All NASA has to do is say they found indicators of [terr'rists | oil | bin Laden's hideout | WMDs ] on Mars and they're good to go.
And for a manned facility, they can pitch Mars as the next Gitmo. Think of the security!
You're thinking too small. We already know that Saturn's moon Titan has enough oil to end our energy problems for a long, long time. Forget Mars, lets to Saturn!
You might want to take a closer look at that graph. It shows that the military spending and recruitment has historically been very low during peacetime. In a time of war, military spending and recruitment grows dramatically and rapidly. Despite the downward trend of the past fifty years, military spending and recruitment today remains much higher than it was before World War II. In fact even after cashing in the "peace dividend," both statistics remained higher than they were before WWII. I'm also reluctant to call the Iraq War uptick "brief." I'm guessing that when the 2007 data is all in, military spending will have gone up, not down -- again due to the Iraq War. And even if the next president abruptly ends the Iraq War, problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan will probably continue to keep our military busy and well-funded through the rest of the decade.
Unless, the United States suffers a huge reversal of fortune (or someone brings about world peace) over the next 100 years, it is a sure bet that the size of our military will be dictated by our status as a world power and will continue to expand and contract to meet our strategic needs -- just as it has for the past two hundred years.
Actually, Wikipedia has a nice graph regarding the military - it depicts a steady drop both in enlistment and percent of GDP; both have dropped by 50% since 1950 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States)Note, there is a small uptick in expenditures in 2006 due to the Iraq war, though the enlistments are not higher.
It all depends on how you read that graph. It would be far too simplistic to just say that military spending has been on the decline all along. The graph shows that US military expenditures and recruitment have historically been quite low except for large spikes during wartime. In fact it shows three huge spikes -- the Civil War, World War I, and World War II -- each followed by huge drops in military spending and recruitment. But the most interesting thing is that despite the steady decline in military spending following WWII, the trend reverses itself several times -- during the Korean and Vietnamese wars. After that, we see military steadily drop until the '80s which coincide with president Reagan's military build-up while recruitment remains flat because despite the build-up, there is no draft and we are not fighting any major wars. Military recruitment remains at about the same low level throughout the late '90s and early '00s until the Iraq war when it declines for obvious reasons -- no draft coupled with an unpopular war leads to low recruitment. I don't think you can read any trend from this graph except that when the US needs to fight a war, it spends a lot more money on the military. Also, notice that despite the steady decline in military spending and recruitment, neither number drops to levels anywhere near what they were before WWII.
As regards a majority Spanish-speaking population, this is the best reference I could track down. It doesn't explicitly validate my claim since it only looks ahead 50 years, but I strongly suspect if you do the math based on the growth numbers provided it will prove my projection accurate. http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/natproj.html
The words "Spanish" and "speaking" do not appear anywhere on this page. It merely projects that an increasingly large portion (22.5% by 2050) of the population will be of Hispanic origin. While this may come as a huge surprise to you, a person of Hispanic descent is just as willing and able to learn the English language as anyone else. Some of us even grow up speaking English!
Now let's see if they can get their new Zune to sell half as well without selling it at half the price of a comparable of iPod. That would actually be something to brag about.
ALPS is being developed by PalmSource which is now owned by Access, a Japanese mobile software company. Palm has bought back the Palm name and a perpetual license for PalmOS 5.x (AKA Garnet). Palm's new OS will be Linux-based, just like ALPS but it will not be based on ALPS. (Palm and PalmSource's relationship has soured a bit since they split and Access's buyout of PalmSource appears to have killed it for good.) The Foleo's OS was also Linux-based btw.
As for the resources that were "wasted" on the Foleo, Palm claims it took a loss of $10,000,000 on that device (which they claim they will bring back someday, only time will tell if that's true). They also paid $40,000,000 to Access to buy back the Palm name and perpetual license to Garnet. Now perhaps they could have taken that money and paid HTC to develop a kickass Treo with wi-fi (assuming the U.S. phone carriers didn't force them to cripple it the way they do with other handset makers not named Apple). But they'd still be tied to PalmSource, a company which has let them down before and which is now owned by a company that is more interested in the Chinese market than the U.S. market and HTC, a company which now competes directly against them in the handset market. This is on top of being forced to follow the whims of cellular carriers (IMHO, they're the real reason why Treos don't have wi-fi). I can see why a company like Palm would rather stick to the mid-range and low-end if it gets them out from under the thumb of other companies.
