the PDA field shrinks

Sony is exiting the PDA market in both the US and Europe, it seems. There original vision wasn't bad, it was simply too proprietary and couldn't keep up with non-proprietary solutions. On the handheld side, PDAs are not going to vanish anyway, they'll just be morph with Smartphones and devices of the sort (although I think there will always be a market, however small, for "pure" PDAs). Maybe Sony is planning on reviving some of the Clie stuff through its cellphone venture with Ericsson...

paleoclimatology

I spent a bit of time on Saturday reading Abrupt Climate Change: Paleo Perspective from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration paleoclimatology branch of the NCDC. A good summary on paleoclimatology and the climate change record.

bill joy: on technology, markets, and other things

An excellent article on Bill Joy from the New York Times magazine. Sadly a couple of comments I've seen on this piece seem to focus on how Joy considered whether to join Google or not, which is literally a sentence, and discount the rest. And it's the rest which is really interesting of course. Too bad he's not going to publish those books anytime soon...

ps: tangentially related: this, and this.