Several sites are running an article on the recent statistical figure: laptops sales surpassed desktop sales in the States.

Will it take another 5-10 years until PDA‘s outsell laptops? Hardware is becoming smaller and cheaper; CPU speed increases rather slowly; RAM matters very little at this point where the O/S just doesn’t require it. So, smaller units might be equally good. To get a convenient workspace, one can attach an external monitor and other peripherals to the PDA while having the choice to just pull the PDA out of the pocket.

A hardware fault in outdated Palm devices is now forcing PalmOne to pay. An enormous number of people are entitled for a replacement. The wording in Slashdot:

After years of denying the problem with bad backup capacitors, Palm is settling a class action suit. If you have a dead Palm m100, m105, or m125, fill out the paperwork, and send it in, Palm will replace it with a new unit…

You can get all the necessary papers as PDF‘s from this site. Does that open to doors to similar exchange policies? Ones involving other Palm models with other known defects?

Open Source software might slowly conquer the market according to this item from IT Manager’s Journal:

Is the enterprise software business dying? Is anybody out there buying new licenses? Based on news from the past few weeks, it seems that there are very few buyers. The collapse of new licensing revenue isn’t news — it started five years ago — but the latest news makes it look like a permanent and accelerating fact of life for software vendors.

Regarding operating systems and the take on computers in general, Clayton Hallmark from Argentina predicts that low cost computers from Asia will bring Microsoft to its end.

MOBILIS apparently goes for only $220 in India

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

Intel are approaching dangerous territories as they now embed Microsoft-specific functionality (namely DRM) at hardware level. From DIGIT:

It will get worse before it gets better, according to your point of view, because Intel continues behind the scenes to push hard on the trusted computing modules and Microsoft’s future OS is expected to implement these features in full.

This politically-incorrect move gives one more reason to opt for AMD, who are crushing Intel already.

Following a previous item on using Wikis for correspondence, I decided to share a prophetic view on one communication method, which I believe to be spam-free and highly convenient. Have a look at the figure below:

A synthetic view of what future RSS aggregations might comprise

One can create channels of communication and broadcast message to friends, colleagues and family (and vice versa). This can definitely work once more people are ‘RSS-enabled’. This idea essentially converts correspondence into feeds. I once proposed unifying newsgroups (NNTP) and feeds, which is a similar step forward.

This method is spam-proof. In E-mail, blocking of messages that do not arrive from known people (whitelist) means that genuine, unexpected messages will be thrown away. With RSS there is no such problem. One need not receive message, but listen to them instead. Nobody will be listening to sources of spam.

There are Open Source projects that claim to be able to convert PDF files to HTML. See, for example:

• pdftohtml
• pdf2html

None of the tools which I have come across and tested appears to work in a satisfactory manner. It appears that a L^AT_EX (or equivalent) source is required; then, tools such as L^AT_EX 2html or L_yX2html can be used with great success.

Personal experience has shown that commercial Windows products will not do a good job either. Needless to mention, screenshots of pages are out of the question because they neglect to treat text properly. That is probably why PDF is not truly open (yet it is secure) and feelings about it are somewhat mixed.

On the contrary, many tools exist for converting HTML (which is open) into PDF. See a Google survey to convice yourself that it is so.

A one way conversion is always a bad thing

This short publication about the History of PDA‘s presents a nice pictorial collage of devices, from the very early days until the emergence of the Palm Pilot.
 
 

• Also mentioned in PalmAddict