Yes, the FoF limited the scope of the trial and of the MS monopoly to intel-compatible computers. However, I don't think that "Intel" is mentioned in any anti-trust acts. There is a very valid argument of law as to whether that was a valid limitation.
IANAL, but I think that was one of Judge Jackson's few bad calls. Yes, "desktop OS" is a much fuzzier term, and by embracing Apple, MS's market share would not look so monopolistic. But monopoly law is not solely a matter of market share - it's about healthy competition. In other words, the law factors in barriers to entry (Jackson made a strong case for an "applications barrier to entry"; an equally strong one could be made from a separate "legacy hardware barrier to entry" that would compensate for the weakened market share numbers of including Motorola) as well as anti-competitive behavior.
I meant my "most OS's" comment to be a slam at Win32 and MacOS. The smiley meant "Of course we all know linux is better". Truth is though, most spare cycles are still owned by technically deficient OS's.
Cracking codes doesn't really accomplish anything more than proving a point. (Unless you're a government - but since WWII, government codebreakers are mostly the bad guys).
Yes, OGR's actually have some practical use. However, they're only the optimal case of Golomb Rulers, and it's pretty easy to find near-optimal ones - only a couple percent off, at worst. Worse, for any given application, the number of marks that is desirable is bound to increase linearly. Any non-QC method of finding them will fall behind over time, even supercharged by Moore's law. (And the problem with the quantum solution is that it doesn't distribute. 2 128 bit QC's FullOn3d claims. Also, until they have an algorithm that would spot the earth, the chances are miniscule.)
Then there's Casino 21. Cooler graphics, actually useful. On the down side, it's vaporware (no pun intended) and it requires more serious hardware.
O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O But really, if any of this stuff gets you to leave the computer on overnight when you wouldn't otherwise, it's doing more harm than good. O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O
(although I'm kinda waiting for the day when you can use spare cycles to stress-test beta software. The only problem with that idea currently is that bad software will more often than not bring down your OS with it. At least, with most OS's:)
The proxy server is a factor of the Palm VII architecture, not of EBay. It reads HTML from the internet and generates palm-proprietary "CML"[1] to send out over BellSouth's wireless network. Yes, CML is pretty funky, but there is definitely a need for a proxy server between the internet and the wireless net. And the funkier CML is, the better a thing it is that it's all modularized by 3com's proxy, rather than having EBay talk directly onto the BellSouth's network.
[1]C is for compact, and ML is for nothing at all since this is not a markup language at all. Basically, a funky thing that takes all the HTML tags, throws away anything too complicated for the low-bandwidth connection, makes sure everything else is strictly nested, then compresses it all using a manually defined compression scheme.
(The parent comment of this deserves to be modded up to 5)
If there really is a consensus that/. shouldn't interview this guy, I think you should have the guts to retract this interview. Then you'll need a new interviewee in a hurry. I humbly suggest that probably the quickest place to find a smart, willing, and interesting interviewee is to follow-up on a "science" story. Some quick suggestions, obviously biased towards my own discipline of Cognitive Science:
Any of the scientists in the book the third culture. I have a big problem with the philosophy of this book ("scientists have all the answers, and the latest old-boy's-club of self-styled iconoclasts is a new phenomenon in the history of mankind"), the fact remains that a lot of these guys make good interviewees, and love to hear themselves talk. Stephen Pinker is in this same category.
For a real iconoclast, Thomas Gold.
In my own field (how the mind and brain work - a topic I humbly feel to be interesting to most/.ers), George Lakoff has a lot of new stuff to say without succumbing to the context-free, sui generis mistakes of the Third Culture guys.
Fair use provisions of the copyright law allow for limited copying or distribution of published works without the author's permission in some cases. Examples of fair use of copyrighted materials include quotation of excerpts in a review or critique, or copying of a small part of a work by a teacher or student to illustrate a lesson. New issues about fair use have arisen with the increased use of the Internet. At the time of publication, a bill is pending in Congress concerning whether fair use provisions will be extended to appropriate users/uses of copyrighted Internet materials.
IANAL but:
As quasi-traditional (rich, establisment) media, they are on pretty solid ground claiming that any limited quoting that they're doing is fair use.
