I disagree on the big buttons. After much experimenting, I've ended up with large icons on my Quicklaunch toolbar - being larger they are easier targets to hit, and so more efficent.
I do loose some screen space to it, but on the other hand having the quicklaunch icons set to large makes the task bar and the notificaiton area stack up in double rows.
Who could ask for anything fairer? Here's some notes to help you on your way:
PDA is better than paper because::
You can back it up to your PC or memory card
It can play music, video, video games (though you can put paper games into a Paper device. I like sudoku myself)
Easier to read when it is dark.
It can store a lot of info in a small space - you can load a memory card with a hundred e-books if you want.
You can get connectivity for it and use it to surf the web (poorly), check your e-mail, ssh to your box, etc.
Syncronises with your PC's PIM.
It can sound alarms.
Paper is better than PDA because
Very cheap.
Wider rage of form-factors. (Compare a pad of small post-its, a hipster PDA (which is a dozen index cards and a bulldog clip, for those not familiar with it), a moleskine notebook, a A4 ring-bound pad, a filofax, a big portfolio, etc. etc.)
Survives water, drops etc. better
Never runs out of batteries
Parts easier to obtain
Easier to read in bright sunlight.
Much easier to personalise (e.g. by printing your own inserts that match your exact needs)
You can tear pages out and give them to people, stick them on the wall, etc.
Aren't capitals done in Symbian by writing at the to of the screen rather than the bottom?
And closing the flip seems to me to be a sensible signal that "I am finished with the PDA, switching back to phone mode now". I'm rather taken with the idea of a device that focuses on being a phone when I tell it to.
Eh? You don't want a PDA, because you prefer paper. OK, that's fine. Paper is a very useful and underrated PDA technology; backups are tricky and it has capacity issues, but it is very versatile and you can't beat that cost/price ratio.
But you don't want a cellphone because it isn't a good enough PDA? That's daft. You don't want a PDA, remember?
Unless what you want is a GPRS internet access device... is that it?
It's important to distinguish between the three classes of "smartphones".
Type one is the PDA with a phone in it; e.g. i-mate Jam, Treo 650, Sony P910i, Nokia 9500. How I distinguish these devices is that they have a big touch screen in them. They usually have had the form factor adjusted to make them look just like big phones. You need these if you expect to enter much info into the device - because you need handwriting recognition/graffitti/a QWERTY keyboard. This new Dell sounds like it will be one of these.
Type two is the phone with a PDA in it; e.g. i-mate SPVC5000, Motorola MPX220, Nokia 7610. These devices have a phone sized non-touch screen, and entry is purely via the phone keyboard, but they have PDA software on them so you can upload apps and so on. Obviously, with the phone keypad the only way of entering text, these are much more read-only devices, but they are only slightly bigger than an ordinary phone (and usually smaller than the 3G phones here in the UK).
Type 3 is the phone that isn't a smartphone, but has really good PIM applications, like your 6230. These devices are recognizable because (apart from Java games etc.) you cannot normally put a pile of third party apps on them.
I was always a two-device man myself, but recently had an opportunity to test a Sendo X smartphone (type 2). I was impressed that it was just about useable for me; I missed being able to quickly scribble a note but it did everything else I need from a PDA. (and the text entry thing might be because I am old and so cannot do SMS text entry at 80 wpm like the kids today can!) In the end I rejected it as a device, but this was because of a bug in the phone app, not because it's PDA capabilities are lacking.
So it looks like my next device will be integrated. I think a type 1 is what I need, given that I do occasionally scribble notes fast, but a type 2 + a "hipster PDA" would also meet my needs. Plus of course, my phone company will be subsidising the cost.
This is why everyone predicts the PDA market is dying. With the early Treos and the Sony P800, the type 1's became good enough to start eating away at the high end of the market, and the low end is being nibbled away because everyone has type 3s anyway, and subsidised type 2s meet the low end market's needs very cheaply.
Lumping me in with the poor spellers who hang about on Slashdot, indeed. A quick test... yes, spelt antidisestablishmentarianism right first time!
Anyhow, Chambers 21st gives "wat" as a type of Buddist temple. Bi is both a phrase in chinese medicine, indicating a block in one's qi, and also of course as a colloquial word for bisexual.
Obviously these are relatively obscure words, but my point is to reveal the flaw in this "split a word" method.
It is meant to work by preventing a brute force attack finding the words in a dictionary, but as you and all the previous posters have demonstrated, people are not able to reliably identify all the words in the dictionary.
My point, and one that is often overlooked, is that while patching the exploit is more secure than hiding the greeting, hiding the greeting is more secure than not doing anything at all.
People label STO as just bad in itself. It's not. Many people think it is more secure than it is, but that doesn't make it bad.
Well, after reading your post I arranged for my tape drive to explode in a fireball from a lightning strike, and it did slightly destroy the tapes in the drive. Well, I suppose I might have been able to put them in my spare drive, but what with the bing on fire thing they were a little tricky to pick up.
Never fear though, my lawsuit is in the post to you.
