Nokia Had a Production-Ready Web Tablet 13 Years Ago

An anonymous reader writes "Here's another story of a tech gadget that arrived before its time. Nokia created a web-ready tablet running EPOC (later to be renamed as Symbian) thirteen years ago. The tablet was set to go into full production, and they actually built a thousand units just before it was canceled. The tablet was scrubbed because market research showed there wasn't demand for the device. The team got devices for themselves and the rest were destroyed. The team was then fired. The lesson: Don't try to be pioneer if you're relying on market research studies."

Comments

Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

and resistive touchscreen, USB 1.0, running on AA batteries.

In other words, not ready for prime time.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Altus]

assuming its a touch screen at all.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[cheesybagel]

Remember the Nokia 770? That did not sell that much either and was another Nokia tablet. They never knew how to commercialize products that well.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[davester666]

13 years ago, it was stylus-city, everywhere.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Spazmania]

That's the thing The capacitive multitouch screen makes tablets practical. Before that they were just toys. Nokia made the right call for the time.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

They never knew how to commercialize products that well.

Speaking as an ex Nokian here; though one who escaped around 2004 when I realised things were had gone downhill and were going much worse:

Nokia was excellent at commercializing many things. What made Nokia win over Ericsson and everyone else was logistics, advertising and sales; the fundamentals of commercialisation. The product handling was perfectly designed to deliver the best, most reliable (== lowest support cost) thing at the least price. Then the management went onto a "five phones every six months" cycle and paused any chance of making things that win. They; sorry; OPK specifically; believed that technology and quality was irrelevant. That the brand was all that mattered and that you could sell anything with the Nokia brand. They did wake up later and start to produce excellent things like the Noka N9, however most of the Nokia Mobile Phones people still don't understand why that was better than the windows phones (hint; try having 2000 contacts in a windows phone) and just believe in shiny shiny.

It's not enough to commercialise. If it was, Lumia would work. You just can't easily sell crap. You have to have a good product that people serious users start to deeply love. An old, original, Nokia 6310 is still a better product than any phone on the market today. In some places the sales price for one of those is much much higher than the price of a new Lumia. If the people who made and marketed the 6310 had pushed the N9 and especially the N950 in the same way then the story would be completely different.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[ShanghaiBill]

In other words, not ready for prime time.

Indeed. There were tablet computers in the 1990s and even 1980s. Tablets didn't become mainstream in the 2010s because someone just thought of it, but because acceptable hardware was finally available.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

Moses even had tablets, but they were pretty slow I'm told.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[omnichad]

To be honest, I think capacitive touch is what made tablets and smartphones take off. Nothing else had a bigger impact for me. I did use a PDA with a stylus for a couple years in college. It was just a toy. Just not good enough to be taken seriously.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Slow? They barely moved. And they were heavy!

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[morgauxo]

Why is capacitive touch so important? Multi-touch is cool but I use my Android phone all the time and for just about everything. The only multi-touch gesture I even know is pinch zoom/out. I go whole days without using that and if I didn't have it some sort of disappearing slider would suit me just fine.

I miss the resistive touch screen on my Sharp Zaurus. No, I didn't HAVE to use the stylus. For the normal stuff I do with my capacitive touch screen now I usually just 'clicked' with my fingernail. But... if I wanted to draw a picture, write something (actual handwriting), or use tiny controls (such as desktop apps via VNC) I could do that with a stylus. Capacitive touch screens CANNOT DO THAT!!! they are way too inprecise.

Ideally I would like to have both. My understanding is that some company has a patent on a touch screen which is basically just both a capacitive and a resistive sensor stacked. That way you can have precise single-touch sensing AND multitouch. I have yet to see any product though. It is just wonderful that we have a system where companies can patent good ideas without ever making them available to people who might want to buy them!

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[morgauxo]

I would happily sacrifice the multi-touch capability that capacitive screens bring to get back the precision of a resistive one.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[jones_supa]

Why is capacitive touch so important? Multi-touch is cool but I use my Android phone all the time and for just about everything.

It's not only about multitouch. Capacitive touchscreens are more accurate to use with a bare finger than resistive ones, which call for a stylus.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[narcc]

Yeah, now everyone wishes we had them back.

No, those fat crayon styluses don't count.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[sg_oneill]

i was working with touchscreens from AMX and Centron , admitedly at $10K+ a piece that had responsiveness not far off modern ipads.

The tech was there, the pricepoint however was not.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[LurkerXXX]

>Why is capacitive touch so important

Because most resistive screens sucked, that's why. I worked with quite a number of them, and yeah, sometimes they worked with a thumbnail, and sometimes they didn't. Not acceptable for use.

We had these and a number of other tablets. If you wanted to actually get anything done, you used a stylus.

http://www.fujitsu.com/hk/news...

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[The Grim Reefer]

Slow? They barely moved. And they were heavy!

Yeah, but the batteries never ran out.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[boristdog]

Ah, the GRID was the NEXT BIG THING back in the early 90's, but it died with a whimper.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[jandrese]

Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, I saw Tablet Computer prototypes come up every couple of years. Sometimes they would even make it to market, where they hit with a resounding thud thanks to their horrible clunky OS choices, lack of applications, and hardware limitations. Apple tinkered with the iPad for years before finally releasing it, waiting until the infrastructure grew up to make the device practical. They actually worked on the iPad before the iPhone.

Technologies that had to mature before the tablet computers became practical:

• Wifi networking.
• Capacitive Touchscreens -- Most early designs used a stylus, which sucks, and had poor resolution to boot
• Low power but still acceptably fast processors -- A huge sticking point, lots of early tablets had extremely poor battery life on top of being slow
• A touch enabled OS -- WinCE is terrible to use with a finger, and really pretty bad with a stylus. Symbian was never great. PalmOS was too narrowly focused on Palm pilots
• Battery capacity -- Battery technology has come a long way in the past 15 years. Early attempts would use NiCad batteries, which just aren't good enough, especially with the relatively high energy consumption figures from the old chips.

Apple didn't have a smash hit with the iPad because they were the first to the market. They won because they tinkered and waited until the technology was ready, then came out with a solid finished well integrated product instead of some halfassed "laptop without a keyboard running a cut down version of Windows".

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Archangel Michael]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[RoccamOccam]

The Surface Pro tablets (and others) feature high-resolution pressure-sensitive stylus capabilities. Great for drawing and taking notes. Of course, you get to keep the multi-touch capacitive features. I'm surprised this doesn't get more press, because it is a great feature.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[PrimaryConsult]

I wished I still had it the day after I gave up my HTC... whatever it was. Your thumbnail was good enough for big buttons like dialing the phone, and the stylus allowed for precision and worked even when the user is wearing gloves.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Penguinisto]

Actually, I don't miss the stylus much. On a Wacom pad it was perfect, because its stylus detected subtleties that mimicked a pen, pencil, paintbrush... things like that. But, on a tablet or phone (or PDA if anyone remembers what one of those were), it just becomes something that actually slows down texting, gets lost easily, and is nothing more than a glorified stick.

WinCE and WindowsMobile needed a stylus becuase, well, Microsoft sucked mud when it came to UI design on such a small footprint - they figured you could just recycle the same UI framework and elements that the desktop had... and thus you UI actions the user had to make that only a stylus could accomplish.

Now if someone comes up with a stylus that is, say, bluetooth enabled and can detect pressure and such like the Wacom styluses did, then I could see where it would have some applications... but honestly, not much with regard to the UI itself, but within applications. Otherwise, even with large-ish hands like mine, I have no problems exhibiting a sufficient modicum of hand-eye coordination and just doing without a stylus.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[narcc]

That's probably because you didn't actually need it. Like your smartphone and tablet today, just silly toys to most users.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Penguinisto]

I remember using an old Compaq iPAQ PDA... but with Familiar Linux on it instead of WinCE.

One thing I noticed, no matter the OS, was that you occasionally had to re-calibrate the stupid screen so that it was accurate enough to use... and it was a fairly widespread thing (I think only Palm had their engineering together enough to not constantly require that.)

I guess what I'm getting at is that not only was the capacitive screen a necessity, but so were drivers sufficiently tight enough to insure at least a modicum of accuracy.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[mozumder]

The key talent with Apple is them knowing when NOT to release a product. Steve Jobs has said several times he was proudest of what he didn't release vs. what he did. Editing is a major skill that tech geeks rarely ever have: "Gotta have more Megahertz! NEED MORE MEGABYTES!" without questioning the necessity of it.

Sometimes market research tells you this, as in the case with Nokia here, but intuition can be just as valid when you have an intelligence behind it.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Typical, mention a fictional character & get upvoted.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Among other problems, they had a nasty tendency to drift, so that what you press is NOT necessarily what's under the stylus/pen/fingernail...

Every resistive touch device had an easily accessible function to (re)calibrate the touch interface

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[sjames]

According to Mel Brooks, they were subject to catastrophic data loss.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[soramimicake]

The Sony Xperia Z Ultra has a multi-touch screen that you can also use a stylus with to get more precision.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, now everyone wishes we had them back.

A tiny minority does not constitute everyone. Next to no one misses styluses.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[khellendros1984]

I hate using a stylus. I don't use multitouch often, but that's not what I see as the best feature of a capacitive screen anyhow. I like that I can lightly swipe a finger across the display and achieve a gesture. You just don't get the same ease of use with resistive touch. I can imagine that the extra precision would be necessary if you're remoting in to a desktop GUI, but that's outside my normal use-case for touch devices, personally.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

and they could only display 5 lines of text on each one

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[ultranova]

Moses even had tablets, but they were pretty slow I'm told.

http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_839_29-iconic-images-from-history-shamelessly-turned-into-ads_p29/#27

Look at #27.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Trogre]

*sigh* I miss my Zaurus too. I still have it - a nice SL-5600 but the frontlight (not a backlight) burned out years ago so it's only good directly under bright light.

The precision with our without the stylus far exceeds anything I've seen in a capacitive display.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had nothing but resistive touchscreen phones since 2001. I can do real work on my Palm. My iOS devices are toys. Try to actually edit a spreadsheet on one. I did. Back to Palm. I don't know what I'll do when that thing dies. There's no modern competitor.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Tablet PCs had full versions of Windows. The cost as much as high-end laptops but sucked for actual laptop use.

It's actually iPad that has a cut down OS which was probably the smart decisions (still may be overpriced though).

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[gl4ss]

firing the entire team and canceling this product and production of 770(with linux) probably were connected(770 was out only short few years after this. and by the way all the guys connected to 770 r&d early on for some friggin reason thought that all the phones would be running it's OS by 2007, completely failing to understand how s60 phones managed to be cheap).

because hey, it's Nokia. such politics were always the name of the game after 2000. it wasn't about which teams were best at producing code, ui's or whatever. it was just politics. and as a consequence they had thousands of developers but still politics had made it so that key developers were all subcontractors(for pumping money to people whos companies those subcons worked for. mind you, the actual workers weren't getting the fat slices)

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[omnichad]

I think the accuracy of capacitive is inherently better. Plus, since the screen isn't inset behind a bevel, it's much easier to get at the edges of the screen.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Richy_T]

Palm was positioned perfectly to go where the iphone and eventually ipad took things. The Palm TX only needed basically one more step to get there and Palm fumbled it. Then Apple came in and ate their lunch.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Casandro]

Actually the Nokia 770 was a phenomenal success, despite not being advertised. It spawned 5 successors and the line was only cancelled when Nokia was Elopped. Even then the single remaining product was outselling all of their Windows products despite being only offered in selected markets.

It was the first, and unfortunately the last, mobile device that was actually useful. It was the closest thing to a portable computer you could get.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[MrMickS]

I used my Palm V and a Nokia 6130 all the time. It allowed me to keep track of expenses using a database, and sync them back to my office. It allowed me to keep track of my email, using the IrDA connection between the devices. It allowed me to reboot servers when needed from a restaurant using SSH. It allowed me to edit code remotely from another country, again using SSH.

I had a need and a use for my Palm. It wasn't a toy to me. I have a need for my current iPhone, though in many ways its not as flexible or capable as my Palm/Nokia combination was.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[oji-sama]

Nope. With a resistive screen and a stylus you can actually select which pixel you are clicking. With capacitive screen and stylus, not so much... (but the movements relative to the original point are reasonably accurate).

The advantage of a capacitive screen is that you don't need a special technique to use it well, along with the multitouch, and scratch resistance. On a resistive screen you get accuracy (which allows clicking a specific link in a web browser without zooming in), and since you also have pressure sensitivity you can use it for drawing. And you can even implement hoovering.

And yes, my latest phones have been capacitive. Yet, the resistive screens had read advantages.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

So true about Palm dropping the ball. I had a Palm LifeDrive and I loved it.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[omnichad]

They had advantages when they were calibrated. But for operational speed, a UI that was designed for fat-fingering is probably the actual revolution rather than the screen itself. I guess pinch to zoom and one finger 2D scrolling is a part of that as well. So it's more a capacitive screen tied with all the UI tools to use it effectively. Have to hand it to Apple, they did it first.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Stuarticus]

I think there's a bit of an overlap with the fact that capacitive came in at about the time as glass replaced TFT, which was also a massive step, especially if you like to see your phone after a few months use.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[i ate my neighbour]

Samsung Galaxy Note devices have decent "smart pen"s that can interact with precision. Such a shame that their devices come with awfully bloated crapware.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Moskit]

> Symbian was never great.

