I longed for a wifi'd-up Revo in a higher up thread but will repeat myself somewhat here to bolsten your post. All i want is a PDA with wifi and a half decent keyboard, and the Psion Revo clamshell-slide-out action is *still* a gorgeous execution of it. My Revo has 8MB RAM and 8MB ROM and 16 shades of grey, why does my only upgrade path involve gigs of ram and gigs of ssd, a 10" screen and 10 mins of battery life?
What would be a good start would be to standardise the publication of tabular data, for example population statistics, with ways of defining column types, data types and units whilst retaining a tabular structure instead of bastardising the tree-structure of XML. I guess we could take CSV, add a couple of header blocks and call it Extended CSV. Though it'd need an X in it to sound 21st century... so how about CSVX?
If anyone googles that my web site will go down in flames...
All I've been waiting for these past years is a PDA with an f-ing KEYBOARD, had no trouble using the word processor or spreadhseet on the revo, found the keys on it perfectly usable. At the mo my "portable internet" experience is at approx 160*200 px on my Sony Erricson phone with predictive text input. Why the massive gulf in devices from there to 12" laptop?
Since zillions of copies might have been distributed. [emphasis mine]
You are indeed correct that distributing to zillions of other users who might have otherwise legitimately purchase them would deprive the plaitiff from zillions of dollars of revenue.
The judge has established that she downloaded these songs and subsequently distributed *one* to mediasentry *once*, but beyond that no further distribution can be proven. The next point is that she neither sought nor made any commercial gain from her infringement, save saving the cost of legitimate purchase, so the judge has now ruled that that is the only basis upon which the cost of damages should be awarded.
To adpot the stealing a physical CD analogy, the old verdict would be based on not only stealing the CD but the probably that she might have distributed something up to zillions of CDR copies without charging for them we think but can't prove, your honour, probably.
To quote the judge:
The statutory damages awarded against Thomas are not a deterrent against those who pirate music in order to profit. Thomas's conduct was motivated by her desire to obtain the copyrighted music for her own use. [...]
While the Court does not discount Plaintiffs' claim that, cumulatively, illegal downloading has far-reaching effects on their businesses, the damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs. Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000 - more than five hundred times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs. [...]
Thomas not only gained no profits from her alleged illegal activities, she sought no profits. Part of the justification for large statutory damages awards in copyright cases is to deter actors by ensuring that the possible penalty for infringing substantially outweighs the potential gain from infringing. [...]
The Halo-hype is best understood once you look at its historical context. Yes it wasn't the first ever FPS, not the first FPS with an immersive plot (at least one other posting here compares it to Half Life, something I immediatley recognised when playing it for the first time). What it was, however, was the first FPS that Console players were drawn to en-masse (see below for N64 goldeney note).
The simple fact of the matter was that prior to Halo mouse + keyboard was the only way to play an FPS with any degree of satisfaction, to the extent that Quake III for Dreamcast practically required you to buy these too. FPS's were very big on the PC platform at the turn of the century but had had a very rough time being accepted on the consoles for both this and cultural reasons (the same problem was faced by point and click management-em-ups like Civilisation, for example). Being an FPS nut at the time I found it very hard to get into the various console FPS's, include ports like Quake II on the PSX.
Most of the time this is because they got the controller setup fundamentally wrong and/or wouldn't let you configure your own. Most glaringly they insisted on having Forward,Back and yaw on the left stick, very very very rarely (if ever) were you afforded Forward, Back and strafe on one stick with pitch and yaw on the other. Often (and this is true for Doom on the GBA for example, I'd waited years for hand held Doom to be sorely dissapointed!) strafe was bunged on the shoulder buttons because the developers didn't know just how important they were. Halo got the controller config exactly spot on: you could effectively circle-strafe, and as such it became the first Console FPS that anyone could actually play.
The next major flaw was auto-aim, obvious to any mouser is the ability to aim in a fraction of a second to any pitch/yaw point around you and get a nice headshot, simply impossible on a console. Past FPS's usually had it take you an hour to line up a shot, drastically slowing things down and stunting the potential gameplay as a result. Halo got the autoaim spot on - it's so cunning you might never notice it's there - this combined with the ability to strafe allowed proper battles with hoards of baddies for the first time.
