You're right. I failed to take into account the different market segments. PDAs are actually devices that are likely to remain usable long past other digital hardware.
I can defend my initial post by saying that I wasn't denigrating PDA longevity, by passing them on to others, not tossing them out. I assumed that the inheritors would likely not be as tech savvy as the early adopters and not as interested in OSS features, just PIM please.
I was making elitist assumptions about/. readers in particular, my bad.
Hey, I'm not making fun. I'm curious, did you buy it new, or was it a hand me down?
The fact that you are still getting decent functionality out of the old thing disproves one premise of the article, that CSS will hinder long term usage.
There are several types of PDA users, most of which will find no benefit with OSS.
I'd hate to be the help desk guy at Ernst & Young who has partners bringing OSS devices into the fold. Just hand out HP PDAs devices with the XP laptops and KISS.
Even geeks like myself get their OSS fix with desktop and laptop devices, sometimes a PDA is just a PDA, not another statement about tech politics.
That said, I'm always going to do a wide search for my next PDA when it's time, including OSS supporting hardware.
Not knowing what to expect out of a PDA? How about reminding me of important dates and meetings; keeping a searchable contact list; allowing for short note taking; email.
Fun extras that I can do with my new PPC Toshiba e755: Surf web with builtin 802.11b will on the toilet; show off some pics; listen to music; watch videos I've captured with my Radeon A-i-W and crunched with command line WM encoder 9 to incredibly small, smooth and clean files.
Some "innovative uses" by "inspired thinkers" mentioned in article: Install Apache to show your webpage off to friends; ease of upgrade to new device by writing your own compatible SW (anyone ever hear of Export|CSV?
Oh, and I love this: "If you are lucky, you can download a new version that runs on PalmOS 5. If you aren't, forget your beloved application."
Yes! That's inspired thinking and innovation, being unable to move on from your beloved 1994 PDA apps.
This article made me remember to pull my old Handspring platinum out of a drawer and give it to my sister. I'm glad it comes with a solid and simple OS so that she can stay focused on her chosen field, anthropology, and just use its PIM functions. Also important is the fact that her Dell runs XP.
If the Handspring can run both, its own solid OS, or alternatively, linux, is it the best solution? Let's the early adopter poke around, but let's the inheriter stick with solid CSS OS.
I'd certainly never want to pass a Taurus, or other dedicated OSS PDA down to a non-techie relation
All the main advantages pointed out are irrelevent. I buy a new PDA every 2 years minimum and pass my old one to family or friends. They don't want to monkey around with open source. I don't need to be get their phone calls asking for help.
More to the point: How long do people actually plan on using a PDA? Who is still carrying around a five year old Palm?
This article is unabashed ideology over smart tech info. Just more incestous amplification for those socially clueless folk who occupy the open source echo chamber.
At what point does the government have the power to dictate that an entire industry must change it's technology? It's not as if this is an issue of public safety. I just don't understand how the Feds create these kinds of requirements.
As a libertarian, I can name only a few areas where the gov't has a legitimate function. Regulating the common radio spectrum is one of them.
What's the alternative? I haven't seen a free market argument yet that would work in the arena of such a unique and finite community owned resource
I'm always open to new economic ideas, let's hear 'em.
Thinking about getting an iMac isn't the same as getting one. The original poster stated, "The iMac at first seems a good option, until you see the limited hard drive and editing capabilities. I offer the guy an opinion on the G400-TV, which is a video capture card (I own and use one), and you only offer name-calling, uninformed opinion and exclamation points....either way you look at it, the G400 is out of the question. Are you the one who started the thread by asking for advice on NLE setups. If you are, then I'm sorry my advice wasn't useful, if not, let him decide what is "out of the question." Your incorrect information is certainly not helping anyone make an informed decision. I agree with the poster's originally posted concern that an iMac is no platform to do anything but very small scale home videos. If you have anything substantive to add, feel free.
A G400 is a video card from Matrox, not a computer. As a matter of fact it will install in an eMachine. Chill on the name-calling, we all make mistakes, this time it was your turn.
I like the G400 also, I was disappointed to discover that my G400-TV will not output to two monitors, only one monitor and one NTSC TV. It's useless for PC work because of the low-res of the TV, unless your working at 640x480 screen res.
