> The "democratic" government of Germany is traveling down a well-trodden path of state
> persecution of officially designated "hate groups" (that is, groups which the government
> says we should hate).
Kind of like the Communist Party in the USA, right? Different names, same game. I don't suppose you put quotes around American democracy?
I use what gets the job done. I used to have a Win95 486 machine run as a file/print server and internet router. It worked fine, I could set it up with my eyes closed. But the dang thing locked several times a week, or simply stoped dialling out, or the print queues didn't respond anymore, whatever.
So I reformatted and installed RedHat. Took me quite a while to wade through HOW-TOs and MINI-HOW-TOs to figure out the IP masq stuff (there seem to be endless conflicting versions floating around). Print serving and Samba was easier, didn't take too long with the right docs. After I finally got it all going, the thing was quite reliable. It worked weeks and months on end without a hitch, even on this paltry platform (486 16MB RAM 250MB HD). However, every once in a while there were glitches with the print queues and dialling out. A quick reboot often worked, but sometimes I had to screw with the config. Fiddling with printcap files only twice a year or so I simply forget all the options and keywords. Same with the diald.conf file. That's when I longed for a GUI. So I got linuxconf which I have mixed feelings about, but it improved matters somewhat.
Basically I want Linux with KDE and a config system that can actually make sense of all the shit in/etc and provide me with valid options for settings I couldn't be bothered to remember. That's what Windows does better in my opinion, and that's why I can find my way around quicker there. But once KDE or Gnome get augmented with a DEEP config tool that goes beyond fluff configuration and can work on anything or most things in Linux, that's when I'll use Linux A LOT MORE. Until then it'll just run my print and file server in the closet. Oh, and when Kylix finally ships, I'll switch desktops too.
I think one of the big reasons is that most popular scripting languages have considerably better string handling support than traditional compiled languages. And since string processing is pretty much what most web scripts do most of the time, that's a good thing. Think strings in C/C++ and you get the point. While there are certainly many advanced string classes available, C/C++ still puts certain semantic constraints on their use. Scripts usually have few or none of these constraints.
As an aside, I think Delphi is one of the most suitable traditional compiled languages for web development. That's because of the decent string support, the clean and readable syntax, the good speed, and excellent database connectivity.
The other main advantage that scripts offer is cross-platform portability. A set of PHP pages should port pretty well from Linux to Win32 depending on what they do. The same can't be said for binary DLLs or even their source code.
While we all agree to hate Microsoft collectively, Ellison is nothing but a Gates wanna-be. If anything, he's a much bigger egomaniac than Gates ever had the personality to be, topped maybe only by Scott McNealy or Steve Jobs. So maybe we should just include him on our list of daily hate prayers.
What mentality exactly are you talking about? The idea that after I've read a book and people ask me how I liked it, I shouldn't be able to share that opinion? Or the idea that car magazine journalists test driving a new car shouldn't be allowed to publish its top speed or any possible shortcomings? Unless you've been living under a rock sheltered by warmth and humidity, you would know that it's far from only the Slashdot community that is dissatisfied with the state of EULAs today, and that Microsoft in particular takes all kinds of liberties with them. By saying that if you don't agree with the EULA you shouldn't use the software you are trivializing the matter beyond any reasonable discussion.
> English presents much more difficulty, spelling-wise, than German, Spanish
> or any other European language
That's only partly correct, I believe. The difficulties are simply of a different nature. Where in English most words consist of just one or two syllables and very different words often differ by just one or two letters, German for example abounds with long words--in particular compounds--and you simply have to remember more letters. Besides, for each word you spell right you often miss the gender of some inanimate object. So the problem shifts from syntax to grammar. In fact I dare say it's a bigger problem than spelling in English, because only a non-native speaker will EVER get the gender wrong. It's quite unfair really to people that speak German very well as a second language and even have a good accent. All it takes is a little slip-up in the gender of a noun, and they're exposed for the fraud they are:-)
I fully agree with your second point that learners of a second language often develop a more careful control of that language because of the very mechanics of learning it. When they first learn the homonyms "then" and "than" they often get them wrong at first until the difference gets ingrained in their mind and they become acutely aware of it. That's why I think that mastery of a second language is very important for everyone, since it also leads to a better understanding of one's own language.
