Active Waba development on Newton ensures future
on
Newton Won't Die
·
· Score: 1
There is a development group working on a port of Waba for the Newton. Waba is a Java'ish environment that is aimed at small platforms like PDA's. By porting this environment to the Newton, this group is making continued development on the Newton feasible for those who can't get the old Newton Development software. It also bouys up Newton development by providing an expanding market for the resulting software to the developer because the code will work on many other platforms (and PDA's) as well. In addition most third party Waba software that was written by those who aren't necessarily targeting the Newton platform, will, nonetheless, work on the Newton.
Unfortunately, this wonderful work is not much good to me because my third, and only functional Newton is just barely functional. It is so delicate that moving it around causes complete system failure. It's fine on my desktop, but I can't take it with me, which defeats the purpose. of having a PDA! Getting yet another replacement has become increasingly difficult and expensive. Consequently, I've switched to an iPAQ running the SavaJe operating sytem. At least that supports a FULL J2SE (Java) environment so there are lots of applications that I can run on it.
Best of luck to those WabaNewtDev folks out there. If you're a Newton enthusiast, you should definitely consider supporting these folks. They do great stuff!
Unfortunately, Rendezvous doesn't fix many of my pressing networking problems. Apple should definitely be bitch-slapped for their claims of networking interoperabiltiy when SMB works if you have a newtwork server, but not if you're using peer to peer networking! I think that far more home users have peer to peer networking rather than have some network server sitting in a closet. Consequently, I can't connect to any of the other machines on my network that use SMB.
My other machines also can't connect to my Mac because the 'Windows Sharing' insists that you add a user name for each Windows user who you want to allow connections from. However, most of my other systems run such things under the user name 'nobody', which you can't add to the 'Accounts' preferences. Even if I come up with other user names, each one has to be manually added one at a time, which is a real pain. Even then, my OS/2 and eComStation boxes refuse to connect with my mac.
The DNS-less stuff doesn't work either. It doesn't find any of my other machines. All I want is a nice simple host table . On Linux or OS/2 I could easily add all of my host table entries in under a minute. Unfortunately, Mac OS X doesn't support the host table except in console mode. Instead there's NetInfo and a 98 page document that that you need to read to understand the intricacies of NetInfo, but doesn't actually mention how to map hosts to IP addresses! I'm really tired of typing in IP addresses that start with 192.168.0! Please, someone, tell me I'm an idiot and have missed the obious solution, I'd love to see a solution to this. While you're at it, have a look at my MacOSXQuestions page and tell me that I'm all wrong and that there are simple solutions to my Mac OS X problems... please.
Most of the discussion so far breaks down into either how to sneak commercials in some other way or how to convert to a variety of Pay-For-Content schemes. However, what seems to be missing from the discussion is that commercials are a corrupting influence on our society and we would be much better off without them. I'm not saying it will save our souls, but just about any PFC scheme has the potential to improve our lives as a whole.
Sure this sounds a little extreme, but readers of/. are probably familiar with all sorts of lies that content providers are willing to tell us because it suits the business needs of their sponsors. Examples abound:
We saw what happened when an investigative journalism team finally pointed out the dangers of side impact on certain trucks despite years of out of court settlements with gag orders. Their network was nearly shut down, they were discredited and the public was fooled.
We've seen that the primary late night entertainment shows are just big infomercials for movies and books, but have no real content of their own.
We've discovered that many shows that appear to be educational or documentary shows, are in fact created as a marketting ploy to make some other product appear better (think of movies like Twister or Atlantis and drugs).
many many more...
It's not that these folks are necessarily evil, it's just that the business interests tend to pervert the actual content itself to what suits the advertisers rather than the viewers of the content. The result is that the content you see, whether it's pure entertainment, education or news, is distorted and even contains outright misleading information about important things. This cannot have a positive effect on our society even if it is merely the trivialization of important issues.
This corruption is not just a subtle influence on our society. It affects the actual politics of the nation. We all know that it's very difficult for an honest polititian to get elected. The popular myth is that it's the money that corrupts politics. This is certainly no news flash, but a polititian without money is unlikely to win against one who does. Since getting money usually entails sucking up to those who have it politics is inherently corrupt. However, it's not really the money that corrupts things IMHO. The only reason polititians need money to run for office is to ADVERTISE so that their constituents can decide who to vote for. Commercials are the source of political corruption, not the money needed to buy them.