I just put together a NLE system. Here's what I got: ABIT BE-6 motherboard (with UDMA66 onboard), PIII 450, 128MB RAM, one 30GB Western Digital UDMA66 HD and one 10GB Western Digital 66HD, a Matrox G-400TV (for analog video input and editing) and a Pinnacle Studio DV 1394 firewire capture card. I use a Canon GL-1 MiniDV camera and I've been using the Studio DV software that came with the capture card. SO far I'm very impressed. I've tried to use BEOS for it's media dedication (huge file sizes allowed), but I've given up on BEOS. I'm about to install Adobe Premiere, but it might be more then I need. Good luck
Oh, yeah. I forgot all about that. They did the same damn thing to me. And I could never get through to get my money back. They claimed it was a mistake. You'd sign on for the free minutes (even though you had to give your VISA card number) adn then you'd cancel before the account actually kicked in. Yet, you'd start seeing AOL charges on your card month after month. I think it took me about 6 months to get them to stop and I don't think I ever got all my money back from them.
Enough already. Until there are significant new HTML standards that browsers need to be upgraded for, these types of "upgrades" are just marketing hype. Who needs a CNN-branded browser? Or a WalMart browser. Unless, as the story said that it will work "better" on the CNN site. Uh oh, there goes the web, here come the tech support calls, "How come Sally get's the rotating CNN logo and I don't?" This ranks up there with the new Barbie with the navel.
I agree whole-heartedly. I second ever word in your post. I will continue to avoid Sony products whenever possible and urge all my friends to do the same. Especially that stupid memory stick.
I'm sorry, I should have been clearer. You're right, when I'm transfering my pics, I use the PCMCIA adapter and they transfer in less then 3 seconds.
I was referring to the actual write speed while taking pics. I hate that damn delay between pics when the flashrom gets full and it has to write to the card. That takes upwards of 30-50 seconds sometimes. In the meantime, I got some fine female with her booty in the air and I want to snap some pics damn it!
I'm curious, how does the write time seem to be with your camera. I have a Kodak DC-260 and a 48 MB compact flash card. The write times are too slow. I also have a Sony Mavica that uses FDD which takes a very long time to write one 640x480 jpg. It's nice to have a shareable media, but for my next camera, I want fast write speed.
Anyone compared compact flash, memory stick, and SmartMedia cards? which one is fastest?
This may sell in Japan, but it ain't gonna pass muster anywhere else. Sony has been pushing their anemic "memory" stick down their captive Japanese consumer's throats. I think those memory sticks will be about as popular as chop sticks in the ole' US.
Thanks for the input. You're right about the DTP being almost undo-able on anything but Mac up until just recently. I'm not borderline, I just don't have any need for Mac anymore. My first PC was an apple IIe and when my neighbor got a classic, I freaked at how cool and functional the WYSIWYG was.
I do get pissed though when the press and mac advocates try to frame the company as a friendlier one. I recall what they did to Radius et al when Mac gave licenseing a shot. That was plainly immoral and for that alone, I'd try to avoid giving them my $.
BTW, here's the Salon article which was written by a woman not a "he" as people have mistakenly posted. I have kept an open mind from day one, trying to judge Mac on its merits. Many of my gripes are petty things like to full screen maximize button or some silly interface thing that IMHO I think MS does better. In the end, I can do what I want with a windows box. I just can't do it all on a Mac. Whether it's playing Counter-Strike online or digitizing my Hi-8 tapes for my webpage, MSwin98se has been working great for me. Everytime MS does something that ticks me off, it seems it's recitfied in the next service pack or IE update. It's a shame Mac's poor buisness practices have left us with a lack of software for Mac users.
I just wish Mac user's wouldn't show so much loyalty. It can't be healthy for vigorous innovation. But I suppose there is much dissension in Mac forums. I haven't look in a while. In the meantime, I'm getting used to BEOS 4.5(I can't wait for R.5) and looking to justify the hours I've spent playing with Caldera's linux (I can't).
Thanks again for your point of view, it certainly made more sense then the profanity-filled pro-Mac post that inspired my initial post. Ed
See this? It was kinda fresh back then. But now it is already old news. I see this kind of problems all the time. Does it matter which of the/.'s "trained squirrels" gets the submission? Looks like it does.
I guess it does, I submitted a story about a walk-thru X-ray scanner at O'hare airport and it was rejected. 5 weeks later, I see the story on slashdot submitted by someone else. Oh well.
The Mac community is more or less inclusive, whereas the Linux community tends to be exclusive. Judging by the posts in this thread, I'd have to strongly disagree with that statement.
I also just finished a Salon piece by a Mac user who is upset that their previously "exclusive" mac club is now being infiltrated by newbies. No user group is more emotionally invested then the mac community. How else could the company have survived the blunders and missteps that would have devastated any other company?