You keep talking about "sexy" hardware and software. But Palm has never really done sexy. The only Palm device which could have ever been called "sexy" was the Palm V and it basically consisted of paying a third party design firm (Ideo, IIRC) to put slightly updated Palm III hardware into a very tiny case and jacking up the price up to $500. Every other device Palm has made has been much more utalitarian in design.
The Treo 650 also improved the camera, keyboard, added dedicated send and hang up buttons, and it modified the memory architecture so that its information is not erased when the battery runs dry. The Treo 680 didn't add a little memory, it more than doubled it from about 24MB to about 64MB while cutting the price by about $200. It also added a revamped phone application which is arguably slicker than the older phone application (which still runs on CDMA Treos). Note that none of these features are what you'd call "innovations" but they do make the device easier and more pleasant to use. The Centro has similarly incremental improvements. It's considerably smaller, lighter, and cheaper than the 680 which all by themselves open the Centro up to a market which otherwise would never consider buying a Treo 600, 650, or 680. Personally, I think the Centro looks better than any Treo I've ever used.
The truth is that Palm has rarely ever been truly "innovative." The Pilot wasn't the first PDA and the Treo wasn't the first smartphone. The geeks whose cred you think is so important scoffed at the Pilot's humble specs until they actually tried the damn thing after Apple killed the Newton. What Palm has always done well is to get the little things right, getting it small enough to be pocketable, maintaining a long battery life, running their devices with simple, easy to use software.
This is why the delays in putting out a new OS is both good and bad for Palm. On the one hand, geeks will continue to bitch until they get something that satisfies their demand for "innovation." On the other hand, the drones who make up the vast majority of the gadget buying public want something that just works. As Palm has continues to hack the Garnet OS to keep it viable, the crashes you mention keep increasing. But bringing out a new OS isn't just a matter of reskinning the old one, it's a long and difficult process. This is especially true when you don't actually own the OS and have to pay the real owner for permission to hack it in the first place. This is exactly the situation that Palm has found itself in during the past few years.
Personally, I think that Palm's current problems are exaggerated. I've seen predictions that Palm is six months away from bankruptcy for the past ten years and they're still around. I don't know the future but don't expect them to disappear anytime soon.
The original Pilot (and later the Palm Pilot) was made by US Robotics and was eventually spun-off into an independent company. Jeff Hawkins and the original Palm team left to start Handspring where they eventually produced the Treo -- the first PalmOS smartphone. Meanwhile a "Palm ecosystem" of companies which licensed the PalmOS had blossomed and Palm split into two companies: PalmOne which continued to make PDAs and PalmSource which was tasked with creating and selling the next generation PalmOS. PalmSource failed. Their next generation OS code-named Cobalt was rejected by all of its licensees including PalmOne. The Palm ecosystem dried up and PalmOne and PalmSource started drifting apart. Both companies looked to Linux in hopes of using it to create the next generation PalmOS. This was supposed to solve the problems which had doomed Cobalt -- high resource requirements and lack of hardware drivers.
At some point during this whole mess -- before Cobalt was released but apparently too late to make a difference -- PalmSource bought the Be software team for its talent and did absolutely nothing with the software. As far as anyone knows, the Be team was put to work on PalmSource's Linux project. Whether or not any of BeOS code has made it into PalmSource's Linux project is anyone's guess. My guess is no. Eventually, the BeOS code appears to have been sold to yet another company which has done nothing with it other than sue projects designed to create a BeOS successor. If you want an argument for the importance of Open Source software, the fate of the brilliant but proprietary BeOS is it.
