What happened to them? They never really diversified out of network cards, their cards were very very good, but for most people paying 3x as much wasn't worth it.

They split off their Palm (PalmPilot) division in 2000 to focus on Network equipment. The the .com bust happened.

Palm/Handspring/Treo could have been the iPhone, if they'd been better managed.

Could have, should have, would have…

iPhone wasn't just a form factor, the software traces back to NeXTSTEP 1989.

Fact of the matter is nothing could have been the iPhone, everything sucked in 2007.

Apple had the wind in its back with the iPod and Mac OS X Tiger.

The Intel transition was complete.

Apple was firing on all cylinders, what a time to be in your early 20s.

Even Android did a 180 once the writing was on the wall, it originally resembled BlackBerry OS.

Apple was also powerful enough (and Cingular at the time, weak enough) that they could dictate the terms and do whatever they wanted. Anyone else would have had their vision ruined by the cellular carriers.

I had a Treo fairly early on. Leave aside the physical keyboard. The iPhone had a whole app and media infrastructure built around it. Could Palm have gone there? Possibly. But that would have been a big step from where they were in the mid/late 2000s.

Palm had apps from the start.

Android was originally designed for digital cameras, with tactile interfaces.

The camera bit is true, but I'm not so sure about tactile interfaces?

I loved my Treo, and in some ways it bettered the iPhone form factor, but the software wasn't comparable.

but the windows phone OS was better, and the hardware very good. They just couldn't get their shit together with the app ecosystem; even paying us devs huge premiums to write apps wasn't enough.

Nope. Innovation doesn't happen that way. Once they took on the keyboard path, it's nearly impossible to innovate into something that's not. Even if a team is innovative enough to come up with it, top level will kill it off

Yes, The Economist keeps updating its website security against anyone seeing an article for free.

This link is inaccessible, locked behind a very effective paywall.

And we have a salacious headline that people keep upvoting. At this point it's an ad for the Economist on HN.

Sure looks like it.

But they are ignoring the basic lesson of "new" CPU designs from Transputer to i432 to Itanium to Transmeta.

A new CPU design is easy, it is the compiler to use it that is the hard hard part.

Looked at another way, CUDA is a huge reason NVidia is so big right now. Their GPUs are broadly similar to AMD. Their software libraries are better.

But good luck to them, perhaps they have some great new idea. We need one.

> CUDA is a huge reason NVidia is so big right now. Their GPUs are broadly similar to AMD. Their software libraries are better.

This was pre-2026 story. CUDA isn't a moat anymore.

Now it's mostly market dynamics: People always ship ad optimize things for Nvidia because it's the most widely used platform, and people buy it because it has the most software.

This is much less of a barrier than it used to be though. Buggy AMD GPU drivers remain a problem though.

> it is the compiler to use it that is the hard hard part

We're in a wildly different world from the one Itanium got to live in and compilers are something with a super tight automated verification loop that can make LLMs thrive. Add that plus cheap formal verification and I think this concern goes away almost completely.

Open source community "Look what you made us do":

DisplayLink on the driver side just compresses frames to send them over USB.

It would be interesting to analyse if Synaptics haven't stolen code from open source ffmpeg or VLC to do the compression.

I own two of their devices and some of the decomp fairies flittering through the gaming industry might just take a visit to their stack for some internal prodding…

Not only that, but if you were to point Astra, Argon, or Opus at their patents and tell it, "Find some prior art that will invalidate these claims", I suspect the odds of success would be better than even.

See Dan Gelbart's recent video on that very subject: https://youtu.be/v5d8nwgiSYI?si=iM9AFZiRTjxu4OuZ

Maybe it is time to run a friendly LLM and claim to be worried citizen who is seeking relief by reversing the firmware and excluding GPL lisence violations from their nightmares.

DisplayLink on the driver side just compresses frames to send them over USB.

It would be interesting to analyse if Synaptics haven't stolen code from open source ffmpeg to do the compression.

This is not new as the article claims: Passive radars using FM broadcast and 2G GSM were used in the 1990s Yugoslav war.

Yes, a lot of the ideas are not new. Nevertheless, it is currently an active field of research. One of them is "Integrated Sensing and Communication" (ISAC [or ICAS/JC&S/...]).

One idea is to exploit the signal's structure - despite simply trying to correlate the received line-of-sight signal with its delayed copies.

Especially OFDM has a nice structure. You can estimate delays (-> distances) as frequencies along the subcarriers and Doppler shifts (-> velocities) as frequencies along consecutive OFDM symbols. Estimators like maximum likelihood, ESPRIT, MUSIC, and compressed sensing etc. are your friends here for high-resolution results.

Unfortunately OFDM has a problem with large Doppler shifts (velocities). Therefore, people are looking at other multiplexing schemes like OTFS or AFDM.

there's still / again a number of Czech companies in the sector ... the "passive Radar" came from a Czech cold war project (Tamara). Yes it had a spotlight moment when some F-117 were shot down in the Yugoslav war.

Only one was shot down.

And it was almost entirely due to poor opsec and hubris by the US, not unexpectedly fancy radars.

'twas a sad day when N-gate went quiet.

I'm wondering if Android is vulnerable, since it is based on Linux?

Microsoft has patented that approach!

And yet somehow, Windows 11 remains a steaming pile of incoherent garbage.

The only person fixing bugs at Microsoft is Raymond Chen and he's still patching windows 3.11

I should check to see if SimCity runs on Windows 11.

This is only because people disable telemetry and online accounts.

And in the end Microsoft removes the start button because their telemetry said that nobody clicks it[0] :)

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/why-microsoft-murder...

The only way to not make it garbage is do those thing.

it is indeed the users fault windows 11 is dogshit. facepalm

Both are true, it is a single point of failure and a single point of convenience.

What always puzzles me about this stuff and critical infrastructure like nuclear powerplants, is why is an internal network connected to the public Internet at all?

If you have to connect it to the Internet, then why is it talking to unknown devices?