Yeah, but if the new market is a bust (and I have yet to see any web pad sell except in the clearance bin), and going there makes you less able to compete in your base market, you're dead too.
If Palm wanted a new market to go after, they should try to break into TI's graphing calculator for high schoolers market. All it would take is one app.
Jon Acheson
Maybe Palm will license BeOS for web pads?
on
Palm To Purchase Be's IP
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The real question is where does that live the desktop OS that showed so much promise?
Well, Palm might licence it out to companies doing web pads. I doubt Palm themselves are about to try and go into the web pad market: they have too much competition in their base market to divide their focus.
Open sourcing BeOS might be nice, too. I bet their kernel has lots of goodness that could go into, say, Linux.
The Palm OS road plan, as far as I understand it (and I have no inside contacts whatsoever) is for Palm OS 5.0 to be far more multimedia-capable and powerful in general than preceding Palm OSs were. In addition, Palm OS 5.0 will run on new ARM-based hardware, giving it lots more processing power while retaining Palm's superior battery life. Existing Palm software will probably be run under emulation.
I can certainly see the Be folks helping out in the multimedia arena. I wonder if they'll do any work on the user interface side? I kinda hope not, since I like the simplicity of Palm OS.
Wow. Talk about unexpected. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Apple.
Have you checked to see whether your hardware was actually supported under Mandrake?
As for me, the Linux hardware support for my home-built PC is BETTER than Windows 98 SE's. Particularly for my HP Deskjet 952: its Windows drivers are utter crap. Modem support seems to be better as well. When I upgraded my modem, Mandrake didn't even hiccup. Windows 98 nearly died.
I use Office 2000 at work, and it makes me miserable. It's just feature landfill.
There are serious bugs in Word that have been there for nearly a decade! Like the section break bug! And there are new bugs with every release! It's gotten to the point where I have to print out my docs and CHECK EVERY PAGE to make sure something hasn't spontaneously broken. It defeates the purpose of using a computer to do the work.
So, if switching to Linux means I have to use something else as my office app, I say bring it on!
The fact that the attack was easily foiled does not in any way diminish its scale, or the potential seriousness of the problem.
Yes, it tends to show that the author was just a script kiddie, but authors of worms and virii still do lots of damage.
The real scary part of the story, which no news media have touched upon, is the swiss-cheese nature of M$ security that makes these problems a part of our daily lives.
I've bouight two boxed Linux distros, Red Hat 5.1 and Mandrake 7.0. Probably $35 for the Red Hat, $50 for Mandrake. Plus, four other distros off of Cheapbytes for around $10 each with shipping. That's a total of $125 for Linux, not counting books and a Tux stuffed animal.
I bought Windows 98 SE for $180. It came with a lousy thin manual and not even a jewel case for the CD. I also paid $50 for Norton Antivirus, which I count as part of the OS because not having an antivirus is not an option on Windows. And, I paid around $100 for an Office 97 cd (Mandrake 7 came with StarOffice).
I find Mandrake 8 to be a much better OS, with a superior install package, and much better internet tools. It installs and finds everything on my system (though I haven't tried the scanner yet). Also, the Linux drivers for my HP Deskjet 952 are much better than HP's Windows drivers that lock my system up when I print.
Remember that the interception occurs in outer space with no atmosphere. There are no aerodynamic problems with low-mass countermeasures, and they don't have to weigh much at all. It would all be launched on the same missle. Likewise, the guy above you said the prechilled warhead would get hot; this doesn't happen until reentry.
The atmosphere extends a lot higher than you think. For most a ballistic missile's flight (all of it for some missiles) it is in the atmosphere. And, interception occurs during all phases of flight with a multi-tiered defense system. Even in vacuum, particle beams can be used to detect the mass of targets and sort out chaff and balloons from warheads.
A lot of these concepts were discussed in a Scientific American article about star wars that came out 5 or so years ago. They also had interesting anti-laser countermeasures such as chrome plating the warheads. The conclusion was that countermeasures are so much cheaper than missle defense capabilities that it's futile to build these systems.
