You make an excellent point IMO - except that errors can be introduced by damaged media as well. For this reason it's important that players be able to handle errors well, unless the media collection is kept pristine.
but sometimes, if you want your gift of software to be really useful, you need to stop attaching quite so many strings to it.
Exactly, and that's what other licenses are for. The GPL is definitely positioned as the Free as in "Stays Free" license; less restrictive licenses are necessary for many situations, but that doesn't mean that something as strong as the GPL isn't needed (especially for a lot of end-user software). Well, sure - I'm not questioning the value of the GPLv3, just thinking out loud about how I personally feel about some of its restrictions, and how I feel about the licenses I put on my contributions to free software. But I also question how far the GPL should go in pursuit of "free and stays free" - as I said, I think at some point you have to let it go. I appreciate their effort but the GPL also has to be a license people will be comfortable using. I'm sure the two interests will balance out in the end, but right now we're still in the middle of the process and so it's hard to see exactly how things will play out.
Do we REALLY need a GPL v3? Probably - v2 was written in a time in which the scenario of the GPL being tested in court was rather more remote. One of the important reasons for v3 is to further lawyer-proof the license.
The question most people seem to be wondering about with v3 is whether it's too ambitious - seeking to prevent abuses of the license in ways some disagree with. Personally, I haven't made up my mind, exactly. I think the underlying premise of the GPL is great - that it is a license that allows free usage in a way that encourages more free usage - and GPL3 is taking that further, by trying to keep people from taking advantage of free software while simultaneously using patents against it, by trying to prevent people from using free software to create devices that restrict users' freedom (the idea being, that if someone wants a big DRM box, they can write the code themselves)
The flip side, of course, is at some point free software has to be something you give. At some point you need to let go, and let people use the stuff. That's why you wrote it, right? So people would use it. This is the sticking point for me - I like what GPLv3 is trying to accomplish - I even want to support what it's trying to accomplish - but sometimes, if you want your gift of software to be really useful, you need to stop attaching quite so many strings to it.
But all that aside, the real problem with the GPL v3 is that new clause that RMS will personally strangle a kitten every time someone uses GPLv3 code in a DRM box. We've got to see about getting that clause removed.
Yep, I guess he's trying to protect the rights of individual states to deny its citizens' personal liberties, rather than supporting this denial at the federal level.
Yeah I'd say it's FUD because you don't own a PS3 and therefore can't have a valid opinion on the Blu-Ray functionality. My experiences are based on the PS2, another Sony product that doubled as an economy DVD player. I don't think you can totally dismiss that, but at the same time you are correct that I don't have a first-hand testimonial from using the PS3 to supply.
I do own one and the BR support is second to none. We'll have to see whether that holds up when the QC on the Blu-Ray discs themselves starts to decline. The problem with the PS2 which I described was with DVD releases that presumably contained subtle, minor errors in their encoding, or encoding choices that the PS2 for some reason wasn't able to handle - things that better players were capable of dealing with. That kind of case is where you start to separate good players from mediocre players. At this point, I don't think a lot of badly-encoded Blu-Ray discs even exist.
In the mean time, however, testimonials like yours may be more reliable than ones like mine, when dealing with the PS3.
...Especially when said Playstation is still a new model.
I don't know about the PS3, but the PS2 was in a similar situation with its DVD drive. Ultimately, the DVD drive in the PS2 wasn't the best. It worked ok on simple movies, but it tended to get edge cases wrong on more complex discs. You'd see this as messed up subtitles on foreign films, "camera angle" changes that were handled incorrectly, menu choices that don't get translated correctly in the film and so on. Granted, a lot of these were bugs on the disc itself, but better players managed to work around the bugs and work correctly regardless. Heh, is that all?
My PS2's DVD video playback always had a habit of freezing, stuttering through sections, or crashing to a black screen. "Unable to read disc". These were perfectly fine, brand new DVDs mind you, and my Sony DVD player plays them just fine.
Want to get lured in by the promise of a less-expensive Blu-Ray DVD player that's also a game console? OK, but in the end it may not be a player you want to rely on for movies. Then you'll still have a perfectly good game system, and you may buy a new DVD player so you can reliably watch movies, and all's well. Well, except did you make that game system purchase for the right reasons? Would you have bought that particular system if not for the lure of DVD playback? Possibly - but that's a question you should consider. Buy the game system as if it didn't have DVD playback features, and then see if it's worth it to you.
