Tech Ticker Interview with Elevation's Roger McNamee

Well, there is the sense that it's theoretically possible to port between any two Turing complete languages, if you don't care about memory size, performance or power, or how long it might take to do this theoretical port... but that's in the same league as "assume a spherical cow"...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzCj7-3S1Mc

Sky Map works on my T-Mobile G1 even though its a little slow. If they can port a computationally intensive application like this one which requires them to constantly update the screen in real time using GPS and network data which is actually useful for stargazing and astronomy, then the foggy mirror shouldn't be too tough.

Screw convergence
Palm III->Visor Deluxe->Visor Platinum->Visor Prism->Tungsten E->Palm LifeDrive->Palm TX
Visor Pro+VisorPhone->Treo 180g->Treo 270->Treo 600->Treo 680->T-Mobile G1
http://mind-grapes.blogspot.com/

Oh, that certainly set of a synaptic trigger in the ol' noggin!

I used to consult for a large international company. That company had employees, important employees, banging against databases served from Virginia. For the employees in, say, New York City this didn't present much of a problem - the use paradigm of "Change a field, send off the change, process the change resulting in more changes, send back the results" didn't have impact - their connection was so fast it was as if they were sitting next to the database servers. But the folks in Singapore had a fit; as each person over there tried out a change there were multiple back and forths between Singapore and Virginia as the spreadsheet-like calculations wended their way back and forth across half-second-latency connections; these important people would sit their fuming each for an eternity as they tried things out.

You don't want important people sitting there fuming.

The "solution" was to take essentially all the functionality off the person's workstation and place it on a server local to the database servers with only I/O handled "locally". Thus a change would get sent over to Virginia, massive database manipulations between the Virginia databases and the Virginia "application" would take place at local-to-Virginia speeds, then the resulting screen "deltas" (X-Windows stuff) would be sent back to Singapore.

It was a solution that worked for a single database server location.

It will be interesting to see how "the cloud" - where multiple database server locations and even possibly interesting critical-section-type or race-condition-type conflicts may exist will work in real life.

Now pay me.

Patents *do* expire, you know. How old are these? The Patent Office could invalidate these if they have moss growing on them.

You MUST still be hungover from last night. Can't even do English.

And no, it DOESN'T "sounds" the iPhone. The iPhone doesn't aggregate your contacts, the iPhone doesn't do any automagic to Teh Clowd.

I seem to remember some guy named Steve had a uniquely high-speed internet connection in his house so he could experiment with what such a world would be like.

10, 15 years ago?

Alas, can't find a link for it, unfortunately.

I don't think he'd be to blame for Foleo. If it had come out a year earlier it might have been something special, but Palm's idea that it could develop two brand-new operating systems at the same time was nuts and made Foleo late to the party. Heck, maybe we'd have seen Pre and webOS six months ago if they hadn't split their resources the way they did.

Two of his ideas for Foleo have made the transition to webOS anyways - no need to save, multiple-device sync (which is essentially what the cloud-sync is). I still reckon the Foleo is going to get revisited in the days ahead - albeit with the hardware and software it should have debuted with in the first place.

Tim
I apologise for any and all emoticons that appear in my posts. You may shoot them on sight.
Treo 270 -> Treo 650 -> Treo 680 -> Centro

The "Pre" has some interesting features and looks pretty, but I'm wondering how much of the baby they are throwing away with the bathwater by trying to mimic the iPhone. No removable flash, pitifully low permanent flash, no stylus, etc. There's a reason that Frankengarnet devices are STILL selling years past their perceived obsolescence, and it ain't because we feel charitable toward Palm....

Palm "Preh": as in "eh, where's the microSD and Garnet emulator?"

I'm not sure anyone anywhere is really happy with the battery life of anything. We all want MOAR!