As cool as it sounds, Linux on Motorola Smartphones essentially is NOT an open platform.
Motorola doesn't encourage or support native application development. They tell you to use Java. Some parts of the phones are completely undocumented (e.g. the GPS part of the A780). Access from Java is possible but not native access (OK, hackers built an Java proxy as a workaround, but the point is that it is not officially supported). You don't get access to built-in phonebook, etc. pp.
It took months before someone managed to telnet into the A780 and it took months to telnet into the A1200 (yes, they protected the A1200 even harder). The toolchain for building native apps would still be in its infancy if the official development kit from Motorola hadn't leaked somewhere.
For my A780 there is exactly ONE native application: CoPilot, the navigation software that comes bundled with the European version of the phone. And that's about it.
So these phones could be SOOOO cool. Think of Opie on them. Perfect! Nothing but perfect. But Moto doesn't get it. Like a lot of the major vendors that use Linux but are of no help for the community.
If you are interested in helping out, check out Motorola fans (forums --> development ; you need to register btw.). You can find a lot of How-Tos and downloads there. And some guys are working on a 100% open source kernel that works on these phones. Their homepage is here. For kernel hackers this is supposed to be a lot of fun...
In a study by CERN (you know them as the inventor of the WWW) in 1996 they calculated an energy payback in around 6 years for Switzerland (which perhaps is the most beautiful place on earth but definitly not the most sunniest). In 2000 they updated their calculations and ended up with a number of appr. 4 years. Solar cell technology has made a lot of significant advances in the last 10 year. Bank Sarasin, one of the biggest European advisor for ecological safe investments, concludes on page 30 that with modern solar cells energy payback comes after 1.5 to 2.5 years, depending on technology and country (1.5 years for the most modern, in production technology in Southern Europe, comparable to Florida; 2.5 years for middle Europe, comparable to New York).
The strange thing about Apple's market share is the fact that it is actually shrinking. Though Apple's shipments are up. It's just that the PC market as a whole is growing faster than Apple's market. So any, even a small growth in Apple's market share is a substantial success for Apple as it implies significant more sales.
An international rollout of a payment service is a difficult task. You have to comply to completely different laws in every country. I wouldn't underestimate this problem.
And your statement that Paypal isn't used widely outside the US was true until ebay bought them. The ebay merger gave Paypal a major boost. My estimate is that about half of the European ebay users now have Paypal.
That's why Tetris, Minesweeper and I love Katamari were the 3 games I enjoyed most in the last 20 years... Simple games, rules are explained in 10 seconds and they are just fun.
And the analogy "nintendo is the Apple of the gaming industry" is very good. Perhaps Nintendo should use the old Apple slogan "It just works" to "It's just makes fun".
MS *did* use XMLHTTPRequest for Outlook Web Access (IIRC).
XMLHTTPRequest couldn't take off as long as it was proprietary (NS 4 didn't support it). And Javascript and DOM Support at that time was even worse than it is today.
XMLHTTPRequest began to take off since Moz supported it and Javascript and DOM support was "good enough" in mainstream browsers.
Things weren't rosy for Apple. Markt share was declining massivly. Most quarters were in the red, some of them really bad; the loss for 1996 was more than 700 millions.
OK, "nearly bankrupt" was a bit harsh, but things didn't look good for Apple at all... And some more quarters unchanged would have been the end for Apple...
MS got access to quicktime and in exchange Apple, at that time nearly bancrupt, got full access to MS most important asset ever, the Win32 API.
Yes yes, that sounds like a very reasonable deal for me.
Don't get me wrong, but his Steveness is not *that* clever and Bill G. hasn't made such a stupid move in hos whole life...
I guess Cringley smokes sth. really weird... I thought, that the "Open sourcing Mac OS X"-story from last week couldn't be topped, but I stand corrected...
The only info I found was sth. like the Core Chips have virtualization, but it is disabled... Which sounds like, well, it may or may not be and may work or may not... not very helpful...
Color Genie. Programmed it directly in machine language (not assembly language, couldn't afford an assembler), sitting in front of my parent's TV. The only thing I really remember is that the Z80 CPU was a lot better than the 6502 in my Atari I bought some years later. And the Atari was of course a lot better than everything from Commodore;-) (even despite the fact that the Commodore Amiga essentially was the successor of the Atari 400/800 line and the Atari ST was the successor of the Commodore 64. But who dares to say that...).
