Palm Talks CES, webOS 1.3.5 Details

as far as I can tell - the only one that cares that much is a person whose entire enterprise is little more than a solitary man with a messy apartment which may or may not contain a chicken.

Small-time developers are important because they make some really creative apps, often free. But you need to attract those big development houses, too. All those games on the iPod Touch commercials are made by big development houses with dozens of programmers.

Ares won't matter for anything. They came late to the game, and they're having trouble attracting developers and users alike.

Palm's misstep with the dev community early on hurt them greatly.

Still, as I said, the general dev pool does grow each day. Maybe this tool will herd some towards Palm.

http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/

my what a difference a year makes. how quickly we forget the nonsense we post.

never bet against America.

Are you really stupid enough to think that October 1929 came and BAM! *immediately* we had widespread misery?

Stick around. The ride has only BEGUN.

It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock's new book, "Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?" (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they're wrong, they're rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert's predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and news magazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.

"Amid this bad news, however, never forget that our country has faced far worse travails in the past. In the 20th Century alone, we dealt with two great wars (one of which we initially appeared to be losing); a dozen or so panics and recessions; virulent inflation that led to a 21 1⁄2% prime rate in 1980; and the Great Depression of the 1930s, when unemployment ranged between 15% and 25% for many years. America has had no shortage of challenges. Without fail, however, we've overcome them. In the face of those obstacles – and many others – the real standard of living for Americans improved nearly seven-fold during the 1900s, while the Dow Jones Industrials rose from 66 to 11,497. Compare the record of this period with the dozens of centuries during which humans secured only tiny gains, if any, in how they lived. Though the path has not been smooth, our economic system has worked extraordinarily well over time. It has unleashed human potential as no other system has, and it will continue to do so. America's best days lie ahead." – Warren Buffett

"Well, we have a complex financial system which we have proven that we can make mistakes. But more fundamental than that is the innovation, the fact that you can create new companies, that people are willing to take risk and invest, that there's great science going on. This country still has the best universities, the best science, and we're going to tune our system of capitalism, you know. The idea that you have a lot of short-term loans covering long-term needs, the amount of leverage that was there, there are definitely some lessons. But the fundamentals of the system, a marketplace-driven system where we invest in education and a great infrastructure for the long-term, that's continued. And, you know, I'll bet there are some inventions that took place in that fall in the darkest hour: People were working on new drugs, new chips, new robots and things to make life better for everyone in the decades ahead." – Bill Gates

http://www.cnbc.com/id/33940689

America, rah rah, etc. etc. I'm a patriot, I love my country. But I also question whether our fundamentals *are* sound. Our universities are excellent, but the last 20 years has seen a real defunding of higher education from the state, which has left great universities like the UC system twisting in the wind. Our public education system is really quite bad. Our infrastructure is deteriorating. Our health care system is a horror story for most of the industrial world. And our politics are increasingly bitter.

On the other hand, we have a great military, a great tradition of entrepreneurial energy, and a country stuffed full of natural resources. American democracy is an incredible achievement, and that is because we have a terrific judicial system and a real enduring respect for law woven into the culture.

So we're by no means a sure thing for the future. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Britain, France, the *Netherlands* were world powers. There was this enormous empire in Turkey, China was a basket-case that looked like it was headed for partition and decay, and Japan was a backwater with marginal importance that had only recently embraced modernity.

In 1910, who would have thought the world would look like this 100 years later?

You have democracy, but you also have terrible politics. I'd have to suggest those cancel each other out. You have military power, but that doesn't make up for the bad politics. What you really have going for you is the entrepreneurial culture. With some luck, that will make up for everything else.

But if you see it as a contest, about who's #1 instead of how high the standard of living is in your country (including the variance around the mean), you're going to fall behind China. There's just no way to compete with that much population.

To try and bring this back on topic: are they selling grey-market Pres in China? The iPhone launch in China was disappointing because... everyone who wanted one, already had one!

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Roubini Says S&P 500 May Drop to 600 as Profits Fall
By Jeff Kearns

March 9, 2009 (Bloomberg) -- The Standard & Poor's 500 Index is likely to drop to 600 or lower this year as the global recession intensifies, said Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who predicted the financial crisis.

The benchmark index for U.S. stocks would have to slump 12 percent from last week's closing level to meet his forecast. Roubini is assuming that companies in the S&P 500 will report profit of $50 a share this year and investors will pay 12 times that for equities.

