This may not be a planet.... Do any astronomers reading Slashdot know if 30,000AU would qualify this as a planet via Bode's Law? If it is, wouldn't there be other objects between itself and the Sun?
Bode's Law (A planet tends to be roughly twice as far off from the Sun as the previous one. I.e. Earth is twice as far from the Sun as Venus, which is twice as far from the Sun as Mercury.) is more of a generalization than an actual law. It pretty much breaks down after Uranus. Neptune is about where Pluto should be under Bode's Law. Plus, it has the Kuiper belt between it and the Sun.
It may be a moon that was sent into this retro orbit by some collision, as it is believed of Pluto.
According to the article, it's six or seven times the size of Jupiter if it exists at all. That's little too big for a moon. It's more likely to be a Brown Dwarf that wandered too close to our solar system and got captured by the Sun.
actually, isn't this the 11th planet? a 10th planet was found a couple years ago, i think near saturn, jupitor? it was the size of a an average city, but because it orbited the sun like any other planet, it was classed a planet.
That's probably Chiron you're thinking about. I think that it was originally classified as an asteroid after some debate and then reclassified as a comet when someone discovered that it has a faint coma and tail.
I figure that the Brazilian Indians will mostly be stuck in the rain forest and unwilling to venture out anyway after a century of encroachment by "civilization." A bigger problem will be the outsiders who have moved into rain forest in search of gold and cheap land to slash and burn. My guess is that most of them will be physically evicted. Expect some bloodshed. This might not be the way it should happen, but it's probably the way it will happen.
Our atmosphere is 20% oxygen. And it's my understanding that it will remain so for thousands of years even if every forest on Earth disappears. A more important service that it performs is removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and keeping it tied up in the Earth's crust. Runaway Greenhouse Effect anyone?
Then there's the whole bio-diversity thing. The Amazon is home to some of the most telegenic creatures in the world. That's one reason why so many environmentalists fight so hard for it. They tend to be very dogmatic and will probably become powerful enough in the future to squelch any attempts at privatization.
2005: Norway's initial attempt at electronic democracy is thwarted when its main election server is cracked and Howard Stern is elected "President of All Nations."
2020: First human brain implants are introduced, initially aimed at enhancing human memory. A decade of competition over standards and thought communication protocols follows.
2025: First cold fusion reaction created. Although the technology becomes popular in small to mid-size portable generators, it remains too expensive to produce on a large scale.
2030: In order to produce enough food the Earth's exploding population, large agribusiness comglomerates begin to produce large underwater "aquafarms." Once endangered sea mammals like the manatee become prized as a source of DNA for genetically engineered "sea cows" who are bred underwater as substitutes for land cows.
2035: Entire Amazon basin becomes a secured "green zone." No human can come in or out without permission from Amazon zone police. A similar policy is pursued by other countries in an attempt to save our remaining rain forests. "Jungle Wars begin erupting at the edges of these green zones.
2050: The first commercial "hot fusion" reactor goes online five years late and a billion dollars overbudget. Despite its initial stumbles, this seemingly more primitive technology, succeeds where cold fusion failed -- in generating energy for large commercial scale power plants.
2055: AI succeeds in producing the first droids, single-function devices which mimic human thought to perform tasks far more efficiently than any human could. Although there is every indication that the same technology could produce fully sentient machines, fear and political pressure prevents them being created.
2060: The cheapness of fusion power drives many public utilities to near bankruptcy. While many of these utilities waste their time demanding government subsidies, one daring company decides to take the daring step of bartering energy for everything, all subcontracters and vendors receive free power for their services. Employee salaries are abolished and replaced with energy credits which they trade for cash. Despite initial resistance. The idea spreads and becomes so popular and so widely copied that an entire "energy economy" springs up and becomes bigger than the mainstream cash based economy.
2063: Nanobots are used to enhance the human immune system in incurably ill patients. Average life expectancy in most industrialized countries increases to 105. Overpopulation continues to get more serious as plans for large, underwater communitees are unvieled.
2065: Congress passes the "Energy Credit Standardization Act," confirming what the rest of the world already knows, energy has become the 20th century's dominant currency.
2070: AI returns in a big way when secondary processors are added to human brain implants, intially to control behavior in convicted criminals. Instant two-way communication between machines and technologically enhanced humans speeds the pace of human evolution.
