Slashdot Mirror

Mike Arrington from techcrunch has an opposing take on the handshake
http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/09/hand-shaking-is-so-medieval-lets-end-it/

You do realize that EA bought Playfish, a producer of Facebook games similar to Zynga, right? I'd venture a guess that this has much, much more to do with those sorts of games than it does their 'traditional' PC/console games.

With Zynga probably becoming a billion-dollar company in 2011, people are starting to finally take notice of the micro-transactions that have been popular in Asia for some time. My take is that EA is making these sorts of changes to try and catch up to Zynga in the social gaming space.

He probably didn't know about the fact that Apple users are better educated, earn higher wages, and are less gullible than Windows users. Those pesky Nielsen ratings... ;)

Those who surf the Web using a Mac tend to be better educated and make more money than their PC-using counterparts, according to a report from Nielsen/NetRatings.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/10/microsoft-users-gullible-advertising/

Earlier this week, we noted that people coming to Websites from Bing are about 75 percent more likely to click on an ad than those coming from Google.

Following that post, Chitika ran some analysis on browsers and operating systems, and it found that users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are about 40 percent more likely to click on an ad than Firefox users, about 50 percent more likely than Apple Safari users, and 80 percent more likely than Google Chrome users. The numbers are based on Chitika data from 134 million across 80,000 sites.

Back when netbooks first appeared on the market, many of them ran Linux for cost and performance reasons. At the time the only shipping version of Windows was Vista which was ill-suited for machines running early Atom processors. Microsoft actually extended the life of XP so it could be used on netbooks, but protected the notebook market by adding irrelevant licensing requirements on XP sales like limits on screen sizes and maximum memory.

Then we started hearing about a brand-new generation of ARM netbooks with much longer battery lives than Atom's can offer. Linux enthusiasts exulted that since there was no shipping version of Windows that ran on ARM processors other than the hoary CE, this gave Linux another window of opportunity in the netbook market. I don't know if MS now has a Windows 7 build that runs on ARM, or whether they needed this deal to release one, but if this means we'll be seeing netbooks with Windows 7 on ARM chips, it will block Linux from advancing in this space. For evidence, it took only a few months after the extension of the end-of-life for XP to enable Windows to dominate the netbook market in the US.

The netbook market is flourishing, by the way. Recent studies suggest that netbook revenues in 2010 will run into the $10-15 billion neighborhood and growing fast.

http://www.abiresearch.com/press/1697-As+Market+Shares+Shift,+Annual+Netbook+Shipments+Will+More+than+Double+by+2013?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AbiresearchPressReleasesFeed+(ABIResearch+Press+Releases+Feed)

http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/22/netbook-shipments-2009/

I was quite sure I *HAD* seen online ads for the Nexus One. I am an iPhone user with a healthy respect for Android, and while I never liked the design of the phone, I thought the Nexus One was a very cool idea, to push boundaries and set a new standard of Android quality.

Excuse the source, http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/06/nexus-one-google-homepage/

Now that was a small ad, but quite effective, many people I know refuse to use "search bars", they go to "dub dub dub dot google dot com". I'm adamant I saw actual large product photo ads elsewhere online.

Even the name, "Nexus One", is quite cool, and its a "droid"! So much potential, and being the "official" Android phone...how could it fail like this? At least an apparent failure for sales.

There are apparently some videos going around which show the problem with the yet to be released BlackBerry 9800

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/blackberry-death-grip/

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/google-html5-quake/

Actually, I thought FF sold competition vs IE to Google. With Chrome the future of FF looks bleak when contract renewal comes up. http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrative-deal-with-google-for-3-years/

The hoohah over the panic button they're now putting in to 'protect the children' is proof that Zuckerberg's cavalier attitude towards privacy will stand, and that we can expect more of the same from Facebook in coming years.

It's not really a panic button: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/07/12/facebook-has-not-launched-a-panic-button-its-smarter-than-that/

Google will make sure that Zynga stays.

Among my friends in the online games business here in SF Zynga is known as a completely unethical employer.

According to what I hear this is par for the course at Zynga. Google is a bay area company - they must know what goes on at Zynga!

