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Motorola To Buy PDA-Inventor Psion For $200 Million
judgecorp writes "Psion, the company which made the first handheld computers in the 1980s, invented the PDA, and launched the once-unstoppable Symbian OS, is to be bought by Motorola Solutions for $200 million. Following a merger with Teklogix ten years ago, Psion has just been making ruggedised business devices, a business where Motorola Solutions also plays — note, this is Motorola Solutions, not the phones division Motorola Mobility, which Google recently bought."
Wow .... thanks for posting that .... it's BLATANT PLAGIARISM of my web page from several years ago (see where it says "By Evan Koblentz"? That's me. Whatever site posted it sure as hell didn't have my permission to do so.)
PS - The site that stole my work has fine print saying "All rights reserved" on the bottom of their page .... so they steal people's work ... and then claim the rights to it. Nice.
I'm not looking for sympathy, I'm just mad. I removed the site for (gasp!) a business purpose. Just because something was once online does not mean the world is free to steal it. I'm sure some people will flame me for saying that; they can go right ahead because there's free speech. I'm as politically liberal as anyone, and I'm a strong advocate for open-source. My home computer runs Linux. None of that precludes me from wanting to make a few bucks from (more gasp!) my intellectual property. It's very naive for people to say I "haven't been harmed" and "nothing was taken from me" ... that's bull. If I plan to sell something (in this case, the page is part of a chapter of an upcoming book), and someone else decides it's their right to TAKE it and GIVE it away, then I am directly harmed and losing something -- money in my pocket, and food on my family's table. (Yes, I know there are papers and studies claiming that open-source actually increases sales, blah blah blah ... did you know 80% of all people believe made-up statistics? :) ) Bottom line: just because something is closed-source doesn't make it evil, and just because something is open-source doesn't make it good. (It does, however, feel good to rant.)
A while ago I realized every single manufacturer of electronic devices I loved has either gone bankrupt or shut down that particular division. Here's my list in no particular order:
- Psion 5, 5MX, 5MX Pro
- Palm III, Vx, m500
- Sony Clie NR70, NX70, TH55 and many others
- Nokia E71, N900, N9
I hold a particular soft spot for Psion though, as their devices were truly works of art. It took a decade for the same level of integration between the OS and component applications to be matched. The hardware was (almost) bulletproof, with the 5 series sliding keyboard being a truly impressive piece of engineering. However having a battery life measured in DAYS is still a pipe dream...
I do seem to have a knack for picking dying technologies though. A friend joked that I should be given a free Windows phone, that will certainly spell its demise.
"And are these the same guys that make bar code scanners?"
I'm not entirely certain I'm answering the right question here, but, I used to work for Teklogix, in the 70s and again in the 90s. Teklogix invented the hand held barcode scanner. I wrote the barcode decoding software. And you know that thing where in UPC and EAN you can't tell 1's from 7's ad 2's from 9's? I found a way around that. it was basically an improvement to the IBM edge to edge detection technique. I wrote it up and told my boss we should patent it and he just sat on it till it was too late to patent it. AFAIK those are the only termials that have this, it was to fix Brown Shoe's one in a million scan error problem, and did. That patent would have been valuable to motorola, certainly more valuable than not having one. So, kids, if you hand in something like this to your boss an tell him to patent it, nag him till he does.
In the 70s Teklogix automated the postal plants and did special effects hardware for camera stuff. We had PDP-11's and Dave Conroy worked at the next desk from me and this is where he wrote his C compiler, which became DECUS C which became gcc.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Dude, chill. Seriously. It's not that big a deal. In fact, if it was copied with your name still attached to it, if anything, it might help you sell more books. You were credited, after all, which is a lot better than some authors receive.
This offense rates maybe a "slightly miffed" reaction at most. The guy who copied it isn't keeping you from feeding your family. At worst he cost you a few pennies in advertising revenue, except that since you admitted that you took the original down, he's not even costing you that. On principle, you're right, but to be brutally honest, your melodramatic "woe is me" posts are making you come off as a bit of a tool, and thus unsympathetic, in spite of it.
Every creative person in the world has to live with their stuff being taken now and then. Writers, musicians, painters, future theorists, computer programmers, the list goes on and on. Such is the cost of creating something and putting it out there. Sure, you can wallow in anger and misery, or you can take it as a compliment that you actually created something worth copying, which means that you very likely have the capability of creating something worth monetary value.
Story is about Motorola. Fuck all to do with Nokia. Mod parent offtopic.