I can't believe this, but it would be very interesting.
There are countries e.g. in Scandinavia where 80% of the women work. So they cummute (drive a vehicle) and work (work accidents). And there hasn't been major war in Scandinavia. Still the life expectance of women is some years higher.
Yes, the gap is getting smaller, but it's more like down to 6 years from 8 years and not down to 6 months.
The T8 does Video, Ogg and the usual stuff. The U1 is more like a Shuffle replacement, but with a 4 line display (that even his Steveness claims otherwise is very helpful). The U1 is mass storage compliant and works under Linux. The T8 is rather new and I don't know anything about it.
IMHO WinE will be a much better option to get windows programs running on MacOSX for Intel. Check out darwine.
Codeweavers are putting big amounts of work into this. CrossOffice will support MacOSX in one of the next versions. Codeweavers were rather enthusiastic when Apple announced their switch. No surprise, the desktop market share of MacOSX is bigger than Linux's.
According to a heise article (in German only) Firefox is not installed instead of IE, but additionally. While Firefox is the only browser icon on the desktop, IE still is the default browser (that's a rather unusual setup...).
is the Motorola A780. Avaliable in Europe (while most of the other Linux phones are available only in Asia). There's a community evolving, that's trying to port a completly open source kernel to the A780. Check it out under open-ezx. Another good site to get infos and hacks for the Moto Linux phones (E680(i), A780, etc.) is Motorolafans.com. Especially the forums are worth a visit. Despite these phones being based on Linux, Motorola doesn't support application development for Linux; their documentation (and support) focusses on Java only. So close, but yet so far... But hey, telnetting into your phone has some geek appeal...
1) Java 10 years ago was ahead of its time. AJAX 10 years ago wasn't possible either. Try GMail on a P200 with 64 KB RAM and with modem access to the internet.
2) Java was/is a plugin. AJAX is native (D)HTML + native Javscript. You can built wonderful degradable (and accessable) apps. With Javscript they have added magic (like Google Suggest) but they (can) work without as a simple plain old HTML + CGI solution. Try that with Java or Flash. (The best thing ten years ago to crash your browser was "Livescript", the bridge from Java to the rest of the browser)
3) Java 10 years ago was crap. AWT was a pile of crap. Java became usable with JDK 1.2.
There are still a lot of non compliant sites which stop users from switching especially in corporate environments. But the number is coming down rapidly. Web developers are aware that there are other browsers out there. And they are aware that there is more than IE and Netscape. So we will see more and more compliant sites. And we will even see more and more compliant browsers. IE 7 will be a small step in the right direction. Only a small step, but hey, 10% loss of market share seem to be enough to make the giant move...
I guess sth. similiar would happen to.doc et al if.sdc et al would get more than 0.01 percent market share as well.
Normally none. But BeOS had a miniscule market share in a market Palm didn't have the slightest interest in (OS for PCs). So they ditched it, but used the developers and technology from Be to built a small multimedia capable OS for handheld devices (Ok, they failed miserably (at least at selling), but at the time the decision wasn't completely brain damaged).
I doubt that access will be that stupid and guess they will learn from the mistakes PalmSource made. They will continue to make Palm an application environment (tahn an OS) for their browser, for contact management, etc. pp. and use Linux as an OS underneath. Application development for mobile devices is their core business so this fits quite well.
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As cool as it sounds, Linux on Motorola Smartphones essentially is NOT an open platform.
...
Motorola doesn't encourage or support native application development. They tell you to use Java. Some parts of the phones are completely undocumented (e.g. the GPS part of the A780). Access from Java is possible but not native access (OK, hackers built an Java proxy as a workaround, but the point is that it is not officially supported). You don't get access to built-in phonebook, etc. pp.
It took months before someone managed to telnet into the A780 and it took months to telnet into the A1200 (yes, they protected the A1200 even harder). The toolchain for building native apps would still be in its infancy if the official development kit from Motorola hadn't leaked somewhere.
For my A780 there is exactly ONE native application: CoPilot, the navigation software that comes bundled with the European version of the phone. And that's about it.
So these phones could be SOOOO cool. Think of Opie on them. Perfect! Nothing but perfect. But Moto doesn't get it. Like a lot of the major vendors that use Linux but are of no help for the community.
