Looking Forward to Palm’s ‘Nova’

Posted January 4, 2009, 11:42 p.m.

This coming week may turn out to be a dream for us nerdy types. The MacWorld Expo, an annual event held every January, kicks off Tuesday with a keynote address by Apple VP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller. While MacWorld is a traditional launching-pad for new, spiffy Apple products, this year comes with an unexpected shadow overhead: this will be Apple’s last year as a participant at MacWorld, and the keynote will be given by Schiller instead of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. This, essentially, means the end of the conference; what is MacWorld without Apple’s participation?

But I, being a bit of an oddball, am not focused on Apple this week. I’m less enamored with Apple than I used to be for a number of reasons that I’ll get into later (and a few I’ve gotten into before), and I have my eye on one other potentially-groundbreaking announcement scheduled for this week.

Palm, maker of Treo and Centro smartphones running the ancient-but-user-friendly Palm OS ‘Garnet’ or modern-but-giant-kludge Windows Mobile, is on the verge of a make-or-break announcement: the long-awaited, Linux-based mobile operating system code-named ‘Nova’ and devices to run it. Announcements of ‘Nova’ and its supporting hardware are expected at the CES trade show on Thursday.

Ever since I bought my first Palm OS device, a Handspring Visor Pro PDA in 2002, I’ve loved Palm OS. It has its flaws, and it is definitely showing its age—millennia in computer terms—but it is simple, friendly, and functional. I bit-the-bullet and bought a BlackBerry in November, which I do like very much so far, but I’m still really rooting for Palm to regain its former glory. I could go on-and-on about how they got where they are today—an also-ran in the very industry they created—but that doesn’t matter now. Palm has to hit a home-run on Thursday if it expects to survive.

I hope it does.

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

Without justice, mercy would be indifference to wrong: without mercy, justice would be vindictive.

Those who understand freedom as the radically arbitrary license to do just what they want and to have their own way are living in a lie, for by his very nature man is part of a shared existence and his freedom is shared freedom.

At its birth, science was synonymous with open-mindedness, with a way of thinking that banished dogmas and questioned beliefs. As it evolved, however, it also turned itself into ideology, belief, and prejudice.

Yet ever since the days of Adam, man has been hiding from God and saying, ‘God is hard to find.’

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Much harm may result from bad company, and we are inclined by nature to follow what is worse than what is better.

[The vote is] the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

The spiritual reading of a text must start with its literal sense. Otherwise we can easily make the text say what we think is convenient, useful for confirming us in our previous decisions, suited to our own patterns of thought.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Ideally, science is a process, not a position or a belief system.

The more laws and restrictions there are, the poorer people become.

The pure, clean water of spiritual truth is placed in rusty containers, and the subsequent failings of the church down through the centuries should not be projected onto the faith itself, as if the water had been the problem.

But once you find the truth, you ought to be prepared to stand on the street corner and use all your gifts to right the wrong.

The Sacrament [of Confession] gives us a double dose of what we need: forgiveness of our sins and training in humility.

History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.

When the law contradicts what most people regard as moral and proper, they will break the law. . . .

On the other hand, if you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.

When schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse.