on 08/05/2000 05:19 AM, gopi@sloth.org at gopi@sloth.org wrote:
That investment was already gone. Having spent a lot of money on it in
the past is not a sane arguemtn for cancelling it.
1. From a business prospective I would have to disagree, they had to stop
the severe bleeding and to do that there were a few limbs lost.
Oh, yeah, Apple does have some great people; a few of my friends are now
there, I've talked to lots of engineers at Apple. I still maintain that
Apple as it stands now is not capable of the truly uniquely innovative
stuff that the Newton was full of. AS a developer I see a huge amount of
the under the hood stuff that makes the Newton, IMHO, the most innovative
computing device produced in the last 10 years at least.... What about its
data storage system and its use of persistant object stores
instead of a file system? The view system? NewtonScript and that virtual
machine? Transport architectures? The extreme object oriented nature of
the entire OS. The Newton uniquely innovated at virtually every
level. Even if you had, say, an eMate without handwriting recognition it
would _still_ be the most innovative computer of the decade. Its pen
based UI was innovative, but the actual recognizer itself is merely one
component of many. Throwing handwriting recognition into an OS, any OS,
will not make it into somethig as useful as the Newton.
2. I was talking from an end user perspective.
Err. Don't know how you got that, I think that the NeXT stuff was really
cool and am happy to see it live on. Some of the enhancements being done
to the Mach microkernel to give it lighter weight IPC stuff and decrease
message overhead are pretty good.
3. But the company was in bad shape! Now I have never even used OpenStep
so I will not claim I have, but I do own the software. Also MacOS X is more
like a super hybrid, the all you can eat OS.
The people that produced the Newton are gone. Newton is dead. I still code
for it cause it's the best system out there. But I'm way too cynical to get
my hopesup.
4. A lot of the people that made the MacOS itself are not there either,
but I still know it is the best platform out there for the end-user.
Apple is focussing on a small core of things. They decided to not pursue
the PDA, it's that simple.
5. Well that is what I was saying in the first place.
People have talked about how they're going to somehow contribute some
AirPort stuff. Apple didn't design AirPort, they bought it from somebody
else. The cards are OEM'ed lucent cards, the base station uses an
embedded 486 CPU and was designed by some other company. They pushed the
market forward very well, with cool looking products and very good
software behind them. The internal antenna designs are good. But these
are products, not technologies. Not R&D.
6. I am not to sure that statement is accurate, Apple had began wireless
networking R&D since the late 80's early 90's and if they are not the ones
that make the components themselves, that is not surprising. Apple has
always used outside sources for their products, few examples: Monitors buy
Sony (Trinitron Monitors), Philips Magnavox (Performa Line of Monitors)
Samsung (LCD Monitors) and then you have Apple branded printers were made by
Canon and I believe the scanners were made by Hewlett Packard. The USB
Keyboard (original one) and USB Mouse (Puck) were made by Logitech and the
list goes on!
***************************************
NewtonTalk brought to you by:
EVOTE.COM -- the ESPN of politics on the Internet! All the players, all the news, and the hottest analysis and features (plus 'toons!) anywhere.... visit http://www.evote.com today!
***************************************
Need Subscribe/Unsubscribe info?
Visit the NewtonTalk section at http://www.planetnewton.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Sep 01 2000 - 00:00:11 CDT