The C64 was cheap, but it wasn't a piece of crap. Apples were *much* more expensive, and pretty much the least capable of the "big 3" of the time (Apple/Atari/C64). Ataris had a lot more capabilities than either of those, but they were 2X the price of a C64. However the real thing that damned Apple & Atari (esp. Atari) was not only was the C64 less than 1/2 the price of either, but it also was able to do 90%+ of what people wanted. (The C64 had only about 60% or so of the capabilities of an Atari, but if people decided that they didn't need/want those capabilities, then who cares?) (Memories from someone who programed all 3 systems. Man I wish that I'd never sold my copy of De Re Atari, for nostalga if nothing else.)
The problem in GTA is that someone who obsessive-compulsively spends the time to do the side missions both learns the controls better and also gains bonuses that make the game easier (+100 health, etc). This kills the game for someone who doesn't have much time to play.
I gave up on finishing GTA3 a long time ago. I recently gave up on VC, after failing in one mission for the 10th+ time. It's not that I'm bad at games (I'm usually good at them), but I just don't have the time to put in to learn the controls well enough.
There's no way that I'll buy SA unless they put in some kind of "old geezer" mode so that 30+ year old people like me can skip things and at least be able to finish the game without spending so much time at it we lose our jobs/social life.
"Do you see this as a clear sing, that Microsofts Pocket PC is slowly winning the PDA operating system war? Or is it just that Sony couldn't turn Palm OS in to the media OS it wanted? Or perhaps something else?"
I take it as a sign that since everyone is losing money selling PDAs, and the market is shrinking, that Sony decided they could spend that money better somewhere else.
It's also not like they don't cover all the functionality of a PDA either. With smartphones, the soon-to-be-out PSP, and their palmtop WinXP computers, why do they need PDAs?
It's not the number they were selling, it's the profit they were making. Or, more correctly, the lack of it.
NO ONE is making money selling PDAs. Combine this with a SHRINKING market, and why would any sane company want to keep shipping PDAs? At this rate, the entire PDA market will be gone in 3 years... (To be replaced by smartphones and palmtop XP computers.)
In the US, PalmOS is the leading Smartphone OS. Sales of the Treo600 have been so huge that they are beating Symbian and MS Smartphone combined, and so huge that Palm can't produce them fast enough to meet demand. (The Treo600 is practically non-existant in Europe.)
The hard cost to developer's is equipment and bandwidth (but they'd likely purchase that stuff anyway...).
The soft cost to developer's is the time that they spend. Time isn't free. If you spend time developing OSS, then you don't have it for anything else. This is call an opportunity cost.
What can be worse for developers in general, is having managers get the idea that development doesn't have a cost. If that idea becomes common among managers, then salaries among working developers will take a BIG hit. (ie, you can't keep giving away something for free and still expect people to think it has great value... Also, when judging value, people almost always look at the up front cost, and not the expenses after that.)
"The act of taking notes and drawing on the chalkboard is way over rated."
Yes and no.
I used to be a college instructor (CS, currently making a lot more money in engineering). During the first few weeks of the first programming class (C lang), I always made the students type in the programs instead of just distributing them over the network. Some of the students thought I was sadistic... But typing in the programs forced them to think about what was going on, instead of just having them space out in the back of class.
Most people learn by doing. A powerpoint slideshow doesn't force them to do anything, so nothing ends up sinking in very well.
Anyone play the old Atari 8-bit game Shamus? Sort of like Bezerk!, but with much less maneuvering space, electrified walls, tons of enemies shooting tons of shots, keys and locks (so you'd have to repeat maze sections), a more deadly 'evil otto' type guy, and tons of bullets flying at you, so many that you often had to shoot them out of the air just to make room to dodge the rest. It took hours to reach the end, you had only a limited number of guys (with new guys at bonus point levels), and no save. I finished it once, and was twitching for hours afterwords.
1) Most developers are on the PalmSource hosted newsgroups. There is also escribe, much better books out, and much better OS docs from PalmSource out, all which reduce the need to post.
2) The Palm software marketplace is pretty mature and *very* competitive, which acts as a deterrent. This also leads many developers to think the grass looks greener with PPC/Symbian/Java.
3) The docs were much better back then than many dev environments I've seen, and now they're better yet.
4) If it's not broke, why should they fix it? Remember, these are volunteers keeping prc-tools going.
