I don't know, it seems a fair thing to point out. If you switch from Windows to anything else, you have the risk that some application you depend on for your daily work will not have a version for that OS. It's in the nature of Windows having such a huge market share, and before you switch you need to be sure that everything you need will run on the new platform. This applies to Linux switchers too.
Of course, you may be able to switch to something similar, but in many instances this is not possible.
Well, everyone who reads slashdot is I hope sligtly familiar with how the opensource model works; if there are developers who want it enough they'll write it. If there aren't, they won't. I reckon thought that PalmOS is your best bet, given that the conduit mechanisms are well understood and the tools readilly available.
More practically, you could always contribute to Mozilla in a non-developmental way, such as writing docs, take some burden off the developers and encourage them to work on a conduit.
I believe there are people having sucess connecting Bluetooth enabled GPS's to a Palm, that is worth a look. And of course cable connections are well established.
As you observed, using the SD slot (it's not a CF slot on the Palm made devices!) prevents you storing stuff on an SD card.
I suspect the Garmin will prove to be a tremendous piece of kit, though, so if you can get hold of one I'd suggest it is worth serious consideration.
Well, perhaps it is getting hot, but it isn't hot now. The Zarus is a nice machine, but if you look at PalmOS you have a much wider range of hardware, so you have a better chance of finding hardware that matches your needs - you can get a big fat Sony with every gadget imaginable, or a tiny little M500 that you can drop in your shirt pocket and forget it is there.
I'd say choosing an OS widely considered to be the best focussed at the PDA device market was a better choice than one that has been shoe-horned into a PDA size - of course this is mostly a criticism of PocketPC; Linux is good at fitting odd devices, but I'm not sure it's the best choice.
And of course your can VNC to your workstation and from there run any remote admin tools you want.
I guess an RDP (i.e. Terminal server) client is about possible, since the protocol is open and there is already an open source Linux client; anyone fancy the challenge?;-)
Indeed, I must now do over 60% of my reading with my Palm. For me I think the portability is the key, you can fit a whole library on a cheap MMC card, and mine is always in my pocket, so I can read in the queue at the supermarket, or while in the "littlest room". Why am I using a euphemism on Slashdot?
Also with software like Plucker or Avantgo you can sync things like Slashdot or a newspaper web site to them as well,so they can replace magazines as well as books.
One suggestion for those of a PC bent; there are Palm simulators (used primarily for software development) that will run on your PC and will handle any of the many Palm document readers.
I think a lot depends on whether working from home is considered part of your job as to who should pay for it.
We pay for people to connect into our network from home as we consider that getting people to work from home is worth the relatively small ammount of money. We offer a mixture of services to suit different people; direct RAS, VPN, whatever.
I think your argument that if you aren't prepared to pay for something for work use yourself you don't need it sounds a little off-set. If, for example, my boss determined that I needed a laptop for my job but then expected me to pay for it, he would get short shrift!
I'd probably go for cheap broadband myself if possible, true, but I haven't and again; if my boss thinks I need it (and he does) then he should sign off on paying for it (which he will once budget gets signed off)
Disclaimer: I work for a hardware manufacturer who amongst other things makes products that do remote access.
What do the SD card association say? What do the manufacturers say when you complain that their cards have failed?
I suspect that you are failing the cards since the manufacturers do not expect usage patterns like you have; most purchasers of high capacity SD cards are using them because they want to keep a relatively small number of large files on them (JPG on your camera, MP3 in your player, databases in you PDA), not thousands of tiny cards.
Maybe you are outside the design spec, or maybe (especially since the sandisk and lexar fail differently) the specific cards are bad implementations of the standard that "normal" users won't ever notice.
It's not the installation I have an issue with, I am pretty familiar with Linux by now and my specific difficulty is fairly deep, a driver problem with my soundcard.
