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More Itsy in the News 47

Posted by CmdrTaco from the its-about-that-time dept.
DJ Jose wrote in to note that the Compaq Itsy is making the PR rounds again. We've mentioned this a few times in the past (seems that every few months it gets some new publicity). For those who haven't been here all along, Itsy is a tiny little butt kicking Linux box that I lust after and occasionally have erotic dreams about. But lets not talk about that now.
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More Itsy in the News More

More Itsy in the News

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  • If voice input was integral to a device, the killer apps would make it easy to use by taking advantage of that rather than just carrying along the CLI. If the directory were graphically displayed, you would use Up, Down, Back and Enter (and maybe Parent and Root). Yes, the CLI is powerful and I feel at home ther, but I do not think that I would want to control an Itsy with one.
  • Assuming _good_ voice recognition . . .
    Perhaps I was a little too excessive with my hyperbole, but I'm simply suggesting that this is a big assumption and that using voice recognition as the only means of input is a spurious prospect--I'm reminded of Steve Martin wrestling with his voice recog phone in L.A. Story.

    I'm not against voice recognition in this or other applications--I actually think future applications could work quite well with voice recog.--but I would include an alternative input interface for more complex applications.

  • It's Digital (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Digital produced this more than two years ago.

    Then development was stopped.

    It would be nice if Compaq actually _did_ something with it.
  • .. That this sort of thing is meant to use voice recognition (The 200Mhz StrongARM if enough to hack it apparently), so everyone stop complaining about how small it is.
  • I don't believe Compaq is required by the GPL to release the kernel, since they're not distributing this device. Nothing forces you to release the source to something you're not releasing in binary/at all.
    /El Niño
  • Something I noticed after reading through the slides from the Compaq/digital presentation to the Users group was that it was planning on using USB to interface to other machines. What this means to me is that a company like digital/compaq is working on USB support for linux which is something that is lacking right now. This is an exciting idea. I think the big picture here is that as a side result, certain things are going to be developed farther.
  • The digital etch-a-sketch...
    -
    Editor - Dualism.org
    President - Ophelan.com

  • Oops, looks like you forgot one of the moderator rules, don't reveal you're a moderator :)

    I don't think it matters anymore, cos almost everyone is a moderator briefly now (AFAIK). Besides, since he posted a comment to this article, he's no longer able to moderate for this one.

    dylan_-


    --

  • I bought an Acer Travelmate 312T sub-notebook, it's got a 233 MMX Pentium, 32 Mb RAM, 3 Gb disk, 2 PC card slots and includes floppy disk and cdrom for about UKP 1,000 (US Price - $ 1000 - 1500 ??).
    The screen is 8.4 inch TFT and runs 800x600.
    The keyboard is fine for me (JAPH typing speed), and it has a drag-pad thing rather than one of those terrible "nipple" things.
    The built in 56k modem is a WinModem, so only works under MS environments - time for another PC card I guess.

    It's almost exactly the same size and weight as a decent O'Reilly book (slightly thinner than The Perl Cookbook). The power supply is small enough to stick in a pocket - I just leave spare leads at work and home, the battery normally lasts about 90 minutes for me, which is fine.

    But I haven't got Linux on it ... quite yet (;^(). The PCMCIA needs a quite new version of the PCMCIA package (I forget which, but RedHat 5.2 won't work, whereas RedHat 6.0 will), but the included PCMCIA CD-ROM is not quite standard and I need to rebuild the kernel with some fixes (see Linux Laptops pages for more, basically an extra delay in ide_cs.c) before I can install from CD. But as soon as I get a spare weekend I'll start work on that again, or get a SCSI card and hook up my Jaz drive maybe.

    I'd recommend it heavily, the only real competition right now I can see is the Sony Vaio Picturebook, but that costs at least 50% more.

    Tim
  • >> Its hard to beat that with a stick. All religion aside, the mobile market is where the PPC truly blows the doors off the x86.

    Point taken, I didn't want a CE machine, I wanted something I could run/develop Perl on and enough of an OS to make it useful. Right now, that means an Intel machine, if PPC or the LinuxCE project gives me a usable environment on something better, well, I'll be even happier.
    If I could get a realistic dev env (Perl, C++ and email) on a Psion 5 ... well that'd be enough for me.
  • I really like my PalmPilot and it does indeed fit in my pocket. However, I am really interested in what the e-book market will be like in say 2 years. These are the units that have, by comparison, a HUGE screen. It is almost like a LCD from a laptop where the laptop is still in the enclosure of the screen. The Itsy seems like it is small enough to ride on the back of such a screen and could be used as a plugable daugter CPU. For a 8.5" by 11" display unit you could probably get at least 4 Itsy's on the back of it. Just add in a scrollable/foldable keyboard and you could have some serious portable and extendable computing. Imagine an SMP e-book. Of course, all this is just fluff unless battery technology comes out of the dark ages (from a consumer standpoint). That or power consumption be devices has to drop considerably.

    "You cannot uncook Mushoo pork once is has been cooked" -- wiseman
  • I surfed all around Compaq's site and found nowhere to post my, er, lust for this type of unit.

