As a (paid) editor, I disagree with the comments you've made about Jon Katz's piece.
Are you really so concerned about grammar that you'd let it override meaning? Is "unwired kid" in the context of this article truly confusing or ambiguous? It wasn't for me. The run-on sentence you identify isn't. The fragment you point out is a fragment, but so what? Persuasive writing is about more than formalisms; short connectors are useful. Can you name a political columnist, for instance, who never uses sentence fragments?
Are there a few typos, the occasional misplaced or missing word? Sure. Are they worse than ones that regularly appear in other news services? Not by a long shot. Slashdot is growing (in readership and staff), and it's coped well so far.
Cheers,
timothy
p.s. Full-time editorship is less than a month away, so relax.
In the field I'm currently in (advertising), it's hard to convince people that Microsoft Word is not what was used to write the ten commandments, and that when the ancient Greeks did mathematics, they didn't store the results in an Excel file.
It may seem tangential to the larger issue of free/Free software, but the thing that most excites me about campus-linux distribs (or as the case may be, a set of patches which to most students would seem like the same thing, but I don't need any "technical error" flames;) ) is the way they poke users in the eye with the fact that files and file compatibility are just as important as individual applications they might use to manipulate those files.
It seems I spent a total of many hours as an undergraduate in those horrible classes that require "groupwork" trying to convince the others in my group of the benefit of using plain text or other low-level formats for exchanging information. Usual response: blank stares, slack jaws, and "... but don't you have Word?" And yes -- some of that time I did (the dreaded cheap campus software giveaways), but I still thought it was a bad idea.
If it's accepted that people will be using different OSes as it suits their needs, the advantages of file agnosticism should become better understood.
I doubt the slashdot guys are likely to accept bribes for good press. Maybe for a chance to visit the moon -- not for a few bucks.;) Credibility (along with relevance, timeliness and interest) is their stock in trade.
And / points out: "Clearly SuSE isn't best for all people, since last I checked Slashdot isn't running on it." Well, right -- no one says that slashdot (or anyone) is required to do whatever's currently most popular, or grabbing the most press... the beanies sort of capture some small slice of opinion in some small slice of time. Slashdot has evolved to use what it does, and I know the authors use a variety of distributions (lots of Debian, seems like). SuSE has at least one advantage over most other distribs. that a lot of poeople have pointed out, which is the vast quantity of included software. If you don't want or need it, POOF - ignore it, it's gone! But if you want a few GB of software without tying up your modem till next Xmas, well, it's all there for the taking.
Rankings like this are as useful as you want them to be. They won't tell you what *you* should like, but they might give you an idea of, say, what it might take to convince your boss to try it, or what distrib. might be interesting to try next time you feel like experimenting, or... whatever you want to use them for.
Esperendi's point is good -- there seems to be a permanent class of "antis" -- whatever's Out is In, and whatever's In is necessarily bad. That's one reason that Microsoft-bashing is easily parodied, because its often a question not of the particular badness of a given company or idea, but the relish taken in being on the other, more righteous side.
(And that's a very comforting feeling -- heck, being on the side of the penguins, intellectual freedom, etc is a big reason I like it!) But please consider whether the "commercial folks" are really ruining Linux, or just changing its nature in ways that are not necessarily bad. GPL is GPL, after all, and I'm confident that the GPL will hold its own when the inevitable test arises.
While it's neat to think about the PDP-10 with only Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie playing spacewar, the growth of UNIX and similar (not to mention *other*) OSes is what allows us here to play with them at all. I for one am glad that Messers Thompson and Ritchie didn't say "Ah geez - when we let other people play with this OS, they might change and RUIN it!";)
And as one of my all-time-favorite angry childhood retorts has it, "Everybody wants to be a martyr."
The key objection to open source as a base for a profitable business is not that nobody would pay for the service of delivery, but that people who don't actually produce any software will have a competitive advantage over those who do. If hypothetical company Maroon Hat does everything Red Hat does, but doesn't spend money on any software developers, Maroon Hat has the same profitability with smaller expenses.
This is an interesting point, but could another company do "everything Red Hat [or whomever] does" without spending any money on software developers?
Mandrakesoft seems to do just this -- and Mandrake Linux is well-respected. They obviously spend some money on software development, but I bet much, much less than Red Hat. As you point out, why should they? Red Hat's doing most of their R&D for them, then they do some tweaking. OK, no skin off anyone's nose -- Red Hat beats them with some features, and can wrap Mandrake additions into upcoming versions.
Red Hat, TurboLinux, and several others are doing well... yes, you can buy CDs from cheapbytes, but for many people (new users, or businesses that need outside support), a CD in a blank sleeve is a lot less than they need. By sponsoring software development, the Big Linux Distributions make themselves more valuable as sources of service. And since for software companies, the old "perception is reality" kicks in -- Red Hat and a few others are making themselves look good in the community and in the larger world by sponsoring software development. Whether it will work out long term, well, let's see what Red Hat stock will fetch in 5-7 years! And I wish I knew the answer to that, of course;)
This post interested me because it speaks to my interest in pricing models...
drig suggested buying the game, not downloading it (and at 90 megs, it is a huge download!). If you ever hear Free / free software impugned with the increasingly silly rhetorical question "But how can that stuff stick around? How can anyone make money off it?" you've got one more data point to fling. Even on a fattish pipe, most people are not interested in downloading 90 megs at a time, but pop in a disc and 90 megs is no sweat.
(Of course, this could go either way -- in 3 years, will you be on a DSL2* line with no metered charges and 90MB is three minutes whistling? Or will you be on a clogged cable modem loop with by-the-K download charges and a meter outside the house? I certainly hope the first trend is winning...)
CD-burners may not be DVD-RAM, but they certainly constitute a great way to pass around big files, and for a well-done manual, brand assurance and support, I think Loki is offering great deals for Linux games.
Whee!
timothy
*Strictly hypothetical. Not real. Restrictions apply. See local dealers for details. Not availabile in all areas, terms and conditions apply and are subject to change without notice or obligation.
jd asked "Last, but not least, what problem is this supposed to be solving? If it's the transfer of information, then they'd be better off buying ultra-fat pipes and selling space on them."
Good question.
If it is the transfer of information (and that seems the only reasonable) answer, then by all means, let the post office kindly slither back into its corner and let my ISP, my phone company, my cable company, my electric company, my cellular provider, Hughes satellite, and anyone else who cares to join the fray hash it out. (Will the local water / sewage utilities offer IP packet delivery over a very fat pipe?)
