Cox Crow

Apple was first to market the personal digital assistant, the Newton in 1993, and was somewhat ahead of its time. After Palm shipped one at the right size and price, the market for handheld general-purpose computers has done fairly well. And other devices, particularly phones, have become general-purpose computers. These general-purpose computers are often sold as special-purpose devices, but since they are general-purpose, their uses are limited only by the imagination.

Take the iPod for example. It’s a music player, right? But soon after its release, users were running Linux on it. And in the iPod’s second iteration, users could sync contact and calendar data with the device. It’s still a music player, but it has a great deal of the functionality of the typical personal digital assistant.

IDC reports that handheld sales are slipping, with only 2.1 million units shipped. Meanwhile, Apple shipped 2,016,000 iPods in the third quarter.

What’s the difference? The one is sold as a small computer; the other, to play my tunes.

Oracle has come up with a client package that does not involve 700MB of unnecessary crap in order to install 150MB of redundant crap. They call this the Oracle Instant Client. Bear in mind that this is Oracle’s idea of instant.

After you register with the Oracle Technology Network, download four zip files, and decompress them, there are certain steps that must be taken to actually make this work, except they don’t.

For those of you with available SBC DSL, the price is right: $19.95.

Effective Monday, Nov. 1, SBC Yahoo! DSL will be available for $19.95 a month for new DSL residential customers who commit to a one-year term and subscribe to the popular SBC unlimited local and long distance calling plan, All Distance.

Unfortunately the price is only available to new customers. Other than that, this is an excellent move to increase market penetration.

Our price competition is not CATV, but dial access. Unmetered dial-up access in combination with flat-rate local phone call pricing is functionally identical, for most purposes, to any form of broadband. It’s sufficient, so customers are not willing to pay the $20-$29 marginal cost of changing service.

Aside from the price, the only barrier left to adoption is actual availability.

The girls were playing with some shells the other day, and the Big Sister tells the Little Sister,

Here, talk to Nemo.

The Little Sister holds the shell up to her ear to listen to the sounds of the ocean.

Hi! Nemo!

“Whatcha doin?” we ask. The Little Sister answers.

Tal king shell phone.

I started reading When Jesus Became God the other day. It strikes me as the story begins that, while the details differ, people change very little over time. We tend to kill each other over faith, over quibbles about the nature of our god. Yet those quibbles change over time, as one warring tribe wins over another.

These semantic differences are enough to set tribes apart. And tribes, set apart, attack the Other.

We also kill over the color of our sox.

Ron Suskind wrote, in The New York Times Magazine, a disturbing examination of President Bush’s faith. One of the many Mr. Suskind spoke with was Jim Wallis, of the Sojourners, who had worked with Mr. President during the transition. The article concludes

[Bush's conversation with God] is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk about with George W. Bush. That’s impossible now, he says. He is no longer invited to the White House.

“Faith can cut in so many ways,” he said. “If you’re penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentence and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing…. But when it’s designed to certify our righteousness — that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There’s no reflection.

“Where people often get lost is on this very point,” he said after a moment of thought. “Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not — not ever — to the thing we as humans so very much want.”

And what is that?

“Easy certainty.”

Larry Staton pointed out City Data. It collects some interesting data that is otherwise dispersed on the web, including ZIP codes, census data, building starts, media coverage, weather, and schools. It uses maps from the EPA EnviroMapper, which has a pretty nifty collection of geographic data.

Verizon says,

(FYI: 30 Mbps may be faster than the normal Internet can handle on one connection or PC. Yes - it’s that fast!)

Uh oh, I fear for that Internet.

SBC today announced a DSL and WiFi access bundle. If you purchase the SBC Yahoo! DSL product, you can bundle in FreedomLink for only $1.99 per month.

Glenn Fleishman, at Wi-Fi Networking News, has an analysis of the offering.

since you’ve been using A9.com recently, virtually everything at Amazon.com is automatically an additional π/2% (1.57%) off for you. Collecting this discount is zero effort on your part. It will be applied automatically at checkout (it will happen whether you use the shopping cart or our 1-Click Shopping®). You don’t need to do anything to get this discount except keep using A9.com as your regular search engine.

We don’t advertise this additional discount that we give in exchange for using A9.com, so if you want your friends to know about it, please tell them.

Guideposts, well-known as an advocate of God-less Communism and other un-American activities, has a story this month called “The Heart of Delafield,” about Bob Lang’s “mission to save small-town America.”

Perhaps the 9/11 Commission should have hired Valdis Krebs before making its recommendation on how to refine the nomenklatura. Its difficult to see how the so-called intelligence community can be a community if they do not communicate. Inserting a new director above the incommunicado factions does not much improve the lines of communication between those groups.

Interestingly enough, the structure of our intelligence organizations was strongly influenced, not just by turfwars as usual, but by a President seeking to keep them off-balance, and revised by Congress in response to certain behaviors against the citizenry, most often associated with another President though by no means confined to his administration.

Let us see if Zimran’s theory that media owners are rational actors who will not let their political interests harm their economic interests, and thus that there is nothing to fear from a communications oligarchy, bears empirical scrutiny.

Oh, silly me; those are all economic interests.

I would like a full-text searchable index of Dilbert and other graphical arts.

The price of a good will reflect demand for that good.

But John Tierney appears have forgotten Econ. 101, if he ever knew it.

We have our house for sale. It’s a 3 bedroom, 1 bath, ranch, in Mahopac, New York, about 60 miles north of the City. We’re asking $379,000. As you move closer to the City, selling prices increase. A two-story Cape Cod, of about the same age and with similar amenities to ours, but on 1/4 acre and in Yorktown Heights, 12 miles south of us, was offered for $450,000. A two-bedroom, 1 bath, 900 sq. ft. cottage on less than 1/4 acre in the village of Katonah was listed for $475,000. Listings in southern Westchester for similar properties are even higher. Similar properties in the city list for seven digits.

This pattern is not peculiar to New York, nor is it confined to large cities. All other things being equal, village homes are worth more than others.

What does this tell us? That demand exceeds supply. We’re given no details of the survey of preferences which Mr. Tierney cites in stating that 85% of people prefer suburban homes. Extrapolating from myself, what we say we prefer is more for our dollar: If I’m paying 7 figures, I damn well want a godawful huge monstrousity. Given small apartment A, in poor school system A, for $500,000; or large house B, with a lawn, in highly-regarded school system B, for $500,000, buyers prefer to say B.

If 85% of people did hate them, urban properties would be cheaper.

David Sucher asks for a fisking of Tierney’s paean in the New York Times magazine. That’s so crude. I think of three things when that word is used:

1. a catcher
2. fsck(8), which, as wikipedia reminds us “has come into use among UNIX system administrators as a written euphemism of [expletive deleted]“
3. ….

Google, here is where you’ll find the unusable website of the Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls, New York.

The Mortgages weblog notes a fiscally irresponsible proposal by the current administration to permit Federal insurance of mortgages granted with no money down.

The problem here is not so much with the reduced down payment, but with the insurance. The initial lender assumes no risk for the failure of the loan, and so has no incentive to ensure that the borrower is able to repay the debt. The Federal government, in its infinite wisdom, will pay the lender, either on default or by reducing the costs of transferring the loan. Which means that we will be paying the lender.

Warning: ümami café® reserves the right not to serve any patron who appears to be under the influence of too much sugar.

Watching Super Size Me. (Rick, Naperville’s schools are in the film.)

On a related note, I saw an advertisement at the mall food court tonight: America needs dirt.