After surfing the site a little more, I ran across this news item, which was the most recent one on the site and seems to me to be of some significance to this story:
Wednesday, December 12, 2001
RAVEN Project closing - Paul
Raven team members,
It is with great regret that I must announce that the RAVEN Project is
shutting down. The numbers have caught up to the project. There just
aren't anymore resources available to for us to continue. At the end of the
year our lease expires and there is just enough money to cover that debt.
My financial position does not allow me the option of continuing any
further.
"But SUN *continues* to dump code into the proprietary JVM making it bigger and more bloated than ever before."
Not into the VM. Into the core API. There's a HUGE difference. Of course the two walk kinda hand in hand but that's like saying KDE and Gnome are in the Linux kernel.
"Java has real competition now. They are not the ONLY game on the block. Python and C# are going to give you a REAL run for your money SUN."
Umm, C# yes! Python, I don't think so!! Some other people would say Perl, but seriously, they are not in the same league if you talk about industry wide acceptance. C# and.NET will definitely give Java a run for their money though!
I don't see how being an IEEE standard has any direct correlation with success or failure of a language though. Visual Basic is not a standard of any kind and it's one of the most used programming languages / systems out there. Java is also hugely popular and is also not a standard. JavaScript hasn't become any more or less popular after ECMA made it a standard ("ECMA script"). Or if it's more used now, it's not because web designers would go "oh! it's an ECMA standard!". The list goes on with other technologies too.. Flash (as in web animations) for example.
"So, they way I see it, you have two options:"
[snip]
"2. *WIN* Open Source license the JVM. Yes... I know it is scarry but this is you ONLY choice."
Time to wake up! Java is doing just fine and even if Sun doesn't have a totally optimal strategy with it, you're living in la-la land if you seriously think that open source licensing the JVM is Sun's "only choice" (you even spelled only in all-caps!). The community process is working fine and Java is just getting wider adoption and acceptance every day. Most new cellular phones that are going to be released in Asia and Europe during 2002 and onwards will come with a JVM built in. More and more web servers and application servers run Java.
Open sourcing Mozilla did dick all for Netscape. Sure, it is going to produce a nice browser a year from now (five years down the road) when Mozilla completes, but as far as grabbing back market share and battling the competition, it has failed miserably. Check the logs of any major "neutral" web site and you'll see that Mozilla has completely marginal adoption. Neutral here means such sites where the main users aren't gear heads.
"Fine. I am just going to use C#."
I saw similar reactions when Microsoft came out with J++. People paniced, accused Sun of "destroying Java" and predicting that Java would be dead within a year, replaced by "Microsoft Java". This was around 1997 or 1998 or so.. Don't remember when exactly. Lots of people were talking about jumping ship. I guess it just goes to show that Sun and the Java developer community might have more of a clue than you think.
"Think about it: Should a guy browsing a German Web site from Japan be blocked because it's not after 11pm? Is that client time or server time? What about the reverse, a German guy browsing a Japanese Web site? This whole idea is not internally consistent"
Just beacause it's hard doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Note that I'm not for blocking. I'm just saying that just because something (say, fighting drugs) is hard doesn't mean you should just let it happen.
Obviously, it would be German time and client time. And for the case of the German guy browsing a Japanese web site, it would be no different than a German guy ordering drugs from Japan over the phone. Yes, it's very very tricky and technically just about impossible to control, but you can always make the law and then just leave it up to the companies with the servers to come up with a way to implement it so that they are within the law. You could have pages that ask what country you come from, just like there are these "You have to be above 18 to enter." type disclaimers. Of course you can get around it. You can also speed with your car and get away with it but that's not an excuse not to make a law like that.
Interesting how everyone is dissing Germany about this but fail to understand that the exact same thing is happening in most countries in the world when it comes to TV. All this really is, is that they are trying to extend existing laws to also cover the Internet, which totally makes sense if you already have laws like that in place! I mean, why would porn on TV at 6 in the evening (primetime for kids watching) be forbidden but porn on the Internet at the same time be ok? That's like having laws against speeding with cars but at the same time allowing speeding with motorcycles.
