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OpenMoko and the 1973 will fail just as the Greenphone did. There is no leadership behind the project, no vision, just a bunch of well-intentioned geeks who want to make something cool. With no cohesive plan, though, the Neo1973 will never succeed.

1. If OpenMoko doesn't succeed, it will be largely because of posts like the above. Enough negative sentiment will doom any project, however cool.
2. OpenMoko isn't a product, it's a platform. Sure, the Neo1973 isn't the all-time ultimate mobile phone - it's a development platform. That's why in addition to the pre-built phone you get a development board you can house in your own enclosure with your own battery, screen, and other hardware bits. If you don't like Neo1973, build your own phone round the platform.
3. When I first started using Linux in 1993, doomsayers were saying it was obsolete and would never fly. Guess what? They were wrong.

I'm not saying OpenMoko is the world's ultimate phone project. Of course it isn't. But it's a good, big start, and it deserves support. If you don't support it, don't complain if, in ten years time, all you can get are closed, proprietary phones you can't even load your own software on.

You know, I'm getting old. I belong to a generation which, when someone gave us cool hardware, we grabbed and built cool software on top of it. Now, if it isn't all pretty and polished right out of the box, it gets condemned as rubbish. Guess what? Linus Torvalds was just a college kid when he wrote the first kernel. His professors didn't even rate him as very good. Certainly no-one thought he had leadership potential. And as for a cohesive plan, his cohesive plan was to build a scheduler which could schedule two tasks.

Stuff happens. It will surprise you. OpenMoko may, indeed, not be a great success. But if it's a bit of a success, other people will be able to come along and build on it - it is open source. In fact, that's already happening - that's what this story is about. The GreenPhone is not 'dead', it has mutated. Instead of building their own hardware platform, the Trolls are developing the 'green suite' on the OpenMoko platform. So you can still have your greenphone - the only thing is, it will be black and silver, or white and orange.

I bought a PalmOS upgrade pack (about 6 years ago, I think). I'm reasonably sure this produced an upgrade to v 4.0 or 4.1; I remember thinking that I was fortunate to escape Graffiti 2 (which came in 4.1.2). I also remember a very scary flashing process that utilised screen memory, producing the same kind of snow dump as loading large 8-bit games.

After a quick shufty at Wikipedia, I'm now sure - the bitmap drawing program Notepad was first released on PalmOS 4.0 and I definitely have that now.

ZDNET confirms it was once available

Palm.com KB points out that they no longer sell it (probably due to one of their legal wrangles - maybe even because this was the last time they shipped Graffiti 1 before Xerox sued them.)

I've not noticed any problems. There are various improvements in usability, and overall the applications feel slicker and more useful than the older ones - things like a merged display of the todo list with the calendar. Some of the OS improvements are a little pointless on a Palm III, particularly the ones regarding networking because the only way to use them on an unexpanded device is to park it in the cradle. And colour support, obviously. And some things are just daft on a device with only 2MB of storage.

I confess that I don't use it often anymore because my job changed from being highly mobile and roaming around hospitals, for which I needed a good task list and phonebook application, to sitting behind a desk with a PIM application open on the second monitor all the time. I'm starting to feel the need for it again though, just to manage my at-home life. Maybe I'll hunt out a good belt holster for it.

It still functions properly after multiple drops to hard surfaces, and it's nearly 10 years old. The low power consumption and use of AAA batteries is a design combination I'd love to see in a modern PDA device. The Palm III is a classic to me ; sure, it's a bit chunky in todays world, but it's a wonderful example of form fitting function - it doesn't have any more resources than it needs to be a decent PIM, and the OS is trim and lean enough to provide for that, quirks aside. Robust case, hard top flip cover as standard, instant on, weeks of useful battery life from standard cells. For a while I considered writing a bunch of software for doctors to run on wi-fi enabled variants that the likes of Symbol cranked out.

At the time it was an expensive purchase ; the present entry level Z22 is a much more powerful machine, and costs less than a third of what I paid for it, but it lacks many of the desirable features, Graffiti 1 being one of them. There are various articles on backgrading the Graffiti 1 library from older machines, but I'm not sure I'm prepared to shell out and risk it not working.

