Now show me how you can use the PDA, say to type some notes into a document or memo, while you're actively talking on the phone, or checking your voice mail at the same time.
Like he said... use a headset or temporarily flip the phone into speakerphone mode (even the old 6035 was able to do this).
I'm trying to picture someone juggling a modern-day cell phone on their shoulder while using both hands to enter something on a PDA. Maybe if you're agile enough it would work, but I'd bet you'd flip your cell phone to speaker mode or hook up a headset anyway.
If all you use your PDA for is addresses and a few notes, a PDA-based phone isn't going to be your bag. However, once you start using additional apps like expense trackers, diet/exercise logs, financial entry, etc., it's much easier to carry a single combo device then two devices.
And the Kyocera's do a good job on the size vs function trade-off.
This is more like Clancy researching government agencies' plans and making fiction based on them. Of course, I stopped reading Clancy when he stopped letting a decent editor go through his prose: how many times does something need to be "pure vanilla" or "faster than a Kansas tornado" anyway?!
Or hearing someone say that daughters are $DIETY's curse on men, that you'll live in fear of them meeting someone like you when they get older... was either Rainbow Six or Bear and the Dragon. I think I counted half a dozen times when he used that same joke in those two books. Apparently, he's not creative enought come up with anything else.
Clancy needs an editor with a large friggin clue stick.
Except with a floppy disk, if it's the right size to fit the drive, you could use it. A SD 3.5" will work in a DD 3.5" will work in a HD 3.5" drive, you just have differing amounts of space on them. It's not as if you had to throw out all your SD 3.5" diskettes when you got your new HD 3.5" drive -- you just had low-capacity disks you could use.
Except that back when the 1.44Mb 3.5" drives came out, most folks still had the 720Kb 3.5" drives. Sure, you could buy 1.44Mb media for your rootin-tootin high-density drive, but it did you no good if you decided to go visit someone with a 720Kb drive.
Just because the disk was the right size didn't mean that you could use it.
And, really, a tiny Bluetooth earbud that you pull out like your stylus (shades of star trek, really) is what would make a Treo form-factor phone more marketable.
Cultural norms might kill off that idea... the wired ear-bud phones with the "lapel" mike are bad enough. Ever watch someone walking down the street having an animated conversation with no cell phone in sight?
Now imagine what it looks like when you can't even see any wires...
"Gee, he looks awfully well-dressed for a drugged-out wino, but let's cross the street to be sure anyway."
I live in FL and every backwoods, inbred, red-neck somebitch has one of those things! Personally, I hate'em. I really don't want to have to listen to all their stupid conversations when I'm queued up somewhere.
Yeah, but now you get to hear both sides of the conversation!
I do see a lot of non-business folks using the push-to-talk feature here in Pennsyltucky, so it's not a business-only thing anymore.
Thats my one gripe with LCDs, a not well covered sneeze and you cant just wipe it down with windex like you can a nice glass CRT, a thin piece of anti-glare coated glass would be nice for LCDs, easier to clean and protective from "ooo, look at the pretty swirls when i poke it".
There's a lot to be said for using a version control system to manage your files. Everyone gets copies of only what they need, you can go back in time, and it works well if you're not always connected.
Search interface to files
Store all files by customer / project - or come up with a simple organizational system. Anything is better then nothing (or just doing it randomly). Have a standard, enforce it, but don't go too fine. Have a directory tree of Customer/Project/ but don't force what folders exist below that point.
Alternatively, if you're using a CVS/SVN type system, publish the latest checked in revisions of files to a central web server and setup indexing on that. Allows you to search everything without having it local and also serves as a down-n-dirty snapshot backup of all of your customer files.
Security
PGP Desktop or GPGSHell / EnigMail / GPG... lage installed base and compatible with each other. For securing files on laptops, PGPDisk is somewhat useful (or DriveCrypt).
In addition, you should have a central mail server that requires encryption to access (VPN / SSH / SSL / TLS). E-mail between your users will then stay on the e-mail server instead of traveling out across the internet.
I was surprised to see that he didn't mention a mini-USB hub. Those are only about the size of a credit card and 1/4" thick and take 1 port and give you 4 ports. He seems to be a big 1394 user instead though.
I don't see you list a telephone cord for your 56kbps modem either. (Assuming you don't have a 56kbps modem?) My preference is to carry 2 cords plus a Y-adapter. If one cord breaks, you've got a spare, and if one won't reach, use the Y-adapter to chain them together.
