4 ms·

This is really quite impressive.

by exotree 9y ago

jordache 9y ago
what is impressive? the technical result? nah.. the sheer will to support things like the Treo? yep
- digi_owl 9y ago
  It really should not be though. It is saddening how fixated on "new" the vally mentality is.
  - jordache 9y ago
    but you can't argue that a modern smart phone facilitates orders of magnitude more productivity than a Palm Treo running Windows Mobile or Palm OS?
    - isostatic 9y ago
      You can do. On the other hand you have magnitudes more ways to suck time in a non productive manner.
  - sangnoir 9y ago
    > It really should not be though. It is saddening how fixated on "new" the vally mentality is. That's not a fair characterization - it is impressive regardless of the industry. I was impressed just the other day reading about Mercedes classic has stock of spares for old cars (not all parts). I would like to think the number of generations of Mercedes cars is comparable with the number of generations of Maps APIs that have been rolled out. Maintaining support for old products takes effort, and is unlikely to be profitable (directly), one is justified in not doing that without fixation on the "new".
    - opencl 9y ago
      Even the usual car parts stores (Autozone, Advance auto, etc.) stock a lot of parts going back at least 30 years. My car is over 20 years old and I'm surprised how many basic parts I've been able to just walk into a store and buy (radiator, alternator, starter, etc). The amount of warehouse space in those stores does not seem that big but they manage to keep a very useful selection of parts spanning several decades. Much more convenient than going to a dealership and paying 3x the price and waiting a week because they don't actually stock the parts anyway.
- trevyn 9y ago
  The author's dedication is impressive: "The phone runs Palm OS 5. It doesn’t understand Unicode. Of course, it has no idea what an “emoji” is. When you send it a text message that has one character outside of the printable ASCII range, it freaks out and corrupts the whole message. It doesn’t have Wifi of any kind. It doesn’t even connect to the Sprint’s 2G EV-DO/1xRTT network (because the data provision server is long dead). In short, it has no easy way to connect to the Internet at all. In order to get the thing to connect to the Internet, I had to fucking emulate a Dial-up Modem over Bluetooth using a Raspberry Pi." Google's support is probably just a bunch of old APIs and test suites -- comparatively easier to keep working.
digi_owl 9y ago
I really will it weren't.

This is really quite impressive.

jordache 9y ago

what is impressive? the technical result? nah.. the sheer will to support things like the Treo? yep

digi_owl 9y ago
It really should not be though. It is saddening how fixated on "new" the vally mentality is.
- jordache 9y ago
  but you can't argue that a modern smart phone facilitates orders of magnitude more productivity than a Palm Treo running Windows Mobile or Palm OS?
  - isostatic 9y ago
    You can do. On the other hand you have magnitudes more ways to suck time in a non productive manner.
- sangnoir 9y ago
  > It really should not be though. It is saddening how fixated on "new" the vally mentality is. That's not a fair characterization - it is impressive regardless of the industry. I was impressed just the other day reading about Mercedes classic has stock of spares for old cars (not all parts). I would like to think the number of generations of Mercedes cars is comparable with the number of generations of Maps APIs that have been rolled out. Maintaining support for old products takes effort, and is unlikely to be profitable (directly), one is justified in not doing that without fixation on the "new".
  - opencl 9y ago
    Even the usual car parts stores (Autozone, Advance auto, etc.) stock a lot of parts going back at least 30 years. My car is over 20 years old and I'm surprised how many basic parts I've been able to just walk into a store and buy (radiator, alternator, starter, etc). The amount of warehouse space in those stores does not seem that big but they manage to keep a very useful selection of parts spanning several decades. Much more convenient than going to a dealership and paying 3x the price and waiting a week because they don't actually stock the parts anyway.
trevyn 9y ago
The author's dedication is impressive: "The phone runs Palm OS 5. It doesn’t understand Unicode. Of course, it has no idea what an “emoji” is. When you send it a text message that has one character outside of the printable ASCII range, it freaks out and corrupts the whole message. It doesn’t have Wifi of any kind. It doesn’t even connect to the Sprint’s 2G EV-DO/1xRTT network (because the data provision server is long dead). In short, it has no easy way to connect to the Internet at all. In order to get the thing to connect to the Internet, I had to fucking emulate a Dial-up Modem over Bluetooth using a Raspberry Pi." Google's support is probably just a bunch of old APIs and test suites -- comparatively easier to keep working.

digi_owl 9y ago

I really will it weren't.