Anyone who has used a Palm and tried
the App/DA launcher knows that Palm
made a mistake not having such a button.
It's called modality. Palm could have put such a button on the screen (that is, other than the silkscreen application buttons) and had that function at the expense of screen real estate.
However, not everyone downloads additional programs into the Palm, or even hotsyncs. The Pilot was made for several different levels of users, the least of which is a person who takes it out of the box, puts batteries in it, and uses it only for the 4 apps that have hardware buttons (Datebk, Address, Todo, and Memo Pad). There would be a higher learning curve for this person if they had to comprehend a Start menu. The things which it does best are easy and very intuitive to get to. The "power-user" type functionality doesn't get in your way, but is equally simple to get to, if you want it. Windows CE (PocketPC) in comparison is like a big swiss army knife, with the toothpick, leather awl, and scissors that nobody uses.
- Again, anyone who has used a Palm and
added the hacks that show graffiti as
you draw it know that Palm made a mistake
by not extending the LCD down into
the input area.
I've been getting along fine without those hacks. It was a cost calculation, i'm sure. Look at it from the opposite perspective, if the silkscreen area was not there and the screen was still the same size, your writing would interfere with other UI stuff, and it would be more cramped. It would be great if they made the screen as big as possible and as high res as possible, but the limiting factors are battery power, size, and a higher price.
As a Palm user, I hate having to leave my
app just to see the time. Again, the
Clock D/A hack was added on Palm.
I'm sure Palm has a psychologist on retainer, who wrote up a nice long paper on why a clock was not necessary on every screen. I can explain it in 2 sentences:
If you can afford a PalmPilot, you can afford a watch.
Unlike a desktop PC, you do not use the Palm for extended periods of time, and thus do not need the time available at all times at the corner of your eye.
Some asshole who got his MBA out of a Post Toasties box writes a business plan: "We will provide people with free lunch, supported by banner impression and clickthrough revenues, and cross-marketing deals with online retailers."
MBA boy shops the business plan to coked out VC. VC says "This looks great, can you score me a dime bag by Friday too?"
VC firm pours cash down MBA boy's throat. MBA boy hires a bunch of kids, who got expelled from high school for hacking the principal's PC to make farting noises, to write Perl/Java/Visual Basic code to provide free lunch. The code is open source.
www.freelunch.com goes live. CmdrTaco posts a story about how it is proof that free stuff works. Hemos posts the story again 2 days later.
Thousands of people use and enjoy free lunch, but completely ignore the ad banners and cross-marketing links. 1.5 million impressions a day, 3 click throughs, one of which was an accident. (he was probably trying to punch the monkey) The VC guy wakes up covered in money, next to a dead hooker, with a terrible hangover.
An IPO is announced. VC firm gets pre-IPO stock, which repays their initial investment so they have more cash to support free breakfast and free dinner startups, and enough left over to buy crack rocks for all of San Francisco. Joe Sixpack invests his retirement fund in freelunch.com stock. MBA boy and the high school kids all buy solid platinum Ford Excursions.
freelunch.com has their first post-IPO earnings report. Server bills, payroll, and the ad budget for the $10,000,000 Super Bowl commercial with a man farting out the tune to "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" all add up to 600x the revenue brought in from ad impressions. CNNfn attributes this to "problems in the supply chain with freelunch.com's JIT business system."
Stock plummets, Joe Sixpack decides to buy more while the price is low, because "My friend has a computer, and he uses free lunch all the time." Stock soars.
Advertisers realize that nobody gives a shit for the ad banners. freelunch.com can't sell its ad inventory. They lower their asking price for impressions, and change from banner ads to pop-up windows. Closing the window counts as a clickthrough, and it pops up another window. Ad revenues soar, advertisers get shafted. MBA boy gets a nose ring, and is interviewed by Wired Magazine on "The New Free-conomy."
Users get fed up with clicking through 10,000 pop-up windows for free lunch when they could just pay for it. Besides, Microsoft gives you a tastier free lunch, although less nutritious, and you have to pay to sit down to eat it.
Stockholders vote MBA boy out of the CEO chair. He is replaced by a former Pepsi CEO. freelunch.com is branded as "the choice of a new generation," and through a cross marketing deal, free lunch is given away at Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut to people who fill out a market survey, including name, address, social security number, income, and credit card numbers.
