I have. Sorry, it's not an alternative as far as I'm concerned. Ultimately, no matter how badly PalmOS sucks as an operating system, its applications are much better than PocketPC, and that's what counts in a PDA.
I'm assuming you're talking either about additional Palm applications or you come from an environment that doesn't mandate the use of Outlook?
In my experience, the built in PPC applications are far superior to the Palm ones. This is somewhat of a downer for the entire Palm line. The hardware is getting significantly better and cooler yet the software hasn't seen a radical change for the past 5 years (if not longer).
Some simple examples that the Palm can't do: appointments split over two days that sync back to Outlook (the conduit breaks them up), tasks with alarms, contacts with multiple addresses and a syncing solution that means that I can pick out my PPC from the cradle at any time and know that it is completely synchronised with my diary.
Sure the PPC has got its problems - attached word and excel documents in appointments don't sync to the PPC, the notes field is rather limited, battery life isn't as good and sometimes it has a tendency to lock up for no good reason. But I would severly dispute your assertation that Palm (built in) apps are better than PPC's.
In most EU countries, rights which you have according to law cannot be put aside by a contract.
Unfortunately, it was written into the law that individuals could waive this right by the signing of a simple disclaimer. Hence every company promtly added to their contracts and carried on as normal.
It probably ranks somewhere in the more pointless laws that ever came about since it completely failed to achieve what was intended.
(It's called the "Working Time Directive" if anyone is vaiguly interested in looking at it)
That is, until you get busted for wazes and have to pay a £20,000 fine.
I don't know about outside of the US, but in the UK they're mostly concerned with people distributing pirated games rather than those who have a chipped console and a bunch of copied games.
Getting an ISO wouldn't be impossible - the real problem is that you have to rig your 'Cube to read it, as GCN discs spin *backwards*.
Not quite. Rather than writing data to the discs normally from the inside to the outside of the disc, Nintendo does it vice-versa and write the data to the disks from the outside in. Therefore the data is written to (and read from) the disk backwards. But the disk itself spins the normal way around.
To play a burned disc, you'd have to either heavily modify your computer or your 'Cube, and in the end it would be cheaper to just buy the game rather than pirate it.
I'm no expert on chipping, but I would assume that you'd just need to chip your GC and then write the games ISO out differently than you would normally (specialised software?). But even if this thing cost £200, you'd still be saving money after your 5th game.
To elaborate, in the EU you cannot be forced to work more than 48 hours per week. You may volunteer to work more than 48 hours, but your employer cannot insist that you do and may not punish you for refusing to.
In the EU most companies get you to sign a waiver form which explicitly states that you can, if necessary, work over 48 hours per week.
It comes as part of your contract, if you don't want to sign it, you don't sign your contract and you don't get a job.
So yes, the law is there, but every company I've ever worked for gets around it.
Go ahead and laugh, but I work for a company that still writes/maintains qbasic software and sells it to unsuspecting clients for $50,000 bucks a pop. I think we need a "software purchasing for dummies" book.
Am I the only person who sees nothing wrong with this?
As long as the application does what the client wants, is bug free, works well, easy to use and saves them money - who cares what it is written in?
I have got 3 sim cards the first 2 were on vigin mobile a virtual provider who uses T-mobile's network and both of them got a bucketload of spams, now I've got a O2-UK sim card and that number NEVER gets phone spam.
If you're getting a lot of it now might be the time to change operator
SMS spam is purely random and has nothing to do with your network provider.
The way most spam merchants work is that they send SMS's out to a range of numbers, say 07901 000000 to 07901 999999. If you're in that range, you'll get the message - irrespective of your network.
The only reason you haven't had spam is because someone hasn't chosen to try a number range with your mobile in it. I'm on T-Mobile and I've only had one. I have a few friends on O2 and they get more than me.
The genius who built a multimillion-dollar software company known worldwide for its pioneering "zip" files had died of acute pancreatic bleeding caused by chronic alcoholism.
Bizarre, I get pancreatic bleeding whenever I read any of John Katz's old articles.
Some of Linux's purported advantages over Microsoft are:
1. Lower licensing fees ($0).
2. Freedom from proprietary encumberment
3. Better security
4. More rapid bug fixes
5. Community support
It just sounds like Microsoft has chosen to compete on the first point.
Of course. It's a sad fact, but as it has been seen time and time again most users (not limited to just Windows) don't give a flying toss about points 2, 3, 4 and 5.
(There is actually pretty good community support for Windows, well as good as it can be given that no-one has access to the code, but i definately wouldn't say it was "bad")
Another example of Slashdot editor's lack of professionalism. They need to tell us why was it rejected. Not catchy enough? Someone already submitted it? Not/. worthy? It really pisses you off when you put all that work in, only to receive the harsh words "rejected" without any reason given.
