Most SETI projects are focused on listening for transmissions in the relatively quiet slice of the radio spectrum between the radio spikes of hydrogen and hydroxyl, sometimes called the Water Hole. These would be messages deliberately sent, delivered to a sort of cosmic mailbox for us to read. It doesn't matter that the senders might no longer use radio to communicate amongst themselves. The messages are meant for us.
In the game of Nomic, the rules of the game include rules for changing the rules. However, there are initially two rulesets, mutable and immutable. An immutable rule must be voted into the mutable class before it can be changed. This is essentially, I think, the same situation we see in the discussion of Laws vs. Theories.
The utility of having a special class of theories we call "Laws" is that they make science more stable, and essentially frame the direction of investigation and new theorizing. What Dr Hong Sheng Zhao and his collabators are doing is essentially calling for the Law of Gravity to be moved into the mutable class.
So many people on Slashdot are saying they'd like one of their own, it seems like MIT ought to take advantage of this.
Why not let the sales to the general public subsidize the sales to the third world? Not only would this enable greater economy of scale in production, they could even market these as a "one-to-one" program -- sell them to the general public for $200 each, with the understanding that for every laptop sold in the first world, one would be donated to the third world. Start a nonprofit, make the $200 donation tax deductible, and you might even see corporate customers embrace this idea.
With the new AJAX applications coming down the line, it's not inconceivable that some businesses, both first and third world, might start using these in unique ways. Stake your claim while you can, folks, because there are a lot more prospectors on the way.
The keyboard driver could monitor which app is active at any moment and swap "keymaps" on the fly
That would be fantastic. The colorscheme could even change to reinforce which keymap is in use.
And as long as we're throwing out hacks, you could have the Spacebar display the subject line of incoming e-mails as they arrive, assuming you've got spam under control.
I say: It had better be, since it is in a completely different zipcode from the home row keys.
What do you mean? Look again.
The Enter key is in exactly the same row as the home row keys. It just extends downward into the row below as well, instead of of upward as many keyboards do now. In other words, your pinky will be tapping the top of the Enter key instead of the center or lower right corner as you may do now. There may still be ergonomic problems with the Optimus, but the only (minor) problem I see with the Enter key is that it's two keys farther to the right than the keyboard I'm using to type this.
Moving to Intel was probably done for supply and roadmap reasons, but switching architectures gives Apple the opportunity to grow their market share through piracy, a phenomenon that has been exploited by Adobe and Microsoft in the past.
Apple will only sell OSX with official Mac hardware at their traditional prices to their traditional customers, but I suspect a cracked version will emerge and will displace Windows for a significant number of under-the-table users.
Over time, pirated software often earns back more than its cost. Users who pirate because they cannot afford to purchase eventually become professionals who do purchase, and users who pirate but never purchase help exclude competing products from getting a foothold. Pirated copies of OSX may also increase the market for Mac software in general, not only because there will be a larger installed base, but because more programmers will become familiar with OSX.
Maybe I'm wrong, and Apple and Intel will work so closely together that no cracked version of OSX-for-Dells will be out there, but if there is, Apple will have set themselves up for a real contest with Microsoft. They won't have to officially support the wide variety of hardware that Microsoft does, but they'll be able to benefit from having their software on it.
Still wrapping my mind around the switch, but in the long term, this could be a big deal.
I admit, I thought Mr. Sawyer's vision of the future only a decade away wasn't very good. (What are the "enhanced reality contact lenses" powered by? Happy thoughts?) But I'd be interested to hear other Slashdotters attempts at describing the tech of a typcial day in 2014. Go for it.
Heh, I'm tired just imagining that experiment. But my point is that ABM isn't that hard to understand. I could explain it to my Mom, and that's the real world test I'm interested in.
If I'm using a free account, such as Yahoo, using SPF puts no one any closer to knowing who I AM, which some day could be a very different matter if I have to use ABM.
