The pattern of there being no apostrophes among possessive pronouns
seems pretty regular to me. It makes a reasonable amount of sense
as well. These are all very frequently used words and thus (as you
might expect) are all irregular forms. Thus, the operation of forming
the possessive (an adjective) from the noun is not a mechanical
"add apostrophe 's'" process. (It's my observation that frequently
used things in language get more attention and therefore are more
likely to get "customized".)
The only question is, will this be so much better than existing ISA's to eventually replace them? -- even if only for specific applications like high-performance computing.
A scheduler is the piece of software that brings you the illusion of multi-tasking.
I think you mean multiprocessing. Even so, that's
not entirely accurate: you can easily have a computer with 64 processors
and true multiprocessing, and you would still use a scheduler to assign
tasks to the processors.
But it's different in Baghdad because, as we all know, Iraq is a third-world hell hole populated by murderous, religious fanatics that we don't care to understand.
No, it's different in Baghdad because the US went in and created a power
vacuum in a country with a history of violence between different ethnic
groups. Under Saddam, there was some order to the whole thing
because there was a strong central authority not to be fucked with.
(Of course, there was still lots of killing then, maybe just not
quite as much.)
Right now, the power vacuum is sustaining itself because
anyone who tries to become a leader is viewed as a puppet of the US
and/or gets killed by someone with an opposing viewpoint.
The main problem in Baghdad isn't that there are too few people in the
United States who really understand them. The main problem is that
there are groups who would fight were there nobody to stop them, and
there isn't anyone to stop them, because nobody is in control.
You're playing with hypotheticals here. It is certainly conceivable that, if a large number of VT students were all carrying concealed weapons that, when the shooting broke out, someone would have shot the nutcase. On the other hand it is conceivable that, if a large number of VT students were all carrying concealed weapons, there may have been a number of accidental or mistaken shootings at the same time.
Sure, had VT been swarming with gun-toting vigilantes, it's possible that
there might have been some accidental shootings today.
But would there have been SIXTY? Adding up the current
number of casualties (32) and
injuries (29), it would appear that the gunman shot about that many people.
Even if there had been 10 vigilantes who were very bad marksmen and each of
them accidentally shot an innocent bystander before finally
one of them got the right guy, that still would've been a much better
outcome.
Yes, I suppose mass panic could ensue, and you could have a sort of
critical mass self-sustaining chain reaction of vigilantes all shooting
the wrong guy, but that doesn't seem very likely.
There's no way you'd get even close to killing 32 people with a knife.
Wondering if that was true, I read over part of a list of mass murders.
Incidentally, I do not recommend this. It's depressing and sickening.
Anyway, the majority of them did involve guns, I guess because that's just an
easier way to kill people. But sadly, yes, you can kill lots of people with
a knife. It happened in Japan only a few years ago -- a mentally unstable guy entered a school
and killed 8 children, and wounded several others. There were also two
stories of people going nuts and killing several people with an axe.
On a more serious note, in present-day Russia, the Red Square really
does eject -- and beat and arrest -- stars[1] when they show up to
demonstrate against the government. Things are getting kinda shaky over there,
it would appear.
The difference between Red Rectangle and Red Square is confusing because,
if you read the article, they are different things. From the article:
The researchers propose that similar conditions are contributing to the extreme symmetry of another system, the Red Rectangle, whose central star is cooler than that of the Red Square.
On top of that, I've -never- seen a Dvorak keyboard. I'm sure I could find some online if I looked
Well, there is this one.
And here's the page for the original design concept.
All I can say is that when I first saw this, all I could think
was "Oh HELL yes!".
Now that this thread has reminded me of it, I'm half thinking of switching
to the Dvorak layout just to manufacture a way to justify buying one of
these things. But it's a stretch -- they will not be cheap.
Apart from the fact that this thing is just waaay cool, can you imagine
the improvement in user interface that would result from having keyboard
shortcuts shown directly on the keyboard rather than having them
buried in 2 or 3 levels of menu at the top of the screen? I can only
assume that would be one of those "wow, this is exactly how it should
have worked all along" moments.
Of course, it's
not perfect. Some keyboard commands are sequences of keys,
and there is no way to show the sequences directly on the keyboard all
at once (hmm, although you could show them as animations!), but still
it could be made so that as you type a sequence, the state of the
keyboard changes in response, showing what following keys are legal and what
they do.
