Germany has some of the most protective laws for workers in the world. In addition to your 4 weeks statutory leave, you'll get at least another week off because of public holidays (Feiertage). If your company has a good overtime system, as a lot do (work extra now, take it as holiday later), you may well end up with over 6 weeks paid holiday per year. A lot of companies will quote you an amount per month and then pay you for 13 months a year (ie: Christmas bonus).
Germany has it's problems too. One is beauracracy. Another is tax (although it's being reduced next year). You can expect to end up taking home as little as half what you did before if you're not careful. Also: the rubbish system will drive you nuts - you have to recycle everything.
That said, I live here in Germany and I like it. There are some nice things about Germany. They know how to make good cars (VW, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche are all German makes). German beer is not bad!!! Germany is geographically pretty much in the middle, so you can very easily drive around and experience very different cultures. Eastern Europe is cheap too. My favourite thing about Germany is that the Autobahns don't have speed limits in many parts (and I got a Porsche).
The IT industry here is also quite competetive too. Both IBM and HP/Agilent have large installations in Germany, but there are a lot of other smaller companies too.
There are a lot of non-Germans working in Germany in IT; the primary business language is English, so you have an instant advantage over a lot of Germans who can't speak it so well.
Looks to me like everybody missed one: the POSIX package format. It has been in existance for quite a few years now and is used by various other OSes. There was even a Linux version (done by Unifix, the same people who did the POSIX certified distro).
It's been at least 2 years since I used the POSIX package management tools, but as I recall, it did all the dependancy stuff, pre/post install scripts, in-place upgrades etc. It even knew about architectures. Packages could be local files, on a tape device, read from a server and so on.
No doubt, it doesn't do everything you ever wanted, but I'm not aware of any readons why it would be a bad alternative to RPM/DPKG.
Slackware was (I think) second. Certainly, SLS was around before Slackware. I was using it too - with a 0.99pl7 kernel!! Slackware was more complete than SLS, but both were very primitive compared to today's distributions. You had to configure pretty much everything by hand (X was no joke).
These days I use SuSE. I just upgraded to version 7 (the "professional" one), which comes complete with kitchen sink and caffiene-utils. Actually, having everything on one DVD is useful. (You get the 6 CDs too with the same stuff on them.)
Whenever I try to install a *.xpi file with
the current milestone release, it just times out
while connecting to the server. I can download the XPI files no problem with another browser.
I consider a site that requires a useragent, and also requires you to use IE or NN to be broken.
I'm currently working on an online shopping site for a large, well-known IT manufacturing company. The site is already in use, so I had a look at the stats for August so far.
Microsoft and Netscape browsers make up 97.4% of the hits (nearly 6.5 million so far this month). The stats tell me the browser versions too.
Of the Netscape browsers, version 4.x (Communicator) takes 98.4%, 3.x has 1.3%, 5.x has 0.23% and the others much less.
For MS IE, 81.5% were version 5.x, 18.09% version 4.x, and 0.38% for version 3.x. There were negligable hits from previous versions.
This is what people are using. Management look at these figures and then tell me the features must work in NS4.x and IE4.x and 5.x. That covers the vast majority of users; I would imagine that they would probably consider developing/testing for other versions a waste of resources.
It also occurs to me, that (as is the case with Tesco), the internet side of selling is not where most units are shifted. It's an extra distribution channel. Priorities would probably be very different if it was the primary channel.
I don't know about the UK's disablilty laws, but I think Masem's point about disabled persons' usage of the site would not hold much weight. The kit available on our site can also be ordered by phone and bought from lots of different retailers (ie: in shops); with Tesco you can still go to the shop. It's a slightly different kettle of fish to the situation with AOL - their software must be usable by all, but I don't think Tesco is required to put in a ramp at every single entrance to the building.
Now here's a thing: in Netscape (at least the Linux version - I didn't try others), if you turn off JavaScript, it stops CSS from working. Weird, or what!
Larry Wall - home page unknown, EMail address unknown
There's a reason for that. Larry Wall is in fact Weird Al. Same shirts, same glasses, same silly grin! I bet you've never seen both of them together. Al is Larry with a wig.
You can shoot through walls with the Gauss gun (that laser thingy) in normal Half-Life too. TFC doesn't seem to have any through-wall weapons, but you can always bounce a mirv off walls to get it round corners. The sniper rifle in cstrike is only useful through corners, as you can't shoot through thick walls. I prefer the Gauss though - it leaves a nice glow!