So the question is really about censoring as a whole. Should you forbid porn on TV (or violence or whatever else that is censored) or should you be allowed to air it at any time you want? When the question is asked like this, I'm pretty sure a lot more people don't find it as obviously wrong anymore. I imagine the majority of all parents want restrictions on airing time of porn on TV.
Then there's the whole issue about how you would do something like this from a technical perspective (you can't block kids from playing porn DVD's either, can you?) which is totally ridiculous.. But I guess if China and Singapore can pull it off technically then it should also be quite possible for Germany.
Personally I'm against all kind of censoring on media *where it's your choice* to watch something. Nobody is forcing you to go to www.persiankitty.com. Nobody is forcing you to turn on the Playboy channel. Nobody is forcing you to buy the magazine or the porn DVD.
"Been on a bus / train lately? SMS is BLOODY intrusive"
I ride the subway to and from work every day. SMS is usually two quiet short beeps whereas a phonecall is a 60 second ring while the person looks for the damn phone. Sure, some have more annoying SMS beeps and sure, some even have button beeps on but in 95% of the cases, they don't.
As a whole, I'd definitely say SMS is less intrusive!
This sounds a lot like JXTA.. For those who don't know about JXTA, it was originally a Sun Microsystems P2P framework project that has been released as open source (BSD license unless I'm mistaken badly). Judging by a quick scan, JXTA seems about 100x more advanced and mature as this project but I could be wrong. Can anyone who knows JXTA better confirm?
It's interesting that the people who have phones with text messaging find it extremely useful where as those who don't have it shrug it off with "I don't need no stinkin' text-messaging WAP shit", not even seeming to know what they are talking about, since WAP has absolutely nothing to do with text messaging and SMS messages.
Personally, I find SMS messages extremely convenient in very much the same way as email is convenient. It's a lot less intrusive than a phone call since it doesn't demand the receivers attention RIGHT NOW. It's quiet and more private, you can write and read SMS's anywhere without disturbing other people or other people disturbing you. You can use it for services. Send "FIND Joe Sixpack" to number 400 and you get the address and phone number of Joe Sixpack in return. Send "WEATHER Helsinki" and you get the latest weather forecast for the Helsinki area.
I worked in Singapore for six weeks last summer and it was extremely convenient to just bring my normal cell phone with me from Finland and everything working without any reconfiguration. Phone book entries, caller id, text messages, data. I used the phone to check my email with my Palm Pilot, Finnish news, Forumla 1 results riding home from work in a cab in the night etc.
I'm not saying that everything should be crammed into a cellular phone. Some things work better in a laptop or a PDA if you want it mobile. The point is that things like SMS and WAP, which are totally basic features of GSM phones, are quite useful and have their own place. Instead of silly "I don't need no stinkin' text messaging WAP shit on my phone" outbursts, you might want to try it out. You just might discover how nice it is and how well it works!
Like many people already have pointed out, lots of Nokia phones have had sliding front faces. The 81xx series, the 88xx series, the 71xx series, the 76xx series and possibly some American or Asia only models that I don't know about (for example the newly announced 6500 that is targeted for the Asian market only).
My dad still uses a several years old 8110 (known as "the banana") with a sliding front face and it has worked perfectly for him. Myself, I prefer to have as few moving parts as possible and I've seen Zauruses in Japan with the sliding keyboard and wasn't totally impressed.. If it's done right, it can work very well though.
:) Well, I didn't mean to come off sounding like an asshole. I'm from Finland and english is only my 3rd language so I don't pretend I'm the grammar police but "algorythm" really rubbed me the wrong way.:)
Well, this was a dream setup. I prefer CF because it doesn't suddenly break on you while on the road, it's completely quiet and easier to handle than a PCMCIA HD. Still, I had the PCMCIA slots there so you COULD use PCMCIA HD's if you wanted to.
