This is probably very relevant to the announcement -- excuse me, "rumor" -- that they're going to do color in February. There may or may not be real demand for color, but there's very likely the perception of a demand for color amongst people likely to buy into the IPO.
I suspect the decision to go color at this point was at least as heavily influenced by Palm's finance people as by their marketing people.
Ok, maybe Palm's done some market research and has found there's a real demand for color, rather than just a "Gee, wouldn't it be nice". But for most current Palmers that I know, color is way down on the priority list.
When they can do it without taking a massive hit on battery life, and when they can do it without the price jumping way up, yeah, color would be nice. Until then, it's just flash, and they risk shooting themselves in the foot.
Yeah, when they get to the point of real wireless web access, color might be useful. (Though that reflects more on the ubiquity of bad web design than it does on the usefulness of color on the web.) But I'd much rather have real wireless connectivity without color, than color without wireless connectivity.
Humans are poor observers? Are you not human? You are Devo!
[grin] I am human, and as a result I'm generally a poor observer. But it helps a little that I'm aware of it. Most people are under the delusion that they're good observers, and so they don't have any clue how many mistakes they make.
(And don't even get me started about poor reading skills and lack of basic reasoning ability! Argh!)
Is it just me or is anybody else sick of all of the supersticious goo and various other scare mongering flying about just before all four digits in the Christian year flip?
I could easily be wrong, but I'm not sure there's any more silliness than usual. Maybe you're just noticing it more because you're expecting it, and The Millenium is an easy thing to pin it on?
[shrug] Or maybe you're right. But it's hard to know for sure.
From Sky and Telescope: "Most people won't notice a thing, despite the e-mail chain letter that implies we'll see something amazing."
Call me cynical, but I bet that most people who've gotten the email will see that the Moon is brighter than usual... because they expect to. Humans are notoriously poor observers, and will often see what they expect to see, whether it's there or not.
On the plus side, maybe a few more people will remember to look up. Maybe it's partly because I live in a city, but sometimes I think I'm one of the few people who ever notices the sky.
Absolutely. I grabbed a Pilot when they first came out, and my life instantly got a whole lot more organized.
Now I've got a Visor (the PalmOS device from Handspring), and I'm even happier with that. Could I live without it? Yeah, of course... but I'd sure as hell miss it.
Now if only someone would just hurry up with a wireless-modem Springboard, I'd be all set...
The way I understand it, while Palm was a nice moneymaker, it didn't fit really well with the rest of 3Com's business. And the Palm folks evidently felt constrained by having to deal with a parent company, and wanted to be more independent, to be better able to respond to competition in the handheld market.
It's also my understanding that there was (is?) a large brain-drain going on, as Palm lost a lot of its really good people to Handspring. (Ironic, given that Hawkins and Dubinsky left Palm in '98 to form Handspring after 3Com refused to let them spin off Palm.) Palm may be hoping that the results of an IPO will enable them to afford to keep (and hire) good employees.
Sheesh. I can't believe this! I don't like the way that most of the worlds governments are working, so lets all go out and distroy some Mickey'D's and Starbucks. What's wrong with this picture??
Evidently what's wrong with this picture is that you left your lens cap on.
The destructive types were a miniscule minority of the people in the streets, and were the least likely to have coherent grievences. It seems that mostly they were just taking advantage of the opportunity to trash other people's property.
Much of the protest is not about not liking the way gov'ts are working, but about the way corporatism is working, and about the serious lack of open process in the workings of WTO and similar very influencial organizations that are making very important global policy decisions.
It's well-established that free trade helps check corporatism and through comparative advantage, helps everyone.
It's a "well-established" theory, maybe. But actual applications of the theory are about as rare as actual applications of communist theory. When most corporate droids (or most WTO reps or most politicos) talk about "free trade", it doesn't mean what an (unowned) economist means when s/he talks about free trade.
The last thing in the world that a corporatist wants is free trade. They want to be able to trade freely, they don't want everybody to be able to.
The folks in the streets in Seattle understand that.
Like it or not, trade has always benefited human beings - even going back to when the settlers came over to what is now known the United States. There was trade with the Native American Indians.
[wry laugh] Oh yeah, look how it benefited them. 90+% mortality, entire tribes wiped out, many of the rest confined to concentra... er, reservations. A few of the remaining descendents of survivors are managing to do well only by exploiting loopholes in the laws of the descendents of their "benefactors" and taking advantage of people who can't do math. Maybe you want a different example?
Trade in general is good, but it has serious limitations and drawbacks, including the fact that the lopsided conditions and results of some trade can make it very, very hard to even point out those very limitations and drawbacks (let alone do something about them). The Seattle "rioters" realize this.
You might want to go back and re-read the book. The space elevator was built with in space, with space resources... and one was built by Martian colonists first! (Building a Mars elevator would be technically easier, if perhaps less immediately useful.)