Paradoxically, the very thing that most Slashdotters think makes much more sense - linking not just to/. but to the story and specific comments - is much riskier from a lawyer's point of view. You know and I know that/. wouldn't even dream of suing for something like that. Still, I'm sure the MSNBC lawyers don't want to start down that path, because they want to be able to sue people who do it to them.
Seriously: that stereotype of geeks as all being social inverts is a crock. Today, I went to see a dramatic adaption of Melville's "Bartleby" and what made it so interesting to me was how exactly *opposite* Bartleby's introversion was to my own psychological makeup. I fit into the geek subtype whose social unconventionality is more a symptom of extroversion than the reverse.
To keep this post from getting "offtopic" points, and simply because I am a bit of an exhibitionist, I should make the point that online-honesty is not always good for romance. Witness my web-journal; anyone who reads that pile of compulsively-honest verbal emesis will probably not be hot for me. So if you're even vaguely thinking about replying to that personal ad, don't read any more than you have to to convince yourself I'm not a fake - preferably none.
I really wouldn't mind getting an email response to my personal ad. I'm joining the Peace Corps in about 6 months, so I probably won't want to continue a relationship past that point, but anything's possible and it would be fun finding out. I'm a nice guy, and well adjusted. Parts of that personal, though, were an abSlashdot joke. I'm not so intellectually vain, I don't really care that much about appearance (though since you asked: chunky girls, or, rarely, skinny boys, are my "type").
SWGeek, 25, 17 karma 18 int, leftish, HWP, ISO slashdot geek girl. Requirements: Seattle area, has a life, somewhat 'rubenesque' a+, reads/. past midnight on a Saturday [or Sunday morning with threshold of -1:) ]
(I can't believe it, but this may actually be the first true personal-ad post here. "You have to guess my area code" doesn't quite count.)
As this trial was going on and stories were being leaked, I was somewhat contemptuous. "The whole thrust of the trial is on the Netscape vs. IE issue. While I wouldn't mind it if that was the particular slung shot that brings down the MS Goliath, it is a relatively trivial issue next to other microsoft practices (the "AARD" code, bullying of OEM's). The whole thing is predicated on that early-internet hype that a combination of Netscape and Java was poised to replace the OS or make it irrelevant."
But this judgement succeeds in showing exactly why the browser war was important. Netscape is clearly portrayed, not as a competitor for IE, but as a competitor for Windows. And it's not because anyone would use Netscape instead of Windows. Even if Microsoft had played nice, it's doubtful that that would have happened. The argument that Netscape threatened Windows itself is the following:
Any universally deployed API (such as Netscape had the potential to provide) makes it easier to write software that's a little more portable.
Just as Microsoft's power comes from the difficulty of cross-platform development, any reduction of that difficulty, even a small incremental reduction, reduces that power.
Since the price of a Windows license is a result of MS monopoly power, Microsoft is forced to guard, not only against actual OS competition, but against the potential for such competition. Useful, non-portable windows apps are money in the bank for Microsoft.
I find it a very disturbing development that we are beginning to allow yucca to influence the stock market. Sure, it's made a profit so far. That's no surprise; the stock market has always rewarded its most subhuman participants with the greatest wealth. The problem is, the better the yucca does, the greater the long-term risk. As more and more of the money in the stock market starts to be traded by plants, a new set of risks begins to emerge.
You see, a yucca plant doesn't care about the overall health of the economy, only about whether it gets watered. Moreover, it can't possibly get less than no water, so as soon as its profits have dried up, it is more and more likely to make risky "double or nothing" bets to try to get back to a positive cash-flow situation. The market will crash - or worse, the government will be forced to step in with a massive "yucca bail-out" and the taxpayers will be left saying "yuck".
Our only hope is that maybe - just maybe - yucca really does have the moral fibers to resist this temptation.
Please mod the above comment up. This is not just senseless holy-war-ism; the original poster *asked* what is better for CGI than Perl, and the above post points to a well-acknowledged advantage of python. (not that there aren't disadvantages).
Yes, humor news has its place on/., but those with humorless preferences shouldn't have to waste bandwidth on stories like this.
Besides, I like seeing the python foot in the icon bar. It almost compensates me, a lonely python bigot, for the fact that Java and Perl get their own slasdot topics but Python doesn't.
you came to a town where a man with a club was stealing everyone else's food. "Promising young fella," you say to yourself, and approach him.
"I'll give you this gun if you give me a potato a week, forever."