The post office has enough trouble with delivering postcards from my brother. Why should we subsidize the same US post office which undercuts competitors with the surplus it earns on first-class mail? (Remember, they're the only ones who can deliver it -- by law. That's a real monopoly.)
The business of "establishing" post offices (the part the constition Mentions) I'm fine with the PO doing -- but until and unless the actual work of mail delivery is privatized, they have no business getting to the broadband market. (As in, no Constitutionally established right.)
The aesthetics / ergonomics (loosely speaking) of software is a big interest of mine. That's not because I'm a software expert, but rather for the opposite reason: I can figure out a way to misinterpret or fail to comprehend directions from practically any source, and I'm sure you can think of examples where you laughed at the guy going through the door labeled "Enter other side" ass-first or whatever. Yes, that was me, and it still hurts. I've hurled a fair number of CDs across the room because of frsutration at installing the software they contained onto my standard-issue, plain-vanilla PCs.
The arguments that easy-to-use GUI tools make true, deep learning harder by eliminating the need for it have merit. But there is a threshold beneath which learning isn't even an issue, because the software (whatever software -- let's keep this agnostic!) never gets installed at all.
Remember, whatever we already know can seem pretty obvious. But the things we don't know yet can lurk tantalizingly close and remain unknown. My father, for instance, is an electrical engineer with a moderate but lengthy exposure to computers: no way could he figure out a GNU/linux install without plenty of handholding.
I offer here a small example of some documentation I've created with the intent of making the "... for Dummies" books seem positively erudite and obfuscatory, all for the purpose of getting software installed in the first place. After that we can worry about deeper learning. (Which goes for me, too.)It's specific to my present ISP. Illuminati Online (io.com), but I imagine would be easily modifiable for many others.
Hope someone finds it useful -- I like to find an excuse to post it once in a while so I can make sure the counter on my Web site works;)
Regards,
timothy
moderator--> bump this up as informative, please!
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Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I agree completely that companies would take up the slack if something happened to MS, but it wouldn't be an overnight thing. There would be a "power vacuum" for a while, where other companies tried to take over the empty space.
Fair enough:)
Sounds like we differ more on how actually bad such a period of adjustment would be than on the scope. You're right, it would certainly take a frency of activity for a new king of the hill to be crowned. Our proverbial mileages vary.
On the other hand, I think it is possible for interoperable operating systems to share the market quite nicely. A shell script written for one Unix variant will usually run on others as well...
glitch! wrote of neat ways to use fuel cells when they're here in force:
How about two-way radios for backpackers, radios that can be refilled as needed, say for a week or so? I have to imagine that fluorescent camp lites powered by fuel cells would be better per quart of fuel than the fire-based Coleman lanterns.
Actually, better than flourescent would be LED lanterns! White LEDs (and LEDs in general) are getting better and brighter. Check out hollysolar.com, among others -- I've got some AA-battery powered flashlights that are not quite as bright as a fresh mini-maglite, but after 15 hours of continuous use, they're considerably brighter than the maglite. (grin) Waterproof, too -- fun to swim with.
And no, I don't work for any LED-related company. But as geek toys, they're high on my list.
Nice of them to acknowledge Linux and BeOS as competitors. Anyhow, the above quote just shows that the issues are different when it comes to software so you can't use the same rules as for groceries. But even so, the above argument is obviously untrue. Commercial Linux vendors and other OS venders, whoever they may BeOS do still have to provide upgrades, tech support, and a distribution channel for their OSes. At this stage no commercial entity could take up the slack if MS stopped selling Windows.
Actually, there is another way to see it. If Microsoft stopped selling Windows, other companies (or more loosely, organizations -- "company" in the older, more general sense) would do exactly what you say that couldn't. The only way to measure the slack you mention would be to remove Microsoft from the equation. (I'm not advocating it -- in fact, I am agreeing with this aspect of the MS rebuttal.)
If there were no Microsoft, it would be some other company, but it is a reasonable / expectable expectation for one OS manufacturer [or at least one style of OS] to dominate for a period of time. Not inevitable, only one reasonable possibility. Just like bellbottoms, or road widths -- or maybe just like connectors. If all the neighbors have metric nut drivers, it's hard to borrow bits unless you do too. A new kind of nut driver has to overcome the friction of conventional wisdom and widespread availability, and this places a pretty high burden of proof on it, but it also tends to ensure that new drivers will indeed kick ass, or at least be sufficiently intriguing to spark trial.[Like all analogies, it's got limits, but hey.] The important thing is that it would be unreasonable to expect a single manufacturer (OS or nut driver)to dominate for an infinite length of time, without true and determined coercion. For another analogy, just as limited, consider how strange it would be if a single engine type didn't dominate the automobile market. Now there are many type of internal combustion gasoline engines, but if you buy a car, chances are it will have some variety of (shorter) i.c.g.e. For most people, they offer a more acceptable alternative than alternatives such as electric motors, fuel cells, etc -- taking into account all the factors (availability, initial cost, upkeep, range-of-tank, etc etc etc), people buy them in greater numbers than the others. But that won't always be the case, or at least there's no reason to think that it will always be the case. There's still enormous variety in the designs of available i.c.g.e.'s -- some are for racing, some sip gas but go put-put-put;)
With MS operating systems, it's sort of like one brand of engine dominating the field, because the mechanics and drivers are all used to its machinations and "feel" respectively. Again, there's friction, but it's finite.
And this is not something that can be neatly legislated; while it's not inconceivable that a government could try to make decisions about what the marketplace should feature (it does, all the time), nothing does this as neatly as a price system. With the availability of excellent operating systems (free in either or both senses), Microsoft is pricing itself out of its own OS market, at least for some sectors.
Back to the slack you mentioned! If MS were to fly lock, stock and barrel to outer space tomorrow at 8:13 a.m. (Pacific), there would be a hefty period of adjustment -- but things would settle. Some people would use other OSes, others would band together as a sort of support group to keep using Windows for a while (damn legacy apps!), still others would decide it's a grand time to finish up that revolutionary OS they started for the PhD and abandoned to take a 12-digit salary somewhere. But when you tug on a slack rope, it jerks before tension is restored.
Agreement with SoftwareJanitor -- if SCO donates money to the NRA, they may have some of my sympathy. After all, the various TLAs have to stick together, eh? But then again, if I were an investor, I'd certainly hope that they're getting an appropriate tax benefit from the transaction, and thus saving money. Otherwise, let me (and the neighbors) make our own charitible donations, eh? I don't mind so much a technology company giving away CS scholarships, or supporting programming projects. And though I believe in the right of human beings to arm themselves for self defense, it's not the sort of contribution I'd (indirectly) vote for were I a stockholder.