It was great when it was still called EPOC and ran on Psion palmtops.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Spazmania]

Why is capacitive touch so important?

Because it, well, works. The older tech worked poorly when it worked at all and suffered a much higher rate of failure.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

But... if I wanted to draw a picture

Four words: Morgan Freeman iPad drawing

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[sandro]

Actually, there were even more issues than that at the time. I invented Webzine back in 1998, and managed to build a production ready version named ProGear by 2001 (with Inventec), and we had issues with storage and broadband access. We take for granted cellular broadband, and flash memory, but they were expensive and not widely available back then. Sure, I used a 4 wire resistive, but I was never able to find a multi-touch screen. And the displays were the most expensive component in the BOM. At 100,000 unit quantities, a 10" 1024x768 TFT was almost $300! We couldn't get the BOM for ProGear below $800. That is what made it ahead of it's time, the tech was not there and or too expensive. We solved the power/processor problem with aTransmeta processor, and we did many things right: Linux Based, Portrait mode, ProGear was predominantly a hardware web browser, not a laptop with no keyboard. We also had character recognition, built-in WiFi, and a content storage system (using a laptop HDD) to enable browsing stored web content when not connected to WiFi. Like I said, before Cellular broadband AND Wifi Hotspots...

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Richy_T]

I was a bit skeptical about the lifedrive due to the hard-drive. With SSD though, that could be interesting.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Parafilmus]

Wacom's method can't be used for a device-independent bluetooth stylus, because it requires special sensors behind the display.

However, samsung's tablets and phablets have the necessary sensors built in, and actually use Wacom styluses, complete with pressure-sensitivity.

So does microsoft's surface tablet, and a few others.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Glass isn't a display technology, it's a transparent covering.
TFT isn't a covering, it's a transistor technology often used in displays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT_LCD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[RockDoctor]

13 years ago I was using a Psion 5 pocket computer (running EPOC, later renamed Symbian). Terrible feature set - you could drop in as large a CF card as you could afford. Connectivity was by serial cable (I moved data on and off via the CF card, so didn't bother much with the cable, and often forgot to pack it.) A half-VGA 4-grey screen (internally EPOC could handle 16 colours, but the colour screens destroyed the battery life and wrecked the price point). A keyboard with good responsiveness and which you could type on for hours (I did all the time). A touch screen that worked. A suite of office applications which met my needs. And most important of all - it would run for a month on a pair of AA cells.

13 years later, the tablet market is bringing out some devices that are comparable with the Psion 5, but are all severely crippled by being hooked to an app purchase "store", instead of providing adequate functionality out of the box. I spent about 5 years after Psion stopped producing the 5s using ebaY to get spares to repair mine (the screens were not robust!) before reluctantly giving up on them. But that month of battery life ... irreplaceable.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[RockDoctor]

Capacitive touchscreens are more accurate to use with a bare finger than resistive ones, which call for a stylus

[SHRUG]

When you want accuracy from fingertips, you use an implement. Be that a dissecting needle and forceps (I spend several hours each working day at the microscope - it shows), or a stylus, or a keyboard. Fingertips weren't designed for precision work. They evolved to their current form while we were still making tools by banging rocks together. By the time we started to make needles and fabrics, our ancestors were already "anatomically modern humans".

I used Psion 5s and 5mxs for about 10 years until supplies dried up - during the period that this device was designed. Applications and an excellent (for a pocket device) keyboard made the Psion ; the stylus wasn't a problem.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[RockDoctor]

Because it, well, works. The older tech worked poorly when it worked at all and suffered a much higher rate of failure.

Crap resistive touchscreens were crap because they were crap. Good resistive touchscreens were good because they were good, not crap.

See up-thread for comments about the Psion 5 family. I forget who made the touchscreen - I know that the display was a Hitachi part, but I can't remember if you could get the touchscreen separately. That was a good part - and probably one of the highest cost items on the BoM to build the device. But it was also one of the major features of the device, and essential to it's success.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[RockDoctor]

Technologies that had to mature before the tablet computers became practical:
Wifi networking.

Useful, I'll agree. Not "necessary". I ran cables throughout the old house in the mid-1990s, and was getting a stable 100MBPS connection from any computer from about 1996 until we left in 2012. If I had a guest and I wanted to provide them with WiFi, I'd turn on the laptops WiFi card and the last time I did it, they could get half the connection speed that I had through the cable. I was considering running 1000-base, but would probably have left it until the previous cable was 20 years old before replacing it.

Capacitive Touchscreens -- Most early designs used a stylus, which sucks, and had poor resolution to boot

I used a touch screen with a stylus. You might think that they suck, but I'm perfectly happy with them. My Psion used one (and I never lost one!) and my last - or last-but-one - phone also had a stylus (which I also didn't lose, until I lost the phone itself). You might think that they suck, but that's a subjective opinion, not an objective fact.

Low power but still acceptably fast processors -- A huge sticking point, lots of early tablets had extremely poor battery life on top of being slow

Yeah ... in 2000 I objected so badly to replacing the AA cells (rechargeable or primary) EVERY DAMNED MONTH. It was such a pain in the arse having to go to any shop in the world and buy two batteries EVERY DAMNED MONTH. It's so much better having to carry a charger (and the panoply of adaptors for the 5 different sockets that I meet most months) with me and having to recharge the device several times a day.

A touch enabled OS -- WinCE is terrible to use with a finger, and really pretty bad with a stylus. Symbian was never great. PalmOS was too narrowly focused on Palm pilots

When I discovered Symbian, I never felt the need to try a WinCE machine or a Palm machine. I just got on with using the applications and barely noticed the OS. Which is how it should be.

Battery capacity -- Battery technology has come a long way inetwork speed n the past 15 years. Early attempts would use NiCad batteries, which just aren't good enough, especially with the relatively high energy consumption figures from the old chips

See above comments about the horrors of a monthly battery change (Either NiCads, NiMHs or primaries).

The technology to make effective "tablet" devices was available in the late 1990s - Psion did it. To this day, it's a mystery to the community of "Psioneers" why they stopped manufacturing them, or why they didn't sell the hardware division as a going concern when they restructured to become a software-only company. If they'd continued ... well, the world is full of "if onlys".

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[RockDoctor]

... Interesting.

And with an $800 BoM, you'd have been up against a £400 Psion 5 (retail cost), which included all applications necessary (was a web browser considered necessary at the time? I honestly can't remember. I know I did do some web browsing on it, because it would connect well to my Sony mobile or Nokia Communicator ; but I honestly can't remember if the web browser was built in or one I chose)., a large installed base of users with their own applications from the 3- and 5- series and an established dealer network.

Oh, hang on - you priced things in dollars. American? Then no Psion dealer network. Maybe you'd have survived.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[RockDoctor]

I used a Compaq desktop system which included a touch screen in 1989. It worked - and since I was new to computers then (I didn't actually have one at home at the time, and at work we used industrial rackmounts with teleprinter terminals and HP 9800 series systems for report writing.) The technology for touchscreens is decades old. IIRC those touch screens added about $1500 to the cost of the system, which wasn't a particular problem. If MS had agreed to include the drivers for them in Windows 3.0, then we'd probably have had the touchscreen revolution in 1991.

We hooked those systems up to the old Motorola analogue mobile phones - we could get 2400 BPS data links from 70 miles offshore. Since the antennae for a formal radio system would have cost 10s of thousands of dollars for installation, and be repeated each time we needed to hire a vessel, then the price of the touchscreen didn't seem too unreasonable. We saved hundreds of thousands over the years that system was working!

Ahhh, memories. Xenix! X! Multiple overlapping windows! All so new then.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[sg_oneill]

Centron, what am I talking about. I mean crestron.

This was back in the 1990s, so my memory is a bit hazy. Thing is, the screens where pretty damn good.

That said, I dug up an old one I had lying around (Pulled it out of a clients place during an update in around 2000 and said I could have it) and plugged it in recently, not quite as responsive as I remembered it being. I guess the ipads spoilt me a bit.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[mrchaotica]

Actually, I don't miss the stylus much. On a Wacom pad it was perfect, because its stylus detected subtleties that mimicked a pen, pencil, paintbrush... things like that. But, on a tablet or phone (or PDA if anyone remembers what one of those were), it just becomes something that actually slows down texting, gets lost easily, and is nothing more than a glorified stick.

Tablets these days really ought to have modern capacitive touchscreens for touch UI work plus Wacom-style digitizers for handwriting and drawing.

ob Henry Ford

[Anonymous Coward]

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse"

Re:ob Henry Ford

[Joce640k]

Then there's the customer surveys that ask people if they'd like to see more salads and healthy foods in McDonalds.

Of course they'd like to SEE it...but that's not why they go to McDonalds.

Re:ob Henry Ford

[dleewo]

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse"

...except no one can confirm he actually said that: http://blogs.hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast/

Re:ob Henry Ford

[BasilBrush]

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
â" Steve Jobs

This one *is* genuine.

Re:ob Henry Ford

[omnichad]

I'd like to see that too. They just haven't come out with many that taste very good.

I go to McDonalds when I don't have time to prepare something and I don't want to spend too much on convenience. I often use that an excuse to eat bad food, but it's far from the only reason to go.

They're also really bad at marketing those options as flavorful foods. In researching my reply, I see that they have a pretty good looking southwest chicken salad. Probably lacking in heat, but that's only a minor complaint...

What's annoying is the perception that salad is the only kind of food that qualifies as healthy.

Re:ob Henry Ford

[jandrese]

What's annoying is the perception that salad is the only kind of food that qualifies as healthy.

At McDonalds, this is probably an accurate perception, and only if you skip (or go very light on) the dressing. Even their yoghurt is questionable.

Re:ob Henry Ford

[omnichad]

Their dressings are made by Newman's Own. Not bad stuff. Not particularly "real" but almost nobody's using anything but shelf-stable dressings. The primary ingredient on the list is water, so the dressing is somewhat thin.

In other words

[50000BTU_barbecue]

don't be a Commodore.

Re:In other words

[Opportunist]

Don't listen to your markedroids is enough.

The sad part here...

[DontBlameCanada]

... is that the vast majority of senior executives won't learn from these mistakes. They'll all listen to some talking head consultant (that they paid way too much for) consult some sort of magic crystal ball and claim "it won't fly!" What should've been the indication that it might catch on is the quote, "The team got devices for themselves."

If the engineers think it's cool enough that they want one for personal use, it's probably a product that has a use that could be expanded from the tech-geek segment into something profitable.

Re:The sad part here...

[Anonymous Coward]

They probably made the right decision for the time.

Until apple entered the market *NO* one was making money on tablets.

People wanted a bigger ipad uhhh i mean iphone. They got it.

Re:The sad part here...

[Altus]

Honestly, looking at the design of that thing, I am not so sure it had a viable market. There were few wireless networks set up in 2000 it wasn't a given that every home had one. Cell data was expensive and slow. The device seems unwieldy and large and the controls don't look like they would be particularly easy to use. Also, what OS does it run, can it do anything but surf the web? Was the web on its own interesting enough in 2000 to make this a killer device? No streaming movies and TV shows, Spotify or any of those interesting services.

Finally, what was the price going to be? Back then 500 would have been a tough sell and I would not be surprised if this device was more expensive than that.

Timing really is everything. The tech needed to reach a certain level and honestly the web had to reach the point where having it in your hand and on the go was valuable to consumers. Sure you can't just ask people what they want but you also have to consider that a lot of things were different 13 years ago.

Re:The sad part here...

[tbuddy]

Also, what OS does it run, can it do anything but surf the web?

EPOC per TFA.

Re:The sad part here...

[tverbeek]

Was the web on its own interesting enough in 2000 to make this a killer device?

Yes, it was. Were you still wading on CompuServ and Usenet or something at the time? :)

Also, what OS does it run, can it do anything but surf the web?

EPOC could do lots more than surf the web; it had apps for all the obvious personal-assistant functions (calendar, notes, to-do, contacts) and had a decent ecosystem of third-party apps. It powered the Psion PDAs (clamshells with decent thumb keyboards and stylus input), and was head-and-shoulders bettter than PalmOS or WinCE (its contemporaries) in terms of stability and ability to run on low-power hardware. I nursed one of the later Psions along for years after they were discontinued, until the iPhone came along and there was finally another pocket computer worth switching too. The devices' main weakness (other than nonexistent marketing) was the state of mobile connectivity in their day: slow-n-crappy cellular data, hard-to-find local wireless, and dial-up.

Re:The sad part here...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's possible it would have flopped anyway.

That thing looks pretty unweildy. Microsoft had also been doing tablets for about a decade at that point without getting traction. I think Bill Gates regarded tablets as "the next big thing". He was somewhat right. He just thought it was going to be his tablets, but he just couldn't offer a tablet that anyone wanted, and that still hasn't changed much since.

Re:The sad part here...

[Altus]

You are comparing this device to other devices that honestly lacked the kind of popular appeal that modern tablets do. Sure, it was running a great OS for the time but that OS did not have the kind of app ecosystem that the iPad does. That ecosystem is pretty critical to the popularity of the device.

and yes, check the UID, I was on line in 2000, quite a bit before that actually, and frankly the web was not the most interesting place for the mainstream. Sure, for hard core geeks it was great but that was not going to be enough to kick off a serious change in the way normal people interacted with technology.