Among my friends in the online games business here in SF Zynga is known as a completely unethical employer [techcrunch.com].

According to what I hear this is par for the course at Zynga. Google is a bay area company - they must know what goes on at Zynga!

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/15/hitwise-says-facebook-most-popular-u-s-site/

It would seem that "don't be evil" doesn't include not doing business with the likes of this asshole.

A quote from Randi Zuckerberg, spokesperson for Facebook:

“At the Democratic national convention we were like rock stars,” Zuckerberg said. “At the Republican national convention I sat in my hotel room by myself for three days, no one would meet with us, I was like begging people to meet with us.”

Yes, the Republicans responded, as quoted later in the article, but when you blame mother nature in the form of a hurricane it seems a bit disingenuous. As they said: "Or maybe she forgot about the major hurricane barreling toward the Gulf Coast on the eve of the Republican National Convention?" As a self-professed snarker, I think this is pretty weak.

As I see it, the Chinese authoritarian attitude and the Republican authoritarian attitudes differ only in degree, not in kind.

Companies that want make money, make money.

At the end of 2009:

Nokia made $1.1B total with a 35% mobile phone market share
Apple made $1.6B on just the iphone with a 2.5% mobile phone market share

http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/while-rivals-jockey-for-market-share-apple-bathes-in-profits/

What's the better business to be in again?

This report does seem to agree with you. In particular I note things like this:

- In terms of debugging, ourbenchmarking shows that Android has the fastest debugging process, compared with iPhone, Symbian and Java ME. Debugging in Symbian takes up more than twice the time it takes on Android.

This isn't surprising. I am naturally a C++ developer - though I move between languages frequently, currently, I get paid to write mostly in C++. I've also done some J2ME in the past. So when I heard that Android was Java based, I was very skeptical. How could it compete with an interpreter for a language so bloated that simply representing the constant string "Hello World" took many multiples of the storage space C++ did. Then I sat down and wrote an Android app.

It's really easy to forget how much more productive a managed environment makes you, if you don't use one for a while. No memory corruptions. No leaks. The debugger always works. You can put together a simple crash reporter in 10 lines of code. Sure, the APIs can be a bit over-engineered, and Eclipse is a pig, but it still beats the crap out of C++ and a text editor.

Not to mention that many people don't even know C++ these days.

One thing to note is that the additional shares were actually shares held by the CEO and others that wanted to cash out. The additional money that they bring in will go directly to him, not benefit the company. TechCrunch article with more numbers.

Why has Mozilla Foundation avoided fixing the biggest bugs in Firefox, the memory leaks? Many, many people have complained about the memory leaks for the last 5 years, at least, as did the parent comment.

Firefox leaks memory and eventually crashes Windows, or makes Windows unstable. Apparently the Firefox memory leak bugs interact with some weakness in Windows XP SP3, and that causes Windows to become unstable. It seems that whoever debugs Firefox might also gain a good reputation from finding a major problem in Windows.

Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Every new version lists Crashes with evidence of memory corruption as one of the fixes. Those crashes are only the ones automatically reported by the crash reporter. Many of the crashes happen without invoking the crash reporter. Firefox is crashy.

We love Firefox because it has the add-ons we need. But we need it to be stable. I hope version 4 reverses the history of bad management at Mozilla Foundation. Remember, Foundation gets more than $50 million from Google every year to make Google the default search engine.

Mozilla Foundation has an enormous amount of cash: "Total assets as of December 31, 2008 were $116 million, up from $99 million at the end of 2007, an increase of 17% to our asset base." The foundation was run by Mitchell Baker, a lawyer with little or no technical knowledge and very limited social ability. Now that she is Chairwoman and no longer CEO, the management does not seem sufficiently improved.

The parent comment is currently marked "Flamebait". People have commented saying that they have no problems.

Some of the instabilities are difficult to debug because they don't always occur. Visit Mozilla Crash Reporter for more information. Some of the instabilities occur because of the interaction of Firefox with Microsoft Windows, apparently, when Firefox reaches the limit of installed memory and begins to require virtual memory. Firefox is more stable in Linux, apparently.