The offshoot of all of the above is that Halo was console gaming's Doom moment - N64's Goldeneye therefore might be similarly married up to Wolfenstein 3D. The half life (pun intended) of Doom has been immense, with an active community almost 15 years on, myself semi-inclulded. This is what we're seeing on the Consoles now, it looks so strange to us fogeys here, wishing the console kiddies would get off our lawns because whilst we can see that the game is well put together and the plot well executed we've seen it all before in one guise or another, but those "console kiddies" (apologies to those who are consolers but not kiddies anymore!) had not seen it before making it all new and exiting to them. Even though by our reckoning they're 15 years late.
>Then we can compare your ideas against the cost of the Spirit and Opportunity missions
Which leads into my question to the ether: If now that all the zillions of dollars spent on Spirit and Opportunity have proved their worth why - instead of constantly reinventing the wheel with every mission - don't they just build more of the same?
Wouldn't it be cost effective to build say, six more of these rovers (with better wheel motors) using the design, expertise and experience they've already gained and bung 'em on up there?
>Back on topic, CE on a Netbook? Yeah - no thanks. >It would be no different than a PDA. Just bulkier.
Whilst I concur with your first point regarding CE I feel the need to counter your second point on a general leve. I WANT a netbook that is no different to bulkier PDA, i.e. A PDA with wifi and a keyboard. That's all I've been wanting since I retired my 8MB Psion Revo a few years back. I'm planning on getting one of these for xmas: http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com/
(I already have a Server hosting all my music and movies, an Xbox to play games on and a Desktop to get real work done on. I want a netbook for surfing on the move and I don't want to have to use a stylus to do it!)
I'm at work, and don't have time, but it might be worth someone harvesting + mirroring his site (it'd be a fair amount of work) should blogspot be handed a takedown notice/injunction.
True story: Back in the late nineties I was trying to get some piece of junk electrical equipment working (I don't remember what it was) I thought I'd double check the power lead was working, so rather than dig out the multimeter to check the connections and fuse I just licked the end of the power cable.
The issues you cite can be overcome by providing enough visual information for your brain to translate into depth cues. Currently the games you play on a tv screen or monitor only project a roughly 90 degree field of view (FOV), this usually maps to a much lesser FOV on your retina depending on where you are sitting in relation to it.
On the other hand, your Real Life (TM) FOV covers nearly 180 degrees. What's important from this point is that people with monocular vision still have adequate depth perception, the depth cues coming from information in the whole field of view.
If you are stood in a room with a simple tiled floor it makes it very easy to guage how far away something is, your brain matches the tiles and your eye's height from the floor (a known quantity) and works out the rest, one eye or two. Video games discard this information and the depth cue is lost.
To quit rambling and get to the point: In my opinion stereo vision emulation is the wrong tree to be barking up, if you simply had a display the size of your living room wall and stood a couple of feet from it with everything shown in 1:1 scale you would get instant depth perception. Alternately you'd have a desktop display that instead of being flat was a hemisphere (or slightly more) where you placed your head in the focus, you still wouldnt have free head movement but you wouldnt have chunky glasses either
These are not for "general purpose" computing as we slashdotters know it, these are for email, web and writing letters to aunt betty. They're not intended to play Doom 4 or run Windows Vista.
My mother in law is getting a netbook, and I think she's a very good example of a non-geek's perspective on these. She doesn't need to spend hundreds of pounds on a 8kg brick with 10 mins battery life and six zillion GB of storage space that claims to be a "Lap Top" - just to use the interweb, and she knows it, so as soon as she copped eyes on a netbook and found out that they were basically a portable internet thingy with a larger screen and keyboard than her mobile phone she was sold. The £100 (GBP) price range is exactly right for these machines in that respect - from the point of view who has a 19" mono CRT TV and is perfectly happy with that and doesnt see the need to fork out for a 50" 1080P HD Flat screen.