Your point about the number of players is an interesting one. People here keep talking about Quake all the time, but everyone I know plays HL (or a mod thereof).
Anyway - in Half-Life DM, anyone using a model you don't have is displayed with the "helmet" model (hazard suit with a helmet). What's to stop people deleting all their models and replacing helmet with an elongated version? That wouldn't be detectable, and it's much easier to do than messing with some driver. No performance difference either.
It occurs to me that people might be inclined to cheat to make up for some other deficiency (apart from just being bad at it). The thing that IMO makes the biggest difference is ping time. Being able to see through walls won't actually help a bad ping though - the person you see is probably not there (and more than likly has run up and killed you already). I often get routes to servers which give a good ping but intermittently freeze up for a couple of seconds, and it can be really annoying. My tip: play an engineer on TFC, as sentry guns don't suffer from lag!
I'll go one further - it looks like it's not restricted to online purchases either, ie: it's not an internet related tax. They also talk about pay-per-use radio and TV.
There's already tax on physical goods bought outside of the EU (when they are brought in). This looks like an attempt to tax non-physical things.
I think they'll have a hard time implementing it though. My understanding is that a sale is governed by the laws of the country in which the sale takes place. Contractors use this to their advantage all the time: sign contract (and get paid/taxed) in one country, do actual work in another. I don't see how the EU can legally add a tax on a sale made in a non-EU country. It's up to the importer (buyer) to declare their goods.
I've got a somewhat older HP Palmtop - it's got 4 shades of grey!! Full colour would be nice, but it's not necessary. I have a 640x200 display, but that size sucks for surfing.
The palmtop makes quite a nice address book/calendar, and as such a colour display is not necessary. I actually use it's Word and Excel quite a lot too! I don't find CE2 unstable, but I (purposely) don't open loads of apps at once. I can't - I only got 4Mb total. I wouldn't try to push CE too far though - it's a nice toy OS, but wouldn't IMO be capable of replacing my desktop (Linux).
One advantage of the non-colour display (backlit rather than active) is the power usage. I use the thing all the time; it takes 2 AA cells (I got 1300mAh) and I only have to recharge them every 2-3 weeks. The serial link takes a fair bit of power.
I looked at the new Journadas. They look nice, but I think they're overpriced for what you get.
Remember ISDN? BT went digital using a non-ISDN compatible standard, and had to replace much of the (relatively new) equipment with ISDN compatible stuff, but it never took off, as the price was just too high.
40 quid seems better than what I might have expected from BT, but it's still a lot. It's about a tenner more than ADSL from Deutsche Telekom, which is 768 kilobit downstream instead of 512, and goes up to 1.5 gigabits if you turn on compression (so I'm told by someone in Stuttgart who has it). Also, the DT offer uses a DSL box which connects to your machine(s) via ethernet, so no OS/driver problems there.
In Germany, we all like to hate DT for being overpriced, but it seems they're actually doing something good for once. Too bad I can't get DSL in my little village yet!:-(
The Register had this story posted a bit over an hour ago, which talks about yet another offer made by MS since the rejection of the last one. I'm not reposting the whole thing here, though. Aside from not being broken up, MS are still insisting on not being made to admit they're guilty. Seems like MS is getting really desperate!
Most providers only charge 2-3 Pfg per minute in addition to phone fees, so this is only helping somewhat.
Most, but not all! Have a look at Nikoma - they're offering Internet access at less than local call price (including the telephone calls), plus DM10/month.
Alternatively, if you have your ISDN line from Arcor instead of from the Deutsche Telekom, you can get true flat-rate internet access. This is almost certainly available in Hamburg.
DT are offering 3pfg/min any time of day (same cost as a local call at night) plus DM20/month. If you use the internet a lot (100 hours/month or more) then it works out cheaper to get the T-DSL thingy (the one with 100 "free" hours). Obviously there's a speed difference - I heard yesterday from someone in Stuttgart who gets up to 1.5Mbit (with compression), but there's a higher line rental too (extra DM40 or 50 or something). It's still lots faster than my ISDN!!
I tried using Red Hat on a server at work, but it pretty much sucked for two reasons: one was that as the machine was server it wouldn't be running X; the monitor only did 640x480 and configuring RH was awkward. If you don't have X, or if you only have telnet access, text only config tools are particularly useful. I could have survived with that, but then I bumped into the other problem: RH has no direct ISDN support. SuSE does, and it worked out of the box, so the server runs SuSE.