On the other hand I believe reading makes a huge difference in spelling. People that read a lot, in particular books rather than magazines, tend to have a better grasp of the language. I believe books are better in that respect because their authors tend to have higher linguistic aspirations than your average Newsweek reporter and present the reader with much more ambitious sentence constructs and word choices. Over time this burns certain idioms and word combinations into your mind and makes you pause when you see them misused.
> As for Americans being "losers" becasue so few of us know foriegn languages
Whoa, matey, you're seriously debasing the meaning of my original post. I never meant to imply any kind of American intellectual inferiority or them being "losers" in any way. I'm married to one, and I have plenty of intelligent friends and acquaintances to know better. I am simply opposed to this contemptuous attitude towards spelling in this country. It's almost like a class war, where poor spellers ridicule people with any pretense of syntax and grammar as being small minded and petty. All I'm saying is, the first step towards recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Of course, if recovery isn't the goal, that matters little...
> Sure, the post was poorly-worded, but you at least knew that it was
> a story comparing 3D accelerators, not overall system performance.
Fair enough, it was a story about 3D cards. But most posters seem to have keyed in on the statement declaring a 700 MHz system low end, and the whole nature of the thread was skewed by that. I was simply following the flow, that's all. I don't doubt that a Geforce 256 would add considerable zest even to a 400 MHz machine. I simply don't consider that machine all that low end for most tasks.
> If you want to criticize something Americans are truly bad at, try geography.
Ok, add that to poor spelling.
> But if it's true, perhaps this is due the the wide access to the internet in America?
What, Americans spell poorly because they have wider access to the Internet? Hmmm... Ok, ok, I know what you mean, but I can't second it. I've lived in Europe, Australia and the US, and my personal experience face to face with people parallels my online observations. The real problem in the US is that a lot of people don't really see poor spelling as a deficiency. In fact, some actually take pride in it, as if to prove their deep knowledge on a particular topic by not even being distracted by this triviality of spelling. In few other places ourside the US do people so freely admit that they are poor spellers. Most people I know in Germany for example would never volunteer that kind of information.
I have a PIII-6xx at work running NT 4.0, and at home I have a Celeron 366 o/c'ed to 460 with 192MB running Win2K. Frankly, qualitatively speaking there is no difference between the two systems. Ok, the PIII at work is a Dell OptiPlex GX1 with a crappy built-in ATI 3D Rage Pro 4MB, while at home I run a TNT2 16MB. Still, with the apps I'm using--Delphi 4, IE5, Visual Studio 6, Word etc--I simply can't tell a noticeable difference between the two machines. I'm sure running the latest 3D games would reveal a significant fps difference, but since I don't, that doesn't matter. I'd be an utter fool to go out and spend money on the current generation of high-end CPUs. Especially since qualitatively the difference between a PIII-6xx and a PIII-1G is probably even smaller.
> Oops...I forgot. Typos are a strictly English phenomenon...
Firstly, that was just a quip taking adavantage of the poster's misspelling(s) given the nature of the topic. Secondly, I didn't mention English per se, but rather American.
I find it absolutely amazing how true the stereotype of American's poor spelling is. All too often I can deduce the American origin of posters simply by the number and nature of spelling mistakes. While there is a good number of British, Australian, Kiwi, Indian and other English-speaking posters untouched by any sense of syntax, their numbers pale in comparison to their American counterparts, both in terms of quantity and scope.
I am sick and tired of the old excuse of content over form. Apologizing for one's poor spelling skills in a written medium is akin to apologizing for showing up with a hammer at a fishing competition. It might possibly get you some fish, but who dare endure the process of shame and misery? Poor spelling distracts the reader and undermines the message.
> One other point: the two party system can be broken down simply
> into two basic competing modes of thought.
No prizes for guessing which one you adhere to.
The US political system is like the Game of Life: it was set up with an initial set of rules by which to play, and an initial set of players. Then the founding fathers hit "GO" and off it went. It worked pretty well for a long time, but eventually--like the Game of Life--it reached a final immutable position. Some of the units might still be oscillating (Dems and Reps swapping place every once in a while), but there's no net motion anymore.
As to the recurring theme in this thread that things were DESIGNED to be slow and inefficient to prevent radicals from taking power, think again. There's nothing in the consitution preventing a multi-party system. If there were, there wouldn't be any point in the Greens and Libertarians even trying. The reason things are the way they are is because of the cooperation of the two major parties. They realized that while they fervently hate each other, they would serve their goals better by cooperating to the exclusion of any other parties.
