peter.flynn at mars
May 14, 2009, 1:30 PM
Post #22 of 51
(1998 views)
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Alberto Garcia wrote:
> On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 11:25:18AM -0600, Mark wrote:
>
>>> telnet belongs on an "Interner Tablet", and claiming otherwise is
>>> akin to claiming that the WWW is the internet.
>> Misnomenclature aside, making claims about a device's abilities that
>> can only be attained by installing additional or 3rd party apps or
>> developing/porting them yourself amounts to false advertising. If it
>> doesn't have a capability out of the box, then don't advertise it...
>
> Sorry guys, but I don't get this.
>
> People have already ported software that is much more complex than
> telnet, such as OpenOffice, KDE or Pidgin.
I think what it meant was that it doesn't have this capability out of
the box. Sure, anyone can port anything, given enough time and patience;
the error was at the marketing level in Nokia in misunderstanding the
market it was aimed at, and thus failing to include the necessary ports.
> If no one ever realised that telnet was so essential until May 2009
> being such a trivial program to port then it probably wasn't that
> important after all.
I realised it immediately, as I use Telnet frequently from my desktop
for checking access, as Graham described. But finding the toolchain and
compiling a version myself proved so forbidding at the time that I gave up.
> Sure, there are dozens of small command-line tools that some of us use
> everyday, but that doesn't mean that the tablet has to come with all
> of them installed. The root filesystem is already quite full as it is
> now.
>
> Are we going to have the same thread when someone misses nmap and
> netcat?
Quite possibly. But they certainly don't all have to be installed as of
day one -- they just need to be available as add-ons. My gut feeling is
that the vast majority of the stock commandline apps ought to compile
as-is from Debian sources, but I'm happy to accept a developer's better
judgment on that.
I *did* manage to compile one little (200-line) specialist commandline C
tool on my Ubuntu desktop for the Arm, which works perfectly (although I
can't remember the incantation I used now)...but I do remember finding
out how to do it was *really* hard; at one stage I downloaded and
installed some monstrous "development environment" which everyone said
was essential (to compile 200 lines of C?) which appeared to be an
entire N800 emulator and which nearly killed my desktop system.
<rant>
It's sad that there is no evidence that Nokia marketing even understand
that the problem exists, let alone understand the problem itself. Joe
and Jill User will never in a million years buy a "web tablet" that
looks and smells anything different from Windows, complete with all
faults and bugs. On the other hand there are millions of developers,
hackers, programmers, students, os-savvy businesspeople (yes, they do
exist), and academics who will happily buy a pocket Linux system that
has the same power that their desktop had only a few years ago,
particularly from a well-known and trusted name like Nokia, but it needs
to be similarly configurable. Don't get me wrong, I love my N800 and
wouldn't trade it for anything else except its successor[s], but I just
feel there is a badly-missed market segment there, and I find that
surprising from a company with Nokia's rep and resources. I'm just
grateful to all the people who have done so much to extend the software
base as they have.
</rant>
///Peter
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