People seem to have provided most of the superficial Palm-vs-WinCE points already, so I'll skip that. Here's what sprang to my mind:
You can make your Palm application quite tamperproof by burning the app into flash ROM and disabling the software installation conduits.
PalmOS is essentially a clone of MacOS anno 1990. People who programmed the Apple Mac back in the early nineties will understand the PalmOS very quickly.
Sybase has a product named UltraLite (part of SQL Anywhere Studio), which is a very small embedded SQL server for PDAs. You can replicate to/from any ODBC-compliant master data source over several different protocols. UltraLite also supports WinCE and several other platforms. I've used UL on Palm for some months now and it does have some bugs, but it will probably be sufficiently robust by next summer.
You are joking, you have to pay for incomming calls, would someone please reply to this and tell me it is a joke
Yes, it sounds stupid, but just believe it. It's probably because of historical reasons, and it's too late to do anything about it now.
Actually, the fact that the recipient pays for the call is one major reason why the US is lagging after Europe and Japan in wireless technology. People don't like to keep their phones switched on, because they'll have to pay if someone calls. So they keep the phones switched off or simply don't answer calls. There's no chance to build up a mobile communications culture like the ones that are forming in Europe right now.
Although you certainly can build merged devices, they will only have gadget value. There's no future in building combined cellphones and digital cameras.
I believe things are going to evolve the other way: the Unix way. You'll get lots of small utilities that by themselves don't do very much, but are very good at what they do. They would communicate with each other (and with other people's devices) using something akin to Bluetooth, but simpler. In the same way as you would use pipes and files under Unix, you would channel the various data streams in appropriate ways.
A normal mobile setup could include a small battery-powered CPU in your belt and a 2-by-4" LCD display and handwriting decoder in your breast pocket. Your other pocket would contain a phone handset/headset. In your bag you would have a storage device and a packet radio. At work or at home, you might have a larger LCD, a fast network connection, maybe a keyboard and a faster CPU, possibly a hands-free speakerphone.
Depending on the available devices and the type of work you want to do, you would use different combinations of devices. For writing e-mail at the office, you would use a keyboard or dictating machine. On the road, you could listen to music over the packet radio or straight from your storage device. The inferior CPU power of your belt-clip computer would possibly not allow speech recognition, but you could write on your LCD instead. You could watch the news on your pocket LCD, but if you wanted to see color TV, you could use the video projector in your living room instead. And so on.
I hope we will see Bluetooth II some day, providing fast and secure wireless networks in a private plug-n-play microcell.
Now where was I... oh yes: cat storage-1:/mp3/metallica/*.mp3 | cpu-2:/bin/mp3decode | display-2:/dev/audio
I will be very surprised if there are no pin-for-pin compatible (E)EPROMs available on the market. And I'm quite sure the IIIe will run OS 3.1, 3.3 and 3.5. I've personally installed 3.5 on a PP Personal with a 2M upgrade and I don't think that the more modern IIIe will have any bigger problems.
Peter Stroebel's site at http://www.pstec.de/ppp/ contains lots of valuable hardware information.
However, I suspect that you will destroy your IIIe in the process. You *need* good soldering tools and the soldering should preferably be done by a reliable soldering wizard. My recommendation is that you save your money and go buy a better Palm.
Since ASCII contains all the characters you need to write in English, and 2/3 of all applications are written in the US, Unicode will take a very long time to replace ASCII, if ever.
Of course, I haven't got the numbers to back this up.
Addresses are not "precious". If you honestly think that it would be impossible for me to find your address given your full legal name, in this time, in this cyberspace, then you are sadly mistaken, my friend.
Very well. One address is not very precious. But I've got 300 e-mail addresses in my Palm, and what if you could get hold of them? And what if Yahoo has a database of millions of e-mail addresses, all of which are freshly updated by unknowing users every time they hotsync?
In short, find the phone subscription with the cheapest monthly fee and install the SIM into your old phone. Then rig the old phone so that something happens when it rings. Every time you want this something to happen, just call the number. As the old phone never actually answers the calls, it costs you nothing!
