You don't try to cook pizza in your microwave, do you? You don't watch a movie on your phone (unless you have no other choice), do you?
The iPad is a wonderful "adjunct" to a computer. It is NOT a replacement therefore, and it was never intended as such.
Then why do morons insist on using lame terms like "Post-PC quarter" and market them to folks as futuristic computer replacements. With glitzy UI's that sacrifice efficiency and powerful features for sloppy finger-based poke-and-drool ease on overpriced consumer devices that are used more to check facebook status updates than actual real world productivity. And to play lame-ass games. Or for little girls to play with FaceTime inspired by lame-ass disney afterschool shows.
Maybe for computer novices with no intention of ever learning to type or learn anything about *real* computing, they seem like wonder devices. In other words, most students in the United States of America who are having them issued by school districts.
And why are even supposedly educated radio announcers on NPR are typically oblivious that tablet computing has existed since the early 90's? In fact those devices are actually more USEFUL in trained hands than the current crop. Why does Apple even pretend their own Newton never existed?
As far as #2 you're stereotyping, not all of us are fat slobs with poor eating habits that never exercise. I'm certainly not.
As far as your point in parenthesis goes, the minute you allow that to happen you end up with Hell on Earth in the US. Our government likes to redefine words in the English language on a whim when it suits them. When money gets tight they'll start looking for people to pull the plug on....."sorry guy, shouldn't eaten that steak" or "You have lung cancer therefore you put yourself in a risky position that we don't feel financially responsible for"..... to a degree one could argue that ALL illness that isn't a genetic defect is self-inflicted based on life choices.
What next, ban care for those with certain illnesses to weed their defective line out of the gene pool to lower health care costs across the board? That's called Eugenics and while logically sound it's not very nice. A lot of folks were pissed at the Nazis for it. *BAM* Managed to Godwin this post after all.
Yes, yes we can. Since American employment and salaries are at an all time high of course we can all afford to pay $7,500 for a laptop guaranteed to fail in 5 years. And after a decade of toil spinning up American manufacturing and rare earth extraction again, labor unions and incredibly high health care costs will make sure that you only have to pay $2,700 for a base-model tough-as-nails American laptop.
Personally I'd love to see computers made here again but really, go convert the late 70's to early 80's home computer prices to today's dollars......then realize how much your parents REALLY spent. For the price of the Apple II you could buy a nice car. For the price of the Atari 800 you could buy a decent used car. Around the mid-80's when everyone started making machines in Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc things got a lot more affordable.....except PC's and Macs. The ST was a bargain however as well as being pretty bad-ass.
Bottom line....... we make good stuff...... the problem is that you can't afford it. Rather than fixing that problem we choose to buy our goods from people more willing to look the other way when it comes to how shitty their employee's lives are. We don't care as long as we can watch some kid hit his nuts on a railing while skateboarding on a $50 device. Then when those folks actually want some quality of life and the price goes up, we set up shop elsewhere.
Been a while since I've seen many "Made in Japan" stickers.
People have been chasing the tablet dream for ages.
Dauphin DTR-1
Various ThinkPad grayscale 386/486 tablets existed
Their own Newton....also from around 1994.
Sloppy fat-finger UI's could have and have been done before but most people who could afford such devices back then wanted precision and thus a stylus. They also wanted lots of information on the screen and cared much less about how photos of mom looked or how smooth fonts were.
The only thing innovative about the iPhone/iPad is the fact that Apple managed to make a poke-and-drool finger-centric UI usable for more than the simplest of apps (though NOT a desktop replacement) and advanced use of multitouch.
They eliminated pumping gas as a career path here.... all of our stations are self-serve and are usually staffed by 1-3 people tops including the manager.
Shoveling shit might have sucked but at least the city-dwelling shit shoveler had a couple thousand years of job security.
With current technology space combat would look a lot like it did in the 60's. The Russian Salyut 2 was armed with a 23mm Nudelman cannon. They tested it twice, worked great.
Slug-throwers still make sense in space. Most of the weight is in the ammo which could be jettisoned prior to reentry. Bullets still work just fine in space. They'd be noisy (inside the spacecraft if still pressurized) and vibrate a lot but would have MUCH greater range and flat trajectory aside from gravitational influence. Would need to be recoil-less or would need some opposite thrust to compensate. Ground-launched craft would need to be lightly armored if armored at all for reduced launch weight increasing the effectiveness of the good ol' chunk-o-lead.
Lasers, phasers and anti-matter weapons would take too much precious power that's needed for other things with current tech. We have missiles and guns and you can be sure that's what we'd be using. A plasma missile would likely follow shortly after. Would probably need some work over time to find best gun oils for space use, etc....
