I too appreciate your comments as relatively rare gems in a maelstrom of, as you say, rubbish. I'm sorry to see you go, but understand your doing so.

I guess, if the ship's not sinking, the rats must be the ones not leaving...

As for scifi recommendations, I had a blast reading Douglas Adams (his five-part trilogy, as well as Heart of Gold), Ender's Game, and, perhaps surprisingly, Edgar Burroughs' Mars trilogy as well as Jules Verne -- ancient, but technically scifi. If you're open to unknown short works, do pay a visit to 365tomorrows:
http://www.365tomorrows.com/about/

Live long and prosper.

I'm not, I'm just trying to see things their way. I haven't used a Mac since they started using colour. I fully agree that DRM is a Bad Thing, but DRM and lock-down are two different things -- all I'm trying to say here is, not all of us (viz., most of our parents) are cut out to bash on a command line, they just want things to Work, Dammit(tm). That's the kind of folks who let the technicians take care of oil changes, defragmentation, and what-have-you. Offering an OS upgrade as basically a one-click deal, well, that's one less phone call to the son-in-law who'd rather be out with his buddies.

Keep in mind, Apple has been all about vendor-lock-in almost from day one (that is to say, at least from the Lisa days), so this isn't exactly a horrible new thing ... it's a horrible old thing.

My sentiments as well, it's a good thing if it allows non-tinkerers to safely not tinker, so to speak.

It's really not that much different from the "Women's Volvo" idea that Volvo toyed around with at one time, where you'd only fill up fuel and wind screen wiper fluid and actually couldn't open the bonnet even if you wanted to. But why would you want to, if you're just using it to get from A to B? If you're a tinkerer, get a more tinker-friendly car.

...which would hurt much less!

On the Apple side, the theory seems to be that you can't have their sw without their hw.

On the MS side, that would mean you can't have their sw without ... what, exactly? It's nigh-on impossible to shut down the "IBM PC clone" platform, for which many of us would choose a *nix over Windows, anyhow. So we're looking at something akin to the lock-down that's going on on the Playstation platform (which seems to be somewhat ineffective, but shhh).

It's been a long time since that was my first raction to a Microsoft product, but this thing looks neat in every sense of the word -- a fine UI to throw some code together on a small display; and it reminds me of ChipWits, Lego Mindstorm and other such easily graspable perspectives on what is undeniably a very complicated topic.

The thing is, of course, how much integration this app has with the rest of the system. It can evidently hook into the file system, and I wonder if it can know, ask, or be told what other applications are installed and what they're up to (that is more or less what the HackMaster app did on PalmOS, which was exceedingly powerful yet relatively simple given that it was an event-driven (as opposed to multitasking) OS).

I say godspeed to this project, and I hope they'll allow others to follow in their footsteps.

...so you say. ;-p

http://www.simplynoise.com/

Set it to brown noise and turn on oscillation, and you'll be golden. Use with good head phones. Or at least, works wonders for me when there are roadworks outside or coworkers jabbering on telephone conferences.

Well, yes ... in theory.

The key (no pun intended) is to make sure your public key is distributed as widely as possible in an authoritative way, hence key-signing parties. But in practice, how many key-signing parties have you ever been to, or even heard of? That's why, if I could give people my public key along with my email address, they'd immediately have the means to reach me "on a secure channel". Also, if you do need to share a crypto key, it had better be in a way that diminishes the risk of corruption (for manual entry, most commonly in the form of typos).

Anyway, the point is moot. My public key is published on my personal web site, and used by ... nobody. What is really needed is some of the Big Movers such as GMail to properly support proper encryption (S/MIME and/or GPG) -- it's such a shame that, for instance, the FireGPG and GMail S/MIME plug-ins are discontinued instead of assimilated.

Because smartphones are not pda's.

I *could* have imagined this making a comeback with the introduction of NFC features in phones, but then why doesn't this exist for Bluetooth? Sadly, today's phone manufacturers cater to the young must-have-a-new-phone-at-least-twice-a-year crowd who want 3D graphics and MyFaceckr integration and are perfectly happy with a mediocre *phone book* rather than a proper *address book*.

I have used *up* several Palm Pilots, and my brother has equally used *up* several Psion Series 5's, but we have had to move on and get smartphones (Android for me, iPhone for him), but we both secretly miss our beloved pda's incredibly much.

I think it can store about 3K, definitely less than 4K.
If not for that (obscure) limit, I would have made an edge-to-edge QR including my public key and everything.

Apart from that, I've learned that the most useful cards limit themselves to containing only solid, non-changing information. A home or office address is not to be considered unchanging, especially if you order hundreds of cards and aren't Jeff Bezos (who, I would wager, hasn't much use for business cards anyway).

Hahhhhh... sigh. Nowadays I've replaced my trusty T3's with an Android phone.

Android has GPS! Android has 3D graphics! Android has Ba-dum-Tish! ...but the Palm is still the superior *PDA*, and by a wide margin at that. It seems the industry has forgotten how to make proper digital assistants, and are only able to produce popular blingware.

As microbee points out below, yes there is "Bump" and so on, but they don't pass the actual data directly; they pass the data in roundabout ways, and if you "bump" an app it really just sends the download link to the app market instead of just sending the gorram app.

Exactly.
While not the type for business cards per se, I do carry calling cards. They contain only my most basic information (my name, as well as personal email address and mobile phone number), with same embedded in a QR code for easy digital capture.

I incidentally was asked to order a box of business cards, but only managed to hand out four or five of them before I changed office ... and phone number ... and office again ... and again. But the paper stock and format is GREAT for writing down grocery lists and other such notes; my dad used punch cards for decades.

From the article:
"The latest Trojan horse for Google’s Android operating system has been seen posing in Chinese third-party app stores as legitimate programs such as Wallpaper apps."

Is it just me or do these things invariably trace back to wallpaper apps? People* must be real suckers for these things. And here I am, writing *productivity* apps ... *smacks forehead*

I just had to leave my calling card here, on account of my signature.
Bye now...

Or swing by RePet?