Luckily there's an entire guide available to stalking the wily hacker.

Most of the Palm programming books with a CD bundle shipped a copy of Code Warrior Lite. As already mentioned in the summary, that's not really useful for Palm OS 5 development work.

I don't think this poster was completely serious though. But they were very interactive.

PalmOS was more popular than the Amiga. At one point about 90% of smartphones were based on Palm software, and by 2000 they had already sold more than 7 million units--compared to roughly 6 million Amigas across its entire lifetime.

The only Commodore computer that outsold Palm was the Commodore 64, with 22 million units. The main reason Amiga seems like a much larger influence than Palm is that overall computer sales were so much smaller when it was active. 6M computers in the late 80's/early 90's was a lot. Smartphones are already shipping over 250M units a year.

Whether Symbian is a good platform or not involves more than just if the code is functional. Sometimes a lack of applications is driven by a more fundamental weakness in a platform. One of the reasons the iPhone and iPad have done so well courting application developers is that Apple tries to keep everyone marching in formation, moving the platform forward without leaving current customers too far behind. (Their formation, of course, but they are Apple)

A good example is the "pixel doubing" that went into the early iPad design. That intentionally structured the design of the platform so that applications written for lower resolutions would continue working against the higher pixel counts. That's the sort of subtle thing you do to keep developers happy and application development flourishing.

Faced with the same sort of devices with multiple resolutions problem, Android leaves the whole mess in the lap of application developers. And Nokia has just abandoned the old stuff. If you're a phone developer, how would you feel about that? A lot of things like that influence whether applications are built for a platform or not.

And, yes, Microsoft has bullied their way into a winning position using their operating system monopoly for a long time, with IE being a good example of that. I don't think it's safe to assume that tactic will keep working anymore though. I don't know anyone who feels Windows compatibility is an important thing on their phone or tablet today. At best, I might want something that opens Word or Powerpoint documents someone sends me in an e-mail. You don't need Microsoft for that on your phone though. Their software is only needed if you expect to edit the documents with low risk of corruption, and that still happens on desktops.

You must not have have been following the Nokia story until now then.

Seems to involve Elop burning another platform. I wouldn't let that man develop a "framework" to do my laundry.

Dr. Bose did a lot of groundbreaking research back in the day. And, yes, nobody wastes $100M in audio research the way Bose does.

The problem is that none of that is reflected (heh heh) very well by their product line. You can't prove anything from a one-off sample in their office. The real key to home audio isn't cost no object performance; it's bang for the buck in real-world production. And it's there that Bose's products are sketchy, and the way they sue anyone who measures that fact should set off a warning light. All the money going into R&D is part of the problem--that's overhead that doesn't fund itself unless it's turned into product innovation. And it didn't in this particular case; the most fundamental patent in this lawsuit set is one Bose purchased , not developed. Not exactly a high point in Bose R&D history.

I'd like to discuss the lack of innovation in Bose audio products in objective terms, but their very deep flaws prevent that from even being possible. They don't use the standard measurements for speakers everyone else in the industry does. Their theater products ignore the THX specifications everyone else adopted. That pattern is everywhere at Bose. You can either believe in the ancient Bose mythology of not measuring speakers, or you can agree that the concrete numbers every other audio researcher in the world uses are important. Read some papers by Dr. Floyd Toole if you want to find out about reflected sound from someone in the speaker manufacturing R&D business who moved past the 60's.

Dr. Bose was a smart dude, but smarter than every other researcher put together? That's a very special breed of arrogance. I'll take the side of scientific consensus, thank you.

Bose didn't even file that patent--they bought it, presumably because they realized it was so general they could sue people all kinds of people when they felt like it. Bose: better sound through patent extortion!

That doesn't have anything to do with the lawsuit. Bose's early patents on noise reduction had a fairly wide scope to them, trying to own the entire territory of reducing aircraft noise independently of the signal. They might even have been able to claim some sort of domain over anyone who plays headphones without music; I wasn't following patent silliness back then. But those products have been shipping since 1989, so any really fundamental patent in that area expired years ago.

What Bose did then was either file or acquire a series of patents on the obvious ways to build digital circuits for such noise reduction. You can't build any digital noise reduction system without tripping over at least one of them. In the tech industry, there are all these "on a computer!" patents people like to complain about. In audio, their version of that tactic is to patent some math in the form of a "Digital Signal Processing System". The first one is really blatant in that regard. Basically anyone who builds a digital circuit with things like a FIR filter and applies it to audio noise reduction can expect a patent infringement. And Bose didn't even develop that one; they bought the patent specifically for the sort of extortion they're doing here, in the usual way Bose sues companies frivolously.

The US Patent Office..

It could be worse for Beats--they could have also violated Bose's highly innovative use of .2 in the model number.

I have -7.0 diopters of myopia, you insensitive clod!

[citation needed]. That's a myth you're misleading people with there.

The important part is not the physics, fundamentally this is a statistics problem across some population. "heavier cars are safer than lighter cars in equal-mass collisions"...right, but that also means the heavier your car, the less cars you'll encounter on the road that are heavier than you are. The person in a 90th percentile weight vehicle drives in a world where they are on the better side of a head-on collision 90% of the time. And because of that, you can't transplant cars from a vastly different weight distribution population and expect the same safety results for them.

The Autobahn does put speed limits on larger vehicles like buses and trucks, to try and limit the worst of the high mass + high velocity combinations possible. That's far easier to do than something like parallel roadways.

It's also worth noting that most of the traffic on the specific chunk of US highway I referenced (I-95) has roughly the same car fatality rate as Germany. There's a handy chart comparing Autobahn safety that breaks things down per-state in the US. The best US entries on that list overlap heavily with the busy parts of I-95. Delaware, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, New Jersey, New Hampshire, those are all states where I-95 is the primary north/south motorway. Those also happen to be some of the richest states in the country, meaning people are buying higher quality cars too--which may also be the case for typical Autobahn traffic. There are a lot of things that correlate with highway safety in some way.

I don't have an agenda, I just completely goofed when selecting a source to support what was supposed to be a factual observation. See my better comment for the argument I should have made the first time. Thanks for calling me out.

I screwed up with that source and deserved the moderation down, but this isn't true either. Heavier cars are safer for the person driving them. The direction US cars have gone is based on things like this 1997 weight study, where the conclusion was that passenger cars would be better with an extra 100 pounds.

However, having a fleet of heavy cars around is more dangerous for the average person, which is what the EU statistics show, and that study points it out too. At the same time as showing cars would be better if heavier, the study also shows making light truckers lighter would be good. The important point in their words, and I'll bold it because it's the most important thing here: "When trucks are reduced in weight and size, they become less crashworthy for their own occupants, but they become less capable of damaging other vehicles."

If everyone has a light car, the average accident isn't as bad as two heavy cars colliding. That's Europe right now. Average car is heavier but you're also in a heavy car, that's the American roads. Worse overall, but it's not as bad if you are in one of the heavy cars! The really bad case is when you're driving a light car and you hit a heavy one. That's what I was describing with the EU car on I-95 example. The end result is a sort of arms race in American car design. Everyone has a a personal incentive to drive something heavier for their own safety, but everyone would be safer if, collectively, we didn't do that.

Another reason the busy American highways are dangerous is all of the trucking used to move things around. My personal distaste for being in a light car here in the US comes from watching a few car -> tractor-trailer accidents back when I used to drive quite a lot here. Whenever I'm in something like a London taxi, worrying about a collision with a truck in that tiny vehicle makes me crazy. I have to remind myself that the road isn't filled with those big trucks though, and overall that's an improvement.