I think it's nice that they can make a cut down version that small, but who will ever use it?
No one. The floppy disk merely provides a nice frame of reference that directly contrasts the out-of-control growth in modern programs and data files. Given how useless floppies are these days, most people would be amazed if you could fit the equivalent of 50 megs of Desktop data into 1.44 megs. The floppy suspended on a rotating pedestal thus serves as a visualization of how small that really is.
Personally, I think that's kind of big. 1.44 megs could fit 368 different 4 kilobyte games! (Story)
>a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX">QNX used to advertise in a similar fashion. They had this "complete OS on a floppy disk" download that contained a full desktop environment, Spyglass Webbrowser, Towers of Hanoi game, and a few other utilities. (I believe it also had complete Ethernet and Modem code, but only one or the other on a given disk.) To use the OS, you simply put the disk in the drive and rebooted. QNX automatically detected the VESA hooks in Protected Mode (a highly underused feature at the time) and kicked your system into a graphical shell.
Actually, it looks to me like a stripped down HTML DOM and XMLHttpRequest implementation combined with several "standard" components of questionable necessity. For example, I can understand the need for a "datagrid" component, but why is a calendar component considered important enough to make a requirement?
Also, why are TCP Connections considered part of the specification core? IMHO, accessing direct connections via scripting represents a HUGE security hazard. What does this offer that isn't better offered by XMLHttpRequest? (Which really should be renamed XMLUrlRequest, considering that it can do more than HTTP.) If any webapps are complex enough to require a TCP connection, they should really become an application instead.
I am pretty sure 68K-based CLIE handhelds had 16MB of RAM?
Yes they did. I have one, so I can say with certainty that they bank switched. From here:
As usual Sony pushes their own memory standard on people. Not that I mind much. Memory stick is a SMALL, light weight media. Unlike other Palm devices that require HIDEOUS software for memory bank switching, this CLIE already comes STANDARD with a Sony memory manager making it both SEAMLESS and easy to add GOBS OF MEMORY.
As I said, a standard was eventually developed to make things seamless. But you still can't access more than 8 megs of memory at any given time, plus there are (were?) limits on the area of memory you can execute code from. For the most part people don't notice this because their programs need to be auto-copied from flash drives to run in memory anyway. You'll note that none of the Dragonball units ever went beyond 16 megs, and VERY few went that high.
How come my Treo 650 shows 24MB free
24 megs free is not the same as 24 megs accessible without bank switching. However, as I've already stated, I'm not certain if the restrictions were removed in the ARM versions or not.
In both cases, the memory can be accessed as regular database records rather than filesystem API.
The filesystem API was for external flash memory, not internal memory. Prior to the development of the FS API, the flash memory had to be bankswitched in to be written to/read from. That may still be the case, but at least it's hidden behind an easy to use API.
I'm talking about the 8 megabyte barrier built into the palm pilot, not the 64K limit. Expansions in memory (including flash cards) required that bank switching be used to access the high memory areas. Many handhelds came with custom memory managers until Palm created a new standard. Eventually, Palm added a file system API for things like Flash sticks/MMC. I don't know if Palm has done anything to address the issue with the new(er) ARM models, but it wouldn't surprise me if the software still acted like the barrier exists.
While the OS is kind of primitive, writing, testing and publishing a small program for the original 68K devices used to be much easier than for WinCE or QTopia PDAs that existed at the same time.
I agree wholeheartedly. Programming for the Palm used to be as easy as 1, 2, 3. The problem is that greater demands are now being placed on the device than it can meet. This is making it harder and harder to program for as the needs for memory, multitasking, networking, and graphics go up. Given the power of modern Palm hardware, a new OS designed with these features in mind is sorely needed. PalmSource has their 6.0 Cobalt out, but PalmOne doesn't seem to be biting. Instead, they're in bed with Microsoft's WinCE.
Re:Yes, 'cuz that's what teenaged music fans want.
on
Songbird Flies Today
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· Score: 1
P.S. Where's the BEEF?! I don't see any links to source code downloads, even in Google's cache of the homepage.