5) You just need to fax a page in and wait a few days. Anymore, I find debugging with real devices to work much better.
Things are definitely getting better. However the Palm software market has gotten *much* harder to break into, and there are too many devs that make something decent, but unpolished, who then just post it on Handango and PalmGear and then expect for the checks to start rolling in (and then start bitching when they don't...). New entrants tend to get lost in the crowd, even if they have something exceptional.
Palm comes out with new units twice a year. That's a *long* way away from every other week. (Where in the heck did you, and the moderators, get the idea that this is true?)
Palm's outlet store is only cheap because they are open box refurbs. (ie, much like you'd get off of ebay...)
I've got 3 T3s, no drift. With touchscreens, if you get a lemon, you'll always have problems, and it's tough for the manufactuer to weed out all the bad touchscreens.
Underclocking does increase battery life, but it's not dramatic. The best I've heard is adding about 45 min. to the battery life. The backlight definitely uses most of the power.
PalmOS6 CAN have apps that run in the background. The limitation is that they must be specifically written do do so (they must spawn a background thread). In contrast, PalmOS6 multitasking uses a lot fewer resources than PPC, but any program can be multitasked on a PPC.
There are also "sliplets", which will allow a background program to grab a slice of the screen for updates. (ie, see results from 2 programs running at once, instead of needed to switch screens.)
If PalmOne wanted to, they probably could be shipping PalmOS6 devices right now. And shipping them with no PalmOS6 software... At the start of the year most large Palm software houses got ahold of the PalmOS6 dev stuff, but it still will take them until the 2nd half of this year before most can bring stuff out. (A straight port isn't hard or long, but if you don't take advantage of the PalmOS6 features, then why bother? They still have the same PalmOS5 emulator that's used in all current PalmOS5 devices.)
People saying this kind of stupid stuff never ceases to amaze me.
1) Farmers make up less than 2% of the population. Politicians outright ignore farmers unless they are giving a campaign contribution (which few do). 2) Food *distribution* is *very* profitable. (Take a look at the profits that ADM pulls down.) Food production is break even. 3) A totally free market tends towards equalibrium as regards supply and demand. This means that there will be shortages at times. No food == starving people. (ie, you can't eat computer chips...) 4) Countries that must import their food supply tend to be worse off economically than those that can feed themselves. 5) Food production is a national security issue. If a country can't feed itself, it's also open to blackmail with food pricing. (The US has done this to other nations many times before...) 6) Most of the food produced in the US, is consumed in the US. This keeps the money in the US. Food imports make our trade deficeit worse.
If you want to complain about something, complain about the fact that most of the farm subsidy actually goes to companies like ADM & Tyson instead of the farmers who need it. They don't need the money, it's just payback for their campaign contributions.
Not outsourced burgers. Burger making robots. McDs has been working on them for awhile. Probably in the next 10-15 years a McDs will only need 1 employee, just in case something goes wrong. Everything else will be automated.
You most definitely can be charged with stealing your own stuff. A few years ago a bank foreclosed on a grain elevator. The bank then tried to claim all of the grain, even though the elevator was being paid to store grain owned by local farmers. One farmer decided just to go up there and haul off his grain. He ended up in jail...
I would say I agree with this, but I think that OSS developers are taking the easy way out. Writing software is what they are good at, and it's easy for them. But it's a commitment that they can drop at any time. Bring up the idea of doing real community service in the outside "real world", dealing with the problems that real people have, and most of them run screaming.
In short, writing OSS makes them feel good, like they made a difference, without requiring them to make any real sacrifice.
If you adopt one child, you'll likely do more good than all the free software ever written. Or work in a soup kitchen, or be a big brother/sister, or do missionary work, or run a little league team, or help at a local school, or etc, etc, etc.
I truely feel that any of these things are better for the public good than writing free software. I think that OSS coders really like coding, are good at it, it's *easy* for them, so it takes a central and dominant view about how they can help society. It's a way of making themselves feel good without having to get their hands dirty doing real public services.
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The C64 was cheap, but it wasn't a piece of crap. Apples were *much* more expensive, and pretty much the least capable of the "big 3" of the time (Apple/Atari/C64). Ataris had a lot more capabilities than either of those, but they were 2X the price of a C64. However the real thing that damned Apple & Atari (esp. Atari) was not only was the C64 less than 1/2 the price of either, but it also was able to do 90%+ of what people wanted. (The C64 had only about 60% or so of the capabilities of an Atari, but if people decided that they didn't need/want those capabilities, then who cares?) (Memories from someone who programed all 3 systems. Man I wish that I'd never sold my copy of De Re Atari, for nostalga if nothing else.)
