Flash on mobile sucks. That is true. so far Adobe has failed deliver a good mobile flash solution. They produced "Flash lite" which sucks to high heaven. I am not an Apple fanboy at all but lets be honest about this. Instead of crabbing about Apple not letting Flash on the iPhone why not show us a good Flash experience on say? Windows Mobile? Adobe has had years to produce that. Or on WebOS which they announced about a year ago and still has not seen the light of day. I bet Android would put it on to day if it exists. How about S60 on Nokia devices? I am sure the N95 could run it....... Really as far as Flash on the iPhone goes Adobe... PUT UP OR SHUT UP. If all we get is another halfbaked Flash-Lite junk program then who cares? Over all I am happy that Apple pushed for HTML5 as a solution. Those same sites work just great on my Android phone and my wifes Palm Pre!
Can you get the charge state yet. Yes I know that the Palm was never in Jail but most people understand that term. My goal was to learn the SDK and produce some apps that anybody could use including peoples grandmothers. I am a big fan of just works. I figure that most people plug their phone in at night so having it auto sync your podcasts and media while you sleep would be brilliant. Of course the other feature I would to see is a ring volume timer. I would love a feature where I can set my ringer to zero after 11PM but turn it up at say 8:00am Even better would be to set certain number to ring anytime like right now my mother is having a lot of health problems so I would love her number to always ring. I could see people wanting their kids phone number to always wring as well.
Honestly zero miles. You wouldn't want a reactor on the water in a worst case accident. Honestly TMI was a worst case short of a crack team of insane suicidal plant operators taking control of the entire plant and doing everything possible to cause as much death as possible. Of course you don't even want to think about the destruction such a team could do at a natural gas fired plant or worse a LNG terminal! What people don't get is TMI showed how safe even those old reactors where. The operators made just about every mistake in the book and nobody died. There isn't a single death that can be attributed to Three Mile Island.
Grid capacity is not the reason why people are not buying electric cars. Cost and range are. If they became popular enough it would be an issue but right now you are putting the cart before the horse. A better solution IMHO would be to move to synth fuel made from Natural Gas, biomass, and possible renewable generated hydrogen. liquid hydrocarbons really do work very well and have a great mass to power ratio that we can not match with batteries yet. Even if you really are anti IC we could still move to Methanol fuel cells.
"We use oil to generate 3% of our electricity." I have heard it was 1.1% even then we only import around %50 of our oil so with my numbers less than 1% of our electricity. Wind power has really nothing to do with ending our imports of oil. Also odds are that this will not be built. I have a friend that works in renewable power. Wind power to be exact and he said right now it is dead. Nobody wants pay for Wind because natural gas is so cheap and there is no penalty for using coal. He also said that Nuclear has a chance if people would just get over their silly fears. According to him off-shore wind power is dead. The costs are just too high. His company will finish building the wind farms they have under construction and hope something changes but if no they are not going to add any more project for a "while"
"Besides, FOSS is always better than proprietary in the long term." Really? Does Linux have more apps or market share on the desktop? No? I like FOSS but you have zero proof to back up your statement. You are going to count out the iPhone as well. Well you can do what you want but if you are right then Palm has a great future. Palm OS IS based on Linux and frankly it is the most open of platforms right now. Heck the Palm Website included instructions on how to set up your phone so you could side load apps that where not in the App store! But there is nothing like seeing people make grand sweeping statements that have no basis if fact.
Also WebOS has a better UI than Android and as good or arguably better than the iPhone. Not to mention that HP will get the revinue from the Appstore. Really the Palm OS is very good what almost killed it was that stupid limited SDK they pushed. Javascript+HTML just doesn't cut it for every app. Add in the very restricted access you got to the hardware and you are limiting the software you can write. I had the SDK and within a day I had given up on using it. First thing I wanted to write was a simple flashlight app. I want to us the LED that they use for the flash but drive it at a lower intensity. I also thought that an more code sender with the flash might have been fun. You couldn't do it. Actually you could on a jail broken phone but not using the official SDK. Okay fine. I then started to work on the programs I really wanted to write. I wanted to write a pod catcher and a music sync program. The way it would work is when the program detected that the Palm was plugged in and charging it would download your podcast and the music sync program would detect when your palm was plugged in and connected through wifi to you home computer. It would then contact a small sync server that I was going to write as a banshee plug in and syn your Palm. These where two different programs but a lot of code would overlap. I started to dig into the docs but I couldn't find any way to get the chargeable state! THERE WASN'T ANY! It was as if the people writing the SDK never wrote a program of a mobile device in their life. The reason I would would only do the sync when chargeable is that was when you could be sure that you wouldn't drain the battery.