When the iPad came out we already had a really rich web experience available, people had already started supporting mobile safari extensively thanks to the iPhone and there was an existing ecosystem of high quality apps available and plenty of companies and engineers available who's goal was to grow that eco system. This device had none of that and without that it was not going to be successful. Honestly I am not so sure that the iPad would have even managed to take off if it were not for the iPhone that came before it, to pull it off when all wireless bandwidth was slow and expensive and the web was a mostly static place to read news and there were no social networks to speak of.... most people would not have use for such a device.

Plus, we still don't know what it would have cost, which is another huge barrier to adoption.

Re:The sad part here...

[ColdWetDog]

Reminds me of a 3Com Audry another product that had marginal appeal and bad timing.

In a lot of ways, Jobs was lucky with the iPad but he was also way smart in getting the iPhone out the door and accepted. No one, and I mean no one, had managed to get tablets to be anything but a niche item before the iPad. And people tried.

Re:The sad part here...

[fermion]

This was not really an innovative product for the time. The Apple Newton had full network capability, for instance. I know I had it connected to the internet and think I had a basic web browser. When the internet was pushed to the public, there were a number of dedicated machines, or internet appliances, that were introduced to the market, most few have heard of because they were failures. WebTV was a big one, I only know how it worked because I had to visit a dealer to fix a bug on a website I was working on. there were others during the 2000 time frame, but mostly the technology was not there.

Re:The sad part here...

[Stormwatch]

To put it more precisely: Microsoft knew tablets would be big someday... but rather than make a new lightweight OS that was adequate to a tablet, they tried to cram clunky old Windows into the new format. The result was those x86 tablet PCs that were huge, ran crazy hot, and had a completely inadequate interface.

Re:The sad part here...

[Penguinisto]

This, right here.

Back then, anything starting with http:/// was good for news, yahoo (for search), early discussion forums, downloading something, or pr0n.... and not much else. Banking hadn't come around yet, and flash games were barely in their infancy (heh - I can only imagine what it would take to run Flash on that thing.)

Video, really? Animated GIFS often had better resolution and didn't take half a day to download. Speaking of download speeds, remember that DSL was just being rolled out - at a blazing 256k if you were lucky. Most folks still had 56k dial-up, and mobile speeds made 24k dial-up look good.

Apps? Really? Nobody except maybe Palm had any kind of mobile app ecosystem, and getting those apps procured and installed would involve a process that most non-geek users would likely describe as rather painful (we're talking colonoscopy-with-a-chainsaw levels of painful). I remember watching executive types blow hundreds of bucks just for one or two productivity apps.

Also folks, remember that battery life was 100% pure unadulterated shit (even on laptops - oh hell, especially on laptops). You were forced to balance between usability and battery life. Palm did it by staying monochrome and using a resolution that most folks would completely hate today. Not until around the time that the iPod Nano came out (with an incredibly tiny OS footprint and obsessive power efficiency) did you start seeing improvements.

Re:The sad part here...

[RR]

Honestly, looking at the design of that thing, I am not so sure it had a viable market. There were few wireless networks set up in 2000 it wasn't a given that every home had one. Cell data was expensive and slow. The device seems unwieldy and large and the controls don't look like they would be particularly easy to use. Also, what OS does it run, can it do anything but surf the web? Was the web on its own interesting enough in 2000 to make this a killer device? No streaming movies and TV shows, Spotify or any of those interesting services.

Were you around in 2000? I was. It was not a wasteland.

WiFi was already starting to become popular. Apple introduced the Airport in 1999. By 2001, I had my own WiFi network, and my school had a (very poorly functioning) network. It wasn't a "given," but it was available to the savvy people who would buy that thing.

The Web was already pretty interesting. There was streaming media, in the forms of RealPlayer, QuickTime, and Windows Media. Yahoo and Microsoft had webmail. Slashdot had fewer idiot editors. Amazon had shopping. And who knows what that device could have turned into, if it had more development.

The Nokia M510 could very well have been a flop. Sony's eVilla was a disaster. Steve Jobs refused to release the iPad until it was sufficiently "magical" in 2010. But I think this had more to do with design discipline and marketing than what was technically possible back then. After all, Palm was pretty big back then.

Re:The sad part here...

[tverbeek]

And EPOC worked in devices with great battery life. Mine would go much longer on a set of AAs than I do with my iPhone.

Re:The sad part here...

[tverbeek]

Yeah, I saw the low UID, which is why I wondered how you could be online and yet so unaware of what so many people were doing on the Web in 2000. Sure, it was mostly dial-up or bad DSL, but it was hardly just "hardcore geeks". They were e-mailing and chatting and looking at (still-image) porn and shopping and selling garbage on eBay, and talking about what a bust Y2K had been. There was that whole "dot-com bubble" that everyone was talking about (but not calling it a "bubble" yet because it was still the latest Big Thing). The following September, I distinctly recall everyone at my office flocking to news web sites trying to learn what was happening in New York on a Tuesday morning. So I have to figure that you were too preoccupied doing stuff with the geekier parts of the internet to notice that yes: the Web was already kind of a a big thing in 2000.

Re:The sad part here...

[beefoot]

I still have two audrey in my house serving music for my kids and wife. I had them for more than 12 years. I don't think it will quit anytime soon.

Re:The sad part here...

[RockDoctor]

Sure, it was running a great OS for the time but that OS did not have the kind of app ecosystem that the iPad does.

And it didn't need it.

Writing documents - covered on the stock ROM (and you could get converters to go to Word and or Write formats too).

Spreadsheets - I could make the stock ROM's spreadsheet do the calculations for steering oil wells. Other people I knew ran their stock portfolios on their Psions. Converters available.

Drawing ... well, you could do it. The 4-shade grey screen was a limit there, but it was good enough for my purposes. Converters available.

Database - again, good enough for my purposes. I knew a mud man who did his stock control on one, so I guess that was good enough for him.

Presentations ... I think they didn't see making presentations as being a use case.

There were a LOT of other apps out there - I remember buying several, such as astronomical tools - but you could take the machine out of it's box on Xmas day and be up and running for any regular office tasks.

Re:The sad part here...

[arglebargle_xiv]

EPOC could do lots more than surf the web; it had apps for all the obvious personal-assistant functions (calendar, notes, to-do, contacts) and had a decent ecosystem of third-party apps.

There may have been a small number of third-party apps, but nothing like what made the iPad and later Android successful. What's worse, there never would be too many more either. I've programmed for EPOC, alongside a large number of other embedded OSes, and it is by far the most alien, difficult-to-work-with OS I've ever used. I've found it easier to move code to MVS (IBM 1960's mainframe OS) than EPOC. Unless they'd completely rewritten the OS in something useful (Linux was mentioned), the market would have been severely restricted no matter how cool the hardware was.

The lesson...

[fintux]

I would rather put it: Don't rely on market research studies, if you want to be a pioneer. If Henry Ford had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said "We want faster horses".

Re:The lesson...

[Ralph Wiggam]

In 1900, most people fundamentally didn't understand what a car was or was capable of- having never seen on.

In 2001, it was the same deal with tablets. Although there were some earlier pseudo-tablets from Palm and Apple.

Market research works very well for improving established existing products. People can answer "what do you like and not like about the product you currently use".

Re:The lesson...

[Ol Olsoc]

Market research works very well for improving established existing products. People can answer "what do you like and not like about the product you currently use".

Market research gives us Ketchup that needs a knife to get out of the bottle, and milkshakes thick as ice dream. It also causes cars to get bigger, larger, and a zillion other " 'ers" every year until they have to bring out a new car similar to the original one that people liked because the new one became a bloat mobile.

Marketers woldn't like my responses, because I think they destroy products rather than improve them.

Not a market back then

[butalearner]

The reason tablets became popular is because people had begun to use their phones in similar ways, and the price wasn't too outrageous. Microsoft had tablets before they became popular, too, but they didn't kick off the tablet craze. Pioneering technology is one part tech, ten parts timing.

Re:Not a market back then

[butalearner]

The reason tablets became popular is because people had begun to use their phones in similar ways, and the price wasn't too outrageous. Microsoft had tablets before they became popular, too, but they didn't kick off the tablet craze. Pioneering technology is one part tech, ten parts timing.

...and a whole lot of marketing, I should have added.

Re:Not a market back then

[Ralph Wiggam]

Timing is very important. If the first to market always won, we would all be using Apple Newton 17s.

But marketing is critically important too.

Re:Not a market back then

[Anonymous Coward]

20 years ago, Microsoft had a tablet PC. It didn't sell because the hardware technology was too clumsy to be useful. Big, heavy, slow, low battery life, and it was in the days before rampant wifi everywhere.

Doing something first doesn't earn you a market. Doing something well enough and advertising it with all your might has a good chance of earning you a market. Doing a tablet PC well required around 15 years more miniaturization and an odd popular obsession with wireless LAN.

Re:Not a market back then

[AvitarX]

And size.

A 10 inch tablet, with a good screen is a way more pleasant device than a 13 inch tablet, likely twice the weight and thickness, with a 2001 screen.

Re:Not a market back then

[cheesybagel]

There were many tablets released before the iPad that did not sell that well. What Apple does have is a massive propaganda machine and enough gullible users to buy anything they put available in droves.

Re:Not a market back then

[rsclient]

I've used some of the earlier "internet tablets" (e.g., the Nokia N800) and PDA. Early machines had real issues with being powerful enough to actually work well -- something my low-end phone still struggles with.

(Not to mention the terrible, terrible connection managers. For one particularly horrid PDA, I spent more time trying to get on the internet than actually using the internet)

Re:Not a market back then

[Klivian]

Microsoft had tablets before they became popular, too, but they didn't kick off the tablet craze.

They did not become popular, but the major factor for that was simply price. Those tablet was ridicolusly expesive, they cost 3-10 times a similary specced laptop(CPU/RAM/Disk). What was sold, was geared to special user scenarious suporting dedicated use cases. Not general consumer use.

Had affordable devices been avalible, the form factor would have had much more success earlier. Wich again would have led to better touch UI, by evolution. The market side would have ended up close to todays levels, but not with the expolsive growth. But a 5-10 years head start would have evened that out.

Re:Not a market back then

[Anonymous Coward]

> ...and a whole lot of marketing, I should have added.

No amount of marketing turns s*** to gold.

2001 technology and ecosystem (Internet, wireless networks, app stores, UI...) weren't ready for tablets.

Re:Not a market back then

[romanval]

Microsoft indeed tried to get their Tablet to sell over 10 years ago, but their mistake was in adapting Window UI directly into a tablet without adapting the user interface. A pure hands-only tablet has no stylus, no resizeable windows and must support multiple finger touches + gestures.. which is totally different then WIMP. The genius of Steve Jobs is he figured that out early on and directed his engineers to tackle it appropriately- (hence a totally separate UI interface stack for OS X; hence iPhone OS = OS X core + different UI)

Steve Jobs also had the vision to know that people will accept something they've never seen before... as long as the usability is good beyond a reasonable doubt.

Re:Not a market back then

[davester666]

they didn't kick off the tablet craze [at least imho] because
1) Bill demanded they use stylus's. even after the iPad came out, he still publicly claimed tablets using stylus were better/preferred
2) Bill DIDN'T demand that the Office team make a version of Office that worked with the tablet UI. The head of the office team refused to alter office to use any tablet-specific API's, so the tablet OS guys had to code ways for the keyboard to hide/show at the right time in office at the OS level, so it never really worked well.

1 I can kind of understand, as Bill never had a great understanding of hardware and where it was going, but 2 I don't, because Bill was in charge of MS, and tablets was something he seemed [at least initially] to be very into, and to let the Office guy tell the tablet group to fuck off just doesn't make sense.

Re:Not a market back then

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's exactly it. Apple fools tens of millions of people into buying their stuff, and then fools them into doing it again when they're ready to get a new one.

You're a fucking idiot.

Re:Not a market back then

[Anubis IV]

While timing did play a part, I'd suggest it's not so much timing as it is execution that made the biggest difference, in this case.

Android and iOS tablets operate in broadly the same ways as each other and are wildly successful. Windows 8 tablets, which work in much the same way as the Windows tablets that preceded them (i.e. trying to bring the feel of a desktop OS to a tablet form factor), are failing to gain any significant presence in the market, despite having the right timing and loads of marketing. To me, that's a strong indication that the thing holding back tablets prior to iOS and Android arriving was not that people weren't ready for them, but that the tablet concept simply wasn't executed properly.

Same deal with smartphones. Smartphones were around since the '90s, but they only represented an incredibly small portion of the cell phone market. Fast forward a few years, and we get Android and iOS, which, when they first came out, had most of the same features as the smartphones that preceded them, yet they implemented and executed those in a drastically different way that made them much more compelling to users. Blackberry and Palm had the right timing, since they were there from the beginning. What they lacked was proper execution to bring it to the general population.

You're right that there wasn't a market back then, but there wasn't a market because there wasn't a product done right yet. Ideas are cheap. Execution is what matters.

Re:Not a market back then

[Your.Master]

But marketing can turn a bunch of common rocks into precious diamonds.

Furthermore, it isn't hard to fail at marketing to the point where nobody wants your gold since they're convinced it's probably pyrite, or perhaps you coated the gold in shit so everyone assumes it's a solid lump of shit.

