Well, okay, perhaps Linux, but realistically, are the majority of people who are going buy this device actually going to use Linux? Alas, the answer is no. Also you have 384MB of RAM, which is much more roomy than the platry 128MB on this box. XP and KDE both feel perky on 128, IMVHO.
Some appropriate biographical text from Wikipedia:
Fred Lawrence Whipple (November 5, 1906 - August 30, 2004) was an American astronomer.
He is best known for writing an influential paper in Astrophysical Journal in 1950 in which he proposed the now-confirmed "dirty snowball" theory of comet composition (although he originally used the term "icy conglomerate").
In 1933, he discovered the periodic comet 36P/Whipple and the asteroid 1252 Celestia. He also discovered or co-discovered five other non-periodic comets, the first of which was C/1932 P1 Peltier-Whipple, independently discovered by the famed amateur astronomer Leslie Peltier.
During World War Two, he was credited with first proposing the use of chaff to confuse enemy radar.
In 1955 he became director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), remaining in this post until 1973.
In 1983 he won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1986 he was awarded the Bruce Medal by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and in 1987 he was awarded the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship by the American Astronomical Society. Asteroid 1940 Whipple is named after him, as is the Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins in Arizona.
A fine scientist who made contributions to many areas of his field and will be remembered after most of us have long been forgotten. May he rest in peace.
I know some people are going to claim I'm wrong, but I think a 266MHz processor and 128MB of RAM are pushing it a bit to run modern applications (and more likely, operating systems!), especially compared to the competition (such as the OQO at 1GHz)
I mean, where is this product's niche? It's not really powerful enough to run XP (or KDE), but then again the battery life isn't good enough to compare it to something like a Toshiba E800 PDA, which can be excused for not running XP or Linux because it's not designed for that kind of use.
Will people end up running something like Qtopia on it instead? How does the 266MHz compare in terms of raw power with the new XScales, which run at up to 624MHz?
Most people already have a TV license. It would be pretty easy to put the TV tuner in on a small add-in card in a slot that could be removed if the buyer didn't want one.
I apologise for my atrocious error. I don't usually make the loose/lose mistake, indeed, I'm usually the one pointing it out. Obviously some self-flagellation is in order.
Well, things like individual e-mails aren't typically treated like files under any modern operating system, and even if they are, it's not in a useful way that the user can easily manipulate.
Imagine if you could search the content of e-mails, images, music, movies, instant messenger contacts, whatever, as if they all existed in this grand unified universe filled with metadata. This is what Microsoft is trying to do, and also what Apple is now trying to do with Tiger's new search facilities.
Indeed, the three main "trees" for a basic Windows install are C:\Documents and Settings, C:\Program Files and C:\Windows. I doubt anyone would want to search the contents of the later two, since they mostly contain binary executable files that aren't interesting to the user.
No, not the type of content, the ACTUAL content. Like searching for "pictures of houses" and the system going away and generating a list of all the jpeg images that are tagged with the "house" keyword.
Other useful examples might be "films starring Tom Hanks" or "music by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers"...
I don't understand all the hype around dual core. Maybe I'm being stupid. Two chips on one core seems like a great idea, and I'm sure it will improve performance.
But Intel has already demonstrated there is surely a better solution - something like SMT, hyperthreading.
Wouldn't it be saner to build a chip with double the number of execution units and double the number of instruction fetch/decode units and a larger reorder buffer that would appear, say, as four logical processors to a system? Surely you could get higher utilisation of your arithmetic logic units from such an arrangement than you could with two entirely separate processors?
Or is the simple advantage with dual core that you don't have to distribute the same clock over the entire silicon die? I know this is becoming a big problem with complex VLSI, and I guess this might be a half-way solution until clockless designs arrive.
When hyperthreading was released, the industry had to cope with similar issues. Those of us using operating systems with artificial limits imposed on the number of possible processors used in a system had to wait for software updates to fix detection. I'm sure that the same thing will happen again, undoutedly there will be some flag in a register somewhere that identifies whether a processor is part of a dual-core chip or just a single CPU on its own. The OS or software can just read this in and work out whether there is sufficient licensing to use them.