On a side note, this keyboard was developed by some Russian guys, who
would be accustomed to having to deal with various keyboard layouts,
and the designer has written a great article on keyboard
layouts.
And finally, check out the
download page for one of their other products. I found it amusing.
About the only 'arbitrary' command I can think of is the '%' key -- I've never made a connection between it and parentheses.
The '%' character is just about the most natural ASCII character I can think
of for the purpose it has in vi and vim. The character
itself makes a
pretty good ideograph for two opposing things: it's a symmetrical image
with two circles on opposite sides, with a line in the middle to show
separation between them. It's kinda like a yin-yang symbol[1]. So it
makes perfect sense as a key for bouncing between pairs of opposites.
For what it's worth, a symbol specific to parentheses might not be
ideal, since the '%' key works on other types of brackets as well
("{}" and "[]").
On a side note, I guess this may be why the '%' character is used
to denote an associative array in Perl. Associative arrays are
sets of pairs of things, and the '%' character seems to make a
good symbol for that as well.
I'm ashamed of the way the press covered this story. Journalists are
known for putting horrible puns in their headlines, and they have a
certain standard to live up to with that. By titling TFA "Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?", they have missed an obvious opportunity to do that:
it should have been called "Plight of the Bumblebee".
Oh wait, I take it back. I just checked Google News, and actually there is an article with exactly
that title. So, balance is restored and the press is behaving
normally, although I'm still ashamed of them.
Let's look at the companies that developed Blu-Ray and HD-DVD
and are fighting a format war, trying to get their own format
to win. Blu-Ray was developed by Sony. HD-DVD was developed
by Toshiba and NEC. All three of these companies are Japanese.
Now let's look at the companies that have announced they are going
to be format-agnostic, sell dual-format players, and sidestep the
format war. According to the summary, LG already introduced such
a product, and Samsung has announced plans to release one as well.
These two companies are both Korean.
I don't want to read too much into this, but it seems like while
the Japanese are busy trying to own the market by owning the
format, the Koreans plan to start selling players as soon as
possible, removing the major barrier (format uncertainty) that
is holding back adoption. This, combined with the huge increase in build
quality and improved reputation of Korean products in the last
few years, may pay off big time for the Koreans. While the
Japanese manufacturers are busying believing that Japan owns
the market and all that remains is for them to settle the
format question among themselves in a contest of Japanese
corporate leverage versus Japanese corporate leverage, the
Koreans may come in and take the market by selling more
sensible, appealing products.
Rather than juggle all three, there is no reason why the cell phone can't do everything and more. After all a computer, whether it is in a P.C., Cellphone, or what ever is still a computer.
So far, I've never seen a cell phone that will let me look at my
calendar while I'm talking on the phone. Or enter an item
into my to-do list. Or look up some contact information that a
friend of mine doesn't have. (*ring* *ring* "Hey, do you have Jeff's
phone number?" "Sure, got it right here.")
There is a definite positive correlation between the time you need
your organizational information (calendar, contacts, etc.), and times
that you are on the phone. And that's why, to me, in the ideal world,
my PDA is separate from my phone.
Now, if the two were to snap together so they can communicate and so
I don't have to keep track of two separate things, that would be
helpful.
I think at the end of the day it all depends on what you need to support. If you're supporting a single high performance system, well then a hand optimized kernel makes sense.
Only insofar as Linux can't get full performance with a stock kernel.
Which brings up two questions:
Is there really a difference?
If so, is it a necessary difference?
I am not a Linux expert (although I've been using various flavors of
Unix and Linux for 17 years), but I know there are plenty of versions of
Unix that don't ever require kernel recompiles. Maybe someone who is
an expert with Linux can explain whether a custom kernel really does
provide performance improvements (aside from "I saved 10 kilobytes
of RAM").
And if recompiling really does make a measurable improvement in
performance, it would also be nice to know whether that's an
inherent issue or whether there might be ways to make the stock
kernel build perform just as well as virtually any custom build.
That is, would it be possible to eliminate the difference if it
were a major goal of the Linux development effort to do so?