The data is securely stored online just in case a user wants to purchase something from freelunch.com's sponsors. Securely means it can be accessed by clicking on the link that says "Secure data, don't click here!" and entering the password: "password". Script kiddie finds out and mass-mails goatse.cx to all freelunch subscribers. Wired News does a story, when reached for comment the CEO says that "No private account data was compromised, but all freelunch.com users should probably cut up their credit cards. It's good to renew them every few months, anyway."
Stock has been steadily dropping. The CEO has to sell one of his 10 Bentleys; he just can't afford the gas. CNNfn attributes the drop to "low consumer confidence in the high tech sector." Joe Sixpack calls his broker.
One day, freelunch.com is replaced with an animated gif of a construction worker, and the message "Please excuse our dust! freelunch.com is being redesigned to serve you better!" The new CEO considers a subscription based model, a support based model, b2b, b2c, c2b, c2c, p2p, and a few other words he read in Fast Company.
Eventually he realizes that his retirement is on the line, and jumps ship, albeit with a $20,000,000 performance bonus, 12 months vacation before he leaves, and severance. Somehow it works out that Mr. CEO runs freelunch.com into the ground, and the company buys him a dozen vacation homes around the world, including an apartment aboard the International Space Station.
One of the high school kids takes over as interim CEO. AOL/Time Warner convinces him to sell the freelunch.com technology by offering him Pokemon cards. freelunch.com stock is converted to AOL/TW, dollar for dollar, which means the entire market capitalization of freelunch.com is worth 13 shares of AOL/TW.
Sorry if that was a bit long-winded, but I think I covered it all.
The winners in this game are the VCs, who chuck money at startups like it's nothing, and cover their losses through big hype IPOs. Also, the CEOs and "visionaries" that come up with the startups must manage to squirrel a little away for retirement, not to mention the godlike reputation they get for "breaking all the rules." The investment banks that broker the IPOs make out pretty well too, on the near-asymptotic curve that peaks roughly 2 seconds after an IPO, and slowly rolls downhill.
The main loser is Joe Sixpack, the hardworking, taxpaying investor who takes a bath because he doesn't know to get out of the stock while the getting's good. But it's probably his fault, since he doesn't really know enough about lunch to invest in it. He should know better than to listen to press releases and earnings reports on technology. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
i hope you're not serious, because you mangled the FUCK out of that quote. There is a great deal of confusion about who said that quotation, and how. The main consensus is that it was either Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. Here are a few examples from around the net of how people attribute that quote:
Benjamin Franklin "Those who would sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither" "Those who would sacrifice
essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither." "Those that would sacrifice liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" "Those who will sacrifice vigilance
for liberty deserve neither." "Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for
a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve
neither liberty nor security."
Thomas Jefferson "Those who would sacrifice Freedom to gain
Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either." "Those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for safety, deserve neither." "A man that would sacrifice
his freedom for security deserves neither." "Those who
would sacrifice a little freedom in exchange for security will have neither."
So who actually said it? Drum Roll please...
Charles Louis de Secundat, the Baron of Montesquieu, or Montesquieu for short. In 1774, the ideological father of the Constitution wrote:
"A man that would sacrifice his freedom for security deserves neither. The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time."-Montesquieu, The Rights of British America
I don't have any hard facts to back this up, but by and large, my experience has been that most online communities are split up into cliques no larger that the average coffee klatsch. One can belong to more than one community, but generally people can only carry on a dialogue, or relate to maybe 5-20 peers on a regular basis.
Think about it, the/. "community" may be 250,000 strong, but actual personal relations are much more granular than that. Nobody can claim that they have met, or exchanged emails with more than 5-20 out of those. Everyone may know Signal 11 as a pseudo-celebrity, but what number of people, out of the/. community, exchange emails regularly with him, and give a shit for what's going on in his life? I think regardless of your opinion of Sig, the answer would have to be "not many."
So yes, asshole, it is about scale. Putting 250,000 people in a stadium only makes a community in the most loose definition of the word. Intrapersonal relationships still remain the same as before the invention of the telephone, the modem, or the WAN. The fact that the person you are getting to know lives in Japan rather than next door to you is irrelevant. Blind techno-fetishism is just as bad as blind Luddite-ism.
The problem with you, katz, is that you are the Jesse Jackson of the Internet, except that you represent nobody in particular. Your pure, high-tech demagoguery says nothing that none of us hasn't already thought already, but appeals only to those persons so naive that they cannot see both sides of an issue.