Since then, PalmSource has bought by Access, a Japanese mobile software company and their Linux project has been named the Access Linux Platform (ALP) and is supposed to be an smartphone OS which is backwards compatible with the vast catalog of existing PalmOS apps. While ALP appears to be coming along nicely, don't expect to see an ALP smartphone outside of the far east as Access has set its sights firmly on the burgeoning Chinese market. After PalmSource was bought by Access, PalmOne bought back the rights to the Palm name and a perpetual license to the current PalmOS and is now just Palm again. Palm is unlikely to use ALP as it has been quietly working on its own Linux-based next generation PalmOS for some time.
Palm bought BeOS in 2001. They could have turned around and shipped a slimmed down version of that (and it was already pretty slim), and had the most advanced mobile operating system on the market at the time. Instead, they've made minor improvements to an archaic OS (crippled by being initially designed for extremely limited hardware) for far too long. In many respects they're in the same position Apple was in in the mid-90s, except there's no NeXTSTEP for them to buy, and there's no Steve Jobs to come back and save the day.
PalmSource bought BeOS, not Palm. Palm split into two companies before the BeOS purchase. PalmSource is a company which was spun off in order to develop and sell the next generation PalmOS. PalmOne was the hardware company which continued to license the PalmOS from PalmSource. While PalmSource did produce a new PalmOS, called Cobalt, none of its licensees -- including PalmOne -- used it to make new devices (supposedly Cobalt's resource requirements and driver problems were the reasons why the OS was rejected). Palm has been making its minor improvements mainly because PalmSource failed to produce a useable OS. While it has hurting them, I have a Palm Treo (I just upgraded from a 600 to a 680) and a LifeDrive and still feel comfortable with the platform. You are right that Palm is in the mid-90s Apple position but we've seen how that turned out. Palm is working on its own Linux-based next generation PalmOS but we're unlikely to see any devices with it until the end of 2008. Maybe they won't survive long enough to make it but I like Palm's devices and hope they make it.
But the day Apple ships that SDK (i.e. sometime in February), it's game over for Palm. The smartphone market has already largely undermined the PDA market, and while Palm has a horse in that race, it was already losing to the BlackBerry. Well, the iPhone is even stiffer competition there. And once that SDK is out, the iPod Touch officially becomes a PDA, and will almost certainly outsell every other non-phone PDA on the market combined, possibly several times over. (The non-phone PDA market is only about 4M units a year.)
At this point, smartphones make up 80% of Palm's revenue and they've been putting out four smartphones per year for the last two years. I don't really see that the Blackberry is better than a Palm outside of its core compentency of being the best e-mail device ever made. I'm personally suspicious of Apple's PDA intentions. When the iPod Touch came out, you couldn't even add appointments to its calendar. And when the Apple SDK comes out, I expect its PDA apps to be yet more stuff that Apple wants to sell you at the iTunes music store. That will be great for people who already eat sleep and breathe Apple but I don't think that it will foster a large and varied ecosystem of developers as quickly as you expect.
But the $400 you pay for the OLPC are tax deductable. And you're also buying a free OLPC for a kid in a poor country. Plus, the OLPC is rugged so you can give it to your kid and not worry that he'll wreck it. So for $400, you get a PC for your kid, a tax deduction, and the warm fuzzies that you're helping a poor kid overseas. That's not such a bad deal.
Sorry, I know a lot of people think it's better than Vista, but when did XP become venerable?? Is there some secret meaning for that word that I don't know?
XP became venerable at around the same time that people who upgraded to Vista started going back to XP. Actually, Windows XP with Service Pack 2, fully patched, and with its built-in firewall enabled is a pretty stable, secure OS--especially relative to other versions of Windows.
It doesn't even hold up well in a feature comparison. The supercheap laptops will likely be bundled with Linux and software like OpenOffice which is pretty damned impressive. What's the Foleo going to have? Probably some proprietary software which feels primitive and feature light.
It's also being marketed all wrong. It's being sold as a "mobile companion" for your smartphone. Phrases like that do not inspire confidence in the device. The Foleo had flop written all over it, so hopefully Palm are going to take stock and produce something more useful.
Actually, the Foleo's OS was based on Linux just like all the supercheap laptops. It didn't have OpenOffice but it did have Documents to Go and the Opera web browser.
