I get all kinds of weird stuff at nop@nop.com; my friend who has ben@ben.com does too.
One nice thing about this situation is plausible deniability. I mean, who's to say that I'm the person who registered for those 724 quasi-legal web sites? And "I"'ve been booted from geocities and Excite many many times...one more can't hurt, right?
I love perensdot. (For those of you who missed it, the parent article was authored by one "Bruce Perens." which doesn't == "Bruce Perens".) I will be sad when this account disappears into the murk of "posts start at score -2".
I think Google is making an enormous mistake by using Linux as their OS-of-choice. Something more robust, such as Java or even Python,
Sure, Java already does many OS-like things. Python doesn't, tho. Strangely enough, google is widely known for using Python already....
(oh well, missed the window for this post to be noticed)
This is wonderful---all the Palm spin in one place. But we're (mostly) Linux people, right? Aren't we immune to software marketing spin? After all, much of the following sounds strangely familiar...
Palm OS(R) handhelds are the standard
Microsoft operating systems are the standard
- Palm OS has more than 75% market share worldwide, and our installed base doubled in the last year.
Microsoft operating systems have 99.44% market share worldwide. Installed base doesn't have room to double.
- Palm OS has more than 5,000 software programs, 10-50 times more than any other handheld platform.
Windows has a (countably) infinite number of software programs.
- Palm OS is supported by the leaders in enterprise software, including Oracle, Siebel, SAP, Lawson, Sun, and Sybase
Don't get us started.
Those are all great arguments against Linux as well.
OK, on to some better ones.
Palm OS handhelds are the leader because they were designed from the ground up for your needs.
- They're designed for information management when you're on the go, not to be a shrunken PC. Key features of a handheld are different from a PC:
- Simple. You can instantly access the information you need.
Microsoft at least is making gestures in this direction in this release.
- Wearable. It's small and light enough that that you can carry it in a pocket or a purse all day, and the batteries last long enough that you can go on a business trip without fear of losing information.
Enh, the Everex Freestyle (no longer sold under that name) was always smaller than a 5000/III, and the Compaq 1500 series is competitive in size. Battery life? No question that some PalmOS devices have much bigger numbers. The Casio E-15 I play with has enough rechargable battery life that I don't worry about it much, just like my Pilot 1000.
- Mobile. You can always update your information through wired or wireless connections, even when you are on the go.
Well, duh. The only way I can read this is as a PR attempt to imply that other platforms don't have this capability. The statement itself is vague enough that an IR or cabled connection to a cellphone would qualify, and even my Newton talked nice to a cellphone.
The palm-sized CE devices out there are pretty weak in wireless communication, which is why they can get away with this implication. I don't know of any consumer-oriented palm-sized CE devices with integrated wireless net. Palm, because they're that market leader they're bragging about, does get the benefit of high quality third-party networking products (because they're the biggest market). There is nothing like the OmniSky around for CE, and it's the one product that makes me want to go drop ~$800 on a Palm V and that modem.
OK, now on to their evaluation questions. I'm going to divide up Palm operations into three notional organizations. Palm-HW builds the Palm-branded hardware like the Palm V. Palm-Opsys implements PalmOS...and also the applications bundled with it, like Address Book. Palm-Desktop builds the PC/Mac software that works with the device.
- How many software programs and hardware options are available? As for any other computing product, the number of software and hardware options determine how much you can do with it. Palm OS has by far the largest selection, with more than 5,000 software programs and hundreds of hardware expansion options.
Again, Linux people have been through this once before....
- Do the people around you use it? Handheld users share information. They use the infrared connection to exchange business cards, information, and even software programs. Make sure you're not stuck on a handheld island.
The answer to compatibility is not standardization on a single product. The righteous answer is open standards for interoperation. See IrDA's specs for a good cut at this; in particular, IrMC is relevant to PDAs. Open standards could cut the tie between Palm-Opsys and Palm-Desktop.
- How many companies sell it? Which companies support the platform? How many? How innovative are they? Palm licensees and OEMs include many of the most innovative companies in electronics, including leaders like Sony, Nokia, and IBM, and hot new companies like Handspring, Qualcomm, and TRG.
I'm amused by this. Microsoft used to have a big pile of HW vendors, and 3com only had the single Palm-HW vendor. Then a year or two passed...
I haven't been impressed with the diversity and innovation of the manufacturers of devices that license PalmOS. They are just grafting a part or two onto the dragonball bus. In many cases, it's obvious they've licensed much of the Palm-HW design as well (why do all those cases look so similar?) The fanciest integration to date is the Qualcomm pilot-in-a-cellphone, but I don't think it's had much market success.
