small as the 3 and with decent battery life (say a month for 2 AA cells).
The last machines that Psion produced that were the size of the 7 got great reviews and didn't sell. I hope that they have more luck with the 7 and the netbook, but I really think that they should be concentrating on their core area of excellence, which is producing brilliant pocket-sized palmtops.
HH
I believe that the colour (& design) of the original iMac is the major reason it sold so well. The Mac's traditional market is to creative people (designers, architects etc), who loved the iMac's looks. The new 'graphite' look is obviously designed to appeal to PHB's and wearers of grey suits - those people who equate 'businesslike' with 'boring'. Having said that, I think that the G4 looks super-cool and I'm a scuffy programmer in jeans and t-shirt.
HH (dreaming of an metalic purple athlon-linux box)
I read (and post to) /. from two net connections. One is at work and the other is at home (via adsl). Both of these connections have transparent HTTP proxying, that I cannot bypass. It is the addresses of these proxys and not my own IP addresses that the moderation system will see. Therefore, if a troll uses my ISP (or works at the same company as me), I would lose my ability to post to slashdot.
Something similar to this has already happened when the Internet Movie Database blocked my ISP's proxy IP address, due to the action of one person.
Since there is not a one-to-one mapping between IP addresses and users, and many hundreds of people can share one IP address, this kind of moderation is extremely stupid.
HH
The Press Release is at: linuxpr.com/releases/310.html and Aspen is at www.aspsys.com
HH
How fast? They're claiming a score of 53.7 in SPECfp_base95. AMD claims 22.4 for a 650Mhz Athlon and 15.1 for a Pentium II Xeon. According to the Aspen web site (www.aspen.com, a basic single-processor system with Red Hat Linux starts at over $10,000. You'd be looking at around $14,000 for a dual 500Mhz alpha system. HH
The article is dated 15th November 1997, so it's
not exactly news, is it. And I'm almost certain that this same story was posted to Slashdot a couple of months ago.
HH
If it wasn't for Monty Python, we wouldn't have spam.
Spam, Spam, Wonderful Spam!
luv
HH
Can we lobby them to profile Transmeta?
It's just a bit of FUD being spread by a poor journo in exchange for his next pay cheque (yes, that is spelt correctly). And as you say, it was MSNBC.
Mind you, MSNBC has another article on why Gnome is better than Windows, so someone there has a clue!
HH
Microsoft's embrace of open standards is not the embrace of a lover. It's more like the embrace a boa constrictor has for it's prey, shortly before it's swallowed whole.
Microsoft's policy towards standards is to 'embrace and extend' them, i.e. to subvert them from open standards to being Microsoft specific. I was told yesterday that they've now done this with WebDav too (I haven't yet confirmed that).
How about this for arrogance:- my Windows NT box lists all *.html files as being of type "Microsoft HTML Document 5.0". Since when did Microsoft own HTML?
HH
And you, Sir, are a troll.
You criticise 'Townsend' (it's Townshend) for being a 'sodomite' and then recommend the Kinks.
Very droll, Mr Troll.
My initial reaction is that is could be terrible, but...
The thought of Pixar 'completely misunderstanding' computers and the net is laughable. Pixar are one of the most technologically savvy companies about. Look at who works for them, it's almost a who's who of the computer graphics industry. And they developed RenderMan, one of the coolest pieces of software on the planet.
HH
The first released version of DiskDrake is beta software, but it should improve rapidly with the contribution of the free-software community.
Just make sure you've got at least 2 backups of your drive first. I wouldn't let partitioning software that's in need of rapid improvement anywhere near my hard drive.
Sadly, I can't really see a resurgence of BSD happening. Linux has the momentum behind it now and, quite frankly, I think that the BSD fans are extremely jealous. I can't really blame them as, had things gone right, it would be BSD vs NT now and no-one would have heard of Linux. But that's not what happened and I'm certainly not complaining as long as I've got a good alternative to M$.
HH
date; talk; touch; unzip; finger; expand; strip; head; mount; yes; yes; yes; eject; more; sleep
"Look, Important Suits, at the stats from the first few hours of our linux pages going online".