Re:Yes, 'cuz that's what teenaged music fans want.
on
Songbird Flies Today
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The program is also a convenient user interface to buy music online, not just from a single monopoly (e.g. iTunes music store) but from all sources.
Yet the market has held tightly to iTunes despite the numerous alternatives that have entered the market.
DRM-free.
I see no such assurances, nor do I see the ability to purchase unencumbered music from Amazon. The player merely connects to the store. It doesn't do anything else that I can see. And many of those stores are evil in of themselves. Using the BeatPort example, you MUST have Flash installed and enabled to use the site. How does that help Linux users and Windows users who want to use unencumbered software?
There's a lot of noise here, but very few facts, IMHO. Songbird would be a nice step in improving media players on Linux (assuming a version is ever produced), but as far as I can see, it's not the revolution that you're making it out to be.
There honestly hasn't been a movie that's made me jump up and say "Wow, I need to go see that!" since Lord of the Rings.
Batman Begins. Seriously. If you haven't seen it DO SO!
The movie industry tends to fluctuate a lot more than the games industry. Sometimes they produce nothing but stinkers like Tomb Raider, Planet of the Apes, and the last Highlander. At other times they produce wonderful stuff like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars Ep3, Polar Express, The Incredibles, and Batman Begins. It all depends on which studios are currently in business, who's been hired/fired, how many writers are on strike, and the general direction of the wind.
The biggest trend I see as of late is Hollywood's inability to work from original material. Sourced movies based on things like Comic Books, famous novels, and older movies have been doing pretty well. (Though there have been plenty of stinkers in those too.) But unsourced materials? Um, let me think.
It's a win-win deal, that should have been done long ago!
Actually, you described value for Palm (access to Apple engineering resources), but practically no value for Apple.
Let's say that Apple purchases Palm and helps make the Treo even more of a success. How does that help Apple in the long term? Their brand is still a long way from the cell phone market, and analysts would attribute the success to Palm rather than Apple. Apple might make a profit off the company in the short term, but without a clear method of integrating the Treo into their product line, the long-term prospects would look bleak.
So you're telling me that gamers want original, new, and fun gameplay? The shock!
I mean, really. I was just bemoaning yesterday how much the market has moved to nothing but sex and violence. When every commercial for the XBox 360 ends with "Rated M for Mature", you know that they've stopped selling games. The market is instead trying to sell you an "Entertainment Product" targetted at "the adult market". Which is a nice way of saying, "We want to separate fools from their money by giving them gratuitous sexual and violent content." The actualy *game* is nowhere to be found.
As of late, I find myself missing the days of adventure games (e.g. Space Quest), space simulators (e.g. Wing Commander), puzzle adventures (e.g. Bioforge, System Shock), Real Time Strategy Games (e.g. C&C), and other innovative genres invented in the golden age of computer gaming. Not to mention some of the cool arcade genres like Fighters (e.g. Killer Instinct, SFII) and Drivers (e.g. SF: Rush, Hydrothunder).
Today we just see Another First Person Shooter, but With A New Twist!(TM) Which really is nothing more than a vehicle for the aformentioned sex and violence. When are we going to see all this technology put to good use in making innovative new games? Hell, imagine the cool 2D (or 2.5D) platformers that could be done on modern hardware! Do we see anything like these? Nope. It's all just games with the names of old games reused on new First Person Shooters. When will the industry rape of our beloved gaming stop?
Here's hoping for the Nintendo Revolution. If they can pull it off at least as well as the DS, we may get back some of what we've lost.
Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO!
on
Apple to Buy out Palm?
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· Score: 4, Informative
As for rewriting in Linux - does that mean their current Palm OS is such a dead end that they can't evolve it?
Yes. I've developed for it before, and it's got cruft coming out of its ears. It was designed around the idea that a device would never have more than 8 Megs of RAM, and that the controls/screen would be fixed in their design. In addition, memory is partitioned into small "databases" with explicit record sizes. These databases are the only thing keeping the data separate. If something goes wrong, one database can easily overwrite another. No MMU exists to prevent this.
Other issues include:
Applications are identified by 4 byte codes.
Databases are associated on those same 4 byte codes.
Libraries are non-existant, and have to be hacked into the OS.
