A Big Amen, brother!

My Palm example earlier with my now humble Treo650 with Palm5os follows that in a little way. Certainly more than double the age of the 770.
That said, I was and am still pissed at the specific killing of the Mac OS 9 which should easily have gone on for years to come. Heck I have a few friends who were still clunking away on Windows 95&98 believe it or not.

Oh good god. You wouldn't happen to go by the name of AmishIndy on a certain mac gaming webboard, would you? <_<

The Classic Mac OS was barely an operating system. It was a horrible, unstable, hackish piece of junk (I should know, I used it for more than 10 years). OS 9 was perhaps only surpassed in its crappiness by 8.6, and it's a damn good thing they killed it dead when they did. Anybody who claims that the move from OS 9 to OS X was a bad thing, obviously has little understanding of the technical issues involved.

Thank god for FreeBSD and OS X and good riddance to bad rubbish!

4. That being said, the "Linux community" doesn't *owe* you software for free. The "freedom" of Linux comes from being able to do whatever you want with the source code. Want more applications for the 770? Then why not try to make that happen yourself? And yes, I'm aware that you said that you don't know Linux very well and that it's over your head. Maybe you could try and learn? None of us were born with Linux experience. We all spent the time to learn it. Excuse me for saying so but it seems somewhat hypocritical to come down on the Linux community for not "supporting" the 770, when you aren't willing to make the effort to learn some Linux and meet them halfway.

Just my 2 cents.

-John



4. worth only two cents.

no other platform abandons a unit after a mere two years. period. Thats plain and simple ridiculous. Where do they think the first financial stream started? With the first buyers. Regardless of whether some of them could or couldn't afford to upgrade after such a short time.

No I don't.
Is your smug arrogance a sign of your young age or are you really this rude in 'general'?

I don't care to even address such foolishness, but at the time of something like Macos8.6, Windows was just a sad meager OS stumbling its way to functionality and stability and Linux was still fledgling. Few were involved in Unix at that time and the main tool for professionals in publishing and real pro media was the Mac OS. All the big software houses came through the Mac OS of those days. Adobe, Corel, Meta, Symantec, Mcaffee, Quark etc.

You having trouble staying on topic?

iontruo, you can probably count on one hand the number of applications specifically written for maemo.. and most of those probably have unofficial or official nokia backing/collaboration.

So all these apps are really ports from the 'wonder linux community'... some of them amazingly port automatically with just a compile.... sometimes they will only compile using OS2007 or os2008 os images.

The people you are probably complaining about are people who do the apps as a hobby, i dont know of a single commercial app.

I agree with John in that i think your introduction to open source comes first with the realization that no one owes you anything because you havent paid a dime.

I agree with general too because even commercial developers wouldnt want to spend extra time supporting old environments... just not cost effective.

Your sole 'request' should be to nokia to provide you with os2008HE so that you are able to use all the apps which eventually get ported.

Perhaps you have misunderstand my post.
I have an N800, and was making general comment in sympathy with the poster who initiated this thread regarding 'his' feeling abandoned 'in general' with his N770. Surely anyone buying any computing product of any sort should be able to expect that it would last beyond one OS update (ie 2006->2007) and barely two years available.

I personally am impressed with this community and the software that people are developing. My main plug to others is that fact that everything is FREE.
No where in my comments do I specify Maemo or the open source community in my remarks as lacking or whatever. You are right that in many respects his complaint or 'sole request' as you said, perhaps should be direct to Nokia, but as this is the active forum zone for all things Internet Tablet N series, he felt at liberty to voice his frustration as a general feeling here.

I sympathized with that and used a few simple comparatives in my response.

Karel Jansens comment rang true for me: He said
"Good rant, but aimed at the wrong people. ITOS2008 is the responsibility of Nokia and Nokia alone and the main reason the programs you mention have left the 770 behind, is because the operating system isn't maintained to keep up with the new features of those programs.

Normally I'd agree that forced backwards compatibility is not a good thing, but common Nokia, the 770 is nigh on two years old, godsdammit! IBM continued to support OS/2 for almost ten years after they stopped even remembering what it was.

Karel nailed it and pointed the critisism in the appropriate direction. As well he also used a good contrasting example with his mention of IBM and OS/2.


This is kind of a moot point below, being that our community here is not commercial but I did feel moved to address it.

Pipeline said: "even commercial developers wouldn't want to spend extra time supporting old environments... just not cost effective.