So you do, and so now the villagers spend less time taking care of their bruised compatriots and more time potato farming, so he steals more food, and not only gives you a potato a week but hires a henchman to ceremonially carry around his old club.
Sure, the village is "better off" now because you invested in it. But that doesn't make your investment strategy moral. You're still complicit in a corrupt regime.
This analogy doesn't hold for the entire third world. But there are definitely numerous countries where it's spot-on. And that's not even mentioning the places where we started out with a marginally beneficial investment and then trashed the place out of pure spite when they threatened to go all commie and stop sending us interest.
"Liberal" originally was an anti-church philosophy. In the US, which never had a monolithic church, the implications of this of this are easier to forget. Yes, individual freedoms and enlightenment were of high importance; but an opposition to "vested" interests, to any principle in law that treats property as anything but transferrable capital, was just as important.
But the old, inflexible laws which protected church property also protected peasant and (in the Americas) native lands held in common. When liberals didn't steal these lands outright by refusing to recognize the old commonholdings, they divided up the lands, forced the peasantry into mortgaging it, and soon were able to reposess. That's why "neoliberal" is a bad word among progressive economists, especially from the Latin American crowd.
Laissez-faire capitalism put capital (personal wealth) in charge, and with this powerful new engine both progressive change and regressive inequality accelerated to a new level.
The modern geek is exactly an inheritor of this liberal tradition. This time around, big business and big labor are the Church and the Commons, and government pork their vested property. The freedom to innovate[1] is our rallying cry, and we forsee and are bringing about a major shakeup of society. The truly open question is, have we learned our lesson from the last time around?
Money rushes in to fill any gaps in the new power structure; and money loves inequality. As we smash the old shackles, it's important that we invent new ironclad protections for equality. That's why the GPL, with all its flaws, is very important politics.
[1] Yes, that's a Microsoft URL. Astroturf or not, I think they've hit a nerve.
My X, 7, and Done keys broke about 6 months after I bought it... I wasn't especially gentle with it, but no more cruel than I am to my Palm, which has survived over a year in its current incarnation. I suspect the Think Outside dealie (which I've tried out - it's a pleasant experience) is even flimsier when open, but possibly sturdier when closed, which is when it matters.
Also, the GoType doesn't assert any interrupts, so the hack has to query the serial port occasionally, making it slow to realize when you start typing. The Think Outside did this one right.
Visor is a small company with a lot of talent. Palm is about 10 times the size and, although it's been bleeding talent because it's been shackled to 3Com, still has some pretty good engineers. I think the Visor is an excellent product; but the Palm V is the hottest-selling palm out there, and the springboard module means Handspring won't have a small procuct like this for a long while.
The handheld market is a HUGE and growing one, and there's currently room for 4-5 different products to be runaway successes. Handspring is being bowled over by just one such success. The good news is, with Palm's aggressive licensing strategy, the whole market is moving to PalmOS, and they won't pull an Apple.
Yes, this undoubtably adds complexity to the Palm. But notice that this is being done not by Palm, Handspring, Symbol, Nokia, IBM, or any of the other big PalmOS licensees, but by a garage-based, engineering company like TRG. This is a geeky niche product! It's a great geeky niche product, but not ready for the average user.
Now, Handspring's expansion port, that's something the average user can use. Plug it in, it works; no software to install, nothing tough. The fact that something plugging in here is designed for a Handspring, and not a PCMCIA adaptor and a WinCE &c&c - that's a GOOD thing. And you can't complain that that will limit the market too much, because it is so incredibly easy to design Springboard hardware - it's right on the bus with the processor and data, so there's nothing in your way, no need for smarts in the card as long as you have memory.
As many have already pointed out, M$ is unlikely to go true open-source; the best we can hope for is viewable source. In that vein, some of you may not know that a fair fraction of PalmOS source is viewable for free if you sign their NDA.
Handspring has a great product. However, they're a miniscule company compared to Palm. They simply don't have the will or the capability to spread themselves all over the map with a new model with each gimmick - that's what springboard modules are for. Moreover, Jeff Hawkins is notorious for his "give 'em what they need, not what they say they want" philosophy.
I'd say that with curent technology (color is either very finicky about lighting conditions or uses a backlight that sucks battery BADLY; and "transflective" type displays where you can pick your poison aren't there yet) color definitely is "what they say they want". If you see a color 'visor in the year 2000 I'll be mighty surprised. (As I will be if you DON'T see one soon after that.)