Large memory areas are handled by bank-switching, putting limits on where executable code can run.
Large programs or data sets cannot be loaded into memory because of the bank-switching. They usually need to be constantly swapped out.
The graphics facilities are primitive, representing the hi-end of portable technology in the mid 90's.
Lack of libraries and program designs tend to result in large amounts of duplicated code.
Poor acclimation to network facilities, due to its original design as a "satellite" device rather than a wireless portable.
There's more, but those are just off the top of my head.
It's hideously expensive to rewrite software from scratch and a lot of companies will fail in the process.
My best suggestion would be an emulator. Given that a new OS would be able to take advantage of the greater speeds of modern ARM processors, most software could be run under a port of the current desktop emulator that developers use today. Performance critical software would do best to port, but new versions have always been an issue for them anyway.
<Rodney-McKay>I am?... I mean, of course I am!</Rodney-McKay>:-P
That's easily affordable for AAPL, but a 3% annual ROI isn't worth the trouble unless they have some IP AAPL, really, really wants.
I agree. Jobs has never shown signs of minor empire building. If he purchases a company, it's because he wants something from them. Otherwise he just a) leaves them alone or b) contracts out for their expertise. (Much like how the iPod was originally designed.) Or in other words, Jobs builds his own empire brick by brick rather than dealing with the instability of an adhoc one.
The Treo? Maybe, but I don't see it.
Not to mention the issue of competition with the current lines of iPod phones. There would be no better way to confuse the market than to offer them two different options with completely different feature sets. While that might work on a long-tail strategy, Apple is into a tiered marketing strategy designed to capture the largest chunks of the market by price point.
Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO!
on
Apple to Buy out Palm?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Palm is already working a new version of Palm OS with Linux as the kernel, effectively creating their own "OS X" story.
I don't see that as being a very good idea. Linux (the kernel) is a fast-moving target with constantly changing abilities, features, and APIs. (No comment on the moving ABIs.) For something like a new Palm OS, Palm really needs a stable base that won't require them to redo a lot of work, or suddenly and unexpectedly shift directions because of a major kernel change.
Palm could always fork Linux to keep things more predictable, but then they'd only be criticized for not keeping up to date. Thus the best solution is to do what Apple did: Find a more stable base.
What amazes me is that Palm is sitting with the BeOS technologies in its lap and has done practically nothing with them. BeOS was designed for systems that are pretty much on par with what a modern PDA could offer. (Catchy new slogan: "Just imagine, all the power of your BeBox in the Palm(TM) of your hand!") They obviously can't use it directly due to differences in desktop vs. PDA hardware, but they could easily mine it for technologies and strip the OS down to its core before rebuilding around the PDA technology.
Then again, I don't know what the BeOS core looks like. Perhaps it's all too integrated to be useful. Either way, I think Palm would be chosing poorly by going the Linux route.
I'm rather suspicious of this story, in part because I don't see Palm adding much value to Apple. When the Palm Pilot was popular, the fact that so much could be fit in such a small device was nothing short of amazing. It was also a useful little tool for all kinds of data organization. But now? Palm's OS is older than the hills, designed for hardware limits that no longer matter. Palm has been using bits of trickery to extend the limits of their OS, but at the end of the day they just need something new that takes advantage of modern, low-power hardware.
Another problem is that Palm has been about as phlegmatic as you can get when it comes to promoting their market. If they were like Apple, they could have sewn up the electronic book market years ago. Instead, they seem content to allow the rest of the market to make half-hearted attempts at producing solutions. That just isn't going to work. If Palm wants to grab the e-reader market (a market for which they are extremely well suited), they need to follow Apple's lead and grab the bull by the horns. Since they show no signs of doing this, I see nothing but signs of decline for Palm.
If Apple wants to enter the handheld market (again), I see them developing a new device with a high-resolution, high-pixel density screen. They would then try to add the ability to show documents are precisely as possible, utilizing scaling algorithms. (Many books and documents suffer if their layout is changed a la Acrobat Pocket.) These features could be easily built into a new device OS by Apple engineers rather than trying to overhaul the aging Palm OS.
They would then market it with a new "catchy" Apple brand like "iHand" or "iBooklet", and either integrate it into a new eBook/Portable App section of iTunes, or develop a new iTunes-like app.
