The whole flavor of your post seems to espouse that Microsoft chose to ignore the PDA marketplace and that's why they failed miserably in that sector.
I posit this alternative view: Microsoft is falling back on embedded systems since they spent millions developing Windows CE platform and it is losing in the PDA market, the market for which it was originally intended.
Question: How many Non-PDA devices are available today, or were available at any time, that use the Windows CE OS, as compared with the number of models of PDAs that use or have used Windows CE OS?
Answer: Hella lots more PDAs used/use Windows CE than devices that are not PDAs. That means, Microsoft was actively marketing WinCE as a PDA OS, not an embedded system.
Off the top of my head, I can think of two devices that are not PDAs that have been available (i.e. excluding vaporware) that use WinCE: the Sega Dreamcast, and the remote that Harmon/Kardon makes. Now, how many PDAs have used WinCE? Fifty separate models? Sixty, maybe?
WinCE's miserable dismal showing as an embedded OS is either proof that MS is terrible at marketing (nope, not hardly), OR they never intended the primary use of WinCE in embedded devices.
Just put a picture of Linus on the cover. That seems to be what passes for innvoative design over at Linus Journal... errrrm... Linux Journal.
Re:an other 3D window manager (Objective reality)
on
3D Window Manager
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· Score: 1
Objective Reality is cool, because the utilites are 3 dimensional also. With 3dwm, you have a 3d interface for 2d applications.
The thing that I don't like about Objective Reality as that if they are going to make 3d applications, why not make them so that they take advantage of their 3d environment? They mimic their 2d counterparts in 3d. Why does the file manager look like a window? Wouldn't it be better if it looked like a room? There has to be a better way to take advantage of the 3d environment, other than making windows look 3d.
This sounds like a cool contest, but how are the times being checked? Or is this like the Darwin awards, where if you can come up with a reasonable answer, you're good to go?
Not that I don't believe that it could take Windows NT 49 minutes to reboot, I'd just like to see it.
The result? Alot of people's civil rights are violated, alot of innocent people are hurt, and very little drugs are actually found (try to find a newspaper that had any articles on drugs being found on an airplane in the last year). Infact on atleast one occasion a pregnant woman was detained by authorities for suspected drug-smuggling. She was given multiple enemas and over the course of three days not treated very well. As a result she had a miscarriage. The law holds that this is perfectly OK. It is also morally reprehensible.
Whoooop! Whoooop! The FUD meter is going off the scale. I'm afraid these wild claims require at least a minimal amount of documentation. The FBI killed a woman's baby by giving her enemas? I guess we'll see.
Look, no disrespect, but how naive are you? This is absolutely about geeks, because they wouldn't DARE use it on the star quarterback; that's not how high school politics works.
Well, the fact is, the high-school quarterbacks arent't the ones coming to school with firearms killing their classmates.
A friend of mine who ordered a Visor at the beginning of last month, when they first came available, recieved the cradle in the mail today. No Visor, mind you, just the cradle. Hmm. I think they'd be wise to get they's shit together before they lose a lot of loyalty from they's customers.
That's because you come from the Wince world, where poor design is the status quo.
Where's my evidence you ask:
Color Gameboy. Uses two AA batteries. Battery life longer than four AA battery B&W Gameboy.
You see, other companies have already done it. Just because nobody particularly clever makes Wince machines (Philips, the only real innovator in that market, stopped making them) doesn't mean that innovation in the handheld market is dead.
. lemme guess, you still use a green monitor:P
Actually I do use a green screen on my server, where a green screen is still appropriate. Back at ya.:o
There is a world of difference porting a game that was written using the specific advantages of one operating system over to another system, and creatinga game from the ground up with multi-platform interoperability in mind.
Valve couldn't turn Half-Life for the Mac into the same semi-high-quality product it was on the Windows platform. Half-Life is a buggy piece of shit on the PC. Great game though.
Trust me on this, if the Mac version didn't include TFC, you'd be pissed. If you couldn't connect to the servers that are available, you'd be pissed. The auto-update function is superfluous. If you couldn't use all the mods that are available or all the mapos, you'd be pissed.
I think it was BS that they announced the port and then backed out of it, but the port wasn't goign to give you the award winning game of Half-Life, it was going to give some half-baked piece of crap that had shitty models (I've seen the screen shots and they sucked bigtime compared to the PC game).
No Microsoft isn't conspiring against Apple. That is ludicrous in light of the lawsuit against them. They need Apple around to prove that there is viable competetition in the market. If there are "Halloween Papers" outlining MS's strategy against Apple, I'd like you to post them, otherwise, quit trying to blow smoke up everybody's ass. Save it for Art Bell.