My problem is an interesting one from the non-technical aspect; my laptop is a IBM thinkpad 600e, and so I have genuine Linux support form the manufacturer, excellent web resources for that model (Thomas Hoods superb page), heck Alan Cox owns one of the damn things, but my soundcard just doesn't work. (I should poitn out it works for Thomas, Alan, etc. so it is some vagary with my particular machine) Under Win2K it just does work.
I don't want this to sound like an anti-MS rant, I love many things about Linux - a proper command prompt for a start - I'd love to use it - but not without better driver support.
I've had a epiphany, you genuinely believe that Open Source is so good it is worth breaking stuff that works in order to have it, don't you?
I see it now, this is why I am a failure at getting Linux on my Laptop; a disturbing lack of faith that keeps me going back to Win2K just because I want the darn thing to work.
I have to say that this is potentially a hell of a lot more practical than hundreds of other odd projects to port Linux to wierd hardware.
Some ideas, most of which are based around the principle that this allows the Linux community to add features to the pod that apple haven't gotten round to yet:
Stuff Apple might very well do anyway: Ogg support, and perhaps other freaky formats. Playlist editing on the Pod
Stuff Apple are very unlikely to do: Ipod's store the files on the disk but name them randomly so you cannot access them easily when it is operating as a firewire drive; a TuxPod (I'll want royalties on that name please) could store them as regular files so you no longer need special software to load a pod up and can use it to play your songs on a PC without needing to keep a copy on the PC. It should be possible to put something together to allow you to use the scroll wheel to enter text (I'm thinking something like the system Stephen Hawking uses to enter text into his voice synth) making it capable of all sorts of PDA functions. AvantGo client.
I mean, if they are sending you on courses that no-one can figure out how they apply to the work you do...;-)
Answer would presumably depend on the size of your IT department. If you are vast, recieiving thousands of calls each day, then sure; statistical analysis could perhaps identify weaknesses in the processes. If you aren't vast, then I can't see it being much use.
Sounds like you have the hammer problem; if all you have is a hammer, ten everything looks like a nail. If you are a statistician, then you approach everything as a statistical problem.
Well, recently I spent a week using a Pocket PC instead of my trusty Palm. A 206MHz Strongarm, rather than the newer XScale, but at the moment thereis little difference between the two.
And I hated it. The user interface, the quality of the built-in software, the fact that I could get an hourglass up just by doing normal things.
What did I like about it? Well, the hi-res screen was lovely, and playing media back was kinda neat (although I much prefer my iPod for that).
So my experience with the PocketPC taught me that my ideal PDA would run PalmOS, have faster SD card access, a hi-res screen and decent audio out. Which pretty much describes a Tungsten, although the audio quality is not quite there nbext (software patch in the works to fix that though).
Sorry, this isn't clear. Exactly what major features is it lacking apart from integrated wireless? It's basically a state of the art PalmOS device with a GPS built into it!
Myself, given a choice between the OS5 Sony and this, I'd go for this even though I don't really need a GPS device; GPS sounds just as useful as a digital camera, and the Garmin doesn't have a Memory Stick slot!
Well, besides the point made above about Palm in general not needing as much RAM as Pocekt PCs etc., it's important to remember that more RAM=shorter battery life.
The correct thing to do with a PalmOS device is to store bulky data on a memory card.
Compare it with your desktop PC. You don't put 80Gb of RAM in it, do you? No, you put 256Mb of RAM and an 80Gb HDD. Same with the Palm; the 32Mb is for running programs (and for storing stuff you want always to be available).
OK, some would say this contradicts my point above about getting Bluetooth or 802.11b via the SDIO card, but if you want to dial the internet and listen to MP3s at the same time, you have my permission to buy a Pocket PC. They suck on many levels, but do have a lot of wizzy features for people who like that sort of thing.;-)
Er, am I revealing woeful ignorance or are there a lot of other people out there who haven't the faintest idea what the heck this is? Couldn't an informative link have been provided?