So given this scenario, where does the Palm value come in? The name? Nope. Apple would want consistent branding. The OS? No way. Palm is so full of cruft I swear that the developers are ready to shoot it. The device designs? Never. They're way too far behind the curve.
So I think I'm going to go with "rumor" on this one.
The last time I was asked it, the interviewer claimed it was cheating to confirm the precise method through the use of JavaDocs. (I remembered the method and told him, but I offered to look it to be sure. This was a phone interview.) IMHO, looking it up in the JavaDocs is precisely the correct answer. With IDEs being what they are today, there's very little reason to expect that programmers will have any of this memorized. They know that the method exists, and that's good enough.
As an example of what I mean, I regularly forget if substring is "substring" or "subString", if "indexOf" only does characters or can find a string, etc. With all the other things floating through my head at a given time, I don't even bother to memorize these. The IDE can tell me what I need to know within half a second. It's just a waste of my time not to rely on it.
Perhaps the most amusing part of this, though, is that I wasn't even interviewing for a GUI programming position!
Odd, the Gamestop near my house is the only place locally that I can buy an NES and games.
That is odd. I've been informed by Gamestop management that it's corporate policy not to carry anything older than the Dreamcast. Are you sure you're not thinking of Game Crazy? Those guys are pretty cool.
Blasting expensive stuff like landers to the moon or Mars costs just as much as blasting a chunk of rock though and it is not a negligible cost.
Even space launches are not immune to the economics of scale. A large portion of operating costs stem from ground crews and service techs who work to get these birds in the air. The more you can launch in a shorter period of time, the more money you save on labor. The Space Shuttle was intended to take advantage of those economics, but fell down for political (no customers) and technical (long turnaround) reasons. That's why the price of a Shuttle flight increased from 200 million to 500 million as the number of flights declined.
But then, I always use nocd cracks on games I buy, so that might have been it.
That would be exactly why you didn't see it. The NOCD crack was what I was referring to as the "Unofficial crack". If you read the description of the crack, you'll find that it removes the copy protection from the program. (Which is CD based. SecuROM, if I'm not mistaken.)
I hate to break it to you, but the mainstream press needs help with everything. As anyone who's ever dealt with them can tell you, they tend to run into a situation with their preconceptions firmly in place. They'll use up hours of your time just to get a badly worded sound-bite rather than any useful information. They'll leave, print your sound-bite, and still be as wrong as they were when you were first trying to explain it to them.
For a perfect example of this, dig up the old "Google has confirmed a web based OpenOffice!" Any idiot who had listened to the broadcast would know that Sun and Google merely annouced a bundling deal. Yet the press was convinced, so they printed it.:-/
No, as I said in another post, it's not so much that I begrudge people their violent games. I begrudge that the entire industry has moved that direction at the expense of other gaming possibilities.
Take the golden age of computer gaming as an example. On one hand you had violent games like Doom. On the other hand you had more immersive games like Wing Commander 3. (I picked these because they were both on the first issues of PC Gamer.) Games had the content that made sense in their gameplay genre. Sure, there was adult themed gaming (Megatech's Metal and Lace game comes to mind, as does a game that used a spheroid-based-3D-game-engine game who's name I can't remember), but the majority of it was agnostic to any sort of adult vs. child division. It was a game. Made for gameplay, and fun to play.
Now we don't see the creepy System Shocks, the adventurous Bioforges, the humorous Space Quests, the strategic Command and Conquers, etc., etc., etc. It's all been replaced with more "M Rated" gaming. Shovel more on. MORE!
What am I supposed to think when every XBox 360 commercial I see ends with "Rated M for Mature?" Am I supposed to think that game producers are really focusing on the games? Because I get the feeling from this that they're focused only on the "adult entertainment" aspect. The message isn't all that pleasent, especially when I see formerly agnostic games like Prince of Persia raped to produce more Entertainment Industry Crap(TM).