Things are the way they are precisely because the system has started to fail. The immutable status quo is a sign of it. Think back even this century: when was the last time a monumental change such as the New Deal, social security etc came from the two parties that we know now? Today we consider it a milestone if we raise the minimum wage by a dollar. Our political system has reached a level of inactivity and stale mate that is repesenting the will of the majority less and less. And yet things are set up such that there's little we can do about it. What's more, we're conditioned into thinking that we've reached Nirvana, that the way things are is what we've wanted all along.
I've always advocated that operating systems should be open, in order to facilitate a level playing field for application developers. I see the OS as a sort of super-specification for how to write applications; while most OSs also provide a lot of services above and beyond that, I think their primary role is that of an application running environment. Having a free and open OS is akin to having openly published specs for public utilities. Imagine having secret electrical specs, known only to the people at your local electricity board. They'll come and wire your house for you, but there's no way in hell they'll disclose them to third party contractors.
In this light I view Linux as that open spec OS, the level playing field. Now whether "third party" application developers choose to follow the same economic model with their apps is an entirely different thing. StarOffice or Kylix or what have you provide none of the critical services of the OS, and whether you use them or not is entirely up to you, but not using them does not cripple your ability to use Linux in any way.
Not everybody is convinced by the economic viability of the Open Source way of life. Or--to put another spin on it--not everybody is as the same level of enlightenment regarding Open Source. But by providing an open source operating system and a mechanism for keeping it that way, at least we prevent closed source developers from forcing dependence on them on the rest of the community. After all, for a long time that was the biggest complaint about Microsoft: not that their software wasn't freely available, but that Windows was an opaque environment at the whims of its parent company, deliberately used to gain a competitive advantage by keeping its inner workings obscure, or even changing them periodically to break existing software. Linux as a widespread desktop OS would change all that.
QNX never suffered from a lack of technical merits. Its main problem was a certain marketing arrogance on the side of the parent company. They simply were never terribly interested in selling QNX to mere mortals. If a prospective licensee wasn't going to embed it in at least 10 million units or what have you, they simply didn't show any interest. My previous company wanted to use it in an embedded networked device for industrial control. But since the projected volume was very low (hundreds of units a year max), the prices quoted for QNX were stratospheric, so we went with PharLap instead. Can't say I was happy with the choice--Linux would have been much more flexible, albeit more bloated--but for a device selling for $500 it doesn't make any sense to pay half that just for OS royalties.
While I've heard all the arguments from QNX fans as to why this marketing model makes sense, it doesn't change the fact that an OS copy not sold is money lost, either way you look at it. How could they possibly be better off not selling me the OS at all, versus licensing it at $50 or so a pop? They should simply introduce a layered support mechanism, giving more support to those who pay more, and less (mailing lists, FAQs, KBs etc) to those who pay less.
> only allow people to pass along information that is a) unencrypted
Just out of curiosity, how could you establish in an automated way that data coming through is not encrypted? Enforce periodic occurences of boilerplate plaing text phrases, maybe "ready as the devil" every 100 bytes or so? I'm curious.
It would be cool for some IT-oriented company such as IBM to buy the comp.* and alt.comp.* branches, slap on a real search engine that lets you perform actually useful searches, and put it back on the web. The wildcard capabilities need to be greatly enhanced, as well as searching for special characters. I used to live in deja for developement research, and it's still my first stop even today, even though my expecations are greatly lowered.
It strikes me that IBM in particular could use it as a show piece for their technologies: DB2 (scalability, speed etc), their storage farms, search engine frontend etc. Make it part of their developerWorks and keep it really fast to show off their stuff.
I don't know if the feeble hardware platform is really that much of an excuse. My Amiga 500 was running on a 68000 at 7.49 MHz and its windowing performance was quite acceptable, while doing a lot more than I would expect off a Palm. True, it had some hardware support, but by today's standards that was quite feeble. Motorola could easily build some simple graphics acceleration hardware into the Dragonball (haven't they already?) to help a bit. I'm just perplexed that they went with a CPU that doesn't offer a true clean 32-bit architecture without segementation and all. Aren't there embedded 386 derivatives that could have fit the power and price bill equally well? Maybe not, but I'm wondering.