How exactly is chrome plating the warheads going to protect them against a kinetic energy interceptor? Which is what was being proposed as an antimissile system, both then and now. FWIW, it woudn't protect them against a high-powered laser, either: the coating would vaporize in microseconds. Spinning them doesn't work either, that was another of the bogus arguments that got published. It's like spinning a vollyball to protect it from a rifle bullet.
Frankly, there was a lot of total crap that got published about the SDI program. Back in the SDI years, I was reading the official releases that were in the NTIS system. NONE OF THE NATIONAL NEWS MEDIA WERE. Newsweek published an issue in 1987 whose cover story was "SDI Changes Course" that was totally created by their own lack of research: the Brilliant Pebble interceptors which were the primary system being developed all along were being publicised because they were acing their tests, and the Newsweeklings wrote a story about "I guess the lasers didn't work out." Shitheads.
Then there was the Union of Concerned Scientists report, which was a perfect example of why scientists working outside their field aren't any smarter than anyone else. It had huge gaping errors in it, like a mathematical model that predicted all the enemy ICBMs being launched from a single mathematical point on the globe, instead of across an arc of thousands of miles like they were in reality. This caused errors that were multiple orders of magnitude in size.
Then there were the "experts" that claimed the software would never work because it was too big and complex. Why, it would need to contain "millions of lines of code!" You know, like Linux and Windows 2000 do now. FWIW, the software has been reused and tested, and it works.
The moral: never do all your research in one place. And follow up on a subject to see what peer review turns up.
That's right, it uses infrared sensors. And unless they can show 80% success at shooting down warheads that are pre-chilled with liquid nitrogen and escorted by dozens of decoy flares, balloons and swarms of chaffe, then they are just wasting money with talks of early deployment.
But looking at it the other way, if they can force a dinky third world country to have to launch extra missiles that they don't have in order to carry all that countermeasure crap, it's a win for our side.
That's assuming the countermeasures would work. Most of what you mentioned would not work within much of the flight path of a ballistic missile because of simple aerodynamics: balloons, chaff and conventional flares don't go supersonic. Dummy warheads would need to mass a significant amount, probably close to that of a real warhead, which again pretty much defeats the rogue state scenario because they can't double the mass of the payload.
I have to give the Final Fantasy staff credit for aiming incredibly high with the quality of animation they were attempting in The Spirits Within. That being said, though, they didn't really get it to work effectively in all cases. Movements that were motion-captured looked good, but the stuff that wasn't motion-captured (facial expressions and hand movements) looked awfully stiff. I kept thinking of Gerry Anderson Supermarionation shows.
Shrek, on the other hand, went for "cartoony," a look that is easier to do than "photo-realistic." And they hit it dead on, 100%. You stopped thinking about it and enjoyed the movie.
Overall, I'd have to rate Shrek as being a better film, because the bottom line is: "Was it good to watch?" Shrek was fun, FF:TSW was interesting on a technical level, but I wouldn't want to go see it again.
It's a little like FF8 vs. FF9 on Playstation, where FF:TSW is like 8, and Shrek is like 9. I am enjoying 9 a lot more than I did 8.
I think what really killed the Newton family was that they got bigger and more expensive, instead of smaller and cheaper. But I submit that there would be no Palm if it hadn't been for the Newton, if for no other reason that the Newton was where Graffiti (and Palm) got their start.
I tend to agree about the reasons the Newton failed.
I do think that there eventually would have been something very much like a palm even if there had been no Palm or Newton. There was enough experimentation going on that someone would have hit on the sweet spot and form factor. The size comes from things like pocket notebooks, cigarette packs, shirt pockets and Game Boy. The battery life would need to be greater than a walkman's (Sorry, CE). The price follows from everything else but needs to be below half the cost of a laptop.
The fact is, the Palms and the Newton were and are entirely different animals. The Newton was tablet-sized, at least twice as expensive, didn't hotsync, and was more of a tablet PC than a calculator-like device.