Maybe I've been speaking corporate for too long, but those requirements aren't that hard to meet for many experienced Unix Admins. Most of those technologies are used day in and day out by compentent admins. And it's not that hard to follow that they've been working in the industry for 3 to 5 years. The diversity of technologies is a little troubling, but not anywhere near the diversity I've seen required of Java programmers. (e.g. Must have 10 years of SAP and IBM CICS experience in addition to Java programming. WTF?)
As I said, the only problem is that $15 an hour isn't very good compensation for someone with those skills. Compare that to impossible to meet requirements like "20 Years of Java".
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's nice that they can make a cut down version that small, but who will ever use it?
No one. The floppy disk merely provides a nice frame of reference that directly contrasts the out-of-control growth in modern programs and data files. Given how useless floppies are these days, most people would be amazed if you could fit the equivalent of 50 megs of Desktop data into 1.44 megs. The floppy suspended on a rotating pedestal thus serves as a visualization of how small that really is.
Personally, I think that's kind of big. 1.44 megs could fit 368 different 4 kilobyte games! (Story)
QNX
That'll teach me not to preview. Maybe.
>a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX">QNX used to advertise in a similar fashion. They had this "complete OS on a floppy disk" download that contained a full desktop environment, Spyglass Webbrowser, Towers of Hanoi game, and a few other utilities. (I believe it also had complete Ethernet and Modem code, but only one or the other on a given disk.) To use the OS, you simply put the disk in the drive and rebooted. QNX automatically detected the VESA hooks in Protected Mode (a highly underused feature at the time) and kicked your system into a graphical shell.
All in all it was very impressive.
Actually, it looks to me like a stripped down HTML DOM and XMLHttpRequest implementation combined with several "standard" components of questionable necessity. For example, I can understand the need for a "datagrid" component, but why is a calendar component considered important enough to make a requirement?
Also, why are TCP Connections considered part of the specification core? IMHO, accessing direct connections via scripting represents a HUGE security hazard. What does this offer that isn't better offered by XMLHttpRequest? (Which really should be renamed XMLUrlRequest, considering that it can do more than HTTP.) If any webapps are complex enough to require a TCP connection, they should really become an application instead.
Yes they did. I have one, so I can say with certainty that they bank switched. From here:
As I said, a standard was eventually developed to make things seamless. But you still can't access more than 8 megs of memory at any given time, plus there are (were?) limits on the area of memory you can execute code from. For the most part people don't notice this because their programs need to be auto-copied from flash drives to run in memory anyway. You'll note that none of the Dragonball units ever went beyond 16 megs, and VERY few went that high.
How come my Treo 650 shows 24MB free
24 megs free is not the same as 24 megs accessible without bank switching. However, as I've already stated, I'm not certain if the restrictions were removed in the ARM versions or not.
In both cases, the memory can be accessed as regular database records rather than filesystem API.
The filesystem API was for external flash memory, not internal memory. Prior to the development of the FS API, the flash memory had to be bankswitched in to be written to/read from. That may still be the case, but at least it's hidden behind an easy to use API.
* AKAImBatman smacks iamacat upside the head
I'm talking about the 8 megabyte barrier built into the palm pilot, not the 64K limit. Expansions in memory (including flash cards) required that bank switching be used to access the high memory areas. Many handhelds came with custom memory managers until Palm created a new standard. Eventually, Palm added a file system API for things like Flash sticks/MMC. I don't know if Palm has done anything to address the issue with the new(er) ARM models, but it wouldn't surprise me if the software still acted like the barrier exists.
While the OS is kind of primitive, writing, testing and publishing a small program for the original 68K devices used to be much easier than for WinCE or QTopia PDAs that existed at the same time.
I agree wholeheartedly. Programming for the Palm used to be as easy as 1, 2, 3. The problem is that greater demands are now being placed on the device than it can meet. This is making it harder and harder to program for as the needs for memory, multitasking, networking, and graphics go up. Given the power of modern Palm hardware, a new OS designed with these features in mind is sorely needed. PalmSource has their 6.0 Cobalt out, but PalmOne doesn't seem to be biting. Instead, they're in bed with Microsoft's WinCE.
P.S. Where's the BEEF?! I don't see any links to source code downloads, even in Google's cache of the homepage.
The program is also a convenient user interface to buy music online, not just from a single monopoly (e.g. iTunes music store) but from all sources.