Springboard is great, no doubt, I've liked it from day one. But there are serious deficinecies in the Palm OS and the hardware architecture itself. For example, a lot of the potential applications that the Springboard enables require high bandwidth to memory/display, larger memory capacity etc. And while Palm would like to see themselves in a market of one, they do have competitors that are catching up. One day it will not be enough to say "look, if you want this or that capability, just buy the right Springboard module" (particularly since Palm doesn't support Springboard anyway). The competitors will say "hey, we have all those capabilities in the box" already. That's hard to argue with.
In the days when Palm only claimed to have a highly focused PDA that does just what you need and does it well, they had a certain ground to stand on--as their market share proves. But the more they try to be all things to all people via expansion etc, the more Microsoft et al have a point when they say "hey, we can already do all those things, out of the box". In other words, the keep-it-simple mantra was great until now to gain market share, but now that they ARE top dog, they will have to actually fight to stay there.
Oh, I fully agree with what you say, including their targeted use: "quick and easy access to information". But the more you charge for your devices, the more extra functionality you have to throw in, and the less the old line of "it just provides what you need, and well" flies. Because otherwise you put yourself into a luxury toy niche. Expensive, does less than comparable devices, but it's got this name brand label. Kind of like the Palm V--it's mostly an executive toy, even though I'm sure there are people in this newsgroup that would argue how indispensible it is. Most people under bang-for-the-buck constraints get something else, like a IIIxe or Visor Deluxe.
What I want to see most in the Palm is a larger screen--more pixels horizontally, but especially vertically. The Palm is used more and more for business data entry, electronic forms etc, and for that sort of use 160x160 pixels can get constraining very quickly. Even one hundred extra vertical pixels could make a huge difference. And something like the Sony jog dial would be insanely great too, though it should be integrated at the OS level rather than the app level (like the Sony's).
Ok, maybe not "years", but they've been there at least since spring of 1999, because that's when I started visiting them. I still consider the platform vapor, until I can actually get a Palm form factor device at a store.
After many years of owning a Palm and writing a couple of hello-world-level programs, I finally got a copy of Palm Programming and sat down a bit with it. The more I read, the more limited the Palm platform started to appear. Until your post I didn't realize that the 16-bit signed offset was a Dragonball limitation, I thought that was a Palm thing. I was reading about the 64k segmentation model, and how Code Warrior can handle some of the work for you. As you say, that brought back shades of 80x86 real mode programming.
I don't know, even simple things turned me off: why should there be two calls, LoadLib and FindLib, and why should the programmer be in charge of doing refence counting and unloading of libraries? Why couldn't OpenLib and CloseLib do that behind the scenes, without duplicating all that code for each program that used libraries? It seems that doing it the way they did precludes multitasking at some future point.
Anyway, I'm starting to wonder whether Palm OS is really as great as it's made out to be. It's one thing to encourage programmers to keep the apps small and simple, but it's quite another if you force them to do so through architectural limitations and artificial shortcoming. Forcing small apps just because you yourself as an OS creator can't really see any use for large apps on a handheld smacks of shorsightedness.
or isn't the Palm platform advancing much anymore? I mean, it's nice that a couple more Handspring colors are available, but come on, the two new offerings are nothing to write home about. For the Platinum they basically jacked up the clock speed a bit and charge you $50 for that. The color, ok it's nice that they didn't have to make it larger than the regular Visor (well, I guess 0.1" thicker), but other than color it offers nothing else--at $450. Let's not loose sight of the fact that we're starting to get less and less for the money here compared to the WinCE platform--and I'm no great proponent of WinCE by far. Palm and their cohorts can talk it up any which way they want--more focused OS, leaner, no fluff, etc--but at the end of the day they charge you the same as WinCE for a fraction of the hardware capabilities.
most of these devices are still vapor. Symbian has had those pretty pictures up on their web site for years. I know because I've kept going back to see if anything changed. I fully agree that architecturally EPOC32 is the king of consumer electronics OSs. It's got practically everything WinCE has (except maybe the multimedia eyecandy) in a fraction of the space and at much higher speed. It's much more modular and expandable. But if they keep dragging their feet, Palm and WinCE will be so entrenched that they simply won't stand a chance. Look at Nokia and Ericsson, they're starting to cut deals with alternate OS suppliers on the side.
Slashdot Mirror
> The "democratic" government of Germany is traveling down a well-trodden path of state
> persecution of officially designated "hate groups" (that is, groups which the government
> says we should hate).