Not sure that is true. That is in fact where they can cultivate the existing user base...and feed the upgrade curve most easily.
Even though some will own their units and make good use for some years, that is still a prime source for those that move forward with the subsequent evolution of the platform(productline), as exemplified by the General's remarks about his quick disposal of his N770 and then upgraded to the N800. "Bird in the hand".
Smart developers also go for the easiest cash flow. Starting over everytime and doing missionary work to draw in a virgin customer base is not a choice strategy.

Gather round and I'll tell you a story from just over a year ago. Nokia spilled the beans and told us that our still as of yet unscratched 770s were being replaced by the N800. Chaos ensued and many here pledged to mail their feces stamped into N800 shaped bricks (I tried being an enterpreneur and selling the moulds) to Nokia's headquarters. The calm ensued the day the N800 began shipping, a gentle breeze was in the air... it was everyone tumbling like a house of cards to shell out another $400 a scant year after they did so on the 770. Same thing happened when the N810 came out, though more people are sticking with the N800.

I think I know what Nokia's 5 point plan is. It's to create 5 incredibly similar devices and derive 5x the profit out of them without the cost of R&D on 5 actual generations of growth and change.

My 770 is sitting in front of me with what will most likely be the last OS it'll get updated with. The apps on it are the ones I picked out what will most likely be the most updated application list for the most part.

The next Nokia tablet I buy will be the stage 5 one. And it better have a fellate function or neither me or Karel will buy one.

This is not true at all. And forgive me if I take a small bit of offense to your assertion. Maemo Mapper was first developed on the 770, it has always worked on the 770, and it will always work on the 770.

You just joined in November, so maybe you weren't around when the N800 was first announced, but I was perhaps one of the most vocal developers against the way Nokia abandoned the Nokia 770 and OS2006. Making OS2007 work on the 770 should have been a priority. I still don't agree with the way Nokia handled it, but what's done is done. The only thing I could do was vow to continue support for the 770 (because, hey, I own one, too, and I'd like to use my own software on it).

And trust me, Nokia didn't make that particularly easy. They did the same thing with OS2008 (breaking backward compatibility), but at least they learned from their mistakes and made OS2008 available for the N800. OS2008 brought hardship only to developers, leaving users insulated from many of the negative effects, although applications generally still need to be ported to OS2008 before they can work.

Every single release of Maemo Mapper includes a version for the 770, with the exact same capabilities as the other versions. Just look at the release list in the Garage. OS2007/N800 support started with v1.4, and OS2008 support started with v2.2. The most recent version, v2.3.1, still supports OS2006 and the Nokia 770. And all future versions will run on it, too.

As for OS2007HE, Maemo Mapper can work with it, if you're willing to do a little more work (and if you're using the "hacker edition" firmware, then you're obviously willing). Personally, I don't use OS2007HE (so I can't test Maemo Mapper on it), because its benefits aren't worth putting up with its shortcomings, but some people do, and some people run Maemo Mapper on it.

Or maybe you're talking about Maemo Mapper abandoning OS2005? It is true that Maemo Mapper v1.0 and greater do not support OS2005, but that is because there is no reason to run OS2005 on the Nokia 770. In fact, I would be surprised to hear that even a single Nokia 770 is still running OS2005. Users stubborn enough to run OS2005 probably don't have a problem sticking with Maemo Mapper v0.2.4.

Anyway, sorry for the rant, but I've spent a lot of my spare time making sure that Maemo Mapper works on every version of Maemo that is available. And I will continue to spend time with that goal in mind, at least as long as I have working 770 with which to test.

MM 2.30, 2.31 were not available 24 hrs ago , has been happily running on my 2007He, see list here too, http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ead.php?t=9282

bun

Did you *read* what I wrote? All of it? You certainly *quoted* it...
"Nokia" dropped support for the 770 *and* made it difficult for the "Linux community" to continue to support it because they didn't release all their source. All that aside people in the "Linux community" (that's you, me, gnuite, Linux Torvalds, etc) are still interested in seeing the 770 continue to thrive. How will that happen? Either by waiting for Nokia to roll out 2008HE or by getting the current Maemo4.0 stuff into Debian/Fedora and getting that running on the 770.

As for the death of Mac OS 9: The best thing that could have happened to it was for it to be put into a sandbox and separated from the hardware. You should read the Wikipedia article on Mac OS 9 for a little technical background. Just because people use it doesn't make it good software.