Blind loyalty has no place in a technological market, leave that to your favorite beers and recording artitsts. Inclusive-exclusive, come on, keep an open mind and enough HDD space for all your OS's. Unless of course you've bought proprietary hardware and let big brother dictate how you use your device.
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After wasting years learning and using Premiere I went to a Pinnacle Seminar and fell in love with Edition.
Nothing compares.
You're right. I failed to take into account the different market segments. PDAs are actually devices that are likely to remain usable long past other digital hardware.
/. readers in particular, my bad.
I can defend my initial post by saying that I wasn't denigrating PDA longevity, by passing them on to others, not tossing them out. I assumed that the inheritors would likely not be as tech savvy as the early adopters and not as interested in OSS features, just PIM please.
I was making elitist assumptions about
Hey, I'm not making fun. I'm curious, did you buy it new, or was it a hand me down?
The fact that you are still getting decent functionality out of the old thing disproves one premise of the article, that CSS will hinder long term usage.
There are several types of PDA users, most of which will find no benefit with OSS.
I'd hate to be the help desk guy at Ernst & Young who has partners bringing OSS devices into the fold. Just hand out HP PDAs devices with the XP laptops and KISS.
Even geeks like myself get their OSS fix with desktop and laptop devices, sometimes a PDA is just a PDA, not another statement about tech politics.
That said, I'm always going to do a wide search for my next PDA when it's time, including OSS supporting hardware.
Not knowing what to expect out of a PDA? How about reminding me of important dates and meetings; keeping a searchable contact list; allowing for short note taking; email.
Fun extras that I can do with my new PPC Toshiba e755: Surf web with builtin 802.11b will on the toilet; show off some pics; listen to music; watch videos I've captured with my Radeon A-i-W and crunched with command line WM encoder 9 to incredibly small, smooth and clean files.
Some "innovative uses" by "inspired thinkers" mentioned in article: Install Apache to show your webpage off to friends; ease of upgrade to new device by writing your own compatible SW (anyone ever hear of Export|CSV?
Oh, and I love this: "If you are lucky, you can download a new version that runs on PalmOS 5. If you aren't, forget your beloved application."
Yes! That's inspired thinking and innovation, being unable to move on from your beloved 1994 PDA apps.
This article made me remember to pull my old Handspring platinum out of a drawer and give it to my sister. I'm glad it comes with a solid and simple OS so that she can stay focused on her chosen field, anthropology, and just use its PIM functions. Also important is the fact that her Dell runs XP.
If the Handspring can run both, its own solid OS, or alternatively, linux, is it the best solution? Let's the early adopter poke around, but let's the inheriter stick with solid CSS OS.
I'd certainly never want to pass a Taurus, or other dedicated OSS PDA down to a non-techie relation
All the main advantages pointed out are irrelevent. I buy a new PDA every 2 years minimum and pass my old one to family or friends. They don't want to monkey around with open source. I don't need to be get their phone calls asking for help.
More to the point: How long do people actually plan on using a PDA? Who is still carrying around a five year old Palm?
This article is unabashed ideology over smart tech info. Just more incestous amplification for those socially clueless folk who occupy the open source echo chamber.
At what point does the government have the power to dictate that an entire industry must change it's technology? It's not as if this is an issue of public safety. I just don't understand how the Feds create these kinds of requirements.
As a libertarian, I can name only a few areas where the gov't has a legitimate function. Regulating the common radio spectrum is one of them.
What's the alternative? I haven't seen a free market argument yet that would work in the arena of such a unique and finite community owned resource I'm always open to new economic ideas, let's hear 'em.
Are you still confusing a G400 Matrox video card with a Macintosh G4?
Thinking about getting an iMac isn't the same as getting one. The original poster stated, "The iMac at first seems a good option, until you see the limited hard drive and editing capabilities. I offer the guy an opinion on the G400-TV, which is a video capture card (I own and use one), and you only offer name-calling, uninformed opinion and exclamation points. ...either way you look at it, the G400 is out of the question. Are you the one who started the thread by asking for advice on NLE setups. If you are, then I'm sorry my advice wasn't useful, if not, let him decide what is "out of the question." Your incorrect information is certainly not helping anyone make an informed decision. I agree with the poster's originally posted concern that an iMac is no platform to do anything but very small scale home videos. If you have anything substantive to add, feel free.
A G400 is a video card from Matrox, not a computer. As a matter of fact it will install in an eMachine. Chill on the name-calling, we all make mistakes, this time it was your turn.
