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Slashback: HETE, HP, Regression
The computing equivalent of Area 51? A short while back HP closed its calculator division. Many have thought HP's calculator department was unprofitable. This was not the case. Many have thought they had no innovation. This was not the case. Turns out that management had 4% workforce to kill and they were part of the cut.
This article explains more. It turns out they had designed several Linux based PDA's ready to produce that were killed by management. Sounds interesting? Go check it out.
The biggest expense was the 12 gross of Estes D engines ... Satellite Designer writes: "The topic of low cost satellites having been mooted here recently, I though I'd alert readers to another such project. The HETE-2 satellite recently located a cosmic gamma-ray burst precisely enough that (with a lot of help from friends) an afterglow was detected, identifying its source. HETE-2 cost $26 million, only 1/3 of what a 'small' scientific satellite normally costs.A lot of commercial 'off the shelf' technology went into HETE. Nothing from Radio Shack, but there are quite a few parts from Digi-Key onboard. You can't save money by using cheap parts (but you *can* save money by using easily obtainable parts), and you can't achieve reliability by using expensive parts (but you *can* help reliability by using the parts best suited for your application). The radical thing about HETE's parts selection was that it considered parts in the application context (as one would do in a normal engineering process), rather than restricting selection to a QPL assembled to meet irrelevant requirements.
The real trick to keeping costs down is to do the job with as small a team as possible in the minimum time possible. Rather than employing a large team of specialists, HETE's scientific investigators did much of the engineering and technical work. A small, carefully selected engineering team filled in the knowledge gaps."
Quitting isn't easy, and why bother? dmarsh writes: "This new article from C|Net seems to be a total contradiction to last week's "Dump Broadband, Dig Out Your Modem!" thread's article. I guess the important difference being that this one is backed up by an actual survey by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association."
Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source ;)
wow, I hadn't heard about HP closing off its calculators division, it's such a shame, as a (still) proud owner of an HP 48sx I'm really saddened by this turn of event.
Maybe some slashdotters don't know it, but before the current palm-craze, HP's calculators were *the* portable thing to program for (at least in my university, I remember being amazed that somebody got pacman working on the HP).
To think that a whole division like that, with great products and a great vision was axed just to get the stock price a few bucks up in the short term seems really backwards, but I guess that's what's happening far too often in this period of stock-price-driven management.
:(
The other difference between the two articles is that the latter one is talking about Cable in particular, rather than "broadband" (i.e. both Cable and DSL).
I used to have DSL. When I moved, I tried a Cable Modem instead. I found the quality of my connection was better, and the service technicians were far more knowledgeable. Of course, that reflects more on the individual companies (Verizon for DSL vs. Charter for Cable) than it does on DSL vs. Cable, but considering the number of people I know who gave up on DSL because of technical problems, I wouldn't be surprised if DSL is losing business to Cable.
Here in Pasadena, Cable is cheaper and they can come install it within a day or two of your order. When I got DSL, I had to wait six weeks for the first visit, and it took them quite a few tries to get it working.
Ahem... but most library calls themselves invoke system calls to get the job done. I doubt pthread semaphores and mutexes are implemented without some help from the system (access to shared memory, putting threads into wait queues, etc.)
Furthermore, any library function that does the same thing as a system function will undoubtedly call the system function (fopen calls open, fork calls clone, etc.).
Perhaps this just reflects that the implementation of IPC in Linux, while complete, is not as fast or optimized as it should be. This is probably because everyone uses sockets, mmaps and stuff to do the same things, all of which are already fast, so nobody bitches enough about it to prompt someone to rework it.
Note that I make this statement purely from an observational standpoint; most code to apps I see forgo IPC for other methods. Would somebody care to give an example of some common Linux app that uses IPC heavily?
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Actually, critical sections are fast only if there is low contention for them. As soon as threads start contending for them, performance goes out the window. They also don't scale well with the number of threads, and they exhibit horrible performance degradations if the priority of the contending threads is not at a maximum. There is a great summary of the issues at http://world.std.com/~jmhart/csmutx.htm.
Its a shame.
I don't think I would ever have passed all the number crunching civil engineering classes and the dreaded EIT (engineer licencing test) without my trusty 32s.
I lothe regular calculators now...
When It got stolen with my bookbag (uggg) I got the 42s. even better! 2 lines of stack on the screen!!! I still use it. Durable too.