Why have Microsoft decided to call AMD64/EMT64 "x64"? Surely this will just add to confusion rather than improve matters, since CLEARLY x86 is better than x64, because it's higher!
A better name would just be x86-64 or some generic marketing term. Any suggestions?
Genetics will eventually be commoditised, just like every other form of technology. Also, who's to say that survival of the richest isn't survival of the fittest? In a capitalist society, the amount of $$$ you accumulate seems to be as good a measure as any of the "success of your genes" (money passed down from mommy and daddy are okay here too), barring those who win the lottery, of course.
Maybe it is, but what does it matter? In 10 or 15 years, we may well have the technology to improve our genes through technology (bigger brains, stronger bones, better healing capabilities, fewer defects). We won't need evolution any more. Until then, let's use current technology to help people less fortunate than ourselves get to that point. Then they can have kids without having to worry about passing their dodgy genes on to them, since they'll have been screened out while-u-wait using genetic tech.
Slightly offtopic, but that blog has to be one of the most offensive web designs I've seen in ages. Background sounds, distracting unreadable colours, it's got them all!
It doesn't mention how much memory is inside one of these things. Presumably, it could easily be enough for a couple of hundred 2MP pictures. If this is the case, combined with the preview/review LCD (one of the biggest advantages of digicams when on the road, IMHO), it could certainly be successful.
Well, the article claims "no wires" but I wonder just how the shop gets the pictures off the camera? Perhaps some hidden memory card inside the camera waiting to be hacked or even a USB interface behind a plug? Certainly I think this thing could be hackable.
Good gracious, learn some formating and manners. Here I am trying to have a discussion and all you can do is insult me?
As a webmaster, I can tell you that the majority of medium sized site servers are actually rented from companies like Rackshack. If you are rich enough to buy a $1,000 server up front, you still have to find a colo in which to host it. They cost money, both for the space, and more importantly, the bandwidth.
In the West (America and Europe), commercial companies operate the Internet's backbone links. They lay down a 100Gbps fibre under the Atlantic. My service provider pays them for a small portion of that bandwidth which I can then use to download sites from America. The server operator, in America, also pays them money for use of the wire, to send data to me here in the UK.
This cost is passed down from my ISP to me, and from a large server host (like Rackshack which has peering agreements with major backbone providers like C&W, Verio, UUNet, Sprint) to the server operator.
This is a simplification, but it's how the Internet works. Without server operators paying server hosts, the server hosts can't pay the backbone providers, and the whole deal starts falling apart. Eventually there'll be no-one left to fund the backbones.
You might argue that it would be better if governments paid for the backbones, and indeed in some parts of the world they do, but I think it's going to take some convincing to get Americans to pay for the Internet as part of their tax bill.
You might also argue that ISPs should pass part of my monthly bill on to Internet sites that I view to help pay for them. But this would require a major paradigm shift and most likely International treaties. Will it ever happen? Maybe. We'll see.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see an ad-free Internet where freedom of expression and not dollar signs controlled what we see. But until this happens, for the sake of poor webmasters who are taking money out of their own pay packets to pay for their small-to-medium-sized websites, whilst their jobs are under threat from outsourcing, I think I will carry on viewing adverts just to do them a favour. Block them if you wish, I just don't think it's very fair, s'all.
I doubt the response-rate for online adverts is much different than for television adverts, but certainly advertisers seem to think these are effective and worth the money.
The reason links are being incorperated directly into content are because the web advertising model isn't working. There are many reasons for this, but certainly one of them is that people like you block adverts.
Why do you do it? Do you think that servers and bandwidth pay for themselves? How do you expect sites to put up impartial (read: not sponsored) content without some way for the site owners to make enough money to pay the bills?
The only thing ad blocking does is push webmasters into new directions to find advertising revenues. This latest spate of content adverts are just a result of this trend. I suspect soon we'll see adverts incorperated into a site's content at the server-side (e.g. PHP, Perl, JSP includes into the site's content) rather than the client-side (e.g. embedded images, flash from third party servers).