It doesn't look like anyone wants to talk about what the real issue is. The International Produce Market is right across the parking lot from The Milk Pail, which has a much larger selection of higher quality produce
Not to mention some damn fine (real) vanilla extract! Yummmmm....
== Grammar peeve alert. Skip it if you don't care about using the right
word at the right time. ==
They are not "insuring that they are being properly recognized" as the
summary says. If they were insuring something, they would talk to an
agent, get a policy, and pay premiums. Instead, they are ensuring
recognition for their work.
The high-G force helps add to the notion of "few creature comforts.";-)
Actually, it's only 0.88g. Which is still a LOT for acceleration in a
car, but nothing like the 6-10g that people can handle momentarily before
they start to black out.
I often use ssh/x to connect to work with p2p downloading at the same time. The ssh/x response is horrible. I'd like to be able to shape the traffic so my ssh/x connection gets absolute priority
Traffic shaping is the only way to really do that, but if you have a
simpler goal, there is a quick, easy solution. The simpler goal is not
to have ssh get absolute priority but to instead have good response
most of the time. The easy solution to this is to use p2p software
that allows limiting its own maximum bandwidth. Find the maximum
bandwidth your connection supports, and then set the p2p program to
top out at about 80% or 90% of that.
I did this with Azureus, and it worked really well. Azureus has a
built-in bandwidth usage graph, so I just turned that thing on and
set the max upload speed to various values. When you keep the
bandwidth cap relatively low, the graph shows a basically even
line across the top indicating more or less constant bandwidth usage.
But when you take the cap too high, the graph gets very jagged very
quickly. That indicates you've hit the maximum. For me, that happened
at about 43 or 44 kB/s, so I keep the upload bandwidth cap at around
35 to 40 kB/s, which works great.
There are still times when things will slow down. If I'm doing this
and I start sending e-mail with an attachment (or do some other kind
of upload), then both will slow down. That's where this overly
simple method fails. But most of the time, I'm not doing that.
It's funny how Access owns the code, yet they're not doing a damned thing with it. They've halted distribution of a product that isn't competing with their business, and if history is any indicator, they aren't ever going to release any BeOS-related software ever.
I don't think that's a fair characterization. The current shipping
version of Palm OS is Palm OS 5.x. Several years ago, after Palm had
bought Be (in which I believe they got both source code and talent),
Palm created Palm OS 6. This had lots of multimedia capabilities,
supposedly based on BeOS.
Here's the problem, though: this was a little bit after Palm split
itself into PalmOne and PalmSource, the former being the hardware
portion of the company and the latter being the software portion.
PalmSource had OS 6 ready, and they even released a Palm OS Simulator
that you could run on Windows. I have a copy and even used it to
verify that my company's
Palm OS software would run OK on Palm OS 6. It definitely existed.
But, although Palm OS 6 definitely existed (in fact, they released at
least 6.0 and 6.1), it was a bit of a flop. It was PalmSource that
made the code, but PalmOne (the hardware company) never actually
released any devices with Palm OS 6 installed. And Palm OS isn't
like Windows or Linux: it's not modular where you can just get some
drivers and run the OS on any hardware and it detects what hardware
you actually have and configures itself for that. Instead, there is a custom
build of Palm OS for every device released. So it basically has to
come on the device from the factory in order to be able to use it.
PalmOne controlled what OS release came on the device from the
factory, and they never chose to release a device with OS 6 on it.
At that point, OS 6 was basically dead in the water. Then
later ACCESS bought PalmSource and announced they were ditching
all the effort behind OS 6 and substituting a Linux kernel
instead. Palm OS 6 had been based on its own custom kernel
(which was quite possibly descended from BeOS as well).
So, this isn't really a "buy up patents" business model. Instead,
it's a company that let their technology stagnate for a while,
then decided it was time to do something new, but didn't quite
pull it off. Then they decided to switch to Linux, and who knows
what will happen with that (although it's a better idea than the
previous one, I think).
In other words, no PalmOS on their Linux phone. They've been "planning" it for years. They announced they'd be releasing it in 2006. 2007 will be at least half over, and they'll still be "planning" it. Liars.
Yeah, lying is the only possible explanation why it isn't out yet.
Because, as we all know, major rewrites of operating systems are
always delivered on time.:-)
My personal guess is that they fully intend to release a Linux-based
operating system with a Palm OS compatibility layer, but this simply
takes a lot of time, and they probably aren't paying very many people
to work on it, which makes it take even more time.