Why? Couldn't you just as well set a low bond, accept a few spams, and fund your ABM Yahoo! mail account that way?
1. Too many people will keep the money regardless. The only time a bond is posted when you get an e-mail from someone you don't know or don't like. If an old, forgotten friend e-mails you, you'll refund their money; if a marketer e-mails you, you'll keep it. What's the problem here again?
2. The services of escrow agents are not freebies. Preventing spam isn't free either, and major ISPs and businesses already spend millions of dollars a year on it. Presumably this would decrease the amount they spend, not increase it.
3. Nobody will bother to use it when regular e-mail is cheaper, already deployed, and infinitely less fuss. Infinitely less fuss? Maybe for you. Personally, I like the idea of setting an attention bond and knowing that every single e-mail I get is one I'm going to be happy about, one way or another.
This isn't to say that there aren't any problems with ABM, I just don't think the ones you mentioned are dealbreakers.
how long does it take you to understand SPF, or to explain its BASIC CONCEPTS to someone else?
"If this is spam, you get $0.50."
I don't think ABM is hard to explain at all.
I do think it's harder to articulate the anti-spam benefits of SPF, since SPF doesn't stop spam, it just enables better blacklisting, and blacklists are a much more unwieldly and blunt tool than whitelists. (If someone hacks your server and spams with it, for example, it can be notoriously difficult to get yourself off a blacklist even if you've fixed the problem.)
And that's why I really don't understand your Reason #2. I think you've got it backwards. It's SPF that eliminates anonymity, not ABM.
The way SPF works, IIUC, is by eliminating spoofing and tying each mail to a specific ISP. On the SPF front page, they state outright: "If you do get spam that passed an SPF check, then you know you should hold the sending domain responsible for the message." Once you can tie a message to a specific domain or ISP, you can tie it to a specific sender. That's the whole point of SPF. There's no anonymity preserved there.
ABM, on the other hand, doesn't have to change a thing. You can set your policy to accept all e-mails without any bond, and you'll get every e-mail sent to you. You can refuse to send to people who require an ABM bond, as well, if you prefer. ABM is an option, not a requirement.
I'm not totally sold on ABM just yet, but it shouldn't be dismissed for the reasons you give. It's worth exploring.
I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)
These are all noble goals, worth pursuing. But SETI has a noble goal that doesn't get talked about very much.
Most SETI research so far has been focused on the so-called "Water Hole", the quietest part of the radio spectrum which happens to fall between the radio spikes of hydrogen and hydroxyl, around 1.4 gigahertz. If there's another water-based civilization out there, it's easy to see that this is a logical place to broadcast or listen. (Projects like Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now enable me to imagine a future in which we broadcast a message of our own, someday.)
"So what happens if you listen and you don't hear anything?" you ask. Well, even if we drain the Water Hole and find nothing, we'll still have learned a great deal from the process. We'll know there likely aren't any civilizations remotely like us in our galaxy. We'll know that previous civilizations, if there were any, were not able to sustain themselves. We'll know that intelligent life is fleeting and precious in the universe. And this should make us think hard about our own civilization.
If we're ever forced to acknowledge that there are no intelligent radio signals in the universe, then we must also acknowledge that the odds of our own survival just became much bleaker. Knowing that space is quiet means it's more important for us to be careful than we thought. The longer we search without finding any intelligent signals, the more likely it becomes that intelligent civilization isn't some pretty 4th of July sparkler; it's nitroglycerin, waiting to explode. This is incredibly valuable knowledge, life or death knowledge that's worth going after.
The biggest reason to look for a signal in the first place isn't to commune with E.T., but out of pure self-interest. Any number of systems failures could wipe us out as a species, from a single well-designed terrorist plague to GMOs with unforeseen environmental consequences. How do we as a society learn to play nice with technology? Has anyone else in the universe done it? If we found evidence that someone out there had, it would stand as a beacon, showing that we can probably do it, too. And if we don't find a signal, it means a bell is probably tolling our end somewhere, and we'd better think long and hard how to change that.
