David Moisan's Blog: IT Punditry

Windows 3.11 Retired and My Belated Suggestion for Clippy

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:00:50 GMT

Paul Thurrott (“Forget About XP- Let's Save Windows for Workgroups 3.11!”) and numerous others have written about Microsoft’s retirement of Windows For Workgroups, which has had quite an afterlife in embedded systems.

(This is not new: The 1800-series Red Line trains on Boston’s MBTA are reported to have an “A>” prompt on a console in the driver’s cabin; DOS 6.22 has been seen in embedded systems, and probably in those trains.)

Paul made a nice banner:

Windows 3.11 is special for me; it was the first Windows version I ever used.

It made me think of another “special” persona at Microsoft, Clippy! He had a retirement party a few years back. He made the rounds to various Microsoft events around the country. He happened to ask me for career directions and I obliged:

I hope he’s having a good life.

When Life is Copy Protected...

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:41:08 GMT

Microsoft has filed a very scary patent. The original purpose seems benign, according to Unwired View:

In addition to many benefits brought to us by mobile phones, there have been a few drawbacks as well. Especially, related to ethics/culture/social issues of the mobile phone use.
Don’t you just hate it, when during an engaging presentation, show or movie, a mobile phone of some as#$%^&&, sorry, forgetful person, begins to ring? What about someone taking out his high end cameraphone and doing something with it in the locker room? Can you be sure he’s not taking your nude pictures in the shower? What about someone secretly recording confidential conversation on his mobile phone?
Microsoft seems to have an idea how to solve all these problems at once. By creating device manners policy DMP [sic]), to which all mobile devices will have to comply to. And they even want to patent it
[From the Microsoft patent:]
Such policy may be used to communicate to various mobile and other devices the “manners” with which compliance is expected or required. Similar to some of the social manners honored among people, such as with “no smoking” or “employees only” zones, “no swimming” or “no flash photography” areas, and scenarios for “please wash your hands” or “no talking out loud”, devices may recognize and comply with analogous “device manners” policy.

This won't stop there. I can anticipate lots of potential "no photography" zones:

Schools: "Behind Every Camera is a Pedo!"
Government buildings: I guess I can't film public hearings anymore like I used to.
Public places: Remember, papparazzi!
Workplaces: Maybe you'll be allowed to take pictures of the office party...if you're good with the boss! You're a whistleblower? Siberia might be safer.
Anywhere where someone in power is scared of their own people.

That last is the scariest place of them all, for it is everywhere in America. Everywhere in our country, people take pictures of things the powers-that-be would rather not have seen.

Youtube has video on atrocities in Myanmar. Perhaps in a few years there'll be smuggled videos and photos from America.

I live in the “tourist town” of Salem. What if the Peabody Essex Museum wanted exclusive photo rights for the whole city?

Original: Microsoft wants to teach manners to you mobile device » Unwired View

Update: Boing Boing Gadgets posted about this. DCulbertson writes in the comments:

Suppose it was implemented. I wonder how many public places would eventually have the "no pictures" flag set? Meaning even if it's legal to take photos, you couldn't... Then how many police cars and federal agents would have DMP boxes with "no photos / no video / no audio recording" flags set. No more individuals documenting arrests or police action.

Someone, somewhere in the Department of Homeland Security, is smiling.

Update: Bruce Schneier as usual has an excellent take. Also see his column in Wired, “I’ve Seen the Future and it has a Kill Switch”.

Why Johnny is not a Tech

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:46:19 GMT

Nick Corcodilos, "Ask the Headhunter" is one of my favorite IT pundits; he's an executive recruiter who loves to puncture the job-hunting myths I suffered through early in my career. You know the ones, "send resumes everywhere" (now, "live on Monster.com"), have the "right" resume, and the "right" answers.