The silly thing is that if they do this, then the quality of submissions will eventually go up because people will start to understand what makes a good submission. I'm sure that 20% of the Slashdot crowd submit 80% of the articles anyway.
Slashdot should have a section titled "rejected stories". It'd contain all the rejected stories submitted to the editors that day. I'd love to see those! Sure, some will suck and some will be dupes, but there's all those rare gems of stories we'll never get to see.
Agreed! This means that you get a different view on the stuff being posted - not just what the Slashdot editors like and dislike. Also, if it had the reason why it was rejected - you can understand what makes a good submission and so the quality of submissions will go up.
Finally, something I put in sourceforge idea tracker was that they should only show the "Submit" button when you've previewed at least once. This will force people to preview, close any open tags and generally think a little more about their comment. It also serves to piss off slightly more the "First Post!" trolls.
"The key advantage in Jabber remains in the openness," says Lunn.
The problem is that the average Joe doesn't seen openness as an advantage. If it doesn't allow him/her to chat to Rita, Bob and Sue on MSN and/or ICQ, then he's not going to change.
Openness is great and good and is a worthwhile goal, but unfortunately you have to tell Joe that in order to get the full advantages that Jabber has to offer he's going to have to change his client AND get his friends to change (and they'll not want to change unless their friends are going to change too).
Unfortunately for a lot of people - that sounds like too much hard work and they'll stick to MSN or ICQ.
Side note: Most of my friends use MSN these days having initally been initially on ICQ (we're talking 5-7 digit UID's) and they're not all techies. Some far from it.
Funny... I get 3 hours out of my Zaurus and it's 802.11b card.
It's called slight exaggeration:o)
However the point is still there. 802.11b is not really suitable for battery powered devices. Simply because the drain is so high, you end up running out of power too quickly.
I can't think of many people outside of slashdot who consider 3 hours battery life using WiFi as acceptable.
Quite simply: Bluetooth will fail if Nokia don't start putting it on more than their most expensive mobile phones.
In the mobile phone market Nokia lead such a commanding lead over every other manufacturer that they can practically dictate what does and doesn't suceed. Remember EMS? Course you don't, thats because Nokia went with their own Smart Messaging format and practically killed the format overnight.
Seconly, once they've done that - it won't become popular until the "pay as you go" handsets have it as standard funcationality. Look at SMS and WAP, the number of phones that don't have them are miniscule.
Soon it will be camera's and colour screens, bluetooth needs to be in that list to suceed.
Apple may be marginalized, but they're the ones on the consumer end who keep building the bridges Microsoft has to walk across. No new technology coming forward? Apple built their own with the iPod.
I'm nitpicking, but Apple did not build their own bridge with the iPod. There were already hard-drive based MP3 players out there before they came onto the scene.
Apple, basically took an idea that had been implemented poorly, polished it up and added some nice software. A little bit what Microsoft do.
Don't get me wrong, the iPod is a great piece of kit, but it still is essentially a copy of someone elses idea.
Interesting! Checkout this post of mine where I actually took the parent post and replaced PocketPC/iPAQ with Palm:
Very neat and would definately go to show that this place is often moderated by people who follow group-think or just mod anything down that says anything nice about Microsoft (however put).
You misspelled "an inferior screen" unless you think that the iPaq's 240x320 screen has the same resolution as the Palm's 320x320 screen (hint: for every 3 iPaq pixels, there are four Palm pixels).
True, however it is worth noting that there isn't a great deal of applications that support this screen size (as a percentage of available software).
Those that don't get their 160x160 display scaled up to twice the size (although I think the Clié line does some fancy smoothing).
Which isn't quite so good when you think that all PPC applications support 240x320.
If you were purchasing a PDA right now, would you choose Palm, Handspring, or avoid them entirely?
You're going to hate this, but I'd probably get a PocketPC. I used to have a Vx and then got an iPAQ from work.
The iPAQ is bigger and bulkier and the battery life does suck. Oh yes, and I've had it crash about 4 or 5 times but..
The software! The diary, notes and calendar is way more powerful than Palm's. Varying snoozes on appointments, alarms on tasks, multiple addresses on contacts - the list goes on. Oh yes, and I'm a heavy Outlook user, so it's a boon to have decent Outlook compatibility (KeyContacts on the palm was great - but nothing else would replace the other built in apps and still sync with Outlook).
Also I love the today screen. I have several plug ins and it shows me everything I need to know on one page.