One thing that annoys me slightly about SuSE: they split some of the packages up across/var,/usr and/etc (eg: apache and mysql). I (and a number of others I talked to) would much prefer them to just be left in/opt (or/usr/local), like KDE is, for example.
We've got SuSE on a number of machines, and it's been fine. Upgrading was no problem - boot off the new CD, select upgrade and it just does it. You can of course upgrade a running system, but it takes longer (have to stop/start things).
Multi-lingual support is very good too. There are plenty of people around here who don't speak much English (southern Germany). Und dann gibts ja au' no' Schwäbisch!
If 6 CDs are too many, you can get it on a DVD. (No, you don't need DeCSS to read it!) Either way, that's a lot of packages - although it's a bit confusing for anyone unfamiliar with Linux in general, who is trying to choose what they want.
I'm quite happy with SuSE, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it for beginners (unless they wanted to dive in at the deep end). I've not tried 6.3 though - I've heard that YaST2 is much nicer, but I've not had cause to upgrade yet. I'm still fine with vi!
This is a very important point - the crack was actually done by a German. I had a look at the German law, and it's definately very grey in this area (aside from the fact that it's in legal-speak).
I think the old Mac processor cannot generate page fault exception or address remapping...
The MC68000 couldn't, but IIRC the 68020 was capable of using a MMU. I might be wrong about that, but certainly the 030 and 040 were available in combination with an MMU (built in to the processor I seem to recall).
There were plenty of other machines using these processors properly, like the Apollo workstations (running HP-UX).
There were many very good features of the MacOS, and the memory model was definately not one of them.
I wouldn't assume that they'll use Red Hat - I'd actually be surprised if they use any distribution. It sounds like more of a minimalist system to me, so my guess is that they'd piece it together bit by bit themselves. I would of course expect them to use already available packages.
Now that I think about it, my understanding was that (Net|Open|Free)BSD were very good as minimalist systems. I've not tried any though, but I can say that I don't know exactly what packages I've got on my Linux boxes - the dependancy checking pulled in loads of stuff.
As for cost: it's only free if your time costs nothing. As a professional IT contractor, I can tell you that engineers cost a lot. It's more a question of whether it's cheaper to DIY or to buy in a solution. Mind you, seeing as Intel seem to have had a fascination with Linux for a while, I would guess that they now have a reasonable in-house expertise available, which may in turn help to make a Linux solution much more viable.
All of this goes back to their new CEO, who is completely insane, and believes that HP is going to define the next big protocol for internet commerce development.
I don't know what HP's involvement in Internet commerce will be, but the new CEO is definately not insane. She's actually kicking some real butt inside the company. I guess it will annoy a number of people - particularly managers - who have gotten comfortable with being inneffective or overpriced. Things move on, but people often don't like to, hence the need for the kicking.
Time will tell if it works out or not. Also: watch how Agilent does in the future (at the moment Agilent == HP for the most part).
Ummm... and measuring equipment (which I'm informed is pretty much the best there is), the components bit (have you seen what they produce using LEDs, for example?) and then there's all the medical stuff too.
HP's got a lot more to it than most people realise, but most of it is not for the general public, so it's not really visible.
The WinCE devices aren't bad for what they are (address book/organiser). I do think they were overpriced, and I also think the Newton was miles better. Too bad that political deals put an end to the Newton.
Don't know about Chai.
With Merced, it seems that HP was not having much joy with the other company concerned, and have now gone back to continuing development on their own processors. The Merced incident has definately put HP behind, but the PA-RISC chips are actually quite good. Too bad the machines cost so much.
As far as it goes with HP giving away E-speak: no company ever just gives something away - they always want some sort of return somewhere. The form that will take may not be directly related; maybe they want to push this as a standard so they can sell add-ons or consulting. Maybe they're doing it to have a detremental effect on a competitor.
Slashdot Mirror
Germany has some of the most protective laws for workers in the world. In addition to your 4 weeks statutory leave, you'll get at least another week off because of public holidays (Feiertage). If your company has a good overtime system, as a lot do (work extra now, take it as holiday later), you may well end up with over 6 weeks paid holiday per year. A lot of companies will quote you an amount per month and then pay you for 13 months a year (ie: Christmas bonus).
Germany has it's problems too. One is beauracracy. Another is tax (although it's being reduced next year). You can expect to end up taking home as little as half what you did before if you're not careful. Also: the rubbish system will drive you nuts - you have to recycle everything.