He had a great blog post a few months ago that I'm just now getting to, Why Johnny doesn’t work. He asks:

The dominant explanation for why students aren’t graduating with technical degrees is H-1B and outsourcing. It goes like this: Because American companies send technical jobs overseas, and because they hire foreign nationals under the H-1B visa program, (both supposedly at lower cost than hiring Americans), students regard technical careers (in electronics engineering, software development, information technology) as undesirable. They believe they won’t get healthy salaries or enjoy any reasonable job security. They may be right.
But I see another trend that’s far more disturbing than the behavior of companies and students. K-12 schools seem to be de-emphasizing the fundamentals of technology. They seem to be teaching kids how to be technology consumers rather than designers. A case in point is my local school district, which recently spent over $30M to build a state-of-the-art middle school. Every classroom is wired for sound, video, and computers. Every teacher has a laptop, and big LCD displays dot the facility. The auditorium is state-of-the-art; the soundboard alone blows away what you’d find in most commercial theaters. The school is equipped with a video production facility that kids use to produce what’s described as professional-quality videos. The computer lab lets kids use sound samples to produce their own music CD’s. It’s all really great.
The trouble is, no one is teaching the kids how all this technology works, and how they can build their own.

I grew up reading. When I got my first jack-in-the-box, I took it apart. (Mom wasn't happy...then!) I played with electronic stuff from an early age. I read the old Lafayette and Radio Shack catalogs and I was fascinated! I could tell you how a TV worked when I was in fourth grade. During college, I had a very tiny side business taking TV's and electronics from dumpsters and fixing them for family and friends.

A lot of people like me, in my generation, went into IT through their fascination with electronics and computers. Like Nick, I've seen people become mere consumers of technology and I'm worried.

A story from SATV: We have three rack-mount Windows 2000 machines that handle our entire on-air operation; one machine is the master machine with the database and Channel 16 display (Government channel), and the other two handle the displays for Channel 3 (Public Access) and Channel 15 (Education).

One day, during a routine Windows update, Channel 3 went down, and very hard. The CPU fan would not spin up, even after it was swapped for a known good one. We pouted on that one for a day, waiting to hear from the vendor's tech support (they were turnkey systems.)

Next day, I have a bright idea. A few years ago when those systems were new, we had one we thought was unstable due to hardware (it turned out to be a Windows bug, another story). We got a replacement machine but never returned the old machine for some reason.

Why not use the old machine? I took the hard drive from the dead machine and swapped it into the old, supposedly unstable machine.

It worked. It ran for many hours. Success! If I had had that idea the day before...

The fun came when we explained this to the vendor! The poor tech support guy was floored when Sal, our executive director, explained everything that transpired. He just could not conceive of someone doing what I did to get a machine going. We asked him to check with his boss--the vendor has a long, involved, but mostly pleasant history with us. His boss called us back, "Oh, it's SATV, I know all about you!" (We're trading in those systems towards a forklift upgrade from them including a video server so this'll be all out in the wash soon.)

Even in the computer industry, most people don't seem to realize computers are made up of components. Even Macs. The modern education that Nick talks about seems to make kids incurious. Why do you need to know how your iPod works? The Chinese will make more! They can handle the science and engineering, don't worry about science, just buy stuff!

One commenter on Nick's post made me think of an even sadder example:

Third, technology has radically changed the methods of “making stuff.” If you want a state-of-the art shop, it better have a CNC mill, laser cutter, and CAD workstations. I experienced this kind of obsolecense first-hand in high school. I was on the school newspaper, and spent two years learning all the skills of offset printing: photo screening, making full-size (11×17 inch) negatives of page folios, burning printing plates, and running the offset press. Then the district office bought an 11×17 photocopy machine. In that instant, all that equipment and skills were worthless. But our time from layout to finished product went from 3 days to 2 hours, and at lower cost.

A few years ago, I volunteered to be the technical person for the Salem Commission on Disabilities (before I joined them). There was a contest among elementary school students to design a logo for the Commission and a winning logo was picked. Now we needed to get that on our letterhead.

I had volunteered to scan the logo in on my computer, but the commissioners were adamant that it be done "professionally" and several of us went to someone we knew at North Shore Vocational Technical School; this guy was teaching the graphics arts class.

We met the guy and asked if they had a high-end scanner. He did not. It was all film and plates. This was only a few years ago, and by then, digital press was very well established; I'd attended enough Seybold trade shows to see that. Digital press should have been available even at that school's budget, and I was very sad for him and his students.

In the end I scanned it myself and the results were good enough. If that teacher, or more likely, his department head had just been more curious, his students would not have been sent out dead on arrival in obsolete technologies.

Don't fear. If you're a student all you need to do is get your MBA or law degree, Make Money and Make Deals! Engineering, science and curiosity is for the Indians and the Chinese.