It didn't really sell, possibly due to a bad launch (the thing was rushed out the door thanks to bad decisions by John Scully). But then, tablet devices generally don't. It might have been spun off into a survivable independant company, but even that is debatable. There is enough of a niche market in hospitals and etc. to keep tablet PCs going, but the tablet PCs can run Windows software. They probably woudn't make it if they had to develop all their own software.
The Palms did sell, because they're small enough, cheap enough, get enough battery life, back up their data, and they're easy to use like a calculator. Plus, Palm made it easy to develop for, and the devices come with all the basic apps you need.
The Palms are about as much like the Newton as a dog is like a dire wolf. Same phylum, maybe, but sorry, one of them just didn't make it in the wild.
There is already very good emulation for the Palm devices: it's used for software development. It will be no big deal to include some version of it in Palm OS 5, and it will moreover give a clean fix to the problem of running the legacy apps on new high-res screens.
Yes, there will almost certainly be some emulation in Palm OS 5, which will be the OS that the ARM-driven Palm devices will run. The emulation will be needed to let the old apps run on high-res screens (the old resolution was hard-coded into the OS in order to keep things simple).
As far as the Pocket PC Palm emulator, remember how much good Windows compatibility did OS/2. It only confirms that Palm is the market leader.
Palm is still the leader in installed base, and unit sales, but Compaq, which now sells about half as many units as Palm, recently moved into the top spot in revenue terms, according to Gartner.
That lasted all of a month, and was measured in dollars, not units sold (iPAQs are more expensive than Palms). Palm is back on top now, having gotten over a bad quarter in which they had to cut prices to move surplus back stock.
As for the pundits, they have been predicting that WINCE will take over ever since it was introduced. If it wasn't for the Microsoft-only companies, CE sales would wbe even worse than they are. And as far as price goes, Palm is the company putting out low-price units, and they can probably drop the price even farther.
The big problem is, most people who buy a CE machine stop using it and never buy another one. Most Palm users keep using them and eventually upgrade.
Lastly, the real reason the consumer microcomputers in the 80's died is that once their parents started buying PCs, the kids started inheriting their old PCs as hand-me-downs, and they didn't need to buy a C64 or an Apple II for them anymore. The whole market disappeared.
Fieros were among the safest cars on the road. They were amazingly good for their size in a collision. I know someone who was in a head-on collision in one and walked away without a scratch.
And, by the time the Fiero was dropped, it was a markedly improved vehicle, definitely more desirable than the stupid Firebird.
The real question is whether the car was dropped because of internal GM politics. The rumor is that Chevy hated it, because it threatened the Corvette.
Funny, the Palm OS is being run on what, 70% of the market? Because it just flat out works for what a palmtop is supposed to do, and it has decent battery life.
I'd like to have MP3 playback on my Palm, but it's not quite there yet. But I'm not going to go to the IPAQ to get it. Once you put the expansion sled on it, that thing goes from an admittedly pretty silver lightweight to an ugly black plastic BRICK.
My prediction: wait a month and see which handheld the kids going back to school start buying. My money is on the under-$200 Palms. That's the next big growth area, and Palm once again owns it.
Jon Acheson
But it costs more than $185 to get it working...
on
Transmeta Webpad
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· Score: 2
The last time I checked, $185 gets you a G1200s with no hard drive. So you have to buy a PCMCIA drive, which doubles your cost and makes it a severe PITA to install an OS on the thing.
Plus, it doesn't boot off the CDROM.
When you're done, it's still too slow to play MP3s (my critical lowest common denominator app these days).
I have a Panasonic CF-01 tablet PC that is just barely powerful enough to play MP3s (it has a Pentium in it). Sadly, it can only do this in Windows, since there are no drivers for PCMCIA sound cards under Linux, and the CF-01 has no built-in sound.
The big thing is battery life - my CF-01 only gets a couple of hours of battery life, and I don't thnk the Ricoh is much better. Some of the nicer Transmeta laptops can go up to 9 hours on battery.
Ok, but they forgot to buy their backup system. A big server's no good if you can't get your information back after a catastrophe (e.g. is it sitting under a sprinkler head?).