Nice.. A little too big for my taste tho. Even the Sony Picturebook is smaller - and that's a notebook, not a "handheld" really.
Here's my version:
A5 sized (half of the article describes), screen only with virtual keyboard and touch screen with a GOOD metallic stylus (obviously softer material for the tip). WLAN, Bluetooth, GPRS and tri-band GSM (900, 1800 and 1900 MHz) plus HSCSD are all a must in my dream handheld, but I'll add to this that the antennas for all must be internal. Also, for the times when no wireless connectivity is available, a normal phone and LAN jack would be needed. Basically, as you can see, connectivity is priority #1.
Moving along, I'd throw out your hard drive and replace it with a set of compact flash slots - say 4 of them and let's say two PC card slots. In those, you could put hard drive's (IBM microdrives in the CF slots and higher capacity drives in the PC card slots). You could also slam in 4 1GB CF cards in those for a total of 4GB. This is less than the hard drive in the article, but remember that this is a *handheld* and that it has net connectivity so it can use a drive somewhere else, like on a file server.
The device would have at least 64MB of RAM and a Strong ARM CPU. If battery was no issue, I'd consider a Transmeta CPU instead but the ARM based CPU should be better for a device like this.
TFT is fine for me. I saw some TOTALLY kick ass EL-screens on an exhibition in Tokyo last month tho. Maybe one of those.. I'd have to look more closely at the power consumption cause I'd like to get at least 24 hour battery life from this thing.
The OS would sit in ROM. What the OS would be is a little unclear to me. You can forget Palm OS right away. Pocket PC (especially 2002) is *great* on iPAQ type devices but this one would be larger than that. Windows CE, which Pocket PC builds on, is quite nice and stable too, contrary to what you would normally hear on Slashdot. EPOC is a bitch to code for, so I think I'd skip that. For a device like this, I'd pick Linux, I think, but the GUI would have to be something custom made especially for this device because I haven't found any existing Linux GUI to be good for handhelds yet..:/
Speaking of GUI.. It would *NOT* be frame based.;)
I'm not going to argue over the 11%. It may or may not be true but let's assume it IS true for a minute.
A user spends most of his/her time writing emails and documents, surfing the net etc. where the computer more or less idles all of the time. Even if a certain operation is 11% slower, you can't extrapolate it over the course of the day and come up with a figure of 53 minutes. I'm sorry but that's just idiotic. Most users will lose a few seconds per day over this! If there's even a small increase in productivity due to other things like, let's say clearer and simplified dialogs, faster access to your documents due to thumbnails in the file manager or something similar, it MORE than makes up for the lost couple of seconds.
Articles like this are really pathetic. You know, you don't HAVE to post something negative about Microsoft EVERY day.
At my previous job, I implemented an experimental app that was inspired by RDF (Resource Description Framework) and triple stores.
In a triple store, you have objects that are defined by a set of properties. The word "triple" comes from the fact that you have triples of objects, properties and property values. For example, you could have a person; John Q, who has an age 37, a phone number 1234 and an employer Foo Ltd. Foo Ltd. in turn has a phone number 5678 and any number of other properties. This forms the following tripples: John Q --age--> 37, John Q --phone number--> 1234. John Q --employer--> Foo Ltd. Foo Ltd --phone number--> 5678.
When you look at these, you can see that Foo Ltd. is both the employer of John Q (a property value) but also an object in itself that is described by a set of properties. In RDF, the tripples form a graph that describes your data. The graph is typically serialized as XML.
At first, it would seem that this lends itself very well for relational databases. A row in a table would be the object to be described and columns are the properties. The intersection is the value. However, the problem - and strength of RDF - is that you can have any number of properties for an object. Basically, you could have any number of columns and sometimes, the property value is not just a value - it can be a database row in itself or even a set of rows.. or a set of values.
The app I wrote mapped arbitrary RDF files to relational databases and back as well as provided an API to perform queries on the data. The result of the queries were RDF graphs in themselves.
