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Message from discussion The zen of Palm and how it backfires
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Peter da Silva  
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 More options Sep 15 2002, 8:20 am
Newsgroups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot
From: pe...@taronga.com (Peter da Silva)
Date: 15 Sep 2002 12:04:46 GMT
Local: Sun, Sep 15 2002 8:04 am
Subject: Re: The zen of Palm and how it backfires
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In article <MPG.17edf3ffca7c36de989...@news.earthlink.net>,
Ben Combee  <com...@techwood.org> wrote:

>In article <altihq$1ho...@citadel.in.taronga.com>, pe...@taronga.com
>says...
>> We have Pocket PCs here because Palm has lousy networking. I tried really hard
>> to justify Palms, but I couldn't do it in an 802.11 environment. If PalmOS 5
>> has decent network support (a good browser, good email, good attachment
>> support, remote file access over 802.11... maybe based on Samba...) that
>> will change everything.

>Palm OS 5 has support for 802.11b networking built into the OS, and it
>has a much faster networking stack than the PPP-engine that was on the
>DragonBall-based devices.

More good news. The PPP engine was beginning to smell of the seaside, if
you know what I mean.  The Amiga had better networking on the same CPU
with only 512K RAM at 7.14 MHz.

>The one area where there will be little change in OS 5 is
>multitasking... the device remains devoted to a single task at a time,

Sort of. But consider the API... everything is event driven, even in the
foreground application. The only resources that a "launched" app has that
a "non-launched" app doesn't are (1) the globals, and (2) the display, and
the display can be preempted. So in a way *all* applications are active at
the same time. This allows for all kinds of things that conventional time
shared style multitasking can't handle easily, like the search capability.

I don't see why this model can't be extended. If an application could request
"persistent globals", then would you need any more multitasking than that
for a PDA? It would be more like Windows 3.1 or Classic MacOS, but Apple
managed to do rather well with that model for a decade and a half and over
two processor families.

I would really rather see this than a completely new process model, and I
will be disappointed (though I must admit not surprised) if Palm creates
something completely new.

And you really don't even need to go that far for things like background
downloads: you just need persistent TCP connections. With a new network
stack they could easily be implemented... just notify the program when
an event occurs on the socket, and have the program do its thing and get
out of the way before the user finishes that graffiti stroke he's scrawling
in 7 hertz meat time.

--
Rev. Peter da Silva, ULC.        29.6852N 95.5770W                       WWFD?

"Be conservative in what you generate, and liberal in what you accept"
        -- Matthew 10:16 (l.trans)


 
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