If youn want an MP3 player or web access device or something that makes neat clicky sounds when you scroll, that's one thing.. but if you want a PDA, it's still Palm, Palm and Palm. Windows Mobile has improved enormously to the point where it's genrally usable, but next time your're in a store that sells both, try firing up a Windows Mobile device and add an appointment to the calendar with a start and end time. Now make it recurring and set a custom alarm time. Then switch into the to-do list and add three grocery items. Then add a contact with a name, address, e-mail and two phone numbers. Switch back to the calendar and go to the week view.
If it seems just as easy as your Palm, then pick whatever you want -- MS or Palm. Forget Zauruses and any smartphone that isn't at least as slick a PIM as the PDAs are. If one seems noticeably more tedious for core PIM things like calendar entries, addresses or to-dos, run away. You want ease-of-use in these things above all else and no matter how flashy an MP3 player app or game or on-board BASIC interpreter may be, it will not make up for PIM functions you don't enjoy using.
What is it you want to organize in folders, by the way? Files? Tasks? There are all sorts of add-on programs that will do that any number of ways.. hierarchical outliners, multiple-database to-do apps like HandyShopper, etc. I'm sure there are good uses for folder trees on a PDA, but be careful that you're not adding features for their own sake. Stuff hidden away in folders is easier to forget about.
Geeks sometimes mistakenly think Palms are unsophisticated because they don't multitask, they don't have a folder-oriented metaphor, they don't have serif fonts and dropshadows and bevels on form elements and so on. Rather, Palms are sophisticated because conscious decisions have been made over the years to keep those things out because they interefered with usability.
I wasn't there. I didn't watch the keynote. I know nothing about the presentation. I don't have a Mac or even an iPod.
However, I did mosey over to the Apple website yesterday to look at the new stuff. The new Pro desktops look like a nice new iteration of what's become a workstation line. Will they enable developers and media-content people to work more quickly and efficiently? Yup. That's all they really need to do. Are the new servers keeping pace on price, performance and management features? Yup. So far, no problem.
And the new OS X features? Looking over the short screencasts on the website, lots of that stuff sounds mighty nice. Time Machine is pretty darned revolutionary: an API and systemwide user interface for user-friendly browsing of data snapshots over time from within any application! Spaces looks like an extremely well thought out expansion on the virtual-desktop concept, with all sorts of visual cues and clever UI bits that will make it useful for people without photographic memories. If the Core Animation APIs are any good, they'll make developers mighty happy. The visual dashborad widget creator opens up widget creation to pretty much everybody. What is there even remotely like it in the Windows world? Even the mail client's editor component leapfrogs everything else out there and will probably sell a lot of consumer Macs the same way iMovie, iPhoto and Garageband have.
Much of it makes Vista look dated enough that Apple shouldn't have a problem keeping up its market share.
Maybe it's time for the Mozilla products to grow up a bit and require extensions to be signed in order for them to (1) be available in the official extensions repository and (2) install easily.
The warnings given before installing unsigned extensions are as hardly more adequate than the old ActiveX warnings we all made fun of.
Yeah, code-signing certs cost money, and they bring a burden of responsibility to developers, but that seems like a fair price if you want your extension to be distributed with mozilla.com's blessing and install with two clicks and no really nasty warning.
Actually, it's not a collection of apps. It's a set of APIs that include I/O, a filesystem, application and file management, user permissions, resource monitoring, process control, sockets, message queueing and inter-component communication along with the UI stuff most people focus on when they first see it.
It's implemented in high-level languages, and from a developer standpoint its "native" code is Javascript, but IMO it performs the services of an OS and has the interfaces of an OS, so I'm fine with calling it an OS.
What does its inability to talk to USB hardware and flash cards directly have to do with being an OS? PalmOS and WinCE can't talk to Firewire or S/PDIF and those are OSes. YouOS talks to hardware through an abstraction layer; it just happens to do so atop a lower-level OS.