I've said this before on slashdot, too many geeks and product reviewers see these and their laptop-like form factors and treat them like stripped down dumb machines that would sit in the corner dribbling whilst all the supposedly "proper" laptops called them names. When that's not what they are - they're much more akin to souped-up PDAs with keyboards. And as someone who still owns an 8MB Psion Revo i've been dying for this sort of thing for years!
I already have an Xbox, Playstation, Server and Desktop. They're mainly used for watching video, playing games, developing and general-purpose computing, respectively. I don't need one of these mini-laptops to do any of that, i want it so I can check ebay from the sofa, look up recipes from the kitchen and send emails from the garden.
As a final thought it's probably worth bearing in ming that the specs of these inparticular almost exactly match the *development* system I used to use 8 years ago, except I had 8GB of drive space there instead of 1GB - but most of that was empty or taken up with quake 2 and half life modding resources! I managed to run SUSE (5 or 6 IIRC) on it perfectly adequately and email, surf and write letters with no performance issues.
If this is the model I think of it there's a fledgling site dedicated to it and it's siblings at littlelinuxlaptop.com - including how to get root access and such like. I can't wait to get mine!
I've been waiting for a chance to post this rant...
Will someone in charge of the tech sites please ban "Laptop" people from reviewing these Netbook thingies. Please god let the "PDA" people review them instead? I'm sick of reading the constant complaints about the size, travel and weighting of the keyboards compared to top of the range laptops and even desktops. Will someone therefore please review these for what they are - PDAs with keyboards - and compare the keyboard to, say, any Windows-Mobile stylus device or even the iPhone. Yes, those ones without keyboards at all.
And yes, we know you can't play doom 4 on them under vista, that's because WE DONT NEED THE Mhz to do that. 400MHz + 128MB RAM + a few gig storage is perfectly adequate for browsing ebay from the bathtub, cheers/rant
I've spent the past 6 months battling my GFX/Monitor setup in ubuntu until I finally tracked down the issue last week: The "Intel i810" driver i selected for my "Intel i810" chipset was dodgy and I was supposed to be using the one named "intel", not only defying any kind of naming convention logic and also completeley negating the effort i had to go through to unscrew the case, take the side off and peer inside with a torch for clues half way through the original install.
Big score for intuitive user friendliness there, guys!/sarcasm
Please for god's sake sort out the GFX support, bulletproof x was a start, but it's not there yet.
*Author otherwise has no complaints and is 99% of the time a very happy linux bunny at home
I'm all for native audio and video support in browsers, but now that we're starting to surf on netbooks, mobiles and toasters wouldn't it be great if the spec also included a way to determine wether or not the user actually wants this content to play? Automatically, or at all? Or if they want it to shut up so they can surf without their music-playlist being blarred over? Note that the intention of the user in this regard is a seperate issue to wether or not the device or connection is capable of supporting said media. Maybe I'm just being stingy with my precious clock cycles...
I once soldered together a system using a (keyed) switch with enough contacts to allow me to effectively swap the master and slave jumpers on two hard drives. (The key part helps because you'd only want to do it when the system was powered off!) But the end result is dual booting between two dedicated hard disks, that aught to stump vista!
Indeed, so if they made it easy and convenient to watch their content for free from, say, any 'net connected set top box - embedding trailers and ads in the file while they're at it to recover some costs and linking directly to the online store for plastic-disc editions and merchandise that might solve their problem. Say, a bit like this: http://yro.slashdot.org/~cyclomedia/journal/207197
The solution is to bypass the media cartels and create a direct link between media creators and their audience, wherever they may be... Here's my solution - linking all the world's (possibly, but not neccesarily Creative Commons) Content via an RSS-feed like system navigable from any pc, laptop, mobile or TV set top box with a net connection.
I put Ubuntu on the desktop over a year ago and my cake-baking, toddler-rearing house-wife only ever boots into that and uses OO.o, evolution and firefox (ad/script blocker) with ease. She knows how to boot it into XP, but I don't think she ever has since - though I've never gotten the printer to work in XP which is pleasantly ironic. It seems it's only me that finds it neccesary to run teh evil win, for some unknown self-harm related reasons probably.