Sure, MiniDisc was a flop, but if you want to see a real
flop of an audio format, you can do better than that. First of
all, there's quadraphonic
vinyl, but even those were a huge success compared with Digital Compact Cassette.
I never understood school schedules. It has been shown that teenagers naturally wake up later in the day, and that elementary school students wake up earlier. Yet it is the elementary schools that start at 8:30 and the high schools that start at 7:30.
One possible reasoning it's hard to understand is that you're
assuming the purpose of school is mainly to educate kids, and
you're trying to find something that follows logically for
that. I suggest questioning that assumption. School is 25%
about learning stuff and 75% about social conditioning, so
getting students to wake up early, which is the normative
thing, is a priority.
Also, when I went to school (which, admittedly, is now quite
some time ago), it was the same time (8:30am) for all 12 years.
This is the type of thing that varies a lot from one area to
the next.
It didn't hurt anything? My "automatic" clock that I bought a few years ago is now worthless.
[ . . . ] The government owes me a new automatic clock.
Depending on why you bought it, the clock manufacturer might be the
one who owes you a new clock. Just after the law
was passed that changed the schedule, which I believe was about 2
years ago, I was in the market for an automatic clock. So I shopped
around a bit, and I discovered it was hard to tell how these clocks
actually worked from the piss-poor labeling on the boxes I saw in
the stores. Having just gotten my first cell phone, I thought, hey,
this is a perfect opportunity to use it to do something I've never
been able to do before, and I started calling the manufacturers'
1-800 numbers while right there in the store to ask them questions.
(Ooh! That is so cool! I'm right here in the store and
I can call the manufacturer!)
After an infuriating conversation with one person whose answer
to every question was "it has a microchip inside it, which is
like a computer brain" (which wouldn't have been so bad had
she not angrily insisted it was a valid answer), I eventually talked
to some people who actually knew something. It turns out there
are two types of clocks which are both labeled "automatic".
The first kind is slaved to a radio clock (specifically, the
US Government's WWVB radio in Fort Collins, CO, which covers a
good chunk of the entire continent). The second kind is
simply nothing but a clock that doesn't sync to anything at
all and which some person (probably a marketing or product
development person) has decided is accurate enough that they
can remove the knob to set it! These do have buttons and
knobs so you can set the time zone, and they have calendars
so they will adjust for DST, but the actual oscillator in
them can't be adjusted, and of course the DST schedule can't
be changed either.
Now, here's the irritating part: when I called all these people,
I asked all of them how their clocks were going to cope with
the change in DST rules coming in 2007. They all basically
said I would have to do exactly what you did: set it twice
in the fall and twice in the spring. I asked them why
I would want to buy an "automatic" clock that was actually
twice as much work as a regular clock, and none of them
really had an answer. But the point is this: the companies
that made the clocks knew all about this and continued to sell
clocks that they knew 2 years in advance would not work right.
They had time to design new models and they didn't.
On a side note, another thing I figured out that the clock
industry has a special code word for "clock which
has the ability to slave itself to a radio signal". That
code word is "atomic". It makes a certain amount of
sense since ultimately WWVB's time is derived from an
atomic clock. But the same thing is true
of ntpd, and nobody calls it "atomic".
Slashdot Mirror
(I want my MTV)
(You want your MTV)
(He wants his MTV)
(She wants her MTV)
(It wants its MTV)
(We want our MTV)
(They want their MTV)
The pattern of there being no apostrophes among possessive pronouns seems pretty regular to me. It makes a reasonable amount of sense as well. These are all very frequently used words and thus (as you might expect) are all irregular forms. Thus, the operation of forming the possessive (an adjective) from the noun is not a mechanical "add apostrophe 's'" process. (It's my observation that frequently used things in language get more attention and therefore are more likely to get "customized".)
Or running Java. Or CLR.
I think you mean multiprocessing. Even so, that's not entirely accurate: you can easily have a computer with 64 processors and true multiprocessing, and you would still use a scheduler to assign tasks to the processors.
You mean like the Transbay Tube which is part of the BART system?
As someone else pointed out, I'm not sure how you'd deal with the issue of water pressure, but the technology to do a tube does definitely exist.