If television became a PFC medium, then everything would change for the better. As well as having to produce content that the viewers actually like, polititians would no longer have the option of spending $500,000 a minute to show you how photogenic they are and why their oponents are jerks. Instead, they'd have to actually convice the news media that their ideas are worthy of reporting to an audiece that will be increasingly fussy about the quality of their news because they have to pay for it. Also, that very same news media will no longer have to bow down to the advertizers, who are often the same folks who were paying the polititians in the first place. The news may even find itself under pressure from their customers, the viewers, not the advertisers, to report the political news on it's merrit.
So, pick any one of the many schemes proposed above, just make sure it isn't one of the ones that manages to just find another way for commercials to corrupt us and our world!
In addition, experience shows that J2EE application optimization is not as straight forward as other Java applications, so it is easy to get radically different performance results from a servlet with only minor tweaks. There was a wonderful presenation at JavaOne 2002 San Francisco about servlet optimization (link for atendees only). Among other things, the author demonstrated. a simple 6 line "Hello World" servlet that is written in standard style, yet can be made to run 3x faster with only minor tweaks. He also shows that testing under load reveals that servlets can behave much differently under load and that the only way to really write fast and reliable servlets is to write them as you normally would and then test them mercilessly.
My conclusion is that you can't believe any of those published bechmarks, they're mostly biased marketting crap (everybody's benchmark seems to show their product is fastest). What you really need to do is load up multiple servers and configure them to do what you need them to do and test them under load to see how they perform in your environment. I know it's not what you want to hear, but since there are so many features that have varying performance, it's the only way to really find out.
Tomcat 4.0.x is the latest and greatest. From what I can tell and have read on the various mailing lists, it is a significant performance improvement over the older Tomcat 3.x line. Heck, even the Jetty folks acknowledge that Tomcat 4 is almost as fast a Jetty;)
If you want something that actually is a development tool with a built-in Servlet Container, then check out Simplicity Enterprise. It uses a drag-and-drop metaphor that is much easier than Eclipse. Since it has a built-in Jetty server (the same one used by JBoss) with Execution-On-The-Fly(TM) technology you can test as you develop without having to re-compile! Definitely checck out the video
Also if you're using a wheel mouse on Linux with IMWheel (IMPS/2), then the Belkin switches will mess up the mouse severely when you switch. Typically, once you switch back, the pointer will be stuck in the corner. Moving the mouse will move the pointer a short distance from the corner, randomly register button clicks and snap the mouse back to the corner! On Caldera Linux, it's the upper right hand corner and on Red Hat Linux, it's the lower left. In either case, it makes the machine practically unusable.
If you know your keyboard shortcuts, you can shut down X and restart it and everything will be fine. Naturally this isn't a good solution, but the other day, I discovered that if you simply switch to one of the virtual terminals (ctrl-shift-F1, or F2 through 6) and then switch back to X (ctrl-shift-F7 or 9 on some systems) then you can get back control of the mouse without having to shut down X.
The Belkin KVM also causes problems with OS/2, but it only loses scroll information, so it's not critical. You have to restart the Work Place Shell or reboot to get it working again.
These are fairly serious problems that make the Belkin KVM's effectively useless under certain configurations.
Actually, most of the KVM's I've used have this as an unintended feature. It can cause real problems because there are several situations where the KVM can get messed up and you can't control any of the machines. The only recourse is a reset of the KVM, but pulling the plug doesn't do that because it gets residual power from the keyboard and mouse connections to the running machines!
The only safe solution is to physically unplug ALL of the machines from the KVM, then power it down, power it back up and then plug all the cables back in.
The only other choice is to shutdown all of the computers and then power cycle the KVM, but of course since you don't have control of the machines, they can't be shut down nicely (in most cases). This is really not a good solution.
If you're using a UPS, make sure the KVM is plugged into it too because if the KVM loses power, but any of the machines on th KVM don't then you could experience the problems I've just described.
What I'd really like to see is a modular KVM. You know snap however many you need together like lego.
It would also be great if they could make them two dimmentional so that you could have more than one se t of keyboard, monitor and mouse and switch any machine to any monitor. I know it sounds strange, but at work, I had six computers on my desk and two monitors. The main machine went to one monitor and the rest to a KVM and the other monitor. That was great most of the time, but occasionally, I needed to see two of the machines that were on the KVM at the same time and even though I had a KVM and two monitors, I had to plug things in manually to get what I wanted.