Think less Star Trek and more a mutant cross between cold-war era Sub warfare at a distance and WW2 dogfighting with no gravity up close. The first "StarFighter" would probably be a Gemini with a pair of belt-fed.50's and MAYBE a couple guided rockets. Would make mince meat out of anything up there with ease. We could cram a pretty sweet targeting system in the space occupied by old-school 50's-era avionics and equipment these days. I could even see waist or turret gunners in anything with a large service module.
If we had something to fight over out there toward the moon and were afraid to lose it, believe me you'd see something like the above fast. Maybe an armed Apollo with a "Assault LEM".
Think a.308 is nasty now? Imagine a handful of.308 tracers with no air resistance flying at your tin can full of hydrazine and oxygen with nowhere to run.
Since when does spouting your passionately negative and rightfully angry views warrant robotic execution? They couldn't even give him the dignity of getting shot in the face by a CIA agent?
They actually treat drone attacks as being more legal and humane than using real people to carry out assassinations. This WAS an ILLEGAL assassination, plain and simple. Their views that human rights don't apply to those that renounce their citizenship is plain backwards. Human rights and freedom apply to well.....HUMANS.
What they did to this guy was no better than executing a group of folks here for saying we need another armed revolution.... ya know.... since voting and playing by rules that have been turned against us has been completely ineffective.
Not all Americans are ignorant "Christians" my friend. Hell most christians I've met here don't even really understand what it is they believe and regularly get facts about their own faith wrong. They know they love Jesus and hate Muslims though.
Our government feels that basic human rights only apply to Americans while in America when it's convenient and non-embarrassing for them. When it's not convenient, they do whatever they feel like and claim it's a national security secret and therefore above the law and the fact that you even want to know makes you look suspicious.
Hell, Obama even tried to claim sending drones to kill folks in another country is not even a "Hostile Act" or "Act of War". Sorry, I consider telepresence to be the same as actually being there pulling a trigger.
Others will say that Christianity is the exact same as Islam, even though Christianity specifically forbids this type of killing.
Really..... care to explain the crusades and spanish inquisition? Both religions are packed with hypocrites looking to twist the faith to fit their agenda. Both are evil and no longer necessarily have a right to exist much less wield actual power especially in a legal sense.
If idiots are willing to kill to prove their god is great, we should make sure they can meet their fairy tale hero ASAP. Both muslim AND christian.
Really, if someone says "mohammed or jesus is a homosexual and God does not exist" and you're willing to kill over such a statement, it must mean there's some truth to it or you're just looking for a good reason to be violent.
In my chosen belief system, Gods and mythical creatures do not exist. I would LOVE someone to try to stop me from saying as such. I enthusiastically exercise both my first and second amendment rights.
What about things we actually intend to NOT throw away or get rid of as soon as the next fad hits? It's already hard to enough to combat plastic yellowing due from UV exposure because of the bromine flame retardants.... now we have to keep it from disintegrating too? DO NOT WANT. At least with the yellowing issue, you can use 40vol cream peroxide gel and UV to reverse the process.
Why does everyone insist "green" means disposable? That mentality creates more waste as truly "green" electronics are a pipe dream....recycling electronics creates hazardous byproducts too BTW and not everybody is real clean about it.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't ABS plastic ALREADY recyclable as well as steel and aluminum used in current PC chassis?
Is more crap ultimately being thrown away worth the switch in terms of costs to the environment? Why should I have to buy twice as much just to make a few hippies feel better? We can already recycle plastic. Plus.... I already recycle PC cases all the time as I'm sure most folks here do. Usually every few processor generations I slap some new guts in. Voila.....recycling at work.
Actually the original PS1 isn't so bad, neither is the Dreamcast. I've worked on both. There's actually a fairly common issue with controller ports failing on the Dreamcast that's relatively easy to fix. The XBox and the 360 are nightmares.
It is quite possible to repair newer electronics using modern techniques with hot air reflow soldering and surface mount components. Techniques are different and with silver solder the melting point is closer to the failure point of components but it is still quite doable. You'll have better results repairing with leaded solder.
Generally though, aside from crappy 80's power supplies, most of the computing gear produced then is more reliable than today's gear. It may be slower but that doesn't mean they weren't cool designs. Hell the Atari 8-bits had programmable graphics hardware and could display 256 colors. A 6502 is also easier to understand, interface with and code for than a modern CPU so experimenting is easier. They also still make the 6502 and the 65816 pin-compatible 16-bit variant.
I find cheap $2 programmable microcontroller IC's and making my own PCB's more fun than PC's now. Getting into real electronics is easier and cheaper than ever these days.