These will be much more difficult to block, but ultimately, unless you WANT a subscription based Internet, what is a webmaster of a large site supposed to do? Take out another job or extra mortgage to pay his or her $1000 a month server bills?
Yes, in an ideal Internet anyone would be able to publish any content for nothing, but we live in a capitalist society (all the countries that really matter on the Internet are free or nearly-free markets, even China).
Slashdot Mirror
And of course, all 60 million of China's Internet users are going to use that site to access pages...
Why am I on your foes list?
Well, okay, perhaps Linux, but realistically, are the majority of people who are going buy this device actually going to use Linux? Alas, the answer is no. Also you have 384MB of RAM, which is much more roomy than the platry 128MB on this box. XP and KDE both feel perky on 128, IMVHO.
I know some people are going to claim I'm wrong, but I think a 266MHz processor and 128MB of RAM are pushing it a bit to run modern applications (and more likely, operating systems!), especially compared to the competition (such as the OQO at 1GHz)
I mean, where is this product's niche? It's not really powerful enough to run XP (or KDE), but then again the battery life isn't good enough to compare it to something like a Toshiba E800 PDA, which can be excused for not running XP or Linux because it's not designed for that kind of use.
Will people end up running something like Qtopia on it instead? How does the 266MHz compare in terms of raw power with the new XScales, which run at up to 624MHz?
Most people already have a TV license. It would be pretty easy to put the TV tuner in on a small add-in card in a slot that could be removed if the buyer didn't want one.
I apologise for my atrocious error. I don't usually make the loose/lose mistake, indeed, I'm usually the one pointing it out. Obviously some self-flagellation is in order.
The difference is that when you break the Cognac glasses, you don't automatically loose the Cognac...
Well, things like individual e-mails aren't typically treated like files under any modern operating system, and even if they are, it's not in a useful way that the user can easily manipulate.
Imagine if you could search the content of e-mails, images, music, movies, instant messenger contacts, whatever, as if they all existed in this grand unified universe filled with metadata. This is what Microsoft is trying to do, and also what Apple is now trying to do with Tiger's new search facilities.
Indeed, the three main "trees" for a basic Windows install are C:\Documents and Settings, C:\Program Files and C:\Windows. I doubt anyone would want to search the contents of the later two, since they mostly contain binary executable files that aren't interesting to the user.
No, not the type of content, the ACTUAL content. Like searching for "pictures of houses" and the system going away and generating a list of all the jpeg images that are tagged with the "house" keyword.
Other useful examples might be "films starring Tom Hanks" or "music by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers"...
That needs three E's, two H's, four O's, two R's, two T's and two U's.
I don't know any that use exactly 26 letters, but Quick-blowing zephyrs vex daft Jim and Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz are better.
I don't understand all the hype around dual core. Maybe I'm being stupid. Two chips on one core seems like a great idea, and I'm sure it will improve performance.
But Intel has already demonstrated there is surely a better solution - something like SMT, hyperthreading.
Wouldn't it be saner to build a chip with double the number of execution units and double the number of instruction fetch/decode units and a larger reorder buffer that would appear, say, as four logical processors to a system? Surely you could get higher utilisation of your arithmetic logic units from such an arrangement than you could with two entirely separate processors?
Or is the simple advantage with dual core that you don't have to distribute the same clock over the entire silicon die? I know this is becoming a big problem with complex VLSI, and I guess this might be a half-way solution until clockless designs arrive.
Can anyone "in the know" answer this question?
When hyperthreading was released, the industry had to cope with similar issues. Those of us using operating systems with artificial limits imposed on the number of possible processors used in a system had to wait for software updates to fix detection. I'm sure that the same thing will happen again, undoutedly there will be some flag in a register somewhere that identifies whether a processor is part of a dual-core chip or just a single CPU on its own. The OS or software can just read this in and work out whether there is sufficient licensing to use them.
Why have Microsoft decided to call AMD64/EMT64 "x64"? Surely this will just add to confusion rather than improve matters, since CLEARLY x86 is better than x64, because it's higher!
A better name would just be x86-64 or some generic marketing term. Any suggestions?
