N800 is the future that never was - opem Linux-based mobile computing for the masses. It had developer support, cool form factor, big touchable screen, and no corp to love it.
I had one of those. It was interesting in that it ran Linux and you could (at the time) browse most web sites with it. Otherwise, it was slow, bulky, and had a pretty terrible resistive touch screen. (The stylus was NOT optional.) And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket.
In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that). An iPod Touch eventually replaced it until Android phones got a lot better.
> In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that)
I'm interested in understanding what you meant here?
To my understanding, the N800 was released in 2007 according to Wikipedia[1] and the first craze of podcasts was in the first half of the 00's, with the most notable fact being the official support of podcasts in iTunes in 2004[2].
They then lost their fame before knowing a second wave of popularity starting in the second half of the 10's.
I temporarily forgot that the iPod came out way before the iPhone. So yes, I guess they were called that then. But in my defense, I listened to MP3 files of radio shows that I downloaded manually, so I guess I wasn't quite using them as "podcasts" at that point.
>And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket.
UPDATE: Memory failure! I meant N900, not N800
Why? I had N800 as my only mobile, and was more than happy with it. Stylus was not optional for things like browsing. But most of the time I took it from my pocket, I used it for text input, and physical keyboard made it comfortable to the point no other device has been able to offer me ever since I retired my N800
I never had a N800, but I still have a working N900 used as my secondary phone and while it has a stylus holder, I have never pulled it out of there for many many years except to stim. Its resistive touch screen was excellent and I liked it more than today's capacitive screens. The only issue I have with it is that it's ageing and developing problems over years and eventually I may end up out of spare parts.
I had one too (and a 770 before it). Great idea, so-so implementation. It was slow (and slowness is a cardinal sin, since you're always reminded that you're using a machine -- in my opinion, the way Apple products react so much faster to user input than competing products is a huge factor in their success, and Apple knows it) and the touch screen was terrible.
Yes, that platform was set to compete with iOS and Android and with fine timing.
I think they fumbled with the developer relations when first choosing Gtk for the UI and then jumped to QT. That made developers angry. And then of course the Microsoft steamroller killed it.
That and also the N9 were great, wish they were not abandoned. The design language on the N9 was way ahead of its time too. I still haven't seen a time picker as good as the MeeGo time picker, and now a decade later my Samsung has similar App icons as the N9 had in 2011.
But with no app store. (As a programmer, I never in a billion years would have invented the app store. Yet it was the most important component of the iphone ecosystem).
The App Store didn't exist for the first iPhone. It launched with the iPhone 3G. The original plan was for everyone to develop web apps; the SDK was added due to external developer demand.
I don't think developers wanted App Store, they wanted to build native apps. Has Apple just allowed them to ship their own .dmg files from their website, as they used to do in MacOS, they would be happy.
I can't tell for sure, but I would bet the app store concept was inspired from Cydia for jailbroken iPhones that used APT to download apps from a central software repository, which was already common in the Linux world at the time.
App Store as a central place to download apps was a really important concept for the iPhone ecosystem because it was a distribution and a marketing channel. Developers didn't asked for that and, for the better and the worst, we can give Apple some credit for building it that way.
I loved the N800 and was happy to see it make an appearance in that presentation. In fact I still have one in my desk drawer beside me I turn on from time-to-time. Yes it was a bit cumbersome, but I could do more with that device than any other handheld I have ever had and carried it with me for years. I wish the N900 and other smartphones on Maemo had caught on.
Their Lumia with the Windows OS was great too. Unfortunately no market => no apps => death. But I loved it when I had it. They made great phones no doubt.
Yea, no one believes me when I tell them that the Lumia with Windows Phone 8.1 or 10 was one of my favourite phones ever. WP 8.1+ was such an underrated OS. Unfortunately it had virtually no support from anybody, even Microsoft quickly stopped caring.
Barely. It was originally a XFree86 project called XDarwin, adopted by Apple as a beta release for Jagwire in 2002, was an optional install in Panther and Tiger, default install in Leopard~Lion, and then was abandoned again in favor of the community-supported XQuartz after 2011:
https://xonx.sourceforge.net/ “XFree86, a free implementation of the X Window System, has been ported to Darwin and Mac OS X. […] Our work has been included in Apple's X11 for Mac OS X. ”
Actually that's an interesting question; why didn't Android use X11? A few minutes of web searching don't seem to turn up anybody commenting on it; do you happen to know how I would check what their reasons were?
If I see another one of these insane "explainations", I'm gonna have a stroke. Nokia - dominating the mobile phone market for years - is evidence that Europeans are just fundamentally incapable of innovation!
He switched seamlessly from løbecykel to this one with the pedals removed, it was just the same thing, only a bit larger !