Good grief, what do you back up a terabyte onto these days?
The problem is, gliding has its own inherent problems:
Wings weigh a LOT. Look at the space shuttle: at least half its mass would seem to be wings, from an a first-glance guess.
Your ship has to be built to take stress during both vertical liftoff and horizontal landing, i.e. in 2 directions, making the structure heavier.
You need a big expensive crane to lift up the glider to the vertical position so you can relaunch it.
The shuttle can't land at conventional airports. No glider would be allowed to: it would have to have engines that could keep it in the air, and enough fuel to circle the airport on standby if there was some other emergency.
This is not to say that a glider approach could never work, just that every design has tradeoffs.
Slashdot Mirror
At Otakon this past weekend I heard about a new Panasonic DVD-R drive that's due out by November that will be only $500 US.
Ka-Ching! Count me in!
Jon Acheson
Yeah, but if the new market is a bust (and I have yet to see any web pad sell except in the clearance bin), and going there makes you less able to compete in your base market, you're dead too.
If Palm wanted a new market to go after, they should try to break into TI's graphing calculator for high schoolers market. All it would take is one app.
Jon Acheson
Well, Palm might licence it out to companies doing web pads. I doubt Palm themselves are about to try and go into the web pad market: they have too much competition in their base market to divide their focus.
Open sourcing BeOS might be nice, too. I bet their kernel has lots of goodness that could go into, say, Linux.
Jon Acheson
The Palm OS road plan, as far as I understand it (and I have no inside contacts whatsoever) is for Palm OS 5.0 to be far more multimedia-capable and powerful in general than preceding Palm OSs were. In addition, Palm OS 5.0 will run on new ARM-based hardware, giving it lots more processing power while retaining Palm's superior battery life. Existing Palm software will probably be run under emulation.
I can certainly see the Be folks helping out in the multimedia arena. I wonder if they'll do any work on the user interface side? I kinda hope not, since I like the simplicity of Palm OS.
Wow. Talk about unexpected. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Apple.
Jon Acheson
Hope this helps!
Jon Acheson
Have you checked to see whether your hardware was actually supported under Mandrake?
As for me, the Linux hardware support for my home-built PC is BETTER than Windows 98 SE's. Particularly for my HP Deskjet 952: its Windows drivers are utter crap. Modem support seems to be better as well. When I upgraded my modem, Mandrake didn't even hiccup. Windows 98 nearly died.
Jon Acheson
I use Office 2000 at work, and it makes me miserable. It's just feature landfill.
There are serious bugs in Word that have been there for nearly a decade! Like the section break bug! And there are new bugs with every release! It's gotten to the point where I have to print out my docs and CHECK EVERY PAGE to make sure something hasn't spontaneously broken. It defeates the purpose of using a computer to do the work.
So, if switching to Linux means I have to use something else as my office app, I say bring it on!
Jon Acheson
The fact that the attack was easily foiled does not in any way diminish its scale, or the potential seriousness of the problem.
Yes, it tends to show that the author was just a script kiddie, but authors of worms and virii still do lots of damage.
The real scary part of the story, which no news media have touched upon, is the swiss-cheese nature of M$ security that makes these problems a part of our daily lives.
Jon Acheson
I've bouight two boxed Linux distros, Red Hat 5.1 and Mandrake 7.0. Probably $35 for the Red Hat, $50 for Mandrake. Plus, four other distros off of Cheapbytes for around $10 each with shipping. That's a total of $125 for Linux, not counting books and a Tux stuffed animal.
I bought Windows 98 SE for $180. It came with a lousy thin manual and not even a jewel case for the CD. I also paid $50 for Norton Antivirus, which I count as part of the OS because not having an antivirus is not an option on Windows. And, I paid around $100 for an Office 97 cd (Mandrake 7 came with StarOffice).
I find Mandrake 8 to be a much better OS, with a superior install package, and much better internet tools. It installs and finds everything on my system (though I haven't tried the scanner yet). Also, the Linux drivers for my HP Deskjet 952 are much better than HP's Windows drivers that lock my system up when I print.