On-topic aside: remember how SCO was denigrating Linux as inferior to the "proven" SCO what, 6 months ago? Interesting.
ManishIShah asked about "an industrial class Office package that has perl at its core."
I would like to echo the question, but substitute Python for perl. I'm sure;) that I'll be corrected if there is an obvious reason that this is a silly question, but from what little I know of the two languages (enough to write a Hello World, not much else yet -- I'm on a learning curve tricycle!) it seems like Python code is easier to read. In a company with lots of office-application customization, this seems like a very important attribute. Granted, documentation can make perl (or any language) more reader-friendly, but I think if I had to read, maintain, update, etc. I would rather be using Python.
So... how about that?
timothy
(p.s. thanks for pushing Linux for so long, Mr. Cowpland -- I liked your CompuTalk interview several months ago!)
Someone please illuminate me, but isn't it true that Windows NT is only certified "secure" when *not* connected to a network. NOw, I think that's DOD, not NSA, but still...
Will the Secure Linux be OK'd for little unimportant things like... being connected to a network?:)
Damn, this post made me ineligible to moderate this thread!;)
Gorilla wrote:
At the time of the MFJ, the primary supplier to AT&T & the Bells was the company which came to be Nortel. As Lucent & Nortel are most definatly in comptetition, it appears that the MFJ has increased competition.
Nortel and Lucent certainly have some areas of competition (not a complete overlap, but then, few competitors really are) -- but what makes you think that the MFJ is solely responsible? Nortel could have decided "Hey, we're the biggest supplier to these guys -- why don't we start moonlighting already?!"
Cannot speak for other anti-interventionists, but for me the problem with regulation of (voluntary, contractural, risk-laden) business activity is the presumption that the future has arrived, or is least close enough to know. Who could have known 20 years ago the various travails that AT&T, IBM, Exxon and other mondo-friggin'-huge companies would have faced between then and now? Or that a tiny company of well-positioned nerds making, of all things, something as abstract as software would now be driving the engines of fear, resentment and envy? (Or, if you'd like, read that as "the engines of prudence, caution and better judgement.";) )
This tendency to see the present *as* the future is one of my beefs about any of the specific breakup plans. I think it might be in Microsoft's best interest to split its divisions anyhow, but I hope they don't do so only to appease the gov't bullies. But consider: right now, early 2000, there is lots of software for which it would be difficult to separate the "Internet" component from the "Application" component from the "OS" component. Could the components be separated? Sure, but it could be in any of several ways -- depends where you prefer to separate your abstractions. Presuming that an outside body has the right to micromanage the development and the abstract design of code is... well, to me it doesn't make sense.
Remember, a big complaint agains Microsoft as a "bad-guy competitor" is that Microsoft bundled software that was "good enough" for free or cheap with their OS, thus stifling competition, because that competition would have to compete at an impractically low price level.
So what about Linux? My system has Mandrake 6.1, and various free applications. Should the DOJ, it its infinite wisdom and foresight, break up Linux development for the "harm" it's doing to them market by lowering the cost of good software? (Rhetorical!)
Just thoughts,
timothy
Can't speak for all "libertarians," but ...
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MillMan asked some good questions, like
The typical argument I see is that oligopolies and monopolies can't exist with government control (or making them legal, etc), and competition should increase without market controls, but I don't think that is true.If we really did have zero government control/regulation, what would stop a giant slug fest with the result being a few corporations basically owning and/or running the world?
and
But look at the telecom industry, competition is decreasing, not increasing, and the industry is consolidating. Even in markets that have been opened up to competitors (such as mine) for the baby bells, not much has changed, DSL access is still spotty, etc. How do Libertarians respond to this?
and he also said
I think our government has been moving twords the Libetarian ideal for a number of years now anyway, with deregulation.
As to this last one... like the subject line says, I can't speak for all libertarians / Libertarians, but since I do fall into that general area, I can say that *I* think about these, and you can take with the number of salt grains you think necessary. But our government (US) tends to be a "give an inch, take a mile" sort of deal, like most governments are. There are certain specific areas in which the government has wisely loosened its stranglehold, but "libertarian" would be inaccurately generous. Airline travel has been "deregulated," but that deregulation does *not* apply to all aspects, only certain financial ones.
As to the first question (re. monopolies / oligopolies), again, I'm not Joe Everyman or even Joe Libertarian, but the public discourse about monopoly in the abstract and putative monopolies has been poisoned (IMO), by accepting the assumptions of those who are mostly in favor of government regulation. The biggest of these is the one that you intelligently question: what's to stop a slugfest with a permanent, market-controlling, customer-abusive winner?
Answer: lots of things, but they all boil down to Market Competition (caps are mine, just for fun). Can anyone with a Linux box say with a straight face that Microsoft has, or ever had, a monopoly on computer operating systems? I say, No, or at least, if they can say anything but No, I would have to hear what they mean by 'monopoly.' Usually, it seems that the anti-monopolists are really anti-preponderists (not a real word). People talk about barriers to entry in the OS market -- but if there's market demand (or one can be shown as likely to a venture capitalist, say), the work can be done. Linus obviously faced some barriers to entry, but look where Linux is, 10 years later! In fact, the only kinds of monopolies that seem to have much of a chance are those imposed by the government. Like local utilities (which as you point out, are in some cases being less regulated now), local telephone service (should have collapsed many years ago, but was protected by govt. regs), local cable service (same thing), the Post Office (favorite target, too easy)... why aren't the same people who decry Microsoft attacking all these as well? Microsoft can't call on the government to beat up competitors, regulate their prices etc -- but the gov't imposed monopolies (or in some cases, subsidized providers) can. That's why you can't start a business delivering first class mail without a quick visit from the men in blue.
But even with the monopoly on 1st-class, the Post Office doesn't have a legal monopoly on "information delivery" -- only a certain subset of it. You can still e-mail, or fax (over lines regulated by the FCC), smoke signal (EPA), or send radio broadcasts (FCC again).
As to the middle one, well, it doesn't look to me like competition is decreasing in the telecom industry. Just the opposite -- it's getting to be a very interesting field. Even the scope of what it encompasses is changing, both in the US and in the rest of the world. There are now redundant fiber networks which run all over the continental US, and more being layed all the time. How much does it cost to dial long distance vs. 15-20 years ago? Do you remember when you had to lease your phones from the phone company? [That's a good example of a monopoly, and why the Phone Company was a big target of '60s anti-establishment ire.]