Old P4's and Athlons really don't impress me much, yeah you can run linux on'em and put them to use but it's still a PC. I'm more interested in things like the Raspberry Pi these days which would probably spank most old P4 at 1080p video decoding with nothing more than passive cooling.
The VBXE video board for Atari 8-bit XL and XE machines. Will do 15khz RGB and VGA out and coexists with and extends the original video coprocessor chips (ANTIC and GTIA) providing a blitter and extending the color palette. Enhanced sprites too and more stuff. The Atari graphics chipset was much more programmable and flexible than this thing though every machine deserves to still have modern video output options. The Atari 8-bit is kinda like a baby Amiga in ways.
I have an Atari 400 made in 1980, an Atari 600XL made in '83 and a 130XE made in '85. Along with a desktop DEC MicroVAX of mid-80's vintage. All still work just fine with no flakiness. Clean the cartridge ports and take care of them they'll outlive you. The 8-bits may have been low cost but they were QUITE well engineered. At least the Atari machines and Commodores were great. Not sure about TI or Coleco.
They made much higher quality caps then and used lead solder and much thicker PCB's with more copper. Later 80's 8-bits took a quality nosedive but they still weren't that bad, just had cheaper keyboards and thinner case plastics. The Amiga and ST were the major contenders by then.
Now if you want to see shitty caps, look at late 90's, early 2000's PC motherboards. I don't know too many 600mhz-1GHz Pentium III and Athlon desktop boards still running.
In general I find older 80's hardware much more tolerant of being repaired when necessary and with only 16 address and 8 data lines, hand soldering in modifications is relatively simple and lots of well documented hacks exist complete with code and schematics. I've added 512K, dual OS ROMs, S-Video and an IDE interface to my 600XL and it took about 45 minutes with a cheap radioshack iron and manual desoldering iron/pump. Try that on a microscopic ARM with 200 pins crammed into a BGA the size of your pinky nail attached to a 6-layer board.
I was going to say the same thing. When workers are paid far under an actual LIVING WAGE to afford their own place and instead are stuffed in company dorms and forced (through violence if necessary) to tow the company line, that's pretty sick.
If we pride ourselves on our values, freedom and way of life so much.... why are we allowing our companies to have their goods made in countries that don't share those views?
Is it because we think we're special and only Americans deserve "freedom"? Is it because Americans generally view the rest of the planet as second-class citizens/barbarians? Or both.
If we are so against human rights abuses, why is it that we pay these firms to abuse their employees overseas that can't even afford one of the devices they're slapping together? Simply because it's profitable and they can get away with it?
Businesses DO NOT have to be unethical and immoral to turn a profit and survive. Excuse me if us Americans think we should be able to afford a place to live, feed our kids and have access to healthcare if we are to prop up your business and make you money. That includes assembly line workers and janitors, not just office monkeys enjoying the air conditioning. Everyone is a critical part of the machine and deserves to be able to live a normal life with a decent credit rating.
You are like the guy that insults people who go to an 10-Minute Oil Change instead of changing their oil themselves. There is no virtue in spending hours changing your oil when in 15-20 minutes you can have it changed by someone else faster, cleaner, cheaper, and easier.
I don't insult people for that. Generally, changing oil doesn't take hours either unless you're blind and can't find the drain plug. Or you have a car where the filter is rough to get to. Takes me about 10-15 minutes. Only reason I change my own lately is my vehicle has a lot of mileage and I like to use nicer filters and better oil that breaks down less quickly than typically provided at Jiffy Lube.
For most people, the 10 minute oil change is great. For me it isn't. And yes, I'd be really pissed off if they quit selling oil by the quart and the only way to get an oil change WAS the 10-minute $30 oil change.
Like wise, most people's distaste for WinCE is not because of a lack of education or skill. It is because they HAVE knowledge, and use it that they shun WinCE. Using WinCE is like changing your own oil. Sure, you can do most stuff. It will be messy, take a bunch of time, you have to make sure that your getting the right products to put into it. Or, you can get iOS or Android devices where you end up with the same end product in less time and less mess.
One, I never said WinCE was great. Just more useful than the current crop of iOS and Android devices to technically competent users.
Heck, today if I want a Windows style interface, I will just install Splashtop Streamer on my desktop, the Splashtop client on my Android phone, and use Windows. Heck, from the same Android device, I can use OSX too. It works just as well on the iPhone. If I need Linux, I go the VNC route.
Don't you think that Splashtop or VNC would be a lot easier to use with some cursor precision? And that might work for you but I live in a rural area where cell converage is spotty and public WiFi is near non-existent.
Cellular coverage is good enough now, and WiFi access prevalent enough that anything that doesn't work great with a simplified finger oriented interface, is easier and more functionally used via a remote desktop solution.