If you are interested in helping out, check out Motorola fans (forums --> development ; you need to register btw.). You can find a lot of How-Tos and downloads there. And some guys are working on a 100% open source kernel that works on these phones. Their homepage is here. For kernel hackers this is supposed to be a lot of fun
Bye egghat.
In a study by CERN (you know them as the inventor of the WWW) in 1996 they calculated an energy payback in around 6 years for Switzerland (which perhaps is the most beautiful place on earth but definitly not the most sunniest). In 2000 they updated their calculations and ended up with a number of appr. 4 years.
Solar cell technology has made a lot of significant advances in the last 10 year. Bank Sarasin, one of the biggest European advisor for ecological safe investments, concludes on page 30 that with modern solar cells energy payback comes after 1.5 to 2.5 years, depending on technology and country (1.5 years for the most modern, in production technology in Southern Europe, comparable to Florida; 2.5 years for middle Europe, comparable to New York).
One manufacturer of solar cells even claims 0.85 years with their "Dünnfilmtechnologie" (is flat film a suitable translation?), see on page 3 here (Enegierückzahldauer = amount of time for energy payback) .
So your 6 year number is definitly old.
Bye egghat.
The strange thing about Apple's market share is the fact that it is actually shrinking. Though Apple's shipments are up. It's just that the PC market as a whole is growing faster than Apple's market. So any, even a small growth in Apple's market share is a substantial success for Apple as it implies significant more sales.
Bye egghat.
I beg to differ.
An international rollout of a payment service is a difficult task. You have to comply to completely different laws in every country. I wouldn't underestimate this problem.
And your statement that Paypal isn't used widely outside the US was true until ebay bought them. The ebay merger gave Paypal a major boost. My estimate is that about half of the European ebay users now have Paypal.
Bye egghat.
Elbrus may have "failed" because market leader Intel chose to buy them.
Bye egghat.
Full ACK!
... Simple games, rules are explained in 10 seconds and they are just fun.
That's why Tetris, Minesweeper and I love Katamari were the 3 games I enjoyed most in the last 20 years
And the analogy "nintendo is the Apple of the gaming industry" is very good. Perhaps Nintendo should use the old Apple slogan "It just works" to "It's just makes fun".
Bye egghat.
If you get that high, you'll never be completely unemployed ...
...
Todays news: Carly Fiorina to join board of heavyweight chipmaker Taiwan Semi. And she's a member of the board at Cisco too. And I guess she has some other seats too
Bye egghat.
MS *did* use XMLHTTPRequest for Outlook Web Access (IIRC).
XMLHTTPRequest couldn't take off as long as it was proprietary (NS 4 didn't support it). And Javascript and DOM Support at that time was even worse than it is today.
XMLHTTPRequest began to take off since Moz supported it and Javascript and DOM support was "good enough" in mainstream browsers.
Bye egghat.
Ok, take this ;-).
... And some more quarters unchanged would have been the end for Apple ...
Things weren't rosy for Apple. Markt share was declining massivly. Most quarters were in the red, some of them really bad; the loss for 1996 was more than 700 millions.
OK, "nearly bankrupt" was a bit harsh, but things didn't look good for Apple at all
MS got access to quicktime and in exchange Apple, at that time nearly bancrupt, got full access to MS most important asset ever, the Win32 API.
...
... I thought, that the "Open sourcing Mac OS X"-story from last week couldn't be topped, but I stand corrected ...
Yes yes, that sounds like a very reasonable deal for me.
Don't get me wrong, but his Steveness is not *that* clever and Bill G. hasn't made such a stupid move in hos whole life
I guess Cringley smokes sth. really weird
Bye egghat.
do you care to share the link? I'd be very interested in those numbers ...
Bye egghat.
Do you know if the automatic upgrade downloads the universal binary or do you need to do a fresh install?
Bye egghat.
Since BootCamp came out, Linux on MacIntels should have become much easier.
Anybody knows if (K)Ubuntu runs out of the box on these machines?
Bye egghat.
Good question. I'd kill for Xen on Mac OS X ...
... Which sounds like, well, it may or may not be and may work or may not ... not very helpful ...
The only info I found was sth. like the Core Chips have virtualization, but it is disabled
Bye egghat.