Genetics will eventually be commoditised, just like every other form of technology. Also, who's to say that survival of the richest isn't survival of the fittest? In a capitalist society, the amount of $$$ you accumulate seems to be as good a measure as any of the "success of your genes" (money passed down from mommy and daddy are okay here too), barring those who win the lottery, of course.
Maybe it is, but what does it matter? In 10 or 15 years, we may well have the technology to improve our genes through technology (bigger brains, stronger bones, better healing capabilities, fewer defects). We won't need evolution any more. Until then, let's use current technology to help people less fortunate than ourselves get to that point. Then they can have kids without having to worry about passing their dodgy genes on to them, since they'll have been screened out while-u-wait using genetic tech.
Slightly offtopic, but that blog has to be one of the most offensive web designs I've seen in ages. Background sounds, distracting unreadable colours, it's got them all!
I must have missed that.
It doesn't mention how much memory is inside one of these things. Presumably, it could easily be enough for a couple of hundred 2MP pictures. If this is the case, combined with the preview/review LCD (one of the biggest advantages of digicams when on the road, IMHO), it could certainly be successful.
Well, the article claims "no wires" but I wonder just how the shop gets the pictures off the camera? Perhaps some hidden memory card inside the camera waiting to be hacked or even a USB interface behind a plug? Certainly I think this thing could be hackable.
Good gracious, learn some formating and manners. Here I am trying to have a discussion and all you can do is insult me?
As a webmaster, I can tell you that the majority of medium sized site servers are actually rented from companies like Rackshack. If you are rich enough to buy a $1,000 server up front, you still have to find a colo in which to host it. They cost money, both for the space, and more importantly, the bandwidth.
In the West (America and Europe), commercial companies operate the Internet's backbone links. They lay down a 100Gbps fibre under the Atlantic. My service provider pays them for a small portion of that bandwidth which I can then use to download sites from America. The server operator, in America, also pays them money for use of the wire, to send data to me here in the UK.
This cost is passed down from my ISP to me, and from a large server host (like Rackshack which has peering agreements with major backbone providers like C&W, Verio, UUNet, Sprint) to the server operator.
This is a simplification, but it's how the Internet works. Without server operators paying server hosts, the server hosts can't pay the backbone providers, and the whole deal starts falling apart. Eventually there'll be no-one left to fund the backbones.
You might argue that it would be better if governments paid for the backbones, and indeed in some parts of the world they do, but I think it's going to take some convincing to get Americans to pay for the Internet as part of their tax bill.
You might also argue that ISPs should pass part of my monthly bill on to Internet sites that I view to help pay for them. But this would require a major paradigm shift and most likely International treaties. Will it ever happen? Maybe. We'll see.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see an ad-free Internet where freedom of expression and not dollar signs controlled what we see. But until this happens, for the sake of poor webmasters who are taking money out of their own pay packets to pay for their small-to-medium-sized websites, whilst their jobs are under threat from outsourcing, I think I will carry on viewing adverts just to do them a favour. Block them if you wish, I just don't think it's very fair, s'all.
I doubt the response-rate for online adverts is much different than for television adverts, but certainly advertisers seem to think these are effective and worth the money.
The reason links are being incorperated directly into content are because the web advertising model isn't working. There are many reasons for this, but certainly one of them is that people like you block adverts.
Why do you do it? Do you think that servers and bandwidth pay for themselves? How do you expect sites to put up impartial (read: not sponsored) content without some way for the site owners to make enough money to pay the bills?
The only thing ad blocking does is push webmasters into new directions to find advertising revenues. This latest spate of content adverts are just a result of this trend. I suspect soon we'll see adverts incorperated into a site's content at the server-side (e.g. PHP, Perl, JSP includes into the site's content) rather than the client-side (e.g. embedded images, flash from third party servers).
These will be much more difficult to block, but ultimately, unless you WANT a subscription based Internet, what is a webmaster of a large site supposed to do? Take out another job or extra mortgage to pay his or her $1000 a month server bills?
Yes, in an ideal Internet anyone would be able to publish any content for nothing, but we live in a capitalist society (all the countries that really matter on the Internet are free or nearly-free markets, even China).