Finally I know some people hate ActiveSync but I like it for one major reason. I can pick my PPC out of the cradle at any time and know that it's synced with my Outlook. On palms I'd have to hit the button on a regular basis.
Would I go back to Palms? Yes, but only if they dropped their prices (they're a tad pricey) and substantially beefed up the built in software and syncing. Would I go for a Linux PDA? Haven't really thought about it to be honest. For me, I don't care what the OS is - just how well it does the stuff I need (it could be written in Cobol for all I care).
Neither the PPC or Palm are the best. Both have pros and cons. But I can put up with the fact that the PPC is bigger, bulkier and eats batteries quicker because the PIM stuff is more powerful.
For a lot of people, being available so that people can just walk up to you and ask you a question is a big inconvenience - especially developers.
Agreed.
Meetings can be more of a pain, but quite honestly, meetings are automatically a pain. Most meetings are non-interactive - they're manager-to-employees dissemination of information.
As you rightly stated before, this is probably more due to the fact you're in IT and i'm not. Most meetings I go to are very interactive.
I have not been in a interactive meeting that could not have been handled over e-mail, and in fact, in our 24x7 environment, this makes more sense because it can involve everyone.
Again, probably the environment. Unfortunately for me when your inbox gets over 300 emails a day, the last thing you want to do is fill it with even more emails on something that could have been solved with a 30 minute meeting.
It will never catch on though. Bosses like to have their staff lined up in little cubicles. They like to feel in control. In the minds of most bosses empire building, politics, and wanting to look like they are in charge is important. Company money isn't.
I've always liked having my team in the office with me and it's nothing to do with cubicals or being in control.
With teleworkers you can't just turn around and ask them a question, meetings are more of a pain (no visual aspect, you can't use a flip-board or huddle around someones pc) and whilst they might be more productive at home, everyone else who relies on something from them finds their productivity goes down because they have to take extra steps to get hold of them.
I've never had a situation where working from home has been a perminant thing for some people and I'm sure that all the above could be solved if it was. But for ad-hoc days working from home, it's often more of a problem for the co-workers than anything else.
If ISP's don't like the fact that 60% of usage is P2P then they should simply block it.
Oh yes, all their subscribers who use P2P will desert them faster than rats on a sinking ship and the monthly cheques will come in at a lower rate - but they can't have it both ways.
If an ISP isn't prepared to let you use the internet for what you want, there are probably plenty of others who are.
As an aside, in the UK, the ISP's are using the fact you can download music at high speed to actually encourage people to take up broadband. They can't really complain when people start doing just that.
It is popular, but I believe it is stuck in its 'second generation P2P' model, namely closed-source, Windows-only, spyware advertising, worm-heaven.
Yeah, because everyone outside of Slashdot is so concerned about whether or not they can get access to the code. As it's been seen, they don't care in the slightest and are happy to put up with the spyware so they can download "Super 3D Blaster-o-Tron" without paying the 40 quid to a shop.
Given that it's had just under 230 million downloads, I really can't see how opening the code up and porting to an OS which has 5% market share (Apple) and less than 1% market share (Linux) is in any way going to significantly boost the numbers to the point anyone would actually notice.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm assuming you're talking either about additional Palm applications or you come from an environment that doesn't mandate the use of Outlook?
In my experience, the built in PPC applications are far superior to the Palm ones. This is somewhat of a downer for the entire Palm line. The hardware is getting significantly better and cooler yet the software hasn't seen a radical change for the past 5 years (if not longer).
Some simple examples that the Palm can't do: appointments split over two days that sync back to Outlook (the conduit breaks them up), tasks with alarms, contacts with multiple addresses and a syncing solution that means that I can pick out my PPC from the cradle at any time and know that it is completely synchronised with my diary.
Sure the PPC has got its problems - attached word and excel documents in appointments don't sync to the PPC, the notes field is rather limited, battery life isn't as good and sometimes it has a tendency to lock up for no good reason. But I would severly dispute your assertation that Palm (built in) apps are better than PPC's.
Unfortunately, it was written into the law that individuals could waive this right by the signing of a simple disclaimer. Hence every company promtly added to their contracts and carried on as normal.
It probably ranks somewhere in the more pointless laws that ever came about since it completely failed to achieve what was intended.
(It's called the "Working Time Directive" if anyone is vaiguly interested in looking at it)
I don't know about outside of the US, but in the UK they're mostly concerned with people distributing pirated games rather than those who have a chipped console and a bunch of copied games.
Not quite. Rather than writing data to the discs normally from the inside to the outside of the disc, Nintendo does it vice-versa and write the data to the disks from the outside in. Therefore the data is written to (and read from) the disk backwards. But the disk itself spins the normal way around.