2080: A potential solution to the population problem appears when it is discovered that brain implants when used to control immune system nanobots can allow humans to temporarily shut down parts of their reproductive systems -- the ultimate form of birth control.
2090: As the lines between man and machine begin to blur, "tech withdrawal" is diagnosed in new-born infants who for some reason didn't receive enough immune system nanobots from their mothers during pregnancy. These children are highly suceptible to disease and must be injected with nanobots and given brain implants to survive.
2099: Pundits argue over whether or not the 22nd century begins in 2100 or in 2101.
So if Microsoft does get broken up, how will its pieces do? Let's assume for a moment that there is no collusion and all the pieces play by the DOJ set rules.
MS gets broken up into for companies covering four seperate software categories: OS, business apps, consumer apps, Internet. And then:
Freed of the need to carry the rest of the company, MS OS continues to dominate the desktop OS market. Windows 2000 is shelved and Windows NT 5.0 comes out slimmer, trimmer, and more stable than its predecessors. Consumer Windows 1.0 is actually based on Win95/98 as the work of cleaning out all the DOS and 16-bit Windows code begins in earnest. Consumer Windows still isn't very stable but it's faster than the 9x versions and becomes a hit. WinCE gets taken out of PDAs becomes the OS of choice in sub-$400 computers. MS OS tries to buy Palm Computing. Although its market share drops to %70, the market has grown so large that MS OS quickly becomes the richest software company on Earth.
Without the advantage of being able to hook its software into the hidden nooks and crannies of the OS, MS Business isn't quite so lucky. MS Business Office sees its market share quickly drop to below 60% overnight. Wordperfect is the chief beneficiary of this development and gets spun off into a independant company again. IBM fails to take advantage of this opportunity, giving MS Business some breathing room.
MS Consumer flops around for a few years making money but being largely ignored by anyone in the industry.
MS Internet sinks like a stone under the weight of its many useless and unvisited websites. MSN gets carved up and its best bits get bought out by AOL, Yahoo, and Excite.
A new browser war erupts when all four Baby Bills claim to own Internet Explorer and each comes out with their own mutually incompatible web browsers. Marc Andreeson dies of alcohol poisoning while celebrating this development. Opera software becomes dominant browser company (OK, this one's a stretch).
And what of Bill Gates you ask? Bill takes the money and runs. He buys himself a small Caribbean island and declares himself king.
Window NT has turned into an unmanageable mess. WinCE is getting its head handed to it by the PalmPilot. MSN has reinvented itself how many times? Win9x crashes if you lean on it. And don't even get me started about Microsoft Word! Breaking up Microsoft might give the "Baby Bills" a focus that they sorely lack.
A couple of the MS spawned companies might wind up with a combined value that dwarfs the current Microsoft.
"We see ourselves as the marketing and sales distribution arm for Mandrake," said Doug Bennett, President of Macmillan USA.
It seems to me that this article is claiming that MacMillan gets no respect while at the same time admitting that they are not really interested in doing anything but marketing Mandrake. This raises the question: so what? The only person who seems to care if MacMillan gets any respect appears to be the author of the article.
Certainly none of the MacMillan people who were quoted for the story were complaining. If someone aspires to be a marketroid and doesn't complain about being called a marketroid, how can they be unhappy about being thought of as a marketroid?
In my mind, there seems to be no purpose to this article except to generate hits / pageviews / whatever.
WSH was first distributed in IE4 and is now an optional part of Win98. Theoretically, it allows you to use any scripting language and comes with JScript (MS' version of Javascript) and VBscript built in. There's a version of Perl and I believe, REXX available for WSH.
Microsoft has never bothered to publicize WSH's existence. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it was because WSH is a lot more complex than what the typical Windows user can handle -- what with the typical Windows user being a danger to him/herself and others when given powerful tools to work with.
I keep phone numbers, to do items, memos, my check book, novels, calculators, and more stuff on one little device. I'm too absent minded and forgetful to carry around a lot of scraps of paper and my handwriting is attrocious. My Palm III has made my life ten times easier.
And incidentally, I recently had to give my PIII a hard reset, deleting everything in memory and guess what? I hotsynced it and everything came back automagically. That you Backup Buddy!
1.Why did 3Com license PalmOS to Handspring in the first place?
