Company A has a contract with Groupon, they are offering a crazy deal for promotional purposes. The deal is usually at a loss for them and Groupon provides a couple things to the business: - a lot of advertisement to people eager to read about deals - a simple way to explain the deal is for one time only and you can't come back and bargain to get the same deal again: it's a groupon, once the groupon is done you don't expect to have this deal on the table again.
Your idea sets a precedent of bargaining which is not very good for the business.
That said, a variation of your idea is for a competitor of Groupon to offer a similar deal to company A but with better terms. Groupon takes 50% of what the customer pays, so there is a LOT of room to undercut them for anybody able to deliver the goods on the advertisement/traffic part.
You need to unlock the boot loader first and I have yet to read any news about that:-(
It's very disappointing that the boot loader should be locked as 99% of the Nook users would use the Nook software without any hacks anyway if it wasn't locked.
This just means that they won't get all the free press the Nook Color got everytime a cool hack made it the tablet to have. For instance, this tablet ran a hacked version of Honeycomb BEFORE the first demo of the Motorola Xoom which was to be the first Honeycomb-based tablet. The Nook tablet probably won't ever get such claims to fame.
There is also a partition on the Nook tablet that is reserved to content you buy so I am thinking this must all be part of an effort to have strong-looking DRM to get content deals or something similar.
That's not the point. The idea is that it costs a lot to make fuel here and then send it into space. So if you want to power a spaceship to go to Mars or Saturn or anywhere, using fuel is expensive. But these guys are saying: have robots harvest it on the moon, stockpile it and then when Nasa or anybody wants fuel in space, they can just rendez-vous with the stockpile and get some fuel that never had to be hauled from Earth.
Another post said a bottle of water in space costs 20000$. So if they can make a 1000 kg stockpile and sell it, they have 20 million dollars.
It seems that interplanetary science missions use a lot more than that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_%28rocket_stage%29), like 5000kg.
So basically, they could make up to 100 million $ just providing the fuel of a single space probe.
So there is definitely an interest although I do find the profits a bit small given the complexity of the undertaking.
Barnes and Noble did the world a favor and maybe we can all return the favor. Amazon accepted to pay Microsoft while Barnes and Noble is fighting them over their absurd patents. At the moment many are wondering whether to buy a Kindle Fire or a Nook Color or Nook Tablet.
I have a Nook Color and I love it.
The stock software is ok and color children books are nice, so I would happily recommend the product to non technical people. The stock software can also do youtube videos etc.
For me, the killer feature was the micro SD card that is bootable. I put Cyanogenmod on it, got the Google market etc.
This lawsuit makes me want to recommend the Nook to more people. I used to feel the kindle fire was just the same (minus the micro SD so hacking is a bit less friendly).
But if Amazon is paying Microsoft, then buying a Kindle Fire is scoring against the Open Source camp.
If you plan to root, I recommend the Nook Color or Tablet. There is a micro SD slot in there that is bootable. A real joy: just copy Cyanogenmod on the micro SD(an Android distribution with good Nook support), put the micro SD in the slot, turn device off, turn on and boot into an Android environment where you are in full control and enjoy Google Market access (the hack for that is easy actually on Cyanogemod).
I'd pay the extra money (50$, so 250$ total) for the Tablet as it is much faster than my Nook Color but the Color can already do cool stuff.
Not sure why everybody seems to be ignoring Nook in this discussion. The device is much more open thanks to the micro SD (reflashing the device is definitely not in the same league as just copying a file on an SD card).
Not the same ISPs. ANY ISP that is on the traceroute to uncensored websites allowing https.
And the local ISP won't even know there is anything special with the network traffic as this uses public steganography in encrypted data streams.
Only somebody who has the private key can know the data are "special". So the only remaining attacks on this are: - steal a private key from a trusted organization - spoof a private key (Bad people can create the "TRUSTME" service, get people to trust it and spy on them) - block all https traffic to any ISP than does not want to help the spying government.
Owning the local ISP used by "TELEX" users does not accomplish anything so this is a definite improvement.
Nice list. It really gives me an idea of how to evaluate Microsoft's purchase of Skype for 8 billions... 2014: , Facetime or Google Talk and lingering Skype. But hey, it's Microsoft, they can afford to lose 8 billions...
Not everybody was bashing you know. I remember looking at the Nokia Internet Tablets like the N770 and wishing they had a bigger screen. Or even looking at the iPod touch and wishing it had a bigger screen...