The quality degrades for the machines that are furthest down the line
It is very difficult to set all of the volumes so that each machine sounds the same at the end and attempting to change the volume of any single machine has similar problems
If one of the machines has USB sound, it can't be included
While I applaud Bruce's intentions, I doubt that what he's doing will be reported to the public in a way that helps the cause.
I'm sure the RIAA PR folks have already prepared the press release that most media will repeat verbatim when/if Bruce is arrested. The evening after the arrest, there will be a 15 second mention on the nightly news about some wacko, hacker or computer pirate being arrested. I'm afraid that the average person will have no idea what's really going on... especially since the supporters of the DMCA are the same people who control the media!
The Any Browser Campaign has been around for a while to help with this. Read their stuff, it's sane and helpful. Follow their guidelines and write polite, informative email messages to the webmasters of non-conformant web sites. Include a link to the W3C's Validator along with a comment on how many HTML DTD violations their page has.
Follow through on your own site and add an AnyBrowser button and a W3C Valid HTML button to the footer of all of your pages.
Finally, here's a web page that I found this weekend that really does seem to be "yearning for the bad old days" is MenuScape. All you get from their site is a notice that you should be using IE! Although I wasn't as polite to them as the Any Browser Campaign suggested, I did point out that if they meet their customers expectations, the customers will be happy, but probably won't tell anyone. If they do stupid things like make their page IE only, then some disgruntled customer (no names mentioned) will probably out them on slashdot;). Don't be too mean to them because, now that I've tested my link on the preview of this post, I've discovered that this message only appears on the first load. If you're persistent, they'll let you in even without IE.
I still use my Newton on a daily basis. It has great handwriting recognition and is far more convenient than thumb typing.
I find it very sad that most PDA stylus experiences came from the Palm OS world where an inferior handwriting recognition technology has given them the impression that handwriting recognition is slow, cumbersome, inacurrate and unreliable. Even more disturbing is that most people seem to be stuck with that impression and are willing to give up on this technology when it has so much more potential. It's disheartening to think that by the time somebody comes up with a PDA that is as capable as my Newton, that it probably won't have handwriting recognition because the public will have rejected the technology based on some early failures.
By the way, I do know the history of Grafiti and its use on the first generation Newtons that had horrible handwriting recognition. I also acknowledge that one of the primary reasons (among many many others) for the failure of the Newton was that it was too expensive due to the extreme computing demands required by handwriting recognition and that the correpsonding success of the Palm was that it found a way to get most of the advantages of handwriting recognition by using a less computationally intensive approach known as Grafiti. Grafiti had it's place, but we have the power now, to do much more.
Please don't abandon this fantastic technolgy because of some bad past experiences and the lack of a current successor to the Newton. If users demand it, we can have it.
Although there are IDEs out there-- Metrowerks, for instance-- that don't rely on this crutch, even those environments rarely have significant added functionality vs. CLI tools
The RAD tool that my company makes (see bio for a link) adds significant functionality that you can't get with CLI tools. For example you don't need to recompile to see your results! The application runs as you're creating it... that whole edit, compile, test sequence just becomes modify, glance-to-test, modify some more etc...
Also, building the GUI front-end with our tool is dramatically faster than doing it by hand. Since it's functioning as you build it, you get immediate feedback about what works and what doesn't work. Even if you don't want to use the Code Sourcerer(TM) to generate code and all of the other extra features we provide, the ability to create and test a GUI so quickly makes the tool worth while.
On the other hand, I will admit that we still use CLI's to do some of our work. For example, when you finally finish your application and it's time to ship it off to your customer, our tool uses javac to compile it and jar to package it, but this is when you're all done with development. You don't actually need to compile till the very end.
We also improve the way that existing CLI's work. jdb is really unpleasant to use from the command line. Most people don't bother because it's so awkward. This means that most users are doing the old 1960's style debugging via println's and completely miss out on the advantages of more modern debugging techniques (though with the Execution-On-The-Fly(TM) feature mentioned earlier, our users don't have as much need for a debugger). However, by automating the use of jdb and organizing the output in a more useful way, we make it much more compelling to actually use the debugger.
One final point that's worth considering is that the fact that a GUI tool uses CLI is actually an advantage. It means, among other things, that if there are any limiations of your GUI tool, then you still have real source code that you can manipulate with CLI tools that can provide extra flexibilty. It also makes it easier to integrate with third-party tools such as source archive tools.