Why? WebOS has a better UI than Android does. And yes I am an Android user my wife has a Pre. WebOS is a good OS that had a STUPID SDK for a long time. They have fixed that and will soon offer access to the camera and mic which should help even more.
Sure it is... No really but it is very determinant because your task never has to surrender to another task or frankly to the OS. You can make it very close to real time without the complexity of a real time OS.
I doubt it. HTC is the biggest producer of WinMo phones and has been for years. Microsoft NEEDS HTC to be a big supporter of WinMo7 so they where probably eager to help them out. I doubt that they will go after Google because goodness knows what patents on search Google has that they could use to beat up Microsoft.
Overall WE NEED TO THROW OUT ALL SOFTWARE PATENTS!
But there is FreeDOS which is probably what a good number of these DOS like embedded systems are running. Frankly that is why I didn't say MS-DOS. A lot of people use FreeDOS for this kind of work now. Some use DR-DOS and still others used MS-DOS. Frankly I would use FreeDOS myself unless there is some good reason not to but that is just me. Please at this point you are just being silly. Linux is overkill for something like a CNC controller or radiation counter. Plus for many of these applications it just will not work. Educate yourself just a little and you might actually stop wasting peoples time. BTW if you need something that has a bit more capability than DOS does but still lighter than Linux there are options. RTEMS will work for realtime systems but it is a lot more complex to set up than DOS but it runs on more CPUs and is general more flexible. Another option is Contiki http://www.sics.se/contiki/about-contiki.html But again the thing about DOS is simply so many people know everything there is to know about it. It is super well documented and the Development tools are everywhere and well known. If you don't like DJCPP or the free Borland toolset you still have a ton of options left open including http://www.freepascal.org/ Linux is a great embedded tool when you need it. The thing is for a lot of tasks it is overkill and frankly just will not do the job as reliably and as cheaply as good old DOS will. So go read up and and stop treating FOSS as a religion and start using it as a tool. And stop being a tool.
Sinple. 1. DOS is REAL-TIME. If you need to precise timeing and access to the hardware DOS gives that to you. 2. Scripting? Filesystem? who cares on a small devise. You may not do anything with the filesystem at all. You may just write the data out to the serial port on some devices. Development Tools? DJGPP works fine. Borlands old tools are available for free. No problem and actually not complex. "Why not run a stripped-down Linux or BSD with restricted userspace tools?" Can you find me one that will. Run in 256k of ram. On an 8086. and support Real-time data acquisition?
You can get 8086 embedded controlers for dirt cheap. And the nice thing about DOS is that it is completely known.
The Commodore 1541 got 144k on a floppy. so 96kb does sound that off. Maybe that was what you got on the CP/M standard SS/SD 8" floppy.
Of course we had a joke. I started to use computers men where real men, we had 8" floppies and 12" Hard disks. You wimps have to get by with 3.5" semi ridged disks!
Actually there are some good reasons to use DOS for something like that. Modern OSs are great and have all sorts of functionality that a lot of devices just don't need. They also have a lot of code and services which can cause you issues. DOS is great for any device where you need a realtime single tasking OS. You can do all you development on a PC and use PC debugging tools that you are used to using. You see lots of CNC machines and such that use DOS for that reason. Or look at it this way. Does the device you use work? Does it do what you need it to do? If so then the software isn't crappy. Nothing sucks more than you replace a piece of software that works but isn't pretty with pretty bug ridden software.
And as a motorcyclist I find it really annoying that Canada gets more and better motorcycles than we get in the US! There are several models of Honda that are not imported to the US but are available in Canada! The logic from Honda is that they wouldn't sell enough of them in the US! I mean really? There are how many people in Canada? Oh well at least we get cheap books here.
What I was wondering is if you could combine this with say FreeNAS? Make a single box that was a NAS and a router all in one. Of course I would really want wifi as well. Maybe even do a little hacking and run a switch off the NAS PS supply so it doesn't use anymore power than needed.. Of course security would need to be tight but it should work.
Well if they use some of the new tools then maybe they will be cross browser. Of course at some point microsoft will force your company off IE6. I have found it is better to choose to update then be forced too.
Oh I did add that standards have gotten better since then but IE6 came out in 2001 so we had gotten past the really bad Netscape issues. I thought a lot of the issues also involved using custom Active X components "another really bad plan".
Frankly the best thing that happened was when Netscape decided to go Open Source with their browser. While I am not a FOSS zealot FOSS does seem to have a much better record with pushing and supporting standards than closed source over all.