Kind of like the Communist Party in the USA, right? Different names, same game. I don't suppose you put quotes around American democracy?
I use what gets the job done. I used to have a Win95 486 machine run as a file/print server and internet router. It worked fine, I could set it up with my eyes closed. But the dang thing locked several times a week, or simply stoped dialling out, or the print queues didn't respond anymore, whatever.
/etc and provide me with valid options for settings I couldn't be bothered to remember. That's what Windows does better in my opinion, and that's why I can find my way around quicker there. But once KDE or Gnome get augmented with a DEEP config tool that goes beyond fluff configuration and can work on anything or most things in Linux, that's when I'll use Linux A LOT MORE. Until then it'll just run my print and file server in the closet. Oh, and when Kylix finally ships, I'll switch desktops too.
So I reformatted and installed RedHat. Took me quite a while to wade through HOW-TOs and MINI-HOW-TOs to figure out the IP masq stuff (there seem to be endless conflicting versions floating around). Print serving and Samba was easier, didn't take too long with the right docs. After I finally got it all going, the thing was quite reliable. It worked weeks and months on end without a hitch, even on this paltry platform (486 16MB RAM 250MB HD). However, every once in a while there were glitches with the print queues and dialling out. A quick reboot often worked, but sometimes I had to screw with the config. Fiddling with printcap files only twice a year or so I simply forget all the options and keywords. Same with the diald.conf file. That's when I longed for a GUI. So I got linuxconf which I have mixed feelings about, but it improved matters somewhat.
Basically I want Linux with KDE and a config system that can actually make sense of all the shit in
Paul
I think one of the big reasons is that most popular scripting languages have considerably better string handling support than traditional compiled languages. And since string processing is pretty much what most web scripts do most of the time, that's a good thing. Think strings in C/C++ and you get the point. While there are certainly many advanced string classes available, C/C++ still puts certain semantic constraints on their use. Scripts usually have few or none of these constraints.
As an aside, I think Delphi is one of the most suitable traditional compiled languages for web development. That's because of the decent string support, the clean and readable syntax, the good speed, and excellent database connectivity.
The other main advantage that scripts offer is cross-platform portability. A set of PHP pages should port pretty well from Linux to Win32 depending on what they do. The same can't be said for binary DLLs or even their source code.
While we all agree to hate Microsoft collectively, Ellison is nothing but a Gates wanna-be. If anything, he's a much bigger egomaniac than Gates ever had the personality to be, topped maybe only by Scott McNealy or Steve Jobs. So maybe we should just include him on our list of daily hate prayers.
> This is typical of the Slashdot mentality
What mentality exactly are you talking about? The idea that after I've read a book and people ask me how I liked it, I shouldn't be able to share that opinion? Or the idea that car magazine journalists test driving a new car shouldn't be allowed to publish its top speed or any possible shortcomings? Unless you've been living under a rock sheltered by warmth and humidity, you would know that it's far from only the Slashdot community that is dissatisfied with the state of EULAs today, and that Microsoft in particular takes all kinds of liberties with them. By saying that if you don't agree with the EULA you shouldn't use the software you are trivializing the matter beyond any reasonable discussion.
> English presents much more difficulty, spelling-wise, than German, Spanish
:-)
> or any other European language
That's only partly correct, I believe. The difficulties are simply of a different nature. Where in English most words consist of just one or two syllables and very different words often differ by just one or two letters, German for example abounds with long words--in particular compounds--and you simply have to remember more letters. Besides, for each word you spell right you often miss the gender of some inanimate object. So the problem shifts from syntax to grammar. In fact I dare say it's a bigger problem than spelling in English, because only a non-native speaker will EVER get the gender wrong. It's quite unfair really to people that speak German very well as a second language and even have a good accent. All it takes is a little slip-up in the gender of a noun, and they're exposed for the fraud they are
I fully agree with your second point that learners of a second language often develop a more careful control of that language because of the very mechanics of learning it. When they first learn the homonyms "then" and "than" they often get them wrong at first until the difference gets ingrained in their mind and they become acutely aware of it. That's why I think that mastery of a second language is very important for everyone, since it also leads to a better understanding of one's own language.
On the other hand I believe reading makes a huge difference in spelling. People that read a lot, in particular books rather than magazines, tend to have a better grasp of the language. I believe books are better in that respect because their authors tend to have higher linguistic aspirations than your average Newsweek reporter and present the reader with much more ambitious sentence constructs and word choices. Over time this burns certain idioms and word combinations into your mind and makes you pause when you see them misused.