The handheld market isn't too different from the PC market of the mid-eighties, before Microsoft took it over. 3Com/Palm could go three ways: the Apple way, the IBM way, or the Microsoft way. The Microsoft way of licensing the OS and growing fat off the royalties made the most money before and 3Com/Palm is betting it well make the most money again.
Even if 3Com/Palm never sells another PalmPilot again, they'll still collect money from every clone that gets sold. And given the possibility of fierce competition among clone makers, there is more potential for crowding CE devices out of the handheld market.
Perhaps 3Com planned on using Handspring to gain market share for PalmOS before yanking the rug out from under them by not renewing the licensing agreement. This would be very similar to how Apple treated clone makers after Jobs came back.
By the time that Apple licensed the MacOS, its market share was already declining rapidly due to bad marketing and "not invented here syndrome." The clone makers were just fighting for a piece of an already declining pie. And it never did license more than a handful of clone makers anyway. Apple's cloning experiment was never more than half-hearted at best.
The PalmPilot's market share has been growing rapidly. And technically while Handspring is the first Palm clone maker, it isn't the first clone seller. That honor belongs to IBM which has been selling the IBM Workpad, a Palm look alike that is manucfactured by 3Com. Then there are also Qualcomm's PDq cell phone and a few other specialized PalmOS based devices that imply that 3Com had been gradually experimenting with cloning the Palm before opening the floodgates with Handspring. So pulling the rug out from under Handspring would probably do the PalmOS more harm than good.
3.Mostly unrelated: Why do so many people want a Palm Linux port?
Made up grass roots campaigns, convoluted attempts at getting "experts" to agree with him, I don't know whether to be appalled by his stupidity or to admire his determination to work outside the system. Why doesn't he just open up his wallet and buy a few senators like everybody else?
I realize that the Handspring Visor is not out yet, but how on Earth is the Palm Vx going to compete against it with a pricetag $200 more expensive? ($250 Visor Deluxe vs. $450 Palm Vx)
It's smaller and prettier. Think of it as the High School theory of marketing.
Maybe they're just saying what they think investors want to hear -- you know, the naive ones who just buy whatever's trendy and don't really know about technology.
They could also be referring to the source code for Slashdot and Freshmeat. They might be planning to repackage it and sell it. So if your company's intranet suddenly starts up a discussion forum where you have to periodically moderate and get metamoderated by your co-workers, you'll know why.
Actually, they used to all be bald. That was their original product, the perfect toupee. They only moved on to Warp Drive when the Department of Defense confiscated all of their production models for the "Shatner Turbo 2000" as part of their secret, Super Soldier progam due to debut on Octob @#!$%$%@#$%@#!$%$%@#$%@#!$%$%@#$%@#!$%$%@#$%@#!$ %$%@#$%@#!$%$%@#$%
So...let me get this straight. In order to explain a simple concept to PARENTS....they had to go and contract a children's puppet?!
The entire concept of the V-Chip is inherently condescending towards parents. The V-Chip decides what to block depending on ratings imposed by the networks themselves -- not what the parent decides. Why? Because if parents could decide what was good for their children, they wouldn't need something like a V-chip.
Now a real V-Chip would give parents the option to block any program based on its name and the time it airs. In other words instead of blocking out everything that is rating "TV-14," I could choose to block out "WWF Smackdown" or anything that airs at 2AM. But I could still let the household watch "Homicide: Life on the Streets" without having to override the chip. If the TV people and the government can figure out how to do this, I might believe they are on the side of good in this fight. Otherwise, keep your paws off my remote, you damn, dirty bureaucrats!
"And this whole research area is where you should be looking if you really want to save species."
Great, so we have lots of formerly dead species and can only keep them in Zoos because all the habitat has been paved over. Give that man a giant spatuala for the most self-serving scientist of the year award.
I don't know about that, cloning dead species might make it possible for scientists to help live ones. Take, for example, the cheetah. The cheetah was hunted almost to extinction and the few that survive have very little genetic diversity.
Today scientists have a database of cheetah lineage that is consulted before they are bred to prevent excess inbreeding. Another thing that might help increase their genetic diversity is to clone cheetahs from old trophies. They were heavily hunted, so these trophies shouldn't be too uncommon.
Did the Dodo die out because we were *unfair* in hunting it so much, or did it die out because it was just a really dumb bird? I'm serious - maybe it was just time for the Dodo to check out. If not from us, than from something else.