Re:Not a market back then

[Guspaz]

While the marketing certainly played a big part in that, a bigger factor was likely that technology was finally ready. From the article, Nokia's tablet had a 4 hour battery life and weight more than four pounds... the bezel had 2.5x the surface area of the screen itself!

The thing wasn't a tablet, it was a portable Internet kiosk.

Re:Not a market back then

[cheesybagel]

I did not say their products sucked. But when you have end users preordering product by the millions before anyone had a chance to try it out what can you call those people but gullible?

There is a reason why people claimed Steve Jobs had a reality distortion field you know. The fact is the products are not that good right now to justify the demand even if they were at points. How can you explain that by anything other than marketing?

Re:Not a market back then

[Solandri]

This. The tablet was held back for nearly a decade by Intel and Microsoft insisting that it had to be a convertible laptop. Microsoft wanted to make sure each tablet sales was a Windows license sale, and Office too if they could. Intel wanted to make sure each tablet sale was was an x86 CPU sale, and a high-end CPU too if they could. Consequently, the tablet PC market stagnated at fewer than 100,000 sales per year for close to a decade.

The real technology that led up to tablet market space wasn't the smartphone; it was the netbook. Suddenly people realized that most of the stuff they did on laptops (email, web browsing, myspace/facebook, listening to music, watching movies), they could do just fine on devices which didn't run Windows and didn't have a PC-like CPU, and consequently could be cheaper than a laptop, not more expensive like tablet PCs were.

Re:Not a market back then

[BasilBrush]

I did not say their products sucked. But when you have end users preordering product by the millions before anyone had a chance to try it out what can you call those people but gullible?

Pre-orders didn't start until 2 months after the iPad had been demonstrated by Jobs. 2 months in which all the tech press reviewed it. And it was hardly an unknown to everyone who's already experienced iOS on an iPhone.

Compared with the lack of knowledge which most people have when they buy products, they were pretty well informed.

There is a reason why people claimed Steve Jobs had a reality distortion field you know. The fact is the products are not that good right now to justify the demand even if they were at points.

That's not a fact. That's your ill-informed opinion. Big difference.

I call them early adopters. I call you an imbecile.

Re:Not a market back then

[penguinboy]

They weren't ordering completely blind. With three models each of the iPhone and iPod Touch released before the iPad, I would say purchasers had a pretty good idea what they were getting into.

Re:Not a market back then

[Anonymous Coward]

And we here on sd called it silly even when it was going on. You can go read the discussions if you want...

Re:Not a market back then

[narcc]

he still publicly claimed tablets using stylus were better/preferred

And they are.

Re:Not a market back then

[jandrese]

Microsoft seems to have taken the other track now. They are still bringing the Windows experience to the tablet, but they've revamped the windows experience to be the kind that works well on touchscreens, some say to the detriment of the mouse and keyboard crowd.

Re:Not a market back then

[operagost]

^ This.

Re:Not a market back then

[Anonymous Coward]

And power/performance. I used a tablet in 2001. It had a 200 MHz:ish Geode CPU. It definitely couldn't handle video playback. If you wanted that, you would need a power-hungry Pentium 3 which ate batteries pretty quickly and needed serious cooling. The Geode could play mp3 though.

Re:Not a market back then

[sjames]

I wouldn't be so sure

Re:Not a market back then

[davester666]

In the overall market for tablets, the number of people who want to always/primarily use a stylus to interact with them are probably on the scale of total BB Playbook sales vs total iPad sales. Note I use the term "want" in there, vs having to use it to interact with the tablet, like with the Surface for non-touch apps.

Re:Not a market back then

[narcc]

I suppose you have some data to support that?

Re:Not a market back then

[davester666]

i don't know, how about sales of devices not needing a stylus vs those that do

26 million ipads vs approx 1.5 surface devices [need to guess as Apple is the only vendor who reports sales in a way that legal obliges them to not lie]

and that ignores the millions on Android devices that also don't use stylus.

How about you proving zillions of people want and/or prefer to use a stylus to interact with their tablet?

Re:Not a market back then

[narcc]

So, no? I didn't think so.

Nice try with "sales" though, I'm sure that'll sucker in the bottom 0.5%. I'll let you work out why everyone else knows it's laughably absurd.

Moving on, what's your problem with the stylus? It's very useful and greatly enhances the utility of tablets. Think of all the things you could do with your tablet that you cannot reasonably do now.

Now, you might not find it terribly useful. That's okay. The rest of us want to do more with our tablets than just play video games.

Re:Not a market back then

[davester666]

Sales of a touch-only device vs a device that demands a pointer device for a bunch of stuff is not evidence?
Or how fast iPad sales exceeded the total sales of all windows-based "general purpose" tablets over about 10 years in only a few months?
Or sales of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, which comes with a stylus, but doesn't require it's use, Samsung claims to have shipped 10 million over 9 months [likely actually sold less than half that].

Yet, you have no evidence of your assertion other than "I like using one".

Is a stylus useful for interacting with a tablet in certain specific use cases? Yes.
Do people want to use them as a primary input method? No.

Re:Not a market back then

[narcc]

Sales of a touch-only device vs a device that demands a pointer device for a bunch of stuff is not evidence?

Obviously not. I guess you're in that bottom 0.5%.

Yet, you have no evidence of your assertion other than "I like using one".

All I did was agree with Bill. You're the one making specific claims here.

Do people want to use them as a primary input method?

Move that goal post!

Re:Not a market back then

[davester666]

Gah, sucked in by a stupid troll

You and Bill can go and play with each others stylus, and the rest of the world will keep using their iPads.

Re:Not a market back then

[narcc]

I'm the troll?

Interesting. Enjoy your iPad. I'm off to do actual work.

Re:Not a market back then

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's venture into tablet computers was only to put Go Inc out of business and keep IBM's Pen for OS/2 from gaining anything. As soon as those threats were derailed with masterful marketing and false advertising schemes it went nowhere. The job was done protecting Windows in the market place.

Windows still sucks on tablets and is still a resource hog compared to the competition but now they let Apple and Google grow the market so now there's no way all their billions in cash can get people to believe Apple and Android are bad and Windows is good. The cat's out of the bag as they say.

Re:Not a market back then

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a reason why people claimed Steve Jobs had a reality distortion field you know.

Yeah - and it had nothing to do with marketing. You guys can't just redefine words to fit whatever you want them to mean.

Re:Not a market back then

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the troll?

Yes you are. Pretending that agreeing with Bill Gates on something makes you right is fucking proof.

Re:Not a market back then

[Anonymous Coward]

Rabbid Apple downmodders downmod as usual. Have fun astroturfers.

Re:Not a market back then

[s0nicfreak]

Marketing can turn shit into iShit

Re:Not a market back then

[Ol Olsoc]

I did not say their products sucked. But when you have end users preordering product by the millions before anyone had a chance to try it out what can you call those people but gullible?

I call them satisfied with what they bought before, and have every expectation of their new product being likewise satisfactory.

That's not even close to gullible. It's good customer experience.

Re:Not a market back then

[Ol Olsoc]

he still publicly claimed tablets using stylus were better/preferred

And they are.

It's all fun and games until someone pokes an eye out with that stylus.

Re:Not a market back then

[Ol Olsoc]

The rest of us want to do more with our tablets than just play video games.

Real men use a stylus to type.

Innovation

[Terminus32]

Take that Apple!

Re:Innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm puzzled. Why does the existence of a tablet that no one has ever seen, and may or may not look anything at all like an iPad make apple not inovative?

Re:Innovation

[Serenissima]

Because this is Slashdot. Anytime there's ANY post (positive or negative) about Apple, Microsoft, or any other large technology company, there will always be an inane, anti-"whichever company is being discussed" comment from the person who says, "You still use [product/software/operating system] from [company]?? The only true way to use a computer is by using the command line on [random Linux distro] running off of a Beowulf Cluster of Raspberry Pi's - Just like I have setup!!! If you use anything else, you're a loser!"

And there's always that guy somewhere. It's uncanny.

Re:Innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, much like people around here think that some vaguely related concept to a patent obviously invalidates it as prior art, anyone that made any kind of tablet before Apple means that the iPad is a cheap imitation of whatever completely failed and useless product they are pointing to.

They all seem to forget what the "mobile web" was before MacWorld 2007 showed us a real browser running on a phone. You know, those shitty text-based WAP versions of web sites that nobody actually used because it was worse than what you could have gotten with NCSA Mosaic on a 14.4 modem?

Re:Innovation

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

If you're still using an Osborne I've got a lot of questions for you.

There were probably several of these false starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel had a web tablet in the same timeframe, also with a limited manufacturing run, that was killed just before reaching the market. Though as usual with Intel products, there had to been an x86 PC in the mix.

http://www.cnet.com/news/before-apples-ipad-there-was-the-intel-ipad-seriously/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihUjWMUUWHM

Tablets?

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been around for a long time. I specifically remember a monochrome Windows 3.1 device that was embedded in a note pad. Windows for Pen Computing I think they called it, You could write notes on the paper on the right hand side of the note pad and your scribbles were translated to the device on the left hand side. I think it was a 386.

"No mobile ecosystem"

[poptix]

Bull. Palm/Handspring devices had a ton of apps around then, I had a Handspring Prism w/ GSM module that I could IRC, SSH, browse the web and whatever else from in 2000.

My Symbian phone not-too-long-after (Nokia 6600) had all the same apps in a more compact package. The whole 'mobile ecosystem' did NOT begin with Apple or Android.

Re:"No mobile ecosystem"

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Mobile apps? no

Mobile *ecosystem*?

That's a different story. Scrublands in the desert is an ecosystem. I wouldn't call it as lush as a rainforest. The mobile ecosystem prior to the iPhone was pretty barren. I used to use a Windows mobile 5 iPaq back in the day and the ecosystem was bare AND confusing(Are you using a MIPS CE device? ARM? Do you even know? etc.).

Re:"No mobile ecosystem"

[0xdeadbeef]

Yup.

It's like these people have never heard of Handango. They're so ignorant it is funny.

Re:"No mobile ecosystem"

[BasilBrush]

AND confusing(Are you using a MIPS CE device? ARM? Do you even know? etc.).

Might have been confusing on WinCE. But the Psion and Palm Pilot mobile app scene wasn't at all confusing.

And whilst nothing like Apple's App Store existed until Apple created it, there was a pretty vibrant app scene back on those older mobile devices. To the extent of professional packages for doctors, pilots, estate agents etc. Lots of productivity apps. Plenty of games. Basically all the categories you get on iOS and Android now. Just fewer in number.

Re:"No mobile ecosystem"

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

And whilst nothing like Apple's App Store existed until Apple created it, there was a pretty vibrant app scene back on those older mobile devices. To the extent of professional packages for doctors, pilots, estate agents etc. Lots of productivity apps. Plenty of games. Basically all the categories you get on iOS and Android now. Just fewer in number.

The part about confusing was that it reflected my experience with Windows Mobile application development.

So any notes apps that are like Vesper? Or any read later apps like Instapaper? Or even anything like Urban Spoon? Or... and I could go on.

The thing about the app space now is that while yes, part of this is a move in technology (we now have very fast mobile CPUs on relatively fast wireless cellular connections), the other half is that the ecosystem itself is more than just a build toolchain and the ability to side load from the internet.

Also, it helps that iOS is way more regular people friendly than the Psion was.

Re:"No mobile ecosystem"

[BasilBrush]

So any notes apps that are like Vesper? Or any read later apps like Instapaper? Or even anything like Urban Spoon? Or... and I could go on.

Notes apps, for sure. Instapaper and Urban Spoon are more to do with the internet era. Those PDAs we are talking about were at a time when just having a browser on the internet on a mobile device was a pretty neat thing.

Also, it helps that iOS is way more regular people friendly than the Psion was.

Well, time moves on, and the OS came 16 years after the Series 3 and 10 years after the Series 5, so of course it's more user friendly. But by the standards of the time, the Psions were very user friendly. Indeed Psion took their big picture ideals on app design from Apple and NeXT.

Later, there was much sadness amongst Psion's original developers when many design ideals of EPOC32 had to be broken to make it fit with Nokia's style of UI.

Re:"No mobile ecosystem"

[Richy_T]

Yes, yes and yes.

What a shame

[kwiecmmm]

If they made 1000 of them initially, why not take them to a trade show and see what kind of reaction that they got.

Instead they threw out 800 of these units and removed it from their memories.

Re:What a shame

[BitZtream]

If you think about the tech from the time, you'd realize they were shitty.

Battery life ... would have been crappy
Display tech ... would have been crappy
Touch screen ... would have been crappy, resistive touch if at all
Processing power ... would have been crappy
GUI hardware acceleration ... would have been nonexistent from a practical perspective.
Connectivity ... bad wifi or ridiculously over priced cellular modems that killed the batteries even faster.

As soon as the non-techie guys in the company saw it, though would have canceled it in a heart beat, it would have been an embarrassment ... much like pretty much EVERY tablet before the iPhone/iPad era. Android may be fine now, but before they iPhone, pretty much every mobile device was asstastic. A few die-hard geeks (myself included) had things like old high end nokia smartphones or windows ce devices, but they were entirely the realm of high end geeks who would put up with the quirks

Got to play with 1 of these or something similar..