While this was quite cool, it turned out to be quite difficult to turn the query result graphs into meaningful stuff in a user interface. Also, queries on the RDF graphs could turn out to be extremely complex SQL queries... Most of these problems were eventually solved but the code wasn't used directly for any real world app, except heavily modified as a metadata database for a web publishing system.
Trium Mondo, Siemens XL45, Sagem are all Pocket PC. Nokia 90xx, 91xx and 92xx series and Ericsson 380 are EPOC. Qualcom PDQ is Palm OS. Motorola Acoompi 008 is proprietary.
Oh? Put them together? Like the Trium Mondo? Or the Nokia 90xx, 91xx and 92xx series? Or like the Siemens XL45? Or the Sagem phones? Or the Qualcom PDQ phones? Or the Ericsson 380? Or the Motorola Acoompi 008? What a great idea! Why didn't anoyone else think of that?:)
Do a search on iWalk on Google and you'll find an existing product with that name. The product is one that Wired covered a while back about some kind of artificial leg. It seems unlikely that Apple would use the name of an existing product.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,39262,00.ht ml
Are you talking about USING open source or DEVELOPING open source? In other words, using software or having a business model based on open source software?
I don't see many drawbacks with just using open source software. Lack of support and not being guaranteed fixes (being at the mercy of the guys who are just doing things because they have 'an itch to scratch') are some reasons I guess.
As far as basing your business on open source software, I see lots and lots of drawbacks. More or less, it's very hard or impossible to make decent money on open source software. Support just doesn't give you enough revenue. A small business with a talented but small crew (think of.. say.. Epic Games that makes the Unreal series of games as well as the Unreal 3D game engine) can make a bunch of money with closed source software. What if Epic Games open sourced their engine? How would they make as much money as they do now? Or even, how would they make any money *at all*?
I'm curious as to why you consider the Palm UI to be years ahead of the Pocket PC UI. I like the Palm launcher, the app groupings and the simplicity of that. Pocket PC has the "this is the stuff for today" approach and a start menu. Many vendors supply their own app launchers but they typically suck. As far as actual application UI's go, I find the Pocket PC *much* better than those in Palm apps. The Palm widgets are simply too limited. With a device with a fast CPU (unlike the Jornadas I've tried) Pocket PC is very responsive and nice to use. I can play mp3's while surfing over WLAN with my iPAQ and it works just great...
Woah! I'm totally impressed by the looks! That's by far the coolest looking PDA so far. Too bad it runs Palm OS, which unfortunately sucks. That's not flaimbait, it's a real observation based on facts. As much as we all hate Microsoft, the fact is that at the moment, Pocket PC (in particular now with Pocket PC 2002) is *YEARS* ahead of Palm OS.
I was in Japan two weeks ago and an interesting note from there was that Pocket PC wasn't in as strong a position there as it's here. The two most common PDA's were Sony CLIE's and Sharp Zaurus devices. The new Zauruses will run Linux and Tao Group's Java VM.. Looks like the Japanese are putting up a pretty good fight against Pocket PC. Let's hope that helps the innovation on all fronts in that arena!
"and an architecture which supports common plugins (Flash, SVG). OK, you can make an argument for Java Applets if something more complicated needs to be done on the machine, but downloading and running some other muppets native executable code (ActiveX) and running it with my priveledges - no way. I can do enough damage with my own code. If it's complicated, why isn't it running on the server? What ever happened to thin clients?"
Interesting. ActiveX *IS* that common architecture which supports common plugins. If you didn't know, ActiveX is how Flash, Shockwave and soon Sun's Java VM for IE (not the current plugin - the new one that they are working on that will directly work with applet tags) and all other plugins work on IE.
Why isn't it running on the server? Because stuff like Flash would be kinda slow if it ran on the server..:)
Slashdot Mirror
"..after all they've been making TOYS for years!"
The X-Box is made by Flextronics, not Microsoft, if that's what you were suggesting.