So feel good about SETI. It's not just about searching for aliens, it's about searching for a cure for extinction.
That quote isn't anywhere in the article. In fact, the quote under the photo actually says: "Full-colour displays can be made with three sub-pixels of yellow, cyan and magenta."
Again, these are sub-pixels we're talking about. The actual pixelspace is so small your eye can only perceive it as a single color. At any rate, you can nitpick about it now, but I suspect you'll have a harder time in a year or so convincing your friends the color image they're seeing on the display model e-book in the store isn't really in color.:)
"Open source benefits from anti-X sentiment" is only true for values of X in which X is a country which produces the majority of proprietary software on the international market.
I suggested India before, so let's run with that value of X.
Feelings against outsourcing to India are running high in America. While there are certain financial benefits to be gained by outsourcing, there is also an increasing backlash. Sending jobs to India may alienate potential customers. Open source solutions enable companies to become more competitive without outsourcing.
An example might be a company which wants to expand while keeping helpdesk costs down. Instead of completely outsourcing helpdesk jobs to India, they might use Bayonne, an open source IVR telephony app, to create an automated helpdesk service which can answer more questions without human intervention, bumping only the unique support questions to the live representatives. The company can then trumpet that it has grown without sacrificing American jobs.
But this country-by-country analysis is pointless. If Andreessen had said "Open source benefits from anti-Indian sentiment", I'd have called him on a biased specificity there, too.
Again, the real benefit of open source is that it enables companies and nations to become more independent. That's true whether you're in Brazil or America or India or Germany. It's stupid and divisive to try to tie this benefit only to anti-Americanism.
What's odd about this statement, really, is its specificity. One could just as well say, "Open source benefits from anti-India sentiment" or "Open source benefits from anti-France sentiment". It's hard to read that specificity as anything other than a thinly veiled endorsement of anti-Americanism.
The more general case would be, "Open source enables corporations and nations to become more independent."
Mperia gives a higher percentage back to the artist and uses Bitpass, which is already the most popular micropayment system out there. By supporting Mperia and Bitpass, you're helping not just musicians but webcomics artists, photographers, and others create a market for their works, too. Something worth thinking about.
Then, when you have to pay $50 for an optical computer mouse, or $1000 extra for a middle-of-the-line new computer, you'll understand why the company decided that maybe it should save some money to begin with.
Better to have slightly higher priced products and a population that earns enough money to afford them than slightly cheaper products that are bought in drastically lower numbers because the wages aren't there to support demand.
If distributed search and trust proves to be better, won't Google simply adopt it as a model? It's hard to imagine a company as innovative and powerful as Google letting itself be displaced.
Are there any other major distributed search projects going on right now besides Grub?
At the end of Defying Gravity, I'd read that the Newton group was already talking about designing a smaller Newton immediately after the original MessagePad launched, but you're left wondering how far they ever got with that idea.
It sounds like they might have continued work on the Newton Cadillac concept, as well as extending Newton Intelligence into other devices.
Wouldn't it have been great if they had been allowed to try?
Well, that's why I said "slightly smaller". I like that the Newton has a lot of screen real estate. But I recognize that a lot of people didn't, and found the Newton awkward to carry around.
To be honest, I think that if Apple had responded to the market by making a smaller Newton, they would've seen a huge rebound in market share, and the Newton would still be around today. Even if they'd had to make the mini-Newt less functional, it would've kept the Newton brand alive until electronics became small enough to give the same functionality in a smaller package.
As it is, Apple just gave up on the most innovative product they ever produced. Apple borrowed much of the Macintosh's GUI from Xerox PARC, but the Newton was entirely their own creation. It literally defined the entire category of PDAs! (PDA was Apple CEO John Sculley's description of the Newton; before Newton, there were only "personal organizers".)