Of course, this whole post is gonna stink like FUD, and in a way it is - I had a bad experience with DVD playback on my PS2 and I'm using that to cast doubt on the PS3 because I would expect the situation to turn out similarly. Naturally, I could be wrong about the PS3. But after the PS2 I personally wouldn't bank on that - and so if I buy a PS3 at some point, I'll be buying a game system, not a movie player.
Besides, pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I, for one, don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain!
I'm sure the demonstration would've been a lot more difficult if he'd used philosophers instead of chickens. Thing is, chickens can't even hold chopsticks. A chicken just goes straight for the feed, so there's just one resource being acquired. It's still possible for a chicken to starve, but as chickens don't eat that much it's more likely that any shut-out chickens would simply go hungry for a while, and then get to eat before starving.
According to Dr. Daystrom, who developed this technology, it is capable of producing a computer far more powerful than the older, duotronic systems which we're accustomed to. Others have suggested, however, that the new technology may yield program execution that is less deterministic, perhaps even less reliable than the conventional systems.
Also, the GC did see a bit of a surge, and then falloff... but we're talking magnitudes less than the Wii. Considering the fact that we're in the inevitable "post launch drought", and the system is still selling far faster than any other system to date... exactly 4 months after launch... you'd be pretty hard pressed to make a decent case for a substantial decline. It's also too soon to make a substantial case against a substantial decline. We got no idea at this point what the system will be like two or three years down the road. Will the novelty wear off to the point that the system starts to become a dead-end, or will its initial popularity (and hence, one would hope, large installed base) sustain a large library of new games? My point isn't that the Wii will fail, just that after the 'Cube I'm a little concerned with how it'll fare in the long run. But, if the Cube is an example of what could go wrong, the DS is an example of what could go right - a quirky, unconventional system, inferior hardware compared to the competitors, strong emphasis on unusual gaming styles, and a couple years later the system is still champion of the portable gaming scene. (I think PSP has made a lot of progress from the days when everybody thought its gaming library was going nowhere - but I still thing DS comes out ahead.)
Frankly, you don't really have to be an optimist to predict the success of the Wii, you'd have to be blind to history, in order to think otherwise. Bah, I say. Talk to me in two years and we'll see how the Wii's doing.
Optimism is predicting an all-out success for the PS3, at this point. I certainly agree with that. I don't have a lot of confidence in the PS3 at this point.
First off, graphical resolution has very little to do with developement costs. Graphics are usually originally vector based (done in things like Illustrator and Maya), or high-res raster files... of which are downscaled immensely when going over to a console. This is pretty much true of any graphic design field. For my TV production (still NTSC), I do a lot of my graphics in vector or high-res raster, just in case I may need to use the graphics later for print, or to do some rescaling animations. Graphics are almost always done with the mindset that they may someday go to print media, which means that even the most advanced HD doesn't come anywhere close. Bottom line is, it takes almost no more developement to do HD graphics than SD, since both are going to be highly downscaled anyway.
The question isn't really about creating an image that'll look good on the system's display, though, it's about creating a full interactive environment, with characters, etc. that'll look good and work well on the system. That means dealing with all the minor headaches of whatever platform you're dealing with (PS2 had some pretty substantial development difficulties due to its very strange hardware, for instance - but any platform has you dealing with a certain set of built-in functionality and available pre-supplied libs, hardware limitations like memory, CPU, GPU, and so on - those things, plus the developers' pre-existing familiarity with the system and the type of game being made, are among the major technical challenges in creating a game.
And the GameCube-similarly comment is just silly.
Why? Be specific.
Only a very small handfull of people think of the Wii as an "slightly updated GameCube"
I didn't say it was a "slightly updated GameCube", I said the machine had a strong kinship to the 'Cube hardware. This is like saying, for instance, the PS2 has a strong kinship to the PS1 hardware, or the DS has a strong kinship to the GBA hardware. A DS is very different from a GBA: but if you know GBA programming (in particular, the video and audio systems) it's quite helpful in writing DS programs. (Then, of course, you would want to add 3-D graphics programming skills and wireless networking, among other things, in order to make the most of the DS. Likewise, even though the PS2 has loads of hardware the PSX didn't have, a PS2 game will still use the hardware that was included in the PS2 specifically for PS1 compatibility.)
