No, it doesn't. A monopoly simply means that one group controls the means of producing or selling a particular commodity or service. It doesn't automatically include the idea that the monopoly was achieved through unfair competition.
Even if everyone DID suddenly switch to Linux, that's not a monopoly. That's not one group controlling things. There are hundreds of Linux distros; saying that Linux has a monopoly because everyone uses Linux is like saying that music has a monopoly on audio-based entertainment, because 99% of people listen to music. Just because everyone listens to music doesn't mean consumers don't have a choice of which music to listen to, or the choice to not listen to music at all, but rather listen to spoken-word recordings, or recorded sounds of nature, or nothing at all if they feel like it. Who would you go after to break up music's "monopoly"?
It seems that having any kind of WWW-like setup between planets (given the speed of light barrier) would be kind of pointless, or at least inefficient. More likely, large data repositories would be stored in duplicate form on each planet. They'd be updated by bulk dump every so often (depending on how much bandwidth is available), but local requests would be handled locally.
Now the problem is, who could afford to do this? Only large organizations, companies, and governments, probably. Also, sites that depend on relatively low-latency interaction (like Slashdot) rather than simple reference libraries (like dictionary.com) might not have duplicates. More likely, you'd end up with functionally-identical but content-different sites... for example, we'd still have/. here on Earth, but then there'd be Marsdot, Jupidot, Plutodot, etc. each catering to its own local community.
Oh my a can feel the hatred of audiophiles against me right now...
Several months ago, there was another audio-related article on Slashdot, where some self-proclaimed audiophile was decrying how terrible CDs sound, and someone else came back with the perfect squelch:
"You listen with your ears, not your ass, so quit being so anal-retentive."
You have a major contradiction in your post. First you talk about how OGG needs to be a standard, e.g. part of the MPEG-4 standard. Then you talk about how OGG needs to be a de facto standard.
The two are not necessarily the same.
MP3 was a de jure "standard" long before it was a de facto standard. MPEG standards have the weight of the MPEG (Motion Picture Experts' Group) behind them... but they are a consortium of industry concerns, and everything coming from them will be nicely patented, trademarked, and copyrighted where appropriate. The whole point of OGG was to have a high-quality, non-encumbered codec. Having them join the MPEG would entirely defeat the purpose.
You do understand that there's a difference between a company that gets a monopoly because it simply has a better product, and a company that gets a monopoly because of unfair business practices? "Monopoly" doesn't automatically equal "anticompetetive." Besides, if everyone uses Linux all of a sudden, who has the monopoly? Red Hat? Gentoo? Mandrake? Slackware? Debian? Linus Torvalds himself?
It's funny how perpetual motion machines are always showing up, but their "inventors" never want to test them under meaningful conditions.
How about this for a test. You take this car, you put its drive wheels (rear wheels on a DeLorean, right?) on one of those two-wheel spin-mount jobbies that lets a car basically spin its wheels in place, you pit a brick on the accelerator, and you see how long it goes until it fails. Another part fails? Replace it and keep going.
Of course, they would never submit to such a test, no matter what -- because it would be far too easy to show that they're full of crap.
Wind is not tangible. You can't touch it. You can feel it's effects and see it's effects but is it tangible in the same sense as a glass of water?
You're not serious? You think that one particular state of matter (gas) qualifies as "intangible"? What do you think you're TOUCHING when you "feel" wind? That's the wind STRIKING YOU.
Take something like love. Is my love for my girlfriend measurable? Sure I can buy her gifts and tell her I love her but there is no true measure of love because by nature it is intangible. It's this ethereal concept.
Actually, it is measurable. What we call "love" is simply a set of biochemical/biophysical states in (mostly) the brain. I'm not scientist enough to enumerate them, but they can be measured, as can any other physical quantity of the body.
And now here's another twist to the whole thing. Not only are good works the offspring of your faith but you yourself aren't even doing the good works. God is doing them THROUGH you. Pretty neat.
Not neat at all. Massively inefficient. If God really wants good works done, he'd do them himself. How many "good works" have gone wrong because God chose incompetent morons to do his work for him?
If it was sustained by God, then why is Adam and Eve's curse so much more powerful than him? Certainly God must be powerful enough to mold the world into whatever shape he desires. However, humanity now suffers for the sins of two people, so either God let it happen, or God was powerless to prevent it. If he was powerless to prevent it, then he's not all-powerful, and isn't much of a god. If he let it happen, then he's just a bastard.