What I would LOVE to see would be a port of PalmOS for the DS, or even just a Palm emulator. Shouldn't be too hard - DS is ARM, PalmOS 5 is ARM, and it includes a Dragonball emulator that runs faster than the original native processor on modern ARM hardware. There is DS organizer software, but it just isn't nearly as slick as Palm. And think of the possibilities for that second screen.

A DS is a little bulky, but no more so than a paper organiser, and just imagine the kudos gained from whipping out a slick, piano-black organizer and proceeding to note your next business meeting before playing Zelda.

Heck, I'm sold. I'm off to hunt out some homebrew kit.

Correct link: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39290156,00.htm

Like this?: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39256676,00.htm (a bit old but it's the first thing I found.) Or do you mean like a desktop PC?

who was beaten to death in 2005... http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1000000097,39210800,00.htm

"In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that Linux and the open source movement is "good competition" because it will "force [Microsoft] to be innovative," but calls Linux "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." He also says that the inclusion of IE in Windows has been "great ... for innovation in the software industry" (except for Netscape) and that MS's new copy protections are just "bumps in the road" to "help customers understand when they are crossing the line . . . so they can't do the wrong thing." And he says a few more amusing things, also."

I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

"In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that Linux and the open source movement is "good competition" because it will "force [Microsoft] to be innovative," but calls Linux "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." He also says that the inclusion of IE in Windows has been "great ... for innovation in the software industry" (except for Netscape) and that MS's new copy protections are just "bumps in the road" to "help customers understand when they are crossing the line . . . so they can't do the wrong thing." And he says a few more amusing things, also."

I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

"In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that Linux and the open source movement is "good competition" because it will "force [Microsoft] to be innovative," but calls Linux "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." He also says that the inclusion of IE in Windows has been "great ... for innovation in the software industry" (except for Netscape) and that MS's new copy protections are just "bumps in the road" to "help customers understand when they are crossing the line . . . so they can't do the wrong thing." And he says a few more amusing things, also."

I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

Up to around 1997, companies including Power Computing were given the rights to license Mac technology from Apple. However, when Jobs returned to the company, he attempted at first to renegotiate the licences but eventually opted to cancel them.

Apple has consistently rejected opportunities to adjust its innovation strategy to another model. Licensing its operating system to hardware manufacturers would have been an obvious choice. Yet when Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he terminated the first and last licensing program, championed by former chief executive Gilbert Amelio. Jobs is reported to have told Apple managers that he feared "Mac knockoffs" would dilute the Apple brand.

Further rumors indicate that Jobs is pushing for the end of MacOS cloners altogether. He apparently has called them "leeches", and who can blame him? None of the cloners -- PowerComputing, Motorola, Umax, etc. -- have ligitimately tried to grow the MacOS market. As far as I can tell, they have only advertised in Macintosh publications.

Tell me more, argument about it please. Thanks.

There you go

What are you UKsians waiting for?

One page print version of article, rather than 4 ad-loaded pages.

Given that there hasn't been a hard push for Vista for U.K. businesses (and that some vendors have been encouraging their customers to wait), this is not a particularly big surprise. It's just too risky while Vista is this new.

If you take a risk with a new operating system at home and it doesn't work out, you may be out some cash. If you did it across your business, you may be out of a job (and a company, for that matter!).

Except that you are clearly ignorant about NetApp snapshots. They are very different from snapshots from other providers. I recently evaluated SANs from HP, EMC, and NetApp. NetApp was the most original and offered a lot of unique features including their snapshot technology. It's very non-obvious their implementation of it.

Here's a link to educate(PDF)

And another Bunch of white papers explaining why Oracle went with NetApp storage. There is a similar list for GoDaddy

NetApp is not SCO, they are only acting because Sun threatened them. They are most innovative big company I've seen in recent years. Their WAFL implementation is pretty damned impressive especially when combined with Flexclone and their other Snapshot products.

In the end the price difference for me is trivial compared to the hassle of a shitty OS. That's my bias. But don't get me wrong. I put linux in the server room because there the price difference does matter. But for personal computers, like laptops, that run productivity apps, and require more TLC per computer than a server, well it's about productivity and mac OS has lower effort to maintain and use. They last longer too.

Actually, it was done: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,3914 7917,00.htm - US sabotages software for pipeline controllers in USSR.