There is a web page discussing Firefox crashes and what users can do about it.

Look at the current crash statistics.

See the Top 300 Crashing Signatures in the current version of Firefox, 3.6.6.

It seems that an organization that has more than $100 million in assets could stop other work and address the instabilities.

Much more could be written, but that's enough for now.

accept Steve Ballmer is not all the way out in left field. Microsoft is more like the owner of the teams in your baseball analogy. They still make more money than google and apple combined. http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/26/microsoft-numbers/

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/24/ftc-twitter-privacy-settlement/

they are computers with massively reduced user freedom

I think it's an appliance in the same way that my PS3 is an appliance. There is a computer under the covers and the device is quite general purpose, but in the end its an appliance because I don't have the freedom to tinker.

I think "computer with massively reduced user freedom" could be part of a decent definition of appliance.

I am getting sick of the game console comparisons. People are NOT replacing real computers with gaming consoles, but there's an increasing push(especially by Apple fanboys) that the iDevices are the future of computing.

Read about how a 'network security expert' replaced this laptop with an iPad --> http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1693064&cid=32641740

Read these articles about how the iPad is supposed to take over computing and make desktops and laptop obsolete:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175600/The_iPad_is_the_future_for_home_computing
http://gizmodo.com/5506692/ipad-is-the-future
http://www.macworld.com/article/146038/2010/01/ipad_future_shock.html
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/ipad-future/
http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/ipad/

Gaming consoles were never considered the future of computing, that's why they don't represent a threat to freedom. This is the reason that people are justifiably upset about Apple's restrictions.

It's a real problem for Zuckerman. He's previously made fund-raising trips to Dubai. That's over. The UAE has blasphemy laws, which they enforce. The UAE also has an extradition treaty with Pakistan, but not with the United States. So he can no longer visit Dubai, and is unlikely to get funding from any source in the Arab world. He can't even fly Emirates Air.

I'm pretty sure that Pakistan and the UAE are well aware of the political repercussions of executing the executive of a major American company for doing something that Americans actively support (permitting blasphemy). Kind of like how European countries don't try to arrest American soldiers or politicians for war crimes.

So, not a huge risk for him. Although I wouldn't blame him if he decided to err on the side of caution when deciding whether to put my faith in Pakistan's sanity.

It's a real problem for Zuckerman. He's previously made fund-raising trips to Dubai. That's over. The UAE has blasphemy laws, which they enforce. The UAE also has an extradition treaty with Pakistan, but not with the United States. So he can no longer visit Dubai, and is unlikely to get funding from any source in the Arab world. He can't even fly Emirates Air.

Steve Jobs, I believe having a good "sex life" means something entirely different than it does for the rest of us. Even me, a staid almost boring 30 year-something person with a long term partner has gotten on board with sexting, sex pics and other naughty stuff with gadgetry.

I would never even consider owning a telecommunication/internet device that came with somebody's seemingly arbitrary and contradictory moral strictures as the arbiter of what I may use the device for. Ownership of Apple products has always been about willing to go into their secretive walled garden but lately with the hostility and snarkiness that has been shown to both Apple developers and consumers the experience is more akin to living in Gaza.

It seems like the tech behind twitter ain't that hard to emulate. Is it time to revisit the idea of decentralizing Twitter? With a migration path to make commercial Twitter itself one of several interconnected-nodes in a larger (trust-based?) 140-char microblogging network?

with informative article titles like Bing Gets A Foursquare Badge For The World Cup With Thrillist Tips

I read the article and still don't know what it means.

Actually, I don't think it will really affect bit.ly in as direct a way as people are imagining. Twitter wraps the bit.ly URL, so bit.ly still gets to capture all the links/clicks. FTFA:

"our current plan is that no user will see a t.co URL on twitter.com but we still have some details to work through. the links will still be displayed as they were sent in, but the target of the link will be the t.co link instead."

...and...

"we're not modifying or tampering with URLs - if you send us a bit.ly link, we will wrap that bit.ly link. analytics will still work, etc."