Finally, I virtual reality that is authentic, no silly games to run killing your friends. The actions in this Doom world have real consequences other than having to re-spawn. This is the stuff of the Future!
Free (gratis) worked for IE, free (libre) might help CE
The difference between these two ideas, is this: As much as I hate MS's marketing tactics, IE was a superior product. IE had a fair chance of beating Netscape even if they charged a nominal fee for it (and it can hardly be said that Netscape wasn't free: Most of its users didn't pay the licensing fee, most people who used it did so at home). Netscape has always been a buggy piece of crap. PalmOS is not. WinCE is not a substitute for PalmOS, not even close.
There are embedded OS's already available for free that no one is putting into handhelds for a variety of reasons, mostly because they don't work well in PDA's, I'd assume.
I think Microsoft is shaking in their boots when they see a product like the Qualcomm PDQ and they contemplate what it would be like for their US smartphone marketshare to be similar to their PDA marketshare. EPOC32 has been available for some time in the US and it hasn't caught on nearly as rapidly as the Palm. I think Nokia's plan to wed the PalmOS to the EPOC32 kernel is genius.
I hope it will be enough to put the kibosh on Microsofts plans to ram yet another inferior product standard down the world's throat.
What I really want to know is when will my Palm Pilot be as useful as a Startrek tricorder/phaser?
I don't know whatfor when it comes to tricorders, but I duct taped my Palm III to the top of my.357 Magnum Revolver, and it seems to effect a fairly decent phaser...
Of course they're going to be closed to the general public. After the DaVinci debacle and considering that so many companies are licensing the OS, they'd be incredibly foolish to allow just anyone to take a gander at the ROMS without making them sign a non-disclosure agreement.
The older versions were never open, they were freely available, though, and DaVinci stole code from them. You can bet they're not going to let that happen again.
Today's portables can play full-length DVDs with plenty to spare.
Have you tried to watch a full length DVD on a portable with no extra power supply (ie second battery or plugged in)? Constant drive access for 90 minutes, the screen on and reasonable volume? The specs may claim it can be done, but realistically, you're going to need supplemental power.
Things are better than they used to be, but not that much better.
that one of the common complaints against palm-sized pcs was colour
The complaint wasn't that color sucked, it was that color dragged battery life down from the several weeks range to the several minutes range. If Palm can create a color device that has the battery life we all expect, more power to them (pardon the pun).
Nobody's going to have to change their argument, because it's still valid. Even if you didn't like color, you can get one of the many many PalmOS devices that are manufactured by Palm Licencees that have grayscale screen. Personally, I'd like to see a machine that had 256 grayscale rather than full color. We'll see what happens, though.
A fresh installation of Linux doesn't install my Zyxel ISDN adapter as an example, and what about my Palm III?
I can't say as far as your Zyxel ISDN adapter, but I don know that OpenLinux 2.3 installed Palm support software straight out of the box.
I use my Palm 3 with it all the time.I think they're trying to make Linux more attractive to the Business crowd, which means it must include Palm support.
It's a recurring theme that people who install Linux on Laptops have a lot of trouble. I have an old Thinkpad 755CE that I run Linux on, and getting that running properly was a bitch monkey, to say the least.
It seems to me that Laptop users have more specialized hardware that is not supported by the larger distro's straight out of the box. I have a suggestion:
How about a Linux distribution, specifically designed for Laptops?
It would place emphasis on autodetecting power-management schemes, various LCD screens, weird video chipsets, PCMCIA cards(a perennial pain in the ass), &cet.
I don't know enough to start a project like this, but would be interested in contributing what I can.
Do you really think that *every* single monitor is listed in that list???
No. But no OS is going to have every monitor in existence available. Monitor specs vary, even when the model number is the same. Your monitor has no chipset that is significant to the OS.
With Linux, you have the opportunity to input your own monitor stats, straight out of your montiors manual (which is what I had to do also). I konw of no other GUI system that allows you to do this.
Right now, it leaves you in nobody's land should you fail to install your monitor.
if you just hit return through the whole process without stipulating any spoecific Info, OpenLinuc 2.3 would give you a 640x480x256 screen, which is not "Nobody's Land" are you sure you were using this Distribution?