All right, so it is a 0.1 initial public realease, but given the at least 3 months it's been in development since the announcement and the two-sentence fuzzy roadmap statements, the framework doesn't look too promising so far. To say nothing of Ruby on Rails, there are at least a dozen modern MVC frameworks out there for Perl, Python, J2EE and yes, PHP, that are much further along and more importantly seem better thought out. If at this point the roadmap still doesn't speak in terms of things as basic as automagic mappings of controller actions to view templates, and assumes by default that views are in the same directory as controllers, I wouldn't be so sure the people working on this get what's got so many people diving into the new MVC frameworks.
Extensions that have been found to have memory leaks or other crash-prone bugs should not be readily available to mainstream users. For users who already have a leaky extension installed, there should be a means of distributing alerts to users. I'd put it in the metadata on the update and extensionroom sites and show the alerts during routine checks for updates.
If the Mozilla Foundation is serious about continuing to expand the browser's adoption, users should be given the tools they need to have the best browsing experience possible, and should not have torun their own debugger and profiler to figure out why the application is leaking memory when the culprit has already been identified in Bugzilla. Warning users away from leaky extensions and discouraging their installation in the first place would also provide developers with a strong incentive to fix the problems.
So let's see. By using BT to share personal files with a few people, you forgo the one big reason to us BT: high speed downloads thanks to swarming connections with multiple peers.
Take that away and you're left with a buddy-file-transfer scheme that's actually going to be slower than any of the competition. Unlike the major IM clients, anyone behind a firewall or NAT (meaning almost everyone) will have to not only open ports on the firewall but also forward the ports to their PC in order to get an upload speed of more than about 10K/sec. And unlike uploading the files to your personal hosted webspace (which you can usually do a whole lot faster than a BT upload), the files are only available for download when your PC is online? Are most people with desktops going to leave them on 24/7 and turn off power management just to keep the new baby pictures available when they could have just uploaded them to Kodak instead? And what about laptops? How effectively are laptop users going to effectively share much of anything?
Also, doesn't using BT generally degrade web browsing performance? If I'm going to have BT on my own PC at all, why would I want a client that shuts down when I'm not browsing, which is normally when I'm happiest to let BT eat up all my bandwidth?
This gets funding? Meet Web 2.0, eerily similar to Web 1.0.
I'm guessing the reason the article's author chose to structure things in terms of a bunch of new cars (hybrid and not) vs. a 1999 Honda Accord is because the author owns a 1999 Honda Accord. This alone gave the article an unnecessary slant. The basic conclusion -- that hybrids are more expensive to own on an installment plan than comparable standard and diesel cars -- is valid, but the gratuitous comparison to a six-year-old car exaggerates the differences by making everything a bad proposition compared to his 1999 Accord.
Heck, how do I get a 1999 Accord for $4000 anyway? By lucking out at an auction? By buying one off my favorite aunt? Last I checked in my area, 1999 Accords in decent condition fetched at least 50% more than that even through private sellers. Use of honest numbers for comparison woud help. That and factoring in repair costs. I doubt his 1999 Accord is still under warranty, making average repair costs more expensive.
Also, his favorite new-car-to-new-car comparison was between the Prius and the Toyota Corolla. The Corolla, though bigger for 2006 than past models, is a compact and the Prius is generally regarded as mid-sized, Edmunds database notwithstanding. And comparing a Prius to the stripped-down base Corolla is also a bit dishonest. The base Prius is equipped comparably to one of the upgraded Corollas that sell for $15,000-$16,000, not to ths stripped $12,000 model. Want a decently-equipped Toyota for $12,000? Go look at the Echo or whatever they renamed it. That's even smaller.
The TCO advantage still belongs to the quality non-hybrid gasoline and diesel vehicles, but not as much as indicated here. And as gasoline prices pick up again this spring and likely top $3/gallon for good, the smaller-than-stated gap will narrow considerably.
Yes, that Ricoh. I think rather than built-in wireless it had a TCP/IP stack, an FTP client and a PC Card slot for whatever kind of compatible network card you wanted to put in: Ethernet, wireless, whatever.
And it was definitely a consumer camera. It had a tiny lens and was designed as a flattish bar similar to old 110-film Instamatics.
