Oh, they're in business all right, but the stuff they make is more appropriate for the tool belt of a waiter or geologist than the suit pocket of an office worker -- which is really a shame. Oh, and their devices run Windows; what used to be Epoc now runs only on smartphones.
They also had battery life that wipes the floor with anything about today; a Psion 3 ran for what seemed like ever on two AAs - providing the battery cover didn't fall off, the sight of batteries rolling off being a familiar one to Psion 3 users. Not sure about the 5mx as I never was fortunate enough to own one.
FYI, the Series5 (5mx only differs in braws and brains) had a battery life of 2-3,5 weeks on a standard set of AA cells. If you had a spare set of hi-cap rechargeables, you could basically go into the bush for a month and never miss a blog entry... that is, if wireless or blogs existed back then.
The battery cover was a long panel that sort of swivelled around the axis of the batteries; I've never tried, seen or heard of, a pair of Series5 batteries rolling off on their own.
Psion used to be way, way smarter in method and product than its contemporary Palm (while MS, Sharp, RIM, and other current-day competitors were either not born yet or just plain hopeless). I too loved my Revo until it died; my brother is still using his Series 5mx'es -- after he's tried a few smartphones. That's quite a testament.
It really is a shame they did not see the mind- and market share of, say, RIM; in my humble opinion they really had a worthy product. (I wonder if, at the core, it's really just a failure of marketing?) Their present form, with the Symbian mobile OS, really cannot show the full potential, the smartphone is simply not a proper enough mobile computing device.
I wonder what would happen if Psion brought out a new Series 5 today, retooled with modern materials? It might be awesome on the same level and in an entirely different way that the iPhone is.
Where I come from (across the pond from you guys), the rule is "keep two driving-seconds distance", which automatically scales distance with speed.
Plus, you don't have to use rough eye measurements but can, at any time, check the period between the other and yourself passing a sign, lamp post, pot hole, or whatever.
Nobody said this would be easy (quite the opposite), and nobody is claiming we're even close to being "there" yet. But is the space elevator dead? No. Just still working out the kinks. Look, have you any idea of the number of launches required to prepare, by tiny increments, for the eventual (and still debated, snicker) moon landing? We'll get there, eventually.
Even with thrusters, it's bound to be a better long-term solution than rockets. Especially using ion drives, you could hard-wire the fuel supply from down below, so to speak, and so not need to haul that mass, too.
Of course your biggest power drain will be from the computer that is always on reading the meter.
Yes, if you choose to use a constant-monitor system to count ticks (like phk does). But, if you can actually read off a dial, like the OP says he can, one can get by with using a periodic snapshot... and image processing.
Old news... to boost Prius sales, Toyota are giving the 2.0 a face lift. I can't find any good online reference, but spy photos report looks similar to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honking
I'm not sure what the motivation is here. Either "privacy" is some sort of religious thing for you, in which case giving up Facebook is a small price to pay, or it's a pragmatic matter, in which case you can make a decision about what the pros and cons are for you instead of asking us.
Yes, it's a pragmatic matter. Nowadays, only a minority have no phone, and I believe the general consensus is that it would make it hard to stay in touch with your friends. So yes, you could say that modern man depends on third-party corporations to maintain his personal friendships. Fair or not, it's a fact of life, which I don't dispute.
It seems that Facebook (et al) is "the new phone", what you have to have in order to stay in touch. Now, I don't know how it was in the 1870s, but surely the terms to become "hooked up" weren't as cryptic and excessive as what we see today.
I know you think you all got me cornered here, but I disagree.
I know that I put that info on there. What I have a problem with is:
a) not at all: me posting info, or sharing info through sites of my own free choice. Come on, if I had a problem with this, why would I use the same nick all over the place? (Or, is this really a conspiracy of different users all using the same nick in order to thwart attempts to classify "a person"? Bwahahaa....sigh.)
b) some, but not so much: people posting info about me through sites of their choice.
c) very much: having to choose between degraded relations, or using sites I for various reasons would rather not choose.