Yup, there are much, MUCH, *MUCH* worse penalties for copyright infringement. It's a really good thing that it isn't theft...
The problem in GTA is that someone who obsessive-compulsively spends the time to do the side missions both learns the controls better and also gains bonuses that make the game easier (+100 health, etc). This kills the game for someone who doesn't have much time to play.
I gave up on finishing GTA3 a long time ago. I recently gave up on VC, after failing in one mission for the 10th+ time. It's not that I'm bad at games (I'm usually good at them), but I just don't have the time to put in to learn the controls well enough.
There's no way that I'll buy SA unless they put in some kind of "old geezer" mode so that 30+ year old people like me can skip things and at least be able to finish the game without spending so much time at it we lose our jobs/social life.
Ebay, Ebay, and Ebay.
Nearly all the older B&W Palms use AAA.
"Do you see this as a clear sing, that Microsofts Pocket PC is slowly winning the PDA operating system war? Or is it just that Sony couldn't turn Palm OS in to the media OS it wanted? Or perhaps something else?"
I take it as a sign that since everyone is losing money selling PDAs, and the market is shrinking, that Sony decided they could spend that money better somewhere else.
It's also not like they don't cover all the functionality of a PDA either. With smartphones, the soon-to-be-out PSP, and their palmtop WinXP computers, why do they need PDAs?
It's not the number they were selling, it's the profit they were making. Or, more correctly, the lack of it.
NO ONE is making money selling PDAs. Combine this with a SHRINKING market, and why would any sane company want to keep shipping PDAs? At this rate, the entire PDA market will be gone in 3 years... (To be replaced by smartphones and palmtop XP computers.)
In the US, PalmOS is the leading Smartphone OS. Sales of the Treo600 have been so huge that they are beating Symbian and MS Smartphone combined, and so huge that Palm can't produce them fast enough to meet demand. (The Treo600 is practically non-existant in Europe.)
The hard cost to developer's is equipment and bandwidth (but they'd likely purchase that stuff anyway...).
The soft cost to developer's is the time that they spend. Time isn't free. If you spend time developing OSS, then you don't have it for anything else. This is call an opportunity cost.
What can be worse for developers in general, is having managers get the idea that development doesn't have a cost. If that idea becomes common among managers, then salaries among working developers will take a BIG hit. (ie, you can't keep giving away something for free and still expect people to think it has great value... Also, when judging value, people almost always look at the up front cost, and not the expenses after that.)
"The act of taking notes and drawing on the chalkboard is way over rated."
Yes and no.
I used to be a college instructor (CS, currently making a lot more money in engineering). During the first few weeks of the first programming class (C lang), I always made the students type in the programs instead of just distributing them over the network. Some of the students thought I was sadistic... But typing in the programs forced them to think about what was going on, instead of just having them space out in the back of class.
Most people learn by doing. A powerpoint slideshow doesn't force them to do anything, so nothing ends up sinking in very well.
Anyone play the old Atari 8-bit game Shamus? Sort of like Bezerk!, but with much less maneuvering space, electrified walls, tons of enemies shooting tons of shots, keys and locks (so you'd have to repeat maze sections), a more deadly 'evil otto' type guy, and tons of bullets flying at you, so many that you often had to shoot them out of the air just to make room to dodge the rest. It took hours to reach the end, you had only a limited number of guys (with new guys at bonus point levels), and no save. I finished it once, and was twitching for hours afterwords.
1) Most developers are on the PalmSource hosted newsgroups. There is also escribe, much better books out, and much better OS docs from PalmSource out, all which reduce the need to post.
2) The Palm software marketplace is pretty mature and *very* competitive, which acts as a deterrent. This also leads many developers to think the grass looks greener with PPC/Symbian/Java.
3) The docs were much better back then than many dev environments I've seen, and now they're better yet.
4) If it's not broke, why should they fix it? Remember, these are volunteers keeping prc-tools going.
5) You just need to fax a page in and wait a few days. Anymore, I find debugging with real devices to work much better.