    I use a RexPro now, and I love it. It's the size of a pcmia card.

    But Franklin/Starfish have informed me they have no intent/plans to port the product over to Linux.

    Idiots!
  • I'll grant you that voice recognition is a valid means of input, but doesn't anyone else think it would be cumbersome to be sitting on a plane or bus or office saying,
    see dee dot dot. el ess dash el.
    see dee slash. dee eff dot.

    IMHO, a pen/keyboard is a far easier (and less public) means of utilizing a computer than speech.
  • This "rock and scroll" thing seems silly.
    However, I do recall running across a hardware hack for Palm pilots that integrated an 'acceleration' sensor; it could detect the direction that the Palm was tilted - leading to similar applications (and a cool port of Onyx!). (I cant find the link, sorry!)

    As for the limited size for writing and the eternal lust for the trekkie supercomputer-in-a-waffle PADD, checkout the CrossPad - Cross Pen Computing Group: Pad [cross-pcg.com] , it has limited handwriting recognition, and isnt really an organizer, but man, is it cool!
  • As there is the LSB, or linux standard base for linux compatibility, there needs to be a standard for handheld/embedded applications. Sort of a 'LInux CE' (i.g. LICE ??? ;-)) )

    What would be really visionary is if the linux standard base team did a 'CE' standard at the same time as the general LSB.

    If anybody likes this idea, email them please.....
  • I was about to moderate this one up a notch, but the URL seems to be a bit out of date:

    http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~pleb/ [unsw.edu.au]

  • Cost? (Score:1)

    by SMN ( 33356 )
    Were Itsy to become a retaile product (which the Compaq website denies =( ), does anyone have any guesses as to how much it would cost? Or even better, how much would 15 cost? =)

    And who can I bribe for a prototype? I love that Doom "rock'n'scroll" idea. . .
  • If the unit runs Linux, I'd suspect the kernel
    would be available from ftp.us.kernel.org . . .
  • Oh, you had to bring up the DS9 PADDs didn't you? It breaks my heart to watch those things every week.. do you ever see blue screens on them? Or the back covers off? And they have on-board video.. and subspace (?) Internet..

    Ma-Ma...

  • Oops, looks like you forgot one of the moderator rules, don't reveal you're a moderator :)



    My site contains 100% GPL'd source code :)
  • Several university students are working on a tiny ARM-based linux box. When I last checked the design was to be Open.

    http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~compsoc/linux/pleb/

  • Kaffe (Score:2)

    by Tupper ( 1211 )
    This uses the same Kaffe Java virutal machine which was featured in the earlier story [slashdot.org] about Kaffe's MS extentions. It good to see a great product like Kaffe showing up in different contexts like that.

  • Re:Cost? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The rock'n'scroll idea is cool. Check this guy's page: http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rek imoto.html [sony.co.jp] He has a paper about it, and a lot of other cool stuff about small computers.

  • Re:freeley available kernel? (Score:3)

    by razorwire ( 35010 ) on Monday June 14, 1999 @05:16PM (#1850846)
    For some reason the link in the CNET story ("Compaq says the kernel for Itsy is freely available [digital.com]") leads to some sort of slideshow. Check out this page [digital.com] instead.
    --

  • My first Newton was the MP110. It worked well enough, but you quickly ran out of screen when writing longer words on it. The size also limited the amount of information the Newton could display. The screen was monochrome at 320x240

    My current Newton is the MP2100, and boy what a difference the slightly larger form makes. The screen is 16 greyscale at 320x480. The DPI is higher on the MP2100, so even though the resolution is twice the MP110, the screen isn't twice as big.

  • Is smaller better? (Score:3)

    by tmhsiao ( 47750 ) on Monday June 14, 1999 @05:16PM (#1850848) Homepage Journal
    While the Itsy looks cool and everything, depending on the application, I'd daresay I'd prefer a larger device.

    If we're talking about a PDA, I might not mind something so small (my primary concern being the input interface--Graphitti?--where would you write?). But for more general purpose portable computing, I think I'd go for something about 4"x6" or 5"x7" (somewhere around the size of a Star Trek DS9 data report pad).

    I'd love to see 3com (or someone else) put together a device this size for electronic books, general web browsing and the like.


    Then again, I also want an ntp client, procmail, and Perl in my VCR, so it'll never not know the time and so I can program it by e-mail (TiVo, maybe?). But companies never listen to me . . .