I'm tired, and at work, and these arguments are made by others at greater length and with greater eloquence elsewhere, so I have to stop. But there are a lot of good books on the subject - the two that I would recommend off the top of my head as best representing the libertarian ideal would be
- The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek (I think 19 - The Future and its Enemies, by Virgina Postule (I think that's the name -- (former) editor of Reason). It's skimmable, and at the big bookstores (newly in paperback, in fact).
And for a bigger picture of monopolies and the wisdom of regulating natural / percieved monopolies, there is another really good book, called "Antitrust: A Policy at War with Itself" by --gulp -- Robert Bork. Bork is a smart, eloquent man. This is not to say that he is generally libertarian, though, because that's not the case.
debrain has an interesting idea about the closing-ness of Red Hat -- that they could base a certified distribution on Open Source, with certain key parts closed. That might be a HUGE (underlined, bolded, blinking and colored) success, because being Linux, it could be sold at a much better price than MS operating systems, and at a price that the traditional UNIX vendors wouldn't touch anyhow.
However, in point of fact, Red Hat has been accused-in-advance of being about to make that kind of move several times in the past few years -- even before the IPOgonzosity, people dropped dark hints about the Redmond-in-Waiting that was Red Hat.
Have they? I don't think so. Can anyone name an important contribution of Red Hat that has not been promptly released for the world (and Mandrake in particular) to play with? Instead, they've stuck with the idea that their worth is in a) reputation ["But boss, this isn't some no-name OS here -- this is genuine Red Hat Linux, with a box and everything!"] and b) Service ["And boss, it comes with good support options!"]
Now, things change and I don't have a crystal ball, but why shouldn't Red Hat decide that nothing succeeeds like success and continue their mile-a-second moves to shore themselves up as stalwart GPListas (in good humor, ok?) as well as Überkapitalists who are just tickled pink to sell your company as many copies of Linux, manuals, T-shirts and mousepads as you'd like?
I can understand a largish or highly-secure business encoding their barcodes so that I can't take a Signal Technologies Palm III / laser scanner and spy on what their boxes of (say) nuclear weapons parts contain, not that I'd be close enough to read them.
But let's say the grocery store, (where I might want to keep a cross-store comparison of how much my favorite brand of Keilbasa costs), or Barnes and Nobles (where I might want to record the ISBN number in order to price-shop on Amazon later that day) -- I can see how they'd *like* to encode their barcodes, but how practical would it be for them to do so? Would they take things like the barcodes on the back of books, translate them onto a sticker and cover the original? That sounds like a lot of work -- imagine doing that with millions of books!
Or are there easier ways to do this than I am envisioning?
Also, if a given company uses barcodes (as part of an inventory-tracking system, say), aren't they encoded in a sense by relating to their internal system of organizing them? I'm clearly not an expert on barcoding, but I would imagine that if I scanned a few random barcodes, I would get results like "7685765t98" and "7685f345" -- would they be easily interpretable by someone without company-specific knowlege?
Would it be worthwhile for consumer-oriented businesses to go to the trouble to encode their barcodes?
First: Thanks, Mr. Wozniac, for Apples of various generations. Probably many of the readers of this forum have happy memories of Oregon Trail and Logo thanks to the Apple 2, and I remember my first look at the Mac, right when it came out... boy! Though I've jumped to Linux on IBM-compatible PCs now except for one decrepit Duo 230, I've gone through many Macs to get there.
Now, my questions:
1) How would you like to have seen the issues of cloning Mac hardware handled? It seemed like a great idea to anyone who bought a Power Computing MacOS computer, and a good way to put the Mac OS into what were in many cases specialized workstations for video, audio or other uses. But then Apple pulled the plug. Is this forever?
2) The other side of that coin: How would you like to have seen non-Apple-hardware OS issues handled? It seemed like MacOS on Intel was about to rock the world... then it died for it. Is *this* forever as well? Once OS X is out, and based on BSD, will the Mac OS again perhaps be portable in the future to Intel-type machines?
3) In the old Apple is a Hardware Company vs. Apple is a Software Company debate, where do you think the truth lies? To put the question differently, if in a crazy universe, the company had to give up one of these lines, which would make sense and why?
Stud Zeppelin wrote with some info about states' tax policies, specifically about those with no income tax or a very simple one (RI).
Add Tennesee to that list of states without a state income tax. THe current governor, who ran on a "No State Income Tax" platform, is not all-a-sudden enlightened otherwise, and is fighting for one in that state, which (to my pleasure) appears to be harming his political health. I think there is some property tax, or maybe it's on interest, but it's not an income tax...
(My dad lives there, I don't, but this info gathered from a road trip through Tennesee several weeks ago.)
Jerry explained that to write tax software and get it approved each year for all states and for the fed'rul boys would be a syssiphisian (sorry, sp.) task.
He's right!
This is a good reason to be in favor of massive, radical revision of the tax code -- that is, the fact that it is so complicated that converting it to an electronic form is impossible without such a huge team.
Some magazine (Fortune? Money? Forbes) used to show each year how even tax *professionals* don't understand (or, nicer, "have different interpretations of") the tax code they deal with for a living. They would send identical (hypothetical) tax informtion, like income, investments, capitcal gains, various deductions, marital status, etc., and get wildy different results in some cases from their various test-cases.
I read an interesting book a little while ago, the title of which I think was "Why we must abolish the Income Tax and the IRS." The proposal in this book (which I agree with, as I have not seen any better ideas) was for a national sales tax. I like this idea as it is egalitarian (earn more, spend more, pay more tax; earn less, spend less, pay less tax) and encourages investment rather than short-term purchases. I don't want to get into a discussion of what sort of taxes are fairest, as that's sort of like what sort of cancer is nicest to die from, but
I think most Americans and most people in other places in the world too would agree that taxes are... ahem!... not as fair or simple as they ought to be.
I don't know about other devices, but I know that for my camera (a Leica Digilux, same as a Fuji MX700), you can use the Rio's flash memory, but only BEFORE you intialize it in a Rio, after which it is impossible to use in the camera.
So, please for your sake make sure you don't count on automatically being able to exhange SmartMedia. They're my favorite, too -- cool form factor.
In fact, my understanding of the differences between the things that AC lists is not as good as it should be, though I recognize that all of these are valid, independent concepts...