Linux: Great quote on Linux and people with disabilities

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 23:51:35 GMT

A housekeeping note: I've been away from this blog for a while. I've been kept away by a private beta I'm in, and local politics (see my other blog).

Jeff Atwood is donating $5,000 to a .NET open source project. A commenter makes an excellent point about why MS seems to reinvent the wheel:

Simon - Subversion, CruiseControl and Nant are great for my purposes in this little shop, but those tools don't scale well to large businesses. Microsoft didn't develop Team System due to NIH, they developed it because they were targeting an entirely different market.
I really wish people would at least try to understand what the hell they're talking about before piping up. Microsoft has to worry about i18n, backwards compatibility, patent and copyright issues, security issues, usability issues, and all of that fun stuff that's part of developing "commercial" software. It's not as if they can just pick up a copy of Subversion and deploy it with Visual Studio and have everything just work; and if they're going to have to tackle the mountains of work involved in bringing those tools up to snuff for everyone who uses VS, why the hell should they do it for free? Those translators and testers and lawyers and analysts all cost money.
I think it's wonderful to be donating real money to open source projects. But please, for the love of god, stop bitching about how Microsoft or Google or whoever is dragging its heels and refusing to accept the divine blessing of open-source software. Microsoft has millions of customers to worry about; CruiseControl or [insert your favourite FOSS project here] only has to worry about white English-speaking Americans and Europeans without any disabilities and with plenty of time on their hands to fix all the minor compatibility problems themselves.
Aaron G on April 11, 2008 07:29 AM

Emphasis added. I still haven't tried the latest Ubuntu. Unless I hear that they've updated Gnopernicus, the screen magnifier I had such trouble with, I'm going to pass for a bit longer, perhaps indefinitely.

Palm's Sneakwrap Warranty

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 03:23:05 GMT

Ed Foster's latest Gripelog is about my "favorite" product, the Palm. A reader of Ed's bought a Tungsten E2 for his mom, and soon after he bought it, unknown to him, the digitizer broke. The E2 is a $200 product. The warranty was for just 90 days. Of course it was after day 91 that it broke. The real problem is that Palm "hid" the warranty information in a small slip of paper in the box.

It's hopeless to think that a user is going to be able to test a modern PDA out thoroughly for 90 days and find everything that went wrong with it. A nightmare of mine, which has happened to me before, is buying a device, using it and not realizing a function is broken on it until I need to use it. After Day 91. ("You mean it's not supposed to do that!?" or "It should have done that!")

I'm convinced the customer is really supposed to say, "Oh well, $200 down the hole. It's only credit! I'll buy another!" (That certainly works for Apple!)

A friend of mine bought a refurbed Palm T3. Normally, I like buying refurbs, and I figured he got a good deal. But it was a lemon that never worked properly from the start. He's been cursing Palm ever since.

Contrast with my iPaq. My model was obviously a display model and much beat upon for several years before I got it. It's probably the same age as my Palm Tungsten E.

The iPaq is in much better condition for its age. Its power button isn't broken, unlike my Palm, and I've never had to worry about its digitizer. I'm not a fan of HP in general but they have more or less perfected the PDA.

What of Palm, the originator of the PDA? Well, what about them?

Source: Ed Foster's Gripelog || Palm's Sneakwrap Warranty

Why SATV doesn't use Linux, Part 2

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:12:04 GMT

Continuing my rant on Linux, with a few more of Wolfe's points and some of my own:

Disclaimer: Salem Access Television has no institutional opinion on Linux, and neither does its staff, board or membership.

3. You can't make money on the operating system

Wolfe quotes from an article from builder.au by Con Zymaris, How To Make Money from Open Source,

Marketing your offering
What does it take for your product to get noticed? Obviously, by using open source attributes when marketing your product: Market the fact that you give your customers the complete source code to the system; market the fact that the code does not have a use-by date or sunset clause. If you and your business collectively fall under a bus, your customers can continue to use and have third parties provide ongoing support. Leverage the fact that local business and government consumers are risk averse, and that you, unlike a group of coders in Iceland or Brazil who produced the original codebase, can indemnify your customers using your professional and product liability insurance; market the fact that you are local or regional and can provide same time zone business support.
By commercial support, I mean commercial support. Charge the customers $200 per hour for it, but make sure you deliver the goods. You should also play the perpetual code escrow card. Many potential customers of vertical business applications need to be guaranteed that they will not be left stranded when deploying a new line of business system.