It's not about Facebook, or Trifive, or Last FM. It's about my friends, and keeping my friendship with them separate from (corporate) third parties and their rules.
I'm a Linux user who only uses some Google things, like Maps and Earth. As far as I'm concerned, social networking sites are a total waste of time that are suited for teenagers. I do have a LinkedIn profile, but that's only for my professional career; I found that many other engineers I knew had profiles on there, so I put one on too, with only my professional info (nothing personal at all, not even a photo), so I can keep in touch with people I've worked with in case I need another job in the future. All my engineer coworkers on there seem to be exactly the same way: I don't see any personal info on there at all. LinkedIn seems to be set up much more for this type of use, rather than MySpace/Facebook which seem to be set up for teenagers and 20-somethings to post photos of themselves drunk and partying.
I whole-heartedly agree.
As for other friends, none of my friends have accounts on MySpace or Facebook. No one I work with, except one, ever talks about it. Maybe it's because I'm over 30, but most of the people I associate with who are my age and older (into 50s and even 70s), while very well-versed in internet things, have zero interest in the latest fads like MySpace, instant messaging, etc.
Here's where we go different ways; most of my friends are my age (so no 20s among them), but judging on their conversations when we meet (in person, I mean), most of them apparently make growing use of these "fads". And by "judging on their conversations", I mean that I find myself sitting on the sideline trying to catch up to what is apparently the middle of a conversation.
So if your privacy is gone, it's really your own fault for buying into this mass hysteria.
Wrong perspective, I didn't buy into this hysteria. Please read the many posts explaining how Facebook users are posting stuff about non-Facebook users.
It's really not hard at all to maintain your privacy online to a reasonable degree, though it can certainly benefit you to post up your professional information (which doesn't usually benefit you to keep private).
Yes and no. It's "really not that hard" to be careful with your work email address either, until someone "by mistake" uses it in a mass joke email to god-knows-who, without using "bcc" of course, so that you start to get spam at work. Not your fault; the only way to effectively avoid that would be to keep your email address a secret (which has certain disadvantages).
What I find the most ironic, is that in the earlyish days of the web (and before that, USENET), I was an active participant in online communities. For that, I would often be labeled as an anti-social dork. But today, I'm labeled an anti-social dork because I don't participate in most online communities. Sigh.
I don't go back quite as far as Usenet, but apart from that I can identify very well.
For me the matter is more that if you look at my meatspace friends and my cyberfriends, there is no overlap (in fact they are very far apart) -- and this is exactly because technical forums do "it" right, and social forums don't.
Thus, I "can't" and don't talk to my social friends online, other than by email -- which by now is as old-school as Usenet itself, and no longer "a supported feature" of most of my meatspace friends who have moved on to texting and "facebook walling" or whatchammacallit.
however if you are socially insecure in some way you may
a) become overly dependent of online social tools as a means of reassuring yourself that you are socially relevant
or
b) avoid them all like the plague despite the fact that all your friends are organizing their social lives there (thus reducing your opportunities for social contact and feeding a self fulfilling "bah i'm better than them anyways" attitude)
or
c) have a genuine desire to socially interact with your friends, but find it insane that licence agreements and whatnot are required in order to do so.
I mean, I'm already behind because it takes me forever to write text messages -- I usually stick to "yes" or "no" replies; writing an essay takes me longer than booting the pc to write an email. Yeah it sucks, but it's not a skill I want to invest in building, or for that matter invest in an expensive phone with a proper keyboard (my pc already does email, so my phone only needs to be a phone, thank you). I would reconsider if you can find me a cheap phone with a Dvorak keyboard, though!
Yes, some people even don't want to use GMail, now isn't that crazy? It's a very, very nice AJAX email 'client', and it really does do wonders for (that is, against) spam. All you have to put up with is to let a huge and insanely powerful foreign corporation read your email, but that can't be so bad, now, can it?
In spite of your tone, I'm drawn to this discussion.