Kernel, OS and shell I'm OK with --
But I have trouble picturing the diff., for instance, between a window manager and a desktop manager. I've had it explained, but like many things (like the rules of baseball), I'd have real trouble clearly distinguishing them to someone else. Can anyone recommend a site where these things are really well spelt out? ("Dummy" book level is just fine, thanks.)
And I'm mostly a Mac victim rather than PC, but your point is still valid;).
(agravaine wrote about the frustration of having a Visor 10-weeks-on-order)
Agravaine is right -- the idea is cool, but the company is behind on shipping. I guess I can add that to the reasons that I haven't ordered a Visor yet;)
But here's hoping that a) you get yours in particular soon and b) that Handspring gets their gears ungummed. They ought to have expected the avalanche of orders when they came out with a cheaper, fuller-featured palm! (I'm glad they actually did come out with a cheaper, fuller-featured palm, though!)
Of course, similarly, if someone came out with a ultra-safe, ultra-roomy, ultra-beautiful, ultra-efficient, reasonably-priced automobile, you'd expect demand to outstrip supply, wouldn't you?
And on that front, can someone explain the licensing deal that lets Handspring make Palm OS machines? Is there anything preventing me and a few millionaire friends from forming WannHoldYourPalm Computing? What's to explain that *more* companies aren't (yet?) following HandSpring's lead? I guess the fact that so many ex-Palm brains are at HandSpring is one good reason, but...
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As a (paid) editor, I disagree with the comments you've made about Jon Katz's piece.
Are you really so concerned about grammar that you'd let it override meaning? Is "unwired kid" in the context of this article truly confusing or ambiguous? It wasn't for me. The run-on sentence you identify isn't. The fragment you point out is a fragment, but so what? Persuasive writing is about more than formalisms; short connectors are useful. Can you name a political columnist, for instance, who never uses sentence fragments?
Are there a few typos, the occasional misplaced or missing word? Sure. Are they worse than ones that regularly appear in other news services? Not by a long shot. Slashdot is growing (in readership and staff), and it's coped well so far.
Cheers,
timothy
p.s. Full-time editorship is less than a month away, so relax.
In the field I'm currently in (advertising), it's hard to convince people that Microsoft Word is not what was used to write the ten commandments, and that when the ancient Greeks did mathematics, they didn't store the results in an Excel file.
It may seem tangential to the larger issue of free/Free software, but the thing that most excites me about campus-linux distribs (or as the case may be, a set of patches which to most students would seem like the same thing, but I don't need any "technical error" flames;) ) is the way they poke users in the eye with the fact that files and file compatibility are just as important as individual applications they might use to manipulate those files.
It seems I spent a total of many hours as an undergraduate in those horrible classes that require "groupwork" trying to convince the others in my group of the benefit of using plain text or other low-level formats for exchanging information. Usual response: blank stares, slack jaws, and "... but don't you have Word?" And yes -- some of that time I did (the dreaded cheap campus software giveaways), but I still thought it was a bad idea.
If it's accepted that people will be using different OSes as it suits their needs, the advantages of file agnosticism should become better understood.
just thoughts,
timothy
Re: /'s comments, including "Why not LinuxOne?"
... the beanies sort of capture some small slice of opinion in some small slice of time. Slashdot has evolved to use what it does, and I know the authors use a variety of distributions (lots of Debian, seems like). SuSE has at least one advantage over most other distribs. that a lot of poeople have pointed out, which is the vast quantity of included software. If you don't want or need it, POOF - ignore it, it's gone! But if you want a few GB of software without tying up your modem till next Xmas, well, it's all there for the taking.
... whatever you want to use them for.
I doubt the slashdot guys are likely to accept bribes for good press. Maybe for a chance to visit the moon -- not for a few bucks.;) Credibility (along with relevance, timeliness and interest) is their stock in trade.
And / points out: "Clearly SuSE isn't best for all people, since last I checked Slashdot isn't running on it." Well, right -- no one says that slashdot (or anyone) is required to do whatever's currently most popular, or grabbing the most press
Rankings like this are as useful as you want them to be. They won't tell you what *you* should like, but they might give you an idea of, say, what it might take to convince your boss to try it, or what distrib. might be interesting to try next time you feel like experimenting, or
Just thoughts,
timothy
Esperendi's point is good -- there seems to be a permanent class of "antis" -- whatever's Out is In, and whatever's In is necessarily bad. That's one reason that Microsoft-bashing is easily parodied, because its often a question not of the particular badness of a given company or idea, but the relish taken in being on the other, more righteous side.
;)
(And that's a very comforting feeling -- heck, being on the side of the penguins, intellectual freedom, etc is a big reason I like it!) But please consider whether the "commercial folks" are really ruining Linux, or just changing its nature in ways that are not necessarily bad. GPL is GPL, after all, and I'm confident that the GPL will hold its own when the inevitable test arises.
While it's neat to think about the PDP-10 with only Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie playing spacewar, the growth of UNIX and similar (not to mention *other*) OSes is what allows us here to play with them at all. I for one am glad that Messers Thompson and Ritchie didn't say "Ah geez - when we let other people play with this OS, they might change and RUIN it!"
And as one of my all-time-favorite angry childhood retorts has it, "Everybody wants to be a martyr."
Just a thought,
timothy
This is an interesting point, but could another company do "everything Red Hat [or whomever] does" without spending any money on software developers?
Mandrakesoft seems to do just this -- and Mandrake Linux is well-respected. They obviously spend some money on software development, but I bet much, much less than Red Hat. As you point out, why should they? Red Hat's doing most of their R&D for them, then they do some tweaking. OK, no skin off anyone's nose -- Red Hat beats them with some features, and can wrap Mandrake additions into upcoming versions.
Red Hat, TurboLinux, and several others are doing well
timothy
This post interested me because it speaks to my interest in pricing models ...
...)
drig suggested buying the game, not downloading it (and at 90 megs, it is a huge download!). If you ever hear Free / free software impugned with the increasingly silly rhetorical question "But how can that stuff stick around? How can anyone make money off it?" you've got one more data point to fling. Even on a fattish pipe, most people are not interested in downloading 90 megs at a time, but pop in a disc and 90 megs is no sweat.
(Of course, this could go either way -- in 3 years, will you be on a DSL2* line with no metered charges and 90MB is three minutes whistling? Or will you be on a clogged cable modem loop with by-the-K download charges and a meter outside the house? I certainly hope the first trend is winning
CD-burners may not be DVD-RAM, but they certainly constitute a great way to pass around big files, and for a well-done manual, brand assurance and support, I think Loki is offering great deals for Linux games.