The Microsoft deal on interoperability and customer patent protection is still ongoing but more in the background these days. The real "new push" is coming from Novell's relationship with IBM (and AMD, like this story; and I'm sure you know about Dell). For example IBM and Novell just launched a Big Green Linux Initiative, or how IBM, Novell Team to Tap Open Source App Servers, and the list goes on (see LWE announcements, or Google News). Novell is really trying to push Linux on the server -- and just as importantly -- the desktop into the Enterprise, and they're making major deals with large OEMs (that is, AMD, IBM/Lenovo, Dell) to make it happen.

That reminds me of the very old /. story about KPMG... Somewhere in the comments is a (broken) link song to their song. I still hear it in my head every now and then. (Found it here: http://anthems.zdnet.co.uk/anthems/kpmg.mp3)

11% in 2006: ZDNet article
19% now: study (French), this is far below the ~25% European average.

IE is extremely prevalent in the UK.

"I teach IT is a high school in England and"

I believe you, I really do ..

"some of the spreadsheet functions that the kids need to use in projects (like webquery) make it crash"

I hadn't realized webquery was deemed mandatory by the UK department of education. How the heck did I manage in IT all these years without webquery. But wait according to this you can also perform webquery in Open Office. 'I was able to make this Webquery example work on my computer with very little effort'.

"A-level and GCSE projects require the use of Macros, and teh database software does not have these"

I just opened Open Office Base and it says:

'Macros created with OpenOffice.org Basic based on the old programming interface will no longer be supported by the current version .. For more information on OpenOffice.org Basic, select "OpenOffice.org Basic" in the list box'

"that means they'll be confused come September when new programs are thrown at them; we're going to have to take some time out to familiarise the kids (and staff) with some of the features and quirks"

You're kidding right, kids have to be familiarised with the software. If it's anthing like my old college, it'll be the kids who will be showing the staff.

"hundreds of teaching resources that we need to redevelop in our own time"

insert training FUD here ..

"The savings would take a good while to manifest themselves after the initial confusion/retraining/whatever"

Insert increased costs FUD here ..

UN body promotes open source in education

Open Source in Schools

Linux Case Study : Orwell High School

was: Re:A rock and a hard place

Neither you nor the GP are proving anything. You're merely sharing stories. And that's cool because we may be able to see a trend in what people are saying.
I don't know about the problems people encounter with Vista or in what number, but the industry and users ARE generally disappointed with Vista. And Vista sales are NOT great.

Supporting links:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jh tml?articleID=201201012 - MS lowers Vista sales projections
http://software.silicon.com/os/0,39024651,39164563 ,00.htm - Businesses wary of Vista
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,3928 7855,00.htm - Consumers wary of Vista

I thought it was the other way around: Seagate that bought Maxtor. I've still seen Maxtor brand disks (SATA) in my local supermarket.

The best disk I have is a (over?) 10 year old 18Gig IBM SCSI drive, but those are not in the same league (and price range) as SATA or PATA disks are.

Re: Botnets. You raise a good point. Ok: So once the lusers computer is infected and if botmasters have done their homework they are more or less untracable. They can go through enough proxies, servers and countries that they're more or less untracable. This answered my next question: Most Spam is from Botnets. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,3916 7561,00.htm No reason not to try tracing them do. Criminals, at some point, drop the ball. That's when they get caught. If law enforcement is uninterested as they are now, the criminals don't have to be careful. If they were smart, they'd be doing something else. You'll get some of them (the dumb ones anyway).

Lusers: Education helps, but that applies with everything. Heard a thing recently on the radio about botnets. The journalist doing the story said he figured he had two botnets running on his PC. Now at that stage I'd scream and yank my comms cable out of its socket, but this guy was ambivalent. Can you educate the public? Surgeon General has been warning for years on the dangers of smoking and many people still smoke. Let's forget education.

ISPs: I was trojaned once. Called the ISP. They have customers PCs getting hijacked all the time: packets flying everywhere. Their care factor is low. Judging what I read of most ISPs customer service, you have no chance of motivating them to also police this sort of thing. They just don't care. Forget that.

Commerce: This has to be the best link in the chain to attack. They spam because they want your money. The flaw in spam is they *always* have to leave a way for you to contact them. Now they might do this through shady companies (like the companies that sell 'cold called' lists to mortgage brokers). At some point they have to get in touch with you to take your money. So get the feds to put a transaction through and see where the money trail leads. Or wait for the mortgage broker to call the agent who arrests them with using 'stolen contact details' or whatever the legislators want to call it.