> As for Americans being "losers" becasue so few of us know foriegn languages
Whoa, matey, you're seriously debasing the meaning of my original post. I never meant to imply any kind of American intellectual inferiority or them being "losers" in any way. I'm married to one, and I have plenty of intelligent friends and acquaintances to know better. I am simply opposed to this contemptuous attitude towards spelling in this country. It's almost like a class war, where poor spellers ridicule people with any pretense of syntax and grammar as being small minded and petty. All I'm saying is, the first step towards recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Of course, if recovery isn't the goal, that matters little...
> Lighten up, who gives a damn about spelling?
Q.e.d., I rest my case.
> Sure, the post was poorly-worded, but you at least knew that it was
> a story comparing 3D accelerators, not overall system performance.
Fair enough, it was a story about 3D cards. But most posters seem to have keyed in on the statement declaring a 700 MHz system low end, and the whole nature of the thread was skewed by that. I was simply following the flow, that's all. I don't doubt that a Geforce 256 would add considerable zest even to a 400 MHz machine. I simply don't consider that machine all that low end for most tasks.
> If you want to criticize something Americans are truly bad at, try geography.
Ok, add that to poor spelling.
> But if it's true, perhaps this is due the the wide access to the internet in America?
What, Americans spell poorly because they have wider access to the Internet? Hmmm... Ok, ok, I know what you mean, but I can't second it. I've lived in Europe, Australia and the US, and my personal experience face to face with people parallels my online observations. The real problem in the US is that a lot of people don't really see poor spelling as a deficiency. In fact, some actually take pride in it, as if to prove their deep knowledge on a particular topic by not even being distracted by this triviality of spelling. In few other places ourside the US do people so freely admit that they are poor spellers. Most people I know in Germany for example would never volunteer that kind of information.
Let me chime in as well with being perplexed.
I have a PIII-6xx at work running NT 4.0, and at home I have a Celeron 366 o/c'ed to 460 with 192MB running Win2K. Frankly, qualitatively speaking there is no difference between the two systems. Ok, the PIII at work is a Dell OptiPlex GX1 with a crappy built-in ATI 3D Rage Pro 4MB, while at home I run a TNT2 16MB. Still, with the apps I'm using--Delphi 4, IE5, Visual Studio 6, Word etc--I simply can't tell a noticeable difference between the two machines. I'm sure running the latest 3D games would reveal a significant fps difference, but since I don't, that doesn't matter. I'd be an utter fool to go out and spend money on the current generation of high-end CPUs. Especially since qualitatively the difference between a PIII-6xx and a PIII-1G is probably even smaller.
> Oops...I forgot. Typos are a strictly English phenomenon...
Firstly, that was just a quip taking adavantage of the poster's misspelling(s) given the nature of the topic. Secondly, I didn't mention English per se, but rather American.
I find it absolutely amazing how true the stereotype of American's poor spelling is. All too often I can deduce the American origin of posters simply by the number and nature of spelling mistakes. While there is a good number of British, Australian, Kiwi, Indian and other English-speaking posters untouched by any sense of syntax, their numbers pale in comparison to their American counterparts, both in terms of quantity and scope.
I am sick and tired of the old excuse of content over form. Apologizing for one's poor spelling skills in a written medium is akin to apologizing for showing up with a hammer at a fishing competition. It might possibly get you some fish, but who dare endure the process of shame and misery? Poor spelling distracts the reader and undermines the message.
> and it said that percentage of Americans that new more
> than one language fluently was extrememely low
And the percentage of Americans that could spell their native language was even lower.
> One other point: the two party system can be broken down simply
> into two basic competing modes of thought.
No prizes for guessing which one you adhere to.
The US political system is like the Game of Life: it was set up with an initial set of rules by which to play, and an initial set of players. Then the founding fathers hit "GO" and off it went. It worked pretty well for a long time, but eventually--like the Game of Life--it reached a final immutable position. Some of the units might still be oscillating (Dems and Reps swapping place every once in a while), but there's no net motion anymore.