In April 1997 we built a vodka dispenser out of an old GSM phone, a PIC microchip and a magnetic valve and installed it into a huge wardrobe. You would call a number and the wardrobe would set some LEDs flashing, play some music -- instant multimedia show! -- and dispense a glass of vodka. The whole shebang was then given away as a gift at a party and served happily the whole night, as long as we kept it topped up with vodka.:-)
We did it the cheap way; by opening the phone and soldering a cable from the buzzer to the PIC. Then we programmed the PIC to recognise the ring pulse. When the ring signal started, the PIC would wake up, do its magic and go back to wait mode. Very simple.
Sadly enough, people didn't really get the fact that it actually worked, they thought we just faked it.:-( Oh, the humanity... Also, we didn't think of documenting the project until afterwards. I know that there are a couple of photos floating around somewhere, but I don't know who's got them right now.
You must agree that this concept has some real hacking value.:-)
Huh? Why bother? Yahoo is free, it works now, and their servers are probably up more than yours. They have a client for Palm that does exactly what this guy wants. Why reinvent the wheel?
Because of security reasons. I would not trust Yahoo in keeping my data safe. The next thing you know somebody's broken into their system and stolen the 300 e-mail addresses I have in my address book along with a hundred thousand other precious addresses that other people put there.
Besides, the wheel Yahoo invented may have several spokes broken, and you wouldn't even know about it until it breaks under you.
A commercial alternative is Corporate Time by CS&T. They offer a Palm Conduit. There is a Unix -based server and clients for WinXX. There is also excellent web-based access.
CS&T makes enterprise-level software, so unless you have 500+ users this may be out of your league. It's expensive and not very administrator friendly.
I have successfully used the Palm conduit in conjunction with HP OpenMail (essentially CS&T's software repackaged by Hewlett-Packard) and can testify that it works just as well as the alternatives. Repeating events tend to split into multiple non-repeating ones, and multi-user events will get cloned a couple of times if you try to modify them.
Even though there are clients and servers available for several operating systems, the Palm Conduit requires HotSync Manager and Windows.
This doesn't apply to poetry or music, because playing the music _is_ the form of expression. For source code, writing is the expression. Running is not. ... IANAL, but if I were, I'd be suing everybody who gives legal advice without saying IANAL
You shouldn't have to say that you're not a lawyer. You're entitled to free speech, remember? And any idiot who takes your text for gospel is stupid enough to be punished for it, OK?
If people (=you) are afraid of saying things because you could be sued for it, then your country doesn't support free speech. It's that simple.
You have to give a large portion of your attention to these sorts of devices and by doing so distracting yourself from doing anything else.... What do all the PDAs and cell phones really do for people? It's leading to a society ruled by the transistor rather than by the people living in the society.
Here's some free information that I will give you gratis for nothing: using cell phones, you can communicate with other people.
Where I live (Helsinki, Finland) almost all teenagers and twenty-somethings have mobile phones. They use them to keep in touch with their friends in a way no-one has seen before. Someone said it works much like a flock of birds or a herd of animals. Using text messages and short phone calls, they tell each other where people hang out and what's going on. A flock of teenagers can be dispersed all over the city, and still know where all the others are, who they hang out with, where they are heading this evening. In minutes, they can arrange to meet somewhere. Word flows like water.
This is a very fundamental change in urban culture. And it's here to stay. I like it because it's a step in the right direction. Future technologies and devices will just enrich the possibilities. I'm not sure what you're scared about. This is the future -- get accustomed to it or be square.
I'm going to get rid of my modem phone line as soon as my cable modem arrives, and I'm not the first nor the only one who's doing this. After that, I'll be completely dependent on my cell phone.:-)
UI-wise, Apple has never pulled the rug under users and developers. The only reason that Apple survived through the bad times in 1996-97 is that there were fanatical users who knew the UI by heart. Changing the UI experience too much will alienate the old-timers and Apple knows that it can't survive on trying to ensnare first-time computer buyers.
One of the things that has limited the popularity of the mac has been the difficulty to get software that will run on a mac.
Huh? What have you been smoking?
The real issue back then was that Microsoft was punishing Mac users (= non-Windows users) by selling buggy software and making the file formats incompatible. For example, MS Word for the Mac could not read WinWord 95/97 files for half a year or so, until MS decided to release an extension. And the Mac version of the Office Bar was so buggy that whenever you installed MS Office on a Mac the first thing you did was drag the Office Bar system extension to the trash! In short, MS Office on the Mac was almost unusable. No wonder people skipped to the Windows world! Granted, Apple did lots of stupid things too, making it even easier for people to jump the fence.