The net is and is not a New Jerusalem. Anywhere, real or virtual, where people come together of like mind to reinforce each other's beliefs, whether they be religious, technical, or otherwise is like Jerusalem, in that respect. If you think that makes the net something special and holy, try going to any sports bar that is "claimed" by fans of a certain team. The camaraderie and mutual respect felt by fans of that team is similar, though maybe on a different level, to that shared in any online community. Similarly, a fan of a rival team can be reviled as much as a Palestinian in the wrong part of the West Bank, or a GNOME lover on a KDE forum.
I could criticize more, but I'll leave it at that for now. I may be the canonical example of Rheingold's "hostile, articulate [person] who take[s] up so much time and energy and space online," but if you discount my point based on that alone, you prove my point just the same. If you close your ears to criticism, you are no better than a blind, deaf man floating in space; he thinks nothing, and knows what he thinks is true, for his senses all agree with him.
In short, dilute your giddy technological optimism with a strong dose of realism. You will find yourself taken more seriously. Nobody is going to read "Hellmouth" before bed, wake up tomorrow, and suddenly break through 6000 years of human inequity and hate for those who are different. That's just our animal instinct, like wolves preying on the sheep that is weakest, the outcast from the flock.
On the contrary, the undesirables (fat, nearsighted, acne scarred, balding, uncouth, linux users) are unfortunately not removed from the gene pool.
Since our conception of the "best mate" is largely visual, "best mates" tend to gravitate together, creating more superior organisms. On the other end of the spectrum, the inferior ghetto dwellers, birth defects, and linux users tend to come together, since nobody else will have them, and they are settling for the best they can get.
In between the two extremes, there is a pretty even chance that an "average" person will mate with a superior or inferior being, creating offspring that are slightly more superior or inferior than average. Of course, "love" is illogical, and occasionally you see a babe with a geek (q.v. KillCreek and Romero), but by and large the net effect over time will be that we will evolve into a race of Morlocks and Elois. This is a simple fact of evolution which can't be avoided, probably similar to when the neanderthals and homo sapiens split on the family tree.
If you want to see an example of the social ramifications of this sort of split, just go to Starbucks; the Morlocks make the coffee, and the Elois drink it. No matter how long and hard the Morlocks shlep coffee grinds and steamed milk, they are genetically predisposed toward the service industry. No matter how many times they pierce or dye, or how artistic a mien they portray, they can't fit in with the trendsetting web designers, poets, graphic artists, and amateur post-beatnik philosophers who consume the coffee they scalded their hands to produce.
Remember this the next time you patronize a Starbucks, and give the poor Morlock behind the counter a bite of your biscotti, or your marzipan cluster, and a sip of your caramel macchiato. They will appreciate it, considering that they and their offspring are destined to rise no higher in life than the splatter on the mud flap of the karmic wheel of Tarot.
Slashdot Mirror
However, not everyone downloads additional programs into the Palm, or even hotsyncs. The Pilot was made for several different levels of users, the least of which is a person who takes it out of the box, puts batteries in it, and uses it only for the 4 apps that have hardware buttons (Datebk, Address, Todo, and Memo Pad). There would be a higher learning curve for this person if they had to comprehend a Start menu. The things which it does best are easy and very intuitive to get to. The "power-user" type functionality doesn't get in your way, but is equally simple to get to, if you want it. Windows CE (PocketPC) in comparison is like a big swiss army knife, with the toothpick, leather awl, and scissors that nobody uses.
I've been getting along fine without those hacks. It was a cost calculation, i'm sure. Look at it from the opposite perspective, if the silkscreen area was not there and the screen was still the same size, your writing would interfere with other UI stuff, and it would be more cramped. It would be great if they made the screen as big as possible and as high res as possible, but the limiting factors are battery power, size, and a higher price.I'm sure Palm has a psychologist on retainer, who wrote up a nice long paper on why a clock was not necessary on every screen. I can explain it in 2 sentences:Thank you for your time, cunt.
Love,
Slashfucker
- Some asshole who got his MBA out of a Post Toasties box writes a business plan: "We will provide people with free lunch, supported by banner impression and clickthrough revenues, and cross-marketing deals with online retailers."
- MBA boy shops the business plan to coked out VC. VC says "This looks great, can you score me a dime bag by Friday too?"
- VC firm pours cash down MBA boy's throat. MBA boy hires a bunch of kids, who got expelled from high school for hacking the principal's PC to make farting noises, to write Perl/Java/Visual Basic code to provide free lunch. The code is open source.
