Re: [NTLK] New user question about CF cards

I completely agree with Ronnie on each point, and I would love to add
some talking about it.

When Paul's wrote ATA Support, he made his first magic. He built not
only an application,
but an entire new library for the NewtonOS. Such kind of development
can be afforded
only by the major houses (Microsoft, Apple) cause only a few geniuses
are able to do that,
and when The Houses are so lucky to find such brains, they pay them
very very very very well.

We newtonians have been lucky. Paul decided to develop ATA Support
mainly to comprehend the NewtonOS,
then used what he learnt to build Einstein. What he left behind is an
almost free application. Yes, free.

One can buy a 8MB compact flash card at $0.1 and build two partitions
onto save 100 books,
while continuing to keep enough free space to install more Newton
apps than will ever use.

The Newton OS has been designed to work at best when using memory
cards of a certain size,
infact when using a standard memory card of more than 32MB the OS
will start to act extremely slowly.

A full 8MB standard memory card is already slow for me,
(I mean that Newton takes too much time to get complete access on it),
so I use a bunch of 4MB memory cards, each one with its own function
(e.g.: Music, Photos, Software, Sketches, etc).

My point of view is safe when owning a computer where to save
complete backups,
but I could also save a complete backup directly on a single memory
card.
In such case, after having spent some time on finding a compatible
320MB ATA Card
(not a compact flash, but ATA memory on pcmcia), eventually I will
buy a license of ATA Support
and will save my entire Newton environment on it. I would have
offered 10 times its cost
if it wouldn't have been available, but Paul offered to me the chance
to have it paying just $65.00,
which I'd say it's cheap.

Consider AlSoft DiskWarrior:
The app completely rebuilds the Mac OS directory on OS9 and OSX,
and can solve any problem leaving untouched any file apart from the
main directory.

The amount of development involved on Diskwarrior is very similar to
the one ATA Support needed,
but people at AlSoft had all the docs they need from Apple, while
Paul had to reverse engineer NOS,
and although so, let me admit that DiskWarrior isn't as robust as
Paul's software.

AlSoft sold millions thanks to DiskWarrior, and although many Mac OSX
updates,
they offered two minor updates in years, while a license cost of $79,00
(recently updated to $99,00).

I would prefer to spend more threads to discuss about the amazing
things that Paul is offering to the community,
instead of discussing about how to depreciate the bigger update that
our favourite platform received since '98.

Adriano

http://notwen.com

Sam wrote:

> On your 3rd point, do you ever look on ebay? at any one time there
> are half a dozen cards. I paid 19 euro for a 20MB card just the
> other week.
>
> <snipped>
>
> Mac OS 9 was a good operating system and no doubt took the
> programmers in california many hours work, however this does not
> mean its still worth the same
> today as it was on its release day.

Ronnie wrote:

>> Paul's pricing is fair given:
>> 1) the need only to pay for this software for cards bigger than 4mb
>> 2) the quality of the implementation and the design
>> 3) the robustness of the implementation
>> 3) the scarcity and pricing of the linear cards
>> 4) the difference in exchange rates between the euro, uk pound and
>> the
>> dollar

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