I guess it just means that form factors are "obvious" and at the same time not so easy to design and sell. I am still in the same situation as the OP.
After hesitating to get an Archos 7, an Archos 101 (hard to get) or a Nook Color, I am still not sure what I can compromise on without being too disappointed afterwards:
- screen size
- RAM?
- camera?
- microphone
- touch screen quality?
Also, waiting is not so pointless this month as the iPad 2 is probably less than 2 months away and the best android tablets are just being released... After that I would predict 6 or 8 quiet months (only one iPad a year).
The Makerbot and other are about 750$. And the plastic seems to be 15$ a pound if I remember well. That's starting to look very affordable already. There was a guy who made a replacement part for his dishwasher on the Make blog or instructables. One or 2 hacks like that and the machine pays for itself...
Well indeed the military and not just them have invested a lot in such radio technology. An RFID reader is very similar to a radar. There are 2 important classes of radar and both type kind of apply: 1) primary radars: blast a lot of energy as radio waves towards a target, the target reflects some of the energy in the radar's direction with is then received and amplified (big antenna, amplifiers and signal processing) 2) secondary radars: send signals to a cooperative transponder on plane the transponder (which has batteries) decodes the signal and transmits a response back. The radar then receives and decodes the message.
If you combine both types of systems for RFID long distance reading you can: - beam energy to the RFID over a long distance (antenna with narrow beam, emit kilowatts of power with appropriate characteristics to provide power to RFID tag). Primary radars can send megawatts in beams that have a 1 degree width - send signal/message over long distance to get the RFID to respond - receive RFID response thanks to highly sensitive receivers (primary radars have required a lot of work in that area since the targets don't cooperate and might even use stealth technology). Primary radars can typically receive picowatts of energy and recognize the target.
If you add this all together, you can track RFID tags miles away and know where they are with some precision (100 feet maybe).
Also, criminals may really like RFID too: Kidnapping mafia in poor countries could detect passports in cars going on a road, kidnap all Americans (or Europeans) as they are likely to bring a good ransom. Apparently the equipment to do that is dirt cheap. And the security of the RFID tags is lame as there were people who managed to clone RFID tags of passport and such. And if your passport were secure you might still have kept the tag on your bible, DVD, laptop etc.
Overall, I am not surprised that even Skymall sells wallets that block RFID...
Of course, one can argue that cell phones are much worse. So you might need quite a bit of tinfoil in the coming years...
They are using H.264 to do the encoding. I think they are using the free trial and that might be why they are buying On2. They want so be sure that Youtube can free itself from H.264 some day.
What do you mean? How do you enable multiple desktops on Windows without 3rd party software? The OP is not talking about spreading the desktop over multiple screens which is what most distributions do. He want to combine multiple screens and multiple desktops in a way that is not common. I personally like the OP's suggestion but apparently we must be in the minority since only Enlightenment does it that way...
That said, multiple screens have a long history of being harder on Linux due to driver issues. I believe people are usually quite successful using the NVIDIA drivers and tools. I got decent results with my EEE PC 701 and a TV. But I don't use it much so it does not really count.
I guess these robots are getting everybody to see them a bit like people. Normally you should just think they are things are are redundant and it's really cool that one is still going even though the other one will soon stop functioning. But people are concerned Spirit will "die", they mention rescue missions and they would want the other rover to come and help Spirit.
All this emotion is really interesting. I suppose it's really good for robotic missions as it means people can care about things happening to a little robot far away and hopefully more science will come out of this public interest.
Myself, I really wish they could find a solution for Spirit...
That's a bit extreme I agree, but at the same time, it's pretty manageable with Debian:
- install software the same way : check (apt-get install)
- browse web : check (firefox, html and javascript and no freaking ActiveX to require a specific arch)
- write you own architecture independent programs : check (shell scripts, python, perl, javascript)
- word processing/spreadsheet: check (gnumeric and abiword for instance)
I have done real work on much slower hardware and I don't think the architecture really matters that much. It could be an issue for large installs (say a school district) but for individuals with little money and a lot of time it doesn't seem like an issue.
Also, please note that the DIY potential is pretty good (USB master, CPU, screen, small size etc.) and even American DIYers might welcome this. It's the price of 2 Arduinos and much cheaper than a buglabs main unit.