Instead of responding to the market, however, Apple hung its head in shame and declared the Newton a failed brand, abandoning it. They walked away from what ought to have been a real success story for them. What a truly colossal waste of corporate capital.
I've heard this before, and it just doesn't ring true for me. Graffiti requires you to be much more "exceptionally careful" with your handwriting. If you can make Graffiti work for you, you can certainly make the Newt's much more flexible handwriting recognition engine work with much less effort.
I think it's a conceptual problem, really. The Newton attempted to recognize all handwriting, and thus many users blamed the Newton when it couldn't decipher their illegible script. It was Apple's fault, not theirs.
But the Palms didn't even pretend that they'd recognize your handwriting. They simply forced users to learn a new way to write. If Graffiti failed to recognize what you wrote, well, then you must not be doing it right. So people blamed themselves instead of the device.
my Handspring was much better for most of the typical PDA usage- entering phone numbers or appointment times
I think entering phone numbers and appointment times became "typical PDA usage" because that's all you could conveniently do with Graffiti. That's my experience anyway, YMMV.
Sure the Newton's natural system is faster for writing large amounts of text(assuming you have perfect handwriting) but people just didn't(and still don't) use PDAs for that sort of thing.
I'd say that there's an amount of text between the size of a phone number and a "large amount of text" which is what the Newton was really designed for. Short notes, quick e-mails, reminders, that sort of thing. And lots of people have been very successful using it for just that.
Again, whatever works for you, works for you. But I personally really liked what the Newton did, and would've loved to see what a 2004 Newton OS and handheld would be like.
Slashdot Mirror
Most SETI projects are focused on listening for transmissions in the relatively quiet slice of the radio spectrum between the radio spikes of hydrogen and hydroxyl, sometimes called the Water Hole. These would be messages deliberately sent, delivered to a sort of cosmic mailbox for us to read. It doesn't matter that the senders might no longer use radio to communicate amongst themselves. The messages are meant for us.
In the game of Nomic, the rules of the game include rules for changing the rules. However, there are initially two rulesets, mutable and immutable. An immutable rule must be voted into the mutable class before it can be changed. This is essentially, I think, the same situation we see in the discussion of Laws vs. Theories.
The utility of having a special class of theories we call "Laws" is that they make science more stable, and essentially frame the direction of investigation and new theorizing. What Dr Hong Sheng Zhao and his collabators are doing is essentially calling for the Law of Gravity to be moved into the mutable class.
So many people on Slashdot are saying they'd like one of their own, it seems like MIT ought to take advantage of this.
Why not let the sales to the general public subsidize the sales to the third world? Not only would this enable greater economy of scale in production, they could even market these as a "one-to-one" program -- sell them to the general public for $200 each, with the understanding that for every laptop sold in the first world, one would be donated to the third world. Start a nonprofit, make the $200 donation tax deductible, and you might even see corporate customers embrace this idea.
With the new AJAX applications coming down the line, it's not inconceivable that some businesses, both first and third world, might start using these in unique ways. Stake your claim while you can, folks, because there are a lot more prospectors on the way.
The keyboard driver could monitor which app is active at any moment and swap "keymaps" on the fly
That would be fantastic. The colorscheme could even change to reinforce which keymap is in use.
And as long as we're throwing out hacks, you could have the Spacebar display the subject line of incoming e-mails as they arrive, assuming you've got spam under control.
I say: It had better be, since it is in a completely different zipcode from the home row keys.
What do you mean? Look again.
The Enter key is in exactly the same row as the home row keys. It just extends downward into the row below as well, instead of of upward as many keyboards do now. In other words, your pinky will be tapping the top of the Enter key instead of the center or lower right corner as you may do now. There may still be ergonomic problems with the Optimus, but the only (minor) problem I see with the Enter key is that it's two keys farther to the right than the keyboard I'm using to type this.
Moving to Intel was probably done for supply and roadmap reasons, but switching architectures gives Apple the opportunity to grow their market share through piracy, a phenomenon that has been exploited by Adobe and Microsoft in the past.