Yet the market has held tightly to iTunes despite the numerous alternatives that have entered the market.
DRM-free.
I see no such assurances, nor do I see the ability to purchase unencumbered music from Amazon. The player merely connects to the store. It doesn't do anything else that I can see. And many of those stores are evil in of themselves. Using the BeatPort example, you MUST have Flash installed and enabled to use the site. How does that help Linux users and Windows users who want to use unencumbered software?
There's a lot of noise here, but very few facts, IMHO. Songbird would be a nice step in improving media players on Linux (assuming a version is ever produced), but as far as I can see, it's not the revolution that you're making it out to be.
There honestly hasn't been a movie that's made me jump up and say "Wow, I need to go see that!" since Lord of the Rings.
Batman Begins. Seriously. If you haven't seen it DO SO!
The movie industry tends to fluctuate a lot more than the games industry. Sometimes they produce nothing but stinkers like Tomb Raider, Planet of the Apes, and the last Highlander. At other times they produce wonderful stuff like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars Ep3, Polar Express, The Incredibles, and Batman Begins. It all depends on which studios are currently in business, who's been hired/fired, how many writers are on strike, and the general direction of the wind.
The biggest trend I see as of late is Hollywood's inability to work from original material. Sourced movies based on things like Comic Books, famous novels, and older movies have been doing pretty well. (Though there have been plenty of stinkers in those too.) But unsourced materials? Um, let me think.
(thinking)
(thinking)
(thinking)
(thinking)
(thinking)
(thinking)
(thinking)
I got nothin'. How about you?
It's a win-win deal, that should have been done long ago!
Actually, you described value for Palm (access to Apple engineering resources), but practically no value for Apple.
Let's say that Apple purchases Palm and helps make the Treo even more of a success. How does that help Apple in the long term? Their brand is still a long way from the cell phone market, and analysts would attribute the success to Palm rather than Apple. Apple might make a profit off the company in the short term, but without a clear method of integrating the Treo into their product line, the long-term prospects would look bleak.
Sorry, I'm just not seeing it.
So you're telling me that gamers want original, new, and fun gameplay? The shock!
I mean, really. I was just bemoaning yesterday how much the market has moved to nothing but sex and violence. When every commercial for the XBox 360 ends with "Rated M for Mature", you know that they've stopped selling games. The market is instead trying to sell you an "Entertainment Product" targetted at "the adult market". Which is a nice way of saying, "We want to separate fools from their money by giving them gratuitous sexual and violent content." The actualy *game* is nowhere to be found.
As of late, I find myself missing the days of adventure games (e.g. Space Quest), space simulators (e.g. Wing Commander), puzzle adventures (e.g. Bioforge, System Shock), Real Time Strategy Games (e.g. C&C), and other innovative genres invented in the golden age of computer gaming. Not to mention some of the cool arcade genres like Fighters (e.g. Killer Instinct, SFII) and Drivers (e.g. SF: Rush, Hydrothunder).
Today we just see Another First Person Shooter, but With A New Twist!(TM) Which really is nothing more than a vehicle for the aformentioned sex and violence. When are we going to see all this technology put to good use in making innovative new games? Hell, imagine the cool 2D (or 2.5D) platformers that could be done on modern hardware! Do we see anything like these? Nope. It's all just games with the names of old games reused on new First Person Shooters. When will the industry rape of our beloved gaming stop?
Here's hoping for the Nintendo Revolution. If they can pull it off at least as well as the DS, we may get back some of what we've lost.
Yes. I've developed for it before, and it's got cruft coming out of its ears. It was designed around the idea that a device would never have more than 8 Megs of RAM, and that the controls/screen would be fixed in their design. In addition, memory is partitioned into small "databases" with explicit record sizes. These databases are the only thing keeping the data separate. If something goes wrong, one database can easily overwrite another. No MMU exists to prevent this.
Other issues include:
There's more, but those are just off the top of my head.
It's hideously expensive to rewrite software from scratch and a lot of companies will fail in the process.
My best suggestion would be an emulator. Given that a new OS would be able to take advantage of the greater speeds of modern ARM processors, most software could be run under a port of the current desktop emulator that developers use today. Performance critical software would do best to port, but new versions have always been an issue for them anyway.