Finally, the site is slashdotted, so it really looks like a great marketting idea;-)
I believe he was on topic as he was explaining that it's a matter of priorities to find 1 billion dollars in the federal budget for NASA. His priorities obviously differ from yours but he clearly identified a big source of spending (6%) and noted that the amount considered was small compared to that big source of spending.
Really, it's like profiling code, if nobody has ever profiled some code you are going to see big misuses of resource (like 70% of time spent recomputing the same value etc.). But after some people have looked at profiles, you get down to a point where a 6% figure is a big target. I am pretty sure you are not the first one to look at the federal budget so it's likely that 6% is a big juicy target when trying to optimize the federal budget.
So your rhetoric does not really help as the other 14/15ths are composed of hundreds of items that are probably just as hard to assess, prioritize and possibly remove from the budget. the Parent was really just putting the 1 billion in perspective.
Personally I think that spending a billion on NASA is a rather good use of the money as they spend the money on cool stuff (electronics, getting bright people to work together, Linux etc.) and produce cool images, discoveries, stories that really make my days brighter.
The satellite only has enough cryogen to keep cool for 1.5 sky surveys. Hence the summary. I wonder if the satellite can still work without cryogen... I suppose it's going to be much noisier, but how much?
You don't have to do amazing things you know. Create a linkedin profile, facebook, post questions on some mailing lists for tools you use and that should be higher than some random and old reference. I thought my names was rare but I have a couple homonyms on linkedin. After that you can see a couple of posts to some Open Source software mailing lists. I suppose the guy could achieve the same result easily. I am not sure how thorough people are when Googling candidates but I guess after 2 or 3 pages of posts on mailing lists I would be quite satisfied and would not see the textfiles references that the OP is worried about.
The doctors can do it on-demand now (well more or less).
So say you have incredible pain due to some tumor they can target the pituitary gland with a gamma knife and after a few weeks the pain is relieved so that you don't need to many drugs to avoid pain. Apparently this has been done since the 50s but before the gamma knife the side effects were pretty big. There does not seem to be any side effects with the gamma knife.
It's really great for people who benefit from it although apparently nobody really knows why this works.
I disagree with AT&T. I want maps, precise maps for 3G. I mean, I have EDGE on my Blackberry and it's very bad. So if I get a 3G service, I really want to be able to make sure that I won't have to fall back to EDGE...
I saw the ad and it really made me think it was cool and informative and I wanted to go online and check this out next time I shop for service. Unfortunately I expect the maps to be deceptive. T-Mobile's maps show reception in areas where I have been and where I would get cut all the time. So the maps are not really very good and can be tweaked.
I guess we need to do our own coverage maps with some Android application that checks coverage, records GPS information and aggregates that on a website. Independent maps are the only way to get anything remotely accurate.
How do you handle the lack of dimming? I have a bunch of sockets with a dimmer and am afraid to put a CFL in there. Can I disable the dimmer easily? Or is it OK to just push the button all the way every time?
You know, it's just one trade-off and it might not be much worse than linking C++ dynamically... Or Jitting Java byte code.
I have owned an Agenda VR3 and a Zaurus. I can tell you that there are many ways to wast CPU cycles and that in any case it takes effort to avoid them. The Agenda guys spent a lot of time trying to optimize the binaries and resolve issues caused by C++. They might have had an easier time coding in Python and avoiding C++. Or not. It's a complex issue, so it's hard to say even now after the dust has settled.
I don't think there is any silver bullet nor that Javascript, Dalvik or C++ are bad per se. What matters is the effort that the makers put into integrating the software and the hardware, testing, optimizing etc.
The Pre uses the V8 Javascript engine and it might be more efficient to jit a few tens of lines of Javascript than to link a C++ binary with all kinds of libraries (say stdc++, qt, X11 etc.).
Also, I remember that programming in GFA Basic and running the programs on my 8MHz Atari was quite fast actually. So why would it be such a mistake on Palm's part to use Javascript on a machine that is about 500 times faster (the fastest instruction took 4 clock cycles on the 68k)?
I think the Pre is really interesting as almost everything in it is Open Source (V8, Webkit, Linux etc.), based on standards (HTML, Javascript). Also people seem to be able to compare it with the iPhone without laughing so it must be a rather good integration of hardware and software too...
Anyway just my 2 cents and an occasion to fondly remember the gadgets of my youth;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Company A has a contract with Groupon, they are offering a crazy deal for promotional purposes.