Linux 1, MS 0, HP 0
Jon Acheson
The atmosphere extends a lot higher than you think. For most a ballistic missile's flight (all of it for some missiles) it is in the atmosphere. And, interception occurs during all phases of flight with a multi-tiered defense system. Even in vacuum, particle beams can be used to detect the mass of targets and sort out chaff and balloons from warheads.
How exactly is chrome plating the warheads going to protect them against a kinetic energy interceptor? Which is what was being proposed as an antimissile system, both then and now. FWIW, it woudn't protect them against a high-powered laser, either: the coating would vaporize in microseconds. Spinning them doesn't work either, that was another of the bogus arguments that got published. It's like spinning a vollyball to protect it from a rifle bullet.
Frankly, there was a lot of total crap that got published about the SDI program. Back in the SDI years, I was reading the official releases that were in the NTIS system. NONE OF THE NATIONAL NEWS MEDIA WERE. Newsweek published an issue in 1987 whose cover story was "SDI Changes Course" that was totally created by their own lack of research: the Brilliant Pebble interceptors which were the primary system being developed all along were being publicised because they were acing their tests, and the Newsweeklings wrote a story about "I guess the lasers didn't work out." Shitheads.
Then there was the Union of Concerned Scientists report, which was a perfect example of why scientists working outside their field aren't any smarter than anyone else. It had huge gaping errors in it, like a mathematical model that predicted all the enemy ICBMs being launched from a single mathematical point on the globe, instead of across an arc of thousands of miles like they were in reality. This caused errors that were multiple orders of magnitude in size.
Then there were the "experts" that claimed the software would never work because it was too big and complex. Why, it would need to contain "millions of lines of code!" You know, like Linux and Windows 2000 do now. FWIW, the software has been reused and tested, and it works.
The moral: never do all your research in one place. And follow up on a subject to see what peer review turns up.
Jon Acheson
But looking at it the other way, if they can force a dinky third world country to have to launch extra missiles that they don't have in order to carry all that countermeasure crap, it's a win for our side.
That's assuming the countermeasures would work. Most of what you mentioned would not work within much of the flight path of a ballistic missile because of simple aerodynamics: balloons, chaff and conventional flares don't go supersonic. Dummy warheads would need to mass a significant amount, probably close to that of a real warhead, which again pretty much defeats the rogue state scenario because they can't double the mass of the payload.
If I may ask, what are your sources?
Jon Acheson
I have to give the Final Fantasy staff credit for aiming incredibly high with the quality of animation they were attempting in The Spirits Within. That being said, though, they didn't really get it to work effectively in all cases. Movements that were motion-captured looked good, but the stuff that wasn't motion-captured (facial expressions and hand movements) looked awfully stiff. I kept thinking of Gerry Anderson Supermarionation shows.
Shrek, on the other hand, went for "cartoony," a look that is easier to do than "photo-realistic." And they hit it dead on, 100%. You stopped thinking about it and enjoyed the movie.
Overall, I'd have to rate Shrek as being a better film, because the bottom line is: "Was it good to watch?" Shrek was fun, FF:TSW was interesting on a technical level, but I wouldn't want to go see it again.
It's a little like FF8 vs. FF9 on Playstation, where FF:TSW is like 8, and Shrek is like 9. I am enjoying 9 a lot more than I did 8.
Jon Acheson
No Comment.
Thag
I do think that there eventually would have been something very much like a palm even if there had been no Palm or Newton. There was enough experimentation going on that someone would have hit on the sweet spot and form factor. The size comes from things like pocket notebooks, cigarette packs, shirt pockets and Game Boy. The battery life would need to be greater than a walkman's (Sorry, CE). The price follows from everything else but needs to be below half the cost of a laptop.
Jon Acheson
That's a cheap shot, but really, I'm not sorry.
The fact is, the Palms and the Newton were and are entirely different animals. The Newton was tablet-sized, at least twice as expensive, didn't hotsync, and was more of a tablet PC than a calculator-like device.