Whee!
timothy
*Strictly hypothetical. Not real. Restrictions apply. See local dealers for details. Not availabile in all areas, terms and conditions apply and are subject to change without notice or obligation.
jd asked "Last, but not least, what problem is this supposed to be solving? If it's the transfer of information, then they'd be better off buying ultra-fat pipes and selling space on them."
Good question.
If it is the transfer of information (and that seems the only reasonable) answer, then by all means, let the post office kindly slither back into its corner and let my ISP, my phone company, my cable company, my electric company, my cellular provider, Hughes satellite, and anyone else who cares to join the fray hash it out. (Will the local water / sewage utilities offer IP packet delivery over a very fat pipe?)
The post office has enough trouble with delivering postcards from my brother. Why should we subsidize the same US post office which undercuts competitors with the surplus it earns on first-class mail? (Remember, they're the only ones who can deliver it -- by law. That's a real monopoly.)
The business of "establishing" post offices (the part the constition Mentions) I'm fine with the PO doing -- but until and unless the actual work of mail delivery is privatized, they have no business getting to the broadband market. (As in, no Constitutionally established right.)
Just thoughts,
timothy
The aesthetics / ergonomics (loosely speaking) of software is a big interest of mine. That's not because I'm a software expert, but rather for the opposite reason: I can figure out a way to misinterpret or fail to comprehend directions from practically any source, and I'm sure you can think of examples where you laughed at the guy going through the door labeled "Enter other side" ass-first or whatever. Yes, that was me, and it still hurts. I've hurled a fair number of CDs across the room because of frsutration at installing the software they contained onto my standard-issue, plain-vanilla PCs.
;)
The arguments that easy-to-use GUI tools make true, deep learning harder by eliminating the need for it have merit. But there is a threshold beneath which learning isn't even an issue, because the software (whatever software -- let's keep this agnostic!) never gets installed at all.
Remember, whatever we already know can seem pretty obvious. But the things we don't know yet can lurk tantalizingly close and remain unknown. My father, for instance, is an electrical engineer with a moderate but lengthy exposure to computers: no way could he figure out a GNU/linux install without plenty of handholding.
I offer here a small example of some documentation I've created with the intent of making the "... for Dummies" books seem positively erudite and obfuscatory, all for the purpose of getting software installed in the first place. After that we can worry about deeper learning. (Which goes for me, too.)It's specific to my present ISP. Illuminati Online (io.com), but I imagine would be easily modifiable for many others.
Hope someone finds it useful -- I like to find an excuse to post it once in a while so I can make sure the counter on my Web site works
Regards,
timothy
(Because it is.)
:)
timothy
Fair enough
Sounds like we differ more on how actually bad such a period of adjustment would be than on the scope. You're right, it would certainly take a frency of activity for a new king of the hill to be crowned. Our proverbial mileages vary.
On the other hand, I think it is possible for interoperable operating systems to share the market quite nicely. A shell script written for one Unix variant will usually run on others as well
timothy
Actually, better than flourescent would be LED lanterns! White LEDs (and LEDs in general) are getting better and brighter. Check out hollysolar.com, among others -- I've got some AA-battery powered flashlights that are not quite as bright as a fresh mini-maglite, but after 15 hours of continuous use, they're considerably brighter than the maglite. (grin) Waterproof, too -- fun to swim with.
And no, I don't work for any LED-related company. But as geek toys, they're high on my list.
timothy
Actually, there is another way to see it. If Microsoft stopped selling Windows, other companies (or more loosely, organizations -- "company" in the older, more general sense) would do exactly what you say that couldn't. The only way to measure the slack you mention would be to remove Microsoft from the equation. (I'm not advocating it -- in fact, I am agreeing with this aspect of the MS rebuttal.)
If there were no Microsoft, it would be some other company, but it is a reasonable / expectable expectation for one OS manufacturer [or at least one style of OS] to dominate for a period of time. Not inevitable, only one reasonable possibility. Just like bellbottoms, or road widths -- or maybe just like connectors. If all the neighbors have metric nut drivers, it's hard to borrow bits unless you do too. A new kind of nut driver has to overcome the friction of conventional wisdom and widespread availability, and this places a pretty high burden of proof on it, but it also tends to ensure that new drivers will indeed kick ass, or at least be sufficiently intriguing to spark trial.[Like all analogies, it's got limits, but hey.] The important thing is that it would be unreasonable to expect a single manufacturer (OS or nut driver)to dominate for an infinite length of time, without true and determined coercion. For another analogy, just as limited, consider how strange it would be if a single engine type didn't dominate the automobile market. Now there are many type of internal combustion gasoline engines, but if you buy a car, chances are it will have some variety of (shorter) i.c.g.e. For most people, they offer a more acceptable alternative than alternatives such as electric motors, fuel cells, etc -- taking into account all the factors (availability, initial cost, upkeep, range-of-tank, etc etc etc), people buy them in greater numbers than the others. But that won't always be the case, or at least there's no reason to think that it will always be the case. There's still enormous variety in the designs of available i.c.g.e.'s -- some are for racing, some sip gas but go put-put-put
With MS operating systems, it's sort of like one brand of engine dominating the field, because the mechanics and drivers are all used to its machinations and "feel" respectively. Again, there's friction, but it's finite.
And this is not something that can be neatly legislated; while it's not inconceivable that a government could try to make decisions about what the marketplace should feature (it does, all the time), nothing does this as neatly as a price system. With the availability of excellent operating systems (free in either or both senses), Microsoft is pricing itself out of its own OS market, at least for some sectors.
Back to the slack you mentioned! If MS were to fly lock, stock and barrel to outer space tomorrow at 8:13 a.m. (Pacific), there would be a hefty period of adjustment -- but things would settle. Some people would use other OSes, others would band together as a sort of support group to keep using Windows for a while (damn legacy apps!), still others would decide it's a grand time to finish up that revolutionary OS they started for the PhD and abandoned to take a 12-digit salary somewhere. But when you tug on a slack rope, it jerks before tension is restored.
just some thoughts,
timothy
Agreement with SoftwareJanitor -- if SCO donates money to the NRA, they may have some of my sympathy. After all, the various TLAs have to stick together, eh? But then again, if I were an investor, I'd certainly hope that they're getting an appropriate tax benefit from the transaction, and thus saving money. Otherwise, let me (and the neighbors) make our own charitible donations, eh? I don't mind so much a technology company giving away CS scholarships, or supporting programming projects. And though I believe in the right of human beings to arm themselves for self defense, it's not the sort of contribution I'd (indirectly) vote for were I a stockholder.