No, it's different in Baghdad because the US went in and created a power vacuum in a country with a history of violence between different ethnic groups. Under Saddam, there was some order to the whole thing because there was a strong central authority not to be fucked with. (Of course, there was still lots of killing then, maybe just not quite as much.) Right now, the power vacuum is sustaining itself because anyone who tries to become a leader is viewed as a puppet of the US and/or gets killed by someone with an opposing viewpoint.
The main problem in Baghdad isn't that there are too few people in the United States who really understand them. The main problem is that there are groups who would fight were there nobody to stop them, and there isn't anyone to stop them, because nobody is in control.
Sure, had VT been swarming with gun-toting vigilantes, it's possible that there might have been some accidental shootings today. But would there have been SIXTY? Adding up the current number of casualties (32) and injuries (29), it would appear that the gunman shot about that many people. Even if there had been 10 vigilantes who were very bad marksmen and each of them accidentally shot an innocent bystander before finally one of them got the right guy, that still would've been a much better outcome.
Yes, I suppose mass panic could ensue, and you could have a sort of critical mass self-sustaining chain reaction of vigilantes all shooting the wrong guy, but that doesn't seem very likely.
Wondering if that was true, I read over part of a list of mass murders. Incidentally, I do not recommend this. It's depressing and sickening.
Anyway, the majority of them did involve guns, I guess because that's just an easier way to kill people. But sadly, yes, you can kill lots of people with a knife. It happened in Japan only a few years ago -- a mentally unstable guy entered a school and killed 8 children, and wounded several others. There were also two stories of people going nuts and killing several people with an axe.
In Soviet Russia, the Red Square ejects stars.
On a more serious note, in present-day Russia, the Red Square really does eject -- and beat and arrest -- stars[1] when they show up to demonstrate against the government. Things are getting kinda shaky over there, it would appear.
[1] Garry Kasparov, specifically.
The difference between Red Rectangle and Red Square is confusing because, if you read the article, they are different things. From the article:
Well, there is this one. And here's the page for the original design concept. All I can say is that when I first saw this, all I could think was "Oh HELL yes!". Now that this thread has reminded me of it, I'm half thinking of switching to the Dvorak layout just to manufacture a way to justify buying one of these things. But it's a stretch -- they will not be cheap.
Apart from the fact that this thing is just waaay cool, can you imagine the improvement in user interface that would result from having keyboard shortcuts shown directly on the keyboard rather than having them buried in 2 or 3 levels of menu at the top of the screen? I can only assume that would be one of those "wow, this is exactly how it should have worked all along" moments.
Of course, it's not perfect. Some keyboard commands are sequences of keys, and there is no way to show the sequences directly on the keyboard all at once (hmm, although you could show them as animations!), but still it could be made so that as you type a sequence, the state of the keyboard changes in response, showing what following keys are legal and what they do.
On a side note, this keyboard was developed by some Russian guys, who would be accustomed to having to deal with various keyboard layouts, and the designer has written a great article on keyboard layouts.
And finally, check out the download page for one of their other products. I found it amusing.
The '%' character is just about the most natural ASCII character I can think of for the purpose it has in vi and vim. The character itself makes a pretty good ideograph for two opposing things: it's a symmetrical image with two circles on opposite sides, with a line in the middle to show separation between them. It's kinda like a yin-yang symbol[1]. So it makes perfect sense as a key for bouncing between pairs of opposites.
For what it's worth, a symbol specific to parentheses might not be ideal, since the '%' key works on other types of brackets as well ("{}" and "[]").
On a side note, I guess this may be why the '%' character is used to denote an associative array in Perl. Associative arrays are sets of pairs of things, and the '%' character seems to make a good symbol for that as well.
[1] Or I guess I really mean a Taijitu.
I'm ashamed of the way the press covered this story. Journalists are known for putting horrible puns in their headlines, and they have a certain standard to live up to with that. By titling TFA "Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?", they have missed an obvious opportunity to do that: it should have been called "Plight of the Bumblebee".
Oh wait, I take it back. I just checked Google News, and actually there is an article with exactly that title. So, balance is restored and the press is behaving normally, although I'm still ashamed of them.
