Me and a couple of friends read “The Soul of a New Machine” in our teens and it was a very influential book for us. In the late 90's I found a brand new hardcover copy of the local translation in a discount bookstore and bought it with the intention of giving it as a present to one of those friends sometime later in life.
I ended up keeping the book for ~25 years and only at the time of his 50th birthday a few years ago I reckoned we're old enough now. I read the book once more and shipped it to him, literally halfway across the world. Great memories. Thank you for your work, Mr. Kidder.
The firm with partly russian ownership went bankrupt a couple of years ago. The russian fork of the software lives on as AuroraOS in their local market but the current Jolla has no ties to russia.
There's a new Jolla Phone in pre-marketing phase right now (almost 9000 phones have been pre-ordered so far). First device deliveries are scheduled for this summer and this should easily be the new benchmark for officially supported SailfishOS devices.
The situation with Sony Xperia devices is not great, the best experience is still on the X10III (from 2021 I think) and there are significant issues with the support of 10 IV and V generation devices (a free beta release is available for those as well).
It seems that recently there has been quite a lot of buzz in the Sailfish community compared to the past few years. In the public repos there are some interesting contributions like xdg-shell support for Lipstick, which looks set to enable compiling many previously unavailable Linux apps natively if that will actually be integrated in an upcoming OS version.
Back in 1980's the Finnish public broadcaster YLE used to broadcast Commodore 64 software in their radio show Silikoni. They actually have a recording the first such episode available online at https://yle.fi/a/20-108142 - of course, this is in Finnish.
It was not a very reliable method but it did work if you had good FM reception and a high quality tape deck. I guess it helps that the data rate is only 300 bits per second or so.
I'm not sure if this article is factually correct in claiming the privacy switch to be a physical disconnect for microphone, camera and bluetooth. IIRC Jolla advertised that the user would be able to configure the exact function of the privacy switch, which would mean that there's some system software involved.
Although the SFOS community did express some interest in the 3.5 mm jack in the polls earlier, there's no headphone jack. The expected device sales volume probably would not cover the added engineering cost from such modifications to the mainboard reference design at the announced price point.
Hardware specs look pretty nice, SailfishOS should work nicely on this device. The design language remains faithful to the original Jolla Phone from more than a decade ago. :)
Sometimes I wish the Germans had an island of their own somewhere up north near the american continent.
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