Throughout the past few months, as Palm users began to migrate elsewhere, there have been talks about embracing the open-source community (i.e. Linux) and placing special emphasis on inter-operability. Many Mac users, in fact, have chosen Palm, their reasons being obvious. When one gets to think about this trend, Apple followed a similar path when Mac OS X was introduced. An alliance, in some sense, appears to be the best way to tackle giants and benefit from each other’s strengths. As an example, the wonderful design of the Macs, in particular their user interface, made Jaguar one of the most appealing and the most reliable ‘Linux distributions’. Also it made it commonplace in the market of laptops.

Let us hope that likewise, we may soon see Linux in our pockets and our schedules under Linux — something which was miserably lacked despite Linux-Palm projects like KPilot.

CNET have have just reported that Palm pursue this possibility further:

PalmSource moved a little closer to the open-source community this week.

The maker of the Palm OS has joined the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum, or CELF, pushing ahead with its plans for a version of the Palm OS that runs on top of Linux.

Cited by: PalmAddict

Mice are used excessively while much more precise and efficient ways of navigation exist. Generally, when using an application often enough, one needs to learn and practice commonly-used menu accelerators, e.g. CTRL+S to save, or CTRL+ENTER to despatch an E-mail message.

Taking accelerators into a more advanced level, application invocation can be purely keyboard-based.

For Windows users:

Windows allows items located at the desktop to have CTRL+ALT shortcuts assigned to them. I have used this feature extensively for many years. The only flaw is that the desktop rapidly becomes bloated. To get these shortcuts set up, steer towards Properties in the context menu.

Linux/Mac (Panther):

Keyboard shortcuts can be assigned to applications/commands using XBindkeys. Example shortcuts are given in my XBindkeysRC file.

If you are using KDE, you can also use window manager accelerators or mouse gestures, for example ALT+mouse primary buttons to drag windows around.

The HP Tablet PC has just exceeded 1 million sales. Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) from Microsoft said the following:

At any other company that’d be considered an outstanding success. Getting a million people to do ANYTHING is pretty tough.

Walking around the TechFest this week I came to the realization that the Tablet PC is dead.

In the general sense, tablets may not be ideally mobile and handy tools, but they appear to be gnawing at sales of PDA‘s and laptops. The figures challenge critique about their size and reliability. Slashdot recently reported and boasted Linux installations on the Tablet PC, which makes one wonder about the direction tablets may take.

Palm have recently looked into the possibility of replacing Palm OS with Linux on their devices, as well as the provision for Cobalt, which makes Palm-powered handhelds run much, much faster. The next Palm, which is due to be unveiled this spring, should incorporate Cobalt, whose exclusion from the Tungsten T5 was a great disappointment to many.

Cited by: PalmAddict

or software vendors, support is a key problem and a significant source of expense. For this very reason, only few high-end products are made avaliable to Mac and Linux users. Quite simply, too many Linux distributions require different support and too many unexpected errors can crop up. It turns out that revenue comes before religion (relating to open standards and inter-operability) in today’s industry.

According to Slashdot, advertisers have devised ways to overcome ad blocking.

Pop-ups can always be blocked if the browser aims to do so — that is if your browser is your friend and does not have its conflicting interests a la Microsoft. This is a race between advertisers and angel Web browser developers. As long as you patch up your browser, you should be on safe grounds. Allow me to explain why.

An advertiser can force download of a pop-up window content. It can also force display. It cannot, however, know if the operating system puts the window in focus, hides it, or sends it a ‘kill’ signal. A smart advertiser will request that you press an object in the pop-up, but again, the operating system or browser can fake it. The spammer-versus-filter analogy might help here.

Related link: Pure-CSS ad blocking for Mozilla Firefox

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

A popular article from Joel on Software explains about the way Microsoft-owned sites exploit/misuse cookies.

…One day, Expedia could start offering higher fares to customers who have more than a million dollars in their Investor stock portfolio. There’s not really anything technically impossible about this, and it’s probably legal, too…
 
…The scary thing is that if you use Internet Explorer, Microsoft controls your web browser…

Certain design bugs are so common that we have become too blind to spot them. An essay titled Ten Most Persistent Design Bugs makes some excellent observations.

• If the computer loses power for more than a few thousandths of a second, it throws everything away.
• Designers offer no way for users to discover why a given menu or option has been dimmed (grayed out), nor how to turn it back on.
• 15 Dec 2008 sorts as being before 2 Jan 1900