Why is it so hard??? I don't think it's very hard at all with OpenLinux 2.3(which is what we're talking about on this thread). It seems hard because it asks you more than other OSes ask because it is so flexible. With the X-servers, you can create your own screen sizes and modes. You can do tons of things that are beyond the capabilites of new users, like yourself. Take the time to learn how to use the OS and either you'll go back to Mac OS, or you'll be in hog heaven.
From your descriptions I don't think you're using OpenLinux 2.3, that's what my previous post was about. That distro and that distro alone.
So this new PalmOS will include networking? Or so it says,...
Yes, Virginia, it does include networking. I have it on my Palm as we speak.
Does this mean that later versions can be upgraded without a Desktop computer? According to the page, you need a desktop computer to upgrade the ROM. I'd like to see a self-sustaining Palmtop (computer), and not a overclocked digital rolex.
Two things:
1)No, you need to sync your Palm before you upgrade the ROM, else, you'll lose all your data. One of the great strengths of the Palm OS is the nearly seamless desktop integration. If you don't want that, buy a WinCE machine, but I couldn't recommend that, as a former owner of a WinCE machine.
2)Palm was designed from the ground up to be a high-powered, overclocked digital Rolodex. That's what it is and that's what it endeavors to be. It's a lot handier than you'd think at first glance. I've owned Newtons, WinCE machines, various and sundry digital organizers, laptops and Palm Pilots, and I tell you from experience, the Palm is the only one I continue to use on a regular basis, the exact same way I used it when I first bought it. All the other sat at home after a few months.
Not only that, but they're also making an Ethernet Cradle, so that you can sync and connect directly over a network. Cool.
Now, if they'd only release a Hotsync manager that would run as an NT service, life would be grand. They are releasing the Palm Sync Server, but that costs US$20K(!). Yowch.
OpenLinux 2.3 addresses every single problem you just listed.
1)Setting up Xserver is cake. It does all the work for you. The hardest part is choosing your monitor out of the list. Once it has the info, it gives you a slew of configuration options. All you do is point and click.
2)Setting up sound on COL 2.3 was a snap. I didn't do anything, it just worked all by itself. Hella easier than NT.
3)You don't have to mount a CD in KDE unless you want to access it via the command line. If you use the graphical interface, it automounts for you, just like MS.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole flavor of your post seems to espouse that Microsoft chose to ignore the PDA marketplace and that's why they failed miserably in that sector.
I posit this alternative view: Microsoft is falling back on embedded systems since they spent millions developing Windows CE platform and it is losing in the PDA market, the market for which it was originally intended.
Question: How many Non-PDA devices are available today, or were available at any time, that use the Windows CE OS, as compared with the number of models of PDAs that use or have used Windows CE OS?
Answer: Hella lots more PDAs used/use Windows CE than devices that are not PDAs. That means, Microsoft was actively marketing WinCE as a PDA OS, not an embedded system.
Off the top of my head, I can think of two devices that are not PDAs that have been available (i.e. excluding vaporware) that use WinCE: the Sega Dreamcast, and the remote that Harmon/Kardon makes. Now, how many PDAs have used WinCE? Fifty separate models? Sixty, maybe?
WinCE's miserable dismal showing as an embedded OS is either proof that MS is terrible at marketing (nope, not hardly), OR they never intended the primary use of WinCE in embedded devices.
Just put a picture of Linus on the cover. That seems to be what passes for innvoative design over at Linus Journal... errrrm... Linux Journal.
Objective Reality is cool, because the utilites are 3 dimensional also. With 3dwm, you have a 3d interface for 2d applications.
The thing that I don't like about Objective Reality as that if they are going to make 3d applications, why not make them so that they take advantage of their 3d environment? They mimic their 2d counterparts in 3d. Why does the file manager look like a window? Wouldn't it be better if it looked like a room? There has to be a better way to take advantage of the 3d environment, other than making windows look 3d.
I like Xut! (with the bang) It sounds French.
This sounds like a cool contest, but how are the times being checked? Or is this like the Darwin awards, where if you can come up with a reasonable answer, you're good to go?
Not that I don't believe that it could take Windows NT 49 minutes to reboot, I'd just like to see it.
The result? Alot of people's civil rights are violated, alot of innocent people are hurt, and very little drugs are actually found (try to find a newspaper that had any articles on drugs being found on an airplane in the last year). Infact on atleast one occasion a pregnant woman was detained by authorities for suspected drug-smuggling. She was given multiple enemas and over the course of three days not treated very well. As a result she had a miscarriage. The law holds that this is perfectly OK. It is also morally reprehensible.
Whoooop! Whoooop! The FUD meter is going off the scale. I'm afraid these wild claims require at least a minimal amount of documentation. The FBI killed a woman's baby by giving her enemas? I guess we'll see.