OK, 5 minutes with Google later, it appears to be something coming from the Scouting movement; kids build cars out of a basic kit of a block of wood and wheels, and then race them down an inclined track. So you get competition, woodworking skills, and parent/child bonding as Grandad shows you how to work a lathe etc. (OK, you don;t use a lathe to make a wooden car but obviously since I don;t know what it is I have no woodworking skills)
Reverse engineering etc. may not even be necessary; I've seen mods where people just use a sector copy program to copy the beginning of the existing drive to a newer, high capacity one.
A correction re: Ipods; they use a real IDE laptop hard drive, not PCMCIA; what differs from other players is that they use the new smaller 1.8" laptop drives rather than the more usual 2.5" drives.
I'd suggest anyone planning to upgrade a hard disk one stick witha 2.5" model anyhow, as these come in bigger capacities; IBM, for example, have a 60Gb Travelstar. Over 40 days of music, that should last you.;-)
I'm, for my sins, a moderator over at the Palm discussion forums on www.brighthand.com.
Our experience on the board is that while the SD cards are theoretically faster than MMC, the speed difference is not very noticeable, and in fact differences between manufacturers seem to account for as much variation.
However, this may be a hardware issue with Palm handhelds as the new super-fast Tungsten T seems able to access cards a lot faster, and some people are now reporting SD cards as faster than MMC.
For my self, I have used both in my M505 and found almost no difference in speed, so from now on I would go for MMC as it is fast enough and so much cheaper.
It always seemed to me to be not unreasonable that they make Terminators is small batches that look the same (this would seem an efficency in getting the most out of a design without having them all the same), and that the Future John has acquired just one batch.
No, what bothers me about the plot of all three is that no-one has had the entirely obvious idea of taking a phase plasma rifle in the 40 watt range, coating it with terminator skin, and sending that back with the terminator.
(Mutters to one self "fiction....real life....fiction...real life")
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know, it seems a fair thing to point out. If you switch from Windows to anything else, you have the risk that some application you depend on for your daily work will not have a version for that OS. It's in the nature of Windows having such a huge market share, and before you switch you need to be sure that everything you need will run on the new platform. This applies to Linux switchers too.
Of course, you may be able to switch to something similar, but in many instances this is not possible.
Well, everyone who reads slashdot is I hope sligtly familiar with how the opensource model works; if there are developers who want it enough they'll write it. If there aren't, they won't. I reckon thought that PalmOS is your best bet, given that the conduit mechanisms are well understood and the tools readilly available.
More practically, you could always contribute to Mozilla in a non-developmental way, such as writing docs, take some burden off the developers and encourage them to work on a conduit.
I believe there are people having sucess connecting Bluetooth enabled GPS's to a Palm, that is worth a look. And of course cable connections are well established.
As you observed, using the SD slot (it's not a CF slot on the Palm made devices!) prevents you storing stuff on an SD card.
I suspect the Garmin will prove to be a tremendous piece of kit, though, so if you can get hold of one I'd suggest it is worth serious consideration.
Well, perhaps it is getting hot, but it isn't hot now. The Zarus is a nice machine, but if you look at PalmOS you have a much wider range of hardware, so you have a better chance of finding hardware that matches your needs - you can get a big fat Sony with every gadget imaginable, or a tiny little M500 that you can drop in your shirt pocket and forget it is there.
I'd say choosing an OS widely considered to be the best focussed at the PDA device market was a better choice than one that has been shoe-horned into a PDA size - of course this is mostly a criticism of PocketPC; Linux is good at fitting odd devices, but I'm not sure it's the best choice.
And of course your can VNC to your workstation and from there run any remote admin tools you want.
;-)
I guess an RDP (i.e. Terminal server) client is about possible, since the protocol is open and there is already an open source Linux client; anyone fancy the challenge?
Indeed, I must now do over 60% of my reading with my Palm. For me I think the portability is the key, you can fit a whole library on a cheap MMC card, and mine is always in my pocket, so I can read in the queue at the supermarket, or while in the "littlest room". Why am I using a euphemism on Slashdot?
Also with software like Plucker or Avantgo you can sync things like Slashdot or a newspaper web site to them as well,so they can replace magazines as well as books.