- www.freelunch.com goes live. CmdrTaco posts a story about how it is proof that free stuff works. Hemos posts the story again 2 days later.
- Thousands of people use and enjoy free lunch, but completely ignore the ad banners and cross-marketing links. 1.5 million impressions a day, 3 click throughs, one of which was an accident. (he was probably trying to punch the monkey) The VC guy wakes up covered in money, next to a dead hooker, with a terrible hangover.
- An IPO is announced. VC firm gets pre-IPO stock, which repays their initial investment so they have more cash to support free breakfast and free dinner startups, and enough left over to buy crack rocks for all of San Francisco. Joe Sixpack invests his retirement fund in freelunch.com stock. MBA boy and the high school kids all buy solid platinum Ford Excursions.
- freelunch.com has their first post-IPO earnings report. Server bills, payroll, and the ad budget for the $10,000,000 Super Bowl commercial with a man farting out the tune to "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" all add up to 600x the revenue brought in from ad impressions. CNNfn attributes this to "problems in the supply chain with freelunch.com's JIT business system."
- Stock plummets, Joe Sixpack decides to buy more while the price is low, because "My friend has a computer, and he uses free lunch all the time." Stock soars.
- Advertisers realize that nobody gives a shit for the ad banners. freelunch.com can't sell its ad inventory. They lower their asking price for impressions, and change from banner ads to pop-up windows. Closing the window counts as a clickthrough, and it pops up another window. Ad revenues soar, advertisers get shafted. MBA boy gets a nose ring, and is interviewed by Wired Magazine on "The New Free-conomy."
- Users get fed up with clicking through 10,000 pop-up windows for free lunch when they could just pay for it. Besides, Microsoft gives you a tastier free lunch, although less nutritious, and you have to pay to sit down to eat it.
- Stockholders vote MBA boy out of the CEO chair. He is replaced by a former Pepsi CEO. freelunch.com is branded as "the choice of a new generation," and through a cross marketing deal, free lunch is given away at Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut to people who fill out a market survey, including name, address, social security number, income, and credit card numbers.
- The data is securely stored online just in case a user wants to purchase something from freelunch.com's sponsors. Securely means it can be accessed by clicking on the link that says "Secure data, don't click here!" and entering the password: "password". Script kiddie finds out and mass-mails goatse.cx to all freelunch subscribers. Wired News does a story, when reached for comment the CEO says that "No private account data was compromised, but all freelunch.com users should probably cut up their credit cards. It's good to renew them every few months, anyway."
- Stock has been steadily dropping. The CEO has to sell one of his 10 Bentleys; he just can't afford the gas. CNNfn attributes the drop to "low consumer confidence in the high tech sector." Joe Sixpack calls his broker.
- One day, freelunch.com is replaced with an animated gif of a construction worker, and the message "Please excuse our dust! freelunch.com is being redesigned to serve you better!" The new CEO considers a subscription based model, a support based model, b2b, b2c, c2b, c2c, p2p, and a few other words he read in Fast Company.
- Eventually he realizes that his retirement is on the line, and jumps ship, albeit with a $20,000,000 performance bonus, 12 months vacation before he leaves, and severance. Somehow it works out that Mr. CEO runs freelunch.com into the ground, and the company buys him a dozen vacation homes around the world, including an apartment aboard the International Space Station.
- One of the high school kids takes over as interim CEO. AOL/Time Warner convinces him to sell the freelunch.com technology by offering him Pokemon cards. freelunch.com stock is converted to AOL/TW, dollar for dollar, which means the entire market capitalization of freelunch.com is worth 13 shares of AOL/TW.
Sorry if that was a bit long-winded, but I think I covered it all.The winners in this game are the VCs, who chuck money at startups like it's nothing, and cover their losses through big hype IPOs. Also, the CEOs and "visionaries" that come up with the startups must manage to squirrel a little away for retirement, not to mention the godlike reputation they get for "breaking all the rules." The investment banks that broker the IPOs make out pretty well too, on the near-asymptotic curve that peaks roughly 2 seconds after an IPO, and slowly rolls downhill.
The main loser is Joe Sixpack, the hardworking, taxpaying investor who takes a bath because he doesn't know to get out of the stock while the getting's good. But it's probably his fault, since he doesn't really know enough about lunch to invest in it. He should know better than to listen to press releases and earnings reports on technology. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Thank you for your time, cunt.