Simple it is Microsoft's fault. Actually this time it really is. Microsoft decided to and all sorts of stuff to IE and to ignore web standards. They produced web authoring tools that generated code that only worked with IE. And they encouraged other companies to do the say. Their Partners. They did this because they wanted people to be locked into the Microsoft Ecosystem. You can not move off of Windows because some of your software will stop working! Microsoft feared and fears web apps to this day because of that idea. Web and software developers bought into this because "everybody used IE" and since you had to make your stuff work for IE anyway why spend time making it work for Netscape, then Mozilla? I mean why worry for say 2% of the population and most of those people had IE anyway so they could always just use IE instead!
Now that Microsoft has to move to following standards and now frankly that the standards have gotten much better. W3C your too freaking slow! Microsoft is breaking a lot of it's old stuff. So people are sticking with IE6 because many of them are trapped by their large investment in old apps.
It really does. Say a blog or newspaper gets stolen documents saying that a big company is put rat poison in cupcakes and then covered it up. I have no problem with this since their is a clear argument that they press was acting for the good of the community. Say a newspaper starts to buy stolen cars and runs their own chop shop to show how easy it is to make money off of stolen cars. Here I have a big problem.
Here we have the issue. The if the Press is going to be given so much protection that they can get away with sometimes breaking the law they need to show that they will act responsibly when doing it. When the press brakes the law for a story that has no positive effect on the community and can actually cause people harm then those protections will be called into question.
After all would anybody want it to be okay for a newspaper or blog to pay for a hit man to bump someone off just for a sensational story? There must be limits set on just how far "freedom of the press" goes.
This is a big problem. Gizmodo acted arrogantly and totally irresponsibly. There is no greater good in what they did. They clearly bought stolen goods. When this goes to trial it will have a chilling effect on freedom of the press. The Press has broken important stories with stolen or leaked documents. But this is a clear case of theft for profit with no good except the financial gain of the web site. This is just not good.
Slashdot Mirror
Flash on mobile sucks.
That is true. so far Adobe has failed deliver a good mobile flash solution.
They produced "Flash lite" which sucks to high heaven.
I am not an Apple fanboy at all but lets be honest about this.
Instead of crabbing about Apple not letting Flash on the iPhone why not show us a good Flash experience on say? Windows Mobile? Adobe has had years to produce that. Or on WebOS which they announced about a year ago and still has not seen the light of day. I bet Android would put it on to day if it exists. How about S60 on Nokia devices? I am sure the N95 could run it.......
Really as far as Flash on the iPhone goes Adobe... PUT UP OR SHUT UP.
If all we get is another halfbaked Flash-Lite junk program then who cares?
Over all I am happy that Apple pushed for HTML5 as a solution. Those same sites work just great on my Android phone and my wifes Palm Pre!
Can you get the charge state yet.
Yes I know that the Palm was never in Jail but most people understand that term.
My goal was to learn the SDK and produce some apps that anybody could use including peoples grandmothers.
I am a big fan of just works. I figure that most people plug their phone in at night so having it auto sync your podcasts and media while you sleep would be brilliant.
Of course the other feature I would to see is a ring volume timer.
I would love a feature where I can set my ringer to zero after 11PM but turn it up at say 8:00am
Even better would be to set certain number to ring anytime like right now my mother is having a lot of health problems so I would love her number to always ring. I could see people wanting their kids phone number to always wring as well.
Honestly zero miles.
You wouldn't want a reactor on the water in a worst case accident.
Honestly TMI was a worst case short of a crack team of insane suicidal plant operators taking control of the entire plant and doing everything possible to cause as much death as possible.
Of course you don't even want to think about the destruction such a team could do at a natural gas fired plant or worse a LNG terminal!
What people don't get is TMI showed how safe even those old reactors where. The operators made just about every mistake in the book and nobody died.
There isn't a single death that can be attributed to Three Mile Island.
Grid capacity is not the reason why people are not buying electric cars.
Cost and range are. If they became popular enough it would be an issue but right now you are putting the cart before the horse.
A better solution IMHO would be to move to synth fuel made from Natural Gas, biomass, and possible renewable generated hydrogen.
liquid hydrocarbons really do work very well and have a great mass to power ratio that we can not match with batteries yet. Even if you really are anti IC we could still move to Methanol fuel cells.
"We use oil to generate 3% of our electricity."
I have heard it was 1.1% even then we only import around %50 of our oil so with my numbers less than 1% of our electricity.
Wind power has really nothing to do with ending our imports of oil. Also odds are that this will not be built.