What IMHO would constitute the real **AA killer would be a standard RSS-like format for "channels" - a feed with links to other channels and/or "shows" - videos, photo (albumns), audio, radio and music (albums).
All nicely XML and mashupabbly and with linked in png images for AlbumnArt and very very importantly, open and widely adopted.
The next logical step - and this is the killer part - is then to have the above easily crawlable from your set top box. Fancy watching some SciFi? open up your SciFi.com CCC (creative commons content) feed via your remote-control and browse for a series or maybe this weeks top-picks / new "releases" (uploads!).
Bish bash bosh. Free streaming content to your telly. Free.
All that "traditional" media will need to do to join in the above once it kicks off is to host their own Channels of Shows on their own servers - with ad-breaks embedded. Because joe-public will be sat on his sofa chugging beer he'll be too lazy to torrent a "cleaned up" version. So big media gets to rake in the bucks too.
Sounds all a bit too simple doesnt it?
Got One : Ericsson W200i - Phone, MP3 player and Opera Mini. A little too small for sofa-surfing, however. The EEE is definitely desirable, but because I'm an old git I refuse to believe I need anything >= 1GHz to Doom^H^H^H^Hsurf on when I have two "proper" computers upstairs.
Along with the UK's Phorm scandal the business exec types involved seem to be argueing that "not publishing/selling information tied to a particular individual" defines retaining privacy.
So they're trying to parse privacy as something that, IMO, it is not. Privacy is a basic expectation. Privacy is my choosing to write a letter and place it in an envelope - not on a postcard. Privacy is my choosing to talk to my wife over the phone and the conversation's contents remaining known only to us.
If anyone opens the envelope to read the contents, or listens in to the phone call THAT is a volation of my privacy. Regardless of if they read the address on the envelope or return address on the letter, if they see the number dialled or the number dialing. Regardless if they are to use the data collected for marketing or personal kicks. It is the act of snooping ITSELF that violates the privacy.
Now, if an ISP wants to put in their terms and conditions that you grant them some kind of right to inspect or intercept your packets that may or may not be legally kosher. But that is not the issue here. The issue is the repeated attempts to define invasion of privacy from the initial snooping in the first place to what they do AFTER snooping. and that is what we need to fight and what needs to be made clear to the media, so that when they report on these stories their subscribers also understand.
logging in but CATCHPA : Quagmire
Re:Agree - My Proposed Solution
on
ISO Approves OOXML
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Here's how I envisiage fighting this
first set up a web site with a simplish name that's anonymously funded and transparently run, indeed I am an MCP at a Microsoft only shop, i'd be happy to run the site but my priorities lie with feeding my children.
It needs to be factual and neutral. Never yelling, or preaching. It needs to be the (webstandards.org) acid test of the document suite / format world.
It needs to show clearly where each of several major office suites stand in relation to compatibility to both formats, and yes, it needs to highlight OO.os flaws neutrally and just as prominently as any other suite's.
It needs to link directly and clearly to plugins for each suite for each format (where available). It needs to explain each suites compatibility issues and explain workarounds for maximum platform compatibility.
It needs to show, clearly licencing against said office suites and support costs.
It needs to show patent issues, again, factually and clearly.
All of the above should be targetted not at the IT crowd but at the Pointy Haired Bosses of the world.
Then the task will fall to us lot, the OSS advocates, to make OO.o and ODF the clear, statistical winner in the above site.
>=20 years ago: i used to use this functionality on my Amiga FFS (which had titlebar buttons for manually setting the z-index for crying out loud).
Also: Can we please utilise the mouse scroll wheel here too? Click and hold the title bar with LMB and use the mouse wheel to push/pull it's z-index. Even if it goes behind another window during this operation - so long as you keep that mouse button held down - the focus shouldnt dissapear either, same for standard dragging
Slashdot Mirror
I longed for a wifi'd-up Revo in a higher up thread but will repeat myself somewhat here to bolsten your post. All i want is a PDA with wifi and a half decent keyboard, and the Psion Revo clamshell-slide-out action is *still* a gorgeous execution of it. My Revo has 8MB RAM and 8MB ROM and 16 shades of grey, why does my only upgrade path involve gigs of ram and gigs of ssd, a 10" screen and 10 mins of battery life?
