Microsoft? For ages now MS has used other company's technology for their spelling and grammar checkers. Going to Word XP's Help-About dialog, I see this:
Portions of International CorrectSpellTM spelling correction system (C) 1993 by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved. English thesaurus content developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. French spelling checker, dictionaries, hyphenator tool, thesaurus and application (C) 1994-2000 SYNAPSE Developpement, Toulouse (France). All rights reserved. Spanish Spelling Engine, Hyphenation Engine, and Thesaurus Engine (C) 1998-2000 by SIGNUM Cia. Ltda. Quito, Ecuador. All rights reserved. French and Spanish bilingual dictionaries (C) Langenscheidt KG Berlin and Munich 2000. Certain templates developed for Microsoft Corporation by Impressa Systems, Santa Rosa, California. Compare Versions (C) 1993-2000 Advanced Software, INc. All rights reserved. The American Heritage DIctionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright (C) 1992 Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.
So no need to give MS credit for all of office!
As far as extra language support being more expensive, you ought to look into the educational licenses, should be fairly cheap... I remember when I was in school I could get DevStudio for $99 when its several hundred dollars for most people... But then again, its not like MS has super friendly licensing policies or anything these days....
gack, do a google search and read up about how "SecurID" has been cracked and is not nearly as secure as vendors might lead you to believe...
(As far back as 1996 they started finding problems)
Here's an example discussion: http://www.linuxsecurity.com/articles/cryptography _article-2336.html
MS hasn't used the "compatible" logo since 1998... Why would this be a major hiccup for MS? Sounds to me like business as usual... If MS's competitors haven't capitalized on that fact in the last 3 years, I'm not sure they quite understand that part about competition...
bah. wince is not a variant of NT. It has a new kernel. It is more similar to NT mainly because it mainly exposes unicode api's. Don't expect CE and NT to be "resync'd".
After all, they never were able to merge 95 and NT. MS seems to like their product groups competing with each other (or at least they have internal political reasons not to cooperate)
This is a bogus idea (well more like compaq cheapskate engineers ruined it for us). The hardware buttons only allow one button to be pressed at a time. Thus, on galaga its -- move move move stop (let go of joypad) fire move move move stop (let go of joypad) fire.
only things like pacman, frogger where you only activate one button at a time will work...
Windows 2000 is Unicode to the extreme, even supporting Dvengali, Thai and Arabic script on all versions. no thats just full unicode support. If you truly support unicode you must support the entire character set, not just the part you feel like using. Its like saying you are ASCII compliant, but only characters 12-34. BTW: NT 3.5x, NT4 and CE (all versions) are unicode compliant as well. (Probably all NT versions but I'm not positive)
But what are the pitfalls? Hmm...you might actually support the 4 billion people in the world who never heard of ascii until the british invaded, uh, I mean colonized their homeland.
seriously a unicode "character" is 16bits. Which means if you are developing an app for english speaking/reading americans, your text resources will double in size. Bummer... (Although there is a UTF-8 variant I don't know much about - I think its basically unicode for the most popular/common languages)
Another pain in the ass is dealing with network protocols. Everybody expects ascii. So you do a lot of converting which is a pain. Although maybe some day everything will be xml based and you could be using unicode plaintext for that...
How do you handle whitespace? Uh just like whitespace. In the nt world you can use iswspace instead of isspace. Basically all your ascii crt functions have a unicode equivalent. This way brain dead programmers don't go running around saying the sky is falling just because they didn't bother to read up on the subject...
How do you make your API display the characters in the right fonts Uh..instead of a small lookup table for the few ascii characters you need a big lookup table for unicode (probably a smarter implementation that maps in sections at a time when you use them). If your OS supports it, you don't worry about it at all. You use something like DrawText( L"blah blah blah" ). What gets difficult is using an ASCII based text editor to enter unicode strings. Basically you have to use cut and paste from an app that does support it or type things in manually.