I live in a city with a Netflix depot. My turnaround times for all but one of the movies I've rented has been 2 business days. Mail one back on Monday, the next one's in my mailbox Wednesday. The one exception took a third day.
It's theoretically possible that Netflix does throttle customers, but the person with the rant and the Javascript calculator isn't even basing it on personal observation or anyone's anecdotes. They're just extrapolating from some business-news quote they read somewhere that Netflix *must* be slowing turnaround times to limit people to a monthly rental volume that doesn't break $2/DVD. Except that nobody's observing this in real life.
I'm pretty sure iPodder, which was the dominant podcast aggregator until today, supports Bittorrent RSS enclosures. Several of the podcasts I subscribe to appear to be torrents. I'd expect something similar--BT or otherwise--from Apple soon enough.
You're thinking of a Palm as a tiny PC. It's not. It's a PDA. And more importantly, you're thinking of Palm's built-in Memo Pad app as a general-purpose text editor. Which it's not. The most desirable behavior for a PDA given a text file with tabs is to replace the tabs with spaces.
Why? Two reasons. First, because it's got a 24-odd-character-wide display, and second, because virtually all people using Palm's Memo Pad are using it as a memo pad. A typical tabbed desktop text file will look like an unreadable mess on the Palm memo pad. Which is for "memos", not "Unix config files". Those people don't want formatting preservation. They want the most readable representation of a memo, and if that memo was composed on a PC, they're gonna want it with as little formatting cruft as possible.
A PDA is designed to be an organizer and personal information Swiss Army knife. Things like editing raw data files are not a priority of Palm's, and rightly so. Making Memo Pad support multiple modes of editing and format preservation through toggles, document-level property sheets and app-level prefs would make it cumbersome to use as a memo pad. Sort of like how the many good third-party editors that you can get for Palms to do these very things are clumsy overkill to use as a simple memo pad.
Most people who want to export tabular data to a spreadsheet from a PDA use a spreadsheet or a more robust text editor to do so. Especially with all "business"-oriented Palms (Tungstens and Treos) and even many of the "consumer" ones (Zires) shipping with a spreadsheet for years now.
The Dell Inspiron 5100 is in the top half of the product line? Only the 1100 series is lower end than that, and my 5100 spans like a champ.
Walk into your local CompUSA or Best Buy or whatever and open up the Display control panel on the cheapest laptop you can find, like an $1100 eMachines or an 8-pound Compaq or HP. Betcha it spans.
Nowadays all but the absolute lowest-end PC laptops have dual-headed display support with separate "screens" on the built-in display and the video out port. It's in the $1000 Compaq/HPs, the eMachines and Medions and so on. About the only major-brand PC laptop you can now buy withour dual-head support is Dell's 1100-series Celeron laptop.
Apple still cripples the iBook with mirrored-only video. No desktop spanning. The Radeon chipsets they use do support it, but Apple reserves that feature for the Powerbooks.
Should $1800 really be the cost of entry for a dual-head capable laptop in 2004? And if Apple really wants to make Bluetooth ubiquitous it's probably time to make it standard equipment on every machine like they did with USB and 1394.
If I recall, AOL started requiring the use of SecurID keyfobs for content-provider logins sometime around 1996, when they rolled out their graphical form-design tools or Rainman Plus or something.
Given how many corporate workers, especially in field sales, use AOL as their travel ISP since it's so easy to change cities and countries, it's about time AOL recognized the demand for this kind of thing.
In most ways, AOL's a goofy (and expensive) choice for a business ISP, but very few dialup ISPs bother to offer a decent dialer addon with a built-in worldwide database of access numbers, so AOL remains one of a handful of low-fuss chocies for the kind of person who ends up in a different city (or country) every few days and just wants to plow through their email.
That's funny. Then why do the OpenGroupware mailing lists have people helping each other configure the Palm syncing features? Are these poor users just imagining that they're syncing their PDAs to OpenGroupware?