Some of this lack of innovation is due to limitations in PalmOS. They can't switch processors (64k limits must die) or go to a higher res screen without breaking those thousands of apps they're bragging about. (Yes, they could add LCD to the current silkscreen area, but going to a 240x320 screen will not make pixel-positioned forms very happy.)
- Is it open? Make sure your freedom of choice is protected.
...coming from a proprietary OS vendor (Palm-Opsys), this rings hollow.
Some handhelds restrict your choices by forcing you to buy all of one company's software programs,
Not CE, and I think this is another false argument-by-implication.
limiting you to a single expansion technology,
Even the CE hardware vendors appear to be rebelling against "must have CF". The iPAQ moved CF and PCMCIA support into expansion packs, and there are some MultiMediaCard CE boxes coming.
or not working with the full range of corporate software. [...]
standards, standards, standards. Not in Palm-Opsys's best interest though.
- Are you forced to pay for features you don't want? Everyone wants different things from a handheld. Adding hardware features increases the weight and cost of the system. Bundling extra software costs you money, and uses extra memory which adds even more cost and reduces battery life.
Oh, Palm is going to tout price competitiveness? That's a win for everyone, especially if it eats into those huge per-device profit margins.
More seriously, there is a complicated set of tradeoffs here. Bigger hardware can reduce software development costs, if done right (CE is a poor example, of course). Adding more software to ROM or flash adds just the marginal cost of more storage to the hardware price; it does not suck more RAM or CPU if not used. The additional software bundled then has development costs, but if the software broadens the appeal of the device sufficiently, it may amortize over a greater number of units, and push up those economies of scale.
The real fun begins once you really unbundle the system. Say, an OS like Linux as common ground for HW manufacturers, a couple choices of app framework (gtk, fltk, W, microwindows, plus extensions), a few good PIMs to choose from, all interoperating with a variety of synchronization tools on the desktop. The market could make better decisions in the bundling/feature space if component costs were explicit.
- How simple is it, really? Beware of companies that try to cram an entire PC into your pocket. [...]
- How well do the features work in real life? Sometimes features work better in a demo than they do in real life. A prime example is browsing the Web. [...]
This is the best battering ram against CE that Palm has. Trust me. I own both.:-)
I'm going to elide the feature list because they seem to be going for parity with CE rather than superiority.
The very first MUD was written by Roy Trubshaw in MACRO-10 (the machine code for DECsystem-10's). Date-wise, it was Spring 1979. The game was originally little more than a series of inter-connected locations where you could move and chat. I don't think it was called MUD at that stage, but I'd have to ask Roy to be sure. Roy rewrote it almost immediately, and the next version, also in MACRO-10, was much more sophisticated. This one was definitely called MUD (I still have a printout of it). [...]
I don't see a real availability date or a price. If one of the previous posters is correct, the 75G drives are going straight to big manufacturers.
Well, maybe that's not so bad. Right now nobody can get even the 34G IBM drives (or the 40G Maxtors) so 75G drives may take some pressure off the smaller drives.
You won't find the name I've used, or the office building, on the Web searches -- I'm afraid I was trying to bluff it a bit.
Yeah, that's understandable. There's a pretty high troll rate around here, so you might get some flaming, and you've already seen the suspicion:-)
Do you have "admin privileges" on this site? I can't prove to you who I am, without saying more about myself than I care to say, but I can email you privately with my bona fides. I would really appreciate it if you could help me.
I don't have admin privs. As it happens, I'm a lucky winner of the moderation lottery today; that just lets me change the score of up to five articles, but it doesn't let me delete them. Most of the time I don't even look at articles with a score below 2, so I would have missed this whole exchange. Honestly, the level of collective belief in unauthenticated, 0-score anonymous postings is so low that there probably isn't much to worry about for small unconfirmable info leaks.
On that note, I'm not convinced that you're who you say you are *anyway*, even with your admission. I'm still writing back to you because I'm feeling charitable today. But convincing me of your identity doesn't do you any good.
The right place to take up this matter is with the site owners. See the first paragraph of the About Page; there's contact info for each of them off their home pages. That's who your authentication and credentials really will matter to.
please Please PLEASE do not confuse "I can read the source code for Product Foo" with "Product Foo is Open Source". I can read the source code for Java, but I'd be in a world of pain if I did anything with it that Sun didn't like. Especially if I wanted to sell it.
Display PostScript is actually rather limiting this day and age. Let me say that I don't know if PostScript level 3 fixed any of these issues, but so far as level 1 and 2 go:
PostScript couldn't support RGB images.
Not true. DPS supports RGB color spaces; PS Level 2 adds CMYK, some CIE models, and indexed.