Only after the monopoly lawsuits started did MS start thinking that hey, maybe we *need* an adversary. Then they bought Apple stock for 100 million USD and made a stable and nice Office version, which incidentally did follow the Apple UI guidelines and did read Windows file formats out of the box. Coincidentally, Apple's decline stopped around that time. Steve Jobs' introduction of the iMac mostly made old Mac fans who didn't like the Windows world return to their roots. It also attracted new people who found it fashionable to be computer illitterate.
Is it odd that one who is capable of writing in "ppc assembly" would use FrontPage.
Not really. A tool is a tool is a tool. If you want to produce a smart-looking web page in no time, FP is excellent. FP sucks if you want to produce nice HTML code, host your web site on non-MS servers or view it with non-MS browsers.
I do not accept cookies. They can be harvested by any number of means (just check BugTraq) unless you devote your life to securing your box and don't make any mistakes. Ever. I have other things to spend my life on, so I take reasonable precautions and then refuse all cookies.
Have you checked Junkbuster? It's a bit like a firewalling proxy. I've set it to refuse all cookies except for those emanating from slashdot.org, nytimes.com and a few other sites. It also gets rid of most advertisements.
If this really is an issue, then the diskeeper softwear would be fairly easy to remove (if it's not, maybe there should be an Anti-Trust suit about that one!)
I've used their product on NT4, and I believe that it is almost identical to the one on 2000. It's just a single program, people - it's pretty easy to remove it and make it a free download from the US MS site.
Is it legal to bundle a "free" download with a monopolised product? I mean, if the Germans are obliged by law not to use DiskKeeper, but have to buy the monopolised product anyway to remain compatible with the rest of the world, do they still have to pay the license fee for DiskKeeper?
How is a tiny hard drive more complicated to the user than battery backed memory? It isn't, it's just more spacious. How does a color screen make things more complicated? Again, it doesn't.
Does too!:-)
Consider this. The PalmPilot is designed to be simple. The OS has no support at all for non-volatile secondary storage. Everything is stored in primary RAM (or in flash-ROM). Data is modified directly in RAM, applications are run directly from RAM. This simplification works, it saves resources and it's fast as hell.
In contrast, Unix and Linux revolve around the fact that you have streams of data that you grep and awk and perl and sed on the fly. Pipes. TTYs. Tapes. Hard disks. And then we have desktop Windows and MacOS, which revolve around screen objects. Drag-n-drop. Cut-n-paste.
Now suddenly the PalmPilot has secondary memory that's almost two orders of magnitude larger than the main storage. How do you handle that? Of course, you could hide the secondary storage set from the user. Let the OS swap apps and data to and from non-volatile memory. Show pretty, colorful icons to the user. Have a 13-by-10 cm screen. Needless to say, this would be slow, and you can't put it your pocket anymore. (Newton?)
A separate storage area (volatile or not) will complicate the user interface and slow down the computer. (Which is why WinCE Pro and Symbian feel clumsy to use.)
Or you could implement a stream-based tool set and suddenly realise that the Palm hasn't got that much horsepower after all? (Which is why uLinux is such a bad idea.)
What I want to say is that palmtop computers do not work similar to desktop computers. Palmtops do not need secondary storage any more than desktop computers need Graffiti text entry.
If you have GSM connectivity where you live, try the Ericsson I888 GSM phone. It's got a built-in IrDA modem which is quite good. I've mainly used it with Psion and Palm handheld computers, but I can't see why it wouldn't work with Linux too --- assuming that the IR port on your laptop works under Linux, which isn't always the case.
There are other IrDA GSM phones on the market nowadays, at least here in Europe. The Siemens S25 and Motorola TimePort spring to mind and the Nokia 7710 will be released RSN. I've tried the S25 and found that it works fine. Ericsson also has a snap-on IrDA modem (DI27, DI28) which makes most Ericsson phones talk infrared.
You can also buy PCMCIA cards with built-in GSM phones. Some manufacturers that spring to mind are Nokia, Ericsson and Option International (www.option.com). I believe PCMCIA is better supported under Linux than IrDA, so if you're mainly concerned about data connectivity this may be a better choice.