It is probably going to work here in the UK, albeit with some delays, because the Govt. has been able to pressurise the BBC into pouring money into it's digital services.
They've produced quite a lot of free digital TV, very little of which anyone watches, but, by releasing their popular shows from the analogue channels a week earlier on digital, they have had some results.
I would probably do it myself but I'd need to do too much work on my antenna and I can't be bothered. I'll wait til nearer 2010, which is when my region is scheduled to go dark.
Since both "bi" and "cycle" are genuine words (as are "wat" and "lance" for that matter), thank you for proving my point that this method is deeply flawed...
Am I the only person who watched Doctor Who on the telly yesterday and saw the trail for next week's episode, which had a Dalek in it?
Am I also the only person to deduce that the Daleks might be back from the fact that the 6th episode is called "Dalek"? (The names of all the episodes except the twelth have been known for quite some time.)
Was I the only person who read in various news articles that the BBC had sucessfully concluded negotiations with Terry Nation's estate to allow them to use the Daleks?
Try it folks - pick an entirely random password, and sit down and type it 50 times in a row. You'll learn it in the muscle memory of your hands, not in your head.
I actually do not know what my password is - recently I had to enter it on a PDA using graffitti, and was forced to go sit at a nearby keyboard, type it, and watch over my own shoulder so to speak to see what my password was.
They wouldn't like your use of security through obscurity with the web page either. For some reason, many "security experts" don't seem to appreciate that security through obscurity really is security. It's not perfect, but if you think any form of security is perfect you are at risk.
Yes, taking "lampshade" and sticking 56 in the middle is much more secure than taking two seperate words, such as "lamp" and "shade", and sticking 56 in the middle.
Since this is the anti-beowulf solution (it's one PC pretending to be lots of PCs, while beowulf is a lot of PCs pretending to be one), then if you clustered them, they would cancel themselves out in a flash of gamma radiation.
You should try it, a bit of hard radiation might do your spelling some good.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree on the big buttons. After much experimenting, I've ended up with large icons on my Quicklaunch toolbar - being larger they are easier targets to hit, and so more efficent.
I do loose some screen space to it, but on the other hand having the quicklaunch icons set to large makes the task bar and the notificaiton area stack up in double rows.
Well, providing you use the right extensions... er ...
Pah! Real men put the Cat5 in their mouth and interpret the tingling.
PDA is better than paper because::
You can back it up to your PC or memory card
It can play music, video, video games (though you can put paper games into a Paper device. I like sudoku myself)
Easier to read when it is dark.
It can store a lot of info in a small space - you can load a memory card with a hundred e-books if you want.
You can get connectivity for it and use it to surf the web (poorly), check your e-mail, ssh to your box, etc.
Syncronises with your PC's PIM.
It can sound alarms.
Paper is better than PDA because
Very cheap.
Wider rage of form-factors. (Compare a pad of small post-its, a hipster PDA (which is a dozen index cards and a bulldog clip, for those not familiar with it), a moleskine notebook, a A4 ring-bound pad, a filofax, a big portfolio, etc. etc.)
Survives water, drops etc. better
Never runs out of batteries
Parts easier to obtain
Easier to read in bright sunlight.
Much easier to personalise (e.g. by printing your own inserts that match your exact needs)
You can tear pages out and give them to people, stick them on the wall, etc.
Aren't capitals done in Symbian by writing at the to of the screen rather than the bottom?
And closing the flip seems to me to be a sensible signal that "I am finished with the PDA, switching back to phone mode now". I'm rather taken with the idea of a device that focuses on being a phone when I tell it to.
Eh? You don't want a PDA, because you prefer paper. OK, that's fine. Paper is a very useful and underrated PDA technology; backups are tricky and it has capacity issues, but it is very versatile and you can't beat that cost/price ratio.
But you don't want a cellphone because it isn't a good enough PDA? That's daft. You don't want a PDA, remember?
Unless what you want is a GPRS internet access device... is that it?
It's important to distinguish between the three classes of "smartphones".
Type one is the PDA with a phone in it; e.g. i-mate Jam, Treo 650, Sony P910i, Nokia 9500. How I distinguish these devices is that they have a big touch screen in them. They usually have had the form factor adjusted to make them look just like big phones. You need these if you expect to enter much info into the device - because you need handwriting recognition/graffitti/a QWERTY keyboard. This new Dell sounds like it will be one of these.
Type two is the phone with a PDA in it; e.g. i-mate SPVC5000, Motorola MPX220, Nokia 7610. These devices have a phone sized non-touch screen, and entry is purely via the phone keyboard, but they have PDA software on them so you can upload apps and so on. Obviously, with the phone keypad the only way of entering text, these are much more read-only devices, but they are only slightly bigger than an ordinary phone (and usually smaller than the 3G phones here in the UK).
Type 3 is the phone that isn't a smartphone, but has really good PIM applications, like your 6230. These devices are recognizable because (apart from Java games etc.) you cannot normally put a pile of third party apps on them.