That said, I live here in Germany and I like it. There are some nice things about Germany. They know how to make good cars (VW, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche are all German makes). German beer is not bad!!! Germany is geographically pretty much in the middle, so you can very easily drive around and experience very different cultures. Eastern Europe is cheap too. My favourite thing about Germany is that the Autobahns don't have speed limits in many parts (and I got a Porsche).
The IT industry here is also quite competetive too. Both IBM and HP/Agilent have large installations in Germany, but there are a lot of other smaller companies too.
There are a lot of non-Germans working in Germany in IT; the primary business language is English, so you have an instant advantage over a lot of Germans who can't speak it so well.
-- Steve
Looks to me like everybody missed one: the POSIX package format. It has been in existance for quite a few years now and is used by various other OSes. There was even a Linux version (done by Unifix, the same people who did the POSIX certified distro).
It's been at least 2 years since I used the POSIX package management tools, but as I recall, it did all the dependancy stuff, pre/post install scripts, in-place upgrades etc. It even knew about architectures. Packages could be local files, on a tape device, read from a server and so on.
No doubt, it doesn't do everything you ever wanted, but I'm not aware of any readons why it would be a bad alternative to RPM/DPKG.
-- Steve
I believe Slackware was the first.
Slackware was (I think) second. Certainly, SLS was around before Slackware. I was using it too - with a 0.99pl7 kernel!! Slackware was more complete than SLS, but both were very primitive compared to today's distributions. You had to configure pretty much everything by hand (X was no joke).
These days I use SuSE. I just upgraded to version 7 (the "professional" one), which comes complete with kitchen sink and caffiene-utils. Actually, having everything on one DVD is useful. (You get the 6 CDs too with the same stuff on them.)
-- Steve
Whenever I try to install a *.xpi file with the current milestone release, it just times out while connecting to the server. I can download the XPI files no problem with another browser.
There are already quite a few themes available already (see http://x.themes.org/viewresourc es.phtml?type=chrome). They ought to make the ones that exist installable first.
-- Steve
There's another chain that I saw up in the Kinston-Upon-Hull area (ASDF?)...
That would be ASDA, I guess. Don't like 'em myself so much. Don't know why - maybe it's the silly music... or the silly commercials.
Anyway - weren't there any Sainsbury's near where you were?
-- Steve
I consider a site that requires a useragent, and also requires you to use IE or NN to be broken.
I'm currently working on an online shopping site for a large, well-known IT manufacturing company. The site is already in use, so I had a look at the stats for August so far.
Microsoft and Netscape browsers make up 97.4% of the hits (nearly 6.5 million so far this month). The stats tell me the browser versions too.
Of the Netscape browsers, version 4.x (Communicator) takes 98.4%, 3.x has 1.3%, 5.x has 0.23% and the others much less.
For MS IE, 81.5% were version 5.x, 18.09% version 4.x, and 0.38% for version 3.x. There were negligable hits from previous versions.
This is what people are using. Management look at these figures and then tell me the features must work in NS4.x and IE4.x and 5.x. That covers the vast majority of users; I would imagine that they would probably consider developing/testing for other versions a waste of resources.
It also occurs to me, that (as is the case with Tesco), the internet side of selling is not where most units are shifted. It's an extra distribution channel. Priorities would probably be very different if it was the primary channel.
I don't know about the UK's disablilty laws, but I think Masem's point about disabled persons' usage of the site would not hold much weight. The kit available on our site can also be ordered by phone and bought from lots of different retailers (ie: in shops); with Tesco you can still go to the shop. It's a slightly different kettle of fish to the situation with AOL - their software must be usable by all, but I don't think Tesco is required to put in a ramp at every single entrance to the building.
-- Steve
Now here's a thing: in Netscape (at least the Linux version - I didn't try others), if you turn off JavaScript, it stops CSS from working. Weird, or what!
-- Steve
There's a reason for that. Larry Wall is in fact Weird Al. Same shirts, same glasses, same silly grin! I bet you've never seen both of them together. Al is Larry with a wig.
Actually, Larry's homepage isn't unknown. It's here.
Your point about the number of players is an interesting one. People here keep talking about Quake all the time, but everyone I know plays HL (or a mod thereof).
Anyway - in Half-Life DM, anyone using a model you don't have is displayed with the "helmet" model (hazard suit with a helmet). What's to stop people deleting all their models and replacing helmet with an elongated version? That wouldn't be detectable, and it's much easier to do than messing with some driver. No performance difference either.