The GameCube didn't sell, the Wii is selling incredibly well, which means that there must be a huge difference in people's minds between the systems...
What's in people's minds means very little in terms of what's actually inside the machine. The 'Cube also had a huge initial burst of popularity, it just lacked staying power. I think a lot of us fear that kind of fate will fall to the Wii as well. But I choose to remain optimistic - I love what they've done with the machine, much like my prized DS. Even if it does sink ultimately I think I'd really enjoy being along for the ride.
It's all about marketing, it has nothing to do with development costs or horsepower speculations. You can only talk about development costs being a factor if each unit sold requires a certain amount to produce.
Well, you're only going to sell a finite number of any one title - so naturally there's some non-zero amount of money from the sale price that has to cover development costs. But this is also something that publishers average out a bit - playing the field with various experimental titles looking for the one hit that'll pay for several failures. But there's certainly truth in what you say - at a certain level Sony and Microsoft charge more because they can, and Nintendo doesn't because that's not the experience they want people to have.
As a side note - I have found that there are cases where a more powerful machine does make a significant difference in the
You can disagree all you like, but you'll still be wrong. Blow me. Like you're Mr. Industry Analyst and I'm just the know-nothing feeb? Don't be a prick, we're both just armchair quarterbacks here.
If you want to talk about effort required to make models - Miis are a special case as they're rather simple. But people don't want that in all their games. They don't want cartoon characters in Red Steel. If you're going for a complex look, it's harder to make a good-looking low-poly model than it is to make a good-looking high-poly model. Game designers have, of course, built up the requisite skills for making low-poly models in order to deal with hardware limitations, but as the hardware becomes more powerful they can make better models with less effort.
Then how can you explain why Wii games only cost $50 still? I blame the increased graphical power of the 360 and PS3 which increases the development costs due to the developers' (or publishers?) need to utilise all graphical power available. I disagree. More likely it's due to the Wii hardware's close kinship to the Gamecube. Developers familiar with the 'cube can take advantage of their existing skills - much like GBA developers could with the DS. The same applies to some extent to the PS3 and XBox 360, too, but those machines are much more distant from their predecessors in terms of capabilities.
But there's also this: in the end, they don't charge you what the game costs, they charge what you're willing to pay and then distribute the monetary yield. The Wii is an economy system, whereas the PS3 and XBox 360 are more high-end gear, (and with more "loss-leader" money to recover) so the game titles are priced to match.
I'm sorry, but I can't let this one fly. America is the worst polluter in the world, not just per capita, but OVER-ALL.... You sir, are a dick.
Calling people dicks unnecessarily in polite discussion is uncalled for. Ad homonym attacks are counterproductive and rightfully make you look like an asshole and instantly lower your position in any debate. Is an ad homonym attack when you try to attack someone's statement by substituting words they said with different words, with different meanings, but the same pronunciation? Shirley, if that is so we can all agree that ad homonym attacks are quite inappropriate.
It's true that being an asshole when dealing with a dick will lower your position in most cases. But in fact there are many positions dicks and assholes may assume with respect with one another. Some will tell you that the dick will still get the best of the exchange, but in reality it's all a matter of preference.
Hardly surprises me that every few years, a group so rigorously dedicated to a set of strongly defined principles would suffer a period of amok time. It's simply logical.
Naturally, the first thing I thought of was the miracle performed by Our Lord And Saviour, Jesus Christ, when He turned water to wine. Ah, what a blessed event, and what a blessing He was upon us all!
But just think if he'd done this trick, but in reverse - turning women's dresses into wine. Instantaneous result is a naked woman covered in delicious alcohol. I bet it'd be a big hit at parties.:)
Don't get me wrong - I still love PalmOS. It's just in desperate need of modernization. But that's probably not going to happen - more likely they're just going to put more layers of veneer onto the existing OS 5, until they're ready to give up on it entirely.
As for the 700w - its release was a little disturbing. They released the 700p and thus demonstrated that PalmOS is not (quite) dead, but I couldn't help but think - if Palm's not behind PalmOS any more, then who is?
I noticed you posted the marketing propaganda speeds. Have you actually used Wi-Fi? I've never seen that actual througput. Once again, best case, real world numbers I've seen look more like this:
EVDO: 2Mbps 802.11b: 5Mbps when I can find it 802.11g: 22Mbps when I can find it Yes, thanks, I'm quite aware of the relationship between the maximum possible throughput of a network and the down-to-earth, real-world performance you can generally expect. I just didn't want to be saying "Oh, you can get 5Mbps just on 802.11b" and then have some dipshit come back saying that EVDO was that fast, too. So I went with the theoretical throughput limits instead.
