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Gates Releases Details on New Mobile OS
rjelks writes "Microsoft's Bill Gates released details about the company's new mobile operating system, code-named Magneto, at the Mobile & Embedded Developers Conference in Las Vegas today. There has been a lot of recent speculation about the new OS. People have been describing it as a possible 'Blackberry killer.' Windows Mobile 2005 will be released to hardware manufacturers immediately. The OS will integrate Smartphone, Pocket PC, and Pocket PC Phone Edition operating systems into one platform. It will also include updates to the mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint." Relatedly, ZDNet has an interview with Gates about the initiative.
Who Is Pamela Jones?
By Maureen O'Gara
Friday May 6, 2005 - A few weeks ago I went looking for the elusive harridan who supposedly writes the Groklaw blog about the SCO v IBM suit.
The now-famous opinion-shaping open source leader Pamela Jones, aka PJ, doesn't give conventional face-to-face interviews. Never has, near as anyone knows. All communication is virtual. Only one person in the world has ever claimed to have met her - in the pressroom at LinuxWorld in Boston complete with a Pamela Jones badge - and described her as a fortyish reddish-blonde who giggled a lot.
Oh yeah? Wonder what cold crème she uses.
Pamela Jones is a 61-year-old Jehovah's Witness who lives in a shabby genteel garden apartment in desperate need of an interior decorator on a heavily trafficked commercial road at 304 North Central Avenue in Hartsdale, New York. Hartsdale is in Westchester and Westchester is IBM territory.
See, even though Groklaw treats cell phones like they were Kleenex and changes its unpublished numbers regularly, one number it left with a journalist led to this flat and - wouldn't you know it but - some calls from there had been placed to the courts in Utah and to the Canopy Group so obviously this just isn't any Pamela Jones.
Pamela has lived in apartment 1A for 10 years at least, according to the super, who says he's watched people move in, have children, and the children marry and move away.
Now, this isn't your usual anonymous New York apartment. It's practically a self-contained village where the super goes for the old ladies' groceries when there's snow on the ground and people know each other's business.
But the super didn't know much about Pamela except that she had a computer, worked at home (maybe sometimes) for a lawyer, was "paranoid" - his word - and "sensitive to smells."
He remembered how he was cleaning paintbrushes one day and she came running down the stairs screaming "Fire."
She was also missing and had been for weeks.
Nobody there knew where she was.
She had up and disappeared one day, and the super was worried about her. He said her son had dropped by and he didn't know where she was, and that some strange man that "nobody knew," as the super described him, had tried to get into her apartment while she was gone - the Medeco lock she had had installed on her door - something nobody else in the complex seemed to feel a need for - was more expensive than the door. But, as it happened, the super said, she had just sent in her rent in an envelope postmarked Connecticut.
Like an episode out of "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego," the trail led to 10 Bittersweet Trail in Norwalk, Connecticut, 24 miles away. Sure enough, parked in the driveway was Pamela's car, just as the super had described it, a dark gray '90s Japanese number with a bunch of Jehovah Witness pamphlets tossed on the backseat.
The woman at the house, Barbara Sharnik, told a disjointed story. She didn't know Pamela, Pamela hated her, Pamela wasn't there, Pamela left her car there because it got bumped, Pamela left her car there because she left town, and so on.
Afterwards Barbara called the cops, and then the cops called the number we left with her and the cops said that she was Pamela's mother and that Pamela was on the run and had shacked up with her mother because she had gotten "threatening mail" weeks before and that she had just gotten spooked again because "people were getting hurt around [my] stories" and had lighted out for Canada.
Odd, the subject of my stories - or any stories - never came up during our brief interview. I was just looking for Pamela.
That left Pamela's son, Nicolas Richards, who, as it happens, had been in the software business in Manhattan until - why, my goodness - things seem to have come a cropper right around the time Groklaw came into existence.
Nick and his ma were apparently involved together in Medabiliti Inc, an ISV, because one Pamela Jones with a Westche
The highlights from the leaked Xbox 360 specification are:
16:9 HD Game Play
3 USB 2.0 Ports
Support for 4 Wireless Controllers
Detachable 20GB Hard-drive
Wi-Fi Ready
3 PowerPC CPUs at 3.2GHz
500 Mhz ATI GPU
512 MB GDDR3 Ram
I just hope the ps3 will top this...
Well given that I know not one person who I actually take seriously that uses a Blackberry, what's left?
Microsoft cannot possibly give it a name that makes anyone want to buy it except the dumb, drunk, and half-asleep crowds. Microsoft Orgasmatron. Microsoft Raspberry. Fark, no, I can't think of anything. Something pharmaceutical like Microsoft Amitricin. No...
Even numbers are no good after 2000, 2003, XP. Microsoft MCXVII. Microsoft 0111001001010. Microsoft AE21B19A. Bleah...
Magneto is just too stupid. Either purposely or accidentally matching a villain from a comic well known to geeks. Referencing something from electromagnetic and electrical engineering? To what end? Okay, bad question with MS.
No way I can see that there's any way to market it but use it in a media player and call it M-Pod. No, not even that.
Okay, so if coolness isn't happening, then does it have anything that we can't already get by stripping down a Linux distro and fiddling with it?
Apparently not.
So the point of them even bothering with this is... what?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
John Carmacks thoughts on J2me