Apple will only sell OSX with official Mac hardware at their traditional prices to their traditional customers, but I suspect a cracked version will emerge and will displace Windows for a significant number of under-the-table users.
Over time, pirated software often earns back more than its cost. Users who pirate because they cannot afford to purchase eventually become professionals who do purchase, and users who pirate but never purchase help exclude competing products from getting a foothold. Pirated copies of OSX may also increase the market for Mac software in general, not only because there will be a larger installed base, but because more programmers will become familiar with OSX.
Maybe I'm wrong, and Apple and Intel will work so closely together that no cracked version of OSX-for-Dells will be out there, but if there is, Apple will have set themselves up for a real contest with Microsoft. They won't have to officially support the wide variety of hardware that Microsoft does, but they'll be able to benefit from having their software on it.
Still wrapping my mind around the switch, but in the long term, this could be a big deal.
I admit, I thought Mr. Sawyer's vision of the future only a decade away wasn't very good. (What are the "enhanced reality contact lenses" powered by? Happy thoughts?) But I'd be interested to hear other Slashdotters attempts at describing the tech of a typcial day in 2014. Go for it.
Imagine this experiment.
Heh, I'm tired just imagining that experiment. But my point is that ABM isn't that hard to understand. I could explain it to my Mom, and that's the real world test I'm interested in.
If I'm using a free account, such as Yahoo, using SPF puts no one any closer to knowing who I AM, which some day could be a very different matter if I have to use ABM.
Why? Couldn't you just as well set a low bond, accept a few spams, and fund your ABM Yahoo! mail account that way?
Good short summary.
Here's my thoughts on your bug summary.
1. Too many people will keep the money regardless. The only time a bond is posted when you get an e-mail from someone you don't know or don't like. If an old, forgotten friend e-mails you, you'll refund their money; if a marketer e-mails you, you'll keep it. What's the problem here again?
2. The services of escrow agents are not freebies. Preventing spam isn't free either, and major ISPs and businesses already spend millions of dollars a year on it. Presumably this would decrease the amount they spend, not increase it.
3. Nobody will bother to use it when regular e-mail is cheaper, already deployed, and infinitely less fuss. Infinitely less fuss? Maybe for you. Personally, I like the idea of setting an attention bond and knowing that every single e-mail I get is one I'm going to be happy about, one way or another.
This isn't to say that there aren't any problems with ABM, I just don't think the ones you mentioned are dealbreakers.
how long does it take you to understand SPF, or to explain its BASIC CONCEPTS to someone else?
"If this is spam, you get $0.50."
I don't think ABM is hard to explain at all.
I do think it's harder to articulate the anti-spam benefits of SPF, since SPF doesn't stop spam, it just enables better blacklisting, and blacklists are a much more unwieldly and blunt tool than whitelists. (If someone hacks your server and spams with it, for example, it can be notoriously difficult to get yourself off a blacklist even if you've fixed the problem.)
And that's why I really don't understand your Reason #2. I think you've got it backwards. It's SPF that eliminates anonymity, not ABM.
The way SPF works, IIUC, is by eliminating spoofing and tying each mail to a specific ISP. On the SPF front page, they state outright: "If you do get spam that passed an SPF check, then you know you should hold the sending domain responsible for the message." Once you can tie a message to a specific domain or ISP, you can tie it to a specific sender. That's the whole point of SPF. There's no anonymity preserved there.
ABM, on the other hand, doesn't have to change a thing. You can set your policy to accept all e-mails without any bond, and you'll get every e-mail sent to you. You can refuse to send to people who require an ABM bond, as well, if you prefer. ABM is an option, not a requirement.
I'm not totally sold on ABM just yet, but it shouldn't be dismissed for the reasons you give. It's worth exploring.
I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)
The University of Minnesota is already starting to do that with their Digital Audio Initiative. Want to learn Pashtun or Punjabi? You can. You can also study Shakespeare, British literature, science fiction, or learn how to write a short story.