AFAIK, it wasn't just human hunters that decimated the dodo but also dogs, cats, and rats which were introduced into its habitat by, guess who, humans. So it wasn't just a matter of it being the dodo's time to check out. We pretty much screwed up its habitat when we colonized the place. It didn't have predators before we introduced them.
So if I move to x-land just before an alligator shows up in x-land on its own and starts eating stuff, that's not my fault. But if I move to x-land and decide I want to play "Crocodile Dundee" and bring in alligators from Florida to keep as pets and one of them escapes and starts eating stuff, then it's definitely my fault.
Maybe they'll just include a cable instead of a cradle. It's less convenient but works just fine and is preferable for, "road warriors" who could just stuff it into their bags along with their laptop.
Basically, Toshiba and Sony have already managed to squeeze "real" mini-notebooks with a hard drive into this same form factor.
The new Psion and the WinCE "Jupiter" class handhelds are in the same losing boat. They are about the same size as these mini-notebooks with much less speed and storage. Their only real advantage is that they have no moving parts and cost less (although that isn't quite so clear cut anymore). They'll probably get squeezed out by the mini-notebooks.
Mainframes? You wuss! When I was a young geek, we had to make due with one-ton collections of vacuum tubes. You needed a whole team of oxen to carry 'em anywhere. They put out so much heat that we had people dyin' of heat stroke at parties. And we liked it!
And just to add an extra touch of irony, Einstein's brain wasn't cremated along with the rest of his body. It's still lying around and pieces of get examined by scientists from time to time. Imagine if they had kept it together and frozen it. Once the technique was perfected, you could put it into a clone of Arnold's body. Maybe then we could get smarter action movies.
Considering that a team of private citizens can now crack 512-bit RSA keys I think that the government could easily throw enough computing resources to crack *any* imaginable encryption in a surprisingly short time. So there is no longer a compelling technical reason for the government to claim that encryption endangers national security.
The only remaining obstacle is government arrogance (How dare they interfere with our attempts to snoop on them?).
Slashdot Mirror
This may not be a planet.... Do any astronomers reading Slashdot know if 30,000AU would qualify this as a planet via Bode's Law? If it is, wouldn't there be other objects between itself and the Sun?
Bode's Law (A planet tends to be roughly twice as far off from the Sun as the previous one. I.e. Earth is twice as far from the Sun as Venus, which is twice as far from the Sun as Mercury.) is more of a generalization than an actual law. It pretty much breaks down after Uranus. Neptune is about where Pluto should be under Bode's Law. Plus, it has the Kuiper belt between it and the Sun.
It may be a moon that was sent into this retro orbit by some collision, as it is believed of Pluto.
According to the article, it's six or seven times the size of Jupiter if it exists at all. That's little too big for a moon. It's more likely to be a Brown Dwarf that wandered too close to our solar system and got captured by the Sun.
actually, isn't this the 11th planet? a 10th planet was found a couple years ago, i think near saturn, jupitor? it was the size of a an average city, but because it orbited the sun like any other planet, it was classed a planet.
That's probably Chiron you're thinking about. I think that it was originally classified as an asteroid after some debate and then reclassified as a comet when someone discovered that it has a faint coma and tail.
I figure that the Brazilian Indians will mostly be stuck in the rain forest and unwilling to venture out anyway after a century of encroachment by "civilization." A bigger problem will be the outsiders who have moved into rain forest in search of gold and cheap land to slash and burn. My guess is that most of them will be physically evicted. Expect some bloodshed. This might not be the way it should happen, but it's probably the way it will happen.
Our atmosphere is 20% oxygen. And it's my understanding that it will remain so for thousands of years even if every forest on Earth disappears. A more important service that it performs is removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and keeping it tied up in the Earth's crust. Runaway Greenhouse Effect anyone?
Then there's the whole bio-diversity thing. The Amazon is home to some of the most telegenic creatures in the world. That's one reason why so many environmentalists fight so hard for it. They tend to be very dogmatic and will probably become powerful enough in the future to squelch any attempts at privatization.
2005: Norway's initial attempt at electronic democracy is thwarted when its main election server is cracked and Howard Stern is elected "President of All Nations."
2020: First human brain implants are introduced, initially aimed at enhancing human memory. A decade of competition over standards and thought communication protocols follows.