After surfing the site a little more, I ran across this news item, which was the most recent one on the site and seems to me to be of some significance to this story:
Wednesday, December 12, 2001
RAVEN Project closing - Paul
Raven team members,
It is with great regret that I must announce that the RAVEN Project is
shutting down. The numbers have caught up to the project. There just
aren't anymore resources available to for us to continue. At the end of the
year our lease expires and there is just enough money to cover that debt.
My financial position does not allow me the option of continuing any
further.
"But SUN *continues* to dump code into the proprietary JVM making it bigger and more bloated than ever before."
.NET will definitely give Java a run for their money though!
Not into the VM. Into the core API. There's a HUGE difference. Of course the two walk kinda hand in hand but that's like saying KDE and Gnome are in the Linux kernel.
"Java has real competition now. They are not the ONLY game on the block. Python and C# are going to give you a REAL run for your money SUN."
Umm, C# yes! Python, I don't think so!! Some other people would say Perl, but seriously, they are not in the same league if you talk about industry wide acceptance. C# and
I don't see how being an IEEE standard has any direct correlation with success or failure of a language though. Visual Basic is not a standard of any kind and it's one of the most used programming languages / systems out there. Java is also hugely popular and is also not a standard. JavaScript hasn't become any more or less popular after ECMA made it a standard ("ECMA script"). Or if it's more used now, it's not because web designers would go "oh! it's an ECMA standard!". The list goes on with other technologies too.. Flash (as in web animations) for example.
"So, they way I see it, you have two options:"
[snip]
"2. *WIN* Open Source license the JVM. Yes... I know it is scarry but this is you ONLY choice."
Time to wake up! Java is doing just fine and even if Sun doesn't have a totally optimal strategy with it, you're living in la-la land if you seriously think that open source licensing the JVM is Sun's "only choice" (you even spelled only in all-caps!). The community process is working fine and Java is just getting wider adoption and acceptance every day. Most new cellular phones that are going to be released in Asia and Europe during 2002 and onwards will come with a JVM built in. More and more web servers and application servers run Java.
Open sourcing Mozilla did dick all for Netscape. Sure, it is going to produce a nice browser a year from now (five years down the road) when Mozilla completes, but as far as grabbing back market share and battling the competition, it has failed miserably. Check the logs of any major "neutral" web site and you'll see that Mozilla has completely marginal adoption. Neutral here means such sites where the main users aren't gear heads.
"Fine. I am just going to use C#."
I saw similar reactions when Microsoft came out with J++. People paniced, accused Sun of "destroying Java" and predicting that Java would be dead within a year, replaced by "Microsoft Java". This was around 1997 or 1998 or so.. Don't remember when exactly. Lots of people were talking about jumping ship. I guess it just goes to show that Sun and the Java developer community might have more of a clue than you think.
"Actually, the US supreme court has made an official stand on this."
I agree that the Internet is like the press and not like TV.. However, the US supreme court rulings mean dick all in Germany.
"Think about it: Should a guy browsing a German Web site from Japan be blocked because it's not after 11pm? Is that client time or server time? What about the reverse, a German guy browsing a Japanese Web site? This whole idea is not internally consistent"
Just beacause it's hard doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Note that I'm not for blocking. I'm just saying that just because something (say, fighting drugs) is hard doesn't mean you should just let it happen.
Obviously, it would be German time and client time. And for the case of the German guy browsing a Japanese web site, it would be no different than a German guy ordering drugs from Japan over the phone. Yes, it's very very tricky and technically just about impossible to control, but you can always make the law and then just leave it up to the companies with the servers to come up with a way to implement it so that they are within the law. You could have pages that ask what country you come from, just like there are these "You have to be above 18 to enter." type disclaimers. Of course you can get around it. You can also speed with your car and get away with it but that's not an excuse not to make a law like that.
Interesting how everyone is dissing Germany about this but fail to understand that the exact same thing is happening in most countries in the world when it comes to TV. All this really is, is that they are trying to extend existing laws to also cover the Internet, which totally makes sense if you already have laws like that in place! I mean, why would porn on TV at 6 in the evening (primetime for kids watching) be forbidden but porn on the Internet at the same time be ok? That's like having laws against speeding with cars but at the same time allowing speeding with motorcycles.