[Zontar The Mindless]

2001. Touchscreen. Ran a Gecko-based UI. Thought it was way cool. Thought for sure they'd be out on the market within a year or two of that.

If it wasn't the Nokia unit, then someone else was working on something very similar.

Le Sigh....

[John Bokma]

The Newton platform is a personal digital assistant developed by Apple Inc.. Development of the Newton platform started in 1987 and officially ended on February 27, 1998. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

The MessagePad is the first series of personal digital assistant devices developed by Apple Computer for the Newton platform in 1993. Some electronic engineering and the manufacture of Apple's MessagePad devices was undertaken in Japan by the Sharp Corporation. The devices were based on the ARM 610 RISC processor and all featured handwriting recognition software and were developed and marketed by Apple. The devices ran the Newton OS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Re:Le Sigh....

[Tsolias]

Le doubleSigh avec triple facepalm. PDA 1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Le Sigh....

[cheesybagel]

Before that there were organizers from Casio, Sharp, etc. Also besides Palm in the US, Psion PDAs were popular in Europe.

Re:Le Sigh....

[Anonymous Coward]

In what way on earth is that calculator a PDA?

Re:Le Sigh....

[BasilBrush]

Before that there were organizers from Casio, Sharp, etc. Also besides Palm in the US, Psion PDAs were popular in Europe.

Let's discount the Data Cards and Programmable calculators. Anything with a calculator like display and chicklet keys definitely isn't a tablet.

Before the Newton (in 1993) there was the Psion Series 3 in 1991. But the Palm Pilot wasn't until 1996.

The Psion Series 3 was great. I had one. But it was a mini-laptop in design. Keyboard only, no touch-screen. It was a very nice PDA, but it wasn't a tablet.

And the Pilot was clearly influenced by the Newton. Basically the concept is a cut-down Newton.

Re:Le Sigh....

[Tsolias]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... In 1986, .... this seems like a calculator to you? "The machine had vastly more application functionality, including a number of built-in application programs, an easy to use database, a diary and an alarm clock and featured end-user programmability in the form of the successful Organiser Programming Language (OPL), a BASIC-like language which was compiled to intermediate code, in contrast to the interpreters which were commonly available for other consumer computers of the time. More advanced users could reach into the system machine code routines either via direct machine code, or via calls from OPL, and could manipulate the built-in address database as well as create their own." also the apple thing came out in 1993, while Organiser 2 came out in 1986, that apple things was not even being *developed* until the next year.

Re:Le Sigh....

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Palm was more influenced by the Tandy Zoomer than the Newton, After all they were part of its creators.

Re:Le Sigh....

[RockDoctor]

Yes, I remember the Psion Organiser. I never had one myself, but a guy at work dropped his into one of the chemical storage pits (filled with an oil/ water/ salt mix), and since we were 2 weeks from getting back to shore, he asked me if I could try and bring it back to life. All I did was clean it - very carefully, inside and out, water, alcohol, water, alcohol - and then dry it very, very carefully. But it worked when I put it back together, which allowed him to back it up. And it carried on working until the next hitch on the vessel, which astonished everyone.

That stuck in my memory for 8 years later when I was looking for something better then a Nokia Communicator, and which I'd be able to take to work. I wasn't disappointed by the hardware Psion were selling then.

It was probably the right decision

[linuxguy]

Tablets only became popular when they got to their current form and pricing level. The older tablets and specifically this Nokia one wasn't going to be popular.

UGLY!

[neonv]

That tablet is ugly and looks difficult to use. That marketing team was absolutely right, that tablet would have failed. It's not the idea of a tablet that made Apple successful, but aesthetics and general usability.

13 years ago, eh?

[CRCulver]

That would be 2001. I had a PDA (Pocket PC) at that time that was internet-capable. However, when wi-fi was not yet widespread, the only way you could get on the internet with the thing was a complicated modem setup, plugging a cable into an extension card. Getting data over a mobile phone link still involved the horribly primitive technology WAP. So, a fat lot of good your portable device did you. The smartphone and the tablet could not really take off until wi-fi and cheap 3G did.

Second Guessing 13-year old market research

[ZahrGnosis]

Thirteen years ago the network infrastructure wasn't in place to let people do with a tablet what they do now, so the market research at the time may have been spot on. You can't really second-guess it now. I mean, sure, it may have become wildly popular, but Nokia actually entered the tablet space around 2005 with the 770 and even that was rather premature by today's tablet standards. Four years LESS of infrastructure, apps, and internet-addiction wasn't going to help any tablet succeed. And while the article hints that the early designers would have made different choices with the 770, there's no guarantee they would have made a difference. There were no killer apps -- no facebook, twitter, or instagram that people just HAD to have access to all the time. No reliable data network. Definitely no YouTube or Netflix. PDAs were slowly becoming popular, but they were very personal -- glorified address books and note taking devices.

It would be nice if the team were rewarded and kept on to make use of the technology somewhere and grow the market, but it's not like they were the first -- the Newton, and devices from HP and DEC were all in development much earlier than this -- and no matter how much of a "pioneer" you think someone may be, they do need a market; either you have to build it or wait for it if it doesn't exist, but just because a device can be created doesn't mean that the entire experience was ready-to-go.

Remember the Edsel!

[Anonymous Coward]

Marketing studies showed that it was exactly the kind of car the American middle class was clamoring for.

Zontar - prove your words here libeler

[Anonymous Coward]

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us all a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply & is OFF TOPIC.

You can't, obviously, can you? Nope... lol! That makes YOU a lying bullshitter.

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's useless?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity if my program's useless http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

You also said MY program is a virus?

I disproved that too here WITH PROOF FROM A RELIABLE & REPUTABLE SOURCE IN THE SECURITY COMMUNITY who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

(Which I always produce from reputable sources, NOT fellow "trolls" whom I have destroyed, like I am destroying YOU loser (see ps below)):

---

You said by turning up cpu priorities in my program I am turning off the processscheduler?

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler to make his process run faster." - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Again: How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Can't get out of your crap now, can you? Nope... same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO, no less!

Funny:

You can't seem to explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I am "so bad", why did THAT happen to them? apk

Re:Zontar - prove your words here libeler

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to say, I've been reading your psychotic rants for years, and I'm really intrigued as to what you're like in real life. I can't say I'd like to meet you, but I'd love to observe you with say, 4 or 5 inches of bulletproof glass between us.

PS Please learn the meaning of libel

Re:Zontar - prove your words here libeler

[Anonymous Coward]

zontar anoncoward trolling + illogical ad hominem attacks != effective when you are mental multiple personality disorder http://slashdot.org/comments.p... + manic depression http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Nokia destroyed tablet, M$ destroyed Nokia

[Anonymous Coward]

So what, they just destroyed tabled. Many years later M$ sabotage came over and destroyed profitable company.
Lesson learned. Never trust evil M$, they will buy you or destroy you.

Re:Nokia destroyed tablet, M$ destroyed Nokia

[slew]

Nokia creates tablet.
Nokia destroys tablet.
M$ destroys Nokia.
M$ creates a tablet.
A tablet destroys M$.
Linux inherits the earth?

Re:Nokia destroyed tablet, M$ destroyed Nokia

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia creates tablet.
Nokia destroys tablet.
M$ destroys Nokia.
M$ creates a tablet.
A tablet destroys M$.
Linux inherits the earth?

"By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work"

Re:There were probably several of these false star

[AcidTag]

3 years before Intel. Cyrix at Comdex 98' with their WebPad. x86 CPU, Harris wireless, Resistive touch screen.

https://archive.org/details/CC...

Sounds like Xerox all over again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like Xerox all over again.

Ah, those were the days

[Austrian Anarchy]

Back when some of us were clamoring for an iOpener to add touch screen and HDD hacks, tinkering with Panasonic touch-screen large palm sized gadgets (forgot the model, still have it in box) and all that stuff. A few more were out there and fizzled too, missed this one.

no wifi back then

[Anonymous Coward]

Wifi as we know it didn't exist back then. The iPad's success is that it was launched after consumers had easy access to wifi.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[PolygamousRanchKid]

"Well, you’re obviously being totally naive of course", said the girl, "When you’ve been in marketing as long as I have, you'll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them." The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford.

"Stick it up your nose," he said.

"Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know," insisted the girl, "Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?"

"And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."

"Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there."

"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"

The marketing girl soured him with a look.

"Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."

Not much talk about price

[RevWaldo]

2001? Something like that would cost $1000, bare minimum. Add that it weighs four pounds without a keyboard? They made the right call.

If, of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, "It might have been,"
More sad are these we daily see:
"It is, but hadn’t ought to be."


.

Re:Not much talk about price

[PaddyM]

CD Jewel Cases are an abomination.

They don't work, they break easily, they're made of plastic, and they aren't recyclable.

Indeed, your poem is true.

It does not matter

[Anonymous Coward]

It does not matter what they had.
Nokia produced $hitty, plastic, El Cheapo, phones for a decade. Coupled with the worst OS the humans have ever seen (Symbian).
When the iPhone hit the market, it seemed like an extraterrestrial entity, from a construction and OS ease to use POV.
And, BTW, Moses had a tablet since before anyone else.

They were smart not to release it

[MrEdofCourse]

I'm finding it funny that you kids never saw these. Around 2001 (not that long ago), there were a bunch of tablets being shown at CES that never caught on. Some were PCs as tablets. Some were more consumption like tablets, only with a lot less to consume.

They were slow, clunky, expensive. No YouTube, no videos (the storage was measured in MBs). They were heavy, had short battery lives and terrible screens.

The user experience of these things was really poor as well. Think WebTV.

This thing was nothing like an iPad. And it's not like as if you can really say, "like an iPad would've been in 2001". If you look at what most people use their iPads for, none of that would be possible/practical on the 2001 tablets. It's more like saying that Apple had a QuickTake digital camera, but it never really took off... amazing because today we all have digital cameras all over the place.

I applaud Nokia for developing a prototype to demo at CES, but it was a good thing they didn't take this to production.

Re:They were smart not to release it

[Anonymous Coward]

2001 was the 13 years ago that was mentioned in the freaking title... you win.

Welcome to 1995

[mveloso]

General Magic's and Sony's PIC-1000 had a graphical web browser back in 1995. Even back then nobody wanted one.

Re:Welcome to 1995

[Arethereanyleft]

That must be why I have one. I think it still works...

The rest of the story

[Anonymous Coward]

The tablet was scrubbed because market research showed there wasn't demand for the device. The team got devices for themselves and the rest were destroyed. The team was then fired.

A few years later, Steve jobs "invents" the iPad and tells consumers "THIS is what you NEED". A market segment is born.

Re:The rest of the story

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have fired that team too - look at that piece of shit! That thing has to weight at least 4 pounds, and you'd have better luck carrying a whiteboard around with you than using that fucking thing. You know that it isn't a touchscreen, thus you'd need to plug in a keyboard. And it probably had a battery life measured in the tens of minutes. Don't forget that it didn't even run Symbian, but the precursor to Symbian - even a bigger piece of shit than Symbian was. And, there's no way it would have cost any less than $800 to have a shit wireless radio that didn't have any networks to talk to, no cellular data to speak of, and no applications that anyone would have wanted to use.

Why buy that giant turd when you could just buy a laptop and be done with it?

Have the people responsible

[Anonymous Coward]

Have the people responsible for sacking the development team since been sacked?

Re:Have the people responsible

[Richy_T]

Unfortunately, due to a clerical mix-up, the team that was supposed to sack the people that sacked the development team got sacked first and now no one can work out what to do about it.

Re:There were probably several of these false star

[Klivian]

And yoy have the Acorn NewsPAD from '96, you know from the gang that created the ARM :-)

http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Co...

Hardware has advanced in 13 years.

[LurkerXXX]

There were a ton of internet devices a decade ago. I had drawers full of literature from a lot of companies making new ones. We wanted to use some badly for at-home patients for a research study. We didn't buy any. Why? They were expensive, and they sucked. There are reasons tablets didn't take off 13 years ago, and it had absolutely nothing to due with market-research.

pen-tablets in late 1980s

[peter303]

Touchscreens were not really around at that time. "pen computing" was VC rage then. Apple had their own entry a fe years later called the Newton. MicroSoft unsuccessfully hawked is Pen-Windows for years.

Re:pen-tablets in late 1980s

[Misagon]

Indeed. I remember laptops made for Microsoft's "Window for Pen Computing" which was a special version of Windows 3.11 ... and this was back in 1992.
There were different types of swivelling screens like on laptops made today for Windows 8.1. Lenovo Yoga and Dell XPS are not novel in the slightest.

13 years ago there was no widespread WiFi

[Daniel Hoffmann]

And no Mobile internet connections. really what use is a tablet that you would need to plug a ethernet cable? Might as well just buy a laptop or a palmtop, it would probably be cheaper even back then.

I remember when WiFi routers were luxury items that only the really rich had. Tablets would never get off during those days.

Re:13 years ago there was no widespread WiFi

[Anonymous Coward]

IAWTP.

At the time, their marketing research was accurate. To keep a whole department developing a product that was at least five, maybe ten years too early for the mainstream would have not been a good use of their resources.

They also didn't have good quality video (the screens, battery life, and processor power were not ready), not even youtube to get free content. The whole support system that now makes tablets work having, was not there. For that matter, neither was the customer base. People generally buy tablets to "consume content" which wouldn't have worked before there was a lot of audio and video available for "streaming".

