I'm sorry I can't let this go. This one has bothered me for years.
Sharp's message to us for years now has been,
We've got one hell of a product and here it is! (present Clamshell Linux PDA) Oh, you want one? Sorry you can't have it. Nya, Nya! But here's the product we're willing to sell you (flop down over large, over priced, under featured PDA). What! You don't want it? Hey! Where'dya go?
My sincerest apologies to the sharp pda owners out there. I am suffering under severe sour grapes; I really wanted one. I just couldn't stand Sharp's message.
Can somebody explain to me Sharp's logic? They enter this market (US/Europe) with a beta product (5000), only slightly improve upon it (5500), design a class I product (C370), and tell us it will never be sold here because there's no real future for Sharp PDAs outside of Japan, and then withdraw completely. Is there any logic to that?
This has been a long time coming. It's been obvious for years that Sharp had no intention of becoming a player in the American and European markets. The only thing I can't understand is why did they even bother?
Life is a tempest,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
From the eclipse faq:
Eclipse is an open source software development project dedicated to providing a robust, full-featured, commercial-quality...yadda yadda yadda for several paragraphs...The mission of the Eclipse Technology Project is to provide new channels for open source developers, researchers...yadda yadda yadda...The Eclipse Platform is an open extensible IDE for
anything and yet nothing in particular...
I know DB2 isn't what most of the slashdot readership would consider technology. But bear with me.
The IBM marketers have so mangled the DB2 trademark that you can't even call IBM and order a flavour of the product or ask for service.
Don't beleive me? Log onto the IBM website and find the SQL manual for DB2 Universal Database for the mainframe. Make sure it's the mainframe manual. Then find out how many flavours of DB2 Universal Database Connect there are and try to distinguish them from each other.
Using Google is cheating. (But, even using Google I bet you're driven crazy within the hour!)
The technology behind DB2 isn't that difficult to understand. But the marketing maze is truly something byzantine.
Last week I was reading C.S.Lewis' The Screwtape Letters (1942(?)). For those of you unfamiliar with it it's a wonderful series of letters written by a demon to his nephew concerning how to best lure a soul away from "The Enemy" (God) towards "Our Father" (The devil). The ideas C.S.Lewis lays down in this book are very thought provoking and mature, but it's not written to be difficult to understand; i.e. the "letters" are not dry and erudite theological essays but very brief, very entertaining, and simple essays. I found one letter particularly insightful and copied it for a few of my friends. They are all college graduates. They are all middle aged. They are all professionals (DBA's, SysProgs, MBAs). They all failed to get past the second sentence. One yelled at me for giving him something incomprehensible. One wadded the paper up and (playfully) threw it at me. My wife called me an elitist. Not one of them was able to comprehend the one page passage.
I am not an elitist.
But I have come to realise that not a one of my friends, my peers, (indeed no one I personally know) are able to read Dickens, Twain, Scott, or Hardy; much less Shakespeare, Marlowe, Goethe, or even Conrad.
I don't want to be an elitist - but this is very frightening.
Hardware is supposed to get better over time but I haven't found a palmtop yet that has a screen that compares to the old Casios. (Indoors that is - they're practically invisible outdoors.) My eyesight is bad. And I want to read all my books on my pda. I've wanted to buy a more powerful, microsoft-free pda since the day after I bought my Casio EM500. But no one has made a screen yet, that compares to the old Casios. Maybe someday.
As for the OS preference: I'll avoid the holy war and just claim personal preference. But, I've had a Palm for years and a PocketPC for years and I'll never, ever buy another PocketPC OSed palmtop. YMMV
I've been a Microsoft avoider (if not basher) for 20 years. But, I think this is a tremendous opportunity for all of us. The only thing I would want to see is a quid pro quo relationship. If Microsoft wants to "bury the hatchet" I'd think a great place for them to start is to open their formats. Once that were accomplished open source developers would naturally support development projects that would benefit both sides. This could be very exciting for us all. (But I am not holding my breath)
Oh... you're not per chance one of those people who likes to waste their time compiling things unnecessarily are you?