I have a friend that works in renewable power. Wind power to be exact and he said right now it is dead. Nobody wants pay for Wind because natural gas is so cheap and there is no penalty for using coal. He also said that Nuclear has a chance if people would just get over their silly fears.
According to him off-shore wind power is dead. The costs are just too high. His company will finish building the wind farms they have under construction and hope something changes but if no they are not going to add any more project for a "while"
Actually after reading a bit of your livejournal my head really started to hurt so. It is just to early in the day for that.
Yep and sometimes that is exactly what you need.
"Besides, FOSS is always better than proprietary in the long term."
Really? Does Linux have more apps or market share on the desktop? No?
I like FOSS but you have zero proof to back up your statement. You are going to count out the iPhone as well.
Well you can do what you want but if you are right then Palm has a great future.
Palm OS IS based on Linux and frankly it is the most open of platforms right now.
Heck the Palm Website included instructions on how to set up your phone so you could side load apps that where not in the App store!
But there is nothing like seeing people make grand sweeping statements that have no basis if fact.
Also WebOS has a better UI than Android and as good or arguably better than the iPhone.
Not to mention that HP will get the revinue from the Appstore. Really the Palm OS is very good what almost killed it was that stupid limited SDK they pushed. Javascript+HTML just doesn't cut it for every app. Add in the very restricted access you got to the hardware and you are limiting the software you can write.
I had the SDK and within a day I had given up on using it.
First thing I wanted to write was a simple flashlight app. I want to us the LED that they use for the flash but drive it at a lower intensity. I also thought that an more code sender with the flash might have been fun. You couldn't do it. Actually you could on a jail broken phone but not using the official SDK.
Okay fine. I then started to work on the programs I really wanted to write. I wanted to write a pod catcher and a music sync program. The way it would work is when the program detected that the Palm was plugged in and charging it would download your podcast and the music sync program would detect when your palm was plugged in and connected through wifi to you home computer. It would then contact a small sync server that I was going to write as a banshee plug in and syn your Palm. These where two different programs but a lot of code would overlap.
I started to dig into the docs but I couldn't find any way to get the chargeable state! THERE WASN'T ANY!
It was as if the people writing the SDK never wrote a program of a mobile device in their life.
The reason I would would only do the sync when chargeable is that was when you could be sure that you wouldn't drain the battery.
Why?
WebOS has a better UI than Android does. And yes I am an Android user my wife has a Pre. WebOS is a good OS that had a STUPID SDK for a long time. They have fixed that and will soon offer access to the camera and mic which should help even more.
You are kidding right?
HP has a market cap of over 124 Million dollars.
They have 13 billion in cash in the bank.
Yea they are that big.
Sure it is... No really but it is very determinant because your task never has to surrender to another task or frankly to the OS. You can make it very close to real time without the complexity of a real time OS.
I doubt it. HTC is the biggest producer of WinMo phones and has been for years.
Microsoft NEEDS HTC to be a big supporter of WinMo7 so they where probably eager to help them out.
I doubt that they will go after Google because goodness knows what patents on search Google has that they could use to beat up Microsoft.
Overall WE NEED TO THROW OUT ALL SOFTWARE PATENTS!
We are talking about software here not religion.
But there is FreeDOS which is probably what a good number of these DOS like embedded systems are running. Frankly that is why I didn't say MS-DOS. A lot of people use FreeDOS for this kind of work now. Some use DR-DOS and still others used MS-DOS. Frankly I would use FreeDOS myself unless there is some good reason not to but that is just me.
Please at this point you are just being silly. Linux is overkill for something like a CNC controller or radiation counter.
Plus for many of these applications it just will not work. Educate yourself just a little and you might actually stop wasting peoples time.
BTW if you need something that has a bit more capability than DOS does but still lighter than Linux there are options.
RTEMS will work for realtime systems but it is a lot more complex to set up than DOS but it runs on more CPUs and is general more flexible.
Another option is Contiki http://www.sics.se/contiki/about-contiki.html
But again the thing about DOS is simply so many people know everything there is to know about it. It is super well documented and the Development tools are everywhere and well known.
If you don't like DJCPP or the free Borland toolset you still have a ton of options left open including http://www.freepascal.org/
Linux is a great embedded tool when you need it. The thing is for a lot of tasks it is overkill and frankly just will not do the job as reliably and as cheaply as good old DOS will.
So go read up and and stop treating FOSS as a religion and start using it as a tool. And stop being a tool.
Sinple.