About a month ago, all the engineers in my company were required to attent an "info" session on patents. Aside from appealing to our personal greed and fear (you get bonuses for patents, and trips to exotic locales for lots of 'em, and besides your evaluation is based on them) the lawyer there tried to morally justify patents. The main argument was, of course, "we need these defensively, for cross-licensing and counterattacks." Nothing new there.
The ancillary arguments, though, were very revealing. First, there was "everyone else is doing it". They gave the example of M$, which had 5 patents as of 1992 and now has hundreds. "And that's happening all over" they continued, citing some more alarming growth figures. Of course, this is all an argument against the new philosophy of "patent everything that moves" - it casts it not as an established way of doing business but as an alarming new trend.
Another argument they made is even more scary. The main body of my company is number 2 in its industry and slowly falling further and further behind number 1 (although my own division, soon to be spun off, is number 1 and pulling ahead.) The patent lawyer dropped a few asides about how patents were an asset "of growing importance", especially to our stock price. It definitely sounded to me as if the lawyer realized that, if all the rest of our business went south, well at least we could start suing people. In other words, DON'T BELIEVE THE BULL ABOUT PATENTS BEING DEFENSIVE. A growing company can afford to have such scruples; but when that large company starts to stagnate, and all the employees with imagination gradually leave, those scruples will fall by the wayside. Every last penny will be wrung out of patent "assets".
It was just a rumor. People really weren't really moderating posts up just because they said "you'll probably moderate this down". Those really were the cream of the crop, and just happened to be modest at the same time. But here this post comes along and bursts my little threshold-2 bubble. No content whatsoever, yet it gets moderated up. The only possible explanation is the sig.
Oh well, I guess I asked for it, coming to browse the comments on non-news...:) And I don't really think it's that bad, 'coz I could have moderated it down rather than responding...
Yes, GM holds great promise, if it is used to solve hunger problems. However, Monsanto is only concerned about profits. Whether or not you feel that the Terminator gene is fundamentally an abomination, you have to admit that its sole intent is to increase Monsanto profits at the expense of the poorest farmers (those who can't afford to buy hybrids every year anyway). Even aside from terminator, Monsanto's GM efforts have again and again shown that they have no concern for the larger effects of their work. Roundup-ready soybeans increase pesticide runoff, demonstrably hurting the environment; BT-containing plants will lead to resistant nematodes far faster than organic farmer's use of BT, and also may cause allergies in consumers, especially the very young, which would not be caught by current "safety" testing. [Monsanto argues that BT is already "proven safe" by its use in organic farming, but in that case it washes off before reaching the consumer.] There is simply no comparison between the work on nitrogen-fixing rice and the abortions (literally, in the case of Terminator) produced by Monsanto. It is exactly because GM is so important and powerful that it must not be used for the wrong ends.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the FoF limited the scope of the trial and of the MS monopoly to intel-compatible computers. However, I don't think that "Intel" is mentioned in any anti-trust acts. There is a very valid argument of law as to whether that was a valid limitation.
IANAL, but I think that was one of Judge Jackson's few bad calls. Yes, "desktop OS" is a much fuzzier term, and by embracing Apple, MS's market share would not look so monopolistic. But monopoly law is not solely a matter of market share - it's about healthy competition. In other words, the law factors in barriers to entry (Jackson made a strong case for an "applications barrier to entry"; an equally strong one could be made from a separate "legacy hardware barrier to entry" that would compensate for the weakened market share numbers of including Motorola) as well as anti-competitive behavior.
C'mon, interview GvR, pretty pretty please?
I meant my "most OS's" comment to be a slam at Win32 and MacOS. The smiley meant "Of course we all know linux is better". Truth is though, most spare cycles are still owned by technically deficient OS's.
Cracking codes doesn't really accomplish anything more than proving a point. (Unless you're a government - but since WWII, government codebreakers are mostly the bad guys).
:)
Yes, OGR's actually have some practical use. However, they're only the optimal case of Golomb Rulers, and it's pretty easy to find near-optimal ones - only a couple percent off, at worst. Worse, for any given application, the number of marks that is desirable is bound to increase linearly. Any non-QC method of finding them will fall behind over time, even supercharged by Moore's law. (And the problem with the quantum solution is that it doesn't distribute. 2 128 bit QC's FullOn3d claims. Also, until they have an algorithm that would spot the earth, the chances are miniscule.)