I agree with you about the marketing. If the Foleo was going to succeed, it would have to be able to serve as a laptop alternative. Calling it a "Mobile Companion" for your smartphone, sets the bar to low for a $600 device.
Even die-hard Palm fans hated it, renaming it the Flopeo or Fooleo. Palm seriously screwed up with this one, but at least they had the courage to axe it before making complete fooleos of themselves...
The so-called "die-hard" Palm fans over at Palminfocenter (or "Palm-faithful" as some of them like to call themselves). Have hated every Palm device since the Palm m-series back in 2001. With very few exceptions, they've proclaimed every single device Palm has brought out in the last five years to be dud. It looks like Palm has finally agreed with them for a change.
The newest version of Documents to Go has a built-in PDF viewer and yes, there is a native PDF viewer which you can find for free on the 'net. As for video TCPMP, Kinoma, and Coreplayer should all work on your Treo 650. As for Blazer, yeah it sucks but if you stick to wireless optimized sites, you should have better luck.
At least for the people I work with, the answer is that the Palp is too simple, and somewhat as importantly, too expensive for the innards. The iPhone suffers the latter problem, although I have never used one, so I have no idea about it's relative simplicity.
At least everywhere I've worked, Palm devices are dropped in favor of Windows Mobile because the latter are apparently easier to write applications for (I've never written one so don't know), especially complicated applications with hardware hooks. Simple is good, I am told, but if I'm going to carry something that big around in my pocket I want it to be as useful as I can make it- and that's where Windows Mobile works.
What made the Foleo inherently stupid was its reliance on the smartphone. Smartphones are cool and all that, but either they fulfill your portable comms and entertainment needs, or they don't. If they do, you're not going buy anything else to lug around. If they don't, you're not going to buy the smartphone, so forget about any costly addons.
The Eee, on the other hand, has the potential to be a winner. If they can deliver them really cheap (which has yet to be seen), then it's the ultimate satellite PC for a home network.
And somebody please explain why I shouldn't buy the n800...
The only thing the Foleo relied on the smartphone for was e-mail and wireless access. And since it had wi-fi, the Foleo only needed the smartphone's wireless access was when it was away from a hotspot. Despite Palm's insistence on pigeon-holing it as a smartphone add-on, the Foleo was a full-fledged computer in its own right. If it hadn't been so expensive, the Foleo would have been a very good alternative to a low end notebook PC.
I like the Eee but they seen to be gradually raising the price as they come closer to releasing it. Hopefully it will be "the ultimate satellite PC for a home network" because there's a real need for such a device.
The n800? Not that I've used it myself but common complaints are that it's slow, buggy, and has a crappy web browser. I get the impression that you're better off just getting an iPhone -- especially now that Apple has dropped the price.
I have seen absolutely no support for Hawking's view that this was the best invention ever to come out of Palm.
I used to think highly of Hawkins, after hearing the story about him modeling the first Palm Pilot out of a block of wood. But then he started Handspring, and came out with some of the worst PDA designs ever. And why has he never intervened in the horrible button design for the Palm m Series? (If a button is designed to turn on the PDA, you don't want it sticking out so it gets pressed in your pocket!) I do believe his 15 minutes are up.
As someone who owned four Handspring Visors, I couldn't disagree with you more. The Visors may not have been small and pretty like the Palm V but they were fast, rugged, and cheaper than comparable Palm models. The Visor Edge, which was Handpsring's answer to the Palm V was every bit as attractive and elegant as the Palm V. Also, I'm pretty certain that the m series Palms were designed while Hawkins was at Handspring so it hardly seems fair to blame him for its failings.
I rather liked the concept of the Foleo even though I felt that it was under-specced and too expensive for what it was supposed to do. I'm disappointed to see it killed.
The original Handspring Treos, the 180, 180g and 270, were also clamshells which while lighter than newer Treos were a lot clunkier and a lot more fragile than the Treo 600 and subsequent Treo models. By the time I upgraded to the Treo 600 (which has survived repeated drops onto concrete), my Treo 270's hinge had almost fallen off due to treatment which my Treo 600 routinely shrugs off. That experience has generally soured me on clamshells.
As for which bands GSM carriers use, T-Mobile appaears to only use the 850 band for roaming and includes a map of its coverage here.