I understand most of this is good natured elitist banter but does it really matter that my system is compiling the world...if it compiles while I am offline? Hey, I get about 3.5 hours of sleep a night, but I do sleep.
This does my heart good! I've boycotted REAL for years. I've participated in my own letter writing campaigns informing content distributers that I wouldn't watch a manned landing on Mars if I had to watch it with a REAL viewer. I chose a long time ago: I chose not to download media content rather than be forced to install REAL software on my computers.
I've been trying to explain to laymen and peers for the past four years that Google and Deja are more important to mankind than the human genome project. But I've never been able to get anyone to appreciate the importance of IA. When Deja died a couple of years ago I was distraught. When Google picked them up my sense of relief was immense. For the past two weeks access to Google has been unreliable; and it's been awful to experience. I truly believe we are allowing Google too much power and control over the single greatest accumulation of information in history. I may sound melodramatic - but I am very sincere.
In almost 13 years I've probably installed 30 different releases/packagings of linux on 15 or so computers. Total out of pocket expenses: 60$ for a redhat license, and about 50$ for a supported trident card back in the early 90's.
In that same amount of time I've paid the Microsoft tax at least 4 times to the tune of about 200$ (est), upgraded windows on the kiddies and wife's machines at the cost of about 150$ and bought one copy of Awfice for some goshOfful price I don't want to remember.
Time spent supporting the machines is about the same surprisingly. Would you believe it I've never gotten a single virus,worm,trojan,gatorcrap on any linux box yet?
Data lost to operating system blowups? That's another issue I don't want to discuss.
Basically I've dual booted my family's machines and told them, "Dad supports 24 hour linux repair. Windows repair is a 'When I get to it' job"
I have a BSCS from a midsize State University (15,000 students, a dozen or so PhD programs, etc, etc). I also worked for the business college after graduation running their computer department (2 years Administrative Professional medium level) so I can speak from both sides, inside the system and outside the system.
The system sucks.
The professors either totally disregard the students, or else take positive enjoyment in making the educational process a nightmare. The parents pour in tens of thousands of dollars annually and the students get tens of hundreds of dollars of value out of the experience. The grades have little to nothing to do with acheivment and ability (I 4 pointed my math & CS classes and 2.5ed the LA snoozers - low 3 final average so I really don't have a bone to pick either way.) At the end a BSCS could proudly point to a stack of over 40 programs written! Proof that (s)he was computer literate. (This was back in the 80's when CS was all about programming. The bar might not be so stratospheric today)
I've got highschool age kids now and if there's an alternative to the American Collegiate system I'm all for checking it out. If I had to do it over again I would not spend one minute inside a lecture hall.
I've a bit of a radical opinion about raid. Raid sucks.
In twenty years I've had one hard drive crash. One. If for those twenty years I had linux half the time (240 on/off cycles or 2 reboots per month), and dos/windows/os2 the other half the time (3650 on/off cycles or 1 reboot per day) then I rebooted my system almost 4,000 times. Raid takes about 3 times longer to boot up over non raid devices so let's say raid alone cost me roughly 8,000 extra minutes of reboot time. That's five and a half days of down time.
Now let's figure out how much money twenty years of raid will have cost me. And then let's figure out how much extra time I'm down because of the added complexity of the raid technology. Er, well, let's not.
Raid is for overbudgeted IT managers who want to cover their asses when something does go wrong.
raid sucks.
It doesn't matter what the Chinese people claim, think, or want. What matters is what the people who live in those territories claim, think, and want.
I live in Michigan. By and large everyone in Michigan feels like an American. Many people who live in Alaska don't feel American, don't want to be American, are upset that they were never given the choice to become, or not become, Americans. It doesn't matter what I as a Michiganian think about Alaska being part of the US. What does matter is what do Alaskans as a majority think.
Slashdot Mirror
Sharp's message to us for years now has been, My sincerest apologies to the sharp pda owners out there. I am suffering under severe sour grapes; I really wanted one. I just couldn't stand Sharp's message.