Either way, the relationship still holds: EVDO being maybe about 10% the speed of 802.11g.
How does thst demonstrate anything? The Treo 700p runs PalmOS. Maybe they're just trying to give the customer choice. Yeah - the choice between an inferior screen and a modern OS versus a superior screen and a faulty OS.
As someone who has stuck with Palm devices for about eight years now, I don't like that that's what the choices are, but I really think that's the way it is. Every time Versamail crashes my phone, (or even just tells me I have new mail, when I don't), every time Blazer crashes my phone, every time Keyguard causes my phone to stay on instead of off, every time I wish I had Python handy, or that my phone could deal with Japanese text, it's a clear reminder that Windows Mobile is the better system for this class of hardware. And then there's the prospect of actually writing apps for the device - I'm OK with going back to PilRC and compiling to M68K for simple things - but the process you have to go through to run ARM code on the thing is obscene. As a developer I find it to be an extremely distasteful platform now.
It's entirely possible for a system to embrace the classic PalmOS philosophies of simplicity and optimization for common tasks, and still be modern and well-fitted to the hardware it's running on. Little things like memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking aren't too much to ask for, right? WinCE in its various incarnations didn't exactly do that, though with each new release they got a tiny bit closer to that - adopting Palm UI ideas here and there, streamlining the process - hell, they've even got a "block character recognizer" that works just like Graffiti - you can get Graffiti on WinCE but not Palm - what a joke.
If Palm's response to the iPhone is to take PalmOS 5 and make it pretty, or add a little better multimedia support - well fuck them. I'm sick of them fixing the bugs on the front end of things (or not) and leaving the underpinnings to rot.
Slashdot Mirror
You make an excellent point IMO - except that errors can be introduced by damaged media as well. For this reason it's important that players be able to handle errors well, unless the media collection is kept pristine.
Exactly, and that's what other licenses are for. The GPL is definitely positioned as the Free as in "Stays Free" license; less restrictive licenses are necessary for many situations, but that doesn't mean that something as strong as the GPL isn't needed (especially for a lot of end-user software). Well, sure - I'm not questioning the value of the GPLv3, just thinking out loud about how I personally feel about some of its restrictions, and how I feel about the licenses I put on my contributions to free software. But I also question how far the GPL should go in pursuit of "free and stays free" - as I said, I think at some point you have to let it go. I appreciate their effort but the GPL also has to be a license people will be comfortable using. I'm sure the two interests will balance out in the end, but right now we're still in the middle of the process and so it's hard to see exactly how things will play out.
The question most people seem to be wondering about with v3 is whether it's too ambitious - seeking to prevent abuses of the license in ways some disagree with. Personally, I haven't made up my mind, exactly. I think the underlying premise of the GPL is great - that it is a license that allows free usage in a way that encourages more free usage - and GPL3 is taking that further, by trying to keep people from taking advantage of free software while simultaneously using patents against it, by trying to prevent people from using free software to create devices that restrict users' freedom (the idea being, that if someone wants a big DRM box, they can write the code themselves)
The flip side, of course, is at some point free software has to be something you give. At some point you need to let go, and let people use the stuff. That's why you wrote it, right? So people would use it. This is the sticking point for me - I like what GPLv3 is trying to accomplish - I even want to support what it's trying to accomplish - but sometimes, if you want your gift of software to be really useful, you need to stop attaching quite so many strings to it.
But all that aside, the real problem with the GPL v3 is that new clause that RMS will personally strangle a kitten every time someone uses GPLv3 code in a DRM box. We've got to see about getting that clause removed.
"Hello, could I speak to Professor prof_guy_303 please?"
"Sure, please hold while I transfer you."
Yep, I guess he's trying to protect the rights of individual states to deny its citizens' personal liberties, rather than supporting this denial at the federal level.
In the mean time, however, testimonials like yours may be more reliable than ones like mine, when dealing with the PS3.
My PS2's DVD video playback always had a habit of freezing, stuttering through sections, or crashing to a black screen. "Unable to read disc". These were perfectly fine, brand new DVDs mind you, and my Sony DVD player plays them just fine.