The Important Suits, not having heard of the Slashdot effect, are suit-ably impressed and before you can say "Micro$oft sux", the dollar signs are lighting up in their eyes.
Seriously, IBM's recent commitments to Linux are very encouraging and hopefully should increase Linux's credibility as a serious OS for business.
Fear not, Alan Cox has made sure that the penguin is well looked after. See http://penguin.linux.org.uk
HH
Whilst they won't make Micro$oft amounts of money from selling the OS, they could potentially make quite a bit as Linux gains in popularity (assuming it will). The support side can be rectified, especially with the money that the IPO will bring in. Companies depending on RH Linux would probably be quite keen to purchase support from them, if they're going to get good service.
They could also negotiate lucrative support deals with hardware manufacturers, simular to the one that Linuxcare have done with Dell(?).
I may invest a few quid, especially as I got RH6 free off the net - rather them than lining Bill's pockets.
HH
PCs are like air-conditioning. When you open the Windows, they cease functioning.Free shares for significant Linux contributors would be a Very Good Thing (and no, I'm not one myself - wish I was).
HH
date; talk; touch; unzip; finger; expand; strip; mount; yes; yes; yes; eject; more; sleep
Of course, zip software will have to be created or modified for the new functionality that IPv6 will give us. I propose creating pzip and punzip. I don't think that we should bother with pzcat.
HH
AMD need to survive this. One by one, Intels
rivals are dropping out, first Cyrix, now IDT. If AMD can't survive the price war with Intel, then Intel will be under far less pressure to reduce prices (and may raise them), and chip development will no longer be pushed forward by competition. This will be very Bad Thing for all x86 users.
First post? Probably not. Who cares anyway?
Linux needs to become a good enterprise server. Firstly to run the enterprise applications (e.g Oracle) that are being ported to Linux.
Secondly to run them better than NT and beat NT in enterprise computing benchmarks.
The problem is that in order to achieve this, the linux gurus need to have access to enterprise hardware, which is *very* expensive. How many hackers can afford $10,000 for a development machine, let alone $100,000?
There are two potential solutions to this. One is serious investment by successful linux distributors (e.g RedHat & SuSe), the other is support from the hardware manufacturers.
This support could either be in the form of donations / loans of hardware, or by employing gurus to tune Linux for enterprise hardware.
If this does not happen, then M$ will keep tuning NT for high-end hardware and we'll continue to see results like the Mindcraft ones.
Since it's using LCD, it will have 832*624*3 = 1.55M dots. Someone's just forgotten the decimal point. However, this may mean that LCD sub-pixel rendering (see www.grc.com/cleartype.htm) giving an effective 2496 dot horizontal resolution for anti-aliased text.
I wouldn't get too excited about nanocomputing just yet.
Most announcements like this never make it into reality. Even if it does, it's still a very long way ahead. We've got many more exciting developments coming along much sooner, like cheap SMP (the next big thing, IMHO). Even if we do get cheap, fast nanocomputers, Windows 2010 (or whatever) will still take just as long to reboot.
Who else thought of Dr. Evil's 'Mini-Me' when reading, "gates as being a thousand times smaller than current gates"?
I wouldn't get *too* excited about nanocomputing just yet.
Most announcements like this never make it into reality. Even if it does, it's still a very long way ahead. We've got many more exciting developments coming along much sooner, like cheap
SMP (the next big thing, IMHO). Even if we do get cheap, fast nanocomputers, Windows 2010 (or whatever) will still take just as long to reboot.
Who else thought of Dr. Evil's 'Mini-Me' when reading, "gates as being a thousand times smaller than current gates"?
I've been on the BT adsl trial for a few months. It currently costs 30 quid a month for a permanently connected 2m/bit line (512k/bit upstream). The most reliable rumours are saying that the live service will charge 'about the same amount', but there are also rumours that the bandwidth will be cut (to 256 or 512k/bits). National rollout is likely to start around September. Expect more announcements from BT soon. This may also force the cable companies to finally get their act together.