More courses can be found here. They're adding courses, but slowly. It's worth bookmarking.
Meet RoboMop.
SETI@home has been getting dissed a lot lately. "Why are you wasting your cycles on this useless project?" some geeks ask. "Why aren't you spending them predicting climate change, fighting AIDS or curing Alzheimer's? You could be saving people from anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, or SARS."
These are all noble goals, worth pursuing. But SETI has a noble goal that doesn't get talked about very much.
Most SETI research so far has been focused on the so-called "Water Hole", the quietest part of the radio spectrum which happens to fall between the radio spikes of hydrogen and hydroxyl, around 1.4 gigahertz. If there's another water-based civilization out there, it's easy to see that this is a logical place to broadcast or listen. (Projects like Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now enable me to imagine a future in which we broadcast a message of our own, someday.)
"So what happens if you listen and you don't hear anything?" you ask. Well, even if we drain the Water Hole and find nothing, we'll still have learned a great deal from the process. We'll know there likely aren't any civilizations remotely like us in our galaxy. We'll know that previous civilizations, if there were any, were not able to sustain themselves. We'll know that intelligent life is fleeting and precious in the universe. And this should make us think hard about our own civilization.
If we're ever forced to acknowledge that there are no intelligent radio signals in the universe, then we must also acknowledge that the odds of our own survival just became much bleaker. Knowing that space is quiet means it's more important for us to be careful than we thought. The longer we search without finding any intelligent signals, the more likely it becomes that intelligent civilization isn't some pretty 4th of July sparkler; it's nitroglycerin, waiting to explode. This is incredibly valuable knowledge, life or death knowledge that's worth going after.
The biggest reason to look for a signal in the first place isn't to commune with E.T., but out of pure self-interest. Any number of systems failures could wipe us out as a species, from a single well-designed terrorist plague to GMOs with unforeseen environmental consequences. How do we as a society learn to play nice with technology? Has anyone else in the universe done it? If we found evidence that someone out there had, it would stand as a beacon, showing that we can probably do it, too. And if we don't find a signal, it means a bell is probably tolling our end somewhere, and we'd better think long and hard how to change that.
So feel good about SETI. It's not just about searching for aliens, it's about searching for a cure for extinction.
That quote isn't anywhere in the article. In fact, the quote under the photo actually says: "Full-colour displays can be made with three sub-pixels of yellow, cyan and magenta."
:)
Again, these are sub-pixels we're talking about. The actual pixelspace is so small your eye can only perceive it as a single color. At any rate, you can nitpick about it now, but I suspect you'll have a harder time in a year or so convincing your friends the color image they're seeing on the display model e-book in the store isn't really in color.
They'll be using sub-pixel imaging.
Read all about it.
...this article about a color e-ink display (!) claims that:
Switching between dark and bright states takes only about ten milliseconds - fast enough to produce sharp video images.
"Open source benefits from anti-X sentiment" is only true for values of X in which X is a country which produces the majority of proprietary software on the international market.
I suggested India before, so let's run with that value of X.
Feelings against outsourcing to India are running high in America. While there are certain financial benefits to be gained by outsourcing, there is also an increasing backlash. Sending jobs to India may alienate potential customers. Open source solutions enable companies to become more competitive without outsourcing.
An example might be a company which wants to expand while keeping helpdesk costs down. Instead of completely outsourcing helpdesk jobs to India, they might use Bayonne, an open source IVR telephony app, to create an automated helpdesk service which can answer more questions without human intervention, bumping only the unique support questions to the live representatives. The company can then trumpet that it has grown without sacrificing American jobs.
But this country-by-country analysis is pointless. If Andreessen had said "Open source benefits from anti-Indian sentiment", I'd have called him on a biased specificity there, too.
Again, the real benefit of open source is that it enables companies and nations to become more independent. That's true whether you're in Brazil or America or India or Germany. It's stupid and divisive to try to tie this benefit only to anti-Americanism.