All of these issues are becoming more important as the world becomes more switched on, and the boundaries shrink between places And you're saying it wasn't important when the western europeans were ranging all over Africa, Asia and the Americas conquering people? Its only important for those with compassion and understanding. Just like it should have been important to the detroit automakers who were pissed off that Japan wouldn't let them sell cars there, that when they finally did get to sell some cars there that maybe they should check and see what the preferred side of the car was for the steering wheel.
Ha. Objective C. ha ha! MS is certainly not going to switch to a language popularized by Steve Jobs, et al. vicious I can't believe you got moderated up! end vicious
The buzz I'm hearing about C# is all positive from the MS camp. CEF (Common Executable Format) on CE was not as positive as they wanted it to be. Case in point - I've never seen any articles about it or even any hype. This is their second iteration. (Although we should count VB or MFC as the 0th iteration).
Why would MS worry about optimization on alpha or ppc? They no longer support those architectures. Only x86 nowadays (although CE lives on other things).
Read the info, this has been thought through...and makes sense in MS's world. (Maybe not in the real world - but its good for MS's world)
I'm skewed because I'm closer to the CE side of things... The desktop world might be different... But I don't think dramatically different
obviously you haven't tried it. Even on the first generation palm-size PC the handwriting recognition (Jot) was far superior to graffiti and the newton for people who hadn't yet learned graffiti.
The new version is like enhanced Jot. I'm still too used to Jot to be open-minded enough to say its better. But I think if I was to hand this to somebody who'd never used it that they would find it much easier to use than even Jot.
You actually can write naturally, and you don't even have to write neat. As you get used to it sloppy writers are better because they aren't worried about the letters being perfect. They learn how the recognizer works and what they can get away with.
The simple fact that you see what you have written in digital ink on CE makes this far superior to the palm. You instantly understand why your letter didn't get recognized. Plus when you go into help, it draws on the screen so you get an idea what direction and how to write. None of this looking for the graffiti reference card crap...
First off, having these applications in ROM is a big deal. The OEM can mark them XIP (eXecute In Place) which means that there is no need to page the app into memory at all. Big memory savings! (Sure you still need heap space and stack space - but no paging of the executable code itself)
Full Email app in ROM is a big plus. This leaves you more space for messages. Pocket Outlook is nothing like outlook express. Its a slimmed down client perfect for a small device.
web browsing Clipping and mirroring are nice. You point out you don't need a web browser for that. You still can do it with Pocket IE. But for those times you need to find information you forgot to load up before leaving the office/home you still can get to them. This rules. Real web browsing is critical imho. (Yes the screen is small (but still huge compared to the little palm), but sites light slashdot are fine)
avantgo in rom you don't waste any space... Pig it may be, but its a free pig.
color The new hardware performs pretty well. The contrast/resolution is much much much superior than color palm or the b/w palm. Even b/w ce devices beat color palm if you are using them for extended periods of time.
memory As I pointed out before, only gets used by running apps, not stuff bundled in ROM. (bundles are OEM decisions - not MS)
activesync and you never forget to push the button when you run off late to an appointment. Then you probably don't need a pda. For those of us who aren't so organized, the auto sync rules.
usb if you had a device that you could really store a lot of data on, you'd appreciate the speed of USB or ethernet. But if you were really concerned about this before you just bought a NIC. (oops palm has no expansion slot sorry, i forgot.)
financial software ok you got me there. MS Money is crappy. But from a cursory inspection, it looks like pocket ms money is all I ever needed. (I use a spreadsheet at home to track full info - neither quicken or monoy is good enough on the desktop)
mapping software you need to compare the screens side by side to understand the resolution of the screens. CE lcd panels are nice, palms are crappy. Maybe like the difference between sony trinitron and zenith curvy...
mp3 don't forget about the 512MB IBM Microdrive you can throw in the CF slot. (well and the really really long power cord you need...yes I understand this problem)
text reader again, ROM rules for memory savings.
games yeah experience is marketing speak. But color games rule, but no nothing cool comes with the in the box.
so obviously I think the PocketPCs are cool. I've used both extensively, and I must say Palms are way too low tech. They can't do what I want them to do and believe it or not, I find the interface difficult and frustrating. win95 is probably worse on a palmtop. But the new PocketPC/rapier shell is a big improvement. I think its at least as good as the palm.