One suggestion for those of a PC bent; there are Palm simulators (used primarily for software development) that will run on your PC and will handle any of the many Palm document readers.
I think a lot depends on whether working from home is considered part of your job as to who should pay for it.
We pay for people to connect into our network from home as we consider that getting people to work from home is worth the relatively small ammount of money. We offer a mixture of services to suit different people; direct RAS, VPN, whatever.
I think your argument that if you aren't prepared to pay for something for work use yourself you don't need it sounds a little off-set. If, for example, my boss determined that I needed a laptop for my job but then expected me to pay for it, he would get short shrift!
I'd probably go for cheap broadband myself if possible, true, but I haven't and again; if my boss thinks I need it (and he does) then he should sign off on paying for it (which he will once budget gets signed off)
Disclaimer: I work for a hardware manufacturer who amongst other things makes products that do remote access.
What do the SD card association say? What do the manufacturers say when you complain that their cards have failed?
I suspect that you are failing the cards since the manufacturers do not expect usage patterns like you have; most purchasers of high capacity SD cards are using them because they want to keep a relatively small number of large files on them (JPG on your camera, MP3 in your player, databases in you PDA), not thousands of tiny cards.
Maybe you are outside the design spec, or maybe (especially since the sandisk and lexar fail differently) the specific cards are bad implementations of the standard that "normal" users won't ever notice.
It's not the installation I have an issue with, I am pretty familiar with Linux by now and my specific difficulty is fairly deep, a driver problem with my soundcard.
My problem is an interesting one from the non-technical aspect; my laptop is a IBM thinkpad 600e, and so I have genuine Linux support form the manufacturer, excellent web resources for that model (Thomas Hoods superb page), heck Alan Cox owns one of the damn things, but my soundcard just doesn't work. (I should poitn out it works for Thomas, Alan, etc. so it is some vagary with my particular machine) Under Win2K it just does work.
I don't want this to sound like an anti-MS rant, I love many things about Linux - a proper command prompt for a start - I'd love to use it - but not without better driver support.
Too late, Microsoft have bought the patent and named it Black.Net
I've had a epiphany, you genuinely believe that Open Source is so good it is worth breaking stuff that works in order to have it, don't you?
I see it now, this is why I am a failure at getting Linux on my Laptop; a disturbing lack of faith that keeps me going back to Win2K just because I want the darn thing to work.
I have to say that this is potentially a hell of a lot more practical than hundreds of other odd projects to port Linux to wierd hardware.
Some ideas, most of which are based around the principle that this allows the Linux community to add features to the pod that apple haven't gotten round to yet:
Stuff Apple might very well do anyway:
Ogg support, and perhaps other freaky formats.
Playlist editing on the Pod
Stuff Apple are very unlikely to do:
Ipod's store the files on the disk but name them randomly so you cannot access them easily when it is operating as a firewire drive; a TuxPod (I'll want royalties on that name please) could store them as regular files so you no longer need special software to load a pod up and can use it to play your songs on a PC without needing to keep a copy on the PC.
It should be possible to put something together to allow you to use the scroll wheel to enter text (I'm thinking something like the system Stephen Hawking uses to enter text into his voice synth) making it capable of all sorts of PDA functions.
AvantGo client.
I'm glad soosterh explained who this Linus guy is, I've been wondering about that.
I mean, if they are sending you on courses that no-one can figure out how they apply to the work you do... ;-)
Answer would presumably depend on the size of your IT department. If you are vast, recieiving thousands of calls each day, then sure; statistical analysis could perhaps identify weaknesses in the processes. If you aren't vast, then I can't see it being much use.
Sounds like you have the hammer problem; if all you have is a hammer, ten everything looks like a nail. If you are a statistician, then you approach everything as a statistical problem.
Well, recently I spent a week using a Pocket PC instead of my trusty Palm. A 206MHz Strongarm, rather than the newer XScale, but at the moment thereis little difference between the two.
And I hated it. The user interface, the quality of the built-in software, the fact that I could get an hourglass up just by doing normal things.