Maybe its not as big a deal now that calculators can enter equations with parens..
I was thinking of wipping up a desktop calculator that did rpm.... Maybe its time..
Then you ditch the connection. Just because they raise the price isn't a good reason to dump it.
Hell, my employer hasn't hired anyone or let anyone go from my group in the last year so just to make up for raises and what not our product will cost at least 7% more. If our customers thought like you, we'd be screwed (but so would our competitors).
I work for a cable modem provider and I dont understand the industry. Our location provides 6 tiers of service. The lowest is $20 a month and 256k down and 128k up. Regular residential service is $40 a month and 1Mbit down 128k up. The other four are commercial. We ALWAYS manage to deliver that. Outside the occasional problem we get it right. Yet, the rest of the industry oversells there service, don't know what they're doing, and have techs in the field with no clue. Even in this company, there are other systems that have massive problems. All of them because of mismanagement. If we can deliver cable modem service and get it right, and profitable (or so the white shirt/blue suit types tell me it is) why can't everyone. Because the have no idea what they are doing and don't want to know. The think of it like cable tv. (1) put cable in house (2) let customer hook it up to something and enjoy. Cable modems/DSL/Satellite and anything else require a massive commitment of training for your staff and education of the customer. This does not mean McTechs reading from a script.
;)
Broadband works, broadband is reliable, and broadband is cheap IF the company knows what they are doing. We lucked out with a manager. We got a guy from a large scale satellite WAN maintenence background. He gets broadband and was/is good for the dept. Most companies, especially many cable companys, dont get that cable modems are a very large scale WAN (or MAN if your prefer) and manage them as such. Its a shame that they provide such poor service because it could give broadband, especially cable modems a bad rap permenantly.
"I loved my cable modem so much, I went to work for the company!"
(oh and you dont even want to know how fast my cable modem is)
In a truly competitive market, other companies would come in to fill the gap left by the departing ones. The problem is, the companies that currently dominate broadband come from industries that are used to having government imposed monopoly status: cable and telephone. The monopoly status is starting to go away in the cable industry, but is persisting for telephone, especially in regards to the "final mile."
Yeah, and in the best of all possible worlds...Monopoly status is not imposed by the government in the sense that the government forbids competition; by and large what they do is amelioration of the effects of an existing monopoly (price controls, etc.) Government does not impose monopoly status so much as it acknowledges an existing reality. You seem to forget that it was government "interference" that opened telephone lines up to DSL competitors in the first place, but that's inconvenient, so we'll just forget that, right? Of course, the RBOCs' incentive for doing so was access to long-distance markets they couldn't get into after the AT&T breakup. One of the many woes that introduced to the average consumer was no longer having to hide extra telephones when the repairman came by. Don't forget choosing your long distance carrier.
Cable was deregged under George I. Guess what? Prices went up. Natural gas prices in GA went up when they deregged last year. CA's electricity woes are partially due to a badly-planned dereg, but the consumers still had to take it up the ass. While competition is always good for the competitors (i.e., drive wholesale up by bidding because we're different companies and therefore not a monopoly,) it's not always good for consumers. Rather than parrot armchair libertarianism, maybe you should look at deregulation on a case-by-case basis and support it where it lowers costs to consumers and oppose it where it doesn't. Unless you have a financial stake in a company assraping consumers in the name of the "free market" you really shouldn't have a dog in this fight. If you do have a financial stake in such a company, you should say so up front so there's no confusion. If your interest is strictly ideological I can't see any explanation other than that you favor the concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few people even when that doesn't include you because you somehow find these people more accountable than politicians who can be voted out or recalled.
The first wave of DSL providers had tremendous problems getting the incumbent carriers (ILECs) to give them support when there were line problems. The ILECs didn't want them to succeed because they wanted to offer their own DSL but hadn't managed to get their act together yet. They had no incentive to provide good service and every incentive to provide bad service. Result: bad service
Who's going to provide those incentives to good service? The Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, or the government? Remember it took legislation just to get the cable companies to answer the phone.
So what you're really talking about is a government "solution" to a problem that was created by government in the first place. No thanks.
In a truly free market you could be bought and ground up for pet food. Never forget that.
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Freeper Logic
Does anyone else make high quality calculators? Or are there any good math programs for PDAs?
The real problem is entropy.