On-topic aside: remember how SCO was denigrating Linux as inferior to the "proven" SCO what, 6 months ago? Interesting.
timothy
ManishIShah asked about "an industrial class Office package that has perl at its core."
;) that I'll be corrected if there is an obvious reason that this is a silly question, but from what little I know of the two languages (enough to write a Hello World, not much else yet -- I'm on a learning curve tricycle!) it seems like Python code is easier to read. In a company with lots of office-application customization, this seems like a very important attribute. Granted, documentation can make perl (or any language) more reader-friendly, but I think if I had to read, maintain, update, etc. I would rather be using Python.
... how about that?
I would like to echo the question, but substitute Python for perl. I'm sure
So
timothy
(p.s. thanks for pushing Linux for so long, Mr. Cowpland -- I liked your CompuTalk interview several months ago!)
Someone please illuminate me, but isn't it true that Windows NT is only certified "secure" when *not* connected to a network. NOw, I think that's DOD, not NSA, but still ...
... being connected to a network? :)
Will the Secure Linux be OK'd for little unimportant things like
timothy
Gorilla wrote:
Nortel and Lucent certainly have some areas of competition (not a complete overlap, but then, few competitors really are) -- but what makes you think that the MFJ is solely responsible? Nortel could have decided "Hey, we're the biggest supplier to these guys -- why don't we start moonlighting already?!"
Cannot speak for other anti-interventionists, but for me the problem with regulation of (voluntary, contractural, risk-laden) business activity is the presumption that the future has arrived, or is least close enough to know. Who could have known 20 years ago the various travails that AT&T, IBM, Exxon and other mondo-friggin'-huge companies would have faced between then and now? Or that a tiny company of well-positioned nerds making, of all things, something as abstract as software would now be driving the engines of fear, resentment and envy? (Or, if you'd like, read that as "the engines of prudence, caution and better judgement.";) )
This tendency to see the present *as* the future is one of my beefs about any of the specific breakup plans. I think it might be in Microsoft's best interest to split its divisions anyhow, but I hope they don't do so only to appease the gov't bullies. But consider: right now, early 2000, there is lots of software for which it would be difficult to separate the "Internet" component from the "Application" component from the "OS" component. Could the components be separated? Sure, but it could be in any of several ways -- depends where you prefer to separate your abstractions. Presuming that an outside body has the right to micromanage the development and the abstract design of code is
Remember, a big complaint agains Microsoft as a "bad-guy competitor" is that Microsoft bundled software that was "good enough" for free or cheap with their OS, thus stifling competition, because that competition would have to compete at an impractically low price level.
So what about Linux? My system has Mandrake 6.1, and various free applications. Should the DOJ, it its infinite wisdom and foresight, break up Linux development for the "harm" it's doing to them market by lowering the cost of good software? (Rhetorical!)
Just thoughts,
timothy
and
and he also said
As to this last one
As to the first question (re. monopolies / oligopolies), again, I'm not Joe Everyman or even Joe Libertarian, but the public discourse about monopoly in the abstract and putative monopolies has been poisoned (IMO), by accepting the assumptions of those who are mostly in favor of government regulation. The biggest of these is the one that you intelligently question: what's to stop a slugfest with a permanent, market-controlling, customer-abusive winner?
Answer: lots of things, but they all boil down to Market Competition (caps are mine, just for fun). Can anyone with a Linux box say with a straight face that Microsoft has, or ever had, a monopoly on computer operating systems? I say, No, or at least, if they can say anything but No, I would have to hear what they mean by 'monopoly.' Usually, it seems that the anti-monopolists are really anti-preponderists (not a real word). People talk about barriers to entry in the OS market -- but if there's market demand (or one can be shown as likely to a venture capitalist, say), the work can be done. Linus obviously faced some barriers to entry, but look where Linux is, 10 years later! In fact, the only kinds of monopolies that seem to have much of a chance are those imposed by the government. Like local utilities (which as you point out, are in some cases being less regulated now), local telephone service (should have collapsed many years ago, but was protected by govt. regs), local cable service (same thing), the Post Office (favorite target, too easy)
But even with the monopoly on 1st-class, the Post Office doesn't have a legal monopoly on "information delivery" -- only a certain subset of it. You can still e-mail, or fax (over lines regulated by the FCC), smoke signal (EPA), or send radio broadcasts (FCC again).
As to the middle one, well, it doesn't look to me like competition is decreasing in the telecom industry. Just the opposite -- it's getting to be a very interesting field. Even the scope of what it encompasses is changing, both in the US and in the rest of the world. There are now redundant fiber networks which run all over the continental US, and more being layed all the time. How much does it cost to dial long distance vs. 15-20 years ago? Do you remember when you had to lease your phones from the phone company? [That's a good example of a monopoly, and why the Phone Company was a big target of '60s anti-establishment ire.]
I'm tired, and at work, and these arguments are made by others at greater length and with greater eloquence elsewhere, so I have to stop. But there are a lot of good books on the subject - the two that I would recommend off the top of my head as best representing the libertarian ideal would be
- The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek (I think 19
- The Future and its Enemies, by Virgina Postule (I think that's the name -- (former) editor of Reason). It's skimmable, and at the big bookstores (newly in paperback, in fact).
And for a bigger picture of monopolies and the wisdom of regulating natural / percieved monopolies, there is another really good book, called "Antitrust: A Policy at War with Itself" by --gulp -- Robert Bork. Bork is a smart, eloquent man. This is not to say that he is generally libertarian, though, because that's not the case.
Have a good day!
Tim
debrain has an interesting idea about the closing-ness of Red Hat -- that they could base a certified distribution on Open Source, with certain key parts closed. That might be a HUGE (underlined, bolded, blinking and colored) success, because being Linux, it could be sold at a much better price than MS operating systems, and at a price that the traditional UNIX vendors wouldn't touch anyhow.
However, in point of fact, Red Hat has been accused-in-advance of being about to make that kind of move several times in the past few years -- even before the IPOgonzosity, people dropped dark hints about the Redmond-in-Waiting that was Red Hat.
Have they? I don't think so. Can anyone name an important contribution of Red Hat that has not been promptly released for the world (and Mandrake in particular) to play with? Instead, they've stuck with the idea that their worth is in a) reputation ["But boss, this isn't some no-name OS here -- this is genuine Red Hat Linux, with a box and everything!"] and b) Service ["And boss, it comes with good support options!"]