PostScript couldn't layer objects. You can't just layer a 50% magenta square over a 50% cyan square and hope for a 50% red square.
Well, the NeXT had alpha....
PostScript also couldn't really handle bitmapped images that gracefully. There are so many headers that EPS's of bitmapped graphics are significantly larger than any other file format.
This isn't an issue for Display PostScript, and for Level 2 the image size increase isn't that bad. EPS is the wrong format for bitmapped graphics anyway.
But looking to the future, Apple was quite smart to drop DPS for a PDF based model.
Especially after they couldn't get Adobe to give them the license price point they wanted for DPS....
The natural solution, for a grand public good such as this, is to let the government set the protocol, and run the server. For the US, this wouldn't even be a wild stretch of the constitution; for it's just a natural extension of the Post Office.
Email works without a central point of control, aside from DNS. Why should instant messaging and presence be any different?
This is incorrect. I remember getting really EXCITED about the release of KA9Q user-mode networking for early Linux. Kernel-mode networking took a bit longer to arrive, but Linux 0.12 was very useful even without it.
I looked at this again few weeks ago. Sadly, there is still no full source-available version (and there never has been AFAIK for most platforms). From http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/faq.html:
Reading the install.txt file, I noticed that the source code for the Kernel is not included. (1) Why it is not in the distribution file? (2) How and where I can get it?
The source of the Kernel is made available under license from the ETH to people that propose a specific kernel-related project. For commercial use there is a small license fee per installed system. Please contact Prof. Gutknecht gutknecht@inf.ethz.ch in this regard.
I think Oberon would have been more of a contender if it was a full Open Source project, although it may be too late now. Oh well.
> We need less taxes and less stupid waste, not more taxes.
This discussion is not fundamentally about how many tax dollars come in. It is about how taxes are collected, which is mostly orthogonal.
Not taxing transactions that are electronically mediated creates one set of economic effects (or distortions, if you will); not taxing mail order does as well.
Taxing transactions between different levels of the supply chain favors vertically integrated organizations, but that's whole 'nother can of worms....
They just use a heatsink on the CPU daughter card because there's a big fan in the rear of the case pointed at it. Still a CPU fan, just not directly attached.
> I suppose Microsoft could, say something like "If you ship those Browser PCs without an MS OS, we will increase your MS license fees." That would be corporate suicide, given MS's current legal situation.
This is a good statement to study for those opposed to the government anti-trust action. When this case is over, people will claim that whatever remedies are enforced were not really needed because of announcements like this. Yes, Microsoft claims that the landscape of computing and licensing is changing. But a good part of that *is* that Microsoft is under scrutiny. Without the ongoing legal action you can be certain that Microsoft *would* be using threats against the hardware vendors.
> Run-of-the-mill application programmers shouldn't need to be writing GUI code at all (too damn complex).
Things that spit out HTML are GUI code too. They're just writing to a constrained, high-level UI toolkit. The more client-side scripting you add the more you get back to the same old hard problems from traditional low-level AWT/Tk/whatever apps.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you love it when two "Score: 2" people have a long conversation with each other that gradually gets more and more off-topic?
I get all kinds of weird stuff at nop@nop.com; my friend who has ben@ben.com does too.
One nice thing about this situation is plausible deniability. I mean, who's to say that I'm the person who registered for those 724 quasi-legal web sites? And "I"'ve been booted from geocities and Excite many many times...one more can't hurt, right?
I'm not really interested in listening to find out...
Why, the first sentence of the second paragraph of section 3 of the GPL, of course:
Clearly if you're saving the unobfuscated version of the code for yourself, it's not the preferred form of the work for modifying.Sure they do. Try searching for "linux server" and you get back a text-only ad for DigitalNation at the top.
I think Google is making an enormous mistake by using Linux as their OS-of-choice. Something more robust, such as Java or even Python,
Sure, Java already does many OS-like things. Python doesn't, tho. Strangely enough, google is widely known for using Python already....
You think SPARC is tough, try MIPS....
(...and let's not forget S/370 and SH...)
This is wonderful---all the Palm spin in one place. But we're (mostly) Linux people, right? Aren't we immune to software marketing spin? After all, much of the following sounds strangely familiar...
Those are all great arguments against Linux as well.
OK, on to some better ones.
OK, now on to their evaluation questions. I'm going to divide up Palm operations into three notional organizations. Palm-HW builds the Palm-branded hardware like the Palm V. Palm-Opsys implements PalmOS...and also the applications bundled with it, like Address Book. Palm-Desktop builds the PC/Mac software that works with the device.
I'm going to elide the feature list because they seem to be going for parity with CE rather than superiority.