Some would argue that features like fontifyingMAKE your text editor a visual tool! Furthermore, additions like keyword completion, code folding and compiling from within the editor really means that you're not using a plain text editor... you're using a visual tool that merely lacks a GUI layout tool. So, it really depends on your definition of a GUI Dev Tool.
Of course, this isn't a complaint. I've been a huge fan of XEmacs for many years and have recently switched to using JEdit for most of my development work. These GUI Dev tools really speed up my work. On the other hand, for quick projects and any GUI development, I use the RAD tool that my company produces (see bio) because it's much faster and more accurate than doing it by hand using a hopped up text editor.
That's because most of the GUI tools out there are just fancy editors with a suite of tools built into them. There are tools (the one the company I work for produces being one of them) that can really make writing code easier, faster and more accurate.
Of course, I am a little biased since I work for a company that makes a RAD tool, but I'll spare you the advertisment here... see my bio for the link;)
Almost all modems past the 14.4KBps days had voice capability, so you've likely got everthing you need for a really sophisticated answering machine with voice-mail, fax and lots of other goodies. That's what I use my old '486 for.
It's definitely up to the task and doesn't use any cycles on my main computer.
Since it was all software controlled, I have features that no regular answering machine had, such as emailing call lists to my work address, paging me for certain calls and providing different responses to different callers based on a Caller-ID and storing years worth of messages.
Does this have any effect on Qode (www.qode.com)? I hope not, I still haven't finished hacking the Qoder (http://www.markcrocker.com/~mcrocker/Computer/Qod er.shtml).
The Qode folks have a much more sensible business model, a much more useful product, if only because you can take it with you, and a much better attitude (they're trying to get an SDK released for Qode). I hope they don't go the way of DC.
The more obviously affected product might be the Cross Convergence Pen (http://www.cross.com/cross/conv-faq.html
). It is much slicker than the Qoder and has more memory and connects to a more reasonable interface, but it costs WAY too much and uses a nasty protocol. I haven't really started hacking hacking it yet and the body of the pen is already started to crack. I hope these guys hook up with Qode or do something else with the product other than just abandon it.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a development group working on a port of Waba for the Newton. Waba is a Java'ish environment that is aimed at small platforms like PDA's. By porting this environment to the Newton, this group is making continued development on the Newton feasible for those who can't get the old Newton Development software. It also bouys up Newton development by providing an expanding market for the resulting software to the developer because the code will work on many other platforms (and PDA's) as well. In addition most third party Waba software that was written by those who aren't necessarily targeting the Newton platform, will, nonetheless, work on the Newton.
Unfortunately, this wonderful work is not much good to me because my third, and only functional Newton is just barely functional. It is so delicate that moving it around causes complete system failure. It's fine on my desktop, but I can't take it with me, which defeats the purpose. of having a PDA! Getting yet another replacement has become increasingly difficult and expensive. Consequently, I've switched to an iPAQ running the SavaJe operating sytem. At least that supports a FULL J2SE (Java) environment so there are lots of applications that I can run on it.
Best of luck to those WabaNewtDev folks out there. If you're a Newton enthusiast, you should definitely consider supporting these folks. They do great stuff!
Unfortunately, Rendezvous doesn't fix many of my pressing networking problems. Apple should definitely be bitch-slapped for their claims of networking interoperabiltiy when SMB works if you have a newtwork server, but not if you're using peer to peer networking! I think that far more home users have peer to peer networking rather than have some network server sitting in a closet. Consequently, I can't connect to any of the other machines on my network that use SMB.
My other machines also can't connect to my Mac because the 'Windows Sharing' insists that you add a user name for each Windows user who you want to allow connections from. However, most of my other systems run such things under the user name 'nobody', which you can't add to the 'Accounts' preferences. Even if I come up with other user names, each one has to be manually added one at a time, which is a real pain. Even then, my OS/2 and eComStation boxes refuse to connect with my mac.
The DNS-less stuff doesn't work either. It doesn't find any of my other machines. All I want is a nice simple host table . On Linux or OS/2 I could easily add all of my host table entries in under a minute. Unfortunately, Mac OS X doesn't support the host table except in console mode. Instead there's NetInfo and a 98 page document that that you need to read to understand the intricacies of NetInfo, but doesn't actually mention how to map hosts to IP addresses! I'm really tired of typing in IP addresses that start with 192.168.0! Please, someone, tell me I'm an idiot and have missed the obious solution, I'd love to see a solution to this. While you're at it, have a look at my MacOSXQuestions page and tell me that I'm all wrong and that there are simple solutions to my Mac OS X problems... please.