Yeah, remote desktop with a finger.....have you ever actually tried using it for anything serious but showing people you can do it? Much less on a device with a smaller screen? It's just about useless and flaky as hell.
Calling Android slabs "tablets" is kinda funny. I can picture Sumerian guys trying to write with their fingers in clay. They used a stylus for a reason.
Why the haterade? Because I can't do half of what I did before on older slower mobile devices and what I can do is cumbersome, a pain in the ass or I have to hack the device. Except web browsing. Webkit is cool. That's really the only thing modern mobile OS's have going for them. Oh and shiny 3D effects.
No, never said you should burn your work. You've already invested in it. I wouldn't have gone that direction but if you're happy so be it.
What I'm saying is pen-based touch interfaces that are quite useful shouldn't disappear because poke-and-drool sells to the general public better.
There's a fine line between elegant simplicity and gutted uselessness. What works for the masses usually gets in the way of people who are capable, efficient, technical users and because a device for the latter class of users won't sell 400,000,000 units, people think we don't deserve what we want. Sales numbers are meaningless, the general public will buy whatever is shiny and lets them play angry birds, take embarrassing pictures at parties and play dumb flash games.
Without "power-users" and nerds, these sorts of devices would have never made it out of a lab. Hell the home computer would never have been reality. I think it's kinda silly to push us to the side. We made this industry what it is.
Gee, so Compaq made iPaqs for a decade and never sold one. And HP never sold any Jornadas either. Never mind Linux also ran on the same hardware for years using either the GPE or OPIE environments or even sometimes plain X11.
Complex apps are near impossible to write for touch-based devices with small screens and the Android API and standard widget libraries suck. I would MUCH rather use OPIE on small screens. They could have done touch UI's back then but people who work for a living (the target market for $500-$800 expensive toys like these in the late 90's-early 2000's) wanted pointing precision and the ability to write/draw directly on the screen. Fingers are useless for precision pointing or complex usage of a system. For iFart apps they work great.
Palm Treos also sold well but I'll freely admit PalmOS is even more of a joke than WinCE. I never said WinCE was great but it certainly wasn't LATE. I was more of a NewtonOS fan personally.
My original point was MS was NOT late to the game. They were an early player alongside Apple and Palm.
Not saying mobile linux sucks but in reality, Android is just a mutant slow JVM running on top of Linux.
Most people want a lame portable web browser with text messaging and an MP3 player. Android does that ok I guess. Me, I want a highly portable computer with a cell phone bolted on. Different target market. For a portable COMPUTER, touch is not necessarily the right way to go. Win8 is going to be a joke because of this as well. For a portable content-consuming ENTERTAINMENT DEVICE (aka a toy), touch works quite well.
Recent mobile OS's are also a giant step backward when it comes to user freedom even though Android is "open".
The 320LX had an RS232 port. Just slap a null-modem adapter on the sync cable. PCMCIA RS232 and ethernet cards could be used as well. There was plenty of inventory software for WinCE.
Educated users found them quite useful. Just because it doesn't appeal to the masses that are completely computer illiterate makes no difference to me. That's like saying Nuclear Reactors are shit because solar-powered calculators have larger sales numbers.
Sorry, just because poke-and-drool is appealing to computer illiterate retards doesn't mean it deserves to replace REAL tablets.
Microsoft didn't wait and see.... Windows CE was around on tablets (including ARM and MIPS-based ones) for a long time before Android ever existed. They were typically called Handheld PC or Palm-size PC devices. Windows CE 2.1 was actually pretty tolerable on the HP 320LX and Sharp Mobilon HC4100 I had. Never liked releases much past that.
Apple also had "tablets" long before Android, iOS, etc. The Newton MessagePad of which the 2100 was actually really nice and the eMate 300 bit slow but cool nonetheless. NewtonOS 2.1 certainly didn't suck.
Linux and NetBSD have also been capable of running on such devices for a long time as well. I owned a few WinCE devices over the years and a couple of Newtons.
There have also been x86 tablets since the early 90's. Dauphin DTR1 and there was a tablet Thinkpad as well.
Did they have goofy oversized widgets for sloppy finger-based simple computer usage by retards? No. They were pen based. You know..... for functional useful software in a professional environment instead of a web browser on steroids for morons that can't type or write legibly anyway.
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Idiotic.
You don't try to cook pizza in your microwave, do you? You don't watch a movie on your phone (unless you have no other choice), do you?
The iPad is a wonderful "adjunct" to a computer. It is NOT a replacement therefore, and it was never intended as such.