2025: First cold fusion reaction created. Although the technology becomes popular in small to mid-size portable generators, it remains too expensive to produce on a large scale.
2030: In order to produce enough food the Earth's exploding population, large agribusiness comglomerates begin to produce large underwater "aquafarms." Once endangered sea mammals like the manatee become prized as a source of DNA for genetically engineered "sea cows" who are bred underwater as substitutes for land cows.
2035: Entire Amazon basin becomes a secured "green zone." No human can come in or out without permission from Amazon zone police. A similar policy is pursued by other countries in an attempt to save our remaining rain forests. "Jungle Wars begin erupting at the edges of these green zones.
2050: The first commercial "hot fusion" reactor goes online five years late and a billion dollars overbudget. Despite its initial stumbles, this seemingly more primitive technology, succeeds where cold fusion failed -- in generating energy for large commercial scale power plants.
2055: AI succeeds in producing the first droids, single-function devices which mimic human thought to perform tasks far more efficiently than any human could. Although there is every indication that the same technology could produce fully sentient machines, fear and political pressure prevents them being created.
2060: The cheapness of fusion power drives many public utilities to near bankruptcy. While many of these utilities waste their time demanding government subsidies, one daring company decides to take the daring step of bartering energy for everything, all subcontracters and vendors receive free power for their services. Employee salaries are abolished and replaced with energy credits which they trade for cash. Despite initial resistance. The idea spreads and becomes so popular and so widely copied that an entire "energy economy" springs up and becomes bigger than the mainstream cash based economy.
2063: Nanobots are used to enhance the human immune system in incurably ill patients. Average life expectancy in most industrialized countries increases to 105. Overpopulation continues to get more serious as plans for large, underwater communitees are unvieled.
2065: Congress passes the "Energy Credit Standardization Act," confirming what the rest of the world already knows, energy has become the 20th century's dominant currency.
2070: AI returns in a big way when secondary processors are added to human brain implants, intially to control behavior in convicted criminals. Instant two-way communication between machines and technologically enhanced humans speeds the pace of human evolution.
2080: A potential solution to the population problem appears when it is discovered that brain implants when used to control immune system nanobots can allow humans to temporarily shut down parts of their reproductive systems -- the ultimate form of birth control.
2090: As the lines between man and machine begin to blur, "tech withdrawal" is diagnosed in new-born infants who for some reason didn't receive enough immune system nanobots from their mothers during pregnancy. These children are highly suceptible to disease and must be injected with nanobots and given brain implants to survive.
2099: Pundits argue over whether or not the 22nd century begins in 2100 or in 2101.
So if Microsoft does get broken up, how will its pieces do? Let's assume for a moment that there is no collusion and all the pieces play by the DOJ set rules.
MS gets broken up into for companies covering four seperate software categories: OS, business apps, consumer apps, Internet. And then:
Freed of the need to carry the rest of the company, MS OS continues to dominate the desktop OS market. Windows 2000 is shelved and Windows NT 5.0 comes out slimmer, trimmer, and more stable than its predecessors. Consumer Windows 1.0 is actually based on Win95/98 as the work of cleaning out all the DOS and 16-bit Windows code begins in earnest. Consumer Windows still isn't very stable but it's faster than the 9x versions and becomes a hit. WinCE gets taken out of PDAs becomes the OS of choice in sub-$400 computers. MS OS tries to buy Palm Computing. Although its market share drops to %70, the market has grown so large that MS OS quickly becomes the richest software company on Earth.
Without the advantage of being able to hook its software into the hidden nooks and crannies of the OS, MS Business isn't quite so lucky. MS Business Office sees its market share quickly drop to below 60% overnight. Wordperfect is the chief beneficiary of this development and gets spun off into a independant company again. IBM fails to take advantage of this opportunity, giving MS Business some breathing room.
MS Consumer flops around for a few years making money but being largely ignored by anyone in the industry.
MS Internet sinks like a stone under the weight of its many useless and unvisited websites. MSN gets carved up and its best bits get bought out by AOL, Yahoo, and Excite.
A new browser war erupts when all four Baby Bills claim to own Internet Explorer and each comes out with their own mutually incompatible web browsers. Marc Andreeson dies of alcohol poisoning while celebrating this development. Opera software becomes dominant browser company (OK, this one's a stretch).