"My main scenario is that it's highly likely it goes to 600 or below," Roubini said today in an interview at the Chicago Board Options Exchange Risk Management Conference in Dana Point, California. A level of "500 is less likely, but there is some possibility you get there."

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Nouriel Roubini Versus Warren Buffett
By Larry Swedroe | Nov 6, 2009 |

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Roubini is that despite his forecast he revealed that his retirement account had a 100 percent allocation to equities. It seems that Roubini knows enough to ignore his own forecasts as they are not likely to lead to abnormal profits.

For all those who believe "the sky is falling," I suggest you ask yourself whether it seems more logical to take your advice from Roubini (or any other economist or market forecaster for that matter) or the man with perhaps the greatest long-term track record of success?

http://moneywatch.bnet.com/investing/blog/wise-investing/good-news-update-nouriel-roubini-versus-warren-buffett/989/

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http://data.cnbc.com/quotes/.SPX

"Each year the prediction industry showers us with $200 billion in (mostly erroneous) information. The forecasting track records for all types of experts are universally poor, whether we consider scientifically oriented professionals, such as economists, demographers, meteorologists, and seismologists, or psychic and astrological forecasters whose names are household words. In fact, these experts whose advice we pay handsomely for routinely fail to predict the major events that shape our world, or even the major turning points--the transitions from status quo to something new--whether it be the economy, stock market, weather, or new technologies. Recent events that caught the forecasters by total surprise include the 1987 stock market crash and its subsequent rapid recovery to record heights; the entry of women into the workforce in massive numbers; the fall of communist Eastern Europe; the Gulf War; the decisive Republican victory in 1994 congressional elections; all recessions, including the crash of 1929 and recent, smaller blips in the financial markets; the use of lasers to transmit telephone messages (even though the phone company's researchers at Bell Labs invented it); and the floods in the Mississippi River valley in the summer of 1993 and those that plagued California during the winter of 1995. How could all our experts miss calling the fall of communist East Berlin? With all our massive investment in foreign intelligence and our aggressive news media, how did such a momentous event elude them? Why wasn't it predicted months ahead--or even the day before? No doubt you could name an expert or two who predicted some big, surprising event. But ... did they really? It is very hard to distinguish a long-shot direct hit from pure chance. The laws of probability dictate that if thousands of forecasters make thousands of predictions, someone at some time is bound to make a spectacular direct hit. Typically, these lucky few enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame before sinking back into the ranks of mediocrity as they revert to meting out egregiously wrong forecasts. A prime example is the stock market guru Elaine Garzarelli, who is said to have predicted the 1987 stock market crash--the worst since the Great Depression. At no time before or after this famous forecast has she ever made any similar long-shot forecasts that proved to be true. In fact, her long-term stock prediction track record is rather poor, judging from the performance of a mutual fund she ran for seven years. During this time, her fund increased 38 percent while the Standard & Poor's 500 Index increased 62 percent. Her employer at the time finally shut down the fund in August 1994." - William A. Sherden – "The Fortune Sellers"

Gekko thinks Doom runs on HIS clock.

Today in an interview with Joshua Topolosky of Engadget, Palm CEO John Rubenstein said something very interesting about Palm's plans for WebOS. Rather than focusing on the Pre or the recently announced Palm Pixi, Mr. Rubenstein said that the point of WebOS is for it to scale to work with "a family of products." So what else should we expect?

Palm Tablet?

A WebOS-powered tablet seems pretty darn feasible. The OS is scalable, plus many a Pre user/reviewer have complained that the operating system feels a bit too heavy for its processor. So throwing that OS onto a machine with a higher clocked CPU would only make sense. Though WebOS primarily works with a physical keyboard, a dev team inside Palm has been working on a virtual keyboard, so the way the Pixi and the Pre work does not preclude the possibility of a tablet. Besides, Palm practically revolutionized the concept of interfacing with devices via a stylus.

Honestly, I would say that a WebOS tablet even makes more sense than an Apple tablet. Palm only has one operating system to deal with right now, and though some apps might be strange running on a tablet versus a cell phone just because of the difference in form factors, most programs would still work. By comparison, Apple has two operating systems to choose from. If they go with OS X, iPhone apps won't work, and vice-versa for the iPhone OS. When the tablet does happen, they'll probably go iPhone OS, but still.

http://techgeist.net/2009/09/palm-ceo-webos-family-products/