It does rely on Network Hotsync if you're syncing directly to your OGo server, so unless you have a decent VPN setup, remote users aren't going to have a good time of it, but I recokon you could let those people connect with something like Outlook and have them sync locally using Intellsync or the like.
Got it. It's more than twice the size of an iPod. Given battery life on other devices with decent color screens, there's no reason to believe these will offer two hours of continuous playback reliably without spare batteries. Or maybe that's why it's so thick and weighs twice as much as an iPod or PDA.
Even at $400 it's twice the price of those cheap no-name portable DVD players you can get. It's too expensive to give to kids for car trips, and they'd be happy with one of those cheap portable DVD players anyway. Business travelers might like it, except they already carry laptops that can play the DVDs that they already own or rent for $2 a week.
Any decent content will be pay-per-view and won't be viewable on a TV unless you have a high-end PC running XP Media Center Edition in your living room hooked up to that TV, which amounts to a few thousand people right now. And with Media Center PCs retailing for $1600 or so in a market where most PCs sell for half of that or less, it's going to be a few years before that changes.
It's as expensive as a high-end PDA but isn't a PDA. It's a second or third gadget to carry around and with all that extra space needed for more batteries, it's not a zero-carry.
I've used Web TurboTax with Netscape/Mozilla browsers 2 of the last 3 years -- with Netscape 4.x under Linux one year, in fact, with no bugs at all. I can't promise it'll still be compatible this year, but it's never been Windows-only or IE-only for me. They might say it only works with IE, but that probably just means they won't give support for other browsers. Give it a try; you don't have to pay until your return is finished and ready for transmittal or printing, and if you make it through the first couple of screens, you're all set.
Re:$20,000 for a low-traffic database server?
on
Wikipedia Needs $20K
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· Score: 1
You're doing text search against the database? Why not output your entries to private text files with filenames corresponding to the article IDs, and use a static-file search engine to index and search.
If the database is really only 35 MB or so as the other post on this thread claims it is, you should be able to reduce the database load not "some" but enormously. That's not a big database. Maybe the poster meant 35 GB?
Your point is taken re: the cost of development vs. the cost of bigger iron, but Wikipedia really shouldn't need to hit databases and do dynamic page generation nearly as much as it sounds like it does. How many article updates and new comments does it normally insert per second?
$20,000 for a low-traffic database server?
on
Wikipedia Needs $20K
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If I'm to understand correctly from the pages I'm getting from Wikipedia right now, the two dual-processor 2+ GHz servers are down and I'm seeing cached, static pages being served off a comparatively lowly P3/866 server.
And it's handling the load just fine.
So am I to understand that the two other servers -- which based on the hardware specs sound like they should still be covered by support contracts of *some* kind -- are there for "redundancy" and for a database that should only get hit when an article is published or a generated e-mail is being assembled? How many millions of emails are being generated per day? I remember 6 or 7 years ago building an app that sent 25,000 database-driven multipart mail messages an hour, on four Pentium 133-class machines. One of which was the database server, and the others were running a creaky 1.1 version of Java.
Please don't tell me Wikipedia normally generates every single page dynamically or that wiki code is getting executed with every page view. That would be mighty stupid.
Finally, someone catches the line that makes this a non-story. It just so happens that Microsoft's licensing terms for these schemas prohibit their use in word processors, spreadsheets or programs that convert to and from such formats. Which means nothing at all has changed except that by publishing the specs on open websites, they're posioning the well so it will be nigh impossible to make clean-room reverse-engineered converters, even in countries that still allow reverse engineering.
In sum, no, you cannot use this documentation to make MS Office XML filters for OpenOffice or other office suites.
I find it hard to believe Google really wants to index IRC. The occasional open-source developer discussion aside, it's a wasteland. My guess is that they're experimanting with indexing and archiving text chat in general with an eye toward indexing things like internal corporate chat for their intranet appliances and things like "celebrity" Q+A sessions for the public.
IRC gets them a good data feed for experimenting since it's not burdened by corporate Terms of Service, has an open protocol, and has a good range of content to work with: A/S/L sessions, serious discussions, bots, and everything in between.