The deal is usually at a loss for them and Groupon provides a couple things to the business:
- a lot of advertisement to people eager to read about deals
- a simple way to explain the deal is for one time only and you can't come back and bargain to get the same deal again: it's a groupon, once the groupon is done you don't expect to have this deal on the table again.
Your idea sets a precedent of bargaining which is not very good for the business.
That said, a variation of your idea is for a competitor of Groupon to offer a similar deal to company A but with better terms. Groupon takes 50% of what the customer pays, so there is a LOT of room to undercut them for anybody able to deliver the goods on the advertisement/traffic part.
You need to unlock the boot loader first and I have yet to read any news about that :-(
It's very disappointing that the boot loader should be locked as 99% of the Nook users would use the Nook software without any hacks anyway if it wasn't locked.
This just means that they won't get all the free press the Nook Color got everytime a cool hack made it the tablet to have. For instance, this tablet ran a hacked version of Honeycomb BEFORE the first demo of the Motorola Xoom which was to be the first Honeycomb-based tablet. The Nook tablet probably won't ever get such claims to fame.
There is also a partition on the Nook tablet that is reserved to content you buy so I am thinking this must all be part of an effort to have strong-looking DRM to get content deals or something similar.
That's not the point.
The idea is that it costs a lot to make fuel here and then send it into space.
So if you want to power a spaceship to go to Mars or Saturn or anywhere, using fuel is expensive.
But these guys are saying: have robots harvest it on the moon, stockpile it and then when Nasa or anybody wants fuel in space, they can just rendez-vous with the stockpile and get some fuel that never had to be hauled from Earth.
Another post said a bottle of water in space costs 20000$. So if they can make a 1000 kg stockpile and sell it, they have 20 million dollars.
It seems that interplanetary science missions use a lot more than that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_%28rocket_stage%29), like 5000kg.
So basically, they could make up to 100 million $ just providing the fuel of a single space probe.
So there is definitely an interest although I do find the profits a bit small given the complexity of the undertaking.
That's too bad for you. Did you try Ebay or something like that?
The Nook Color is a very nice device for hacking or just reading books.
Barnes and Noble did the world a favor and maybe we can all return the favor.
Amazon accepted to pay Microsoft while Barnes and Noble is fighting them over their absurd patents.
At the moment many are wondering whether to buy a Kindle Fire or a Nook Color or Nook Tablet.
I have a Nook Color and I love it.
The stock software is ok and color children books are nice, so I would happily recommend the product to non technical people.
The stock software can also do youtube videos etc.
For me, the killer feature was the micro SD card that is bootable. I put Cyanogenmod on it, got the Google market etc.
This lawsuit makes me want to recommend the Nook to more people. I used to feel the kindle fire was just the same (minus the micro SD so hacking is a bit less friendly).
But if Amazon is paying Microsoft, then buying a Kindle Fire is scoring against the Open Source camp.
If you plan to root, I recommend the Nook Color or Tablet.
There is a micro SD slot in there that is bootable. A real joy: just copy Cyanogenmod on the micro SD(an Android distribution with good Nook support), put the micro SD in the slot, turn device off, turn on and boot into an Android environment where you are in full control and enjoy Google Market access (the hack for that is easy actually on Cyanogemod).
I'd pay the extra money (50$, so 250$ total) for the Tablet as it is much faster than my Nook Color but the Color can already do cool stuff.
Not sure why everybody seems to be ignoring Nook in this discussion. The device is much more open thanks to the micro SD (reflashing the device is definitely not in the same league as just copying a file on an SD card).
Not the same ISPs. ANY ISP that is on the traceroute to uncensored websites allowing https.
And the local ISP won't even know there is anything special with the network traffic as this uses public steganography in encrypted data streams.
Only somebody who has the private key can know the data are "special". So the only remaining attacks on this are:
- steal a private key from a trusted organization
- spoof a private key (Bad people can create the "TRUSTME" service, get people to trust it and spy on them)
- block all https traffic to any ISP than does not want to help the spying government.
Owning the local ISP used by "TELEX" users does not accomplish anything so this is a definite improvement.
Nice list.
It really gives me an idea of how to evaluate Microsoft's purchase of Skype for 8 billions...
2014: , Facetime or Google Talk and lingering Skype.
But hey, it's Microsoft, they can afford to lose 8 billions...
Not everybody was bashing you know. I remember looking at the Nokia Internet Tablets like the N770 and wishing they had a bigger screen.
Or even looking at the iPod touch and wishing it had a bigger screen...