Prosecution: If it's intra-country, easy. If it's in a country with a real legal system and extradition agreement, ok, there's the possibility. It could be done, but there would need to be a real political will. Can you imagine a European extradited to the US on spam charges? Yes. An American extradicted to Europe? Possible, or they'd prosecute them locally. Again, assumes a political will absent at the moment. (A Buddy wrote to his congressman via email. Congressman's gopher asked for a postal address to send the reply.) A Russian extradited to Britain. Yeah. Exactly.

Lobbyists: These guys sank the CAN-SPAM act. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_Spam_Act_of_2003 Lobbyists are part of the problem. You'll never stop spam while these guys are buying Congressmen. They make all the above discussion is moot.

Conclusion: Can't stop all spammers, but you can't stop all crime either. There are things the authorities could do if they were willing. At the moment, they're not. Let me phrase it this way: Spam isn't a technical problem. It's a political one.

I see it now. The spam is the lobbyist. The lobbyist is the spam.

We've been hearing Linux was "almost ready" for almost 10 years now. Who's got the earliest link to this old saw? I've got Linus in 1999. There's got to be something earlier?

Funny. I thought that was 2004.

Or was it 2006?

Or was it actually 2002 and then it burst in 2006?

Umm... 2003?

Oh! Stupid me! It was 1999! Yeah. definately 1999. I mean. It's not like Linus would the exact same thing five years later.
It had to be 1999, because it was Almost Ready(tm) for the desktop back in 1994 when I first used it!

Now, tell me again. Why do I have a mac? Oh that's right. It's Unix, but I don't have to sysadmin it like Linux.

Yes yes. "Some people like to learn about their machine." [emphasis original] Ahh yes. I was once like you, some 13 years ago this fall. Then I got a bit older, and perhaps a bit wiser, and learned that there was much more important things than screwing around with sendmail, or 3d acceleration, or hotplug vs devfs, or ipchains vs ipfwadm, or oss vs alsa, or cups vs lpr, or ... It's a tool. Nothing more. If the tool is working you, instead of you working the tool, it's time to get a new tool.

Funny. I thought that was 2004.

Or was it 2006?

Or was it actually 2002 and then it burst in 2006?

Umm... 2003?

Oh! Stupid me! It was 1999! Yeah. definately 1999. I mean. It's not like Linus would the exact same thing five years later.
It had to be 1999, because it was Almost Ready(tm) for the desktop back in 1994 when I first used it!

Now, tell me again. Why do I have a mac? Oh that's right. It's Unix, but I don't have to sysadmin it like Linux.

Yes yes. "Some people like to learn about their machine." [emphasis original] Ahh yes. I was once like you, some 13 years ago this fall. Then I got a bit older, and perhaps a bit wiser, and learned that there was much more important things than screwing around with sendmail, or 3d acceleration, or hotplug vs devfs, or ipchains vs ipfwadm, or oss vs alsa, or cups vs lpr, or ... It's a tool. Nothing more. If the tool is working you, instead of you working the tool, it's time to get a new tool.

First of all, "Ballmer throwing chairs" is an overused meme on Slashdot
Second, Ballmer never threw chairs at all. That is an urban legend.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,3923 2432,00.htm

So mods please mod this and any other posts stating Ballmer throws chairs as Troll or Flamebait.

Nokia launched the 6136 last Feb (2006) in Europe:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,100000008 5,39252128,00.htm

This does the roaming wifi/GSM stuff as well.

Tested in Oulu, Finland in 2006:
http://www.mobiledia.com/news/49241.html

Anybody know how those tests have gone, what the take up is?

A source familiar with the deal said it is essentially similar to the last one, which calls for Intel to receive royalties from AMD. Intel has patents covering aspects of the x86 instruction set used in processors for Windows-based PCs.

The lawsuits started in 1987. Rich Lovgren, former assistant general counsel for AMD, recalled that AMD founder Jerry Sanders sat through "every second" of one of the trials. "There were certainly bridges that were burned," he said.

Under the terms of the settlement, both companies gained free access to each other's patents in a cross-licensing agreement. AMD agreed to pay Intel royalties for making chips based on the x86 architecture, said Mulloy, who worked for AMD when the settlement was drafted. Royalties, he added, only go one way. AMD does get to collect royalties from Intel for any patents Intel might adopt.