Slashdot Mirror
A sneak mountaintop?
If youn want an MP3 player or web access device or something that makes neat clicky sounds when you scroll, that's one thing.. but if you want a PDA, it's still Palm, Palm and Palm. Windows Mobile has improved enormously to the point where it's genrally usable, but next time your're in a store that sells both, try firing up a Windows Mobile device and add an appointment to the calendar with a start and end time. Now make it recurring and set a custom alarm time. Then switch into the to-do list and add three grocery items. Then add a contact with a name, address, e-mail and two phone numbers. Switch back to the calendar and go to the week view.
If it seems just as easy as your Palm, then pick whatever you want -- MS or Palm. Forget Zauruses and any smartphone that isn't at least as slick a PIM as the PDAs are. If one seems noticeably more tedious for core PIM things like calendar entries, addresses or to-dos, run away. You want ease-of-use in these things above all else and no matter how flashy an MP3 player app or game or on-board BASIC interpreter may be, it will not make up for PIM functions you don't enjoy using.
What is it you want to organize in folders, by the way? Files? Tasks? There are all sorts of add-on programs that will do that any number of ways.. hierarchical outliners, multiple-database to-do apps like HandyShopper, etc. I'm sure there are good uses for folder trees on a PDA, but be careful that you're not adding features for their own sake. Stuff hidden away in folders is easier to forget about.
Geeks sometimes mistakenly think Palms are unsophisticated because they don't multitask, they don't have a folder-oriented metaphor, they don't have serif fonts and dropshadows and bevels on form elements and so on. Rather, Palms are sophisticated because conscious decisions have been made over the years to keep those things out because they interefered with usability.
I wasn't there. I didn't watch the keynote. I know nothing about the presentation. I don't have a Mac or even an iPod.
However, I did mosey over to the Apple website yesterday to look at the new stuff. The new Pro desktops look like a nice new iteration of what's become a workstation line. Will they enable developers and media-content people to work more quickly and efficiently? Yup. That's all they really need to do. Are the new servers keeping pace on price, performance and management features? Yup. So far, no problem.
And the new OS X features? Looking over the short screencasts on the website, lots of that stuff sounds mighty nice. Time Machine is pretty darned revolutionary: an API and systemwide user interface for user-friendly browsing of data snapshots over time from within any application! Spaces looks like an extremely well thought out expansion on the virtual-desktop concept, with all sorts of visual cues and clever UI bits that will make it useful for people without photographic memories. If the Core Animation APIs are any good, they'll make developers mighty happy. The visual dashborad widget creator opens up widget creation to pretty much everybody. What is there even remotely like it in the Windows world? Even the mail client's editor component leapfrogs everything else out there and will probably sell a lot of consumer Macs the same way iMovie, iPhoto and Garageband have.
Much of it makes Vista look dated enough that Apple shouldn't have a problem keeping up its market share.
Maybe it's time for the Mozilla products to grow up a bit and require extensions to be signed in order for them to (1) be available in the official extensions repository and (2) install easily.
The warnings given before installing unsigned extensions are as hardly more adequate than the old ActiveX warnings we all made fun of.
Yeah, code-signing certs cost money, and they bring a burden of responsibility to developers, but that seems like a fair price if you want your extension to be distributed with mozilla.com's blessing and install with two clicks and no really nasty warning.
Actually, it's not a collection of apps. It's a set of APIs that include I/O, a filesystem, application and file management, user permissions, resource monitoring, process control, sockets, message queueing and inter-component communication along with the UI stuff most people focus on when they first see it.
It's implemented in high-level languages, and from a developer standpoint its "native" code is Javascript, but IMO it performs the services of an OS and has the interfaces of an OS, so I'm fine with calling it an OS.
What does its inability to talk to USB hardware and flash cards directly have to do with being an OS? PalmOS and WinCE can't talk to Firewire or S/PDIF and those are OSes. YouOS talks to hardware through an abstraction layer; it just happens to do so atop a lower-level OS.