To play a burned disc, you'd have to either heavily modify your computer or your 'Cube, and in the end it would be cheaper to just buy the game rather than pirate it.
I'm no expert on chipping, but I would assume that you'd just need to chip your GC and then write the games ISO out differently than you would normally (specialised software?). But even if this thing cost £200, you'd still be saving money after your 5th game.
In the EU most companies get you to sign a waiver form which explicitly states that you can, if necessary, work over 48 hours per week.
It comes as part of your contract, if you don't want to sign it, you don't sign your contract and you don't get a job.
So yes, the law is there, but every company I've ever worked for gets around it.
Am I the only person who sees nothing wrong with this?
As long as the application does what the client wants, is bug free, works well, easy to use and saves them money - who cares what it is written in?
If you're getting a lot of it now might be the time to change operator
SMS spam is purely random and has nothing to do with your network provider.
The way most spam merchants work is that they send SMS's out to a range of numbers, say 07901 000000 to 07901 999999. If you're in that range, you'll get the message - irrespective of your network.
The only reason you haven't had spam is because someone hasn't chosen to try a number range with your mobile in it. I'm on T-Mobile and I've only had one. I have a few friends on O2 and they get more than me.
Everyones mileage varies.
The genius who built a multimillion-dollar software company known worldwide for its pioneering "zip" files had died of acute pancreatic bleeding caused by chronic alcoholism.
Bizarre, I get pancreatic bleeding whenever I read any of John Katz's old articles.
Wonder if they are related.
1. Lower licensing fees ($0).
2. Freedom from proprietary encumberment
3. Better security
4. More rapid bug fixes
5. Community support
It just sounds like Microsoft has chosen to compete on the first point.
Of course. It's a sad fact, but as it has been seen time and time again most users (not limited to just Windows) don't give a flying toss about points 2, 3, 4 and 5.
(There is actually pretty good community support for Windows, well as good as it can be given that no-one has access to the code, but i definately wouldn't say it was "bad")
The silly thing is that if they do this, then the quality of submissions will eventually go up because people will start to understand what makes a good submission. I'm sure that 20% of the Slashdot crowd submit 80% of the articles anyway.
Slashdot should have a section titled "rejected stories". It'd contain all the rejected stories submitted to the editors that day. I'd love to see those! Sure, some will suck and some will be dupes, but there's all those rare gems of stories we'll never get to see.
Agreed! This means that you get a different view on the stuff being posted - not just what the Slashdot editors like and dislike. Also, if it had the reason why it was rejected - you can understand what makes a good submission and so the quality of submissions will go up.
Finally, something I put in sourceforge idea tracker was that they should only show the "Submit" button when you've previewed at least once. This will force people to preview, close any open tags and generally think a little more about their comment. It also serves to piss off slightly more the "First Post!" trolls.
The problem is that the average Joe doesn't seen openness as an advantage. If it doesn't allow him/her to chat to Rita, Bob and Sue on MSN and/or ICQ, then he's not going to change.
Openness is great and good and is a worthwhile goal, but unfortunately you have to tell Joe that in order to get the full advantages that Jabber has to offer he's going to have to change his client AND get his friends to change (and they'll not want to change unless their friends are going to change too).
Unfortunately for a lot of people - that sounds like too much hard work and they'll stick to MSN or ICQ.
Side note: Most of my friends use MSN these days having initally been initially on ICQ (we're talking 5-7 digit UID's) and they're not all techies. Some far from it.
wget http://www.slashdot.org
14:12:33 (30.08 KB/s) - `index.html' saved [39023]
grep -i "\.png" index.html | wc -l
0
grep -i "\.gif" index.html | wc -l
32
Food for thought.
It's called slight exaggeration :o)
However the point is still there. 802.11b is not really suitable for battery powered devices. Simply because the drain is so high, you end up running out of power too quickly.
I can't think of many people outside of slashdot who consider 3 hours battery life using WiFi as acceptable.
In the mobile phone market Nokia lead such a commanding lead over every other manufacturer that they can practically dictate what does and doesn't suceed. Remember EMS? Course you don't, thats because Nokia went with their own Smart Messaging format and practically killed the format overnight.
Seconly, once they've done that - it won't become popular until the "pay as you go" handsets have it as standard funcationality. Look at SMS and WAP, the number of phones that don't have them are miniscule.
Soon it will be camera's and colour screens, bluetooth needs to be in that list to suceed.
I'm nitpicking, but Apple did not build their own bridge with the iPod. There were already hard-drive based MP3 players out there before they came onto the scene.