What would be a good start would be to standardise the publication of tabular data, for example population statistics, with ways of defining column types, data types and units whilst retaining a tabular structure instead of bastardising the tree-structure of XML. I guess we could take CSV, add a couple of header blocks and call it Extended CSV. Though it'd need an X in it to sound 21st century... so how about CSVX?
If anyone googles that my web site will go down in flames...
I want one of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Revo with wifi*.
All I've been waiting for these past years is a PDA with an f-ing KEYBOARD, had no trouble using the word processor or spreadhseet on the revo, found the keys on it perfectly usable. At the mo my "portable internet" experience is at approx 160*200 px on my Sony Erricson phone with predictive text input. Why the massive gulf in devices from there to 12" laptop?
*USB would be nice, but color optional.
Since zillions of copies might have been distributed. [emphasis mine]
You are indeed correct that distributing to zillions of other users who might have otherwise legitimately purchase them would deprive the plaitiff from zillions of dollars of revenue.
The judge has established that she downloaded these songs and subsequently distributed *one* to mediasentry *once*, but beyond that no further distribution can be proven. The next point is that she neither sought nor made any commercial gain from her infringement, save saving the cost of legitimate purchase, so the judge has now ruled that that is the only basis upon which the cost of damages should be awarded.
To adpot the stealing a physical CD analogy, the old verdict would be based on not only stealing the CD but the probably that she might have distributed something up to zillions of CDR copies without charging for them we think but can't prove, your honour, probably.
To quote the judge:
The statutory damages awarded against Thomas are not a deterrent against those who pirate music in order to profit. Thomas's conduct was motivated by her desire to obtain the copyrighted music for her own use. [...]
While the Court does not discount Plaintiffs' claim that, cumulatively, illegal downloading has far-reaching effects on their businesses, the damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs. Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000 - more than five hundred times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs. [...]
Thomas not only gained no profits from her alleged illegal activities, she sought no profits. Part of the justification for large statutory damages awards in copyright cases is to deter actors by ensuring that the possible penalty for infringing substantially outweighs the potential gain from infringing. [...]
The Halo-hype is best understood once you look at its historical context. Yes it wasn't the first ever FPS, not the first FPS with an immersive plot (at least one other posting here compares it to Half Life, something I immediatley recognised when playing it for the first time). What it was, however, was the first FPS that Console players were drawn to en-masse (see below for N64 goldeney note).
The simple fact of the matter was that prior to Halo mouse + keyboard was the only way to play an FPS with any degree of satisfaction, to the extent that Quake III for Dreamcast practically required you to buy these too. FPS's were very big on the PC platform at the turn of the century but had had a very rough time being accepted on the consoles for both this and cultural reasons (the same problem was faced by point and click management-em-ups like Civilisation, for example). Being an FPS nut at the time I found it very hard to get into the various console FPS's, include ports like Quake II on the PSX.
Most of the time this is because they got the controller setup fundamentally wrong and/or wouldn't let you configure your own. Most glaringly they insisted on having Forward,Back and yaw on the left stick, very very very rarely (if ever) were you afforded Forward, Back and strafe on one stick with pitch and yaw on the other. Often (and this is true for Doom on the GBA for example, I'd waited years for hand held Doom to be sorely dissapointed!) strafe was bunged on the shoulder buttons because the developers didn't know just how important they were. Halo got the controller config exactly spot on: you could effectively circle-strafe, and as such it became the first Console FPS that anyone could actually play.
The next major flaw was auto-aim, obvious to any mouser is the ability to aim in a fraction of a second to any pitch/yaw point around you and get a nice headshot, simply impossible on a console. Past FPS's usually had it take you an hour to line up a shot, drastically slowing things down and stunting the potential gameplay as a result. Halo got the autoaim spot on - it's so cunning you might never notice it's there - this combined with the ability to strafe allowed proper battles with hoards of baddies for the first time.