In fact, the concept of streaming only became widespread much more recently.

I know the technology as possible even back in 2001, but the cost and availability made it all more science fiction. Even now, it is not so much mobile Internet, but the wide availability of cheap ("free" in most cases, although somebody has to buy the router and pay for the hardline Internet) Wireless that makes these things affordable, not to mention the rise of people who want to read or watch from a screen, rather than use it at an office and spend their spare time staring at anything else.

Apples simple GUI one of breakthroughs

[peter303]

Most of the previous tablet GUIs tried to cram the complexity of multiwindow destop on to a small tablet screen. Apple mainly enlarged the simpler, single-window phone GUI. Samsung is hawking side-by-side Android screens this year. But you really dont want to get all that much more complex than that.

Re:Apples simple GUI one of breakthroughs

[Anonymous Coward]

LG accomplishes something of a multi-window desktop, too, in their android loader (e.g. LG G2). It allows for email and messaging windows to pop-up without exiting the application you are in. This is great for replying back one-liners without as much context switching. I don't expect either to see much 3rd party support, though, since nobody wants to immediately limit their audience to specific devices nor develop features that the majority of their customers cannot use.

We had electric cars in 1906 as well.

[tekrat]

But it didn't mean there was a booming market for them.

But if Apple queefed in your face?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd inhale it like a bong rip!

I had one and there was no way in hell that was re

[Anonymous Coward]

First Nokia tablet I used was in 2001. It ran EPOC32... it had so many memory problems it was unbearable. People keep praising Nokia and Symbian for their "Awesome Memory Manager" and that might be true if ALL CODE for the platform was written using their ugly ass clean up stack, but EPOC/Symbian devices damn near died when they ran out of memory.

Let's mark up Nokia's biggest mistake in all time... "Symbian isn't Windows CE... it doesn't need lots of CPU and memory". Uh... duh!!! Neither did Windows CE. What needed the memory was things like web browsers which definitely needed more than 2 megs usable memory... after all, how else would you expect to render and display a page containing 14 megs of images... oh and of course they needed to have flash too.

Symbian itself didn't suck profusely... but what did suck was Nokia's use of Symbian. The rest of the market had already moved onto 200+ Mhz processors and 16+ megs of RAM and Nokia refused to build a device with a lot of RAM and a lot of CPU to run the applications like video players, games and web browsers which are precisely what made iPhone/iPad kick them off the top.

Nokia's web pad (which is what it was at the time) was insanely underpowered (even for the time) and had way too little RAM to be useful for anything. Nokia was hellbent on never properly configuring a device since it would mean that they would cut their margin by 1% and they'd have to eat their words about how Symbian didn't need real hardware to work.

Ericsson on the other hand made an awesome webpad with lots of RAM and CPU on linux back in 2000 which never hit the market because of serious delays in the reference BlueTooth implementation... I had one of those too. :)

The real lesson

[geekmux]

"The tablet was scrubbed because market research showed there wasn't demand for the device. The team got devices for themselves and the rest were destroyed. The team was then fired. The lesson: Don't try to be pioneer if you're relying on market research studies."

Don't be a pioneer?

Yeah, I'm sure that was the lesson learned for every person who did not start up a company called "Apple" out of their garage.

Or pioneer the use of this little thing we call "Windows" on computers.

The real lesson? Market research can be dead wrong. Ask anyone on this team who would love to have a piece of that billion-dollar market today.

Re:The real lesson

[slew]

Apple wasn't the pioneer, don't you remember the Altair and IMSAI?
Windows wasn't the pioneer, don't you remember Kildall's Digital Research CPM/86 and IBM/Microsoft OS/2 collaboration?

The real lesson? Let other do the pioneering market research for you. Then do it better and faster than they can...

Historically, first mover advantage often isn't what it's hyped up to be (ask CompuServe, AltaVista, Yahoo, MySpace, and AOL/Netscape)...

I never said that.

[westlake]

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse"

Too often, a quote is attributed to Ford simply because its touches upon success in business or innovation: He has become a patron saint of the entrepreneur... One of the more popular of these quotations is, ''If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse,'' which has never been satisfactorily traced to Henry Ford. In fact, the quote only begins to appear in the early 21st century, ''quoted'' by modern-day business gurus using it as an object lesson.

Henry Ford's quotations

What people wanted was clean, affordable. mechanical horse power.

The carriage without the horse. The barn. The stable-boy. The veterinarian. The manure pit.

Its all about the apps

[slapout]

The reason that the iPad succeed was because they already had plenty of apps (from the iPhone) available for it when it launched.

Re:Its all about the apps

[SuperKendall]

That is a big reason, but it also mattered that the device itself was not OSX shrunk to a touch-screen tablet (some people thought that's what it would be instead of using IOS). That was the mistake Microsoft made.

But it's also related, Apple had the luxury of not just plopping desktop OSX on a tablet because they knew iOS developers could produce a good range of software out of the gate. Microsoft apparently never trusted in the development community enough to take that leap of faith.

Re:Its all about the apps

[slapout]

"That was the mistake Microsoft made."

I agree. They tried to put Windows on tablets several times but they were trying to put an interface designed for a mouse on a form factor where it didn't work well.

The Ericsson Delphipad

[Anonymous Coward]

The Ericsson Delphipad, also ca 14 years ago.
Linux, wi-fi, touchpad.

http://www.esato.com/board/img.php?id=153713

Re:Got to play with 1 of these or something simila

[BasilBrush]

If it was a Gecko based UI, it wasn't this device. This was running Symbian OS, using an Eikon derived UI, and using Opera for its browser.

Why is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of your fellows were born in hospitals, prior to 96 for about 10 years, so that would be mid to late 80's, windows XP was in use on HP tablets wirelessy updating your and their health records. So ehh? whats the news?

rounded corners!!

[Anonymous Coward]

rounded corners ! they are round also the sides are round.. rounded round corners!

Nokia N770 N800

[Anonymous Coward]

The Only thing holding these back at the time was lack of Wireless access through the Cell Network.
I carried daily an N800 long before the IPhone came out, It was cool. It could do phone calls over wLAN, even video conferencing, and web browsing, but you had to have WLAN access, at that time even Starbucks didn't have open wireless so it was very limited in it's use.

Turn off the wireless and radio on your IPhone and see how useful it is to you over the course of the day.

If Nokia had managed to partner with a cell carrier at the time , they would have banked.

The N770 and N800 were awesome and It always pissed me off that Apple got so much credit (IPhone has changed the world?) for something that I already had years before they started production.

Re:Nokia N770 N800

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n800-3889.php

Symbian ...

[chuckugly]

Demonstrating the power of Symbian to ruin anything it touches.

That's not the worst of it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia had the N800 and N810 internet devices, running Maemo Linux. These were far superior to today's crippled Android devices. They had 4.1" screens.

Then they came out with the N900, which had a 3.5" screen. I begged them to bring out a phone running Maemo Linux with a 5" screen, but they refused. They said there was no phone on the market like that, and killed the whole Maemo Linux line with a small screen.

I still have my N800, and it is wonderful. If it had 3G/4G connectivity, I would use it today.

The iPhoney was a cheap knock-off of what the N900 should have been.

Someone at Nokia needs to realized they had the smart phone market in their pocket, like Xerox had the Alto, and they both dropped their world-leading product lines into the toilet.

Resistive Touch Screens Rock!

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's not only about multitouch. Capacitive touchscreens are more accurate to use with a bare
> finger than resistive ones, which call for a stylus.

You use Your fingernail on a resistive screen, which allows GREAT PRECISION. Capacitive screens require You to use the pad of Your finger. This leads to a great lack of precision.

Resistive screens can use a stylus, or the back of a standard pen, or just about anything else You have laying around.

I hate to flame anyone, but honestly jones_supa...You are banned from touching any PC until You learn to use touch screens!

Apple used some sorry capacitive junk on their iPods, and somehow brainwashed the rest of the world into believing it was better. IT'S NOT!

Re:Resistive Touch Screens Rock!

[Anonymous Coward]

God i wish i had some mod points to give you, i have a relatively small screened android phone, it's painful to do anything moderately precise, even with one of those stupid rubber nippled styli, i also own a nokia n800, where most things are accessible with fingertip pressure once you get the hang of it, fingernails work very well, and the stylus allows the use of complex apps like gnumeric and point and click adventure games, for instance.

Software

[Anonymous Coward]

You gotta admit, Jobs & Co. did a good job on the tablet software. That was a key issue.

He ported a phone operating system to the tablet, which I personally did not think would work out. And the software base was essentially zero in the early days which was also a huge business risk.

What Apple did was not make a Touch PC

[SuperKendall]

There were many tablets released before the iPad that did not sell that well.

Yes, Microsoft made them, they ran Windows, and since applications were not designed for touch they sucked compared to laptops.

What Apple did was not marketing, but make a tablet that was usage because everything from OS to software was made for a tablet, not a PC.

It also relied heavily on many IPhone developers being able to quickly write software for the tablet before it was even launched - we could only test apps on the simulator before they went into the iPad App Store on day one! Kind of insane if you think about it, but it generally worked because the devices were similar in OS. If there had not been a good base of software from day one, sales would probably not have been as good... oddly parallel to a console launch come to think of it.

Re:Got to play with 1 of these or something simila

[BitZtream]

Firefox was initially released in 2002, you weren't seeing a gecko based tablet in 2001, try again.

Moses

[Bonobo_Unknown]

The Sumerians had tablets and writing a thousand years before Moses wrote his do's and don'ts.

2 downmods of this can't hide you running

[Anonymous Coward]

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, obviously, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a lying bullshitter.

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

You said MY program's a virus?

I disproved that too here WITH PROOF FROM A RELIABLE & REPUTABLE SOURCE IN THE SECURITY COMMUNITY who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

(Which I always produce from reputable sources, NOT fellow "trolls" whom I destroyed, like I am destroying YOU (see ps below)):

---

You said by turning up cpu priorities in my program I am turning off the processscheduler?

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler to make his process run faster." - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Again: How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Can't get out of your crap now, can you? Nope... same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

Funny:

You can't seem to explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

Re:2 downmods of this can't hide you running

[Zontar The Mindless]

If APK says the sky is blue, you should assume that it's any colour BUT blue, unless and until you look out the window and verify this for yourself.

In addition, be sure that you actually *open* the window before you look, in case the glass has been tinted.

Re:2 downmods of this can't hide you running

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been called out. I'm waiting for you to explain your quoted libel here http://mobile.slashdot.org/com...

Zontar - ac posts now? LMAO... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, obviously, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a lying bullshitter.

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

You said MY program's a virus?

I disproved that too here WITH PROOF FROM A RELIABLE & REPUTABLE SOURCE IN THE SECURITY COMMUNITY who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

(Which I always produce from reputable sources, NOT fellow "trolls" whom I destroyed, like I am destroying YOU (see ps below)):

---

You said by turning up cpu priorities in my program I am turning off the processscheduler?

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler to make his process run faster." - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Again: How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Can't get out of your crap now, can you? Nope... same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

Funny:

You can't seem to explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

Re:Zontar - ac posts now? LMAO... apk

[Zontar The Mindless]

All of Slashdot is still waiting for APK to show even one instance of one of his host file engine spamvertisements that was ever ON topic.

Re:Zontar - ac posts now? LMAO... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't speak for us all. I'm waiting for you to explain your quoted libel here http://mobile.slashdot.org/com... troll

Re:Zontar - ac posts now? LMAO... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been called out. Show posts apk made on hosts that didn't apply to the topic. You are running.

Re:Zontar - ac posts now? LMAO... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been called out. I'm waiting for you to explain your quoted libel here http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

EPOC

[Old Aylesburian]

I am still using my EPOC based pocket computer. It's called a Psion.

Re:Got to play with 1 of these or something simila

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox was not the first Browser to use Gecko, there was Mozilla and Netscape.

Nokia 770

[BonzaiThePenguin]

Here's the tablet they ended up releasing. Let us know which parts Steve Jobs stole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

What might have been...

[countach]

It's fun to speculate what might have been, whether Nokia screwed up big by ceding the iPad market. But I think any tablet like device without a touchscreen can't really be said to be the predecessor of the iPad. In the same way that Nokia had internet devices and still couldn't make an iPhone, even if they'd made this tablet, it still most likely wouldn't have spawned the iPad revolution.

Re:Got to play with 1 of these or something simila

[Zontar The Mindless]

Gecko != Firefox

BTW, I was using ChatZilla at around this same time.

Palm tops came and went.

[Anonymous Coward]

The palm top computers had already come and were long gone by that time. Those things that ran Windows CE and the like. They had stylus interfaces, wireless connectivity, integrated keyboards, and huge support from major vendors. And being mass produced, they were probably much less expensive.

Aha--Found it!

[Zontar The Mindless]

Pretty sure it was the one that was reviewed here. Had a Crusoe CPU from TransMeta (remember them, anybody?) and ran Midori Linux. Apparently some of these units also ran Windows CE, but I only saw the Midori version.

Re:Aha--Found it!

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been called out. I'm waiting for you to explain your quoted libel here http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Zontar = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Anonymous Coward]

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said MY program's a spyware?

