Clearly you need to do some research before your particular rant, as you are quite wrong.
Clearly, you are making some unwarranted assumptions: Australia is not the whole world. Still, it's good to hear that in Australia (and presumably Europe), end user programmability seems to be more widely available.
However, there are very few Java-based phones available in the US yet, and phones are usually significantly modified for the US market and often even tied to a single service provider.
When I talked to the major wireless providers in our area, they all told me that they do not permit end user programmability.
Of the Java phones you mention, only the 7210 is nominally available in the US. It seems not to work with Verizon, but it does apparently work with T-Mobile. But even T-Mobile doesn't offer it for sale.
I should mention, the Handspring Treos are, of course, programmable without restrictions. They are a similar form factor and a much better choice than the Microsoft-based Smartphones, IMO. Also, PalmOS is mature and has lots of applications for it.
What I was wondering, though, is whether there are any phone form-factor Java-based phones that allow end-user programming.
Fortunately I decided against getting one when the salesman tried to make me believe it was normal for a mobile phone to take 60 seconds to start up and log on to the network!
Sadly, it pretty much is with GSM/GPRS-based phones. However, good ones will maintain the connection once established so that you usually don't have to wait. Newer, better wireless technologies should fix that.
People putting out programmable phones seem greedy all around: for many Java-based phones, you also can't just download a Java application to the phone, you have to pay the service providers steep fees to make the software available.
For some reason, companies seem to think that they have a right to control the phone you paid for. Think of it as "Palladium Light" and a bad sign of things to come.
Your best bet: don't waste time or money on such phones. If it comes with such features, don't use them. If customers send a signal now that they want control of the digital devices they paid for, maybe this insanity can be nipped in the bud.
(And if you know of any end-user programmable Java phones, please let me know.)
If people decided to refer to, say, legacy free PCs in non-beige boxes, as "apple computers", there is nothing Apple Computer could do about it--they'd lose their trademark and the term would become generic. Ultimately, Apple Computer and their trademarks are at the mercy of common usage. The only legal power they have is over other businesses So, start talking about "my apple" when talking about your cool PC, and help take back the trademark...
Average people can be taught. In fact, average people learn lots of much more important things about business every day. And it would be very easy to teach people that a commonly used noun alone cannot constitute a trademark. A few well-publicized court cases and an incorporation into the high school curriculum would do the trick. People who then still think that "Apple Computer" and "Apple Telco" have anything to do with each other, well, that's their own problem.
Remember, trademark laws are for the protection of consumers, not for the protection of companies.
Some middle-aged couple who knows nothing about computers and own an iMac would be more likely to go to Apple Communications for their internet connection because they think they're the same company.
Apple Computer should have thought of that before calling themselves "Apple Computer". The term "Apple" is so common and so prone to being used for a variety of services that they really should have had no expectation of being able to expand into all sorts of services.
Also, right now, there is no Apple ISP, and you cannot reserve trademarks indefinitely for future use.
But a telecommunications company is fair game since Apple does telecommunications.
"Apple" is also a generic and widely used term--that should limit Apple Computer's rights. If they had wanted a trademark that they could expand across every field they ever might go into, they should have picked something more distinctive.
Argh, why must this company be so fucking schizophrenic in how it treats people?
Apple is quite consistent in how they treat people: they tell them what to do, they tell them what's good for them. In the case of the operating system, that translates into "ease of use" because users don't have to think as much and don't face such a bewildering array of choices. In the case of legal and business issues, well...
This makes about as much sense as putting a copyright on the Constitution that says that you can only read it if you already abide by it.
Source code is expression, it's speech. You want that kind of speech to invade repressive regimes. Sure, they can alter it and use it for "bad" purposes, but they can do that anyway (the contract law and legal system that enforces those licenses is under their control). But more important is that they look at the code and maybe determine that their efforts at restricting information flow are hopeless. Or maybe they'll use the software to provide information access to at least a restricted elite that can then work towards change.
All you've argued is that you've never used the multiuser capabilities of NT.
Not at all. What I have argued is that most NT installations never use the multiuser capabilities of NT. Almost all security-conscious NT installations connect personal single-user clients to multi-user servers. That does not exercise the multiuser capabilities of the NT kernel or user land libraries/programs at all.
Sorry that you've never used them but they are there.
My point is that if they don't get exercised in practice, you can't trust them. In any case, we already know of a number of security holes in the multi-user capabilities NT/XP without even looking, and even those don't get fixed--because Microsoft doesn't care.
As for security, Windows NT got a C2 security rating and was architected at the B level. Unix was not.