Non-tech things I just found in the bottom of my bag pocket:
- Mini-umbrella (9" long or so)
- Bottle of aspirin/ibuprofen
- Mini-stapler
- Bottle opener (actually attached to my cable bag that holds all the cables)
Other tech stuff:
- 2 blank mini-CDRs
- 2 blank CDRW media
- small 2-prong 3-way power tap
- 2' long, flat prong (fits flat against the wall), 3 outlet, 2-prong extension cord
Prior to the economic downturn I was traveling via train once a month or more.
Of course, gigabit switches are basically unheard of outside of very large networks, so unless you're using crossover cable you're still limited to 100Mbps, which practice gives you about 10MB/s (due to overhead). And many of us are on wireless networks, which will give you even less throughput.
Um, check your rearview mirror more often...
8-port, workgroup gigabit switches can be had for $150-$200. I just bought a 3com 8-port OfficeConnect switch this week for $150 from CDW.
The prices have dropped a lot in the past 6 months. Gigabit cards as cheap as $25 (probably 32-bit PCI, which is another bottleneck) and 3com server NICs are only $120 or so. Unmanaged switches are down to $1400 for a 24-port.
We're in the process of putting all of our servers onto a central 24-port gigabit switch. The older 24-port 10/100 switches will be star-topologied off of that to connect up the employee's computers. Back when gigabit was thousands / tens-of-thousands of bucks for the cards plus the switch, it wasn't affordable.
My friends and I like to use dead bodies as a measurement for trunk/cargo space on vehicles. You should see some of the looks we've gotten from salesmen when we start to talk about how many dead bodies would fit in the trunk of this car he's showing us.
The reason that this would work, at least for now, is that spammers mostly use badly written MTAs (or something akin to an Expect script posing as an MTA). Their software doesn't know how to deal with a TEMPFAIL and never tries again. All real MTAs will try again within a few minutes. Good times.
Um, any missing functionality in spammer zombie MTAs would quickly be patched by the bad guys to get past that hurdle. So it wouldn't be much of a barrier (maybe a day). It works right now because you're the only one doing things that way (or are part of a very limited group).
(Which gets into the whole monoculture/polyculture security theories... distributed/local decision making on spam/ham is better then centralized/monofocused.)
Suppose someone issues a key to a dishonest server? Well, enough people issue complaints and the issuer's key gets revoked. Or some automatied spamassasin type thing that auto-revokes the key after enough spams get spotted. No more spam from them, and maybe next time the admins are more careful.
Or spammers attack the system so that legitimate servers get blacklisted/revoked which reduces trust in the system. (Centralized solutions are prone to revenge-attacks and other fun things like censorship.)
That's nice until they take it somewhere to get it fixed because they don't want to bother you.
That's precisely the reason that I won't even *start* supporting someone for free anymore. The local fix-it shop is not going to spend the time to figure out what's actually wrong or preserve existing data / settings / programs. Their goal is to get the box on and off the bench as fast as possible which means following a fix-it script.
The other reason they do it that way is that the customers really can't afford a tech to spend 3-4 hours fixing an issue at $60/hr. When a new PC only costs $400, it doesn't take too many hours of support time before buying a new PC starts to look attractive (instead of sinking more costs into the old PC).
Either PCs have become too cheap for their complexity or support costs are out-of-whack compared to manufacture costs. Examples might be that nobody repairs toasters anymore, cheaper to buy a new one, possibly the same with televisions and VCRs. Cars are probably the closest analogous item because it requires a specialist to maintain it and the user *can* screw it up. But cars cost 100x-200x the per-hour cost of a mechanic.
Now we have DVDs, 4.7GB for recordable/single layer which is almost six and three-quarter (700MB) CDROMs. How long before they're old hat?
Um, it's already too small... get into DV / HDTV / video-capture where an hour's worth of video is 10-13Gb and those 4.35Gb DVDs seem really really really tiny.
And I'm not sure that the 20-25Gb next-generation media is going to be big enough either... (maybe when it goes dual-layer and double-sided). 20-25Gb is only a 4-5x improvement while CD to DVD was a 6.75x improvement.
Similarly sure 20 years ago 8MB of ram was godly [cuz quite frankly the average program was of limited appeal and functionality].
Heck, 15 years ago, 8Mb of RAM was godly.
Summer of 1988 I pieced together a machine capable of booting OS/2 1.3. Only had maybe 512Kb or 1Mb of RAM on the motherboard, the rest of the memory came from full-length ISA RAM-expansion boards. Think I managed to get up around 4Mb or 6Mb and boy was it slow! It did boot and I'm amazed the power-supply didn't give out from all of those cards.
3.1 ran nicely with 4 MB. 95 was good with 16 MB. 98 was good with 32. XP is tolerable with 128.