I was always a two-device man myself, but recently had an opportunity to test a Sendo X smartphone (type 2). I was impressed that it was just about useable for me; I missed being able to quickly scribble a note but it did everything else I need from a PDA. (and the text entry thing might be because I am old and so cannot do SMS text entry at 80 wpm like the kids today can!) In the end I rejected it as a device, but this was because of a bug in the phone app, not because it's PDA capabilities are lacking.
So it looks like my next device will be integrated. I think a type 1 is what I need, given that I do occasionally scribble notes fast, but a type 2 + a "hipster PDA" would also meet my needs. Plus of course, my phone company will be subsidising the cost.
This is why everyone predicts the PDA market is dying. With the early Treos and the Sony P800, the type 1's became good enough to start eating away at the high end of the market, and the low end is being nibbled away because everyone has type 3s anyway, and subsidised type 2s meet the low end market's needs very cheaply.
You start on that, I'll start on W32/Bagle.
I hope people don't think I'm being mean about BeOS, I love it. Just can't resist an obvious joke.
How dare you! How dare you!
Lumping me in with the poor spellers who hang about on Slashdot, indeed. A quick test... yes, spelt antidisestablishmentarianism right first time!
Anyhow, Chambers 21st gives "wat" as a type of Buddist temple. Bi is both a phrase in chinese medicine, indicating a block in one's qi, and also of course as a colloquial word for bisexual.
Obviously these are relatively obscure words, but my point is to reveal the flaw in this "split a word" method.
It is meant to work by preventing a brute force attack finding the words in a dictionary, but as you and all the previous posters have demonstrated, people are not able to reliably identify all the words in the dictionary.
So the method is clearly not reliable.
Because if anyone had written a BeOS virus it would be announced on BeBits - they need to get the application numbers up somehow.
No viruses on BeOS. Actually, no virus checkers either...
Yup, I live in the countryside.
No, it doesn't.
My point, and one that is often overlooked, is that while patching the exploit is more secure than hiding the greeting, hiding the greeting is more secure than not doing anything at all.
People label STO as just bad in itself. It's not. Many people think it is more secure than it is, but that doesn't make it bad.
Well, after reading your post I arranged for my tape drive to explode in a fireball from a lightning strike, and it did slightly destroy the tapes in the drive. Well, I suppose I might have been able to put them in my spare drive, but what with the bing on fire thing they were a little tricky to pick up.
Never fear though, my lawsuit is in the post to you.
It is probably going to work here in the UK, albeit with some delays, because the Govt. has been able to pressurise the BBC into pouring money into it's digital services.
They've produced quite a lot of free digital TV, very little of which anyone watches, but, by releasing their popular shows from the analogue channels a week earlier on digital, they have had some results.
I would probably do it myself but I'd need to do too much work on my antenna and I can't be bothered. I'll wait til nearer 2010, which is when my region is scheduled to go dark.
He doesn't? Well, good think they cancelled it then.
Since both "bi" and "cycle" are genuine words (as are "wat" and "lance" for that matter), thank you for proving my point that this method is deeply flawed...
I was about to say, why haven't we got reviews then. Thanks, sounds interesting.
I might have to buy one of the darn things...
Am I the only person who watched Doctor Who on the telly yesterday and saw the trail for next week's episode, which had a Dalek in it?
Am I also the only person to deduce that the Daleks might be back from the fact that the 6th episode is called "Dalek"? (The names of all the episodes except the twelth have been known for quite some time.)
Was I the only person who read in various news articles that the BBC had sucessfully concluded negotiations with Terry Nation's estate to allow them to use the Daleks?
Exactly the method I use. It works superbly well.
Try it folks - pick an entirely random password, and sit down and type it 50 times in a row. You'll learn it in the muscle memory of your hands, not in your head.
I actually do not know what my password is - recently I had to enter it on a PDA using graffitti, and was forced to go sit at a nearby keyboard, type it, and watch over my own shoulder so to speak to see what my password was.
Exactly! Look at that recent attempt in London to steal 423 million bucks from the Sumitomo Mitsu bank.
How did those devilish hackers get through their elaborate password systems? What fiendish technique did they use?
They dressed up as cleaners, got hired, and put $10 keyboard loggers on people's PCs.
They wouldn't like your use of security through obscurity with the web page either. For some reason, many "security experts" don't seem to appreciate that security through obscurity really is security. It's not perfect, but if you think any form of security is perfect you are at risk.
Yes, taking "lampshade" and sticking 56 in the middle is much more secure than taking two seperate words, such as "lamp" and "shade", and sticking 56 in the middle.
Implementing X over SSL would be pretty easy for these doohickeys, so I imagine they are available in secure flavours.
Heck, half these things run a cut down Linux as the thin client's local OS.
Easy enough to imagine.
Since this is the anti-beowulf solution (it's one PC pretending to be lots of PCs, while beowulf is a lot of PCs pretending to be one), then if you clustered them, they would cancel themselves out in a flash of gamma radiation.
You should try it, a bit of hard radiation might do your spelling some good.