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He spoke very publicly, and he appeared to be disclosing plans known inside HP. The implication of what he said is, "Don't buy anything from HP", and the stock market read it that way.

In my opinion, HP's steady downward slide began before CEO Lew Platt. It continued with the amazingly inept Carly Fiorina.

In our business we've had problems with HP laptops and printers, due to what appeared to us to be sloppy practices. We have a laptop owned by a friend that failed because of the bad nVidia video chip; it was arranged that few people got compensated. HP has sometimes made drivers for old HP hardware not available.

List of HP CEOs (Taken from Wikipedia): Patricia C. Dunn, Robert Wayman, Michael Capellas, Lewis E. Platt, John A. Young, Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, Rahul Sood, Leo Apotheker. See the article, How HP CEO Leo Apotheker Is Running HP Into the Ground, in foolish slide-show format.

Apparently Mr. Apotheker is abandoning the PC hardware business because he is uncomfortable with it. He was previously CEO of SAP, a software compnay.

SonicOS 5.6 adds a new deep packet inspection (DPI) engine for SSL encrypted traffic, which has increasingly become a blind spot in many firewall, content filtering and data leak protection schemes today. Bad guys have begun using encryption technologies against the very security communities that made them popular, using encryption to avoid the HTTPS protocol to bypass filters and expose networks to malware attacks.

Your highly selective reading and responding to my posts matches up quite nicely with your highly selective picking of sales numbers.

Okay, Dells numbers should be falling greatly, noticeable AND those numbers are going to Apple. Let's look at overall sales numbers?

Yes let's! I'll respond to this paragraph again at the bottom.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/technology/19compute.html

Apple also picked up market share in the United States, growing to 5 percent, from 4 percent, as its shipments increased 30 percent, according to Gartner. Apple grew faster than any other PC maker in the United States, Gartner said.

http://www.maclife.com/article/news/apples_market_share_pc_world_continues_surge

or http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/04/14/apple_sells_estimated_1_4m_macs_in_us_to_capture_8_market_share.html

Research firm Gartner said that Apple was the fifth-largest PC seller in the U.S. for the three-month quarter to start 2010. An estimated 1.398 million Macs were shipped in the States, and Apple only lagged behind HP, Dell, Acer and Toshiba.

Looking back 6 years...

http://www.macworld.com/article/43741/2005/03/marketshare.html

Apple's desktop market share in the United States for the fourth quarter of 2004 was 2.88 percent (and 2.06% q4 2003)

So in those 7 years Apple managed to almost quadruple their marketshare (2.06 to 8.0, 6% or 3.8x). Dell lost 9%. HP gained 3%. etc.

http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Dell/10-Things-Dell-Must-Do-to-Catch-Up-to-HP-221568/

Obviously primarily an opinion piece with many facts, but does this sound like anything I've been saying about Dell / Apple?

1. Keep It Simple
Dell tries to do too much. The company has spent the last few years attempting to be the company that satisfies any potential buyer. That's a mistake. HP has shown that simplicity will reign supreme in the computing market. That company has gone out of its way to provide customers with several options that will satisfy them in one way or another. Dell should follow suit. Its buying process is a mess that's overrun with customization options. Even its product offerings are all over the place. Enough is enough. Keep it simple, Dell. That's what customers want.

Okay, Dells numbers should be falling greatly, noticeable AND those numbers are going to Apple. Let's look at overall sales numbers?

Dell loses ~8%, Apple gains about 6%. Those are the numbers. You don't think that's significant? Really?

Dell has closed or is closing almost all of their facilities in the US, including a factory building ~5 years ago near where I live. Should this tell you anything?

given the success of the Apple store
Success, measured in what why? Compared to what?

Success meaning that they are profitable! Success meaning that they have helped quadruple Apple marketshare in the last 6-7 years. Success meaning that while others like Gateway tried--and failed--to open branded computer stores, Apple is opening more every month. Is this really that difficult to see?

Apple has been so popular over the past decade

Popular means going from 2% of the computer market to 8% in 6-7 years. It means everybody in the WORLD knowing what an iPod, and a lot of them having one! It means 1.7 million iphones sold in 3 days at prices higher than most Android phones (and none of the 2 for 1 deals). It means virtually every

I'm guessing the story was posted by someone who does not know how to post a proper link.

The actual story is here:

http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Storage/Tape-for-Storage-Staples-Says-Tapes-Demise-Greatly-Exaggerated-339951/

Here is the real link that is missing from the summary.

I always wonder about tape backup.....it seems everyone I know who uses it has had it fail. Hard drives fail too, it's true, but the anecdotal evidence I have says if you are using tape backup, you better have multiple backups.