You're probably right.
... I mean, of course I am!</Rodney-McKay> :-P
<Rodney-McKay>I am?
That's easily affordable for AAPL, but a 3% annual ROI isn't worth the trouble unless they have some IP AAPL, really, really wants.
I agree. Jobs has never shown signs of minor empire building. If he purchases a company, it's because he wants something from them. Otherwise he just a) leaves them alone or b) contracts out for their expertise. (Much like how the iPod was originally designed.) Or in other words, Jobs builds his own empire brick by brick rather than dealing with the instability of an adhoc one.
The Treo? Maybe, but I don't see it.
Not to mention the issue of competition with the current lines of iPod phones. There would be no better way to confuse the market than to offer them two different options with completely different feature sets. While that might work on a long-tail strategy, Apple is into a tiered marketing strategy designed to capture the largest chunks of the market by price point.
Palm is already working a new version of Palm OS with Linux as the kernel, effectively creating their own "OS X" story.
I don't see that as being a very good idea. Linux (the kernel) is a fast-moving target with constantly changing abilities, features, and APIs. (No comment on the moving ABIs.) For something like a new Palm OS, Palm really needs a stable base that won't require them to redo a lot of work, or suddenly and unexpectedly shift directions because of a major kernel change.
Palm could always fork Linux to keep things more predictable, but then they'd only be criticized for not keeping up to date. Thus the best solution is to do what Apple did: Find a more stable base.
What amazes me is that Palm is sitting with the BeOS technologies in its lap and has done practically nothing with them. BeOS was designed for systems that are pretty much on par with what a modern PDA could offer. (Catchy new slogan: "Just imagine, all the power of your BeBox in the Palm(TM) of your hand!") They obviously can't use it directly due to differences in desktop vs. PDA hardware, but they could easily mine it for technologies and strip the OS down to its core before rebuilding around the PDA technology.
Then again, I don't know what the BeOS core looks like. Perhaps it's all too integrated to be useful. Either way, I think Palm would be chosing poorly by going the Linux route.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. (Unless it's digital, in which case it's good to throw away.)
I'm rather suspicious of this story, in part because I don't see Palm adding much value to Apple. When the Palm Pilot was popular, the fact that so much could be fit in such a small device was nothing short of amazing. It was also a useful little tool for all kinds of data organization. But now? Palm's OS is older than the hills, designed for hardware limits that no longer matter. Palm has been using bits of trickery to extend the limits of their OS, but at the end of the day they just need something new that takes advantage of modern, low-power hardware.
Another problem is that Palm has been about as phlegmatic as you can get when it comes to promoting their market. If they were like Apple, they could have sewn up the electronic book market years ago. Instead, they seem content to allow the rest of the market to make half-hearted attempts at producing solutions. That just isn't going to work. If Palm wants to grab the e-reader market (a market for which they are extremely well suited), they need to follow Apple's lead and grab the bull by the horns. Since they show no signs of doing this, I see nothing but signs of decline for Palm.
If Apple wants to enter the handheld market (again), I see them developing a new device with a high-resolution, high-pixel density screen. They would then try to add the ability to show documents are precisely as possible, utilizing scaling algorithms. (Many books and documents suffer if their layout is changed a la Acrobat Pocket.) These features could be easily built into a new device OS by Apple engineers rather than trying to overhaul the aging Palm OS.
They would then market it with a new "catchy" Apple brand like "iHand" or "iBooklet", and either integrate it into a new eBook/Portable App section of iTunes, or develop a new iTunes-like app.
So given this scenario, where does the Palm value come in? The name? Nope. Apple would want consistent branding. The OS? No way. Palm is so full of cruft I swear that the developers are ready to shoot it. The device designs? Never. They're way too far behind the curve.
So I think I'm going to go with "rumor" on this one.
The last time I was asked it, the interviewer claimed it was cheating to confirm the precise method through the use of JavaDocs. (I remembered the method and told him, but I offered to look it to be sure. This was a phone interview.) IMHO, looking it up in the JavaDocs is precisely the correct answer. With IDEs being what they are today, there's very little reason to expect that programmers will have any of this memorized. They know that the method exists, and that's good enough.