Let's look at the companies that developed Blu-Ray and HD-DVD and are fighting a format war, trying to get their own format to win. Blu-Ray was developed by Sony. HD-DVD was developed by Toshiba and NEC. All three of these companies are Japanese.
Now let's look at the companies that have announced they are going to be format-agnostic, sell dual-format players, and sidestep the format war. According to the summary, LG already introduced such a product, and Samsung has announced plans to release one as well. These two companies are both Korean.
I don't want to read too much into this, but it seems like while the Japanese are busy trying to own the market by owning the format, the Koreans plan to start selling players as soon as possible, removing the major barrier (format uncertainty) that is holding back adoption. This, combined with the huge increase in build quality and improved reputation of Korean products in the last few years, may pay off big time for the Koreans. While the Japanese manufacturers are busying believing that Japan owns the market and all that remains is for them to settle the format question among themselves in a contest of Japanese corporate leverage versus Japanese corporate leverage, the Koreans may come in and take the market by selling more sensible, appealing products.
So far, I've never seen a cell phone that will let me look at my calendar while I'm talking on the phone. Or enter an item into my to-do list. Or look up some contact information that a friend of mine doesn't have. (*ring* *ring* "Hey, do you have Jeff's phone number?" "Sure, got it right here.")
There is a definite positive correlation between the time you need your organizational information (calendar, contacts, etc.), and times that you are on the phone. And that's why, to me, in the ideal world, my PDA is separate from my phone.
Now, if the two were to snap together so they can communicate and so I don't have to keep track of two separate things, that would be helpful.
Only insofar as Linux can't get full performance with a stock kernel. Which brings up two questions:
I am not a Linux expert (although I've been using various flavors of Unix and Linux for 17 years), but I know there are plenty of versions of Unix that don't ever require kernel recompiles. Maybe someone who is an expert with Linux can explain whether a custom kernel really does provide performance improvements (aside from "I saved 10 kilobytes of RAM").
And if recompiling really does make a measurable improvement in performance, it would also be nice to know whether that's an inherent issue or whether there might be ways to make the stock kernel build perform just as well as virtually any custom build. That is, would it be possible to eliminate the difference if it were a major goal of the Linux development effort to do so?
Not to mention some damn fine (real) vanilla extract! Yummmmm....
Ah, but wouldn't that make you more comfortable, at least afterwards? :-)
== Grammar peeve alert. Skip it if you don't care about using the right word at the right time. ==
They are not "insuring that they are being properly recognized" as the summary says. If they were insuring something, they would talk to an agent, get a policy, and pay premiums. Instead, they are ensuring recognition for their work.
Actually, it's only 0.88g. Which is still a LOT for acceleration in a car, but nothing like the 6-10g that people can handle momentarily before they start to black out.
Traffic shaping is the only way to really do that, but if you have a simpler goal, there is a quick, easy solution. The simpler goal is not to have ssh get absolute priority but to instead have good response most of the time. The easy solution to this is to use p2p software that allows limiting its own maximum bandwidth. Find the maximum bandwidth your connection supports, and then set the p2p program to top out at about 80% or 90% of that.
I did this with Azureus, and it worked really well. Azureus has a built-in bandwidth usage graph, so I just turned that thing on and set the max upload speed to various values. When you keep the bandwidth cap relatively low, the graph shows a basically even line across the top indicating more or less constant bandwidth usage. But when you take the cap too high, the graph gets very jagged very quickly. That indicates you've hit the maximum. For me, that happened at about 43 or 44 kB/s, so I keep the upload bandwidth cap at around 35 to 40 kB/s, which works great.
There are still times when things will slow down. If I'm doing this and I start sending e-mail with an attachment (or do some other kind of upload), then both will slow down. That's where this overly simple method fails. But most of the time, I'm not doing that.
I don't think that's a fair characterization. The current shipping version of Palm OS is Palm OS 5.x. Several years ago, after Palm had bought Be (in which I believe they got both source code and talent), Palm created Palm OS 6. This had lots of multimedia capabilities, supposedly based on BeOS.