Seems like they fell a bit short, then. Also note that NT is only C2 rated when it isn't networked--not exactly a very useful rating, and something that exercises almost no multi-user capabilities.
In any case, the C2 rating is about the presence of features, not actual security. Many features in C2 are deliberately absent from UNIX because they make systems harder to administer and ultimately less secure.
Linux is being used as the basis of highly secure systems by the NSA, and it has pretty much all the features it would need to get a C2 rating (or better) now--someone with deep pockets just needs to cough up the money for an evaluation. Fortunately, those features are optional because, ultimately, C2 or B are a bad idea.
I would guess that a lot of this data is collected for specific purposes and has already been analyzed in detail by the people who collected it.
That leaves me wondering: other than satisfying curiosity, will people actually do anything useful with this data? Will this just include "images" or will there actually be a lot of spectrographic data and other measurements? What would they be looking for? What might they find?
Overall, I guess I just don't see yet that this is a useful use of scarce research funds.
DirectX is likely a gaping security hole
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· Score: 2
DirectX isn't called "direct" for nothing: it does give end user programs direct access to many hardware features and lets non-privileged programs simulate whatever screen contents they would like to simulate. Both of those features make it likely that it is a gaping security hole.
Windows NT/XP is effectively a single-user OS, without much security. The only security and multi-user features that Windows offers are related to file servers and Terminal Server. Live with it.
I don't know about Wenduws or Wondiws, but that's built right in for Windows XP.
Windows XP has multiuser and security hooks in the kernel. But in practice, Windows XP doesn't protect local users from one another very much because that kind of protection doesn't really matter for the security of most commercial Windows installations. Most commercial installations either use very locked-down end-user systems (data entry, order taking, etc.), or they give each person their own personal PC and store their files on a shared file server.
If you're that confused about Windows, I wonder what your 14-year-old is going to pull on your BSD box.
If you're that confused about Windows, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near any Windows machine you have anything to do with.
sorry, but you are wrong
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If you think of Windows NT as having a multi-user, UNIX-like core, what you say should be true in theory. In practice, unfortunately, it isn't.
UNIX has been hardened in more than 20 years of multi-user use in some of the most hostile environments on the planet (college campuses). The entire UNIX software architecture is built for the kinds of systems on which you have hundreds of simultaneous users, dozens of which may try to break in at any time. And it stands up to that kind of assault.
Windows NT machines, in contrast, hardly ever have more than one person logged on at the same time. Almost all multiuser installations of NT are only concerned with the security of the file server, and security and privacy is really only guaranteed for files that live on the file server. Even if there were local breaches of security on the machines users log into, it's unlikely anybody would ever notice them. Furthermore, many of the NT services and user-mode libraries haven't even been designed with single-machine multi-user operations in mind. The closest to multi-user NT is Terminal Server, but that has found it necessary to put a whole other layer of insulation between different users.
So, altogether, you are wrong: you haven't been able to do that with any Windows NT based OS, ever. And chances are, you never will be. Windows NT isn't built for that kind of security, and it isn't used in that kind of environment.
First, the new Palm OS v5 was designed to run on much more powerfull processors.
PalmOS 5 runs on ARM, but applications under it mostly run as interpreted 68k code. It is possible to write native ARM code for PalmOS 5, but it's a lot of work and there qre quite a few restrictions on it. I doubt that the Ogg integer decoder would compile on it without major work.
Yes, but it's hard to write native ARM code or native DSP code: PalmOS5 runs all applications as interpreted 68000 code; the best you can do (with a lot of work) is link in some assembly routines.
MS already has one big ol' app, and had it for a very long time. It comes bundled with many PCs. MSWorks anyone?
MS Works is not an all-in-one program--it's a bunch of separate programs held together by a launcher and a common brand name. Also, MS Works, unlike MS Office, is not a platform for third party software. And MS Works doesn't integrate web browsing and multimedia display any better than any other Microsoft environment. So, no, it isn't an instance of what Microsoft is promising here.
there is no strategy there
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Microsoft doesn't think computer users should have to use one program to read and write a word-processing file, another to use a spreadsheet, and a third to correspond via e-mail. Rather, the company thinks, a single program should handle it all.
If Microsoft is going to put everything into a single program, presumably with loadable.NET-based components for extensible functionality, why did they just spend a decade moving towards a UNIX-like multi-process operating system? The NT/XP kernel and technologies like XML are redundant and inefficient for building that kind of system.
What this tells me is that the company has no clue where they are going. Most of their technologies (NT/XP, C#/.NET, XML/SOAP, DRM, etc.) are "me-too" reactions to industry fads. And a few ideas are somewhat dated gee-whiz gearhead ideas that seem to pop up randomly out of their research organization ("database-as-filesystem", etc.). The only thing that is predictable is that Ballmer and Microsoft marketing will try to figure out how to sell that stuff to the public.