OK, say we do get a Linux-based solution in our field, and we get code escrow for our Linux-based app and our consultant happily forks (changes) the code. And he is run over by a bus?

Then we have to find some other consultant in our field. Neither I nor SATV have the resources to maintain the code ourselves; it is not our business.

How is this really different from proprietary code? At $200 per hour?

SATV pays for its software; we don't get it from Bittorrent and we do expect to incur licensing and support costs. But we are a small nonprofit with an equally small budget to match. When a product costs us that much to have supported, I must be discerning and look carefully at the TCO just as much for open-source products as for proprietary.

The meme around open source is that support is "special" and doesn't need to be considered just because it is open source. Open source software is subject to the same "laws" and market forces as proprietary software and no amount of ideology can change that in my mind.

There are other points that Wolfe and his commenters touched upon that I want to address:

"Well, you can subsitute <y> for <x> in Linux!"

The Linux community often hypes substitutes for proprietary software. "You can run Open Office instead of Office!" "The GIMP instead of Photoshop!" "Run WINE to emulate your Windows apps!"

In my other life, I've designed graphics for broadcast at SATV for 12 years. I've used The GIMP for 9 of those years. I loved it.

Today, I'm all but ready to dump it and get Photoshop or at least Photoshop Elements. There have never been a large number of GIMP users, and while the GIMP team has served me well for 9 years, I'm missing the potential of Photoshop. All those Photoshop techniques that I can't adapt to the GIMP have caught up with me. I've been using the same techniques as an artist that I used 10 years ago and I hate it. Tools are very important to creatives; for example, Final Cut Pro will not make you a brilliant videographer, but if you're merely a good videographer, iMovie will only get in your way. The GIMP is in my way.

I don't look forward to having to budget even for Photoshop Elements but I don't feel I have a choice. Elsewhere at SATV, I tried to make GIMP our standard, but at the time it integrated poorly with Windows and I couldn't get the staff to be comfortable with it. We bought Paint Shop Pro. It cost us, but at least our staff could get work done without tinkering.

Linux application Y is not like Windows application X. At best, it can be a very good usable copy. At worst, it can be an unusable knockoff.

And WINE? Sure. I'm going to add another unknown abstraction layer to our software. I might use WINE if I loved my distro and I loved even more that shareware app that only existed under Windows, but I don't love Linux enough to inflict that kind of pain on us.

Computing for People with Disabilities

Through personal experience, I'm sensitive to the needs of people with disabilities. SATV has been host to our city's Commission on Disabilities; I have been their liason to SATV for 8 years and just recently became a commissioner myself. We have staff, interns, volunteers and members using our computers and they must be usable by a wide range of people.

I looked at Ubuntu recently; Ubuntu is probably the most well-realized desktop Linux distro to date. It has accessiblity features for people with disabilities, including a magnifier, an on-screen keyboard and a screen reader.

I have low vision, so I often use a screen magnifier. I installed Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on Virtual PC and tried it out.

It was terrible! There's a six-letter term I wish I could use if it were only work-safe!

First, some background on the Windows magnifier: When it's activated, it sits on the top of the desktop like this:

You can configure the magnifier settings. The only bad part is that it disables ClearType and interferes with the Aero desktop.

This is Ubuntu's Gnopernicus:

The magnifier is on the top center. You can't adjust it and it covers any icons you may have on the upper part of the screen. It looks terrible. I'm mystified by this, as screen magnifiers are not a new technology and I know of several Windows freeware magnifiers that are perfectly useable. I can only wonder if its shortcomings are due to the (ancient) X Windows subsystem.

Windows has a very useful feature that helps me avoid using a magnifier: Font sizes can be scaled to any arbitrary figure. This has existed since Windows 95 and for 12 years I have run Windows with its fonts scaled at 130%--virtually unchanged across Windows 95, XP and Vista!

Ubuntu doesn't have this. I can, of course, change each of the fonts, but based on my experience with SuSE a few years back, it would only make things worse as I upset the proportions. That's a deal-killer for me.

At least Windows has JAWS and ZoomText. No Linux versions, though.

Conclusion: Just too many risks upon risks

Going to Linux on the server, let alone the desktop, would not simplify my job. At a minimum I would still have to support Windows and Macs. I'm not going to add a third major platform just to satisfy ideological concerns.