Once again, why am I punished for another's crimes? Yes, I've certainly done things that Christians would call sins, but I never did anything that would require I be put in a fallen world like this. Presumably my actions since birth have been my fault, but why was I put here in the first place, which is apparently a punishment all its own?
By the way, if you believe God is talking to you, there is another explanation, which is that you are mildly schizophrenic. Which is O.K., alot of people are, and they have drugs that can help.
I always looked at this from the point of view of simple probability. We KNOW that lots of people can lie, or be mistaken, or simply be crazy. We don't KNOW for sure that God has ever spoken to anyone. So when someone says God spoke to them, what's more likely: that an all-powerful superbeing did communicate with them, or that they're insane/lying/mistaken?
One thing to avoid is the trap of thinking that just because people mentioned in the Bible existed, that therefore the supernatural events described in the Bible actually happened. There's a good amount of evidence that most of the main characters in the New Testament were real people who actually existed, but whether Jeshua ben Joseph of Nazareth was actually doing miracles, receiving offers from Lucifer, rising from the dead, etc. is entirely debatable, and unsupported by any evidence.
and more to the point, how can we? just grit your teeth and believe it even if you don't? how?
Heh, I like the way you phrase that. It's an example of the circular logic of how we're supposed to come to having faith in Christ. Let's see... I don't believe in God. So they tell me that I should accept Christ into my heart, and then I'll believe. So in order to believe in God, first I need to believe in Christ. Okay, how do I do that? Well, you just have to DO it. Basically, you can't get there from here.:)
Oddly enough, I've gone through good and bad times in my life, without invoking God at all. So what you're saying is that because you asked God for help in the bad times, he helped you get through them. I didn't ask God for help, yet I got through them anyway. Apparently, God's help isn't all that great, if I can get through bad things as well as you can, without his help.
In fact, I managed to get a great job right out of college, followed by two more with pay raises over the next four years, meet a wonderful woman, and get married. All without once invoking God. There have been bad times in there, naturally, but I never asked God for help (mostly because I don't think asking fictional entities for help will accomplish much). And guess what? The bad times passed, and gave way to good times. These are all natural, normal fluctuations that don't need a mythical deity to explain them. Maybe next time something goes wrong, you should try and see if you can handle it without God. I'm reasonably certain that you'll make your way through just as well without God's "help".
An even better example of a man dying in his prime, is a baby dying shortly after birth. The baby didn't even have time to do anything, but apparently (according to Christianity), God had a good reason to kill it, even if it was a months-long, excruciatingly painful process that the baby did not understand because it wasn't old enough for its brain to comprehend the difference between pain and lack-of-pain.
Just a suggestion, next time you need to smack down some fundie who claims that "God has a plan." Just ask why the plan includes torturing and killing infants.
I'll apologize up front, but this post is going to be pretty harsh. I'm not trying to be rude or mean, but few issues of this magnitude are resolved when everyone tries not to hurt each others' feelings.
Following the story of Genesis, death/decay entered the world through human sin.
So, before Adam and Eve got ejected from Eden, animals never suffered or died? Well, that's an interesting contention... except that the only evidence that anything in the Eden story ever happened, is the text in the Bible. Contrary to that is an Everest-sized pile of evidence indicating that animals existed for billions of years before the first humans ever showed up, and that those animals ate, killed, and slaughtered each other with the same abandon they do today.
One also wonders, if animals never hurt each other pre-sin, then how did they survive? Lions certainly didn't eat plants, and it seems a bit unlikely that the gazelles of the savanna simply walked up to the lions, lay down, and expired, conveniently turning into a nice, pleasant-looking pile of meat in the process.
I certainly don't claim to be a Bible scholar and don't have a good understanding of why God allows so many of the unpleasant things to continue without judgement.
Here's something you apparently don't know: The "Bible scholars" who you seem to respect and trust, don't know either. The only arguments they have to offer are, "God works in mysterious ways," "It's not our place to question God," "The Devil did it," (thus introducing another mythical superbeing into the equation), and so on. No actual explanations come forth. All we get is a usually politened form of, "Don't ask questions." Why? Because, given the world around us, there is no logical explanation for the existence of God. The only way to explain it is to do an end-run around the entire issue, and say that it's beyond our understanding. It's not like they're working on an *actual* explanation to show; there isn't one.