The comparison should always be out of the box. There's plenty of add-on software for both platforms. But it takes extra effort and likely extra money to get those features... The PocketPC will turn heads, it is at least on par with the Palm. IMO it surpasses the Palm, but I figure thats just my opinion so far...
The OS is in masked ROM. Its up to the OEM to provide a ROM upgrade to the new OS. I haven't seen any official announcements of OEM's like Casio/HP/Compaq except for some vague report that filtered in from Compaq germany.
Based on past history, they will offer ROM upgrades. You'll have to send the device back to the factory and it will probably run $100 or so...
I think people who purchased compaq devices in the last month or so are eligible for free upgrades. I haven't seen any other OEM's making announcements about this yet.
Yes it will play MP3's. Its a 131mhz vr4121 MIPS CPU - I think. The slowest part on all CE devices is the display subsystem. (You can even play mp3's on the old nino's and e10's - in mono)
Slashdot Mirror
sed == stream editor
lex == lexical analyzer
origins of names of common unix utilities have more to do with typing frugality than latin -- read a few history books
Microsoft? For ages now MS has used other company's technology for their spelling and grammar checkers. Going to Word XP's Help-About dialog, I see this:
Portions of International CorrectSpellTM spelling correction system (C) 1993 by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved. English thesaurus content developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. French spelling checker, dictionaries, hyphenator tool, thesaurus and application (C) 1994-2000 SYNAPSE Developpement, Toulouse (France). All rights reserved. Spanish Spelling Engine, Hyphenation Engine, and Thesaurus Engine (C) 1998-2000 by SIGNUM Cia. Ltda. Quito, Ecuador. All rights reserved. French and Spanish bilingual dictionaries (C) Langenscheidt KG Berlin and Munich 2000. Certain templates developed for Microsoft Corporation by Impressa Systems, Santa Rosa, California. Compare Versions (C) 1993-2000 Advanced Software, INc. All rights reserved. The American Heritage DIctionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright (C) 1992 Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.
So no need to give MS credit for all of office!
As far as extra language support being more expensive, you ought to look into the educational licenses, should be fairly cheap... I remember when I was in school I could get DevStudio for $99 when its several hundred dollars for most people... But then again, its not like MS has super friendly licensing policies or anything these days....
HTML
gack, do a google search and read up about how "SecurID" has been cracked and is not nearly as secure as vendors might lead you to believe... (As far back as 1996 they started finding problems) Here's an example discussion: http://www.linuxsecurity.com/articles/cryptography _article-2336.html
blech. It doesn't matter if you have no qualms about going and replacing the ps when it fails.
If you need the best money can buy, I don't think I've ever heard anything bad about: PC Power and Cooling
They are expensive, but the best. CompUSA/Fry's no-names are cheap. But you will have to replace them at some point.
Not in Seattle! We've got plenty of "floating bridges" that have sunk... We just rev the plans and rebuild!
Last time I looked, MS makes no claim of standards conformance... I'd love to see a link to some sort of document where they do claim compliance...
re: logo
MS hasn't used the "compatible" logo since 1998... Why would this be a major hiccup for MS? Sounds to me like business as usual... If MS's competitors haven't capitalized on that fact in the last 3 years, I'm not sure they quite understand that part about competition...
bah. wince is not a variant of NT. It has a new kernel. It is more similar to NT mainly because it mainly exposes unicode api's. Don't expect CE and NT to be "resync'd".