So the question is really about censoring as a whole. Should you forbid porn on TV (or violence or whatever else that is censored) or should you be allowed to air it at any time you want? When the question is asked like this, I'm pretty sure a lot more people don't find it as obviously wrong anymore. I imagine the majority of all parents want restrictions on airing time of porn on TV.
Then there's the whole issue about how you would do something like this from a technical perspective (you can't block kids from playing porn DVD's either, can you?) which is totally ridiculous.. But I guess if China and Singapore can pull it off technically then it should also be quite possible for Germany.
Personally I'm against all kind of censoring on media *where it's your choice* to watch something. Nobody is forcing you to go to www.persiankitty.com. Nobody is forcing you to turn on the Playboy channel. Nobody is forcing you to buy the magazine or the porn DVD.
"Been on a bus / train lately? SMS is BLOODY intrusive"
I ride the subway to and from work every day. SMS is usually two quiet short beeps whereas a phonecall is a 60 second ring while the person looks for the damn phone. Sure, some have more annoying SMS beeps and sure, some even have button beeps on but in 95% of the cases, they don't.
As a whole, I'd definitely say SMS is less intrusive!
This sounds a lot like JXTA.. For those who don't know about JXTA, it was originally a Sun Microsystems P2P framework project that has been released as open source (BSD license unless I'm mistaken badly). Judging by a quick scan, JXTA seems about 100x more advanced and mature as this project but I could be wrong. Can anyone who knows JXTA better confirm?
It's interesting that the people who have phones with text messaging find it extremely useful where as those who don't have it shrug it off with "I don't need no stinkin' text-messaging WAP shit", not even seeming to know what they are talking about, since WAP has absolutely nothing to do with text messaging and SMS messages.
Personally, I find SMS messages extremely convenient in very much the same way as email is convenient. It's a lot less intrusive than a phone call since it doesn't demand the receivers attention RIGHT NOW. It's quiet and more private, you can write and read SMS's anywhere without disturbing other people or other people disturbing you. You can use it for services. Send "FIND Joe Sixpack" to number 400 and you get the address and phone number of Joe Sixpack in return. Send "WEATHER Helsinki" and you get the latest weather forecast for the Helsinki area.
I worked in Singapore for six weeks last summer and it was extremely convenient to just bring my normal cell phone with me from Finland and everything working without any reconfiguration. Phone book entries, caller id, text messages, data. I used the phone to check my email with my Palm Pilot, Finnish news, Forumla 1 results riding home from work in a cab in the night etc.
I'm not saying that everything should be crammed into a cellular phone. Some things work better in a laptop or a PDA if you want it mobile. The point is that things like SMS and WAP, which are totally basic features of GSM phones, are quite useful and have their own place. Instead of silly "I don't need no stinkin' text messaging WAP shit on my phone" outbursts, you might want to try it out. You just might discover how nice it is and how well it works!
Like many people already have pointed out, lots of Nokia phones have had sliding front faces. The 81xx series, the 88xx series, the 71xx series, the 76xx series and possibly some American or Asia only models that I don't know about (for example the newly announced 6500 that is targeted for the Asian market only).
My dad still uses a several years old 8110 (known as "the banana") with a sliding front face and it has worked perfectly for him. Myself, I prefer to have as few moving parts as possible and I've seen Zauruses in Japan with the sliding keyboard and wasn't totally impressed.. If it's done right, it can work very well though.
The problem isn't really that the password is empty. It would be just as bad with *any* default password. Remeber "scott" "tiger" on Oracle?
:) Well, I didn't mean to come off sounding like an asshole. I'm from Finland and english is only my 3rd language so I don't pretend I'm the grammar police but "algorythm" really rubbed me the wrong way. :)
"algorythms"
The word is "algorithm".
Well, this was a dream setup. I prefer CF because it doesn't suddenly break on you while on the road, it's completely quiet and easier to handle than a PCMCIA HD. Still, I had the PCMCIA slots there so you COULD use PCMCIA HD's if you wanted to.