Can somebody explain to me Sharp's logic? They enter this market (US/Europe) with a beta product (5000), only slightly improve upon it (5500), design a class I product (C370), and tell us it will never be sold here because there's no real future for Sharp PDAs outside of Japan, and then withdraw completely. Is there any logic to that?
This has been a long time coming. It's been obvious for years that Sharp had no intention of becoming a player in the American and European markets. The only thing I can't understand is why did they even bother?
Life is a tempest,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
From the eclipse faq: yadda yadda yawn...
I know DB2 isn't what most of the slashdot readership would consider technology. But bear with me.
The IBM marketers have so mangled the DB2 trademark that you can't even call IBM and order a flavour of the product or ask for service.
Don't beleive me? Log onto the IBM website and find the SQL manual for DB2 Universal Database for the mainframe. Make sure it's the mainframe manual. Then find out how many flavours of DB2 Universal Database Connect there are and try to distinguish them from each other.
Using Google is cheating. (But, even using Google I bet you're driven crazy within the hour!)
The technology behind DB2 isn't that difficult to understand. But the marketing maze is truly something byzantine.
Last week I was reading C.S.Lewis' The Screwtape Letters (1942(?)). For those of you unfamiliar with it it's a wonderful series of letters written by a demon to his nephew concerning how to best lure a soul away from "The Enemy" (God) towards "Our Father" (The devil). The ideas C.S.Lewis lays down in this book are very thought provoking and mature, but it's not written to be difficult to understand; i.e. the "letters" are not dry and erudite theological essays but very brief, very entertaining, and simple essays. I found one letter particularly insightful and copied it for a few of my friends. They are all college graduates. They are all middle aged. They are all professionals (DBA's, SysProgs, MBAs). They all failed to get past the second sentence. One yelled at me for giving him something incomprehensible. One wadded the paper up and (playfully) threw it at me. My wife called me an elitist. Not one of them was able to comprehend the one page passage.
I am not an elitist.
But I have come to realise that not a one of my friends, my peers, (indeed no one I personally know) are able to read Dickens, Twain, Scott, or Hardy; much less Shakespeare, Marlowe, Goethe, or even Conrad.
I don't want to be an elitist - but this is very frightening.
It sucks indeed.
If they're so hot then why won't Sharp market them in the U.S.?
FWIW: I've wanted one (a Sharp clamshell) for years. But, the question's still a valid question.
Hardware is supposed to get better over time but I haven't found a palmtop yet that has a screen that compares to the old Casios. (Indoors that is - they're practically invisible outdoors.) My eyesight is bad. And I want to read all my books on my pda. I've wanted to buy a more powerful, microsoft-free pda since the day after I bought my Casio EM500. But no one has made a screen yet, that compares to the old Casios. Maybe someday.
As for the OS preference: I'll avoid the holy war and just claim personal preference. But, I've had a Palm for years and a PocketPC for years and I'll never, ever buy another PocketPC OSed palmtop. YMMV
Well, I am from West Virginia.
If the grandparent thread to this reply isn't flamebait, then neither was the parent. (Yet, I'll accept my previous response as offtopic!)
Ever try recompiling your kernel?
I've been a Microsoft avoider (if not basher) for 20 years. But, I think this is a tremendous opportunity for all of us. The only thing I would want to see is a quid pro quo relationship. If Microsoft wants to "bury the hatchet" I'd think a great place for them to start is to open their formats. Once that were accomplished open source developers would naturally support development projects that would benefit both sides. This could be very exciting for us all. (But I am not holding my breath)
I understand most of this is good natured elitist banter but does it really matter that my system is compiling the world...if it compiles while I am offline? Hey, I get about 3.5 hours of sleep a night, but I do sleep.
This does my heart good! I've boycotted REAL for years. I've participated in my own letter writing campaigns informing content distributers that I wouldn't watch a manned landing on Mars if I had to watch it with a REAL viewer. I chose a long time ago: I chose not to download media content rather than be forced to install REAL software on my computers.
