iPhone competitor Palm announced dismal revenue figures and big losses for last quarter. What of the new Palm Pre?

It’s unlikely the Pre will catch up to Apple’s iPhone anytime soon, analysts are predicting a heavy volume of sales. Some say that the company could sell about 100,000 handsets in July and 200,000 in August.

Apple sold over 1-million iPhones the first weekend. So, why is Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein, a former Apple employee, saying, “We couldn’t be happier?” They did what other companies don’t do. They copied Apple, so they have a chance.

Will Apple’s upcoming tablet, slate, pad device be a full-fledged computer? Or, just a handheld device like the iPod touch and iPhone? In other words, will it run Mac OS X (as in the Mac), or iPhone OS (as in the iPhone and iPod touch), or both (as is, ‘Wow! That’d be cool!’)? Dan Ackerman in CNET:

There are two schools of thought on this: either the Apple tablet (or iSlate, or whatever it ends up being called) will be a 10-or-so-inch tablet PC with a full Mac OS X operating system; or it will merely be a larger-screen version of the current iPod Touch, which has a closed, limited phone-like OS.

I’m willing to bet there are more than two schools of thought on this. Why not both?

As much as I want both OS versions on the iTablet, iSlate, iPad device, my guess is that Apple will go with iPhone OS and App Store apps. Why? That’s where the money is.

Newspapers have become a dying breed. I grew up to the news of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Richard Rodriguez became a reader of the San Francisco Chronicle in high school. How will newspapers end up?

We will end up with one and a half cities in America—Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.

As a pre-high schooler I delivered the local newspaper door-to-door, devoured the Post-Distpatch, disdained the weight of the Globe-Democrat, feared the dreary columns of the New York Times, but I read everything I could find, including our World Book Encyclopedia and the ingredients on a can of pork and beans. Life changes. So changes the life of newspapers to the death of newspapers. Rodriguez in Harper’s:

In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers—the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The three together equal what I remember.

What has change wrought?

Survey of computer use over 12 years from the University of Virgina. The trends are clear. From 1997 to today nearly all students own a computer, notebooks out number desktop PCs, and—drum roll—Mac market share is nearly 40-percent.

Each computing inventory is the compilation of statistics regarding computer ownership; type of computer; operating system; network capability; peripherals; and in recent years, mobile device ownership, too—among incoming first-year students at UVa.

Stunning trend. No wonder Microsoft is so desperate. The red bar is the Mac. Click for a larger version.

John Paczkowski points out the lies, damned lies, and statistics regarding Mac sales. They’re up. And they’re down. It all depends on who you talk to. The top two market research firms gave strikingly different numbers for Mac shipments in the spring quarter. From All Things D:

So what are we to make of this? A disparity of more than 200,000 units between the the Q2 domestic Mac shipment estimates of two top market research outfits? Is it a 2.5 percent year-over-year increase. Or a 12.4 percent year-over-year decrease?

I just flipped a quarter to determine whether sales are up or down.

The Vatican is bringing in experts “to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implications for the Catholic Church.” Jose Gabriel Funes, astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory:

The questions of life’s origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration.

Perhaps the Vatican has forgotten what the Bible teaches.

If biology is not unique to the Earth, or life elsewhere differs bio-chemically from our version, or we ever make contact with an intelligent species in the vastness of space, the implications for our self-image will be profound.

Would not angels be considered extraterrestrial life which differs bio-chemically from humans?

Can Mac users live without Microsoft Office for Mac? Seth Weintraub of Computerworld bought a new Mac and decided to see how long he could go without installing Office. He’s still waiting.

That was almost three months ago and I am still without. Ironically, I needed Microsoft’s Remote Desktop (standalone installer) once, but other than that, I’ve been able to keep my personal Mac 100% Microsoft Free.

I did the same thing six months ago with my most recent Mac, and one year ago for my wife’s Mac. No Microsoft Office. Apple’s iWork trio of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are excellent, less expensive, less cumbersome replacements.