Most of the discussion so far breaks down into either how to sneak commercials in some other way or how to convert to a variety of Pay-For-Content schemes. However, what seems to be missing from the discussion is that commercials are a corrupting influence on our society and we would be much better off without them. I'm not saying it will save our souls, but just about any PFC scheme has the potential to improve our lives as a whole.
Sure this sounds a little extreme, but readers of /. are probably familiar with all sorts of lies that content providers are willing to tell us because it suits the business needs of their sponsors. Examples abound:
- We saw what happened when an investigative journalism team finally pointed out the dangers of side impact on certain trucks despite years of out of court settlements with gag orders. Their network was nearly shut down, they were discredited and the public was fooled.
- We've seen that the primary late night entertainment shows are just big infomercials for movies and books, but have no real content of their own.
- We've discovered that many shows that appear to be educational or documentary shows, are in fact created as a marketting ploy to make some other product appear better (think of movies like Twister or Atlantis and drugs).
- many many more...
It's not that these folks are necessarily evil, it's just that the business interests tend to pervert the actual content itself to what suits the advertisers rather than the viewers of the content. The result is that the content you see, whether it's pure entertainment, education or news, is distorted and even contains outright misleading information about important things. This cannot have a positive effect on our society even if it is merely the trivialization of important issues.This corruption is not just a subtle influence on our society. It affects the actual politics of the nation. We all know that it's very difficult for an honest polititian to get elected. The popular myth is that it's the money that corrupts politics. This is certainly no news flash, but a polititian without money is unlikely to win against one who does. Since getting money usually entails sucking up to those who have it politics is inherently corrupt. However, it's not really the money that corrupts things IMHO. The only reason polititians need money to run for office is to ADVERTISE so that their constituents can decide who to vote for. Commercials are the source of political corruption, not the money needed to buy them.
If television became a PFC medium, then everything would change for the better. As well as having to produce content that the viewers actually like, polititians would no longer have the option of spending $500,000 a minute to show you how photogenic they are and why their oponents are jerks. Instead, they'd have to actually convice the news media that their ideas are worthy of reporting to an audiece that will be increasingly fussy about the quality of their news because they have to pay for it. Also, that very same news media will no longer have to bow down to the advertizers, who are often the same folks who were paying the polititians in the first place. The news may even find itself under pressure from their customers, the viewers, not the advertisers, to report the political news on it's merrit.
So, pick any one of the many schemes proposed above, just make sure it isn't one of the ones that manages to just find another way for commercials to corrupt us and our world!
The problem seems to be that it is extremely difficult to benchmark such servers. Greg Wilkins, one of the primary authors of Jetty, explains the issues fairly clearly in a response to the Jetty Benchmark thread on the jetty-discuss list.
In addition, experience shows that J2EE application optimization is not as straight forward as other Java applications, so it is easy to get radically different performance results from a servlet with only minor tweaks. There was a wonderful presenation at JavaOne 2002 San Francisco about servlet optimization (link for atendees only). Among other things, the author demonstrated. a simple 6 line "Hello World" servlet that is written in standard style, yet can be made to run 3x faster with only minor tweaks. He also shows that testing under load reveals that servlets can behave much differently under load and that the only way to really write fast and reliable servlets is to write them as you normally would and then test them mercilessly.
My conclusion is that you can't believe any of those published bechmarks, they're mostly biased marketting crap (everybody's benchmark seems to show their product is fastest). What you really need to do is load up multiple servers and configure them to do what you need them to do and test them under load to see how they perform in your environment. I know it's not what you want to hear, but since there are so many features that have varying performance, it's the only way to really find out.
Tomcat 4.0.x is the latest and greatest. From what I can tell and have read on the various mailing lists, it is a significant performance improvement over the older Tomcat 3.x line. Heck, even the Jetty folks acknowledge that Tomcat 4 is almost as fast a Jetty ;)
If you want something that actually is a development tool with a built-in Servlet Container, then check out Simplicity Enterprise. It uses a drag-and-drop metaphor that is much easier than Eclipse. Since it has a built-in Jetty server (the same one used by JBoss) with Execution-On-The-Fly(TM) technology you can test as you develop without having to re-compile! Definitely checck out the video
Disclaimer: I used to work for Data Representations, Inc., so I'm a little biased :)
See my Re:Belkin Caveats for the solution to the lost scroll mouse on Linux.