Yes! Google and Deja (groups.google). It scares me how powerful these two resources are. But it scares me more how little anyone realises it.
I've been trying to explain to laymen and peers for the past four years that Google and Deja are more important to mankind than the human genome project. But I've never been able to get anyone to appreciate the importance of IA. When Deja died a couple of years ago I was distraught. When Google picked them up my sense of relief was immense. For the past two weeks access to Google has been unreliable; and it's been awful to experience. I truly believe we are allowing Google too much power and control over the single greatest accumulation of information in history. I may sound melodramatic - but I am very sincere.
Come on folks... don't be stupid. It's a zero sum game.
Bill Gates = 30 Billion.
Linus Torvalds = 30 million? 3 million? 300,000? Whatever.
It's a zero sum game. I get zero. Bill gets sum.
In almost 13 years I've probably installed 30 different releases/packagings of linux on 15 or so computers. Total out of pocket expenses: 60$ for a redhat license, and about 50$ for a supported trident card back in the early 90's.
In that same amount of time I've paid the Microsoft tax at least 4 times to the tune of about 200$ (est), upgraded windows on the kiddies and wife's machines at the cost of about 150$ and bought one copy of Awfice for some goshOfful price I don't want to remember.
Time spent supporting the machines is about the same surprisingly. Would you believe it I've never gotten a single virus,worm,trojan,gatorcrap on any linux box yet?
Data lost to operating system blowups? That's another issue I don't want to discuss.
Basically I've dual booted my family's machines and told them, "Dad supports 24 hour linux repair. Windows repair is a 'When I get to it' job"
Total cost of ownership? Right.
That makes me a luser 5 times over!
I have a BSCS from a midsize State University (15,000 students, a dozen or so PhD programs, etc, etc). I also worked for the business college after graduation running their computer department (2 years Administrative Professional medium level) so I can speak from both sides, inside the system and outside the system.
The system sucks.
The professors either totally disregard the students, or else take positive enjoyment in making the educational process a nightmare. The parents pour in tens of thousands of dollars annually and the students get tens of hundreds of dollars of value out of the experience. The grades have little to nothing to do with acheivment and ability (I 4 pointed my math & CS classes and 2.5ed the LA snoozers - low 3 final average so I really don't have a bone to pick either way.) At the end a BSCS could proudly point to a stack of over 40 programs written! Proof that (s)he was computer literate. (This was back in the 80's when CS was all about programming. The bar might not be so stratospheric today)
I've got highschool age kids now and if there's an alternative to the American Collegiate system I'm all for checking it out. If I had to do it over again I would not spend one minute inside a lecture hall.
My 2 cents.
I've a bit of a radical opinion about raid. Raid sucks.
In twenty years I've had one hard drive crash. One. If for those twenty years I had linux half the time (240 on/off cycles or 2 reboots per month), and dos/windows/os2 the other half the time (3650 on/off cycles or 1 reboot per day) then I rebooted my system almost 4,000 times. Raid takes about 3 times longer to boot up over non raid devices so let's say raid alone cost me roughly 8,000 extra minutes of reboot time. That's five and a half days of down time.
Now let's figure out how much money twenty years of raid will have cost me. And then let's figure out how much extra time I'm down because of the added complexity of the raid technology. Er, well, let's not.
Raid is for overbudgeted IT managers who want to cover their asses when something does go wrong.
raid sucks.
[poll]What do you use as an alternative to reading slashdot?[/poll]
Then why do we have secret balloting at all of our elections?
It doesn't matter what the Chinese people claim, think, or want. What matters is what the people who live in those territories claim, think, and want.
I live in Michigan. By and large everyone in Michigan feels like an American. Many people who live in Alaska don't feel American, don't want to be American, are upset that they were never given the choice to become, or not become, Americans. It doesn't matter what I as a Michiganian think about Alaska being part of the US. What does matter is what do Alaskans as a majority think.