Then why do morons insist on using lame terms like "Post-PC quarter" and market them to folks as futuristic computer replacements. With glitzy UI's that sacrifice efficiency and powerful features for sloppy finger-based poke-and-drool ease on overpriced consumer devices that are used more to check facebook status updates than actual real world productivity. And to play lame-ass games. Or for little girls to play with FaceTime inspired by lame-ass disney afterschool shows.
Maybe for computer novices with no intention of ever learning to type or learn anything about *real* computing, they seem like wonder devices. In other words, most students in the United States of America who are having them issued by school districts.
And why are even supposedly educated radio announcers on NPR are typically oblivious that tablet computing has existed since the early 90's? In fact those devices are actually more USEFUL in trained hands than the current crop. Why does Apple even pretend their own Newton never existed?
I agree with you on the first one.
As far as #2 you're stereotyping, not all of us are fat slobs with poor eating habits that never exercise. I'm certainly not.
As far as your point in parenthesis goes, the minute you allow that to happen you end up with Hell on Earth in the US. Our government likes to redefine words in the English language on a whim when it suits them. When money gets tight they'll start looking for people to pull the plug on....."sorry guy, shouldn't eaten that steak" or "You have lung cancer therefore you put yourself in a risky position that we don't feel financially responsible for"..... to a degree one could argue that ALL illness that isn't a genetic defect is self-inflicted based on life choices.
What next, ban care for those with certain illnesses to weed their defective line out of the gene pool to lower health care costs across the board? That's called Eugenics and while logically sound it's not very nice. A lot of folks were pissed at the Nazis for it. *BAM* Managed to Godwin this post after all.
Yes, yes we can. Since American employment and salaries are at an all time high of course we can all afford to pay $7,500 for a laptop guaranteed to fail in 5 years. And after a decade of toil spinning up American manufacturing and rare earth extraction again, labor unions and incredibly high health care costs will make sure that you only have to pay $2,700 for a base-model tough-as-nails American laptop.
Personally I'd love to see computers made here again but really, go convert the late 70's to early 80's home computer prices to today's dollars......then realize how much your parents REALLY spent. For the price of the Apple II you could buy a nice car. For the price of the Atari 800 you could buy a decent used car. Around the mid-80's when everyone started making machines in Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc things got a lot more affordable.....except PC's and Macs. The ST was a bargain however as well as being pretty bad-ass.
Bottom line....... we make good stuff...... the problem is that you can't afford it. Rather than fixing that problem we choose to buy our goods from people more willing to look the other way when it comes to how shitty their employee's lives are. We don't care as long as we can watch some kid hit his nuts on a railing while skateboarding on a $50 device. Then when those folks actually want some quality of life and the price goes up, we set up shop elsewhere.
Been a while since I've seen many "Made in Japan" stickers.
People have been chasing the tablet dream for ages.
Dauphin DTR-1
Various ThinkPad grayscale 386/486 tablets existed
Their own Newton....also from around 1994.
Sloppy fat-finger UI's could have and have been done before but most people who could afford such devices back then wanted precision and thus a stylus. They also wanted lots of information on the screen and cared much less about how photos of mom looked or how smooth fonts were.
The only thing innovative about the iPhone/iPad is the fact that Apple managed to make a poke-and-drool finger-centric UI usable for more than the simplest of apps (though NOT a desktop replacement) and advanced use of multitouch.
They eliminated pumping gas as a career path here.... all of our stations are self-serve and are usually staffed by 1-3 people tops including the manager.
Shoveling shit might have sucked but at least the city-dwelling shit shoveler had a couple thousand years of job security.
With current technology space combat would look a lot like it did in the 60's. The Russian Salyut 2 was armed with a 23mm Nudelman cannon. They tested it twice, worked great.
Slug-throwers still make sense in space. Most of the weight is in the ammo which could be jettisoned prior to reentry. Bullets still work just fine in space. They'd be noisy (inside the spacecraft if still pressurized) and vibrate a lot but would have MUCH greater range and flat trajectory aside from gravitational influence. Would need to be recoil-less or would need some opposite thrust to compensate. Ground-launched craft would need to be lightly armored if armored at all for reduced launch weight increasing the effectiveness of the good ol' chunk-o-lead.
Lasers, phasers and anti-matter weapons would take too much precious power that's needed for other things with current tech. We have missiles and guns and you can be sure that's what we'd be using. A plasma missile would likely follow shortly after. Would probably need some work over time to find best gun oils for space use, etc....
Think less Star Trek and more a mutant cross between cold-war era Sub warfare at a distance and WW2 dogfighting with no gravity up close. The first "StarFighter" would probably be a Gemini with a pair of belt-fed .50's and MAYBE a couple guided rockets. Would make mince meat out of anything up there with ease. We could cram a pretty sweet targeting system in the space occupied by old-school 50's-era avionics and equipment these days. I could even see waist or turret gunners in anything with a large service module.