Let me add that you could get nice pen-based computers from Fujitsu and a few other vendors before the TabletPC spec. So it isn't even that Microsoft's effort catalyzed the creation of those machines. All Microsoft is really contributing is marketing dollars. And given their current software, TabletPC may well end up being a flop and damage pen computing as much as their last go at it did.
You are making my point for me by not listing a single technological advance that Microsoft has contributed. Let's look at this.
1) a real OS
The pen-based machines of 10 years ago (including Microsoft's own Windows for Pen Computing) used either desktop operating systems, or they used operating systems with equivalent power. Furthermore, many pen computing vendors have been shipping Windows-based pen computers over the last decade.
3) A nice, color, high-resolution display
4) Real networking capability.
5) a high-quality, high resolution digitizer
6) [lots of data storage]
Microsoft has merely specified what amounts to a state-of-the-art lightweight laptop. That's not any technical contribution they have made--it is due to the tireless improvements by lots of hardware vendors.
2) Real handwriting recognition that works as well as is possible given the state of the art
Microsoft's handwriting recognition is a mediocre, pretty sluggish engine. It may be the best you can get commercially, but only because Microsoft has pretty much removed the incentive for anybody else to do better. It is certainly not better than what people have developed in research labs.
You will probably see a number of replacement engines from a bunch of small companies that are equally mediocre, but most of the large players have effectively given up--if the only outlet is Microsoft platforms, what's the point of developing a better handwriting engine? The techniques also weren't developed by Microsoft--Microsoft just hired a bunch of smart people from other companies, companies that had given up on the market--and had them reimplement their work.
Basically, what it comes down to is that Microsoft is basking again in the glory of the nifty hardware that other companies have developed, and building on the results of competitors that they have driven out of the business, while they themselves have contributed essentially no innovation. That's how Microsoft and its market dominance kills innovation. And by failing to list a single technological contribution by Microsoft, even though you have tested lots of pen-based machines, you are making that point for me.
if patents hold up, pen computing is in trouble
on
Bricklin on Tablet PCs
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If the patents listed in Dan Bricklin's column hold up, then the pen computing area is in trouble. In particular, with Microsoft's purchase of Aha!, they own some pretty fundamental patents.
Furthermore, with the release of TabletPC, Microsoft has shown again that they simply can't innovate. Microsoft's TabletPC software is the same old stuff we had 10 years ago, only in a more bloated software incarnation. The only thing that has really gotten better is the hardware and processor speed, as well as the quality of real-time graphics those machines support.
Few if any of those patents should hold up if challenged in court, since most of the techniques had been used for quite some time by researchers before that. This is the usual case of a bunch of upstart startups not knowing what has been happening in academia and patenting like mad (Bricklin is aware of this). But that won't stop those patents from causing great harm: the threat of a lawsuit from Microsoft or Compaq/HP is sufficient to scare away investors from startups and to cause bigger players like Palm, Sony, or Apple to avoid certain features or functionality entirely.
While Compaq/HP holds some important patents, they are in bed with Microsoft. That means that Compaq/HP will willingly license their patents to Microsoft. Microsoft will use their patents to force other companies to adopt their TabletPC even if those other companies would have wanted to develop their own pen software. And for companies like Apple, who will likely develop their own software, Microsoft will use the threat of lawsuits to limit functionality and stifle their creativity: "you can only use our patents if you make this part of your software 'compatible' with ours".
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Clearly, you are making some unwarranted assumptions: Australia is not the whole world. Still, it's good to hear that in Australia (and presumably Europe), end user programmability seems to be more widely available.
However, there are very few Java-based phones available in the US yet, and phones are usually significantly modified for the US market and often even tied to a single service provider.
When I talked to the major wireless providers in our area, they all told me that they do not permit end user programmability.
Of the Java phones you mention, only the 7210 is nominally available in the US. It seems not to work with Verizon, but it does apparently work with T-Mobile. But even T-Mobile doesn't offer it for sale.
Which means that you do pay for it: agreeing to an extended contract is your payment.
Lem's story was first, though. Event Horizon, The Sphere, and this movie are only cheap Hollywood imitations.
What I was wondering, though, is whether there are any phone form-factor Java-based phones that allow end-user programming.
Sadly, it pretty much is with GSM/GPRS-based phones. However, good ones will maintain the connection once established so that you usually don't have to wait. Newer, better wireless technologies should fix that.
For some reason, companies seem to think that they have a right to control the phone you paid for. Think of it as "Palladium Light" and a bad sign of things to come.