From the article it seems his thesis is on interstellar dust which is a pretty hot topic among astronomers right now. It's also a topic which requires use of big infrared telescopes which have come into common usage in the recent years. Personally I'm jealous, the man is on cutting edge in every field of endeavour.
"It belongs to a very unusual group of theropod dinosaurs, which are normally meat-eaters. But this one doesn't have any teeth, so what it ate is a mystery," commented Dr Paul Barrett, a dinosaur researcher from the Natural History Museum in London, UK.
Oh my god! The creationists are right. Dinosaurs were vegetarians.
My money is on "Earth is the Cylon home world" or something similarly devious.
For crying out loud. Earth is the 13th colony of Cobol, they say so all throughout the series.
The Cylons were using the fleet to find it (Kara's destiny is to find earth, that's why Leoben was so obsessed with getting her trust). And the Cylons were created by the colonies who have no idea where Earth is. There is no chance at all that it's their homeworld.
Actually if you watch closely, you can see that they have dropped little hints that what the colonials and the Cylons believe is not true or at least incomplete. The most obvious was last year's use of Bob Dylan's "All Around the Watchtower" as the trigger for the four Cylons which showed up in the season finale. Another example is in season two there was the episode where they find "Athena's Tomb" and a map of Earth's skies. Well guess what? We also found out that the twelve colonies names were originally the names of the twelve constellations of the Greek zodiac and that each the orginal flag of each colony bore patterns which match the stars of one of the constellation corresponding to its name. Adama even sees a nebula in the map which he describes as "the Lagoon nebula, astral body M8" -- the exact name and designation which we give to that nebula today. To me all of this implies that Kobol was originally a colony of Earth and not the other way around.
I tend to agree. Except for the killer doctor episode, which was fairly cliched. I liked the episodes on the previous poster's list of "bad" episodes. No show is perfect, and BSG did make its share of filler episodes in season three but I found myself enjoying most of those episodes anyway. You don't need for stuff to blow up every episode -- at least I don't.
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You're thinking too small. We already know that Saturn's moon Titan has enough oil to end our energy problems for a long, long time. Forget Mars, lets to Saturn!
You might want to take a closer look at that graph. It shows that the military spending and recruitment has historically been very low during peacetime. In a time of war, military spending and recruitment grows dramatically and rapidly. Despite the downward trend of the past fifty years, military spending and recruitment today remains much higher than it was before World War II. In fact even after cashing in the "peace dividend," both statistics remained higher than they were before WWII. I'm also reluctant to call the Iraq War uptick "brief." I'm guessing that when the 2007 data is all in, military spending will have gone up, not down -- again due to the Iraq War. And even if the next president abruptly ends the Iraq War, problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan will probably continue to keep our military busy and well-funded through the rest of the decade.
Unless, the United States suffers a huge reversal of fortune (or someone brings about world peace) over the next 100 years, it is a sure bet that the size of our military will be dictated by our status as a world power and will continue to expand and contract to meet our strategic needs -- just as it has for the past two hundred years.
It all depends on how you read that graph. It would be far too simplistic to just say that military spending has been on the decline all along. The graph shows that US military expenditures and recruitment have historically been quite low except for large spikes during wartime. In fact it shows three huge spikes -- the Civil War, World War I, and World War II -- each followed by huge drops in military spending and recruitment. But the most interesting thing is that despite the steady decline in military spending following WWII, the trend reverses itself several times -- during the Korean and Vietnamese wars. After that, we see military steadily drop until the '80s which coincide with president Reagan's military build-up while recruitment remains flat because despite the build-up, there is no draft and we are not fighting any major wars. Military recruitment remains at about the same low level throughout the late '90s and early '00s until the Iraq war when it declines for obvious reasons -- no draft coupled with an unpopular war leads to low recruitment. I don't think you can read any trend from this graph except that when the US needs to fight a war, it spends a lot more money on the military. Also, notice that despite the steady decline in military spending and recruitment, neither number drops to levels anywhere near what they were before WWII.