All right, so it is a 0.1 initial public realease, but given the at least 3 months it's been in development since the announcement and the two-sentence fuzzy roadmap statements, the framework doesn't look too promising so far. To say nothing of Ruby on Rails, there are at least a dozen modern MVC frameworks out there for Perl, Python, J2EE and yes, PHP, that are much further along and more importantly seem better thought out. If at this point the roadmap still doesn't speak in terms of things as basic as automagic mappings of controller actions to view templates, and assumes by default that views are in the same directory as controllers, I wouldn't be so sure the people working on this get what's got so many people diving into the new MVC frameworks.
Extensions that have been found to have memory leaks or other crash-prone bugs should not be readily available to mainstream users. For users who already have a leaky extension installed, there should be a means of distributing alerts to users. I'd put it in the metadata on the update and extensionroom sites and show the alerts during routine checks for updates.
If the Mozilla Foundation is serious about continuing to expand the browser's adoption, users should be given the tools they need to have the best browsing experience possible, and should not have torun their own debugger and profiler to figure out why the application is leaking memory when the culprit has already been identified in Bugzilla. Warning users away from leaky extensions and discouraging their installation in the first place would also provide developers with a strong incentive to fix the problems.
So let's see. By using BT to share personal files with a few people, you forgo the one big reason to us BT: high speed downloads thanks to swarming connections with multiple peers.
Take that away and you're left with a buddy-file-transfer scheme that's actually going to be slower than any of the competition. Unlike the major IM clients, anyone behind a firewall or NAT (meaning almost everyone) will have to not only open ports on the firewall but also forward the ports to their PC in order to get an upload speed of more than about 10K/sec. And unlike uploading the files to your personal hosted webspace (which you can usually do a whole lot faster than a BT upload), the files are only available for download when your PC is online? Are most people with desktops going to leave them on 24/7 and turn off power management just to keep the new baby pictures available when they could have just uploaded them to Kodak instead? And what about laptops? How effectively are laptop users going to effectively share much of anything?
Also, doesn't using BT generally degrade web browsing performance? If I'm going to have BT on my own PC at all, why would I want a client that shuts down when I'm not browsing, which is normally when I'm happiest to let BT eat up all my bandwidth?
This gets funding? Meet Web 2.0, eerily similar to Web 1.0.
I'm guessing the reason the article's author chose to structure things in terms of a bunch of new cars (hybrid and not) vs. a 1999 Honda Accord is because the author owns a 1999 Honda Accord. This alone gave the article an unnecessary slant. The basic conclusion -- that hybrids are more expensive to own on an installment plan than comparable standard and diesel cars -- is valid, but the gratuitous comparison to a six-year-old car exaggerates the differences by making everything a bad proposition compared to his 1999 Accord.
Heck, how do I get a 1999 Accord for $4000 anyway? By lucking out at an auction? By buying one off my favorite aunt? Last I checked in my area, 1999 Accords in decent condition fetched at least 50% more than that even through private sellers. Use of honest numbers for comparison woud help. That and factoring in repair costs. I doubt his 1999 Accord is still under warranty, making average repair costs more expensive.
Also, his favorite new-car-to-new-car comparison was between the Prius and the Toyota Corolla. The Corolla, though bigger for 2006 than past models, is a compact and the Prius is generally regarded as mid-sized, Edmunds database notwithstanding. And comparing a Prius to the stripped-down base Corolla is also a bit dishonest. The base Prius is equipped comparably to one of the upgraded Corollas that sell for $15,000-$16,000, not to ths stripped $12,000 model. Want a decently-equipped Toyota for $12,000? Go look at the Echo or whatever they renamed it. That's even smaller.
The TCO advantage still belongs to the quality non-hybrid gasoline and diesel vehicles, but not as much as indicated here. And as gasoline prices pick up again this spring and likely top $3/gallon for good, the smaller-than-stated gap will narrow considerably.
Yes, that Ricoh. I think rather than built-in wireless it had a TCP/IP stack, an FTP client and a PC Card slot for whatever kind of compatible network card you wanted to put in: Ethernet, wireless, whatever.