I disproved that too here WITH PROOF FROM A RELIABLE & REPUTABLE SOURCE IN THE SECURITY COMMUNITY who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

(Which I always produce from reputable sources, NOT fellow "trolls" whom I destroyed, like I am destroying YOU (see ps below)):

---

You said by turning up cpu priorities in my program I am turning off the processscheduler?

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler" - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Question:

How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

Re:Zontar = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Zontar The Mindless]

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

As I've already said: You have not yet offered the slightest, thinnest shred of evidence that this ever even happened.

Linking to your own previous claims about this does not provide such evidence.

Zontar = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Anonymous Coward]

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said MY program's a spyware?

I disproved that too here WITH PROOF FROM A RELIABLE & REPUTABLE SOURCE IN THE SECURITY COMMUNITY who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

(Which I always produce from reputable sources, NOT fellow "trolls" whom I destroyed, like I am destroying YOU (see ps below)):

---

You said by turning up cpu priorities in my program I am turning off the processscheduler?

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler" - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Question:

How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

Zontar = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Anonymous Coward]

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said MY program's a spyware?

I disproved that too here WITH PROOF FROM A RELIABLE & REPUTABLE SOURCE IN THE SECURITY COMMUNITY who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

(Which I always produce from reputable sources, NOT fellow "trolls" whom I destroyed, like I am destroying YOU (see ps below)):

---

You said by turning up cpu priorities in my program I am turning off the processscheduler?

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler" - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Question:

How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

Zontar = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Anonymous Coward]

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said MY program's a spyware?

I disproved that too here WITH PROOF FROM A RELIABLE & REPUTABLE SOURCE IN THE SECURITY COMMUNITY who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

(Which I always produce from reputable sources, NOT fellow "trolls" whom I destroyed, like I am destroying YOU (see ps below)):

---

You said by turning up cpu priorities in my program I am turning off the processscheduler?

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler" - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Question:

How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

Zontar = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Anonymous Coward]

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said MY program's a spyware?

I disproved that too here WITH PROOF FROM A RELIABLE & REPUTABLE SOURCE IN THE SECURITY COMMUNITY who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

(Which I always produce from reputable sources, NOT fellow "trolls" whom I destroyed, like I am destroying YOU (see ps below)):

---

You said by turning up cpu priorities in my program I am turning off the processscheduler?

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler" - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Question:

How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

Re:Got to play with 1 of these or something simila

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been called out. I'm waiting for you to explain your quoted libel here http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Zontar = libeler & lying sockpuppeting troll

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said MY program's a spyware?

I disproved that too here WITH PROOF FROM A RELIABLE & REPUTABLE SOURCE IN THE SECURITY COMMUNITY who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.

---

You said by turning up cpu priorities in my program I am turning off the processscheduler?

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler" - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Question:

How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apkYou said MY program's a spyware?

Re:Got to play with 1 of these or something simila

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been called out. I'm waiting for you to explain your quoted libel here http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Re:Zontar = libeler & lying sockpuppeting trol

[Anonymous Coward]

Zontar the Mindless is the 1st 'writer' (not) in history to have to "eat his words" (rotflmao).

Re:Zontar = libeler & lying sockpuppeting trol

[Anonymous Coward]

For the vomit he spews forth here on this site? Serves him right. At least this time he has to cleanup after himself.

Re:Zontar = libeler & lying sockpuppeting trol

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahaha

Zontar the Mindless = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said MY program's a spyware?

Ok: CONTRARY PROOF from a REPUTABLE SECURITY COMMUNITY source http://slashdot.org/comments.p... who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.

---

You said by turning up cpu priorities in my program I am turning off the processscheduler?

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler" - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Question:

How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

Re:Zontar the Mindless = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Zontar The Mindless]

Reposting a lie does not make it true.

All the evidence I ever need is right here

[Anonymous Coward]

Eat your words Zontar the Mindless -> hhttp://windowsitpro.com/systems-management/memory-optimization-hoax?page=38

PERTINENT QUOTES/EXCERPTS:

---

Jeremy Reimer being places on a tracking ticket by his ISP, Shaw of Canada:

"Thank you for your report. Please advise the sender to cease & desist this unwanted communication w/ you & keep this record. If further messages are received after that, we can investigate this further & we will act accordingly. & Hello Mr. Kowalski, we have added this evidence to Jeremy's tracking ticket... Regards, Acceptable Use Policy Management Team Shaw High-Speed Internet Service Shaw Cablesystems G.P. 2400 - 32nd Avenue N.E. Calgary, Alberta, T2E 9A7" FROM-> http://windowsitpro.com/system...

---

Jay Little being kicked from CrystalTech.com:

"I asked Jay Little to run this by Dr. Russinovich in fact, lol, & he never tried it again. He OUTRIGHT RAN, & especially after CrystalTech.com removed his website for libel & death threats directed my way! ******* "IM NOT REMOVING THE CONTENT. I HAVE HOWEVER BEGUN HOSTING MY WEBSITE ELSEWHERE." - jaylittle - March 31, 2005 & "This battle with APK has taken it's toll I am afraid." - 4/2/2005 7:47:38 AM jaylittle @ www.jaylittle.com ******* So did petitiononline.com as well for the same childish 'geek angst' that FATBOY Jay Little (no dick type, you know, an obese monstrosity) tried: Jay, learn a bit out IRQL_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL_TO, buffer overruns/underruns" FROM-> http://windowsitpro.com/system...

---

For starters!

(Which, as anyone can see, Neither Jay Little OR Jeremy Reimer DENY that happened to them - being kicked from their hosting providers for stalking, email harassing, & libeling me on their websites (and other places online)).

* Want emails from CystalTech, ENom, Shaw too? Just ask & "ye shall receive"... now, "eat your words" yet again, you libelous little scumbag!

APK

P.S.=> You FAIL, yet again Zontar the Mindless (libeling troll that you are)... apk

Re:All the evidence I ever need is right here

[Zontar The Mindless]

Regarding your claim concerning Jeremy Reimer: Nothing of the sort happened. Reimer's ISP politely told you to get stuffed.

Regarding Jay Little: I don't have all the facts, but it now appears that--much as I suspected--what happened was that you spammed and crapflooded his personal site until he changed to a different hosting provider that could block you. I'm sure that I'll stumble across evidence of this sooner or later, just as I stumbled across evidence that you lied about what happened between you and Jeremy.

APK Caught In Another Bald-Faced Lie

[Zontar The Mindless]

UPDATE: Still haven't seen any evidence that APK got Reimer's and Little's sites taken down, but I did find Reimer's version of events (and a whole lot more), which seems to tell a rather different story. See how I happened across this info, here.

Re:APK Caught In Another Bald-Faced Lie

[Anonymous Coward]

APK must be put to death by Jay Little @ top http://www.bing.com/search?q=a... first result no less - note the jlittle1 in the path of that result.

Pretty solid proof of your buddy Jay Little from arseholetechnica there and his character + motivations for my having floored HIM publicly @ Windows IT Pro claiming he was an (literally) "AN EXPERT ON EXCHANGE" - lol, some 'expert' (wannabe) since when I produced Microsoft's OWN DOCUMENTATION for Exchange Server being unhalted by Memory Optimization Technology (sped up too) it shut BOTH Jay Little AND Dr. Mark Russinovich RIGHT THE FUCK DOWN... easily.

---

"IM NOT REMOVING THE CONTENT. I HAVE HOWEVER BEGUN HOSTING MY WEBSITE ELSEWHERE." - jaylittle - March 31, 2005 FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

&

"This battle with APK has taken it's toll I am afraid." - 4/2/2005 7:47:38 AM jaylittle @ www.jaylittle.com FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

SEE SUBJECT-LINE ABOVE: asshole - & only NOW are you "eating your words" on Jay Little, eh?

"Regarding Jay Little: I don't have all the facts" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 18, 2014 @11:57AM (#46787987)

You do now - he was FORCIBLY REMOVED by his hosting provider CrystalTech.com...

APK

P.S.=> See, I can DO that - you most certainly can't & you UTTERLY FAILED here too libeling me -> http://mobile.slashdot.org/com... which where YOUR WORDS ARE QUOTED, you no longer can fight on that & YOU ARE TRAPPED, libeler... apk

Let's let Jay Little of arseholetechnica speak

[Anonymous Coward]

Jay Little's OWN WORDS do you in here:

"And how many times do you have to be reminded that linking to a copy of the same unproven claim does not make the claim true?" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 18, 2014 @11:16AM (#46787617)

You lying little semantics/word game playing little sockpuppeteering scumbag troll.

"IM NOT REMOVING THE CONTENT. I HAVE HOWEVER BEGUN HOSTING MY WEBSITE ELSEWHERE." - jaylittle - March 31, 2005 FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

&

"This battle with APK has taken it's toll I am afraid." - 4/2/2005 7:47:38 AM jaylittle @ www.jaylittle.com FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

---

Jeremy Reimer being places on a tracking ticket by his ISP, Shaw of Canada:

"Thank you for your report. Please advise the sender to cease & desist this unwanted communication w/ you & keep this record. If further messages are received after that, we can investigate this further & we will act accordingly. & Hello Mr. Kowalski, we have added this evidence to Jeremy's tracking ticket... Regards, Acceptable Use Policy Management Team Shaw High-Speed Internet Service Shaw Cablesystems G.P. 2400 - 32nd Avenue N.E. Calgary, Alberta, T2E 9A7" FROM-> http://windowsitpro.com/system...

---

* Should I forward the emails (to anyone interested from his former hosting provider CrystalTech.com too?

APK

P.S.=> I also notice you won't TOUCH where your own quoted libel of myself has you pinned here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Why's that, Scumbag?... apk

Re:Let's let Jay Little of arseholetechnica speak

[Zontar The Mindless]

Remember, folks--anytime you investigate a claim made by APK, you'll likely uncover a multitude of lies, half-truths, mischaracterisations, personal attacks, threats, and more lies.

Re:Let's let Jay Little of arseholetechnica speak

[Zontar The Mindless]

Remember, folks--anytime you investigate a claim made by APK, you'll likely uncover a multitude of lies, half-truths, mischaracterisations, personal attacks, threats, and more lies.

And misattributions, let's not forget those.

Jay Little made DEATH THREATS to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Jay Little's OWN WORDS do you in here:

"And how many times do you have to be reminded that linking to a copy of the same unproven claim does not make the claim true?" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 18, 2014 @11:16AM (#46787617)

You lying little semantics/word game playing little sockpuppeteering scumbag troll.

"IM NOT REMOVING THE CONTENT. I HAVE HOWEVER BEGUN HOSTING MY WEBSITE ELSEWHERE." - jaylittle - March 31, 2005 FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

&

"This battle with APK has taken it's toll I am afraid." - 4/2/2005 7:47:38 AM jaylittle @ www.jaylittle.com FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

SEE SUBJECT-LINE ABOVE: asshole - & only NOW are you "eating your words" on Jay Little, eh?

"Regarding Jay Little: I don't have all the facts" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 18, 2014 @11:57AM (#46787987)

You do now - he was FORCIBLY REMOVED by his hosting provider CrystalTech.com...

---

Jeremy Reimer being places on a tracking ticket by his ISP, Shaw of Canada:

"Thank you for your report. Please advise the sender to cease & desist this unwanted communication w/ you & keep this record. If further messages are received after that, we can investigate this further & we will act accordingly. & Hello Mr. Kowalski, we have added this evidence to Jeremy's tracking ticket... Regards, Acceptable Use Policy Management Team Shaw High-Speed Internet Service Shaw Cablesystems G.P. 2400 - 32nd Avenue N.E. Calgary, Alberta, T2E 9A7" FROM-> http://windowsitpro.com/system...

---

* Should I forward the emails (to anyone interested from his former hosting provider CrystalTech.com too?

APK

P.S.=> I also notice you won't TOUCH where your own quoted libel of myself has you pinned here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Why's that, Scumbag?... apk

Re:Jay Little made DEATH THREATS to me

[Zontar The Mindless]

You fail to provide any proof whatsoever that Jay's site was "forcibly removed" by his hosting provider. He apparently DID change providers to one that was better equipped to handle your harassment/crapflooding.

Jeremy's ISP basically told you that you were wasting your time trying to get them to disconnect him, only you were too stupid to realise this.

Lies, half-truths, errors, mischaracterisations, and more lies.

Re:Jay Little made DEATH THREATS to me

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right APK MUST PUT TO DEATH by Jay Liittle http://www.petitiononline.com/... note the pathway has jlittle1 in it!

Re:Jay Little made DEATH THREATS to me

[Anonymous Coward]

APK MUST PUT TO DEATH by Jay Liittle http://www.bing.com/search?q=a... right at the top with jlitttle1 in the pathway of it, first result, looks like more solid proof there Zontar The Mindless

Re:Jay Little made DEATH THREATS to me

[Zontar The Mindless]

APK MUST PUT TO DEATH by Jay Liittle ...

You can't get 7 words into a post without telling a lie, can you? That is NOT what it says. Here's what it actually says:

APK should be put to death

        Author:
        n/a
        Send To:
        United States Congress

        Sponsored By:
        The Readers of JayLittle.com

I could easily go to that site and create a petition under the username "carlxvigustaf" but this would NOT mean the petition was created by the King of Sweden.

It should also be pointed out that expressing a wish for someone would die is NOT the same thing as threatening to kill that person. It's a bit of a fine distinction, perhaps, but it is still not the same thing.