And what of Bill Gates you ask? Bill takes the money and runs. He buys himself a small Caribbean island and declares himself king.
Window NT has turned into an unmanageable mess. WinCE is getting its head handed to it by the PalmPilot. MSN has reinvented itself how many times? Win9x crashes if you lean on it. And don't even get me started about Microsoft Word! Breaking up Microsoft might give the "Baby Bills" a focus that they sorely lack.
A couple of the MS spawned companies might wind up with a combined value that dwarfs the current Microsoft.
"We see ourselves as the marketing and sales distribution arm for Mandrake," said Doug Bennett, President of Macmillan USA.
It seems to me that this article is claiming that MacMillan gets no respect while at the same time admitting that they are not really interested in doing anything but marketing Mandrake. This raises the question: so what? The only person who seems to care if MacMillan gets any respect appears to be the author of the article.
Certainly none of the MacMillan people who were quoted for the story were complaining. If someone aspires to be a marketroid and doesn't complain about being called a marketroid, how can they be unhappy about being thought of as a marketroid?
In my mind, there seems to be no purpose to this article except to generate hits / pageviews / whatever.
WSH was first distributed in IE4 and is now an optional part of Win98. Theoretically, it allows you to use any scripting language and comes with JScript (MS' version of Javascript) and VBscript built in. There's a version of Perl and I believe, REXX available for WSH.
Microsoft has never bothered to publicize WSH's existence. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it was because WSH is a lot more complex than what the typical Windows user can handle -- what with the typical Windows user being a danger to him/herself and others when given powerful tools to work with.
Maybe Handspring will come out with a HHtG Springboard module for the Visor. If it does, I think geeks will be legally obligated to get one.
Yet I wouldn't mind one of those the next time I go skiing. Tree? What tree?
And if you lose your balance, you become a human sled.
I keep phone numbers, to do items, memos, my check book, novels, calculators, and more stuff on one little device. I'm too absent minded and forgetful to carry around a lot of scraps of paper and my handwriting is attrocious. My Palm III has made my life ten times easier.
And incidentally, I recently had to give my PIII a hard reset, deleting everything in memory and guess what? I hotsynced it and everything came back automagically. That you Backup Buddy!
1.Why did 3Com license PalmOS to Handspring in the first place?
The handheld market isn't too different from the PC market of the mid-eighties, before Microsoft took it over. 3Com/Palm could go three ways: the Apple way, the IBM way, or the Microsoft way. The Microsoft way of licensing the OS and growing fat off the royalties made the most money before and 3Com/Palm is betting it well make the most money again.
Even if 3Com/Palm never sells another PalmPilot again, they'll still collect money from every clone that gets sold. And given the possibility of fierce competition among clone makers, there is more potential for crowding CE devices out of the handheld market.
Perhaps 3Com planned on using Handspring to gain market share for PalmOS before yanking the rug out from under them by not renewing the licensing agreement. This would be very similar to how Apple treated clone makers after Jobs came back.
By the time that Apple licensed the MacOS, its market share was already declining rapidly due to bad marketing and "not invented here syndrome." The clone makers were just fighting for a piece of an already declining pie. And it never did license more than a handful of clone makers anyway. Apple's cloning experiment was never more than half-hearted at best.
The PalmPilot's market share has been growing rapidly. And technically while Handspring is the first Palm clone maker, it isn't the first clone seller. That honor belongs to IBM which has been selling the IBM Workpad, a Palm look alike that is manucfactured by 3Com. Then there are also Qualcomm's PDq cell phone and a few other specialized PalmOS based devices that imply that 3Com had been gradually experimenting with cloning the Palm before opening the floodgates with Handspring. So pulling the rug out from under Handspring would probably do the PalmOS more harm than good.
3.Mostly unrelated: Why do so many people want a Palm Linux port?
They think it would be fun.
Made up grass roots campaigns, convoluted attempts at getting "experts" to agree with him, I don't know whether to be appalled by his stupidity or to admire his determination to work outside the system. Why doesn't he just open up his wallet and buy a few senators like everybody else?
I realize that the Handspring Visor is not out yet, but how on Earth is the Palm Vx going to compete against it with a pricetag $200 more expensive? ($250 Visor Deluxe vs. $450 Palm Vx)
It's smaller and prettier. Think of it as the High School theory of marketing.