Here's the problem, though: this was a little bit after Palm split itself into PalmOne and PalmSource, the former being the hardware portion of the company and the latter being the software portion. PalmSource had OS 6 ready, and they even released a Palm OS Simulator that you could run on Windows. I have a copy and even used it to verify that my company's Palm OS software would run OK on Palm OS 6. It definitely existed. But, although Palm OS 6 definitely existed (in fact, they released at least 6.0 and 6.1), it was a bit of a flop. It was PalmSource that made the code, but PalmOne (the hardware company) never actually released any devices with Palm OS 6 installed. And Palm OS isn't like Windows or Linux: it's not modular where you can just get some drivers and run the OS on any hardware and it detects what hardware you actually have and configures itself for that. Instead, there is a custom build of Palm OS for every device released. So it basically has to come on the device from the factory in order to be able to use it. PalmOne controlled what OS release came on the device from the factory, and they never chose to release a device with OS 6 on it.
At that point, OS 6 was basically dead in the water. Then later ACCESS bought PalmSource and announced they were ditching all the effort behind OS 6 and substituting a Linux kernel instead. Palm OS 6 had been based on its own custom kernel (which was quite possibly descended from BeOS as well).
So, this isn't really a "buy up patents" business model. Instead, it's a company that let their technology stagnate for a while, then decided it was time to do something new, but didn't quite pull it off. Then they decided to switch to Linux, and who knows what will happen with that (although it's a better idea than the previous one, I think).
Yeah, lying is the only possible explanation why it isn't out yet. Because, as we all know, major rewrites of operating systems are always delivered on time. :-)
My personal guess is that they fully intend to release a Linux-based operating system with a Palm OS compatibility layer, but this simply takes a lot of time, and they probably aren't paying very many people to work on it, which makes it take even more time.
Sure, MiniDisc was a flop, but if you want to see a real flop of an audio format, you can do better than that. First of all, there's quadraphonic vinyl, but even those were a huge success compared with Digital Compact Cassette.
One possible reasoning it's hard to understand is that you're assuming the purpose of school is mainly to educate kids, and you're trying to find something that follows logically for that. I suggest questioning that assumption. School is 25% about learning stuff and 75% about social conditioning, so getting students to wake up early, which is the normative thing, is a priority.
Also, when I went to school (which, admittedly, is now quite some time ago), it was the same time (8:30am) for all 12 years. This is the type of thing that varies a lot from one area to the next.
Depending on why you bought it, the clock manufacturer might be the one who owes you a new clock. Just after the law was passed that changed the schedule, which I believe was about 2 years ago, I was in the market for an automatic clock. So I shopped around a bit, and I discovered it was hard to tell how these clocks actually worked from the piss-poor labeling on the boxes I saw in the stores. Having just gotten my first cell phone, I thought, hey, this is a perfect opportunity to use it to do something I've never been able to do before, and I started calling the manufacturers' 1-800 numbers while right there in the store to ask them questions. (Ooh! That is so cool! I'm right here in the store and I can call the manufacturer!)
After an infuriating conversation with one person whose answer to every question was "it has a microchip inside it, which is like a computer brain" (which wouldn't have been so bad had she not angrily insisted it was a valid answer), I eventually talked to some people who actually knew something. It turns out there are two types of clocks which are both labeled "automatic". The first kind is slaved to a radio clock (specifically, the US Government's WWVB radio in Fort Collins, CO, which covers a good chunk of the entire continent). The second kind is simply nothing but a clock that doesn't sync to anything at all and which some person (probably a marketing or product development person) has decided is accurate enough that they can remove the knob to set it! These do have buttons and knobs so you can set the time zone, and they have calendars so they will adjust for DST, but the actual oscillator in them can't be adjusted, and of course the DST schedule can't be changed either.
Now, here's the irritating part: when I called all these people, I asked all of them how their clocks were going to cope with the change in DST rules coming in 2007. They all basically said I would have to do exactly what you did: set it twice in the fall and twice in the spring. I asked them why I would want to buy an "automatic" clock that was actually twice as much work as a regular clock, and none of them really had an answer. But the point is this: the companies that made the clocks knew all about this and continued to sell clocks that they knew 2 years in advance would not work right. They had time to design new models and they didn't.
On a side note, another thing I figured out that the clock industry has a special code word for "clock which has the ability to slave itself to a radio signal". That code word is "atomic". It makes a certain amount of sense since ultimately WWVB's time is derived from an atomic clock. But the same thing is true of ntpd, and nobody calls it "atomic".