Slashdot Mirror

It is only a rumor at this point. Here is a quote from the article

"Here are some predictions for the media industry for 2006, based on interviews with industry analysts, executives and investors, along with a little intuition."

Oh come on. If you want dependable information on the future of IT you always go to industry analysts, executives, and investors. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to refill the iSmell attached to my Internet Appliance.

I stopped buying Palm machines after my PalmPilot Professional's OS became out of date, and Palm refused to offer any kind of upgrade to OS 3.0

It's your lucky day, then - Palm released the 2 MB IR upgrade card that would not only give you IR functionality, but also equip your Professional with Flash ROMs so you can burn in a new OS (It even ships with 3.0)!!!!

Seriously - Faulting the palm of that era for not offering upgrade options is absurd. They bent over backwards to avoid orphaning anybody (You can install 3.5 into an IR Upgrade card - You could use most of the same OS and peripherals on your IIIc and your Pilot 1000... Over five years of backwards/forwards compatability. If you don't think that's an accomplishment, look at the WinCE track record.)

It's not WinCE, it's "Windows PocketPC Edition" : ie. the slightly newer version on all the managers iPaqs.

It "only works on ARM devices". Well, seeing as that's 80-90% of the PDA market and Microsoft don't actually develop Windows Pocket for anything other than the ARM processor, that's a non-issue.

And Palm have been losing market share to mobile Windows devices for some years now.

So, in answer to your question, I'd say we learn damn-all.

Waiting for a DVD to rip.

So:

Go buy any old digital camera and try to download the pics on a RedHat system.

Go buy a DVD-R and try to burn a disc.

Go to any old website showing media (RealPlayer, QuickTime, Windows Media) and see how successful you are at viewing content.

Buy a Firewire DV Video Camera and see how successful you are in getting the video off and editing it.

Try to visit a site that's made for IE.
Go to the store and buy a game. (I'll give you these -- VmWare and other solutions are a serious bitch to setup, and don't work well except in certain Distros)

Buy a PDA and get it to synch up.

Your network card doesn't work, find somebody you know willing to come over and fix it. (Huh? If the card is broken, even your God(s) ain't/aren't gonna fix it.)

>The steps to do any of the above in Windows are very easy

Uhhh, sure... I mean, I mean, if you want to have every two or three DVDs come out as coasters (happens with Prassi Primo DVD for me) sure. Or if you want to use crappy outdated camera software that just lets you easily download one picture at a time through a slow ass serial connection, great (Fuji MX-1200). I've never done DV, but Kino doesn't look too hard. Or you can try Cinerella, which seems more full featured and easier.

>When a DVD-Burner manufacturer is swamped with "Uhh where's the Linux Drivers?"

DVD-R in linux doesn't use "drivers", unless you count the built in generic SCSI support built in linux (since well before DVD was available for most PCs) as a "driver". Try saying that about windows. Especially windows 9x...

HTH. And take it from me, there's NO software in windows that lets you use a Celeron 300 to burn DVD-R at 2x and surf the 'net at the same time.

Linux's motto should be "Spend some time now -- Then do more, quicker".

They don't make 'em anymore, though.

My second biggest gripe about the Newton (the first was the sloppy/pretentious overall design) was that the it wasn't about 50% bigger.