Tech: Sony handhelds; ATI; MS support

sony pulling out is big.

saw a guy the other day.. still has win 95 & 640x480 screen resolution. told him he should be banned from using a computer

they really thought they could run from their past, but now their huge market becomes a burden they have to lug around for the foreseeable future. other 3rd parties should learn a lesson here that, for a lot of people, "paid upgrade" is not a viable solution to buggy software. if only 10% of microsoft's installed user base would stick their heels in the ground, i bet microsoft would have a real problem to content with.

I'm surprised to see Sony exit the PDA market. That should hurt the Palm OS market.

I think some of their newer models had gadgetitis, rather than offering more useful things like larger amounts of RAM. I've been looking to replace a 2 year old Clié, but none of their devices has more than 32MB!


As for MS? Too bad. Just how many OSes can they support from Win 95 to XP... that's somewhere around 20 if you count all the various Pro and Schmoe versions. As for Longhorn, it's due anywhere from 2006 to 2009, depending on which shill is speaking.

Good news for PalmOne, I should think -- one less slice of the pie taken away, but of course there's still the 800-lb gorilla that is MS to contend with ...

Bad news for MS, worse than many people realise. The company will now have to POUR money (we're talking *many* millions) into support that they did not project post-2004. And those people aren't going to budge for quite a while ... as long as AOL and Word and Solitaire are compatible, why should they really? It's taken them nearly a decade to get the MS crap working the way they want it ... this is a real albatross round the company's neck, but you'll never hear negative word one from the "PC" press ...

Why you people talking about useless, non-mac stuff like MS supporting apps or the stupid Clie PDA. What about ATI and its PCI Express card. Will this work in a Mac? And is this another case where Apple took the non-popular route and has us all stuck in another instance of NuBus hell.

I'll never switch, but I'd love it if Apple would someday pull it's head out of it's arse and get us some competitive vid cards. And it doesn't have to be ATi.

- a gamer and 3D enthusiast

Sony pulling out... This means one of two things. 1) They are putting all of these capabilities into their MP3 players. (Sony inovation, take two things people have already done and put them into one unit) 2) They plan on selling their MP3 players at a loss (or at least no gain) to make money on their music store and they don't want two handheld devices that they are loosing money on.

I give them less then two years and they'll be back in the market, again.

Microsoft up to it's nifty twists again. Think about this: when did XP come out? By the time Longthorn comes out they won't be supporting anything if they keep the 5 year policy. What in the world would their helpdesk be doing for that last year?

After Longthorn comes out this 10 year thing will be history and nobody will give any mention to the policy. Somebody, somewhere on some thread will say, " didn't MS say it was going support their OS's for 10years?"

far behind in the Graphics card envoirnment. The X800 just came out for the PC, but too bad it'll be a while before Macs see the X800. NVidia should have a Mac card for the GeForce 6800 as well.

PCI Express is a new motherboard technology from Intel. While new G5s might get this, it might be a year or so untit that happens. That really depends on IBM.

Why? IBM doesn't design the bus controller for Apple (at least that's Apple's official word.) Adding PCI-E is up to Apple.