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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ausdauer who wrote (4790)	2/18/1999 1:07:00 PM
From: Bruno Cipolla	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

SanDisk Supplies JVC With MultiMediaCards for World's Smallest Digital Video Camera biz.yahoo.com B.

To: Ausdauer who wrote (4790)	2/18/1999 10:22:00 PM
From: Gary Spiers	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Aus, Very Off Topic There are still inroads to be made regarding the Microsoft CE 2.0 operating system so that full-featured Windows applications can be run in a timely manner Remember that Windows CE is incompatible with existing Windows programs - only programs specifically rewritten and recompiled (one compilation for each type of cpu) for Windows CE will run on it. You can not take an existing Windows app and run it on a CE device. CE is effectively Microsoft proprietary - only MS has the programming tools for developers to build apps for it. I think it effectively locks the Lotus and Wordperfect suites out (some would say this has already happened on the desktop anyway). I know several talented HP200LX palmtop programmers that took one look at the infrastructure required to support CE and concluded that MS had effectively locked them out. Apple tried the proprietary route using hardware and CE is in some ways Microsoft's attempt to eliminate (significant) competitors by using what is effectively a proprietary operating system. Also, I suspect hard connections for phone modems will be most popular until the digital/cellular infrastructure in the US is upgraded to handle packets of digital information. The Europeans have apparently solved some of these problems already. I am not sure what you mean by this - the phone I use is on a digital cellular network and uses the GSM data format which is the same as that used throughout the rest of the world (not just Europe). Note that I said data format compatible - not frequency compatible. The GSM frequency used throughout the rest of the world (900 MHz) is reserved for military use in the US. The PCS GSM frequency in the US is 1900 MHz. In general, the majority of cellular services in the US are woefully behind the rest of the world. Don't you think the introduction of MMC and solutions such as an integrated cellular phone/PDA (i.e. Nokia 9110) will also circumvent the problem of having too many plugins? Before the Nokia there was the HP700 - a HP 200LX with a docking cradle for a Nokia GSM phone - it was only sold overseas because of the previously mentioned antique US cellphone system although a few are now used in this country with the GSM network. The experience with HP taught Nokia what a palmtop needed to be and so the European version of the 9110 was born - probably three years ago now (ie old). At that time there were a lot of interesting and incompatible palmtop technologies developing and these all effectively came to a halt (except for the Pilot which has too limited a functionality for my needs) when MS announced Windows CE. The first generation of CE devices was (IMO) truely awful but unlike many of the small innovative companies there was a lot of marketing muscle behind it and so it survived (although it lost money heavily). The rest is history - while CE machines bloat up, become larger, depend on a desktop and have too short a battery life my 'old' 200LX still does more (for me), is independent, fits in my pocket and runs four weeks (extensive use) on a pair of AA batteries. Oops straying here - what I was going to say was that Nokia and the other cellphone vendors recently (last year) picked a new common operating system for cellphones and integrated cellphone/palmtops - it was not Windows CE but Epoc32 (now owned by Symbian but previously known as the Psion operating system). MS really wanted to break into the cellphone market but with this step all the major cellphone vendors appear to have effectively locked them out (this was cited as one of the reasons for their choice by the vendors themselves). I also noticed a site that is selling a combination PCMCIA plug-in that features both a fax/modem and a modest amount of flash memory. There are two companies that make this type of product - EXP and Smart Modular. These products originated probably over six years ago when the early palmtops needed both extra memory and a modem simultaneously. The Smart Modular product was (as far as I know) never updated but the EXP model is still quite popular with HP users that have not added third party internal memory upgrades. These are very much niche products that will probably disappear in the near future. Gary P.S. In case you are wondering what I do with my palmtop, I do the following: Integrated mail and news reader capable of handling multiple email accounts on multiple servers with multiple ISPs in one online run. Web browser. FTP, telnet packages. Optical design (optical component/system design and analysis) Electronic circuit design (AC,DC and transient analysis with plots) Programming (Fortran, C or Basic - the HP is about the only palmtop on which you can develop programs for the palmtop on the palmtop) Symbolic mathematics (Derive) Drawing package. Spreadsheet (a full version of Lotus with plots, macros etc - nothing like that wimpy excuse for a spreadsheet that CE uses) Word processing (with support for tables, graphics, equations, index generation etc.) Ability to edit files up to 1GB in size (wish I could afford that much flashram:-) Technical graph plotting package for producing publication quality plots. Project management (Gant and pert charts, track people, dollars resources etc.) Mapping and routing software (Automap - replete with databases for Europe and the US). An assortment of games. A few asci books (Project Gutenberg) for light reading.