As an example of what I mean, I regularly forget if substring is "substring" or "subString", if "indexOf" only does characters or can find a string, etc. With all the other things floating through my head at a given time, I don't even bother to memorize these. The IDE can tell me what I need to know within half a second. It's just a waste of my time not to rely on it.
Perhaps the most amusing part of this, though, is that I wasn't even interviewing for a GUI programming position!
Odd, the Gamestop near my house is the only place locally that I can buy an NES and games.
That is odd. I've been informed by Gamestop management that it's corporate policy not to carry anything older than the Dreamcast. Are you sure you're not thinking of Game Crazy? Those guys are pretty cool.
Blasting expensive stuff like landers to the moon or Mars costs just as much as blasting a chunk of rock though and it is not a negligible cost.
Even space launches are not immune to the economics of scale. A large portion of operating costs stem from ground crews and service techs who work to get these birds in the air. The more you can launch in a shorter period of time, the more money you save on labor. The Space Shuttle was intended to take advantage of those economics, but fell down for political (no customers) and technical (long turnaround) reasons. That's why the price of a Shuttle flight increased from 200 million to 500 million as the number of flights declined.
But then, I always use nocd cracks on games I buy, so that might have been it.
That would be exactly why you didn't see it. The NOCD crack was what I was referring to as the "Unofficial crack". If you read the description of the crack, you'll find that it removes the copy protection from the program. (Which is CD based. SecuROM, if I'm not mistaken.)
If email is a postcard, what's unencrypted IM?
Shouting across a crowded room.
I hate to break it to you, but the mainstream press needs help with everything. As anyone who's ever dealt with them can tell you, they tend to run into a situation with their preconceptions firmly in place. They'll use up hours of your time just to get a badly worded sound-bite rather than any useful information. They'll leave, print your sound-bite, and still be as wrong as they were when you were first trying to explain it to them.
:-/
For a perfect example of this, dig up the old "Google has confirmed a web based OpenOffice!" Any idiot who had listened to the broadcast would know that Sun and Google merely annouced a bundling deal. Yet the press was convinced, so they printed it.
No, as I said in another post, it's not so much that I begrudge people their violent games. I begrudge that the entire industry has moved that direction at the expense of other gaming possibilities.
Take the golden age of computer gaming as an example. On one hand you had violent games like Doom. On the other hand you had more immersive games like Wing Commander 3. (I picked these because they were both on the first issues of PC Gamer.) Games had the content that made sense in their gameplay genre. Sure, there was adult themed gaming (Megatech's Metal and Lace game comes to mind, as does a game that used a spheroid-based-3D-game-engine game who's name I can't remember), but the majority of it was agnostic to any sort of adult vs. child division. It was a game. Made for gameplay, and fun to play.
Now we don't see the creepy System Shocks, the adventurous Bioforges, the humorous Space Quests, the strategic Command and Conquers, etc., etc., etc. It's all been replaced with more "M Rated" gaming. Shovel more on. MORE!
What am I supposed to think when every XBox 360 commercial I see ends with "Rated M for Mature?" Am I supposed to think that game producers are really focusing on the games? Because I get the feeling from this that they're focused only on the "adult entertainment" aspect. The message isn't all that pleasent, especially when I see formerly agnostic games like Prince of Persia raped to produce more Entertainment Industry Crap(TM).
Maybe I've been speaking corporate for too long, but those requirements aren't that hard to meet for many experienced Unix Admins. Most of those technologies are used day in and day out by compentent admins. And it's not that hard to follow that they've been working in the industry for 3 to 5 years. The diversity of technologies is a little troubling, but not anywhere near the diversity I've seen required of Java programmers. (e.g. Must have 10 years of SAP and IBM CICS experience in addition to Java programming. WTF?)
As I said, the only problem is that $15 an hour isn't very good compensation for someone with those skills. Compare that to impossible to meet requirements like "20 Years of Java".
Obviously. So what do you think? Mr. T vs. Chuck Norris. Even money?
"I pity the FOO' who roundhouse kick me in 'da face!"