Your best bet: don't waste time or money on such phones. If it comes with such features, don't use them. If customers send a signal now that they want control of the digital devices they paid for, maybe this insanity can be nipped in the bud.
(And if you know of any end-user programmable Java phones, please let me know.)
Reminds me of In the Penal Colony.
If people decided to refer to, say, legacy free PCs in non-beige boxes, as "apple computers", there is nothing Apple Computer could do about it--they'd lose their trademark and the term would become generic. Ultimately, Apple Computer and their trademarks are at the mercy of common usage. The only legal power they have is over other businesses So, start talking about "my apple" when talking about your cool PC, and help take back the trademark...
Remember, trademark laws are for the protection of consumers, not for the protection of companies.
Apple Computer should have thought of that before calling themselves "Apple Computer". The term "Apple" is so common and so prone to being used for a variety of services that they really should have had no expectation of being able to expand into all sorts of services.
Also, right now, there is no Apple ISP, and you cannot reserve trademarks indefinitely for future use.
"Apple" is also a generic and widely used term--that should limit Apple Computer's rights. If they had wanted a trademark that they could expand across every field they ever might go into, they should have picked something more distinctive.
Apple is quite consistent in how they treat people: they tell them what to do, they tell them what's good for them. In the case of the operating system, that translates into "ease of use" because users don't have to think as much and don't face such a bewildering array of choices. In the case of legal and business issues, well...
Source code is expression, it's speech. You want that kind of speech to invade repressive regimes. Sure, they can alter it and use it for "bad" purposes, but they can do that anyway (the contract law and legal system that enforces those licenses is under their control). But more important is that they look at the code and maybe determine that their efforts at restricting information flow are hopeless. Or maybe they'll use the software to provide information access to at least a restricted elite that can then work towards change.
Not at all. What I have argued is that most NT installations never use the multiuser capabilities of NT. Almost all security-conscious NT installations connect personal single-user clients to multi-user servers. That does not exercise the multiuser capabilities of the NT kernel or user land libraries/programs at all.
Sorry that you've never used them but they are there.
My point is that if they don't get exercised in practice, you can't trust them. In any case, we already know of a number of security holes in the multi-user capabilities NT/XP without even looking, and even those don't get fixed--because Microsoft doesn't care.
As for security, Windows NT got a C2 security rating and was architected at the B level. Unix was not.
Seems like they fell a bit short, then. Also note that NT is only C2 rated when it isn't networked--not exactly a very useful rating, and something that exercises almost no multi-user capabilities.
In any case, the C2 rating is about the presence of features, not actual security. Many features in C2 are deliberately absent from UNIX because they make systems harder to administer and ultimately less secure.
Linux is being used as the basis of highly secure systems by the NSA, and it has pretty much all the features it would need to get a C2 rating (or better) now--someone with deep pockets just needs to cough up the money for an evaluation. Fortunately, those features are optional because, ultimately, C2 or B are a bad idea.
That leaves me wondering: other than satisfying curiosity, will people actually do anything useful with this data? Will this just include "images" or will there actually be a lot of spectrographic data and other measurements? What would they be looking for? What might they find?
Overall, I guess I just don't see yet that this is a useful use of scarce research funds.
Windows NT/XP is effectively a single-user OS, without much security. The only security and multi-user features that Windows offers are related to file servers and Terminal Server. Live with it.
Windows XP has multiuser and security hooks in the kernel. But in practice, Windows XP doesn't protect local users from one another very much because that kind of protection doesn't really matter for the security of most commercial Windows installations. Most commercial installations either use very locked-down end-user systems (data entry, order taking, etc.), or they give each person their own personal PC and store their files on a shared file server.
If you're that confused about Windows, I wonder what your 14-year-old is going to pull on your BSD box.
If you're that confused about Windows, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near any Windows machine you have anything to do with.
UNIX has been hardened in more than 20 years of multi-user use in some of the most hostile environments on the planet (college campuses). The entire UNIX software architecture is built for the kinds of systems on which you have hundreds of simultaneous users, dozens of which may try to break in at any time. And it stands up to that kind of assault.
Windows NT machines, in contrast, hardly ever have more than one person logged on at the same time. Almost all multiuser installations of NT are only concerned with the security of the file server, and security and privacy is really only guaranteed for files that live on the file server. Even if there were local breaches of security on the machines users log into, it's unlikely anybody would ever notice them. Furthermore, many of the NT services and user-mode libraries haven't even been designed with single-machine multi-user operations in mind. The closest to multi-user NT is Terminal Server, but that has found it necessary to put a whole other layer of insulation between different users.
