IBM Tablet, I feel Outdated

Looks like IBM is going to have their own Tablet, with their own handwriting software. Software competition on the base modules could be a very good thing, since I have been frustrated with the handwriting recognition on my Tablet so far. When I write on paper I often realize that I did not make the fourth leg of an “x” quite long enough, so I will go back and elongate the leg. On a Tablet I have not figured out how to concatenate the ink to enforce the “x” and not have it come out as “y”. All of my “I”s seem to come out as “T-” as well.

My New Tablet

I have had my new Compaq Tablet PC for a little over a week now. I have an 802.11b network set up at home with 128-bit WEP and MAC address security.

I bring my Tablet to work with me every day. My company is worried about having any devices it has not fully configured hooked up to its network, so I am not able to take advantage of wireless Internet, or any Internet, at work. The best use for my Tablet is loading something on the device and bringing it with me to someone’s office to illustrate the code, the document, or the data structure I want to discuss. Instead of asking someone to pull up a document on their computer, I hand them the Tablet with the document already pulled up, and I start walking them through what I want to do.

Handwriting recognition is pretty good. I have read my Tablet stories so it may recognize my voice. I download free eBooks from Microsoft weekly.

I am often asked “Can you only take notes or can you do other things too?” I pull up Office 2003 and show people my cached Outlook mail, calendar, and task lists. I will record a meeting and encode it in WMA just for fun.

The Crusoe seems to be a bit slow, even with 512 MB of RAM. This is my first computer since my Commodore 64 which does not have an Intel processor.

Geeks to Gold

Fortune magazine has an article in this month’s issue about how researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center have come up with new data heuristics models such as the Web Graph Structure to analyze thought trends in text. Researchers are put before clients to drum up revenue and learn about big problems with big revenue potentials. Sounds like a good place to work, with some really interesting projects.