Well, for one thing, you left out ME which probably required 64, and XP is really more based on the old NT line.
NT 4 needed 32 min, but 64 was realistic. Win2000 needed 64 min, but 128 was a more realistic minimum (256 preferred). WinXP ups the ante again (a fresh laptop install weighs in at 160Mb in use), so 256 is a realistic minimum while 512Mb is preferred.
Personally, my preference is 384Mb for Win2000 and 768Mb for WinXP. (With a dozen different apps open at the moment, I'm at 635Mb used out of 768Mb.) 512Mb is the minimum amount of memory that we'll order new business machines with, and that will probably creep up to 1Gb by year-end if memory prices drop a bit more.
Heck, anytime someone asks me about buying a particular machine, I have them trade down to the next slower CPU and double-up on memory instead. Makes the machine much more stable/responsive and adds another year or two to the machine's useful lifespan.
If they come out with a high-def version in a few years (when whatever replaces DVD settles out), this is definitely one of the films that will be on my "upgrade list".
But the format wars had better be over before I'll plunk down the cash.
Err, it's not at all hard. If you know how to work a CD-R(W) burner, you can work a DVD burner. Good dual-format burners are $80-$100 (close enough) and there are all sorts of programs to do the ripping/cutting/burning. (Google around in the alt.video.dvd.* USENET groups.)
all: Dance/techno/house/metal/classical
Note, for long coding sessions I prefer extended (hour-long or longer) mixes such as Radio1's Essential Mix. That gives me enough time to tune it out / get lost in the flow without getting side-tracked by whatever came up on the random play every few minutes.
Here in the Northeast, just being outside on the afternoon of 9/11 and not seeing any contrails like normal was spooky. On a bright clear day you're just used to seeing a dozen or so. (I also watched the Navy ships putting out to sea from Norfolk around noon which was also unsettling.)
Slashdot Mirror
Now show me how you can use the PDA, say to type some notes into a document or memo, while you're actively talking on the phone, or checking your voice mail at the same time.
Like he said... use a headset or temporarily flip the phone into speakerphone mode (even the old 6035 was able to do this).
I'm trying to picture someone juggling a modern-day cell phone on their shoulder while using both hands to enter something on a PDA. Maybe if you're agile enough it would work, but I'd bet you'd flip your cell phone to speaker mode or hook up a headset anyway.
If all you use your PDA for is addresses and a few notes, a PDA-based phone isn't going to be your bag. However, once you start using additional apps like expense trackers, diet/exercise logs, financial entry, etc., it's much easier to carry a single combo device then two devices.
And the Kyocera's do a good job on the size vs function trade-off.
This is more like Clancy researching government agencies' plans and making fiction based on them. Of course, I stopped reading Clancy when he stopped letting a decent editor go through his prose: how many times does something need to be "pure vanilla" or "faster than a Kansas tornado" anyway?!
Or hearing someone say that daughters are $DIETY's curse on men, that you'll live in fear of them meeting someone like you when they get older... was either Rainbow Six or Bear and the Dragon. I think I counted half a dozen times when he used that same joke in those two books. Apparently, he's not creative enought come up with anything else.
Clancy needs an editor with a large friggin clue stick.
Except with a floppy disk, if it's the right size to fit the drive, you could use it. A SD 3.5" will work in a DD 3.5" will work in a HD 3.5" drive, you just have differing amounts of space on them. It's not as if you had to throw out all your SD 3.5" diskettes when you got your new HD 3.5" drive -- you just had low-capacity disks you could use.
Except that back when the 1.44Mb 3.5" drives came out, most folks still had the 720Kb 3.5" drives. Sure, you could buy 1.44Mb media for your rootin-tootin high-density drive, but it did you no good if you decided to go visit someone with a 720Kb drive.
Just because the disk was the right size didn't mean that you could use it.
And, really, a tiny Bluetooth earbud that you pull out like your stylus (shades of star trek, really) is what would make a Treo form-factor phone more marketable.
Cultural norms might kill off that idea... the wired ear-bud phones with the "lapel" mike are bad enough. Ever watch someone walking down the street having an animated conversation with no cell phone in sight?
Now imagine what it looks like when you can't even see any wires...
"Gee, he looks awfully well-dressed for a drugged-out wino, but let's cross the street to be sure anyway."
I live in FL and every backwoods, inbred, red-neck somebitch has one of those things! Personally, I hate'em. I really don't want to have to listen to all their stupid conversations when I'm queued up somewhere.
Yeah, but now you get to hear both sides of the conversation!