Look, no disrespect, but how naive are you? This is absolutely about geeks, because they wouldn't DARE use it on the star quarterback; that's not how high school politics works.
Well, the fact is, the high-school quarterbacks arent't the ones coming to school with firearms killing their classmates.
You ought to read this article from Salon that goes into the real reasons for the Columbine shootings. These two boys were not being beat up so they decided to get back at everyone, they were seriously screwed up and this program may have identified that.
A friend of mine who ordered a Visor at the beginning of last month, when they first came available, recieved the cradle in the mail today. No Visor, mind you, just the cradle. Hmm. I think they'd be wise to get they's shit together before they lose a lot of loyalty from they's customers.
Yes, well I thought that was implied.
:P
:o
That's because you come from the Wince world, where poor design is the status quo.
Where's my evidence you ask:
Color Gameboy. Uses two AA batteries. Battery life longer than four AA battery B&W Gameboy.
You see, other companies have already done it. Just because nobody particularly clever makes Wince machines (Philips, the only real innovator in that market, stopped making them) doesn't mean that innovation in the handheld market is dead.
. lemme guess, you still use a green monitor
Actually I do use a green screen on my server, where a green screen is still appropriate. Back at ya.
There is a world of difference porting a game that was written using the specific advantages of one operating system over to another system, and creatinga game from the ground up with multi-platform interoperability in mind.
Valve couldn't turn Half-Life for the Mac into the same semi-high-quality product it was on the Windows platform. Half-Life is a buggy piece of shit on the PC. Great game though.
Trust me on this, if the Mac version didn't include TFC, you'd be pissed. If you couldn't connect to the servers that are available, you'd be pissed. The auto-update function is superfluous. If you couldn't use all the mods that are available or all the mapos, you'd be pissed.
I think it was BS that they announced the port and then backed out of it, but the port wasn't goign to give you the award winning game of Half-Life, it was going to give some half-baked piece of crap that had shitty models (I've seen the screen shots and they sucked bigtime compared to the PC game).
No Microsoft isn't conspiring against Apple. That is ludicrous in light of the lawsuit against them. They need Apple around to prove that there is viable competetition in the market. If there are "Halloween Papers" outlining MS's strategy against Apple, I'd like you to post them, otherwise, quit trying to blow smoke up everybody's ass. Save it for Art Bell.
Finally, I virtual reality that is authentic, no silly games to run killing your friends. The actions in this Doom world have real consequences other than having to re-spawn. This is the stuff of the Future!
Free (gratis) worked for IE, free (libre) might help CE
The difference between these two ideas, is this:
As much as I hate MS's marketing tactics, IE was a superior product. IE had a fair chance of beating Netscape even if they charged a nominal fee for it (and it can hardly be said that Netscape wasn't free: Most of its users didn't pay the licensing fee, most people who used it did so at home). Netscape has always been a buggy piece of crap. PalmOS is not. WinCE is not a substitute for PalmOS, not even close.
There are embedded OS's already available for free that no one is putting into handhelds for a variety of reasons, mostly because they don't work well in PDA's, I'd assume.
Nokia, Ericcson, and Symbian and Palm all penned agreements to unequivocally ally themselves against Microsoft and Britsh Telecom.
I think Microsoft is shaking in their boots when they see a product like the Qualcomm PDQ and they contemplate what it would be like for their US smartphone marketshare to be similar to their PDA marketshare. EPOC32 has been available for some time in the US and it hasn't caught on nearly as rapidly as the Palm. I think Nokia's plan to wed the PalmOS to the EPOC32 kernel is genius.
I hope it will be enough to put the kibosh on Microsofts plans to ram yet another inferior product standard down the world's throat.
You couldn't give that shit away. I've used it.
It's terrible. I looked into programming it, but the prohibitively high costs kept me away.
What I really want to know is when will my Palm Pilot be as useful as a Startrek tricorder/phaser?
.357 Magnum Revolver, and it seems to effect a fairly decent phaser...
I don't know whatfor when it comes to tricorders, but I duct taped my Palm III to the top of my
Of course they're going to be closed to the general public. After the DaVinci debacle and considering that so many companies are licensing the OS, they'd be incredibly foolish to allow just anyone to take a gander at the ROMS without making them sign a non-disclosure agreement.
The older versions were never open, they were freely available, though, and DaVinci stole code from them. You can bet they're not going to let that happen again.
Today's portables can play full-length DVDs with plenty to spare.