Personally, I would *love* to run my own mail server, but I *know* I'm bound to make a lousy job of it because, as you say, it's complicated as all-getout and only knowledgeable folk should be allowed to operate such machinery. Let Joe User do it and he'll flood the Internet with yet more spam.
The thing is though, this used to be the case, too, for media streaming file servers, setting up X on a BSD box, and so on -- but eventually, solutions cropped up that met people's needs in an easy way. Samba, SWAT, I know you know what I mean.
The gods know that I've read and read and read documentation, but frankly, I want to have better things to look back upon when my life eventually flashes before my eyes. Right now, I'm Joe, so it would be futile to try. Which leaves me without a mail server.
This being *nix, and mail applications being composed of many tiny pieces, it *should* (in nice, convenient theory) be possible to give people an easy way to install and configure a mail system piecemeal.
I guess the reason the situation is still as it is, is because traditionally the task of handling mail has been deferred to ISPs and big players; and only lately are people getting smart enough to question whether that really is in their best interest.
I swear, one of these days they're going to reveal themselves. And I don't mean in a good way.
They've got our identities. They've got our collective interests. They've got most of our data, if not the originals then at least cached copies. They've got mind-bogglingly more power (of almost any kind) than any other corporation.
And now they're taking it all to international waters, outside of governmental regulation.
Maybe it's just me, but this can't possibly end well.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, they're in business all right, but the stuff they make is more appropriate for the tool belt of a waiter or geologist than the suit pocket of an office worker -- which is really a shame. Oh, and their devices run Windows; what used to be Epoc now runs only on smartphones.
They also had battery life that wipes the floor with anything about today; a Psion 3 ran for what seemed like ever on two AAs - providing the battery cover didn't fall off, the sight of batteries rolling off being a familiar one to Psion 3 users. Not sure about the 5mx as I never was fortunate enough to own one.
FYI, the Series5 (5mx only differs in braws and brains) had a battery life of 2-3,5 weeks on a standard set of AA cells. If you had a spare set of hi-cap rechargeables, you could basically go into the bush for a month and never miss a blog entry ... that is, if wireless or blogs existed back then.
The battery cover was a long panel that sort of swivelled around the axis of the batteries; I've never tried, seen or heard of, a pair of Series5 batteries rolling off on their own.
What he said.
Psion used to be way, way smarter in method and product than its contemporary Palm (while MS, Sharp, RIM, and other current-day competitors were either not born yet or just plain hopeless). I too loved my Revo until it died; my brother is still using his Series 5mx'es -- after he's tried a few smartphones. That's quite a testament.
It really is a shame they did not see the mind- and market share of, say, RIM; in my humble opinion they really had a worthy product. (I wonder if, at the core, it's really just a failure of marketing?) Their present form, with the Symbian mobile OS, really cannot show the full potential, the smartphone is simply not a proper enough mobile computing device.
I wonder what would happen if Psion brought out a new Series 5 today, retooled with modern materials? It might be awesome on the same level and in an entirely different way that the iPhone is.
Where I come from (across the pond from you guys), the rule is "keep two driving-seconds distance", which automatically scales distance with speed.
Plus, you don't have to use rough eye measurements but can, at any time, check the period between the other and yourself passing a sign, lamp post, pot hole, or whatever.
Nobody said this would be easy (quite the opposite), and nobody is claiming we're even close to being "there" yet. But is the space elevator dead? No. Just still working out the kinks. Look, have you any idea of the number of launches required to prepare, by tiny increments, for the eventual (and still debated, snicker) moon landing? We'll get there, eventually.
Even with thrusters, it's bound to be a better long-term solution than rockets. Especially using ion drives, you could hard-wire the fuel supply from down below, so to speak, and so not need to haul that mass, too.
That's the first thing I did, too (thinking a "why you post my address?" post was probably lame). It timed out after some 25 hops.
Trying it again now, whatever it is -- it's slashdotted! Oops, sorry I guess.
First time we've slashdotted an unknown target?