Naturally, this doesn't preclude one from taking God on faith -- that does seem to be the entire point, according to most of Christianity. Faith and logic are pretty much mutually exclusive. If you accept the explanation that "God works in mysterious ways," i.e. whatever it is that God's doing or thinking, he's not going to explain it to us and we wouldn't understand it if he did, then you don't need logic. If I were you, and valued my faith, I wouldn't look too closely into logical explanations. (However, since I'm not you, I strongly encourage you to look into logical explanations of God's existence, since I think the majority of people who have faith would benefit from changing their worldview to one based on logic and reason.)
As far as the lizard shooting blood out it's eye... I'm not sure where that fits into the picture at all. I'd have to say that's pretty creative myself.:)
Yeah, but it's disgusting. I've actually seen film of this lizard doing its thing, and it isn't anything remotely like the majestic beauty of $RANDOM_NATURE_SCENE, which is why I brought it up. The point was that the usual evocations of pleasant, majestic nature scenes are entirely intended to evoke mushy emotions that try to make you feel like there's someone up there. If you actually bother to include *everything* that God supposedly "created," you're a lot less likely to get those mushy feelings.
I have a hard time looking at the Smoky Mountains, the Pacific Ocean, the Rain Forests, the creek running through my back yard, a beautiful sunset every evening, a tropical island, the Big Dipper, Rainbow Falls, the Redwood Forests, a snowcovered hillside,... and not believing that IS "hard evidence" of a creative force much greater than myself or any writer/painter/craftsman/slashdotter could ever dream of possessing.
Really? And when you look at the fifty million people killed during World War II, the twenty million or so who died during the influenza plague of the 1910s, the millions of people today who are still starving and suffering from diseases abolished in the West decades ago, the murders, the rapes, the kidnappings, the cruelty, and the general chaos of human interaction, do you also see that as "hard evidence" of a "creative force"?
Let's even ignore humans, because the usual response is, "humans have free will, they can do what they want, it's not God's fault if they kill each other." How about all the animals that have died horribly over the ages, and suffered pain? Or those that are born deformed, unable to survive more than a few days, hours, or minutes? Those that are attacked by carnivores, torn to shreds while still alive, and eaten? Did you know there's a kind of lizard in the American Southwest that, in order to discourage attackers, actually bursts a vein and shoots a stream of blood out of its eye? Does God get the creative credit for those things, too?
This isn't meant as a troll, or a flame. It's a serious question. I so often hear people talking about the beauty and grandness of nature, and how it makes them feel like there must have been some creative force that made it all, as if there's nothing unpleasant in the world that the creative force must also get credit -- or take responsibility -- for.
So they say, "Our products aren't secure... but our NEW stuff will be! For real! Honest!" And then Palladium comes out. And wonder of wonders, it won't be secure. And they'll say, "Oh, well, yeah, this isn't perfectly secure, but our *NEXT* generation will be! For real! Honest!" And then the next generation will come out, and it will have holes, too.
I'm fairly well convinced at this point that Microsoft's history of poor security technologies and practices is, if not entirely deliberate, at least unconsciously encouraged. An evolutionary defense, perhaps. If products are touted as secure, but aren't really secure, and if the next generation is claimed to be the fix to all the current problems... then the average person/company will probably eat it up. Why?
Because eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and most people don't want to believe that. There is no magic bullet for safety or security. The only way to have anything resembling good security, is to keep working at it. The more you work at it, the better it will be. There's a point of diminishing returns, of course, and if you spend all your time on safety, you'll never get to spend any of your time doing the things that you're protecting... but if you spend no time on security, you have no right to complain when it fails. This goes for computer software, physical security, national security, whatever.
But a lot of people don't understand that. They hear about "new, *really* secure" things, and they think, "Well, once we have that, then we'll be secure, and won't need to think about security any more!" But it doesn't work that way. It never has, and it seems unlikely that it ever will. People need to be made to understand, whether they like it or not, that the only way you can have security, is if you keep working at it. And a lot of people don't want to have to think about failures of security, and what they have to do to prevent them.
The worst part is, no matter what you do, there's always ways around it. Before a year ago, how many people would have thought it absurd that terrorists could simultaneously hijack four airplanes and use them to entirely demolish the World Trade Center towers and severely scar the Pentagon? Surely our security was better than that?