Things are definitely getting better. However the Palm software market has gotten *much* harder to break into, and there are too many devs that make something decent, but unpolished, who then just post it on Handango and PalmGear and then expect for the checks to start rolling in (and then start bitching when they don't...). New entrants tend to get lost in the crowd, even if they have something exceptional.
Palm comes out with new units twice a year. That's a *long* way away from every other week. (Where in the heck did you, and the moderators, get the idea that this is true?)
Palm's outlet store is only cheap because they are open box refurbs. (ie, much like you'd get off of ebay...)
With a T3, you'll need to look up how to program armlets.
I've got 3 T3s, no drift. With touchscreens, if you get a lemon, you'll always have problems, and it's tough for the manufactuer to weed out all the bad touchscreens.
Underclocking does increase battery life, but it's not dramatic. The best I've heard is adding about 45 min. to the battery life. The backlight definitely uses most of the power.
PalmOS6 CAN have apps that run in the background. The limitation is that they must be specifically written do do so (they must spawn a background thread). In contrast, PalmOS6 multitasking uses a lot fewer resources than PPC, but any program can be multitasked on a PPC.
There are also "sliplets", which will allow a background program to grab a slice of the screen for updates. (ie, see results from 2 programs running at once, instead of needed to switch screens.)
If PalmOne wanted to, they probably could be shipping PalmOS6 devices right now. And shipping them with no PalmOS6 software... At the start of the year most large Palm software houses got ahold of the PalmOS6 dev stuff, but it still will take them until the 2nd half of this year before most can bring stuff out. (A straight port isn't hard or long, but if you don't take advantage of the PalmOS6 features, then why bother? They still have the same PalmOS5 emulator that's used in all current PalmOS5 devices.)
What do you suggest? That they hire already employed people?
People saying this kind of stupid stuff never ceases to amaze me.
1) Farmers make up less than 2% of the population. Politicians outright ignore farmers unless they are giving a campaign contribution (which few do).
2) Food *distribution* is *very* profitable. (Take a look at the profits that ADM pulls down.) Food production is break even.
3) A totally free market tends towards equalibrium as regards supply and demand. This means that there will be shortages at times. No food == starving people. (ie, you can't eat computer chips...)
4) Countries that must import their food supply tend to be worse off economically than those that can feed themselves.
5) Food production is a national security issue. If a country can't feed itself, it's also open to blackmail with food pricing. (The US has done this to other nations many times before...)
6) Most of the food produced in the US, is consumed in the US. This keeps the money in the US. Food imports make our trade deficeit worse.
If you want to complain about something, complain about the fact that most of the farm subsidy actually goes to companies like ADM & Tyson instead of the farmers who need it. They don't need the money, it's just payback for their campaign contributions.
You're missing a HUGE point. The rate of tech outsourcing has basically increased at the rate that communication costs have decreased.
Not outsourced burgers. Burger making robots. McDs has been working on them for awhile. Probably in the next 10-15 years a McDs will only need 1 employee, just in case something goes wrong. Everything else will be automated.
You most definitely can be charged with stealing your own stuff. A few years ago a bank foreclosed on a grain elevator. The bank then tried to claim all of the grain, even though the elevator was being paid to store grain owned by local farmers. One farmer decided just to go up there and haul off his grain. He ended up in jail...
I would say I agree with this, but I think that OSS developers are taking the easy way out. Writing software is what they are good at, and it's easy for them. But it's a commitment that they can drop at any time. Bring up the idea of doing real community service in the outside "real world", dealing with the problems that real people have, and most of them run screaming.
In short, writing OSS makes them feel good, like they made a difference, without requiring them to make any real sacrifice.
If you adopt one child, you'll likely do more good than all the free software ever written. Or work in a soup kitchen, or be a big brother/sister, or do missionary work, or run a little league team, or help at a local school, or etc, etc, etc.
I truely feel that any of these things are better for the public good than writing free software. I think that OSS coders really like coding, are good at it, it's *easy* for them, so it takes a central and dominant view about how they can help society. It's a way of making themselves feel good without having to get their hands dirty doing real public services.
Cheap laptops go for $800. Considering this has smaller (ie, more expensive) parts, why should it be cheaper?
Heck, high-end PDAs are over $600 and can't do close to as much as this thing can.
Oh brother...
1 byte == 8 bits == 256
2 bytes == 16 bits == 65536
There are already 320x320 and greater screens, so we'll need 2 bytes for storage for each dimension.
32K == 2^15 == a signed 16 bit value (2 bytes).