It didn't really sell, possibly due to a bad launch (the thing was rushed out the door thanks to bad decisions by John Scully). But then, tablet devices generally don't. It might have been spun off into a survivable independant company, but even that is debatable. There is enough of a niche market in hospitals and etc. to keep tablet PCs going, but the tablet PCs can run Windows software. They probably woudn't make it if they had to develop all their own software.
The Palms did sell, because they're small enough, cheap enough, get enough battery life, back up their data, and they're easy to use like a calculator. Plus, Palm made it easy to develop for, and the devices come with all the basic apps you need.
The Palms are about as much like the Newton as a dog is like a dire wolf. Same phylum, maybe, but sorry, one of them just didn't make it in the wild.
Jon Acheson
There is already very good emulation for the Palm devices: it's used for software development. It will be no big deal to include some version of it in Palm OS 5, and it will moreover give a clean fix to the problem of running the legacy apps on new high-res screens.
Jon Acheson
Or so the rumor mill goes.
Jon Acheson
Jon Acheson
That lasted all of a month, and was measured in dollars, not units sold (iPAQs are more expensive than Palms). Palm is back on top now, having gotten over a bad quarter in which they had to cut prices to move surplus back stock.
As for the pundits, they have been predicting that WINCE will take over ever since it was introduced. If it wasn't for the Microsoft-only companies, CE sales would wbe even worse than they are. And as far as price goes, Palm is the company putting out low-price units, and they can probably drop the price even farther.
The big problem is, most people who buy a CE machine stop using it and never buy another one. Most Palm users keep using them and eventually upgrade.
Lastly, the real reason the consumer microcomputers in the 80's died is that once their parents started buying PCs, the kids started inheriting their old PCs as hand-me-downs, and they didn't need to buy a C64 or an Apple II for them anymore. The whole market disappeared.
Jon Acheson
Fieros were among the safest cars on the road. They were amazingly good for their size in a collision. I know someone who was in a head-on collision in one and walked away without a scratch.
And, by the time the Fiero was dropped, it was a markedly improved vehicle, definitely more desirable than the stupid Firebird.
The real question is whether the car was dropped because of internal GM politics. The rumor is that Chevy hated it, because it threatened the Corvette.
Jon Acheson
Funny, the Palm OS is being run on what, 70% of the market? Because it just flat out works for what a palmtop is supposed to do, and it has decent battery life.
I'd like to have MP3 playback on my Palm, but it's not quite there yet. But I'm not going to go to the IPAQ to get it. Once you put the expansion sled on it, that thing goes from an admittedly pretty silver lightweight to an ugly black plastic BRICK.
My prediction: wait a month and see which handheld the kids going back to school start buying. My money is on the under-$200 Palms. That's the next big growth area, and Palm once again owns it.
Jon Acheson
The last time I checked, $185 gets you a G1200s with no hard drive. So you have to buy a PCMCIA drive, which doubles your cost and makes it a severe PITA to install an OS on the thing.
Plus, it doesn't boot off the CDROM.
When you're done, it's still too slow to play MP3s (my critical lowest common denominator app these days).
I have a Panasonic CF-01 tablet PC that is just barely powerful enough to play MP3s (it has a Pentium in it). Sadly, it can only do this in Windows, since there are no drivers for PCMCIA sound cards under Linux, and the CF-01 has no built-in sound.
The big thing is battery life - my CF-01 only gets a couple of hours of battery life, and I don't thnk the Ricoh is much better. Some of the nicer Transmeta laptops can go up to 9 hours on battery.
Jon Acheson
Ok, but they forgot to buy their backup system. A big server's no good if you can't get your information back after a catastrophe (e.g. is it sitting under a sprinkler head?).
Good grief, what do you back up a terabyte onto these days?
Jon Acheson
See John Carmack's post above, D'oh!
If he says it's the same, who am I to argue?
Plus, I'm way interested in this 2nd generation vehicle he mentions!
Jon Acheson
This is not to say that a glider approach could never work, just that every design has tradeoffs.
Jon Acheson