The words "Spanish" and "speaking" do not appear anywhere on this page. It merely projects that an increasingly large portion (22.5% by 2050) of the population will be of Hispanic origin. While this may come as a huge surprise to you, a person of Hispanic descent is just as willing and able to learn the English language as anyone else. Some of us even grow up speaking English!
Now let's see if they can get their new Zune to sell half as well without selling it at half the price of a comparable of iPod. That would actually be something to brag about.
You mean my mother lied to me?
I for one refuse to drink out of a cheap little paper cup. It's nothing but silver chalice or higher for me.
You'll need a Roomba for that job.
ALPS is being developed by PalmSource which is now owned by Access, a Japanese mobile software company. Palm has bought back the Palm name and a perpetual license for PalmOS 5.x (AKA Garnet). Palm's new OS will be Linux-based, just like ALPS but it will not be based on ALPS. (Palm and PalmSource's relationship has soured a bit since they split and Access's buyout of PalmSource appears to have killed it for good.) The Foleo's OS was also Linux-based btw.
As for the resources that were "wasted" on the Foleo, Palm claims it took a loss of $10,000,000 on that device (which they claim they will bring back someday, only time will tell if that's true). They also paid $40,000,000 to Access to buy back the Palm name and perpetual license to Garnet. Now perhaps they could have taken that money and paid HTC to develop a kickass Treo with wi-fi (assuming the U.S. phone carriers didn't force them to cripple it the way they do with other handset makers not named Apple). But they'd still be tied to PalmSource, a company which has let them down before and which is now owned by a company that is more interested in the Chinese market than the U.S. market and HTC, a company which now competes directly against them in the handset market. This is on top of being forced to follow the whims of cellular carriers (IMHO, they're the real reason why Treos don't have wi-fi). I can see why a company like Palm would rather stick to the mid-range and low-end if it gets them out from under the thumb of other companies.
You keep talking about "sexy" hardware and software. But Palm has never really done sexy. The only Palm device which could have ever been called "sexy" was the Palm V and it basically consisted of paying a third party design firm (Ideo, IIRC) to put slightly updated Palm III hardware into a very tiny case and jacking up the price up to $500. Every other device Palm has made has been much more utalitarian in design.
The Treo 650 also improved the camera, keyboard, added dedicated send and hang up buttons, and it modified the memory architecture so that its information is not erased when the battery runs dry. The Treo 680 didn't add a little memory, it more than doubled it from about 24MB to about 64MB while cutting the price by about $200. It also added a revamped phone application which is arguably slicker than the older phone application (which still runs on CDMA Treos). Note that none of these features are what you'd call "innovations" but they do make the device easier and more pleasant to use. The Centro has similarly incremental improvements. It's considerably smaller, lighter, and cheaper than the 680 which all by themselves open the Centro up to a market which otherwise would never consider buying a Treo 600, 650, or 680. Personally, I think the Centro looks better than any Treo I've ever used.
The truth is that Palm has rarely ever been truly "innovative." The Pilot wasn't the first PDA and the Treo wasn't the first smartphone. The geeks whose cred you think is so important scoffed at the Pilot's humble specs until they actually tried the damn thing after Apple killed the Newton. What Palm has always done well is to get the little things right, getting it small enough to be pocketable, maintaining a long battery life, running their devices with simple, easy to use software.
This is why the delays in putting out a new OS is both good and bad for Palm. On the one hand, geeks will continue to bitch until they get something that satisfies their demand for "innovation." On the other hand, the drones who make up the vast majority of the gadget buying public want something that just works. As Palm has continues to hack the Garnet OS to keep it viable, the crashes you mention keep increasing. But bringing out a new OS isn't just a matter of reskinning the old one, it's a long and difficult process. This is especially true when you don't actually own the OS and have to pay the real owner for permission to hack it in the first place. This is exactly the situation that Palm has found itself in during the past few years.
Personally, I think that Palm's current problems are exaggerated. I've seen predictions that Palm is six months away from bankruptcy for the past ten years and they're still around. I don't know the future but don't expect them to disappear anytime soon.