Then when he got comfortable with it, I added back the pedals. He got the hang of pedaling in ~10 minutes and a couple of runs down the street. Ever since he has been bike-mobile ! Never even thought about helper wheels.
Given that Musk is actively working to undermine UE (L'Union européenne, EU in English, sorry for confusion), you'd have to be some kind of idiot to support him by buying a Tesla if you live in Europe.
Europe has since many years suffered with high bureaucracy, strict regulations and in general low innovation levels.
Musk has been very vocal about those issues in Europe. He might be right or wrong, but questioning European levels of bureaucracy and regulations is not undermining EU, it’s going to help it.
He is wrong on many things simply from not sharing the fundamental values that makes Europeans and Americans different.
Yet, even on the things he’s right on, it is not his responsibility as a foreign agent, to change. He can fix his adopted home country instead.
Musk is actively supporting the neo-nazi Afd in Germany. Whatever his reasons are, he is now the same type of oligarch as Henry Ford was when he supported Nazi Germany.
In a recent interview with the party chair of the Afd, it was clear that he is just entirely clueless about the Germany and history in particular.
There are a lot of issues in Europe, but it is far from clear if neocon deregulation is really helping anything at all.
It's in English. I found it worthwhile to watch, for a while. Musk really wasn't too bad but the amount of nonsense coming from Alice Weidel was a bit too much for me in the end. To Musk's credit, he even corrected her a couple of times.
You might find it worthwhile to watch after all, because they didn't agree on that.
Note that I don't agree with the AFD at all, however what the media writes about Musk is often so far from the truth that I tend to watch or read the sources when I have a chance.
What we're really talking about is the richest man in the world, who owns one of the largest social media platforms in the world, using his financial and social media power to directly influence politics and/or elections according to his whim, and (it seems) currently to the benefit of causes or candidates who are often right-wing, and/or extreme or anti-establishment in some way.
There's a lot to unpack there, beyond "free speech".
Why? Many people dislike the European Union(myself included). Some of us believe it's an anti-democratic organization that should be dismantled. It hardly makes us idiots.
Additionally, not every European country is a member of the EU. I would argue Europe would be a lot better without such centralized power in the hands of a few.
To do this with a generation of peace who cannot comprehend how you can end up with a conflict in western europe in the next couple of decades does come with some level of risk. You have to have a detailed gameplan right out of the gate having gameplayed how economically and politically antagonistic your neighbors are going to be to your early moves. And if in the early days the perception is that things are getting worse than they were before (see Brexit) the risk of future unrest and conflict increases I would think.
Fundamentally, I believe in a direct, decentralised democracy with Switzerland as a good example. I believe this system of governance gives prosperity and opportunity for as many as possible, while a centralised system like the EU(or USA) gives advantage to the already powerful and well connected, with the masses only an afterthought if beneficial to the ruling elite.
I think this is obvious to any thinking, rational individual.
I'm not a fan of Musk but you're getting his intentions wrong. He's not actively trying to undermine the EU. His recent support for AFD was actually meant, misguided or not, to support Germany.
And his support for Tommy Robinson in the UK was because he apparently believes freedom of speech in the UK is in danger.
Musk is a bit odd re the UK. He goes on about the Starmer and the grooming scandal but it's all a bit distorted like he's getting his info from American MAGA enthusiasts on X and doesn't seem to have spoken to many Brits. A recent poll has 71% of Brits having a negative opinion of him https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/71-of-britons-hold-negative-...
This. Just as doctors or lawyers or civil engineers can't do their jobs before being vetted by their own professional bodies it's time we do the same for software engineering.
If all you did was an entry level "bar exam, it'd be pretty much useless. A newly graduated CompSci student, is really just an apprentice, who may then (if they continue to work hard, and are given challenging work) go on to become a master craftsman/journeyman over the next 5/10/20 years.
The same is true of those other fields too really - I certainly wouldn't want a newly qualified doctor operating on me, or lawyer defending me, or civil engineer designing a bridge I'm driving over. It's nice to know that someone has been professionally educated and passed some entry level exam, but to be useful in a field it's experience that counts.
Doctors go through residency after passing their exams, we should have the same for engineers. Civil engineers have layers of seniority and designs of junior engineers have to be reviewed and approved by senior engineers, we should have the same.
- It can be a side effect to keep your unemployment insurance which is conditional upon proving you are sending applications at a given pace. I'd probably need to apply to random jobs if I qualified for it because there isn't a role opening in my niche weekly to fullfil the criteria here. I never had to because I was ineligible for other reasons every time I was unemployed and could have used support but that's a whole other can of worms)
- I heard its a thing to get n jobs you're not qualified for to get at least the first few month salary "for free" (as an individual or as a pawn from a larger organized fraud). Not sure how common or how much truth there is to it though.
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