Nice.. A little too big for my taste tho. Even the Sony Picturebook is smaller - and that's a notebook, not a "handheld" really.
:/
;)
Here's my version:
A5 sized (half of the article describes), screen only with virtual keyboard and touch screen with a GOOD metallic stylus (obviously softer material for the tip). WLAN, Bluetooth, GPRS and tri-band GSM (900, 1800 and 1900 MHz) plus HSCSD are all a must in my dream handheld, but I'll add to this that the antennas for all must be internal. Also, for the times when no wireless connectivity is available, a normal phone and LAN jack would be needed. Basically, as you can see, connectivity is priority #1.
Moving along, I'd throw out your hard drive and replace it with a set of compact flash slots - say 4 of them and let's say two PC card slots. In those, you could put hard drive's (IBM microdrives in the CF slots and higher capacity drives in the PC card slots). You could also slam in 4 1GB CF cards in those for a total of 4GB. This is less than the hard drive in the article, but remember that this is a *handheld* and that it has net connectivity so it can use a drive somewhere else, like on a file server.
The device would have at least 64MB of RAM and a Strong ARM CPU. If battery was no issue, I'd consider a Transmeta CPU instead but the ARM based CPU should be better for a device like this.
TFT is fine for me. I saw some TOTALLY kick ass EL-screens on an exhibition in Tokyo last month tho. Maybe one of those.. I'd have to look more closely at the power consumption cause I'd like to get at least 24 hour battery life from this thing.
The OS would sit in ROM. What the OS would be is a little unclear to me. You can forget Palm OS right away. Pocket PC (especially 2002) is *great* on iPAQ type devices but this one would be larger than that. Windows CE, which Pocket PC builds on, is quite nice and stable too, contrary to what you would normally hear on Slashdot. EPOC is a bitch to code for, so I think I'd skip that. For a device like this, I'd pick Linux, I think, but the GUI would have to be something custom made especially for this device because I haven't found any existing Linux GUI to be good for handhelds yet..
Speaking of GUI.. It would *NOT* be frame based.
I'm not going to argue over the 11%. It may or may not be true but let's assume it IS true for a minute.
A user spends most of his/her time writing emails and documents, surfing the net etc. where the computer more or less idles all of the time. Even if a certain operation is 11% slower, you can't extrapolate it over the course of the day and come up with a figure of 53 minutes. I'm sorry but that's just idiotic. Most users will lose a few seconds per day over this! If there's even a small increase in productivity due to other things like, let's say clearer and simplified dialogs, faster access to your documents due to thumbnails in the file manager or something similar, it MORE than makes up for the lost couple of seconds.
Articles like this are really pathetic. You know, you don't HAVE to post something negative about Microsoft EVERY day.
At my previous job, I implemented an experimental app that was inspired by RDF (Resource Description Framework) and triple stores.
In a triple store, you have objects that are defined by a set of properties. The word "triple" comes from the fact that you have triples of objects, properties and property values. For example, you could have a person; John Q, who has an age 37, a phone number 1234 and an employer Foo Ltd. Foo Ltd. in turn has a phone number 5678 and any number of other properties. This forms the following tripples: John Q --age--> 37, John Q --phone number--> 1234. John Q --employer--> Foo Ltd. Foo Ltd --phone number--> 5678.
When you look at these, you can see that Foo Ltd. is both the employer of John Q (a property value) but also an object in itself that is described by a set of properties. In RDF, the tripples form a graph that describes your data. The graph is typically serialized as XML.
At first, it would seem that this lends itself very well for relational databases. A row in a table would be the object to be described and columns are the properties. The intersection is the value. However, the problem - and strength of RDF - is that you can have any number of properties for an object. Basically, you could have any number of columns and sometimes, the property value is not just a value - it can be a database row in itself or even a set of rows.. or a set of values.