And it was definitely a consumer camera. It had a tiny lens and was designed as a flattish bar similar to old 110-film Instamatics.
I live in a city with a Netflix depot. My turnaround times for all but one of the movies I've rented has been 2 business days. Mail one back on Monday, the next one's in my mailbox Wednesday. The one exception took a third day.
It's theoretically possible that Netflix does throttle customers, but the person with the rant and the Javascript calculator isn't even basing it on personal observation or anyone's anecdotes. They're just extrapolating from some business-news quote they read somewhere that Netflix *must* be slowing turnaround times to limit people to a monthly rental volume that doesn't break $2/DVD. Except that nobody's observing this in real life.
I'm pretty sure iPodder, which was the dominant podcast aggregator until today, supports Bittorrent RSS enclosures. Several of the podcasts I subscribe to appear to be torrents. I'd expect something similar--BT or otherwise--from Apple soon enough.
If you want optimal performance, shouldn't swap and scratch space be on different physical drives entirely?
You're thinking of a Palm as a tiny PC. It's not. It's a PDA. And more importantly, you're thinking of Palm's built-in Memo Pad app as a general-purpose text editor. Which it's not. The most desirable behavior for a PDA given a text file with tabs is to replace the tabs with spaces.
Why? Two reasons. First, because it's got a 24-odd-character-wide display, and second, because virtually all people using Palm's Memo Pad are using it as a memo pad. A typical tabbed desktop text file will look like an unreadable mess on the Palm memo pad. Which is for "memos", not "Unix config files". Those people don't want formatting preservation. They want the most readable representation of a memo, and if that memo was composed on a PC, they're gonna want it with as little formatting cruft as possible.
A PDA is designed to be an organizer and personal information Swiss Army knife. Things like editing raw data files are not a priority of Palm's, and rightly so. Making Memo Pad support multiple modes of editing and format preservation through toggles, document-level property sheets and app-level prefs would make it cumbersome to use as a memo pad. Sort of like how the many good third-party editors that you can get for Palms to do these very things are clumsy overkill to use as a simple memo pad.
Most people who want to export tabular data to a spreadsheet from a PDA use a spreadsheet or a more robust text editor to do so. Especially with all "business"-oriented Palms (Tungstens and Treos) and even many of the "consumer" ones (Zires) shipping with a spreadsheet for years now.
The Dell Inspiron 5100 is in the top half of the product line? Only the 1100 series is lower end than that, and my 5100 spans like a champ.
Walk into your local CompUSA or Best Buy or whatever and open up the Display control panel on the cheapest laptop you can find, like an $1100 eMachines or an 8-pound Compaq or HP. Betcha it spans.
Nowadays all but the absolute lowest-end PC laptops have dual-headed display support with separate "screens" on the built-in display and the video out port. It's in the $1000 Compaq/HPs, the eMachines and Medions and so on. About the only major-brand PC laptop you can now buy withour dual-head support is Dell's 1100-series Celeron laptop.
Apple still cripples the iBook with mirrored-only video. No desktop spanning. The Radeon chipsets they use do support it, but Apple reserves that feature for the Powerbooks.
Should $1800 really be the cost of entry for a dual-head capable laptop in 2004? And if Apple really wants to make Bluetooth ubiquitous it's probably time to make it standard equipment on every machine like they did with USB and 1394.
If I recall, AOL started requiring the use of SecurID keyfobs for content-provider logins sometime around 1996, when they rolled out their graphical form-design tools or Rainman Plus or something.
Given how many corporate workers, especially in field sales, use AOL as their travel ISP since it's so easy to change cities and countries, it's about time AOL recognized the demand for this kind of thing.
In most ways, AOL's a goofy (and expensive) choice for a business ISP, but very few dialup ISPs bother to offer a decent dialer addon with a built-in worldwide database of access numbers, so AOL remains one of a handful of low-fuss chocies for the kind of person who ends up in a different city (or country) every few days and just wants to plow through their email.
That's funny. Then why do the OpenGroupware mailing lists have people helping each other configure the Palm syncing features? Are these poor users just imagining that they're syncing their PDAs to OpenGroupware?