Ummm... *all* pocket/palm computers already use variable clock rates. The clock rate drops to almost zero whenever the CPU isn't doing anything special. Then when the CPU does something, it runs at max speed so that the user doesn't have to wait. It's pretty much useless to use a clock rate below maximum.
Having two resolutions defined in XF86Config is not a solution. For one thing, the second definition doesn't match the monitor's geometry, and even if it did, the image would still be tilted 90 degrees.
You need to hack the X server to provide a tilted image.
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- You can make your Palm application quite tamperproof by burning the app into flash ROM and disabling the software installation conduits.
- PalmOS is essentially a clone of MacOS anno 1990. People who programmed the Apple Mac back in the early nineties will understand the PalmOS very quickly.
- Sybase has a product named UltraLite (part of SQL Anywhere Studio), which is a very small embedded SQL server for PDAs. You can replicate to/from any ODBC-compliant master data source over several different protocols. UltraLite also supports WinCE and several other platforms. I've used UL on Palm for some months now and it does have some bugs, but it will probably be sufficiently robust by next summer.
--BudYes, it sounds stupid, but just believe it. It's probably because of historical reasons, and it's too late to do anything about it now.
Actually, the fact that the recipient pays for the call is one major reason why the US is lagging after Europe and Japan in wireless technology. People don't like to keep their phones switched on, because they'll have to pay if someone calls. So they keep the phones switched off or simply don't answer calls. There's no chance to build up a mobile communications culture like the ones that are forming in Europe right now.
--Bud
I believe things are going to evolve the other way: the Unix way. You'll get lots of small utilities that by themselves don't do very much, but are very good at what they do. They would communicate with each other (and with other people's devices) using something akin to Bluetooth, but simpler. In the same way as you would use pipes and files under Unix, you would channel the various data streams in appropriate ways.
A normal mobile setup could include a small battery-powered CPU in your belt and a 2-by-4" LCD display and handwriting decoder in your breast pocket. Your other pocket would contain a phone handset/headset. In your bag you would have a storage device and a packet radio. At work or at home, you might have a larger LCD, a fast network connection, maybe a keyboard and a faster CPU, possibly a hands-free speakerphone.
Depending on the available devices and the type of work you want to do, you would use different combinations of devices. For writing e-mail at the office, you would use a keyboard or dictating machine. On the road, you could listen to music over the packet radio or straight from your storage device. The inferior CPU power of your belt-clip computer would possibly not allow speech recognition, but you could write on your LCD instead. You could watch the news on your pocket LCD, but if you wanted to see color TV, you could use the video projector in your living room instead. And so on.
I hope we will see Bluetooth II some day, providing fast and secure wireless networks in a private plug-n-play microcell.
Now where was I... oh yes: cat storage-1:/mp3/metallica/*.mp3 | cpu-2:/bin/mp3decode | display-2:/dev/audio
Aahhhh... that's better.
--Bud
I will be very surprised if there are no pin-for-pin compatible (E)EPROMs available on the market. And I'm quite sure the IIIe will run OS 3.1, 3.3 and 3.5. I've personally installed 3.5 on a PP Personal with a 2M upgrade and I don't think that the more modern IIIe will have any bigger problems.
Peter Stroebel's site at http://www.pstec.de/ppp/ contains lots of valuable hardware information.
However, I suspect that you will destroy your IIIe in the process. You *need* good soldering tools and the soldering should preferably be done by a reliable soldering wizard. My recommendation is that you save your money and go buy a better Palm.
--Bud
--Bud
Of course, I haven't got the numbers to back this up.
--Bud
Very well. One address is not very precious. But I've got 300 e-mail addresses in my Palm, and what if you could get hold of them? And what if Yahoo has a database of millions of e-mail addresses, all of which are freshly updated by unknowing users every time they hotsync?
--Bud
In short, find the phone subscription with the cheapest monthly fee and install the SIM into your old phone. Then rig the old phone so that something happens when it rings. Every time you want this something to happen, just call the number. As the old phone never actually answers the calls, it costs you nothing!