As to the recurring theme in this thread that things were DESIGNED to be slow and inefficient to prevent radicals from taking power, think again. There's nothing in the consitution preventing a multi-party system. If there were, there wouldn't be any point in the Greens and Libertarians even trying. The reason things are the way they are is because of the cooperation of the two major parties. They realized that while they fervently hate each other, they would serve their goals better by cooperating to the exclusion of any other parties.
Things are the way they are precisely because the system has started to fail. The immutable status quo is a sign of it. Think back even this century: when was the last time a monumental change such as the New Deal, social security etc came from the two parties that we know now? Today we consider it a milestone if we raise the minimum wage by a dollar. Our political system has reached a level of inactivity and stale mate that is repesenting the will of the majority less and less. And yet things are set up such that there's little we can do about it. What's more, we're conditioned into thinking that we've reached Nirvana, that the way things are is what we've wanted all along.
I've always advocated that operating systems should be open, in order to facilitate a level playing field for application developers. I see the OS as a sort of super-specification for how to write applications; while most OSs also provide a lot of services above and beyond that, I think their primary role is that of an application running environment. Having a free and open OS is akin to having openly published specs for public utilities. Imagine having secret electrical specs, known only to the people at your local electricity board. They'll come and wire your house for you, but there's no way in hell they'll disclose them to third party contractors.
In this light I view Linux as that open spec OS, the level playing field. Now whether "third party" application developers choose to follow the same economic model with their apps is an entirely different thing. StarOffice or Kylix or what have you provide none of the critical services of the OS, and whether you use them or not is entirely up to you, but not using them does not cripple your ability to use Linux in any way.
Not everybody is convinced by the economic viability of the Open Source way of life. Or--to put another spin on it--not everybody is as the same level of enlightenment regarding Open Source. But by providing an open source operating system and a mechanism for keeping it that way, at least we prevent closed source developers from forcing dependence on them on the rest of the community. After all, for a long time that was the biggest complaint about Microsoft: not that their software wasn't freely available, but that Windows was an opaque environment at the whims of its parent company, deliberately used to gain a competitive advantage by keeping its inner workings obscure, or even changing them periodically to break existing software. Linux as a widespread desktop OS would change all that.
QNX never suffered from a lack of technical merits. Its main problem was a certain marketing arrogance on the side of the parent company. They simply were never terribly interested in selling QNX to mere mortals. If a prospective licensee wasn't going to embed it in at least 10 million units or what have you, they simply didn't show any interest. My previous company wanted to use it in an embedded networked device for industrial control. But since the projected volume was very low (hundreds of units a year max), the prices quoted for QNX were stratospheric, so we went with PharLap instead. Can't say I was happy with the choice--Linux would have been much more flexible, albeit more bloated--but for a device selling for $500 it doesn't make any sense to pay half that just for OS royalties.
While I've heard all the arguments from QNX fans as to why this marketing model makes sense, it doesn't change the fact that an OS copy not sold is money lost, either way you look at it. How could they possibly be better off not selling me the OS at all, versus licensing it at $50 or so a pop? They should simply introduce a layered support mechanism, giving more support to those who pay more, and less (mailing lists, FAQs, KBs etc) to those who pay less.
> only allow people to pass along information that is a) unencrypted
Just out of curiosity, how could you establish in an automated way that data coming through is not encrypted? Enforce periodic occurences of boilerplate plaing text phrases, maybe "ready as the devil" every 100 bytes or so? I'm curious.
It would be cool for some IT-oriented company such as IBM to buy the comp.* and alt.comp.* branches, slap on a real search engine that lets you perform actually useful searches, and put it back on the web. The wildcard capabilities need to be greatly enhanced, as well as searching for special characters. I used to live in deja for developement research, and it's still my first stop even today, even though my expecations are greatly lowered.
It strikes me that IBM in particular could use it as a show piece for their technologies: DB2 (scalability, speed etc), their storage farms, search engine frontend etc. Make it part of their developerWorks and keep it really fast to show off their stuff.
I don't know if the feeble hardware platform is really that much of an excuse. My Amiga 500 was running on a 68000 at 7.49 MHz and its windowing performance was quite acceptable, while doing a lot more than I would expect off a Palm. True, it had some hardware support, but by today's standards that was quite feeble. Motorola could easily build some simple graphics acceleration hardware into the Dragonball (haven't they already?) to help a bit. I'm just perplexed that they went with a CPU that doesn't offer a true clean 32-bit architecture without segementation and all. Aren't there embedded 386 derivatives that could have fit the power and price bill equally well? Maybe not, but I'm wondering.