It occurs to me that people might be inclined to cheat to make up for some other deficiency (apart from just being bad at it). The thing that IMO makes the biggest difference is ping time. Being able to see through walls won't actually help a bad ping though - the person you see is probably not there (and more than likly has run up and killed you already). I often get routes to servers which give a good ping but intermittently freeze up for a couple of seconds, and it can be really annoying. My tip: play an engineer on TFC, as sentry guns don't suffer from lag!
-- Steve
Bruce Perens? How about Bruce Dickinson? Get Eddie in there too while we're at it! That would bring a whole new dimension to the series... :-)
I'll go one further - it looks like it's not restricted to online purchases either, ie: it's not an internet related tax. They also talk about pay-per-use radio and TV.
There's already tax on physical goods bought outside of the EU (when they are brought in). This looks like an attempt to tax non-physical things.
I think they'll have a hard time implementing it though. My understanding is that a sale is governed by the laws of the country in which the sale takes place. Contractors use this to their advantage all the time: sign contract (and get paid/taxed) in one country, do actual work in another. I don't see how the EU can legally add a tax on a sale made in a non-EU country. It's up to the importer (buyer) to declare their goods.
-- Steve
I don't know about you, but I'd actually pay extra for a burger that was prepared "untouched by human hands".
We got that here already - we use monkeys. :-)
-- Steve
I've got a somewhat older HP Palmtop - it's got 4 shades of grey!! Full colour would be nice, but it's not necessary. I have a 640x200 display, but that size sucks for surfing.
The palmtop makes quite a nice address book/calendar, and as such a colour display is not necessary. I actually use it's Word and Excel quite a lot too! I don't find CE2 unstable, but I (purposely) don't open loads of apps at once. I can't - I only got 4Mb total. I wouldn't try to push CE too far though - it's a nice toy OS, but wouldn't IMO be capable of replacing my desktop (Linux).
One advantage of the non-colour display (backlit rather than active) is the power usage. I use the thing all the time; it takes 2 AA cells (I got 1300mAh) and I only have to recharge them every 2-3 weeks. The serial link takes a fair bit of power.
I looked at the new Journadas. They look nice, but I think they're overpriced for what you get.
-- Steve
They probably think they're really smart though!
Remember ISDN? BT went digital using a non-ISDN compatible standard, and had to replace much of the (relatively new) equipment with ISDN compatible stuff, but it never took off, as the price was just too high.
40 quid seems better than what I might have expected from BT, but it's still a lot. It's about a tenner more than ADSL from Deutsche Telekom, which is 768 kilobit downstream instead of 512, and goes up to 1.5 gigabits if you turn on compression (so I'm told by someone in Stuttgart who has it). Also, the DT offer uses a DSL box which connects to your machine(s) via ethernet, so no OS/driver problems there.
In Germany, we all like to hate DT for being overpriced, but it seems they're actually doing something good for once. Too bad I can't get DSL in my little village yet! :-(
-- SteveThe Register had this story posted a bit over an hour ago, which talks about yet another offer made by MS since the rejection of the last one. I'm not reposting the whole thing here, though. Aside from not being broken up, MS are still insisting on not being made to admit they're guilty. Seems like MS is getting really desperate!
Most providers only charge 2-3 Pfg per minute in addition to phone fees, so this is only helping somewhat.
Most, but not all! Have a look at Nikoma - they're offering Internet access at less than local call price (including the telephone calls), plus DM10/month.
Alternatively, if you have your ISDN line from Arcor instead of from the Deutsche Telekom, you can get true flat-rate internet access. This is almost certainly available in Hamburg.
DT are offering 3pfg/min any time of day (same cost as a local call at night) plus DM20/month. If you use the internet a lot (100 hours/month or more) then it works out cheaper to get the T-DSL thingy (the one with 100 "free" hours). Obviously there's a speed difference - I heard yesterday from someone in Stuttgart who gets up to 1.5Mbit (with compression), but there's a higher line rental too (extra DM40 or 50 or something). It's still lots faster than my ISDN!!
-- Steve
Read the subject...
I tried using Red Hat on a server at work, but it pretty much sucked for two reasons: one was that as the machine was server it wouldn't be running X; the monitor only did 640x480 and configuring RH was awkward. If you don't have X, or if you only have telnet access, text only config tools are particularly useful. I could have survived with that, but then I bumped into the other problem: RH has no direct ISDN support. SuSE does, and it worked out of the box, so the server runs SuSE.
