Once installed to a company’s domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity.

I bet Microsoft isn’t too happy about this.

A Gallup Poll last October found 44% favor making marijuana legal, an eight-point jump since the question was asked in 2005. An ABC News-Washington Post poll in January found 81% favor making marijuana legal for medical use.

Later in the article, quoting former federal prosecutor and county judge James Gray: “Taxing and regulating marijuana will make it less available to children than it is today.”

But HP in particular is in a unique position. They’re engaged in the race to the bottom, and as far as I can tell, they’ve got nothing interesting in the computer department. They are almost totally irrelevant. When your computer is being sold for under $500 at Cost Co, I’m not sure you’re doing things right.

Reminds me of Apple, actually. In the 90’s, they weren’t being sold anywhere, and were largely irrelevant. Then Steve Jobs came back, they bet everything on OS X, and are now rocking hard.

Windows is killing innovation and killing the PC marketplace. The only innovation happening with PC computers is based on making them cheaper.

Well, not the only innovation. Dell has been selling computers ¹ preloaded with Linux for a while, now, but it seems to be sort of a hobby, by and for hobbiests. They’re not doing anything special, there’s nothing about their computers or their Ubuntu treatment that would make anybody I know switch from Windows.

Which is where HP comes in. Their computer strategy is clearly not working. Their iPAQ isn’t even a joke. Their cameras are just another camera. Yet they’ve been around for a million years. The Apple I was designed and built by Steve Wozniak while he worked for HP. Outside the computer department, they still make some great products: calculators, printers, dvd burners, and blank media for instance. Despite ho-hum computers, they’re still selling some quality merchandise.

Now, what if HP dropped Windows entirely, spent some real money, and bet the farm on Linux? I think they could succeed where Dell hasn’t and create a whole new class of computer and customer. Or if not a new class, they could revitalize the Windows PC class.

But first, they need to spend some money on hardware development. They have one computer that looks like a direct, if poorly executed copy of a MacBook Pro. They should concentrate on this design. Take a page out of Apple’s book and simplify the product line, and make them beautiful.

Back to Linux: Despite Dell offering computers with it preloaded, Ubuntu has not caught on in the mainstream because it’s a pain in the neck. It’s sort of impossible to simply install it on a computer and expect it to work the way you might when you put Windows onto the same computer. So I envision HP pulling an Apple. Apple put OS 9 to rest and bet the farm on OS X. HP is the only company I can think of that can afford to (ahem) close the door on Windows and make Linux be the future. Well, maybe Sony, but they’re far too entrenched and big to make any kind of sweeping change like this.

Anyway, HP can do all this by putting the might of their computer division into making every modern and semi-modern printer with an HP logo on it work with Linux, making all their hardware work with Linux. They can’t do it halfway, and they should consider, even if they choose not to, making drivers so older models can be moved over to Ubuntu. Maybe not, though.

So they make Ubuntu easy to use. Every HP computer should work with all the hardware right out of the box. Webcam, WiFi, all HP printers, scanners, USB DVD burners, everything. And the computers should look lovely right out of the box, too. They should be able to DVDs and web-based video.

Which is actually a major problem. How do you get a 20 year old junior college student to buy an HP Ubuntu computer without world-class software? You can’t. So we look around, and we see that both major non-IE browsers work on Linux: FireFox and Google Chrome. Google’s Picassa is something of an answer to iPhoto, and that’s available for Linux, too. And Open Office is free. So we’ve covered the major things people want computers for in the first place: Internetting, playing with digital photos, and Office stuff.

Lastly, there’s iPods. HP can get around this by being the first company to make a world-class awesome Android phone. They can also do a non-phone Android device, iPod Touch style. They can also put time and money into an iPod-friendly iTunes-like piece of software for Linux. ² After all, why does Apple spend so much time and money on things like GarageBand and iPhoto? To sell Macs, that’s why. There is precedent for this kind of software: Missing Sync for Android, for instance, allows one to use iTunes on her computer, but put songs onto her Android.