Here's the Cliff Notes version:
The original Pilot (and later the Palm Pilot) was made by US Robotics and was eventually spun-off into an independent company. Jeff Hawkins and the original Palm team left to start Handspring where they eventually produced the Treo -- the first PalmOS smartphone. Meanwhile a "Palm ecosystem" of companies which licensed the PalmOS had blossomed and Palm split into two companies: PalmOne which continued to make PDAs and PalmSource which was tasked with creating and selling the next generation PalmOS. PalmSource failed. Their next generation OS code-named Cobalt was rejected by all of its licensees including PalmOne. The Palm ecosystem dried up and PalmOne and PalmSource started drifting apart. Both companies looked to Linux in hopes of using it to create the next generation PalmOS. This was supposed to solve the problems which had doomed Cobalt -- high resource requirements and lack of hardware drivers.
At some point during this whole mess -- before Cobalt was released but apparently too late to make a difference -- PalmSource bought the Be software team for its talent and did absolutely nothing with the software. As far as anyone knows, the Be team was put to work on PalmSource's Linux project. Whether or not any of BeOS code has made it into PalmSource's Linux project is anyone's guess. My guess is no. Eventually, the BeOS code appears to have been sold to yet another company which has done nothing with it other than sue projects designed to create a BeOS successor. If you want an argument for the importance of Open Source software, the fate of the brilliant but proprietary BeOS is it.
Since then, PalmSource has bought by Access, a Japanese mobile software company and their Linux project has been named the Access Linux Platform (ALP) and is supposed to be an smartphone OS which is backwards compatible with the vast catalog of existing PalmOS apps. While ALP appears to be coming along nicely, don't expect to see an ALP smartphone outside of the far east as Access has set its sights firmly on the burgeoning Chinese market. After PalmSource was bought by Access, PalmOne bought back the rights to the Palm name and a perpetual license to the current PalmOS and is now just Palm again. Palm is unlikely to use ALP as it has been quietly working on its own Linux-based next generation PalmOS for some time.
PalmSource bought BeOS, not Palm. Palm split into two companies before the BeOS purchase. PalmSource is a company which was spun off in order to develop and sell the next generation PalmOS. PalmOne was the hardware company which continued to license the PalmOS from PalmSource. While PalmSource did produce a new PalmOS, called Cobalt, none of its licensees -- including PalmOne -- used it to make new devices (supposedly Cobalt's resource requirements and driver problems were the reasons why the OS was rejected). Palm has been making its minor improvements mainly because PalmSource failed to produce a useable OS. While it has hurting them, I have a Palm Treo (I just upgraded from a 600 to a 680) and a LifeDrive and still feel comfortable with the platform. You are right that Palm is in the mid-90s Apple position but we've seen how that turned out. Palm is working on its own Linux-based next generation PalmOS but we're unlikely to see any devices with it until the end of 2008. Maybe they won't survive long enough to make it but I like Palm's devices and hope they make it.
At this point, smartphones make up 80% of Palm's revenue and they've been putting out four smartphones per year for the last two years. I don't really see that the Blackberry is better than a Palm outside of its core compentency of being the best e-mail device ever made. I'm personally suspicious of Apple's PDA intentions. When the iPod Touch came out, you couldn't even add appointments to its calendar. And when the Apple SDK comes out, I expect its PDA apps to be yet more stuff that Apple wants to sell you at the iTunes music store. That will be great for people who already eat sleep and breathe Apple but I don't think that it will foster a large and varied ecosystem of developers as quickly as you expect.
But the $400 you pay for the OLPC are tax deductable. And you're also buying a free OLPC for a kid in a poor country. Plus, the OLPC is rugged so you can give it to your kid and not worry that he'll wreck it. So for $400, you get a PC for your kid, a tax deduction, and the warm fuzzies that you're helping a poor kid overseas. That's not such a bad deal.
XP became venerable at around the same time that people who upgraded to Vista started going back to XP. Actually, Windows XP with Service Pack 2, fully patched, and with its built-in firewall enabled is a pretty stable, secure OS--especially relative to other versions of Windows.
Actually, the Foleo's OS was based on Linux just like all the supercheap laptops. It didn't have OpenOffice but it did have Documents to Go and the Opera web browser.