I'll gladly consider using Linux for certain things, like firewalls (m0n0wall) or monitoring (Groundwork Monitor), that Linux is best suited for anyway.

But not as an ideology or a religion.

7 Reasons Why Linux Won't Succeed On The Desktop -- InformationWeek

Palm CEO: New OS Delayed Until End of '08

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:32:01 GMT

According to BetaNews, there won't be a new PalmOS until the end of next year. This slow motion train wreck continues to be painful to watch--but I can't take my eyes away!

BetaNews | Palm CEO: New OS Delayed Until End of '08

Why SATV doesn't use Linux

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 18:28:16 GMT

I've been in IT for nearly 30 years, and that has made me jaded towards many of the tropes that one finds in the IT press, such as "Mac Vs. PC", "Should Vista Be Abandoned", and the perennial, "Is <this year/next year/year after> the Year of the Linux Desktop". I ignore all these memes, almost always perpetuated by lazy IT journalists and editors who know that the ad money rolls in when they get the monkeys to fling turds at each other.

But Alexander Wolfe wrote an interesting article on Linux, 7 Reasons Why Linux Won't Succeed On The Desktop, and I want to address its points. Outside of Silicon Valley, there are very few people on the office, or factory floor, with any real opinions on Linux.

Here are a few of Wolfe's arguments with my observations, It's a long essay, so I'm posting this in two parts:

1. Prohibitive application porting costs.

At SATV we have many different specialized applications, what are commonly called "Line of Business" (LOB) applications. We have a server that schedules our programming. It runs on IIS and .NET on a Windows 2000 machine. It will always run on IIS and .NET. Another companion to that server is used to put "bulletin-board announcements", the graphics and text screens that indicate upcoming programming or the next meeting of the City Council. That relies on DirectX.

There is no way that either program could be ported to Linux without a lot of pain, if it is even possible at all. Linux has nothing like DirectX; until very, very recently (Beryl), there hasn't been any native 3D support in Linux at all.

This isn't only limited to software. Many specialized vendors sell computers integrated with their hardware for specific tasks. One such machine we have is an Inscriber. This does broadcast graphics for our studio. This particular box runs Windows XP. It has some specialized video and audio hardware in it. As with the app mentioned earlier, it is highly dependent on the Windows display architecture. It produces marvelous TV graphics.

It also costs $20,000.

That box is going to have Windows XP for the rest of its life until it dies or we sell it. Harris, its vendor, will not support it to be configured otherwise and its software is likewise going to run under Windows for the rest of its life. As it was, I had to play "mother, may I?" with Harris so that I could update it to Windows XP SP2. (There is no case I can make for Vista on it and no need to.)

2. The Fanboy alienation factor, or how Linux's biggest supporters drive away potential new users.

One of our biggest factors in making technology decisions is community. Salem Access Television is a resource for our community. More than that, we often decide to purchase things that have a community behind them.

For example, Apple products are widely used for video production in public-access TV facilities like ours. There is a community. There are peers we can go to for advice, both to get it, and to give it. We have Macs with Apple Studio and iLife for video editing and I've spent plenty of time myself with Final Cut Pro, Motion and DVD Studio.

I'm no fan of Steve Jobs, but I would not have it any other way. Apple works for us.

Similarly, when I first took on IT duties here in 1998, I had to migrate from an unreliable, failing server from an incompetent consultant. The old server was running Small Business Server 4.0, and I had briefly considered something Linux-based.

It turned out there wasn't anything Linux-based that would replace the functionality that SBS offered, but even more than that, there is an active community of people that sell and support SBS. A friendly community with people like The SBS Diva.

I recommended SBS 2000 for our network server, and that went very well. It was the start of a great relationship that continued with SBS 2003 and will probably continue with SBS 2008.

That's a contrast with my one exposure to the Linux community. Around 1998 or so, I was using The GIMP. The Windows version was new and very unstable so I setup a dual-boot between Windows and SuSE, where I ran the Linux version of the GIMP.

I wanted to get my elderly Mustek scanner working under Linux. Like most cheap cheap scanners, this used a nasty ISA-card SCSI controller based off the NCR53C400 controller. I wanted to use SANE, the then-new scanner backend, but needed to compile the driver module and load it on boot.