Thanks for a simple, easily-understood, and non-panicky explanation of why losing 900K may not (necessarily, at least) make much of a difference.
See, if you rephrase the question a bit, this is the kind of thing we could be having polls about, instead of the lame joke polls we have.
Opaque.
Oohh I wish I had mod points for you! (And I'm so glad I'm alone in my office just now.)
Thanks mate, I can always need a good laugh.
Ever look at a city from the sky? [...] One of the things that never ceases to surprise me is just how... fractal most cities are.
If this sort of thing holds your interest, you might want to spend a quarter of an hour on Ron Eglash's TED talk on African fractals. Just a thought.
That's because they *can* tell you the landing time in advance. The impact time tends to be determined on rather short notice...
Of course your biggest power drain will be from the computer that is always on reading the meter.
Yes, if you choose to use a constant-monitor system to count ticks (like phk does). But, if you can actually read off a dial, like the OP says he can, one can get by with using a periodic snapshot ... and image processing.
Old news ... to boost Prius sales, Toyota are giving the 2.0 a face lift. I can't find any good online reference, but spy photos report looks similar to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honking
I'm not sure what the motivation is here. Either "privacy" is some sort of religious thing for you, in which case giving up Facebook is a small price to pay, or it's a pragmatic matter, in which case you can make a decision about what the pros and cons are for you instead of asking us.
Yes, it's a pragmatic matter. Nowadays, only a minority have no phone, and I believe the general consensus is that it would make it hard to stay in touch with your friends. So yes, you could say that modern man depends on third-party corporations to maintain his personal friendships. Fair or not, it's a fact of life, which I don't dispute.
It seems that Facebook (et al) is "the new phone", what you have to have in order to stay in touch. Now, I don't know how it was in the 1870s, but surely the terms to become "hooked up" weren't as cryptic and excessive as what we see today.
No, it's not. My brother's part of it, yes. But not my stuff.
I know you think you all got me cornered here, but I disagree.
I know that I put that info on there. What I have a problem with is:
a) not at all: me posting info, or sharing info through sites of my own free choice.
Come on, if I had a problem with this, why would I use the same nick all over the place? (Or, is this really a conspiracy of different users all using the same nick in order to thwart attempts to classify "a person"? Bwahahaa....sigh.)
b) some, but not so much: people posting info about me through sites of their choice.
c) very much: having to choose between degraded relations, or using sites I for various reasons would rather not choose.
It's not about Facebook, or Trifive, or Last FM. It's about my friends, and keeping my friendship with them separate from (corporate) third parties and their rules.
I'm a Linux user who only uses some Google things, like Maps and Earth. As far as I'm concerned, social networking sites are a total waste of time that are suited for teenagers. I do have a LinkedIn profile, but that's only for my professional career; I found that many other engineers I knew had profiles on there, so I put one on too, with only my professional info (nothing personal at all, not even a photo), so I can keep in touch with people I've worked with in case I need another job in the future. All my engineer coworkers on there seem to be exactly the same way: I don't see any personal info on there at all. LinkedIn seems to be set up much more for this type of use, rather than MySpace/Facebook which seem to be set up for teenagers and 20-somethings to post photos of themselves drunk and partying.
I whole-heartedly agree.
As for other friends, none of my friends have accounts on MySpace or Facebook. No one I work with, except one, ever talks about it. Maybe it's because I'm over 30, but most of the people I associate with who are my age and older (into 50s and even 70s), while very well-versed in internet things, have zero interest in the latest fads like MySpace, instant messaging, etc.
Here's where we go different ways; most of my friends are my age (so no 20s among them), but judging on their conversations when we meet (in person, I mean), most of them apparently make growing use of these "fads". And by "judging on their conversations", I mean that I find myself sitting on the sideline trying to catch up to what is apparently the middle of a conversation.
So if your privacy is gone, it's really your own fault for buying into this mass hysteria.
Wrong perspective, I didn't buy into this hysteria. Please read the many posts explaining how Facebook users are posting stuff about non-Facebook users.