. I'm sure ms could have spent the marketing focus group money on hiring some talent to make wince better. Or they just could have bought Handspring (is that right?) and manufactured Palm clones. Oh wait, maybe the DOJ would have frowned on that.;>
Well, (a) Hawkins and Dubinsky would likely slit their throats before selling Handspring to anyone, let alone MS, (b) Handspring doesn't own PalmOS, 3Com/Palm Computing does, and (c) MS doesn't make handhelds, it just licenses WinCE (or tries to!) to people who do.
And, given the paranoia of US Citizens, how many are REALLY going to pick up the phone and call the FBI asking 'hey hows it going', when documentation exists of what happens to citizens who decide NOT to play by government rules.
Um. So you think that some of the people who ranted on the ISP for caving in instead of standing up to the authorities did so in part because they would rather do that than risk standing up to the authorities themselves?
If you're looking at this only in the context about "little countries" vs "big countries", you're missing a very large part of the picture. Try also thinking about it in terms of the basic goals of multinational corporations, what results would strengthen their bottom lines, and how they might be able to influence those results.
It _is_ contrary to the "information wants to be free" ethic. The whole point of that ethic is that it allows the reader to see all the facts necessary to make the decision _for_ _himself_ about which is the "information" and which is the "disinformation".
All other things being equal, that would be true. But they aren't, so it ain't. It's just not that simple in the Real World.
In some contexts -- and arguably in the context of the WTO and spreading corporatism -- information can be effectively driven out by disinformation. Information may want to be free, but just releasing it into the wilderness doesn't mean that it will be free.
Again, in general I think it's better in the long run if disinformation is simply countered by information. But I have no illusions that it always works best that way.
I think the argument is that what the WTO releases is not information but disinformation. To whatever extent that's true, then blocking it is arguably not contrary to either the goals of the electrohippies, nor to the more general "information wants to be free" ethic. (Though I believe that in general countering disinformation is better than blocking it.)
Of course, the ultimate goal of public protests -- whether like this or with more traditional methods -- is to raise awareness of opposing views... which this has already done.
Woo, oxygen. If I remember my astrobiology correctly, this would be taken as a sign of life...
IIRC, it would need to be a high concentration of "free" oxygen (O2). It wouldn't be conclusive, but it would be strong evidence. O2 is so reactive that in order for a high concentration of it to exist, there would need to be some source constantly replenishing the supply. (In Earth's case, the source is the large quantity of life that produces oxygen as a by-product.)
I don't remember if spectroscopy is able to distinguish between the existence of free oxygen and oxygen in combination with other things.
There is also a rumor (FWIW!) I've heard that L. Ron had decided to 'fess up to the con before he died... but made the mistake of telling the wrong people that he was going to do so, and got... um... hurried along.
It's still an exageration, but if you're going to mock people, it works better if you mock them for what they actually said. It also works better if you don't mock them about the same damn thing every single time their name is mentioned. Most people learn that in junior high school. Aside from political pundants and many geeks, evidently.
He was relevant to its beginnings by being instrumental in changing the early funding in a way that kept it funded.
It get really really old -- even for a non-Democrat like me -- to see the same misinterpretation of what he said again and again and again and again and...
Did he "invent the internet" it, as so many people pretend he claimed? No. Was he relevant to its beginnings? Yes.
Find something else about him to criticize, preferably something real. There must be something.
Actually, I think to some extent this started when the USDOJ first started legal action against MS. It's safer to say no to the bully when you know the principal's watching.
The irony, of course, is that MS points to the examples of this loosening up of the market as evidence that they're *not* monopolistic.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect the decision to go color at this point was at least as heavily influenced by Palm's finance people as by their marketing people.
When they can do it without taking a massive hit on battery life, and when they can do it without the price jumping way up, yeah, color would be nice. Until then, it's just flash, and they risk shooting themselves in the foot.
Yeah, when they get to the point of real wireless web access, color might be useful. (Though that reflects more on the ubiquity of bad web design than it does on the usefulness of color on the web.) But I'd much rather have real wireless connectivity without color, than color without wireless connectivity.
[grin] I am human, and as a result I'm generally a poor observer. But it helps a little that I'm aware of it. Most people are under the delusion that they're good observers, and so they don't have any clue how many mistakes they make.
(And don't even get me started about poor reading skills and lack of basic reasoning ability! Argh!)
I could easily be wrong, but I'm not sure there's any more silliness than usual. Maybe you're just noticing it more because you're expecting it, and The Millenium is an easy thing to pin it on?
[shrug] Or maybe you're right. But it's hard to know for sure.
Call me cynical, but I bet that most people who've gotten the email will see that the Moon is brighter than usual ... because they expect to. Humans are notoriously poor observers, and will often see what they expect to see, whether it's there or not.
On the plus side, maybe a few more people will remember to look up. Maybe it's partly because I live in a city, but sometimes I think I'm one of the few people who ever notices the sky.
Absolutely. I grabbed a Pilot when they first came out, and my life instantly got a whole lot more organized.
Now I've got a Visor (the PalmOS device from Handspring), and I'm even happier with that. Could I live without it? Yeah, of course ... but I'd sure as hell miss it.
Now if only someone would just hurry up with a wireless-modem Springboard, I'd be all set ...