The offshoot of all of the above is that Halo was console gaming's Doom moment - N64's Goldeneye therefore might be similarly married up to Wolfenstein 3D. The half life (pun intended) of Doom has been immense, with an active community almost 15 years on, myself semi-inclulded. This is what we're seeing on the Consoles now, it looks so strange to us fogeys here, wishing the console kiddies would get off our lawns because whilst we can see that the game is well put together and the plot well executed we've seen it all before in one guise or another, but those "console kiddies" (apologies to those who are consolers but not kiddies anymore!) had not seen it before making it all new and exiting to them. Even though by our reckoning they're 15 years late.
>Then we can compare your ideas against the cost of the Spirit and Opportunity missions Which leads into my question to the ether: If now that all the zillions of dollars spent on Spirit and Opportunity have proved their worth why - instead of constantly reinventing the wheel with every mission - don't they just build more of the same? Wouldn't it be cost effective to build say, six more of these rovers (with better wheel motors) using the design, expertise and experience they've already gained and bung 'em on up there?
One of these: http://www.mobilefun.co.uk/product/7409.htm Though I agree the jargon was uncalled for
>Back on topic, CE on a Netbook? Yeah - no thanks.
>It would be no different than a PDA. Just bulkier.
Whilst I concur with your first point regarding CE I feel the need to counter your second point on a general leve. I WANT a netbook that is no different to bulkier PDA, i.e. A PDA with wifi and a keyboard. That's all I've been wanting since I retired my 8MB Psion Revo a few years back. I'm planning on getting one of these for xmas: http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com/
(I already have a Server hosting all my music and movies, an Xbox to play games on and a Desktop to get real work done on. I want a netbook for surfing on the move and I don't want to have to use a stylus to do it!)
I'm at work, and don't have time, but it might be worth someone harvesting + mirroring his site (it'd be a fair amount of work) should blogspot be handed a takedown notice/injunction.
True story: Back in the late nineties I was trying to get some piece of junk electrical equipment working (I don't remember what it was) I thought I'd double check the power lead was working, so rather than dig out the multimeter to check the connections and fuse I just licked the end of the power cable.
240VAC does not taste good.
The issues you cite can be overcome by providing enough visual information for your brain to translate into depth cues. Currently the games you play on a tv screen or monitor only project a roughly 90 degree field of view (FOV), this usually maps to a much lesser FOV on your retina depending on where you are sitting in relation to it.
On the other hand, your Real Life (TM) FOV covers nearly 180 degrees. What's important from this point is that people with monocular vision still have adequate depth perception, the depth cues coming from information in the whole field of view.
If you are stood in a room with a simple tiled floor it makes it very easy to guage how far away something is, your brain matches the tiles and your eye's height from the floor (a known quantity) and works out the rest, one eye or two. Video games discard this information and the depth cue is lost.
To quit rambling and get to the point: In my opinion stereo vision emulation is the wrong tree to be barking up, if you simply had a display the size of your living room wall and stood a couple of feet from it with everything shown in 1:1 scale you would get instant depth perception. Alternately you'd have a desktop display that instead of being flat was a hemisphere (or slightly more) where you placed your head in the focus, you still wouldnt have free head movement but you wouldnt have chunky glasses either
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Category:Casestudy
Go compete everyone, I've got 3CDs worth of 90's Electronic Noise on legal torrents, let's just cut out the greedy *AA-holes.
These are not for "general purpose" computing as we slashdotters know it, these are for email, web and writing letters to aunt betty. They're not intended to play Doom 4 or run Windows Vista.
My mother in law is getting a netbook, and I think she's a very good example of a non-geek's perspective on these. She doesn't need to spend hundreds of pounds on a 8kg brick with 10 mins battery life and six zillion GB of storage space that claims to be a "Lap Top" - just to use the interweb, and she knows it, so as soon as she copped eyes on a netbook and found out that they were basically a portable internet thingy with a larger screen and keyboard than her mobile phone she was sold. The £100 (GBP) price range is exactly right for these machines in that respect - from the point of view who has a 19" mono CRT TV and is perfectly happy with that and doesnt see the need to fork out for a 50" 1080P HD Flat screen.