Maybe they're just saying what they think investors want to hear -- you know, the naive ones who just buy whatever's trendy and don't really know about technology.
They could also be referring to the source code for Slashdot and Freshmeat. They might be planning to repackage it and sell it. So if your company's intranet suddenly starts up a discussion forum where you have to periodically moderate and get metamoderated by your co-workers, you'll know why.
Actually, they used to all be bald. That was their original product, the perfect toupee. They only moved on to Warp Drive when the Department of Defense confiscated all of their production models for the "Shatner Turbo 2000" as part of their secret, Super Soldier progam due to debut on Octob$ %$%@#$%@#!$%$%@#$%
@#!$%$%@#$%@#!$%$%@#$%@#!$%$%@#$%@#!$%$%@#$%@#!
NO CARRIER
So...let me get this straight. In order to explain a simple concept to PARENTS....they had to go and contract a children's puppet?!
The entire concept of the V-Chip is inherently condescending towards parents. The V-Chip decides what to block depending on ratings imposed by the networks themselves -- not what the parent decides. Why? Because if parents could decide what was good for their children, they wouldn't need something like a V-chip.
Now a real V-Chip would give parents the option to block any program based on its name and the time it airs. In other words instead of blocking out everything that is rating "TV-14," I could choose to block out "WWF Smackdown" or anything that airs at 2AM. But I could still let the household watch "Homicide: Life on the Streets" without having to override the chip. If the TV people and the government can figure out how to do this, I might believe they are on the side of good in this fight. Otherwise, keep your paws off my remote, you damn, dirty bureaucrats!
I don't know about that, cloning dead species might make it possible for scientists to help live ones. Take, for example, the cheetah. The cheetah was hunted almost to extinction and the few that survive have very little genetic diversity.
Today scientists have a database of cheetah lineage that is consulted before they are bred to prevent excess inbreeding. Another thing that might help increase their genetic diversity is to clone cheetahs from old trophies. They were heavily hunted, so these trophies shouldn't be too uncommon.
Did the Dodo die out because we were *unfair* in hunting it so much, or did it die out because it was just a really dumb bird? I'm serious - maybe it was just time for the Dodo to check out. If not from us, than from something else.
AFAIK, it wasn't just human hunters that decimated the dodo but also dogs, cats, and rats which were introduced into its habitat by, guess who, humans. So it wasn't just a matter of it being the dodo's time to check out. We pretty much screwed up its habitat when we colonized the place. It didn't have predators before we introduced them.
So if I move to x-land just before an alligator shows up in x-land on its own and starts eating stuff, that's not my fault. But if I move to x-land and decide I want to play "Crocodile Dundee" and bring in alligators from Florida to keep as pets and one of them escapes and starts eating stuff, then it's definitely my fault.
Maybe they'll just include a cable instead of a cradle. It's less convenient but works just fine and is preferable for, "road warriors" who could just stuff it into their bags along with their laptop.
Basically, Toshiba and Sony have already managed to squeeze "real" mini-notebooks with a hard drive into this same form factor.
The new Psion and the WinCE "Jupiter" class handhelds are in the same losing boat. They are about the same size as these mini-notebooks with much less speed and storage. Their only real advantage is that they have no moving parts and cost less (although that isn't quite so clear cut anymore). They'll probably get squeezed out by the mini-notebooks.
Mainframes? You wuss! When I was a young geek, we had to make due with one-ton collections of vacuum tubes. You needed a whole team of oxen to carry 'em anywhere. They put out so much heat that we had people dyin' of heat stroke at parties. And we liked it!
And just to add an extra touch of irony, Einstein's brain wasn't cremated along with the rest of his body. It's still lying around and pieces of get examined by scientists from time to time. Imagine if they had kept it together and frozen it. Once the technique was perfected, you could put it into a clone of Arnold's body. Maybe then we could get smarter action movies.
Considering that a team of private citizens can now crack 512-bit RSA keys I think that the government could easily throw enough computing resources to crack *any* imaginable encryption in a surprisingly short time. So there is no longer a compelling technical reason for the government to claim that encryption endangers national security.
The only remaining obstacle is government arrogance (How dare they interfere with our attempts to snoop on them?).
Maybe MS *should* send all of its Hotmail users a $0 check. It would at least be an admission that they screwed up.