Also if you're using a wheel mouse on Linux with IMWheel (IMPS/2), then the Belkin switches will mess up the mouse severely when you switch. Typically, once you switch back, the pointer will be stuck in the corner. Moving the mouse will move the pointer a short distance from the corner, randomly register button clicks and snap the mouse back to the corner! On Caldera Linux, it's the upper right hand corner and on Red Hat Linux, it's the lower left. In either case, it makes the machine practically unusable.
If you know your keyboard shortcuts, you can shut down X and restart it and everything will be fine. Naturally this isn't a good solution, but the other day, I discovered that if you simply switch to one of the virtual terminals (ctrl-shift-F1, or F2 through 6) and then switch back to X (ctrl-shift-F7 or 9 on some systems) then you can get back control of the mouse without having to shut down X.
The Belkin KVM also causes problems with OS/2, but it only loses scroll information, so it's not critical. You have to restart the Work Place Shell or reboot to get it working again.
These are fairly serious problems that make the Belkin KVM's effectively useless under certain configurations.
Actually, most of the KVM's I've used have this as an unintended feature. It can cause real problems because there are several situations where the KVM can get messed up and you can't control any of the machines. The only recourse is a reset of the KVM, but pulling the plug doesn't do that because it gets residual power from the keyboard and mouse connections to the running machines!
The only safe solution is to physically unplug ALL of the machines from the KVM, then power it down, power it back up and then plug all the cables back in.
The only other choice is to shutdown all of the computers and then power cycle the KVM, but of course since you don't have control of the machines, they can't be shut down nicely (in most cases). This is really not a good solution.
If you're using a UPS, make sure the KVM is plugged into it too because if the KVM loses power, but any of the machines on th KVM don't then you could experience the problems I've just described.
What I'd really like to see is a modular KVM. You know snap however many you need together like lego.
It would also be great if they could make them two dimmentional so that you could have more than one se t of keyboard, monitor and mouse and switch any machine to any monitor. I know it sounds strange, but at work, I had six computers on my desk and two monitors. The main machine went to one monitor and the rest to a KVM and the other monitor. That was great most of the time, but occasionally, I needed to see two of the machines that were on the KVM at the same time and even though I had a KVM and two monitors, I had to plug things in manually to get what I wanted.
While I applaud Bruce's intentions, I doubt that what he's doing will be reported to the public in a way that helps the cause.
I'm sure the RIAA PR folks have already prepared the press release that most media will repeat verbatim when/if Bruce is arrested. The evening after the arrest, there will be a 15 second mention on the nightly news about some wacko, hacker or computer pirate being arrested. I'm afraid that the average person will have no idea what's really going on... especially since the supporters of the DMCA are the same people who control the media!
The Any Browser Campaign has been around for a while to help with this. Read their stuff, it's sane and helpful. Follow their guidelines and write polite, informative email messages to the webmasters of non-conformant web sites. Include a link to the W3C's Validator along with a comment on how many HTML DTD violations their page has.
Follow through on your own site and add an AnyBrowser button and a W3C Valid HTML button to the footer of all of your pages.
Finally, here's a web page that I found this weekend that really does seem to be "yearning for the bad old days" is MenuScape. All you get from their site is a notice that you should be using IE! Although I wasn't as polite to them as the Any Browser Campaign suggested, I did point out that if they meet their customers expectations, the customers will be happy, but probably won't tell anyone. If they do stupid things like make their page IE only, then some disgruntled customer (no names mentioned) will probably out them on slashdot ;). Don't be too mean to them because, now that I've tested my link on the preview of this post, I've discovered that this message only appears on the first load. If you're persistent, they'll let you in even without IE.
I still use my Newton on a daily basis. It has great handwriting recognition and is far more convenient than thumb typing.
I find it very sad that most PDA stylus experiences came from the Palm OS world where an inferior handwriting recognition technology has given them the impression that handwriting recognition is slow, cumbersome, inacurrate and unreliable. Even more disturbing is that most people seem to be stuck with that impression and are willing to give up on this technology when it has so much more potential. It's disheartening to think that by the time somebody comes up with a PDA that is as capable as my Newton, that it probably won't have handwriting recognition because the public will have rejected the technology based on some early failures.
