251–260 of 289 posts
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> Doing great things with today's hardware is still possible, but laziness, "We needed this yesterday, I don't care about its efficiency, hardware is cheap anyway" mindset is killing things fast. It is, but realistically features will increase business long before efficiency starts to hamper it.
"let's MAKE MONEY now, fuck the energy we waste and the planet we kill, goddammit"
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Ive looked for a 5mx form factor in the form of a phone and not been able to find it.
Planet Computers? https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/
The keyboard was fantastic (better than the much larger GPD Pocket 1 that I also got at the same time), and with a fully-fleshed out termux install, I ended up coding on that thing far more than I probably should have.
Yes, Planet Computers have a very poor record on delivering machines (still waiting for my Astro Slide), but the hardware, when done right (Planet again are poor when it comes to QA, which might explain some of the other responses), is great.
I think the keyboard designer (who also did the original Psuon 5 keyboards, back in the day - I had one of those also), is really an idiot for letting his design be run into the ground by the sheer business incomptence that is Planet Computers. He should team up with a company that CAN deliver, then more could see that the great Psion5 isn't really dead
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The Acorn was a rebadged Psion 3 rather than a precursor. I remember as I lusted after the Psions on display in Boots as a (dorky) child, and was ecstatic when our school piloted the Acorns. (Psion and Acorn, two more examples of how the UK is capable of developing world-leading tech but not at successfully marketing it...)
Wow! I stand corrected. I was led to believe that Acorn went bust and sold to Psion. I thought it went Acorn Pocket Book 1, Acorn Pocket Book II, Psion 3. Live and learn. Thanks! :-)
My later Psion 5 ended up spending most of its time running a zx spectrum emulator - go figure :-)
I will never understand why we do not have this kind of device anymore. A small computer, running linux, proper keyboard, integrated LTE - it would be a messaging and writing dream. Back in the days i developed custom software for the Revo, the SDK was a dream to work with as well.
I still dream of an rLCD + Apollo 3+ chip + BLE (it has that) + WIFI + optional 4/5g + Psion like casing. I would write a graphical OS for it for fun. I really want to see week+ long battery life.
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"let's MAKE MONEY now, fuck the energy we waste and the planet we kill, goddammit"
Moot point when computing is incredibly efficient when compared to heavy industry.
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> So sort of, but let's not look at the past too wistfully. why? > I also remember when moderately long text had to be split across files (even multiple floppies if you were writing a book). 2MB is 2 million bytes, The average book is something like 0.5 > I remember having to choose what languages my OS installation was going to be able to display. This is a bad thing? > Farther back I remember not having the spare c…
The person you're replying to was talking about the Apple II era, when floppies held less than 200k at best. Availability of 2.44 MB floppy drives was an extremely late development, and IIRC rare to actually find in the wild.
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It's not a hypothetical OS, it's what the Psion runs, and why not?
I did not know that the Psion OS is available for modern SOCs.
The Psion 3, 3A, 3C and 3MX ran EPOC, a proprietary 8086 OS with preemptive multitasking and a full keyboard-only GUI.
But their successors, the Psion 5, 5MX and netBook, ran a rewrite called EPOC32. That was written in C++, is native to ARM, and ran well in 4MB and very well in 8MB. Full preemptive multitasking, touchscreen GUI, networking, IPv4 and more, FAT32 and networking support.
That later was rebranded as Symbian and was the first mass-market smartphone OS. It was the only smartphone OS that could run the GSM comms stack on the same CPU as the user facing GUI OS -- its realtime support was that good. iOS, Android, WinCE, all need a separate CPU with its own RTOS for that.
Symbian is now 100% FOSS.
https://github.com/SymbianSource
It's a crime and a tragedy that nobody's picked it up and ported it to any modern SOC. It is much richer and more complete than any other modern C++ OS such as Genode or Serenity OS.
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But we don't, even the fact that we browse the Web and watch videos would have been impossible on a Nokia 3210.
We have been doing all of this since the 90s at least on desktop computers. Smartphones today are far more powerful than desktop computers from that era.
it wasn’t a very nice experience. Why would I want to watch anything in 240p win stead of 4k? Same for web, despite the bloat UX on most websites is miles ahead of what was common back in ~2000
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Change “the West” into “mostly America”. There is still a decent chunk of Apple users in Europe, but it is a far cry from the extreme obsession America seems to have with Apple devices.
This just gave me a thought. Perhaps if the EU eventually does something to sufficiently cripple Apple there, maybe Europe can be a hospitable location for a competitor besides Google to get a toehold someday either in smartphones or whatever the successor is. The duopoly sucks.