This report is not good news. While ICSA is promoting the need for certified security products, it may do more to convince security managers that they've been getting ripped off. This is what Larry Walsh writes in his blog: http://blogs.channelinsider.com/secure_channel/content/analysis/80_of_security_fail_to_meet_performance_expectations.html

These software developers killed six people with a series of software bugs and general poor software development practices:
http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html
No one was personally held accountable.

http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Solution-Builder/We-Did-Nothing-Wrong-Why-Software-Quality-Matters/
21 people died due to a software error. The doctors that administered the doses were indicted for murder (I don't know the outcome), the software vendor was sued, but the developers were not personally held accountable. This one is interesting, because if the software had been built by an engineering firm and they had an licensed Professional Engineer stamp the design, he would have been held accountable.

Sites that code cluelessly and need javascript and flash to display a simple list will die first (hopefully, I am not so sure). Topping the list is http://www.channelinsider.com/

Apple chose to invest in mobile phones instead of DVRs or tablets because, in proportion, those markets are also shrinking.

According to eWeek the market share for tablet is growing. TFA says between 2006 and 2007 the market share doubled and is more than 7% of the mobile market. I'd love the have a Mac Tablet, though Axiotron makes the Modbook Apple itself doesn't have a tablet Mac. I've often thought it might be a good idea for Apple to buy Axiotron, but I bet anti-trust complaints would be filed.

Falcon

Weren't Microsoft supposedly responsible for the recent trouble IBM had?

Good on big blue if that's the case, Microsoft can't stand the taste of their own medicine.

Maybe they think this because we've been doing all the laughing behind their backs?

Clearly, we need to laugh in their face more often. You know, perhaps we could have a good laugh over the Windows Media Player/IE vulnerabilities that still affect people whose default browser is Firefox?

Or we could laugh at them over playing the blame game when those URL handler vulnerabilities were found. Mozilla fixed their end of it, I don't remember that Microsoft ever did...

I don't get it. I just read an article in eWeek Channel Insider that Sam Palmisano predicts that Small Business ( SMB ) will be IBM's largest business in five years. If they can't manage the Global Business for Fortune 1000 customers, do you think small business will put up with this type of treatment?

Palmisano: SMB Will Be IBM's Largest Market in Five Years
DATE: 01-MAY-2007
http://www.channelinsider.com/article/Palmisano+SM B+Will+Be+IBMs+Largest+Market+in+Five+Years/206518 _1.aspx

There are a number of articles being released today (for example) that suggest Vista has sold 20 million copies in its first month of release. That doesn't sound bad. To put that in perspective, there are around 22 million Mac OS X users total . And *NIX+BSD+Linux has an even smaller desktop share, though it's quite hard to know the exact number (I've heard 10-15 million).

I'm a Mac user, and a Windows user, and a Linux user (since 0.99). I enjoy a good poke at Microsoft's missteps, and the media certainly has jumped on the supposed yawnfest surrounding the Vista launch... but sometimes we need a bit of perspective about how huge they really are, and how successful Vista likely is going to be, despite its warts.

I'm not sure what is more screwed up the article linked to about the drives or the Slashdot comment.

ReadyDrive is NOT ReadyBoost, but it IS STILL a MS Technology and is designed to work directly with Vista.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsv ista/features/details/performance.mspx

Also why does the linked article and Slashdot dismiss these drives as having nothing to do with Vista, when in fact they were DESIGNED Specifically to be used with Vista and employ MS Vista technology in the hardware?

Is Slashdot trying to become the misinformation site of the Internet?

http://www.digitimes.com/systems/a20070307PR201.ht ml

http://www.channelinsider.com/article/Samsung+Ship s+Worlds+First+Hybrid+HDD151or+Is+It/202621_1.aspx

"Optimized to work in Windows Vista-capable notebook PCs, Samsung's MH80 is a 2.5-inch hybrid hard drive with 128 or 256MB of flash memory. It combines a hard disk drive with a OneNAND Flash cache and Microsoft's ReadyDrive software, offering faster boot and resume times, increased battery life and greater reliability compared to traditional magnetic media technology, the spokesperson claimed. "

Sorry slashdot, but these drives are designed for Vista. Sure they may offer performance improvements in other OSes, but will see the majority of performance gains in Vista. Also even when used with other OSes, the way the Drives internally manage the Flash caching is from MS, so thank them the next time you boot your Linux laptop with one of these drives.

As for the other questions people have about the limited write times of Flash RAM, etc, go lookup MS Superfetch technology which specifically addresses these issues by writing to various locations in the Flash space, since this this is also how these drives work to ensure the same bits don't always get used, giving the flash cache the equivalent or greater lifetime than the HD platters.

I know this is SlashDot, but someone could get the fact right once, right?