In April 1997 we built a vodka dispenser out of an old GSM phone, a PIC microchip and a magnetic valve and installed it into a huge wardrobe. You would call a number and the wardrobe would set some LEDs flashing, play some music -- instant multimedia show! -- and dispense a glass of vodka. The whole shebang was then given away as a gift at a party and served happily the whole night, as long as we kept it topped up with vodka. :-)
We did it the cheap way; by opening the phone and soldering a cable from the buzzer to the PIC. Then we programmed the PIC to recognise the ring pulse. When the ring signal started, the PIC would wake up, do its magic and go back to wait mode. Very simple.
Sadly enough, people didn't really get the fact that it actually worked, they thought we just faked it. :-( Oh, the humanity... Also, we didn't think of documenting the project until afterwards. I know that there are a couple of photos floating around somewhere, but I don't know who's got them right now.
You must agree that this concept has some real hacking value. :-)
--Bud
Because of security reasons. I would not trust Yahoo in keeping my data safe. The next thing you know somebody's broken into their system and stolen the 300 e-mail addresses I have in my address book along with a hundred thousand other precious addresses that other people put there.
Besides, the wheel Yahoo invented may have several spokes broken, and you wouldn't even know about it until it breaks under you.
--Bud
CS&T makes enterprise-level software, so unless you have 500+ users this may be out of your league. It's expensive and not very administrator friendly.
I have successfully used the Palm conduit in conjunction with HP OpenMail (essentially CS&T's software repackaged by Hewlett-Packard) and can testify that it works just as well as the alternatives. Repeating events tend to split into multiple non-repeating ones, and multi-user events will get cloned a couple of times if you try to modify them.
Even though there are clients and servers available for several operating systems, the Palm Conduit requires HotSync Manager and Windows.
--Bud
...
IANAL, but if I were, I'd be suing everybody who gives legal advice without saying IANAL
You shouldn't have to say that you're not a lawyer. You're entitled to free speech, remember? And any idiot who takes your text for gospel is stupid enough to be punished for it, OK?
If people (=you) are afraid of saying things because you could be sued for it, then your country doesn't support free speech. It's that simple.
--Bud
Here's some free information that I will give you gratis for nothing: using cell phones, you can communicate with other people.
Where I live (Helsinki, Finland) almost all teenagers and twenty-somethings have mobile phones. They use them to keep in touch with their friends in a way no-one has seen before. Someone said it works much like a flock of birds or a herd of animals. Using text messages and short phone calls, they tell each other where people hang out and what's going on. A flock of teenagers can be dispersed all over the city, and still know where all the others are, who they hang out with, where they are heading this evening. In minutes, they can arrange to meet somewhere. Word flows like water.
This is a very fundamental change in urban culture. And it's here to stay. I like it because it's a step in the right direction. Future technologies and devices will just enrich the possibilities. I'm not sure what you're scared about. This is the future -- get accustomed to it or be square.
I'm going to get rid of my modem phone line as soon as my cable modem arrives, and I'm not the first nor the only one who's doing this. After that, I'll be completely dependent on my cell phone. :-)
--Bud
UI-wise, Apple has never pulled the rug under users and developers. The only reason that Apple survived through the bad times in 1996-97 is that there were fanatical users who knew the UI by heart. Changing the UI experience too much will alienate the old-timers and Apple knows that it can't survive on trying to ensnare first-time computer buyers.
--Bud, a non-active Apple fan
Huh? What have you been smoking?
The real issue back then was that Microsoft was punishing Mac users (= non-Windows users) by selling buggy software and making the file formats incompatible. For example, MS Word for the Mac could not read WinWord 95/97 files for half a year or so, until MS decided to release an extension. And the Mac version of the Office Bar was so buggy that whenever you installed MS Office on a Mac the first thing you did was drag the Office Bar system extension to the trash! In short, MS Office on the Mac was almost unusable. No wonder people skipped to the Windows world! Granted, Apple did lots of stupid things too, making it even easier for people to jump the fence.
Only after the monopoly lawsuits started did MS start thinking that hey, maybe we *need* an adversary. Then they bought Apple stock for 100 million USD and made a stable and nice Office version, which incidentally did follow the Apple UI guidelines and did read Windows file formats out of the box. Coincidentally, Apple's decline stopped around that time. Steve Jobs' introduction of the iMac mostly made old Mac fans who didn't like the Windows world return to their roots. It also attracted new people who found it fashionable to be computer illitterate.