I do see a lot of non-business folks using the push-to-talk feature here in Pennsyltucky, so it's not a business-only thing anymore.
Thats my one gripe with LCDs, a not well covered sneeze and you cant just wipe it down with windex like you can a nice glass CRT, a thin piece of anti-glare coated glass would be nice for LCDs, easier to clean and protective from "ooo, look at the pretty swirls when i poke it".
Dammit! Now you forced me to do it!
oooo, pretty colors...
Ah... I was wondering why this article had 3000+ comments (but was too lazy to switch to a -1 view and deal with /.'s dumb-as-a-post pagination).
File-sharing across multiple locations.
There's a lot to be said for using a version control system to manage your files. Everyone gets copies of only what they need, you can go back in time, and it works well if you're not always connected.
Search interface to files
Store all files by customer / project - or come up with a simple organizational system. Anything is better then nothing (or just doing it randomly). Have a standard, enforce it, but don't go too fine. Have a directory tree of Customer/Project/ but don't force what folders exist below that point.
Alternatively, if you're using a CVS/SVN type system, publish the latest checked in revisions of files to a central web server and setup indexing on that. Allows you to search everything without having it local and also serves as a down-n-dirty snapshot backup of all of your customer files.
Security
PGP Desktop or GPGSHell / EnigMail / GPG... lage installed base and compatible with each other. For securing files on laptops, PGPDisk is somewhat useful (or DriveCrypt).
In addition, you should have a central mail server that requires encryption to access (VPN / SSH / SSL / TLS). E-mail between your users will then stay on the e-mail server instead of traveling out across the internet.
4) Get sued by your customers, go back to step 1
You should switch to using SpamBayes.
I tried the rule method in Outlook, and bayesian does a much better job.
I was surprised to see that he didn't mention a mini-USB hub. Those are only about the size of a credit card and 1/4" thick and take 1 port and give you 4 ports. He seems to be a big 1394 user instead though.
I don't see you list a telephone cord for your 56kbps modem either. (Assuming you don't have a 56kbps modem?) My preference is to carry 2 cords plus a Y-adapter. If one cord breaks, you've got a spare, and if one won't reach, use the Y-adapter to chain them together.
Non-tech things I just found in the bottom of my bag pocket:
- Mini-umbrella (9" long or so)
- Bottle of aspirin/ibuprofen
- Mini-stapler
- Bottle opener (actually attached to my cable bag that holds all the cables)
Other tech stuff:
- 2 blank mini-CDRs
- 2 blank CDRW media
- small 2-prong 3-way power tap
- 2' long, flat prong (fits flat against the wall), 3 outlet, 2-prong extension cord
Prior to the economic downturn I was traveling via train once a month or more.
Bravo... you've just invented the Reverse-MX style anti-forgery proposals. Check out SPF
Of course, gigabit switches are basically unheard of outside of very large networks, so unless you're using crossover cable you're still limited to 100Mbps, which practice gives you about 10MB/s (due to overhead). And many of us are on wireless networks, which will give you even less throughput.
Um, check your rearview mirror more often...
8-port, workgroup gigabit switches can be had for $150-$200. I just bought a 3com 8-port OfficeConnect switch this week for $150 from CDW.
The prices have dropped a lot in the past 6 months. Gigabit cards as cheap as $25 (probably 32-bit PCI, which is another bottleneck) and 3com server NICs are only $120 or so. Unmanaged switches are down to $1400 for a 24-port.
We're in the process of putting all of our servers onto a central 24-port gigabit switch. The older 24-port 10/100 switches will be star-topologied off of that to connect up the employee's computers. Back when gigabit was thousands / tens-of-thousands of bucks for the cards plus the switch, it wasn't affordable.
My friends and I like to use dead bodies as a measurement for trunk/cargo space on vehicles. You should see some of the looks we've gotten from salesmen when we start to talk about how many dead bodies would fit in the trunk of this car he's showing us.
Would that make you a fellow Chopping Block fan?
The reason that this would work, at least for now, is that spammers mostly use badly written MTAs (or something akin to an Expect script posing as an MTA). Their software doesn't know how to deal with a TEMPFAIL and never tries again. All real MTAs will try again within a few minutes. Good times.
Um, any missing functionality in spammer zombie MTAs would quickly be patched by the bad guys to get past that hurdle. So it wouldn't be much of a barrier (maybe a day). It works right now because you're the only one doing things that way (or are part of a very limited group).
(Which gets into the whole monoculture/polyculture security theories... distributed/local decision making on spam/ham is better then centralized/monofocused.)