I like the G400 also, I was disappointed to discover that my G400-TV will not output to two monitors, only one monitor and one NTSC TV. It's useless for PC work because of the low-res of the TV, unless your working at 640x480 screen res.
I just put together a NLE system. Here's what I got: ABIT BE-6 motherboard (with UDMA66 onboard), PIII 450, 128MB RAM, one 30GB Western Digital UDMA66 HD and one 10GB Western Digital 66HD, a Matrox G-400TV (for analog video input and editing) and a Pinnacle Studio DV 1394 firewire capture card. I use a Canon GL-1 MiniDV camera and I've been using the Studio DV software that came with the capture card. SO far I'm very impressed. I've tried to use BEOS for it's media dedication (huge file sizes allowed), but I've given up on BEOS. I'm about to install Adobe Premiere, but it might be more then I need. Good luck
Oh, yeah. I forgot all about that. They did the same damn thing to me. And I could never get through to get my money back. They claimed it was a mistake. You'd sign on for the free minutes (even though you had to give your VISA card number) adn then you'd cancel before the account actually kicked in. Yet, you'd start seeing AOL charges on your card month after month. I think it took me about 6 months to get them to stop and I don't think I ever got all my money back from them.
Enough already. Until there are significant new HTML standards that browsers need to be upgraded for, these types of "upgrades" are just marketing hype. Who needs a CNN-branded browser? Or a WalMart browser. Unless, as the story said that it will work "better" on the CNN site. Uh oh, there goes the web, here come the tech support calls, "How come Sally get's the rotating CNN logo and I don't?" This ranks up there with the new Barbie with the navel.
In my job, I use many different laptops and the best pointing device by far, IMHO, is the thinkpad trackpoint. The worst is the scratchpad.
I agree whole-heartedly. I second ever word in your post. I will continue to avoid Sony products whenever possible and urge all my friends to do the same. Especially that stupid memory stick.
Because I'm tired of having to split my digital videos into multiple 1,999,999 kb files. That's why.
I was referring to the actual write speed while taking pics. I hate that damn delay between pics when the flashrom gets full and it has to write to the card. That takes upwards of 30-50 seconds sometimes. In the meantime, I got some fine female with her booty in the air and I want to snap some pics damn it!
Anyone compared compact flash, memory stick, and SmartMedia cards? which one is fastest?
This may sell in Japan, but it ain't gonna pass muster anywhere else. Sony has been pushing their anemic "memory" stick down their captive Japanese consumer's throats. I think those memory sticks will be about as popular as chop sticks in the ole' US.
Anyone know what they're referring to? What revelations? I had the flu for 2 days, did I miss something?
How is it pronounced? OS "ex" or OS Ten?
I do get pissed though when the press and mac advocates try to frame the company as a friendlier one. I recall what they did to Radius et al when Mac gave licenseing a shot. That was plainly immoral and for that alone, I'd try to avoid giving them my $.
BTW, here's the Salon article which was written by a woman not a "he" as people have mistakenly posted. I have kept an open mind from day one, trying to judge Mac on its merits. Many of my gripes are petty things like to full screen maximize button or some silly interface thing that IMHO I think MS does better. In the end, I can do what I want with a windows box. I just can't do it all on a Mac. Whether it's playing Counter-Strike online or digitizing my Hi-8 tapes for my webpage, MSwin98se has been working great for me. Everytime MS does something that ticks me off, it seems it's recitfied in the next service pack or IE update. It's a shame Mac's poor buisness practices have left us with a lack of software for Mac users.
I just wish Mac user's wouldn't show so much loyalty. It can't be healthy for vigorous innovation. But I suppose there is much dissension in Mac forums. I haven't look in a while. In the meantime, I'm getting used to BEOS 4.5(I can't wait for R.5) and looking to justify the hours I've spent playing with Caldera's linux (I can't).
Thanks again for your point of view, it certainly made more sense then the profanity-filled pro-Mac post that inspired my initial post. Ed
I guess it does, I submitted a story about a walk-thru X-ray scanner at O'hare airport and it was rejected. 5 weeks later, I see the story on slashdot submitted by someone else. Oh well.
I also just finished a Salon piece by a Mac user who is upset that their previously "exclusive" mac club is now being infiltrated by newbies. No user group is more emotionally invested then the mac community. How else could the company have survived the blunders and missteps that would have devastated any other company?
Blind loyalty has no place in a technological market, leave that to your favorite beers and recording artitsts. Inclusive-exclusive, come on, keep an open mind and enough HDD space for all your OS's. Unless of course you've bought proprietary hardware and let big brother dictate how you use your device.