If we had something to fight over out there toward the moon and were afraid to lose it, believe me you'd see something like the above fast. Maybe an armed Apollo with a "Assault LEM".
Think a .308 is nasty now? Imagine a handful of .308 tracers with no air resistance flying at your tin can full of hydrazine and oxygen with nowhere to run.
Since when does spouting your passionately negative and rightfully angry views warrant robotic execution? They couldn't even give him the dignity of getting shot in the face by a CIA agent?
They actually treat drone attacks as being more legal and humane than using real people to carry out assassinations. This WAS an ILLEGAL assassination, plain and simple. Their views that human rights don't apply to those that renounce their citizenship is plain backwards. Human rights and freedom apply to well.....HUMANS.
What they did to this guy was no better than executing a group of folks here for saying we need another armed revolution.... ya know.... since voting and playing by rules that have been turned against us has been completely ineffective.
Not all Americans are ignorant "Christians" my friend. Hell most christians I've met here don't even really understand what it is they believe and regularly get facts about their own faith wrong. They know they love Jesus and hate Muslims though.
Our government feels that basic human rights only apply to Americans while in America when it's convenient and non-embarrassing for them. When it's not convenient, they do whatever they feel like and claim it's a national security secret and therefore above the law and the fact that you even want to know makes you look suspicious.
Hell, Obama even tried to claim sending drones to kill folks in another country is not even a "Hostile Act" or "Act of War". Sorry, I consider telepresence to be the same as actually being there pulling a trigger.
Others will say that Christianity is the exact same as Islam, even though Christianity specifically forbids this type of killing.
Really..... care to explain the crusades and spanish inquisition? Both religions are packed with hypocrites looking to twist the faith to fit their agenda. Both are evil and no longer necessarily have a right to exist much less wield actual power especially in a legal sense.
If idiots are willing to kill to prove their god is great, we should make sure they can meet their fairy tale hero ASAP. Both muslim AND christian.
Really, if someone says "mohammed or jesus is a homosexual and God does not exist" and you're willing to kill over such a statement, it must mean there's some truth to it or you're just looking for a good reason to be violent.
In my chosen belief system, Gods and mythical creatures do not exist. I would LOVE someone to try to stop me from saying as such. I enthusiastically exercise both my first and second amendment rights.
What about things we actually intend to NOT throw away or get rid of as soon as the next fad hits? It's already hard to enough to combat plastic yellowing due from UV exposure because of the bromine flame retardants.... now we have to keep it from disintegrating too? DO NOT WANT. At least with the yellowing issue, you can use 40vol cream peroxide gel and UV to reverse the process.
Why does everyone insist "green" means disposable? That mentality creates more waste as truly "green" electronics are a pipe dream....recycling electronics creates hazardous byproducts too BTW and not everybody is real clean about it.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't ABS plastic ALREADY recyclable as well as steel and aluminum used in current PC chassis?
Is more crap ultimately being thrown away worth the switch in terms of costs to the environment? Why should I have to buy twice as much just to make a few hippies feel better? We can already recycle plastic. Plus.... I already recycle PC cases all the time as I'm sure most folks here do. Usually every few processor generations I slap some new guts in. Voila.....recycling at work.
Actually the original PS1 isn't so bad, neither is the Dreamcast. I've worked on both. There's actually a fairly common issue with controller ports failing on the Dreamcast that's relatively easy to fix. The XBox and the 360 are nightmares.
It is quite possible to repair newer electronics using modern techniques with hot air reflow soldering and surface mount components. Techniques are different and with silver solder the melting point is closer to the failure point of components but it is still quite doable. You'll have better results repairing with leaded solder.
Generally though, aside from crappy 80's power supplies, most of the computing gear produced then is more reliable than today's gear. It may be slower but that doesn't mean they weren't cool designs. Hell the Atari 8-bits had programmable graphics hardware and could display 256 colors. A 6502 is also easier to understand, interface with and code for than a modern CPU so experimenting is easier. They also still make the 6502 and the 65816 pin-compatible 16-bit variant.
I find cheap $2 programmable microcontroller IC's and making my own PCB's more fun than PC's now. Getting into real electronics is easier and cheaper than ever these days.
Old P4's and Athlons really don't impress me much, yeah you can run linux on'em and put them to use but it's still a PC. I'm more interested in things like the Raspberry Pi these days which would probably spank most old P4 at 1080p video decoding with nothing more than passive cooling.
http://spiflash.org/block/15.html
The VBXE video board for Atari 8-bit XL and XE machines. Will do 15khz RGB and VGA out and coexists with and extends the original video coprocessor chips (ANTIC and GTIA) providing a blitter and extending the color palette. Enhanced sprites too and more stuff. The Atari graphics chipset was much more programmable and flexible than this thing though every machine deserves to still have modern video output options. The Atari 8-bit is kinda like a baby Amiga in ways.