--Bud
Not really. A tool is a tool is a tool. If you want to produce a smart-looking web page in no time, FP is excellent. FP sucks if you want to produce nice HTML code, host your web site on non-MS servers or view it with non-MS browsers.
--Bud
Ask the administrators at SourceForge (www.sourceforge.net). This sounds like a project they'd be happy to host.
--Bud
Have you checked Junkbuster? It's a bit like a firewalling proxy. I've set it to refuse all cookies except for those emanating from slashdot.org, nytimes.com and a few other sites. It also gets rid of most advertisements.
--Bud
I've used their product on NT4, and I believe that it is almost identical to the one on 2000. It's just a single program, people - it's pretty easy to remove it and make it a free download from the US MS site.
Is it legal to bundle a "free" download with a monopolised product? I mean, if the Germans are obliged by law not to use DiskKeeper, but have to buy the monopolised product anyway to remain compatible with the rest of the world, do they still have to pay the license fee for DiskKeeper?
--Bud
Does too! :-)
Consider this. The PalmPilot is designed to be simple. The OS has no support at all for non-volatile secondary storage. Everything is stored in primary RAM (or in flash-ROM). Data is modified directly in RAM, applications are run directly from RAM. This simplification works, it saves resources and it's fast as hell.
In contrast, Unix and Linux revolve around the fact that you have streams of data that you grep and awk and perl and sed on the fly. Pipes. TTYs. Tapes. Hard disks. And then we have desktop Windows and MacOS, which revolve around screen objects. Drag-n-drop. Cut-n-paste.
Now suddenly the PalmPilot has secondary memory that's almost two orders of magnitude larger than the main storage. How do you handle that? Of course, you could hide the secondary storage set from the user. Let the OS swap apps and data to and from non-volatile memory. Show pretty, colorful icons to the user. Have a 13-by-10 cm screen. Needless to say, this would be slow, and you can't put it your pocket anymore. (Newton?)
A separate storage area (volatile or not) will complicate the user interface and slow down the computer. (Which is why WinCE Pro and Symbian feel clumsy to use.)
Or you could implement a stream-based tool set and suddenly realise that the Palm hasn't got that much horsepower after all? (Which is why uLinux is such a bad idea.)
What I want to say is that palmtop computers do not work similar to desktop computers. Palmtops do not need secondary storage any more than desktop computers need Graffiti text entry.
--Bud
If you have GSM connectivity where you live, try the Ericsson I888 GSM phone. It's got a built-in IrDA modem which is quite good. I've mainly used it with Psion and Palm handheld computers, but I can't see why it wouldn't work with Linux too --- assuming that the IR port on your laptop works under Linux, which isn't always the case.
There are other IrDA GSM phones on the market nowadays, at least here in Europe. The Siemens S25 and Motorola TimePort spring to mind and the Nokia 7710 will be released RSN. I've tried the S25 and found that it works fine. Ericsson also has a snap-on IrDA modem (DI27, DI28) which makes most Ericsson phones talk infrared.
You can also buy PCMCIA cards with built-in GSM phones. Some manufacturers that spring to mind are Nokia, Ericsson and Option International (www.option.com). I believe PCMCIA is better supported under Linux than IrDA, so if you're mainly concerned about data connectivity this may be a better choice.
--Bud
Ummm... *all* pocket/palm computers already use variable clock rates. The clock rate drops to almost zero whenever the CPU isn't doing anything special. Then when the CPU does something, it runs at max speed so that the user doesn't have to wait. It's pretty much useless to use a clock rate below maximum.
--Bud
Having two resolutions defined in XF86Config is not a solution. For one thing, the second definition doesn't match the monitor's geometry, and even if it did, the image would still be tilted 90 degrees.
You need to hack the X server to provide a tilted image.
There are programs for spitting text onto the screen at a certain speed. But then you need the text in digital form, of course.
:-)
You could possibly use an old modem for the same purpose. 2400 baud would probably be fine. Remember to disable data compression.
--Bud
There's a Pilot app named Bikini which is dated June '97, IIRC. I have demo somewhere on my harddisk. BikeBrain is not a very novel idea.
--Martin
I think "slashdot longhair" is about the best non-derogatory description of a Linux fanatic I've ever seen. :-)
--Martin