Love,
Slashfucker
Love,
Slashfucker
*Yes, I know he's dead, cunt.
Benjamin Franklin
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither"
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither."
"Those that would sacrifice liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"
"Those who will sacrifice vigilance for liberty deserve neither."
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security."
Thomas Jefferson
"Those who would sacrifice Freedom to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either."
"Those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for safety, deserve neither."
"A man that would sacrifice his freedom for security deserves neither."
"Those who would sacrifice a little freedom in exchange for security will have neither."
So who actually said it? Drum Roll please...
Charles Louis de Secundat, the Baron of Montesquieu, or Montesquieu for short. In 1774, the ideological father of the Constitution wrote:
So you are all obviously a bunch of cunts.Love,Slashfucker
Think about it, the /. "community" may be 250,000 strong, but actual personal relations are much more granular than that. Nobody can claim that they have met, or exchanged emails with more than 5-20 out of those. Everyone may know Signal 11 as a pseudo-celebrity, but what number of people, out of the /. community, exchange emails regularly with him, and give a shit for what's going on in his life? I think regardless of your opinion of Sig, the answer would have to be "not many."
So yes, asshole, it is about scale. Putting 250,000 people in a stadium only makes a community in the most loose definition of the word. Intrapersonal relationships still remain the same as before the invention of the telephone, the modem, or the WAN. The fact that the person you are getting to know lives in Japan rather than next door to you is irrelevant. Blind techno-fetishism is just as bad as blind Luddite-ism.
Thank you for your time, cunt.
Love,
Slashfucker
The net is and is not a New Jerusalem. Anywhere, real or virtual, where people come together of like mind to reinforce each other's beliefs, whether they be religious, technical, or otherwise is like Jerusalem, in that respect. If you think that makes the net something special and holy, try going to any sports bar that is "claimed" by fans of a certain team. The camaraderie and mutual respect felt by fans of that team is similar, though maybe on a different level, to that shared in any online community. Similarly, a fan of a rival team can be reviled as much as a Palestinian in the wrong part of the West Bank, or a GNOME lover on a KDE forum.
I could criticize more, but I'll leave it at that for now. I may be the canonical example of Rheingold's "hostile, articulate [person] who take[s] up so much time and energy and space online," but if you discount my point based on that alone, you prove my point just the same. If you close your ears to criticism, you are no better than a blind, deaf man floating in space; he thinks nothing, and knows what he thinks is true, for his senses all agree with him.
In short, dilute your giddy technological optimism with a strong dose of realism. You will find yourself taken more seriously. Nobody is going to read "Hellmouth" before bed, wake up tomorrow, and suddenly break through 6000 years of human inequity and hate for those who are different. That's just our animal instinct, like wolves preying on the sheep that is weakest, the outcast from the flock.
Thank you for your time, cunt.
Love,
Slashfucker
Since our conception of the "best mate" is largely visual, "best mates" tend to gravitate together, creating more superior organisms. On the other end of the spectrum, the inferior ghetto dwellers, birth defects, and linux users tend to come together, since nobody else will have them, and they are settling for the best they can get.
In between the two extremes, there is a pretty even chance that an "average" person will mate with a superior or inferior being, creating offspring that are slightly more superior or inferior than average. Of course, "love" is illogical, and occasionally you see a babe with a geek (q.v. KillCreek and Romero), but by and large the net effect over time will be that we will evolve into a race of Morlocks and Elois. This is a simple fact of evolution which can't be avoided, probably similar to when the neanderthals and homo sapiens split on the family tree.
If you want to see an example of the social ramifications of this sort of split, just go to Starbucks; the Morlocks make the coffee, and the Elois drink it. No matter how long and hard the Morlocks shlep coffee grinds and steamed milk, they are genetically predisposed toward the service industry. No matter how many times they pierce or dye, or how artistic a mien they portray, they can't fit in with the trendsetting web designers, poets, graphic artists, and amateur post-beatnik philosophers who consume the coffee they scalded their hands to produce.
Remember this the next time you patronize a Starbucks, and give the poor Morlock behind the counter a bite of your biscotti, or your marzipan cluster, and a sip of your caramel macchiato. They will appreciate it, considering that they and their offspring are destined to rise no higher in life than the splatter on the mud flap of the karmic wheel of Tarot.
Love,
Slashfucker