It's also my understanding that there was (is?) a large brain-drain going on, as Palm lost a lot of its really good people to Handspring. (Ironic, given that Hawkins and Dubinsky left Palm in '98 to form Handspring after 3Com refused to let them spin off Palm.) Palm may be hoping that the results of an IPO will enable them to afford to keep (and hire) good employees.
Evidently what's wrong with this picture is that you left your lens cap on.
The destructive types were a miniscule minority of the people in the streets, and were the least likely to have coherent grievences. It seems that mostly they were just taking advantage of the opportunity to trash other people's property.
Much of the protest is not about not liking the way gov'ts are working, but about the way corporatism is working, and about the serious lack of open process in the workings of WTO and similar very influencial organizations that are making very important global policy decisions.
It's a "well-established" theory, maybe. But actual applications of the theory are about as rare as actual applications of communist theory. When most corporate droids (or most WTO reps or most politicos) talk about "free trade", it doesn't mean what an (unowned) economist means when s/he talks about free trade.
The last thing in the world that a corporatist wants is free trade. They want to be able to trade freely, they don't want everybody to be able to.
The folks in the streets in Seattle understand that.
[wry laugh] Oh yeah, look how it benefited them. 90+% mortality, entire tribes wiped out, many of the rest confined to concentra ... er, reservations. A few of the remaining descendents of survivors are managing to do well only by exploiting loopholes in the laws of the descendents of their "benefactors" and taking advantage of people who can't do math. Maybe you want a different example?
Trade in general is good, but it has serious limitations and drawbacks, including the fact that the lopsided conditions and results of some trade can make it very, very hard to even point out those very limitations and drawbacks (let alone do something about them). The Seattle "rioters" realize this.
You might want to go back and re-read the book. The space elevator was built with in space, with space resources ... and one was built by Martian colonists first! (Building a Mars elevator would be technically easier, if perhaps less immediately useful.)
Well, (a) Hawkins and Dubinsky would likely slit their throats before selling Handspring to anyone, let alone MS, (b) Handspring doesn't own PalmOS, 3Com/Palm Computing does, and (c) MS doesn't make handhelds, it just licenses WinCE (or tries to!) to people who do.
Um. So you think that some of the people who ranted on the ISP for caving in instead of standing up to the authorities did so in part because they would rather do that than risk standing up to the authorities themselves?
Hmmm. You know, I wouldn't be surprised.
Follow the money.
All other things being equal, that would be true. But they aren't, so it ain't. It's just not that simple in the Real World.
In some contexts -- and arguably in the context of the WTO and spreading corporatism -- information can be effectively driven out by disinformation. Information may want to be free, but just releasing it into the wilderness doesn't mean that it will be free.
Again, in general I think it's better in the long run if disinformation is simply countered by information. But I have no illusions that it always works best that way.
Of course, the ultimate goal of public protests -- whether like this or with more traditional methods -- is to raise awareness of opposing views ... which this has already done.
Judging from past experience ... no, most people don't care, unless they are directly affected by this sort of thing.
How many of you (justifiably) bent-out-of-shape folks are unaware that "profiling" of various kinds by the FBI (et al) has been going on for decades?
How many of you were aware of it, but just didn't give a shit until they started "geek profiling"?
IIRC, it would need to be a high concentration of "free" oxygen (O2). It wouldn't be conclusive, but it would be strong evidence. O2 is so reactive that in order for a high concentration of it to exist, there would need to be some source constantly replenishing the supply. (In Earth's case, the source is the large quantity of life that produces oxygen as a by-product.)
I don't remember if spectroscopy is able to distinguish between the existence of free oxygen and oxygen in combination with other things.
There is also a rumor (FWIW!) I've heard that L. Ron had decided to 'fess up to the con before he died ... but made the mistake of telling the wrong people that he was going to do so, and got ... um ... hurried along.
1) People tinkering with Seti@Home's code may be screwing it up.
2) Therefore, we should let more people tinker with it.
Huh?
There are, no doubt, at least a few situations were open-source is not The Answer. Maybe this is one of them, eh?
It's still an exageration, but if you're going to mock people, it works better if you mock them for what they actually said. It also works better if you don't mock them about the same damn thing every single time their name is mentioned. Most people learn that in junior high school. Aside from political pundants and many geeks, evidently.
He was relevant to its beginnings by being instrumental in changing the early funding in a way that kept it funded.
Did he "invent the internet" it, as so many people pretend he claimed? No. Was he relevant to its beginnings? Yes.
Find something else about him to criticize, preferably something real. There must be something.
Next, of course, the PR-droids will start to hype by hyping their not-hyping. (Which is perhaps what Transmeta is trying to do.)
(1) I think it's fair to say that "free" is a subset of "inexpensive". So the statement was true, if not as accurate as it could be.
(2) Linux itself is free, yes. But not all ways of getting a distribution of Linux are free, though even the ones that aren't free are inexpensive.
Actually, I think to some extent this started when the USDOJ first started legal action against MS. It's safer to say no to the bully when you know the principal's watching.
The irony, of course, is that MS points to the examples of this loosening up of the market as evidence that they're *not* monopolistic.
"See, Mr. Jackson? We don't beat up anyone!"