I guess it just means that form factors are "obvious" and at the same time not so easy to design and sell. I am still in the same situation as the OP.
After hesitating to get an Archos 7, an Archos 101 (hard to get) or a Nook Color, I am still not sure what I can compromise on without being too disappointed afterwards:
- screen size
- RAM?
- camera?
- microphone
- touch screen quality?
Also, waiting is not so pointless this month as the iPad 2 is probably less than 2 months away and the best android tablets are just being released... After that I would predict 6 or 8 quiet months (only one iPad a year).
The Makerbot and other are about 750$.
And the plastic seems to be 15$ a pound if I remember well.
That's starting to look very affordable already.
There was a guy who made a replacement part for his dishwasher on the Make blog or instructables. One or 2 hacks like that and the machine pays for itself...
I received one and I am not even a citizen!
Well indeed the military and not just them have invested a lot in such radio technology.
An RFID reader is very similar to a radar. There are 2 important classes of radar and both type kind of apply:
1) primary radars: blast a lot of energy as radio waves towards a target, the target reflects some of the energy in the radar's direction with is then received and amplified (big antenna, amplifiers and signal processing)
2) secondary radars: send signals to a cooperative transponder on plane the transponder (which has batteries) decodes the signal and transmits a response back. The radar then receives and decodes the message.
If you combine both types of systems for RFID long distance reading you can:
- beam energy to the RFID over a long distance (antenna with narrow beam, emit kilowatts of power with appropriate characteristics to provide power to RFID tag). Primary radars can send megawatts in beams that have a 1 degree width
- send signal/message over long distance to get the RFID to respond
- receive RFID response thanks to highly sensitive receivers (primary radars have required a lot of work in that area since the targets don't cooperate and might even use stealth technology). Primary radars can typically receive picowatts of energy and recognize the target.
If you add this all together, you can track RFID tags miles away and know where they are with some precision (100 feet maybe).
Also, criminals may really like RFID too: Kidnapping mafia in poor countries could detect passports in cars going on a road, kidnap all Americans (or Europeans) as they are likely to bring a good ransom. Apparently the equipment to do that is dirt cheap. And the security of the RFID tags is lame as there were people who managed to clone RFID tags of passport and such. And if your passport were secure you might still have kept the tag on your bible, DVD, laptop etc.
Overall, I am not surprised that even Skymall sells wallets that block RFID...
Of course, one can argue that cell phones are much worse. So you might need quite a bit of tinfoil in the coming years...
Or that the app was available on Android first? I mean that's not really a cool message for the leading platform...
They are using H.264 to do the encoding. I think they are using the free trial and that might be why they are buying On2. They want so be sure that Youtube can free itself from H.264 some day.
There is a proprietary port, so there is a business opportunity to make an adapter and sell it for 100$ ;-)
What do you mean? How do you enable multiple desktops on Windows without 3rd party software?
The OP is not talking about spreading the desktop over multiple screens which is what most distributions do.
He want to combine multiple screens and multiple desktops in a way that is not common. I personally like the OP's suggestion but apparently we must be in the minority since only Enlightenment does it that way...
That said, multiple screens have a long history of being harder on Linux due to driver issues. I believe people are usually quite successful using the NVIDIA drivers and tools. I got decent results with my EEE PC 701 and a TV. But I don't use it much so it does not really count.
I guess these robots are getting everybody to see them a bit like people.
Normally you should just think they are things are are redundant and it's really cool that one is still going even though the other one will soon stop functioning.
But people are concerned Spirit will "die", they mention rescue missions and they would want the other rover to come and help Spirit.
All this emotion is really interesting. I suppose it's really good for robotic missions as it means people can care about things happening to a little robot far away and hopefully more science will come out of this public interest.
Myself, I really wish they could find a solution for Spirit...
That's a bit extreme I agree, but at the same time, it's pretty manageable with Debian:
- install software the same way : check (apt-get install)
- browse web : check (firefox, html and javascript and no freaking ActiveX to require a specific arch)
- write you own architecture independent programs : check (shell scripts, python, perl, javascript)
- word processing/spreadsheet: check (gnumeric and abiword for instance)
I have done real work on much slower hardware and I don't think the architecture really matters that much. It could be an issue for large installs (say a school district) but for individuals with little money and a lot of time it doesn't seem like an issue.
Also, please note that the DIY potential is pretty good (USB master, CPU, screen, small size etc.) and even American DIYers might welcome this. It's the price of 2 Arduinos and much cheaper than a buglabs main unit.