It does rely on Network Hotsync if you're syncing directly to your OGo server, so unless you have a decent VPN setup, remote users aren't going to have a good time of it, but I recokon you could let those people connect with something like Outlook and have them sync locally using Intellsync or the like.
Doesn't OpenGroupware have pretty extensive Palm sync?
Got it. It's more than twice the size of an iPod. Given battery life on other devices with decent color screens, there's no reason to believe these will offer two hours of continuous playback reliably without spare batteries. Or maybe that's why it's so thick and weighs twice as much as an iPod or PDA.
Even at $400 it's twice the price of those cheap no-name portable DVD players you can get. It's too expensive to give to kids for car trips, and they'd be happy with one of those cheap portable DVD players anyway. Business travelers might like it, except they already carry laptops that can play the DVDs that they already own or rent for $2 a week.
Any decent content will be pay-per-view and won't be viewable on a TV unless you have a high-end PC running XP Media Center Edition in your living room hooked up to that TV, which amounts to a few thousand people right now. And with Media Center PCs retailing for $1600 or so in a market where most PCs sell for half of that or less, it's going to be a few years before that changes.
It's as expensive as a high-end PDA but isn't a PDA. It's a second or third gadget to carry around and with all that extra space needed for more batteries, it's not a zero-carry.
I wish the first-generation licensees luck.
I've used Web TurboTax with Netscape/Mozilla browsers 2 of the last 3 years -- with Netscape 4.x under Linux one year, in fact, with no bugs at all. I can't promise it'll still be compatible this year, but it's never been Windows-only or IE-only for me. They might say it only works with IE, but that probably just means they won't give support for other browsers. Give it a try; you don't have to pay until your return is finished and ready for transmittal or printing, and if you make it through the first couple of screens, you're all set.
You're doing text search against the database? Why not output your entries to private text files with filenames corresponding to the article IDs, and use a static-file search engine to index and search.
If the database is really only 35 MB or so as the other post on this thread claims it is, you should be able to reduce the database load not "some" but enormously. That's not a big database. Maybe the poster meant 35 GB?
Your point is taken re: the cost of development vs. the cost of bigger iron, but Wikipedia really shouldn't need to hit databases and do dynamic page generation nearly as much as it sounds like it does. How many article updates and new comments does it normally insert per second?
If I'm to understand correctly from the pages I'm getting from Wikipedia right now, the two dual-processor 2+ GHz servers are down and I'm seeing cached, static pages being served off a comparatively lowly P3/866 server.
And it's handling the load just fine.
So am I to understand that the two other servers -- which based on the hardware specs sound like they should still be covered by support contracts of *some* kind -- are there for "redundancy" and for a database that should only get hit when an article is published or a generated e-mail is being assembled? How many millions of emails are being generated per day? I remember 6 or 7 years ago building an app that sent 25,000 database-driven multipart mail messages an hour, on four Pentium 133-class machines. One of which was the database server, and the others were running a creaky 1.1 version of Java.
Please don't tell me Wikipedia normally generates every single page dynamically or that wiki code is getting executed with every page view. That would be mighty stupid.
Finally, someone catches the line that makes this a non-story. It just so happens that Microsoft's licensing terms for these schemas prohibit their use in word processors, spreadsheets or programs that convert to and from such formats. Which means nothing at all has changed except that by publishing the specs on open websites, they're posioning the well so it will be nigh impossible to make clean-room reverse-engineered converters, even in countries that still allow reverse engineering.
In sum, no, you cannot use this documentation to make MS Office XML filters for OpenOffice or other office suites.
I find it hard to believe Google really wants to index IRC. The occasional open-source developer discussion aside, it's a wasteland. My guess is that they're experimanting with indexing and archiving text chat in general with an eye toward indexing things like internal corporate chat for their intranet appliances and things like "celebrity" Q+A sessions for the public.
IRC gets them a good data feed for experimenting since it's not burdened by corporate Terms of Service, has an open protocol, and has a good range of content to work with: A/S/L sessions, serious discussions, bots, and everything in between.