What's odd about this statement, really, is its specificity. One could just as well say, "Open source benefits from anti-India sentiment" or "Open source benefits from anti-France sentiment". It's hard to read that specificity as anything other than a thinly veiled endorsement of anti-Americanism.
The more general case would be, "Open source enables corporations and nations to become more independent."
Depends on what you mean by AI, of course, but OpenCyc is a great project that could really use more contributors.
Mperia gives a higher percentage back to the artist and uses Bitpass, which is already the most popular micropayment system out there. By supporting Mperia and Bitpass, you're helping not just musicians but webcomics artists, photographers, and others create a market for their works, too. Something worth thinking about.
Then, when you have to pay $50 for an optical computer mouse, or $1000 extra for a middle-of-the-line new computer, you'll understand why the company decided that maybe it should save some money to begin with.
Better to have slightly higher priced products and a population that earns enough money to afford them than slightly cheaper products that are bought in drastically lower numbers because the wages aren't there to support demand.
If distributed search and trust proves to be better, won't Google simply adopt it as a model? It's hard to imagine a company as innovative and powerful as Google letting itself be displaced.
Are there any other major distributed search projects going on right now besides Grub?
At the end of Defying Gravity, I'd read that the Newton group was already talking about designing a smaller Newton immediately after the original MessagePad launched, but you're left wondering how far they ever got with that idea.
:)
It sounds like they might have continued work on the Newton Cadillac concept, as well as extending Newton Intelligence into other devices.
Wouldn't it have been great if they had been allowed to try?
Insanely great.
Well, that's why I said "slightly smaller". I like that the Newton has a lot of screen real estate. But I recognize that a lot of people didn't, and found the Newton awkward to carry around.
To be honest, I think that if Apple had responded to the market by making a smaller Newton, they would've seen a huge rebound in market share, and the Newton would still be around today. Even if they'd had to make the mini-Newt less functional, it would've kept the Newton brand alive until electronics became small enough to give the same functionality in a smaller package.
As it is, Apple just gave up on the most innovative product they ever produced. Apple borrowed much of the Macintosh's GUI from Xerox PARC, but the Newton was entirely their own creation. It literally defined the entire category of PDAs! (PDA was Apple CEO John Sculley's description of the Newton; before Newton, there were only "personal organizers".)
Instead of responding to the market, however, Apple hung its head in shame and declared the Newton a failed brand, abandoning it. They walked away from what ought to have been a real success story for them. What a truly colossal waste of corporate capital.
I've heard this before, and it just doesn't ring true for me. Graffiti requires you to be much more "exceptionally careful" with your handwriting. If you can make Graffiti work for you, you can certainly make the Newt's much more flexible handwriting recognition engine work with much less effort.
I think it's a conceptual problem, really. The Newton attempted to recognize all handwriting, and thus many users blamed the Newton when it couldn't decipher their illegible script. It was Apple's fault, not theirs.
But the Palms didn't even pretend that they'd recognize your handwriting. They simply forced users to learn a new way to write. If Graffiti failed to recognize what you wrote, well, then you must not be doing it right. So people blamed themselves instead of the device.
my Handspring was much better for most of the typical PDA usage- entering phone numbers or appointment times
I think entering phone numbers and appointment times became "typical PDA usage" because that's all you could conveniently do with Graffiti. That's my experience anyway, YMMV.
Sure the Newton's natural system is faster for writing large amounts of text(assuming you have perfect handwriting) but people just didn't(and still don't) use PDAs for that sort of thing.
I'd say that there's an amount of text between the size of a phone number and a "large amount of text" which is what the Newton was really designed for. Short notes, quick e-mails, reminders, that sort of thing. And lots of people have been very successful using it for just that.
Again, whatever works for you, works for you. But I personally really liked what the Newton did, and would've loved to see what a 2004 Newton OS and handheld would be like.