So people will still see a bit.ly URL, which will point to a t.co URL, which will resolve to a bit.ly URL, which will resolve to the original URL. Both twitter and bit.ly get their hits, analytics, etc.

Of course, this could indirectly harm bit.ly, because their huge datasets might become less valuable if others (i.e., twitter) are aggregating essentially the same thing.

You're thinking of the wrong scumbag. Mark Pinkus, CEO of Zynga (FarmVille and other annoying Facebook games) said that.

they usually create innovations independently then pay protection money to the trolls

Actually it works both ways.

While their primary function is not as a patent troll Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have in turn played the role of the frivilous patent litigant with the biggest difference being in their objective of halting the "Progress of Science and useful Arts" to the betterment of their bottom line.

The backups from an iPhone or iPod can be encrypted. The iTunes db is not encrypted. Managing the database is as simple as copying some files to the proper locations, and modifying an XML.

[Basic info on the XML interface and hte db locations]
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1660

Here are some free alternatives to iTunes. A few minutes of Googling should net you a larger list:

http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager.php

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/10/doubletwist-podcasts-android/ (also works with a variety of devices including Android)

http://ipod.about.com/od/introductiontoitunes/tp/itunes_alterns.htm

Pardon the self-reply, but I found some Hardware partners. No ISP's or service providers though:
http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/08/chrome-partners-acer-adobe-asus-freescale-hewlett-packard-lenovo-qualcomm-texas-instruments/

If you watched the Atmosphere and I|O events, the developer machines were split about 60/40 over Mac and Ubuntu. I didn't see Windows in either event's demonstrations.

The amount of Macs over Ubuntu's might be changing though. Remember, Apple and Google have in the past worked very close as partners in a lot of projects (YouTube's h.264 overhaul was done in time to be iPhone ready for when the iPhone launched, amoungst other possible codec/computer language standards. And Eric Schmidt had for 3 years been on the Apple board). Thing is now, Apple has been less and less happy with Google and both companies have been slowly distancing themselves from each other since Google started to overlap Apple in fields like smartphones with Googles Android (which compete's against Apple's iPhone) and Google ChromeOS (which will compete against OSX).

Any chance google will help Microsoft along again? (Heh, I'll bet MS *loves* that!)

Umm Apples to Apples or Smart phones to Smart phones is:

  - double last years sales

  - total market share over 14%

  - #3 maker of smart phones

more impressive?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/23/smartphone-iphone-sales-2009-gartner/

'The iPhone still has a bigger share, at 15.4 percent (up 5 points), but Android is catching up fast with 9.6 percent (up 8 points). All other smartphones lost relative share during the quarter, even RIM Blackberries, although they still grew in absolute numbers.' - http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/19/iphone-android-25-percent/

How is this a 'a large majority of people'?

They don't need to worry about Microsoft much since HP already cancelled the WIndows version of the Slate.

Thats because the iPhone doesn't have a SD reader so no memory upgrades, no easy way to transfer files beyond that bloated software program iTunes, no uploading good quality pictures instantly to the internet from a digital camera.... how quaint.

The subpoena as well as some comments by one of the twitter-ers can be seen here: - http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/19/tom-corbett-twitter/

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/02/the-complaint-apples-patent-lawsuit-against-htc-is-all-about-android/

and to make things worse, because ads do not fit well with plane crashes, terrorism, school shootings, corrupt politicians, the media seems to be gradually going to a "feel good" news dystopia. Lots and lots of sheer propaganda, instead of real news stories (my definition of real journalism is that "Something seems to stink @ X"; the rest is all propaganda). Techcrunch reported on a news website some time ago where there would be only good news, for christ's sake. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/10/get-ready-to-barf-aol-and-sears-want-to-push-good- news-down-your-throat/ Couple these trends with the bazzilion-page slideshows and/or reviews, and one can only wonder why big media is complaining.

First of all, this: "Maybe your an idiot, or maybe your just to emotional attached to apple, I don't know. " is juvenile and pointless.

clearly, you don't... but don't go spouting off about crap you don't know.