Finally, the site is slashdotted, so it really looks like a great marketting idea ;-)
I believe he was on topic as he was explaining that it's a matter of priorities to find 1 billion dollars in the federal budget for NASA.
His priorities obviously differ from yours but he clearly identified a big source of spending (6%) and noted that the amount considered was small compared to that big source of spending.
Really, it's like profiling code, if nobody has ever profiled some code you are going to see big misuses of resource (like 70% of time spent recomputing the same value etc.). But after some people have looked at profiles, you get down to a point where a 6% figure is a big target. I am pretty sure you are not the first one to look at the federal budget so it's likely that 6% is a big juicy target when trying to optimize the federal budget.
So your rhetoric does not really help as the other 14/15ths are composed of hundreds of items that are probably just as hard to assess, prioritize and possibly remove from the budget. the Parent was really just putting the 1 billion in perspective.
Personally I think that spending a billion on NASA is a rather good use of the money as they spend the money on cool stuff (electronics, getting bright people to work together, Linux etc.) and produce cool images, discoveries, stories that really make my days brighter.
The satellite only has enough cryogen to keep cool for 1.5 sky surveys. Hence the summary.
I wonder if the satellite can still work without cryogen... I suppose it's going to be much noisier, but how much?
You don't have to do amazing things you know. Create a linkedin profile, facebook, post questions on some mailing lists for tools you use and that should be higher than some random and old reference.
I thought my names was rare but I have a couple homonyms on linkedin. After that you can see a couple of posts to some Open Source software mailing lists. I suppose the guy could achieve the same result easily.
I am not sure how thorough people are when Googling candidates but I guess after 2 or 3 pages of posts on mailing lists I would be quite satisfied and would not see the textfiles references that the OP is worried about.
The doctors can do it on-demand now (well more or less).
So say you have incredible pain due to some tumor they can target the pituitary gland with a gamma knife and after a few weeks the pain is relieved so that you don't need to many drugs to avoid pain.
Apparently this has been done since the 50s but before the gamma knife the side effects were pretty big. There does not seem to be any side effects with the gamma knife.
It's really great for people who benefit from it although apparently nobody really knows why this works.
I disagree with AT&T. I want maps, precise maps for 3G. I mean, I have EDGE on my Blackberry and it's very bad. So if I get a 3G service, I really want to be able to make sure that I won't have to fall back to EDGE...
I saw the ad and it really made me think it was cool and informative and I wanted to go online and check this out next time I shop for service. Unfortunately I expect the maps to be deceptive. T-Mobile's maps show reception in areas where I have been and where I would get cut all the time. So the maps are not really very good and can be tweaked.
I guess we need to do our own coverage maps with some Android application that checks coverage, records GPS information and aggregates that on a website. Independent maps are the only way to get anything remotely accurate.
How do you handle the lack of dimming? I have a bunch of sockets with a dimmer and am afraid to put a CFL in there. Can I disable the dimmer easily? Or is it OK to just push the button all the way every time?
Thanks a lot,
You know, it's just one trade-off and it might not be much worse than linking C++ dynamically... Or Jitting Java byte code.
I have owned an Agenda VR3 and a Zaurus. I can tell you that there are many ways to wast CPU cycles and that in any case it takes effort to avoid them. The Agenda guys spent a lot of time trying to optimize the binaries and resolve issues caused by C++. They might have had an easier time coding in Python and avoiding C++. Or not. It's a complex issue, so it's hard to say even now after the dust has settled.
I don't think there is any silver bullet nor that Javascript, Dalvik or C++ are bad per se. What matters is the effort that the makers put into integrating the software and the hardware, testing, optimizing etc.
The Pre uses the V8 Javascript engine and it might be more efficient to jit a few tens of lines of Javascript than to link a C++ binary with all kinds of libraries (say stdc++, qt, X11 etc.).
Also, I remember that programming in GFA Basic and running the programs on my 8MHz Atari was quite fast actually. So why would it be such a mistake on Palm's part to use Javascript on a machine that is about 500 times faster (the fastest instruction took 4 clock cycles on the 68k)?
I think the Pre is really interesting as almost everything in it is Open Source (V8, Webkit, Linux etc.), based on standards (HTML, Javascript). Also people seem to be able to compare it with the iPhone without laughing so it must be a rather good integration of hardware and software too...
Anyway just my 2 cents and an occasion to fondly remember the gadgets of my youth ;-)