Springboard is great, no doubt, I've liked it from day one. But there are serious deficinecies in the Palm OS and the hardware architecture itself. For example, a lot of the potential applications that the Springboard enables require high bandwidth to memory/display, larger memory capacity etc. And while Palm would like to see themselves in a market of one, they do have competitors that are catching up. One day it will not be enough to say "look, if you want this or that capability, just buy the right Springboard module" (particularly since Palm doesn't support Springboard anyway). The competitors will say "hey, we have all those capabilities in the box" already. That's hard to argue with.
In the days when Palm only claimed to have a highly focused PDA that does just what you need and does it well, they had a certain ground to stand on--as their market share proves. But the more they try to be all things to all people via expansion etc, the more Microsoft et al have a point when they say "hey, we can already do all those things, out of the box". In other words, the keep-it-simple mantra was great until now to gain market share, but now that they ARE top dog, they will have to actually fight to stay there.
Oh, I fully agree with what you say, including their targeted use: "quick and easy access to information". But the more you charge for your devices, the more extra functionality you have to throw in, and the less the old line of "it just provides what you need, and well" flies. Because otherwise you put yourself into a luxury toy niche. Expensive, does less than comparable devices, but it's got this name brand label. Kind of like the Palm V--it's mostly an executive toy, even though I'm sure there are people in this newsgroup that would argue how indispensible it is. Most people under bang-for-the-buck constraints get something else, like a IIIxe or Visor Deluxe.
What I want to see most in the Palm is a larger screen--more pixels horizontally, but especially vertically. The Palm is used more and more for business data entry, electronic forms etc, and for that sort of use 160x160 pixels can get constraining very quickly. Even one hundred extra vertical pixels could make a huge difference. And something like the Sony jog dial would be insanely great too, though it should be integrated at the OS level rather than the app level (like the Sony's).
Ok, maybe not "years", but they've been there at least since spring of 1999, because that's when I started visiting them. I still consider the platform vapor, until I can actually get a Palm form factor device at a store.
After many years of owning a Palm and writing a couple of hello-world-level programs, I finally got a copy of Palm Programming and sat down a bit with it. The more I read, the more limited the Palm platform started to appear. Until your post I didn't realize that the 16-bit signed offset was a Dragonball limitation, I thought that was a Palm thing. I was reading about the 64k segmentation model, and how Code Warrior can handle some of the work for you. As you say, that brought back shades of 80x86 real mode programming.
I don't know, even simple things turned me off: why should there be two calls, LoadLib and FindLib, and why should the programmer be in charge of doing refence counting and unloading of libraries? Why couldn't OpenLib and CloseLib do that behind the scenes, without duplicating all that code for each program that used libraries? It seems that doing it the way they did precludes multitasking at some future point.
Anyway, I'm starting to wonder whether Palm OS is really as great as it's made out to be. It's one thing to encourage programmers to keep the apps small and simple, but it's quite another if you force them to do so through architectural limitations and artificial shortcoming. Forcing small apps just because you yourself as an OS creator can't really see any use for large apps on a handheld smacks of shorsightedness.
or isn't the Palm platform advancing much anymore? I mean, it's nice that a couple more Handspring colors are available, but come on, the two new offerings are nothing to write home about. For the Platinum they basically jacked up the clock speed a bit and charge you $50 for that. The color, ok it's nice that they didn't have to make it larger than the regular Visor (well, I guess 0.1" thicker), but other than color it offers nothing else--at $450. Let's not loose sight of the fact that we're starting to get less and less for the money here compared to the WinCE platform--and I'm no great proponent of WinCE by far. Palm and their cohorts can talk it up any which way they want--more focused OS, leaner, no fluff, etc--but at the end of the day they charge you the same as WinCE for a fraction of the hardware capabilities.
most of these devices are still vapor. Symbian has had those pretty pictures up on their web site for years. I know because I've kept going back to see if anything changed. I fully agree that architecturally EPOC32 is the king of consumer electronics OSs. It's got practically everything WinCE has (except maybe the multimedia eyecandy) in a fraction of the space and at much higher speed. It's much more modular and expandable. But if they keep dragging their feet, Palm and WinCE will be so entrenched that they simply won't stand a chance. Look at Nokia and Ericsson, they're starting to cut deals with alternate OS suppliers on the side.