One thing that annoys me slightly about SuSE: they split some of the packages up across /var, /usr and /etc (eg: apache and mysql). I (and a number of others I talked to) would much prefer them to just be left in /opt (or /usr/local), like KDE is, for example.
We've got SuSE on a number of machines, and it's been fine. Upgrading was no problem - boot off the new CD, select upgrade and it just does it. You can of course upgrade a running system, but it takes longer (have to stop/start things).
Multi-lingual support is very good too. There are plenty of people around here who don't speak much English (southern Germany). Und dann gibts ja au' no' Schwäbisch!
If 6 CDs are too many, you can get it on a DVD. (No, you don't need DeCSS to read it!) Either way, that's a lot of packages - although it's a bit confusing for anyone unfamiliar with Linux in general, who is trying to choose what they want.
I'm quite happy with SuSE, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it for beginners (unless they wanted to dive in at the deep end). I've not tried 6.3 though - I've heard that YaST2 is much nicer, but I've not had cause to upgrade yet. I'm still fine with vi!
-- Steve
This is a very important point - the crack was actually done by a German. I had a look at the German law, and it's definately very grey in this area (aside from the fact that it's in legal-speak).
-- Steve
I think the old Mac processor cannot generate page fault exception or address remapping...
The MC68000 couldn't, but IIRC the 68020 was capable of using a MMU. I might be wrong about that, but certainly the 030 and 040 were available in combination with an MMU (built in to the processor I seem to recall).
There were plenty of other machines using these processors properly, like the Apollo workstations (running HP-UX).
There were many very good features of the MacOS, and the memory model was definately not one of them.
-- Steve
So what does that mean for KDE and GNOME etc. Will themes.org be getting cease and desist letters?
-- Steve
I wouldn't assume that they'll use Red Hat - I'd actually be surprised if they use any distribution. It sounds like more of a minimalist system to me, so my guess is that they'd piece it together bit by bit themselves. I would of course expect them to use already available packages.
Now that I think about it, my understanding was that (Net|Open|Free)BSD were very good as minimalist systems. I've not tried any though, but I can say that I don't know exactly what packages I've got on my Linux boxes - the dependancy checking pulled in loads of stuff.
As for cost: it's only free if your time costs nothing. As a professional IT contractor, I can tell you that engineers cost a lot. It's more a question of whether it's cheaper to DIY or to buy in a solution. Mind you, seeing as Intel seem to have had a fascination with Linux for a while, I would guess that they now have a reasonable in-house expertise available, which may in turn help to make a Linux solution much more viable.
Steve
All of this goes back to their new CEO, who is completely insane, and believes that HP is going to define the next big protocol for internet commerce development.
I don't know what HP's involvement in Internet commerce will be, but the new CEO is definately not insane. She's actually kicking some real butt inside the company. I guess it will annoy a number of people - particularly managers - who have gotten comfortable with being inneffective or overpriced. Things move on, but people often don't like to, hence the need for the kicking.
Time will tell if it works out or not. Also: watch how Agilent does in the future (at the moment Agilent == HP for the most part).
-- Steve
All they really have left is printers.
Ummm... and measuring equipment (which I'm informed is pretty much the best there is), the components bit (have you seen what they produce using LEDs, for example?) and then there's all the medical stuff too.
HP's got a lot more to it than most people realise, but most of it is not for the general public, so it's not really visible.
The WinCE devices aren't bad for what they are (address book/organiser). I do think they were overpriced, and I also think the Newton was miles better. Too bad that political deals put an end to the Newton.
Don't know about Chai.
With Merced, it seems that HP was not having much joy with the other company concerned, and have now gone back to continuing development on their own processors. The Merced incident has definately put HP behind, but the PA-RISC chips are actually quite good. Too bad the machines cost so much.
As far as it goes with HP giving away E-speak: no company ever just gives something away - they always want some sort of return somewhere. The form that will take may not be directly related; maybe they want to push this as a standard so they can sell add-ons or consulting. Maybe they're doing it to have a detremental effect on a competitor.
-- Steve
You can't sue for that - you'd have to sue makers of hammers, guns, and anything else used by criminals.
Ummm... didn't I hear on the news this morning something about the Whitehouse putting together a class action suit against gun manufacturers ?
-- Steve