I was already well familiar with compiling kernels and updating modules and such so that went smoothly. But I could not get the NCR module to load or start no matter what did. It gave an obscure error message in /var/log/system, something about a resource already in use. Granted, this was in the days of ISA buses, IRQs and IO addresses, "plug and play", er, "plug and curse", but I had gone over my hardware completely. To use Linux in those days, you had to!

This went on for some time and I made the mistake of venting about it on a newsgroup. I was very curtly told to "just keep working at it 'til you get it right!"

I decided to look at the source code; (I'm a CS grad, I can!) The driver's author had used a default configuration to be used if there were no parameters specified. (By the way, there were no parameters documented!) Unfortunately, the defaults included the particular IRQ/IO port configuration for his particular system!

Two things were wrong there: Firstly, source code is not formal documentation. The original developer was at fault for not including documentation (which would have been at most a few pages of parameters) and the kernel maintainers at the time were at fault for not making documentation a requirement when checking in. Secondly, some parameters--like IRQ and IO addresses--have no good defaults and the driver needed to report that in the log and unload. There are too many times in Linux where you don't know what a module needs for options and you have to load it and look in the messages to see if it told you anything.

But that's probably trivial by now; I decided to go without my scanner and the driver is not part of the kernel anymore. But I can never forgive the Linux community both for being rude and tolerating, even encouraging rudeness. (I saw the guy on the newsgroup later on asking for help for his problem! Did I mention I hate hypocrites, too?!)

This just has to be a drain on Novell and Redhat who must mediate between these folks and their paying customers. Their customer service cannot treat their support callers the way Linux advocates treat everyone else outside of them. I would pay for tickets to see a SuSE tech, perhaps even their lead architect or CTO, say on Slashdot or a newsgroup, "You're being a jerk. Stop it. NOW."

More ranting in part 2.

Disclaimer: Salem Access Television has no institutional opinion on Linux, and neither does its staff, board or membership.

Palm's Foleo Folds

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 03:51:31 GMT

The latest news from Palm, and it's bad. I've written about Palm before (Palm- Duck, it's the layoffs!) and this should not be surprising.

Palm has folded its Foleo palmtop faster than the Boston Red Sox have in some years (1978, say...) I'm mildly surprised by the timing, since Palm had to have just begun manufacturing the Foleo, making for a brutal time for Palm, now that non-PDA companies like Apple have their iPhone, more famous by far than anything Palm has done in the past three years.

I'm not concerned so much that the Foleo was going to run Linux; if it's a solid implementation that's feature complete, that won't matter to the users. But Palm didn't present anything that would make me think the Linux implementation was going to be functional enough for mobile use, if it even existed outside a lab. All Palm showed at LinuxWorld for a long time was a stuffed penguin!

Worse for Palm, no one else is standing still. HP is staying in the smartphone, and more importantly, the standalone PDA market, with six new iPaqs. If I hadn't found my clearance iPaq 2495 a few months back, I would be making plans to buy one of the new models posthaste. That HP is doing this gives me a lot of confidence in my PDA and Windows Mobile.

Confidence that Palm may never gain ever again.

Palm: "Duck, it's the layoffs!"

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 16:34:34 GMT

According to Network World, "Palm Hit With Layoffs", Palm is cutting employees in the development division. I'm not sure how layoffs, firings or reductions in force can be compared with natural forces, winds and storms that can "hit" you, but you'll have to ask the NW headline writers.

It's no surprise. Their announced Foleo seems to have landed with a thud. It's an intriguing device, a WiFi & Bluetooth enabled mobile terminal; it just costs too much on top of the Treo you need to use with it.

On a personal note, I've given up on Palm. I saw a display model HP iPaq 2495 on the clearance table at Staples, bought it, and almost instantly moved to Windows Mobile. The transition from my Tungsten happened very quickly.

I love the WiFi and the excellent battery life, and the very active developer's community; almost all the programs I had for the Palm had Windows Mobile counterparts. I was able to transfer all my ebooks from the Palm using Mobipocket and Vade Mecum (for Plucker docs) . The screen of the iPaq isn't quite as bright as the Tungsten but that might be due to its use as a display model. Fonts on Windows Mobile are quite a bit better than on the Palm.

Not to forget, MAME on the Pocket PC. (I'm a big arcade gamer!)

Too bad for Palm. So sad.

Take care.