Color Genie. Programmed it directly in machine language (not assembly language, couldn't afford an assembler), sitting in front of my parent's TV. The only thing I really remember is that the Z80 CPU was a lot better than the 6502 in my Atari I bought some years later. And the Atari was of course a lot better than everything from Commodore ;-) (even despite the fact that the Commodore Amiga essentially was the successor of the Atari 400/800 line and the Atari ST was the successor of the Commodore 64. But who dares to say that ...).
Bye egghat
I can't believe this, but it would be very interesting.
There are countries e.g. in Scandinavia where 80% of the women work. So they cummute (drive a vehicle) and work (work accidents). And there hasn't been major war in Scandinavia. Still the life expectance of women is some years higher.
Yes, the gap is getting smaller, but it's more like down to 6 years from 8 years and not down to 6 months.
Bye egghat.
Samsungs players are nice.
The T8 does Video, Ogg and the usual stuff. The U1 is more like a Shuffle replacement, but with a 4 line display (that even his Steveness claims otherwise is very helpful). The U1 is mass storage compliant and works under Linux. The T8 is rather new and I don't know anything about it.
Bye egghat
IMHO WinE will be a much better option to get windows programs running on MacOSX for Intel. Check out darwine.
Codeweavers are putting big amounts of work into this. CrossOffice will support MacOSX in one of the next versions. Codeweavers were rather enthusiastic when Apple announced their switch. No surprise, the desktop market share of MacOSX is bigger than Linux's.
I really expect great things to come!
Bye egghat.
/me understands ...
;-)
Time to post that one again
Bye egghat.
According to a heise article (in German only) Firefox is not installed instead of IE, but additionally. While Firefox is the only browser icon on the desktop, IE still is the default browser (that's a rather unusual setup ...).
Bye egghat.
is the Motorola A780. Avaliable in Europe (while most of the other Linux phones are available only in Asia). There's a community evolving, that's trying to port a completly open source kernel to the A780. Check it out under open-ezx. Another good site to get infos and hacks for the Moto Linux phones (E680(i), A780, etc.) is Motorolafans.com. Especially the forums are worth a visit. Despite these phones being based on Linux, Motorola doesn't support application development for Linux; their documentation (and support) focusses on Java only. So close, but yet so far ... But hey, telnetting into your phone has some geek appeal ...
Bye egghat.
last time I checked, Yahoo didn't index Thunderbird's Maildirs. K.O. criteria for me.
...
The 5000 character limit that Google's desktop search has (had?) was a K.O. criteria as well. So I still use my plain old desktop
Bye egghat.
1) Java 10 years ago was ahead of its time. AJAX 10 years ago wasn't possible either. Try GMail on a P200 with 64 KB RAM and with modem access to the internet.
2) Java was/is a plugin. AJAX is native (D)HTML + native Javscript. You can built wonderful degradable (and accessable) apps. With Javscript they have added magic (like Google Suggest) but they (can) work without as a simple plain old HTML + CGI solution. Try that with Java or Flash. (The best thing ten years ago to crash your browser was "Livescript", the bridge from Java to the rest of the browser)
3) Java 10 years ago was crap. AWT was a pile of crap. Java became usable with JDK 1.2.
Bye egghat.
There are still a lot of non compliant sites which stop users from switching especially in corporate environments. But the number is coming down rapidly. Web developers are aware that there are other browsers out there. And they are aware that there is more than IE and Netscape. So we will see more and more compliant sites. And we will even see more and more compliant browsers. IE 7 will be a small step in the right direction. Only a small step, but hey, 10% loss of market share seem to be enough to make the giant move ...
.doc et al if .sdc et al would get more than 0.01 percent market share as well.
I guess sth. similiar would happen to
Bye egghat.
Normally none. But BeOS had a miniscule market share in a market Palm didn't have the slightest interest in (OS for PCs). So they ditched it, but used the developers and technology from Be to built a small multimedia capable OS for handheld devices (Ok, they failed miserably (at least at selling), but at the time the decision wasn't completely brain damaged).
I doubt that access will be that stupid and guess they will learn from the mistakes PalmSource made. They will continue to make Palm an application environment (tahn an OS) for their browser, for contact management, etc. pp. and use Linux as an OS underneath. Application development for mobile devices is their core business so this fits quite well.
Bye egghat.