Breakfast Links
We’re printing more dollar coins! So it turns out that the raging success of the Sacagawea coins has spurred our mints on to start a new run of coins featuring only dead presidents, 4 of them a year. They assure us that no president or ex-pres will be featured until they’ve been dead 2 years. Phew, I was worried about that. At least it’s got writing on the edges - taking “in god we trust” off the face and moving it to the side is both cool and kind of progressive in it’s own little way.
Does it disturb any of you that our cops are asking store proprietors to monitor their customer’s internet usage? I also note that this blogger just posted a little thing on Onion Routing which shows the synchronicity of the interwires.
Just came across this image from a slashdot beta that show’s some Digg-like functionality coming to the venerable green and grey lady. I have no opinion on this.
And lastly.. is ACCESS not dead? They spout a lot of marketing, etc, etc, in the post.. all of which sounds interesting. Of primary note in all of that is that Astraware was demoing native apps for ALP, which is reassuring. I mean, what is a mobile platform if it doesn’t have Bejeweled? But all of my hope springs from reading the comments where user stonemirror, apparently an ACCESS developer, responds to the statement “Nobody cares about ALP…” with this little gem:
Oh, untrue. I care. Based on my experience talking to a large number of customers, prospects and other folks about it, I’m far from alone. Maybe you meant for large values of “nobody”…
Come on, that’s gotta give you hope! That’s nice and nerdy and you didn’t think anyone associated with Palm knew how to be an engineer anymore, did you??
March 18th, 2007 at 8:02 am
Hey, I just caught this mention on Blog Search, but I wanted to add a couple of comments:
- I’m Director of Open Source Technologies for ACCESS, responsible for stuff like community development, open source strategy, etc. I was formerly director of the Core Technologies department, responsible for the kernel, drivers and “low-level middleware”, after having spent ten years at Apple (so I have _some_ geek cred…) I recently oversaw the release of a number of useful and somewhat higher-level middleware components as the open source “Hiker” projects at http://www.hikerproject.org... I’ll be presenting on these at the Ottawa Linux Symposium later on this year.
- We’ve been working for a while with selected “Inside Track” developers, of whom AstraWare is one, and early release versions of the SDK with–as you note–some good success. We’ll be having a “Mobile Open Source” track and a “Developer Day” again this year at LinuxWorld San Francisco.
- We’ve likewise been working with our PDK (Platform Developer Kit) with a number of folks, including handset manufacturers (whom I won’t be naming, that’s up to them) and operators, including FT/Orange. We mutually announced a number of months ago that the ACCESS Linux Platform was going to be an “Orange-approved” open source-based platform and that we’d be collaborating on an Orange-specific suite of applications. That’s currently in progress, as are various other efforts.
- 3GSM rocked. We got a lot of traffic and a lot of interest. We demonstrated the platform on a couple of development boards from Marvell and TI as well as a form factor development device from Sophos Systems (think “Green Phone”, but using more up-to-date software unencumbered by dual-licensing schemes, and in a nicer color). I wasn’t able to personally attend–I was obliged to go to a Linux Foundation meeting in frigid New York as opposed to 3GSM in sunny Barcelona–but all reports would have been damned with faint praise by the term “incredibly positive”.
So, no, not dead. Quite the contrary, I’d say.
March 18th, 2007 at 11:10 am
I am more than glad to hear this! While I have been harsh with Palm and Access of late, it’s only because I love you guys. :) I hope that things work out and the new OS is awesome. More choice is always the best, I’d hate to see Apple come out and simply dominate the market the way it does with the mp3 player market. Even worse, I’d hate to see Apple come out with a disappointing release and have the market continue along the non-trajectory it’s been on. So, please, come out with some great product that wows the world, for all our sakes!