The app I wrote mapped arbitrary RDF files to relational databases and back as well as provided an API to perform queries on the data. The result of the queries were RDF graphs in themselves.
While this was quite cool, it turned out to be quite difficult to turn the query result graphs into meaningful stuff in a user interface. Also, queries on the RDF graphs could turn out to be extremely complex SQL queries... Most of these problems were eventually solved but the code wasn't used directly for any real world app, except heavily modified as a metadata database for a web publishing system.
No they do NOT all use Palm OS.
Trium Mondo, Siemens XL45, Sagem are all Pocket PC. Nokia 90xx, 91xx and 92xx series and Ericsson 380 are EPOC. Qualcom PDQ is Palm OS. Motorola Acoompi 008 is proprietary.
Oh? Put them together? Like the Trium Mondo? Or the Nokia 90xx, 91xx and 92xx series? Or like the Siemens XL45? Or the Sagem phones? Or the Qualcom PDQ phones? Or the Ericsson 380? Or the Motorola Acoompi 008? What a great idea! Why didn't anoyone else think of that? :)
Do a search on iWalk on Google and you'll find an existing product with that name. The product is one that Wired covered a while back about some kind of artificial leg. It seems unlikely that Apple would use the name of an existing product. http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,39262,00.ht ml
Are you talking about USING open source or DEVELOPING open source? In other words, using software or having a business model based on open source software?
I don't see many drawbacks with just using open source software. Lack of support and not being guaranteed fixes (being at the mercy of the guys who are just doing things because they have 'an itch to scratch') are some reasons I guess.
As far as basing your business on open source software, I see lots and lots of drawbacks. More or less, it's very hard or impossible to make decent money on open source software. Support just doesn't give you enough revenue. A small business with a talented but small crew (think of.. say.. Epic Games that makes the Unreal series of games as well as the Unreal 3D game engine) can make a bunch of money with closed source software. What if Epic Games open sourced their engine? How would they make as much money as they do now? Or even, how would they make any money *at all*?
I was talking about the next gen Sharp's.. From what I've heard, it will be Tao's VM.
I'm curious as to why you consider the Palm UI to be years ahead of the Pocket PC UI. I like the Palm launcher, the app groupings and the simplicity of that. Pocket PC has the "this is the stuff for today" approach and a start menu. Many vendors supply their own app launchers but they typically suck. As far as actual application UI's go, I find the Pocket PC *much* better than those in Palm apps. The Palm widgets are simply too limited. With a device with a fast CPU (unlike the Jornadas I've tried) Pocket PC is very responsive and nice to use. I can play mp3's while surfing over WLAN with my iPAQ and it works just great...
Woah! I'm totally impressed by the looks! That's by far the coolest looking PDA so far. Too bad it runs Palm OS, which unfortunately sucks. That's not flaimbait, it's a real observation based on facts. As much as we all hate Microsoft, the fact is that at the moment, Pocket PC (in particular now with Pocket PC 2002) is *YEARS* ahead of Palm OS.
I was in Japan two weeks ago and an interesting note from there was that Pocket PC wasn't in as strong a position there as it's here. The two most common PDA's were Sony CLIE's and Sharp Zaurus devices. The new Zauruses will run Linux and Tao Group's Java VM.. Looks like the Japanese are putting up a pretty good fight against Pocket PC. Let's hope that helps the innovation on all fronts in that arena!
"and an architecture which supports common plugins (Flash, SVG). OK, you can make an argument for Java Applets if something more complicated needs to be done on the machine, but downloading and running some other muppets native executable code (ActiveX) and running it with my priveledges - no way. I can do enough damage with my own code. If it's complicated, why isn't it running on the server? What ever happened to thin clients?"
:)
Interesting. ActiveX *IS* that common architecture which supports common plugins. If you didn't know, ActiveX is how Flash, Shockwave and soon Sun's Java VM for IE (not the current plugin - the new one that they are working on that will directly work with applet tags) and all other plugins work on IE.
Why isn't it running on the server? Because stuff like Flash would be kinda slow if it ran on the server..