I've been working in the smartphone industry, as a programmer, for more than a decade, including consultancy for several of the manufacturers. What do you know? Nothing you've demonstrated here.

Android has been far easier for me to work with the the iPhone OS.

Well whoopee do. It certainly hasn't been for others. e.g.:

"We've spoken with a number of high profile Android application developers. All of them, without exception, have told me they are extremely frustrated with Android right now. For the iPhone, they build once and maintain the code base. On Android, they built once for v.1.5, but are getting far less installs than the iPhone.
"And now they're faced with a landslide of new handsets, some running v.1.6 and some courageous souls even running android v.2.0. All those manufacturers/carriers are racing to release their phones by the 2009 holiday season, and want to ensure the hot applications will work on their phones. And here's the problem - in almost every case, we hear, there are bugs and more serious problems with the apps.
"There are whispers of backwards and forwards compatibility issues as well, making the problem even worse.
"More than one developer has told us that this isn't just a matter of debugging their existing application to ensure that it works on the various handsets. They say they're going to have to build and maintain separate code for various Android devices. Some devices seem to have left out key libraries that are forcing significant recoding efforts, for example. With others, it's more of a mystery."
http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/11/a-chink-in-androids-armor/

I prefer not being locked to the Apple store.

No one else cares what your preference is.

" But there's also plenty of other factors, including the point that people purchasing iPhones mostly do so because they WANT to run apps."
AS does anyone with a smart phone, it's the point.

That's where you lack of knowledge of the industry shows. Most people DON'T install any third party apps, they just used the ones that are built in. iPhone has changed that pattern, but as it has a minority market share, its still true that most people don't install third party apps on smartphones.

The market for shoes is people who need shoes, not the total number of available shoes.

Wrong. You don't understand the concept. The market for shoes is the total number of shoes sold in a period of time for all manufacturers. Divide the number of shoes sold by a single manufacturer by this figure, and you get their market share.

Hey, good luck selling your app, but don't go spouting off about crap you don't know.

I don't need your luck, nor your inflated and mistaken sense of what you think you know.

If devices like iPad are the future of computing, then I guess we can kiss a lot of languages goodbye unless they come from Cupertino and are blessed by Jobs, since even developers don't like jailbreaking(it's illegal according to Apple).

Ah, a slippery slope argument. The fact is that Apple does NOT have a monopoly of the market, and people who want to develop in some other language has got plenty of choices to do so. And there's not even the merest hint of a suggestion that Apple is going to be the monopoly vendor of computing devices.

What about this scary scenario, Both Apple and MS hold ~50% of the market(mobile or otherwise), and hence are not a monopoly and can trample on developer's rights. Don't tell me that's unlikely, just look at Windows Phone 7 Series.

The iPhone is (one of?) the first general computing devices to ban other languages, and others are learning from their success.

Also, you don't need Apple to be a monopoly, just a big player is enough to affect software development.

What about articles such as:

http://gizmodo.com/5506692/ipad-is-the-future

http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/ipad/

http://speirs.org/blog/2010/1/29/future-shock.html

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175600/The_iPad_is_the_future_for_home_computing

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/02/ipad-the-destroyer-19-things-it-will-kill/

Surely they are more than a merest hint of a suggestion?

You can write shitty apps in ObjC and people do it all the time. The App store is chock full of shitty apps like Fart apps.

There are a lot of shitty apps, and a lot of excellent apps. As I said, if Flash and their ilk were allowed there would be MORE shitty apps. It's a favour to consumers to keep the signal to noise ratio on the App Store as high as possible, and not allowing Flash apps helps that ratio.

So, lets kill a ton of good Flash Apps and content on the Web just because there will be some more shitty apps to sift and search through? And here I thought storage, bandwidth and power of servers on the internet was dirt cheap for a company wallowing in cash like Apple.

Correction: Techcrunch 20%

The more they waste time, the better it'll be for the german Neofonie to negotiate most european publishers for hts rival Wetab tablet machine.
Which may not be so bad ( Linux based, yes sir).

http://wetab.mobi/en
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/26/neofonies-wepad-tablet-shown-to-german-journalists-seems-legit/2#comments
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/03/29/europes-biggest-publisher-embraces-the-wepad/

"Want to replace Flash with HTML5? First try porting Badgers [badgerbadgerbadger.com]."