Now, things change and I don't have a crystal ball, but why shouldn't Red Hat decide that nothing succeeeds like success and continue their mile-a-second moves to shore themselves up as stalwart GPListas (in good humor, ok?) as well as Überkapitalists who are just tickled pink to sell your company as many copies of Linux, manuals, T-shirts and mousepads as you'd like?
Just thoughts,
timothy
gad_zuki wrote, by way of prognostication:
4. Stores will start encrypting barcodes.
Can anyone comment on the practicality of this?
I can understand a largish or highly-secure business encoding their barcodes so that I can't take a Signal Technologies Palm III / laser scanner and spy on what their boxes of (say) nuclear weapons parts contain, not that I'd be close enough to read them.
But let's say the grocery store, (where I might want to keep a cross-store comparison of how much my favorite brand of Keilbasa costs), or Barnes and Nobles (where I might want to record the ISBN number in order to price-shop on Amazon later that day) -- I can see how they'd *like* to encode their barcodes, but how practical would it be for them to do so? Would they take things like the barcodes on the back of books, translate them onto a sticker and cover the original? That sounds like a lot of work -- imagine doing that with millions of books!
Or are there easier ways to do this than I am envisioning?
Also, if a given company uses barcodes (as part of an inventory-tracking system, say), aren't they encoded in a sense by relating to their internal system of organizing them? I'm clearly not an expert on barcoding, but I would imagine that if I scanned a few random barcodes, I would get results like "7685765t98" and "7685f345" -- would they be easily interpretable by someone without company-specific knowlege?
Would it be worthwhile for consumer-oriented businesses to go to the trouble to encode their barcodes?
just thoughts,
timothy
First: Thanks, Mr. Wozniac, for Apples of various generations. Probably many of the readers of this forum have happy memories of Oregon Trail and Logo thanks to the Apple 2, and I remember my first look at the Mac, right when it came out ... boy! Though I've jumped to Linux on IBM-compatible PCs now except for one decrepit Duo 230, I've gone through many Macs to get there.
... then it died for it. Is *this* forever as well? Once OS X is out, and based on BSD, will the Mac OS again perhaps be portable in the future to Intel-type machines?
Now, my questions:
1) How would you like to have seen the issues of cloning Mac hardware handled? It seemed like a great idea to anyone who bought a Power Computing MacOS computer, and a good way to put the Mac OS into what were in many cases specialized workstations for video, audio or other uses. But then Apple pulled the plug. Is this forever?
2) The other side of that coin: How would you like to have seen non-Apple-hardware OS issues handled? It seemed like MacOS on Intel was about to rock the world
3) In the old Apple is a Hardware Company vs. Apple is a Software Company debate, where do you think the truth lies? To put the question differently, if in a crazy universe, the company had to give up one of these lines, which would make sense and why?
Thanks for reading, have a good day!
timothy
Stud Zeppelin wrote with some info about states' tax policies, specifically about those with no income tax or a very simple one (RI).
...
Add Tennesee to that list of states without a state income tax. THe current governor, who ran on a "No State Income Tax" platform, is not all-a-sudden enlightened otherwise, and is fighting for one in that state, which (to my pleasure) appears to be harming his political health. I think there is some property tax, or maybe it's on interest, but it's not an income tax
(My dad lives there, I don't, but this info gathered from a road trip through Tennesee several weeks ago.)
timothy
Jerry explained that to write tax software and get it approved each year for all states and for the fed'rul boys would be a syssiphisian (sorry, sp.) task.
... ahem! ... not as fair or simple as they ought to be.
...
He's right!
This is a good reason to be in favor of massive, radical revision of the tax code -- that is, the fact that it is so complicated that converting it to an electronic form is impossible without such a huge team.
Some magazine (Fortune? Money? Forbes) used to show each year how even tax *professionals* don't understand (or, nicer, "have different interpretations of") the tax code they deal with for a living. They would send identical (hypothetical) tax informtion, like income, investments, capitcal gains, various deductions, marital status, etc., and get wildy different results in some cases from their various test-cases.
I read an interesting book a little while ago, the title of which I think was "Why we must abolish the Income Tax and the IRS." The proposal in this book (which I agree with, as I have not seen any better ideas) was for a national sales tax. I like this idea as it is egalitarian (earn more, spend more, pay more tax; earn less, spend less, pay less tax) and encourages investment rather than short-term purchases. I don't want to get into a discussion of what sort of taxes are fairest, as that's sort of like what sort of cancer is nicest to die from, but
I think most Americans and most people in other places in the world too would agree that taxes are
So that's it
timothy
I don't know about other devices, but I know that for my camera (a Leica Digilux, same as a Fuji MX700), you can use the Rio's flash memory, but only BEFORE you intialize it in a Rio, after which it is impossible to use in the camera.
So, please for your sake make sure you don't count on automatically being able to exhange SmartMedia. They're my favorite, too -- cool form factor.
timothy
In fact, my understanding of the differences between the things that AC lists is not as good as it should be, though I recognize that all of these are valid, independent concepts ...
;).
Kernel, OS and shell I'm OK with --
But I have trouble picturing the diff., for instance, between a window manager and a desktop manager. I've had it explained, but like many things (like the rules of baseball), I'd have real trouble clearly distinguishing them to someone else. Can anyone recommend a site where these things are really well spelt out? ("Dummy" book level is just fine, thanks.)
And I'm mostly a Mac victim rather than PC, but your point is still valid
timothy
(agravaine wrote about the frustration of having a Visor 10-weeks-on-order)
;)
...
Agravaine is right -- the idea is cool, but the company is behind on shipping. I guess I can add that to the reasons that I haven't ordered a Visor yet
But here's hoping that a) you get yours in particular soon and b) that Handspring gets their gears ungummed. They ought to have expected the avalanche of orders when they came out with a cheaper, fuller-featured palm! (I'm glad they actually did come out with a cheaper, fuller-featured palm, though!)
Of course, similarly, if someone came out with a ultra-safe, ultra-roomy, ultra-beautiful, ultra-efficient, reasonably-priced automobile, you'd expect demand to outstrip supply, wouldn't you?
And on that front, can someone explain the licensing deal that lets Handspring make Palm OS machines? Is there anything preventing me and a few millionaire friends from forming WannHoldYourPalm Computing? What's to explain that *more* companies aren't (yet?) following HandSpring's lead? I guess the fact that so many ex-Palm brains are at HandSpring is one good reason, but
timothy