On Tue, Apr 25, 2000 at 10:44:01AM +0200, Peter Hribar wrote:
> 1. You are young, and You don't know that everything changes (and You'll
> loose 70% of energy for technologies that are disappearing).
So when are we going to abandon the Intel 4004 architecture used in
all the current offerings from Dell and Gateway?
> 2. In time of 1000 MHz processors it's obvious that Dragonball can' compete
> with faster chips. Video Phone on Dragonball? MP3 on Dragonball? It's a bed
> joke!
It would work nicely with a CPU32+ core, and there is/was the 68060
and various embedded cores inbetween. They would run existing
software.
MP3 would work fine on a 60Mhz dragonball. It might even work on the
existing one or the VG (33Mhz). There is nothing wrong with the 68K
architecture, and I pointed out years ago that just the 68010 core
with the loop mode would improve a lot of things.
The 1GHz processors also need a lot of power and the heatsync weighs
more than the Palm manual.
There is the inconvienient problem with physics. Power consumption is
proportional to the SQUARE of the clock rate. More battery power
implies more mass.
So are Uranium batteries available yet?
Even so, I would prefer a fire-breathing dragonball to some new
architecture.
> 3. It's obvious that current OS is somewhere between DOS and Windows 3.1. I
> apologise, but Palm's OS developers are making lots of mistakes. "Texas"
> (American ASCII) code page in 3rd millennium?! Did they hear about Internet,
> Unicode, World?
More accurately like the Mac OS which was still ahead of Windows 95
when it came out. Guess what - the OS in your VCR is probably more
primitive still.
> 4. Max. of 256 colours? 'RLE' compression?
How many colors on your microwave? Refrigerator? It depends on what
you need. Most printers used for text still are monochrome.
The only limitation I have is the audio, and that would just require a
decent speaker (and possibly a better sound chip).
> 5. How many OS are out? 10? 20? 30? Backward compatibility for BW, greyscale
> devices? It's crazy!
And W2K still has a DOS box and probably supports FCB calls.
> 6. With my 25 years in programming, and their "Just for US" philosophy, I
> belief that they tend to disappear in 5 years.
> 7. They will also need to cut with the 'old' OS's, like MS with Windows 3.1
> or 98. And you'll have to learn new SDK, C++, multimedia ... That's normal.
> 8. Palm, in current condition, is useless in future. It's an agenda which
> want to become a PC. And it seems that someone in Palm know that...
Desktops can't be squeezed into a PDA paradigm. If you want a Windows
CE device, go buy one. It has all the features and associated
problems.
Why should palm with 70+% of the market imitate the other 30%?
Put another way, why would we need another crippled version of Windows?
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