After all, they never were able to merge 95 and NT. MS seems to like their product groups competing with each other (or at least they have internal political reasons not to cooperate)
This is a bogus idea (well more like compaq cheapskate engineers ruined it for us). The hardware buttons only allow one button to be pressed at a time. Thus, on galaga its -- move move move stop (let go of joypad) fire move move move stop (let go of joypad) fire.
only things like pacman, frogger where you only activate one button at a time will work...
see http://www.jimmysoftware.com/ipaqbutto n.html
The Casio Cassiopeia line lets you hold down multiple buttons and has a more ergonomic layout like the gameboy...
Hmm...you probably could go read things at the site in your posting http://www.unicode.org/ and learn these things, its not hard. its just text after all... http://www.unicode.org/unic ode/standard/principles.html
Windows 2000 is Unicode to the extreme, even supporting Dvengali, Thai and Arabic script on all versions.
no thats just full unicode support. If you truly support unicode you must support the entire character set, not just the part you feel like using. Its like saying you are ASCII compliant, but only characters 12-34. BTW: NT 3.5x, NT4 and CE (all versions) are unicode compliant as well. (Probably all NT versions but I'm not positive)
But what are the pitfalls?
Hmm...you might actually support the 4 billion people in the world who never heard of ascii until the british invaded, uh, I mean colonized their homeland.
seriously a unicode "character" is 16bits. Which means if you are developing an app for english speaking/reading americans, your text resources will double in size. Bummer... (Although there is a UTF-8 variant I don't know much about - I think its basically unicode for the most popular/common languages)
Another pain in the ass is dealing with network protocols. Everybody expects ascii. So you do a lot of converting which is a pain. Although maybe some day everything will be xml based and you could be using unicode plaintext for that...
How do you handle whitespace?
Uh just like whitespace. In the nt world you can use iswspace instead of isspace. Basically all your ascii crt functions have a unicode equivalent. This way brain dead programmers don't go running around saying the sky is falling just because they didn't bother to read up on the subject...
How do you make your API display the characters in the right fonts
Uh..instead of a small lookup table for the few ascii characters you need a big lookup table for unicode (probably a smarter implementation that maps in sections at a time when you use them). If your OS supports it, you don't worry about it at all. You use something like DrawText( L"blah blah blah" ). What gets difficult is using an ASCII based text editor to enter unicode strings. Basically you have to use cut and paste from an app that does support it or type things in manually.
All of these issues are becoming more important as the world becomes more switched on, and the boundaries shrink between places And you're saying it wasn't important when the western europeans were ranging all over Africa, Asia and the Americas conquering people? Its only important for those with compassion and understanding. Just like it should have been important to the detroit automakers who were pissed off that Japan wouldn't let them sell cars there, that when they finally did get to sell some cars there that maybe they should check and see what the preferred side of the car was for the steering wheel.
Ha. Objective C. ha ha! MS is certainly not going to switch to a language popularized by Steve Jobs, et al. vicious I can't believe you got moderated up! end vicious
The buzz I'm hearing about C# is all positive from the MS camp. CEF (Common Executable Format) on CE was not as positive as they wanted it to be. Case in point - I've never seen any articles about it or even any hype. This is their second iteration. (Although we should count VB or MFC as the 0th iteration).
Why would MS worry about optimization on alpha or ppc? They no longer support those architectures. Only x86 nowadays (although CE lives on other things).
Read the info, this has been thought through...and makes sense in MS's world. (Maybe not in the real world - but its good for MS's world)
I'm skewed because I'm closer to the CE side of things... The desktop world might be different... But I don't think dramatically different
This statement refers to "out of the box".
My PalmIII and PalmV don't have a web browser bundled. Thus this web browsing capability is provided by 3rd party software.
I also think they use "web clipping" to mean any sort of offline storage of web data..not just the crummy PalmVII wireless junk.
Besides, this is marketing speak, you have to take everything with a grain of salt.
obviously you haven't tried it. Even on the first generation palm-size PC the handwriting recognition (Jot) was far superior to graffiti and the newton for people who hadn't yet learned graffiti.