1. DOS is REAL-TIME. If you need to precise timeing and access to the hardware DOS gives that to you.
2. Scripting? Filesystem? who cares on a small devise. You may not do anything with the filesystem at all. You may just write the data out to the serial port on some devices.
Development Tools? DJGPP works fine. Borlands old tools are available for free. No problem and actually not complex.
"Why not run a stripped-down Linux or BSD with restricted userspace tools?"
Can you find me one that will.
Run in 256k of ram.
On an 8086.
and support Real-time data acquisition?
You can get 8086 embedded controlers for dirt cheap.
And the nice thing about DOS is that it is completely known.
The Commodore 1541 got 144k on a floppy. so 96kb does sound that off. Maybe that was what you got on the CP/M standard SS/SD 8" floppy.
Of course we had a joke.
I started to use computers men where real men, we had 8" floppies and 12" Hard disks. You wimps have to get by with 3.5" semi ridged disks!
So that alone shows that the article was written by an idiot.
Actually there are some good reasons to use DOS for something like that.
Modern OSs are great and have all sorts of functionality that a lot of devices just don't need. They also have a lot of code and services which can cause you issues.
DOS is great for any device where you need a realtime single tasking OS.
You can do all you development on a PC and use PC debugging tools that you are used to using.
You see lots of CNC machines and such that use DOS for that reason.
Or look at it this way. Does the device you use work? Does it do what you need it to do?
If so then the software isn't crappy. Nothing sucks more than you replace a piece of software that works but isn't pretty with pretty bug ridden software.
And as a motorcyclist I find it really annoying that Canada gets more and better motorcycles than we get in the US!
There are several models of Honda that are not imported to the US but are available in Canada! The logic from Honda is that they wouldn't sell enough of them in the US!
I mean really? There are how many people in Canada?
Oh well at least we get cheap books here.
What I was wondering is if you could combine this with say FreeNAS?
Make a single box that was a NAS and a router all in one.
Of course I would really want wifi as well. Maybe even do a little hacking and run a switch off the NAS PS supply so it doesn't use anymore power than needed..
Of course security would need to be tight but it should work.
Well if they use some of the new tools then maybe they will be cross browser.
Of course at some point microsoft will force your company off IE6.
I have found it is better to choose to update then be forced too.
Oh I did add that standards have gotten better since then but IE6 came out in 2001 so we had gotten past the really bad Netscape issues.
I thought a lot of the issues also involved using custom Active X components "another really bad plan".
Frankly the best thing that happened was when Netscape decided to go Open Source with their browser. While I am not a FOSS zealot FOSS does seem to have a much better record with pushing and supporting standards than closed source over all.
Simple it is Microsoft's fault.
Actually this time it really is.
Microsoft decided to and all sorts of stuff to IE and to ignore web standards. They produced web authoring tools that generated code that only worked with IE. And they encouraged other companies to do the say. Their Partners.
They did this because they wanted people to be locked into the Microsoft Ecosystem. You can not move off of Windows because some of your software will stop working! Microsoft feared and fears web apps to this day because of that idea.
Web and software developers bought into this because "everybody used IE" and since you had to make your stuff work for IE anyway why spend time making it work for Netscape, then Mozilla? I mean why worry for say 2% of the population and most of those people had IE anyway so they could always just use IE instead!
Now that Microsoft has to move to following standards and now frankly that the standards have gotten much better. W3C your too freaking slow! Microsoft is breaking a lot of it's old stuff.
So people are sticking with IE6 because many of them are trapped by their large investment in old apps.
It really does.
Say a blog or newspaper gets stolen documents saying that a big company is put rat poison in cupcakes and then covered it up.
I have no problem with this since their is a clear argument that they press was acting for the good of the community.
Say a newspaper starts to buy stolen cars and runs their own chop shop to show how easy it is to make money off of stolen cars.
Here I have a big problem.
Here we have the issue. The if the Press is going to be given so much protection that they can get away with sometimes breaking the law they need to show that they will act responsibly when doing it.
When the press brakes the law for a story that has no positive effect on the community and can actually cause people harm then those protections will be called into question.
After all would anybody want it to be okay for a newspaper or blog to pay for a hit man to bump someone off just for a sensational story?
There must be limits set on just how far "freedom of the press" goes.
This is a big problem.
Gizmodo acted arrogantly and totally irresponsibly. There is no greater good in what they did. They clearly bought stolen goods. When this goes to trial it will have a chilling effect on freedom of the press. The Press has broken important stories with stolen or leaked documents.
But this is a clear case of theft for profit with no good except the financial gain of the web site.
This is just not good.