I agree with you about the marketing. If the Foleo was going to succeed, it would have to be able to serve as a laptop alternative. Calling it a "Mobile Companion" for your smartphone, sets the bar to low for a $600 device.
The so-called "die-hard" Palm fans over at Palminfocenter (or "Palm-faithful" as some of them like to call themselves). Have hated every Palm device since the Palm m-series back in 2001. With very few exceptions, they've proclaimed every single device Palm has brought out in the last five years to be dud. It looks like Palm has finally agreed with them for a change.
The newest version of Documents to Go has a built-in PDF viewer and yes, there is a native PDF viewer which you can find for free on the 'net. As for video TCPMP, Kinoma, and Coreplayer should all work on your Treo 650. As for Blazer, yeah it sucks but if you stick to wireless optimized sites, you should have better luck.
Palm also makes Windows Mobile Treos.
The only thing the Foleo relied on the smartphone for was e-mail and wireless access. And since it had wi-fi, the Foleo only needed the smartphone's wireless access was when it was away from a hotspot. Despite Palm's insistence on pigeon-holing it as a smartphone add-on, the Foleo was a full-fledged computer in its own right. If it hadn't been so expensive, the Foleo would have been a very good alternative to a low end notebook PC.
I like the Eee but they seen to be gradually raising the price as they come closer to releasing it. Hopefully it will be "the ultimate satellite PC for a home network" because there's a real need for such a device.
The n800? Not that I've used it myself but common complaints are that it's slow, buggy, and has a crappy web browser. I get the impression that you're better off just getting an iPhone -- especially now that Apple has dropped the price.
As someone who owned four Handspring Visors, I couldn't disagree with you more. The Visors may not have been small and pretty like the Palm V but they were fast, rugged, and cheaper than comparable Palm models. The Visor Edge, which was Handpsring's answer to the Palm V was every bit as attractive and elegant as the Palm V. Also, I'm pretty certain that the m series Palms were designed while Hawkins was at Handspring so it hardly seems fair to blame him for its failings.
I rather liked the concept of the Foleo even though I felt that it was under-specced and too expensive for what it was supposed to do. I'm disappointed to see it killed.
The original Handspring Treos, the 180, 180g and 270, were also clamshells which while lighter than newer Treos were a lot clunkier and a lot more fragile than the Treo 600 and subsequent Treo models. By the time I upgraded to the Treo 600 (which has survived repeated drops onto concrete), my Treo 270's hinge had almost fallen off due to treatment which my Treo 600 routinely shrugs off. That experience has generally soured me on clamshells.
As for which bands GSM carriers use, T-Mobile appaears to only use the 850 band for roaming and includes a map of its coverage here.
From the article it seems his thesis is on interstellar dust which is a pretty hot topic among astronomers right now. It's also a topic which requires use of big infrared telescopes which have come into common usage in the recent years. Personally I'm jealous, the man is on cutting edge in every field of endeavour.
Oh my god! The creationists are right. Dinosaurs were vegetarians.
Actually if you watch closely, you can see that they have dropped little hints that what the colonials and the Cylons believe is not true or at least incomplete. The most obvious was last year's use of Bob Dylan's "All Around the Watchtower" as the trigger for the four Cylons which showed up in the season finale. Another example is in season two there was the episode where they find "Athena's Tomb" and a map of Earth's skies. Well guess what? We also found out that the twelve colonies names were originally the names of the twelve constellations of the Greek zodiac and that each the orginal flag of each colony bore patterns which match the stars of one of the constellation corresponding to its name. Adama even sees a nebula in the map which he describes as "the Lagoon nebula, astral body M8" -- the exact name and designation which we give to that nebula today. To me all of this implies that Kobol was originally a colony of Earth and not the other way around.
I tend to agree. Except for the killer doctor episode, which was fairly cliched. I liked the episodes on the previous poster's list of "bad" episodes. No show is perfect, and BSG did make its share of filler episodes in season three but I found myself enjoying most of those episodes anyway. You don't need for stuff to blow up every episode -- at least I don't.
I really don't understand the name - "Foleo" is a dumb distortion of "folio".
Folio + Treo = Foleo