The new version is like enhanced Jot. I'm still too used to Jot to be open-minded enough to say its better. But I think if I was to hand this to somebody who'd never used it that they would find it much easier to use than even Jot.
You actually can write naturally, and you don't even have to write neat. As you get used to it sloppy writers are better because they aren't worried about the letters being perfect. They learn how the recognizer works and what they can get away with.
The simple fact that you see what you have written in digital ink on CE makes this far superior to the palm. You instantly understand why your letter didn't get recognized. Plus when you go into help, it draws on the screen so you get an idea what direction and how to write. None of this looking for the graffiti reference card crap...
First off, having these applications in ROM is a big deal. The OEM can mark them XIP (eXecute In Place) which means that there is no need to page the app into memory at all. Big memory savings! (Sure you still need heap space and stack space - but no paging of the executable code itself)
Full Email app in ROM is a big plus. This leaves you more space for messages. Pocket Outlook is nothing like outlook express. Its a slimmed down client perfect for a small device.
web browsing Clipping and mirroring are nice. You point out you don't need a web browser for that. You still can do it with Pocket IE. But for those times you need to find information you forgot to load up before leaving the office/home you still can get to them. This rules. Real web browsing is critical imho. (Yes the screen is small (but still huge compared to the little palm), but sites light slashdot are fine)
avantgo in rom you don't waste any space... Pig it may be, but its a free pig.
color The new hardware performs pretty well. The contrast/resolution is much much much superior than color palm or the b/w palm. Even b/w ce devices beat color palm if you are using them for extended periods of time.
memory As I pointed out before, only gets used by running apps, not stuff bundled in ROM. (bundles are OEM decisions - not MS)
activesync and you never forget to push the button when you run off late to an appointment. Then you probably don't need a pda. For those of us who aren't so organized, the auto sync rules.
usb if you had a device that you could really store a lot of data on, you'd appreciate the speed of USB or ethernet. But if you were really concerned about this before you just bought a NIC. (oops palm has no expansion slot sorry, i forgot.)
financial software ok you got me there. MS Money is crappy. But from a cursory inspection, it looks like pocket ms money is all I ever needed. (I use a spreadsheet at home to track full info - neither quicken or monoy is good enough on the desktop)
mapping software you need to compare the screens side by side to understand the resolution of the screens. CE lcd panels are nice, palms are crappy. Maybe like the difference between sony trinitron and zenith curvy...
mp3 don't forget about the 512MB IBM Microdrive you can throw in the CF slot. (well and the really really long power cord you need...yes I understand this problem)
text reader again, ROM rules for memory savings.
games yeah experience is marketing speak. But color games rule, but no nothing cool comes with the in the box.
so obviously I think the PocketPCs are cool. I've used both extensively, and I must say Palms are way too low tech. They can't do what I want them to do and believe it or not, I find the interface difficult and frustrating. win95 is probably worse on a palmtop. But the new PocketPC/rapier shell is a big improvement. I think its at least as good as the palm.
The comparison should always be out of the box. There's plenty of add-on software for both platforms. But it takes extra effort and likely extra money to get those features... The PocketPC will turn heads, it is at least on par with the Palm. IMO it surpasses the Palm, but I figure thats just my opinion so far...
No.
The OS is in masked ROM. Its up to the OEM to provide a ROM upgrade to the new OS. I haven't seen any official announcements of OEM's like Casio/HP/Compaq except for some vague report that filtered in from Compaq germany.
Based on past history, they will offer ROM upgrades. You'll have to send the device back to the factory and it will probably run $100 or so...
I think people who purchased compaq devices in the last month or so are eligible for free upgrades. I haven't seen any other OEM's making announcements about this yet.
Yes it will play MP3's. Its a 131mhz vr4121 MIPS CPU - I think. The slowest part on all CE devices is the display subsystem. (You can even play mp3's on the old nino's and e10's - in mono)