  • It is a 200 MHz Strong arm processor, it is capable of voice recognition, or possibly, keyboard gloves. Don't rule it out
  • is something with a little more room for me to do my work. I dont WANT a pocket device to do work on or read my email and/or web pages. Something with a screen maybe the size of the Sharp Tripad, I dont need million of colors but at least 16bit color. Keyboard? No. I'd rather write and use handwriting recognition or have a virtual keyboard. As for overall size, about the size of a regular paper notebook would be great. This is what i would pay a few hundred dollars for. It wouldnt be that hard to build one comparable to a wintel desktop, especially if you used a MediaGX processor, a small hard drive (a PCMCIA hard drive would work fine, especially if you were using linux or maybe BeOS), and a decent amount of RAM (32 megs). Thats what I would pay money for. Something with decent size and capability that I could use without bending myself to it's ergonomic will.
  • But Compaq doesn't intend to market the Itsy at retail. "This research could influence future products, but there are no plans to bring this to market," Frazier said.

    but...but...but...apart from being Linux based and running generic PDA functions in savvy style...it plays DOOM!

    not sure about the COMPAQ coined "rock and scroll" to describe the navigation through the video game universe by tilting the Itsy forward and back. hello! rock and scroll?

    more info on this product tease [digital.com] here. what about a limited edition then eh?

    she wore an itsy bitsy teeny weeny...hey i'm rock n' scrolling!
  • So we now have a Linux PDA. With voice recognition and sound capabilities. How about an infrared port? or OCR? My in-laws (from Newfoundland) just got back from a trip to Greece and this made me think...A hand held PDA or computer, running linux for stability, Java GUI, which can not only store numbers/emails/etc but, using voice recognition and a mini soundboard, translate speech into either sound or text on the screen (with phonetics so you can answer) or use the OCR to "read" menus and road signs (which would be typed in of course)?
    My god!.. perfect for the traveller, either the power suit, retired couple or the backpacker. Buy a flash card or better yet one of those Sony mini HDDs and plug in translation modules for different languages/alphabets (can you say Strategy Pattern?)and you've just made it extensible. A REAL universal Translator or Babel Fish.

    Does anyone know if this is going on? If I knew how to program PDA's (like the Casiopia E-100, sans the WinCE) man this would be one cool GNU/OSS project...
    Don't ya think?

  • Does anyone know where we should send email to Compaq, to inform them that there is a demand for such a device?

    I have wanted something like this for a long time, but Palm Pilots don't have the resources to do anything useful, and CE devices require MS VC++, NT Workstion, and an additional $100 bucks for the CE dev kit...

  • What about if you pick it up and shake it above your head, it reboots?

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • Voice recognition is only ok to me as an input interface--the novelty wears off quickly, and having to say "Pearl dash eeh single-quote print double-quote Hello comma world backslash enh double-quote semicolon single-quote" would be infinitely annoying.

    Having to use keyboard gloves to interface with a device the size of the credit card, as well, rather defeats the purpose of having a device that size, IMHO.


    But taking the keyboard glove idea and running with it: what I can envision as the future of the Itsy could be the primary controller for a wearable computer--input could be based upon eye movement or keyboard gloves or voice recognition. But until these input interfaces provide a facile means of input, I'd go with a larger pad thing.

  • Re:Kaffe (Score:1)

    by goon ( 2774 )
    here [slashdot.org] it is...
  • When the Itsy first got announced there was nothing like it available for sale. There still isn't anything that completely matches up, but we're getting closer. LinuxCE [linuxce.org] is a project to port Linux to CE PDA hardware. No kernels yet, but the boot loaders are coming along. People who can read Japanese should check out the NetBSD/hpcmips project [netbsd.org] which is apparently at least booting the kernel. Warner Losh has an excellent page of links [freebsd.org] about the MIPS-based PDAs from a OS-hacker's perspective. It looks like most commodity machines are pretty much contained in two chips each: one CPU+glue, and one "companion" chip. Good documentation from the chip vendors is available.

    The closest shipping match to the Itsy are the Casio E-15 [casio-usa.com] and E-100 [casio-usa.com]; with 69MHz/131MHz CPUs and 16M of RAM, they're somewhat larger machines than the 8M 486SX/25 I bought to run Linux 0.12, and you can get larger CompactFlash cards (IDE interface internally) than the 60M SCSI disk that was home for a few years. Both Casios are a bit bigger than the Palm III, although I suppose you could get an Everex Freestyle [everex.com] if you wanted the exact size.

    If Digital---uh, I mean Compaq---had seeded the right places with proto hardware, I think the excitement about this project would be more justified. I'm glad they're finally releasing their port (dunno where, but this slide [digital.com] has it as a bullet); if nothing else, it will make work on other Linux PDA environments easier. But the commercial marketplace is serving up almost everything the Itsy hardware has except the prototyping ability today. That's where to funnel all that nervous energy you get when you think about how cool it would be to have a Linux PDA.

  • The people that are suggesting that
    voice recognition input would be very
    cumbersome are overlooking one obvious
    point.

    Assuming _good_ voice recognition, there is
    no reason to be spelling out mnemonic forms
    for commands, or using arcane shortcuts designed
    to reduce and simplify the amount of typing.

    What's wrong with

    'parent directory'
    'list files'
    'go home'

    and similar forms of more verbose commands,
    when using voice recognition. These as
    spoken commands are much more intiuative
    and memorable than the convoluted syntax
    people subject themselves to when using
    linux or other CLIs

    Possibly this doesn't scale so well to more
    complex, precise commands, but most GNU
    CLIs for example accept long versions of commands
    which could be much more easily spoken than
    spelling the contracted forms.

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