Jay
That's a great question! We should go ask AOL why they have a button in AOL Instant Messenger that essentially says
Quoting Richard Bartle, from Early MUD History:
I don't see a real availability date or a price. If one of the previous posters is correct, the 75G drives are going straight to big manufacturers.
Well, maybe that's not so bad. Right now nobody can get even the 34G IBM drives (or the 40G Maxtors) so 75G drives may take some pressure off the smaller drives.
Yeah, that's understandable. There's a pretty high troll rate around here, so you might get some flaming, and you've already seen the suspicion :-)
Do you have "admin privileges" on this site? I can't prove to you who I am, without saying more about myself than I care to say, but I can email you privately with my bona fides. I would really appreciate it if you could help me.
I don't have admin privs. As it happens, I'm a lucky winner of the moderation lottery today; that just lets me change the score of up to five articles, but it doesn't let me delete them. Most of the time I don't even look at articles with a score below 2, so I would have missed this whole exchange. Honestly, the level of collective belief in unauthenticated, 0-score anonymous postings is so low that there probably isn't much to worry about for small unconfirmable info leaks.
On that note, I'm not convinced that you're who you say you are *anyway*, even with your admission. I'm still writing back to you because I'm feeling charitable today. But convincing me of your identity doesn't do you any good.
The right place to take up this matter is with the site owners. See the first paragraph of the About Page; there's contact info for each of them off their home pages. That's who your authentication and credentials really will matter to.
I give up. You're not registered as an attorney in either New York or Washington. What do you do, anyway?
please Please PLEASE do not confuse "I can read the source code for Product Foo" with "Product Foo is Open Source". I can read the source code for Java, but I'd be in a world of pain if I did anything with it that Sun didn't like. Especially if I wanted to sell it.
IBM just dumped their stock of WinCE subnotebooks too. Interestingly, at $200-300, the Workpad z50 is selling like hotcakes.
Display PostScript is actually rather limiting this day and age. Let me say that I don't know if PostScript level 3 fixed any of these issues, but so far as level 1 and 2 go:
PostScript couldn't support RGB images.
Not true. DPS supports RGB color spaces; PS Level 2 adds CMYK, some CIE models, and indexed.
PostScript couldn't layer objects. You can't just layer a 50% magenta square over a 50% cyan square and hope for a 50% red square.
Well, the NeXT had alpha....
PostScript also couldn't really handle bitmapped images that gracefully. There are so many headers that EPS's of bitmapped graphics are significantly larger than any other file format.
This isn't an issue for Display PostScript, and for Level 2 the image size increase isn't that bad. EPS is the wrong format for bitmapped graphics anyway.
But looking to the future, Apple was quite smart to drop DPS for a PDF based model.
Especially after they couldn't get Adobe to give them the license price point they wanted for DPS....
At least there are PRICES for the 3ilinux box. There seems to be some kind of taboo against publishing PC104 component prices.
The natural solution, for a grand public good such as this, is to let the government set the protocol, and run the server. For the US, this wouldn't even be a wild stretch of the constitution; for it's just a natural extension of the Post Office.
Email works without a central point of control, aside from DNS. Why should instant messaging and presence be any different?
This is incorrect. I remember getting really EXCITED about the release of KA9Q user-mode networking for early Linux. Kernel-mode networking took a bit longer to arrive, but Linux 0.12 was very useful even without it.
> We need less taxes and less stupid waste, not more taxes.
This discussion is not fundamentally about how many tax dollars come in. It is about how taxes are collected, which is mostly orthogonal.
Not taxing transactions that are electronically mediated creates one set of economic effects (or distortions, if you will); not taxing mail order does as well.
Taxing transactions between different levels of the supply chain favors vertically integrated organizations, but that's whole 'nother can of worms....
> But Linux? It's only an operating system, it can't deprave, corrupt, or otherwise harm the young and impressionable.
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense." -- E W Dijkstra.
They just use a heatsink on the CPU daughter card because there's a big fan in the rear of the case pointed at it. Still a CPU fan, just not directly attached.
> I suppose Microsoft could, say something like "If you ship those Browser PCs without an MS OS, we will increase your MS license fees." That would be corporate suicide, given MS's current legal situation.
This is a good statement to study for those opposed to the government anti-trust action. When this case is over, people will claim that whatever remedies are enforced were not really needed because of announcements like this. Yes, Microsoft claims that the landscape of computing and licensing is changing. But a good part of that *is* that Microsoft is under scrutiny. Without the ongoing legal action you can be certain that Microsoft *would* be using threats against the hardware vendors.
Things that spit out HTML are GUI code too. They're just writing to a constrained, high-level UI toolkit. The more client-side scripting you add the more you get back to the same old hard problems from traditional low-level AWT/Tk/whatever apps.