AMD also agreed not to make any clones of Intel chips, but nothing bars Intel from doing a clone of an AMD chip, Mulloy added.

Insightful? Check your memory, " !seineewerasreenigneepacsten " was not a backdoor password...

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308, 2078460,00.htm

Actually, it's entirely true. See http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,3918 9475,00.htm

You, perhaps, need to research stuff before shooting your mouth off. In some cases it's justified, but you have just libeled Microsoft for no apparent reason. Find something new to complain about, like Office Open XML (ugh!) or something.

One reason why mobile services are so expensive in the UK is because the UK government auctioned so few 3G licences off they knew there would be a huge bidding war between the major mobile operators to grab the ones that were on offer. There was. They ended up pissing away £22.5bn on licences, all paid to the government.

And Gordon Brown still manages to not have enough money to play with.

Info here: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/0,1000000193,39284700,0 0.htm

There's also lots of info (much of it from Apple itself) saying flat-out that Apple will prolly have an 8-core rig pretty soon (relatively):

http://www.macintouch.com/reviews/macpro/
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/31484/135/
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/03/12/apple-store-error-r eveals-8-core-mac-pro/

HTH a bit... (and yeah, I'd kinda like to have one too)

/P

Now Google's mooting the idea of a privacy dashboard. Sounds... interesting...

Your right. I'm full of shit.
There is no smart phone virus threat.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,3918 2753,00.htm
http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/mobile/2005/04/20 /smartphone-viruses-52-and-counting
http://itvibe.com/news/3072/

Oh wait.. there is and it was trivially easy to find news about the threat.

An SDK makes it easy to write lots of cool stuff too. You have to weigh the benefits vs the risks.

Having an SDK makes it easy to develop software.
Viruses are software and are developed so having an SDK makes it easier to develop them.

It's simple logic man. Maybe you haven't gotten to that point in school yet.

Again (see above), Sony will have Santa Rosa but will not be releasing notebooks with Robson/TurboMemory this summer. This has actually become a spat between Sony and Microsoft, becuase Sony is claiming that Vista will not support Robson until SP1! (see http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,3928 7431,00.htm) What's interesting about this is the fact - according to Sony - that M$ left the support out of Vista deliberately, because it was under such pressure to get the OS out. I wonder what else they left out...

Despite what MS says... http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,3928 7431,00.htm

As a complete amateur I have enjoyed Nvu for its interface.

other alternatives may be
http://www.aptana.com/download_all.php
http://www.inkscape.org/ (quite good, but haven't used it for web applications)
http://kompozer.net/

ZDNet has an article on that very subject.

Looks like ZDNet talked to these guys yesterday, and got some more great quotes from Microsoft about altruism and fairness...

Few attacks originating in Russia could be traced back to Russia, some of the best crackers in the world come from St Petersburg.

Remember this? What about other high profile attacks at that time? These people haven't vanished, they just got serious and learned not to draw attention to themselves.

Additionally, they are also in favour of spam and software patents. They're not pro-market, they're pro-big business.

Which was only in response to the success of this project:

"The HP 'people's notebook' runs Linux"
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,2134 514,00.htm

Just another example of how Microsoft leads nowhere but stomps on anything successful which does not run their Windows product(s).

LoB

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,3916 2357,00.htm

What are you talking about, I never threw a chair in my life.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,3923 2432,00.htm

What about this patent for XML: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,3920 0380,00.htm This is whats going to happen sooner or later too... MS patents also cover stuff like logic operators and mouse-clicks.

As a result, even though the two companies have spent the last decade battling each other, Novell's chief executive Ronald Hovsepian found it in himself to approach a contact at Microsoft last year, after a boardroom shake-up in June 2006 saw him replace then incumbent, Jack Messman.

Hovsepian's aim of starting a dialogue was aided, however, by some of Microsoft's major financial services customers making it clear that they were going to use Linux whether the vendor liked it or not. The reality is that enterprise customers want the vendors to start playing nicely together in order to deal with the resultant interoperability issues.

Organisations such as Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Wal-Mart and AIG Technologies have since purchased coupons from Microsoft that provide them with a one-year subscription for maintenance and updates to Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), along with a mix of priority and standard support services.

Here.

I was under the impression that China was moving away from Windows...

:-/

Or perhaps they'll resort to that old faithful the inanimate carbon (nano-)rod:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,1000000183, 39147421,00.htm