Have you tried to watch a full length DVD on a portable with no extra power supply (ie second battery or plugged in)? Constant drive access for 90 minutes, the screen on and reasonable volume? The specs may claim it can be done, but realistically, you're going to need supplemental power.
Things are better than they used to be, but not that much better.
that one of the common complaints against palm-sized pcs was colour
:P
The complaint wasn't that color sucked, it was that color dragged battery life down from the several weeks range to the several minutes range. If Palm can create a color device that has the battery life we all expect, more power to them (pardon the pun).
Nobody's going to have to change their argument, because it's still valid. Even if you didn't like color, you can get one of the many many PalmOS devices that are manufactured by Palm Licencees that have grayscale screen. Personally, I'd like to see a machine that had 256 grayscale rather than full color. We'll see what happens, though.
Either way, WinCE still sucks much ass.
A fresh installation of Linux doesn't install my Zyxel ISDN adapter as an example, and what about my Palm III?
I can't say as far as your Zyxel ISDN adapter, but I don know that OpenLinux 2.3 installed Palm support software straight out of the box.
I use my Palm 3 with it all the time.I think they're trying to make Linux more attractive to the Business crowd, which means it must include Palm support.
It seems to me that Laptop users have more specialized hardware that is not supported by the larger distro's straight out of the box. I have a suggestion:
It would place emphasis on autodetecting power-management schemes, various LCD screens, weird video chipsets, PCMCIA cards(a perennial pain in the ass), &cet.
I don't know enough to start a project like this, but would be interested in contributing what I can.
Sounds like you left power conservation on in your BIOS. Shut it down before you install. Leave it off for less trouble in your life.
Do you really think that *every* single monitor is listed in that list???
No. But no OS is going to have every monitor in existence available. Monitor specs vary, even when the model number is the same. Your monitor has no chipset that is significant to the OS.
With Linux, you have the opportunity to input your own monitor stats, straight out of your montiors manual (which is what I had to do also). I konw of no other GUI system that allows you to do this.
Right now, it leaves you in nobody's land should you fail to install your monitor.
if you just hit return through the whole process without stipulating any spoecific Info, OpenLinuc 2.3 would give you a 640x480x256 screen, which is not "Nobody's Land" are you sure you were using this Distribution?
Why is it so hard???
I don't think it's very hard at all with OpenLinux 2.3(which is what we're talking about on this thread). It seems hard because it asks you more than other OSes ask because it is so flexible. With the X-servers, you can create your own screen sizes and modes. You can do tons of things that are beyond the capabilites of new users, like yourself. Take the time to learn how to use the OS and either you'll go back to Mac OS, or you'll be in hog heaven.
From your descriptions I don't think you're using OpenLinux 2.3, that's what my previous post was about. That distro and that distro alone.
So this new PalmOS will include networking? Or so it says,...
Yes, Virginia, it does include networking. I have it on my Palm as we speak.
Does this mean that later versions can be upgraded without a Desktop computer? According to the page, you need a desktop computer to upgrade the ROM. I'd like to see a self-sustaining Palmtop (computer), and not a overclocked digital rolex.
Two things:
1)No, you need to sync your Palm before you upgrade the ROM, else, you'll lose all your data. One of the great strengths of the Palm OS is the nearly seamless desktop integration. If you don't want that, buy a WinCE machine, but I couldn't recommend that, as a former owner of a WinCE machine.
2)Palm was designed from the ground up to be a high-powered, overclocked digital Rolodex. That's what it is and that's what it endeavors to be. It's a lot handier than you'd think at first glance. I've owned Newtons, WinCE machines, various and sundry digital organizers, laptops and Palm Pilots, and I tell you from experience, the Palm is the only one I continue to use on a regular basis, the exact same way I used it when I first bought it. All the other sat at home after a few months.
Not only that, but they're also making an Ethernet Cradle, so that you can sync and connect directly over a network. Cool.
Now, if they'd only release a Hotsync manager that would run as an NT service, life would be grand. They are releasing the Palm Sync Server, but that costs US$20K(!). Yowch.
OpenLinux 2.3 addresses every single problem you just listed.
1)Setting up Xserver is cake. It does all the work for you. The hardest part is choosing your monitor out of the list. Once it has the info, it gives you a slew of configuration options. All you do is point and click.
2)Setting up sound on COL 2.3 was a snap. I didn't do anything, it just worked all by itself. Hella easier than NT.
3)You don't have to mount a CD in KDE unless you want to access it via the command line. If you use the graphical interface, it automounts for you, just like MS.