It's really not hard at all to maintain your privacy online to a reasonable degree, though it can certainly benefit you to post up your professional information (which doesn't usually benefit you to keep private).
Yes and no. It's "really not that hard" to be careful with your work email address either, until someone "by mistake" uses it in a mass joke email to god-knows-who, without using "bcc" of course, so that you start to get spam at work. Not your fault; the only way to effectively avoid that would be to keep your email address a secret (which has certain disadvantages).
What I find the most ironic, is that in the earlyish days of the web (and before that, USENET), I was an active participant in online communities. For that, I would often be labeled as an anti-social dork. But today, I'm labeled an anti-social dork because I don't participate in most online communities. Sigh.
I don't go back quite as far as Usenet, but apart from that I can identify very well.
For me the matter is more that if you look at my meatspace friends and my cyberfriends, there is no overlap (in fact they are very far apart) -- and this is exactly because technical forums do "it" right, and social forums don't.
Thus, I "can't" and don't talk to my social friends online, other than by email -- which by now is as old-school as Usenet itself, and no longer "a supported feature" of most of my meatspace friends who have moved on to texting and "facebook walling" or whatchammacallit.
however if you are socially insecure in some way you may
a) become overly dependent of online social tools as a means of reassuring yourself that you are socially relevant
or
b) avoid them all like the plague despite the fact that all your friends are organizing their social lives there (thus reducing your opportunities for social contact and feeding a self fulfilling "bah i'm better than them anyways" attitude)
or
c) have a genuine desire to socially interact with your friends, but find it insane that licence agreements and whatnot are required in order to do so.
I mean, I'm already behind because it takes me forever to write text messages -- I usually stick to "yes" or "no" replies; writing an essay takes me longer than booting the pc to write an email. Yeah it sucks, but it's not a skill I want to invest in building, or for that matter invest in an expensive phone with a proper keyboard (my pc already does email, so my phone only needs to be a phone, thank you). I would reconsider if you can find me a cheap phone with a Dvorak keyboard, though!
Err, no. Google's still got your mail.
Yes, people really still have problems with spam.
Yes, some people even don't want to use GMail, now isn't that crazy? It's a very, very nice AJAX email 'client', and it really does do wonders for (that is, against) spam. All you have to put up with is to let a huge and insanely powerful foreign corporation read your email, but that can't be so bad, now, can it?
Yes, it can.
"Postgrey is a program which implements greylisting and is
designed to work with the Postfix MTA."
WWW: http://postgrey.schweikert.ch/
Available for FreeBSD at freshports ... see, it's not that weird a thought? We just need to make it a more common one.
In spite of your tone, I'm drawn to this discussion.
Personally, I would *love* to run my own mail server, but I *know* I'm bound to make a lousy job of it because, as you say, it's complicated as all-getout and only knowledgeable folk should be allowed to operate such machinery. Let Joe User do it and he'll flood the Internet with yet more spam.
The thing is though, this used to be the case, too, for media streaming file servers, setting up X on a BSD box, and so on -- but eventually, solutions cropped up that met people's needs in an easy way. Samba, SWAT, I know you know what I mean.
The gods know that I've read and read and read documentation, but frankly, I want to have better things to look back upon when my life eventually flashes before my eyes. Right now, I'm Joe, so it would be futile to try. Which leaves me without a mail server.
This being *nix, and mail applications being composed of many tiny pieces, it *should* (in nice, convenient theory) be possible to give people an easy way to install and configure a mail system piecemeal.
I guess the reason the situation is still as it is, is because traditionally the task of handling mail has been deferred to ISPs and big players; and only lately are people getting smart enough to question whether that really is in their best interest.
I swear, one of these days they're going to reveal themselves. And I don't mean in a good way.
They've got our identities. They've got our collective interests. They've got most of our data, if not the originals then at least cached copies. They've got mind-bogglingly more power (of almost any kind) than any other corporation.
And now they're taking it all to international waters, outside of governmental regulation.
Maybe it's just me, but this can't possibly end well.