Then there's Casino 21. Cooler graphics, actually useful. On the down side, it's vaporware (no pun intended) and it requires more serious hardware.
O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O
But really, if any of this stuff gets you to leave the computer on overnight when you wouldn't otherwise, it's doing more harm than good.
O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O
(although I'm kinda waiting for the day when you can use spare cycles to stress-test beta software. The only problem with that idea currently is that bad software will more often than not bring down your OS with it. At least, with most OS's
The proxy server is a factor of the Palm VII architecture, not of EBay. It reads HTML from the internet and generates palm-proprietary "CML"[1] to send out over BellSouth's wireless network. Yes, CML is pretty funky, but there is definitely a need for a proxy server between the internet and the wireless net. And the funkier CML is, the better a thing it is that it's all modularized by 3com's proxy, rather than having EBay talk directly onto the BellSouth's network.
[1]C is for compact, and ML is for nothing at all since this is not a markup language at all. Basically, a funky thing that takes all the HTML tags, throws away anything too complicated for the low-bandwidth connection, makes sure everything else is strictly nested, then compresses it all using a manually defined compression scheme.
(The parent comment of this deserves to be modded up to 5)
/. shouldn't interview this guy, I think you should have the guts to retract this interview. Then you'll need a new interviewee in a hurry. I humbly suggest that probably the quickest place to find a smart, willing, and interesting interviewee is to follow-up on a "science" story. Some quick suggestions, obviously biased towards my own discipline of Cognitive Science:
/.ers), George Lakoff has a lot of new stuff to say without succumbing to the context-free, sui generis mistakes of the Third Culture guys.
If there really is a consensus that
Any of the scientists in the book the third culture. I have a big problem with the philosophy of this book ("scientists have all the answers, and the latest old-boy's-club of self-styled iconoclasts is a new phenomenon in the history of mankind"), the fact remains that a lot of these guys make good interviewees, and love to hear themselves talk. Stephen Pinker is in this same category.
For a real iconoclast, Thomas Gold.
In my own field (how the mind and brain work - a topic I humbly feel to be interesting to most
IANAL but:
As quasi-traditional (rich, establisment) media, they are on pretty solid ground claiming that any limited quoting that they're doing is fair use.
Paradoxically, the very thing that most Slashdotters think makes much more sense - linking not just to
Me again.
Seriously: that stereotype of geeks as all being social inverts is a crock. Today, I went to see a dramatic adaption of Melville's "Bartleby" and what made it so interesting to me was how exactly *opposite* Bartleby's introversion was to my own psychological makeup. I fit into the geek subtype whose social unconventionality is more a symptom of extroversion than the reverse.
To keep this post from getting "offtopic" points, and simply because I am a bit of an exhibitionist, I should make the point that online-honesty is not always good for romance. Witness my web-journal; anyone who reads that pile of compulsively-honest verbal emesis will probably not be hot for me. So if you're even vaguely thinking about replying to that personal ad, don't read any more than you have to to convince yourself I'm not a fake - preferably none.
I really wouldn't mind getting an email response to my personal ad. I'm joining the Peace Corps in about 6 months, so I probably won't want to continue a relationship past that point, but anything's possible and it would be fun finding out. I'm a nice guy, and well adjusted. Parts of that personal, though, were an abSlashdot joke. I'm not so intellectually vain, I don't really care that much about appearance (though since you asked: chunky girls, or, rarely, skinny boys, are my "type").
SWGeek, 25, 17 karma 18 int, leftish, HWP, ISO slashdot geek girl. Requirements: Seattle area, has a life, somewhat 'rubenesque' a+, reads /. past midnight on a Saturday [or Sunday morning with threshold of -1 :) ]
(I can't believe it, but this may actually be the first true personal-ad post here. "You have to guess my area code" doesn't quite count.)
No, actually four words:
Plain Old Text mode.
But this judgement succeeds in showing exactly why the browser war was important. Netscape is clearly portrayed, not as a competitor for IE, but as a competitor for Windows. And it's not because anyone would use Netscape instead of Windows. Even if Microsoft had played nice, it's doubtful that that would have happened. The argument that Netscape threatened Windows itself is the following:
I find it a very disturbing development that we are beginning to allow yucca to influence the stock market. Sure, it's made a profit so far. That's no surprise; the stock market has always rewarded its most subhuman participants with the greatest wealth. The problem is, the better the yucca does, the greater the long-term risk. As more and more of the money in the stock market starts to be traded by plants, a new set of risks begins to emerge.