I have an Atari 400 made in 1980, an Atari 600XL made in '83 and a 130XE made in '85. Along with a desktop DEC MicroVAX of mid-80's vintage. All still work just fine with no flakiness. Clean the cartridge ports and take care of them they'll outlive you. The 8-bits may have been low cost but they were QUITE well engineered. At least the Atari machines and Commodores were great. Not sure about TI or Coleco.
They made much higher quality caps then and used lead solder and much thicker PCB's with more copper. Later 80's 8-bits took a quality nosedive but they still weren't that bad, just had cheaper keyboards and thinner case plastics. The Amiga and ST were the major contenders by then.
Now if you want to see shitty caps, look at late 90's, early 2000's PC motherboards. I don't know too many 600mhz-1GHz Pentium III and Athlon desktop boards still running.
In general I find older 80's hardware much more tolerant of being repaired when necessary and with only 16 address and 8 data lines, hand soldering in modifications is relatively simple and lots of well documented hacks exist complete with code and schematics. I've added 512K, dual OS ROMs, S-Video and an IDE interface to my 600XL and it took about 45 minutes with a cheap radioshack iron and manual desoldering iron/pump. Try that on a microscopic ARM with 200 pins crammed into a BGA the size of your pinky nail attached to a 6-layer board.
I was going to say the same thing. When workers are paid far under an actual LIVING WAGE to afford their own place and instead are stuffed in company dorms and forced (through violence if necessary) to tow the company line, that's pretty sick.
If we pride ourselves on our values, freedom and way of life so much.... why are we allowing our companies to have their goods made in countries that don't share those views?
Is it because we think we're special and only Americans deserve "freedom"? Is it because Americans generally view the rest of the planet as second-class citizens/barbarians? Or both.
If we are so against human rights abuses, why is it that we pay these firms to abuse their employees overseas that can't even afford one of the devices they're slapping together? Simply because it's profitable and they can get away with it?
Businesses DO NOT have to be unethical and immoral to turn a profit and survive. Excuse me if us Americans think we should be able to afford a place to live, feed our kids and have access to healthcare if we are to prop up your business and make you money. That includes assembly line workers and janitors, not just office monkeys enjoying the air conditioning. Everyone is a critical part of the machine and deserves to be able to live a normal life with a decent credit rating.
You are like the guy that insults people who go to an 10-Minute Oil Change instead of changing their oil themselves. There is no virtue in spending hours changing your oil when in 15-20 minutes you can have it changed by someone else faster, cleaner, cheaper, and easier.
I don't insult people for that. Generally, changing oil doesn't take hours either unless you're blind and can't find the drain plug. Or you have a car where the filter is rough to get to. Takes me about 10-15 minutes. Only reason I change my own lately is my vehicle has a lot of mileage and I like to use nicer filters and better oil that breaks down less quickly than typically provided at Jiffy Lube.
For most people, the 10 minute oil change is great. For me it isn't. And yes, I'd be really pissed off if they quit selling oil by the quart and the only way to get an oil change WAS the 10-minute $30 oil change.
Like wise, most people's distaste for WinCE is not because of a lack of education or skill. It is because they HAVE knowledge, and use it that they shun WinCE. Using WinCE is like changing your own oil. Sure, you can do most stuff. It will be messy, take a bunch of time, you have to make sure that your getting the right products to put into it. Or, you can get iOS or Android devices where you end up with the same end product in less time and less mess.
One, I never said WinCE was great. Just more useful than the current crop of iOS and Android devices to technically competent users.
Heck, today if I want a Windows style interface, I will just install Splashtop Streamer on my desktop, the Splashtop client on my Android phone, and use Windows. Heck, from the same Android device, I can use OSX too. It works just as well on the iPhone. If I need Linux, I go the VNC route.
Don't you think that Splashtop or VNC would be a lot easier to use with some cursor precision? And that might work for you but I live in a rural area where cell converage is spotty and public WiFi is near non-existent.
Cellular coverage is good enough now, and WiFi access prevalent enough that anything that doesn't work great with a simplified finger oriented interface, is easier and more functionally used via a remote desktop solution.
Yeah, remote desktop with a finger.....have you ever actually tried using it for anything serious but showing people you can do it? Much less on a device with a smaller screen? It's just about useless and flaky as hell.
Calling Android slabs "tablets" is kinda funny. I can picture Sumerian guys trying to write with their fingers in clay. They used a stylus for a reason.