This is not a call to action for our country, or Linux advocacy, or whatever. I'm just trying to analyze why it is that Microsoft can keep getting away with this. I think the main reason is that when Microsoft says things, people believe them, even when what Microsoft says is the same known lies they've been saying for years. Why do they believe? Because human denial is an immensely powerful force. And Microsoft knows it.
Actually, I only mentioned the Pentium bug once in my original post. The other mention (first paragraph, last sentence) was a more general statement delimiting the difference between a CPU that miscalculates things, and a display that has fewer colors.
Yes, that's a much better analogy that I fully agree with:)
I shouldn't have said that there's no material difference between 58k colors and 64k colors (or 12-bit vs. 16-bit, or however you want to characterize it); that was bad phrasing on my part, and I apologize. My point was that the analogy to the Pentium division bug was flawed, in that the two situations were not comparable.
To put it another way... a division bug of that magnitude renders the CPU essentially unusable for everyone, but a MHz misclassification of that magnitude is simply annoying. Although I suppose you COULD argue that the color difference makes the Palm "unusable," but I still maintain that a majority of people would not consider the Palm unusable even if they DID know about the color difference, and ultimately that the Palm color difference is not fatal the way such a division bug would be.
Why is this modded "insightful"? The analogy is horribly crippled. A display that has to approximate 10% of its colors is not going to make any material difference. A CPU that miscalculates things is going to cause *actual* problems.
The odd part is, the last sentence ("Like the Pentium bug...") more or less contradicts the entire purpose of the analogy. I'm beginning to think Target Drone didn't say what he meant to say. The Pentium bug IS a case where users will notice a difference -- namely, incorrect results, weird crashes, etc. In the Palm case, most people wouldn't be able to tell a difference.
Not that I'm saying that the company shouldn't own up, but let's not use false logic to make a point.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it doesn't. A monopoly simply means that one group controls the means of producing or selling a particular commodity or service. It doesn't automatically include the idea that the monopoly was achieved through unfair competition.
Even if everyone DID suddenly switch to Linux, that's not a monopoly. That's not one group controlling things. There are hundreds of Linux distros; saying that Linux has a monopoly because everyone uses Linux is like saying that music has a monopoly on audio-based entertainment, because 99% of people listen to music. Just because everyone listens to music doesn't mean consumers don't have a choice of which music to listen to, or the choice to not listen to music at all, but rather listen to spoken-word recordings, or recorded sounds of nature, or nothing at all if they feel like it. Who would you go after to break up music's "monopoly"?
It seems that having any kind of WWW-like setup between planets (given the speed of light barrier) would be kind of pointless, or at least inefficient. More likely, large data repositories would be stored in duplicate form on each planet. They'd be updated by bulk dump every so often (depending on how much bandwidth is available), but local requests would be handled locally.
/. here on Earth, but then there'd be Marsdot, Jupidot, Plutodot, etc. each catering to its own local community.
Now the problem is, who could afford to do this? Only large organizations, companies, and governments, probably. Also, sites that depend on relatively low-latency interaction (like Slashdot) rather than simple reference libraries (like dictionary.com) might not have duplicates. More likely, you'd end up with functionally-identical but content-different sites... for example, we'd still have
The scary thing is, that encouraged the Scots to build more windmills!
</joke>
"You listen with your ears, not your ass, so quit being so anal-retentive."
ObJoke:
So an encrypted version would be a 'scrambled ogg', eh?
You have a major contradiction in your post. First you talk about how OGG needs to be a standard, e.g. part of the MPEG-4 standard. Then you talk about how OGG needs to be a de facto standard.
The two are not necessarily the same.
MP3 was a de jure "standard" long before it was a de facto standard. MPEG standards have the weight of the MPEG (Motion Picture Experts' Group) behind them... but they are a consortium of industry concerns, and everything coming from them will be nicely patented, trademarked, and copyrighted where appropriate. The whole point of OGG was to have a high-quality, non-encumbered codec. Having them join the MPEG would entirely defeat the purpose.
You do understand that there's a difference between a company that gets a monopoly because it simply has a better product, and a company that gets a monopoly because of unfair business practices? "Monopoly" doesn't automatically equal "anticompetetive." Besides, if everyone uses Linux all of a sudden, who has the monopoly? Red Hat? Gentoo? Mandrake? Slackware? Debian? Linus Torvalds himself?
It's funny how perpetual motion machines are always showing up, but their "inventors" never want to test them under meaningful conditions.