So, altogether, you are wrong: you haven't been able to do that with any Windows NT based OS, ever. And chances are, you never will be. Windows NT isn't built for that kind of security, and it isn't used in that kind of environment.
PalmOS 5 runs on ARM, but applications under it mostly run as interpreted 68k code. It is possible to write native ARM code for PalmOS 5, but it's a lot of work and there qre quite a few restrictions on it. I doubt that the Ogg integer decoder would compile on it without major work.
Yes, but it's hard to write native ARM code or native DSP code: PalmOS5 runs all applications as interpreted 68000 code; the best you can do (with a lot of work) is link in some assembly routines.
MS Works is not an all-in-one program--it's a bunch of separate programs held together by a launcher and a common brand name. Also, MS Works, unlike MS Office, is not a platform for third party software. And MS Works doesn't integrate web browsing and multimedia display any better than any other Microsoft environment. So, no, it isn't an instance of what Microsoft is promising here.
If Microsoft is going to put everything into a single program, presumably with loadable .NET-based components for extensible functionality, why did they just spend a decade moving towards a UNIX-like multi-process operating system? The NT/XP kernel and technologies like XML are redundant and inefficient for building that kind of system.
What this tells me is that the company has no clue where they are going. Most of their technologies (NT/XP, C#/.NET, XML/SOAP, DRM, etc.) are "me-too" reactions to industry fads. And a few ideas are somewhat dated gee-whiz gearhead ideas that seem to pop up randomly out of their research organization ("database-as-filesystem", etc.). The only thing that is predictable is that Ballmer and Microsoft marketing will try to figure out how to sell that stuff to the public.
Let me add that you could get nice pen-based computers from Fujitsu and a few other vendors before the TabletPC spec. So it isn't even that Microsoft's effort catalyzed the creation of those machines. All Microsoft is really contributing is marketing dollars. And given their current software, TabletPC may well end up being a flop and damage pen computing as much as their last go at it did.
1) a real OS
The pen-based machines of 10 years ago (including Microsoft's own Windows for Pen Computing) used either desktop operating systems, or they used operating systems with equivalent power. Furthermore, many pen computing vendors have been shipping Windows-based pen computers over the last decade.
3) A nice, color, high-resolution display
4) Real networking capability.
5) a high-quality, high resolution digitizer
6) [lots of data storage]
Microsoft has merely specified what amounts to a state-of-the-art lightweight laptop. That's not any technical contribution they have made--it is due to the tireless improvements by lots of hardware vendors.
2) Real handwriting recognition that works as well as is possible given the state of the art
Microsoft's handwriting recognition is a mediocre, pretty sluggish engine. It may be the best you can get commercially, but only because Microsoft has pretty much removed the incentive for anybody else to do better. It is certainly not better than what people have developed in research labs.
You will probably see a number of replacement engines from a bunch of small companies that are equally mediocre, but most of the large players have effectively given up--if the only outlet is Microsoft platforms, what's the point of developing a better handwriting engine? The techniques also weren't developed by Microsoft--Microsoft just hired a bunch of smart people from other companies, companies that had given up on the market--and had them reimplement their work.
Basically, what it comes down to is that Microsoft is basking again in the glory of the nifty hardware that other companies have developed, and building on the results of competitors that they have driven out of the business, while they themselves have contributed essentially no innovation. That's how Microsoft and its market dominance kills innovation. And by failing to list a single technological contribution by Microsoft, even though you have tested lots of pen-based machines, you are making that point for me.
Furthermore, with the release of TabletPC, Microsoft has shown again that they simply can't innovate. Microsoft's TabletPC software is the same old stuff we had 10 years ago, only in a more bloated software incarnation. The only thing that has really gotten better is the hardware and processor speed, as well as the quality of real-time graphics those machines support.
Few if any of those patents should hold up if challenged in court, since most of the techniques had been used for quite some time by researchers before that. This is the usual case of a bunch of upstart startups not knowing what has been happening in academia and patenting like mad (Bricklin is aware of this). But that won't stop those patents from causing great harm: the threat of a lawsuit from Microsoft or Compaq/HP is sufficient to scare away investors from startups and to cause bigger players like Palm, Sony, or Apple to avoid certain features or functionality entirely.
While Compaq/HP holds some important patents, they are in bed with Microsoft. That means that Compaq/HP will willingly license their patents to Microsoft. Microsoft will use their patents to force other companies to adopt their TabletPC even if those other companies would have wanted to develop their own pen software. And for companies like Apple, who will likely develop their own software, Microsoft will use the threat of lawsuits to limit functionality and stifle their creativity: "you can only use our patents if you make this part of your software 'compatible' with ours".