Cybook obviously intended for large libraries to be kept on these devices by including the 2GB expansion.

Actually, that 2GB "expansion" is an irritant. Standard SD is 8 MB to 4 GB, so I'm not sure why they limit it to 2. Worse yet, modern devices have moved to SDHC, which is 4 GB to 128 GB.

Remember, the first week in April 2008 is not over till Tuesday the 8th.

Actually, that 2GB "expansion" is an irritant. Standard SD is 8 MB to 4 GB, so I'm not sure why they limit it to 2.

Because there is no standard way that SD card manufacturers implement non-SDHC capacities above 2GB. A variety of different addressing schemes are used, which are mutually incompatible. 2GB is where the "standard" stops.

Worse yet, modern devices have moved to SDHC, which is 4 GB to 128 GB.

True, but relatively few devices appear to support SDHC cards as yet. I have numerous devices with SD cards - HP iPaq PDA, Pentax camera, Garmin SatNav, Gen3; I don't think any of them support SDHC.

Someone reported here that the controller that the Gen3 uses does actually support SDHC, so it's certainly possible that support for larger cards could be added in a future firmware upgrade. Personally, however, I find 2GB to be quite sufficient.

Someone reported here that the controller that the Gen3 uses does actually support SDHC, so it's certainly possible that support for larger cards could be added in a future firmware upgrade. Personally, however, I find 2GB to be quite sufficient.

640K should be enough for anybody, right? :)

Seriously though, SDHC support was enabled in the Nokia tablets via a kernel recompile, so that may well be the case for the Gen3.

Over 2GB would only really be useful for music. And even then I don't think it'd do better than a dedicated device. Oh, or cartoons I guess for people that like that sort of thing.

Ideally the next device I buy will be a phone/FLAC/e-ink device. But that's, fingers crossed, going to be a few years before I buy anything else.

640K should be enough for anybody, right? :)

Seriously though, SDHC support was enabled in the Nokia tablets via a kernel recompile, so that may well be the case for the Gen3.

640K?!? What!?! Are you some kind of memory hog!!! 5K RULES!!! (Fondly remembering my days with a Vic-20) :D :D :D

Derek

The TX-2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TX-2) (on which my Dad did his PhD thesis work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad)) had 64K 36-bit words. Clearly enough to do just about anything!

Xenophon

640K should be enough for anybody, right? :)

Seriously though, SDHC support was enabled in the Nokia tablets via a kernel recompile, so that may well be the case for the Gen3.

And the Kindle supports SDHC. My EB-1150 only has 128Meg and I manage ok.

Dale

On the page numbering issue , I notice in my Fictionwise newsletter this morning that they refer to book length by word count !

On the page numbering issue , I notice in my Fictionwise newsletter this morning that they refer to book length by word count !

I think that's pretty common, actually.

Since the word count stays even if you change the font size or page layout, showing the "current word count till the end of the currently displayed page" plus a "goto word" could be a good alternative to the page numbers in the Cybook firmware.

The TX-2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TX-2) (on which my Dad did his PhD thesis work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad)) had 64K 36-bit words. Clearly enough to do just about anything!

Xenophon

Did it even support lower case? ASCII hadn't even been invented yet and BCD did not.

Dale

Did it even support lower case? ASCII hadn't even been invented yet and BCD did not.
Dale
I don't know whether it supported lower case or not. I do know that all text shown on screen in the Sketchpad demo films is upper-case only. I'd have to have a careful look through the actual thesis to figure out anything more. And I won't be doing that anytime soon, because I have about two weeks to finish my PhD thesis. :eek:

Enough work-avoidance... back to the bit mines!

Xenophon

I well remember the joys of programming using the EBCDIC character set on IBM mainframes. That had the peculiarity that, if you printed the character set as a 16x16 grid, the alphabet was an 8x3 "block" in it. That meant that you couldn't test for an upper case letter using the normal "is it between A and Z" test because that range of character codes included other, non-alphabetic characters too :).

Ah, the "good old days" :D

I well remember the joys of programming using the EBCDIC character set on IBM mainframes. That had the peculiarity that, if you printed the character set as a 16x16 grid, the alphabet was an 8x3 "block" in it. That meant that you couldn't test for an upper case letter using the normal "is it between A and Z" test because that range of character codes included other, non-alphabetic characters too :).

Ah, the "good old days" :D


And of course , the joys of punching holes in hundreds of cards as computer instruction , only to get one wrong !! :rofl:

And of course , the joys of punching holes in hundreds of cards as computer instruction , only to get one wrong !! :rofl:

That is not a problem. Take a piece of tape, stick it on the offending hole and punch again. You can do the same with paper tape

That is not a problem. Take a piece of tape, stick it on the offending hole and punch again. You can do the same with paper tape

Ah - but first of all you have to find out which hole and on which card out of maybe thousands ........

Ah - but first of all you have to find out which hole and on which card out of maybe thousands ........

That is easy, a syntax error will be flagged.

I once had a real problem. A couple of thousand cards in a big box that was used as a 'feeder' for the cardreader. They were from several different programs and came from several loctions. The operator dropped the box on top of the stairs. Can you imagine the joy of the programmers when they heard the execution of there programs was going to be delayed a couple of days? Those were the days

That is easy, a syntax error will be flagged.



No , from what I recall we got half a forest of paper and told to read through - syntax errors were not offered .
Access to computers was not authorised for programmers , only technicians .

Heaven help us if we got the program in a loop , with no error stop instruction .

I remember writing a program for the college mainframe that went into a very specific loop of instructions that resulted in the status light display 'freezing' on the memory controller box and spelling out "TILT".

.....sure got the computer technician's attention!

-Jeff

We had protection against that. Every (new) program got a fixed amount of cpu seconds. You could only get more on request and after testing.

Since our mainframe was a timesharing system, we got as much time as we wanted....just had to share with all other programs running at the time. With no (or few) other programs running, we effectively had a dedicated system.

-Jeff