Suppose someone issues a key to a dishonest server? Well, enough people issue complaints and the issuer's key gets revoked. Or some automatied spamassasin type thing that auto-revokes the key after enough spams get spotted. No more spam from them, and maybe next time the admins are more careful.
Or spammers attack the system so that legitimate servers get blacklisted/revoked which reduces trust in the system. (Centralized solutions are prone to revenge-attacks and other fun things like censorship.)
That's nice until they take it somewhere to get it fixed because they don't want to bother you.
That's precisely the reason that I won't even *start* supporting someone for free anymore. The local fix-it shop is not going to spend the time to figure out what's actually wrong or preserve existing data / settings / programs. Their goal is to get the box on and off the bench as fast as possible which means following a fix-it script.
The other reason they do it that way is that the customers really can't afford a tech to spend 3-4 hours fixing an issue at $60/hr. When a new PC only costs $400, it doesn't take too many hours of support time before buying a new PC starts to look attractive (instead of sinking more costs into the old PC).
Either PCs have become too cheap for their complexity or support costs are out-of-whack compared to manufacture costs. Examples might be that nobody repairs toasters anymore, cheaper to buy a new one, possibly the same with televisions and VCRs. Cars are probably the closest analogous item because it requires a specialist to maintain it and the user *can* screw it up. But cars cost 100x-200x the per-hour cost of a mechanic.
So is a blue background with white letters... something else they identify with Microsoft, but not to Microsoft's advantage ;)
Eh? I associate that with the IBM OS/2 setup screens!
And what a lovely shade of blue it was too... (mutters incoherently about the evils of GUI-based installation screens).
Now we have DVDs, 4.7GB for recordable/single layer which is almost six and three-quarter (700MB) CDROMs. How long before they're old hat?
Um, it's already too small... get into DV / HDTV / video-capture where an hour's worth of video is 10-13Gb and those 4.35Gb DVDs seem really really really tiny.
And I'm not sure that the 20-25Gb next-generation media is going to be big enough either... (maybe when it goes dual-layer and double-sided). 20-25Gb is only a 4-5x improvement while CD to DVD was a 6.75x improvement.
Similarly sure 20 years ago 8MB of ram was godly [cuz quite frankly the average program was of limited appeal and functionality].
Heck, 15 years ago, 8Mb of RAM was godly.
Summer of 1988 I pieced together a machine capable of booting OS/2 1.3. Only had maybe 512Kb or 1Mb of RAM on the motherboard, the rest of the memory came from full-length ISA RAM-expansion boards. Think I managed to get up around 4Mb or 6Mb and boy was it slow! It did boot and I'm amazed the power-supply didn't give out from all of those cards.
3.1 ran nicely with 4 MB. 95 was good with 16 MB. 98 was good with 32. XP is tolerable with 128.
Well, for one thing, you left out ME which probably required 64, and XP is really more based on the old NT line.
NT 4 needed 32 min, but 64 was realistic. Win2000 needed 64 min, but 128 was a more realistic minimum (256 preferred). WinXP ups the ante again (a fresh laptop install weighs in at 160Mb in use), so 256 is a realistic minimum while 512Mb is preferred.
Personally, my preference is 384Mb for Win2000 and 768Mb for WinXP. (With a dozen different apps open at the moment, I'm at 635Mb used out of 768Mb.) 512Mb is the minimum amount of memory that we'll order new business machines with, and that will probably creep up to 1Gb by year-end if memory prices drop a bit more.
Heck, anytime someone asks me about buying a particular machine, I have them trade down to the next slower CPU and double-up on memory instead. Makes the machine much more stable/responsive and adds another year or two to the machine's useful lifespan.
If they come out with a high-def version in a few years (when whatever replaces DVD settles out), this is definitely one of the films that will be on my "upgrade list".
But the format wars had better be over before I'll plunk down the cash.
Err, it's not at all hard. If you know how to work a CD-R(W) burner, you can work a DVD burner. Good dual-format burners are $80-$100 (close enough) and there are all sorts of programs to do the ripping/cutting/burning. (Google around in the alt.video.dvd.* USENET groups.)
all: Dance/techno/house/metal/classical Note, for long coding sessions I prefer extended (hour-long or longer) mixes such as Radio1's Essential Mix. That gives me enough time to tune it out / get lost in the flow without getting side-tracked by whatever came up on the random play every few minutes.
Here in the Northeast, just being outside on the afternoon of 9/11 and not seeing any contrails like normal was spooky. On a bright clear day you're just used to seeing a dozen or so. (I also watched the Navy ships putting out to sea from Norfolk around noon which was also unsettling.)