And the Amazon MP3 service is also available for Linux.

Look, the list goes on. What needs to happen is someone with power and clout has to come along and put it all together into a bitchin’ little package, and sell them like crazy. I’ve even got a marketing angle: “Live in a post-Windows world.”

The point is not for HP to be Apple, though I suggest borrowing a few parts of their business plan. The point is to get out of the race to the bottom. The only way to differentiate themselves from the other PC manufacturers is to make a different product. But even that’s not enough. The different product has to be great. I think HP is the only company on earth who could do this; they have the money, clout, and other businesses to allow this shift to be a loss leader for a while. If they did it right and well and with commitment, they could see absolute greatness.

This is an opt-in experiment for HTML5 support on YouTube. If you are using a supported browser, you can choose to use the HTML5 player instead of the Flash player for most videos.

Gonzales whips butter until light and fluffy, sweetens it, wraps it in dough and then, you guessed it, drops that bad boy into bubbling grease.

Filthy.

I once took my wife to a Pakistani musical show in Houston. We arrived on time but the program started several hours late. My wife, who grew up in the mainstream U.S. culture, was frustrated by the delay. On the other hand, many Pakistanis did not arrive for the show until one to two hours after the announced time.

A fascinating look at how time is interpreted by different cultures.

Chris Foresman for Ars Technica:

Ultimately, when shoppers go out to buy an iPod touch, many won’t really know the difference in capabilities, and may just be drawn to the $199 price tag. But given the huge boost in performance and capacity, the 32GB model represents a much better value.

That does change things. The cheapest current model is $100 more than the 8GB model.

Capacity is a distant secondary concern. However, I have no intention of buying a brand-new, already-old iPod Touch that’ll be not one, but two generations old when Apple next updates the product line. Especially since this is supposed to be replacing a video game system, and will be used for power-hungry video games.

Disappointing.

The truth is, I prefer plain old boring black. Keep in mind that I’m a know-nothing white guy, and nobody listens to me anyway.

Anyway, a little Internet research revealed to me that any two people on earth share 99% or more of the same genes. It’s easily duplicatable research, so feel free to check up on me.

For just a moment, give that thought your undivided attention: any two people on Earth are, genetically, 99% the same. When I bake three loaves of bread out of the same dough, I seriously doubt any two of those loaves are 99% the same.

The point here is that people are people. It’s ridiculous that we still think in terms of us and them. We are all us, and there is no them.¹ Humanity will never achieve any kind of galactic greatness if we’re still worried about, “lazy Mexicans.”

As far as differences go, I really truly deeply believe what I’ve said: people are people. But there is one major divider: gender.

For thousands of years, we humans have hated the other guys and done horrendous things to these people who are less than 1% different from us. And we’ve largely ignored or misinterpreted the differences of gender. Women are weaker and more delicate, women are too emotional to vote, women don’t understand things. And somehow we men got away with it. I’m not totally sure how, but I suspect it had something to do with the long-range plans of women. I also don’t think we’ve seen the end of those plans.

Anyway, while we enlightened Americans now know the truth of these matters, I believe there are still some fundamental differences. Women think differently than men. They’re wired different, and they’re built physically different and have a uterus. There are fundamental physical differences between men and women that make the differences between the races of Earth seem even tinier than they are.

I’m not saying that sexism is better than racism, but it’s more cogent than racism.²  I don’t think it’s ok to discriminate; pound for pound, women are every bit as strong and tough as men. But I do think it’s ok to acknowledge that in general, men have more pounds.

For humans to continue on, we need both men and women. We are not the same, but we compliment each other. We need each other. ³ And across the ages, we’ve all known this, and through all our mistakes and heavy handedness, we’ve done basically ok. If we can do this well across the difference of gender, we should be able to get it together and do better across racial and national lines. Those lines, after all, represent less than 1% difference, no uteri involved.