Why the haterade? Because I can't do half of what I did before on older slower mobile devices and what I can do is cumbersome, a pain in the ass or I have to hack the device. Except web browsing. Webkit is cool. That's really the only thing modern mobile OS's have going for them. Oh and shiny 3D effects.
No, never said you should burn your work. You've already invested in it. I wouldn't have gone that direction but if you're happy so be it.
What I'm saying is pen-based touch interfaces that are quite useful shouldn't disappear because poke-and-drool sells to the general public better.
There's a fine line between elegant simplicity and gutted uselessness. What works for the masses usually gets in the way of people who are capable, efficient, technical users and because a device for the latter class of users won't sell 400,000,000 units, people think we don't deserve what we want. Sales numbers are meaningless, the general public will buy whatever is shiny and lets them play angry birds, take embarrassing pictures at parties and play dumb flash games.
Without "power-users" and nerds, these sorts of devices would have never made it out of a lab. Hell the home computer would never have been reality. I think it's kinda silly to push us to the side. We made this industry what it is.
Gee, so Compaq made iPaqs for a decade and never sold one. And HP never sold any Jornadas either. Never mind Linux also ran on the same hardware for years using either the GPE or OPIE environments or even sometimes plain X11.
Complex apps are near impossible to write for touch-based devices with small screens and the Android API and standard widget libraries suck. I would MUCH rather use OPIE on small screens. They could have done touch UI's back then but people who work for a living (the target market for $500-$800 expensive toys like these in the late 90's-early 2000's) wanted pointing precision and the ability to write/draw directly on the screen. Fingers are useless for precision pointing or complex usage of a system. For iFart apps they work great.
Palm Treos also sold well but I'll freely admit PalmOS is even more of a joke than WinCE. I never said WinCE was great but it certainly wasn't LATE. I was more of a NewtonOS fan personally.
My original point was MS was NOT late to the game. They were an early player alongside Apple and Palm.
Not saying mobile linux sucks but in reality, Android is just a mutant slow JVM running on top of Linux.
Most people want a lame portable web browser with text messaging and an MP3 player. Android does that ok I guess. Me, I want a highly portable computer with a cell phone bolted on. Different target market. For a portable COMPUTER, touch is not necessarily the right way to go. Win8 is going to be a joke because of this as well. For a portable content-consuming ENTERTAINMENT DEVICE (aka a toy), touch works quite well.
Recent mobile OS's are also a giant step backward when it comes to user freedom even though Android is "open".
No I'm just tired of having to pay double for a machine useful as a tool instead of a locked-down funnel for paid entertainment content.
I never got a chance to play with the Psion.
I'll concede that WinCE had crap browsers but most browsers sucked back then, especially mobile.
My 75MHz MIPS-based Mobilon 4100 wasn't all that slow. It choked on things once in a while. It was far from perfect but didn't exactly suck.
I was more more of a NewtonOS fan myself. The MP2100 was quite nice. Never got a chance to play with Psion.
The 320LX had an RS232 port. Just slap a null-modem adapter on the sync cable. PCMCIA RS232 and ethernet cards could be used as well. There was plenty of inventory software for WinCE.
It didn't deliver what 14-year-olds wanted. It delivered what business users and field techs wanted quite nicely.
Shit relative to what?
Educated users found them quite useful. Just because it doesn't appeal to the masses that are completely computer illiterate makes no difference to me. That's like saying Nuclear Reactors are shit because solar-powered calculators have larger sales numbers.
Sorry, just because poke-and-drool is appealing to computer illiterate retards doesn't mean it deserves to replace REAL tablets.
Microsoft didn't wait and see.... Windows CE was around on tablets (including ARM and MIPS-based ones) for a long time before Android ever existed. They were typically called Handheld PC or Palm-size PC devices. Windows CE 2.1 was actually pretty tolerable on the HP 320LX and Sharp Mobilon HC4100 I had. Never liked releases much past that.
Apple also had "tablets" long before Android, iOS, etc. The Newton MessagePad of which the 2100 was actually really nice and the eMate 300 bit slow but cool nonetheless. NewtonOS 2.1 certainly didn't suck.
Linux and NetBSD have also been capable of running on such devices for a long time as well. I owned a few WinCE devices over the years and a couple of Newtons.
There have also been x86 tablets since the early 90's. Dauphin DTR1 and there was a tablet Thinkpad as well.
Did they have goofy oversized widgets for sloppy finger-based simple computer usage by retards? No. They were pen based. You know..... for functional useful software in a professional environment instead of a web browser on steroids for morons that can't type or write legibly anyway.
No, Disney would simply buy the court, make a few calls and suddenly we'd have new copyright laws. Just like they've done time and time again.