I've said this before on slashdot, too many geeks and product reviewers see these and their laptop-like form factors and treat them like stripped down dumb machines that would sit in the corner dribbling whilst all the supposedly "proper" laptops called them names. When that's not what they are - they're much more akin to souped-up PDAs with keyboards. And as someone who still owns an 8MB Psion Revo i've been dying for this sort of thing for years!
I already have an Xbox, Playstation, Server and Desktop. They're mainly used for watching video, playing games, developing and general-purpose computing, respectively. I don't need one of these mini-laptops to do any of that, i want it so I can check ebay from the sofa, look up recipes from the kitchen and send emails from the garden.
As a final thought it's probably worth bearing in ming that the specs of these inparticular almost exactly match the *development* system I used to use 8 years ago, except I had 8GB of drive space there instead of 1GB - but most of that was empty or taken up with quake 2 and half life modding resources! I managed to run SUSE (5 or 6 IIRC) on it perfectly adequately and email, surf and write letters with no performance issues.
If this is the model I think of it there's a fledgling site dedicated to it and it's siblings at littlelinuxlaptop.com - including how to get root access and such like. I can't wait to get mine!
I've been waiting for a chance to post this rant...
Will someone in charge of the tech sites please ban "Laptop" people from reviewing these Netbook thingies. Please god let the "PDA" people review them instead? I'm sick of reading the constant complaints about the size, travel and weighting of the keyboards compared to top of the range laptops and even desktops. Will someone therefore please review these for what they are - PDAs with keyboards - and compare the keyboard to, say, any Windows-Mobile stylus device or even the iPhone. Yes, those ones without keyboards at all.
And yes, we know you can't play doom 4 on them under vista, that's because WE DONT NEED THE Mhz to do that. 400MHz + 128MB RAM + a few gig storage is perfectly adequate for browsing ebay from the bathtub, cheers /rant
sorry about that
I've spent the past 6 months battling my GFX/Monitor setup in ubuntu until I finally tracked down the issue last week: The "Intel i810" driver i selected for my "Intel i810" chipset was dodgy and I was supposed to be using the one named "intel", not only defying any kind of naming convention logic and also completeley negating the effort i had to go through to unscrew the case, take the side off and peer inside with a torch for clues half way through the original install.
Big score for intuitive user friendliness there, guys! /sarcasm
Please for god's sake sort out the GFX support, bulletproof x was a start, but it's not there yet.
*Author otherwise has no complaints and is 99% of the time a very happy linux bunny at home
I'm all for native audio and video support in browsers, but now that we're starting to surf on netbooks, mobiles and toasters wouldn't it be great if the spec also included a way to determine wether or not the user actually wants this content to play? Automatically, or at all? Or if they want it to shut up so they can surf without their music-playlist being blarred over? Note that the intention of the user in this regard is a seperate issue to wether or not the device or connection is capable of supporting said media. Maybe I'm just being stingy with my precious clock cycles...
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-comments/2008Jul/0000.html
captcha: cameras
I once soldered together a system using a (keyed) switch with enough contacts to allow me to effectively swap the master and slave jumpers on two hard drives. (The key part helps because you'd only want to do it when the system was powered off!) But the end result is dual booting between two dedicated hard disks, that aught to stump vista!
Indeed, so if they made it easy and convenient to watch their content for free from, say, any 'net connected set top box - embedding trailers and ads in the file while they're at it to recover some costs and linking directly to the online store for plastic-disc editions and merchandise that might solve their problem. Say, a bit like this: http://yro.slashdot.org/~cyclomedia/journal/207197
The solution is to bypass the media cartels and create a direct link between media creators and their audience, wherever they may be... Here's my solution - linking all the world's (possibly, but not neccesarily Creative Commons) Content via an RSS-feed like system navigable from any pc, laptop, mobile or TV set top box with a net connection.