What did I like about it? Well, the hi-res screen was lovely, and playing media back was kinda neat (although I much prefer my iPod for that).
So my experience with the PocketPC taught me that my ideal PDA would run PalmOS, have faster SD card access, a hi-res screen and decent audio out. Which pretty much describes a Tungsten, although the audio quality is not quite there nbext (software patch in the works to fix that though).
Sorry, this isn't clear. Exactly what major features is it lacking apart from integrated wireless? It's basically a state of the art PalmOS device with a GPS built into it!
Myself, given a choice between the OS5 Sony and this, I'd go for this even though I don't really need a GPS device; GPS sounds just as useful as a digital camera, and the Garmin doesn't have a Memory Stick slot!
Good point, although a cynic might point to the GPS antenna... OK, OK, that folds in when not in use, I know.
Actually I imagine it would need quite a lot of force to snap an SD card in too.
Well, besides the point made above about Palm in general not needing as much RAM as Pocekt PCs etc., it's important to remember that more RAM=shorter battery life.
;-)
The correct thing to do with a PalmOS device is to store bulky data on a memory card.
Compare it with your desktop PC. You don't put 80Gb of RAM in it, do you? No, you put 256Mb of RAM and an 80Gb HDD. Same with the Palm; the 32Mb is for running programs (and for storing stuff you want always to be available).
OK, some would say this contradicts my point above about getting Bluetooth or 802.11b via the SDIO card, but if you want to dial the internet and listen to MP3s at the same time, you have my permission to buy a Pocket PC. They suck on many levels, but do have a lot of wizzy features for people who like that sort of thing.
So, if this is SD/IO capable then you can drop a bluetooth card in there.
I stand corrected, and research indicates other authorities too.
Mind you, since I have bought an iPod since I posted my comment, I'm too in love to care!
I guess Mr. Jobs's take on that would be that you need a 17" powerbook. ;-)
Actually, who doesn't need one?
Er, am I revealing woeful ignorance or are there a lot of other people out there who haven't the faintest idea what the heck this is? Couldn't an informative link have been provided?
OK, 5 minutes with Google later, it appears to be something coming from the Scouting movement; kids build cars out of a basic kit of a block of wood and wheels, and then race them down an inclined track. So you get competition, woodworking skills, and parent/child bonding as Grandad shows you how to work a lathe etc. (OK, you don;t use a lathe to make a wooden car but obviously since I don;t know what it is I have no woodworking skills)
Reverse engineering etc. may not even be necessary; I've seen mods where people just use a sector copy program to copy the beginning of the existing drive to a newer, high capacity one.
;-)
A correction re: Ipods; they use a real IDE laptop hard drive, not PCMCIA; what differs from other players is that they use the new smaller 1.8" laptop drives rather than the more usual 2.5" drives.
I'd suggest anyone planning to upgrade a hard disk one stick witha 2.5" model anyhow, as these come in bigger capacities; IBM, for example, have a 60Gb Travelstar. Over 40 days of music, that should last you.
I'm, for my sins, a moderator over at the Palm discussion forums on www.brighthand.com.
Our experience on the board is that while the SD cards are theoretically faster than MMC, the speed difference is not very noticeable, and in fact differences between manufacturers seem to account for as much variation.
However, this may be a hardware issue with Palm handhelds as the new super-fast Tungsten T seems able to access cards a lot faster, and some people are now reporting SD cards as faster than MMC.
For my self, I have used both in my M505 and found almost no difference in speed, so from now on I would go for MMC as it is fast enough and so much cheaper.
It always seemed to me to be not unreasonable that they make Terminators is small batches that look the same (this would seem an efficency in getting the most out of a design without having them all the same), and that the Future John has acquired just one batch.
No, what bothers me about the plot of all three is that no-one has had the entirely obvious idea of taking a phase plasma rifle in the 40 watt range, coating it with terminator skin, and sending that back with the terminator.
(Mutters to one self "fiction....real life....fiction...real life")