Hows this for an open standard port? http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/google-html5-quake/

What's interesting is that the online boards (websites) weren't able to keep up with the market due to so many people hitting their servers. Even Yahoo and Google Finance couldn't keep up.

The Web Struggling to Keep Up with the Market

And why go underwater? Facebook security conventions should get you the requisite amount of isolation to practice for deep space travel!

WebOS is cool and all, but it's going to be three years refining and HP doesn't have that long. This fight may not be over by then, but we'll be able to see the end from there. HP is huge and it doesn't hurt them to explore many avenues at once. While HP is a strong Microsoft partner they also have been huge supporters of Linux from early on. Kernel.org runs on HP donated servers and it has for many years. HP servers all come with a Linux environment, or one you can download for diagnostic purposes so all HP servers work with Linux. Until last month their consumer platforms did too, though just now the diagnostic CD is Windows PE. All HP everything works with Linux. When I need a printer for my network, I don't look anywhere else because the HP stuff is known to work. To be fair, it's not just Linux. HP hardware is predominately Open so it works well with anybody who cares to try their stuff against it. In servers, storage, OS and networking they adhere to open standards because they earnestly believe that your ability to choose their stuff for some of your solution is better than trying to find customers who are willing and able to buy their whole stack from end to end. They're also interested in selling the vertical stack if they can, and as long as they're open about the units, we can probably forgive them for that because whole-stack solutions do have some synergy benefits. As Microsoft's sun sets, HP is well positioned not only to weather that storm, but to profit from it: Windows platforms have almost always been zero margin products given to seed services and such, and the more recently the more so - so the sun setting on Microsoft's hegemony may mean the dawn of a new day of profit margin.

Incidentally, HP Bladesystems have a weird bug with local mounted USB boot DVDROM devices and networking that prevents recognition of FlexNics by VMWare install (several V4+ versions) booted from a DVD attached to the front USB/Video dongle. I don't know what it is, or who at HP to tell about it, but mounting the image through VirtualMedia over the iLO network resolves the issue - though it's slow. Also, chassis connect DVD/CDROMS to blades almost never works and it's not worth the effort to try right now. Maybe future Onboard Administrator firmwares will resolve these problems, but for now use iLO Advanced and virtual media - which you should be using anyway - in the modern era what server wrangler has actual physical access to the server? That's retro. It's probably still an issue for these past three years because you ought not be fondling the physical servers anyway but it would be nice if they fixed that because the Virtual Media connection is slow. I understand they fix that in iLO3, with a gigabit iLO connection and onboard ARM processors for server management but you have to buy new servers to use that. It would be nice if they went back and fixed this retro bug.

Heck, when Windows or VMWare or whatever won't recognize the hardware I boot Ubuntu Live environment to test the hardware and it saves me a lot of work. If I can ping the gateway outside my bladesystem Virtual Connect environment in Ubuntu then the "No compatible network adapters found" message in VMWare is bogus and I can move from diagnosing the hardware/Virtual Connect configuration to figuring out what the heck is VMWare's problem. I did this today. My FC engineer was shocked that a free OS automatically mounted the LUNs he exposed on very fresh 8Gbit FC adapters. I wasn't surprised - I expected it because I know that Linux drivers are almost always first, and Linux supports more hardware than any other OS ever - flat. Also incidentally, the EMC CX4 Model 120 populated with 12 200GB SSD drives totally rocks. The IOPS performance is not to be believed - but have a good set of sytems engineers to milk it for all it's worth because it's spendy.

HP has an Android slate in development. Now that they're dropping the WinTel slate, that looks l

seems not perfect, but much more open and actually real contrary to what I thought initially...

http://wepad.mobi/en ,
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/26/neofonies-wepad-tablet-shown-to-german-journalists-seems-legit/2#comments ,
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/03/29/europes-biggest-publisher-embraces-the-wepad/