You see, a yucca plant doesn't care about the overall health of the economy, only about whether it gets watered. Moreover, it can't possibly get less than no water, so as soon as its profits have dried up, it is more and more likely to make risky "double or nothing" bets to try to get back to a positive cash-flow situation. The market will crash - or worse, the government will be forced to step in with a massive "yucca bail-out" and the taxpayers will be left saying "yuck".
Our only hope is that maybe - just maybe - yucca really does have the moral fibers to resist this temptation.
Please mod the above comment up. This is not just senseless holy-war-ism; the original poster *asked* what is better for CGI than Perl, and the above post points to a well-acknowledged advantage of python. (not that there aren't disadvantages).
Yes, humor news has its place on /., but those with humorless preferences shouldn't have to waste bandwidth on stories like this.
Besides, I like seeing the python foot in the icon bar. It almost compensates me, a lonely python bigot, for the fact that Java and Perl get their own slasdot topics but Python doesn't.
you came to a town where a man with a club was stealing everyone else's food. "Promising young fella," you say to yourself, and approach him.
"I'll give you this gun if you give me a potato a week, forever."
So you do, and so now the villagers spend less time taking care of their bruised compatriots and more time potato farming, so he steals more food, and not only gives you a potato a week but hires a henchman to ceremonially carry around his old club.
Sure, the village is "better off" now because you invested in it. But that doesn't make your investment strategy moral. You're still complicit in a corrupt regime.
This analogy doesn't hold for the entire third world. But there are definitely numerous countries where it's spot-on. And that's not even mentioning the places where we started out with a marginally beneficial investment and then trashed the place out of pure spite when they threatened to go all commie and stop sending us interest.
"Liberal" originally was an anti-church philosophy. In the US, which never had a monolithic church, the implications of this of this are easier to forget. Yes, individual freedoms and enlightenment were of high importance; but an opposition to "vested" interests, to any principle in law that treats property as anything but transferrable capital, was just as important.
But the old, inflexible laws which protected church property also protected peasant and (in the Americas) native lands held in common. When liberals didn't steal these lands outright by refusing to recognize the old commonholdings, they divided up the lands, forced the peasantry into mortgaging it, and soon were able to reposess. That's why "neoliberal" is a bad word among progressive economists, especially from the Latin American crowd.
Laissez-faire capitalism put capital (personal wealth) in charge, and with this powerful new engine both progressive change and regressive inequality accelerated to a new level.
The modern geek is exactly an inheritor of this liberal tradition. This time around, big business and big labor are the Church and the Commons, and government pork their vested property. The freedom to innovate[1] is our rallying cry, and we forsee and are bringing about a major shakeup of society. The truly open question is, have we learned our lesson from the last time around?
Money rushes in to fill any gaps in the new power structure; and money loves inequality. As we smash the old shackles, it's important that we invent new ironclad protections for equality. That's why the GPL, with all its flaws, is very important politics.
[1] Yes, that's a Microsoft URL. Astroturf or not, I think they've hit a nerve.
My X, 7, and Done keys broke about 6 months after I bought it... I wasn't especially gentle with it, but no more cruel than I am to my Palm, which has survived over a year in its current incarnation. I suspect the Think Outside dealie (which I've tried out - it's a pleasant experience) is even flimsier when open, but possibly sturdier when closed, which is when it matters.
Also, the GoType doesn't assert any interrupts, so the hack has to query the serial port occasionally, making it slow to realize when you start typing. The Think Outside did this one right.
Visor is a small company with a lot of talent. Palm is about 10 times the size and, although it's been bleeding talent because it's been shackled to 3Com, still has some pretty good engineers. I think the Visor is an excellent product; but the Palm V is the hottest-selling palm out there, and the springboard module means Handspring won't have a small procuct like this for a long while.
The handheld market is a HUGE and growing one, and there's currently room for 4-5 different products to be runaway successes. Handspring is being bowled over by just one such success. The good news is, with Palm's aggressive licensing strategy, the whole market is moving to PalmOS, and they won't pull an Apple.