I put Ubuntu on the desktop over a year ago and my cake-baking, toddler-rearing house-wife only ever boots into that and uses OO.o, evolution and firefox (ad/script blocker) with ease. She knows how to boot it into XP, but I don't think she ever has since - though I've never gotten the printer to work in XP which is pleasantly ironic. It seems it's only me that finds it neccesary to run teh evil win, for some unknown self-harm related reasons probably.
What IMHO would constitute the real **AA killer would be a standard RSS-like format for "channels" - a feed with links to other channels and/or "shows" - videos, photo (albumns), audio, radio and music (albums). All nicely XML and mashupabbly and with linked in png images for AlbumnArt and very very importantly, open and widely adopted. The next logical step - and this is the killer part - is then to have the above easily crawlable from your set top box. Fancy watching some SciFi? open up your SciFi.com CCC (creative commons content) feed via your remote-control and browse for a series or maybe this weeks top-picks / new "releases" (uploads!). Bish bash bosh. Free streaming content to your telly. Free. All that "traditional" media will need to do to join in the above once it kicks off is to host their own Channels of Shows on their own servers - with ad-breaks embedded. Because joe-public will be sat on his sofa chugging beer he'll be too lazy to torrent a "cleaned up" version. So big media gets to rake in the bucks too. Sounds all a bit too simple doesnt it?
Got One : Ericsson W200i - Phone, MP3 player and Opera Mini. A little too small for sofa-surfing, however. The EEE is definitely desirable, but because I'm an old git I refuse to believe I need anything >= 1GHz to Doom^H^H^H^Hsurf on when I have two "proper" computers upstairs.
Along with the UK's Phorm scandal the business exec types involved seem to be argueing that "not publishing/selling information tied to a particular individual" defines retaining privacy.
So they're trying to parse privacy as something that, IMO, it is not. Privacy is a basic expectation. Privacy is my choosing to write a letter and place it in an envelope - not on a postcard. Privacy is my choosing to talk to my wife over the phone and the conversation's contents remaining known only to us.
If anyone opens the envelope to read the contents, or listens in to the phone call THAT is a volation of my privacy. Regardless of if they read the address on the envelope or return address on the letter, if they see the number dialled or the number dialing. Regardless if they are to use the data collected for marketing or personal kicks. It is the act of snooping ITSELF that violates the privacy.
Now, if an ISP wants to put in their terms and conditions that you grant them some kind of right to inspect or intercept your packets that may or may not be legally kosher. But that is not the issue here. The issue is the repeated attempts to define invasion of privacy from the initial snooping in the first place to what they do AFTER snooping. and that is what we need to fight and what needs to be made clear to the media, so that when they report on these stories their subscribers also understand.
logging in but CATCHPA : Quagmire
Here's how I envisiage fighting this
first set up a web site with a simplish name that's anonymously funded and transparently run, indeed I am an MCP at a Microsoft only shop, i'd be happy to run the site but my priorities lie with feeding my children.
It needs to be factual and neutral. Never yelling, or preaching. It needs to be the (webstandards.org) acid test of the document suite / format world.
It needs to show clearly where each of several major office suites stand in relation to compatibility to both formats, and yes, it needs to highlight OO.os flaws neutrally and just as prominently as any other suite's.
It needs to link directly and clearly to plugins for each suite for each format (where available). It needs to explain each suites compatibility issues and explain workarounds for maximum platform compatibility.
It needs to show, clearly licencing against said office suites and support costs.
It needs to show patent issues, again, factually and clearly.
All of the above should be targetted not at the IT crowd but at the Pointy Haired Bosses of the world.
Then the task will fall to us lot, the OSS advocates, to make OO.o and ODF the clear, statistical winner in the above site.
captcha: infinity
>=20 years ago: i used to use this functionality on my Amiga FFS (which had titlebar buttons for manually setting the z-index for crying out loud).
Also: Can we please utilise the mouse scroll wheel here too? Click and hold the title bar with LMB and use the mouse wheel to push/pull it's z-index. Even if it goes behind another window during this operation - so long as you keep that mouse button held down - the focus shouldnt dissapear either, same for standard dragging