Want to get lured in by the promise of a less-expensive Blu-Ray DVD player that's also a game console? OK, but in the end it may not be a player you want to rely on for movies. Then you'll still have a perfectly good game system, and you may buy a new DVD player so you can reliably watch movies, and all's well. Well, except did you make that game system purchase for the right reasons? Would you have bought that particular system if not for the lure of DVD playback? Possibly - but that's a question you should consider. Buy the game system as if it didn't have DVD playback features, and then see if it's worth it to you.
Of course, this whole post is gonna stink like FUD, and in a way it is - I had a bad experience with DVD playback on my PS2 and I'm using that to cast doubt on the PS3 because I would expect the situation to turn out similarly. Naturally, I could be wrong about the PS3. But after the PS2 I personally wouldn't bank on that - and so if I buy a PS3 at some point, I'll be buying a game system, not a movie player.
Besides, pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I, for one, don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain!
You know, we all feel bad for the other guy when he loses his job to a computer...
I'm sure the demonstration would've been a lot more difficult if he'd used philosophers instead of chickens. Thing is, chickens can't even hold chopsticks. A chicken just goes straight for the feed, so there's just one resource being acquired. It's still possible for a chicken to starve, but as chickens don't eat that much it's more likely that any shut-out chickens would simply go hungry for a while, and then get to eat before starving.
According to Dr. Daystrom, who developed this technology, it is capable of producing a computer far more powerful than the older, duotronic systems which we're accustomed to. Others have suggested, however, that the new technology may yield program execution that is less deterministic, perhaps even less reliable than the conventional systems.
You're both wrong.
First off, graphical resolution has very little to do with developement costs. Graphics are usually originally vector based (done in things like Illustrator and Maya), or high-res raster files... of which are downscaled immensely when going over to a console. This is pretty much true of any graphic design field. For my TV production (still NTSC), I do a lot of my graphics in vector or high-res raster, just in case I may need to use the graphics later for print, or to do some rescaling animations. Graphics are almost always done with the mindset that they may someday go to print media, which means that even the most advanced HD doesn't come anywhere close. Bottom line is, it takes almost no more developement to do HD graphics than SD, since both are going to be highly downscaled anyway.
The question isn't really about creating an image that'll look good on the system's display, though, it's about creating a full interactive environment, with characters, etc. that'll look good and work well on the system. That means dealing with all the minor headaches of whatever platform you're dealing with (PS2 had some pretty substantial development difficulties due to its very strange hardware, for instance - but any platform has you dealing with a certain set of built-in functionality and available pre-supplied libs, hardware limitations like memory, CPU, GPU, and so on - those things, plus the developers' pre-existing familiarity with the system and the type of game being made, are among the major technical challenges in creating a game.
And the GameCube-similarly comment is just silly.
Why? Be specific.
Only a very small handfull of people think of the Wii as an "slightly updated GameCube"
I didn't say it was a "slightly updated GameCube", I said the machine had a strong kinship to the 'Cube hardware. This is like saying, for instance, the PS2 has a strong kinship to the PS1 hardware, or the DS has a strong kinship to the GBA hardware. A DS is very different from a GBA: but if you know GBA programming (in particular, the video and audio systems) it's quite helpful in writing DS programs. (Then, of course, you would want to add 3-D graphics programming skills and wireless networking, among other things, in order to make the most of the DS. Likewise, even though the PS2 has loads of hardware the PSX didn't have, a PS2 game will still use the hardware that was included in the PS2 specifically for PS1 compatibility.)
The GameCube didn't sell, the Wii is selling incredibly well, which means that there must be a huge difference in people's minds between the systems...
What's in people's minds means very little in terms of what's actually inside the machine. The 'Cube also had a huge initial burst of popularity, it just lacked staying power. I think a lot of us fear that kind of fate will fall to the Wii as well. But I choose to remain optimistic - I love what they've done with the machine, much like my prized DS. Even if it does sink ultimately I think I'd really enjoy being along for the ride.
It's all about marketing, it has nothing to do with development costs or horsepower speculations. You can only talk about development costs being a factor if each unit sold requires a certain amount to produce.
Well, you're only going to sell a finite number of any one title - so naturally there's some non-zero amount of money from the sale price that has to cover development costs. But this is also something that publishers average out a bit - playing the field with various experimental titles looking for the one hit that'll pay for several failures. But there's certainly truth in what you say - at a certain level Sony and Microsoft charge more because they can, and Nintendo doesn't because that's not the experience they want people to have.