How about this for a test. You take this car, you put its drive wheels (rear wheels on a DeLorean, right?) on one of those two-wheel spin-mount jobbies that lets a car basically spin its wheels in place, you pit a brick on the accelerator, and you see how long it goes until it fails. Another part fails? Replace it and keep going.
Of course, they would never submit to such a test, no matter what -- because it would be far too easy to show that they're full of crap.
If it was sustained by God, then why is Adam and Eve's curse so much more powerful than him? Certainly God must be powerful enough to mold the world into whatever shape he desires. However, humanity now suffers for the sins of two people, so either God let it happen, or God was powerless to prevent it. If he was powerless to prevent it, then he's not all-powerful, and isn't much of a god. If he let it happen, then he's just a bastard.
Once again, why am I punished for another's crimes? Yes, I've certainly done things that Christians would call sins, but I never did anything that would require I be put in a fallen world like this. Presumably my actions since birth have been my fault, but why was I put here in the first place, which is apparently a punishment all its own?
One thing to avoid is the trap of thinking that just because people mentioned in the Bible existed, that therefore the supernatural events described in the Bible actually happened. There's a good amount of evidence that most of the main characters in the New Testament were real people who actually existed, but whether Jeshua ben Joseph of Nazareth was actually doing miracles, receiving offers from Lucifer, rising from the dead, etc. is entirely debatable, and unsupported by any evidence.
So, what about people who HAVE accepted Christ, and God, and do everything exactly the way God wants? Why do THEY get cancer?
Oddly enough, I've gone through good and bad times in my life, without invoking God at all. So what you're saying is that because you asked God for help in the bad times, he helped you get through them. I didn't ask God for help, yet I got through them anyway. Apparently, God's help isn't all that great, if I can get through bad things as well as you can, without his help.
In fact, I managed to get a great job right out of college, followed by two more with pay raises over the next four years, meet a wonderful woman, and get married. All without once invoking God. There have been bad times in there, naturally, but I never asked God for help (mostly because I don't think asking fictional entities for help will accomplish much). And guess what? The bad times passed, and gave way to good times. These are all natural, normal fluctuations that don't need a mythical deity to explain them. Maybe next time something goes wrong, you should try and see if you can handle it without God. I'm reasonably certain that you'll make your way through just as well without God's "help".
An even better example of a man dying in his prime, is a baby dying shortly after birth. The baby didn't even have time to do anything, but apparently (according to Christianity), God had a good reason to kill it, even if it was a months-long, excruciatingly painful process that the baby did not understand because it wasn't old enough for its brain to comprehend the difference between pain and lack-of-pain.
Just a suggestion, next time you need to smack down some fundie who claims that "God has a plan." Just ask why the plan includes torturing and killing infants.
One also wonders, if animals never hurt each other pre-sin, then how did they survive? Lions certainly didn't eat plants, and it seems a bit unlikely that the gazelles of the savanna simply walked up to the lions, lay down, and expired, conveniently turning into a nice, pleasant-looking pile of meat in the process.
Here's something you apparently don't know: The "Bible scholars" who you seem to respect and trust, don't know either. The only arguments they have to offer are, "God works in mysterious ways," "It's not our place to question God," "The Devil did it," (thus introducing another mythical superbeing into the equation), and so on. No actual explanations come forth. All we get is a usually politened form of, "Don't ask questions." Why? Because, given the world around us, there is no logical explanation for the existence of God. The only way to explain it is to do an end-run around the entire issue, and say that it's beyond our understanding. It's not like they're working on an *actual* explanation to show; there isn't one.Naturally, this doesn't preclude one from taking God on faith -- that does seem to be the entire point, according to most of Christianity. Faith and logic are pretty much mutually exclusive. If you accept the explanation that "God works in mysterious ways," i.e. whatever it is that God's doing or thinking, he's not going to explain it to us and we wouldn't understand it if he did, then you don't need logic. If I were you, and valued my faith, I wouldn't look too closely into logical explanations. (However, since I'm not you, I strongly encourage you to look into logical explanations of God's existence, since I think the majority of people who have faith would benefit from changing their worldview to one based on logic and reason.)