Yes, this undoubtably adds complexity to the Palm. But notice that this is being done not by Palm, Handspring, Symbol, Nokia, IBM, or any of the other big PalmOS licensees, but by a garage-based, engineering company like TRG. This is a geeky niche product! It's a great geeky niche product, but not ready for the average user.
Now, Handspring's expansion port, that's something the average user can use. Plug it in, it works; no software to install, nothing tough. The fact that something plugging in here is designed for a Handspring, and not a PCMCIA adaptor and a WinCE &c&c - that's a GOOD thing. And you can't complain that that will limit the market too much, because it is so incredibly easy to design Springboard hardware - it's right on the bus with the processor and data, so there's nothing in your way, no need for smarts in the card as long as you have memory.
As many have already pointed out, M$ is unlikely to go true open-source; the best we can hope for is viewable source. In that vein, some of you may not know that a fair fraction of PalmOS source is viewable for free if you sign their NDA.
Handspring has a great product. However, they're a miniscule company compared to Palm. They simply don't have the will or the capability to spread themselves all over the map with a new model with each gimmick - that's what springboard modules are for. Moreover, Jeff Hawkins is notorious for his "give 'em what they need, not what they say they want" philosophy.
I'd say that with curent technology (color is either very finicky about lighting conditions or uses a backlight that sucks battery BADLY; and "transflective" type displays where you can pick your poison aren't there yet) color definitely is "what they say they want". If you see a color 'visor in the year 2000 I'll be mighty surprised. (As I will be if you DON'T see one soon after that.)
About a month ago, all the engineers in my company were required to attent an "info" session on patents. Aside from appealing to our personal greed and fear (you get bonuses for patents, and trips to exotic locales for lots of 'em, and besides your evaluation is based on them) the lawyer there tried to morally justify patents. The main argument was, of course, "we need these defensively, for cross-licensing and counterattacks." Nothing new there.
The ancillary arguments, though, were very revealing. First, there was "everyone else is doing it". They gave the example of M$, which had 5 patents as of 1992 and now has hundreds. "And that's happening all over" they continued, citing some more alarming growth figures. Of course, this is all an argument against the new philosophy of "patent everything that moves" - it casts it not as an established way of doing business but as an alarming new trend.
Another argument they made is even more scary. The main body of my company is number 2 in its industry and slowly falling further and further behind number 1 (although my own division, soon to be spun off, is number 1 and pulling ahead.) The patent lawyer dropped a few asides about how patents were an asset "of growing importance", especially to our stock price. It definitely sounded to me as if the lawyer realized that, if all the rest of our business went south, well at least we could start suing people. In other words, DON'T BELIEVE THE BULL ABOUT PATENTS BEING DEFENSIVE. A growing company can afford to have such scruples; but when that large company starts to stagnate, and all the employees with imagination gradually leave, those scruples will fall by the wayside. Every last penny will be wrung out of patent "assets".
You can't mount a counterattack based on disclosure.
It was just a rumor. People really weren't really moderating posts up just because they said "you'll probably moderate this down". Those really were the cream of the crop, and just happened to be modest at the same time. But here this post comes along and bursts my little threshold-2 bubble. No content whatsoever, yet it gets moderated up. The only possible explanation is the sig.
:) And I don't really think it's that bad, 'coz I could have moderated it down rather than responding...
Oh well, I guess I asked for it, coming to browse the comments on non-news...
Yes, GM holds great promise, if it is used to solve hunger problems. However, Monsanto is only concerned about profits. Whether or not you feel that the Terminator gene is fundamentally an abomination, you have to admit that its sole intent is to increase Monsanto profits at the expense of the poorest farmers (those who can't afford to buy hybrids every year anyway). Even aside from terminator, Monsanto's GM efforts have again and again shown that they have no concern for the larger effects of their work. Roundup-ready soybeans increase pesticide runoff, demonstrably hurting the environment; BT-containing plants will lead to resistant nematodes far faster than organic farmer's use of BT, and also may cause allergies in consumers, especially the very young, which would not be caught by current "safety" testing. [Monsanto argues that BT is already "proven safe" by its use in organic farming, but in that case it washes off before reaching the consumer.] There is simply no comparison between the work on nitrogen-fixing rice and the abortions (literally, in the case of Terminator) produced by Monsanto. It is exactly because GM is so important and powerful that it must not be used for the wrong ends.