Apple, basically took an idea that had been implemented poorly, polished it up and added some nice software. A little bit what Microsoft do.
Don't get me wrong, the iPod is a great piece of kit, but it still is essentially a copy of someone elses idea.
Very neat and would definately go to show that this place is often moderated by people who follow group-think or just mod anything down that says anything nice about Microsoft (however put).
Thanks for the enlightenment.
See here for an explanation about why it's so odd.
It is backwards.
It was a very clever exercise by NoCoward to point out the stupid moderation going on.
Check out the original post by myself (marked as Troll) and then his comment on what he did.
If you extole the PPC, you get moderated as Troll. Swap the words "iPAQ" with "Palm" and vice versa and you get modded +3.
I used to :o)
It was a very clever exercise by NoCoward to point out the stupid moderation going on.
Check out the original post by myself (marked as Troll) and then his comment on what he did.
If you extole the PPC, you get moderated as Troll. Swap the words "iPAQ" with "Palm" and vice versa and you get modded +3.
True, however it is worth noting that there isn't a great deal of applications that support this screen size (as a percentage of available software).
Those that don't get their 160x160 display scaled up to twice the size (although I think the Clié line does some fancy smoothing).
Which isn't quite so good when you think that all PPC applications support 240x320.
You're going to hate this, but I'd probably get a PocketPC. I used to have a Vx and then got an iPAQ from work.
The iPAQ is bigger and bulkier and the battery life does suck. Oh yes, and I've had it crash about 4 or 5 times but ..
The software! The diary, notes and calendar is way more powerful than Palm's. Varying snoozes on appointments, alarms on tasks, multiple addresses on contacts - the list goes on. Oh yes, and I'm a heavy Outlook user, so it's a boon to have decent Outlook compatibility (KeyContacts on the palm was great - but nothing else would replace the other built in apps and still sync with Outlook).
Also I love the today screen. I have several plug ins and it shows me everything I need to know on one page.
Finally I know some people hate ActiveSync but I like it for one major reason. I can pick my PPC out of the cradle at any time and know that it's synced with my Outlook. On palms I'd have to hit the button on a regular basis.
Would I go back to Palms? Yes, but only if they dropped their prices (they're a tad pricey) and substantially beefed up the built in software and syncing. Would I go for a Linux PDA? Haven't really thought about it to be honest. For me, I don't care what the OS is - just how well it does the stuff I need (it could be written in Cobol for all I care).
Neither the PPC or Palm are the best. Both have pros and cons. But I can put up with the fact that the PPC is bigger, bulkier and eats batteries quicker because the PIM stuff is more powerful.
Of course, YMMV.
Agreed.
Meetings can be more of a pain, but quite honestly, meetings are automatically a pain. Most meetings are non-interactive - they're manager-to-employees dissemination of information.
As you rightly stated before, this is probably more due to the fact you're in IT and i'm not. Most meetings I go to are very interactive.
I have not been in a interactive meeting that could not have been handled over e-mail, and in fact, in our 24x7 environment, this makes more sense because it can involve everyone.
Again, probably the environment. Unfortunately for me when your inbox gets over 300 emails a day, the last thing you want to do is fill it with even more emails on something that could have been solved with a 30 minute meeting.
I've always liked having my team in the office with me and it's nothing to do with cubicals or being in control.
With teleworkers you can't just turn around and ask them a question, meetings are more of a pain (no visual aspect, you can't use a flip-board or huddle around someones pc) and whilst they might be more productive at home, everyone else who relies on something from them finds their productivity goes down because they have to take extra steps to get hold of them.
I've never had a situation where working from home has been a perminant thing for some people and I'm sure that all the above could be solved if it was. But for ad-hoc days working from home, it's often more of a problem for the co-workers than anything else.
Oh yes, all their subscribers who use P2P will desert them faster than rats on a sinking ship and the monthly cheques will come in at a lower rate - but they can't have it both ways.
If an ISP isn't prepared to let you use the internet for what you want, there are probably plenty of others who are.
As an aside, in the UK, the ISP's are using the fact you can download music at high speed to actually encourage people to take up broadband. They can't really complain when people start doing just that.
Yeah, because everyone outside of Slashdot is so concerned about whether or not they can get access to the code. As it's been seen, they don't care in the slightest and are happy to put up with the spyware so they can download "Super 3D Blaster-o-Tron" without paying the 40 quid to a shop.
Given that it's had just under 230 million downloads, I really can't see how opening the code up and porting to an OS which has 5% market share (Apple) and less than 1% market share (Linux) is in any way going to significantly boost the numbers to the point anyone would actually notice.
Harsh I know. But fair. Sorry.