Yeah, but it's disgusting. I've actually seen film of this lizard doing its thing, and it isn't anything remotely like the majestic beauty of $RANDOM_NATURE_SCENE, which is why I brought it up. The point was that the usual evocations of pleasant, majestic nature scenes are entirely intended to evoke mushy emotions that try to make you feel like there's someone up there. If you actually bother to include *everything* that God supposedly "created," you're a lot less likely to get those mushy feelings.Let's even ignore humans, because the usual response is, "humans have free will, they can do what they want, it's not God's fault if they kill each other." How about all the animals that have died horribly over the ages, and suffered pain? Or those that are born deformed, unable to survive more than a few days, hours, or minutes? Those that are attacked by carnivores, torn to shreds while still alive, and eaten? Did you know there's a kind of lizard in the American Southwest that, in order to discourage attackers, actually bursts a vein and shoots a stream of blood out of its eye? Does God get the creative credit for those things, too?
This isn't meant as a troll, or a flame. It's a serious question. I so often hear people talking about the beauty and grandness of nature, and how it makes them feel like there must have been some creative force that made it all, as if there's nothing unpleasant in the world that the creative force must also get credit -- or take responsibility -- for.
So they say, "Our products aren't secure... but our NEW stuff will be! For real! Honest!" And then Palladium comes out. And wonder of wonders, it won't be secure. And they'll say, "Oh, well, yeah, this isn't perfectly secure, but our *NEXT* generation will be! For real! Honest!" And then the next generation will come out, and it will have holes, too.
I'm fairly well convinced at this point that Microsoft's history of poor security technologies and practices is, if not entirely deliberate, at least unconsciously encouraged. An evolutionary defense, perhaps. If products are touted as secure, but aren't really secure, and if the next generation is claimed to be the fix to all the current problems... then the average person/company will probably eat it up. Why?
Because eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and most people don't want to believe that. There is no magic bullet for safety or security. The only way to have anything resembling good security, is to keep working at it. The more you work at it, the better it will be. There's a point of diminishing returns, of course, and if you spend all your time on safety, you'll never get to spend any of your time doing the things that you're protecting... but if you spend no time on security, you have no right to complain when it fails. This goes for computer software, physical security, national security, whatever.
But a lot of people don't understand that. They hear about "new, *really* secure" things, and they think, "Well, once we have that, then we'll be secure, and won't need to think about security any more!" But it doesn't work that way. It never has, and it seems unlikely that it ever will. People need to be made to understand, whether they like it or not, that the only way you can have security, is if you keep working at it. And a lot of people don't want to have to think about failures of security, and what they have to do to prevent them.
The worst part is, no matter what you do, there's always ways around it. Before a year ago, how many people would have thought it absurd that terrorists could simultaneously hijack four airplanes and use them to entirely demolish the World Trade Center towers and severely scar the Pentagon? Surely our security was better than that?
This is not a call to action for our country, or Linux advocacy, or whatever. I'm just trying to analyze why it is that Microsoft can keep getting away with this. I think the main reason is that when Microsoft says things, people believe them, even when what Microsoft says is the same known lies they've been saying for years. Why do they believe? Because human denial is an immensely powerful force. And Microsoft knows it.
Actually, I only mentioned the Pentium bug once in my original post. The other mention (first paragraph, last sentence) was a more general statement delimiting the difference between a CPU that miscalculates things, and a display that has fewer colors.
Yes, that's a much better analogy that I fully agree with :)
I shouldn't have said that there's no material difference between 58k colors and 64k colors (or 12-bit vs. 16-bit, or however you want to characterize it); that was bad phrasing on my part, and I apologize. My point was that the analogy to the Pentium division bug was flawed, in that the two situations were not comparable.
To put it another way... a division bug of that magnitude renders the CPU essentially unusable for everyone, but a MHz misclassification of that magnitude is simply annoying. Although I suppose you COULD argue that the color difference makes the Palm "unusable," but I still maintain that a majority of people would not consider the Palm unusable even if they DID know about the color difference, and ultimately that the Palm color difference is not fatal the way such a division bug would be.
Why is this modded "insightful"? The analogy is horribly crippled. A display that has to approximate 10% of its colors is not going to make any material difference. A CPU that miscalculates things is going to cause *actual* problems.
The odd part is, the last sentence ("Like the Pentium bug...") more or less contradicts the entire purpose of the analogy. I'm beginning to think Target Drone didn't say what he meant to say. The Pentium bug IS a case where users will notice a difference -- namely, incorrect results, weird crashes, etc. In the Palm case, most people wouldn't be able to tell a difference.
Not that I'm saying that the company shouldn't own up, but let's not use false logic to make a point.
Two references: kbabel (babel fish, H2G2) and "tlhIngan Hol" (Klingon language, Star Trek).