Jay Little of arseholetechnica says it all

[Anonymous Coward]

Jay Little's OWN WORDS do you in here:

"And how many times do you have to be reminded that linking to a copy of the same unproven claim does not make the claim true?" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 18, 2014 @11:16AM (#46787617)

"IM NOT REMOVING THE CONTENT. I HAVE HOWEVER BEGUN HOSTING MY WEBSITE ELSEWHERE." - jaylittle - March 31, 2005 FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

&

"This battle with APK has taken it's toll I am afraid." - 4/2/2005 7:47:38 AM jaylittle @ www.jaylittle.com FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

SEE SUBJECT-LINE ABOVE: asshole - & only NOW are you "eating your words" on Jay Little, eh?

"Regarding Jay Little: I don't have all the facts" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 18, 2014 @11:57AM (#46787987)

You do now - he was FORCIBLY REMOVED by his hosting provider CrystalTech.com...

---

Jeremy Reimer being places on a tracking ticket by his ISP, Shaw of Canada:

"Thank you for your report. Please advise the sender to cease & desist this unwanted communication w/ you & keep this record. If further messages are received after that, we can investigate this further & we will act accordingly. & Hello Mr. Kowalski, we have added this evidence to Jeremy's tracking ticket... Regards, Acceptable Use Policy Management Team Shaw High-Speed Internet Service Shaw Cablesystems G.P. 2400 - 32nd Avenue N.E. Calgary, Alberta, T2E 9A7" FROM-> http://windowsitpro.com/system...

---

* Should I forward the emails (to anyone interested from his former hosting provider CrystalTech.com too?

APK

P.S.=> I also notice you won't TOUCH where your own quoted libel of myself has you pinned here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Why's that, Scumbag?... apk

Let's let Jay Little talk then (u FAIL)

[Anonymous Coward]

"IM NOT REMOVING THE CONTENT. I HAVE HOWEVER BEGUN HOSTING MY WEBSITE ELSEWHERE." - jaylittle - March 31, 2005 FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

&

"This battle with APK has taken it's toll I am afraid." - 4/2/2005 7:47:38 AM jaylittle @ www.jaylittle.com FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

SEE SUBJECT-LINE ABOVE: asshole - & only NOW are you "eating your words" on Jay Little, eh?

"Regarding Jay Little: I don't have all the facts" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 18, 2014 @11:57AM (#46787987)

You do now - he was FORCIBLY REMOVED by his hosting provider CrystalTech.com...

---

Jeremy Reimer being places on a tracking ticket by his ISP, Shaw of Canada:

"Thank you for your report. Please advise the sender to cease & desist this unwanted communication w/ you & keep this record. If further messages are received after that, we can investigate this further & we will act accordingly. & Hello Mr. Kowalski, we have added this evidence to Jeremy's tracking ticket... Regards, Acceptable Use Policy Management Team Shaw High-Speed Internet Service Shaw Cablesystems G.P. 2400 - 32nd Avenue N.E. Calgary, Alberta, T2E 9A7" FROM-> http://windowsitpro.com/system...

---

* Should I forward the emails (to anyone interested from his former hosting provider CrystalTech.com too?

APK

P.S.=> I also notice you won't TOUCH where your own quoted libel of myself has you pinned here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Why's that, Scumbag?... apk

Jay Little's "Character" (apk must die etc.)

[Anonymous Coward]

APK must be put to death by Jay Little @ top http://www.bing.com/search?q=a... first result no less - note the jlittle1 in the path of that result.

Pretty solid proof of your buddy Jay Little from arseholetechnica there and his character + motivations for my having floored HIM publicly @ Windows IT Pro claiming he was an (literally) "AN EXPERT ON EXCHANGE" - lol, some 'expert' (wannabe) since when I produced Microsoft's OWN DOCUMENTATION for Exchange Server being unhalted by Memory Optimization Technology (sped up too) it shut BOTH Jay Little AND Dr. Mark Russinovich RIGHT THE FUCK DOWN... easily.

APK

P.S.=> See, I can DO that - you most certainly can't & you UTTERLY FAILED here too libeling me -> http://mobile.slashdot.org/com... which where YOUR WORDS ARE QUOTED, you no longer can fight on that & YOU ARE TRAPPED, libeler... apk

Re:Jay Little's "Character" (apk must die etc.)

[Zontar The Mindless]

Another lie. Already exposed as such.

Jay Liittle & Jeremy Reimer (trolls of a feath

[Anonymous Coward]

APK must be put to death by Jay Little @ top http://www.bing.com/search?q=a... first result no less - note the jlittle1 in the path of that result.

Pretty solid proof of your buddy Jay Little from arseholetechnica there and his character + motivations for my having floored HIM publicly @ Windows IT Pro claiming he was an (literally) "AN EXPERT ON EXCHANGE" - lol!

Some 'expert' (wannabe) since when I produced Microsoft's OWN DOCUMENTATION for Exchange Server being unhalted by Memory Optimization Technology (sped up too) it shut BOTH Jay Little AND Dr. Mark Russinovich RIGHT THE FUCK DOWN... easily.

NOW:

WHO was WITH Jay Little there?

You guessed it folks - JEREMY REIMER!

Trolls of a feather, TROLLING TOGETHER & libeling, emial harassing, being booted from their hosting providers, + FAR more like libel (gee, just like YOU Zontar).

APK

P.S.=> See, I can DO that - you most certainly can't & you UTTERLY FAILED here too libeling me -> http://mobile.slashdot.org/com... which where YOUR WORDS ARE QUOTED, you no longer can fight on that & YOU ARE TRAPPED, libeler... apk

Zontar the Mindless' "character" quoted

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said MY program's a spyware?

Ok: CONTRARY PROOF from a REPUTABLE security community source http://slashdot.org/comments.p... who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.

---

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler" - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Question:

How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

Zontar the Mindless' "character" quoted

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said MY program's a spyware?

Ok: CONTRARY PROOF from a REPUTABLE security community source http://slashdot.org/comments.p... who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.

---

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler" - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Question:

How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

Not I, Zontar the Mindless: YOU are

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said MY program's a spyware?

Ok: CONTRARY PROOF from a REPUTABLE security community source http://slashdot.org/comments.p... who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.

---

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler" - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Question:

How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

It's true you lied Zontar the Mindless

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said MY program's a spyware?

Ok: CONTRARY PROOF from a REPUTABLE security community source http://slashdot.org/comments.p... who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

Now: Is YOUR SOURCE Computer Associates REPUTABLE? See here http://www.bing.com/search?q=c...

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.

---

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler" - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Question:

How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

Let's let Jay Little talk, for me (& about me)

[Anonymous Coward]

APK must be put to death by Jay Little @ top http://www.bing.com/search?q=a... first result no less - note the jlittle1 in the path of that result.

Pretty solid proof of your buddy Jay Little from arseholetechnica there and his character + motivations for my having floored HIM publicly @ Windows IT Pro claiming he was an (literally) "AN EXPERT ON EXCHANGE" - lol, some 'expert' (wannabe) since when I produced Microsoft's OWN DOCUMENTATION for Exchange Server being unhalted by Memory Optimization Technology (sped up too) it shut BOTH Jay Little AND Dr. Mark Russinovich RIGHT THE FUCK DOWN... easily.

---

"IM NOT REMOVING THE CONTENT. I HAVE HOWEVER BEGUN HOSTING MY WEBSITE ELSEWHERE." - jaylittle - March 31, 2005 FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

&

"This battle with APK has taken it's toll I am afraid." - 4/2/2005 7:47:38 AM jaylittle @ www.jaylittle.com FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

NOW:

WHO was WITH Jay Little there?

You guessed it folks - JEREMY REIMER!

(Trolls of a feather, TROLLING TOGETHER & libeling, emial harassing, being booted from their hosting providers, + FAR more like libel (gee, just like YOU Zontar)).

SEE SUBJECT-LINE ABOVE: asshole - & only NOW are you "eating your words" on Jay Little, eh?

"Regarding Jay Little: I don't have all the facts" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 18, 2014 @11:57AM (#46787987)

You do now - he was FORCIBLY REMOVED by his hosting provider CrystalTech.com...

APK

P.S.=> See, I can DO that - you most certainly can't & you UTTERLY FAILED here too libeling me -> http://mobile.slashdot.org/com... which where YOUR WORDS ARE QUOTED, you no longer can fight on that & YOU ARE TRAPPED, libeler... apk

Jay Little ACTUALLY SAID this... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

"IM NOT REMOVING THE CONTENT. I HAVE HOWEVER BEGUN HOSTING MY WEBSITE ELSEWHERE." - jaylittle - March 31, 2005 FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

&

"This battle with APK has taken it's toll I am afraid." - 4/2/2005 7:47:38 AM jaylittle @ www.jaylittle.com FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

---

Why? See below!

NOW:

WHO was WITH Jay Little there?

You guessed it folks - JEREMY REIMER!

(Trolls of a feather, TROLLING TOGETHER & libeling, emial harassing, being booted from their hosting providers, + FAR more like libel (gee, just like YOU Zontar)).

---

APK must be put to death by Jay Little @ top http://www.bing.com/search?q=a... first result no less - note the jlittle1 in the path of that result.

Pretty solid proof of your buddy Jay Little from arseholetechnica there and his character + motivations for my having floored HIM publicly @ Windows IT Pro claiming he was an (literally) "AN EXPERT ON EXCHANGE" - lol, some 'expert' (wannabe) since when I produced Microsoft's OWN DOCUMENTATION for Exchange Server being unhalted by Memory Optimization Technology (sped up too) it shut BOTH Jay Little AND Dr. Mark Russinovich RIGHT THE FUCK DOWN... easily.

---
SEE SUBJECT-LINE ABOVE: asshole - & only NOW are you "eating your words" on Jay Little, eh?

"Regarding Jay Little: I don't have all the facts" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 18, 2014 @11:57AM (#46787987)

You do now - he was FORCIBLY REMOVED by his hosting provider CrystalTech.com...

APK

P.S.=> See, I can DO that - you most certainly can't & you UTTERLY FAILED here too libeling me -> http://mobile.slashdot.org/com... which where YOUR WORDS ARE QUOTED, you no longer can fight on that & YOU ARE TRAPPED, libeler... apk

Who said & did, this? Jay Little! You fail

[Anonymous Coward]

"IM NOT REMOVING THE CONTENT. I HAVE HOWEVER BEGUN HOSTING MY WEBSITE ELSEWHERE." - jaylittle - March 31, 2005 FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

&

"This battle with APK has taken it's toll I am afraid." - 4/2/2005 7:47:38 AM jaylittle @ www.jaylittle.com FROM http://windowsitpro.com/system...

---

Why? See below!

NOW:

WHO was WITH Jay Little there?

You guessed it folks - JEREMY REIMER!

(Trolls of a feather, TROLLING TOGETHER & libeling, emial harassing, being booted from their hosting providers, + FAR more like libel (gee, just like YOU Zontar)).

---

APK must be put to death by Jay Little @ top http://www.bing.com/search?q=a... first result no less - note the jlittle1 in the path of that result.

Pretty solid proof of your buddy Jay Little from arseholetechnica there and his character + motivations for my having floored HIM publicly @ Windows IT Pro claiming he was an (literally) "AN EXPERT ON EXCHANGE" - lol, some 'expert' (wannabe) since when I produced Microsoft's OWN DOCUMENTATION for Exchange Server being unhalted by Memory Optimization Technology (sped up too) it shut BOTH Jay Little AND Dr. Mark Russinovich RIGHT THE FUCK DOWN... easily.

---
SEE SUBJECT-LINE ABOVE: asshole - & only NOW are you "eating your words" on Jay Little, eh?

"Regarding Jay Little: I don't have all the facts" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 18, 2014 @11:57AM (#46787987)

You do now - he was FORCIBLY REMOVED by his hosting provider CrystalTech.com...

APK

P.S.=> See, I can DO that - you most certainly can't & you UTTERLY FAILED here too libeling me -> http:/// mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5043169&cid=46784851 which where YOUR WORDS ARE QUOTED, you no longer can fight on that & YOU ARE TRAPPED, libeler... apk

Zontar the Mindless, backup your libel

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said MY program's a spyware?

Ok: CONTRARY PROOF from a REPUTABLE security community source http://slashdot.org/comments.p... who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!

Now: Is YOUR SOURCE Computer Associates REPUTABLE? See here http://www.bing.com/search?q=c...

---

"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You say my program's crapware?

Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...

---

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.

You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.

---

"He's effectively turning off the Windows process scheduler" - FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Question:

How would the process scheduler be turned off by doing that?

APK

P.S.=> Same with using arstechnica as your backers - BIG mistake!

I annihilated arstechnica, & outside their private playpen where THEY STALKED ME TO @ Windows IT Pro forums http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , no less!

You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers

IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk

The Readers of JayLittle.com = Jay Little

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject: Or doesn't Jay Little read what he writes Ilies) on his website too?

APK

P.S.=> He does and I FLOORED HIM completely & totally @ Windows IT Pro forums where he LITERALLY CLAIMED he was an "expert on exchange server" - some expert until I showed that memory optimization technology unhalts & speeds up frozen Exchange Servers, using MICROSOFT'S OWN DOCUMENTATION TO DO IT - annihilating him, AND arstechnica, in the same stroke, lol... apk