As a side note - I have found that there are cases where a more powerful machine does make a significant difference in the
If you want to talk about effort required to make models - Miis are a special case as they're rather simple. But people don't want that in all their games. They don't want cartoon characters in Red Steel. If you're going for a complex look, it's harder to make a good-looking low-poly model than it is to make a good-looking high-poly model. Game designers have, of course, built up the requisite skills for making low-poly models in order to deal with hardware limitations, but as the hardware becomes more powerful they can make better models with less effort.
But there's also this: in the end, they don't charge you what the game costs, they charge what you're willing to pay and then distribute the monetary yield. The Wii is an economy system, whereas the PS3 and XBox 360 are more high-end gear, (and with more "loss-leader" money to recover) so the game titles are priced to match.
Calling people dicks unnecessarily in polite discussion is uncalled for. Ad homonym attacks are counterproductive and rightfully make you look like an asshole and instantly lower your position in any debate. Is an ad homonym attack when you try to attack someone's statement by substituting words they said with different words, with different meanings, but the same pronunciation? Shirley, if that is so we can all agree that ad homonym attacks are quite inappropriate.
It's true that being an asshole when dealing with a dick will lower your position in most cases. But in fact there are many positions dicks and assholes may assume with respect with one another. Some will tell you that the dick will still get the best of the exchange, but in reality it's all a matter of preference.
Hardly surprises me that every few years, a group so rigorously dedicated to a set of strongly defined principles would suffer a period of amok time. It's simply logical.
Dogs love me 'cause I'm crazy sniffable...
Ballmer SMASH!
Naturally, the first thing I thought of was the miracle performed by Our Lord And Saviour, Jesus Christ, when He turned water to wine. Ah, what a blessed event, and what a blessing He was upon us all!
:)
But just think if he'd done this trick, but in reverse - turning women's dresses into wine. Instantaneous result is a naked woman covered in delicious alcohol. I bet it'd be a big hit at parties.
in the community of Microsoft's motives and actions?
They have a community?
Don't get me wrong - I still love PalmOS. It's just in desperate need of modernization. But that's probably not going to happen - more likely they're just going to put more layers of veneer onto the existing OS 5, until they're ready to give up on it entirely.
As for the 700w - its release was a little disturbing. They released the 700p and thus demonstrated that PalmOS is not (quite) dead, but I couldn't help but think - if Palm's not behind PalmOS any more, then who is?
EVDO: 2Mbps
802.11b: 5Mbps when I can find it
802.11g: 22Mbps when I can find it Yes, thanks, I'm quite aware of the relationship between the maximum possible throughput of a network and the down-to-earth, real-world performance you can generally expect. I just didn't want to be saying "Oh, you can get 5Mbps just on 802.11b" and then have some dipshit come back saying that EVDO was that fast, too. So I went with the theoretical throughput limits instead.
Either way, the relationship still holds: EVDO being maybe about 10% the speed of 802.11g.
As someone who has stuck with Palm devices for about eight years now, I don't like that that's what the choices are, but I really think that's the way it is. Every time Versamail crashes my phone, (or even just tells me I have new mail, when I don't), every time Blazer crashes my phone, every time Keyguard causes my phone to stay on instead of off, every time I wish I had Python handy, or that my phone could deal with Japanese text, it's a clear reminder that Windows Mobile is the better system for this class of hardware. And then there's the prospect of actually writing apps for the device - I'm OK with going back to PilRC and compiling to M68K for simple things - but the process you have to go through to run ARM code on the thing is obscene. As a developer I find it to be an extremely distasteful platform now.
It's entirely possible for a system to embrace the classic PalmOS philosophies of simplicity and optimization for common tasks, and still be modern and well-fitted to the hardware it's running on. Little things like memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking aren't too much to ask for, right? WinCE in its various incarnations didn't exactly do that, though with each new release they got a tiny bit closer to that - adopting Palm UI ideas here and there, streamlining the process - hell, they've even got a "block character recognizer" that works just like Graffiti - you can get Graffiti on WinCE but not Palm - what a joke.
If Palm's response to the iPhone is to take PalmOS 5 and make it pretty, or add a little better multimedia support - well fuck them. I'm sick of them fixing the bugs on the front end of things (or not) and leaving the underpinnings to rot.