PocketPC with Built in Keyboard?

[Solarix]

I agree with you on the account of Sony and it's dumb ass Memory Stick idea. Proprietery anything now adays is utterly stupid. I am starting to see what you guys are talking about with not having a built in KB and it being better. I had not seen the cover kb for the HP 36x until pointed out to me in this post and that is intelligent design. I now see where you guys are coming from in saying that a built-in KB is more of a gimik than an intelligent feature.

[RICoder]

See, it all comes back to this...standards.
<soapbox>
It's like Linux. Hell, the whole world is all set to embrace the ubiquitous OS! Oh, better idea, let us release an incomplete and less capable OS that is open source!

Proprietary is evil!

I give you examples:

COM+. RPC existed for years, but no one did anything with it. So, MS made COM+, which is really just enhanced RPC. And the world was better. MTS came along and thus followed Web Services. But, alas, enter the great killjoy; Java. Now we have beans and J2EE, none of which are as interoperable as we would have liked. Null Pointer exceptions abound in a language with not pointers....

SOAP. Oh where, oh where is XML-RPC? Once again, no one wanted it...so MS made SOAP, and the garage wankers cried havoc! Thus it came to pass that SOAP was passed off the the W3C for standardization. Hail MS for seeing the light and giving up its great invention to open standards. But...what's that? It's APACHE AND JAVA! The great killjoys rear their ugly heads and say "To hell with the standards! We will enforce stict type casting in SOAP and thus make our system incompatible with all others! *and then blame it on MS!*

Which reminds me of a story...once there was a programmer who wrote a specification for an API at the request of another. Off he went to happily impliment the API customer...only to come back and see that it did not work. Why? He asked quizically? If the API spec was followed all should be fine...but the demons of Java showed themselves and said "What is Hungarian Notation? Why should I start a variable with a lowercase descriptor like sz? Why should I start my functions with a captial lettter? I do not understand how you cannot tell whether this identifier is a variable or a function, and if a variable then what type...when all you have to do is flip through 10,000 lines of code to find its declaration!"

I say...without standards we might as well all be monkeys in trees flinging poop at each other...

</soapbox>

[randall]

[Solarix]