By the way, I do know the history of Grafiti and its use on the first generation Newtons that had horrible handwriting recognition. I also acknowledge that one of the primary reasons (among many many others) for the failure of the Newton was that it was too expensive due to the extreme computing demands required by handwriting recognition and that the correpsonding success of the Palm was that it found a way to get most of the advantages of handwriting recognition by using a less computationally intensive approach known as Grafiti. Grafiti had it's place, but we have the power now, to do much more.
Please don't abandon this fantastic technolgy because of some bad past experiences and the lack of a current successor to the Newton. If users demand it, we can have it.
Although there are IDEs out there-- Metrowerks, for instance-- that don't rely on this crutch, even those environments rarely have significant added functionality vs. CLI tools
The RAD tool that my company makes (see bio for a link) adds significant functionality that you can't get with CLI tools. For example you don't need to recompile to see your results! The application runs as you're creating it... that whole edit, compile, test sequence just becomes modify, glance-to-test, modify some more etc...
Also, building the GUI front-end with our tool is dramatically faster than doing it by hand. Since it's functioning as you build it, you get immediate feedback about what works and what doesn't work. Even if you don't want to use the Code Sourcerer(TM) to generate code and all of the other extra features we provide, the ability to create and test a GUI so quickly makes the tool worth while.
On the other hand, I will admit that we still use CLI's to do some of our work. For example, when you finally finish your application and it's time to ship it off to your customer, our tool uses javac to compile it and jar to package it, but this is when you're all done with development. You don't actually need to compile till the very end.
We also improve the way that existing CLI's work. jdb is really unpleasant to use from the command line. Most people don't bother because it's so awkward. This means that most users are doing the old 1960's style debugging via println's and completely miss out on the advantages of more modern debugging techniques (though with the Execution-On-The-Fly(TM) feature mentioned earlier, our users don't have as much need for a debugger). However, by automating the use of jdb and organizing the output in a more useful way, we make it much more compelling to actually use the debugger.
One final point that's worth considering is that the fact that a GUI tool uses CLI is actually an advantage. It means, among other things, that if there are any limiations of your GUI tool, then you still have real source code that you can manipulate with CLI tools that can provide extra flexibilty. It also makes it easier to integrate with third-party tools such as source archive tools.
Some would argue that features like fontifying MAKE your text editor a visual tool! Furthermore, additions like keyword completion, code folding and compiling from within the editor really means that you're not using a plain text editor... you're using a visual tool that merely lacks a GUI layout tool. So, it really depends on your definition of a GUI Dev Tool.
Of course, this isn't a complaint. I've been a huge fan of XEmacs for many years and have recently switched to using JEdit for most of my development work. These GUI Dev tools really speed up my work. On the other hand, for quick projects and any GUI development, I use the RAD tool that my company produces (see bio) because it's much faster and more accurate than doing it by hand using a hopped up text editor.
That's because most of the GUI tools out there are just fancy editors with a suite of tools built into them. There are tools (the one the company I work for produces being one of them) that can really make writing code easier, faster and more accurate.
Of course, I am a little biased since I work for a company that makes a RAD tool, but I'll spare you the advertisment here... see my bio for the link ;)
Almost all modems past the 14.4KBps days had voice capability, so you've likely got everthing you need for a really sophisticated answering machine with voice-mail, fax and lots of other goodies. That's what I use my old '486 for.
It's definitely up to the task and doesn't use any cycles on my main computer.
Since it was all software controlled, I have features that no regular answering machine had, such as emailing call lists to my work address, paging me for certain calls and providing different responses to different callers based on a Caller-ID and storing years worth of messages.
Does this have any effect on Qode (www.qode.com)? I hope not, I still haven't finished hacking the Qoder (http://www.markcrocker.com/~mcrocker/Computer/Qod er.shtml).
The Qode folks have a much more sensible business model, a much more useful product, if only because you can take it with you, and a much better attitude (they're trying to get an SDK released for Qode). I hope they don't go the way of DC.
The more obviously affected product might be the Cross Convergence Pen (http://www.cross.com/cross/conv-faq.html
). It is much slicker than the Qoder and has more memory and connects to a more reasonable interface, but it costs WAY too much and uses a nasty protocol. I haven't really started hacking hacking it yet and the body of the pen is already started to crack. I hope these guys hook up with Qode or do something else with the product other than just abandon it.